February 2010 Archives

With all the hype surrounding the Knowledge is Power Program or KIPP schools, it may seem like a given that kids fare better in charter schools that are affiliated with that program than they otherwise would in regular public schools. But the truth is that few really rigorous experiments have put that assumption to the test.

A working paper posted on the National Bureau of Economic Research Web site this month, however, offers something a little more solid in the way of evidence. It describes a randomized study of KIPP Academy Lynn, a charter school in Lynn, Mass., that serves a high concentration of Hispanic students, many of whom are new to the English language. As part of the study, a high-powered team of economists from MIT, Harvard, and the University of Michigan compared learning gains for students who were admitted to the school by lottery with those for students who applied but failed to win a seat. Over the course of three years, on state tests in both reading and math, the learning improvements for KIPP students were greater than those for the lottery losers attending regular public schools. The study also found that the biggest gains came among the students who needed the most help: English-language learners, special education students, and those who started out with low baseline scores.

The study also challenges the idea that KIPP schools have high attrition rates by offering some evidence that, in this case at least, the lottery winners were actually less likely to change schools.

This was not a perfect study, as the lottery was not oversubscribed every year, but it was better than most.

There is, however, one key factor that it doesn't take into account: At Lynn Academy, as with most KIPP schools, students spend a lot more time in school. The school year starts in August. Students attend some Saturday classes and the school day runs from 7:30 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon. Why wouldn't they do better?

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

President Obama on Tuesday announced his picks to fill some long-empty seats on the National Board for Education Sciences.

And, as they say at the Oscars, the nominees are:
Deborah Loewenberg Ball, dean of the education school at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Adam Gamoran, a professor of sociology and educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research; Bridget Terry Long, professor of education and economics at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education; and Margaret R. (Peggy) McLeod, executive director of student services and special education in the Alexandria City Public Schools in Virginia.

These selections are long overdue. Created to advise the federal Institute of Education Sciences on education research matters, the 15-member board has been hobbling along with six members for nearly a year and even had to postpone one meeting for lack of a quorum. But the wait isn't yet over. The nominations have yet to be approved by Congress.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 9:29 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

It's no secret that growing up in poverty has a negative impact on children's life chances. A new study suggests, however, that family income plays a more critical role in some stages of children's development than at others.

According to this study, published in the current issue of Child Development, the key period seems to be from birth to age 5. University of California, Irvine researcher Greg Duncan and his colleagues analyzed data on a nationally representative sample of people born between 1968 and 1975, with an eye toward determining links between the level of a family's income throughout the childhood years and a host of outcomes later on in children's lives.

Were poorer children, for instance, more likely than others to have been arrested or employed by the time they reached their 20s and 30s? Were they healthy? Did they finish school? (All of this, of course, comes after controlling for a wide range of variables, such as parents' education, whether the child's parents were living together, birth order, and the part of the country where the family lived.)

The researchers found that the strongest links were between living in poverty before age 5 and having lower earnings and fewer work hours 30 years later. The researchers estimate that a $3,000 annual increase in income between a child's prenatal year and 5th birthday is associated with 19 percent higher earnings and 135 more work hours.

So why are these findings important? The researchers give two reasons.

First, the study is the first to have detailed income information across the span of childhood. Researchers were able to collect data on income from jobs, food stamps, welfare payments, and other sources for at least 12 years of a child's first 15 years of life and to track participants up until age 37.

Second, the study has implications for public policy. With the federal Earned Income Tax Credit, for example, low-income working families already can receive a refundable tax credit worth more than $4,800 a year. Policymakers could modify, or expand, such policies to focus on families with young children.

The bottom line, says Duncan, is that "our findings suggest that policymakers might do well to focus on situations involving deep and persistent poverty early in childhood."

Posted by Debra Viadero at 9:21 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In the early years of elementary school, teachers often refer to retention benignly as the "gift of time" for students who seem to lag behind their peers in terms of maturity. The reasoning is that it gives students an extra year to catch up with their peers.

Yet most, but not all, studies on grade retention suggest that in the long run, the practice may not work out so well for the students. Most disheartening of all, some studies show, in fact, that students who repeat a grade in school are more likely than their nonretained counterparts to drop out later on.

So what accounts for the disconnect between practice and research? A study in the current issue of the Journal of Educational Psychology sheds some light on what might be happening to grade repeaters
over time. It suggests that what teachers see happening to retained students in the early years may be different from students' experiences over time.

For four years, researchers from the University of Kansas, Texas A&M University, and Arizona State University tracked 124 children who were retained in 1st grade and 251 similarly low-performing 1st graders who were promoted. The good news is that in both the short- and long-term, the retained children were rated to be more engaged in their new classes and less hyperactive by their teachers, and their classmates also rated them to be less sad and withdrawn.

But other benefits were more fleeting. Immediately after they were retained, for instance, the grade repeaters got a boost in popularity with their younger classmates and they themselves reported a greater sense of belonging in school. But these effects decreased rapidly over the next three years. Part of what might be happening, the study says, is that the potentially stigmatizing effects of being overage for grade don't show up until students get older.

"Despite benefits through fourth grade," the authors write, "retention may create vulnerabilities that don't appear until the middle grades."

Posted by Debra Viadero at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

There has been no shortage of newsmaking charter school studies over the last year. The biggest of the bunch was a national study of charter schools by Margaret Raymond and her colleagues at the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University. It compared learning gains over the course of a school year for charter school students in 16 states to those of demographically similar students in nearby traditional schools. The bottom line: Although there was huge variation among the charter schools studied, the traditional school students, on the whole, appeared to learn slightly more than their charter school counterparts.

The study came in for some heavy criticism, though, in October from Caroline Hoxby, another Stanford researcher, after she conducted her own study of charter schools in New York City and reached the opposite conclusion. She said the CREDO study suffered from "a serious mathematical mistake" that may have biased the results in a downward direction.

Now the federal What Works Clearinghouse has waded into the debate. In its latest "quick review," the research agency concludes that the CREDO study was "consistent with WWC standards with reservations." It also adds a word of caution, though:

"Although the study matched charter school students to traditional public school students based on demographic characteristics and test scores, it is possible that there were other differences between the two groups that were not accounted for in the analysis, and these differences could have influenced achievement growth."

The CREDO researchers would probably not disagree. The question now is: Will we see a similar review from the clearinghouse of the New York City study? I'll be watching.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

There are private schools and then there are private public schools. We've all come across the latter. These are public schools that enroll so few students from low-income families that they might as well be called private.

So how many schools across the country actually fit that description? The answer is 2,817, according to a report published this morning by the Fordham Institute. For the study, authors Michael J. Petrilli and Janie Scull defined private-public schools as those where less than 5 percent of students are poor enough to qualify for the federal free- and reduced-price lunch program. The 2,817 schools they found, which include mostly elementary schools, collectively enroll 1.7 million children, or 4 percent of the nation's public school population.

As might be expected, most of these schools are in relatively wealthy states such as Connecticut, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. Likewise, comparatively poor states, such as Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, and West Virginia, have almost no such schools.

Still, there are a few aberrations. One is Arizona. In that state, 41 percent of public school students are poor, which is around the national average. You might expert, therefore, that the number of students in private-public schools would also be around the national average of 4 percent. Yet the study finds that 14 percent of that state's schoolchildren attend private-public schools.

At the other end of the spectrum, only 2 percent of students in Minnesota, which has a lower-than-average proportion of low-income students, are enrolled in these sorts of schools.

This report also names names, singling out all the private-public schools it found in the 25 largest metropolitan areas in the nation. Boston and New York City top the list, with 16 and 13 percent of students, respectively, enrolled in private-public schools. In the Miami, Portland, and Tampa metropolitan areas, however almost no students attend such schools. My neck of the woods, the Washington metro area, falls somewhere in the middle, with 6 percent of public school students enrolled in these more affluent public schools.

The Fordham Institute, not unexpectedly, uses its findings to justify expanding the numbers of school-choice options across the country. They say:

"Call us naive if you like, but we find it difficult to countenance why someone would support spending taxpayer dollars on such 'public schools' for their own kids while opposing 'private' school choice options for other people's children."

I'm more curious to know whether the glass is half-full or half-empty. Are the numbers of these schools dwindling, possible artifacts from a time when neighborhood covenants prohibited homeowners from selling their houses to minorities? (That's the case, at least in my Virginia neighborhood, where one elementary school is on the Fordham list.) Or are these numbers indicative of a disturbing, growing trend? And why are some states and districts more successful at ensuring that their school enrollments are more representative of society as a whole, and not just one segment of it?

Posted by Debra Viadero at 4:22 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The Houston Chronicle's education blog is reporting that city schools Superintendent Terry Grier is talking about finding a "world-renowned researcher" to help make the school system the hub of a new research center dedicated to measuring what works in the Houston schools.

"Think about it," Grier told the bloggers over at School Zone. "We're sitting right here in Houston. M.D. Anderson is the biggest cancer institute in the world. We have all kinds of energy and petroleum companies that are constantly doing research around trying to find alternative fuels. We are the hub of a research center here in Houston that I think would rival that of any place in the world. I'd like to see us have a research center tied to our school system that helps us measure what works -- whether it's computer software programs or a literacy reading program in a particular school or whether it's which algebra books get the best results from kids."

Faithful readers of this blog may remember that I wrote back in November about the Texas Consortium on School Research, of which Houston is a part. Similar sorts of scholar-school district collaborations are popping up across the country as well. The model for these efforts: the Consortium on Chicago School Research, based at the University of Chicago, which has been churning out a steady stream of studies on Chicago's schools for nearly 20 years. Read more about it here.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 9:45 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In national education policy circles, you don't hear much about Experience Corps, a national program that recruits older Americans to work with children in disadvantaged elementary schools. A new study review suggests, however, that maybe you should.

Begun in 1995, the nonprofit program now operates in 22 cities across the country. Through the program, trained adults who are 55 or older are paid $100 to $300 a month to spend 15 hours a week tutoring and mentoring children who are struggling in school.

In a randomized study of the program completed last year, researchers from Washington University in St. Louis found that 3rd graders who participated in the program were more likely than nonparticipating children to improve comprehension and general reading skills over the course of the school year. Now, in its latest "quick review," the What Works Clearinghouse offers its own vote of confidence on the study, calling it a "well-implemented, randomized controlled trial."

If you're not familiar with the federal clearinghouse's quick reviews, these are the reviewers' initial take on whether a single study uses sound methodology. This is different from the clearinghouse's usual, more thorough reviews, which look at all the research evidence on a particular intervention. The idea is to take a relatively recent study that has garnered some media attention and give policymakers some quick guidance on whether the findings seem credible. And, by the WWC's standards, "well-implemented, randomized controlled trial" is high praise.

The Experience Corps review is the third quick review by the the clearinghouse this month. The other reviews focused on a study of I CAN Learn, a computer-aided program for teaching algebra, and a study of an experiment in which self-affirming student essays were successfully used in narrowing achievement gaps between white and African-American middle school students. For a look at the nine quick reviews the clearinghouse published last year, check out this link.

The original Experience Corps study involved 900 students in 23 schools in Boston, New York City, and Port Arthur, Texas. According to the researchers, the average improvement was large enough to move a typical student from the 50th percentile on a standardized reading test to about the 56th percentile.

I wonder if Experience Corps would qualify as "supplemental education service" under the No Child Left Behind law? At between $7 and $20 an hour, it may be less expensive than the private tutoring services with which many persistently failing districts now contract.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The upside to the record-breaking snowfalls that paralyzed the Washington area this week was that I got a chance to catch up on some reading. So, instead of digging into snow, I dug into President Obama's budget request for the 2011 fiscal year. (Don't laugh. It beat shoveling!)

I focused on the section of the proposal that deals with the U.S. Department of Education's $738.8 million request for the Institute of Education Sciences. The institute, as most of you know, is the main research arm for the department. A couple of new projects on the runway caught my eye:

• A $2 million national study on minority male achievement. Mandated by Congress as part of the recent reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, this study would focus on high school completion and preparation for college, success on the SAT and ACT, and minority male access to college, including the financing of college, and college persistence and graduation.


• A new grant program, scheduled to begin in 2011, to develop and validate measures of kindergarten readiness.


• A quasi-experimental evaluation of the four different models that states and districts are using, with Race to the Top funds and Title I school improvement grants, to turn around low-performing schools. This goes hand in hand with the study that the IES is spearheading to evaluate what happens with the $100 billion in economic-stimulus funds the department is handing out to states and districts. It will also include in-depth case studies of 50 such schools.


• A rigorous study, conducted in partnership with the National Science Foundation, to look at professional development for math teachers that focuses on the teaching of fractions, percentages, and decimals in grade 4, a long-recognized weak spot for many students.


• At the National Center for Education Statistics, which comes under the IES umbrella, a study aimed at equating scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, with those on The International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS. The idea here is to allow states to compare their students' 8th grade math achievement with that of students in other countries.


• Also under the NCES, adding fall testing to the data-collection schedule for the 2010 Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, better known as ECLS. This would allow researchers to get a better handle on "summer learning loss," the achievement dip that occurs when students are out of school over the summer and which affects different population groups differently.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Most studies of charter schools use students' scores on standardized tests to measure success. But what really matters to most students is whether they graduate and go on to college.

That's the measure a group of researchers use in a first-of-a-kind study published in Education Next this week. For their study, researchers from Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., Florida State University, Michigan State University and RAND analyzed data on four to five cohorts of 8th graders in Florida and Chicago as they moved to high school and beyond. The students who attended public charter schools were 7 to 15 percentage points more likely than the regular high school students to graduate and 8 to 10 percentage points more likely to attend a two- or four-year college.

That's not a fair comparison, you might be thinking, because the students who actively choose charter schools might be more academically motivated or have more supportive parents than their traditional high school counterparts. That's a common complaint about charter school research. These researchers try to address it, though, by focusing only on students who were in charter schools in 8th grade and comparing those who stuck with the charter school model in 9th grade to those who moved to a regular high school that year. Whether this would completely account for differences in motivation, no one can say, but it seems like a reasonable approach.

To chip away at that issue a little more, the researchers also compared students who lived near charter schools, and thus may have chosen them out of convenience, to those who lived too far away to make attending a charter school practical. The pattern of results held.

One possible explanation for the different outcomes may be that charter schools offered different grade configurations than did the traditional public schools in the study. In Florida, for instance, 22 percent of charter schools offering some middle grades at the time also offered at least some high school grades. In Chicago, that percentage was 40 percent, the Ed Next article says. Could it be that schooling was less disruptive for the charter school students because they didn't have to change schools? The answer from researchers is "no" and "maybe." They determined that grade configuration was not linked to students' success in Florida, but they couldn't say for sure about Chicago.

Likewise, the authors also considered and discarded the possibility that charter students' success came from attending smaller-than-average schools. But, they conclude, "there is certainly room for future work to explore how differences in curricula, expectations, peer characteristics, and other factors may cause charter schools to diminish the high-school dropout rate and ease the transition to postsecondary schooling."

Another open question: Are charter schools in Florida and Chicago somehow different from those anywhere else?

Posted by Debra Viadero at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

There's a pretty broad research base on how "formative assessments" can improve learning but not so much on "interim assessments," according to a new paper by the Consortium on Policy Research on Education.
So what's the difference between the two?

According to co-author Leslie Nabors Olah (there should be an accent over the `a' in Olah), formative assessments, usually made by teachers, are used to gauge students' thinking, to find out what they know and whether they are "getting" the lesson. The interim variety is usually developed by testing companies, states, and districts. The results can be aggregated and are used to determine students' strengths and weaknesses and plan instruction accordingly, often with an eye toward getting students up to some "proficient" level on state tests. The latter have become increasingly popular with the advent of the No Child Left Behind law and the growing capacity of states to collect data on student achievement. But few studies have looked at what teachers are doing with the results of those tests, what kinds of supports they need to make use of them, and whether they impact student achievement, according to the consortium.

To help fill in that gap, the CPRE research team has been studying elementary school teachers in one urban and one suburban district in Pennsylvania. They found that, while the results helped teachers identify instructional weaknesses, they didn't necessarily spur any changes in instruction. Often the disconnect came because teachers weren't given the know-how, the time, or the resources to figure out how to address students' knowledge gaps or because the assessments weren't aligned with the curriculum.

"If the support isn't there they can't use the assessment," said Olah, a senior researcher for CPRE.

There are lots of other recommendations in this report—all of them timely, I'd say, since data-based decision-making is one of the areas getting a heavy emphasis in the U.S. Department of Education's Race to the Top competition for economic-stimulus funds. You can also find a brief summarizing the report's findings here.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 7:29 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

After watching their students' test scores drop for nearly 20 years, school officials in Mapleton, Colo., took steps to shut down the city's traditional, comprehensive high school and replace it over a period of years with a network of six to seven smaller schools as part of a broad, and bold, effort to improve learning.

The story of the school system's transition over the next five years is the stuff of a new book, titled Against the Odds, by five researchers and school reformers. The team, led by noted Stanford University researcher Larry Cuban, draws on interviews, analyses, and observations conducted between 2006 and 2009 as the initiative kicked into high gear.

Yes, I know small schools are yesterday's news in national debates on school reform, but this book extracts some interesting lessons and observations from Mapleton's experiment, which was heavily backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. For one, the school system found the conversion was expensive, largely due to increased building and transportation costs. That may not have been unexpected, but the surprise (for me, anyway) was that the added 5 percent in costs meant that educators had to make up the money somewhere else. The cut, for Mapleton, came in instructional services. The district reduced some staff development and asked teachers to volunteer their time for other professional development workshops.

Another surprise: While participation in high school athletics dropped off after the conversion, it grew for after-school clubs, including those that were academically oriented.

In the end, while the district did succeed in creating more personalized learning environments for students, it still had not seen the hoped-for, dramatic learning gains by 2008. But dropout rates appeared to be decreasing by the end of that time span, and district officials were hopeful that, with a little more time, test scores would follow suit. At the same time, though, the district was facing increasing pressure to ratchet up accountability measures and boost lagging test scores.

It's hard to know how many, if any, of these changes were due to the high school's downsizing. (In a second phase of the reform, the district also began shrinking its elementary schools.) As part of the transformation, the district embraced a more constructivist-oriented approaching to teaching. And each of the new schools also adopted a different instructional model, such as Big Picture High School or Expeditionary Learning, so much was happening at the same time.

But, for any school system that's still interested in downsizing, Mapleton offers a candid and cautionary case study.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 9:41 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The movement to build longitudinal-data systems on student achievement has long butted heads with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, better known as FERPA, a 1974 law created to protect students' privacy.

The conflicts got to be so frequent that the U.S. Department of Education, under Margaret Spellings, even updated its regulations on the law last year to make it clearer that schools may share student data with outside contractors who perform work that school employees would otherwise do, such as electronic recordkeeping and testing.

This story from Inside Higher Ed suggests, however, that the conflicts haven't gone away. In the Feb. 1 article, the Education Department's top FERPA watchdog, Paul Gammill, contends that he was fired because he argued in internal meetings and documents that the agency's approach to spurring states to expand their longitudinal-student-data systems was running into conflict with the privacy law. In the story, department officials made no comments on Gammill's allegation, which they say is a personnel matter.

But there is one congressman who is outraged. U.S. Rep. John Kline of Minnesota, the top Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee, said in a statement issued Friday that "the allegation that the U.S. Department of Education is making an end run around student-privacy laws is a serious charge and one that Congress should investigate immediately."

My guess: We haven't heard the last of this issue.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The Institute of Education Sciences announced this week that it is soliciting proposals for a boatload of research competitions, including one aimed at helping states and districts gear up to evaluate the school-improvement efforts they put in place with economic-stimulus dollars from the Race to the Top Fund.

Working in partnership with universities or research groups, states and districts can get up to $1.2 million a year, over five years, to measure their progress in implementing a wide range of education-reform efforts, including some that might be underwritten by Race to the Top, through the research agency's Evaluation of State and Local Education Programs competition. This is an ongoing grant program, says Lynn Okagaki, IES' commissioner for education research, but the agency added a new April 1 deadline to accommodate researchers who want to hit the ground running when states and districts start up their new new federally funded initiatives in the fall. The other two deadlines for this research program are in June and September.

The agency is also looking for bidders on at least four national research centers, some new and some ongoing, each of which can qualify for up to $2 million a year over five years. The National Research and Development Center for State and Local Policy, for instance, will study state and district education policies aimed at improving education outcomes for K-12 students. The agency has two centers that operate under this umbrella now—the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Date in Education Research, or CALDER at the Urban Institute and the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University—but their contracts are due to expire soon. The number of centers will depend in part on the quality of the proposals; applications are due in September.

Under the Special Education Research and Development Center, IES wants to create a center to focus on school-based interventions for secondary students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD.)

"The projects we've funded so far target preschool and early elementary children with ASD," Okagaki said. "IES is competing this new center, in part, to direct research attention on adolescents with ASD." Applications are due in September for this award.

Another national research center out for bid is the National Research and Development Center on Cognition and Adult Literacy, which is aimed at studying the cognitive processes that underlie reading and basic math in adult learners and developing instructional approaches targeted to that group.

The fourth center will be aimed at research on postsecondary education and employment. The agency already funds the National Center on Postsecondary Research at Teachers College, Columbia University, but the new incarnation of the center calls for broadening the focus to include labor-market outcomes.

The agency is also shopping for institutes to run two postdoctoral training programs— one in education sciences and one in special education—and one interdisciplinary predoctoral program to nurture budding education researchers. To learn more about these programs, which are growing in number throughout the country, see this story I wrote back in 2008.

Finally, the institute is offering grants of up to $400,000 a year, over three years, for research projects aimed at developing new or improved methods for conducting the kind of research that the agency supports. In particular, it seeks techniques for boosting the power of research effects in randomized studies. Remember all those "no effects" studies?

If this seems like a long list, just wait. Later this month, IES plans to announce the rest of its research competitions for 2010. And that list, which covers the majority of the agency's research dollars, will be much longer.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 9:02 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

When it comes to achievement gaps between students of different racial, socioeconomic, and gender groups, the good news in recent years has been that the distances between those groups seem to be narrowing. The bad news: Not so for everyone.

For the nation's best and brightest, a new report says, academic gaps between girls and boys, between white students and disadvantaged minority students, between poor students and their better-off peers, and between English-language learners and their English-speaking counterparts have only widened, stagnated, or declined by a hair since the late 1990s. If present trends continue, the authors of this new report say, black 4th graders won't catch up to their white classmates on mathematics tests until 2107!

"People aren't talking about the gaps at the top," said Jonathan A. Plucker, the lead author of the study, released this morning by the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy at Indiana University in Bloomington. "What they basically say is let's just focus on minimum competency gaps." Indeed, under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, states and school districts get credit for raising test scores overall and raising the test scores for particular subgroups, such as black and Hispanic students, but there's no particular incentive to pay attention to the top performers, many of whom may be hitting the ceiling anyway on their state assessments.

The center's report is not the first to point to trouble at the top. In a 2008 longitudinal study looking at black-white achievement gaps, Stanford University researcher Sean Reardon noted that the most able African-American students were the ones who lost the most ground to white students over the course of their school careers. Likewise, the Fordham Institute in 2008 published "High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB," which pointed to stagnating improvement rates in recent years for the most advanced students.

What makes the Indiana University report a little different is that the researchers analyzed data on lots of different students from lots of different angles. They looked at assessment numbers from the late 1990s until 2007 on both national and state-level reading and mathematics tests administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and they looked at results from state assessments in those subjects. (There's a nifty interactive map on center's Web site, by the way, where you can find an "excellence-gap" profile for your own state.)

The researchers also defined high achievers in different ways, looking at those who fell in the top 10 percent as well as those who scored in "advanced" categories on state or national tests. In most cases, the trends were the same for the most advanced kids. That is, with a few exceptions. In 8th grade reading, for instance, 37 states managed to shrink their gender gaps a bit.

The researchers say their findings are important because they disprove policymakers' hope that a rising tide would lift all boats. When a state narrowed gaps at the proficient level on state tests, their analysis showed, it didn't necessarily follow that the gaps at the top were reduced as well.

"In policy discussions, policymakers need to ask two specific questions," says Plucker, who is also a professor of education and cognitive science at IU. "They need to ask how will this specific policy affect our brightest students? And how will it help other students achieve at high levels?"

Posted by Debra Viadero at 9:35 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

An entry that I posted a week or so ago raising questions about President Obama's pitch, in his State of the Union address, for bolstering the nation's community colleges has generated some debate in the blogosphere.

The best critique comes from Sara Goldrick-Rab, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the co-author of a thoughtful blog called The Education Optimists. As one of the architects of a paper that served as the blueprint for the president's initiative on community colleges, Goldrick-Rab is an expert on that subject.

She argues in this post, that I "jumped to conclusions" when I suggested that, in some respects, for-profit or career colleges may have a better track record than the troubled community college sector. She says I neglected three important considerations:

1) Studies don't show whether students attending career colleges differ from those attending community colleges. Are they more motivated, for instance, or financially better off?

2) If career colleges are more successful at, say, graduating students, research doesn't off any definitive evidence on which career-college practices are linked to that success; and

3) Students who attend career colleges tend to accumulate more debt on average than their counterparts in community colleges.

"Community colleges have a long, rich history of serving this nation," she writes. "Sure, there's room for improvement, but without more solid evidence of which changes are needed let's not jump to conclusions and tout the for-profits as a model to which they ought to aspire. We might end up in a bigger mess than we're already in."

All good points, I say. Still, it certainly wouldn't hurt to look at what the career colleges might be doing differently, given the low graduation and completion rates at community colleges.

Over at the Quick and the Ed, Kevin Carey offers a much more searing attack critique, questioning my use of statistics from a study by the Educational Policy Institute,which was formed to support career colleges. Hey, it's a blog, Kevin! Had I been writing a story, I would've had the full report.

I also commend to him the book After Admission: From College Access to College Success by James E. Rosenbaum, which I have read and which points to some practices that seem to contribute to the success that some career colleges are having at graduating students. I drew on those findings, too, in my blog entry, but Kevin doesn't mention that.

Finally, if you're interested in learning more about some of the efforts that community colleges are making to increase student success, there's a study out this morning from the MDRC research group. It reports on a randomized experiment at South Texas College to test a simple intervention aimed at improving passing rates in low-level math classes. Basically, the college recruited and trained employees to visit math classes and talk, very briefly, about the services available to struggling students there. The result: While there was no overall increase in passing rates or students' persistence in college, the study did find some benefits for part-time students and those categorized as developmental or remedial.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Most studies of school-choice programs tend to focus on whether the programs improve the academic performance of the students who attend them. A new report, however, explores a very different, if unintended, consequence of school-choice initiatives: their impact on housing values.

In a study published last week by the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, a trio of researchers used national data to study changes in
housing values and residential populations between 1990 and 2000 as states introduced inter-district public school choice programs. According to the report, 31 states now offer such plans, which permit parents to enroll their children in schools outside of their assigned school district, and 26 of them were put in place during the course of the study.

What the researchers found was that, when states enacted such changes, population density increased in districts with low-quality schools that were near the jurisdictions with the "good" schools. This came as relatively high-income families moved into those lower-cost areas and, in essence, began to gentrify them. The study calculates that, as a result of those inflows, home values in the cheaper districts rose by as much as $3,631 to $6,342, depending on which calculation the researchers used. Because some of those families left the more-expensive districts with high-quality schools, the overall effect is that home values started to even out throughout those areas.

"Residential homogeneity increases across local districts when excludable local public services become less exclusive," the study concludes.

Led by Erick J. Brunner of the University of Connecticut, the study is not the first to advance the idea that home values rise when choice programs open up. Other researchers have come to similar conclusions using computer models. But the study authors say theirs may well be the first to weigh in with some empirical evidence on the topic.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 9:05 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

President Obama's budget request contains some good news for education research, says Jim Kohlmoos, the president of the Knowledge Alliance.

According to a budget summary published this morning by the Office of Management and Budget, the administration favors giving the Institute of Education Sciences an additional $61 million in the 2011 fiscal year for investing in "development, evaluation, and dissemination." If Congress goes along, funding for that purpose would increase from an estimated $200 million this year to $261 million.

Presumably, a big chunk of that money would help underwrite the big $10 billion evaluation that IES is spearheading looking at what states are doing with their economic-stimulus dollars and whether those efforts are working. But, as Kohlmoos says, this particular pot of money is "really the most flexible" of IES's funding streams, so lots of other research initiatives may benefit as well.

Smaller spending boosts for statistics and assessments are also part of the administration's spending plan for IES, which is the U.S. Department of Education's main research arm and includes the National Center for Education Statistics under its umbrella. One puzzle in the budget request: The administration recommends extending funding for the regional education laboratories at current levels for one more year. Does this mean that the expected overhaul of the laboratory system is being delayed?

Outside of IES, the budget proposal calls for investing an extra $500 million for the Investing in Innovation program, some of which includes research on innovations that show promise.

"I think this is pretty good news for research and development and innovation," said Kohlmoos, whose Washington-based organization represents many of the research groups that stand to benefit from any funding increases. Stay tuned.

Also, for a broader look at the budget, see my colleague Alyson Klein's post today in Politics K-12.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend