Group items tagged

Many discussions of "school reform" focus either on the need to provide students with choice as a way out of failing schools or on how to close or restructure the schools in order to "turn them around." For our purposes in this first paper, let's examine the underlying claim that a particular child is actually in a failing school. A school in Louisiana is given the letter grade F and we assume that children in this school are receiving a sub-standard education. Almost by definition! Yet the second part of the title of this paper, which comes from a chapter in the late Gerald W. Bracey's 2003 book "On the Death of Childhood and the Destruction of Public Schools," raises an interesting question.  Should we be confident that the letter grade F actually indicates that the quality of teaching in the school is the reason for the failure? If it is not the quality of teaching, then what is it?

"Most research on educational interventions, including school vouchers, focuses on impacts on short-term outcomes such as students' scores on standardized tests. Few studies are able to track longer-term outcomes, and even fewer are able to do so in the context of a randomized experiment. In the first study using a randomized experiment to measure the impact of school vouchers on college enrollment, we examine the college-going behavior through 2011 of students who participated in a voucher experiment as elementary school students in the late 1990s. We find no overall impacts on college enrollments but we do find large, statistically significant positive impacts on the college going of African American students who participated in the study. Our estimates indicate that using a voucher to attend private school increased the overall college enrollment rate among African Americans by 24 percent."

Video of panel discussion and links to resources. This briefing was sponsored by the Office of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), in partnership with the Coalition for Teaching Quality.

A National Education Association commission issued a report today with specific recommendations for upping pre-service requirements, establishing career paths for teachers, and developing new evaluation systems.

What [the Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff] paper shows - using an extremely detailed dataset and sophisticated, thoroughly-documented methods - is that teachers matter, perhaps in ways that some didn't realize. What it does not show is how to measure and improve teacher quality, which are still open questions. This is a crucial distinction, one which has been discussed on this blog numerous times (also here and here), as it is frequently obscured or outright ignored in discussions of how research findings should inform concrete education policy.

Over the past decade, amazing research has been conducted in the area of school leadership. With the wealth of information out there, I often wish someone would take the best of it and put it into simple terms, describing exactly what it is that great principals do to significantly improve teaching and learning. The Wallace Foundation's recent Perspective, The School Principal as Leader: Guiding Schools to Better Teaching and Learning, is a huge step forward in granting my wish. The report tells us that the most successful principals perform five key functions well

"The question of what to do with bad teachers has stymied America's education system of late, sparking chaotic protests in state capitals and vitriolic debate in a recent congressional hearing. It has also stoked the movement known as 'education reform,' which has zeroed in on teacher quality by urging school districts to sort the star teachers from the duds, and reward or punish them accordingly. The idea is that America's schools would be able to increase their students' test scores if only they had better teachers. Since 2007, this wave of education reformers -- in particular Democrats for Education Reform, a group backed by President Barack Obama and hedge fund donors -- has clashed with teachers unions in their pursuit of making the field of education as discerning in its personnel choices as, say, that of finance. Good teachers should be promoted and retained, reformers contend, instead of being treated like identical pieces on an assembly line, who are rewarded with tenure for their staying power or seniority. But what to do with the underperformers?"

Over the past 2 years, several states have passed legislation to create new teacher evaluation systems linked to student learning, and to require results from those evaluations to be used to inform key personnel decisions--particularly teacher layoffs. (Report can be found at http://bellwethereducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/State-Teacher-Leg-Comparison.pdf)

A year ago yesterday, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" to announce he was making an unprecedented $100 million donation to help reform Newark's struggling school system. A year later, the spending of the "Facebook money" - as it's become known in Newark - has gotten mixed reviews. The process got off to a bad start when the first $1 million was spent on a public survey that critics called a waste of money. That was followed by months of political missteps and public-relations debacles related to politically linked firms hired to help spend the donation. But in recent months, the Newark-Facebook team seems to have gotten its act together, according to interviews with community leaders and education experts inside and outside of New Jersey. With a new Newark schools superintendent on board and a new head for the nonprofit group overseeing the project, the first Facebook dollars are showing up in Newark classrooms.

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

This paper is designed to help policymakers and accountability professionals wrestle with the challenges of using student performance information as a component of educator evaluations when yearly state standardized tests are not available.

http://www.jstor.org/pss/10.1086/660009 This study examines how the neighborhood environments experienced over multiple generations of a family influence children's cognitive ability. 

Charter critics often contend that many charters have high attrition, and that lower-performing students leave - whether due to "counseling out" (as may have been the case in the NYT story) or on their own volition - which artificially boosts test scores. The standard reply to this argument from charter supporters is to point to studies (such as this paper on New York City charters and this one on KIPP schools) showing that charter school attrition is similar to that of regular public schools. In addition, supporters point out that these studies that include high-performing charters, though limited in scope and number, use techniques to ensure that attrition does not directly affect their results (for example, put simply, "following" students who leave charters into their new schools).

Research on teacher productivity, and recently developed accountability systems for teachers, rely on value-added models to estimate the impact of teachers on student performance.  The authors test many of the central assumptions required to derive value-added models from an underlying structural cumulative achievement model and reject nearly all of them.  Moreover, they find that  teacher value added and other key parameter estimates are highly sensitive to model specification.  While estimates from commonly employed value-added models cannot be interpreted as causal teacher effects, employing richer models that impose fewer restrictions may reduce  the  bias in estimates of teacher productivity.  

They say it's all about great teachers and principals....

...mounting evidence suggests that the seeming relationship between student demographics and teacher turnover is driven, not by teachers' responses to their students, but by the conditions in which they must teach and their students are obliged to learn.