|
SEO Ed Digest
|
Vol. 2, Issue 10
October 2005
Bringing urban P-16 education resources to policymakers, parents, advocates, and district and school staff in the District of Columbia
Education News
Research on DC Schools
National Lessons Learned
New Ideas
The State Education Office does not endorse the views expressed in the resources and reports contained in the SEO Ed Digest.
|
|
This is the second issue since the beginning of this school year. This issue of the SEO Ed Digest covers school choice and the growing alternatives to traditional schooling. In this issue you can read about Florida's voluntary Pre-K program, school choice in Chile, and high performing Catholic Schools in the Netherlands. The Digest also touches on charter school research based in the District, cyber and home charter schools. Finally, this issue contains reports on opportunties for Afterschool Programs, and ideas on how to introduce markets into the education sector.
Interactive Resources
Reports
September 2005
August 2005
June 2005
May 2005
2004
August 2004
2003
December 2003
 
September 2005
This report presents information from the Fall 2004 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) web-based data collection. Data were requested from nearly 6,600 postsecondary institutions participating in Title IV federal student financial aid programs. The tables in this publication present counts of institutions by selected institutional characteristics including tuition, fees, and other costs. Tables also present data on the number of degrees and other formal awards conferred during the period July 1, 2003 through June 30, 2004 by Title IV postsecondary institutions.
August 2005
This Toolkit provides parents and community leaders with information, tips, and tools to help families understand and use SES options.
This tool is part of a series of technical assistance resources on financing and sustaining out-of-school time and community school initiatives. It is developed by The Finance Project with support from both public and private foundations, including the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Wallace Foundation, and the federal Child Care Bureau. These tools and resources are intended to assist policy makers, program developers and community leaders in developing financing and sustainability strategies to support effective initiatives.
May 2005
An Analysis of Florida’s Voluntary Pre-K Program
http://www.ncspe.org/publications_files/OP103.pdf*
On January 2, 2005, Governor Jeb Bush signed House Bill 1-A (HB 1A) into law, which created Florida’s Voluntary Prekindergarten (VPK) Program. Using the policy instruments of regulation, finance, and support services, the VPK program is analyzed. The likely consequences of the VPK program on the criteria of freedom of choice, productive efficiency, equity, and social cohesion based on specific benchmarks are predicted using the analysis of the policy instruments. The author concludes that the Florida VPK program appears to favor the principles of freedom of choice and efficiency at the expense of equity and social cohesion.
May 2005
School Choice in Chile: An Analysis of Parental Preferences and Search Behavior
http://www.ncspe.org/publications_files/OP97_update.pdf*
This study by Gregory Elacqua examines the behavior of parents when selecting schools in the Metropolitan Region of Santiago, Chile. Chile has sponsored a national voucher program since 1980 where all students can choose to enroll in public, private non-profit or for-profit schools, both secular and religious. Elacqua conducts a survey of parents, and based on his data, concludes that parents’ decisions are influenced by demographics rather than academic performance. Based on this evidence, he argues that unfettered choice may reduce the pressure on schools to improve their performance and could potentially increase stratification.
February 2005
Supply and Demand in a Public School Choice Program
http://www.ncspe.org/publications_files/OP99.pdf*
This study examines parents’ demand for sending their children to a public school located outside their residential school district.The analyses reveal that mean student test scores are stronger predictors of transfer demand than both students’ socio-economic characteristics and school district spending, suggesting that parents care more about outcomes than inputs.
2004
This paper investigates the educability of charter school students in Washington DC for the 2002-03 school year. The authors conclude with an analysis that moves beyond simple demographic/programmatic factors to consider measures of educability using individual-level survey data from charter and traditional public school students. The authors conclude that they find little evidence of differences in the educability of students in the two sectors.
A common finding in the economic literature on schooling effectiveness is the phenomenon of better performance by religious, and, more precisely, Catholic schools in terms of scholastic achievement, educational attainment and measurable labor market outcomes (i.e. subsequent employment status and wages). While the majority of this research in the economic sciences stems from the US, fueling the debate over public financing of private education in this country, comparatively little research directly addressing the
phenomenon that has been performed in the Netherlands despite evidence of a significant achievement premium to Dutch Catholic schools. This study explores the phenomenon of superior achievement of Catholic over other public and Protestant) primary schools in the Netherlands.
This publication, which focuses on the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act's public school choice provisions, is the first in the "Innovations in Education" series, published by US Department of Education.
This paper reviews recent evidence on home-schooling and home-based education in the US. Using various sources including state-level information and data on homeschoolers who took the SAT in 2001, the authors describe the characteristics of home-schoolers and analyze the motivation to home-school. The authors then evaluate home-schooling in terms of freedom of choice, efficiency, equity, and social cohesion.
This paper examines how alternative charter school models are emerging within the larger public school and charter school communities with particular attention to recent developments in California and Pennsylvania. In these two states, public scrutiny of cyber and homeschooling charter schools has led to considerable debate and demands for public accountability. Of particular concern is the need to modify the regulatory framework to accommodate cyber and homeschooling charter schools.
This link provides six frequently asked questions and answers about charter schools, home-schools, educational vouchers, for-profit schools, private schools and tuition tax credits. Each FAQ category defines privatization initiatives, describes growth, and discusses points of controversy.
The authors use data from a telephone survey of Washington DC, parents to evaluate the success of the District’s large and growing charter school program. They find that parents with children in charter schools rate their teachers, principals, facilities and schools higher than their traditional public counterparts. The authors claim this finding is robust even when controlling for self-selection into charter schools. However, the charter school advantage fades over the course of the school year. Thus while the higher grades assigned to charter schools are not a function of self-selection, the durability of greater parental “satisfaction” with charter schools is a question that must be studied in the future.
This paper summarizes the trend toward introducing markets into the education sector. The researchers begin with a brief history of the market reforms and then review recent policy developments related to vouchers, charter schools, tuition tax credits, and educational management organizations. The internal anatomy of markets is then described, recognizing both the possibility of imperfect competition and of market failure. Next, they set out a framework for evaluating market reforms which has four criteria – freedom of choice; productive efficiency; equity; and social cohesion – and a set of three policy instruments – finance, regulation, and support services.
|
|
|
Back to OSSE Ed Digest Main