Dual Enrollment, Performance-Based Funding, and the Completion Agenda: An Analysis of Post-Secondary Credential Outcomes of Dual Enrollment Students by Credential Type

Objective: Dual enrollment has become a significant portion of community college enrollment throughout the country. Some scholars have argued that dual enrollment implementation can be used as a viable policy lever to achieve the certificate and associate degree obtainment outcomes identified in Reclaiming the American Dream, a large-scale policy framework driving the community college completion agenda. However, research on dual enrollment participation and credential completion is just starting to emerge with little focus on associate degree and certificate obtainment. To fill this gap, this study investigates the relationship between dual enrollment and credential completion, paying close attention to associate degree and short-term certificate obtainment. Methods: A quantitative analysis was conducted with data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to ascertain the relationship between taking college classes in high school and post-secondary credential obtainment. Disaggregated completion percentages were collected both 3 and 5 years after students began at a post-secondary institution, and binary logistic regression models were constructed to calculate the odds of post-secondary credential obtainment when taking dual enrollment courses. Results: Overall, dual enrollment students have increased odds of completing any post-secondary credential compared to non-dual enrollment students. When disaggregated by credential type, dual enrollment students have diminished odds of completing an associate degree or certificate, compared to increased odds of completing a bachelor’s degree. Contributions: This study adds to the growing literature surrounding dual enrollment and post-secondary credential obtainment by demonstrating that dual enrollment is not a viable policy lever to achieve the credential obtainment goals of the completion agenda.

Broader outcomes in procurement policy – a case of New Zealand pragmatism

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the underpinning ideas of public procurement allowed for broader outcomes – a more strategic form of public procurement – to emerge. The paper contributes to the literature on public procurement by empirically addressing the evolution of procurement as a government policy lever in New Zealand so as to demonstrate how policy pragmatism can ensure a shift without a complete overhaul of a complex system. Design/methodology/approach The paper has used a single country case study to examine a recent development in procurement policy. The objectives of the paper are achieved by adopting a unique conceptual framework connecting ideas, sensemaking and bricolage. Findings The paper provides empirical and conceptual insights about how bricolage, or policy pragmatism, aids in dealing with the constraints of ideational legacies. It demonstrates a particular form of targeting in procurement, common in public administration but not well understood in the procurement field. Research limitations/implications Single country case studies lack scientific generalizability. However, they add to the canon of knowledge that is lacking in the field of public procurement in this case. They also provide a stronger starting point for further research especially with respect to comparative studies. Practical implications The paper provides an excellent example of the development of procurement policy that is useful for procurement officials from other countries undergoing change or looking to update or create procurement policies. It shows a high-level process of implementation for government priority outcomes from a country well-known for its quality of public management and governance. Social implications New Zealand has significant equity issues especially as related to its indigenous population. Procurement is being used increasingly as a lever to improve equity. This article includes information about New Zealand's uptake of social procurement. Originality/value This paper fulfils a need for greater understanding of how policy is “put together” and the dynamics at major points of change or the implications of policy changes. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this case study of procurement policy in New Zealand is original, and the author is aware of no other similar work emanating from New Zealand in the academic journals.

Disconnected Development? The Importance of Specific Human Capital in the Transition From Student Teaching to the Classroom

We use a novel database of student teaching placements in Washington State to investigate teachers’ transitions from student teaching classrooms to first job classrooms and the implications for student achievement. We find first-year teachers are more effective when they teach in the same or an adjacent grade, in the same school type, or in a classroom with student demographics similar to their student teaching classroom. We document that only 27% of first-year teachers are teaching the same grade they student taught, and that first-year teachers tend to begin their careers in higher poverty classrooms than their student teaching placements. This suggests that better aligning student teacher placements with first-year teacher hiring could be a policy lever for improving early-career teacher effectiveness.

NonProfits: A Public Policy Tool for the Promotion of Community Subjective Well-Being

Looking to supplement common economic indicators, politicians and policymakers are increasingly interested in how to measure and improve the subjective well-being of communities. Theories about nonprofit organizations suggest they represent a potential policy-amenable lever to increase community subjective well-being. Using longitudinal cross-lagged panel models with IRS and Twitter data, this study explores whether communities with higher numbers of nonprofits per capita exhibit greater subjective well-being in the form of more expressions of positive emotion, engagement, and relationships. We find associations, robust to sample bias concerns, between most types of nonprofit organizations and decreases in negative emotions, negative sentiments about relationships, and disengagement. We also find an association between nonprofit presence and the proportion of words tweeted in a county that indicate engagement. These findings contribute to our theoretical understanding of why nonprofit organizations matter for community-level outcomes and how they should be considered an important public policy lever.

Is social capital underproduced?

Is social capital likely to be underproduced without state action? Where previous analysts have typically argued that social capital is a public good and, therefore, needs government action to be produced at an optimal level, we argue that social capital is not a public good because though often non-rivalrous, it is almost always excludable. As such, social capital is more appropriately conceived of as a club good. Further, we argue that governments are not likely to be in a position to improve a society’s social capital due to epistemic limits and the complexity of social capital. Finally, we argue that rather than a state solution, solutions to social capital-related problems are best solved through a bottom-up process. As we demonstrate throughout, this has implications for how we understand community resilience in the wake of disasters. The key role that social capital plays in facilitating community rebound after disasters has been widely acknowledged. If social capital is a public good, then policymakers could be justified in focusing on cultivating social capital as a strategy for promoting community resilience. If social capital is a club good and there are limits to top-down strategies for creating social capital, however, then social capital creation is not an available policy lever.

Principal Evaluation under Elementary and Secondary Every Student Succeeds Act: A Comprehensive Policy Review

A growing body of research recognizes the critical role of the school principal, demonstrating that school principals’ effects on student outcomes are second only to those of teachers. Yet policy makers have often paid little attention to principals, choosing instead to focus policy reform on teachers. In the last decade, this pattern has shifted somewhat. Federal policies such as Race to the Top (RTTT) and Elementary and Secondary Education Act waivers emphasized principal quality and prompted many states to overhaul principal evaluation as a means to develop principals’ leadership practices and hold them accountable for the performance of their schools. The development and dissemination of principal evaluation policies has proceeded rapidly, however, it is unclear whether focusing on principal evaluation has targeted the most impactful policy lever. In this policy brief, we describe where policy makers have placed their bets in post-RTTT principal evaluation systems and comment on the wisdom of these wagers. We describe the degree to which principal evaluation components, processes, and consequences vary across the fifty states and the District of Columbia, and review evidence on which aspects of principal evaluation policies are most likely to improve principals’ practice and hold them accountable.

The Strategy of Foreign Subversion

This chapter presents the core theoretical argument of this book: states with incompatible policy interests subvert state authority in the pursuit of foreign policy objectives against their adversaries. This conflictual behavior weakens state authority and impedes state consolidation. The chapter then describes the use of subversion as an instrument of statecraft and the political benefits of delegating disruption to local proxies in the target state. It explores the strategic and operational advantages of subversion, and considers how this foreign policy lever can help states increase the probability that they will prevail in their disputes with adversaries. Because subversion is not costless, the chapter also examines the constraints that would-be sponsors face when considering this tool of statecraft. Finally, it introduces three mechanisms through which subversion undermines state authority, showing how foreign support plays a pivotal role in these processes. Target states are hardly passive victims of subversion, yet their efforts to respond to foreign subversion rarely recapture the authority losses imposed on them by the sponsor state.