At the dawn of the 21st century, educational research is finally entering the 20th century. The use of randomized experiments that transformed medicine, agriculture, and technology in the 20th century is now beginning to affect educational policy. This article discusses the promise and pitfalls of randomized and rigorously matched experiments as a basis for policy and practice in education. It concludes that a focus on rigorous experiments evaluating replicable programs and practices is essential to build confidence in educational research among policymakers and educators. However, new funding is needed for such experiments and there is still a need for correlational, descriptive, and other disciplined inquiry in education. Our children deserve the best educational programs, based on the most rigorous evidence we can provide.

Evidence-Based Education Policies: Transforming Educational Practice and Research

Teacher quality is now the focus of unprecedented policy analysis. To achieve its goals, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) requires a “highly qualified teacher” in all classrooms. The concern with teacher quality has been driven by a growing recognition, fueled by accumulating research evidence, of how critical teachers are to student learning. To acquire and retain high-quality teachers in our Nation’s classrooms will require substantial policy change at many levels. There exists longstanding precedent and strong justification for Washington to create a major education manpower program. Qualified teachers are a critical national resource that requires federal investment and cross-state coordination as well as other state and local action. NCLB provides a standard for equitable access to teacher quality that is both reasonable and feasible. Achieving this goal will require a new vision of the teacher labor market and the framing of a national teacher supply policy. States and local districts have vital roles to play in ensuring a supply of highly qualified teachers; however, they must be supported by appropriate national programs. These programs should be modeled on U.S. medical manpower efforts, which have long supplied doctors to high- need communities and eased shortages in specific health fields. We argue that teacher supply policy should attract well-prepared teachers to districts that sorely need them while relieving shortages in fields like special education, math and the physical sciences. We study the mal-distribution of teachers and examine its causes. We describe examples of both states and local school districts that have fashioned successful strategies for strengthening their teaching forces. Unfortunately, highly successful state and local program to meet the demand for qualified teachers are the exception rather than the rule. They stand out amid widespread use of under-prepared teachers and untrained aides, mainly for disadvantaged children in schools that suffer from poor working conditions, inadequate pay and high teacher turnover. The federal government has a critical role to play in enhancing the supply of qualified teachers targeted to high-need fields and locations, improving retention of qualified teachers, especially in hard-to-staff schools, and in creating a national labor market by removing interstate barriers to mobility.

Wanted: A National Teacher Supply Policy for Education: The Right Way To Meet the "Highly Qualified Teacher" Challenge.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 substantially increases the testing requirements for states and sets demanding accountability standards for schools, districts, and states with measurable adequate yearly progress (AYP) objectives for all students and subgroups of students defined by socioeconomic background, race–ethnicity, English language proficiency, and disability. However, states’ content standards, the rigor of their tests, and the stringency of their performance standards vary greatly. Consequently, the percentage of students who score at the proficient level or higher on the state assessments varies radically from state to state. Some states have farther to go than others to meet the mandated target of 100% proficient within 12 years. These differences are illustrated and the implications for achieving AYP targets are discussed. Also addressed are possible uses of results from the biennial state-level administrations of the National Assessment of Educational Progress as a means of leveling the...

Accountability Systems: Implications of Requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001:

Principals are held accountable for student achievement although most studies find that they have no direct effect on it. In this study we tested a model hypothesizing that principals contribute to student achievement indirectly through teacher commitment and beliefs about their collective capacity. Path analysis of data from 205 elementary schools supported this hypothesis. Schools with higher levels of transformational leadership had higher collective teacher efficacy, greater teacher commitment to school mission, school community, and school ‐ community partnerships, and higher student achievement. Increasing the transformational leadership practices in schools makes a small but practically important contribution to overall student achievement. Key words: teacher efficacy, transformational leadership, path analysis, grade 3 and 6 Les directions d’ecoles sont imputables au regard du rendement scolaire sur lequel elles n’ont aucun effet direct d’apres la plupart des etudes. Les auteurs ont teste un modele selon lequel la direction d’ecole contribuerait indirectement au rendement scolaire a travers l’implication des enseignants et leurs facons de percevoir leur capacite collective. L’analyse acheminatoire (path analysis) de donnees issues de 205 ecoles primaires vient etayer cette hypothese. Les ecoles presentant un niveau plus eleve de leadership transformationnel se distinguaient par une plus grande efficacite du corps enseignant, une implication plus grande des enseignants vis ‐ a ‐ vis de la mission de l’ecole, de l’equipe ‐ ecole, des partenariats ecole ‐ communaute et un meilleur rendement scolaire. L’amelioration d’un ecart ‐ type des methodes propres au leadership transformationnel dans les ecoles augmenterait le rendement scolaire en lecture, en ecriture et en mathematiques en 3 e et en 6 e annees de 0,22 d’un ecart type. Mots cles : efficacite des enseignants, leadership transformationnel, analyse acheminatoire, 3 e et 6 e annees

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School leadership and student achievement: the mediating effects of teacher beliefs

The accountability requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 place high-poverty schools and racially diverse schools at a disadvantage because they rely on mean proficiency scores and require all subgroups to meet the same goals for accountability. In this article, student achievement data from six states are used to highlight differences in the demographic characteristics of schools identified as needing improvement and schools meeting the federal adequate yearly progress requirements. School-level data from Virginia and California are used to illustrate that these differences arise both from the selection bias inherent in using mean proficiency scores and from rules that require students in racially diverse schools to meet multiple performance targets. The authors suggest alternatives for the design of accountability systems that include using multiple measures of student achievement, factoring in student improvement on achievement tests in reading and mathematics, and incorporating state acc...

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Measuring Academic Proficiency Under the No Child Left Behind Act: Implications for Educational Equity

A number of states have school-building accountability systems that rely on comparisons of achievement from one year to the next. Improvement of the performance of schools is judged by changes in t...

https://www.ncaase.com/docs/LinnHaug2002.pdf

Stability of School-Building Accountability Scores and Gains

The transition to remote teaching in K–12 schools during the spring of 2020 as a result of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) presented new challenges to teachers across the United States. This survey-based mixed methods study investigates these challenges, as well as differences by grade level, to better understand teachers’ experiences remote teaching. A total of 604 teachers who had completed the survey were included in this study. Findings indicate that some challenges were experienced by teachers across grade levels, with common challenges including student engagement, adjusting curriculum to the remote format, and the loss of the personal connection of teaching. Differences were also found by grade level, with elementary teachers struggling more with varying attitudes of parents regarding remote learning and adjusting their curriculum to an online format, and secondary teachers more often reporting student engagement and a general feeling of being lost or unsupported in their teaching as challenges. These challenges provide important context around the experience of remote teaching, as well as what supports teachers need to continue remote teaching.

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The Challenges of Remote K–12 Education During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Differences by Grade Level

ABSTRACT
 Occupational embeddedness is defined as what keeps people in their current occupation and is believed to have three dimensions: Fit (perceived compatibility), Links (ties to others), and Sacrifice (material or psychological losses upon career change). Occupational embeddedness is highly relevant for academic faculty in higher education, who have a large investment to earn an advanced degree only to enter a highly competitive job market. However, there is currently not a validated measure of occupational embeddedness. This study seeks to validate the Occupational Embeddedness Scale (OES; Ng and Feldman 2009) using a sample of 91 higher education faculty members in the United States. The participants had been in higher education for an average of 21.28 years (SD = 13.53). A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed using maximum likelihood estimation and internal consistency was examined. Results indicated that due to the open-ended nature of the items comprising the Links dimension, that entire dimension necessitated deletion despite its theoretical importance. After Links was removed, a revised OES including just Fit and Sacrifice is proposed; this revised scale demonstrated acceptable-to-good model fit, factor loadings, and internal consistency. It is highly recommended that future research reintroduce the Links dimension to the OES with closed-ended Likert-type items.

Higher education faculty and job embeddedness: validation of the occupational embeddedness scale

The purpose of this study is to expand our knowledge of how academic faculty members in schools of education view their careers by exploring occupational commitment. Ninety-one academic faculty members from 11 U.S. research institutions volunteered to participate in this quantitative survey study. Confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to determine if occupational commitment for this sample was modelled better by four or three factors. Results indicated that the data better fit a four-factor model of occupational commitment, with the following four factors: affective occupational commitment, normative occupational commitment, accumulated costs, and limited alternatives. Further, means comparison found that faculty members in higher education scored higher than workers in other fields on three of the four factors, with the most striking difference apparent for the limited alternatives factor. These results indicate that academic faculty members perceive they have few options for alternative careers and thus may feel more trapped in their careers than workers in other fields. Potential implications for teacher education administrators, research productivity, and doctoral education are discussed. 

Carolyn A. Haug

Papers

Stability of School-Building Accountability Scores and Gains

The Challenges of Remote K–12 Education During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Differences by Grade Level

Higher education faculty and job embeddedness: validation of the occupational embeddedness scale

What keeps faculty members from schools of education in higher education settings: measuring occupational commitment