Over at the National Journal's education blog, two top federal education officials have started a lively conversation on the role of innovation in education. The questions being posed by John Easton, the director of the department's Institute of Education Sciences, and Jim Shelton, the chief of the office of innovation and improvement, are:

What are the essential components of an effective innovation, research, development, and dissemination infrastructure in education? How can we tap into the collective expertise of practitioners when designing and refining new school programs? Finally, what are the capabilities that need to exist at the local, state, and national levels and how should organizations that provide them fit together into a coherent whole?

This is no idle conversation, though. Shelton's office is overseeing a new grant program, funded with $650 million in economic-stimulus dollars, to promote and scale up innovative education strategies. Likewise, Easton's office will soon be fixing new priorities for the research that gets funded by his institute and setting a new direction for the 10 education laboratories around the country that work with states and districts. The federal Education Sciences Reform Act, the law that gave birth to the institute, is also overdue to be reauthorized. Some of the ideas from this conversation may find their way into federal policy.

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Graduate business schools often hold competitions to nurture the development of innovative business plans. But when was the last time you heard about a business-plan competition geared entirely to educational entrepreneurship? Probably never—at least not until now.

A blog post on Eduwonk alerted us yesterday to this upcoming competition being sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education and the Milken Family Foundation. The first annual Milken-PennGSE education business-plan competition will award one prize of $25,0000 and another of $15,000 for the best business plans aimed at addressing educational problems that crop up at any point from cradle to grave. The winning plans will be required to outline the problem, its proposed solution, and possibilities for scaling up their innovations.

A description of the competition posted on the graduate school's Web site yesterday notes that:

"Despite the size and import of learning, we have immense challenges; many hold out the hope of entrepreneurship to help solve some of these challenges. That said, until now there hasn't been a single education business plan competition in the world and while entrepreneurship in bio tech, software, engineering and medicine is quite robust with clusters of start ups surrounding some of the world's great universities, nothing similar exists in education.

Doug Lynch, the school's vice dean, said the competition grew out of an invitation-only meeting the university held over the summer to brainstorm for ways to promote more innovation in education. The 13 judges, who include a wide range of corporate CEOs and foundation officers, include many of the participants from that event. (Eduwonk is one, too.) Submissions can describe either nonprofit or for-profit ventures and competitors have until Jan. 15 to signal their intent to participate. Winners will be announced in May.

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More than three decades of research has shown that, when it comes to academic achievement, children who focus on effort tend to be more successful than those who focus on innate ability. The problem, though, is that many kids decide early in life that more effort isn't, well, worth the effort. They believe people are either born smart or dumb and that no amount of work is going to change that situation. In the face of such persistent beliefs, how do you motivate kids to try harder?

Stanford University psychologist Carol S. Dweck and her colleague, Lisa Sorich Blackwell, have hit on one possible solution. They developed a software program, called "Brainology," that uses brain science to persuade middle school students that intelligence is a malleable, rather than a fixed trait.

Studies have shown that it seems to help. Compared with peers in traditional classrooms, middle school students who used the program improved their motivation to work harder in school and, over time, their achievement as well. (You may have read about some of that related research in this space before. A good, readable summary of all the research that led to the development of this program can also be found in this 2007 article from Scientific American.)

What's new is that, starting today, the program will be available on the commercial market. Designed to be "like an owner's manual for your brain," the software teaches middle schoolers that when people practice and learn new skills, the areas of the brain responsible for those skills become larger and denser with neural tissue, and that new areas of the brain become active when performing related tasks. They're taught that the brain continues to grow nerve cells, or neurons, daily, and that this process speeds up when a lot of active learning is occurring.

Marketed by a for-profit company called Mindset Works of San Carlos, Calif., the program may be a bit pricey from some: It costs $99 for one child for families, and less for siblings, and $20 a head for educators who order 20 or more programs. Could a skilled, well-informed teacher get the same results for free? Possibly.

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Here's a tidbit that you may have missed: Vanderbilt University scholar James Guthrie has been tapped to direct education policy studies at former President George W. Bush's new think tank.

Based at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, the George W. Bush Institute will be part of the Bush Presidential Center, which also includes Bush's presidential library and museum. Besides education policy, the center will focus on global health, human freedom, and economic growth. Read all about it in the Houston Chronicle and in these press releases from Vanderbilt and SMU.

Guthrie currently directs the Center for Education Policy at Vanderbilt, where he specializes in studying improving school leadership. At the Bush institute, he'll be teaming up with Sandy Kress, who was Bush's campaign adviser on education, to continue that line of inquiry.

Construction on the center isn't expected to begin until fall, but Guthrie and Kress are already planning a national conference on education leadership, policy, and school reform at SMU for this March.

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Researchers and practiioners from Dallas, El Paso, Houston, and 16 other Texas school districts got together last month to formally kick off the formation of the Texas Consortium on School Research.

Modeled after the 19-year-old Consortium on Chicago School Research, the new group enlists university academics, local educators, and administrators to work together on research projects that address the common, real-world problems that school districts have. Over time, they hope to create a "community of practice" for sharing findings and strategies. The Texas consortium's research partners are the University of Texas at Dallas Education Research Center, the Regional Education Laboratory-Southwest, which is one of the 10 regional education laboratories funded by the federal government, and the Chicago consortium.

The Texas group is the latest of several district-university research partnerships to get off the ground: Recall that similar efforts have been launched in Baltimore, Newark, N.J., and New York City. And the Chicago group hosted a conference over the summer to help nurture some of those burgeoning efforts across the country, which you can read more about here.

Do I spot a trend?

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The back-and-forth on charter school research never seems to end.

The latest analysis takes to task the much-publicized study of New York City's charter schools that was conducted by Stanford University economist Caroline M. Hoxby and colleagues. (You can read more about the original study in this EdWeek article. Read the full text of the Hoxby study here.)

In the new critique, Sean F. Reardon, a colleague of Hoxby's at Stanford, points up what he sees as flaws in the New York City study. For one, he says, in measuring the effects of charter schooling on students in grades 4-12, the study relies on statistical models that include test scores from the previous year, which are measured after the admissions lotteries take place. Because of that timing, he says, the scores could be affected by whether students attend a charter school, which "destroys the benefits of the randomization" that is a strength of Hoxby's study.

Reardon, a research methodologist, also faults the Hoxby study for "inappropriately" extrapolating data on students' achievement gains between kindergarten and 8th grade to calculate learning benefits over their entire school careers and raises some other, equally technical, issues as well.

Reardon's bottom line: While it makes an important research contribution, the report "likely overstates the effects of New York City charter schools on students' cumulative achievement, though it is not possible—given the information missing from the report—to precisely quantify the extent of overestimation."

You can find the full paper at the Web site for the Think Tank Review Project, which posted it on Thursday. The project, which specializes in reviewing studies in the news on hot-button education issues, is a joint project of the University Colorado at Boulder Education and the Public Interest Center and the Arizona State University Education Policy Research Unit.

And here's a side note: If you think nobody pays attention to all these studies on charter schools, think again. The final guidance issued by the federal Education Department this week for its $4 billion Race to the Top program indirectly references some of that research in relaxing language, in the draft guidelines, that many had interpreted to be an endorsement of charter schools as the chief remedy for failing schools. The new language reads:

"Notwithstanding research showing that charter schools on average perform similarly to traditional public schools, a growing body of evidence suggests that high-quality charter schools can be powerful forces for increasing student achievement, closing achievement gaps, and spurring educational innovation.

That first clause sounds to me like a reference to a national study released over the summer by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, or CREDO, which is also based a Stanford. The wording also partly explains, in a nutshell, why so much of the research on charter schools seems to conflict. Some charter schools are very good and some, not.

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A lot of policymakers and educators have been drawing hope from recent studies of the High/Scope Perry Preschool Program. If you haven't heard of it, the Perry Preschool project was an early-intervention program for children from disadvantaged families that was run out of Perry Elementary School in Ypsilanti, Mich., in the 1960s. A forerunner of the federal Head Start program, the project has long been considered a success.

Recent re-analyses of program data show that, from a public-investment perspective, it provided a pretty good bang for the buck, too. Those studies estimate the rates of return to be about 16 percent to 17 percent. You'd be hard-pressed to find a checking account or a certificate of deposit that pays that well. The rate is high in part because, compared with nonparticipants, fewer of the program grads required special education services or ended up in prison later on in life.

In a new working paper, however, Nobel Prize-winning economist James J. Heckman and colleagues suggest those earlier estimates might have been a little too generous. In their paper, which was posted online this month at the Web site for the National Bureau of Economic Research, the economists argue that the previous analyses were flawed because of problems in the randomization process for the original experiment, missing data and costs, and a failure to calculate standard errors.

When they account statistically for all those issues, they come up with a rate of return that falls somewhere between 7 and 10 percent. That's still statistically better than zero, they maintain. But it's not nearly as exciting as 16 or 17 percent. Look for this study to figure heavily in debates over President Obama's plans to expand the federal Head Start program.

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The national board that advises the U.S. Department of Education on its research operations voted to weigh in yesterday on the proposed rules for the new Investing in Innovation or "i3" program—and just in the nick of time.

The window for commenting on draft guidelines for the $650 million grant program was scheduled to close at midnight last night, but the six members of the National Board for Education Sciences, at their meeting earlier in the day, approved a resolution that calls for strengthening and expanding the criteria the feds hope to use to decide how to distribute and evaluate grants through the program.

Part of the $100 billion in economic-stimulus funds for education, the i3 program is designed to spur the "next generation" of improvements in education and promote the spread of proven innovations. The biggest awards, or "scale up" grants, would be worth up to $50 million each for programs that are supported by "strong" evidence of research. A second category of "validation" grants of up to $30 million each would go to programs with a "moderate" research track record. The draft rules also call for awarding "development" grants of up to $5 million each for programs with "reasonable research-based findings or theories." (For further details, see my colleague Michele McNeil's story inEdWeek.)

The problem with the draft rules, the board maintains, is that their definition of "strong evidence" and their evaluation requirements for validation grants give equal weight to random-assignment experiments and quasi-experimental studies. Only the former, which involve randomly assigning subjects to either experimental or status quo groups, are considered the "gold standard" for determining whether an intervention works. Said board vice chairman Jon Baron:

"Our thought is that awarding scale-up grants solely on the basis of quasi-experimental studies would likely lead to implementation of some programs that are not effective."

What the department ought to do instead, the board says, is express a clear preference for randomized experiments. The board is not the only group to stake out that position: The Knowledge Alliance, a Washington-based group that represents research groups, also submitted a comment calling for giving more weight to randomized research in the definition for strong evidence. That group does not, however, favor setting out the same sort of methodological hierarchy as the criteria for evaluating validation grants, according to Jim Kohlmoos, the association's president.

The board's resolution also says the program should require evaluations to include estimates of program costs, and not just benefits, and that the new fund guidelines ought to encourage ways to design evaluations so that research costs and the burdens on schools and districts are kept as low as possible.

But, as Kohlmoos points out, there's also a risk in setting the methodological criteria too high for this program: Will there be enough education programs with a research track record strong enough to qualify for the new grants? Time will tell.

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The last "Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education" is now available online. Readers of this blog will recall that Gerald Bracey was working on this report the night before his death last month at the age of 69.

In this, his 18th edition of the report, he offers a critical analysis of the research behind three popular education reform pushes: the call for high-quality schools, mayoral takeovers of school districts, and the drive for higher academic standards. The report is being published jointly by the Education in the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado and the Education Policy Research Unit at Arizona State University.

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A study described today in the "Science Daily" blog offers some timely advice for educators on the optimal time for shutting down schools when a flu outbreak strikes.

"You'd want to get a school closed before an epidemic peaks, to prevent transmission of the virus, but you also don't want to close a school unnecessarily," explains John Brownstein, an epidemiologist and study co-author. However, he says, most schools base those decisions on fear, expediency, or politics.

To develop some evidence-based guidance for schools, Brownstein and colleagues from the Children's Hospital Boston Informatics Program and the University of Nigata in Japan analyzed data from 54 Japanese elementary schools over four consecutive flu seasons. They tested dozens of school-closing scenarios and finally decided that the ideal early-warning trigger should be when a school has an absentee rate of 4 percent or more for two days in a row.

And, no, I don't know if this rule of thumb would hold for swine flu, which, from what I read, seems to be more contagious than the garden-variety flu virus.The Centers for Disease Control is advising against closing schools, but that's a switch from advice it gave last spring.

At any rate, you can read the full study for yourself. It appears in the November issue of a journal called Emerging Infectious Disease.

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