National Charter School Research Project

Guidelines for Charter School Research

To improve the assessment of charter school performance, NCSRP convened an Achievement Consensus Panel on charter school research in early 2005. The goals of the Panel are to improve the quality of future charter school research, identify the relevant facts that must be considered in charter school studies, and show how better studies can be designed. In addition, the Panel hopes to influence the type of studies that receive funding and educate the public on the complexities of charter school research and how to interpret results.

To reach these goals, the Consensus Panel published a white paper, Key Issues in Studying Charter Schools and Achievement: A Review and Suggestions for National Guidelines (May 2006).

The panel's compilation, Taking Measure of Charter Schools: Better Assessments, Better Policymaking, Better Schools, (April 2010), eds. Julian Betts and Paul Hill, is available from Rowman & Littlefield Education.

Panel members include:

• Julian Betts, a Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego, is also a Senior Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC). He has written extensively on the link between student outcomes and measures of school spending including class size, teachers' salaries, and teachers' level of education. More recently, he has examined the role that standards and expectations play in student achievement. Examples of his recent work include a theoretical analysis of the impact of educational standards published in the American Economic Review (1998) and the co-authored book From Blueprint to Reality: San Diego’s Education Reforms (PPIC 2005). Current research includes studies of various forms of school choice and a follow-up evaluation of San Diego’s controversial "Blueprint for Student Success."
• Dominic J. Brewer is Professor of Education and Policy, Planning and Development at the University of Southern California, where he also co-directs the Center on Educational Governance. Prior to joining the USC faculty, Dr. Brewer was a Vice President at RAND, where he directed the education policy research program for more than five years. He has overseen major projects focusing on educational productivity and teacher issues in both K-12 and higher education, and published more than fifty articles in academic journals on economics and education. Dr. Brewer most recently spearheaded RAND’s effort to assist in major K-12 reform in the Gulf nation of Qatar. Dr. Brewer holds a Ph.D. in Labor Economics from Cornell University.
• Anthony Bryk holds the Spencer Chair in Organizational Studies in the School of Education and the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. His main areas of expertise are school organization, education reform and educational statistics. Dr. Bryk is the Founding Director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research, a federation of Chicago-area research organizations that undertakes a range of studies designed to advance school improvement and assess the progress of Chicago school reform. Professor Bryk is the recipient of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation Prize for Distinguished Contributions to Educational Scholarship and the Distinguished Career Contributions Award from the American Educational Research Association.
• Dan Goldhaber is a Research Associate Professor at the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Affairs and an Affiliated Scholar of the Urban Institute’s Education Policy Center. Dr. Goldhaber’s work focuses on issues of educational productivity and reform at the K-12 level and the relationship between teacher labor markets and teacher quality. His published work also includes such topics as the relative efficiency of public and private schools, and the effects of accountability systems and market competition on K-12 schooling. His current research addresses teacher labor markets and the role teacher pay structure plays in teacher recruitment and retention; the relationship between teacher licensure test performance and student achievement; the effects of Florida’s Opportunity Scholarship Program on its schools, teachers, and students; the implementation and impact of comprehensive school reform models; and the effects of National Board Certification. Dr. Goldhaber holds degrees from the University of Vermont (BA, Economics) and Cornell University (MS and PhD, Labor Economics).
• Laura Hamilton is a Senior Behavioral Scientist at RAND, where she conducts research on educational assessment, accountability, instructional practices, and school reform implementation. She is currently directing or co-directing several large-scale studies, including an evaluation of systemic reforms in mathematics and science and a study of the implementation of standards-based accountability in response to the No Child Left Behind legislation. Much of her work focuses on the validity and effects of large-scale achievement testing, on the implementation of value-added assessment systems, and on the development of measures of instructional practice, particularly in mathematics and science. She has served on a number of national and state panels, including the Brookings National Commission on Choice in K-12 Education. She received a Ph.D. in educational psychology and an M.S. in statistics from Stanford University.
• Jeffrey R. Henig is Professor of Political Science and Education at Teachers College and Professor of Political Science in Columbia University. He earned his B.A. at Cornell University and his Ph.D., in political science, at Northwestern University. Henig’s research over the years has focused on the boundary between private action and public action in addressing social problems. Most recently, he has been focusing on the politics of school choice, charter schools, and coalition-building for urban school reform. He is the author or co-author of seven books including most recently Mayors in the Middle: Race, Politics & Urban School Reform (Princeton, 2004) and Building Civic Capacity: The Politics of Reforming Urban Schools (Kansas, 2001).
• Paul Hill is a Research Professor at the University of Washington's Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs, and Director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, which studies alternative governance and finance systems for public K-12 education. Dr. Hill’s recent work on education reform has focused on school choice plans, school accountability, and charter schools. He chaired the National Working Commission on Choice in K-12 Education, which issued its report, School Choice: Doing it the Right Way Makes a Difference, in November 2003. Dr. Hill holds a Ph.D. and M.A. from Ohio State University and a B.A. from Seattle University, all in political science. He is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Brookings and Hoover Institutions.
• Susanna Loeb is an Associate Professor of Education at Stanford University, specializing in the economics of education and the relationship between schools and federal, state and local policies. She studies resource allocation, looking specifically at how teachers' preferences and teacher preparation policies affect the distribution of teaching quality across schools and how the structure of state finance systems affects the level and distribution of funds to districts. She also studies poverty policies including welfare reform and early-childhood education programs. Susanna's recent papers include Explaining the Short Careers of High-Achieving Teachers in Schools with Low-Performing Students, and The Draw of Home: How Teachers' Preferences for Proximity Disadvantage Urban Schools. Susanna is also co-director of Policy Analysis for California Education, Director of Stanford's education policy center, and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
• Patrick J. McEwan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Wellesley College. He previously taught in the Departments of Educational Policy Studies and Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor McEwan's research focuses on the economics of education, applied econometrics, and education policy in Latin America. His research has been published in a wide range of economics and education journals, as well as three books. He has consulted widely on education policy and evaluation at the Inter-American Development Bank, the RAND Corporation, UNESCO, the World Bank, and the ministries of education of several countries.