GOVERNANCE, MANAGEMENT AND PERFORMANCE IN THE NORWEGIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM

English The three PhD students financed by the project have all finished studies at the Department of Economics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, during 2013. These are: Jon Marius Vaag Iversen, Educational governance: Interactions between institutions and school resources Kaja Høiseth Brugård, Dropped out? Three Essays on High School Education Rune Borgan Reiling, Essays on Resources and Graduation in Upper Secondary Education All theses include essays that are accepted for publication in highly reputed international journals, and, in addition, single authored essays that are published or invited to revise and resubmit in highly reputed international journals. Iversens thesis includes four chapters which provide empirical evidence on the working of governing systems in the Norwegian compulsory education. In particular, how the use of special education influences behavior at the school level is emphasized. The papers are entitled ?Disadvantaged students in the early grades: Will smaller classes help them??, ?School accountability reforms and the use of special education?, and ?Conditional peer effects and the role of school authorities? Brugårds thesis? starting point of the thesis is that dropping out of high school education is considered to be both a major educational and social problem. Systematic analyses of causes and consequences of dropout are therefore welcome. The thesis also includes analyses on the probability to enroll in higher education. The papers are entitled ?Post-compulsory education and imprisonment?, ?Gender peer effects on further education?, and ?Does school choice improve student performance?? Reilings thesis includes analyses of the probability to graduate high school and factors affecting the expenditure level in high school education. The thesis uses a long panel of data starting in 1980. The papers are entitled ?Upper secondary school completion and the business cycle?, ?Battle of the ages? County demographic structure and spending in upper secondary education?, and ?Does size matter? Educational attainment and cohort size? Another part of the project have calculated value-added measures for the quality of the individual high schools, which is published in Tidsskrift for samfunnsforskning in 2013. A report which also calculate value-added measures focus on public compulsory education. This work is based on individual students' results on common national tests in mathematics, reading and English which were conducted in the 5th grade in 2007 and for the same students in the fall in the 8the grade (the first year in lower secondary education) in 2010. In addition, average value-added for different socio-economic groups is calculated. Different types of measurement errors in the value-added measure are discussed. This report includes several interesting findings. For example, the method makes it possible to investigate whether high-performing and low-performing students become less different over time (convergence) or diverge over time (a Matthew effect). The analyses indicate that it is a small convergence in mathematics and reading from 2007 to 2010, but, on the other side, a clear Matthew effect in English. In addition, the report discusses whether it is reasonable to assign the value-added measure to the primary school as the government asserts. There is not a straightforward answer since the students shift from a primary school to a lower secondary school after grade 7. The analyses show that the average value-added varies to a large extent across lower secondary schools, conditional on the primary school of the students. This clearly indicates that the value-added measures to some extent capture progress during the first few weeks in the lower secondary school. Major events in the project have been the yearly workshops. The purpose of the workshops is to let young researchers present their ongoing research and to get feedback from more experienced researchers. The workshops are considered as very successful in educating young researcher to the international level and to bring the papers into high-quality international journals. World-leading scholars have given keynote lectures on the workshops, and, in addition, the workshops have each included about 20 research papers by researcher from all over Europe. In addition, the project arranged a conference for policy-makers in 2011, where the Minister of Education was one of the speakers.

We propose a large research project emphasizing the roles of governance and management of schools. The project covers both compulsory (primary and lower secondary) and non-compulsory (upper secondary) education. The project consists of 4 parts. Part 1 is on governance in compulsory education, and the main purposes are to investigate the implementation and consequences of new modes of governance and management. We will describe the variation in governance systems across municipalities, analyze whether gove rnance and management systems are systematically related to local factors such as income, education, political preferences, and finally investigate whether and how governance systems affect student performance. The purpose of part 2 is to develop performa nce indicators for upper secondary education. For low-performing students the main concern is dropouts and re-election, and the project will investigate gender differences in particular. We will investigate whether and how dropout affects post-school outc omes as employment, income and utilization of social security. Part 3 will analyze how the performance indicators are affected by governance. The indicators will be related to location of schools, the composition of study tracks, and the local school choi ce system. The extent to which the composition of study tracks matches the local industry structure is in particular relevant for the apprenticeship system of the vocational study tracks. Finally, the topic of part 4 is management of schools, both at the compulsory and the non-compulsory level. The main purpose of this part is to investigate how management of schools affects student performance. The analyzes will distinguish between leadership properties, such as formal qualifications, and leadership beha viour.