Group items tagged

We first must specify just what it is we intend to evaluate: performance? effectiveness? something else? It is critical that we answer this question clearly, because performance and effectiveness are different criteria determined by different variables, which suggests the potential for different interventions to improve them.

This paper examines the effect of early childhood investments on college enrollment and degree completion. We use the random assignment in the Project STAR experiment to estimate the effect of smaller classes in primary school on college entry, college choice, and degree completion. We improve on existing work in this area with unusually detailed data on college enrollment spells and the previously unexplored outcome of college degree completion. We find that assignment to a small class increases the probability of attending college by 2.7 percentage points, with effects more than twice as large among blacks. Among those with the lowest ex ante probability of attending college, the effect is 11 percentage points. Smaller classes increase the likelihood of earning a college degree by 1.6 percentage points and shift students towards high-earning fields such as STEM (science, technology, engineering and medicine), business and economics. We confirm the standard finding that test score effects fade out by middle school, but show that test score effects at the time of the experiment are an excellent predictor of long-term improvements in postsecondary outcomes. We compare the costs and impacts of this intervention with other tools for increasing postsecondary attainment, such as Head Start and financial aid, and conclude that early investments are no more cost effective than later investments in boosting adult educational attainment.

While the fight over closing schools may be hotter than the weather this summer, the evidence shows that this is not a strategy that works to help all New York City kids get the education they deserve. Yet Mayor Bloomberg has adopted it with a single-mindedness that makes no sense. He has closed more than 140 schools since he took control of the city's school system in 2002. Bloomberg's agenda has disrupted school communities, alienated parents and destabilized neighborhoods. College-readiness rates in the new schools created to replace closing schools are abysmally low, and overall grad rates in these new schools have actually been falling, even as overall grad rates remained flat. Instead of closing schools, there is a better and more effective intervention to turn them around. The Chancellor's District was an innovative program involving nearly 60 schools that flourished from 1996 to 2003 under a joint agreement between then-Chancellor Rudy Crew and the UFT. It's an approach we can use in the 24 schools that are now the subject of litigation between the Department of Education and the principals' and teachers' unions over how they will be staffed.

"Pity the new district superintendent. Like any responsible educational leader, he'd like to be sure that his district's curricular materials and interventions are grounded in solid scientific research. But no sooner does he start talking with his staff, his teachers, and various and sundry "experts" than he finds that everything is "research-based," including approaches that are clearly very different from those employed by his teachers. Should he let well enough alone, or should he introduce programs that seemed to work fine in the last district he was in? Neither. Instead, he should go read Dan Willingham's ingenious new book, When Can You Trust the Experts? The book won't tell him which programs to use, but it will help him think through -- and, in some cases, see through -- the claims their creators make on their behalf. An accomplished cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia and the author of the must-read Why Don't Students Like School? (as well as an NCTQ advisory board member), Willingham aims to make district superintendents, principals, teachers and parents into educated consumers of education research."

In a post over a year ago, I discussed the common argument that dismissing the "bottom 5-10 percent" of teachers would increase U.S. test scores to the level of high-performing nations. This argument is based on a calculation by economist Eric Hanushek, which suggests that dismissing the lowest-scoring teachers based on their math value-added scores would, over a period of around ten years  (when the first cohort of students would have gone through the schooling system without the "bottom" teachers), increase U.S. math scores dramatically - perhaps to the level of high-performing nations such as Canada or Finland.* This argument is, to say the least, controversial, and it invokes the full spectrum of reactions. In my opinion, it's best seen as a policy-relevant illustration of the wide variation in test-based teacher effects, one that might suggest a potential of a course of action but can't really tell us how it will turn out in practice. To highlight this point, I want to take a look at one issue mentioned in that previous post - that is, how the instability of value-added scores over time (which Hanushek's simulation doesn't address directly) might affect the projected benefits of this type of intervention, and how this is turn might modulate one's view of the huge projected benefits. One (admittedly crude) way to do this is to use the newly-released New York City value-added data, and look at 2010 outcomes for the "bottom 10 percent" of math teachers in 2009.

"The rationale here is muddled at best, but the detriments are obvious. For instance, young students in New York State who are developing as they should will be placed in remedial services, forgoing enrichment in the arts because they are a "2" and thus below the new proficiency level. That is where the vast majority of students fall on the new scales - below proficiency and off the "road to college readiness."  Students, who in reality may not need support will be sorted into special education or "response to intervention" services.  Parents will worry for their children's future. The newspapers will bash the public schools and their teachers at a time when morale is already at an extreme low. The optimism teachers first felt about the Common Core State Standards is fading as the standards and their tests roll into classrooms."

The use of value-added models in education research has expanded rapidly. These models allow researchers to explore how a wide variety of policies and measured school inputs affect the academic performance of students. An important question is whether such effects are sufficiently large to achieve various policy goals. For example, would hiring teachers having stronger academic backgrounds sufficiently increase test scores for traditionally low-performing students to warrant the increased cost of doing so? Judging whether a change in student achievement is important requires some meaningful point of reference. In certain cases a grade-equivalence scale or some other intuitive and policy relevant metric of educational achievement can be used. However, this is not the case with item response theory (IRT) scale-score measures common to the tests usually employed in value-added analyses. In such cases, researchers typically describe the impacts of various interventions in terms of effect sizes, although conveying the intuition of such a measure to policymakers often is a challenge.   

A new report from the National Center for Learning Disabilities says too few students with learning disabilities graduate from high school, and some racial and ethnic groups are still disproportionately represented in LD programs, but early intervention strategies appear to be reducing the overall number of students who are identified as having a learning disability.

In 2010, California enacted education legislation known as the "parent trigger." The legislation empowers parents of children at schools that have failed to meet annual yearly progress for at least four years to change the administration, convert the school to a charter, or shut it down completely if they gather signatures from at least 51% of parents at the school. Similar legislation exists in Mississippi and Connecticut, but has failed to become law in Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, and Maryland. Parents at McKinley Elementary in Compton Unified - a school that only met yearly progress once in the last eight years -were the first in the nation to "pull the trigger" and remain the sole group to do so to date. As a result of their action, the State of California required the district to hire a "direct assistance intervention team," and later, an attempt by parents to convert the school to a charter was rebuffed by the school district on technical grounds. A case is currently pending in Los Angeles Superior Court. Many school reformers believe that this law puts the interests of children ahead of teachers and helps to save children in failing schools before the clock runs out. Many education professionals, among them the president of the California Federation of Teachers, view the law as a "lynch mob provision," intended to dismantle the public school system. The politics of the "parent trigger" are confusing, with the lines between conservatives and liberals often blurred. This debate will examine the arguments in favor and in opposition to this reform, focusing on the experience to date in California and developments in other parts of the country where similar legislation is being considered.

It's a persistent and troubling problem: the gap between white students and students of color in academic achievement. There are many theories about how to resolve these disparities, from interventions with parents, increased accountability for teachers, school programs and testing, and others. Guests: Diane Ravitch and Angel Harris

The U.S. Department of Education today released the final regulations for the early intervention program under Part C of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). These final regulations will help improve services and outcomes for America's infants and toddlers with disabilities and their families.

In any case, among these five interventions (tutoring, extended time, improving human capital, interim assessments and "high expectations"), only one of them - "improving human capital" through more selective hiring and performance bonuses - focuses directly on improving teacher quality, the primary tool advocated by market-based reformers. Frankly, the human capital component is really the only one that could be called "market-based" by any reasonable definition (though the regular analysis of interim assessment data might be loosely classified as such). In other words, the teacher-focused, market-based philosophy that dominates our public debate is not very well represented in the "no excuses" model, even though the latter is frequently held up as evidence supporting the former.

If you follow education research - or quantitative work in any field - you'll often hear the term "significant effect." For example, you will frequently read research papers saying that a given intervention, such as charter school attendance or participation in a tutoring program, had "significant effects," positive or negative, on achievement outcomes. This term by itself is usually sufficient to get people who support the policy in question extremely excited, and to compel them to announce boldly that their policy "works." They're often overinterpreting the results, but there's a good reason for this. The problem is that "significant effect" is a statistical term, and it doesn't always mean what it appears to mean. As most people understand the words, "significant effects" are often neither significant nor necessarily effects. Let's very quickly clear this up, one word at a time, working backwards.

"RTI raises many concerns. Some parents worry that RTI winds up denying children with learning disabilities services. One fear is that some parents don't think they can request an evaluation, or they are led to believe it isn't necessary."

This report takes an important first step in assessing the consequences of relying on state tests versus study-administered tests for general, student-level measures of reading and math achievement in evaluations of educational effectiveness.