Education Finance and Accountability Program
(EFAP)
 

Robert Bifulco
William Duncombe
John Yinger

Related Papers

EFAP’s New York City project investigates the effectiveness of the whole-school reform programs that were implemented in many elementary schools in New York City in the mid 1990s. 

Because they offer the promise of help for failing inner-city schools around the country, whole-school reform programs have become one of the hottest topics in education policy. Many troubled school districts have turned to one of these programs. Moreover, in 1998 the federal government passed the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration Program, which assists low-performing schools in implementing whole-school reforms.

How well do these reform programs work? In February, 1999, the American Institutes for Research released a comprehensive report, commissioned by five leading education groups, that evaluates twenty-four existing reform programs. Unfortunately, however, the scholars who wrote this report did not have a lot of information to work with. According to a story in Education Week (February 17) 

More than anything, experts said last week, the study underscores the need for strong, third-party evaluations of schoolwide reform models....

"The fact is that the capacity to do this kind of research is very limited in this country," said Marc S. Tucker, a founder of America's Choice, one of the 24 models reviewed. "I believe that it's very important for the federal government to put a fair amount of money on the table to make this kind of research possible." 

Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, the president of the National Academy of Education, a group of education researchers and scholars, agreed. "It's amazing how little evaluation there is," she said. "Since the early 20th century, the people who have peddled the educational reform strategies that we all hear about tend to be successful because they're the best entrepreneurs. It doesn't necessarily have to do with any research credibility."

This project provides a unique opportunity to help close this information gap, that is, to provide a rigorous evaluation of several whole-school reform programs.  This opportunity exists because we have data on individual students in the New York City school district, which has experimented extensively with five different whole-school reform programs in a sub-set of its low-performing schools. These programs include Success for All, Accelerated Schools Project, and the Comer School Development Project, each of which has been implemented in schools around the country.

The New York data include student test scores and other student characteristics, along with classroom characteristics, such as teacher credentials and experience, number of students, and student turnover. We will be able to determine whether the test scores for students in schools where reform programs are implemented improve relative to the test scores of similar students in similar schools without such programs.  Because the data allow us to track students over time, to compare student performance in schools with and without reform programs, and to control for many other factors that influence student performance, we will be able to provide the most rigorous evaluation of reform models so-far attempted. In addition, this project has collected extensive information on the degree to which the elements of each whole-school reform program were implemented. As a result, we will be able to investigate whether the impacts of the programs depend on the degree and nature of program implementation.  

Papers:

• "Addressing Self-Selection Bias in Quasi-Experimental Evaluations of Whole-School Reform: A Comparison of Methods"  
  Robert Bifulco, Center for Child and Family Policy, Duke University.  Final Report

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