C. Philip Kearney

The Creation and Development of an Interest Group: Life at the Intersection of Big Business and Education Reform

Responding to calls from the president of the United Sates and the Business Roundtable, business leaders have become increasingly involved in setting the education reform agenda. Using five interest group theories and longitudinal data; the authors examined the formation, agenda setting, and maintenance of an organization of business leaders. Moderate support was found for each of the theories. Analyses further revealed that policy interests and to a lesser degree, functional interests were important to the formation and activity of the interest group. To forge successful partnerships and to implement effective reform, educators, policy makers, and researchers must better understand the motives and actions that impel business involvement in education

Teacher Quality in Michigan: A School-Level Analysis of the Detroit Metropolitan Region.

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.

Market Driven Schools and Educational Choices

been major themes of American education reform. Many advocates of choice argue that subjecting public schools to market forces will compel them to be more responsive to parents and students. The Reagan and Bush administrations, which supported an expanded marketplace in education, proposed tuition tax credits and vouchers to extend choice to the private schools. However, there was little support for these measures among the advocates of the market approach to school improvement. Instead these reformers proposed increasing competition within the public school sector, thus foregoing the arguments for public school and private school competition. Within the past few years, several states have passed legislation increasing competition within the public sector and there are indications that the Clinton administration will support such measures. Clearly, the issues of educational choice and market driven schools, whether in the public or private sector, will continue to be of importance at federal, state, and local levels.

Fiscal Impacts and Redistributive Effects of the New Federalism on Michigan School Districts.

Using a quasi-experimental time-series design and employing a multiple regression technique, we examined the fiscal impacts and redistributive effects of the recently enacted federal education block grant on Michigan’s 525 K–12 school districts. Two important policy questions were addressed: Are resource allocations for targeted school districts likely to be affected by the adoption of different federal grant mechanisms? If so, will there be a shifting of resources away from or toward these districts? We found that the movement to the block grant mechanism resulted in a definite shift of funds away from former Emergency School Aid Act (ESAA) districts, districts with high proportions of poverty children, highly urbanized districts, and large districts toward smaller and rural districts. The implications of these changes in federal policy are discussed.

Michigan's Experiences with the Federal Education Block Grant.

Abstract The results of a detailed study undertaken in Michigan to ditermine the impact of the Chapter 2 block grant in its first two years of implemention 1982–1983 and 1983–1984 are summarized in this article Following a discussion of changes in intergovernmental relationships that resulted from Chapter 2 major state decisions snd actions that centered on the block grant program are described General and specific impressions of the impact of Chapter 2 based on an in depth study of nine public school districts and four non-public schools comprise the major portion of the article.

Teacher Quality and Sorting across Traditional Public and Charter Schools in the Detroit Metropolitan Region.

Introduction In the quest to raise student achievement in low-performing urban schools, researchers often point to the central importance of recruitment and retention of a high quality teacher workforce (Lankford, Loeb and Wyckoff 2002; Rivkin, Hanushek and Kain 2005; Jacob 2007).1 At the same time, advocates have proposed charter schools not only as a means to reform traditional public schools, but also as a strategy to close the achievement gap between urban students and their suburban counterparts in no small part because charter schools are often freed from many of the constraints faced by traditional public schools, allowing them greater flexibility to recruit and retain a qualitatively different teacher workforce (Center for Education Reform n.d.). Using data for the Detroit metropolitan region of Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties for the 2005-2006 school year, this study sought to answer four research questions: (1) Did charter school teachers differ in measures of teacher quality from traditional public school teachers; (2) Was there variability in teacher quality within traditional public and charter schools; (3) To what extent were teacher quality indicators associated with teacher effectiveness; and (4) Did teacher sorting take place across charter and traditional public schools? This article is divided into eight sections. It begins with a background section on charter schools in Michigan, followed by a section on research on teacher quality and sorting. The third section presents research methods used in the study while findings are discussed in the next four sections, one for each of the research questions. The article closes with a summary, conclusions, and recommendations for future research.