Charter schools elevate choice and competition to foster educational innovations. Indeed, these market-style mechanisms are intended to challenge standardized practices associated with district administration of schools. However, a comprehensive review of practices in charter schools indicates that, although some organizational innovations are evident, classroom strategies tend toward the familiar. Drawing on organizational and economic theory, this article considers the forces shaping educational innovation in market-oriented reforms. Although reformers assume that competition and choice necessarily lead to innovations within schools, a more complex examination of competitive institutional environments suggests that mechanisms employed by reformers may actually undercut their intended purposes. The discussion highlights the potential for choice and competition to constrain opportunities for educational innovation and to impose pedagogical and curricular conformity.
This article develops a framework for investigating research use, using an “advocacy coalition framework” and the concepts of a “supply side” (mainly organizations) and “demand side” (policymakers). Drawing on interview data and documents from New Orleans about the charter school reforms that have developed there since 2005, the authors examine (a) the role of intermediaries in producing information and research syntheses for local, state, and/or federal policymakers; (b) the extent of policymakers’ demand for such research and information; and (c) the extent to which local and national coalitions of organizations appear to be influential in research use. The article concludes that there are two coalitions in New Orleans that differ in their interpretations of charter school performance, equity, and access; that there is overall very low research capacity within the intermediary sector; and that there is little evidence of demand from state policymakers for research findings. There was agreement across both coalitions that there is a lack of a credible and non-partisan research group studying the reforms, that is, one that produces data analyses that are not merely descriptive. The authors map preliminary findings about how intermediary organizations are connected to national groups, as well as how research is shared within coalitions.
Recent analyses challenge common wisdom regarding the superiority of private schools relative to public schools, raising questions about the role of school processes and climate in shaping achievement in different types of schools. While holding demographic factors constant, this multilevel analysis of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics data on over 270,000 fourth and eighth graders in over 10,000 schools examines differences among schools on five critical factors: (1) school size, (2) class size, (3) school climate/ parental involvement, (4) teacher certification, and (5) instructional practices. This study provides nationally representative evidence that both teacher certification and some reform-oriented mathematics teaching practices correlate positively with achievement and are more prevalent in public schools than in demographically similar private schools. Additionally, smaller class size, more prevalent in private schools, is significantly correlated with achievement.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.