The Cost-Effectiveness of 22 Approaches for Raising Student Achievement

As a consequence of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law there is tremendous pressureon school principals teachers school superintendents district staff state departments ofeducation and governors to maximize the increase in student achievement that is obtained withevery dollar of expenditure.Currently teachers are forced to rely on extremely inefficient approaches that take enormousamounts of time both during the school day and throughout the K-12 learning years. This isexperienced in terms of the reduced time that is available to teach subjects other than math andreading as schools resort to double periods of math double periods of reading and enormousamounts of remedial instruction that directly reduce the time available for other subjects includingscience art and music.In contrast this book suggests that student achievement may be increased in a way that is not only cost-effective in dollar terms butefficient in the sense that it does not rely on unusual investments in the time required to obtain results. The book draws upon a wealth ofcost-effectiveness data to dispel common notions about what works in addressing the achievement gap: increased expenditure perpupil charter schools voucher programs increased educational accountability class size reduction comprehensive school reformincreased teacher salaries more selective teacher recruitment the use of value-added methods to measure and reward teacher performancethe use of National Board teacher certification to identify high-performing teachers and a host of other approaches.