Efficiency

Assessed the effects of 3 increasingly inclusive versions of the Behavioral Consultation (BC) model on problem behavior in mainstream classrooms in an effort to develop an effective and efficient approach to prereferral intervention.

Providing children with nutritious school meals continues to be a topic of interest in education policy. It has been argued that a healthy diet can have a positive impact on childhood obesity as well as student achievement. However, there is little empirical evidence to support this popular intervention. A working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research offers insights to help policy makers decide whether to select this option as a way to make a difference in children’s lives. The study, a natural experiment conducted in California public schools, uses a difference-in-difference regression statistical analysis of data from a treatment group and a control group at two or more different time periods, pre-treatment and post-treatment. The study found no evidence to support a reduction in obesity, but it did discover that introducing healthy meals was associated with a 0.036 standard deviation increase in test scores. The improved student achievement, although small, makes nutritious school lunches a viable cost-effective intervention that can boost test scores. It is important to remember that this is a correlational study and thus cannot establish a cause and effect relationship between healthy eating and student achievement.

The first section of this essay provides examples from reading and mathematics curricula that show experts dispensing unproven methods and flitting from one fad to another. The middle section describes how experts, for ideological reasons, have shunned some solutions that do display robust evidence of efficacy. The following sections show how public impatience has forced other professions to "grow up" and accept accountability and scientific evidence. The paper concludes with a plea to develop education into a mature profession.

This analysis examines the performance of the U.S. K–12 education system over time, in comparison to other nations, and at different levels of organizational structure: states, school districts, and schools. It also reviews performance in terms of four societal outcomes: effectiveness, equity, efficiency, and participation.

Education researchers are being asked to conduct rigorous, scientifically based studies of K–12 curriculum interventions; therefore, the need for measuring fidelity of implementation and empirically relating it to outcomes (the chief rationale for this review) is warranted to ensure internal and external validity. The results of this review indicate that there are too few studies to guide researchers on how fidelity of implementation to core curriculum interventions can be measured and related to outcomes, particularly within efficacy and effectiveness studies, where the requirements for fidelity measures differ. 

Over the past decade, the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA, has become the world’s premier yardstick for evaluating the quality, equity and efficiency of school systems. This special issue of the PISA in Focus series highlights the results of the first two volumes of the PISA 2015 initial report: Excellence and Equity in Education; and Policies and Practices for Successful Schools.

Efficient use of educational resources is a perennial challenge for school systems. Maximizing the impact of education interventions to magnify student achievement is an important goal for all school districts. This guide examines the use of expenditure-to-performance ratios as a critical indicator for school systems to help decide which interventions make sense when education dollars are at a premium. It describes how states and districts can use available data on district expenditures and student academic achievement to calculate six district-level expenditure-to-performance ratios.

A recent large-scale evaluation of Reading Recovery, a supplemental reading program for young struggling readers, supports previous research that found it to be effective.  In a 4 year, federally funded project, almost 3,500 students in 685 schools found that generally students benefitted from the intervention. Students receiving Reading Recovery receive supplemental services in a 1:1 instructional setting for 30 minutes 5 days a week from an instructor trained in Reading Recovery.  In the study reported here, students who received Reading Recovery had effect sizes of .35-.37 relative to a control group across a number of measures of reading.  These represent moderate effect sizes and account for about a 1.5 month increase in skill relative to the control group.  Even though the research supports the efficacy of the intervention, it also raises questions about its efficiency.  The schools that participated in the study served about 5 students and the estimated cost per student has ranged from $2,000-$5,000.  These data raise questions about the wisdom of spending this much money per student for growth of about a month and a half.

This analysis examined the cost effectiveness of research from Stuart Yeh on common sturctural interventions in education. Additionally, The Wing Institute analyzes class-size reduction using Yeh's methods.