| Feature Article The Use and Efficacy of Capacity-Building Assistance for Low-Performing Districts: The Case of California's District Assistance and Intervention Teams Katharine O. Strunk, Andrew McEachin, and Theresa N. Westover The theory of action upon which high-stakes accountability policies are based calls for systemic reforms in educational systems that will emerge by pairing incentives for improvement with extensive and targeted technical assistance (TA) to build the capacity of low-performing schools and districts. To this end, a little discussed and often overlooked aspect of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) mandated that, in addition to sanctions, states were required to provide TA to build the capacity of struggling schools and Local Education Agencies (LEAs, or districts) to help them improve student achievement. Although every state in the country provides some form of TA to its lowest performing districts, we know little about the content of these programs or about their efficacy in improving student performance. In this paper, we use both quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore the actions taken by TA providers in one state-California-and examine whether the TA and support tied to California's NCLB sanctions succeeds in improving student achievement. Like many other states, California requires that districts labeled as persistently failing under NCLB (in Program Improvement year 3, PI3) work with external experts to help them build the capacity to make reforms that will improve student achievement. California's lowest performing PI3 districts are given substantial amounts of funding and are required to contract with state-approved District Assistance and Intervention Teams (DAITs), whereas the remaining PI3 districts receive less funding and are asked to access less intensive TA from non-DAIT providers. We use a five-year panel difference-in-difference design to estimate the impacts of DAITs on student performance on the math and English language arts (ELA) standardized tests relative to non-DAIT TA during the two years of the program intervention. We find that students in districts with DAITs perform significantly better on math California Standards Tests (CSTs) averaged over both treatment years and in each of the first and second years. We do not find evidence that students in districts with DAITs perform higher on ELA CSTs over the combined two years of treatment, although we find suggestive evidence that ELA performance increases in the second year of treatment relative to students in districts with non-DAIT TA. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions that explore the association between specific activities fostered by DAITs and changes in districts' gains in achievement over the two years of treatment show that DAIT districts that report increasing their focus on using data to guide instruction, shifting district culture to generate and maintain high expectations of students and staff, and increasing within-district accountability for student performance, have higher math achievement gains over the course of the DAIT treatment. In addition, DAIT districts that increase their focus on ELA instruction and shift district culture to one of high expectations have higher ELA achievement gains than do DAIT districts that do not have a similar focus. © 2012 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. Link to JPAM Early View. If you want to cite this article before it is in print, please use the DOI number listed with each article. |
| Feature Article State Unemployment Insurance Trust Solvency and Benefit Generosity Daniel L. Smith and Jeffrey B. Wenger This paper employs panel estimators with data on the 50 American states for the years 1963 to 2006 to test the relationship between Unemployment Insurance (UI) trust fund solvency and UI benefit generosity. We find that both average and maximum weekly UI benefit amounts, as ratios to the average weekly wage, are higher in states and in years with more highly solvent trust funds. This result holds after controlling for state-level unemployment rate, gross domestic product, population growth, legislative political ideology, partisan control of the executive and legislative branches, and gubernatorial election year across multiple specifications, including fixed-effects and dynamic panel estimators. We propose a theory of moderate coupling as the causal mechanism, whereby UI program benefits and financing are directly related but are not as tightly linked as in other social insurance programs, such as Medicaid. The findings have important policy implications for the funding of states' UI systems. As a consequence of moderate coupling, the countercyclicality of the UI program is dampened. Forthcoming in JPAM 32(3). Link to JPAM Early View. If you want to cite this article before it is in print, please use the DOI number listed with each article. |
| Feature Article Aviation Security, risk Assessment, and Risk Aversion for Public Decisionmaking Mark G. Stewart and John Mueller This paper estimates risk reductions for each layer of security designed to prevent commercial passenger airliners from being commandeered by terrorists, kept under control for some time, and then crashed into specific targets. Probabilistic methods are used to characterize the uncertainty of rates of deterrence, detection, and disruption, as well as losses. Since homeland security decisionmakers tend to be risk-averse because of the catastrophic or dire nature of the hazard or event, utility theory and Monte Carlo simulation methods are used to propagate uncertainties in calculations of net present value, expected utility, and probabilities of net benefit. We employ a "break-even" cost-benefit analysis to determine the minimum probability of an otherwise successful attack that is required for the benefit of security measures to equal their cost. In this context, we examine specific policy options: including Improvised Physical Secondary Barriers (IPSBs) in the array of aircraft security measures, including the Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS), and including them both. Attack probabilities need to exceed 260 percent or 2.6 attacks per year to be 90 percent sure that FAMS is cost-effective, whereas IPSBs have more than 90 percent chance of being cost-effective even if attack probabilities are as low as 6 percent per year. A risk-neutral analysis finds a policy option of adding IPSBs but not FAMS to the other measures to be preferred for all attack probabilities. However, a very risk-averse decisionmaker is 48 percent likely to prefer to retain FAMS even if the attack probability is as low as 1 percent per year-a level of risk aversion exhibited by few, if any, government agencies. Overall, it seems that, even in an analysis that biases the consideration toward the opposite conclusion, far too much may currently be spent on security measures to address the problem of airline hijacking, and many spending reductions could likely be made with little or no consequent reduction of security. Forthcoming in JPAM 32(3). Link to JPAM Early View. If you want to cite this article before it is in print, please use the DOI number listed with each article. |
| International Conference News Trends in Migration and Migration Policy Douglas J. Besharov, Mark H. Lopez and Melissa Siegel Worldwide, more than 215 million people have left the countries of their birth and moved elsewhere (World Bank, 2011). These migrants make up more than 3 percent of the world's population. Another 700 million adults say they would migrate to another country if they could, according to polls conducted by Gallup (Esipova & Ray, 2009). Almost all of the world's nations are either sending or receiving countries, or both. As of 2010, the world's top three migrant sending countries were Mexico (about 12 million), India (about 11 million), and Russia (about 11 million). The top regional destinations were North America, Europe, and the Gulf States, which together contained about 44 percent of the world's migrant population. The United States, alone, had more than 42 million migrants, making it the world's top receiving country. As a region, though, Europe (depending on how defined), had about as many migrants. Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, together, had about 38 million migrants in 2010. The Gulf States of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, combined, had more than 15 million migrants (World Bank, 2011). Public attitudes toward migration differ among receiving countries. In 2011, for example, a majority of adults in Spain, the UK, and the U.S. told the German Marshall Fund's (GMF) Transatlantic Trends Survey (2011) that "immigration is more of a problem" than "an opportunity" (p. 5). In other countries, such as Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, opinion was split: just about as many adults said "immigration is a problem" as said "immigration is an opportunity" (p. 5). Only among Canadian adults (surveyed through 2010) did a majority see immigration as more of an opportunity (German Marshall Fund, 2010, p. 4). These differences are likely the result of the receiving country's social values and economic situation, as well as the history and characteristics of migration in that country. Views in sending countries are also mixed. In a 2012 Pew Research Center survey, half of Mexican adults (50 percent) said "people leaving [Mexico] for jobs in other countries" was "a very big problem" for Mexico (Pew Global Attitudes, 2012, p. 15). The same survey, however, found other issues more likely to be rated as "very big problems" (p. 16) for Mexico: cartel-related violence (according to 75 percent of Mexican adults), human rights violations by the military and police (74 percent), crime (73 percent), corrupt political leaders (69 percent), economic problems (68 percent), illegal drugs (68 percent), terrorism (62 percent), and pollution (58 percent). In 2010, the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM), the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance, and the University of Maryland School of Public Policy held an international conference on migration in Maastricht, the Netherlands. Titled: Migration: A World in Motion: A Multinational Conference on Migration and Migration Policy, the conference brought together a worldwide audience of academics and professionals from think tanks, government agencies, the private sector, and civil society. Forthcoming in JPAM 32(3). Link to JPAM Early View. If you want to cite this article before it is in print, please use the DOI number listed with each article. |