The release of the latest results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) garnered all the usual headlines about America's lackluster performance and the rise of competitor nations. To be sure, the findings--that America's fifteen-year-olds perform in the middle of the pack in both reading and math--are disconcerting for a…

In most PISA-participating countries and economies, the average socio-economic background of students who attend privately managed schools is more advantaged than that of those who attend public schools. Yet in some countries, there is little difference in the socio-economic profiles between public and private schools. Why? An analysis of PISA…

This year's Brown Center Report contains studies taking a long view. Part I examines national test data going back to 1971 from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The study in Part II compares the 1989 test scores of more than 1,000 schools to the same schools' scores in 2009. Part III compares the test scores of conversion…

In January 2010, the UCLA-based Civil Rights Project (CRP) released "Choice without Equity: Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards." The study intended to report on, among other things, levels of racial segregation in charter schools across the United States. The authors use 2007-08 data from the U.S. Department of…

It is established that the socio-economic status (SES) of individual students is strongly associated with academic achievement but less is known about this relationship when both student and school socio-economic status are considered. To examine these associations at a finer grain, with the intent of informing educational funding policy, we…

The purpose of this study was to examine the participation of students in extended day programming at Donoghue Elementary School, a University of Chicago Charter School, during the 2009-2010 school year and explore whether participation was related to academic performance and improvement. Using the available written records, the authors found that…

The study examined the role of classroom assessment and its relationships to student characteristics and mathematics performance by comparing the USA, Canada and Finland using Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) 2003 data. The results indicated that student individual characteristics such as gender, family social-cultural status,…

Tooley, Dixon and Gomathi maintain that private unrecognised unaided schools in Hyderabad, India, catering for children of the poor, provide a better level of education than do their government counterparts. We examine this contention and argue first that Tooley et al.'s conceptualisation of education and its benefits is flawed and second that the…

The general-equilibrium effects of performance-related teacher pay include long-term incentive and teacher-sorting mechanisms that usually elude experimental studies but are captured in cross-country comparisons. Combining country-level performance-pay measures with rich PISA-2003 international achievement microdata, this paper estimates…

On the basis of taxometric analyses of data sets that they created to pose interpretive challenges, S. R. H. Beach, N. Amir, and J. J. Bau (2005) cautioned that using comparison data simulated by J. Ruscio's programs can lead to inaccurate conclusions. Careful examination of S. R. H. Beach et al.'s methods and results plus reanalysis of their data…

Using student achievement data from British Columbia, Canada, this study is an exploration of the differences that lie within the private school sector using hierarchical linear modeling to analyze the data. The analysis showed that when controlling for language, parents' level of educational attainment, and prior achievement, the private school…

University rankings are having a profound effect on both higher education systems and individual universities. In this paper we outline these effects, discuss the desirable characteristics of a good ranking methodology and document existing practice, with an emphasis on the two main international rankings (Shanghai Jiao Tong and THES-QS). We take…

Although behavior analysis relies primarily on visual inspection for interpreting data, previous research shows that the method of display can influence the judgments. In the current study, 26 Board-Certified Behavior Analysts reviewed two data sets displayed on each of three methods--equal-interval graphs, tables, and Standard Celeration…

Qualitative researchers in school psychology have a multitude of analyses available for data. The purpose of this article is to present several of the most common methods for analyzing qualitative data. Specifically, the authors describe the following 18 qualitative analysis techniques: method of constant comparison analysis, keywords-in-context,…

Notes that intergenerational theories of family functioning sparked interest in empirical investigations that test intergenerational relationships. Presents test of difference scores enabling researchers to compare related and unrelated dyads, thus creating comparison group when using only two generations. Contrasts procedure with correlational…