Ceci Rouse is a labor economist who teaches at Princeton. She has evaluated the effects of vouchers in Milwaukee, and more recently has studied the effects of accountability in Florida with fellow cool person David Figlio.

With Lisa Barrow, Rouse has a new literature review out (School Vouchers and Student Achievement: Recent Evidence, Remaining Questions) about the effects of vouchers on both the students who receive them and the students who remain in public schools. Basically, the take home story is that we shouldn't expect much from vouchers. No surprises there for those who have watched vouchers closely, but do check out Rouse's great review of the literature:

The best research to date finds relatively small achievement gains for students offered education vouchers, most of which are not statistically different from zero. Further, what little evidence exists regarding the potential for public schools to respond to increased competitive pressure generated by vouchers suggests that one should remain wary that large improvements would result from a more comprehensive voucher system. The evidence from other forms of school choice is also consistent with this conclusion. Many questions remain unanswered, however, including whether vouchers have longer-run impacts on outcomes such as graduation rates, college enrollment, or even future wages, and whether vouchers might nevertheless provide a cost neutral alternative to our current system of public education provision at the elementary and secondary school level.

Here's a very special weekend meditation for voucher die-hards from John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

Posted by eduwonkette at 11:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

It is a rare talent that can filter the mass of information around us, process it, and spit it back out to shed new light on things we thought we already understood. Among educational researchers, few share Jonathan Zimmerman's knack for cutting to the core of the issues of the day.

A historian who teaches at NYU, Zimmerman is the author of three books that examine cultural and political conflict in our schools throughout history. His first book, Distilling Democracy: Alcohol Education in America’s Public Schools, 1880-1925, reviews conflicts over how children were taught about alcohol during the temperance movement and prohibition. His second book, Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools investigates the role of advocacy groups in determining what should be taught in schools. His most recent book, Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century, was inspired by his own experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal. It examines the experiences of - and lessons learned by - American teachers abroad.

You can catch Zimmerman's incisive takes on current events in his regular op-eds that appear in papers throughout the country. For example, in his op-ed, "How Special are Your Needs?", he reflects on the reaction to Palin's claim that children with special needs will have a friend and advocate in the White House if she is elected. Why is it, he asks, that we see children of special needs as deserving of public support, while we largely ignore the needs of children of poverty? What makes some kids, he wonders, more special than others?

And perhaps more relevant today is his recent TC Record commentary, "Sarah Palin and the Assault on Merit." As we await the debate, I'll leave you with this excerpt:

[Historically] The dispute lay in the measurement of ability, not in its significance. Nobody questioned whether skill matters, or whether society should recognize and reward it.

Nobody, that is, until this election cycle. In the smiling face of Sarah Palin, we see something fresh and truly remarkable in American history: the anti-merit candidate.

Some people have gamely tried to depict Palin as a kind of Jeffersonian natural aristocrat, a sharp diamond plucked out of the Alaskan rough. More commonly, though, they have embraced her for her lack of special talent, ability, or knowledge. There's nothing special about Sarah Palin, and that's precisely what is so new--and so special--about her.

And that brings us back to "elitism," which Palin's defenders inevitably invoke whenever anyone questions her qualifications. The very charge shows how far we have strayed from the meritocratic ideal. It ignores the difference between deserved and undeserved elitism, suggesting that any claim to high status is somehow suspect. And it makes a mockery of our entire government, implying that anyone among us is good enough to lead it.

In one of his best-known quips, the conservative icon William F. Buckley said he would rather be governed by the first 300 names in the Boston phonebook than by the faculty of Harvard University. In the end, though, Buckley didn't want either group in charge. He rejected the faculty's left-liberal politics, of course, but he also recoiled at the notion of any average Joe at the helm.

He was, in short, an elitist. And so am I. In a time of economic turmoil at home and enormous peril overseas, we need extraordinary—not ordinary--leaders. Woe to America if we fall victim to the seduction of Sarah Palin, who tricks us into thinking that Everyman---or Everywoman---is good enough for us all.

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We know that the average African-American student lags behind the average white student. But until recently, we did not have a clear portrait of the differences between black and white high-achievers in elementary school - a critical pipeline issue in shaping inequality in access to the most coveted colleges, graduate schools, and jobs. Thanks to Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist of education who studies school segregation and the sources of racial/ethnic achievement gaps, we've come a long way.

How does the progress of initially high-achieving black and white students compare as they progress from kindergarten through 5th grade? It turns out that high-achieving black students fall back significantly more than low-achieving black students. For students who start school at the 84th percentile, black-white gaps grow twice as fast as students who start school at the 16th percentile. (See Reardon's paper here.)

The question, then, is why. Reardon suggests a few possible mechanisms, each of which deserve more attention in future research. The first possibility is an outgrowth of racial segregation. The average black high achiever attends school with lower achieving students than the average white high achiever. If teachers teach to the middle, high-achieving black kids may lose out compared to their white peers. A second possibility is that teachers treat black and white low achieving students similarly, but differentiate treatment among high-achieving black and white students. (This seems less plausible to me, but perhaps you have thoughts here.) A third possibility is that the home environments of high-achieving black and white students diverge more than the home environments of low-achieving black and white students.

Kudos to Reardon for putting this issue on the map, and may a thousand dissertations bloom.

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To many observers of public education, there is no doubt about which schools are failing - it's the schools with low rates of students passing state tests, stupid!

Of course, this assumes that students' achievement is a direct measure of school quality. "Yet we know that this assumption is wrong....It follows that a valid system of school evaluation must separate school effects from nonschool effects on children's achievement and learning" writes Doug Downey, a cool Ohio State sociologist of education you should know, in his recent paper (in collaboration with Paul von Hippel and Melanie Hughes), "Are 'Failing' Schools Really Failing?"

Analyzing data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - Kindergarten Cohort, a national sample of 21,000 kindergarteners that were then followed through 5th grade, Downey and colleagues thus set out to isolate the effects of schools on student learning. The ECLS data are uniquely suited for this task because the study evaluated students in the fall and spring of kindergarten, and again in the fall and spring of first grade. It turns out that summers - a time when students are only affected by non-school influences - are the key to teasing apart school and nonschool factors.

Downey and colleagues look at schools' effectiveness in four different ways. First, they examine NCLB's method - overall test score levels. They then turn to 12-month learning rates; think growth models, which measure test score growth, for example, between a test given in April 2007 and a test given in April 2008. They contrast those rates with 9-month learning rates; imagine a test given in September, and then again in May. Finally, they introduce a measure called impact, which is the difference between the school year and summer learning rate.

"Impact" is attractive because it doesn't require us to measure and statistically control for all of the different aspects of children's nonschool environments that may affect school success, as do cardiac surgery report cards. It captures what we need to know about students' out-of-school environments without bogging us down in the methodological and political problems associated with introducing these controls. And it helps us adjust for "soft" factors like innate student motivation, for which it is difficult to measure and control. Moreover, it holds schools harmless for what happens to their students over the summer, which currently serves as a confounding factor in growth models.

What percent performing in the bottom 20% of overall achievement are actually in the bottom 20% for measures of impact and learning? Less than half! High-achieving schools are concentrated in more affluent communities, but "high impact" schools exist across the socioeconomic spectrum. And the opposite is true. There are plenty of school with good test scores that are skating by because simply because they had advantaged kids to begin with.

What does this all mean for NCLB? Downey and colleagues put it like this:

Our results raise serious concerns about the current methods that are used to hold schools accountable for their students' achievement levels. Because achievement-based evaluation is biased against schools that serve the disadvantaged, evaluating schools on the basis of achievement may actually undermine the NCLB goal of reducing racial/ethnic and socioeconomic gaps in performance. If schools that serve the disadvantaged are evaluated on a biased scale, their teachers and administrators may respond like workers in other industries when they are evaluated unfairly - with frustration, reduced, effort, and attrition. Under a fair system, a school's chances of receiving a high mark should not depend on the kinds of students the school happens to serve.

Crystal clear, creative thinking is the distinguishing feature of Downey's work - see, for example, his paper on school effects on child obesity, or his paper asking if schools are "the great equalizer."

Wonks can rest a little easier tonight with the knowledge that Downey's now turned his attention to NCLB.

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Yesterday, in eduwonkette’s bombshell revelation that she is Jennifer Jennings, a Columbia doctoral student in sociology, she explained that the timing was influenced by the fact that there was potentially damaging misinformation about her identity swirling in the blogosphere and beyond. Many people thought that eduwonkette was Amy Ellen Schwartz. Who is this Amy Ellen Schwartz? Why, she’s a cool person you should know.

Amy is the Director of the Institute for Education and Social Policy at NYU, and a Professor of Public Policy and of Education and Economics appointed both in NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. She’s also the President of the American Educational Finance Association, which makes her a wonk among wonks. Amy’s a New Yorker through-and-through, and through her analyses of administrative data gathered by the New York City Department of Education, she's made important contributions to our understanding of how New York City schools serve immigrant children; strategies for measuring school performance and efficiency; and racial/ethnic differences in students’ test scores. And that’s just a sampling of her work in education; she also writes on public finance and housing.

About two weeks ago, the Census Bureau reported that the U.S. is projected to become a “majority-minority” country by 2042. New York City passed that threshold a long time ago, and few people are aware of the actual racial/ethnic make-up of the New York City public schools. About 40% of the children in the system are Hispanic; 30% are Black; 15% are Asian; and just 15% are white. At the elementary and middle-school level, one in six children was born in another country; and in a city as large and diverse as New York City, these children hail from more than 180 countries. High schools for newcomers can serve students from as many as 50 different countries.

Over the past several years, Schwartz, along with her long-time collaborator Leanna Stiefel (who is also cool, but two people wouldn’t fit on the card) and their colleagues, have sought to understand the experience of immigrant students in New York City elementary and middle schools. Two pieces of good news are that immigrant students in New York City are not, for the most part, isolated from native-born students, and that immigrant students typically attend schools that receive their fair share of school resources—largely because immigrant children are more likely to be English language learners and living in poverty than their native-born peers. Moreover, their analyses suggest that foreign-born students perform better than similar native-born students on reading and math tests, have better attendance, and are less likely to participate in part-time special education.

There is not, of course, just one immigrant experience in New York; the resources that families bring with them, and the contexts of reception they encounter when they arrive, differ across regions and countries. Moreover, what Amy and her colleagues have learned about immigrant elementary and middle school students may not apply to the experiences of immigrant high school students, and extending their analyses in this direction is definitely on their agenda.

The ways that Amy Ellen Schwartz and her colleagues have used administrative data to address fundamental questions about the performance of the New York City public schools have been a model for our masked marvel eduwonkette, and for education researchers across the country. And get this, David Cantor: an eduwonkette post on New York City that isn’t discouraging!

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Economist David Figlio, who has extensively studied the intended and unintended consequences of accountability systems, recently made a move from the University of Florida over to Northwestern. Figlio has a knack for the creative - but still substantive - paper: for example, see his papers on the unintended consequences of accountability systems including Food for Thought? The Effects of School Accountability Plans on School Nutrition, Accountabilty, Ability, and Disability: Gaming the System?, and Testing, Crime, and Punishment. More recently, he mounted an impressive survey of Florida principals to identify their responses to accountability pressures. (See Feeling the Florida Heat? How Low-Performing Schools Respond to Voucher and Accountability Programs.)

In our chat on testing and accountability on Tuesday, Figlio provided a terrific overview of the accountability literature in response to Sherman Dorn's question, which is worth reprinting in full here:

I think that the evidence is becoming clearer that many of the hopes of high-stakes accountability advocates and many of the fears of high-stakes accountability critics are correct -- school administrators and teachers can and do respond to accountability pressures, at least at the margins.

A number of recent studies have shown that schools subject to greater accountability pressure tend to improve student test performance in reading and mathematics to a meaningful degree -- my recent study of Florida with Cecilia Rouse, Jane Hannaway and Dan Goldhaber (working paper on the website of the National Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, or caldercenter.org), for instance, suggests test score gains of one-tenth of a standard deviation in reading and math associated with a school getting an "F" grade relative to a "D" grade. We find that these test score gains persist for several years after the student leaves the affected school. Jonah Rockoff of Columbia University has a new working paper studying New York City's rollout of school grades that suggests that responses to grading pressure seem to happen immediately -- grades released in November were mainfested in test score changes in the same winter/spring.

In the case of my study with Rouse, Hannaway and Goldhaber, we try to look inside the "black box" by studying a wide variety of potentially productive school responses, and it appears that Florida schools responded to accountability pressures by changing some of their instructional policies and practices, rather than "gaming the system."

The rapid and apparently productive response of school personnel to school accountability pressure suggests that educators are, at least to some degree "magisters economici," responding to the incentives associated with the system. And this makes getting the system right so important, because if schools and teachers respond quickly to incentives, the incentives had better be what society/policymakers want.

Many people raise concerns about teaching to the test, and there is certainly evidence of this -- consistently, estimated effects of accountability on high-stakes tests are larger than those on low-stakes tests -- though the low-stakes test results tend to be meaningful still, especially with respect to math. Harder to get a handle on is the narrowing of the curriculum to concentrate on the measured subjects; there is a lot of suggestive evidence that this is taking place to a small degree at the elementary level, though studies of the effects of accountability on performance on low-stakes subjects typically don't find that performance on these subjects suffers -- but of course, those subjects are still being measured with tests. Still there is certainly the incentive to reduce focus on "low-stakes" subjects. One possible solution for those concerned about low-stakes subjects being given short shrift would be to impose requirements such as minimum time spent of instruction or portfolio reviews.

There is a lot of evidence that accountability systems can have unintended consequences that are predicted by the magister economicus model. Derek Neal and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach at the University of Chicago note that accountability systems based on getting students above a given performance threshold tend to induce schools to focus on the kids on the "bubble." I've found that that type of system may lead schools to employ selective discipline in an apparent attempt to shape the testing pool, or even to utilize the school meals program to artificially boost student test performance by "carbo-loading" students for peak short-term brain activity. These types of unintended consequences are much more likely in accountability systems based on the "status" model of getting students above a proficiency threshold, rather than the "gains" model of evaluating schools based on how much these students gain.

But there's a tradeoff here. The more we evaluate schools based on test score gains, where gaming incentives are lower, the more the focus is taken off of poorly-performing students whom society/policymakers would like to see attain proficiency. How the system is designed is crucially important.

You can find the transcript for the chat on testing and accountability here.

Posted by eduwonkette at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

You don't come across statistics ninjas like David Rindskopf, a psychologist who teaches at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, every day. Whether he's making advances in latent class analysis, multilevel modeling, or Bayesian statistics, Rindskopf has paved the way for education researchers to better understand the factors that affect students' performance in school. And his work hasn't gone unnoticed. A few years ago, Rindskopf was elected a fellow of the American Statistical Association, a designation rarely bestowed on scholars outside of a statistics department.

Here's how Rindskopf describes his own work:

I don't know who invented the term "empirical epistemologist," but I do know that when I first heard the term I knew that it was a perfect phrase for describing what I do. Almost all people believe that they are epistemologists in a vague sense; after all, isn't everyone searching for the truth? But empirical epistemology implies the search for methods that will help researchers who design studies and collect data. For each supposed fact in social science, one could ask "How do we know that this is true?" My teaching and research is devoted to helping researchers answer this question.

Rindskopf also does a lot of statistical consulting, and has a great sense of humor - for example, check out Rindskopf's Rules for Statistical Consulting.

PS - Who's got a card game in mind to play with these new "cool people" trading cards?

Posted by eduwonkette at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Regular readers know that eduwonkette was an early endorser of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education policy statement crafted by Sunny Ladd, Pedro Noguera, and Tom Payzant, and co-signed by some of skoolboy’s favorite scholars, policymakers and activists. The fundamental premise of the policy agenda is that efforts to advance student’s learning and development need to combine policies intended to improve schools with policies designed to transform the social and economic contexts in which children and youth develop. The approach is described as broader and bolder because it postulates that school improvement—which includes holding schools accountable for students’ learning and development—can’t do it alone. Rather, investments in communities, families and other social institutions that shape children’s lives outside of formal schooling are critical to moderating the powerful linkage between socioeconomic advantage and children’s learning and development.

The potential of this approach is illustrated through the research of Suet-Ling Pong, a cool person you should know. Dr. Pong is Professor of Education, Sociology and Demography at Penn State, where she serves as the Professor-in-Charge of the Educational Theory and Policy Program. (Some colleges and universities have program heads, or chairs, or coordinators. At Penn State, apparently, someone is actually in charge!) Over the past 15 years, she has pursued a program of research that has illuminated the mechanisms by which families, neighborhoods, and labor markets – important out-of-school contexts – shape students’ achievement in school.

Dr. Pong’s research strongly suggests that policies can weaken the links between a child’s social and economic background and her achievement. A key example is in the arena of family structure and family policy. In the U.S., we are accustomed to thinking of single-parent families, typically headed by women, as inherently disadvantaged. Female-headed families without another adult in the household struggle economically, and these mothers find it difficult to balance long hours at work and the time they spend with their children at home. As David Ellwood and Christopher Jencks point out, single-parent families are defined as an economic problem, a child development problem, and a moral problem; and the moral overtones have shaped American family policy.

Suet-Ling Pong and her colleagues have shown that there is nothing deterministic about the correlation between growing up in a single-parent family and children’s school achievement. Instead, she finds, the association between single-parenthood and children’s academic outcomes varies across countries. In the U.S., children growing up in single-parent families are comparatively worse off in their math and science achievement, relative to similar children in two-parent families, than is true in other countries, and some European countries have much smaller achievement gaps between single-parent and two-parent families than do others.

A country’s family policy environment is what makes the difference. Family policy takes many forms, including maternity and parental leave, child-care programming and subsidies, public after-school programs, and housing subsidies, to name a few. Countries which Pong and her colleagues describe as having strong family and welfare policies have smaller achievement gaps in math and science between children in single-parent and two-parent families than are found in other countries.

There’s no guarantee, of course, that policies that have helped to close gaps in other countries will have the same effect in the U.S. Policy-borrowing is a very delicate matter, and the successful enactment of a policy depends on many factors beyond the substance of the policy itself. Nor can we conclude that family and welfare policies are likely to eliminate the many disparities in academic outcomes observed in the U.S. Schools can’t do it alone—and neither can families and communities. But policies that unite these social institutions in a concerted effort have more potential to create progress than those that treat them in isolation from one another.

Posted by skoolboy at 6:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The current policy discourse about teachers and teaching in the U.S. emphasizes the recruitment and retention of “high-quality” teachers, defined either by the teachers’ credentials, or their value-added influence on students’ achievement, or both. It has not, in skoolboy’s view, paid sufficient attention to the ways in which the school serves as a context for teachers’ work, shaping the conditions under which a teacher might be more or less successful in advancing students’ learning. Teachers don’t teach in a vacuum; the ability of the leaders in a school to set a direction, secure resources, facilitate professional development, and build a culture for teachers to work in concert has a lot to do with whether a teacher can be successful. One of the implications of this perspective is that a teacher’s effectiveness may be contingent on the school context, which eduwonkette has pointed to as an issue that needs further research before we embrace value-added assessment as the last word on teacher effectiveness.

Jim Spillane, who studies school leadership, is a cool person you should know. He’s the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Professor of Learning and Organizational Change in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. Over the past half-dozen years or so, he has led a series of research projects on distributed leadership and instructional improvement. A key principle of distributed leadership is the distinction between leadership roles and leadership practices. The conception of the “great man” theory of leadership is only exacerbated by calls by business leaders, politicians and high-level school administrators for “strong” principal leadership. (“Strong” is always cast as better than “weak.”) Leadership, Spillane explains, is not limited to people who are formally designated as leaders. Rather, there are times when people other than the school principal perform key organizational functions, and the principal works with these others—who may include curriculum specialists and coaches, assistant principals, and of course teachers.

Spillane also emphasizes the importance of organizational routines to the practice of leadership. All organizations have a set of routines and rituals that guide the day-to-day work and interactions of teachers, students and administrators in schools. Leaders can purposively design organizational routines that might contribute to improved teaching and learning. A distributed leadership perspective is no panacea, he warns; but it can be a useful lens for making sense of the practice of leadership, and how schools can create organizational routines that allow a broader array of educators in schools to take on leadership responsibilities and develop as leaders.

The goals of schooling are too complex, and the technology for achieving those goals is currently too weak, to rely on a single person—no matter how talented—to be defined as the sole leader of a contemporary U.S. school.

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When I read about the University of California's proposed changes to their admissions standards, which would deemphasize test scores in favor of class rank (Hat tip: Education Optimists), I realized that proposal is a partial outgrowth of a decade of work on higher education access by Marta Tienda. Among educational researchers, Tienda, a demographer and sociologist who teaches at Princeton, stands out for her record of doing research that informs public policy debates about educational opportunity for disadvantaged kids, and for the passion and flair with which she does this work.

After the Hopwood case temporarily ended affirmative action in Texas, the state adopted a plan that gave the top 10% of each graduating high school automatic admission to the two flagship campuses. Tienda mounted a major study of the policy change under the auspices of the Texas Higher Education Opportunity Project, and has since produced dozens of articles on the policy's impact. Her recent paper with colleague Sigal Alon, Diversity, Opportunity, and the Shifting Meritocracy in Higher Education, is a real tour de force for the ground that it covers. They analyzed four datasets covering high school classes graduating in the 1980s and 1990s in order to determine how the relative weights put on grades and test scores in the admissions process have changed over time. Their results support the "shifting meritocracy" hypothesis; selective colleges have increasingly relied on test scores to screen students, which, because of persistent test score achievement gaps, has made it difficult to admit a diverse group of students to these colleges in the absence of race-sensitive preferences. Alon and Tienda, through a series of simulations, show that deemphasizing test scores would allow institutions to admit diverse classes without lowering graduation rates.

Their conclusion is far-reaching, but can be summed up in just one sentence: "The apparent tension between merit and diversity exists only when merit is narrowly defined by test scores."

Tienda's personal story is also quite remarkable. As one of five children and the daughter of illegal Mexican migrant laborers, she planned to become a hairdresser until the 7th grade, when a teacher noticed her talent. As she explains in an interview, "It was such a riveting moment for me that I even remember what the teacher was wearing that day. Until then, I thought that college was only for rich people and I was from a working class family. But when my teacher suggested college and told me that there were scholarships to help good students like me get to college, that was it." Since then, she has been awarded honorary degrees from multiple universities, and has served on the boards of RAND, the Carnegie Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, Brown University, TIAA, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and a dozen other major organizations.

But she's never forgotten where she came from, and continues to do outreach work to encourage disadvantaged kids to go to college, and to make them feel comfortable once they're there. In this profile, you'll see her take no prisoners attitude in full effect. As she exhorted a group of students to carry the torch, "Let me tell you something. If you were admitted, you belong. Your job is to do the very best you can and to bring up two of the classmates you left behind.” Through her research, which has drawn our attention to the potential for disadvantaged kids to succeed and excel in higher education, Tienda has done just that.

Posted by eduwonkette at 8:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (24) | TrackBacks (0)

Stefanie DeLuca is a sociologist who teaches at Johns Hopkins. Self-described as "Ann Coulter's anti-matter, but not as tall," DeLuca has recently been named a W.T. Grant Foundation Scholar - a prestigious five-year award - to study residential mobility in the lives of poor adolescents. Deluca is a rare find in educational research as she is equally skilled in quantitative and qualitative methods, and has used both approaches to study the effects of residential mobility on poor children and their families.

DeLuca's work on the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program, which attempted to relocate poor families from high-poverty neighborhoods by providing housing vouchers, is a good example of her ability to get her head around tough problems in novel ways. Though everyone expected that moving to a better neighborhood would have a positive impact on students' academic achievement, the MTO project found no effects. DeLuca, who interviewed program participants in Baltimore, has attempted to explain why in this article in Education Next. You can read an interesting bio-profile about her experiences conducting this research here. Her conclusions are worth quoting at length:

The interviews conducted in Baltimore shed light on the explanations for why the MTO experiment didn’t lead to better schools and educational achievement. Many MTO parents told us about frightening conditions in their children’s schools and their concern for their children’s well-being. Yet these fears and realities did not always translate into efforts to remove their children from these environments. Poor mothers and their children juggle myriad extreme conditions, and schooling is not always on the top of the list. Murder, crippling drug addiction, suspicious landlords, diabetes, and depression took center stage in the lives of many, if not most, MTO families we interviewed. While neighborhood change could be a necessary condition to protect children and improve their schooling, it is not sufficient in light of the deep morass of issues that characterize the lives of the urban poor.

Many social policies assume that all low-income parents approach opportunity the same way that most middle-class families do, and that the main problem is a lack of financial resources. Our interviews provide a reminder that poor families are not just wealthy families without a bankbook. Poor parents often have less information about school choice programs and school quality than do middle-class parents. Poor families may approach opportunities, and in particular may secure schooling for their children, in ways that diverge from many research models of educational decision making.

These insights are also relevant to school choice policy in general. Many cities, including those in which MTO families were living, have expanded school choice programs. No Child Left Behind gives parents the option of sending their child to another school if the current one doesn’t make adequate progress. The success of these policies in enhancing education opportunities for the types of families who participated in the MTO experiment will depend on gaining a better understanding of how these families view the school choice process and where it fits into their overall strategies for well-being.

DeLuca's other projects will also be of interest to many eduwonkette readers. She has examined the effects of delaying entry into postsecondary education after high school, finding that delaying college is associated with lower odds of getting a BA. Another strain of her work looks at the effects of non-cognitive skills - for example, student effort, engagement, and motivation - on students' educational attainment (i.e. how long they stay in school and what degrees they earn). Very much looking forward to the papers coming out of that project.

If all of that wasn't enough, here's one more tidbit: It's rumored that DeLuca has impeccable taste in shoes. Can't vouch myself, but it came from a good source. A girl after my own heart indeed.

Posted by eduwonkette at 8:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

We’ve spent a lot of time here lately talking about tests and test scores. You can’t ignore ‘em – they’re a ubiquitous part of the educational landscape in the U.S., and their salience has only increased in the NCLB era. To the extent that they are able to tell us about students’ mastery of core academic skills, they can be a useful tool to guide education policy and practice.
But some of the importance of testing comes from the way we use tests for sorting, selecting and certifying individuals, and not from the intrinsic qualities that the tests are seeking to measure. I would never say that literacy and numeracy skills are unimportant; but there’s a lot more to being a competent adult and citizen than high test scores.

This point is driven home by a cool person you should know: Mike Rose, Professor of Social Research Methodology at UCLA. The son of working-class Italian immigrants, Mike was classified as a remedial student, until some perceptive high school teachers figured out he had the potential to go to college. He spent much of his early career teaching literacy skills to students at various levels of schooling who had not been well-prepared. His autobiographical book Lives on the Boundary is an inspiring account of the power of good teaching to engage struggling students in the study of written English.

In an article entitled “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” published in the June, 2008 issue of Atlantic Monthly, “Professor X,” an adjunct English teacher at a private college and a community college, turned a lot of heads with his palpable resignation at teaching students who he believes don’t belong in college and are destined to fail. Rose, in his recent foray into blogging, considers how he might teach James Joyce’s short story “Araby,” which “Professor X” views as outside the ken of his students, to a group of underprepared students. I’ve never taught English, but it’s a tour de force.

Rose’s most recent monograph is entitled The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker. Through portraits of blue-collar workers such as carpenters, waitresses and hair stylists, he persuades us that there is a tremendous amount of mental work involved in manual labor. People don’t live their lives taking tests; they live them engaging with tools, symbols, and, most importantly, with other people. Mike Rose calls for a conception of intelligence that acknowledges school, to be sure, but also the workplace and the public sphere of our democracy.

On his blog, Rose writes, “If I had to sum up the philosophical thread that runs through my work, it would be this: A deep belief in the ability of the common person, a commitment to educational, occupational, and cultural opportunity to develop that ability, and an affirmation of public institutions and the public sphere as vehicles for nurturing and expressing that ability.” As we approach the 4th of July holiday, it’s hard to imagine a philosophy more consistent with the founding ideals of this country.

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If you've been reading the New York papers this week, you've already heard of Andrew Ho, an educational psychologist who teaches at the University of Iowa's School of Education. Ho studies high-stakes score trends, and has done some excellent work comparing NAEP and state score trends.

If you want to hear more about why measuring achievement trends with proficiency scores is problematic, you should watch his talk, Trend-Flipping, Gap-Bowing, and Growth Stretching: The Pliability of Popular High-Stakes Statistics. Here's a description:

The most important large-scale policy questions in education - Are students learning? Are gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students decreasing? - are answered in part by test score trends. These trends can be reported in different ways. One popular approach is to look at the change in the percent of proficient students, where "proficient" is defined as scoring above a chosen cut score. In an clear, lively presentation, Professor Andrew Ho describes how misleading these trend statistics can be - they can be larger, smaller, and even undergo sign-reversal under a different choice of cut score. He explains the basis for this "pliability," and describes alternative approaches to reporting and comparing score trends that avoid the troublesome properties of the proficiency-based reporting that has become widespread under No Child Left Behind.

And here's a little clip from the NYT article about the New York state tests:

[Andrew Ho] said that while there was no question that students had improved substantially on New York’s exams, such gains were not mirrored in the national tests.

“They are on the order of what you might see in a 25-year trend on the national assessment,” Mr. Ho said. “Even the most pro-testing regime would have to admit there is a small component of inflation at the very least here.”

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Brian Jacob teaches at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. He has studied a wide range of education policy topics, including school choice, housing voucher programs, neighborhood and peer effects, educational accountability programs, and teacher labor markets. If you're interested in Chicago school reform, Jacob is a good place to turn. Kevin Carey will also be happy to know that he keeps a model website, and most of his papers are available there.

Previously on this blog, I've discussed Jacob's studies of Chicago school choice, which find no effects on test scores at the elementary or high school levels, his study asking whether principals know teachers' value-added without access to formal value-added measures, and his most recent study on the persistence of teacher effects. Another Jacob paper that I really like is called, "What Do Parents Value in Education? Empirical Investigation of Parents' Revealed Preferences for Teachers." Using data tracking the number of parental requests for teachers, here's what he found:

On average, parents strongly prefer teachers that principals describe as good at promoting student satisfaction and place relatively less value on a teacher’s ability to raise standardized math or reading achievement. These aggregate effects, however, mask striking differences across family demographics. Families in higher poverty schools strongly value student achievement and are essentially indifferent to the principal’s report of a teacher’s ability to promote student satisfaction. The results are reversed for families in higher-income schools.

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Ken Frank is a statistician who teaches at Michigan State's College of Education. The release of the National Research Council report on the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards is a good time to profile his recently published article asking whether NBPTS certification affects the number of colleagues a teacher helps with instructional matters. His research team collected sociometric data from 47 elementary schools in two states. Teachers reported which teachers were helpful with instruction, and Frank and colleagues found that NBPTS certified were more likely to provide instructional help to their colleagues. He concluded:

As a major reform in American education, NBPTS certification has yet to prove itself in certain terms. But we interpret the evidence so far as indicating for the most part that NBPTS certified teachers are effective teachers, and that the status of NBPTS certification can serve a number of potentially useful functions in schools and districts. If NBPTS certification status promotes helping behavior among teachers, it is one important indicator of their leadership potential in such formal roles as mentor teacher, instructional coach, cooperating teacher (with university-based teacher education), team- or grade-level leader, and others. Such leadership is increasingly important because many schools across the country are developing teacher leader positions intermediate between the principal and a school’s staff (see, e.g., Mangin and Stoelinga, in press). NBPTS certification is one natural device for “certifying” a teacher’s capability in filling these new roles; evidence indicating both that NBPTS certified teachers provide help more than comparable peers and that certification status enjoys a causal relationship with such help is an important finding in the evolving social organization of the teaching occupation.

Here is a partial list of publications coming out of the project, including contact info if you'd like a copy of the paper.

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Mica Pollock is an anthropologist who teaches at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, and studies how youth and adults struggle daily to discuss and address issues of racial difference, discrimination, and fairness in school and community settings. She has two new books coming out this summer: Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real about Race in School and Because of Race: How Americans Debate Harm and Opportunity in Our Schools. Her first book, Colormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School, won AERA's 2005 book award. You can find an excerpt from Colormute below:

“This is a book about race talk – about people in one school and district struggling with the basic American choice of when and how to describe one another racially…..Americans confront the question of whether and how race should matter, as I argue in this book, every time we wonder whether to talk as if it does. As this book will demonstrate, we encounter, every day, the pitfalls inherent in this most basic act of racialization: using race labels to describe people…..Ultimately, we wrestle with the paradoxical reality that in a world in which racial inequality already exists, both talking and not talking about people in racial terms seem alternately necessary to make things ‘fair.’

Given the amount of worrying that race-label use seems to require in America, it is perhaps unsurprising that many Americans have proposed we solve our ‘race problems’ by talking as if race did not matter at all….Having witnessed three full years of struggles of talking and not talking in racial terms at Columbus [High School] – as a teacher in 1994-95 and as an anthropologist in 1995-1997 – I have come to argue explicitly what policy debates across the United States are currently implying: Race talk matters. All Americans, every day, are reinforced racial distinctions and racialized thinking by using race labels, but we are also reinforcing racial inequality by refusing to use them. By using race words carelessly and particularly by deleting race words, I am convinced, both policymakers and laypeople in America help reproduce the very racial inequalities that plague us. It is thus crucial that we learn to navigate together the American dilemmas of race talk and colormuteness rather than be at their mercy, and that is the overarching purpose of this book.”

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Doug Ready is a sociologist of education who teaches at Teachers College. His research examines the influence of educational policies and practices on educational equity and access. With Valarie Lee, he co-authored Schools Within Schools: Possibilities and Pitfalls of High School Reform, which warns that schools within schools can become powerful tracking devices. Recently, he penned an excellent review of the class size literature. You can listen to a podcast of his class size talk and read the report here.

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Cool people you should know returns after a brief hiatus.

Annette Lareau is a sociologist who teaches at the University of Maryland. Lareau is an ethnographer, and in my opinion, one of the best ethnographers in the country. She has written two spectacular books, Home Advantage: Social Class and Parental Intervention in Elementary Education and Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. You can read Chapter 1 of Unequal Childhoods here), so let me talk about Home Advantage.

We often hear that poor parents don’t "value" education. In Home Advantage, Lareau argues that teachers often misunderstand the meaning of and reasons behind poor parents’ lower involvement. According to the teachers in her study, parents who were involved wanted educational success for their children more than those who weren’t. But Lareau finds no evidence to suggest that working class parents value education less; rather, working and middle class parents may value education equally yet understand the range of possible actions that can flow forth from that value quite differently.

In Home Advantage, Lareau explored the mismatch between teachers’ and parents’ understanding of involvement, and found that poor parents did comply with their half of the educational bargain, as they understood it. Poor parents saw teachers as professionals, deferred to their judgment, and believed it was the role of the school to educate their children. But teachers’ definitions of what parents' role should be differed, and many interpreted their failure to fill this role as an issue of values.

On the other hand, middle-class parents saw themselves on equal or even superior footing with teachers. They walked in and out of classrooms with ease and entitlement, asked for their children to be included in programs, and in general, adroitly tried to shape the school experience of their children. Lareau argued that schools use particular linguistic structures, authority patterns, and types of curricula. That children from middle/upper class families enter school familiar with these patterns gives their kids a “home advantage.”

I'm sure you're thinking, "Isn't that obvious?" It seems so, until you listen to the current discussion on parental involvement. So much of that conversation assumes either a) if schools just give parents formal opportunities to be involved, everything else will follow, b) that a "good" school can get parents involved, or c) that poor parents just need to "care" more. Lareau's book makes clear that the parental involvement issue is much more complex, and is a must read if you want to better understand these challenges.

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Spoiler alert: I'm going to write about data-driven decision making next week, so who better to profile than Kathryn Boudett, who teaches at the Harvard Grad School of Ed and is a co-author of the book Data Wise: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching and Learning. Note that the book is about improving teaching and learning, not just test scores! And that's why I like it. Here is a little snippet about the book, which I will say more about next week, and the syllabus for her course.

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Cool people you should know #14! Russ Rumberger teaches at the University of California - Santa Barbara's School of Education. Not only does he have the most zany academic website I've ever visited (animation + music), he's done a lot of NCLB-relevant work on dropouts, English language learners, and student mobility.

Check out his recent study on a critical question - how does the high school a student attends affect her test scores and likelihood of dropping out or transferring? Despite the recent media frenzy about "dropout factories," Rumberger determined that after you control for student background characteristics, schools don't vary substantially in their dropout rates. However, there are big differences between schools in their transfer rates. Perhaps most relevant for NCLB, he found that, "Schools that are effective in promoting student learning (growth in achievement) are not necessarily effective in reducing dropout or transfer rates. " Rumberger advises that school performance should not be judged only by test scores, but by dropout and transfer rates as well. Multiple measures, anyone?

Rumberger and Greg Palardy's paper, "Test Scores, Dropout Rates, and Transfer Rates as Alternative Indicators of High School Performance," published in the American Educational Research Journal in 2005, is available at his website. California readers, you might also be interested in his study on the California dropout problem.

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