TEACHER'S PERCEPTION OF SMALL HIGH SCHOOLS

Teacher's Perception of Small High Schools

Teacher's perception of Small High Schools

Overview

Teacher quality is widely believed to be important for education, despite little evidence that teachers' credentials matter for student achievement. To accurately measure variation in achievement due to teachers' characteristics-both observable and unobservable-it is essential to identify teacher fixed effects. School administrators, parents, and students themselves widely support the notion that teacher quality is vital to student achievement, despite the lack of evidence linking achievement to observable teacher characteristics. Studies that estimate the relation between achievement and teachers' characteristics, including their credentials, have produced little consistent evidence that students perform better when their teachers have more 'desirable' characteristics. This is all the more puzzling because of the potential upward bias in such estimates-teachers with better credentials may be more likely to teach in affluent districts with high performing students. (Joy 2002)

Research Question

Research will be based on the following questions;

How does teachers' perception of Small High Schools impact student achievement on science and math End of the Course Test in an urban school district?

How does teachers' perception of Small High Schools impact discipline referrals in an urban school district?

How does teachers' perception of Small High Schools impact student engagement in an urban school district?

Discussion

How does teachers' perception of Small High Schools impact student achievement on science and math End of the Course Test in an urban school district?

This has led many observers to conclude that, while teacher quality may be important, variation in teacher quality is driven by characteristics that are difficult or impossible to measure. Therefore, researchers have come to focus on using matched student-teacher data to separate student achievement into a series of “fixed effects,” and assigning importance to individuals, teachers, schools, and so on. Researchers who have sought to explain wage determination have followed a similar empirical path; they try to separate industry, occupation, establishment, and individual effects using employee-employer matched data (Abowd and Kramarz, 1999). Despite agreement that the identification of teacher fixed effects is a productive path, this exercise has remained incomplete because of a lack of adequate data. Credible identification of teacher fixed effects requires panel data where students and teachers are observed in multiple years, and this type of data is not readily available to researchers. A small number of studies have found significant variation in test scores across classrooms within particular schools, even after controlling for student characteristics.3 In other words, dummy variables identifying students' classrooms seem to be important explanatory variables in regressions of student test scores. (Johnson 2004) Although researchers have associated the significance of classroom dummy variables with variation in teacher quality, other classroom specific factors may also be driving differences among classroom achievement levels. In these studies, teacher effects cannot be separated from other classroom effects because teachers are only observed in one classroom. Estimates of teacher fixed effects from linear regressions of test scores consistently indicate that there are large differences in quality among teachers in this ...