Three Essays on Education Law and Policy

Three Essays on Education Law and Policy PDF Author: Regina R. Umpstead
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education and state
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description

Three Essays on Education Law and Policy

Three Essays on Education Law and Policy PDF Author: Regina R. Umpstead
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education and state
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description


Three Essays on Education Policy

Three Essays on Education Policy PDF Author: Kari Dalane
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education and state
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The three essays in my dissertation each address topics in education policy. While they all address substantively different research questions, each provides insight into how schools are organized and run, and how this affects student experiences and outcomes. All three papers address policy-relevant questions in education related to equity. In my first essay, I focus on a recent policy development in the provision of free and reduced-price lunch called Community Eligibility Provision (CEP). CEP allows schools and districts with a certain proportion of students from low-income families to opt to provide free lunch to their entire student bodies. Using student-level administrative data from North Carolina, I find evidence that students with Limited English Proficiency (LEP) have lower levels of suspension and higher math and reading achievement in years they are enrolled in a school participating in CEP.In my second essay, I examine understudied questions in arts education in American public schools. Schools devote substantial time and resources to arts education, but little research examines how arts offerings in schools have changed over time, or which students have access to the arts. Even less credible research examines the question of how arts experiences in schools impact student outcomes. I provide insight into trends in arts education using national datasets (the Schools and Staffing Surve and the National Teacher and Principal Survey) and more detailed administrative data from one state, North Carolina. I then take up the question of how arts impacts student outcomes. The principal threat to any study of arts education is fundamental endogeneity of schools' arts curricula, and students' decisions to enroll in courses that are often elective. I estimate the impact of arts education on outcomes in a student-by-school fixed effects framework, comparing outcomes for students in years they are enrolled in arts courses to outcomes in years they are enrolled in no art courses while attending the same school. I find arts enrollment has positive impacts on attendance.In my third essay, my co-author Dave Marcotte and I examine within school segregation by income in schools in North Carolina. While recent research has examined between school income segregation, within school segregation has received relatively little attention. Since students experience school in classrooms, within school segregation is relevant to understanding how segregation overall impacts students. We generate dissimilarity indexes to measure how economically disadvantaged (ED) students and non-ED students are sorted into classrooms within schools. We then investigate whether a common policy lever, charter schools, impact levels of within school ED segregation. Traditional public school administrators could face heightened pressures to retain students when school choice options become available nearby. These pressures may encourage administrators to ramp up academic tracking or the introduce or expand specialized curricula such as gifted and talented programs. These changes could increase within school segregation. We find some evidence that within school ED segregation increases in grades 3 and 4 in traditional public schools located closest to charter schools, but little evidence of impacts in other grades.

Law, religion, and education considered in three Essays

Law, religion, and education considered in three Essays PDF Author: Francis GRANT (Advocate.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Three Essays on Special Education Placement in Early Childhood and K-12 Education

Three Essays on Special Education Placement in Early Childhood and K-12 Education PDF Author: Sarah Marie Parsons
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
Special education law mandates that children with disabilities be offered free appropriate public education. Under federal policy, schools are responsible for identifying children with disabilities that adversely affect their educational performance and providing services to these students to allow them to learn and thrive in school. Each of the following essays examines student placement in special education to describe how placement practices align with the goals of special education. Each uses national data and regression analysis to empirically examine the relationships between observable child characteristics, policy parameters, and special education placement. The second chapter identifies services and settings in early childhood that are associated with special education placement upon entering school. The third chapter examines processes by which children graduate out of receiving special education services. In the fourth chapter, I examine education funding parameters and their association with special education placement rates. These essays highlight the challenges of special education placement decisions

Three Essays in Search of a Conversation

Three Essays in Search of a Conversation PDF Author: Sherman Lewis
Publisher: Hayward Area Planning Association
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
These essays are for Americans concerned about the future of our country and for policy wonks. By and large, the political process is controlled by those who take an intertest in politics, large in number but small as a percent of population. Are you a member of the political class? Membership is voluntary. Our first 800 years of thinking: science culture and empathy from the Enlightenment ~1600 to ~ 2400 The Crisis of the Anthropocene: The most comprehensive description of all issues of the crisis in less than 100 pages. For the purpose of going through your mind to influence your brain. Musings on our Present Discontent: America, not advanced, not a democracy. Right to life for baby; right to choose for mom. Taxation. The security of a free state. Issues not discussed. The threat from within, Trumpism. The threat from without: Putinism. How to participate. Renewal.

Three Essays on Education Outcomes and Institutions

Three Essays on Education Outcomes and Institutions PDF Author: Cristelle A. A. Kouame
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This dissertation, in the standard three-essay format, covers three loosely connected topics that focus on education outcomes and the quality of a country's institutions in facilitating access to sanitation in Africa. Chapter 1 attempts to estimate peer effects on student effort. I present a structural model of friendship networks in which I introduce a student grade point average (GPA) as a positive function of the student's effort and their own characteristics. I show that my model is functionally different from the standard model as it captures heterogeneity based on whether students have friends or not. I estimate peer effects using the first wave of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) and by applying the generalized method of moments (GMM) approach. I find that on average, a one-point increase in the mean GPA of student's peers induces the student to increase their effort that in turn increase their own GPA by 0.856 points. I also find that the estimated endogenous peer effect coefficient is significantly larger than the estimated coefficient obtained under the standard model. Furthermore, I consider an alternative specification by controlling for network endogeneity. I find that the size of the estimated peer effect does not change much. My results are robust and provide a consistent and efficient measure of peer effects, which can inform the efficiency of network-targeted public policies. Chapter 2 examines whether expansion in institutional quality broadens access to improved sanitation in Sub-Sahara Africa. This is a published paper with two co-authors. This paper employs a dynamic panel-data model and data from 44 Sub-Sahara African countries over the period 2002-2015 to estimate the direct effect of institutional quality on access to sanitation. The estimation techniques control for potential endogeneity of regressors and country-specific effects. The results indicate that institutional quality promotes access to improved sanitation with control of corruption, regulatory quality, and voice and accountability playing the most significant roles. The results also show a dichotomy between rural and urban areas in which aspects of institutions increase access to sanitation. Specifically, in urban areas, the populace's ability to participate in selecting government and expressing freedom through associations and free media drives access to sanitation. In contrast, efficient curbing of corruption, increasing rule of law, and enhancing the capacity of governments to formulate and implement sound policies facilitate access to sanitation in rural areas. This dichotomy generates important policy implications as countries move towards achieving the Sustainable Development goal, universal access to improved sanitation.Finally, Chapter 3 estimates partial correlation of teacher quality and language of instruction on student learning deprivation. I use a unique primary school-level dataset on standardized test scores of Senegalese and Mauritanian grade 4 students and teachers (cross-sectional data). Learning deprivation is a dichotomous variable that takes the value 1 if a student reading test score falls below the minimum reading proficiency level, and 0 if otherwise. An instrumental-variable probit model controls to some extent for the endogeneity of teacher quality due to unobserved school-specific factors correlated with both teacher quality and learning deprivation. After controlling for a range of student, socioeconomic, school, district and regional related variables, I find that a decrease of one in the average teacher test score at the school level (teacher quality) is associated with an increase of the likelihood of a student's being learning deprived by 6.05 percentage points. I also show that the learning deprivation of a student who is taught in French is 98 percentage points higher than that of a student who is taught in a familiar language, (i.e., Arabic). The results suggest that policymakers in developing countries should focus on teachers' subject knowledge in teacher recruitment, training, and compensation policies. They also shed light on the importance of using a familiar language.

Encyclopedia of Human Services and Diversity

Encyclopedia of Human Services and Diversity PDF Author: Linwood H. Cousins
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 148334665X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1603

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Book Description
Encyclopedia of Human Services and Diversity is the first encyclopedia to reflect the changes in the mission of human services professionals as they face today’s increasingly diverse service population. Diversity encompasses a broad range of human differences, including differences in ability and disability, age, education level, ethnicity, gender, geographic origin, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, and values. Understanding the needs and problems of Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, the deaf, the blind, the LGBT community, and many other groups demands an up-to-date and cutting-edge reference. This three-volume encyclopedia provides human services students, professors, librarians, and practitioners the reference information they need to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse population. Features: 600 signed entries are organized A-to-Z across three volumes. Entries, authored by key figures in the field, conclude with cross references and further readings. A Reader’s Guide groups related articles within broad, thematic areas, such as aging, community mental health, family and child services, substance abuse, etc. A detailed index, the Reader’s Guide, and cross references combine for search-and-browse in the electronic version. A helpful Resource Guide guides students to classic books, journals, and web sites, and a glossary assists them with the terminology of the field. Available in both print and electronic formats, Encyclopedia of Human Services and Diversity is an ideal reference for students, practitioners, faculty and librarians.

The New European Private Law:Vol. 3:Essays on the Future of Private Law in Europe

The New European Private Law:Vol. 3:Essays on the Future of Private Law in Europe PDF Author: Martijn Hesselink
Publisher: Kluwer Law International B.V.
ISBN: 9041119620
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
In The New European Private Law, Martijn W. Hesselink presents a revised and supplemented collection of essays written over the last five years on European private law. He argues that the creation of a common private law in Europe is not merely a matter of rediscovering the old ius commune or of neutrally establishing the present 'common core' which may be codified in a European Civil Code. Rather, it is a matter of making choices, some of which may be highly controversial. In this book he discusses some of the most important choices which will have to be made with regard to culture, principles, politics, models, rights, concepts and structure in the new European private law.

Three Essays in Education and Labor Economics

Three Essays in Education and Labor Economics PDF Author: Jordan Dmitri Matsudaira
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Three Essays in Development Economics

Three Essays in Development Economics PDF Author: David Russell Hansen
Publisher: Stanford University
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
This dissertation is composed of three chapters. All three deal with topics in development economics. The first chapter examines the effects on village institutions of introducing formal financial institution options into the village. The second addresses the effects of government policy on educational investment and crime. The third tests the explanatory power of various explanations of the gender gap in math test scores. The first chapter examines the effects of a transition from a ``traditional'' economy based on an uncertain source of income, with risk fully insured away by one's neighbors in a social network through costly network ties, to a ``modern'' economy in which some agents have access to partial insurance at a lower cost. A theoretical model is used to show that village social networks can break down as some members of the village no longer need the insurance the social network provides, producing a reduction in welfare (if the costs of reducing moral hazard are not too high) for at least some individuals and possibly the village as a whole. This loss of welfare can occur even when networks provide other benefits to those belonging to them and is likely to be heterogeneous, depending on the opportunities and networks available to individuals. This paper tests these predictions using Indonesian data to examine the effect of a change in the banking institutions available to a community on the strength of social networks (measured by community participation) and welfare (measured by household expenditure and by child health). The analysis finds that changing financial institution availability in general does not influence community participation or welfare, but that financial institutions that primarily serve certain groups do relatively reduce the welfare of households not in those groups, which is consistent with the hypotheses generated by the model. Crime is an important feature of economic life in many countries, especially in the developing world. Crime distorts many economic decisions because it acts like an unpredictable tax on earnings. In particular, the threat of crime may influence people's willingness to invest in schooling or physical capital. The second chapter explores the questions "What influence do crime rates and levels of investment have on one another?" and "How do government policies affect the relationship between investment and crime?" by creating a simple structural model of crime and educational investment and attempting to fit this model to Mexican data. A method of simulated moments procedure is used to estimate parameters of the model and the estimated parameters are then used to carry out policy simulations. The simulations show that increasing spending on police or increasing the severity of punishment reduces crime but has little effect on educational investment. Increased educational subsidies increase educational investment but reduce crime only slightly. Thus, one type of policy is insufficient to accomplish the goals of both reducing crime and increasing education. The third chapter is joint work with Prashant Bharadwaj, Giacomo De Giorgi, and Christopher Neilson. Boys tend to have better performances than girls in mathematical testing; in particular, there are significantly more boys than girls among high achievers and the score distribution appears to have a longer right tail for boys. We confirm such results on several low- and middle-income countries. In particular we find that the gender gap is already present by age 10 and substantially increases by age 14 and 15. We propose and try to test a series of explanations for such a gap: (i) parental investment, (ii) ability, (iii) school resources, (iv) individual investment and effort (not tested directly), (v) competitive environment, and (vi) cultural norms. We conclude that none of our proposed explanations can account for a substantial portion of the gap.