Michael F. Addonizio

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.

The push and pull of open enrolment policy in metro Detroit

Abstract As US public education enrolment grows increasingly diverse, school choice policies create opportunities to break the link between residential and school segregation. They also create new pathways for families to self-segregate into ever more racially isolated schools. This study explores student enrolment patterns in Metro Detroit over a ten-year period to understand the implications of open enrolment policy on school racial and economic demographics. By focusing on the ten suburban districts that enrol the most Detroit resident students, we provide initial evidence that, while those districts increasingly enrol more Black and poor students than their residential population, many students from those districts are also taking advantage of school choice policy to enrol in districts further from the Detroit city centre. The in-flow and out-flow of students from these districts has implications for district budgets; design and implementation of school choice policy; and support for students in transitioning school environments.

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.