March 2010 Archives

Harlem's Promise Academy Charter Middle School really might be a successful as everyone says it is. At least that's what you might gather from reading the latest "quick review" from the famously tough research reviewers over at the U.S. Department of Education's What Works Clearinghouse.

Rather than the usual in-depth review of all the research on a particular topic, the clearinghouse uses "quick reviews" as a means of taking a second look at single studies that get a lot of media attention. The reviews are meant to let the public know, in a timely way, whether the spotlight is deserved—or, more accurately, did the study's methods meet the clearinghouse's stringent research-design criteria?

The Promise Academy Charter Middle School study, which was conducted by Harvard University researchers Roland G. Fryer Jr. and Will S. Dobbie, certainly made a media splash when it was posted in the fall on the Web site for the National Bureau of Economic Research, and even before then. That's because the school is part of the Harlem Children's Zone, a high-profile initiative that combines charter schools with wraparound community services, such as free medical, dental, and mental-health services, early-childhood programs, parenting workshops, and asthma and anti-obesity programs.

The school itself also operates on an extended school day, including Saturday, and offers students incentives for high achievement and intensive test preparation. Pioneered by Geoffrey Canada, the zone has become a template for President Obama's Promise Neighborhoods program, on which he hopes to spend $10 million in 2010.

For their study, Fryer and Dobbie focused on 470 New York City students who applied for enrollment as entering 6th graders in 2005 and 2006. It compared those who snagged a seat in the enrollment lottery to those who were turned down, tracking their scores on state English and math exams over the next three years. The Promise Academy middle schoolers outperformed their peers in both subjects by the time they finished 8th grade, but the gains were most impressive in math, where students moved from the 50th to the 71st percentile. This EdWeek story has more details on the study and you can go here to read the study itself.

In its new one-page review, the WWC concludes that the research is "consistent with WWC evidence standards," which is as good as it gets in these sorts of clearinghouse reviews. It also offers none of the usual caveats on why we should take the findings with a grain of salt.

What we still don't know, of course, is whether students' improved performance was due to the quality of the schools or the combination of schooling and community supports that the children and their families were also receiving. That's fodder for yet another study.

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The open-access movement continues to grow. The latest potential recruit is the University of North Texas in Denton, which announced this week that it is taking steps to become the second public university in the United States to develop a policy to make faculty research available for free on the Web. (The first was the University of Kansas, according to a UNT official.)

You may recall that I wrote last year that the faculty of the ed schools at Harvard and Stanford had also voted to join the open-access movement. And Massachusetts Institute of Technology, likewise, puts entire courses up on the Web for public use.

These developments are a boon for members of the public and independent researchers. That's because most new research is only available now through scholarly journals, which can be pretty costly. But the idea also can be a hard sell at universities, whose departments sometimes run those scholarly journals. Scholars also worry, with good reason, whether the move to make scholarship public will come at the expense of quality control.

To introduce the idea to UNT faculty, the university is hosting a symposium on May 18, with some of the movers behind the worldwide open-access movement. One argument that the university will likely make at the event: Past research shows that the more readily available scholarly articles are on the Web, the more often they get cited. Can you spell T-E-N-U-R-E?

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If you think the latest round of NAEP reading results are an epitaph for the No Child Left Behind law, think again, say a group of researchers from Northwestern University.

Researchers Manyee Wong, Thomas D. Cook, and Peter M. Steiner base their conclusions on an examination of 4th grade reading and 4th and 8th grade math scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The research team analyzed scores from 1990 to 2009, with an eye toward comparing rates of learning growth over that time for public schools with the gains made in higher-scoring Catholic schools.

Why Catholic schools? The reasoning is that Catholic schools, because they are not subject to the sanctions imposed under the law, would serve as a sort of control group. (A small percentage of Catholic schools, however, did take part in the federal Reading First program.)

So here's what happened: In both 4th and 8th grade math, the scores jumped up a bit for the public school students around 2002, just when the law took effect, and then grew at a slightly steeper rate thereafter. The rate of achievement growth in the Catholic schools, on the other hand, either stagnated, dropped, or grew at the same pace from 2002 on. The positive post-NCLB trend was especially pronounced in 4th grade math, where the public school students had halved the gap between them and their Catholic school counterparts by 2008.

In reading, however, the advent of NCLB did not seem to step up the pace of improvement—at least not in a statistically significant way.

If you, like me, were wondering how a law passed in 2001 could possibly have an effect on 2002 test scores, the researchers' explanation is that states were already ratcheting up their school accountability efforts in anticipation of the law.

But the researchers didn't stop there. They also took a look at long-term data from state exams across the nation, comparing the results for each state to how well that state's students did on NAEP tests in the same subject. Based on that analysis, they sorted states into three groups—those with tough standards, those with moderate achievement thresholds, and those where the bar was set lower. The states that experienced the greatest gains on NAEP, post-NCLB, were those with the most rigorous standards, which would presumably be the states with the highest numbers of schools getting those nasty failing labels under the law.

The researchers warn that the findings, which they have presented on Capitol Hill and in research conferences over the past few months, do not amount to a comprehensive evaluation of NCLB. But, given the impending reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—a.k.a. NCLB—it's something to think about. Look for the full study on the Web site for Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research.

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Earlier this week, Joanne Jacobs alerted us to a study documenting a trend that signals both good and bad news for education. Here's the good news: Parents are spending more time with their children. The bad part is that the increase is twice as great for college-educated parents as it is for less-educated parents.

In this study, which is scheduled to be presented at the April 10 conference of the Brookings Papers on Economic Actvity, a pair of researchers from the University of California, San Diego, analyze 12 time-use surveys conducted between 1965 and 2007. They figure that parents began spending increasing amounts of time with their children in the 1990s. The researchers explored and discarded some of the usual explanations for the increase, including flexible work schedules for working parents and concerns about safety. Instead, they suggest a new possibility: Worries about increased competition for college entrance.

Study authors Gary and Valerie A. Ramey argue that parents began devoting more time to their children just as as the number of college-bound students surged. What's more, a major factor in that time increase has been time spent with with older children. The authors also bolster their case by comparing data from time-use surveys over the same period in Canada, where the competition for slots in colleges and universities has been more stable and less intense. And parents there aren't spending any more time with their kids now than they did in the 1980s.

In the U.S., they conclude "increased scarcity of college slots appears to have induced heightened rivalry among parents, taking the form of more hours spent on college preparatory activities."

"In other words," they add, "the rise in childcare time resulted from 'rug rat race' for admission to good colleges."

This trend of increased parental involvement, in general, in the lives of kids has not gone completely unnoticed by child development experts, of course. There's been plenty of handwringing in recent years about 'helicopter parents' and their 'hothouse'-raised kids. If the researchers' conclusions prove true, though what I worry about is the potential here for expanding the already-persistent achievement gaps between the haves and have-nots in U.S. society.

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Pioneered in places such as Boston, Chicago, and Denver, "residency" programs are becoming the hot thing in teacher training. It has helped, of course, that the U.S. Department of Education has backed the approach, awarding $43 million last fall in teacher-preparation grants that helped support the model, which bases training on a yearlong clinical practicum for teachers.

Now comes word of an ambitious new study that is aimed at determining whether teachers trained through residency programs do as well as, or better than, teachers prepared in the usual ways. Mathematica, a research group based in Princeton, N.J., announced yesterday that it had won a $4 million grant from the department's Institute of Education Sciences to study the new teacher-residency programs forming now as a result of the grants in districts across the nation.

Phil Gleason, the study director, says the research plan is for schools to randomly assign students to either teacher-residents or traditionally trained teachers in the same schools, grades, and subjects. The researchers will then follow all the teachers for two years and compare the gains that their students make from fall to spring of each year.

A second part of the study will also compare the retention rates for teachers in the new programs with those of other novice teachers. Researchers will also look at who joins these programs and how those recruits may differ, or not, from other teachers.

Answers to these sorts of questions are much needed. Apart from a study of Boston's teacher-residency program by Tom Kane at Harvard, there is zero research on this model. (As far as I know, anyway.) Unfortunately, the first report from this experiment is not due until the fall of 2013.

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Science Daily is reporting this morning on a discovery that might one day lead to a pill that could boost students' learning capacity after they hit puberty.

Research—and experience—has long shown that learning languages and certain spatial skills, such as operating a video or computer game, become more difficult during the teenage years. In a study published this month in the journal Science, researcher Sheryl Smith and her colleagues at State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn argue that such difficulties are linked to the emergence of a novel brain receptor, called alpha4-beta-delta, in the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that controls learning and memory. They show in their study, however, that such learning deficits can be reversed by a stress steroid that diminishes the harmful effects of alpha4-beta-delta.

Here's what the good professor had to say about it in Science Daily:

"These findings suggest that intrinsic brain mechanisms alter learning during adolescence, but that mild stress may be one factor that can reverse this decline in learning proficiency during the teenage years. ... They also suggest that different strategies for learning and motivation may be helpful in middle school. And it is within the realm of possibility that a drug could be developed that would increase learning ability post-puberty, one that might be especially useful for adolescents with learning disabilities."

Don't look for any magic learning pills to be available in your neighborhood drug store anytime soon, though.

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Earlier this month, you read in this space about a Public Agenda report that highlighted what happens to high school students when their guidance counselors are too overworked to give them sound advice about college.

Now comes some findings on a program that was designed to help address that very problem. How's that for a fast turn around?

At the annual meeting this month of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, a group of California researchers shared some early results from their evaluation of a Los Angeles-based program that links high school juniors from low-income communities to college-student mentors. Through the program, which is known as Student Outreach for College Enrollment, or SOURCE, college students meet regularly with their mentees to advise them about college choices, SAT-taking, financial-aid deadlines, and other things they need to know about negotiating the road to higher education. Researchers helped design the program, which is run by a Los Angeles group called EdBoost.

"Often kids who on paper qualify for college don't go," said Jacqueline Berman of Berkeley Policy Associates. She's conducting the federally funded evaluation with Johannes Bos of the American Institutes for Research. "They think college is expensive and they don't know how to apply for financial aid or their parents never went to college so they don't know either."

For their study, the researchers focused on 2,500 juniors with grade point averages of 2.5 or higher from high schools with high concentrations of students from families poor enough to qualify for federally subsidized school meals. Nearly 1,500 of those students were randomly assigned to trained program mentors and the remainder learned about college the usual way, through parents or high school guidance counselors. (The program also had a component through which students could get free help from H&R Block in filling out federal financial-aid forms, but few families took up that offer.)

The researchers checked back with the students when they were old enough to be finishing their freshman year of college and verified their responses though the National Student Clearinghouse.

What they found was, although the program did not seem to have much of an effect on students' high school grades or GPAs, it did lead to small, but significant, increases in other important ways. It increased the percentages of students taking SAT tests; enrolling in the University of California or California State University; completing federal financial-aid forms; and getting grants and scholarships.

Perhaps more important, some of the larger increases came among students whose parents did not attend college or whose families spoke Spanish at home.

To put the results in perspective, Berman suggests comparing them with those for Upward Bound, another college-preparation program for disadvantaged high school students. She said sudies of that program suggest that it yields similar percentage-point increases in college-going rates—but at an annual cost that is four times higher than that of the SOURCE program.

This study is not complete yet, though. The researchers still plan to finish verifying their data through the National Student Clearinghouse and to check back with students again to find out whether they are staying in college. But the results so far, Berman says, are pretty encouraging.

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When 4th grade mathematics scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress seemed to stall last year after years of climbing upward, some experts pronounced the results to be a disappointment.

But a report released today suggests that the lack of continued progress may have been a necessary correction after a long, and possibly unrealistic, trajectory of success rather than a cause for despair.

"The main NAEP has always been an outlier in terms of how much progress it's measuring," said author Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank. "So, in a sense, it's coming back to earth now."
The review of NAEP trends is among several analyses comes in the latest annual report on American education produced by Brookings' Brown Center on Education.

Another study in the same volume, drawing on 20 years of state testing data for California, finds that very few schools ever "turn around"—or drop dramatically—when it comes to students' academic performance.

And, in a third section of the report, another study based on California data suggests that, compared with charter schools started from scratch, regular public schools that convert to charter status tend to look more like traditional schools, in terms of their demographics and the credentials of their teaching staffs.

To put the NAEP results from last year in context, Mr. Loveless compared 4th graders' academic growth since 1990, to the long-runnIng trend lines for 4th graders on two other tests: the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and the Long-Term Trend NAEP. The latter is a separate test given to the same age group of students every few years.

Of the three tests, Mr. Loveless writes, the main NAEP test has consistently registered the biggest gains from one testing year to the next. If the trend were to continue at the same pace, instead of stalling, he reasons, by the year 2053 4th graders will know about the same amount of math as high school seniors did in 1990.

"Perhaps the skyrocketing gains had to stall on this particular test, and elementary teachers did not become horrible math instructors in 2007," the report says. "If you go by the main NAEP, don't forget, they had been miracle workers the previous 17 years."

Look for the full story on this report later today on edweek.org.

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In 2001, the last time the Congress voted to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, much was made of the fact that the resulting law included the phrase "scientifically based research" more than 100 times.

Research gets far fewer mentions, though, in the blueprint that President Obama released on March 13 for updating the federal government's landmark education law. Of course, a federal law and a blueprint for a federal law are not the same thing. No one would expect a broad outline to include so many mentions of research. But it's clear from the blueprint that research, or the reforming of research, is not at the top of the administration's agenda this time around.

That's not to say that it doesn't get any mention at all. One of the blueprint's "crosscutting priorities," in fact, is a call for putting evidence-based programs, projects, or strategies first in line for federal funding.

The plan also calls on the nation's lowest-performing schools to use effective, research-based strategies, along with with other turnaround strategies, and it promises competitive grants to enable consortia of states to research, develop, or improve assessments in a wide range of areas, including science, history, and foreign languages; high school career and technical subjects; and tests for English-learners and students with disabilities.

The outline also recommends expanding and making permanent the Investing in Innovation, or i3, program that the department created with $650 million in economic-stimulus funds. That program, which is just getting under way, uses a three-tiered evidence framework that will direct the biggest grants to the programs with the strongest evidence.

By the same token, though, the blueprint also advocates some strategies for which the research evidence is either mixed or sparse. (Then again, you could say that about a lot of programs and strategies in education.)

Here's what the Knowledge Alliance, a Washington group that represents research organizations, had to say about the plan:

The proposal's many powerful and, for some, controversial ideas should be viewed and critiqued through the lens of research-based evidence. In the coming weeks and months we urge Congress and stakeholders alike to carefully consider the best available empirical evidence on such challenging issues ... as accountability, assessments, teacher quality, school improvement, and innovation.

Will research figure prominently in the Congressional debate over ESEA? Stay tuned.

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Just seeing the letter F before an exam may make a student more likely to fail, while seeing the letter A can enhance a student's chance of success.

That's according to a pair of University of Missouri researchers writing in a study published this month in the British Journal of Educational Psychology. (Hats off to Science Daily for alerting the world to this report.)

Researchers Keith Ciani and and Ken Sheldon base their conclusions on results from a series of three small experiments involving a total of 131 college students. In the first experiment, 23 undergraduates all took the same word-analogies test. Half of the tests, however, were labelled "Test Bank ID: F" in the top right corner, while the other half read "Test Bank ID: A" in the same place.

The researchers found that the A group performed significantly better than the F group, getting an average of 11.08 of 12 answers correct. The F group on average got 9.42 answers correct. The researchers found the same pattern of results in two more studies, and even when they labeled some papers "Test Bank ID:J" to introduce a more neutral third condition. The performance of students whose exams had that label fell somewhere in between those with the A and F test papers.

"We believe that the meanings inherent in the evaluative letters [A and F] were enough to influence students' performance through the motivational state they produced," said Mr. Ciani. "Exposure to the letter A made the students non-consciously approach the task with the aim to succeed, while exposure to the letter F made the students non-consciously want to avoid failure."

It sounded a bit far-fetched to me, but then again so did the idea of "stereotype threat" when I first heard of it. Stereotype threat refers to people's tendency to do less well on a test when they fear their performance could confirm a negative stereotype about their racial or gender group. African-American students, for instance, have been shown perform worse on a test when told beforehand that it will measure their intelligence. Studies have even shown that white men get lower scores on math tests when they take the test in a room full of Asian students. The power of suggestion is apparently pretty potent.

Are there any implications in this study for schools? Possibly, according to the researchers. The obvious one is to avoid putting letter F's on students' tests. But the researchers also said teachers might think about adorning their classrooms with an A+ symbol or success-oriented phrases to positively motivate students. Well, we already knew that.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 5:15 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Over hundreds of years of lawmaking, good intentions, and bureaucracy, the federal government has spawned a considerable tangle of programs aimed at improving life in some way for the nation's children and youth. You can find education-related programs, for example, in the departments of agriculture, education, housing and urban development, health and human services, and justice; in the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Corporation for National and Community Service, just to name a few.

To get a read on the extent of that reach, a group of researchers, in a new paper, offer an inventory of all the child-related programs in seven of those agencies. They came up with a grand total of 363 such programs, many of which either overlap or use a confusing array of requirements.

"If you look at it against the services being offered you find a lot of problems with definitions, who's eligible, and under what circumstances," said Christopher T. Cross, whose research and consulting firm, Cross & Joftus, took on the inventory project.

Twenty-three programs, for instance, focus on very young children, but the populations they target are all over the map. They variously target children between birth and age 6, 0 to 7, 0 to 8, or 0 to 9, for instance. While 96 programs aim to help poor children and families, the criteria for how poor a family has to be to qualify varies from program to program. And, in Congress, a variety of different committees oversee all those programs, often with no awareness that a similar program may be operating in an agency outside of their committee's jurisdiction.

"It's hard for communities to come together to coordinate all these programs in a coherent way," said Mr. Cross, who was once a part of the federal bureaucracy himself. He served as an assistant secretary for educational research and improvement in the U.S. Department of Education under President George H.W. Bush.

Mr. Cross' group is not the first to highlight the need for better coordination of child-related services at the federal level. A report out of Teachers College today, in fact, makes a similar call and Mr. Cross says several Obama administration officials are discussing the matter, too.

"It's just getting it to happen," said Mr. Cross. The seven-agency inventory his firm created, however, may be one place to start. Check it out for free here.

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For a good look at the state of research on how to teach, check out Elizabeth Green's story in Sunday's New York Times Magazine. While some experts argue that the way to improve schools is to weed out the worst teachers, Green explores some ongoing efforts to take a different tack and determine what good teachers do differently. She looks at research-based efforts by both charter school practitioners and university-based researchers to study more closely the elements of good teaching—a topic of research that's surprisingly understudied, according to Green. I'd call this one a must read.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A national survey released earlier this week targets a subject that doesn't get talked about in education nearly enough: high school guidance counseling. It's no secret that high school guidance counselors are stretched pretty thin. Across the nation, a typical counselor is responsible for setting 265 students on the right path for life beyond high school. But, in some states, such as California, the student-to-counselor ratio can be three times as high.

What's interesting about this new survey, which was conducted by the Public Agenda research group, is that it gives some insight into what happens to students when their counselors fall down on the job. The Public Agenda pollsters talked to a nationally representative group of more than 600 adults in their early 20s who had at least some college experience under their belts. More than 60 percent of the respondents said their counselors had done a "fair" or "poor" job of helping them select the right college or career. The survey also showed that the young people who got bad advice in high school were less likely to receive financial aid and less likely to be happy with the college choice. Among those badly advised students, nearly a quarter ended up delaying going to college.

I know a lot of middle-class families already put a lot of energy into directing their children to college, but many other students don't have that kind of resource at home. In this survey, which was intended to be nationally representative, six out of 10 students came from families in which neither parent had attended college.

This study strikes a chord in me because, 30 or so years ago, I was one of those students with no college-experienced adults to advise me. While I made a decent college choice in the end, I also stopped myself from applying to other schools that I feared were beyond my family's financial reach. I didn't really know for sure whether that was the case. I just knew that these schools sounded prestigious and expensive so I backed off. My guidance counselors never told me differently. What I wonder now is how many students in a similar situation might never consider college at all?

The report, "Can I Get Some Advice Here?," was paid for by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Check out the full text here.

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The Institute of Education Sciences has some more money to give out to researchers, according to new research grant guidelines posted this week. The grants will be available in 24 topical areas, including cognition and student learning, special education, education policy and finance, and teacher quality.

Most of these study programs have been around a few years, but two are new. One calls for studies on the organization and management of schools and districts. Under this program, which reflects IES Director John Easton's experience working with Chicago public schools, researchers are being encouraged to study the organizational factors, such as the coherence of the instructional program, the degree of trust in a school, or how much teachers learn from one another, that contribute to successful schools.

"I think all successful programs and policies depend on an understanding of how classrooms are connected to school buildings and how school buildings are connected to districts," Easton says of the new initiative. "The better we are able to understand these connections, the better we will be able to develop and implement strong programs."

The second newbie is a program of studies on adult education. According to Lynn Okagaki, the IES commissioner who oversees the research grants program, even though 14 percent of adults have difficulty reading and 22 percent have limited number skills, little is known about how to boost their skills in adult education programs, including those that are targeted to English-language learners.

Also, under the early learning studies program, the institute is looking for researchers to develop and validate easy-to-use measures of kindergarten readiness that cover a variety of the skills that children need to succeed in their first year of school as well as screening procedures to locate children who might need special interventions.

And an interesting strand of work under the student learning in special education study program calls for research that applies new advances in cognitive science to the field of special education.

You can find the official request for application for the research grants here. The special education grants are listed separately. The applications are due in June and September. Researchers who want to catch the first wave of grants need to file a letter of intent by April 29.

If Congress agrees to the Education Department's budget request for the research agency, the IES expects to spend more than $150 million in the coming fiscal year on new and continuing grants for all of these programs. Though not nearly as much as the department is spending on Race to the Top programs, it's a healthy chunk of the IES's funding, nonetheless.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Three new studies out this morning weigh in on the effects—or lack of effects—of video or digital technology on society's youngest citizens.

In the most interesting study, (I think, anyway) a group of New Zealand researchers looked at survey data on thousands of teenagers in that country from two separate time periods—2004 and 1987-88. Over both periods, the researchers found that the more time students spent in front of a computer or television screen the less attached they felt to their parents. In the first wave of data, more television time was also linked to lower-quality peer relationships. Science Daily has the details.

In a second study reported in Science Daily, Iowa State University researcher Craig Anderson reviews 130 studies from around the world on how violent video game play affects young people's behavior. His conclusion is not surprising: Regardless of gender or nationality, young people who are exposed to violent video games are more likely to behave more aggressively, and be less caring, than those who are not. You can find the full study in the March issue of Psychological Bulletin.

The last study, published yesterday in the Archives of Adolescent & Pediatric Medicine, reports on whether toddlers who watched an educational DVD for six weeks improved their word learning. Researchers from the University of California, Riverside, studied 96 12- to 25-month-olds, half of whom watched the DVDs at home and half of whom did not. In the end, there were no real vocabulary differences between the two groups, except in cases where parents intervened to teach the words to their children.

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A report out this morning suggests the difficulty of the task that curriculum reformers potentially face in agreeing on a common standards that students must meet in order to be deemed "college ready" in language arts.

Researchers at the Regional Education Laboratory Southwest systematically analyzed four such sets of standards to see how well they lined up, in terms of content. Using the American Diploma Project's standards as a benchmark, the analysts looked in particular at each of the language arts college-readiness standards developed by the ACT and the College Board, as well as another set called Standards for Success, which was developed at the University of Oregon's Center for Educational Policy in 2003.

It turns out that the four sets don't overlap much. According to this report, the percentage of standards statements that line up completely or partly with the ADP benchmarks ranges from 34 percent for the ACT's standards to 77 percent for the College Board's standards.

And only 5 percent of the ADP content statements completely align with the content in all three comparison sets. If you count the number of statements with a partial match, that share rises to 27 percent. It seems that great minds disagree quite a bit on what students must know to succeed in college.

The researchers also found some variation with respect to the cognitive demand the standards required of students. Overall, though, they found that just over half of the standards statements in each of the four documents rated about 3 for their intellectual demand on a scale of 1 to 4, with 4 representing the most complex skills. At level 3, students are required to demonstrate reasoning, planning skills, and the ability to make complex inferences.

The federal laboratory originally did this analysis for the Commission for a College Ready Texas, which was working on developing college-readiness standards for that state. The report released yesterday by the Institute of Education Sciences, however, is a little more rigorous than the first study.

What would really be interesting, though, would be to see how closely these standards match the English/language arts standards being developed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers as part of their multistate Common Core State Standards Initiative. A final version of those standards is not due out until this spring, but already Kentucky has agreed to adopt the initiative's K-12 standards in both reading and math.

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