No abstract

This article draws on 5 years of data from a nationally representative sample of students to explore how institutional discontinuities between middle and high schools affect the mathematics and science progress of students with varied backgrounds. The study finds evidence that changes in safety, academic environment, teacher push, and student autonomy to select courses affect student progress across the transition. The analysis found little evidence of a differential impact based on student background characteristics; only the measure of the degree to which parents participate in nonschool activities surfaced as a predictor of student progress across the transition, reaffirming what other studies have found about the importance of this variable. Recommendations focus on targeting education policy in ways that can ease this problematic transition for students.

Teacher experience has long been a central pillar of teacher workforce policies in U.S. school systems. The underlying assumption behind many of these policies is that experience promotes effectiveness, but is this really the case? What does existing evidence tell us about how, why, and for whom teacher experience matters? This policy brief distills the research on teacher experience into four general findings: (1) the effect of experience is most evident during the first few years of teaching; (2) the early-career experience effect varies by level of education and subject area; (3) inexperienced teachers are most likely to teach in high-poverty schools; and (4) the impact of experience differs for teachers in high- versus low-poverty schools. The brief concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for several key policy measures including teacher compensation, support and professional development, and the unequal distribution of teachers across schools.

This article offers a framework for assessing how education policy initiatives may affect a school’s capacity to improve its performance. Drawing on the theoretical literature regarding school capacity and case studies of high-stakes accountability policies, the authors develop and illustrate a framework that includes both a resource dimension and a productivity dimension. They argue that this dual dimensional construction of school capacity encourages a more complete exploration of the manner in which education reform policies might alter school capacity.

School reconstitution has become a prevalent but underexamined policy option. Although the stated aim of school reconstitution is to enhance the human capital available in low-performing schools, this aim may not be realized. Instead, reconstitution reform may impose substantial human costs, which undermine its ability to achieve its primary aim. This article draws on 2 years of case study data to examine the nature, distribution, and consequences of the human costs associated with this reform. This case study can be empirically instructive, because it exposes a category of costs—namely, human costs— that were largely unanticipated and/or underestimated by the policy makers but were highly consequential for the fate of the reform. This discovery is significant, theoretically, because it reaffirms the recognition that human costs exist, and it contributes to the understanding of how these costs might be operationalized and linked to the efficacy of personnel-dependent reforms.