What should high schools be doing to prepare students for college? Here's what a new research-based practice guide published by the federal Institute of Education Sciences suggests:

1) Offer courses that prepare students for college-level work;
2) Use assessments throughout the high schools years so that students will know early on how prepared they are for college-level work;
3) Recruit adults and peers to support students' postsecondary aspirations;
4) Prod and encourage students to take the necessary steps to search and apply to colleges; and
5) Find ways to help families become aware of financial-assistance opportunities for their college-going children.

None of this is rocket science, of course. What is unsettling, though, is how little research there is to back up a set of recommendations that most people would agree make good sense.

According to the practice guide, only the last two recommendations are backed by a level of research evidence that reaches the level of "moderate." The evidence levels for the first three recommendations were all judged to be "low" by the expert panel that developed the them. That doesn't suggest, by any means, that the recommendations are bad ideas—just that, in many cases, rigorous studies haven't been done to help us determine one way or the other.

The report, "Helping Students Navigate the Path to College: What High Schools Can Do," is the 11th in a series of practice guides published by the federal research agency. Falling somewhere between a consensus-panel report and a rigorous meta-analysis, they are meant to inform policymakers on best practices they can use until more definitive studies can be completed.

A nice feature of this report is a section of the appendix that rates the research evidence for specific programs, such as Gear Up or Upward Bound. Check it out.

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Empirical Education, a blog run by a consulting group based in Palo Alto, Calif., offers a nice summary this morning of a talk that the U.S. Department of Education's top research official gave in July to a meeting of the federal regional education laboratories.

At the meeting, John Q. Easton apparently laid out a five-point agenda outlining his plans for the department's Institute of Education Sciences, which is the main research arm for the department. Some of Easton's points you've heard before: He wants to retain the agency's focus on rigorous research, for example, yet at the same time produce work that is relevant and usable for practitioners.

The director also talked, though, about moving away from the "top-down dissemination model in which researchers seem to complete a study and then throw the findings over the wall to practitioners" and engage practitioners more in using the research evidence the agency produces.

Empirical Education also reports that Easton wants the agency to "take on a stronger role in building capacity to conduct research at the local level." To some extent that's already happening. With support from the feds, many states are building longitudinal data systems that could help them answer a wide range educational questions for themselves. What's still needed, according to this blog post, is help in framing research questions, applying the right study design, and choosing the right statistics, and that may be where the department—and the regional laboratories—come in.

In fact, Easton probably could not have picked a better audience before which to lay out his plans for the agency. The 10 labs are due to be recompeted soon, which means they may well turn out to be the frontlines for any changes that the research director plans to put into action.

UPDATE: I mistakenly labeled Empirical Education as a consulting group. It is, in fact, a research organization.

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In case you missed it, the Brookings Institution's "Scouting Report" last week featured Grover "Russ" Whitehurst, the former director of the federal Institute of Education Sciences.

During his six-year tenure at the federal research agency, Whitehurst mostly kept mum on where he stood on hot-button education issues. But as the director of the Brown Center for Education at Brookings, Whitehurst is free to opine now on whatever he likes. And opine is what he does in this Q&A session moderated by Politico's Fred Barbash. In the Sept. 2 discussion, Whitehurst comes clean on vouchers, charter schools, merit pay for teachers, alternative teacher certification, and the federal No Child Left Behind Act, among other controversial topics.

In response to a question, Whitehurst also appears to differ some with the contention, recently made public by his Brookings' colleague Tom Loveless, that NCLB is leaving smart children behind. (For more on that, check out this Aug. 28 commentary in the The New York Times by Loveless and Fordham's Mike Petrilli.) Whitehurst says that, while value-added assessments are needed to "give schools as much incentive to increase the learning of gifted students as they have to teach low-achieving students," there's little evidence from the National Assessment of Educational Progress or other sources that the performance of top students is declining.

If you were out enjoying the Labor Day weekend, you may also have missed the article, "What Washingtonians Make" in Monday's Washington Post. Among the 100 Washingtonians whose annual salaries were listed in the article was well-known education researcher Robert Slavin. He earns $140,000 a year, according to the article, as a "professor and director of a research center" at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Incidentally, that's nowhere near as much as Michelle Rhee makes. As the chancellor of the District of Columbia's public school system, she is paid $275,000 a year—much more than the city's mayor.

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The mood was contemplative and the talk was candid at yesterday's meeting of the National Board for Education Sciences. The board meets three times a year, as you know, to share its collected wisdom with the Institute of Education Sciences, which is the U.S. Department of Education's key research arm.

At board Chairman Eric Hanushek's invitation, members mused on what's going right—or wrong—with the 7-year-old agency. While members agreed that the institute has made enormous strides in improving the quality of the education research that the department underwrites, they also seemed to think that more could be done to get the word out on the fruits on that research.

"Many of the reports done by IES never get out there," said member Sally E. Shaywitz, a noted Yale University researcher on reading disabilities. "People aren't aware of them."

The long string of "no effects" studies coming out of IES was on board Vice Chairman Jon Baron's mind. (See my story on this topic in EdWeek.)

"If all IES produces is null findings from here on out, the enterprise is not going to be long for this world," warned Baron, who, ironically, is also the executive director of the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, a Washington-based group that has promoted randomized controlled studies.

He suggested the agency might get better results by being more strategic in choosing the interventions it evaluates and focusing on those with stronger research bases.

That assertion drew a rise from Hanushek, a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute. "Do you think IES has purposely chosen to evaluate policies they know are going to fail?" he said. "Directing them to do good doesn't seem to provide any guidance."

Newcomer David C. Geary, a psychologist from the University of Missouri in Columbia, suggested that closer analysis of the "null findings themselves" may also be in order to find out why some interventions worked on a small scale but not in the larger IES evaluations.

But John Q. Easton, who is nine weeks into the job as IES director, offered yet another perspective. "The school-improvement process isn't always intervention-based," he said. "Achievement is affected by multiple factors...so the question might be what is it about schools that allow them to self-evaluate, monitor, and make improvements?"

Agreed, said Hanushek, "But is that researchable?"

It sounds like the times they are a' changing at the agency. If you're interested in reading more of this interesting conversation, keep checking IES's Web site for minutes of the July 27 board meeting.

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The U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences has been cranking out those practice guides lately. The institute's 10th and latest guide, posted online today, focuses on how to structure out-of-school programs to maximize academic achievement.

The advice is timely. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, schools that continually fail to meet their academic targets are required to offer supplemental education services to students. And that list of schools grows longer each year.

The problem is that researchers haven't yet hit on proven strategies for delivering programs that consistently yield learning gains. As regular readers of this blog may recall, studies so far on the effectiveness of tutoring programs are a pretty mixed bag, with a few studies showing that students can benefit from the after-school programs and others showing no difference at all.

That's where the new practice guide comes in. The idea behind the guides is to offer practitioners best-bet strategies they can use when the research base comes up short. The institute's What Works Clearinghouse develops the guides with help from an ad hoc panel of experts who analyze the existing literature and make recommendations accordingly. The panel also evaluates the research for every recommendation it makes, characterizing the evidence as either "strong," "moderate," or "low."

In the case of out-of-school programs, the guide lists five recommendations, none of which cross into "strong" evidence territory.

The first one calls for aligning the out-of-school program academically with the school day. (That may sound like a no-brainer, but you'd be surprised how rarely it occurs.)

The guide also calls for: maximizing student participation and attendance, tailoring instruction to individual and small group needs, providing engaging learning experiences, and assessing program performance with an eye toward making improvements.

You can download Structuring Out-of-School Time to Improve Academic Achievement for free on the IES/What Works Web site.

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The board that advises the federal Institute of Education Sciences—or at least what's left of it—has announced plans to meet on July 27.

You'll recall that the board, which is more properly called the National Board on Education Sciences, had to cancel its May meeting when it failed to muster a quorum. Rallying enough members to meet has been difficult for the 15-member board because it has undergone a dramatic downsizing. Nine members left the board as their terms expired; only six remain. But the Federal Register announcement on the upcoming meeting says a majority of the remaining six is all that's needed to carry on with the meeting.

Among the items on the agenda? The federal stimulus, of course. In a closed session, the board will also discuss potential commissioners for the research centers that fall under the IES umbrella.

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John Q. Easton, the new director of the Ed Department's Institute of Education Sciences, used his first major public appearance yesterday to broadly outline some of his plans for the research agency over the next six years.

Easton, who began his term as IES director on June 1, is the former director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research, an independent research group that studies school reforms in Chicago. And, as might be predicted, he said he expects to bring some of the principles that guided the consortium to his new gig at the department.

"We know IES sponsors top-notch research," he told participants at the annual IES research conference. "I think our greater challenge is in working better with practitioners and policymakers to make schools places where students learn more and have greater opportunities for success in life."

Easton said the IES, like the consortium, plans to work toward building the capacity of practitioners and policymakers to use data and research and to make the agency's work transparent and openly available.

He also made a pitch for integrating results from studies across fields to "provide the guidance the field wants to hear" and synthesizing the "major learnings" from the studies the IES has funded over the past several years.

Easton wasn't the only Ed Department official to make a policy address at the June 7-9 conference. His boss, Arne Duncan, talked about building better longitudinal data systems, which, he says, are the first of four "assurances" that are built into the federal economic-stimulus law. For more on what he had to say, see the description of the speech by my colleague Michele McNeil in Politics K-12.

Conference-goers also heard from Jon Baron, the vice chairman of the National Board for Education Sciences, which advises Easton's agency. As executive director of the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, which promotes the use of rigorous experiments, Baron represents a bit of the old guard at the IES. But he used his time in the pulpit to put forth a new idea as to why so many of the randomized controlled trials that the agency funded failed to turn up findings of positive effects.

"Perhaps the process does not give sufficient attention to innovative, practitioner-generated ideas," he said, noting that, in welfare reform, the models that yielded the most promising outcomes in experimental studies were those that came from the field.

I bet there are more than a few teachers out there who would say "amen" to that—or perhaps "I told you so."

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Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and John Q. Easton, the Ed Department's brand-new research chief, are scheduled to say a few words this morning at the Institute of Education Science's fourth annual research conference here in Washington.

The conference, begun by Grover "Russ" Whitehurst, the department's last IES head, provides an opportunity for the institute's grantees to meet, discuss common problems, and share their work. Princeton University economist Cecelia Rouse, a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, is also on the agenda.

This may be the first major public appearance for Easton, who's been on the job exactly one week, and may provide an opportunity for him and Duncan to drop a few details about what's in store for IES under the Obama administration.

Yours truly will be there, too. Come back to this space tomorrow for a report on the goings-on.

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The U.S. Senate voted last night to confirm John Easton for a six-year term as the new director of the Institute of Education Sciences, the main research arm of the Department of Education. Here's what he had to say about it in the "Dear Colleague" letter being circulated today:

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I am both thrilled and honored to take on this new challenge after a long and rewarding career working to help Chicago Public Schools through the Consortium on Chicago School Research here at the University of Chicago.

I head to Washington during a time of great promise in school reform when top-notch informative research is all the more critical. The Institute of Education Sciences is the nation's engine for educational research, evaluation, assessment, and statistics -- and instrumental to scholars, education policymakers, and practitioners. The institute funds hundreds of research studies on ways to improve academic achievement, conducts large-scale evaluations of federal education programs, and reports a wide array of statistics on the condition of education, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. As director, I will oversee four major national centers, a staff of about 200, and partnerships with institutions nationwide.

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IN CASE YOU WERE LOOKING FOR IT: The June 20-21 meeting of the National Board for Education Sciences was canceled this week when it was unable to produce a quorum. The board, formed to advise the federal Education Department on research matters, is authorized to have up to 15 members.
Now, caught as it is between Presidential administrations, the board is down to six because of all the unfilled vacancies created when earlier board members' terms expired. Of those six, three couldn't make it to this week's meeting, said Norma Garza, the board's executive director. She said the absences were due to illnesses and one last-minute conflict. No word yet on whether the meeting will be rescheduled.

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An independent review out today takes issue with the federal study of the District of Columbia's private school voucher experiment.

Published in March by the Institute of Education Sciences, the study found that after three years, students who nabbed a tuition voucher through the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program were doing modestly better in reading, and no better in math, than public school peers who tried for, but failed to win, a scholarship.

You'll recall that interpretations of the findings were all over the map in the news media, with some writers pronouncing the program a success and others seeing them as an indictment of it. The results were reason enough, though, for the Obama administration to suggest allowing program to sunset, and possibly grandfathering in the 1,600 students who now receive the vouchers, worth up to $7,500 a year.

In his review of the federal study, though, Stanford University economist Martin Carnoy contends the researchers were not as nuanced as they could be. For instance, he says, they did not emphasize the fact that most of the gains came among students who were "more academically adept before they were offered the voucher."

But, as the study's lead researcher, Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas, points out, he didn't exactly hide that information, either. "What's more important," he asked. "the average effect for all participants or on those who seemed to benefit the most?"

Carnoy has other quibbles as well. For one, there was a lot of school-switching going on among voucher students, and some never used their vouchers at all. (Wolf says those patterns are typical of big-city voucher programs.) For another, much of the academic gain in reading came among the first cohort of students. (Even so, Wolf says, differences between the two cohorts were not statistically significant.)

The review is part of the Think Tank Review Project based at Arizona State University, which was formed to set the record straight on reports issued by think tanks looking to advance their point of view. The project, it has to be said, is financed by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice, which is made up of the National Education Association and its state affiliates in that region—presumably no fans of private school vouchers.

Extraneous note to the Think Tank Review Project from Wolf: Since when is the federal government a think tank?

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Yesterday, as a Senate committee in Washington approved his nomination to be the new research czar at the U.S. Department of Education, John Easton shared one idea that he hopes to bring to the job.

Easton, who is currently the executive director of the Chicago Consortium on School Research, talked to me at a conference that his organization hosted in Chicago. Here's what he had to say:

One thing that I would like to see as a real priority for myself is to look carefully over the last six years and ask under what circumstances, and under what conditions, are particular kinds of research strategies and methodologies most likely to give the most information.

That, of course, refers to ongoing debates over what some think has been an overemphasis at the Institute of Education Sciences on strict scientific experiments, over other kinds of studies. What Easton has in mind is a commission of sorts to generate some "good thinking" on the topic. (What do you think, readers? Is he on the right track or have organizations like the National Research Council already plowed this ground thoroughly enough?)

Easton also said he wants to take stock of findings from the dozens of studies that IES has financed over the past six years to see if any cross-cutting themes emerge that can be shared with the field.

The confirmation process has not ended for Easton, though. Even though the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee gave its thumbs up yesterday, the full Senate still has to take up the matter.

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Most reading research over the last 25 years has focused on how to help children learn to sound out or decode words. Relatively fewer studies have tackled the thorny problem of helping students understand the words they're sounding out.

For instance, experts know that children who come to school with deeper stores of background knowledge, a richer vocabulary, or better oral-language skills tend to become better readers. The trick is how to help the students who lag behind their peers in those areas catch up and learn to read proficiently.

In an attempt to fill in the knowledge gap, the federal Institute of Education Sciences announced plans last week for an ambitious new research initiative called Reading for Understanding.

This is no typical research competition for IES, though. What the U.S. Department of Education agency wants to do is step up the pace of research on the problem over the next five years by putting together a mission team not unlike those that specialize in problems for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

The R&D network that IES has in mind would include five core teams, each working on reading comprehension for a specific age span of students, such as grades 3 to 5 or grades 8 to 9. Scientists on each team would focus on understanding the underlying cognitive processes involved in reading comprehension, developing new instructional approaches to promote it, and figuring out if their interventions work. Another team would focus on advancing theoretical understanding of the problem and developing assessments to measure students' progress in acquiring reading-comprehension skills.

The size of the awards for the project will vary, but IES, in its formal request for applications for the program, says the grants for each core R&D team will range from $2 million to $4 million a year. The assessment team could qualify for up to $3 million a year for its work.

Interested? You have until Aug. 3 to submit a letter of intent.

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In this space a month ago, I reported that Marshall S. "Mike" Smith, a senior adviser over at the U.S. Department of Education, was hinting that the final version of President Obama's proposed 2010 budget would contain good things for research. He wasn't joking.

My colleague Alyson Klein reports in a May 8 article on the budget that the Institute of Education Sciences, the department's key research arm, would see its budget increase by 11.7 percent, to $689 million, under the proposed spending plan unveiled last Thursday. Here's the way the Obama administration wants to distribute the additional IES money: research, development, and dissemination overall, an extra $56.8 million; the regional education laboratories, $3 million more; the National Assessment of Educational Progress ("the nation's report card") and its governing board, a $34.7 million hike; grants for states to develop statewide data systems, $16.7 million more; and special education research, $2 million in added funds. See the details here.

Education research got no mention at all in the president's economic-stimulus package, so, if you hear a soft whooshing sound, it's probably a collective sigh of relief from the research community. Stay tuned, though. Experts are predicting a long and difficult budget battle ahead in Congress.

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In education, one of the hottest imports from Southeast Asia in recent years has been Singapore Math, a collection of textbooks developed by Singapore's Ministry of Education for use in that nation's schools. Pockets of educators and parents all around the United States rave about the books, which are also available for purchase here.

Slimmer and decidedly less flashy than the books that weigh down the backpacks of most U.S. students, the Singapore books provide more in-depth coverage of a smaller number of topics. For a more detailed treatment of what makes such an approach to math instruction so appealing, see this Education Week article from 2005.

The books' popularity also stems from Singapore students' consistent ranking at or near the top of the world on international math tests. After all, if Singapore students do so well year in and year out, the textbooks must be doing something right.

That's why it was a bit of a surprise yesterday when the What Works Clearinghouse posted a ho-hum review of the research on the Singapore Math curricula for middle school. The federal researchers analyzed 12 studies on the program that were conducted between 1983 and 2008 and found none that could pass its tough evidence screens.

The reviewers concluded:

The lack of studies meeting WWC evidence standards means that, at this time, the WWC is unable to draw any conclusions based on research about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of Singapore Math.

The clearinghouse reached the same non-conclusion two years ago when it reviewed the research on Singapore Math programs geared to elementary school students.

The new report's timing, though, may have been slightly impolitic. Only a week earlier, the education ministry hosted an event at the embassy of Singapore to showcase its approach to math education for educators and the media.

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It could be weeks, even months, before the U.S. Senate confirms nominee John Easton as director of the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. The lull in leadership at the nation's top education research agency leaves Washingtonians to engage in their favorite armchair sport: reading tea leaves. What direction, they wonder, will the institute take under the new regime?

One insightful reading came last week from Mark Schneider, a vice president of the American Institutes for Research. As the former commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which is part of IES, Schneider is someone who actually knows what he's talking about. In last Friday's Education Gadfly—in case you missed it—he offers a unique insiders' roadmap to some of the areas where change is most likely to occur under Easton's watch.

He suggests keeping an eye, in particular, on the regional education laboratories, or RELs, that the institute operates around the country.

Under their current contracts, the RELs have been instructed to conduct RCTs [randomized controlled trials] and much of their autonomy and regional responsiveness has been curtailed. That has led some lab staff and constituents to complain that their ability to address the needs of state and local education agencies has been weakened and that they have been forced to sacrifice relevance on the altar of rigor.

According to Schneider, the Consortium on Chicago School Research, the research group that Easton currently heads at the University of Chicago, offers an alternate model for the labs—one that is rooted in the needs of the local community and involves practitioners and policymakers. And the labs' contracts, he notes, are due to be re-competed in about a year.

The former statistics commissioner also recommends watching the institute's 13 national research-and-development centers.

Will he [Easton] establish processes that align the work of the R&D centers with that of the RELs and build a coordinated system whereby research-based tools and resources get to practitioners in usable forms?

You can read the full text here. In the meantime, at Flypaper, Mike Petrilli puts in another pitch for the Fordham Institute's call for making research and development the engine of federal education policy.

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John Q. Easton, the man that President Obama plans to nominate to head the

But Easton has dropped some hints about where you can go to get a flavor of his thinking on that subject. It's a report called Consortium on Chicago School Research: A New Model for the Role of Research in Supporting Urban School Reform. The publication chronicles the 19-year history of the research group that he heads and describes its unique conception of the role that education research can play, working in partnership schools and districts, to improve learning in urban schools.

Even if you don't give a fig about federally funded education research, you might want to check out the report. The consortium's model for bringing research to bear in the service of local, on-the-ground school reform is catching on in other cities, including New York, New Orleans, and Baltimore.

Happy weekend reading!

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Flypaper appears to have the scoop on who will be the Obama administration's choice to head the Institute of Education Sciences. It's another Chicagoan: John Q. Easton, the executive director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research. You can read his biographical information here.

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