August 2011 Archives

President Obama today nominated labor economist Alan B. Krueger to be chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, as part of the White House's strategy to boost job creation. He is a Princeton University economist who has been vocal on some hot-button education topics, from class sizes to vouchers.

Krueger served as assistant secretary for economic policy and chief economist at the U.S. Treasury Department from 2009-10, and was chief economist for the U.S. Labor Department from 1994-95. He also served as chief economist at the Council for Economic Education, which promotes economics and financial literacy in schools, from 2003-09.

While his work has generally centered on labor issues, he has studied the effectiveness of various education issues and the impact of education choices on students' long-term earnings. Among the studies:

• College attendance: In June 2011, Krueger found that for black and Hispanic students and for those from less-educated families, attending a highly selective college significantly improved their lifetime earnings, while college selectivity had little effect on the long-term outcomes for other students. In a 2004 analysis, he had found that without affirmative action admissions policies, increasing the number of black students at the most selective colleges will require substantial narrowing of the K-12 test score gap between black and white students.

• Vouchers: In a 2003 study of New York City's voucher program, Krueger found, contrary to other studies at the time, no significant advantage for students using vouchers to attend private schools.

• Class size: In a 2001 study, he found that small class sizes in kindergarten through 3rd grade reduced the black-white achievement gap.

"As one of this country's leading economists, Alan has been a key voice on a vast array of economic issues for more than two decades," President Obama said in a statement. "Alan understands the difficult challenges our country faces, and I have confidence that he will help us meet those challenges as one of the leaders on my economic team."

If the Senate confirms Mr. Krueger, he will replace outgoing CEA chairman Austan Goolsbee, who is returning to the University of Chicago.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

As part of a move to simplify grant and other education regulations, the U.S. Department of Education said it expects to have final revisions of data privacy regulations for the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act out by the end of the year.

In a rules analysis report released last week, the Education Department said it had received about 274 comments on the proposed privacy rules it released in April. (Privacy chief Kathleen Styles already noted that this was more than double the public response to the FERPA rules released in 2008.) The changes would, among other things, allow states to enter into data-sharing agreements with researchers on behalf of multiple districts, and would hold anyone who works with student data to the same privacy protection standards required of the agencies that collect it.

The department also vowed by the end of the year to update research and reporting rules for its discretionary grants to eliminate obsolete and outdated procedures. Researchers and educators can expect several changes to the federal Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval, or EDGAR, system, including:

• New rules on how grantees must collect data to demonstrate their performance;
• Revised selection criteria that peer reviewers use to evaluate grant applications; and
• New procedures for grantees to choose research sites and evaluators.

The department expects to complete a draft proposal of the new rules for public comment early next spring.

(And a hat-tip to Jim Kohlmoos of the Knowledge Alliance for pointing out some of the buried details in the report.)

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 8:52 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Back in February, I wrote about emerging research into relational aggression—the gossip and rumor-mongering that can happen even in plain sight of teachers.

This sort of "hidden" bullying has remained a hot topic for educators as school comes back into session, and I joined a recent conversation with Karin Frey, a University of Washington bullying researcher, and Stan Davis, founder of the group Stop Bullying Now, on the social dynamics of harassment and even bullying among friends.

Examining relational aggression, as opposed to direct physical violence has thrown into relief a mistaken notion of bullies as hulking misanthropes lurking at the back of the classroom. While some are, Frey said, "others are extremely socially skilled and very good at hiding their intentions and actions from teachers. ...Those kids are rarely problems in class."

You can hear more insights about what this bullying looks like and how educators can confront it via BAM radio's Body, Mind, and Child show.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 2:01 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A year after the Education Department launched its Ed Data Express Web site to help researchers and the public access the mountains of data it collects, the department today released a new version of the site with considerably more data analysis bells and whistles.

The site includes detailed information on state and National Assessment of Educational Progress assessments, school accountability reports, education budget information, and program reporting data, among other information.

The upgrades are intended to help visitors navigate the information more visually. New tools allow you to map student demographic data across states, or set up trend lines to track graduation rate changes across multiple years.

In what might be most helpful for researchers, the new site also includes an analysis tool to view multiple data elements in context. In my initial puttering around the site, I found this one pretty useful. It's easy to look at the number of schools that made adequate yearly progress in 2009, say, when their state had only 25 percent of its English-language learners proficient. (For those interested, the ELL student group makes a big difference; nine states had 300 or more schools in improvement when 25 percent of the ELL population was proficient.) The tool also highlights areas where state data is less comprehensive, such as the achievement of former English language learners who have attained proficiency.

As a frequent Tweeter, I also like the new ability to share data from the site directly through social networking sites, including Twitter and Facebook.

ED expects to release a third update this winter, including more detailed snapshots of state data. ""By providing parents and educators with more robust and interactive ways to explore education data, we are supporting their ability to understand, evaluate and improve how we educate our children," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement on the release.

For readers who are familiar with the National Center for Education Statistics site's data tools, how do you think this compares?

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 3:36 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The National Center for Education Statistics has released a back-to-school bonanza for education data junkies, in the form of new state-level information on education reforms.

The new tables cover standards and assessments, teacher and administrator criteria and professional development, and high school graduation criteria and alternative certifications.

Among the tidbits:
• As of 2011, 42 states offer a K-12 technical program leading to an industry-recognized certificate or credential as part of their high school diploma.
• Twenty-two states now test teachers on their teaching performance as part of their initial teaching certification, up by just one from 2010.
• Thirty-two states require new principals to complete a supervised internship before being licensed, while 19 require them to participate in a mentoring or induction program.

Happy data-crunching!

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

If you needed more evidence of incentives for early literacy, a new study published in the latest issue of Cognitive Science finds that children as young as 2 can understand complex language structure and grammar—even if they can't yet articulate what they know.

United Kingdom researchers at the Max Planck Child Study Center at the University of Manchester and the University of Liverpool Child Language Study Center developed a series of pictures of cartoon animals involved in various activities, either together or separately. They then showed sets of pictures to 86 children, ages 2 to 4, accompanied by a sentence involving a made-up verb, such as "blick" or "dax."

Caroline Rowland, a co-author of the study and psychologist at the University of Liverpool, said using the picture-matching tests can help researchers determine nuances of children's language ability that are harder to parse out using grammar tests or the commonly used eye-gaze measures of infants' and toddlers' attention paid to unusual words.

"We've done some eye-gaze studies ourselves, but we wanted to see if we could actually get the children to make a decision, a behavioral choice," Rowland told me.

The researchers found that children as young as 2 years old could point to the picture that corresponded with the made-up verb, using grammatical cues in the sentence. For example, for a sentence like, "The duck is daxing the bunny," the children successfully pointed to a picture of a duck pressing down on a bunny's head, rather than a picture of both the duck and bunny waving. However, only children older than 3 successfully identified sentences which used a joint action with an intransitive verb, such as linking the sentence, "The duck and bunny are blicking," with a picture of the two characters kicking their legs.

"The beginnings of grammar acquisition start much earlier than previously thought, but more importantly, it demonstrates that children can use grammar to help them work out the meaning of new words, particularly those that don't correspond to concrete objects such as 'know' and 'love'," Rowland said in a statement on the experiment. "Children can use the grammar of sentences to narrow down possible meanings, making it much easier for them to learn."

Rowland told me that Claire H. Noble, study lead author at Manchester, plans to follow up the experiment with more studies probing how children learn intransitive language, while Rowland and her colleagues at the University of Liverpool are replicating this experiment with children of other languages, particularly Welsh-speaking children in Liverpool and Cantonese-speaking children in Hong Kong.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

After a more than two-year search, the Institute of Education Sciences has finally named Deborah L. Speece as commissioner of the National Center for Special Education Research.

"Scientists who claim special education as their field of study are among the finest scholars in the country," Speece said in a statement on the appointment, "and I am eager to work with them, the special education community, and our colleagues in sister disciplines who are interested in addressing the challenges faced by children and youth with disabilities, their families, and their teachers."

Speece comes on leave from the University of Maryland's college of education, where she is a special education professor and a 27-year expert on disability classification and inclusion of students with disabilities in regular classes. She had previously served on IES grant review panels and on NCSER's Technical Working Group for the Evaluation of Response to Intervention Strategies in Elementary Reading.

Speece comes at a challenging time for NCSER, whose budget has been cut this year by $20 million, down to $51 million. Yet Easton told me he's "delighted" by Speece's six-year appointment and hoping Speece's breadth and experience will help the center reach out to promising special education researchers. "In spite of the fact that the NCSER budget was reduced, there is still room for increasing the number of grants that we fund," he said. "We want to fund as many high-quality grants as we can."

So far the response has been good from the research community; Speece serves on the editorial boards of eight education research journals including Exceptional Children and the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness.

"The long-vacant position dating back to the Bush Administration will be filled by a stellar, highly regarded special education researcher," Jim Kohlmoos, the president of the Knowledge Alliance, which represents researchers and the regional educational labs, told me. "Getting a person of Deborah Speece's caliber and leadership was well worth the wait. She will bring yet another strong and knowledgeable voice to the IES leadership team."

(Read a little more about the appointment at the On Special Education blog.)

IES' leadership team won't get much of a breather, though. As of August 15, Lynn Okagaki stepped down after nine years as commissioner of IES' National Center for Education Research to become dean of the University of Delaware's college of education and human development. Associate Commissioner Elizabeth Albro has stepped in as acting commissioner, but IES is in the middle of a nationwide search for a replacement. Easton told me so far, IES "did not get an overwhelming response, but we did get some response."

"It takes time to find the person and it takes time to figure out the details of the appointment," Easton said. "It takes a whole range of skills to be able to do this. The kind of people we want, you have to have a person who is just at the right place in their career where they are willing to leave the work they love, work they've been very successful in, to come here and put their own work on hold for awhile. So we're asking a lot of these people."

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Here's a study guaranteed to make your Monday morning a little cheerier: A pilot project sponsored by Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University found 2nd graders who read aloud to a dog slightly increased both their reading ability and enjoyment of reading, compared to students who read with adults or peers.

Working under the premise that struggling readers often take a hit to their self-esteem and withdraw from group reading activities, a team of researchers led by Cummings veterinary student Dawn Lenihan studied the Reading Education Assistance Dogs, or READ program, which has children read aloud to therapy animals.

Researchers randomly assigned 18 children to participate in five 30-minute weekly summer read-aloud sessions at the Grafton, Mass. public library, either with a dog or with a human volunteer. They found children reading with the dogs were more likely to complete the program. By the end of the five-week study period, the children reading with dogs recognized slightly more words per minute than those who read with adults, based on the Curriculum Based Measurement for reading, and also had slight improvements in their enjoyment of reading based on the Elementary Reading Attitude Survey. By contrast, the children reading aloud with adults showed a decline of interest in reading over the same time.

The Associated Press published a more in-depth look at the program, including the apparent enthusiasm of its four-legged research assistants:

"When we come in as a group and the dogs are there waiting with their handlers, dogs' ears are up and forward, dogs' tails are wagging. Dogs are smiling," [Grafton's Children and Youth Services Librarian Amanda] Diurba said. "When it's over, the children leave. Ears are back. Tails are down. Nobody's smiling. The dogs love it as much as kids do. You can see the difference."

Considering the tiny sample size, it's impossible to draw any significance from the findings, but they do make sense in the broader base of research on using service animals to reduce stress. Study co-author Lisa M. Freeman, Cummings clinical sciences professor, told the AP that children seemed to be more relaxed and self-confident reading aloud to dogs than to adults or peers. Maybe the dogs aren't so quick to bark out corrections?

The pilot was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, and I'd be interested to see whether a scaled-up (furred up?) version of this study can produce more significant reading improvements. That would be enough to give the most curmudgeonly reading researcher the warm fuzzies.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

As states ponder the evolution of assessments for accountability under the No Child Left Behind Act, experts are weighing in on what national and international tests can tell us about what American kids are learning.

A study released by Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance and Education Next yesterday compares U.S. students who performed at or above the proficient level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (generally dubbed the "Nation's Report Card") in math to the 15-year-olds tested through the Program for International Student Assessment, administered by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Researchers developed a crosswalk study of a sample of the graduating class of 2011, which participated in the 2007 NAEP as 8th graders and in the 2009 PISA as 15-year-olds.

Researchers led by Paul E. Peterson, director of Harvard University's Program on Education Policy and Governance, found that America's math gap is not limited to particular student groups. For example, 42 percent of non-Hispanic white students scored proficient in math, well above the 15 percent of Hispanic and 11 percent of African-American students. Yet internationally, the percentage of math-proficient American white students trailed that of all students in 16 countries, including Japan, Germany, and Canada. In Korea and Finland, the proficiency gap between white American students and all students in the countries exceeded 25 percentage points.

"The U.S. ranks number 1 in self-esteem when it comes to math and number 32 in performance," Peterson said yesterday during a briefing on the study. "I think the U.S. has not figured out how to motivate students to learn mathematics."

Marshall "Mike" Smith of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching said he thinks policymakers should be concerned, not just by differences in America's rankings on international tests, but by what those differences mean in terms of what is taught in American schools.

"Different tests require different generalization and transfer of knowledge," Smith said during a discussion at the Knowledge Alliance's annual Big Ideas conference in Queenstown, Md., last week. Students' performance on state content assessments tracks most closely to their state standards and curricula, so improvements show up more quickly on these tests. NAEP is broader and requires more extended response to problems, but still hews closely to the subject curricula.

"There's almost no transfer of knowledge; you're doing what you've done before and what you've been prepared to do," he said.

By contrast, Smith said, PISA requires students to transfer their knowledge from one subject area to another and use it in new ways.

For example, the Harvard study highlighted two sample math questions at the proficient level:

• From NAEP (8th grade):
"Three tennis balls are to be stacked on top of another in a cylindrical can. The radius of each tennis ball is 3 centimeters. To the nearest whole centimeter, what should be the minimum height of the can? Explain why you chose the height that you did. Your explanation should include a diagram." This is followed by five choices.

• From PISA (15-year-olds)
"Mark (from Sidney, Australia) and Hans (from Berlin, Germany) often communicate with each other using 'chat' on the Internet. They have to log on to the Internet at the same time to be able to use chat. To find a suitable time to chat, Mark looked up a chart of world times and found the following: [In clock form] Greenwich, 12 Midnight; Berlin, 1 a.m.; Sydney, 10 a.m. At 7 p.m. in Sydney, what time is it in Berlin?"

In a briefing on the Harvard study, Peterson also noted that the NAEP test "is more of a pencil-and-paper test in mathematics,... whereas the PISA test is more taking real-world questions and trying to come up with answers to them."

That should be what really keeps educators up at night, Smith said. "PISA asks you to do something different from what you're being asked to do on these other tests: different kinds of items, a different way of structuring the items, and a different way of thinking about them. It's not a good sign for American students not to be able to transfer their knowledge from one setting to another setting."

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Here's a happy pile of data on which to start the weekend: According to new Census Bureau data, more young children are reading with their families and more older children are taking advanced courses than were a decade ago.

The Bureau's newly released "A Child's Day: 2009," provides a set of 30 detailed indicators taken from the Survey of Income and Program Participation on the well-being of American children ages 18 and younger, disaggregated by age, income level, ethnic background and other characteristics. The data tables are pretty dense, but they include some promising tidbits, including:

• In 2009, more than half of children ages 1 to 5 were read to by their families at least seven times a week. There is still a reading gap between families in poverty and those better off—poor families read to their preschool children about six times a week on average, compared to nearly eight times a week on average for families at or above 200 percent of the poverty line. Family reading has been flat for middle and upper-income kids since 1998, but the number of poor families reading with their children shot up 37 percent during that time.

• More children took advanced courses in school. From 1998 to 2009, the percentage of children ages 12 to 17 in gifted classes increased from 21 percent to 27 percent. Among children in poverty, the percentage in gifted classes rose from 15.5 percent to 17 percent.

• After school and on weekends, young children—those ages 6 to 11—are more likely than older children to participate in academic enrichment, such as music, language or computers. This hasn't changed since 1998, but more elementary-age children in poverty participated in academic enrichment in 2009—21 percent, compared to 18 percent in 1998.

There's a lot of great information to dig into with these data, and I'll be exploring them in more depth over the weekend. Readers, what strikes you about our changing profile of American children?

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 1:12 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

On Tuesday, I reported on a new analysis from the Center on Education Policy that found rising math and reading scores and proficiency levels for students participating in federal Title I poverty education programs in many states.

Commenter LaToshaDC was typical of those skeptical of the findings, writing:

Is this based on NAEP data or state tests[?] I mean most of those state tests are so easy my cat could pass. I don't think passing a state test is an indicator that Title I is working for low income students. It's probably more of an indicator that those states are gaming the system.

There have been numerous criticisms over the years that student progress is as much due to states and districts gaming the system as legitimate student learning. In this case, the National Center for Education Statistics has just come out with a new analysis on the rigor of state proficiency levels that backs up her concern.

As my colleague Steve Sawchuk reports, while many states lowered their test cut-off scores for proficiency levels from 2005 to 2007, eight states increased the rigor of 21 different tests from 2007 to 2009. Even so, by 2009, 35 states still set their benchmark for "proficient" below what the Nation's Report Card considers "basic" understanding of math and reading, according to the NCES report. While the NCES study focuses on 2007 to 2009, it also covers trends since 2005, while the CEP study looks at three-year trends from 2002 to 2009.

Moreover, it specifically notes that, "Changes in achievement between 2005 and 2009 in state tests are not corroborated by changes in achievement measured by NAEP."

If we look specifically at the 19 states CEP studied in its analysis, a dozen of them were found to have higher reading achievement in 4th or 8th grade from 2007-2009, compared to NAEP scores for the same period, suggesting possible score inflation. By contrast, five states—Colorado, Kentucky, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Utah— had NAEP reading scores that backed up their state test gains.

Granted, the CEP and NCES reports are not directly comparable. CEP's findings are based on state accountability reporting under No Child left Behind rather than on the NAEP, which disaggregates student performance by income based on a student's free or reduced-price lunch eligibility—an indicator that may not be exactly the same as eligibility for the Title I program. Moreover, CEP found achievement gaps between low-income and wealthier students—the groups that would be compared in NAEP—were larger than the gaps between Title I and non-Title I students, suggesting that NAEP may be looking at a different set of students than those served by Title I.

Still, at a time when lawmakers are trying to determine what Title I, the largest federal education program in American history, should look like after the next authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the contrast between these reports suggests researchers need better ways of differentiating the tools to judge a program's effectiveness from those intended to track student progress.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Queenstown, Md.
For the research and policy watchers at the Knowledge Alliance's Big Ideas meeting winding up here today, sea changes were building in education even before the economic malaise that has tightened education budgets.

The annual gathering of about 80 policymakers and national research group leaders focused on how education research can ease the burden for schools of limited resources, changing student demographics, and rapidly shifting technology.

Mark Elgart, the founder and CEO of Advance Education, an education accreditation group, noted that 25 state education chiefs took their positions within the last 15 months, and the need for technology in schools has become more urgent to improve students' career readiness just as funding for infrastructure and training is drying up.

"We're in the midst of a tremendous period of uncertainty," he said. "Some organizations are becoming static ... to wait out the storm, but others are in development mode to be ready to jump when it starts to move again."

Netty Legters of Johns Hopkins University's Center for the Social Organization of Schools said she thinks education researchers need to become better grounded in daily classroom practice to keep up with changes in the field. Educators and policy makers frequently argue that a study intended to answer a problem from the field becomes obsolete by the time it is released, or that its resulting intervention doesn't work when translated to real classrooms. "I see too much of the prototype working better than iterations in the field," she said. "That needs to change."

Many participants agreed, and there was a sense that future education research may, both for budget and quality reasons, become more integrated into ongoing school improvement projects. Louis Gomez, a senior partner at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, also warned that researchers need clearer definitions of how to collect evidence of both effectiveness and budget value when working with educators.

"We should challenge the assumption that we should do more with less. If we could demonstrate that we could do more with more, we would probably attract more investment," he added. "The sea change we should see is to get policymakers to understand that."

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 9:14 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The Race to the Top and School Improvement Fund grants are generating a potential goldmine for researchers, with hundreds of schools producing in-depth data about their students, teachers, and the ways they are trying to improve.

Yet at a roundtable Thursday afternoon of state directors of Title I, the federal poverty education program, officials voiced concerns that some researchers are taking the wrong approach to getting that data.

Monique Chism, the innovation and improvement division administrator at the Illinois state board of education, said she has received complaints from districts that have been contacted by researchers asking for data and saying they were working with the U.S. Department of Education. Both Race to the Top and the school improvement grants require schools to provide information to researchers for the official evaluations of those programs, but the district administrators were getting confused about who the researchers were and how they were connected to the federal evaluation study.

Carlas McCauley, the U.S. Department of Education's team leader for school improvement grants, noted that other states have also voiced similar concerns: "We've talked to a lot of states, and this is becoming problematic."

McCauley noted that the American Institutes of Research has been awarded a five-year contract to study the effectiveness of school turnarounds under the federal program, and Mathematica Policy Research will be taking up a portion of the research. The groups now are identifying 50 case study sites for the project.

While AIR and Mathematica may subcontract other researchers, "they are the ones, the only ones, who have the official contract," McCauley said. He said that researchers who are studying school improvement in other ways using Institute of Education Sciences grants are technically working with the Education Department, but they should make clear to schools and districts when they request data that they are not part of the official evaluation.

Which is not to say that some states and districts aren't looking to partner with researchers to make sense of their schools' improvement processes. For example, Anne Hansen, a consultant with Michigan's state office of education improvement and innovation, said the state has set up its own experimental pool of schools which may make it easier to study the effects of different turnaround strategies.

The state passed a law requiring all schools identified as persistently low-performing to adopt one of the four federal turnaround options identified in Race to the Top and the school improvement grants: closure; restarting the school under a charter; a "turnaround" process involving replacing at least half of the instructional staff; and "transformation," involving replacing the principal and meeting regular interim benchmarks. The identified schools must implement and report on their chosen models, regardless of whether or not they received additional grant money for the improvement plan through one of the federal grants.

Michigan set aside money to conduct its own evaluation, through WestEd, comparing the 28 schools who received federal improvement money in 2010 to those who didn't, Hansen said.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has made "extended learning time" a political catch-phrase, listing it as a top turnaround strategy across federal programs from Race to the Top to the School Improvement Fund.

"We know 180 six-and-a-half-hour days just aren't enough," Kelly Stuart of the Education Department's Doing What Works site told state directors of federal Title I poverty education programs at their annual meeting in Washington, D.C., this week.

State officials and learning time experts at the meeting noted that more states and districts are starting to explore instructional time in the second year of implementing school improvement grants. Yet it's not clear whether or how that will equate to more meaningful learning time.

In studying school improvement efforts across the country, Ben Lummis of the National Center on Time and Learning said it generally takes an increase of 300 hours of additional time each year to make a real difference for students. Moreover, among about 40 schools the center has studied, those most effective in expanding learning time ensure it affects all students, not just a few, and is balanced among core academics, enrichment activities, and teacher collaboration and planning time.

The center found that changing time without having a larger plan—such as a high school that adds five minutes to each class or an elementary school that adds an after-school program without advertising it—often falls flat.

"Avoid the Christmas tree effect—just adding more things," Lummis said. "Don't do more things; reach for your academic goals in a deeper and more meaningful way."

He noted that few districts work with researchers to audit their existing time use before planning more learning time, which makes it difficult to tell what will change and how to measure the effectiveness of a new schedule. Oklahoma, for example, now requires all its schools to conduct a "quality time analysis." The 2008-09 statewide analysis found that schools only used about three-quarters of their time for instruction, as opposed to class transitions, recess, and other things. Some schools had little more than a half-hour of actual learning time per day.

"Some schools say they have a focus on literacy, and then they figure out they are only spending 10 percent of their time on literacy instruction," Lummis said. "There's a lot of lost time in anyone's work day, but particularly in schools."

Lummis and Stuart highlighted several schools nationwide that have greatly increased instructional time without changing the total cost of schooling, often by staggering teacher schedules throughout the day or year to ensure students get a longer instructional block without requiring teachers to work longer hours. Brooklyn Generation School in New York, for example, staggers four sets of teachers throughout the school year to create a schedule of 200 seven-hour days, with class sizes below 18 students and more teacher training time. Similarly, Fort Logan Elementary School in Sheridan, Colo., uses a "second shift" of teachers to add more than an hour to each school day.

It will be interesting to see how well these more flexible scheduling models play out over time, and whether schools can translate more instructional time into better student performance.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 1:44 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Connecting teachers to their students—and vice versa—remains one of the thorniest problems for state longitudinal data systems, both technically and politically, and more states and districts seem to be trying to get teachers invested in the process.

According to the Data Quality Campaign's most recent analysis, 17 states are unable to match individual teachers to students. In part, this is because while all states provide a unique identification to each teacher, many either cannot legally or practically link those identification numbers to student identifiers.

The DQC also found that states and districts often use educator codes inconsistently, sometimes assigning educator codes to non-instructional staff, and more than half of states cannot link more than one teacher to a student for a given course, making co-teaching and integrated services for English-language learners and special education students harder to track.

Patricia Sullivan, who chairs the National Education Statistics Agenda Committee, announced at last week's National Center for Education Statistics data forum that the committee would launch a new working group dedicated to the issue.

"The forum must call for deeper study of linking teacher-student data," she said.

Building the understanding of people using the teacher-student links will be just as important as building technical systems, according to Hella Bel Hadj Amor, director of teacher effectiveness research and evaluation for the District of Columbia public schools. She said the teacher-student data link has been one of the most challenging parts of implementing the district's new teacher evaluation system, which calculates individual students' growth to gauge whether a teacher qualifies for bonuses or needs professional development.

The district has been conducting data training for schools and teachers on how to ensure teachers get credit for each student, particularly in older grades when a child may have several instructors during the course of the day.

"You have to take these technical concepts and translate them to a layperson's terms. It's very important to get this right; we have found ourselves accused of lying when we meant to simplify," she said.

Officials also hope that by conveying the complexity of the system to teachers, they can prevent adult attempts to cheat in order to reap bonuses. "We try to say, by trying to game the system, you may end up hurting yourself. Are you sure you know what a low-growth student is?" in the context of the merit pay system, Amor explained.

"It's very important to let [schools] know what the information is for and what the stakes are," Amor said. "A mistake can cost a teacher their job; you can't get more high-stakes than that."

In her own state of Texas, Sullivan noted that the University of Texas at Austin has developed a teacher effectiveness model, but state law does not allow teachers to be connected individually to their classrooms; all data must be aggregated. Many districts do not track when a student changes teachers mid-year, leaving only the last teacher as recorded, even if he or she taught the child relatively briefly. The state has now developed a tool to allow teachers to see and analyze their students' longitudinal data privately, though it will not be used by the public.

Kentucky has taken a different tack. Barbara Q. Shoemaker, K-12 liaison for the University of Kentucky's Partnership for Math and Science Education, launched a pilot program of nine Appalachian universities and surrounding school districts to train teachers to use their own students' data to plan instruction and professional development.

"The teachers were looking at the reports on the data, but they were just looking at changes to the data; they weren't really delving into the data," she explained. "It was easy for them to just look at the deficiencies."

Instead, the program taught teachers to look for trends in performance problems across students' academic careers and change instruction to catch problems earlier. For example, elementary and middle school teachers noticed that about a third of high school science students earning "D" grades in high school had been at the same struggling level in middle school, and they have started to look for ways to identify and motivate these students in lower grades.

"Teachers became focused on what was happening in the overall math and science program, not just their own grades and scores," she said.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 6:38 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Who would have thought that this spring's budget woes for the regional educational laboratories would eventually link up with the nation's debt ceiling debate? As my colleague Michele McNeil over at Politics K12 reports, the final 11th-hour Congressional deal to raise the nation's borrowing limit is being pushed through using S.B. 365 as a legislative vehicle.

Some folks might remember that the Senate passed that bill back in February as a temporary technical fix to extend the current education labs' contracts after Congress cut their funding in the continuing budget resolution in December. The regional labs' budget was reinstated in April and the Institute of Education Sciences has since conducted a new round of lab contract applications, but S. 365 never got out of the House Education and Workforce committee.

That apparently made it perfect for housing the debt ceiling agreement: Because of procedural timeline requirements for offering a new bill, Congress needed to find an existing live bill in order to pass it before the debt-ceiling-increase deadline tomorrow.

Jim Kohlmoos, of the Knowledge Alliance, which urged passage of the original technical bill, said it's an ironic choice for the debt ceiling bill—it remains to be seen how education research will fare in the funding fallout from the debt-limit deal.

Posted by Sarah D. Sparks at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend