Sean P. Corcoran

White and Black Teachers' Job Satisfaction: Does Relational Demography Matter?.

Data on the impact of student, teacher, and principal racial and gender composition in urban schools on teacher work outcomes are limited. This study, a secondary data analysis of White and Black urban public school teachers using data taken from the restricted use 2003-04 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), examines the effects of relational demography on teacher job satisfaction adjusting for other known determinants of job satisfaction. Relational demography is conceptualized as a set of racial and gender congruency items between teachers and principals, teachers and teachers, and teachers and students. The results of the study show that some components of relational demography directly affect teacher job satisfaction, over and above the effects of work-related attitudes.

Training Your Own The Impact of New York City’s Aspiring Principals Program on Student Achievement

The New York City Leadership Academy represents a unique experiment by a large urban school district to train and develop its own school leaders. Its 14-month Aspiring Principals Program (APP) selects and prepares aspiring principals to lead low-performing schools. This study provides the first systematic evaluation of achievement in APP-staffed schools after 3 or more years. We examine differences between APP principals and those advancing through other routes, the extent to which APP graduates serve and remain in schools, and their relative performance in mathematics and English language arts. On balance, we find that APP principals performed about as well as other new principals. If anything, they narrowed the gap with comparison schools in English language arts but lagged behind in mathematics.

Value Added and Its Uses: Where You Stand Depends on Where You Sit.

In this policy brief we argue that there is little debate about the statistical properties of value-added model (VAM) estimates of teacher performance, yet, despite this, there is little consensus about what the evidence about VAMs implies for their practical utility as part of high-stakes performance evaluation systems. A review of the evidence base that underlies the debate over VAM measures, followed by our subjective opinions about the value of using VAMs, illustrates how different policy conclusions can easily arise even given a high-level general agreement about an existing body of evidence. We conclude the brief by offering a few thoughts about the limits of our knowledge and what that means for those who do wish to integrate VAMs into their own teacher-evaluation strategy.

Long-run trends in the quality of teachers: Evidence and implications for policy

One of the key provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act requires states to ensure that every teacher be highly qualified. Though the meaning of highly qualified remains hotly contested, the legislations emphasis on teachers is well founded. Nearly all modern research on the subject finds teacher effectiveness to be among the most important school inputs into student achievement. Yet recent literature, including my own work (Corcoran, Evans, and Schwab 2004), finds evidence that the quality of teachers has steadily eroded over time. In particular, the likelihood that a high-aptitude female pursued a career in teaching dropped precipitously between 1960 and 2000. In this article, I summarize these and related findings, review some of the most common explanations for the trend in teacher quality, and discuss policies that have been advanced to attract talented graduates to the teaching profession.

LOCAL DEMAND FOR A SCHOOL CHOICE POLICY: EVIDENCE FROM THE WASHINGTON CHARTER SCHOOL REFERENDA

The expansion of charter schools—publicly funded, yet in direct competition with traditional public schools—has emerged as a favored response to poor performance in the education sector. While a large and growing literature has sought to estimate the impact of these schools on student achievement, comparatively little is known about demand for the policy itself. Using election returns from three consecutive referenda on charter schools in Washington State, we weigh the relative importance of school quality, community and school demographics, and partisanship in explaining voter support for greater school choice. We find that low school quality—as measured by standardized tests—is a consistent and modestly strong predictor of support for charters. However, variation in performance between school districts is more predictive of charter support than variation within them. At the local precinct level, school resources, union membership, student heterogeneity, and the Republican vote share are often stronger predictors of charter support than standardized test results.

The New York City Aspiring Principals Program: A School-Level Evaluation

New York suffers from a persistent shortage of principals. The Leadership Academy - an independent, not-for-profit organization - represents the centerpiece of New York City’s attempts to expand its principal labor pool while at the same time increasing the autonomy and day-to-day responsibilities of its school leaders. In particular, the Leadership Academy seeks to prepare principals for schools marked by high student poverty, low achievement and frequent staff turnover - schools in which principal vacancies had been historically hard to fill. Aspiring Principals (APP), the Leadership Academy’s pre-service principal preparation program, is a 14-month intensive program involving three components. This report represents the first systematic comparison of student outcomes in schools led by APP graduates after three years to those in comparable schools led by other new principals. We provide both a straightforward comparison of average achievement in these two groups of schools, and in efforts to isolate a potential program effect, we conduct a formal regression analysis that accounts for pre-existing differences in student performance and characteristics. We also report key differences between the school leaders themselves and the schools in which they were placed. All principals in this study were installed in 2004-05 or 2005-06, remained in the same school for three or more consecutive years, and led their school through the 2007-08 school year.

Commuting to Work: RN Travel Time to Employment in Rural and Urban Areas

Purpose: To investigate the variation in average daily travel time to work among registered nurses (RNs) living in urban, suburban, and rural areas. We examine how travel time varies across RN characteristics, job setting, and availability of local employment opportunities. Method: Descriptive statistics and linear regression using a 5% sample from the 2000 Census and a longitudinal survey of newly licensed RNs (NLRN). Travel time for NLRN respondents was estimated using geographic information systems (GIS) software. Findings: In the NLRN, rural nurses and those living in small towns had significantly longer average commute times. Young married RNs and RNs with children also tended to have longer commute times, as did RNs employed by hospitals. Conclusions: The findings indicate that travel time to work varies significantly across locale types. Further research is needed to understand whether and to what extent lengthy commute times impact RN workforce needs in rural and urban areas.

Surviving at the Street Level: How Counselors’ Implementation of School Choice Policy Shapes Students’ High School Destinations:

Given the dominance of residentially based school assignment, prior researchers have conceptualized K–12 enrollment decisions as beyond the purview of school actors. This paper questions the continued relevance of this assumption by studying the behavior of guidance counselors charged with implementing New York City’s universal high school choice policy. Drawing on structured interviews with 88 middle school counselors and administrative data on choice outcomes at these middle schools, we find that counselors generally believe lower-income students are on their own in making high school choices and need additional adult support. However, they largely refrain from giving action-guiding advice to students about which schools to attend. We elaborate street-level bureaucracy theory by showing how the majority of counselors reduce cognitive dissonance between their understanding of students’ needs and their inability to meet these needs adequately given existing resources. They do so by drawing selectively on competing policy logics of school choice, narrowly delineating their conception of their role, and relegating decisions to parents. Importantly, we also find departures from the predictions of this theory as approximately one in four counselors sought to meet the needs of individual students by enlarging their role despite the resource constraints they faced. Finally, we quantify the impact of variation in counselors’ approaches, finding that the absence of action-guiding advice is associated with students being admitted to lower-quality schools, on average.

Neighborhoods, schools and obesity: The potential for place-based approaches to reduce childhood obesity

A common policy approach to reducing childhood obesity aims to shape the environment in which children spend most of their time: neighborhoods and schools. This paper uses richly detailed data on the body mass index (BMI) of all New York City public school students in grades K-8 to assess the potential for place-based approaches to reduce child obesity. We document variation in the prevalence of obesity across NYC public schools and census tracts, and then estimate the extent to which this variation can be explained by differences in individual-level predictors (such as race and household income). Both unadjusted and adjusted variability across neighborhoods and schools suggest place-based policies have the potential to meaningfully reduce child obesity, but under most realistic scenarios the improvement would be modest.

The Gender Gap in Charter School Enrollment

Many studies have investigated whether students in charter schools differ systematically from those in traditional public schools with respect to prior achievement, special education, or English Language Learner status. None, however, has examined gender differences in charter school enrollment. Using data for all U.S. public schools over 11 years, we find charters enroll a higher fraction of girls, a gap that has grown steadily over time and is larger in secondary grades and KIPP schools. We then analyze longitudinal student-level data from North Carolina to examine whether differential rates of attrition explain this gap. We find boys are more likely than girls to exit charters once enrolled, and gender differences in attrition are larger than in traditional schools. However, the difference is not large enough to explain the full enrollment gap between charter and traditional schools in North Carolina, suggesting gaps exist from initial matriculation.