In most school achievement research, the relationships between achievement and explanatory variables follow the Newton and Einstein concept/principle and the viewpoint of the macro-observer: Deterministic measures based on the mean value of a sufficiently large number of schools. What if the relationships between achievement and explanatory…

One of the most influential studies affecting educational policy is Glass and Smith's 1978 study, "Meta-Analysis of Research on the Relationship of Class-Size and Achievement." Since its publication, educational policymakers have referenced it frequently as the justification for reducing class size. While teachers and the public had long believed…

Class size may be important in achievement, but it is not the only decision for policymakers. Class size plays a role, but the role is effectively fulfilled only when the other players are successful. Therefore, it is appropriate to address several questions: What goals are to be accomplished; what is the best distribution of personnel related to…

The previous articles on class size and other productivity research paint a complex and confusing picture of the relationship between policy variables and student achievement. Missing is a conceptual scheme capable of combining the seemingly unrelated research and dissimilar estimates of effect size into a unified structure for policy analysis and…

This article focuses on a method of policy analysis that has evolved from the previous articles in this issue. The first section, "Toward a Theory of Educational Production," identifies concepts from science and achievement production to be incorporated into this policy analysis method. Building on Kuhn's (1970) discussion regarding paradigms, the…

The author believes that a unified theory might provide ideas helpful for improving research; professional training and practice; and therefore, student achievement. Little attention was paid to how several variables might work together and there is little discussion regarding how they might work together. The author stresses that there are…

Combining explanatory variables into factors instead of using individual variables in an achievement production function is advocated in several of the articles in this special issue. This article provides a brief overview of factor analysis explaining and illustrating the reasoning for this technique. There is a linchpin: Factor analysis is an…

The purpose of this article is to illustrate how a valid and reliable state accountability system could be developed that identifies effective schools and school districts in a comprehensive, understandable, and practical way. The author presents an overview of the strategy used in the analysis, discusses the use of education production functions…

The never-ending organizational challenge is to allocate available resources to best achieve its goals. Out of this fundamental question several models have evolved. One is a conceptual model--a way to think about how organizations operate. A second is a statistical model estimating the magnitude of relationships among goals and elements of the…

How do district policies, leadership, and support services influence the quality of teaching and learning in public schools? This article uses a rich longitudinal school-level database to estimate a model of student achievement and analyzes the residuals in the model to obtain estimates of the contributions of unobserved school and school district…