Huriya Jabbar

Intermediary Organizations in Charter School Policy Coalitions Evidence From New Orleans

This article develops a framework for investigating research use, using an “advocacy coalition framework” and the concepts of a “supply side” (mainly organizations) and “demand side” (policymakers). Drawing on interview data and documents from New Orleans about the charter school reforms that have developed there since 2005, the authors examine (a) the role of intermediaries in producing information and research syntheses for local, state, and/or federal policymakers; (b) the extent of policymakers’ demand for such research and information; and (c) the extent to which local and national coalitions of organizations appear to be influential in research use. The article concludes that there are two coalitions in New Orleans that differ in their interpretations of charter school performance, equity, and access; that there is overall very low research capacity within the intermediary sector; and that there is little evidence of demand from state policymakers for research findings. There was agreement across both coalitions that there is a lack of a credible and non-partisan research group studying the reforms, that is, one that produces data analyses that are not merely descriptive. The authors map preliminary findings about how intermediary organizations are connected to national groups, as well as how research is shared within coalitions.

The Hub and the Spokes Foundations, Intermediary Organizations, Incentivist Reforms, and the Politics of Research Evidence

The rise in the influence of and spending by educational philanthropists and foundations over the past two decades, especially in the area of market-based reforms, such as charter schools, vouchers, and merit pay, is evident across the United States. Largely due to philanthropic investments, relatively new educational intermediary organizations (IOs) have also been growing in size, scope, and influence. These new IOs have sought to implement market-based reforms in key urban school districts, frequently based on ideological stances and/or evidence of their efficacy. As yet, researchers have not conceptualized the unique position of foundations in the landscape of intermediary organizations, market-based reforms, and evidence production and utilization. Drawing from a 3-year (2011-2014) study of IOs, research utilization, and policymaking in the case of “incentivist” reforms, we find that foundations are uniquely situated in the reform landscape as a central actor, at the “hub” of intermediary activity as a funder of IOs, but also as a “spoke” in the wheel that helps to mobilize and, in many ways, direct the activities of the IOs. We discuss the implications of the role of foundations in research production, promotion, and utilization for research and policymaking.

Every Kid Is Money: Market-Like Competition and School Leader Strategies in New Orleans.

One of the primary aims of choice policies is to introduce competition between schools. When parents can choose where to send their children, there is pressure on schools to improve to attract and retain students. However, do school leaders recognize market pressures? What strategies do they use in response? This study examines how choice creates school-level actions using qualitative data from 30 schools in New Orleans. Findings suggest that school leaders did experience market pressures, yet their responses to such pressures varied, depending in part on their perceptions of competition and their status in the market hierarchy. Some took steps toward school improvement, by making academic and operational changes, whereas others engaged in marketing or cream skimming.

Using Bibliometric and Social Media Analyses to Explore the “Echo Chamber” Hypothesis

Educational policy debates are no longer occurring exclusively in academic or governmental settings. Intermediary actors are promoting research using a variety of traditional and non-traditional media to advance and oppose policy agendas. Given the current policy arena, it is useful to re-examine the research underlying current reforms, and to determine whether there is an “echo-chamber” effect, where a small, or unrepresentative, sample of studies is repeatedly cited to create momentum around a policy proposal. In exploring the echo-chamber hypothesis, we focus on two distinct methodologies. Using bibliometric methods and examining social media activity by intermediary organizations, our preliminary evidence suggests the presence of an echo-chamber effect in policy debates.

Selling Schools: Marketing and Recruitment Strategies in New Orleans

Under new school-choice policies, schools feel increasing pressure to market their schools to parents and students. I examine how school leaders in New Orleans used different marketing strategies based on their positions in the market hierarchy and the ways in which they used formal and informal processes to recruit students. This study relied on qualitative interviews, observations of board meetings, and board-meeting minutes from a random sample of 30 schools in New Orleans. Findings indicate that marketing was a very common strategy. Yet even though choice policies were meant to give parents, not schools, power in selecting where their children attend school, some schools found ways to avoid enrolling disadvantaged students, often by not marketing. Faced with the pressure of accountability and charter renewal, these schools traded greater funding for potentially greater averages in student achievement. At the same time, some schools that were oversubscribed invested in marketing and recruitment anyway to draw less affluent parents to the school, who might not be aware of the open application and enrollment process. I discuss the implications of these marketing strategies.

The Behavioral Economics of Education New Directions for Research

Over the past several decades, researchers have used economics to understand a number of issues in education policy. This article argues that some education researchers have defined economics too narrowly, neglecting several areas of economics research that cut across disciplinary boundaries. One subdiscipline of economics that might be of use in education, but which has not been applied much to it, is behavioral economics, which incorporates psychological knowledge about human behavior to enhance and extend economic models of decision making. This article reviews some of the behavioral concepts in economics that are most likely to inform education research and policy—prospect theory, framing effects, status quo bias, paradox of choice, and intrinsic motivation—and suggests directions for further research.

The Intermediary Function in Evidence Production, Promotion, and Utilization: The Case of Educational Incentives

An increased role for the federal government and philanthropic organizations in education over the last decade, along with a growing demand for evidence by public and private policymakers, has invigorated an already vibrant sector of intermediary organizations that seek to package and promote research on educational policies and programs for policymakers, typically around a specific policy agenda. Educational reforms that promise to incentivize school improvement—charter schools, vouchers, teacher compensation incentives, and student pay-for-performance, for example—are of particular interest to intermediary organizations. This chapter examines how national and local intermediary organizations function to shape evidence on the benefits and drawbacks of incentivist educational reforms through funding, production, and dissemination in New Orleans, Denver, and New York City and at the national level. We find evidence of national-local coalitions through which a variety of evidences—academic, journalistic, anecdotal, think tank, and advocacy oriented—are produced and disseminated. We are also witnessing the ways in which intermediary organizations, through their coalitions, are providing a political function to a host of policy actors and the public writ large.

Competitive Networks and School Leaders’ Perceptions: The Formation of an Education Marketplace in Post-Katrina New Orleans

School choice policies are often based on the idea that competition will generate better outcomes for all students. Yet there is limited empirical research about how school leaders actually perceive competition and whom they view as rivals. Drawing on concepts from economic sociology, I study principals’ competitive networks and the sets of schools they view as rivals, and I use network and statistical analysis to explore factors that explain the existence of a competitive tie between two schools. Most school leaders perceived some competition, but the extent to which they competed with other schools varied significantly. Factors that predicted a competitive relationship between two schools included geography, student transfers, school performance, principal characteristics, and charter network.

‘Drenched in the past:’ the evolution of market-oriented reforms in New Orleans

As the city with the largest charter-school market share in the United States, New Orleans, Louisiana exemplifies market-oriented models in education. For a city that is so ‘drenched in the past,’ the reform movement in New Orleans typically neglects historical context, often dismissing the education system pre-Katrina as simply corrupt and dysfunctional. This is an incomplete story. While national narratives and news media tend to downplay these features, there is no local consensus on the reforms. There is mistrust on both sides of the debate, and a growing opposition movement, which arises from decades of racial and political struggles, corrupt public officials, and previous experiences with the state exerting power over locally elected school boards, which disenfranchised African-Americans in New Orleans in particular. Although the new, post-Katrina educational system significantly altered political dynamics, it has not eradicated politics altogether. In this paper, I conduct a policy history of education reforms in New Orleans, connecting the historical and political context to current reform efforts. As researchers evaluate the effectiveness of the new reforms in terms of student achievement, it is important also to examine their impacts on communities and the democratic control of schools, as well as how they reproduce or break from historical patterns of political struggle and inequality.

How Policymakers Define ‘Evidence’: The Politics of Research Use in New Orleans

Nearly ten years after Katrina and the implementation of a host of new and radical education reforms in New Orleans, there remains little evidence about whether the changes have improved school performance. Despite this lack of evidence, the New Orleans model is held up as a reform success, and is being adopted by other cities. In this article the authors ask how policymakers in New Orleans and at the state level define, access and interpret research or evidence on the reforms, and how, if at all, such evidence informs their decision-making. They interviewed key district and state policymakers, as well as representatives from dozens of intermediary organizations in the area, who, they argue, are also shapers of policy. On the demand side, they found that policymakers primarily used personal anecdotes to justify their position and explain the success of reforms, and they relied on blogs or non-peer-reviewed sources for background information. Peer-reviewed research was seldom used, typically passed to policymakers via an echo chamber of intermediary organizations, personal contacts or key partners. Connecting supply to demand, the authors find that intermediary organizations broker research and evidence to advance their policy agendas, and that they serve as de facto policymakers in New Orleans.