Group items tagged

As charter schools play an increasingly central role in education reform agendas across the United States, it becomes more important to have current and comprehensible analysis about how well they do educating their students. Thanks to progress in student data systemsand regular student achievement testing, it is possible to examine student learning in charter schools and compare it to the experience the students would have had in the traditional public schools (TPS) they would otherwise have attended. This report presents a longitudinalstudent-level analysis of charter school impacts on more than 70 percent of the students in charter schools in the United States. The scope of the study makes it the first national assessment of charter school impacts.

In 1988, U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett proclaimed Chicago's public schools to be the worst in the nation. Since that time, Chicago has been at the forefront of urban school reform. Beginning with a dramatic move in 1990 to move power away from the central office, through CEO Paul Vallas's use of standardized testing to hold schools and students accountable for teaching and learning, and into CEO Arne Duncan's bold plan to create 100 new schools in five years, Chicago has attempted to boost academic achievement through a succession of innovative policies. Each wave of reform has brought new practices, programs, and policies that have interacted with the initiatives of the preceding wave. And with each successive wave of reform this fundamental question has been raised: Has progress been made at Chicago Public Schools (CPS)?

Have you ever wondered how your state's educational performance compares to the performance of other states? Now with the new State of the States in Education document released yesterday by the Department of Education, you can see a snapshot of how educational performance varies substantially across states.

Colorado taxpayers will spend $100 million this year on online schools that are largely failing their elementary and high school students, state education records and interviews with school officials show.

The Star Tribune declares it a miracle school on 9/24/11 with the headline 'At this school, usual excuses don't apply' http://www.startribune.com/opinion/otherviews/130474133.html Claim from the article: In this year's state math tests in grades three through eight, this school outperformed every metro-area school district, including Edina and Wayzata. Its students outperformed all state students in reading proficiency (77 percent to 75 percent), and state white students in math proficiency (82 percent to 65 percent).

Few observers doubt that Teach For America (TFA) has high aspirations. Established in 1990, TFA strives to close persistent racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps in U.S. public education by recruiting high-achieving college graduates to teach for two years in low-income urban and rural schools. In recent years, applications to TFA have soared, especially at highly selective colleges. In 2009-10, for example, 18% of Harvard University's seniors applied to the program. Proposing to expand its teaching corps from 7,300 to 13,000 over the next five years, TFA recently won $50 million in the federal i3 (Investing in Innovation) competition and succeeded in raising $10 million in matching funds.

The increasing availability of longitudinal student achievement data has heightened interest among researchers, educators and policy makers in using these data to evaluate educational inputs, as well as for school and possibly teacher accountability. Researchers have developed elaborate "value-added models" of these longitudinal data  to estimate the effects of educational inputs (e.g., teachers or schools) on student achievement while using prior achievement to adjust for nonrandom assignment of students to schools and classes. Achallenge to such modeling efforts is the extensive numbers of students with incomplete records and the tendency for those students to be lower achieving. These conditions create the potential for results to be sensitive to violations of the assumption that data are missing atrandom, which is commonly used when estimating model parameters. The current study extends recent value-added modeling approaches for longitudinal student achievement data Lockwood et

In several posts, I've complained about how, in our public discourse, we misinterpret changes in proficiency rates (or actual test scores) as "gains" or "progress," when they actually represent cohort changes-that is, they are performance snapshots for different groups of students who are potentially quite dissimilar.

I entered the fight against the 'reformers' back in February after hearing Duncan claim that a school in Chicago got dramatic results by shutting down and replacing with a charter school in the same building with the same kids, but with different adults. It was important for Duncan to have at least one 'miracle school' to prove that his style of reform was reaping results. Knowing this couldn't possibly be true, I investigated and found him to be using statistics in a very misleading way. This spurred my contacting the 'leader' of the other side (are they 'anti-reformers' or just 'pro-research'?), Diane Ravitch who then featured my investigation in a New York Times OpEd which generated a lot of attention.

The College Board, which oversees undergraduate and graduate school entrance exams, released results for the 2011 SATs, revealing mixed news: More students took the test than ever before, posting scores that are some of the lowest in history. On reading comprehension, the 1.65 million students who filled out answer sheets earned a mean score of 497 out of a possible 800 - a three-point drop off from 2010. Comparatively, the results in 2005 showed a mean score of 507.

New federal statistics shared Thursday about thousands of schools and districts show that students across the country don't have equal access to a rigorous education, experienced teachers, early education, and school counselors.

This paper contributes importantly to the growing literature on the training of special education teachers and how it translates into classroom practice and student achievement. The authors examine the impact of pre-service preparation and in-service formal and informal training on the ability of teachers to promote academic achievement among students with disabilities. Using student-level longitudinal data from Florida over a five-year span the authors estimate value-added models of student achievement. There is little support for the efficacy of in-service professional development courses focusing on special education. However, teachers with advanced degrees are more effective in boosting the math achievement of students with disabilities than are those with only a baccalaureate degree. Also pre-service preparation in special education has statistically significant and quantitatively substantial effects on the ability of teachers of special education courses to promote gains in achievement for students with disabilities, especially in reading. Certification in special education, an undergraduate major in special education, and the amount of special education coursework in college are all positively correlated with the performance of teachers in special education reading courses.

This article will investigate the fix-the-teachers campaign of today's "education reformers." It's not their only project. They also want public schools run with the top-down, data-driven, accountability methods used in private businesses; they aim to replace as many regular public schools as possible with publicly funded, privately managed charter schools; some are trying to expand voucher programs to allow parents to take their per-child public-education funding to private schools.

Thousands of students getting free or reduced-cost school lunches may not be eligible for the program, a report released by the state auditor this week finds. But school districts have little incentive to question applications because a higher participation rate also increases their state aid, the report states.

Principals tend to prefer working in schools with higher-achieving students from more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. Principals often use schools with many poor or low-achieving students as stepping stones to what they view as more desirable assignments. District leadership can also exacerbate principal turnover by implementing policies aimed at improving low-performing schools such as rotating school leaders. Using longitudinal data from one large urban school district we find principal turnover is detrimental to school performance. Frequent turnover results in lower teacher retention and lower student achievement gains, which are particularly detrimental to students in high-poverty and failing school

In my previous post, I explained that the new push to rate schools of education by the student outcome gains of teachers who graduated from certain education schools is a problematic endeavor… one unlikely to yield particularly useful information, and one that may potentially create the wrong incentives for education schools.  To reiterate, I laid out 3 reasons (and there are likely many more) why this approach is so problematic. Here, I divide them out a bit more - 4 ways.

New York City's Department of Education recently released their 'progress reports' for all the middle and elementary schools for the 2010-2011 school year. For each school they have a complicated formula that assigns up to 60 points for 'progress', up to 25 points for 'achievement', and up to 15 points for 'school environment'. The scores are tallied and out of the 1100 schools, the bottom 3%, which is around 33 are labeled as an 'F.' When a school gets an F, they are on probation and could get shut down and turned into a charter school or other sanctions. Even if it doesn't get shut down, it is pretty embarrassing when schools get this grade, particularly when they know that they don't deserve this label.

As the few regular readers of this blog know, I am working on a report that focuses on Texas charter schools. Many of the myths surrounding charter schools-especially the so-called high-performing charter schools-will be examined and some debunked. In doing this research, I found something very, very curious. The Texas Education Agency lists a number of schools with the KIPP name. Yet, KIPP does not claim all of these schools on their national website. Kipp does not use the same names to identify schools with the Texas Education Agency and on the national KIPP website.