Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE)

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  • Publication
    Examining sustainment of an evidence-based kindergarten literacy curriculum
    (University of Pennsylvania, 2023-05-01) Fink, Ryan; Suwak, Katarina; Lawson, Gwendolyn; Spilliane, Maurice
  • Publication
    Standardizing School Dropout Measures
    (2017-08-21) Williams, Patrica
    Proposes the establishment of a uniform definition of school dropout which would help to more accurately measure the extent of the dropout problem. The report describes elements of dropout measures and examines factors that account for variation in measures from city to city and state to state.
  • Publication
    Increasing Educational Productivity Through Improving the Science Curriculum
    (2017-08-21) Raizen, Senta
    Outlines features of an “Accelerated School,” a transitional elementary school designed to bring disadvantaged students up to grade level by the end of sixth grade. Several schools across the nation are piloting the model.
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  • Publication
    Strategies for Strengthening the Technical Workforce: A Review of International Evidence
    (2017-06-01) Conn, Katharine M; Park, Elizabeth H; Nagakura, Wakasa; Khalil, Sherihan; Corcoran, Thomas
    Numerous countries suffer from a shortage of technicians and skilled workers, particularly in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), due to a mismatch between the skills and interests of the students graduating from or leaving the current education system and the needs of the labor market. Often, parents and students place a high priority on entering and completing university, and as a consequence, many students pursue academic education in secondary schools in order to gain entrance to university, only to find themselves entering the job market lacking the skills they need for employment and advancement. Further, in some countries, the vocational school system is not well-respected by the public and focuses heavily on preparation of youth for specific jobs in one firm rather than preparing them for careers within an industry as a whole. This literature review aims to synthesize the research evidence about the effectiveness of various strategies used by national governments, non-governmental organizations, technical schools, and industries to strengthen both the quality of the technical workforce, as well as the avenues through which individuals can access career and technical programming.
  • Publication
    State Leadership Development Policies An Analysis of 50 States and Territories
    (2017-01-01) Newman, Bobbi; Supovitz, Jonathan; Prociw, Stephen; Hull, Robert; Collins, Gregory
    State education systems to support leadership development have received relatively scant attention and resources, despite the demonstrated importance of leadership to school improvement. This need spurred the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) to form a study group with its members and partner with the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) to examine the problem from a state policy perspective; to offer a framework, guidance, and resources to help states develop and keep effective leaders; provide examples of practices for states; and share insights from partner organizations. The report, Successful Leaders for Successful Schools: Building and Maintaining a Quality Workforce, details findings that emerged from this work. As a companion piece to this work, State Leadership Development Policies -An Analysis of 50 States and Territories, presents a comprehensive picture of school leadership development policies across all 50 states and US territories. CPRE Researchers Bobbi Newman, Jonathan Supovitz, and Greg Collins, in collaboration with NASBE's Robert Hull and Stephen Prociw, produced an interactive report that seeks to operationalize the framework developed for state education agencies to improve the school leadership pipeline. Researchers interviewed state board members and staff members from state education agencies to learn about their states' school leadership development policies and practices. Data collection questions focused on identifying the organizational and individual supports that states have established. State Leadership Development Policies -An Analysis of 50 States and Territories provides a wealth of information for state leaders interested in learning about a sample of each state's policies and programs that support the school leadership pipeline.
  • Publication
    Instruction, Capacity, and Improvement
    (1999-06-01) Cohen, David K; Ball, Deborah Loewenberg
    Since World War II, efforts to improve schools have numbered in the thousands. Most efforts have concentrated on improving the curriculum materials used in schools or on "training" teachers in new instructional methods. Many of these efforts have gone under the banner of "building instructional capacity," a term that for decades has been featured prominently in conversations about educational reform. Unfortunately, three decades of research has found that only a few interventions have had detectable effects on instruction and that, when such effects are detected, they rarely are sustained over time. A review of research and professional experience with school improvement suggests several explanations for these disheartening findings. One is that schools are complex social organizations situated within, and vitally affected by, other complex social systems including families, communities, and professional and regulatory agencies. The larger social environment of schools constrains and shapes the actions of teachers, students, and administrators, often in ways that greatly complicate the work of school improvement. Challenges to school improvement are particularly acute in high-poverty settings where recruiting well-qualified teachers is difficult and where the emotional and health problems of students often deflects attention to educational issues or impedes work on them. As a result, many researchers now believe that school improvement involves much more than efforts to change interactions occurring within schools. To succeed, school improvement interventions also must attend to the complex relationships that exist among intervention agents, schools, and their social environments.
  • Publication
    When Accountability Knocks, Will Anyone Answer?
    (1999-03-01) Abelmann, Charles; Elmore, Richard
    Pressure for increased school accountability is a distinctive hallmark of the present period of educational reform. Account- ability, as presently defined in state and local educational policy, includes four major ideas: the school is the basic unit for the delivery of education and hence the primary place where teachers and administrators are held to account; schools are primarily accountable for student performance, generally defined as measured achievement on tests in basic academic subjects; school-site student performance is evaluated against externally-set standards that define accept- able levels of student achievement as mandated by states or localities; and evaluation of school performance is typically accompanied by a system of rewards, penalties, and intervention strategies targeted at rewarding successful schools and remediating or closing low-performing schools (Ladd, 1996). These accountability policies are typically directed toward individual schools or teachers, and increasingly, students, as in Texas, New York, Virginia, and Florida where exit exams or proficiency requirements are central to educational reform policies. Coupled with these new account- ability systems, states and localities often are pursuing policies such as charter schools and choice programs that move schools outside the existing bureaucratic structure and are intended to sharpen the focus on academic quality and student performance. Growing political and fiscal pressure on schools lies behind this conception of accountability. The political pressure stems from the increasing visibility of school performance as a policy issue at the state and local levels and the increasing capacity of states and localities to measure and monitor student achievement. The fiscal pressure derives from heightened awareness of accountability present in the literature on school reform, but to leave the definitions as open as possible. This study is focused primarily on schools and how they construct their own conceptions of accountability. We chose this focus for conceptual and practical reasons. First, we are interested in understanding how teachers, administrators, students, and parents think about and behave toward accountability issues in schools, apart from how they respond to new external accountability systems. Schools function, in part, as accountability systems in their own right, and these systems are worth understanding in and of themselves. Second, we are interested in learning, from the variations we observe among schools, about the range of responses that schools of various types formulate to the problem of accountability. To the degree that schools vary in their responses to the accountability problem, we learn something about how conceptions of account- ability are formed and how they change in the daily life of schools. Third, we are ultimately interested in joining our research on school-level accountability with research on external accountability systems to understand the sources of school-site variation in response to state and local accountability structures.
  • Publication
    Do Curriculum-Based External Exit Exams Enhance Student Achievement?
    (1998-04-01) Bishop, John
    Two presidents, the National Governors Association and numerous blue ribbon panels have called for the development of state content standards for core subjects and examinations that assess the achievement of these standards. The Competitiveness Policy Council, for example, advocates that "external assessments be given to individual students at the secondary level and that the results should be a major but not exclusive factor qualifying for college and better jobs at better wages (1993, p. 30)." The American Federation of Teachers advocates a system in which: Students are periodically tested on whether they' reaching the standards, and if they are re not, the system responds with appropriate assistance and intervention. Until they meet the standards, they won' be able to graduate t from high school or enter college (AFT 1995 p. 1-2). It is claimed that curriculum-based external exit exam systems (CBEEES), based on world class content standards will improve teaching and learning of core subjects. What evidence is there for this claim? New York' Regents Exams are an s example of such a system. Do New York students outperform students with similar socio-economic backgrounds from other states? Outside the United States such systems are the rule, not the exception. What impacts have such systems had on school policies, teaching and student learning?
  • Publication
    Teaching for High Standards: What Policymakers Need to Know and Be Able to Do
    (1998-11-01) Darling-Hammond, Linda; Ball, Deborah Loewenberg
    In this report, Ball and Darling-Hammond discuss the relationship between teacher knowledge and student performance; they summarize what the research suggest about what kinds of teacher education and professional development teachers need in order to learn how ot teach to high standards; and they describe what states are doing to provide these opportunities for teacher learning, and with what effects.