Convention All Academic Convention can solve the abstract management needs for any association's annual meeting. Submission - Custom fields, multiple submission types, tracks, audio visual, multiple upload formats, automatic conversion to pdf. Review - Peer Review, Bulk reviewer assignment, bulk emails, ranking, z-score statistics, and multiple worksheets! Reports - Many standard and custom reports generated while you wait. Print programs with participant indexes, event grids, and more! Scheduling - Flexible and convenient grid scheduling within rooms and buildings. Conflict checking and advanced filtering. Communication - Bulk email tools to help your administrators send reminders and responses. Use form letters, a message center, and much more! Management - Search tools, duplicate people management, editing tools, submission transfers, many tools to manage a variety of conference management headaches! Click here for more information.
Association: Name: The Midwest Political Science Association URL: http://www.indiana.edu/~mpsa/
Citation: URL: http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p83764_index.html Direct Link: HTML Code:

Abernathy, Scott. "School Choice, No Child Left Behind, and the Problem of Measurement" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the The Midwest Political Science Association, Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Illinois, Apr 15, 2004 <Not Available>. 2008-08-16 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p83764_index.html>

Abernathy, S. F. (2004, Apr) "School Choice, No Child Left Behind, and the Problem of Measurement" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the The Midwest Political Science Association, Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Illinois <Not Available>. 2008-08-16 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p83764_index.html

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript Review Method: Peer Reviewed Abstract: On the surface, the two major educational reform initiatives currently underway in the United States, school choice and No Child Left Behind, appear to be very different in theory, emphasis, and approach. Choice is a bottom-up empowerment of customers, while No Child Left Behind is a top-down centralized accountability system. Both of these initiatives, however, struggle against the unobserved nature of process and product in educational production, often relying on aggregate test score data to overcome these informational problems—explicitly, in the case of No Child Left Behind, and implicitly, in parents’ use of test scores and similar ratings in their evaluations of prospective schools. Scholars of public administration such as James Q. Wilson have argued that bureaucrats in organizations whose processes and products are unobservable will tend towards risk-aversion. However, scholars have not adequately considered the importance of peer effects in educational production and measurement. Parents seeking to place their children in schools and regulators seeking to sanction schools on the basis of the same aggregate achievement data reinforce tendencies of defining quality based on the student body, rather than what the school is doing for individual students. Using original survey data collected from Minnesota public school principals in the fall of 2003, I examine the bureaucratic responses to both school choice and No Child Left Behind. I pay particular attention to principals’ views of their own influence, autonomy, and leadership across school policy areas as well as perceptions about the impact that school choice and No Child Left Behind are having or will have on their own leadership. I focus on patterns of bureaucratic response among principals experiencing either a loss of customers to school choice, potential state sanction for insufficient test scores, or both. I argue that the informational problems in measuring bureaucratic performance in education—either by parents or regulators—override the theoretical differences in choice and test-based accountability, resulting in similar patterns of risk aversion on the part of public school principals in response to these reforms. I conclude with an exploration of incentive structures that might be used to mitigate these unintended policy consequences.

No Child Left Behind, School Choice, and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school District: A Case Study

School Choice, No Child Left Behind, and the Problem of Educational Production