Elementary and Secondary Schools

Eighteen education policy experts put the past decade's surge in high-school reform efforts to the test in Saving America's High Schools from the Urban Institute Press. Led by coeditors Becky Smerdon and Kathryn Borman, the team of authors size up national reform trends and draw on at least five years of research in Baltimore, New York City, Chicago, Ohio, and North Carolina.

Our educational system is in a continuous state of reform, yet outcomes are nowhere near what we can accept. Though the search for answers is perpetual, many efforts over the past decade have homed in on one feature of high schools—their size. If we simply reduce school size, the argument goes, students will gain a safer environment that can address their individual needs. It seems like common sense, but such changes alone have not proven a magic bullet. Saving America's High Schools offers quantitative research drawn from large-scale reform studies along with recommendations for federal, state, and district reform.

When given the opportunity, many teachers choose to leave schools serving poor, low-performing, and minority students. While substantial research has documented this phenomenon, far less effort has gone into understanding what features of the working conditions in these schools drive this relatively high turnover rate. This paper explores the relationship between school contextual factors and teacher retention decisions in New York City. The methodological approach separates the effects of teacher characteristics from school characteristics by modeling the relationship between the assessments of school contextual factors by one set of teachers and the turnover decisions by other teachers within the same school. Teachers’ perceptions of the school administration have by far the greatest influence on teacher-retention decisions. This effect of administration is consistent for first-year teachers and the full sample of teachers and is confirmed by a survey of teachers who have recently left teaching in New York City.

Using data from North Carolina, this paper examines the frequency, incidence, and consequences of teacher absences in public schools, as well as the impact of an absence disincentive policy. The incidence of teacher absences is regressive: when schools are ranked by the fraction of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch, schools in the poorest quartile averaged almost one extra sick day per teacher than schools in the highest income quartile, and schools with persistently high rates of teacher absence were much more likely to serve low-income than high-income students. The authors find that absences are associated with lower student achievement in elementary grades and that the demand for discretionary absences is price-elastic. Estimates suggest that a policy intervention which simultaneously raised teacher base salaries and broadened financial penalties for absences could both raise teachers' expected income and lower districts' expected costs.

To pay for college, many low- and moderate-income students and their families rely on financial aid and savings. But how students and families save—and in whose name—affects both the tax consequences and the impact of savings on financial aid. Not saving in a tax-preferred account can raise the out-of-pocket costs of college by thousands of dollars. Alternately, saving for college can result in tax penalties if families do not use tax-preferred savings for education.