In 2002, voters in Florida approved a constitutional amendment limiting class sizes in public schools to 18 students in the elementary grades, 22 students in middle grades, and 25 in high school grades. Analyzing statewide achievement data for school districts from 2004-2006 and for schools in 2007, this study purports to find that "mandated…

The gold standard in making causal inference on program effects is a randomized trial. Most randomization designs in education randomize classrooms or schools rather than individual students. Such "clustered randomization" designs have one principal drawback: They tend to have limited statistical power or precision. This study aims to…

Discusses quantitative and qualitative approaches in research on peer effects on student attainment, using two texts to argue that the definition of "effect" cannot be restricted to "statistical effect," and that institutional properties are not the sum of individual properties. Asserts that quantitative investigators have…

The concept is simple and attractive: Evaluate teachers on the basis of how much academic growth their students experience over the course of the school year. Often referred to as "value-added," this concept and the statistical methods for implementing it have been a topic of debate in state legislatures and at state and national…

A new report published by the Manhattan Institute for Education Policy, "The Effect of Special Education Vouchers on Public School Achievement: Evidence from Florida's McKay Scholarship Program," attempts to examine the complex issue of how competition introduced through school vouchers affects student outcomes in public schools. The…

The study under review is the second-year evaluation report of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), a publicly funded voucher program that allows low-income students in Milwaukee to attend secular and religious private schools in that city. Its primary finding is that there were no overall statistically significant differences in…

In 1990, Milwaukee (Wisconsin) became the site of the first publicly funded school-choice program providing low-income parents with vouchers that could be used to send their children to secular, private schools. An evaluation of Milwaukee's school-choice experiment was conducted by a team of researchers, headed by John Witte at the University of…

Evaluation of teacher performance is usually done with the use of ratings made by students, peers, and principals or supervisors, and at times, self-ratings made by the teachers themselves. The trouble with this practice is that it is obviously subjective, and vulnerable to what Glass and Martinez call the "politics of teacher…

A Friedman Foundation report attempts to find empirical support for the contention that competition from private schools, through voucher programs, improves the effectiveness of public schools. In the first year of Ohio's new EdChoice voucher program, the report claims to have found substantial academic gains at public schools exposed to the…