Lora Cohen-Vogel

“Staffing to the Test” Are Today’s School Personnel Practices Evidence Based?

Faced with mounting policy pressures from federal and state accountability programs, school leaders are reallocating curricula, time, even diet in an attempt to boost student achievement. To explore whether they are using test score data to reallocate their teacher resources as well, I designed a cross-case, cross-sectional study and explored principals’ reported staffing practices in one higher performing and one lower performing elementary school in each of five Florida school districts. Findings show that school leaders are “staffing to the test” by hiring, moving, and developing teachers in an effort to increase their schools’ overall performance. The paper discusses the implications of evidence-based staffing for policy, practice and future research.

Schooling Closer to Home: Desegregation Policy and Neighborhood Contexts

This article uses census data, information collected by health and police departments, and GIS mapping software to analyze the neighborhood contexts surrounding schools in one Southern school district. When courts lifted Nashville’s desegregation order in 1999, the district agreed to implement a new student assignment plan geared toward neighborhood attendance and shorter bus rides—in short, schooling closer to home. The return to neighborhood schools is embedded in widespread assumptions about the power of the neighborhood as a potential source of school improvement and school quality. Neighborhood schools are expected to boost community attachment to schools, encourage resource sharing, and increase parent involvement and social capital. This article explores the implications of schooling closer to home by analyzing neighborhood contexts. What does “closer to home” mean and for whom? Our results suggest that geographic proximity does not necessarily translate into structurally supportive community contexts for children, and black children are much more likely to be reassigned to schools in high‐risk neighborhoods as crosstown busing is eliminated.

The Influence of Local Conditions on Social Service Partnerships, Parent Involvement, and Community Engagement in Neighborhood Schools.

By using Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping software to combine health and crime data with data from 20 schools in one Southeastern district, the study explores whether and how neighborhood conditions affect school-community arrangements. Findings show that the nature of the relationships and the strategies principals and teachers use to partner with social service organizations, encourage parental involvement, and engage with the community, in particular, are influenced by the conditions of the neighborhood in which schools sit. The implications for theory development, policy, and practice are discussed as are ideas for future research.

Governing Quality in Teacher Education: Deconstructing Federal Text and Talk.

Two dueling national agendas characterize discussions surrounding teacher quality and teacher education reform. For professionalists, teacher quality is synonymous with meeting a set of professional standards. For deregulationists, these standards are roadblocks that deter high‐quality candidates from pursuing jobs in teaching. Despite differences regarding the means for improving teacher quality, both agendas try to depict their ideas as empirically sound, results driven, and in the best interest of the American public. Organized around and extending a framework devised by Cochran‐Smith and Fries (2001), the article analyzes legislation as well as public reports and speeches on teacher education to unpack how the professionalization‐deregulation debate is playing out in federal policy. We find a clear federal preference for deregulating teacher preparation.

Seniority Provisions in Collective Bargaining Agreements and the “Teacher Quality Gap”

For at least two decades, studies have demonstrated that the least experienced and credentialed teachers are concentrated in poor, minority, and low-performing schools. Some blame provisions in collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) between teachers unions and school districts that favor senior teachers. Seniority preference rules, they say, exacerbate the “teacher quality gap” by allowing experienced teachers to transfer. Using data from Florida, the authors analyze whether and how CBAs influence the distribution of teacher quality within school districts, paying special attention to staffing rules that grant preferences to senior teachers. They find little evidence that the within-district variation in teacher quality between more and less disadvantaged schools in Florida is explained by the determinativeness of union contract rules.

Understanding Effective High Schools Evidence for Personalization for Academic and Social Emotional Learning

This article presents findings from a year-long multilevel comparative case study exploring the characteristics of effective urban high schools. We developed a comprehensive framework from the school effectiveness research that guided our data collection and analysis at the four high schools. Using value-added methodology, we identified two higher and two lower performing high schools in Broward County, Florida. We found that the two higher performing high schools in the study had strong and deliberate structures, programs, and practices that attended to both students’ academic and social learning needs, something we call Personalization for Academic and Social Emotional Learning. Because of the study’s inductive focus on effectiveness, we follow our findings with a discussion of theories and prior research that substantiate the importance of schools’ attention to the connection between students’ academic and social emotional learning needs in high schools.

Implementing Educational Innovations at Scale: Transforming Researchers Into Continuous Improvement Scientists

There is growing concern among researchers and governmental officials that knowing what works in education is important, but not enough for school improvement. Sound evidence alone is not sufficient for large-scale, sustainable change, both because practitioners may consider it irrelevant to their own problems of practice or run into challenges when they try to implement. Failed attempts at replicating positive outcomes in new (or simply expanded) settings underscore the need for a different relationship between research and practice, one that takes a systemic perspective on improvement and transforms the role for research. In this article, we describe the new science of improvement and where it sits in the evolution of research on education policy implementation. We discuss the roots of the approach as well as its key features. We explain how the work differs from that of traditional research and end with illustrations of this difference from our experiences with the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools.

Introduction: Teacher and Leadership Preparation and Development: No Strangers to Politics

Debates over the quality of the nation’s teaching force extend at least as far back as the early 1900s. Today, teacher quality is again at the top of the reform agenda for America’s public schools. Consensus over the substance of reform, however, has not yet been achieved. Before introducing the articles in this double issue and discussing their individual and combined value for the study of educational politics, this article provides a brief history of the politics surrounding teacher and administrator preparation, unpacks the arguments behind the two national reform agendas for America’s teachers (professionalization and deregulation), and parses out a quality problem within a political discourse that stresses teacher shortages.

Leading With Data: Evidence From the National Center on Scaling up Effective Schools

Through comparative case study, we seek to understand the ways in which actors in high schools use and think about performance data. In particular, we compare data use in higher and lower value-added schools. Data use is conceptualized here as having access to a host of available performance data on students, using them to guide instructional decisions, and building cultures in which data are seen as vehicles for improvements in practice. While our findings do not show consistent differences in the higher and lower value-added schools, they do allow us to set out an expanded conceptualization of school data use.

The Politics of Teacher Reform in Florida: Analyzing Causal Narratives Surrounding State Adoption of Performance-Based Evaluations, Performance Pay, and Tenure Elimination

Following a multiyear debate, Florida lawmakers passed the “Student Success Act” in March 2011, introducing some of the most sweeping educational reforms in the states history—the introduction of teacher evaluation systems based on value-added modeling, mandatory “performance pay” for teachers, and the elimination of long-term professional service contracts. Using Stones (1989) Causal Stories framework, this article analyzes arguments made for and against these reforms by numerous policy actors. Analysis of transcripts, news coverage, and policy reports reveals that actors on both sides of the debate constructed competing stories regarding the “causes” of poor student achievement. These competing causal narratives were central to actors’ efforts to define the nature of the educative process, identify the “players” who controlled student learning, and portray the proposed reforms as solutions to the problem of underachievement, on one hand, or ill-conceived and poorly targeted answers, on the other.