Betheny Gross

Do Accountability Policy Sanctions Influence Teacher Motivation? Lessons From Chicago’s Low-Performing Schools:

The federal No Child Left Behind Act and previous performance-based accountability policies are based on a theoretical assumption that sanctions will motivate school staff to perform at higher levels and focus attention on student outcomes. Using data from Chicago, this article draws on expectancy and incentive theories to examine whether motivation levels changed as a result of accountability policies and the policy mechanisms that affected teacher motivation. Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative data, the authors found that the value teachers placed on their professional status and their goals for students focused and increased their effort, but low morale had the potential to undercut the sustainability of teachers’ responses.

Is It Better to Be Good or Lucky? Decentralized Teacher Selection in 10 Elementary Schools.

In this article, the authors explore how school-based hiring reforms play out among schools serving different students in different locations within a single district. In particular, they consider how the intersection of school-based capacity and local school context affect teacher selection practice and outcomes. The analysis is based on a qualitative field study that describes recruitment and interview practices in 10 elementary schools in a large, decentralized urban school district. In addition to conducting interviews with school and district personnel, the authors observed a district-run training session for school-based interview teams and examined district and school documents, including district administrative data on vacancies and assignments for the 2006-2007 school year. All of the schools followed a common hiring procedure, but the authors found striking differences in the extent to which the schools actively recruited teachers and articulated consistent hiring priorities. The authors argue that these differences and the schools’ subsequent hiring outcomes are contingent on a complex interaction of school-based knowledge, resource constraints, and each school’s relative standing in the district’s internal labor market.The article highlights contingencies that offer an important caveat to the premise that school-based hiring will, by virtue of empowerment alone, lead to more effective teacher recruitment and selection.

Boosting Student Achievement: The Effect of Comprehensive School Reform on Student Achievement.

Between the late 1980s and early 2000s, schools, districts, states, and the federal government devoted enormous resources to the implementation of Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) models. With more than 1.6 billion federal dollars distributed through the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration (CSRD) project and its successor, the CSR project, states and districts made CSR adoption a central reform strategy for their lowest performing schools. Today, however, federal funding for CSR has dried up, and this policy has been left behind with few explicit efforts to assess the effect of these CSR funds on schools. In this article, the authors look back on this federal reform initiative and the effect it had on Texas students. Using promising analytic techniques for nonexperimental studies to investigate the effects of federal CSR awards on student achievement, the authors find that CSRD funding did not significantly effect students’ reading performance and that its effect on math performance varied across different student types.

Choice, Preferences, and Constraints Evidence from Public School Applications in Denver

Does ‘‘choosing a home’’ still matter for ‘‘choosing a school,’’ despite implementation of school choice policies designed to weaken this link? Prior research shows how the presence of such policies does little to solve the problems of stratification and segregation associated with residentially based enrollment systems, since families differ along racial/ethnic and socioeconomic lines in their access to, and how they participate in, the school choice process. We examine how families’ nearby school supply shapes and constrains their choices. Drawing on a unique dataset consisting of parents’ ranked preferences from among one urban district’s full menu of public schools, we find that Hispanic, white, and black parents share a strong preference for academic performance, but differences in their choices can be traced to variation in nearby supply. Our findings illustrate how the vastly different sets of schools from which parents can choose reproduce race-based patterns of stratification.

How Do Charter Schools Compete for Teachers? A Local Perspective

Charter schools are held up as examples of the benefits of a freer approach to hiring teachers. Most studies of charter school personnel policies, however, overlook important variation in personnel practice within the charter school sector. Examining how charter schools use recruitment timelines and teacher compensation to complete for teachers in their local context, the authors found that charter schools most often distinguish themselves from their local districts by experimenting with merit pay. Despite competitive efforts, the schools performance—and not competitive recruitment or compensation practice—appears to be the strongest predictor of both the quality and quantity of applicants to a school.