Amanda Rutherford

Evaluating Impacts of Performance Funding Policies on Student Outcomes in Higher Education

Concerns about performance and cost efficiency have taken center stage in discussions about the funding and oversight of public universities in recent years. One of the primary manifestations of these concerns is the rise of performance funding policies, or policies that seek to directly link state appropriations to the outcomes institutions generate for students. Despite the popularity of these policies, relatively little systematic research examines their effect on student outcomes at public colleges and universities. We use data collected from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) to analyze the effectiveness of performance funding policies as a mechanism for improving student graduation, persistence, and degree attainment in more than 500 postsecondary institutions in all fifty states over a span of 18 years. We find that current performance funding policies are not associated with higher levels of student performance and that these policies may in fact contribute to lower performance over a longer period of time. However, more recent policies linked to institutional base funding may produce some likelihood of long-term improvement and require additional research.

Partisanship, structure, and representation: the puzzle of African American education politics

The 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act targeted electoral structures as significant determinants of minority representation. The research regarding electoral structures and representation of constituents, however, has produced conflicting results, and the continued application of some of the provisions set forth in the Voting Rights Act is in doubt. This article addresses the impact of at-large elections on African American representation and reveals a striking and unanticipated finding: African Americans are now overrepresented on school boards that have at-large elections when African Americans are a minority of the population. Using the 1,800 largest school districts in the United States (based on original surveys conducted in 2001, 2004, and 2008), we find that partisanship changes the relationship between electoral structures and race to benefit African American representation.

Organizational Turnaround and Educational Performance The Impact of Performance-Based Monitoring Analysis Systems

How do accountability policies affect failing organizations? Are additional interventions used to improve underperforming agencies effective in raising performance outputs? This article investigates the effectiveness of turnaround policies in organizations that persistently fail to meet accountability standards. Using Performance-Based Monitoring Analysis System data from169 school districts in Texas, this article shows that turnaround interventions have only limited success. While monitoring strategies work for the most salient performance indicator in the short term, improvements quickly dissipate following an intervention. Supporting the notion that management matters, results also show that the type of monitor assigned to a failing school can affect the extent of improvement in performance.

Reexamining Causes and Consequences: Does Administrative Intensity Matter for Organizational Performance?

ABSTRACT This study examines the relationship between organizational structure (size and complexity) and administrative intensity and, subsequently, the effect of administrative intensity on organizational performance in the context of four-year institutions of higher education in the United States between 2003 and 2009. Organizational size has a negative effect on administrative intensity and supports the notion of economies of scale. Size and complexity also interact such that complexity has a greater effect on total administrative intensity in larger organizations. While administrative intensity has a nonlinear relationship with degree productivity, suggesting a tipping point of 30% total administration, it has little direct effect on graduation rates.

For Better or worse: Organizational turnaround in New York City schools

Abstract The performance of public organizations has become a more salient issue as the popularity of accountability policies has grown. Though organizations are often defined as underperforming, little is known about the effectiveness of various strategies commonly recommended for agency turnaround. This study provides a large-N test of three common categories of turnaround mechanisms – retrenchment, repositioning, and reorganization – in nearly 300 failing New York City schools between 2008 and 2011. Models show that none of the three turnaround strategies appear to be significantly associated with improvements in core organizational performance from an administrative perspective, although repositioning appears to improve client satisfaction.

The Effect of Top-management Team Heterogeneity on Performance in Institutions of Higher Education

ABSTRACT Empirical studies aiming to test theories connecting management to organizational performance in public administration have generally focused on a single executive at the apex of the organization. Yet organizations are increasingly governed by top-management teams (TMTs) composed of two or more individuals. In these team settings, managers have varying levels and types of previous experience, education, and socialization, and these backgrounds and skill sets can lead managers to hold different values that affect decision-making processes and, consequently, organizational performance. Whether higher levels of heterogeneity are linked to variation in outcomes, however, is debated and has rarely been examined in the context of large public bureaucracies. Using data on university presidents and provosts in U.S. higher education, this study finds that heterogeneity in top-management teams does affect performance indicators for some, but not all, goals of access, affordability, and quality.

The Role of Managerial Fit in Determining Organizational Performance: An Empirical Assessment of Presidents in U.S. Higher Education

The question of managerial fit—the congruence between a manager and his or her environment—has become widely debated by policymakers, practitioners, and scholars from a number of fields as the occurrence of non-internal management hires has increased across many types of organizations. Although many assume that higher levels of fit in an organization will generate better performance, others argue that misfits are better suited at leading organizations as motivated change agents. In this study, a measure of person–organization fit is created using original cross-sectional time-series data on U.S. university presidents from 1993 to 2009. Findings indicate that maximizing fit is not always ideal and that fit has a nonlinear relationship with organizational performance such that some fit is healthy but high fit can be detrimental for student performance measures.

Shifting Administrative Intensity and Employee Composition: Cutback Management in Education

Many public organizations are increasingly confronted with substantive and unpredictable reductions of financial resources. Despite growing research attention to this issue, empirical investigation of the organizational consequences of decline and turbulence has been limited. This article aims to understand the combined effects of decline and turbulence on personnel, one of the largest expenditure categories in organizations. Analyses use data from 2- and 4-year public institutions of higher education in the United States from 1988 to 2012. Findings in this context suggest that while decline alone has little to no effect on staffing, turbulence is associated with larger effects that are moderated by decline. Two-year institutions more closely resemble operational, efficiency-oriented responses to turbulence, and 4-year institutions reflect a more strategic reaction.

Representation, Partisanship, and Equality in Education

Racial inequities in access to quality education are one of the most persistent issues in American politics. African-American educational attainment lags behind all other groups in the United States and appears resistant to most policy levers. The Politics of African-American Education: Representation, Partisanship, and Educational Equity brings together the results of a major national study focused on the local politics of education. The study stresses four major themes. First, racial disparities in education reflect, in part, political inequities. Although a wide range of factors influence the educational attainment of African Americans including income levels, housing patterns, employment opportunities, and myriad social factors, the correlation between African-American political power and access to quality education for African American students has persisted for more than two hundred years. Within the African-American community, consistent response to the lack of educational opportunities has been to mobilize politically through interest groups (such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), protests, or politicians (by running for electoral office). The political side of educational equity will be the primary focus of this study rather than sociological or economic variables. We argue that while research sometimes overlooks this aspect of educational processes, it can be one of the most important in determining what opportunities are afforded to students. Second, representation is an effective instrument for addressing African-American educational inequities. This study views political representation broadly to include African-American school board members, school administrators, and, most of all, school teachers. Representation in school politics occurs through a cascade effect with school board representation influencing administrative representation which, in turn, directly affects teacher representation. Increases in school board representation predict increases in administrative representation, and increases in administrative representation predict increases in teacher representation. Among these groups, African-American teachers are consistently associated with better educational outcomes for African-American students in policy outputs (gifted class assignments, special education assignments, suspensions, and expulsions) as well as in policy outcomes (test scores, graduation rates, and preparation for higher education). Third, electoral and governance structures create biases in the political and bureaucratic systems that influence how representation and other factors affect African-American education. Electoral structures such as at-large elections are designed to bias electoral results to discriminate against numerical minorities.