September 2009 Archives

The Early EdWatch Blog alerted me to this important study in the September/October issue of the journal Child Development. It finds that high-quality child care in infancy and the toddler years can blunt the negative effect on learning that is usually associated with growing up in poverty. In fact, the study finds, poor children raised in such settings perform nearly as well on reading and math tests taken in 3rd and 5th grades as peers from more affluent homes.

There are a couple of things to note about this study, which draws on data for a nationally representative set of more than 1,300 children.

First, the study extends earlier findings by focusing on children between the ages of 6 months and 3 to 4 years and following them into middle childhood. Most of the earlier research found learning benefits in early elementary schools for children who attended preschools between the ages of 2 and 5.

Second, it finds that children benefited from a wide range of settings and not just from formal, and sometimes expensive, programs such as the Perry Preschool Project. In this study, the achievement boost came in a variety of formal and informal settings that researchers judged, in observational visits, to be "above average," based on caregivers' responsiveness to children, the availability of appropriate learning materials, and the degree to which caregivers talked to children and encouraged them to learn and use language.

The researchers—Eric Dearing of Boston College, Kathleen McCartney of Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Beck A. Taylor of Samford University—theorize that high-quality child care "protects" children through elementary school from poverty's negative learning impact by "promoting the growth of early cognitive skills on which later achievement is based."

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:22 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

Remember comprehensive school reform? That was the popular Clinton-era initiative that provided federal grants to help schools put in place tested, off-the-shelf improvement programs, such as Success For All and Direct Instruction. The program didn't get much attention under the Bush administration. President Obama, likewise, hasn't made it part of his call for turning around chronically low-performing schools.

Now comes this "tweet," picked up yesterday from aoakes4 at the Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement, a federal technical-assistance center based in Washington and run by Learning Point Associates:

"heads up, team, that our center closes sep 30, due 2 end of ed dept funding - site & materials will b archived tho - we had gr8 5 year run!"

Posted by Debra Viadero at 9:56 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

That report on New York City's charter schools continues to draw media attention. The Washington Post, in a Sunday editorial, goes so far as to say that the report "demolishes the argument" that charter schools cream the best students from traditional public schools. It also says:

This evidence should spur states to change policies that inhibit charter-school growth. It also should cause traditional schools to emulate practices that produce these remarkable results.

That kind of enthusiam might be a little premature. New York is just one city—and one that charter school experts tell me is known for the quality of its authorizing system for charter schools. What's more, the promising practices that the report identifies were merely linked to higher student achievement. Even study author Caroline M. Hoxby points out that her findings don't suggest that things like longer school days, performance pay, or strict classroom management caused the charter school students to outperform their peers in traditional schools.

Some of the excitement over Hoxby's findings stem from her choice of study design. Hoxby used a randomized control trial to compare the achievement of students who won a charter-school seat in a lottery to that of students who applied but failed to land a spot. Experts consider this methodology to be the "gold standard" for research on effectiveness, but, as this blogger points out in a blog called—what else?—"More Thoughtful," even randomized studies have their limitations.

There've been lots of comments, too, in the blogosphere about Hoxby's penchant for finding positive results in studies involving free-market education strategies. That may be cause for skepticism, I say, but is it a good enough reason to dismiss the new findings out of hand?

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:10 AM | Permalink | 4 Comments | Recommend

How much weight do education leaders give to research when they make decisions about schooling? Apparently, not much, according to a new report.

Released earlier this week, the report's findings are drawn from six conversations held around the country over the last year or so with focus groups made up of congressional staff members, state legislators, state and local school superintendents, school board members, and the like.

Asked to discuss what influences education-related decision making in their arenas, these folks didn't mention any pathbreaking studies in education. They cited public opinion, mandates from political higher-ups, newspaper articles, trusted colleagues, local data, and information from professional organizations and conferences. As one of the congressional staffers in the mix put it:

"It is what it is. I would certainly say the anecdotal or the real-life experiences that staff or members face are probably always going to trump research."

When the participants did talk about research, the report says, they expressed skepticism and talked about the limitations of studies. Report authors Steven R. Nelson, James C. Leffler, and Barbara A. Hansen write:

"It was a common perception of the participants that research could be shaped to say anything, that one piece of research often conflicts with another, and that much research is not timely for users' needs."

I'm struck by the difference between these findings and those from a national public-opinion poll that I wrote about last month. In that survey, which was published in Education Next, researchers found that just adding the phrase "research shows" to a question led to double-digit increases in public-approval ratings of specific education initiatives, such as charter schools. Could it be that the public puts more stock in research findings than its leaders do?

The new report does offer one bright spot: It highlights the potential role that trusted "intermediaries" can play as a conduit for research. Education leaders already turn to research organizations, professional groups, and coalitions—and trusted individuals within those groups—for research information, but the report contends that even more could be done to help education leaders apply research knowledge to local situations.

And, no, no one specifically mentioned "Inside School Research."

This report was put together by Education Northwest, the Portland, Ore., research group formerly known as the Northwest Regional Education Laboratory. The William T. Grant Foundation of New York City commissioned the study. (Not coincidentally, the foundation is headed by Robert Granger, the former president of the national board that advises the U.S. Department of Education on its research operations.) Look for the findings to inform the foundation's new research initiative on exploring and expanding the use of education research.

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A study out this morning suggests that New York City's charter schools are helping to close achievement gaps between disadvantaged minority students and their white, more-affluent counterparts elsewhere.

The much-anticipated study, led by Stanford University researcher Caroline Hoxby and colleagues, focuses on 78 charters. On average, it finds, students who attended a charter school from kindergarten through 8th grade would close about 86 percent of what Hoxby calls the "Scarsdale-Harlem" achievement gap in math and 66 percent of the gap in English. (The "Scarsdale-Harlem" achievement gap refers to the 35- to 40-point spread between poor, minority students in Harlem and their peers in the affluent suburb of Scarsdale, N.Y.)

In comparison, students who applied to attend a charter school but failed to get in, while making educational progress over the same grade span, would end up in 8th grade having fallen further behind more-advantaged peers, according to the study.

The study also finds that charter high school students are 7 percent more likely to earn a Regents diploma by age 20 for each year spent in that school.

These are large effects, and they contrast with the somewhat gloomier results posted earlier this year in a much larger, 15-state study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, which is also at Stanford. (See this EdWeek story for details on that study.) But I haven't yet had time to sort out the reasons for the conflicting results. Look for a more thorough story later today on edweek.org.

In the meantime, a nice feature of Hoxby's study is that she tries to take a look at what charter schools might be doing differently to bring about these encouraging results.The promising practices she identified include: a long school year; more time on English instruction; teacher pay based somewhat on performance or duties, rather than a traditional pay scale; an emphasis on academics; and a "small rewards/punishment policy." By that, Hoxby refers to a policy of addressing small infractions at the classroom level, rather than ignoring them. I'm guessing that's sort of like the "broken windows" theory that has been credited with a crime reduction in the Big Apple.

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If you haven't seen it yet, check out my colleague Stephen Sawchuk's blog item on what may be the first study to attempt to gauge the effectiveness of teachers certified by the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence.

The ABCTE program is a national alternative route that allows would-be teachers to bypass traditional education school coursework.

In this Florida study by researchers from Mathematica Policy Research Inc., secondary-school students of the alternatively certified teachers performed about the same in reading, and worse in math, than those whose teachers were traditionally certified.

As Sawchuk dutifully point out, there's a big caveat here. The study was based on a very small, nonrandom sample of ABCTE teachers from a single state—about 30 teachers in all—state so it's too soon to draw any solid conclusions from the findings.

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In what is perhaps a sign of the growing maturity of the field of school research, scholars from around the world yesterday announced plans to form the first World Education Research Association.

The 25 groups that make up the organization represent more 60,000 researchers from six continents. The member groups come from, among other nations, Australia, the U.K., Mexico, Pakistan, Japan, Singapore, Peru, Turkey, Germany, and, of course, the United States, which has the largest and possibly the oldest education research group in the world. And, unlike some other international scholarly groups, this one will include both specialty groups, such as the Spanish Society of Pedagogy, and groups like the Nordic Education Research Association, which represent regions of the world.

Felice J. Levine, AERA's executive director, is the interim secretary general for the

group and Ingrid Gogolin, an education professor from the University of Hamburg in
Germany, will be the interim president.

There are no plans now for publishing any academic journals or holding any world congresses on education research. (If you think AERA meetings are overwhelming, can you imagine what would it be like at a convention for this group?)

What the association does plan to do, however, is spark the formation of international working groups on particular topics, collaborate on issues of common interest, and synthesize findings from around the world, among other activities. A Web site is already up and running and the group's first meeting of organizational leaders is scheduled to take place next week in Vienna.

Levine says the collaboration was the idea of Eva L. Baker, who was AERA's president in 2006-07, and its development was two years in the making. The group's headquarters will be wherever the secretary general is, which, for now, is in Washington.

Photo of Felice J. Levine courtesy of WERA.

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What should high schools be doing to prepare students for college? Here's what a new research-based practice guide published by the federal Institute of Education Sciences suggests:

1) Offer courses that prepare students for college-level work;
2) Use assessments throughout the high schools years so that students will know early on how prepared they are for college-level work;
3) Recruit adults and peers to support students' postsecondary aspirations;
4) Prod and encourage students to take the necessary steps to search and apply to colleges; and
5) Find ways to help families become aware of financial-assistance opportunities for their college-going children.

None of this is rocket science, of course. What is unsettling, though, is how little research there is to back up a set of recommendations that most people would agree make good sense.

According to the practice guide, only the last two recommendations are backed by a level of research evidence that reaches the level of "moderate." The evidence levels for the first three recommendations were all judged to be "low" by the expert panel that developed the them. That doesn't suggest, by any means, that the recommendations are bad ideas—just that, in many cases, rigorous studies haven't been done to help us determine one way or the other.

The report, "Helping Students Navigate the Path to College: What High Schools Can Do," is the 11th in a series of practice guides published by the federal research agency. Falling somewhere between a consensus-panel report and a rigorous meta-analysis, they are meant to inform policymakers on best practices they can use until more definitive studies can be completed.

A nice feature of this report is a section of the appendix that rates the research evidence for specific programs, such as Gear Up or Upward Bound. Check it out.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A word to for-profit educational management organizations: Someone out there is watching you.

Researchers from a small collection of academic groups—the Commercialism in Education and Education Policy Research Units at Arizona State University, the Education and Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the Western Michigan University College of Education—yesterday published their 11th annual report profiling the profit-making organizations hired to manage charters and other types of public schools across the country.

As you probably know, education-management organizations, or EMOs, emerged in the early 1990s as interest grew in market-based school reform proposals. Since the academic group's first report, in 1998, the number of for-profit EMOs profiled by the researchers has soared, growing from 14 to 95 last year.

The scholars contend, however, that the growth spurt is ending. Large companies are cutting back on the numbers of schools they run and diversifying. Buoyed by the supplemental education services provisions in the federal No Child Left Behind law, for instance, some companies are moving into tutoring. Others are taking on the virtual school world.

The list of companies profiled in the report grew this year, nonetheless, because researchers have improved their data-collection techniques, gathering information, for instance, from state education departments rather than relying only on private companies that may be reluctant to share data.

The companies profiled in this year's report collectively enrolled 339,222 students in 31 states last year. More than three quarters of those students attended schools run by EMOs that the researchers termed as "large"—those that manage 10 or more schools. So what's the largest of those management chains? That would still be EdisonLearning of New York City. Although the chain has seen the number of schools it manages dip for the second year in a row, it still claims 62 public schools in its management portfolio.

In terms of the number of students served, though, the Herndon, Va.-based K12 Inc. is nipping at Edison's heels. At 37,543, total enrollment in the 24 virtual schools that K12 operates nearly matched that of Edison.

Keep in mind, too, that these numbers don't include private schools or the large number of charter schools that are managed by non-profit entities.

For me, though, the burning question is what's behind the apparent slow down, if that indeed is what is happening. Tougher start-up standards? Poor profit outlooks? Competition from nonprofits? Or political resistance? The authors don't say.

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Empirical Education, a blog run by a consulting group based in Palo Alto, Calif., offers a nice summary this morning of a talk that the U.S. Department of Education's top research official gave in July to a meeting of the federal regional education laboratories.

At the meeting, John Q. Easton apparently laid out a five-point agenda outlining his plans for the department's Institute of Education Sciences, which is the main research arm for the department. Some of Easton's points you've heard before: He wants to retain the agency's focus on rigorous research, for example, yet at the same time produce work that is relevant and usable for practitioners.

The director also talked, though, about moving away from the "top-down dissemination model in which researchers seem to complete a study and then throw the findings over the wall to practitioners" and engage practitioners more in using the research evidence the agency produces.

Empirical Education also reports that Easton wants the agency to "take on a stronger role in building capacity to conduct research at the local level." To some extent that's already happening. With support from the feds, many states are building longitudinal data systems that could help them answer a wide range educational questions for themselves. What's still needed, according to this blog post, is help in framing research questions, applying the right study design, and choosing the right statistics, and that may be where the department—and the regional laboratories—come in.

In fact, Easton probably could not have picked a better audience before which to lay out his plans for the agency. The 10 labs are due to be recompeted soon, which means they may well turn out to be the frontlines for any changes that the research director plans to put into action.

UPDATE: I mistakenly labeled Empirical Education as a consulting group. It is, in fact, a research organization.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 1:06 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

A Scottish researcher is making the case that spending time on Facebook can make you smarter. Tracy Alloway of the University of Stirling told the British Research Association that Facebook brings about educational benefits because it requires users to exercise their working memory—their ability, in other words, to store and manipulate information. The same goes, she says, for video games that require planning and strategy and for Sudoku.

Alloway bases her conclusions on studies of low-achieving children between the ages of 11 and 14 who spent time on a brain-training program that involved social-networking sites, playing video games, or using other kinds of digital media. The heaviest Facebook users, she found, boosted their IQ scores by as much as 10 points over the course of the study.

Twitter, text-messaging, and YouTube are an entirely different matter, Alloway says. They seem to have no IQ-enhancing effect, and may even harm the development of working memory.

“On Twitter, you receive an endless stream of information, but it's also very succinct,” Alloway says. "You don't have to process that information.”

Read more about it at IB Times, Mashable, and Telegraph.co.uk. Then keep it to yourself. We wouldn't want the word to get out among our teenagers.
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Several media outlets reported earlier this month on a study pointing up high rates of verbal harassment in the nation's high schools. Christy Lleras, a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, analyzed survey data on more than 10,600 high school students and found that one in five had been verbally put down by a classmate at some point in his or her high school career.

That is disturbing, but I was intrigued by a secondary finding in this study that drew much less attention. Lleras found that teenage insults are just as common—and, in some cases, more so— in private schools, smaller public schools, and public schools that serve a more socioeconomically advantaged student population as they are in all those overpopulated, disadvantaged, public schools that we hear so much about. (In fact, the study found that African-American and Hispanic students overall are less likely than white students to report being put down by classmates.)

I'm surprised, because I thought the whole point of the small-schools movement was to create a more nurturing, affirming climate for kids. Likewise, many parents seek out private schools precisely because they perceive the environment to be a more protective one for their children. So what is going on here? The study doesn't explain.

I need to offer a caveat at this point: Students at those private schools, small public schools, and better-off high schools were also more likely to say they felt safe—at least from physical harm—than peers in other types of schools. But insults hurt, too, and this study suggests that it takes more than a new school structure, nicer facilities, and richer classmates to build a true community. A cynic might see the results as confirmation of the axiom, "kids will be kids."

In other findings, the study notes that boys experience more verbal harassment than girls. Again, that was especially true for boys in private schools.

Among African-American and Hispanic teenagers, the study also found, students who thought of themselves as "good students" seemed to be particular targets of harassment—but only in schools with high concentrations of minority students.

Lleras doesn't believe that the hostile climate surrounding those students causes achievement gaps, but it may contribute. She says:

"Sadly, verbal harassment is just one more thing these students have to deal with, and as long as we accept it, because it's not physical bullying, we're doing a grave disservice to the kids who need non-disruptive and focused learning environments the most."

Curious to read more? Here's a link to the full study and to the press release from the university. The study also appeared in the Journal of School Violence.

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It's no secret that school districts vary widely in how much they spend per pupil. Among the 100 largest public school systems, for example, per pupil spending in 2007 ranged from a low of $5,048 in Alpine, Utah, to $19,435 in Boston.

A federal report out yesterday, however, suggests that such variation may be even more pronounced among districts made up entirely of charter schools. (Yes, there apparently are such districts and, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, 22 states keep data on them. But the regular districts in this study include some affiliated charters as well.)

To minimize the effect of outliers on the results, federal statisticians compared per-pupil spending at the 95th and the 5th percentiles for both traditional public school districts and independent charter school districts. Among the regular districts, per-pupil expenditures ranged from $7,688 or less to $19,549 or more, which calculates to a "federal range ratio" of 1.5. In comparison, spending in independent charter districts had a "federal range ratio" of 2.5. Per-pupil costs for those districts ranged from $4,828 or less to $17,911 or more.

Does this mean that a proliferation of charter school districts will exacerbate disparities among schools? The report doesn't say. It's interesting to note, though, that the two types of districts vary less markedly when it comes to revenue disparities. The "federal range ratio"—the difference, in other words, between the top 5 percent and the bottom 5 percent of districts—is nearly the same for charter school districts and traditional public school districts.

It's also clear from the report that charter schools in these special districts seem to operate, for the most part, on far less money than regular schools in traditional districts. Check out the full report here and let me know what this data says to you. You won't find any interpretations of the results from the feds.

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In case you missed it, the Brookings Institution's "Scouting Report" last week featured Grover "Russ" Whitehurst, the former director of the federal Institute of Education Sciences.

During his six-year tenure at the federal research agency, Whitehurst mostly kept mum on where he stood on hot-button education issues. But as the director of the Brown Center for Education at Brookings, Whitehurst is free to opine now on whatever he likes. And opine is what he does in this Q&A session moderated by Politico's Fred Barbash. In the Sept. 2 discussion, Whitehurst comes clean on vouchers, charter schools, merit pay for teachers, alternative teacher certification, and the federal No Child Left Behind Act, among other controversial topics.

In response to a question, Whitehurst also appears to differ some with the contention, recently made public by his Brookings' colleague Tom Loveless, that NCLB is leaving smart children behind. (For more on that, check out this Aug. 28 commentary in the The New York Times by Loveless and Fordham's Mike Petrilli.) Whitehurst says that, while value-added assessments are needed to "give schools as much incentive to increase the learning of gifted students as they have to teach low-achieving students," there's little evidence from the National Assessment of Educational Progress or other sources that the performance of top students is declining.

If you were out enjoying the Labor Day weekend, you may also have missed the article, "What Washingtonians Make" in Monday's Washington Post. Among the 100 Washingtonians whose annual salaries were listed in the article was well-known education researcher Robert Slavin. He earns $140,000 a year, according to the article, as a "professor and director of a research center" at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Incidentally, that's nowhere near as much as Michelle Rhee makes. As the chancellor of the District of Columbia's public school system, she is paid $275,000 a year—much more than the city's mayor.

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Mark Schneider, the former statistics czar for the U.S. Department of Education, offers an interesting critique in Education Next of efforts afoot to enlist states to participate on their own in international assessments, such as TIMSS and PISA. (For the uninitiated, TIMSS stands for the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and PISA is the Program for International Student Assessment.) Schneider writes:

What would be gained if, in addition to the nation as a whole, individual states were to participate directly in these assessments by testing a much larger and more representative sample of students? Not as much as many advocates would have us believe, and probably not enough to justify the considerable cost.

He offers two reasons for his skepticism. First, it's likely that most states won't have much to crow about in the results. Studies that use existing data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress to link student achievement in states to that of other countries have shown that even the best states can't match high-performing Chinese Taipei or Korea.

Second, he writes, the results can't offer much in the way of sound policy guidance for educators because of their statistical limitations. On this point, Schneider is particularly critical of PISA, which he says routinely issues sweeping policy conclusions without offering any qualifications.

The cost to a state for fully participating in TIMSS or PISA can be as much as $500,00 to $700,00 per grade, according to Schneider. A less expensive way to go, he added, might be to use statistical measures to link data from NAEP to international-exam results for other countries. If states still want to pony up to expand their participation in international assessments programs, though, Schneider's advice is caveat emptor.

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There goes that swinging pendulum: Much was made of the fact that the phrase "scientifically based research" appeared more than 100 times in the federal No Child Left Behind Act. But in the rules proposed last week for the U.S. Department of Education's $4 billion Race to the Top competition, the terms don't appear at all.

The omission hasn't gone unnoticed by the research community. Both the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association and the Knowledge Alliance, which represents research organizations, federal laboratories, and technical assistance centers, submitted comments that make a case for adding a definition for scientifically based or scientifically valid research to the proposed regulations and for requiring grant applicants to rely more on research in crafting their reform plans.

The AERA, in particular, also urges federal policymakers to take the opportunity to address the fact that the research base on charter schools and on turning around persistently low-achieving schools is disappointingly weak.

But that group's most controversial recommendation—one that is echoed by Helen Ladd and Dan Koretz, two researchers who also contributed comments—warns against basing evaluations of teachers and principals on student-achievement data alone. They write:

"Neither research evidence related to growth models nor best practice related to assessment supports the proposed requirement that assessment of teachers and principals be based centrally on student achievement"

Posted by Debra Viadero at 12:05 PM | Permalink | 4 Comments | Recommend

Studies in economics have long noted that highly productive workers seem to produce a "spillover" effect in their peers. Supermarket checkers, for instance, work faster when they're in the line of sight of a more productive co-worker, and berry-pickers tend to calibrate their work speed to that of friends laboring nearby.

In today's Web edition of EdWeek, I have a story on a study that documents these effects for the first time in teachers. (At least that's what the researchers tell me.) Using 11 years of data on North Carolina elementary schoolers, C. Kirabo Jackson and Elias Bruegmann find that teachers in the same grade apparently step up their performance when a more-effective teacher joins the staff. As a result, levels of student achievement rise for the entire grade of students.

The effects aren't huge, experts say, but they carry some serious implications for the way in which schools structure merit-pay programs for teachers. If teachers are already working together and learning from one another in constructive ways, introducing a pay plan that rewards individual teachers could turn colleagues into competitors. Offering bonuses at the school level, on the other hand, could conceivably enhance that team spirit.

If research on teachers is your thing, you might also want to check out my colleague Stephen Sawchuk's report yesterday on second-year findings from an ongoing Mathematica Policy Research study on comprehensive teacher-induction programs in 17 states. The bottom line from this rigorous, federally funded study is that, compared to business as usual, the programs aren't yet translating to any improvements in teacher-retention rates or student achievement.

Could that be because veteran teachers are already helping the rookies out?

Posted by Debra Viadero at 9:33 AM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

I've always been fascinated by teachers who undertake their own research in the classroom. With a full day of teaching, lessons to plan, and homework to grade, I should think teaching would already be hard enough.

But it seems that some teachers find much to value in all the extra, painstaking effort involved in undertaking research. The August issue of Teachers College Record shows why. Devoted to the topic of teacher research, the volume contains seven studies by working teachers. The studies explore what happens when a troublesome student becomes a peer tutor, test out ways to encourage teenage students to become more reflective about their learning, probe the social aspects of a yearlong effort to create an "inclusive" classroom, and survey high school students for their thoughts on after-school programs, among other topics.

Granted, none of these studies would count as "scientifically based research." But the teachers all conduct their research in a thoughtful, systematic fashion, and their insights are illuminating. If conventional research gives us a view of the forest, I would argue, then teacher research like this provides a vivid, and very human, look at the trees.

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