May 2009 Archives

Despite educators' best efforts to create an even playing field for girls and boys, gender gaps appear to be growing around the world, says a report out this week. (A hat tip to the Gotham Schools blog, which picked this item up from a U.K.-based blog called SchoolGate.)

The report, which was published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, bases its findings on results from three successive administrations of tests from the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which are taken by 15-year-olds in dozens of countries.

The study says the largest gaps are in reading, where girls outperform boys by an average of 32 test-score points, which seems like a lot to me. What's more, girls have the edge in that subject in every participating country. Surprisingly, high-scoring Finland had the largest gender differences, but researchers attributed that mostly to the unusually good performance of Finnish girls in that subject.

The study also found that gender differences in reading grew between 2000 and 2006, with some of the greatest growth coming in Argentina, Australia, Bulgaria, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, and Spain. (Don't look for the U.S. on this measure. The report contains no data for American students on the latest reading test.) Even more disturbing, that growth is due mostly to the declining performance of boys, according to the OECD researchers.

In math, a small gender gap of 11 points on average favors males over females, with Korea racking up the biggest gender difference. The trend is more hopeful here: Across the board, there were no substantive changes in the size of the gap between the 2003 and 2006 test administrations. If you look at the appendix in the back of the report, you can also see that the math gap is smaller than average in the U.S., which is also good news.

The report contains no trend data for science because the 2006 PISA test was the first for that subject. But those results show that male and female 15-year-olds generally performed at similar levels on that test. Still, boys outperformed girls on questions requiring students to "explain phenomena scientifically," while girls had the edge on questions that involved "identifying science issues." In science, though, the gender gap is slightly larger for the U.S. than it is for OECD nations overall.

It's for better minds than mine to determine whether the persisting gaps are due to culture or innate differences in the way that girls and boys think—the Mars vs. Venus thing, in other words. But the report does point to two possible causes for girls' advantage in reading: Girls around the world do more homework and spend more time reading for pleasure than their male counterparts do.

Check out the full text of the report, "Equally Prepared for Life? How 15-Year-Old Boys and Girls Perform in School," here.

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Did you know that the percentage of students enrolled in a public school other than their home school grew from 11 to 16 percent between 1993 and 2007?

That statistic, illustrating the growth of charter schools and other public schools of choice around the country, is just one of the useful information nuggets that you can find in The Condition of Education, a data compilation that is put out each year by the federal Education Department. The National Center on Education Statistics, which oversees the collection of all that data, is rolling out the latest version of the report in a press conference this morning.

There aren't many surprises in this statistical buffet. Most of the data has already been published in one form or another by the feds. But where else could you find such a wide array of up-to-date, trend data on education in a single volume?
Here's a sampling of what's inside:

• Total public school enrollment is expected to set new records each year from 2009 through 2018, when it's projected to reach 53.9 million students. Most of the growth is expected to occur in the South.


• Growing percentages of students attend schools where 75 percent or more of the students are members of minority groups. Such schools now enroll 24 percent of all public elementary and secondary students, but that percentage is twice as high for Hispanic and black students.


• Between the 1996-97 and 2006-07 academic years, the percentage of associate's, bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees awarded by private, for-profit institutions rose at a faster rate than the number conferred by public and private, not-for-profit schools.

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"Today's children are coming of age in yesterday's science fiction future," according to one of the authors writing in the current issue of the journal Children, Youth and Environments. Released yesterday, the entire issue is devoted to exploring the promises and perils of growing up in a digital age.

Be prepared for some out-of-the-box thinking—one article, for instance, focuses on "seeing young people's hacking as creative practice"—as well as laments about the shrinking role of nature in children's lives. But educators and those who study them might find some use in the journal's offerings on designing digital libraries, using remotely operated vehicles to engage kids in underwater environments, and the learning power of video games for students with disabilities.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Claims of an "Obama effect" on student achievement may be "exaggerated," says a New York University researcher.

Back in January, yours truly was among the dozens of media folks who reported on a Vanderbilt University study that found evidence that African- American college students' test performance improved markedly during high points of President Obama's political campaign, such as his acceptance speech at the Democratic national convention. The improvements in performance at that point were large enough, in fact, to close the achievement gap between black and white students taking the test.

But the same hypothesis failed to pan out for Joshua Aronson and his students at NYU. For their experiment, which was conducted at the same campaign high point that the Vanderbilt study references, the NYU researchers studied black and white students from a residential summer program for medical school aspirants. Before the students were scheduled to take the verbal section of the Medical College Admissions Test, the researchers "primed" them for a possible "Obama effect" by asking them to complete a short survey on either Obama, his then-rival John McCain, or a completely different topic.

Writing about Obama, it turned out, gave the African-American students no special boost in scores and they continued to lag behind their white peers. Their study is scheduled to appear in July in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Aronson says his findings suggest that "claims about an Obama effect are probably exaggerated, most likely due to biases in the method and sample used in the much-discussed first Obama-effect study."

"As much as I believe in the power of role models," he adds in a press release put out today by NYU, "I suspect that the greatest contribution Obama will make to narrowing the achievement gap will be his policies, not his persona."

Aronson ought to know. Along with his mentor, Stanford University scholar Claude Steele, Aronson is a leading expert on "stereotype threat," which refers to the tendency of people to fare less well on tests when they fear their efforts will confirm a negative stereotype about their racial or gender group. He says it will take more than "one highly visible African-American" to make the black-achievement gap go away.

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The U.S. Senate voted last night to confirm John Easton for a six-year term as the new director of the Institute of Education Sciences, the main research arm of the Department of Education. Here's what he had to say about it in the "Dear Colleague" letter being circulated today:

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I am both thrilled and honored to take on this new challenge after a long and rewarding career working to help Chicago Public Schools through the Consortium on Chicago School Research here at the University of Chicago.

I head to Washington during a time of great promise in school reform when top-notch informative research is all the more critical. The Institute of Education Sciences is the nation's engine for educational research, evaluation, assessment, and statistics -- and instrumental to scholars, education policymakers, and practitioners. The institute funds hundreds of research studies on ways to improve academic achievement, conducts large-scale evaluations of federal education programs, and reports a wide array of statistics on the condition of education, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. As director, I will oversee four major national centers, a staff of about 200, and partnerships with institutions nationwide.

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IN CASE YOU WERE LOOKING FOR IT: The June 20-21 meeting of the National Board for Education Sciences was canceled this week when it was unable to produce a quorum. The board, formed to advise the federal Education Department on research matters, is authorized to have up to 15 members.
Now, caught as it is between Presidential administrations, the board is down to six because of all the unfilled vacancies created when earlier board members' terms expired. Of those six, three couldn't make it to this week's meeting, said Norma Garza, the board's executive director. She said the absences were due to illnesses and one last-minute conflict. No word yet on whether the meeting will be rescheduled.

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An independent review out today takes issue with the federal study of the District of Columbia's private school voucher experiment.

Published in March by the Institute of Education Sciences, the study found that after three years, students who nabbed a tuition voucher through the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program were doing modestly better in reading, and no better in math, than public school peers who tried for, but failed to win, a scholarship.

You'll recall that interpretations of the findings were all over the map in the news media, with some writers pronouncing the program a success and others seeing them as an indictment of it. The results were reason enough, though, for the Obama administration to suggest allowing program to sunset, and possibly grandfathering in the 1,600 students who now receive the vouchers, worth up to $7,500 a year.

In his review of the federal study, though, Stanford University economist Martin Carnoy contends the researchers were not as nuanced as they could be. For instance, he says, they did not emphasize the fact that most of the gains came among students who were "more academically adept before they were offered the voucher."

But, as the study's lead researcher, Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas, points out, he didn't exactly hide that information, either. "What's more important," he asked. "the average effect for all participants or on those who seemed to benefit the most?"

Carnoy has other quibbles as well. For one, there was a lot of school-switching going on among voucher students, and some never used their vouchers at all. (Wolf says those patterns are typical of big-city voucher programs.) For another, much of the academic gain in reading came among the first cohort of students. (Even so, Wolf says, differences between the two cohorts were not statistically significant.)

The review is part of the Think Tank Review Project based at Arizona State University, which was formed to set the record straight on reports issued by think tanks looking to advance their point of view. The project, it has to be said, is financed by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice, which is made up of the National Education Association and its state affiliates in that region—presumably no fans of private school vouchers.

Extraneous note to the Think Tank Review Project from Wolf: Since when is the federal government a think tank?

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Yesterday, as a Senate committee in Washington approved his nomination to be the new research czar at the U.S. Department of Education, John Easton shared one idea that he hopes to bring to the job.

Easton, who is currently the executive director of the Chicago Consortium on School Research, talked to me at a conference that his organization hosted in Chicago. Here's what he had to say:

One thing that I would like to see as a real priority for myself is to look carefully over the last six years and ask under what circumstances, and under what conditions, are particular kinds of research strategies and methodologies most likely to give the most information.

That, of course, refers to ongoing debates over what some think has been an overemphasis at the Institute of Education Sciences on strict scientific experiments, over other kinds of studies. What Easton has in mind is a commission of sorts to generate some "good thinking" on the topic. (What do you think, readers? Is he on the right track or have organizations like the National Research Council already plowed this ground thoroughly enough?)

Easton also said he wants to take stock of findings from the dozens of studies that IES has financed over the past six years to see if any cross-cutting themes emerge that can be shared with the field.

The confirmation process has not ended for Easton, though. Even though the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee gave its thumbs up yesterday, the full Senate still has to take up the matter.

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I'm in Chicago today, where the Consortium on Chicago School Research is holding a two-day confab for educators and researchers looking to start partnerships between school districts and researchers similar to the Chicago model. In a testament to the growing interest in that model, representatives from 19 districts around the country have showed up for the event. (It probably doesn't hurt matters, of course, that the consortium's director, John Q. Easton, is President Obama's pick to head the federal Institute of Education Sciences, the key research arm of the U.S. Department of Education.)
Look for a more comprehensive story on the goings-on here later on in Education Week.

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Nationwide, the opportunities for poor and minority students to attend a high-performing school are only about half what they are for white students, says a national study out today.

The report by the Cambridge, Mass.-based Schott Foundation for Public Education ranks all 50 states on the basis of student achievement and the percentages of students from historically disadvantaged groups attending the state's top-performing public schools.

Only eight states fared well on both counts: Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Virginia. It may be worth noting that these are all states with comparatively low populations of African-American, Latino, and Native American populations.

The 10 states at the other end of the scale—in other words, the ones that got low scores for both proficiency and educational access—were somewhat more mixed in that regard. They are: Missouri, Texas, Rhode Island, Illinois, Michigan, Arkansas, Arizona, Nevada, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia.

Here's one surprise in the study: Some wealthy, typically high-achieving states, such as Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York, scored near the bottom on the foundation's overall opportunity-to-learn scale.

And here's another: Judged solely on the basis of disadvantaged students' access to the best schools, Louisiana ranks first. But the report also says that finding may be a bit skewed because the state's public schools have disproportionately high proportions of black, Latino, Native American, and low-income students, and large percentages of white, middle-class students enroll in private schools there.

The full report, titled "Lost Opportunity in America," also contains statistics on disparities, within and among states, access to early-childhood education, high-quality teachers, instructional materials, and a college-preparatory curriculum. Check it out here.

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Here's one that got by me: Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton University economist who occasionally studies education, is now the assistant secretary of economic policy at the U.S. Department of Treasury.

According to this Reuters article, Krueger's nomination was confirmed by the Senate on May 7.

An award-winning scholar, Krueger has conducted research on everything from

environmental economics to terrorism. Up until February, he was also a contributor to the Economix blog at the NYT.

In education, he's weighed the costs and benefits of reducing class sizes, being educated in a state with a school system of higher-than-average quality, and completing additional years of schooling. (For that last study, Krueger and his research partner attended a convention for twins in order to find twins with different schooling experiences and compare their earnings later in life.)

He also drew some attention for his 2003 reanalysis of New York City's experiment with private school vouchers, which concluded, contrary to some earlier studies, that the program yielded no special academic gains for African-American students.

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Research has long shown that children who come to school with a rich storehouse of vocabulary words tend to have an easier time learning to read than peers who know fewer words. There's a huge gap, though, between preschoolers of different socioeconomic levels in terms of the number of words they learn at home.

One study estimates, in fact, that by the time they are four, children of professional families have heard nearly 30 million more words than those growing up in working-class homes. (See a good summary of the 30-million-word-gap study here.)

So it's no surprise that producers at WGBH Boston and Studio B Productions Inc. in

The six Martha books, written and illustrated by Susan Meddaugh, tell the story of Martha, a dog who becomes humorously loquacious whenever she eats alphabet soup. (My daughter loved to memorize all of Martha's long and chatty speeches, which are depicted in the books in a cartoon bubble.) Martha's talkative nature makes her the perfect vehicle for introducing children to some of the words the series tries to teach, such as "deserted," "neglected," or "recuperate."

In putting together the show, Martha Speaks, senior executive producer Carol Greenwald says, the production team called in some of the biggest research names in the field. They include: Andy Biemiller of the University of Toronto, David Dickinson of Vanderbilt University, Michael Graves of the University of Minnesota, the University of Pittsbugh's Linda Kucan, Catherine Snow of Harvard University, Mariela Paez of Boston, and the University of Maryland's Rebecca Silverman, who is also the show's content director.

Greenwald says the researchers provided input on which words to teach and which words would be more challenging for the target age group, which is 4- to 7-year-olds. Silverman also observed Head Start preschool programs and preschools in affluent neighborhoods to round out the research.

"She also did a crash course on vocabulary for everyone who works on the show," said Greenwald, who also produced the Arthur educational TV series.

With financing from the U.S. Department of Education, researchers are now evaluating the educational effects of the Martha Speaks show, which began airing on public television stations in the fall. Those results are still a few months away, but in the meantime, here's a Monday morning treat, a cute video clip of a couple of young fans lip-syncing the show's theme song. You can also check out the show's interactive Web site for kids here.

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Have you ever wondered what research has to say about what happens to traditional public schools when new schools of choice open nearby? How much does it cost to start up and maintain a charter school? Do other countries have public-private forms of schooling similar to U.S. charter schools?

These are among the questions addressed in the new Handbook of Research on School Choice. The hefty, 630-page tome is a first-of-its-kind compilation of research syntheses on a wide variety of forms of school choice, including home schools, charters, private schools, magnets, and virtual schools.

It was pulled together by the National Center on School Choice, a consortium based at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. The center is one of the 10 national research centers that the federal Institute of Education Sciences underwrites.

Center scholars enlisted leading academics with a range of perspective on school-choice issues to pen the book's 34 chapters. Where else would you find Amy Stuart Wells, a Teachers College, Columbia University, researcher who has long written on inherent social inequities in school-choice initiatives, writing alongside Paul Peterson, a Harvard University scholar known for his support of private-school vouchers?

Mark Berends, one of the volume's editors, said his hope is that the range of scholarly opinion will give the book "an independent kind of voice" on some of the most prickly debates in education.

In next week's print edition of EdWeek, I'll have an article on one chapter in the book that describes international versions of charter-style schooling. (See an earlier post I wrote on this same research here.) But, if you want to go straight to the source, you can find ordering information for the $114 volume here.

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The cover story this week in the conservative-leaning Weekly Standard is a lengthy, and mostly withering, portrait of the American Educational Research Association's annual meeting last month in San Diego.

In the piece, which was posted online today, writer Charlotte Allen describes her "zany" experiences as she visits a reception hosted by the association's Marxist special-interest group, searches in vain for sessions not colored by progressive ideology, and tags along after William C. Ayers, the former Weather Underground member turned education researcher. You'll recall that Ayers was the focus of a controversy during last year's presidential campaign over the extent of his ties to President Barack Obama. For more on Ayers and the AERA, see my post from the AERA research fest here.

It's not a pretty picture that she paints. Allen writes:

Attending an AERA convention can give you the impression that the best thing that could happen to American education might be to shut down education schools.

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A Swedish study posted yesterday on Science Daily suggests that teenagers are more logical than they used to be. (Obviously, those Swedish researchers haven't visited my house.)

The new results come from tests in verbal skills, spatial ability, and inductive logic that researchers have been administering to large numbers of 13-year-olds in Sweden every five years since the 1960s. The tests show that today's 13-year-olds score much higher in logic and spatial ability than their counterparts of 40 or so years ago did. Not so for verbal ability, possibly because the tests include words that are rarely used in contemporary Swedish society.

Researchers say their findings suggest that students ought to be doing better in math, which is a bit of a surprise to Swedes. They, like many other countries, have been concerned about their nation's slipping status on international math tests.

Contrary to stereotype, the latest round of tests also shows that girls now outpace boys on the spatial tests. That's a complete flip-flop from the pattern of results in the 1960s. You can read more about the study results here.

I don't know if the same trends apply in this country. But researchers have for years been documenting a worldwide rise in IQ scores among young people, a pattern that has come to be known as the "Flynn effect" after the researcher who first noted it. So it all fits.

I guess I'll have to keep that in mind the next time my almost-13-year-old leaves her clarinet behind at school for the umpteenth time. Of course, remembering such things is more characteristic of what some experts call "practical intelligence," and that's another story altogether.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Most reading research over the last 25 years has focused on how to help children learn to sound out or decode words. Relatively fewer studies have tackled the thorny problem of helping students understand the words they're sounding out.

For instance, experts know that children who come to school with deeper stores of background knowledge, a richer vocabulary, or better oral-language skills tend to become better readers. The trick is how to help the students who lag behind their peers in those areas catch up and learn to read proficiently.

In an attempt to fill in the knowledge gap, the federal Institute of Education Sciences announced plans last week for an ambitious new research initiative called Reading for Understanding.

This is no typical research competition for IES, though. What the U.S. Department of Education agency wants to do is step up the pace of research on the problem over the next five years by putting together a mission team not unlike those that specialize in problems for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

The R&D network that IES has in mind would include five core teams, each working on reading comprehension for a specific age span of students, such as grades 3 to 5 or grades 8 to 9. Scientists on each team would focus on understanding the underlying cognitive processes involved in reading comprehension, developing new instructional approaches to promote it, and figuring out if their interventions work. Another team would focus on advancing theoretical understanding of the problem and developing assessments to measure students' progress in acquiring reading-comprehension skills.

The size of the awards for the project will vary, but IES, in its formal request for applications for the program, says the grants for each core R&D team will range from $2 million to $4 million a year. The assessment team could qualify for up to $3 million a year for its work.

Interested? You have until Aug. 3 to submit a letter of intent.

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In this space a month ago, I reported that Marshall S. "Mike" Smith, a senior adviser over at the U.S. Department of Education, was hinting that the final version of President Obama's proposed 2010 budget would contain good things for research. He wasn't joking.

My colleague Alyson Klein reports in a May 8 article on the budget that the Institute of Education Sciences, the department's key research arm, would see its budget increase by 11.7 percent, to $689 million, under the proposed spending plan unveiled last Thursday. Here's the way the Obama administration wants to distribute the additional IES money: research, development, and dissemination overall, an extra $56.8 million; the regional education laboratories, $3 million more; the National Assessment of Educational Progress ("the nation's report card") and its governing board, a $34.7 million hike; grants for states to develop statewide data systems, $16.7 million more; and special education research, $2 million in added funds. See the details here.

Education research got no mention at all in the president's economic-stimulus package, so, if you hear a soft whooshing sound, it's probably a collective sigh of relief from the research community. Stay tuned, though. Experts are predicting a long and difficult budget battle ahead in Congress.

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Terry M. Moe and John E. Chubb made a big splash in 1990 with their book, Politics, Markets, and America's Schools. Claiming that the education reforms tried up to then had not worked, the book sounded a controversial call for a more aggressive application of the free-market philosophy in public education.

Now, in a book out this month, Moe and Chubb are pitching for revolution again. In Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education, the authors make the case that technology will transform both the nation's schools and the politics of schooling.

If you think that this idea sounds a lot like the "disruptive innovation" theory that Harvard

Why? One reason is that technological innovations in distance learning make it possible for teachers to be dispersed across a much wider geographic region, according to Moe, a Stanford University political scientist. And that makes it tougher for unions to organize teachers.

Moe also says technological developments create competition for traditional schools by enabling a broader range of schooling options, from cyber charters to virtual schools, from which students can choose.

At the same time, states' increasingly sophisticated data systems are making it possible for schools and districts to determine which teachers are effective with students, and which aren't, and to try to pay them accordingly.

"For a variety of reasons, life is going to be much more difficult for unions," Moe says. "This is coming like a big tidal wave and no one can hold it back."

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One statistic that gets bandied about frequently in education is this: The average college graduate will earn $1 million more over a lifetime than someone who has just a high school degree.

The problem is that the figure may be a bit of an exaggeration, according to Mark Schneider, the former commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. Now the vice president for new educational initiatives at the American Institutes for Research, Schneider wrote a paper for the American Enterprise Institute in which he suggests that the actual returns on a college education may be much smaller than commonly believed.

In his paper, Schneider tries to account for the fact that the payoff may vary, depending on the the school the student attends. The "Harvard-educated hedge fund manager" may be making, or used to make, hundreds of millions a year, he notes, while the "graduate from Bob's college" may get promoted from assistant manager to manager of the retail store at the mall as a result of his degree. To get a better handle on the variation, the former statistics czar uses longterm federal survey data to compute actual earnings for graduates of colleges at different levels of competitiveness.

He also accounts for tuition expenses and the cost of the earnings that are foregone while a student is studying in college. He concludes that, while college does indeed provide a substantial payoff for most students at most colleges, it's nowhere near the $1 million figure that gets quoted so much. That number, in fact, may be three times too high, according to Schneider.

Keep that in mind the next time you get a notice of another tuition increase from your child's college.

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At the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's gabfest on national standards today, Michigan State University researcher William H. Schmidt told conference-goers a "a tale of two countries." The two countries in this bedtime story are the United States and Germany, both of which in 1996 found their students scoring in the middle of the pack on international tests in mathematics.

Both countries have similar education systems, according to Schmidt. Germany places much of the control over what gets taught in schools in the hands of its 16 federal states, just as the U.S. cedes that authority to its 50 states.

The Germans took the bad news as a wake-up call to go to work on setting national standards for what their students ought to learn in school. The driving force for that effort was the Standige Konferenz der Kultusminister der Lander or KMK, which is an independent conference of state education ministers much like our Council of Chief State School Officers. The happy ending: By 2003, the nation had signed off on curricular standards for foreign languages, German, math, and science in grades 4, 9, 10, and 12, as well as a set of tests closely aligned with them.

It's not that the U.S. hadn't made similar sorts of efforts over the same time period, though. Policymakers here advocated voluntary national tests and national groups developed voluntary national standards. But, in the end, "in Washington," Mr. Schmidt said, "they did not end up getting past the fear of federal control over the local system."

Now, 12 years later, the call for national standards is being renewed in the U.S. And this time around, two KMK-like organizations—the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association—are leading the drive to develop common academic standards. (You can read more about their efforts so far in this EdWeek story.)Will the two nations' stories converge this time around? That's to be continued.

In the meantime, you can read more about Germany's experience with national standards, as well as those of nine other countries, in this policy brief that Schmidt and his colleagues prepared for the Fordham conference.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 2:15 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

The popularity of crossword puzzles and Sudoku attests to the fact that thinking can, in fact, be quite entertaining. Yet most kids don't enjoy school, the one place they come for the purpose of learning to think. What gives?

Daniel T. Willingham, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia, attempts to answer that question in a new book published by Jossey-Bass. Appropriately titled Why Don't Students Like School?, the book boils down findings from hundreds of studies in cognitive science into nine principles to guide practicing classroom teachers. Willingham is experienced at doling out this sort of nuts-and-bolts advice. He writes the Ask the Cognitive Scientist column for AFT's American Educator magazine.

Even though humans are naturally curious, Willingham says in his book, they are not naturally good thinkers.

Thinking is slow and unreliable work. Nevertheless, people enjoy mental

work if it is successful. People like to solve problems, but not to work on unsolvable problems. If schoolwork is always just a bit too difficult for a student, it should be no surprise that she doesn't like school much.

Some of the book's lessons will come as a surprise to advocates of teaching approaches that emphasize critical thinking and analysis over content knowledge. Willingham says his reading of the research shows that such skills require extensive factual knowledge first.

Willingham also champions the evil twins of "drill and practice," pointing out that practice is necessary because it reduces the amount of "room" that the mind has to do its mental work. The trick for teachers is to use practice more effectively, spacing it out, for instance, or embedding it in teaching more advanced skills.

The professor is also no fan of the popular idea that children are born with multiple, distinct intelligences, such as musical intelligence. He prefers to think of most of those qualities as abilities. "Children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn," he writes.

The science here is highly readable and, yes, even entertaining in a Sudoku-kind of way. For a more extensive review of the book, see this article from the WSJ online.

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In his take on the results released earlier this week from the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests in reading and mathematics, the NYT's Sam Dillon emphasizes the fact that the test-score gaps separating poor and minority students from their higher-achieving white and better-off counterparts have not budged over the last four to five years.

Now a new report from the Educational Testing Service explores some of the many possible reasons why. Parsing the Achievement Gap II is a follow-up to a 2003 study that lays out the racial and ethnic fault lines for 14 different indicators that have been linked to academic achievement. Its basic conclusion: While the nation has made some progress in narrowing disparities among students of different racial, ethnic, and income groups, not much has changed, for the most part, since 2003.

I know. That may not exactly be news.

But the new report, which expands the original number of indicators to 16, includes some illuminating statistics. Did you know, for instance, that in 2007 more than half of African-American 8th graders, compared with a fifth of white 8th graders, had a teacher who left before the end of the school year? Among students poor enough to qualify for federal free-lunch programs, two-thirds had teachers who failed to finish out that year.

That's sobering. My two children attend, or graduated from, middle-class public high schools. In all their years of schooling, I can only recall two instances in which one of their teachers failed to make it to the finish line—one because of a terminal illness and another due to maternity leave.

If you couple those statistics with the disproportionately high mobility rates that the report documents among poor and minority families, it adds up to a lot of disrupted schooling.

One bright spot the report notes, however, is that increasing numbers of students of all racial, ethnic, and income groups are taking on more advanced coursework in high school. (For an interesting analysis on how that trend has contributed—or not contributed—to longtern NAEP results see my colleague Sean Cavanagh's post in the Curriculum Matters blog.) Yet, by the same token, black students remain badly underrepresented among those students who go on to take Advanced Placement exams.

Check out the full report for yourself here.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 12:10 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend