This paper assesses the degree of equality of educational opportunities across Argentina's public primary schools. The main finding is that there are inequalities between jurisdictions, but even greater inequalities within them, suggesting the existence of serious problems in the distribution of resources at the sub-national level. Following…

The commentary (1) uses the U. S. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) as a prototype for examining standardized reading achievement tests at the item level, and (2) sketches an alternative based on an initiative underway in the United Kingdom.

In recent years, some states in the United States have enacted policies that grant some higher education benefits--primarily in-state resident tuition eligibility--to certain undocumented students. While in existence since 2001, little is known of the role of high school institutional agents in implementing such policies. This study describes the…

The article identifies several key concepts used to describe and categorize social pedagogy. The first section of the paper establishes a framework for considering the diversity that characterizes the field, including reflection on social pedagogy's theoretical, political and social dimensions. This is followed by a discussion based on a…

This study investigated the effects of immigration and home language on academic achievement over time. Using data from Ontario's Assessments of Reading, Writing and Mathematics administered to the same students in Grades 3 and 6, logistic regression was used to predict if students achieved proficiency in Grade 6 if they were not proficient…

This paper presents a framework for evaluating efforts by organizations to share research as exemplified on their websites, then reports the result of an evaluation of these efforts in 100 organizations. The result shows that the overall research sharing efforts of these organizations are modest and not well aligned to evidence on effective…

Federal special education and accountability policies requires that educators individualize instruction for students with disabilities, while simultaneously ensuring that the vast majority of these students meet age-based grade-level standards and assessment targets. In this paper, we examine this dynamic interplay between policies through…

Using Head Start as an example of a compensatory social program based on a liberal egalitarian view of justice, this paper shows how all such programs are fundamentally flawed. In spite of any good intentions, by creating a discourse of deficiency and attempting amelioration through segregation this approach contains the seeds of its own failure.…

In this manuscript, the guest editors of the EPAA Special Issue on "Value-Added Model (VAM) Research for Educational Policy" (1) introduce the background and policy context surrounding the increased use of VAMs for teacher evaluation and accountability purposes across the United States; (2) summarize the five research papers and one…

In this article, we explain how overly prescriptive, rigid state statutory and regulatory policy frameworks regarding teacher evaluation, tenure and employment decisions outstrip the statistical reliability and validity of proposed measures of teaching effectiveness. We begin with a discussion of the emergence of highly prescriptive state…

Some characterizations describe social pedagogy as a broad, complex, ambiguous and problematic concept that applies to very different things. This is due to the simplicity of the tools used to approach such a complex area. A change of perspective to interpret social pedagogy as a hybrid and complex subject may transform the alleged deficiencies…

Accountability in education has prompted policy makers and practitioners to focus on data use for instructional and organizational decision-making. The popular media have seized on Value Added (VA) measures as a key type of data use for reforming U.S. schools. Among education researchers, however, there are both critics and proponents. We examined…

The paper asks why, unlike much of Europe, the UK has until recently taken very little interest in social pedagogy. It looks at the meanings of social pedagogy, including the importance of both "social" and "pedagogy" in understanding the term and argues that social pedagogy policy, practice, and theory are interlinked and…

If teacher value-added estimates (VAEs) are to be used as indicators of individual teacher performance in teacher evaluation and accountability systems, it is important to understand how much VAEs are affected by the data and model specifications used to estimate them. In this study we explored the effects of three conditions on the stability of…

The authors of the study "The Long-Term Impact of Teachers" claim that their study shows that increases in teacher value-added lead to significant and lasting increases in test scores and significant increases in income that will last throughout adulthood. Instead, I show that these claims are false because they are contradicted by the…