Among the criticisms of charter schools is their potential to further stratify schools along ethnic and class lines. This study addressed whether Arizona charter schools are more ethnically segregated than traditional public schools. In 1996-97, Arizona had nearly one in four of all charter schools in the United States. The analysis involved a series of comparisons between the ethnic compositions of adjacent charter and public schools in Arizona's most populated region and its rural towns. This methodology differed from the approach of many evaluations of charter schools and ethnic stratification in that it incorporated the use of geographic maps to compare schools' ethnic make-ups. The ethnic compositions of 55 urban and 57 rural charter schools were inspected relative to their traditional public school neighbors.

Connecticut’s interdistrict magnet schools offer a model of choice-based desegregation that appears to satisfy current legal constraints. This study presents evidence that interdistrict magnet schools have provided students from Connecticut’s central cities access to less racially and economically isolated educational environments and estimates the impact of attending a magnet school on student achievement. To address potential selection biases, the analyses exploit the random assignment that results from lottery-based admissions for a small set of schools, as well as value-added and fixed-effect estimators that rely on pre–magnet school measures of student achievement to obtain effect estimates for a broader set of interdistrict magnet schools. Results indicate that attendance at an interdistrict magnet high school has positive effects on the math and reading achievement of central city students and that interdistrict magnet middle schools have positive effects on reading achievement.

Critics of traditional teacher education programs have suggested that verbal ability along with subject knowledge is sufficient for measuring good teaching. A small group of research studies is called upon to support this contention. This article reviews these studies, analyzes the role of verbal ability in teaching, and presents research examining the relationship of teachers' verbal ability and teacher effectiveness. Research results indicate that for acceptable, good, very good, and outstanding teachers, there is no significant correlation between verbal scores and expert assessment of teacher effectiveness. However, weaker teachers have lower average verbal scores. This research and logical analysis suggest that educators should take verbal ability into account, but due to the wide range of scores among good to excellent teachers, it is inadvisable to use single measures of verbal ability to measure or predict teacher effectiveness. The authors provide an alternative system for teacher selection.

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Study Purpose: This article examines the influence of Educational Administration Quarterly (EAQ) on the scholarly literature in education during the 25-year period 1979 to 2003. This article continues part of the first critique of EAQ conducted by Roald Campbell in 1979. Study Methods: Two citation measures are used in this study to assess EAQ influence: (a) citation frequency, the total citations counts to EAQ articles found in the Web of Science database and (b) the impact factor, a ratio of citations to articles published that is calculated as part of the Journal Citation Reports . Study Findings: The findings point to three conclusions: (a) EAQ's substantive, ongoing influence on the scholarly education literature is limited to a small percentage of its published articles, which are cited predominantly by subsequent articles in EAQ; (b) this level of influence, though perhaps not the form, appears to be generally comparable to the level of other scholarly education journals with a solid academic reputation; and (c) EAQ appears to be statistically among the top tier of influential scholarly journals in education, but below the most influential. Overall, EAQ's influence on the scholarly education literature has improved since the first critique published in 1979.