scholarly journals Searching for Effective Teachers with Imperfect Information

2010 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 97-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas O Staiger ◽  
Jonah E Rockoff
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Student Achievement ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
School Districts ◽  
Teacher Effectiveness ◽  
Effective Teachers ◽  
Imperfect Information ◽  
Achievement Data ◽  
Noisy Signals ◽  
Hiring And Firing

Over the past four decades, empirical researchers—many of them economists—have accumulated an impressive amount of evidence on teachers. In this paper, we ask what the existing evidence implies for how school leaders might recruit, evaluate, and retain teachers. We begin by summarizing the evidence on five key points, referring to existing work and to evidence we have accumulated from our research with the nation's two largest school districts: Los Angeles and New York City. First, teachers display considerable heterogeneity in their effects on student achievement gains. Second, estimates of teacher effectiveness based on student achievement data are noisy measures. Third, teachers' effectiveness rises rapidly in the first year or two of their teaching careers but then quickly levels out. Fourth, the primary cost of teacher turnover is not the direct cost of hiring and firing, but rather is the loss to students who will be taught by a novice teacher rather than one with several years of experience. Fifth, it is difficult to identify at the time of hire those teachers who will prove more effective. As a result, better teachers can only be identified after some evidence on their actual job performance has accumulated. We then explore what these facts imply for how principals and school districts should act, using a simple model in which schools must search for teachers using noisy signals of teacher effectiveness. The implications of our analysis are strikingly different from current practice. Rather than screening at the time of hire, the evidence on heterogeneity of teacher performance suggests a better strategy would be identifying large differences between teachers by observing the first few years of teaching performance and retaining only the highest-performing teachers.

Teacher Layoffs: An Empirical Illustration of Seniority versus Measures of Effectiveness

2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 439-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Boyd ◽  
Hamilton Lankford ◽  
Susanna Loeb ◽  
James Wyckoff
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
School Districts ◽  
Teacher Effectiveness ◽  
District Leaders ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
School District Leaders ◽  
Alternative Approaches ◽  
Teacher Layoffs ◽  
Measures Of Effectiveness

School districts are confronting difficult choices in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Today, the financial imbalance in many school districts is so large that there may be few alternatives to teacher layoffs. In nearly all school districts, layoffs are currently determined by some version of teacher seniority. Yet, alternative approaches to personnel reductions may substantially reduce the harm to students from staff reductions relative to layoffs based on seniority. As a result, many school district leaders and other policy makers are raising important questions about whether~other criteria, such as measures of teacher effectiveness, should inform layoffs. This policy brief, a quick look at some aspects of the debate, illustrates the differences in New York City public schools that would result if layoffs were determined by seniority in comparison to a measure of teacher effectiveness.

scholarly journals UNDERSTANDING HOW THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE SPECIALIST HIGH SKILLS MAJOR PROGRAM CONTRIBUTES TO STUDENT OUTCOMES

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Segedin
Keyword(s):  
Student Achievement ◽  
School Districts ◽  
Policy Implementation ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Graduation Rates ◽  
Program Implementation ◽  
Student Outcomes ◽  
Critical Factors ◽  
Achievement Data

The Specialist High Skills Majors (SHSM) program has been implemented in Ontario as a way to increase secondary graduation rates. This study’s aim was to understand how the implementation of the SHSM program impacts student outcomes. The conceptual framework consists of an amended version of Fullan’s (2007) critical factors that affect policy implementation. The study’s methods analyzed provincial student achievement data. Thirty-four interviews from four school districts in Ontario occurred. A true need, program clarity and simplicity, equality of resources, and strong leadership were found to affect program implementation, and in turn, student outcomes.

Lifting the Veil

2014 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
pp. 43-55
Author(s):  
Scott Pittman
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
State Government ◽  
The State ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Red Scare ◽  
National Archives ◽  
The Veil ◽  
Hiring And Firing ◽  
And Control ◽  
California Schools

The story of anti-communism in California schools is a tale well and often told. But few scholars have appreciated the important role played by private surveillance networks. This article examines how privately funded and run investigations shaped the state government’s pursuit of leftist educators. The previously-secret papers of Major General Ralph H. Van Deman, which were opened to researchers at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., only a few years ago, show that the general operated a private spy network out of San Diego and fed information to military, federal, and state government agencies. Moreover, he taught the state government’s chief anti-communist bureaucrat, Richard E. Combs, how to recruit informants and monitor and control subversives. The case of the suspicious death of one University of California, Los Angeles student – a student that the anti-communists claimed had been “scared to death” by the Reds – shows the extent of the collaboration between Combs and Van Deman. It further illustrates how they conspired to promote fear of communism, influence hiring and firing of University of California faculty, and punish those educators who did not support their project. Although it was rarely successful, Combs’ and Van Deman’s coordinated campaign reveals a story of public-private anticommunist collaboration in California that has been largely forgotten. Because Van Deman’s files are now finally open to researchers, Californians can gain a much more complete understanding of their state bureaucracy’s role in the Red Scare purges of California educators.

Unification and Its Discontents

2016 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-16
Author(s):  
Brian Kovalesky
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School District ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
School Districts ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
The State ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
City Schools

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the height of protests and actions by civil rights activists around de facto school segregation in the Los Angeles area, the residents of a group of small cities just southeast of the City of Los Angeles fought to break away from the Los Angeles City Schools and create a new, independent school district—one that would help preserve racially segregated schools in the area. The “Four Cities” coalition was comprised of residents of the majority white, working-class cities of Vernon, Maywood, Huntington Park, and Bell—all of which had joined the Los Angeles City Schools in the 1920s and 1930s rather than continue to operate local districts. The coalition later expanded to include residents of the cities of South Gate, Cudahy, and some unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County, although Vernon was eventually excluded. The Four Cities coalition petitioned for the new district in response to a planned merger of the Los Angeles City Schools—until this time comprised of separate elementary and high school districts—into the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The coalition's strategy was to utilize a provision of the district unification process that allowed citizens to petition for reconfiguration or redrawing of boundaries. Unification was encouraged by the California State Board of Education and legislature in order to combine the administrative functions of separate primary and secondary school districts—the dominant model up to this time—to better serve the state's rapidly growing population of children and their educational needs, and was being deliberated in communities across the state and throughout Los Angeles County. The debates at the time over school district unification in the Greater Los Angeles area, like the one over the Four Cities proposal, were inextricably tied to larger issues, such as taxation, control of community institutions, the size and role of state and county government, and racial segregation. At the same time that civil rights activists in the area and the state government alike were articulating a vision of public schools that was more inclusive and demanded larger-scale, consolidated administration, the unification process reveals an often-overlooked grassroots activism among residents of the majority white, working-class cities surrounding Los Angeles that put forward a vision of exclusionary, smaller-scale school districts based on notions of local control and what they termed “community identity.”

The “Japanese Turn” in Fine Dining in the United States, 1980–2020

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Samuel H. Yamashita
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
San Francisco Bay Area ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Further Training ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Wide Acceptance

In the 1970s, Japanese cooks began to appear in the kitchens of nouvelle cuisine chefs in France for further training, with scores more arriving in the next decades. Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Joël Robuchon, and other leading French chefs started visiting Japan to teach, cook, and sample Japanese cuisine, and ten of them eventually opened restaurants there. In the 1980s and 1990s, these chefs' frequent visits to Japan and the steady flow of Japanese stagiaires to French restaurants in Europe and the United States encouraged a series of changes that I am calling the “Japanese turn,” which found chefs at fine-dining establishments in Los Angeles, New York City, and later the San Francisco Bay Area using an ever-widening array of Japanese ingredients, employing Japanese culinary techniques, and adding Japanese dishes to their menus. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the wide acceptance of not only Japanese ingredients and techniques but also concepts like umami (savory tastiness) and shun (seasonality) suggest that Japanese cuisine is now well known to many American chefs.

Book Reviews

2003 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 130-146
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
German Industry ◽  
University Of North Carolina ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Chapel Hill ◽  
Nazi Past ◽  
Nazi Era

Clarence Lusane, Hitler’s Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans, and African Americans in the Nazi Era (New York and London: Routledge 2002)Review by Kader KonukHelmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2002)Review by Daniel MoratJulia Sneeringer, Winning Women’s Votes: Propaganda and Politics in Weimar Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)Review by Diane J. GuidoS. Jonathan Wiesen, West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past, 1945-1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)Review by Simon Reich

Les minorités des villes globales : New York et Los Angeles

1995 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-87
Author(s):  
John R. Logan ◽  
Richard D. Alba ◽  
Thomas L. McNulty
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles

Community-based? Asian American Students, Parents, and Teachers in the Shifting Chinatowns of New York and Los Angeles

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benji Chang ◽  
Juhyung Lee
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Asian American Students ◽  
Education Experience ◽  
American Students ◽  
Community Organizers ◽  
Holistic Vision

This article examines the experiences of children, parents, and teachers in the New York and Los Angeles Chinatown public schools, as observed by two classroom educators, one based in each city. The authors document trends among the transnational East and Southeast Asian families that comprise the majority in the local Chinatown schools and discuss some of the key intersections of communities and identities within those schools, as well as the pedagogies that try to build upon these intersections in the name of student empowerment and a more holistic vision of student achievement. Ultimately, this article seeks to bring forth the unique perspectives of Chinatown community members and explore how students, families, teachers, school staff and administrators, and community organizers can collaborate to actualize a more transformative public education experience.

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