June 2010 Archives

Public school systems spent an average of $10,259 per pupil in 2008—a 6.1 percent increase over the previous year, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Census Bureau.

As usual, the report notes that public education is the largest single category of state and local government expenditures. From all sources, public school systems received $582.1 billion in funding in 2008, the report says, but spent $593.2 billion.

What I found particularly interesting was the report's breakdown showing how much each level of government contributes to that $582-billion revenue pot. It says state government kicked in 48.3 percent, followed by local governments, which contributed 43.7 percent. The remaining 8.1 percent came from the feds. Keep in mind these figures are for 2008, before the U.S. Department of Education began distributing economic-stimulus aid to states.

The biggest spenders, on a per pupil basis, were: New York ($17,173); New Jersey (16,491); Alaska ($14,630); the District of Columbia ($14,594); and Vermont ($14,300.)

At the other end of the scale were: Utah ($5,765); Idaho ($6,931); Arizona ($7,608); Oklahoma ($7,685); and Tennessee ($7,739).

So where did all that money come from? At the local level, property taxes accounted for 63.7 percent of revenue for public school systems. There's lots more data to be found here.

UPDATE: Several readers have informed me that the link to the Census page is broken. Try this one.

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

The National Board for Education Sciences won't have to hold its next meeting in a phone booth. (Yes, I'm old enough to remember what that is.) That's because the U.S. Senate voted last week to confirm President Obama's nominees to fill some long-empty spaces on the advisory board.

The newly confirmed members 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. The four were nominated back in February.

You may recall that the board, which advises the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, had been operating for nearly a year with just six of its allotted 15 seats filled. Four more nominations for the board, however, are still pending.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 9:24 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Innovation is a big buzz word in national education circles these days. But a new study suggests that innovation for the sake of innovating may not always be the wisest strategy for improving schools.

A team of researchers launched by Vanderbilt University's Peabody College of Education has been analyzing four years of student-testing data for 44 charter and traditional public schools in Idaho, Indiana, and Minnesota. The sample they studied included a total of 1,727 students from both types of schools who were matched up by achievement, and demographic characteristics.

Here's what they found: First, students made similar math gains over the course of the study in both types of schools. Second, and more interestingly, the gains were smaller in schools where teachers reported there was more instructional innovation going on.

That finding held across the board, regardless of whether the school was a charter or not. But previous studies by some members of this same group have shown that charters do tend to be more innovative than their regular public school counterparts. After all, having the freedom to innovate is the point of charters.

"The finding that increased innovation was negatively associated with achievement gains suggests that innovation for innovation's sake may not be the best strategy for improving student achievement in any school," the researchers write. By the same token, they add, the results may also support "critics' claims that institutional regulations and constraints in schools are so strong that it is very difficult for truly innovative reforms to take hold in a way that could impact student achievement."

Here's another thought: Maybe schools that are already struggling the most are those where educators are frantically innovating.

The study is by Mark Berends, who has since moved to Notre Dame, Ellen Goldring, Marc Stein, and Xiu Cravens. It was published last month in the American Journal of Education but you can also read a brief on the results on the web site for Vanderbilt's National Center on School Choice.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 9:13 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

On the heels of my story yesterday on findings from New York City's efforts to replace big impersonal high schools with smaller, more intimate ones comes word of this report on a similar initiative in Chicago.

Researchers from the Consortium on Chicago School Research compared educational outcomes for students in 17 nonselective small high schools that the district created between 2002 and 2004 with outcomes for similar students enrolled in the system's comprehensive high schools. (No, this was not a randomized study.)

As in New York, they found that the students attending Chicago's small schools were more likely to be on track to graduate by the end of 9th grade and to persist in school than a demographically and academically similar group of students attending the city's comprehensive high schools. Among the students who entered high school in 2004-05, for example, 57.2 of those attending the small schools graduated on time, compared to 49 percent of their counterparts in regular high schools. That margin is similar to the 6.8 percentage point edge that MDRC found for New York City's small schools.

The small-schools students in Chicago also had slightly better grades and attendance rates. That said, however, these indicators were nothing to brag about: Students still missed an average of a month of school each year and their grade average in core academic subjects was slightly below a C.

As for test scores, the small-schools students scored about the same as the comparison-group students on both state assessments and the ACT college-entrance exams.

In summing up the results, the Chicago researchers were not quite as enthusiastic as the MDRC study team.

"Our findings show that this initiative did accomplish much, but not all, of what it was intended to do," they write. "However, being 'slightly better' than similar students does not mean that these students are college ready."

This study was completed last month but the consortium didn't trumpet the findings at the time, as they were no different from its interim studies on this initiative. You can find the report on the consortium's website.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 8:50 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A closely watched program that provided scholarships of up to $7,500 for public school students in the nation's capital to attend private schools spurred more students to graduate from high school but didn't do much to boost their scores on standardized tests.

That's according to the final report on the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which was released yesterday by the federal Institute of Education Sciences. All eyes have been on this program since it started because it's the first federally funded, private school voucher program in the United States. President Obama has said he wants to eliminate it, but congressional Republicans and parents continue to lobby for its survival.

The new study tracks educational outcomes over four to five years for 2,300 public school students who applied for the scholarships, which were assigned by lottery. Of that group, 1,387 students were offered a scholarship; the remaining 921 were not. Nearly 300 of the scholarship recipients, however, never used their scholarships at all.

At least four years later, the study found, the lottery winners' reading and math scores were not statistically different from those of students who failed to nab a golden ticket, leading the researchers to concluded that the program had had "no significant impact" on student achievement. This was also true for lottery winners coming out of schools deemed to be in need of improvement, which was the group that Congress was particularly concerned about when it created the program in 2003.

A brighter picture emerges, though, when you look at the much smaller group of 500 students who made it to 12th grade by the end of the study. Their graduation rates were 12 percentage points higher than those of lottery losers.

If the lottery winners actually used their scholarships, the likelihood of graduating was 28 percent higher.

In the end, this is a very, very small sample, but graduation rates, after all, are where the rubber meets the road, as the U.S. secretary of education has been saying.

An interesting aspect of this final report is that it explores why so many students either didn't use their scholarships or used them intermittently. The number one reason—cited by more 30 percent of parents—was that the private schools had no room for their kids. The second most-cited reason was that the private schools lacked the special services their kids needed, such as special education. That, too, says a lot.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Getting federally subsidized school lunches as a child doesn't seem to yield any special health benefits in the long-run, but it just might lead to pay-offs in education.

At least that's the conclusion that Peter Hinrichs draws in a study in the current issue of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. Hinrichs, a researcher at Georgetown University's public policy institute, takes advantage of changes in the federal funding formula that have occurred since the National School Lunch Program's 1946 inception to study how its availability affected students later on in life.

A little background is in order here: The federal program apparently began in response to Congressional testimony in 1945 by General Lewis B. Hershey, who was then a major general in charge of the country's Selective Service System. He told lawmakers that 16 percent of the Selective Service registrants in World War II were rejected or placed in a limited service class, largely due to problems stemming from malnutrition. (This was news to me. I never thought of the program as a national security issue.)

In keeping with that tradition, Hinrichs in his study uses several waves of national survey data to examine the same same sort of health indicators the military used back in World War II: height, weight, overall health, and whether an individual experiences any health limitations. He also looks at percentages of young men who are rejected for military service in states with varying degrees of school-lunch availability. And he concludes that, overall, former recipients of subsidized school lunches are no healthier than non-recipients by the time they reach adulthood.

For education, however, he found that the positive effect could be quite significant. Increasing the percentage of students exposed to the program in a given state by ten percentage points was linked to an added .365 years of schooling for women and a full year for men.

Hinrichs speculates that the poor health results may be explained by the fact that the health benefits that children received as a result of the program simply faded away by the time they grew up. Also, the program in its early days was not specifically targeted to poorer children as it is now, so some participating students were probably getting good meals at home before the program even began.

The researcher thinks the good education results, on the other hand, might be because parents began to send their children to school more often after the lunch program began. The more students went to school, the better able they were to persist in school year after year.

What I want to know is: If a school-lunch program leads to educational gains, what do we do to improve students' health outcomes? Teach algebra?

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Is the SAT biased against African-American students? That's the question that Washington Post reporter Jay Mathews raises in a riveting blog post published last night. He cites a study in the latest issue of the Harvard Educational Review by Maria Veronica Santelices at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santiago and Mark Wilson of UC Berkeley.

The study replicates and updates some work published in 2003 by Roy Freedle, a retired research psychologist from the Educational Testing Service about whom Mathews once wrote. In both studies, researchers looked at how white and black students who were matched by ability levels did on different sections of newer SAT tests. They found that white students outperformed black students overall, and on easier, more common words on verbal sections of the tests, while black students tended to outperform white students on the harder words. (Those would be the ones that drew fewer correct answers, in other words.)

According to Mathews, Freedle's theory is that the easier words tend to have more than one meaning. And some of those meanings may be different in white, middle-class communities than they are in disadvantaged African-American communities. If the test had included less ambiguous words, Freedle figured, the overall scores for black students might have been higher.

Unlike Freedle's study, the new research does not, however, show the same pattern for other minorities.

Predictably, the College Board, which administers the SAT, is not happy, calling the Santelices-Wilson paper "fundamentally flawed." A more-formal critical analysis of the results is forthcoming.

Lots of studies have tackled this question before and few, besides Freedle, have found much evidence of bias. It will be interesting to see if this new study renews the debate on this conversation.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 8:36 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The federal Institute of Education Sciences yesterday announced it was awarding $100 million in grants to six teams of researchers across the country for a major new initiative aimed at promoting reading comprehension in students from preschool to high school.

The grants, spread over five years among 130 researchers in the fields of linguistics, reading, developmental psychology, speech, cognitive psychology, assessment, and language pathology, are the largest ever awarded by the Institute's National Center on Education Research for a single research program, said IES director John Q. Easton.

The money will go to help create a new Reading for Understanding Network, in which researchers will be required to work with teachers and other practitioners on the ground level, as well as with one another, to try to find proven, practical solutions to the thorny problem of improving reading comprehension.

While studies are converging on the best practices for teaching children to decode text, less is known about how to help students understand what they're decoding—particularly as they reach 3rd grade and are required to rely more on text for learning science, social studies, and other subjects.

"We thought this was an area that was really ripe," said Easton in an interview. "We thought, 'How can we really make a significant investment in moving it up a notch?' "

The six recipients are: the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, N.J.; Florida State University; the Strategic Education Partnership Institute; the University of Illinois; Ohio State University; and the University of Texas at Austin.

"One of those centers has an overarching focus on assessment," Easton added. "One is focusing on a particular grade span, while others focus on different grade spans. We wanted to get the full grade span but we also wanted people learning from each other."

With its $20 million grant, for instance, the Washington-based SERP institute has recruited researchers from Harvard University and Stanford University to work in four school districts in Massachusetts and California to study comprehension issues among students in 4th through 8th grades.

According to the SERP Institute, that study will examine some cognitive processes that are often overlooked in reading research, such perspective taking, complex reasoning, and academic language skill. The plan is for researchers to work in tandem with local educators to develop structured discussion and debate techniques that teachers can use to develop those skills in their students.

Is this the first of a new breed of research projects at IES? "There may be other with similar features coming down the pike," said Easton.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 8:34 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

An interesting essay in the current issue of Educational Researcher critiques a little known—and probably even less used—provision of the No Child Left Behind law. Under the law, states are required to identify "persistently dangerous schools." It also says students who attend those schools or who have themselves been victims of violent crime at school are eligible to transfer to another public school.

In her article, University of Massachusetts researcher Billie Gastic suggests, however, that the provision does an inadequate job of protecting students from harm for three reasons:

1) The transfer option is currently restricted only to those students who are victims of violent crime at school, which is a very, very small group. (Fortunately.) In 2007, such students accounted for 2 percent of 12- to 18-year-olds.

2) As has been reported, states have identified very few persistently dangerous schools, vary widely in the numbers of schools they identify, and tend to point to the same schools year after year.

3) The law ignores the fact that some students are more at risk than others. Five percent of female high school students, for instance, have been threatened or injured with a weapon at school, compared with 10 percent of high school males.

Gastic offers suggestions for improving the law, including expanding the definitions that most states use to identify which schools are "persistently dangerous" and broadening the transfer provision to include more than just students who have been victims of violent crime. New Jersey, for example, includes bullying in its definition. Yet, at the same token, experiencing bullying does not trigger the NCLB transfer provision in that state.

Would a more aggressive interpretation of the Unsafe School Choice Option have saved Massachusetts bullying victim Phoebe Prince from killing herself? It's something to think about, anyway.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Efforts to close the "digital divide" and boost student achievement by supplying students with home laptops have been getting a lot of attention in recent years. What's still unclear, though, is whether that sort of thing could make a difference.

In an effort to get a handle on that question, researchers Jacob L. Vigdor and Helen F. Ladd studied statewide data on North Carolina students from 2000 and 2005—a period of time when computer access expanded noticeably and many areas of the state were just getting access to high-speed internet service. The study focused on students enrolled in 5th through 8th grades.

The researchers were able to figure out which students had computers at home because North Carolina students fill out surveys asking them about computer use and ownership in tandem with the state exams they take every year. To determine whether areas had internet access, the researchers relied on zip code data and Federal Communications Communication reports on the rollout of Internet services.

The news was not good, though: The researchers found that students who gain access to a home computer between 5th and 8th grade tend to experience a slight—yet persistent—decline in reading and math scores. With regard to the introduction of Internet access, the researchers found that the technology had a more negative impact on some students than others—possibly because parents of those students exercised less control of their activities on the Internet.

"For school administrators interested in maximizing achievement test scores, or reducing racial and socioeconomic disparities in test scores, all evidence suggests that a program of broadening home computer access would be counterproductive," the study concludes.

One caveat the researchers offer, though, is that this study does not look beyond test scores. For instance, computer-literacy could pave the way to better job opportunities for some students. We'll never know from this report.

You also need to know that this is another one of those working papers from the National Bureau of Economic Research. By the way, a commenter recently asked me why I report these findings since they don't come from a peer-reviewed journal. My thinking is that people in the trenches need to know what the research says now, not a year from now when academic journals get around to publishing it. And NBER working papers are the next best thing. They're more of a finished product, anyway, than many of the the presentations that researchers make in conferences. So, if a study has interesting findings and seems to incorporate reasonable research methods, I let you know about it. I figure you are smart enough, in the end, to sort it all out for yourself.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 9:11 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

There's an important new appointment over at the Institute of Education Sciences. The agency announced last week that University of Pennsylvania researcher Rebecca Maynard will be the new commissioner of its National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance. Read all about it here.

This is a key post because NCEE will be helping to lead the evaluation of all the funding programs launched by the U.S. Department of Education with stimulus dollars from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Formerly headed by Phoebe Cottingham, the center also oversees the 10 regional education laboratories, which IES director John Easton has said are due for an overhaul soon.

Currently a professor of education and social policy at UPenn, Maynard has a national reputation as a distinguished scholar. But she's also no stranger to IES. She directed one of the postdoctoral training programs for budding researchers that the department funds and also played role in helping to shape the What Works Clearinghouse. Her appointment takes effect today.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

An intriguing new study out of Florida suggests that public schools tend to improve their game when competition from nearby private schools heats up.

David N. Figlio and Cassandra M.D. Hart at Northwestern University's Institute for Policy Research draw that conclusion from a study of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program. Begun in 2001, the state-run program initially provided low-income families with vouchers of $3,500 to cover the cost of tuition and fees at private schools. To qualify, a student had to have spent the entire previous year in a public school, or be on the cusp of entering kindergarten or 1st grade.

Before you read any further, though, there's one thing you have to know about most research that attempts to gauge the impact of school choice programs on public schools: It's very tricky stuff. That's partly because, when a voucher program launches, the demographics tend to shift at both the private and public schools. The most motivated or the most able students, for instance, might abandon the public schools to head for private ones. That could skew results from any study looking to see how public school students' achievement changed after the introduction of the voucher program.

The way Figlio and Hart get around this problem is to focus on measuring achievement changes in the public schools in the year before students actually move to private schools. In that year, even though students are just applying to the private schools, the threat is already looming large for public school educators. In Florida's case, the pressure may have been especially intense because the vouchers were particularly generous. On average, they covered nearly 90 percent of the cost of attending nearby religious schools, which made them a realistic option for many families, according to the study.

In all, though, the researchers collected achievement data across a lot of years—from 1999-2000 to 2006-07—for nearly 3 million students throughout the Sunshine State. They also gauged competitive pressure four different ways. They looked, for instance, at whether there was a competing private school within five miles as the crow flies from a public school, how many private schools lay within a five-mile radius, how many different "types" of private schools were nearby, and how many schools there were of each of those types.

The bottom line: The nearer or more intense the competition, the more the test scores rose in that transition year. And scores continued to rise over time.

Of course, it's entirely possible that public school students' performance was already on an upward trajectory. To some extent, the researchers concluded, that was true. But the magnitude of that growth was much smaller before the tuition program materialized. Also, the report says, during the 2000-01 school year, before the program officially came to be, the researchers could find no relationship between any changes in test scores and the intensity of competition from nearby private schools. (For the record, Florida introduced its statewide student-testing program in 1998-99—the year before researchers began collecting achievement data.)

One caveat here is that this study focuses on Florida; there are no guarantees that the results would generalize to other states. Ninety percent of Florida students live in metropolitan areas, which means that students tend to have a lot of private schools from which to choose—possibly more than students elsewhere do.

"Nevertheless," the researchers write, "this study indicates that private school competition, brought about by the infusion of means-tested scholarships aimed at low-income families, could have sizable effects on the performance of traditional schools."

The gains don't look huge to me, but that's a matter for real researchers to debate. You should also know that this is technically a working paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which means it's still a work in progress. You can find the full study here. It could make for interesting weekend reading.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Faithful readers of EdWeek may recall a story I wrote last month examining the research on preventing bullying. At the time, researchers told me that studies on school-based bully-prevention were rare and that they tended to yield mixed results.

Then, I came across this research review from the Campbell Collaboration. Campbell is an international group that does meta-analyses, which are essentially systematic reviews of all the existing research on a given social-science topic. The group sets fairly high methodological standards. This review, for instance, includes only experimental studies or quasi-experiments where students at a given age after the intervention were compared with students of the same age in the same school before the intervention.

When all was said and done, the Campbell reviewers found 53 reports produced between 1989 and 2003 that met their criteria. Contrary to what I heard, however, the Campbell reviewers determined that school-based bullying prevention programs, overall, may actually be fairly effective. On average, the study says, bullying decreased by 20 to 23 percent and incidences of victimization decreased by 17 to 20 percent after schools put these programs in place.

So what accounts for the mismatch between researchers' assessments and the Campbell report? One reason (I think) is that the Campbell reviewers gathered a much broader range of studies. They sought out both published and unpublished research reports, in English and other languages, from 22 different countries. And some programs that have worked repeatedly in other countries have had only limited success in the U.S. Even the granddaddy of all anti-bullying programs, Norway's Olweus Bullying-Prevention Program, has not had any dramatic success here. Not so, in Europe, where the program has proved itself over and again. I think the researchers with whom I spoke were focusing mostly on programs tried in the U.S. Also, some were narrowing the pool even further to focus on studies that met the "gold standard" of research—pure randomized experiments, in other words.

But why, I wonder, would some of these programs have better track records overseas than here? I invite your thoughts on this question.

The Campbell reviewers also call out a few of the common components of successful programs, which is always useful. Time is one such characteristic. The longer the duration, and the more intensive the program, the greater the success. The review also recommends that programs attend to what happens on the playground, through supervision or other means, and incorporate disciplinary methods to address instances of bullying. The Olweus program, for instance, provides for a range of sanctions, including having a serious talk with the alleged bully, making him or her stay close to the teacher at recess, or depriving bullies of privileges.

Calling the findings "encouraging," the reviewers conclude that "the time is ripe to mount a new long-term research strategy on the effectiveness of these programs, based on our findings." Their idea: Create and test new anti-bullying programs built from common components of successful programs. And while we're at it, they add, why not develop an international system of accrediting anti-bullying programs?

At a time when news of bullied teenagers committing suicide seems to crop up on almost a monthly basis I'd say it couldn't be more timely.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In an earlier post, I mistakenly linked the Harlem Success Academy to the Harlem Children's Zone. That is NOT the case. The Harlem Success Academy is part of a separate network called the Success Charter Network, which is headed by Eva Moskowitz. Here is the correct post:

A study out this morning finds that 3rd-grade students enrolled in the Harlem Success Academy outperform peers who applied to the school but failed to win a seat in the lottery.

For the study, researchers Jonathan Supovitz and Sam Rikoon of the University of Pennsylvania's graduate school of education studied students whose families applied to win a seat in the school's 2006-07 1st grade class, tracking them through the end of 3rd grade. In math, they found, the Success Academy 3rd graders performed an average of 48 scale-score points higher than counterparts who lost the lottery and ended up in regular New York City public schools. In reading, the Success Academy students' edge was 35 points.

Compared to demographically similar New York City public school 3rd graders who never applied to the charter school, the score differential favoring Success Academy students was even higher— 58 points.

While the Success Academy schools do have longer school days and years than is typically the case at traditional schools, they do not benefit from the wraparound social services that students in the Harlem Children's Zone receive, which is what I erroneously reported earlier today.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

CORRECTION:This blog post incorrectly states that the Harlem Success Academy is part of the Harlem Children's Zone. It is not. The Harlem Success Academy is part of the Success Charter Network, which is headed by Eva Moskowitz. Please go here for the correct post.

A study out this morning has found that students in Harlem Success Academy outperform those who apply to the same school but fail to win a seat.

[CORRECTION: Please see updated post here.] Harlem Success Academy is an elementary charter school embedded in the famous Harlem Children's Zone in New York City. Unless you've been living under a rock for the last five years, you'll know that HCZ is Geoffrey Canada's much-watched social experiment to carve out an impoverished section of the city and provide disadvantaged children with all the social services they need to get a shot at success. That includes preschool, health care, dental care, and after-school programs, in addition to academic add-ons, such as tutoring. A study published last year by Roland Fryer and his colleagues at Harvard University has already found that students in Promise Academy Middle School, which is the zone's charter middle school, score higher than non-lottery-winning peers on standardized tests. Read more about that earlier study in this EdWeek story and in a blog item I wrote back in March.

In this newest study, a different group of researchers turn their attention to elementary school. Researchers Jonathan Supovitz and Sam Rikoon of the University of Pennsylvania's graduate school of education studied students whose families applied to win a seat in the school's 2006-07 1st grade class, tracking them through the end of 3rd grade. In math, they found, the Success Academy 3rd graders performed an average of 48 scale-score points higher than counterparts who lost the lottery and ended up in regular New York City public schools. In reading, the Success Academy students' edge was 35 points.

Compared to demographically similar New York City public school 3rd graders who never applied to the charter school, the score differential favoring Success Academy students was even higher— 58 points.

It has to be noted that in this case, as with the middle school study, students have both a longer school day and a year than most traditional public schools—not to mention all those helpful social services. It does seem, though, that the findings suggest that President Obama's Promise Neighborhoods initiative, which attempts to employ the same sorts of tactics in urban and rural pockets of poverty across the country, could be on to something.

On the down side, what about those students who lose the lottery? In this case, researchers say, that was a lot of students. Seven thousand students applied for one of the 1,100 seats available at the start of the study in Harlem Success Academy schools in Harlem and the South Bronx.

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Posted by Debra Viadero at 9:11 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

This one almost got by me: The White House late last month announced four more nominations to the National Board on Education Sciences.

The newest nominees are Anthony S. Bryk, the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching at Stanford University and the co-founder of the Consortium on Chicago School Research; Kris D. Gutiérrez , a professor of learning and literacy at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the immediate past president of the American Educational Research Association; Atlanta school superintendent Beverly L. Hall, and Robert A. Underwood, the current president of the University of Guam and a former delegate from that territory to the U.S. House of Representatives.

The board, as you'll recall, was created to offer independent advice to the Institute of Education Sciences, which is the main research arm for the federal education department. But its ranks thinned dramatically in the transition from one administration to another and the board now has just seven of its 15 members.

So whatever happened to the President Obama's first four nominees to the board, which were announced back in February? (That would be Deborah Loewenberg Ball, Adam Gamoran, Bridget Terry Long, and Margaret R. (Peggy) McLeod, in case you've forgotten.) Word is that their nominations have recently been approved by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and sent to the full Senate. You can keep track of the progress of all the President's nominations—if that sort of thing interests you—at this handy website.

UPDATE: IES Director John Easton tells me there are currently six—not seven—sitting board members. That means one more person is left to be nominated.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

One of the trickiest problems in education reform is figuring out how to improve teacher quality on a grand scale. As difficult as that problem may be, however, proposals for solutions abound, some of which are quite controversial. For instance, one idea—and it really is just an idea at the moment—calls for doubling, or even tripling, the percentage of teachers who are dismissed for being least effective at improving students' test scores.

In a new report, researchers at Public Impact, a North Carolina-based research group, do the math on that proposal and some other ideas for resolving the teacher-quality conundrum. They calculate that tripling the percentage of worst teachers who get booted every year—raising it, in other words, from the current level of 2.1 percent to 6.3 percent—would still leave a lot of kids without good teachers. After five years of this, they calculate, 70 percent of the nation's children still lack access to high-quality teachers, which they define as those in the current top quartile.

What about recruiting more good teachers? Well, the Public Impact study looks at that option, too, analyzing the effect of growing the ranks of incoming teachers who spur student gains at the same rates as teachers who are currently in the top quartile from 25 percent to 40 percent. In order to do that, though, authors Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel say, schools across the nation would have to recruit 50,000 more very, very talented teachers, which would be quite a tall order. The New Teacher Project and Teach for America together only yield 8,000 new teachers a year.

The Hassels propose instead to combine a couple of different strategies: Retain the best teachers and extend their reach so that they can have an impact on more students.

The report says schools currently lose about 8 percent of top-quartile teachers each year. Their idea is to cut the turnover rate among top teachers in half and keep up that pace of retention for five years.They figure that practice would raise the percentage of kids served by really terrific teachers from 25 percent to 28 percent.

To extend the reach of those teachers farther, the report has several suggestions. One is to re-organize schools so that the best teachers don't have to waste their time on cafeteria duty and could take on more pupils. Another idea is to use technology, such as distance learning, video, and software, to enable great teachers to reach students in different schools and districts—places, perhaps, where students don't have much access to excellent teaching now.

If you do all of that for five years, plus continue to dismiss the worst performers and recruit good teachers, you could increase the percent of students taught by top-performing teachers to 87 percent, the report concludes.

It's a pretty provocative thought experiment. But, even if you disagree with the plan these researchers are proposing, you have to admit that the calculations add some perspective to a lot of the current prescriptions floating around for improving teacher quality.

UPDATE: When this post first went up, I erroneously reported that 70 percent of students would still have access to highly qualified teachers if the dismissal rate for the nation's worst performing teachers were to double every year for five years. The sentence should have read, as it does now, that 70 percent of children would still lack access to such teachers.

Also, please note that the 87 percent estimate that the Hassels give is derived from retaining the best teachers, extending the reach of high-quality teachers, recruiting better teachers, and dismissing more teachers from the bottom quartile. That's four strategies. An earlier version implied the estimate was based on just three of those strategies.

Mea culpa.

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

The use of "value-added" data to determine which teachers are good, and which aren't, continues to be a hot topic in education. But, regardless of what you think about using student test scores to judge teachers' performance, you have to admit that it would be interesting to know whether the teachers who rack up high value-added test scores tend to be the same teachers that principals hire, anyway.

That's why this study highlighted in the latest edition of the National Council on Teacher Quality Bulletin caught my eye. In it, researchers Donald Boyd, Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb and colleagues mine some long-term data on 81,000 teachers in New York City schools to find out which teachers apply for transfers and which of those applicants get hired. They sorted teachers in terms of their licensing-exam scores, whether they graduated from a selective college, how many years of teaching experience they possessed, and their value-added scores—factors most of which have been linked in studies, in one way or another, to better student outcomes.

It turns out that teachers with impressive preservice qualifications in terms of exam scores and sheepskins from prestigious universities tend to be those who are most likely to want to jump ship. On the other hand, teachers who are judged to be effective based on their students' test performance tend to be more satisfied to stick around a little longer.

When it comes to hiring, though, principals tend to choose teachers who are strong on all four counts—even when they have no idea what the teachers' value-added scores might be.

"The results suggest not only that more-effective teachers prefer to stay in their schools but that when given the opportunity schools are able to identify and hire the best candidates," the researchers conclude.

I think it also suggests that having a sixth sense about teachers should be part of the job description for principals.

The full text of the study can be downloaded for a fee from the National Bureau of Economic Research. It's titled "The Role of Teacher Quality in Retention and Hiring: Using Applications-to-Transfer to Uncover Preferences of Teachers and Schools."

Posted by Debra Viadero at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

USA Today's Greg Toppo rounds up some recent and forthcoming studies on summer reading for an article over the weekend on whether giving books to kids can help lessen 'summer slide.' Summer slide, as most of you undoubtedly know, is the learning loss that occurs over the long, lazy summer break. The especially tricky thing about summer learning loss is that it tends to disproportionately affect low-income students whose families lack the money to send them to summer camp, buy them books, or take them on outings and vacations.

In his article, Toppo shares findings from a soon-to-be-published study by Richard Allington that tracked what happened when educators in 17 high-poverty elementary schools in Florida gave selected students 12 books on the last day of school every year for three years. The selections were drawn from wish lists that students put together. Three years later, the researchers found, the 852 students who received books had "significantly higher" reading scores, experienced less of a summer slide, and read more on their own than the 478 students who didn't get books. The full study is scheduled to be published later this year in Reading Psychology.

"Can a $50 stack of paperback books do as much for a child's academic fortunes as a $3,000 stint in summer school?" Toppo writes. He may be on to something.

Posted by Debra Viadero at 9:23 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend