October 2008 Archives

There's no surer sign of autumn's arrival than Halloween, when friends, co-workers, and complete strangers greet you in colorfully outlandish costumes, looking to impress you and rustle up some candy while they're at it. Yet autumn also brings another important American tradition: an unrelenting, glorious spate of football games. Since we're roughly at the midway point of the professional football season, I thought I'd relay a story that relates to that beloved American sport, and to science teaching.

Not too long ago, I read a fine biography of the legendary late coach of the Green Bay Packers, Vince Lombardi. It was written by David Maraniss, and it's titled When Pride Still Mattered. (Maraniss is the author of a bio of Bill Clinton, among other works.) The book chronicles Lombardi's life and career, and presents a vivid image of college and professional athletics in the post World War II-era.

Like many coaches, Lombardi had to pay his dues early, climbing up the ranks from high school to college before eventually reaching the pros. One of his first stops, Maraniss writes, was at St. Cecilia, a Catholic school in New Jersey. Lombardi took a job as an assistant football coach and as a Latin, physics, and chemistry teacher. In fact, at that point in his life, Lombardi would say that he "wanted to be a teacher more than a coach."

If you know anything about Lombardi's coaching style, it might not surprise you to learn that he had a hard-nosed and volatile temperament in the classroom. (He wasn't above throwing an eraser at a daydreaming student, the biographer notes.)

Yet Lombardi also displayed traits in the classroom that would make him a successful football coach. He was intensely demanding. He would challenge his students sharply, which in turn made them covet his praise even more. But above all, Lombardi was methodical, insisting that all the students master a concept before moving on to the next one. Just as he would later require the Packers to run their most famous play, the "sweep," in practice again and again, working out the flaws.

Lombardi often spent a week repeating a concept until struggling students understood. "He had a great way of sensing whether you were you getting it," recalled one student, quoted in the biography. "He'd say, 'I don't think you really understood that,' and go over it again."

The Packers coach, who died in 1970, worked at St. Cecilia for eight years, Maraniss writes. I know that science teachers reading this post would be a better judges of Lombardi's teaching style, and whether it has any application in today's classroom, than me. I'm sure that plenty of coaches have drawn inspiration from Lombardi. If there's a science teacher out there who's inspired by Lombardi's work deliniating chemical equations, rather than drawing up plays, more power to them.

And in case you're wondering, I'm a Minnesota Vikings fan.

Posted by Sean Cavanagh at 2:52 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A few years ago, I queried a few states looking for itemized budgets for Reading First. I was curious to learn what similarities and differences were in the kinds of things individual states were spending their millions in federal grant monies on.

Of course, much of the money was spent in very visible ways—well-attended and well-organized professional-development sessions, new instructional materials, reading coaches in every school—but there were also rumors that some of the money was being spent hastily on nonessentials simply because there was so much cash on hand, or to meet spending deadlines.

Alas, there were no such reports available, or at least I couldn't figure out what to ask for or how to get my hands on them.

I fully expected, however, that the U.S. Department of Education would ask for annual line-item reports from states to make sure the money was being spent properly. You may recall that the department had been very demanding of states in getting the fine details of how they would carry out the strict requirements of Reading First. (I also fully expected, naively it seems, that the federal studies of Reading First would actually give us some definitive information on how well the $1 billion-a-year program was working.)

But as far as I can tell this didn't happen.

Until now, that is. Yesterday, the Ed Dept. issued a Notice of Proposed Information Collection related to Reading First expenditures.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't really see the point now that the program is essentially being phased out. If the money was spent unwisely at any point, or even if it was used efficiently, isn't it too late to use that information? (There were some data collected in the 2004-05 school year, ED officials tell me, as part of an analysis on the targeting and use of funds across federal education programs, but that report hasn't been released yet.)

In any event, the notice asks for public comment on the following questions:

"(1) Is this collection necessary to the proper functions of the Department; (2) will this
information be processed and used in a timely manner; (3) is the estimate of burden accurate; (4) how might the Department enhance the quality, utility, and clarity of the information to be collected; and (5) how might the Department minimize the burden of this collection on the respondents, including through the use of information technology."

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Opponents of a new mandate requiring that all California students take introductory algebra in 8th grade scored a victory in court this week. How significant a victory? Check back in December.

A Sacramento County superior court judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the new mandate from taking effect. Judge Shelleyanne Chang agreed the groups that sued to prevent the requirement from going forward, the California School Boards Association and the Association of California School Administrators, would "suffer irreparable injury before the matter can be heard" formally, the Associated Press reported.

She said the state Board of Education, which approved the policy earlier this year, can't make any further decisions on the algebra test until a Dec. 19 court hearing.

Opponents of the requirement have said that the board had rushed into making the decision, which was also backed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and that it would set an unrealistically high bar for many students. State data shows that many 8th graders struggle mightily in algebra, and even more basic math, on state tests. Even some experts who favor setting higher standards for elementary and middle school math have questioned the policy, saying many students would be better off waiting until 9th grade to take Algebra 1, when they're more likely to be ready.

Policymakers, and business advocates, have taken a strong interest in getting more students into introductory algebra earlier in school. They reason that those students are more likely to move on to advanced math and science courses, study those subjects in college, and choose careers in those areas.

It remains to be seen whether the California judge's decision, and the overall battle being waged there over 8th grade algebra, has an impact on other states. Only one other state, Minnesota, has a middle school algebra policy similar to California's.

A crucial question in California is the degree to which economic uncertainties will influence the algebra policy. Many economists believe the nation is headed into prolonged rough patch, which, as Ed Week has reported, is likely to sap money from state budgets for schools. (Here's an online "chat" we hosted on this topic.)

Opponents of the California algebra requirement, which was to be phased in over three years, have predicted that it would cost the state billions of dollars, in teaching hiring and other areas. (The critics include state schools chief Jack O'Connell, who says the mandate would force California schools to double the number of middle school Algebra 1 teachers.) California is already coping with a budget deficit. Will the state and school districts put money into a new math curriculum requirement, if other, existing education programs are under financial strain?

Posted by Sean Cavanagh at 5:18 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

After some five years at the helm of the National Institute for Literacy, Sandra Baxter's appointment was not renewed this month and a national search was launched for her replacement. It took a bit of effort to find the announcement, but here it is. No word on where Baxter has landed, but Dan Miller of OVAE is now the acting director.

Like Baxter, the next executive director will have the unenviable task of answering to officials from the Education Department, the NICHD, and the other federal agencies that are part of the Interagency Group that oversees the institute. There's no word either on what will happen to those programs that Baxter championed during her tenure. But I wouldn't be surprised to see at least one of them wither on its long and untended vine.

The Commission on Reading Research that was supposed to follow up and expand on the research syntheses of the National Reading Panel, which completed its work more than eight years ago, has been in a kind of bureaucratic purgatory for some five years now. (Background here and here.) The determined Baxter may be just what kept the plans for the panel alive.

Bowing to its relatively new policy of full disclosure of the potential conflicts of interest for federal consultants and commission members, the Ed Dept. has been vetting the panel members for more than nine months. This after NIFL conducted an initial screening of the panelists.

Back in February, Troy Justesen, the assistant secretary for vocational and adult education, told me: “It’s gonna happen.We’re working very, very hard to get it done.”

Justesen's office oversees the National Institute for Literacy, a federal agency that began planning for the commission more than five years ago.

What's really amazing is that the prospective panel members have all held on for so long to participate in what is likely to be a time-consuming and difficult task, perhaps even more so than that of the National Reading Panel. (But the task is a critical one, many observers say, at a time when educators are hungry for more guidance on teaching reading.) The members are supposed to review and evaluate a broad array of reading studies—old and new, quantitative and qualitative—and figure out what lessons they hold for improving reading instruction and achievement.

I've sent several requests to the Education Department about the status of the commission. They are checking, I'm told. So stay tuned.

Posted by at 3:25 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Here's another rebuttal of the notion that U.S. schools and students are being outperformed by other nations. Veteran Washington Post education reporter and columnist Jay Mathews in an Op/Ed piece in the Boston Globe takes issue with the claims that American students have fallen far behind their counterparts in India and China and elsewhere.

"The widespread feeling that our schools are losing out to the rest of the world, that we are not producing enough scientists and engineers, is a misunderstanding fueled by misleading statistics," he writes. "Reports regularly conclude that the United States is falling behind other countries—in the number of engineers it produces, in the performance of its students in reading or in mathematics. But closer examinations of these reports are showing that they do not always compare comparable students, skewing the results."

But the picture he paints of American schools is not glowing. Too many of the nation's urban and rural schools are "simply bad."

"Not only are we denying the children who attend them the equal education that is their right, but we are squandering almost a third of our intellectual capital," Mathews writes. "We are beating the world economically, but with one hand tied behind our back."

There are a couple of initiatives under way in the United States to set standards that align with international benchmarks, meaning the expectations that other countries hold for their students at various grade levels. But while proponents say this strategy will bring world-class schooling to America, critics argue that such expectations will leave more students in the dust.

Mathews (who is a board member for Editorial Projects in Education, which publishes Education Week) suggests focusing not on what other countries are doing, but on success stories among urban schools in U.S. cities for examples of the real potential for raising student achievement in the most unlikely places.

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Olena, Ana, and Ioana, we salute you.

At a time when American educators and elected officials are fretting about their inability to encourage more girls to consider studies and careers in math, you apparently jumped into that subject quite willingly. You three were high finishers in the Putnam Mathematical Competition, an intercollegiate, six-hour test of students from universities in the United States and Canada. Those results were reported in a recent study I wrote about, which examined the shortage of U.S. girls with superior math talent.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the study reports that several other top Putnam finishers were not born and educated, precollege, in the United States or Canada. According to the study, Ana and Ioana, were born and educated through high school in Romania; Olena was born in Russia and went to high school in Canada. In fact, of 11 high-scoring females on the Putnam, three listed their place of birth as Romania, two were born in Russia, one in Bulgaria. Just three were born in the United States. and one was born in Canada.

I've written, and so have many others, about the math curriculum and teaching in high-performing Asian nations, and how the strategies used in those countries can influence schools in the United States. As far as I can tell, much less attention has been paid to K-12 math study in Russia and former Soviet bloc countries, and what they do well, especially in helping their best female students.

Of course, by some measures, those nations aren't doing that well at all. On the 2006 PISA, a major international test, Bulgarian and Romanian students, on average, didn't fare especially well in math. Their performance also wasn't stellar in a study released last week, which focused on how U.S. urban students compared with their counterparts in foreign countries.

Yet some scholars have voiced admiration for the math skills of high-performing students from Russia and the former Soviet bloc. If some of these nations are doing a better job of nurturing females with superior math talent, I'd be curious to hear readers' thoughts on why.

One of the more interesting perspectives on math teaching in Eastern Europe that I've come across was that of Mark Saul. In a 2003 essay, published in the Notices of the AMS, Saul describes traveling in Eastern Europe and spending time with teachers and mathematicians in a number of countries, especially Romania and Bulgaria. While he concludes that no countries are doing as well as they should in involving girls in math, Saul also sees a lot to like about math instruction in Eastern Europe. One of his conclusions is that the math community in those countries is less divided than it is in the United States—mathematicians seem more interested in what is taught in K-12 classrooms, and teachers and scholars seem far more eager to work together.

He spoke with one Hungarian scholar, who, as I interpret the article, teaches K-12, college, and graduate-level education courses, a breadth of professional experience that Saul finds appealing.

"We don't place an emphasis on calculus in the high school years, not on earlier algebra," the Hungarian scholar said of his country's approach to teaching math. "Rather, we look for ways to get students to make better use of what they already know. We spend time developing their cognitive abilities."

Saul suggests that for years in Russia and Eastern Europe "intellectually active" people turned to math as a refuge from Communism totalitarianism. If there are readers who've examined math teaching in these countries, and can offer comparisons to the U.S. approach, I invite your perspectives.

Posted by Sean Cavanagh at 4:47 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Career-and-technical education (the subject formerly known as voc-ed) occupies a strong place in the school curriculum, not to mention the public imagination. Studies have shown that many students take at least one elective class focused on a specific trade or a job-based skill, like auto technology, health care, or construction. Many of us can remember trading our textbooks for safety goggles at some point during middle or high school.

Those programs aren't just popular in school districts. They've been popular on Capitol Hill, too. The federal vocational program receives $1.3 billion a year. I saw one study describing it as the nation's largest high school program.

Yet critics have long questioned whether these programs challenge students academically in subjects like math and science. Are CTE students being given skills that will help prepare them for challenging, and potentially high-paying jobs? Or are these courses serving to relegate them to low-paying work and outdated career tracks? How can CTE courses be made more academically demanding?

Five states—Arizona, Nebraska, New Jersey, Ohio, and Oklahoma—will soon begin examining these questions in earnest. The states were competitively awarded the right to take part in a "policy academy" focused on "Meeting Academic and Economic Need Through Career Technical Education," arranged by the the National Governors Association.

The states will take part in meetings and a "learning lab," and perform a diagnostic analysis of state CTE efforts, with help from NGA.

The mission will be to seek better ways to connect CTE courses to skilled jobs, encourage more demanding academic work in courses, and build standards and curricula in CTE that prepare students not only for the working world, but for college.

NGA has staged many policy academies in the past, on topics such as early-childhood education and improving high schools. You can read more about the organization's work on state efforts in career-and-technical education here.

(Credit for the photo goes to the Juneau Empire, in Alaska.)

Posted by Sean Cavanagh at 4:24 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

If you saw Mike Petrilli with his red, white, and blue facepaint amid a faux backdrop of China's Great Wall this past summer, you had to see the humor in the video reports for Fordham's Education Olympics 2008. But behind his antics was a serious message about the relative low standing of U.S. students on international comparisons of various achievement measures, from college-going rates to PISA results.

Well, researchers for the Think Tank Review Project didn't find the series so funny. The project is a joint effort by the Education and the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Education Policy Research Unit at Arizona State University.

They released their own fact-checking review of Petrilli's reports this week and concluded that the "Education Olympics provides no basis for assertion that the nation's students will harm its economic future."

The review looks at the more than two dozen tables Petrilli used, showing how the U.S. ranks compared with other countries, and commentary that accompanied the data.

"While a link between international test rankings and global economic standing may be widely assumed, it is by no means a settled question," the review states. "The Education Olympics report, driven by predetermined positions and lacking any rigorous demonstration of argument, theory, evidence or methods, provides no basis for generating constructive policy for improving our nation's educational performance."

I'm sure Petrilli is polishing his saber as he gets ready to settle this one with authors Edward Fierros of Villanova University and Mindy Kornhaber of Penn State. I'm not sure the U.S. Fencing Association will endorse this match.

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A couple weeks ago, I wrote a story about a study that looked at the rising number of students taking algebra in 8th grade and made the argument that many of those middle schoolers are woefully unprepared for the challenge.

How unprepared? Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution examined coursetaking data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress and found that the lowest-performing students taking 8th grade algebra were scoring five or six years below grade level.

Now a new study takes issue with Loveless' conclusions, particularly his use of data comparing average state NAEP scores and students' enrollments in 8th grade Algebra 1. It basically argues that Loveless is overstating any link between more middle schoolers taking 8th grade algebra and their struggles in math. The new review, authored by Carol Corbett Burris, says the report also doesn't do enough to touch on prior research on the potential benefits of holding middle schoolers to higher math standards.

The analysis is published by the Think Tank Review Project, a joint effort run by scholars at Arizona State University and the University of Colorado that puts studies published by policy organizations through an independent analysis. Burris is identified as a researcher and the principal of a New York school with a successful accelerated mathematics program.

You can read the review of the algebra study here. Make your own call.

Posted by Sean Cavanagh at 7:58 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Some parents and residents in Racine, Wis., are raising eyebrows over a section in a middle school literature textbook that includes a lengthy narrative on Barack Obama and excerpts from his book, Dreams From My Father. The 8th grade text, published by McDougal Littell, has been in use in the schools since last year, according to this local news account.

And now, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, the debate has gone national, fueling a feeding frenzy on blogs and Web forums. Some conservative bloggers and pundits see it as a carefully organized campaign to indoctrinate students with liberal values. Others are angered by the lack of equal time for John McCain, George Bush, Hillary Clinton, and other national leaders.

When I first heard of the controversy—and the conspiracy theories about how the text was a tool for bolstering the candidate's chances in the current presidential election—I wondered how a publisher could act so quickly to get fresh material into its books. I remember that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, it was a couple of years before any substantive additions were made to the most popular history texts. Then I realized that it is a dated entry, referring to Sen. Obama's 2004 address at the Democratic National Convention, and his intentions to run for president.

I am not familiar with this text, which is about a year old, but it was likely several years in development. News reports say the book features a diverse selection of authors. The online activities associated with the text include a list of dozens of authors, of which Obama is one. He does seem to be odd man out among the likes of Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy, Isaac Asimov, Emily Dickinson. But textbook publishers are under a lot of pressure to make sure people of color are represented in schoolbooks.

Some commenters on this blog are talking leftist conspiracies and suggesting a "book burning."

And a Web site that is identified as an independent online forum for supporters of Hillary Clinton (but with no associations to the senator) hasn't taken so kindly to the news either. See here.

Looks like this might become one of those bandwagon causes that attracts all kinds of citizens, whether they have children in the school system or not. The Racine district hadn't received any complaints until the news hit the Internet. Apparently the controversy started when a parent complained to a conservative blog site in the state.

District officials announced today that they would review the text to ensure it aligns with state and local standards, and to respond to a complaint from a parent of an 8th grader.

In an earlier press release, they said the book was adopted before the presidential primaries and is popular throughout the country. The Obama section fits into lessons on community and provides "a contemporary and multicultural figure to explore the unit on community."

A bunch of blogs are now urging their readers to call the district. They may want to beef up staffing at the switchboards.

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My fellow bloggers at edweek.org have covered the lawsuit filed last week by the New York City teachers' union, which is protesting restrictions on teachers wearing political buttons in school (see Teacher Beat and Campaign K-12 ). But there is a compelling curriculum angle to the issue as well.

The United Federation of Teachers asked for a temporary restraining order against the decades-old policy—which Chancellor Joel Klein recently asked principals to enforce—it says violates educators' free-speech rights.

I've spoken to a lot of history/social studies teachers over the last 12 years at Ed Week, and written a number of stories about how controversial issues are handled in the classroom. Last week, I wrote about the presidential election and how teachers are trying to engage students in history and civics lessons and develop their critical-thinking skills around the social and political issues involved in the campaign.

Most of the teachers I've encountered have gone to great lengths to get students to balance all sides and all issues, and to draw conclusions based on their research and carefully informed opinions. In the view of these teachers, sharing their own preferences regarding candidates could undermine this goal. In some cases, it would also violate district policy.

One high school teacher I interviewed for this election story said she works hard to avoid any partisan discussion and doesn't share her own personal views, even though students often ask her opinion, because she's trying to get them to think for themselves.

I wonder if this is the ideal just for a social studies course, or if it should be the mantra for all teachers. Certainly a political button could help spark discussion of the issues in the classroom, but it could also alienate or intimidate students who think the teacher only wants to hear certain viewpoints.

Even if teachers have the right to express their opinion in school, should they? What would students learn from such an exercise?

Posted by at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The country will soon have a new way of measuring the technological know-how of its students, if federal testing officials' plans come to fruition.

The board that oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress is taking steps to create a test of technological literacy for students, which federal officials say will be the first-ever nationwide gauge of those skills.

The governing board has announced that it has made a preliminary move to create the tech test by awarding a $1.86 million contract to WestEd to develop a framework, or basic blueprint for the exam. The test will "define and measure students' knowledge and skills in understanding important technological tools," according to the National Assessment Governing Board, the independent entity that directs NAEP.

The idea is to have a plan in place by 2012. The board is still contemplating at which grade level it would be administered—4, 8, or 12, says a statement put out by the governing board.

Board officials say the Technological Literacy Assessment would be the country's first nationwide evaluation of student achievement in that area, though some states have created their own tests of those skills.

Several organizations are expected to help WestEd shape the test, including the Council of Chief State School Officers, the International Technology Education Association, the International Society for Technology in Education, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and the State Educational Technology Directors Association, according to the governing board.

The board is also expected to hold public hearings on the test framework, which its officials would like to have in place by the end of 2009.

The No Child Left Behind Act set a goal that all students should become technologically literate, though there are no mandatory "accountability" provisions for states testing students in those skills, as there are in reading and math. Nonetheless, there have been efforts by private organizations and states to move forward with tech assessments, as Ed Week's Scott Cech reported earlier this year.

At the same time, federal officials have acknowledged the difficulty of creating computer-based assessments for NAEP. The exam, after all, has to be administered in different school districts with different kinds of computer software—systems that are sometimes outdated and incompatible with each other. Mark Schneider, the outgoing commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, summed up those obstacles very bluntly last year in a meeting with the governing board.

Posted by Sean Cavanagh at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Earlier this week I attended an event sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and the Conference Board of Mathematical Sciences, an umbrella group representing 17 math organizations. The event was focused on the recent report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel and how to interpret its findings and translate them into school policy.

Some members of the math panel spoke, as did Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. But the event, held Oct. 6-7, was also arranged to allow groups of state and local school officials, math curriculum experts, and college faculty to meet in small groups to discuss the panel's work—and some of the pressing issues in math education, overall.

The math panel's work has evoked strong opinions, some of which were voiced at the event. But the small-group discussions veered into many other topics. One group, made up of state math curriculum officials, talked about the overly vague definitions of what is known as "formative assessment," and that ambiguity is affecting teaching in math classrooms.

Formative assessments are typically defined as on-the-spot tests of students' ability that teachers use during a lesson, or a series of them, to quickly gauge student ability. Ideally, they should give teachers a quick read on whether students are grasping the material, allowing them to speed up, slow down, or adjust their presentation in some other way. The formative model stands in contrast to "summative" assessments, generally end-of-course or end-of-year tests meant to measure the knowledge students have gained over a longer period of time.

Some members of the group I listened to complained that the publishing industry is marketing all kinds of commercial math programs to schools that are not formative assessments at all. For instance, some of those products are "benchmark" tests, given, say, every six weeks or so, the participants said, which are not tied to the schedule of math lessons that teachers are delivering. So by the time those tests are given, the students have long since moved on to new material, and it's too late to gauge whether they learned much from the strategy used by the teacher.

Formative assessment should be a teacher working with a student "and deciding what they know, and deciding what to do next," Jane Cooney, the elementary mathematics and science specialist for the Indiana Department of Education, told me. A lot of the textbooks and software being marketed to schools isn't following that approach, she said.

For a good examination of the debate over the uses of formative assessment in the test industry, see my colleague Scott Cech's story here.

Posted by Sean Cavanagh at 3:06 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

Reading First may benefit from the lack of action on the fiscal 2009 federal budget. As my colleague Alyson Klein reported this week, Congress passed an extension bill that would essentially provide the same level of funding for the federal reading program as in fiscal 2008. That's $393 million. The figure is less than the $1 billion or more the program had received each year since it was implemented in 2002. But it is far more than the zero funding that two congressional panels proposed in their versions of the fiscal 2009 budget.

Congress passed the extension bill late last month, allowing for the possibility that Reading First will continue to get federal support for another year. But that's only a possibility.

In her story, Alyson writes:

"But the stopgap bill doesn’t mean federal funding of the program will be continued. The money would not be allocated to school districts until July 1. If Congress decides to eliminate the program when it returns to the education spending bills in March, schools won’t receive any new Reading First money."

Regardless of the outcome of the November election, she continues, "the next Congress might simply pass a measure extending the fiscal 2008 funding levels for the Education Department and other federal programs for the remainder of fiscal 2009. If such a yearlong extension is approved, without any changes to the Reading First program, funding for that program may continue through fiscal 2009, a Democratic Senate aide said."

Posted by at 4:28 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Mark Schneider, who has served as director of the U.S. Department of Education’s top statistical office since 2005, is resigning from his post to take a job at a leading Washington research organization.

You can read more on this at Ed Week's home page.

The NCES official is leaving to accept a job at the American Institutes for Research, a major research center headquartered in the nation’s capital. Before joining NCES, Schneider, 61, was a widely published scholar and professor of political science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

He was named deputy commissioner of the National Center for Education Research in August of 2004, and then was nominated by President Bush to fill the NCES commissioner’s post the following year. He was subsequently confirmed by Congress.

As of Wednesday, no official announcement had been made on who will replace Schneider, whose term was scheduled to end next year, according to the Institute of Education Sciences, which oversees NCES.

Posted by Sean Cavanagh at 3:58 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

If Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has her way, "the nation's report card" will soon have its own place on state and local report cards.

Back in April, her department proposed federal rules that would require states and local education agencies to report state results on the National Assessment of Educational Progess (dubbed "the nation's report card") on their report cards, which detail results on state assessments.

Those proposals were put out for public comment, and the secretary said the final regulations are likely to be issued in October or November. On Tuesday, Spellings said she still favors going forward with that change as a way to provide the public with another measure of student academic performance. (States are required to take part in NAEP reading and math tests to receive federal Title I funds.)

"Transparency is a big part of our work," Spellings told an audience in Washington. The secretary was speaking at an event sponsored by the Conference Board of Mathematical Sciences. The board hosted a gathering focused on strategies for moving the recommendations of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel into policy.

The secretary told the audience that she occasionally hears policymakers argue that the public won't know how to interpret the NAEP results, or why the NAEP scores are different from state results. But she said the public has a right to know how students are performing on the national test, too.

The original, proposed rule says that local education agencies would be required to report state NAEP results on their report cards, too. The rule, published in the Federal Register, lays out some of these arguments:

"The Department recognizes that simple comparisons of student
performance on the NAEP and State assessments cannot be made without
some understanding of the key differences between the two assessments.
For example, the NAEP is not aligned with State academic content and
achievement standards and, therefore, does not necessarily reflect the
curriculum and instruction to which students are exposed in the
classroom. Therefore, the Department encourages States to provide
information to parents on how to interpret the NAEP and State data.
When the NAEP assessment information is presented in the appropriate
context, the Department believes information on how students in a State
are performing on State assessments compared to their performance on
the NAEP will provide for greater transparency and give parents another
tool to assess the education system in their State."

A cynic might say that states have another reason to resist having NAEP scores published alongside those from their state exams: NAEP often presents a more negative view of student achievement. A number of studies have also shown that some states set considerably lower standards for judging student proficiency than NAEP does.

Posted by Sean Cavanagh at 3:53 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

Why are more minorities not pursuing undergraduate and advanced degrees in computer science?

A new book examines that question and finds that the answer can be traced to a number of factors in K-12 systems, including high school course offerings, access to counseling, the influence of teachers, and students' beliefs about their own abilities.

"Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing" by UCLA Senior Researcher Jane Margolis, was published by the MIT Press last month. The book focuses in part on the experiences of students and teachers in three public high schools in Los Angeles, including an overcrowded urban high school, a math and science magnet school, and a well-funded school in an affluent neighborhood.

The book says that the number of African-American and Latino students receiving computer- science degrees is "disproportionately low." The proportion of students in those groups receiving science and engineering degrees has risen over the past two decades, according to federal estimates I looked this up (in the report "Science and Engineering Indicators, 2008," published by the National Science Board) though it appears those students' overall numbers as a percentage of the population remains small.

Posted by Sean Cavanagh at 3:39 PM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend