This study examines the results of multiple evaluations of the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Grant Program (CTSP), a state-funded voucher program, by exploring extant evaluations and literature. Attention will be given to the following research question: Does participation in the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Grant Program have the hypothesized positive effect on traditional public school students' academic achievement? Cleveland's voucher program provides an ideal contextualized setting for ascertaining the extent to which school choice programs afford poor families the same educational options available to affluent families. This study concludes that overall there are no statistically significant gains in voucher students' academic achievement. In fact, it appears that some voucher students performed slightly worse in math. The program does, however, afford low-income students the opportunity to attend private secular or religious schools in accordance with the program's initial design and intent.
Over the past twenty years, educational policy has been characterized by top?down, market?focused policies combined with a push toward privatization and school choice. The new Every Student Succeeds Act continues along this path, though with decision?making authority now shifted toward the states. These market?based reforms have often been touted as the most promising response to the challenges of poverty and educational disenfranchisement. But has this approach been successful? Has learning improved? Have historically low?scoring schools “turned around” or have the reforms had little effect? Have these narrow conceptions of schooling harmed the civic and social purposes of education in a democracy? This book presents the evidence. Drawing on the work of the nation’s most prominent researchers, the book explores the major elements of these reforms, as well as the social, political, and educational contexts in which they take place. It examines the evidence supporting the most common school improvement strategies: school choice; reconstitutions, or massive personnel changes; and school closures. From there, it presents the research findings cutting across these strategies by addressing the evidence on test score trends, teacher evaluation, “miracle” schools, the Common Core State Standards, school choice, the newly emerging school improvement industry, and re?segregation, among others. The weight of the evidence indisputably shows little success and no promise for these reforms. Thus, the authors counsel strongly against continuing these failed policies. The book concludes with a review of more promising avenues for educational reform, including the necessity of broader societal investments for combatting poverty and adverse social conditions. While schools cannot single?handedly overcome societal inequalities, important work can take place within the public school system, with evidence?based interventions such as early childhood education, detracking, adequate funding and full?service community schools—all intended to renew our nation’s commitment to democracy and equal educational opportunity.
"Kraft and Furlong provide students with a conceptual understanding of public issues and how the public policy process functions. This book also provides a forum for discussions of social, economic, and sustainable development issues; their characteristics; and impacts on human beings (citizens) as well as the environment. It will give students the needed tools to make informed economic and human development decisions that could lead to sustainable growth, human capacity building, and better lives." —Robert Dibie, Indiana University Kokomo With the right information, we can develop public policies that work better. All too often, public policy textbooks offer a basic grounding in the policy process without the benefit of integrating the use of policy analysis. Kraft and Furlong take a different tack. Public Policy: Politics, Analysis, and Alternatives, Seventh Edition helps students understand how and why policy analysis is used to assess policy alternatives. The text encourages them to not only question the assumptions of policy analysts, but also recognize how these strategies are used in the support of political arguments. The authors introduce and fully integrate an evaluative approach to policy to encourage critical and creative thinking on issues ranging from health care to climate change. From a concise review of institutions, policy actors, and major theoretical models to a discussion of the nature of policy analysis and its practice, Kraft and Furlong show students how to employ evaluative criteria in six substantive policy areas. Students come away with the analytic tools they need to understand that the motivations of policy actors—both within and outside of government—influence a complex yet comprehensible policy agenda. A Complete Teaching & Learning Package LMS Cartridge (formally known as SAGE Coursepacks) Import this title’s instructor resources into your school’s learning management system (LMS) and save time. Don’t use an LMS? You can still access all of the same online resources for this title via the password-protected Instructor Resource Site.
Sponsored by the University Council of Educational Administration, this comprehensive handbook is the definitive work on leadership education in the United States. An in-depth portrait of what constitutes research on leadership development, this handbook provides a plan for strengthening the research-based education of school leaders in order to impact leadership’s influence on student engagement and learning. Although research-oriented, the content is written in a style that makes it appropriate for any of the following audiences: university professors and researchers, professional development providers, practicing administrators, and policy makers who work in the accreditation and licensure arenas.
Praise for Meta-Analysis for Public Management and Policy "In his usual rigorous but readable style, Evan Ringquist and co-author Mary Anderson have produced a tour-de-force on the topic of meta-analysis in public policy and management research. Meta-analysis is badly needed in the all-too-common situation when researchers have low confidence in summarizing the overall results of dozens of studies on the effectiveness of some policy. This book has a nice combination of conceptual overview, methodological details, and applications that will make it possible for researchers to conduct their own meta-analysis. It is tempting to require all graduate students to write a meta-analysis as a chapter in their dissertation, or include meta-analysis as a standard offering in the research methods curriculum of social science graduate programs. The more people that adopt Ringquist and Anderson's approach, the less resources will be wasted on conducting studies that do not contribute to cumulative scientific knowledge. " —Mark Lubell Department of Environmental Science and Policy Director, Center for Environmental Policy and Behavior University of California-Davis “Ringquist and his colleagues deliver value and add to canon of public management methods by delivering an analytical framework that makes the case for systematic research using the tools of meta-analysis. This book will be a must read for all committed to strengthening evidence-based research that improves public policy and management decision making.” —David M. Van Slyke The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs Syracuse University “In Meta-Analysis for Public Management and Policy Evan Ringquist and his colleagues provide a lucid and practical roadmap for policy and public management scholars who use meta-analysis in their research. But this is more than a “how to” volume; it provides background on why meta-analysis is a potent means for accumulating and synthesizing empirical research findings, and shows how its use has evolved in recent decades. Specific applications of meta-analysis to long-standing policy and management debates are given, essentially providing an array of developed “templates” through which scholars and practitioners can assess how to approach different kinds of analytical problems using meta-analysis. Particularly valuable to me is the careful development and presentation of the necessary stages of meta-analysis, from conceptualization through data coding and bias assessment to advanced modeling. All of the statistical analyses can be conducted in Stata, utilizing readily available “.ado” modules. I will use this book, both in research and in the classroom. Overall it is one of the most useful methodological contributions I’ve seen in some time.” —Hank Jenkins-Smith Department of Political Science Director, Center for Applied Social Research University of Oklahoma “Meta-Analysis for Public Management and Policy conveys the considerable untapped potential of meta-analysis to strengthen and advance bodies of knowledge and evidence in public management and policy. This book takes students and researchers deep into the methods of meta-analysis and details of their empirical application, without losing sight of the important policy questions and the implications of choices that researchers make in their empirical work for the production of evidence for public managers and policymakers. This book will serve as an excellent practical guide for those conducting their first meta-analysis, while at the same time supporting critically-focused consumption of existing meta-analyses and discussion of where the field can gainfully take this approach to enhance our research and knowledge bases. It draws in a range of valuable and important examples of applications of meta-analysis techniques throughout the book and rounds off with four full-fledged applications of the method. Although the book reaches out to an audience of public management and policy researchers and consumers of this research, it should be of interest to a broad range of applied social science researchers and students as well.” —Carolyn Heinrich Sid Richardson Professor of Public Affairs Director, Center for Health and Social Policy LBJ School of Public Affairs University of Texas – Austin “Even for incredibly specialized techniques, public management and policy scholars have a multiplicity of methods texts from which to choose. Yet it is truly surprising that a strong guide to applied meta-analysis — a rigorous framework for the organization of empirical findings — has not been available. Ringquist and Anderson provided just that with an accessible guide to sophisticated techniques. Marrying an instructive text to a set of exemplary standalone studies, Meta-Analysis for Public Management and Policy offers unparalleled guidance for instructors and students and more than a little wisdom for seasoned scholars. It is destined to become the standard reference for our field.” —Anthony Michael Bertelli CC Crawford Chair in Management and Performance USC Price School of Public Policy USC Gould School of Law University of Southern California “This comprehensive treatment of meta-analysis is an excellent guide for scholars and students in public management and public policy. The carefully done exposition demonstrates why meta-analysis should have greater use in the profession.” —Kenneth J. Meier Charles H. Gregory Chair in Liberal Arts Department of Political Science Texas A&M University “This remarkable book reviews the history of the use of meta-analysis in the social sciences, argues forcefully for its importance, value, and relevance for public managers, and provides one-stop-shopping for those who want to learn how to do it or understand how others have done it. The detailed coverage of each step in the process allows a student to learn the technique completely while fully understanding the logic and intellectual goals of the enterprise. Most importantly, the authors review techniques from a range of disciplines, drawing most of their positive suggestions from the field of medical statistics rather than the social sciences. The examples and applications, on the other hand, stem from the world of government and public policy. Four chapters provide new syntheses of research on individual policies using the techniques and practices introduced in the earlier chapters. The result is original research, a strong argument for the value of meta-analysis in a field (political science and public administration) that uses it little, and a complete tool-kit for those who would want to apply these powerful ideas on their own. A very impressive and useful text.” —Frank R. Baumgartner Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor Department of Political Science University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill “Meta-analysis is a valuable tool for accumulating knowledge about how management matters from across a range of policy areas and disciplines. It is also an underused tool, in large part because of the lack of a comprehensive and useable guide on the topic. Ringquist remedies this problem by offering clear instruction on how to apply the technique wisely, as well as highly useful empirical demonstrations. The field of public management needs this excellent book.” —Donald Moynihan Professor of Public Affairs University of Wisconsin-Madison “Professors and students frequently face decisions about how deeply to invest in a statistical procedure, a new technology, a new theory, or some other development in their discipline. The authors of Meta-Analysis for Public Management and Policy support such a decision about meta-analysis by making a convincing case for its value and increasing utilization, including such steps as a careful consideration of criticisms of the method. Evan Ringquist then provides clearly, engagingly written chapters on the major concepts, procedures, and issues in the techniques of meta-analysis. His coauthors then provide effectively-presented examples of meta-analytic studies about such topics as school voucher effectiveness, public service motivation and performance, and public sector performance management. The accessible and reader-friendly explanations, coupled with the illustrative examples that walk the reader through how to do it, make this a distinctively effective methodological text. In so doing, it offers a distinctively valuable resource for those of us who want to learn more about this important statistical method.” —Hal Rainey Alumni Foundation Distinguished Professor Department of Public Administration and Policy University of Georgia “James Heckman’s Nobel lecture described the combined influence of micro surveys, advances in computers and software, and the development and dissemination of multivariate statistical methods on applied economic research. His comments apply equally well to empirical research throughout the social sciences. These forces have created a “flood of numbers” and advances in technology since he wrote about them have assured that the process is accelerating. We need to transform the ways we learn from empirical analyses and create a science for the analysis of the secondary data from applied statistical and econometric models. This science would include methods for summarizing what has been learned from estimates and tests. It would provide methods for diagnostic screening of results to gauge the importance of modeling assumptions and the types of primary data for the findings being reported. Finally, it may well lead to the development of meta-models—integrating findings intended to describe a single system but viewed thru distinctive empirical lenses. Meta-analysis is a method that takes an important step in developing this science. It is a collection of methods that is a product of the transformation in applied research in the past half century. Initially much of this research was the domain of social scientists working on the evaluation of educational interventions. In these applications the primary data from different studies were routinely available, but the outcome and control variables differed across studies. As a result, the focus for these meta-analyses was on data combination with multiple, distinctive measures for asset of latent variables associated with the hypothesized underlying process. The texts describing meta-analysis focused on these situations. As applications of meta-analysis expanded to economics, political science, and sociology, the data structures changed. The new data came from empirical models –as estimated parameters or summaries of test results. The challenges posed in developing these types of data and understanding what they reveal were distinctly different. A text developed by scholars who appreciate how these types of summaries are different was missing until Ringquist and Anderson’s Meta Analysis for Public Management and Policy. Explaining a process that blends the best of qualitative and quantitative research is a challenge. This book has met this challenge and delivered researchers a great platform for teaching these methods to their students and for updating their own skills. At least four features distinguish this book: 1. The authors display a clear understanding of the strengths and the weaknesses of meta- analysis. Their treatment describes how care in data construction, variable coding, relevant statistical methods and, especially, careful attention to interpreting the findings from a meta-analysis can reinforce the strengths and mitigate the weaknesses. 2. There are real examples presented throughout the book along with a genuine understanding of the importance of the details in developing meta-analyses. 3. The coverage of relevant statistical methods is comprehensive and clear. And 4. The Appendices offer the detail researchers need to see in order to genuinely learn how to use meta analytic methods. It should be in the library of every serious teacher or practitioner”—V. Kerry Smith Regents Professor and W.P. Carey Professor Department of Economics Arizona State University “There are several texts for meta-analysis available, most notably “The Handbook of Research Synthesis and Meta-Analysis” by Cooper, Hedges and Valentine, but none specifically directed to public administration and policy scholars. In fact the points of emphasis and examples make the existing texts both difficult and poorly suited for the applied social sciences. Ringquist’s book is a spectacular success in filling this lacuna. Ringquist provides a clearer encapsulation of “the basics” in its opening section, and the “basics” are tailored to “problem-oriented” policy sciences (noting for instance, that meta-analyses in public management and policy will almost always use random-effects over fixed-effects). The empirical examples woven throughout as well as the actual analyses on PSM and school vouchers are exceptionally useful in identifying the stages of the process. At the same time, the book doesn’t spare the gritty details of confronting commonly required procedures, like bootstrapping and dealing with clustered robust SE, hierarchical modeling, etc. For readers with no exposure to meta-analysis, the text eases the transition by offering a refresher on how statistical techniques are used in original research, then how they differ when used in meta-analysis. Ringquist offers guidelines for syntheses, formulating problems, data evaluation, turning studies into data, techniques in meta-analysis, “the language of meta-analysis”, coding strategies and publication bias. The author also notes that the context and even techniques of meta-analysis are different for public management and public policy compared with medicine and psychology, and education. Public administration and policy analysis provide great opportunities for meta-analysis, but these fields also present considerable challenge. Great care is needed in synthesizing differently designed studies, which are observational and quasi-experimental or correlational designs, because the statistics of meta-analysis were originally developed to synthesize results from experiment design. Measurement issues are tricky because authentic scales are used less frequently than in psychology or medical research. In addition PA and policy as fields of scholarship are diverse and eclectic in research design which makes comparison of parameter estimates exceedingly difficult. Ringquist adroitly compiles an approach to meta-analysis adapted to reflect this context. While Section 1 consists of seven chapters, which discusses techniques of meta-analysis, Section 2 including Chapters 8, 9, 10 and 11 illustrates actual studies using meta-analysis conducted in public management and policy research: evaluating the effectiveness of educational vouchers, performance management in public sector, the effects of federal poverty deconcentration efforts on economic self-sufficiency and problematic behaviors, and the relationship between public service motivation and performance. The book is an easier read than other texts in it guides from project inception through lit review and analysis in a manner tailored to policy and management, and it actually provides a much more accessible and thorough coverage of many of the basic building blocks, random effects, r-based effect sizes, and bootstrapping, making it far more indispensable for any PA meta-analysis. The check-lists for coding articles are especially useful. Provision of Stata commands and practical data management suggestions (creating a command file for data set transformations, for instance) is a great advantage for this text. Adding an addendum with R programming options, in the next edition might be helpful too. The conclusion both compelling and concise but I would like to have seen some of the arguments presented here at the beginning of the book, reserving the conclusion for a fuller encapsulation of what the overall strategy of the book accomplishes in stages – rebutting criticisms that meta-analysis in social science is a waste of time because study estimates are non-comparable and effect sizes non-independent with careful examination of research design and models. This book is essential reading for any scholar in public administration and policy considering undertaking meta-analysis. I expect it will gain many readers in other social science disciplines as well. For serious users of meta-analysis Ringquist’s book will not be the only one on the shelf, but it is a valuable addition.” —Richard Feiock Augustus B. Turnbull Professor Askew School of Public Administration and Policy Florida State University
Updated to reflect the latest developments and increasing scope of school-based options, the second edition of the Handbook of Research on School Choice makes readily available the most rigorous and policy-relevant research on K–12 school choice. This comprehensive research handbook begins with scholarly overviews that explore historical, political, economic, legal, methodological, and international perspectives on school choice. In the following sections, experts examine the research and current state of common forms of school choice: charter schools, school vouchers, and magnet schools. The concluding section brings together perspectives on other key topics such as accountability, tax credit scholarships, parent decision-making, and marginalized students. With empirical perspectives on all aspects of this evolving sphere of education, this is a critical resource for researchers, faculty, and students interested in education policy, the politics of education, and educational leadership.
With the right information, we can develop public policies that work better. Public Policy: Politics, Analysis, and Alternatives, Eighth Edition helps students understand how and why policy analysis is used to assess policy alternatives. The text encourages them to not only question the assumptions of policy analysts, but also recognize how various strategies are used in support of political arguments.
Sponsored by the Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP), the second edition of this groundbreaking handbook assembles in one place the existing research-based knowledge in education finance and policy, with particular attention to elementary and secondary education. Chapters from the first edition have been fully updated and revised to reflect current developments, new policies, and recent research. With new chapters on teacher evaluation, alternatives to traditional public schooling, and cost-benefit analysis, this volume provides a readily available current resource for anyone involved in education finance and policy. The Handbook of Research in Education Finance and Policy traces the evolution of the field from its initial focus on school inputs and revenue sources used to finance these inputs, to a focus on educational outcomes and the larger policies used to achieve them. Chapters show how decision making in school finance inevitably interacts with decisions about governance, accountability, equity, privatization, and other areas of education policy. Because a full understanding of important contemporary issues requires inputs from a variety of perspectives, the Handbook draws on contributors from a number of disciplines. Although many of the chapters cover complex, state-of-the-art empirical research, the authors explain key concepts in language that non-specialists can understand. This comprehensive, balanced, and accessible resource provides a wealth of factual information, data, and wisdom to help educators improve the quality of education in the United States.
