Hopes, Fears, & Reality: A Balanced Look at American Charter Schools in 2007
Like previous editions of Hopes, Fears, & Reality, the 2007 edition explores some of the most challenging issues facing the charter school movement with a focus on the pressing concerns, tensions, and opportunities involved with teaching, leading, and governing charter schools.
Lessons from the Headlines: Key Questions for Districts Attempting to Close Schools
This brief touches on the experiences of urban school districts as they sought to close schools. It offers insight into the critical questions districts encountered and different paths chosen during the process.
Are Public Schools Losing Their Best? Assessing the Career Transitions of Teachers and Their Implications for the Quality of the Teacher Workforce
This paper examines attrition and mobility of early-career teachers in North Carolina public schools using teacher value-added measures.
Quantity Counts: The Growth of Charter School Management Organizations
This report analyzes why replicating successful charter schools has been tougher and more costly than expected for both for-profit and nonprofit charter management organizations (EMOs and CMOs).
Teacher Labor Markets and the Perils of Using Hedonics to Estimate Compensating Differentials in the Public Sector
Policymakers and researchers alike have expressed concern about a teacher quality gap between schools with affluent student populations and the more disadvantaged ones. This study uses teacher and school-level data from the NCES Schools and Staffing Survey combined with census-level information about community characteristics to build hedonic wage models for both public and private schools.
Teacher Attitudes About Compensation Reform: Implications for Reform Implementation
This paper describes research designed to shed light on how teachers feel about different pay and incentive reforms.
Difficulties of Estimating the Cost of Achieving Education Standards
This paper shows that none of the available methods for estimating what it would cost to reach high standards for all children is adequate to the task.
District Resource Allocation Modeler (DREAM): A Web-Based Tool Supporting the Strategic Use of Educational Resources
This paper is a companion piece to the District Resource Allocation Modeler (DREAM) tool developed by Education Resource Strategies.
Spending Choices and School Autonomy: Lessons From Ohio Elementary Schools
This study examines resource allocation patterns across elementary schools and how these patterns differ depending, in part, on various levels of autonomy over resources at the school level.
Two Alternative Yet Complementary Conceptual Frameworks for Financing American Education
In this working paper, Michael Kirst suggests that a productive education system would focus relatively greater resources on out-of-school interventions, especially for the most disadvantaged children. He argues that such interventions could help teachers and students focus on instruction and actually increase student learning.