May, Henry

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  • Publication
    The Impact of America's Choice on Student Performance in Duval County, Florida
    (2002-10-01) Supovitz, Jonathan A; May, Henry; Snyder Taylor, Brooke
    The America's Choice School Design is a K-12 comprehensive school reform model designed by the National Center on Education and the Economy. America's Choice focuses on raising academic achievement by providing a rigorous standards-based curriculum and safety net for all students. The goal of America's Choice is to make sure that all but the most severely handicapped students reach an internationally benchmarked standard of achievement in English/language arts and mathematics by the time that they graduate.
  • Publication
    A Longitudinal Study of the Impact of America's Choice on Student Performance in Rochester, New York, 1998-2003
    (2004-07-01) May, Henry; Supovitz, Jonathan A; Perda, David A
    Education is a cumulative process. Yet while students' knowledge and skills are built up over time, educational researchers are rarely afforded the opportunity to examine the effects of interventions over multiple years. This study of the America's Choice school reform design is just such an opportunity. Using 11 years of student performance data from Rochester, NY - which includes several years of data before America's Choice began working in the district - we examine the effects of America's Choice on student learning gains from 1998 to 2003. Employing a sophisticated statistical method called Bayesian hierarchical growth curve analysis with crossed random effects, we compare the longitudinal gains in test performance of students attending America's Choice schools to those of students attending other Rochester schools. Our analytical method allows us to examine student test performance over time, account for the nested structure of students within schools, and account for the very real problem of within-district student mobility.
  • Publication
    A multilevel Bayesian item response theory method for scaling
    (2006-01-01) May, Henry
    A new method is presented and implemented for deriving a scale of socioeconomic status (SES) from international survey data using a multilevel Bayesian item response theory (IRT) model. The proposed model incorporates both international anchor items and nation-specific items and is able to (a) produce student family SES scores that are internationally comparable, (b) reduce the influence of irrelevant national differences in culture on the SES scores, and (c) effectively and efficiently deal with the problem of missing data in a manner similar to Rubin’s (1987) multiple imputation approach. The results suggest that this model is superior to conventional models in terms of its fit to the data and its ability to use information collected via international surveys.
  • Publication
    Recruitment, Retention and the Minority Teacher Shortage
    (2011-09-01) Ingersoll, Richard; May, Henry
    This study examines and compares the recruitment and retention of minority and White elementary and secondary teachers and attempts to empirically ground the debate over minority teacher shortages. The data we analyze are from the National Center for Education Statistics’ nationally representative Schools and Staffing Survey and its longitudinal supplement, the Teacher Follow-up Survey. Our data analyses show that a gap continues to persist between the percentage of minority students and the percentage of minority teachers in the U.S. school system. But this gap is not due to a failure to recruit new minority teachers. Over the past two decades, the number of minority teachers has almost doubled, outpacing growth in both the number of White teachers and the number of minority students. Minority teachers are also overwhelmingly employed in public schools serving high-poverty, high-minority and urban communities. Hence, the data suggest that widespread efforts over the past several decades to recruit more minority teachers and employ them in hard-to-staff and disadvantaged schools have been very successful. This increase in the proportion of teachers who are minority is remarkable because the data also show that over the past two decades, turnover rates among minority teachers have been significantly higher than among White teachers. Moreover, though schools’ demographic characteristics appear to be highly important to minority teachers’ initial employment decisions, this does not appear to be the case for their later decisions to stay or depart. Neither a school’s poverty-level student enrollment, a school’s minority student enrollment, a school’s proportion of minority teachers, nor whether the school was in an urban or suburban community was consistently or significantly related to the likelihood that minority teachers would stay or depart, after controlling for other background factors. In contrast, organizational conditions in schools were strongly related to minority teacher departures. Indeed, once organizational conditions are held constant, there was no significant difference in the rates of minority and White teacher turnover. The schools in which minority teachers have disproportionately been employed have had, on average, less positive organizational conditions than the schools where White teachers are more likely to work, resulting in disproportionate losses of minority teachers. The organizational conditions most strongly related to minority teacher turnover were the level of collective faculty decision-making influence and the degree of individual classroom autonomy held by teachers; these factors were more significant than were salary, professional development or classroom resources. Schools allowing more autonomy for teachers in regard to classroom issues and schools with higher levels of faculty input into school-wide decisions had far lower levels of turnover.
  • Publication
    The Impact of America's Choice on Writing Performance in Georgia: First-Year Results
    (2004-07-01) May, Henry; Supovitz, Jonathan A; Lesnick, Joy K
    During the first year of implementation, the emphasis of the America's Choice school reform design is an intensive focus on building students' writing skills. Writers workshop, the primary instructional emphasis of America's Choice during this year, is the component of the design for which teachers first receive in-depth training. In keeping with the emphasis of America's Choice, this year-one external evaluation study of the impact of America's Choice on student performance in Georgia focuses on student writing performance. The study examines changes in student writing performance from 2001 to 2002, the initial year of implementation of America's Choice in 109 Georgia elementary schools and 50 Georgia middle schools. Because state writing assessments were administered to students in fifth and eighth grades, our analyses are restricted to these grade levels.
  • Publication
    The relationship between teacher implementation of America's Choice and student learning in Plainfield, New Jersey
    (2003-01-01) Supovitz, Jonathan A; May, Henry
    The America's Choice School Design is a K-12 comprehensive school reform model designed by the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE). America's Choice focuses on raising academic achievement by providing a rigorous standards-based curriculum and safety net for all students. The goal of America’s Choice is to make sure that all but the most severely handicapped students reach an internationally benchmarked standard of achievement in English/language arts and mathematics by the time they graduate.
  • Publication