Performance-based funding (PBF) in higher education has grown in recent years as a means of institutional accountability and incentive for improving student success. Although most states have successfully implemented their respective systems, research on early funding models suggests a difficult fiscal environment can introduce tension between theory and practice of the concept. This policy brief uses the case of Washington State's redesign of the Student Achievement Initiative to describe new implications around this tension. The revision focused on using a base reallocation as the funding source in the context of diminished state resources and the importance of college buy-in. Regression analyses tested the alignment between the principles and metrics for awarding funds, which resulted in a funding model that awarded the maximum dollars related to performance versus college characteristics. Policy makers considering new or revised PBF systems can benefit from critical lessons learned from Washington State's comprehensive process and final product.

Student loan debt and defaults have been steadily rising, igniting public worry about the associated public and private risks. This has led to controversial regulatory attempts to curb defaults by holding colleges, particularly those in the for-profit sector, increasingly accountable for the student loan repayment behavior of their students. Such efforts endeavor to protect taxpayers against the misuse of public money used to encourage college enrollment and to safeguard students against potentially risky human capital investments. Recent policy proposals penalize colleges for students’ poor repayment performance, raising questions about institutions’ power to influence this behavior. Many of the schools at risk of not meeting student loan default measures also disproportionately enroll low-income, nontraditional, and financially independent students. Policy makers therefore face the challenge of promoting the efficient use of public funds and protecting students while also encouraging access to higher education.

This brief argues that charter school programs can have direct fiscal impacts on school districts for two reasons. First, operating two systems of public schools under separate governance arrangements can create excess costs. Second, charter school financing policies can distribute resources to or away from districts. Using the city school districts of Albany and Buffalo in New York, we demonstrate how fiscal impacts on local school districts can be estimated. We find that charter schools have had fiscal impacts on these two school districts. Finally, we argue that charter schools policies should seek to minimize any avoidable excess costs created by charter schools and ensure that the burden of any unavoidable excess costs is equitably distributed across traditional public schools, charter schools, and the state. We offer concrete policy recommendations that may help to achieve these objectives.

Debate over the design of state and federal accountability systems is an important ongoing issue for policy makers. As we move toward next-generation accountability through No Child Left Behind's (NCLB) waivers and reauthorization drafts, it is important to understand the implementation and effects of key elements of prior accountability systems. In this policy brief, we investigate an under-researched feature of NCLB accountability—the use of safe harbor to meet proficiency rate objectives. We use school-level data on California schools between 2005 and 2011 to investigate the prevalence of safe harbor over time. We find dramatic increases in recent years, primarily for the objectives for historically disadvantaged groups. Furthermore, we find no evidence that schools using safe harbor meaningfully outperform schools failing Adequate Yearly Progress in the short or long run, casting doubt on the utility of the measure. We conclude with recommendations to policy makers, including state assessment and accountability coordinators, regarding accountability policy design in future laws.

Education reform advocates who base policy decisions on empirical research often face the argument that because background variables explain so much of student outcomes, it follows that policy interventions cannot be effective. This policy brief explains the logical fallacy in the argument, illustrating with two examples, one taken from the teacher quality literature and one taken from the class size literature.

The United States is an outlier with respect to its heavy emphasis on student test scores for the purposes of school accountability. Many other countries instead use school inspection systems that pay more attention to a school's internal processes and practices. This policy note focuses on the school inspection systems of New Zealand and the Netherlands, with the goal of drawing lessons for the United States. It addresses three main policy issues: For what should individual schools be held accountable? Should inspectors be more like coaches or more like judges? And how independent should they be of policy-making bodies?

This article examines the interconnected phenomena of recruitment, retention, and utilization of faculty at research universities, with special emphasis on the changing mix of tenure track and contingent (i.e., fixed term) faculty members. The authors argue, based upon both national data and detailed information from a particular institution, that powerful economic forces are prompting research universities to rethink fundamental strategies about the core academic workforce.

Professional development and teacher education policies have the potential to greatly affect teachers' abilities to teach and, as a result, students' abilities to learn. States can play varied roles in the provision of teacher education and professional development. This policy brief summarizes states' policy approaches to teacher professional development and education throughout teachers' careers. It explores what states are currently doing in the realms of pre-service education, induction and mentoring, ongoing professional development, and teacher evaluation, as well as the existing evidence regarding the effectiveness of such policies. We find that states play disparate roles in the provision of teacher education and professional development that fall along the regulatory spectrum from highly prescriptive to rather laissez-faire. Research on the effects of such policies is still in the early stages, and more attention is needed to determine the effectiveness of states' professional development policies.

This article seeks to move the adequacy issue forward by demonstrating that under a certain set of assumptions, it is possible to provide a set of programmatic offerings that corresponds well with what we consider to be an emerging, research-based consensus about what constitutes best practices. We do this by showing what could be purchased with the national average expenditure per pupil if it were to be applied to one adequacy approach, the evidence-based approach, and how these resources have been linked to increases in student performance.

One of the key provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act requires states to ensure that every teacher be “highly qualified.” Though the meaning of “highly qualified” remains hotly contested, the legislation's emphasis on teachers is well founded. Nearly all modern research on the subject finds teacher effectiveness to be among the most important school inputs into student achievement. Yet recent literature, including my own work (Corcoran, Evans, and Schwab 2004), finds evidence that the quality of teachers has steadily eroded over time. In particular, the likelihood that a high-aptitude female pursued a career in teaching dropped precipitously between 1960 and 2000. In this article, I summarize these and related findings, review some of the most common explanations for the trend in teacher quality, and discuss policies that have been advanced to attract talented graduates to the teaching profession.

Several national and international assessments have demonstrated that there has been little improvement in the performance of American high school students in recent decades. High school students are increasingly underprepared for transition into college-level course-work. One new approach to high school redesign, “early college,” seeks to address these issues. The model features a rigorous academic course of study that engages students in college-level work in grades nine through fourteen. Early college is a subset of dual enrollment programs providing opportunities for students to complete high school and college credits with the same courses. The goal is to prepare students academically for college-level coursework while easing the transition to higher education. Early college offers promise in directly addressing student academic performance, attrition rates, and readiness for college, but further research is needed to determine its efficacy and scalability.

In recent years, state legislatures, state education departments, and advocacy groups in more than thirty states have sponsored education adequacy studies, which aim to determine objectively the amount of funding needed to provide all students with a meaningful opportunity for an adequate education. Based on a detailed analysis of judicial and other critiques of the state of the art of “costing-out” studies, this policy brief recommends specific mechanisms for defining the outcome standards for these studies, more precise means for identifying the extent to which students with special needs require extra resources, ways to minimize political bias and manipulations, and the use of “quality education models” to integrate efficiency and accountability considerations into the basic cost analysis. More extensive public engagement and continuing judicial oversight will be necessary to ensure the credibility and legitimacy of the ultimate judgments that result from these studies.

This brief summarizes findings from several research articles that focus on the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). This work focuses on three key questions: Who applies for and becomes National Board certified? Where do National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs) teach? Are they more effective than other teachers? The findings suggest that: (1) teachers are less likely to become certified if teaching disadvantaged students; (2) NBCTs are more effective than noncertified NBPTS-applicants and nonapplicants; and (3) the mobility patterns of NBCTs decrease the chances that low-performing students will be taught by a teacher with this credential.

Achieving full compliance with the accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) federal legislation poses major challenges for most of the nation's states. Structured, open-ended interviews were conducted with ranking representatives from a number of so-called high-readiness states: California, Florida, New York, South Carolina, and Texas. (Collectively, these states enroll over 16 million children, or approximately 35 percent of the nation's total school-attending population.) Most policy makers are reportedly confident their respective state school systems are able to meet NCLB standards. Yet while each state's situation is unique, limited resources coupled with dramatically increased expectations for public schools may spell trouble ahead. Lessons learned so far by several states as they engage the NCLB mandate are discussed and analyzed. Ultimately, patience and flexibility on the part of federal officials, it is argued, will be critical to the long-term success of the No Child Left Behind reform initiative.