Simon Calmar Andersen

Taking Managerial Context Seriously: Public Management and Performance in U.S. and Denmark Schools

ABSTRACT While recent research has shown that management matters, we know very little about the role of national contexts in shaping management effects on performance. We address this issue by comparing the impact of management of similar organizations—schools—in very different national contexts, the unitary and corporatist Denmark and the fragmented, adversarial Texas. We hypothesize that external as well as internal management matter more in Texas than Denmark. This is because Texas principals can gain power by negotiating the adversarial system, while the corporatist influence of teachers reduces the decision authority of principals in Denmark through collective agreements and important shop stewards. Based on combinations of parallel surveys of school principals and archival data on student performance, we confirm that aspects of both external and internal management matter substantially in Texas while having virtually no effect in Denmark. We therefore suggest that public management research should pay more attention to the role of context.

Increasing instruction time in school does increase learning

Significance Across the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the instruction time at age 10 y old varies by a factor of two, reflecting, at least in part, differences in beliefs about the value of additional instruction time. Because educational resources are typically not randomly allocated, it has proven to be a major challenge to determine how different educational resources, such as instruction time, affect student learning. We present evidence from a large-scale, randomized trial that increasing instruction time in school increases student learning. Importantly, a regime with no formal requirements on how the extra time is spent is at least as efficient as an increase in instruction time with a detailed teaching program. Increasing instruction time in school is a central element in the attempts of many governments to improve student learning, but prior research—mainly based on observational data—disputes the effect of this approach and points out the potential negative effects on student behavior. Based on a large-scale, cluster-randomized trial, we find that increasing instruction time increases student learning and that a general increase in instruction time is at least as efficient as an expert-developed, detailed teaching program that increases instruction with the same amount of time. These findings support the value of increased instruction time.

Bureaucratic Investments in Expertise: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Field Trial

How can elected officials induce bureaucrats to invest in acquiring the expertise necessary to provide high-quality public services? To address this question, we test and extend aspects of Gailmard and Patty’s expertise model in the context of contemporary governance using a unique randomized controlled field experiment of school principals in Denmark. Consistent with the expertise model, we find that bureaucratic agents randomly assigned greater discretion in the allocation of personnel resources were more likely to acquire information on school performance. We extend the model in two ways. First, we show that discretion effects are stronger when the information available aligns with bureaucratic goal preferences. Second, we show that institutional design choices that improve the relative benefits of the information increase information acquisition.

How Should We Estimate the Performance Effect of Management? Comparing Impacts of Public Managers’ and Frontline Employees’ Perceptions of Management

ABSTRACT Many areas of public management research are dominated by a top-focused perspective in which emphasis is placed on the notion that managers themselves are usually the best sources of information about managerial behavior. Outside of the leadership literature, managers are also the typical survey respondents in public management studies. An alternative perspective on management can be provided by subordinates’ perceptions of what management is doing. Surveys of subordinates and of managers each pose potential advantages and potential disadvantages when it comes to measuring management, and each approach is likely to prove more fruitful for measuring certain management functions. Using a unique data set of parallel surveys on management with managers and their subordinates as respondents, we examine the differences and relationships between Danish school managers’ and teachers’ perceptions of management functions and the implications of such relationships for organizational performance. We find a surprisingly low correlation between manager and teacher responses regarding the same management functions. Teacher responses are better predictors of student performance for management aspects that are visible to and mediated by teachers. However, manager responses better predict performance for manager expectations that are less visible to employees.

Reading intervention with a growth mindset approach improves children's skills.

Significance Many large-scale parent interventions turn out to be ineffective, particularly for socioeconomically disadvantaged families—possibly because some parents believe that their children’s reading skills are relatively fixed and unresponsive to practicing. This study shows large and consistent effects on both reading and writing skills of second-grade children whose parents received a few children’s books and information about the value of supporting children when learning to read. Effects are at least as large for children with immigrant background or low-educated mothers as for other children—and biggest for those children whose parents before the intervention believed reading abilities to be relatively fixed. The study thereby shows a direction for effective parent interventions. Laboratory experiments have shown that parents who believe their child’s abilities are fixed engage with their child in unconstructive, performance-oriented ways. We show that children of parents with such “fixed mindsets” have lower reading skills, even after controlling for the child’s previous abilities and the parents’ socioeconomic status. In a large-scale randomized field trial (Nclassrooms = 72; Nchildren = 1,587) conducted by public authorities, parents receiving a reading intervention were told about the malleability of their child’s reading abilities and how to support their child by praising his/her effort rather than his/her performance. This low-cost intervention increased the reading and writing achievements of all participating children—not least immigrant children with non-Western backgrounds and children with low-educated mothers. As expected, effects were even bigger for parents who before the intervention had a fixed mindset.

Student-centered instruction and academic achievement: linking mechanisms of educational inequality to schools’ instructional strategy

Research in the sociology of education argues that the educational system provides different learning opportunities for students with different socioeconomic backgrounds and that this circumstance makes the educational process an important institutional context for the reproduction of educational inequality. Using combined survey and register data for more than 56,000 students in 825 schools, this article conducts the first empirical test of the argument that instructional strategies which emphasize student responsibility and activity, also referred to as student-centered instruction, increase educational inequality. We analyze whether the impact of student-centered instructional strategies on academic achievement differs for students with different socioeconomic backgrounds. Results suggest that a student-centered instructional strategy has a negative impact on academic achievement in general, and for students with low parental education in particular. Our findings support the argument that the instructional strategy of schools is an important mechanism in generating educational inequality through the stratification of learning opportunities.

Political Pressure, Conformity Pressure, and Performance Information as Drivers of Public Sector Innovation Adoption

ABSTRACT Why public organizations adopt and abandon organizational innovations is a key question for any endeavor to explain large-scale developments in the public sector. Supplementing research within public administration on innovation with the related literature on policy diffusion, this article examines how external factors such as conformity pressure from institutionalized models, performance information from other organizations, and political pressure affect innovation adoption. By the use of two survey experiments in very different political contexts—Texas and Denmark—and a difference-in-differences analysis exploiting a reform of the political governance of public schools in Denmark, we find that public managers respond to political pressure. We find no indications that they emulate institutionalized models or learn from performance information from other organizations when they adopt organizational innovations. The results thereby point to political pressure as an important factor behind large-scale adoptions of organizational innovations in the public sector.

The Effect of Teacher's Aides in the Classroom: Evidence from a Randomized Trial

Countries around the world use teacher’s aides to support students, although there is no strong evidence of any positive impact on student outcomes. We use a randomized trial to challenge this state of evidence. We compare two treatment groups — aides with and without teaching degrees — to a control group. With a fixed budget, assistants without formal teaching qualifications can spend more time in the classrooms and tend to have a greater impact on students than co-teachers with a formal degree. These results are consistent with the notion that the teaching dosage is important for the positive effect of teacher’s aides

Randomised controlled trials in Scandinavian educational research

ABSTRACT Background: The Scandinavian countries have a long history of implementing social interventions, but the interventions have not been examined using randomised controlled trials until relatively recently compared with countries like the United States and the United Kingdom. Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the history of randomised controlled trials in Scandinavian compulsory schools (grades 0–10; pupil ages 6–15). Specifically, we investigate drivers and barriers for randomised controlled trials in educational research and the differences between the three Scandinavian countries Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Methods: To locate relevant trials, we performed a systematic search of four bibliographic databases and a search for grey literature. Results were combined with trials located through direct contact with researchers and government officials. A trial was included if one or more interventions were randomly assigned to groups of students and carried out in a school setting with the primary aim of improving the academic performance of children aged 6–15 in grades 0–10 in Denmark, Norway, or Sweden. We included both conducted and ongoing trials. Publications that seemed relevant were screened based on full-text versions. Data extraction included information from the included studies on grade level, study period, sample size (N), project owner, funding source, and theme. In addition, we conducted two semi-structured interviews by phone or in person with central employees in funding agencies and ministries and 25 correspondences with researchers and policymakers. Findings and conclusion: RCTs in grades 0–10 were few in all of Scandinavia until about 2011, after which there was an increase in all three countries, although at different rates. The largest number of trials has been conducted in Denmark, and the increase is more marked in Denmark and Norway compared with Sweden. International trends towards more impact evaluations and results from international comparisons such as PISA have likely affected the development in all countries, but while many trials in Denmark and Norway are the result of policy initiatives, only one such example in Sweden was identified. We believe the lack of government initiatives to promote RCTs in Sweden is the most likely explanation for the differences across the Scandinavian countries. Funding and coordination from the government are often crucial for the implementation of RCTs and are likely more important in smaller countries such as the Scandinavian ones. Supporting institutions have now been established in all three countries, and we believe that the use of RCTs in Scandinavian educational research is likely to continue.

The Positive Effects of Nationwide Testing on Student Achievement in a Low-Stakes System

This article examines the implementation of a set of compulsory IT-based, self-scored, and adaptive nationwide tests in a low-stakes accountability system. We exploit exogenous variation resulting from students voluntarily retaking the nationwide test after the IT system was down for ten days. We find beneficial effects of testing across the student population. Disadvantaged schools were more likely to (re)take the test despite the crash, and their students gained more from being tested. Our results indicate that the core component in accountability systems, i.e. student testing, is beneficial even without the high stakes that are part of many accountability systems.