April 2011 Archives

By guest blogger Mary Ann Zehr
A third of students who graduated from the 8th grade at KIPP's first two middle schools earned a four-year college degree, according to a report released today by the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, network of charter schools. In comparison, the report notes that 30.6 percent of all Americans ages 25 to 29 have earned at least a bachelor's degree.

In addition to those KIPP students who have earned four-year degrees, 5 percent have completed a two-year degree and 19 percent are still persisting in college, KIPP found. The report doesn't say how many students were studied, but Steve Mancini, the public-affairs director for KIPP, said in an email it is 209 students.

KIPP followed students who graduated 10 or more years ago from the KIPP Academy Middle School in Houston and the KIPP Academy Middle School in the Bronx. Today the network runs 99 schools across the nation.

The KIPP report notes that more than 85 percent of the original KIPP students qualified for federal free or reduced-price lunches, and almost all of them were African-American or Latino. It cites data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census that shows only 8.3 percent of students from low-income families have earned a bachelor's degree by their mid-20s.

The bottom line, the report concludes, is that the college completion rate for the KIPP students is four times that of comparable students from low-income families.

But Jeffrey Henig, a professor of political science in education at Teachers College, Columbia University, says that it's problematic to compare the KIPP students with the average low-income student in the United States.

"There is good reason to think that KIPP families, even if they are low-income, are atypical in their interest and concern about education," said Henig in a phone interview today. He said that since the report is based on data from the first two KIPP schools, it's likely that the parents of students at those schools were especially highly motivated. "They may be atypical in that as soon as they heard about this option for KIPP schools, they were first in the door and were unusually interested and concerned about their kids' education."

Henig observed that studies that compare students who were selected for the lottery of a charter school and those who weren't selected provide a better comparison. "Then you are effectively comparing motivated families to motivated families."

KIPP acknowledges in the report that the network's college-completion rate is "far short of our goal." KIPP aspires for the rate to be 75 percent, which it says is roughly the rate for high-income students. To that end, the authors of the report say that KIPP has expanded its network to include primary schools and high schools as well as middle schools. And it supports students after they enter college. The report says: "For students from underserved communities, too many unique obstacles often stand in the way of a college degree; they cannot go it alone."

Research by Princeton, N.J.-based Mathematica Policy Research has found that KIPP students are more likely to be black or Hispanic and from low-income families than students in their surrounding school districts. But they are less likely to have disabilities or be English-language learners. Mathematica also found that students entering KIPP students have lower achievement than the average level for schools across the rest of the district but the same level of achievement as students in the nearby schools that feed into KIPP schools.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 1:40 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The U.S. Census Bureau has released the most detailed information to date about how far Americans get in the education system—and where the education pipeline begins to leak.

According to the new Educational Attainment in the United
States: 2010, in spite of rising pressure for students to attend college, a high school diploma remains the most common end-point of American education. Of the 200 million Americans ages 25 and older in 2010, 87 percent had earned at least a high school diploma or an equivalent degree, up from 84 percent in 2000. Yet that left 26 million adults who never finished high school. Of those that did not complete high school, 1 percent reached 12th grade, 2 percent made it to 11th grade and another 2 percent left after completing a GED.

"The tabulations permit one to see not only the broad levels of educational attainment adults experienced, but also, for instance, if they did not receive a high school diploma, the specific level of schooling they did reach," said Sonia Collazo, a Census Bureau demographer, in a statement on the data release.

The data tables are pretty dry, but there are some interesting nuggets in there. The data support the trend of women's increasing academic careers. While slightly fewer adult women than men overall have earned at least bachelor's degrees, 29.6 percent versus 30.3 percent, among workers the numbers switch, to 37 percent of female versus 35 percent of male workers holding at least a bachelor's degree. That gender gap becomes even starker when you look at younger adults: 36 percent of women ages 25 to 29 held a bachelor's degree or better, versus only 28 percent of men in the same age group.

The Census Bureau gathered the data across about 100,000 households nationwide as part of its annual spring social and economic supplement to the Current Population Survey.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 9:39 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Fans of education data-mining—or comedian Stephen Colbert—take notice: A new research competition with a host of edu-celebrity judges could land you a trip to "Colbert Nation."

DonorsChoose.org, an online charity that pairs teachers' classroom requests for equipment and resources with contributors, has opened its database to researchers and "data-crunchers" with a contest to develop an analysis or application with the best potential to change education. The winner and three friends will attend a taping of the Comedy Central political satire "The Colbert Report," where fake-pundit Colbert will hand over a trophy.

The web site uses a crowd-sourcing system in which teachers request help with a problem or support for a classroom project—everything from a field trip to a history museum to new science lab equipment—and one or more donors pitch in to support the proposal. In more than a decade since the site launched in 2000, it has gathered more than 300,000 project requests from 165,000 teachers at 43,000 public schools. Together, the donations have been worth more than $80 million.

"We do hope these 300,000 classroom projects will be the basis for inspiration and discoveries, but we also hope the researchers will come up with stuff that would never have occurred to our teachers or staff or even our donors," said Charles Best, DonorsChoose's founder and CEO.

The competition will award $1,000 gift cards, trips and other goodies for those who make the most helpful apps or analysis in seven categories. The overall prize will be judged by a big-name panel including Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post, former New York City schools chief Joel Klein, Teach For America Founder Wendy Kopp and venture capitalist Fred Wilson.

It sounds like the competition may make for some interesting tinkering for the research crowd. The DonorsChoose database does not collect the sort of information that would make a straightforward effectiveness study easy; the only post-grant information comes from essays teachers write a few weeks or months after the project, describing what happened. But researchers would have access to a plethora of information about the requested projects, the type of schools and students, and the different donors. The group has also collected specialized information on requests from schools with high concentrations of military children.

Among the examples of research entries suggested by the group:

• Identify trends in geographic requests that could point lawmakers or bigger grant-making foundations to educational needs, such as an increase in teachers requesting science equipment.

• Determine what types of requests tend to generate the most interest and why.

• Develop an application that allows people to see what requests are being made by local schools.

Get creative, and you could be the next in a long line of thoughtful education interviews by one of cable's truthiest pundits.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 8:44 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Rigorous research doesn't have to be limited to randomized controlled trials. The Education Department's research agency and national research organizations are looking for ways to help researchers boost their study rigor when they don't have the money or capacity for a fully randomized experiment.

Researchers Thomas D. Cook of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, and William Shadish of the University of California, Merced, will conduct two workshops this August to help researchers learn ways to improve quasi-experimental design and analysis. The workshops, sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences and the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, will be held on August 8-12 and August 15-19.

Quasi-experimental methods are often used as alternatives to so-called gold-standard research; they also compare a group that receives an intervention to a control group that does not, but participants are not randomly assigned to the groups. For example, regression discontinuity analysis, one increasingly popular quasi-experimental method, uses existing participation cut-off points; students who barely make the cut-off for assignment to an intervention will be statistically similar to students who barely missed the cut-off, allowing researchers to compare similar groups without random assignment. Here's a good in-depth primer on different types of quasi-experimental designs.

This sort of research can be less expensive and easier to organize, but according to SREE, "Several recent analysis of the quality of quasi-experiments in education point to designs and analysis that are generally below the state of the art, so the workshops' principal aim is to improve this state."

The workshops will each accept up to 60 researchers, and are intended to focus mainly on researchers who are planning or working on active quasi-experimental projects. There's more information on the workshops here, and the applications, due June 3, are here.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 4:47 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Incoming teachers believe neuroscience has the potential to improve their practice, according to new research, but there remain a lot of misconceptions about what science of the brain really proves about learning.

Arizona State University researchers Debby Zambo, an associate professor in educational leadership and innovation, and Ronald Zambo, an associate professor in teacher preparation, queried two groups of teachers—215 pre-service and 63 in-service teachers—on their thoughts about the value of neuroscience in educational practice as well as whether neuroscience findings should be included in teacher pre-service education and professional development.

The results, presented at the American Educational Research Association convention in New Orleans last week, showed that teachers generally approved of new science that can improve their practice, but they tended to confuse legitimate findings with commercial promises that simply mentioned neuroscience but weren't really based on research. Moreover, many associated popular but discredited theories with neuroscience.

"Fifty-seven percent believed in [neuroscience] wholeheartedly, believed it could answer questions now debated in education—but they also believed learning styles were part of it," Debby Zambo said, referring to a widely scientifically discredited theory about types of learning. (See this Psychological Science briefing.pdf for a good review of the evidence.)

One in four teachers took a more cautious stance, saying they thought neuroscience showed promise but needed to be better translated into actual instructional practices teachers can follow. Just under one in five teachers rejected it outright, with many pointing to flimsy science under some commercial products to say that the emerging research too easily could be skewed.

Yet throughout the sample, Ms. Zambo said teachers got most of their information about neuroscience research from popular media, up to and including The Oprah Show and Dr. Phil television shows. Teachers reported that they already included neuroscience in their instruction because they used practices such as teaching with music or taking stretch breaks.

Ronald Zambo followed up the interviews with a separate study of 267 pre- and in-service teachers who were given a fake scientific article on learning research. One third of the articles include a graph, another third included a picture of an fMRI image, and the final third included only text. He found that teachers were more likely to believe the text was legitimate if it included a picture of an fMRI, he found, but teachers remained cautious about basing instructional practice on a single example.

The results pointed to the need for greater explanation of emerging research in neuroscience, the Zambos said, both to identify true effective practices and weed out the fakes. "I don't think we're quite there in clarity in teachers' minds," Mr. Zambo said.

These are very small studies themselves, and not yet published, but they do make me wonder why effective research takes so long to filter down to real classroom practice when educators seem incredibly eager to stay current in their field. Have you seen neuroscience affecting classroom practices? What education myths seem to be the most resistant to new evidence? Let me know what you are seeing out there.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 4:16 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Sean P. "Jack" Buckley, the new commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, is determined to keep state longitudinal data systems evolving amid state budget and staff constraints, he told participants at the American Educational Research Association convention in New Orleans.

The Education Department provided $500 million in grants for states to build up their data systems under the fiscal stimulus law, but, Mr. Buckley said, "While we were shoving all that money out the door, we did not set common education data standards for what we wanted to see. There's been a lot of money spent on building these data warehouses and not a lot of money spent on helping people to do anything useful with them."

In the past year, NCES and state data officials developed common data standards to put the various state systems on a common footing. This year, Mr. Buckley said NCES would provide more training and guidance for states and districts on how to work with researchers. "States don't have the money to do what they want to do, much less answer the phone from researchers who want them to anonymize their data so they can use it," he said. "We want to help."

NCES is busier than usual this year, he said, with a packed schedule of 15 test reports due from the National Assessment of Educational Progress—including a high school transcript study due out tomorrow. Mr. Buckley said he also is putting together a panel with the National Academies to review and finalize NAEP's achievement levels. When the Nation's Report Card first rolled out, the benchmarks for each proficiency level were set on a trial basis, with the understanding that they would be tested out and finalized, but "the 'trial' status of the achievement levels is now probably about 20 years old," he said. "It's a little embarrassing that we are still saying that."

NCES will also try to benchmark NAEP internationally this year. Because states are also scheduled to take the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS, this year, Mr. Buckley said he plans to have a sample of students take a selection of items from both tests to allow NCES to link the two and provide better feedback to states on how the NAEP results may predict their students' international competitiveness—something state education and business leaders have been requesting.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 2:55 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

As my colleague Alyson Klein has been reporting over at Politics K-12, Congress agreed to a basic deal last week to prevent a government shutdown, but there was no specific language available to give the details. Now there is, and it looks like the regional eductional labs can finally breathe a bit.

Jim Kohlmoos of the Knowledge Alliance, which represents the labs, spotted the year-end continuing resolution filed in the wee hours this morning. It provides $57.65 million for the labs for this year—$12 million less than the fiscal 2010 levels but a whole lot better than nothing—and authorizes their contract to be extended for up to 12 months from the time they would expire. That gives the Institute of Education Sciences enough time to choose a new round of labs, provided it ever officially opens the competition. (We're still waiting on that request for proposals.)

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 7:49 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Math may be considered a universal language, but linguistic difficulties still often hamstring English-language learners' ability to demonstrate what they know on standardized assessments. A new study from the University of Georgia, presented at the American Educational Research Association conference here in New Orleans, suggests that including appropriate graphics with test questions can help English-language learners translate their math skills, even when there are no other accommodations available.

Albert M. Jimenez, researcher in evaluation measurement and statistics at the University of Georgia and a former math teacher, partnered with a large suburban school district in the South to evaluate test items for the district's standardized interim assessments for grades 3-8. About 400 of the district's nearly 3,000 students in those grades are ELLs.

Mr. Jimenez studied student performance item by item on nine math exams across the grades. He found that out of 270 test questions, only 70 included a useful graphic. The graphic might be a rectangle labeled with measurements for a question asking for the area of a swimming pool, for example. The other questions either had no graphic at all or a graphic that had nothing to do with the question; for instance, a word problem on golf accompanied by a picture of a golf ball.

Most standardized tests allow ELLs to use accommodations such as reading the questions aloud or using a bilingual dictionary, but Mr. Jimenez said, the students he studied received no accommodations "so I was able to look at this in kind of a vacuum."

English-proficient students outperformed ELLs on questions without a useful graphic by 7.9 percent. Yet when ELLs had a useful graphic, that gap closed to only 2.8 percent, and ELLs outperformed English-proficient students on 28 graphic questions.

That makes sense, said Rachel R. Prosser, a multicultural education researcher at the University of Colorado-Boulder. In a study presented at AERA of 78 students in grades 6-8, half of whom were ELLs, she found that even high-level English learners often mentally switch to their native language when working through concepts in a science multiple-choice test, to communicate words and concepts they were not yet certain of in English. She is now studying whether students are better able to understand and communicate science test questions which include a graphic element.

"We are interested in seeing data of students' interpretation of a visual item," she said.

Mr. Jimenez is conducting additional studies to determine whether the unconnected graphics help or hinder English-language learners' ability to solve math problems and if the useful graphics help without other accommodations at different grades.

The full reports are not yet published, so I can't include a copy here, but you can find the abstracts at AERA's web site or contact Mr. Jimenez at albertmjimenez@gmail.com.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 8:28 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The American Educational Research Association is calling for Congress to decouple education statistics and education research in the next reauthorization of the Institute of Education Sciences, arguing that the National Center for Education Statistics should have the same equal, independent status as the Education Department's research agency.

AERA released its recommendations for the reauthorization of IES at AERA's annual convention on Sunday, calling for lawmakers to give the IES director more control over the agency's research budget and to charge IES to study how its research is used. The research group's top recommendation is to return NCES to equal status with IES, as it was before Congress passed the Education Sciences Reform Act in 2002, which created IES.

"The statistics program now has to be approved by the director of IES, who is not a statistician—and no reason he would be a statistician—and by an advisory board that has no requirement that there be anyone with a knowledge of statistics on it," said Gerald E. Sroufe, AERA's government relations director.

Kenji Hakuta, the chairman of AERA's reauthorization task force and an education professor at Stanford University, argued that the federal education statistics agency predates the Education Department's education research projects and has different goals and methods than education research. The group is calling for NCES to develop its own quality standards and be given clearer responsibility for working with states to develop their longitudinal data systems.

In addition to asking that NCES report directly to the Education Secretary, rather than to the IES director, AERA called for Congress to reinstate the advisory board that supported NCES before it joined IES, and to make the NCES commissioner an honorary member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which supervises the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

While adamant that NCES should come out from under the IES umbrella, AERA voiced support for the the decision to bring in the National Center for Special Education Research, which was previously housed in the Education Department's program offices. However, members argued Congress should ensure the center, which still operates under an acting commissioner, finally gets an official leader.

In addition to its recommendations for NCES, the task force is calling for Congress to provide more money for IES, equal to .5 percent of the Education Department's budget during the next decade, and to give the IES director more authority over which research projects get funded and what research methods can be used. As it stands, much of IES's research is directed my specific programs approved by Congress.

The research group deliberately did not include legislative language for the recommendations, in part because it is not certain whether IES will be updated under its current law, the Education Sciences Reform Act—which has been overdue for reauthorization since 2008—or will be wrapped into the next authorization of the larger Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The group has also wanted to limit Congress's role in determining small daily decisions at IES.

"Some of the problems you might hear about in the [current ESRA] legislation are administrative matters that wouldn't be dealt with very well by legislation," Mr. Hakuta said.

However, AERA Executive Director Felice J. Levine said the group would put out a separate series of briefs on ESEA reauthorization later this year, presenting the research base for various parts of the law.

The reauthorization recommendations will be posted on AERA's Web site.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 7:33 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

By guest blogger Mary Ann Zehr

The number of late-arriving students as a proportion of enrollment at KIPP schools is similar to that of local traditional public schools, according to a working paper released today by the Princeton, N.J.-based Mathematica Policy Research Inc.

"To be sure, KIPP's success is not simply a mirage that is based on the results of a select number of high achievers who persist through 8th grade," the researchers write in the working paper.

"Nonetheless," they say, "student flows into and out of KIPP schools remain of interest. Funders and policymakers wonder how much of the student population KIPP might grow to serve, and critics ask whether KIPP's results depend on excluding students who are the most disadvantaged or the most difficult to serve, either in admissions or subsequent attrition."

But while the Mathematica researchers found that the overall number of late arrivals as a proportion of enrollment at 22 KIPP middle schools is the same as in schools in their local school districts, they also found that KIPP admits a substantial number of late entrants in 6th grade, and fewer in 7th and 8th grades.

The researchers, who based their findings on student-level data, said they will continue to examine the flows of students into and out of KIPP middle schools. For example, they will examine the characteristics of late-arriving KIPP students separately from those who arrive in 5th grade. KIPP, the Knowledge Is Power Program, has nearly 100 public charter schools across the country, most of which serve children in grades 5-8.

A 2010 study by Mathematica found large, positive achievement effects at KIPP schools even when students who had left the schools were counted as part of the original KIPP group.

But a study using aggregate data sets, not student-level data, conducted by researchers at Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, and released last month, raised questions about whether KIPP is serving the same kinds of students as are traditional public schools. That study contended that 40 percent of the black males KIPP enrolls leave between grades 6 and 8. "KIPP is doing a great job of educating students who persist, but not all who come," said Gary J. Miron, a professor of evaluation, measurement, and research at Western Michigan University and the lead researcher for the study, in an interview here in our offices at Education Week last month.

In the working paper, the Mathematica researchers released for the first time attrition rates for different racial and ethnic subgroups of students. They found that KIPP schools actually have lower rates of attrition for black males when compared with traditional schools.

"Our data is showing that KIPP loses black males overall at a lower rate than the local district schools," said Christina Clark Tuttle, a senior researcher for Mathematica, in a phone interview today.

Miron acknowledged last month that he couldn't prove that the overall shrinkage of cohorts of students from grades 6 to 8 was solely because of students leaving KIPP schools. (A Mathematica researcher suggested it could also be because of retention of students.) Miron compared the proportion of students leaving KIPP "districts," a group of schools at a particular location, with the proportion of students in the entire surrounding school district.

The Mathematica researchers, by contrast, compared student-level data from individual KIPP schools with other individual schools in their surrounding traditional public school districts.

In a phone interview today, Miron said that the new Mathematica findings don't contradict those of his study because of how he's comparing KIPP clusters of schools with entire school districts. Both kinds of urban schools lose a lot of black males. But, what's different with the traditional public school districts is that the students who leave one school move to another within that same district. They may move at any point of the year and thus disrupt classrooms where they are arriving. "You have these kids constantly coming into the class. The schools can't say, 'Sorry we're not taking any students.' "

By contrast, Miron says, KIPP turns students away in the 7th and 8th grades.

The Mathematica working paper also reiterated findings from its earlier study, that KIPP students are more likely to be black or Hispanic and have lower incomes than students in the surrounding school districts, but they are less likely to be English-language learners or students with disabilities.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 5:20 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The disquieting side effect of our increasingly detailed longitudinal studies of students is we keep finding warning signs of a future graduation derailment earlier and earlier in a child's school years.

Robert Balfanz of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore found those warning signs as early as 6th grade— chronic absences, poor behavior, failing math or language arts, which when put together lead to a 90 percent risk that a student won't graduate on time.

A study to be released this morning at the American Educational Research Association convention here in New Orleans presents an even earlier warning sign: A student who can't read on grade level by 3rd grade is four times less likely to graduate by age 19 than a child who does read proficiently by that time. Add poverty to the mix, and a student is 13 times less likely to graduate on time than his or her proficient, wealthier peer.

"Third grade is a kind of pivot point," said Donald J. Hernandez, the study's author and a sociology professor at Hunter College, at the City University of New York. "We teach reading for the first three grades and then after that children are not so much learning to read but using their reading skills to learn other topics. In that sense if you haven't succeeded by 3rd grade it's more difficult to [remediate] than it would have been if you started before then."

Mr. Hernandez analyzed the reading scores and later graduation rates of 3,975 students born between 1979 and 1989 in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979. He found 16 percent overall did not have a diploma by age 19, but students who struggled with reading in early elementary school grew up to comprise 88 percent of those who did not receive a diploma. That made low reading skills an even stronger predictor than spending at least a year in poverty, which affected 70 percent of the students who didn't graduate. In fact, 89 percent of students in poverty who did read on level by 3rd grade graduated on time, statistically no different from the students who never experienced poverty but did struggle with reading early on.

By contrast, more than one in four poor, struggling readers did not graduate, compared with only 2 percent of good readers from wealthier backgrounds. Mr. Hernandez found that gaps in graduation rates among white, black and Hispanic students closed once poverty and reading proficiency were taken into account. "If they are proficient in reading, they basically have the same rate of graduation" above 90 percent, Mr. Hernandez said. "If they did not reach proficiency, that's when you see these big gaps emerge."

For some children in the sample, Mr. Hernandez was able to track reading scores as early as 2nd grade, but not enough to do a separate analysis. It's interesting to me that since we don't do much testing before grade three, the first accountability point under NCLB, it's difficult to say exactly when these reading gaps emerge.

Mr. Hernandez is working on further studies on the nuances of these findings, including the effects of concentrated poverty—often associated with low-performing schools—and factors that make some students more resilient to poverty and early academic difficulty.

The study, "Double Jeopardy: How Third-Grade Reading Skills and Poverty Influence High School Graduation," will be posted by the Annie E. Casey Foundation here.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 9:36 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In its effort to clarify student data privacy rules for researchers and education officials alike, the U.S. Department of Education proposed several changes to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, on Thursday and named its first chief privacy officer.

"Data should only be shared with the right people for the right reasons," U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a statement on the proposals. "We need common-sense rules that strengthen privacy protections and allow for meaningful uses of data. The initiatives announced today will help us do just that."

The department proposes the following changes to FERPA:

• Tighter enforcement: In the past, department officials said there has been confusion about whether agencies that received permission to work with student data—but did not collect it or work with the children directly—could be held to the same standards for protecting students' privacy. The new rules would require that everyone who has access to student data, even through an "exception" in FERPA, would still be held to the law. Those who fail to meet the requirements could see their grants withheld or be barred from student data-sharing for five years.

• Directory information protection: Rather than simply categorizing something as directory information, the department proposed that schools be allowed to have directories for limited uses, to limit the ability of marketers or identity thieves from accessing the data. For example, a school could collect data for a yearbook, like a student's name, grade, photo, and activities, but restrict that use to the yearbook itself.

• State representation: FERPA already allows districts to enter into written agreements with researchers to use data to evaluate programs, but the department also would allow states to create such agreements on behalf of multiple districts. This would allow state officials to research the effectiveness of a statewide kindergarten reading program, for example, or to compare the implementation of math coaches among districts.

• P-20 tracking: In keeping with the department's push for better college and career readiness information, it also would allow high school administrators to share student achievement data to track their graduates' academic success in college.

In addition, the department launched a new division devoted to "responsible stewardship, collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of information at the national level within the Education Department," and will supervise the department's existing technical assistance for states and districts.

Its new chief, Kathleen Styles, comes from the Census Bureau, where she headed the Office of Analysis and Executive Support, which manages "confidentiality, data management, the Freedom of Information Act, privacy policy, and coordination for the acquisition and management of data from other agencies" for the nation's largest data system. She has 17 years of experience as a public and private attorney and is apparently "passionate about privacy."

Back in November, I reported that the department had launched a new Privacy Technical Assistance Center, housed at the National Center for Education Statistics, to answer states' questions on privacy issues.

Education Department officials told me that PTAC has already gotten a lot of questions from states and districts, not just on FERPA requirements, but about more practical problems associated with the plethora of new state longitudinal data systems sprouting in the last few years: How to keep data secure, what policies to put into place to govern the use of the data, and how to safely collect and report the new information required by the fiscal-stimulus law.

The technical assistance center is developing a privacy toolkit for states, including a checklist for data privacy policies and a list of frequently asked questions. It also is coordinating regional visits and training for state officials who are building privacy protections for their states' longitudinal databases. It has released a series of briefs on common privacy issues, such as definitions and best practices, as well.

PTAC is also looking for feedback from states and districts about how to define what counts as "reasonable methods" for data security; it plans to release guidance on best practices in that area later.

The full FERPA proposal will be posted here this morning, and readers can submit comments for the next 45 days. The department hopes to release final rules by the end of the year.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 7:01 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In honor of April 1st, I thought research aficionados might enjoy some award-winning studies of critical education issues, including:

• The pitfalls of getting students to pay close attention.

• Why fingernails on chalkboards remain one of the most bloodcurdling sounds we hear.

• Damage to reading comprehension caused by reading someone's incorrectly highlighted version of the text.

• The value of differentiating instruction for all learners, even those at the well below basic level.

• And, my favorite, one reason education research often fails to affect policy.

Happy April Fool's Day!

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend