An ambitious effort to improve STEM education in Alabama has generated academic gains for students, according to a study issued this week by the federal Institute of Education Sciences.

The study involved a randomized control trial to assess the effectiveness of the Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative. The program, which was profiled in a 2009 EdWeek story, seeks to provide teachers with intensive professional development, access to quality instructional materials and technology, and in-school supports.

After one year, the effect on math achievement was positive and statistically significant, based on end-of-year scores on standardized tests, according to the new study. That impact amounted to a gain of 2 percentile points, the study says. The researchers helpfully sought to translate this for a general audience (as in reporters like me!) and said the gain was equivalent to 28 days of additional student progress in comparison with students receiving "conventional mathematics instruction." However, the effect on science achievement was not statistically significant after one year.

In reading, meanwhile, the study detected a gain of 2 percentile points for students participating in the STEM initiative.

Although the Alabama program targets students and schools across all grade levels, the study from U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences focuses on the effectiveness in grades 4-8.

An "exploratory investigation" of the two-year effect of the Alabama STEM program found a gain of 4 percentile points—equivalent to an estimated 50 days of additional student progress. In science, the gain was 5 percentile points. (The two-year effect is less reliable, the report says, because of changes to the control group. Or to put it in research-speak, the analyses after two years is "exploratory rather than confirmatory.")

The researchers also explored matters beyond test scores, including changes in classroom practices and teacher knowledge. It found that the STEM program "had a positive and statistically significant effect on classroom practices in mathematics and science after one year." Based on multiple teacher surveys, math teachers reported an average of an extra 50 minutes, every 10 days, in which they used "active learning strategies." For science teachers, the bump was 40 more minutes in comparison with teachers in the control group.

The study also looked at the impact of the initiative on teacher-reported content knowledge and here found no statistical difference in the level of such knowledge.

The Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative, which was described in my colleague Sean Cavanagh's 2009 story as "one of the largest and most ambitious state-run math and science programs in the country," was launched in 2002 and has seen increased participation across the state over time. As of 2009, the report says, it reached about 40 percent of the state's public schools.

Alabama's state schools superintendent, Tommy Bice, hailed the report's findings

"This is a day of affirmation, that what we've felt and known for almost a decade we've now had affirmed," he said, according to the Birmingham News. "Alabama's future is bright as these young minds are challenged to think critically and solve complex problems with no obvious answer—the 21st-century skills business and industry are asking of our graduates."

Posted by Erik Robelen at 4:33 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Last week's report by the Brookings Institution sure made a splash. As we reported to you, author Tom Loveless argued that the new common standards will have no effect on student achievement. He pointed out that there has been little connection between states' own standards and student performance on NAEP, and says there is little reason to contend that such a dynamic would change with a new set of standards, however common or uncommon.

As the comments section of our post suggested, the blogosphere wasn't content to let Loveless' report lie there uncontested.

Robert Rothman of the Alliance for Excellent Education, one of the common standards' most ardent supporters, argues that there is plenty of reason to hope that these new standards will change the game in education. For one, he notes, publishers are developing "innovative" new materials that they wouldn't have absent a national marketplace. States and districts are making new curricula, revising tests, and conducting professional development. Cross-state collaborations are taking shape, Rothman argues, such as one in which math educators have banded together to improve teacher preparation. All of this, he says, suggests that standards could indeed drive change for the better this time around.

Richard Lee Colvin at the Quick and the Ed calls Loveless' report a "pessimistic dead-end." Good standards that are well implemented and bring about change in many aspects of the education system are indeed cause for optimism, he argues.

Andy Rotherham at Eduwonk admits that implementation is critical if the new standards are going to make things better, but says that even questions about implementation aren't cause to make a case against the standards.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A bill to prevent implementation of the common standards in South Carolina is rumbling through the state Senate.

According to the Associated Press, there were so many people that wanted to testify at yesterday's subcommittee hearing that another hearing was scheduled for next week.

The bill was introduced last year in the state Senate, as we reported to you.

Sponsored by Republican Mike Fair, S. 604 would bar the state from putting into practice the standards that were adopted by the state board of education in July 2010.

Interestingly, the hearing yesterday drew common-core opponents from out of state. A Senate education committee staffer was kind enough to supply me with a list of those who testified. Supporters of the bill include names that have appeared in EdWeek stories (see below):

Joe Mack and Jane Robbins (both from the American Principles Project); Williamson Evers (research fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University); Jim Stergios (executive director, Pioneer Institute); Ze'ev Wurman (California high-tech entrepreneur)..

The list of those testifying against the bill was heavy on school district folks, and didn't seem to include anyone from out of state:

Tripp Dukes (assistant superintendent for instruction, Anderson school district 5); Amy Hawkins (director of middle and high school programs, Anderson 5); Rose Wilder (superintendent, Clarendon school district 1); Cindy Smith (school board member, Lexington school district 1); Robbie Barnett (associate vice president for workforce, education and manufacturing policy, South Carolina Chamber of Commerce).

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

One item tucked into President Obama's new budget request that you might have missed is a proposed cut to the esteemed "nation's report card."

The administration wants to trim $6 million from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a key measure of U.S. student achievement across disciplines relied upon by educators, policymakers, researchers, and, yes, journalists. The proposal comes as part of a $70 billion budget request for the U.S. Department of Education that, overall, would increase the agency's discretionary coffers by 2.5 percent. The NAEP cut would bring the testing budget down to $132 million, a reduction of 4.3 percent.

At the same time, the president's budget request would add $6 million—a strange coincidence, perhaps?—to create a pilot program for states to benchmark the performance of their 15-year-olds against that of students around the world on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA.

The Obama administration suggests the NAEP cut wouldn't have any noticeable impact.

"The administration believes that the funds requested are sufficient to enable NAEP to fulfill its mission and continue to provide the critically important information needed on student achievement over time," it says in a budget document.

But Cornelia Orr, the executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for NAEP, isn't so sure.

"I was really surprised myself," she said of the proposal, predicting that such a cut could lead to changes in the NAEP program, including possible testing delays.

"We might be asked to change the assessment schedule so an assessment doesn't occur in the year it's scheduled," she said. "We don't think any cuts are needed in the NAEP budget, and I don't think the [governing] board is going to enjoy having to have conversations about what to cut out of the NAEP program."

I should note that $1 million of the NAEP cut would come from the $8.7 million budget of the governing board itself.

As for the proposal for PISA, in essence, the pilot would allow "state-level results" on the international exam of 15-year-olds, the administration says. Participating states would be asked to pay a portion of the costs. The total cost per state would be about $600,000, the administration says.

Orr, however, suggested instead an approach that involves NAEP.

"I think that linking [PISA results] back to the NAEP scale would give more states access to that information," she said. Orr explained that even a state that wasn't part of the pilot could then look at its NAEP score and extrapolate from that to get a gauge on how its performance stacks up against other nations'.

The last round of PISA results came out in December 2010. The exam, which assesses literacy in reading, science, and math across dozens of countries, is given every three years. It will next be administered later this year, with a special focus this time on math.

Needless to say, it remains to be seen whether Congress will go along with a cut to the NAEP program, especially in a fiscal 2013 budget request that otherwise boosts overall spending at the Education Department.

For more analysis of the president's budget plans for education, check out this blog post on Obama's plans to trim back previous proposals for a set of "teaching and learning" funds. And for the bigger picture on the budget, check out our EdWeek story from the other day.

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Although most states have adopted the common-core math standards, the debate over their value is by no means over. Today, the journal Education Next published a forum that brought together two experts to take up the matter.

In one corner, W. Stephen Wilson, a math professor at Johns Hopkins University who served on the "feedback group" for the math standards. In the other, Ze'ev Wurman, a Silicon Valley executive and former education official under President George W. Bush who served on a California commission that evaluated the suitability of the common standards for that state.

Here's a quick taste of what they had to say.

Are the standards "fewer, higher, and clearer?"

Wurman: "Common-core standards may in fact be clearer and more demanding than many, though not all, of the state standards they replaced. ... If one compares them to the better state mathematics standards like those of Minnesota or California, they are more numerous. ... They may be higher than some state standards, but they are certainly lower than the best of them. ... They may be clearer than many state mathematics standards, but they still tend to be wordy and hard to read."

Wilson: "There is much to criticize about [the math standards], and there are several sets of standards, including those in California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Indiana, and Washington, that are clearly better. Yet common core is vastly superior—not just a little bit better, but vastly superior—to the standards in more than 30 states."

Wurman and Wilson fielded a number of other questions from the editors at Education Next, including whether the common standards will put an end to the "math wars" and how the standards compare with those of the world's top-performing nations. You can read it all here.

Of course, you can also read the math standards for yourself right here, and draw your own conclusions.

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Will the Common Core State Standards improve student achievement? Not according to a new study out today.

The crux of the argument in the Brookings Institution report is that there is not much of a connection between standards—even rigorous ones—and student achievement. If there was a connection, we would have seen signs of improvement from states' own individual standards—all states have had standards since 2003—but NAEP scores don't bear that out, author Tom Loveless argues.

Loveless also points to a 2009 Brookings study that found no connection between the quality of states' standards and their students' NAEP scores. Loveless examines NAEP scores from 2003 to 2009 and finds no correlation between the quality of states' standards and NAEP gains during that period.

Loveless also looks at performance standards, or the "cut points" set for proficiency on states' tests, to examine the argument that the presumed higher cut scores on the future tests for the common standards will help drive better student achievement. Again, he finds that cut scores are unrelated to NAEP performance.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 9:23 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

We all have our stereotypes about which subjects appeal more to girls or boys. Well, in perusing a new report on the Advanced Placement program, I was intrigued to discover some hard data to help shed light on the matter. In addition to reporting participation on AP exams by racial and ethnic groups, the College Board includes the gender breakdown for all subjects tested.

Some of what I learned may not surprise readers. Males dominate AP Computer Science and all three physics courses, for instance. Females dominate AP Art History and English Language and Composition.

But not all of the findings were obvious, and a few were even a little puzzling.

(Note: The data in this blog post all reflect the gender breakdown of AP tests taken by public-school graduates from the class of 2011. My source is the College Board's 8th annual "AP Report to the Nation.")

Participation in the popular Calculus AB program was about evenly divided, but in the Calculus BC course, males were more heavily weighted (59 percent) than females. (Calculus BC covers all of the content in the AB course, plus additional material.)

Meanwhile, AP Biology was more popular with females (59 percent), while males were apparently more into AP Music Theory (58 percent). AP Statistics is pretty evenly divided, with 52 percent female.

One striking finding is that in a majority of subjects, the gender preference appears to be fairly pronounced. In my not-very-scientific approach, I decided to count the number of AP subjects in which one gender represented at least 55 percent of test-takers.

The result? (Drumroll, please...) Twenty-three out of 37 AP subjects tested.

For more analysis of the latest "AP Report to the Nation," check out the EdWeek story, as well as this blog post, which takes a closer look at trends in AP participation, subject by subject. (Teaser: Subjects including geography, environmental science, and Chinese are rapidly growing in popularity.)

Back to gender differences, here's a sampling of subjects in which they seemed pretty significant for the class of 2011.

What girls like:
• Art history: 66 percent female
• Biology: 59 percent female
• English literature and composition: 63 percent female
• French language and culture: 69 percent female
• Psychology: 63 percent female
• Spanish Language: 63 percent female
• Studio Art: Drawing Portfolio: 74 percent female

What boys like:
• Calculus BC, 59 percent male
• Computer Science A: 80 percent male
• Computer Science AB: 86 percent male
• Music Theory: 58 percent male
• Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism: 77 percent male
• Physics C: Mechanics: 74 percent male

Among the AP subjects in which gender differences seemed marginal were 'Calculus AB,' Chemistry, European History, 'Latin:Vergil,' Statistics, and U.S. Government and Politics.

So, what does it all mean? Post a comment and let us know!

Posted by Erik Robelen at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Those of you who read here about the "close reading" exercise conducted by the Aspen Institute recently will be interested in a debate raging on the English Companion Ning. Teachers are debating, with no small degree of intensity, whether this key tenet of the common standards is a good thing. (Registration is required to read the conversations, but it's free.)

A quick recap: I went to a retreat of chief academic officers in Tampa last month, hosted by the Aspen Institute, and reported that they walked through a "close reading" exercise with one of the English teachers who helped shape the common standards. Read my blog post, and then story to catch up on that.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute's Kathleen Porter-Magee picked up on this and blogged about it (see here and here). And this picked up heat and rolled onto the English Companion Ning, where teachers are now arguing about the merits—and dangers—of an approach to literacy instruction that is heavy on "close reading" of text.

Some teachers are defending the new standards. Some are feeling suspicious that the standards writers, who took pains to say in the standards themselves that no one was telling teachers how to teach, are now doing exactly that. Some are questioning the bona fides of David Coleman, one of the lead writers of the English/language arts standards, who has been advancing the close-reading idea in appearances around the country but lacks classroom-teacher credentials. When I checked this morning, that thread had logged 180 comments. (Another thread about the common core, called, "Time for the gloves to come off"—yikes!—has more than 50.)

What's interesting—of many interesting things—in the thread about close reading is how it plays out the division in the ELA community about the common standards' approach to literacy instruction. There are echoes in there of what the International Reading Association's Rich Long said in my story: that the close-reading approach dispenses inappropriately with what the field knows about the value of students' background knowledge in reading. There are also echoes of broad disagreements about the standards in general, as reflected in the National Council of Teachers of English's position on them (we don't oppose or favor them, but will support teachers and students as they are implemented).

The debates among ELA teachers about the legitimacy of the standards' literacy approach bear close watching as nearly every state in the country starts work to implement it.

Posted by Catherine Gewertz at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

President Obama's latest budget request, unveiled earlier this week, includes a healthy dose of new and recycled proposals at the U.S. Department of Education for improving STEM learning, as well as revisiting plans he's put forward to target various areas of the curriculum through three "Effective Teaching and Learning" funds.

But what's striking about those three funds—twice before rejected by Congress—is that the budget requests keep shrinking, especially this time around. The smaller requests also come in the context of a budget plan that overall would increase the Education Department's discretionary budget by 2.5 percent, to $69.8 billion.

(For the big picture on the budget, check out this EdWeek story.)

Two years ago, Obama requested $450 million for the Effective Teaching and Learning: Literacy fund. Last year, it dropped to $383 million. This year? Cut by about half to $187 million.

The new budget suggests that while Obama still appears to like the idea of a "well-rounded education," perhaps his enthusiasm is dwindling. He's requesting $90 million for the Effective Teaching and Learning for a Well-Rounded Education fund, barely a third of the $246 million last year, and $265 million the year before.

As for the STEM fund, the request is down to $150 million, from $206 million last year, and $300 million in fiscal 2010. But with STEM, this isn't the whole story. More on that in a moment.

All three Effective Teaching and Learning funds are intended to supply competitive grants to improve instruction. In its budget request, the Obama administration says the funds "would address the need to strengthen instruction and raise student achievement across the core academic content areas, especially in high-need [school districts], by replacing a patchwork of programs and funding streams in current law with three comprehensive, coherent programs that provide increased flexibility for states and [districts] to design, develop, and implement strategies that best meet the needs of their students."

You can read a more detailed analysis of the president's budget proposal last year for these funds here.

Back to STEM education. The president's budget also includes a variety of other plans. For one, he wants to set aside $80 million from a proposed Effective Teachers and Leaders program to recruit, train, and place recent college graduates and mid-career professionals in the STEM fields in high-need schools. In fact, the Education Department developed a special summary of its STEM education proposals.

The administration also wants to create a new, $30 million "evidence-based grant competition" focused on "developing, evaluating, and scaling proven practices that can help increase student achievement in K-12 STEM. And the budget also notes other places where STEM would be included as a priority, such as the Investing in Innovation program and a new Presidential Teaching Fellows program.

President Obama discussed some of these STEM proposals when he hosted his second White House Science Fair earlier this month.

Of course, as I always say when writing about the budget request, it's important to remember that this is only a request. Some of these proposals have been put forward before and rejected by Congress. And indeed, this year more than ever, political analysts suggest that the president's budget proposal is as much a political document outlining his priorities in what's sure to be an intense election year.

Posted by Erik Robelen at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Gov. Jerry Brown of California is proposing to eliminate a second year of science from the state's requirements for high school graduation.

The measure was included in his recently released budget request for the coming fiscal year, according to a story in The Reporter newspaper of Vacaville, Calif. The article suggests that the Democratic governor's intent was to give school districts greater say in setting their priorities in spending state aid.

The story quotes officials from a couple of districts indicating that they had no plans to cut science courses.

In any case, the proposal may well face some stiff opposition, including from state Sen. Lois Wolk, a Democrat who chairs the Senate Government and Finance Committee.

"If anything, we should be going in the other direction," she told the newspaper. "We're falling behind in math and science. If we want to compete, we need students trained in math and science."

According to the state's department of education, to graduate currently in California, "a student must successfully complete at least two courses in science, including biological and physical sciences."

The development comes as the Virginia state Senate recently voted overwhelmingly to eliminate 3rd grade standardized testing in both science and history.

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