No abstract

No abstract

The so-called &dquo;property tax revolt&dquo; and the New Federalism have combined to increase the state role in financing local schools. This strengthened state role gives rise to a need for reexamining the use of the intergovernmental grants for education in terms of their rationale, design, and effects.

In response to demands for school accountability, states now devote much attention to distinguishing among effective and ineffective schools. These efforts, while varying considerably in rigor and sophistication, generally emphasize technical or allocative efficiency (e.g., the marginal productivity of measured inputs employed in various combinations) in schools and sometimes seek to estimate the "cost" of input bundles associated with successful schools. This approach, however, ignores the impact of "x-efficiency" (e.g., school policies, incentives, practices, etc.) on school performance. Drawing upon Leibenstein's seminal 1966 article on the theory of the firm and the "effective schools" research of the 1980s, this article uses a production function approach and basic econometric techniques to interrogate a rich panel of elementary school-level data in order to quantify the effects of x-efficiency on school performance. Findings reveal a substantial impact of school x-efficiency on academic outcomes, far in excess of the contributions of standard, observed school inputs. School influences are greater for mathematics achievement than for reading achievement in the elementary grades with effect sizes averaging 0.45 standard deviations for reading and 0.61 standard deviations for mathematics.

No abstract

Most of the low-performing schools and students are in urban districts where poverty is high, where large proportions of students have limited English proficiency, and where students perform poorly on achievement tests. Moreover, urban districts face numerous challenges, including attracting teachers to their schools and optimizing their hiring, transfer, and retention policies so that they bring the best available teachers to the classroom setting. What's now needed is an understanding of how schools differ on the qualifications of their teachers and the mechanisms driving these differences. In this article, the authors use the Detroit metropolitan region as a case study in order to (a) determine whether there is teacher sorting across schools and districts, and (2) identify which schools and districts have the least qualified teachers.

No abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify an association between student mobility through open enrollment and voter support for school bond proposals. Specifically, we hypothesized that higher percentages of nonresident enrollment in a school district and resident exit from a district would be associated with lower levels of voter support for bond proposals. Data Collection and Analysis: We utilized publicly available data on bond proposals placed on ballots between 2009 and 2015, publicly available data from the State of Michigan for information on percentages of nonresident enrollment and resident exit, and publicly available data from the U.S. Census Bureau for data on district resident characteristics. Regression analysis was used to identify associations between nonresident enrollment and resident exit with the percentage of “yes” votes on school bond proposals controlling for community and resident characteristics. Findings: We failed to reject the null hypotheses, finding no statistically significant association between nonresident enrollment and resident exit and average voter support for school bond proposals, ceteris paribus. Implications for Research/Practice: We laid some groundwork for reconceptualizing the relationship between open enrollment policies and communities’ willingness to support local public schools. This has potential implications for both local- and state-level policies regarding enrollment issues and issues of school finance. As local boards continue to struggle with budget shortfalls and mounting capital needs, they may need to further weigh their own communities’ interest in supporting local public schools in the wake of increased student mobility in and out of districts.