School Choice Program Found to Reduce Crime and its Related Social Cost Among High-Risk Youth

High-risk middle- and high-school students who transfer to their preferred school are less likely to be arrested and spend less time incarcerated, pointing to impact of school choice

CAMBRIDGE, MA – A new study of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina (CMS) school choice program finds that high-risk male youth who are admitted by lottery to their preferred schools commit fewer crimes and remain in school longer than their peers who seek admittance but do not gain seats in the lottery process.  Lottery-winning middle school students also are 18 percentage points more likely than those who lose the lottery to still be enrolled in school in 10^th grade.

In general, high-risk students commit about 50 percent less crime as a result of winning a school choice lottery.  Among male high school students at high risk of criminal activity, winning admission to a first-choice school reduced felony arrests from 77 to 43 per 100 students over the study period (2002-2009).  The attendant social cost of crimes committed decreased by more than 35 percent.  Among high-risk middle school students, admittance by lottery to a preferred school reduced the average social cost of crimes committed by 63 percent (due chiefly to a reduction in violent crime), and reduced the total expected sentence of crimes committed by 31 months (64 percent).

David J. Deming, assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, conducted the study and authored an article that will appear in the Spring, 2012 issue of Education Next.  The article, “Does School Choice Reduce Crime?  Evidence from North Carolina,” is now available online at www.educationnext.org.  Considering the impact of gaining admission to a first-choice school on high-risk youth, Deming writes, “The findings suggest that schools may be an opportune setting for the prevention of future crime.”

The study examines the impact of winning a school choice lottery on dropout rates and crime for groups of students with different propensities to commit crimes, using an index of crime risk that includes test scores, demographics, behavior, and neighborhood characteristics to identify the highest-risk group.  The final sample (males only, as they are overwhelmingly at higher risk of criminal activity) included 1,014 high school students and 1,081 middle school students.  The study finds that the overall reductions in criminal activity are concentrated among the top 20 percent of high-risk students, who are disproportionately African American, eligible for free lunch, with more days of absence and suspensions than the average student.

All of the students in the study selected schools to attend that they preferred over the default option, which was their assigned neighborhood school.  High school lottery winners in the high-risk group and all middle school lottery winners transferred to schools featuring modest increases in standard measures of school quality, such as average test scores and higher proportions of teachers with more than 3 years of experience.  For youth in the highest risk group (top 20%), the gain in school quality indicators is “roughly equivalent to moving from one of the lowest-ranked schools to one around the district average.”

After a thirty-year period of court-mandated busing to desegregate schools ended in 2001, CMS implemented a policy of district-wide open enrollment, launched in the 2002-03 school year.  Children who lived in each neighborhood zone were guaranteed access to their neighborhood school.  In cases where schools were oversubscribed, the CMS lottery system gave preferences to low-income students who applied to schools with a low fraction of low-income students.  The author estimates that this policy choice lowered the social cost of crime by about 12 percent, relative to a simple charter-style lottery with no preferential treatment.   If slots in oversubscribed schools were systematically allocated to not only low-income students, but also to students at highest risk of criminal activity, he states, “the social cost of crime would fall by an additional 27 percent” relative to the actual CMS assignment mechanism.

About the Author

David J. Deming is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  He is available to discuss questions about the study at david_deming@gse.harvard.edu.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information, please visit:  www.educationnext.org

For more information on the Program on Education Policy and Governance contact Antonio Wendland at 617-495-7976, pepg_administrator@hks.harvard.edu/pepg.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst   gwhitehurst@brookings.edu Brookings Institution
Janice B. Riddell  (203) 912-8675  janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu External Relations, Education Next

Experts Envision New Federal Role Advancing Equity and Choice in Education

NCLB reauthorization offers possibility for federal redirection, if it focuses on providing parents more accurate information and greater choice rather than requiring top-down compliance

CAMBRIDGE, MA – The Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education (KTF) proposes that No Child Left Behind (NCLB), when reauthorized, provide parents with more accurate information and expand their opportunities to choose schools for their children.  Task force member and author, Grover J. Whitehurst, observes, “The federal government has a legitimate role in overseeing the marketplace for schooling.  A new system that is based on expanding parents’ ability to choose schools that are a good match for their children and is explicitly designed to ‘avoid students being sorted by race, economic background, and other conditions’ is in the interest of individual students and their families, and of our society.”  The abridged version of the report, “Let the Dollars Follow the Child:  How the federal government can achieve equity,” is available at www.educationnext.org and will appear in the Spring, 2012, issue of Education Next.

“Washington is at a crossroads on K-12 education policy,” observes the KTF.  Policymakers can either continue on the path of top-down regulation and accountability that has characterized the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era;  devolve federal power to the states, which would in practice return to the laissez-faire model of the mid-1990s;  or “rethink the fundamentals.”

Two principles “have served the nation exceedingly well throughout its history:  federalism and choice.”  The report holds that “government services are most efficiently delivered if provided closest to the taxpayers or consumers receiving them.”  Equally important is well-informed choice, a powerful principle in our economy and in higher education, but one that is severely constrained in K-12 public education, particularly for low-income populations that are most likely to be assigned to low-performing schools under the nation’s residence-based school system.  The lack of geographic mobility for large segments of the population relieves low-performing school districts from the competitive pressure that research has shown to be a potent motivator for school district improvement. The lack of accurate information on school quality hinders the identification of better schools.

Under current federal policy, funding for the extra costs associated with low-income and high-need students is provided to districts and states chiefly through Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).  The KTF proposes to replace the complicated federal guidelines under which funds are currently disbursed with “backpack funding,” weighted funding that follows students as individuals.  Backpack funding, writes Whitehurst, “has been shown to direct proportionally more funds to schools that serve needy students than traditional distribution schemes.”

Backpack funding is the core mechanism by which parental choice in education will be unleashed under the plan.  When funding follows individual students, it will “create real competition for students and the public funding that accompanies them among the providers of K-12 education services.”  As a condition of the receipt of federal funds to support the education of individual students, schools should be required to participate in an open enrollment process conducted by a state-sanctioned authority.  The task force calls for “unified open-enrollment systems” that encompass as many choices as possible from the regular public charter, private, and virtual (online) school universes.”  Well-functioning school choice requires a federal role in gathering and disseminating high-quality data on school performance; ensures that civil rights laws are enforced; distributes funds based on enrollment of high-need students in particular schools; and supports a growing supply of school options through an expanded, equitably funded charter sector and through the unfettered growth of digital learning via application of the U.S. Constitution’s commerce clause.

The proposal to reauthorize ESEA, IDEA, and Head Start to conform to these recommendations will appeal more to some states than to others.  Whitehurst suggests pilot-testing the proposal by allowing states to opt out of the statutory and regulatory requirements of these programs in exchange for creating a marketplace of informed choice and competition.  If it turns out that the electorates in these pioneering states find success with the Koret approach – moving decision-making closer to the consumers of K-12 public education and empowering more parents to choose schools – other states would “find the risk of coming onboard manageable and…face escalating demand from their citizens.”

The full report of the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education is available at www.choiceandfederalism.org.

About the Author

Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst is a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information, please visit: www.educationnext.org

For more information on the Program on Education Policy and Governance contact Antonio Wendland at 617-495-7976, pepg_administrator@hks.harvard.edu, or visit www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:

Eric A. Hanushek, hanushek@stanford.edu, Stanford University
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675, janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, External Relations, Education Next

Achievement Gains under No Child Left Behind Test-Based Accountability Projected To Yield Large, Long-Term Economic Returns

Fact-checking analysis of recent National Research Council report shows that seemingly modest gains are significant

CAMBRIDGE, MA – An analysis of a new report by a committee of the National Research Council (NRC), the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that average student gains from the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) test-based accountability measures would yield, over the next 80 years, a national economic benefit of approximately $14 trillion.  When examined in this light, the impacts of NCLB – which the NRC estimates at a 0.08 standard deviation improvement in average achievement nationwide – are far greater than suggested by the NRC committee, which concludes that test-based accountability under NCLB had minimal impact and probably should be abandoned.

Eric A. Hanushek, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, prepared the analysis.  His critique, “Grinding the Antitesting Ax:  More bias than evidence behind NRC panel’s conclusions,” will appear in the Spring, 2012, issue of Education Next and is currently available at www.educationnext.org.

The NRC report, titled “Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education,” was released in draft version to the media five months in advance of its expected publication date, an indication, notes Hanushek, that the NRC “clearly wants to enter the current debate about the reauthorization of NCLB.”  Hanushek examines the report’s two main conclusions:  a) that test-based incentive programs “have not increased student achievement enough to bring the United States close to the level of the highest achieving countries;” and b) that high school exit exam programs “decrease the rate of high school graduation without increasing achievement.”  He finds that the report’s “strongly worded, unequivocal conclusions” about test-based accountability “are only weakly supported by scientific evidence.”

Hanushek writes that the NRC’s average estimated impact of test-based accountability at 0.08 of standard deviations of student achievement “may well be too low.”  The NRC committee considers a 2008 review of 14 studies, as well as 4 studies conducted after that review.  He notes that these studies produce a wide distribution of estimated impacts, and that the committee chooses to emphasize the 10% of these studies with negative findings, while downplaying the 90% of these studies that have positive findings.  Even leaving this concern aside and accepting the 0.08 of standard deviation achievement boost, Hanushek finds that “we are hard pressed to come up with any other education program working at (national scale) that has produced such results.”  Further, the cost of designing, administering, and reporting the results from statewide examinations have been estimated at between $20 and $50 per pupil, a small sum compared to the average U.S. per-pupil education expenditures of above $12,000 annually, or to the costs of reforms such as in-service training programs or class size reductions.

Drawing on his previous work on the impact on U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of higher levels of student achievement, Hanushek explains that an NCLB impact of $14 trillion over 80 years is “very close to the current $15 trillion level of our entire (annual) GDP.”  If a $100 per student testing cost is assumed and the U.S. tested students in all grades (rather than grades 3-8 and 10, as is now the case), the rate of return on investment would be 9,189 percent.  “Not a bad return,” he states.

About the Author

Eric Hanushek is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Martha Derthick, mad2d@virginia.edu, University of Virginia
Andrew Rotherham, andy@bellwethereducation.org, Bellwether Education
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675, janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, External Relations, Education Next

Obama Administration’s Conditional Waivers from No Child Left Behind Provisions Spark New Legal, Policy, and Constitutional Debate

Are waivers that require states to accept “principles” necessary or do they constitute rewriting law?

CAMBRIDGE, MA – The Obama administration characterizes its plan to offer states waivers from some provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) as a necessary response to glacial congressional progress on reauthorizing and revising the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (whose current version is NCLB).  In exchange for the states’ acceptance of the administration’s “principles” set forth in its Blueprint for Reform, they will be exempt from some of the more onerous NCLB timetables and yearly-progress provisions.  While the conditional waivers are welcomed by many states – 41 have indicated their intent to apply for them – some analysts are questioning their legal status and effect on school accountability.

Martha Derthick and Andy Rotherham discuss whether the conditional waivers are both necessary and will stand up to legal scrutiny in an Education Next forum released today at www.educationnext.org.  Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia and Rotherham is a columnist for Time magazine and a former White House aide for President Clinton.

Raising concerns to which the NCLB waivers point, Derthick asks, “Just how far is the United States going to take government-by-waiver?”  The framers of the United States Constitution wrote that it is a duty of the chief executive to “take care” that the law be faithfully executed, but waivers began to make a significant appearance in public policymaking in the 1980s and 1990s.  While recognizing that waiver provisions in federal law have repeatedly been upheld in court, Derthick cautions, “waivers threaten to get out of hand, and to undermine the rule of law.”  “Nothing in the law,” she writes, authorizes the administration “to craft new conditions – in effect, to attempt making law itself – even if the new conditions are not called law or rules or conditions or standards, but merely ‘principles.’”

Derthick and Rotherham agree that some action to revise NCLB is needed.  Rotherham observes that foot-dragging on reauthorizing and revising NCLB reflects the current political and governmental stalemate in Washington.  “This dysfunction matters,” he writes, “because when NCLB was passed in 2001, no one involved imagined the law would run for at least a decade without a congressional overhaul.”

Rotherham observes that there are some broadly supported provisions in the administration’s waiver package, such as getting rid of NCLB’s “highly qualified teacher rules,” which many states “have gamed…to the point of meaninglessness.”

However, a key reform of NCLB, Rotherham writes, was that it “changed the unit of analysis for educational performance and accountability from schools to students.”  Thus, NCLB has shined a light on the performance of minority students and students with disabilities even in schools that had generally high levels of student achievement.  Accountability provisions such as these are likely to be muted under the new NCLB waivers, which stipulate that states must focus their improvement efforts on the lowest-performing 15% of schools, but de-emphasize performance of student sub-groups in every school.  He states that the law “does not need a rollback of this bright and often uncomfortable light.”

Derthick observes, “there is a lot of prescription woven in among the principles” that U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, stipulates.  For example, six states, including Virginia and Texas, have not yet adopted the Common Core standards in reading and math that are one of the conditions for being granted waivers.  She wonders if the Department of Education will withhold federal funding if these states apply for waivers but offer much less in the way of conforming principles than Secretary Duncan would like.  She also wonders how the Department will respond if some states “just stop complying with NCLB and drag their feet on the waivers.”  Courts have been applying a “clear statement” rule for federal grant-in-aid conditions, stipulating that a federal agency cannot withhold funds unless states have been told their obligations in plain language.  “If that were the test,” Derthick states, “The Department of Education would be heading into court with a weak hand.”

About the Authors

Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia and co-author of the legal beat column for Education Next.  Andrew Rotherham is a former White House aide for President Clinton, co-founder of Bellwether Education, and columnist for Time magazine.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information, please visit: www.educationnext.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Michael Goldstein, mgoldstein@matchschool.org, MATCH Charter School
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675, janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, External Relations, Education Next

Practical Research for Teachers is in Short Supply
Need for Research on Effective Choices That Work in the Classroom

CAMBRIDGE, MA – The nation’s 3 million teachers generate about 2 billion hour-long classes per year.  Yet, there is scant empirical research on which actions, decided by individual teachers in their classrooms, are most effective in helping students to learn.

Michael Goldstein offers a “practitioner’s take” on what is blocking the research teachers need and what kinds of useful, empirical studies might help to fill this gap.  His article, “Studying Teacher Moves,” will appear in the Winter 2012 issue of Education Next and is now available at www.educationnext.org.

“There is almost nothing examining the thousands of moves teachers must decide on and execute every school day,” writes Goldstein.  These include decisions such as:  whether to ask for raised hands, or cold-call;  whether to give a warning or a detention;  and whether to accept a student’s answer that is mostly right, or stay with a question until one member of the class reaches a 100% correct answer.  One problem with most education policy research is that the element of teacher time is missing.  “The return on investment for teacher time and the opportunity cost of spending it one way rather than another is rarely taken into account,” Goldstein observes, leading to teachers’ skepticism about the relevance of policy research.

Goldstein investigated ways to conduct useful, classroom-relevant research with an experiment of his own in the MATCH charter school he founded.  He asked Harvard economist Roland Fryer to help him conduct an empirical study of the question:  “Do teacher phone calls to parents work?”  A randomized study was designed involving 16 observers, under supervision of two graduate students, who carefully coded student behavior for several weeks in two sets of classes (classes that received parent calls from teachers, and those that did not).  The results of the study were that “on average, teacher-family communication increased homework completion rates by 6 percentage points and decreased instances in which teachers had to redirect students’ attention to the task at hand by 32%.”

Drawing on this experiment as a model, Goldstein outlines a proposal for a “typology of trials,” that would mirror the kinds of empirical studies that are regularly done in the medical field.  He proposes that each of the nation’s 1,200-plus school of education and teacher prep programs conduct one randomized trial on a teacher move each year.  Phase 1 trials would be small, nongenerablizable empirical studies whose dependent variable is not year-end test scores, but “next-day or next-week outcomes:  measurable effects on student behavior, effort, or short-term learning.”  Phase 2 trials would test promising teacher practice from Phase 1 on a larger, more varied teacher pool to see if the next-day outcomes held up.  Phase 3 trials would be randomized trials in which teachers combine multiple moves that emerge from Phase 2, to identify “combinations of moves that are measured to see if they bolster year-end student learning gains.”

With a typology such as the one Goldstein outlines, teacher research would progress the way much medical research does, with “thousands of people each trying to answer small questions in a very rigorous way,” leading to research that might be useful to teachers on a daily basis.

About the Author
Michael Goldstein is the founder of MATCH Charter School and MATCH Teacher Residency, in Boston.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information, please visit:  www.educationnext.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Bruno V. Manno, bmanno@wffmail.com, Walton Family Foundation
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675,  janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, External Relations, Education Next

Advocacy Groups Empower Parents to Act as Catalysts for School Reform
A growing number of nonprofit organizations bypass PTAs to force change in public education

CAMBRIDGE, MA – Nonprofit groups that organize, educate, and mobilize parents to take active roles in promoting school improvement in their communities are on the rise in a number of states.  The old-style Parent Teacher Association (PTA) – whose national membership has declined from more than 12 million in 1965 to around 5 million in 2010 – is seen by these groups as an extension of the educational establishment.  Today’s advocates for better schools are insurgent groups that challenge the establishment by encouraging parents to engage actively in K-12 reform efforts, demanding major changes in school choice and teacher policies, as well as school governance.

In “Not Your Mother’s PTA,” which will appear in the Winter, 2012, issue of Education Next and will be available at www.educationnext.org, Bruno Manno writes that the new community organizations “empower parents to make their voices and choices a primary catalyst of school reform.”  Manno focuses on three of these nonprofit organizations that have had helped to lift charter school caps, implement “parent trigger” policies, and reform teacher effectiveness provisions.  They include Parent Revolution in California, Education Reform Now (ERN), which has nine state affiliates, and Stand for Children, which has national offices in Oregon and Massachusetts and affiliates in nine additional states.  He focuses on the potential of these groups and their different organizational models, legal structures, and political strategies, all of which lead to differences in the scope of their parent mobilization, advocacy, and activities.

Parent Revolution organized the first campaign to implement the “parent trigger” provision of the 2010 California Parent Empowerment Act, which allows at least 51 percent of all parents whose children attend a failing California school to petition the local school board to reform a low-performing school by either:  closing the school and reopening it as a charter school;  bringing in new staff;  keeping school staff but firing the principal;  or closing the school and sending students to a better school.  Parent Revolution obtained 62 percent of school parents’ signatures asking for conversion of McKinley Elementary School – a K-5 school that is 60 percent Hispanic and 40 percent African American and ranks in the bottom 10 percent of schools statewide – to a charter school.  While conversion did not happen (the school board voted it down, citing various technicalities), it led the State Board of Education to develop clear procedures for implementing parent trigger provisions.  Mississippi, Connecticut, and Ohio now have some form of a parent trigger law and at least a dozen states are considering similar laws.

Education Reform Now (ERN) has state affiliates in California, Colorado, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin.  Under the umbrella of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) the group coordinated a major effort in 2010 to urge the New York State legislature to lift a charter school cap that had been a stumbling block in the state’s first bid to win a federal Race to the Top (RttT) grant.  The bill lifting the charter cap from 200 to 460 schools passed the state assembly 91-43 just 3 days before the second RttT application deadline on June 1, 2010, and New York ultimately was among the 10 finalists to win a $700 million RttT grant.

Stand for Children’s state affiliates are under the legal umbrella of the national organization and its respective boards, though each has advisory and other groups that provide counsel on specific issues.  The organization’s leadership center trains “everyday people” to become leaders in the fight to win improvements in children’s programs. Stand’s diverse legal structure allows them to train and organize the general public, target legislators, and raise money to support state lawmakers who support legislation the organization wants made into law.

Manno writes that each of these insurgent organizations, which rely chiefly on donations from foundations and individuals, see no immediate threats to their revenue sources, and hold strong promise for mobilizing parents to advance a school reform agenda that “goes far beyond today’s PTA.”

About the Author
Bruno V. Manno is senior advisor for K-12 education reform at the Walton Family Foundation and former U.S. assistant secretary of education for policy.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information, please visit: www.educationnext.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Sa Bui, sbui@uh.edu, University of Houston
Steven Craig, scraig@uh.edu, University of Houston
Scott Imberman, simberman@uh.edu, University of Houston
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675, janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, External Relations, Education Next

Study Finds Gifted and Talented Programs in Middle-Schools Have Little Impact on Math and Reading Achievement

However, science scores improve from attending a gifted and talented magnet program

CAMBRIDGE, MA – Studies of two middle-school programs for high-achieving students — known as gifted and talented (G&T) programs — show that being placed in programs with academically strong peers does not boost students’ achievement over and above what is learned in a regular classroom from the start of 6^th grade to mid-way through 7^th grade.  However, student performance in science was higher for those who attended G&T magnet schools.

A team of scholars from the University of Houston – Sa Bui, Steven Craig, and Scott Imberman – studied programs in a large urban school district with a substantial minority and low-income population in the southwestern United States, where since 2007 all 5^th-grade students have been tested for eligibility to participate in GT programming.  Students deemed eligible often are grouped in classes with other high-achieving students; they also are permitted to apply for admission to two schools that focus on high-achieving students. The report, “Poor Results for High Achievers: New evidence on the impact of gifted and talented programs” will appear in the Winter, 2012, issue of Education Next and is available at www.educationnext.org.

The authors’ report results from two separate studies.  One study looks at students who attended two magnet middle school programs that had an exclusive focus on high-achieving students.  Because these schools were popular, applicants exceeded space available and lotteries were held to determine which students were admitted. Of the 542 eligible students who applied to these schools, 394 won the lottery, while 148 lost the lottery and were not admitted.

The lottery process allowed the researchers to compare the performance of students who won the lottery with those who lost the lottery and either attended a neighborhood G&T program, a charter school, or an alternative magnet school.  The two groups of students are assumed to be identical in all respects other than admission to the program, allowing for a precise identification of the effect of attending a school for high-achieving students.  The study found positive effects of attending the school on student performance on a science test.  The effect was 0.28 standard deviations, approximately one extra year’s worth of learning. No statistically significant effects in math, reading, language and social studies were identified, however.

Another study examines the effects of participation in a G&T program offered within regular middle schools to students who were just barely deemed eligible to participate as compared to those who just missed becoming eligible, based on the “identification matrix” scores the district used.  The researchers assumed that those who barely passed the threshold of acceptance were little different from those who barely missed that threshold.  Students entered the G&T program in 6^th grade, and their progress was measured when they were 7^th graders, using data drawn from their Stanford Achievement Test scores and attendance rates.  Using data on 2,600 students the study shows no statistically significant impact on performance in math, science, language, reading or social studies.

The data do not allow for a clear explanation for striking gains in science from attending a magnet school but not in other subjects.  The authors suggest that instruction in science may require especially qualified teachers with access to excellent science facilities, something that may be more available in G&T programs than in regular middle schools.

The authors caution that test scores are not the only way in which programs for high-achieving students should be assessed. There might also be benefits that the researchers said they are not able to study, such as the impact on graduation rates and college attendance.  Further, they caution that the analysis of G&T programs within regular schools focuses only on students who are on the margin of entering a gifted program and hence may not apply to higher achieving students.

About the Authors
Sa Bui is a doctoral candidate in economics at the University of Houston, where Steven Craig is a professor of economics and Scott Imberman is an assistant professor of economics.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information, please visit: www.educationnext.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT
June Kronholz, junekronholz@me.com
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675, janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, External Relations, Education Next

Shortchanging Extracurriculars Might be Penny-Wise and Pound-Foolish

Student involvement in sports, arts, and civic activities linked to higher academic achievement and persistence

CAMBRIDGE, MA – A growing body of research shows that there is a link between afterschool activities and graduating from high school, going to college, and becoming a responsible citizen.  The National Center for Education Statistics, analyzing the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS) data, found that high-school seniors who were involved in school activities were less likely to cut class than kids who weren’t involved.  Three times as many had a GPA of 3.0 or higher;  twice as many scored in the top quarter on math and reading tests;  and 68 percent expected to get a college degree, compared to 48 percent who weren’t involved in school activities.

School districts faced with tight budgets are prone to cutting back extracurriculars, asking parents to pay fees toward their kids’ participation in sports and other activities, or relying on volunteers to fill staffing gaps.  In light of evidence that afterschool activities boost student success, reducing students’ opportunities for powerful extracurricular experiences might be an unwise way to meet budget caps, writes June Kronholz.  Her analysis, “Academic Value of Non-Academics: The case for keeping extracurriculars,” will appear in the Winter, 2012, issue of Education Next, and is available at www.educationnext.org.

Kronholz cites U.S. Department of Education data showing that “kids with the highest test scores are the most active in afterschool activities,” with two-thirds of students in the top quarter of test takers playing sports, for example, compared to less than half in the lowest quarter.

Some researchers insist there is a cause-effect relationship between activities and academic success, not just the other way around.  For example, Margo Gardner, a research scientist at Columbia University’s National Center for Children and Families, used data from the 1988 National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS), controlling for poverty, race, gender, test scores, and parental involvement.  She calculated that the odds of attending college were 97 percent higher for students who took part in school-sponsored activities for two years than for those who didn’t do any school activities.  The chances of completing college were 179 percent higher, and the odds of voting eight years after high school, a proxy for civic engagement, were 31 percent higher.

Other researchers have examined involvement in activities as a predictor of success.  University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth, for example, rated the resumes of recent graduates who were applying for their first teaching jobs, giving high “grit” scores to those who had been in a college activity for several years and attained a level of leadership or achievement.  Those with the strongest records of extracurricular involvement turned out to be the best teachers, based on the academic gains of their students.  She attributes this difference to “perseverance rather than talent,” as she found no significant difference in teacher effectiveness based on the teachers’ SAT scores and college GPAs.

Temple University psychologist Laurence Steinberg suggests other reasons for the boost to academic success from extracurriculars.  Students who are involved in the school newspaper, clubs, and sports spend extra hours each week with an adult – a role model, such as a drama director or a football coach — and students are motivated to work hard for these mentors.

For many students, involvement in a club that they enjoy is the “hook” that keeps them tied to school.  They also gain skills that can be applied to other areas.  As Tony Wagner, co-director of the Change Leadership Group at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education observes, “kids who have a significant involvement in an extracurricular activity have a capacity for focus, self-discipline, and time management that I see lacking in kids who just went through school focused on their GPA.”

About the Author

June Kronholz is a former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and education reporter, and currently a contributing editor at Education Next.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information, please visit: www.educationnext.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT

Jay P. Greene, jpg@uark.edu, University of Arkansas
Josh B. McGee, Josh@arnoldfoundation.org, Laura and John Arnold Foundation
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675, janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, External Relations, Education Next

Study Shows That Wealthy Suburban School Districts Are Only Mediocre by International Standards

Sixty-eight percent of all U.S. districts have average math achievement below the 50th percentile when compared to achievement in 25 developed nations

CAMBRIDGE, MA – The first ever comparison of math performance in virtually every school district in the United States finds that even the most elite suburban school districts produce results that are mediocre when compared to those of international peers.  According to the study, entitled “When the Best is Mediocre,” the math achievement of the average student in Beverly Hills, California, is at the 53rd percentile relative to the international comparison group.  White Plains, New York, is at the 39th percentile; Evanston, Illinois is at the 48th percentile; Montgomery County, Maryland is at the 50th percentile; and Fairfax, Virginia is at the 49th percentile.

State accountability systems emphasize in-state comparisons between suburban and urban districts, which give impressions of relatively high achievement in more affluent suburban districts.  However, Jay P. Greene and Josh B. McGee, authors of the study, note that this is “false reassurance,”  as “America’s elite suburban students are increasingly competing with students outside the U.S. for economic opportunities,” making meaningful global comparisons essential.  Even wealthy communities “are barely keeping pace with the typical student in the average developed country.”

The study’s findings rest on an index developed by the authors called the “Global Report Card” (GRC), which builds on state accountability test results for every district for which the American Institutes for Research (AIR) collected achievement data between 2004 and 2007.  The GRC links performance on state tests to the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP), which then allows for a linkage to PISA, international tests conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The GRC compares academic achievement in math and reading across all grades of student performance on state tests with average achievement in a set of 25 other countries with developed economies that might be considered economic peers of the U.S.  A percentile ranking of 60, for example, indicates that the average student in a district performed better than 59.9 percent of students in the global comparison group.

Of the top 20 U.S. school districts in math achievement, 7 are charter schools (which are treated as separate public school districts in some states).  Most of the 13 other school districts in the top 20 are in rural communities.  In four states — Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, and West Virginia — there is not a single traditional school district with average student achievement in math above the 50th percentile.  In 17 states, not a single district has average achievement in the upper third relative to the global comparison group.  In over half of the states, there are no more than three districts that reach average achievement levels in the upper third.

The scholars find some pockets of excellence across the U.S.  For example, the average student in the Pelham, Massachusetts district (home to Amherst College) is at the 95th percentile in math relative to the international comparison group.  Students in Spring Lake, New Jersey, achieve on average at the 91st percentile relative to the international group, and Waconda, Kansas, a small rural community, also is at the 91st percentile.  At the other end of the scale, the average student in the Washington, D.C. public school district is at the 11th percentile in math; in Detroit, the 12th percentile; in Los Angeles, the 20th percentile; and in Chicago, the 21st percentile.

To be included in this comparison group, countries had to have a 2007 per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of at least $24,000 and a population of at least 2 million, not be a member of OPEC, and have test results from PISA.  Of the 25 countries that met these criteria (among them Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Spain, Taiwan, and United Kingdom) 23 had per-capita GDPs that significantly trailed the $45,597 of the U.S.

The study, “When the Best is Mediocre,” will appear as an article in the Winter, 2012, issue of Education Next, and will be available at www.educationnext.org.   The GRC ranking in math and reading of students in 13,636 of the nearly 14,000 school districts in the U.S. will be posted at www.globalreportcard.org on the website of the George W. Bush Institute.

About the Authors

Jay P. Greene is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and a fellow at the George W. Bush Institute.  Josh B. McGee is vice president for public accountability initiatives at the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information, please visit:  www.educationnext.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Paul E. Peterson, (617) 495-8312, ppeterso@gov.harvard.edu, Harvard University
Eric A. Hanushek, hanushek@stanford.edu, Stanford University
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675, janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, External Relations, Education Next

U.S. Proficiency in Math and Reading Lags Behind That of Most Industrialized Nations, Endangering Long Term Economic Growth

Harvard Study shows large variation in each state’s international standing in math and reading achievement

CAMBRIDGE, MA – Results from a new study of student achievement show that U.S. students rank 32nd among industrialized nations in proficiency in math and 17th in reading.

The 32 percent of U.S. students who achieved proficiency in math compares to 75 percent of students in Shanghai, 58 percent in Korea, and 56 percent in Finland.  Countries in which a majority – or near majority – of students performed at or above the proficiency level in math include Switzerland, Japan, Canada, and the Netherlands.

Comparing students’ math achievement across states, the study finds the highest performing state to be Massachusetts, where 58 percent achieve proficiency.  The states of Minnesota, Vermont, North Dakota, New Jersey, Kansas, South Dakota, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Montana are among the top ten performing states.

The scholars analyze test results for the high-school graduating class of 2011, the most recent cohort for which data are available.

The study authors are Paul E. Peterson, Harvard University, Ludger Woessmann, University of Munich, Eric Hanushek, Stanford University, and Carlos X. Lastra-Anadón, Harvard University.  The article will appear in the Fall 2011 issue of Education Next and is currently available at www.educationnext.org.

California, our nation’s most populous state, had a math proficiency rate lower than that of 36 countries and no better than the rate in Greece and Russia. Michigan students are outperformed by those in 30 other countries, placing it at a level equivalent to the students in Italy and Portugal.

The authors say their math findings are of particular importance, because firms are experiencing shortages of technically skilled workers and outsourcing professional-level work to workers abroad.  “Graduates in each and every state compete for jobs with graduates from all over the world,” Hanushek observed.  “Since student performance on international tests such as PISA is closely related to long-term economic productivity growth, increasing U.S. students’ proficiency levels to those attained in Canada would increase our economic growth rate by some 50 percent.”

Data examined by the authors also show considerable variation in proficiency rates among students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds.  While 42 percent of white students and 50 percent of students from Asian and Pacific Islands backgrounds were identified as proficient in math, only 11 percent of African American students, 15 percent of Hispanic students, and 16 percent of Native Americans were so identified.  “The 42 percent math proficiency rate for U.S. white students trails behind all students in 17 other countries, among them Korea, Japan, Finland, Germany, Belgium, and Canada,” Peterson noted.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is administered by the U.S. Department of Education and is generally known as the nation’s report card.  NAEP’s concept of proficiency, set by its governing board, reflects a consensus of what educators, curriculum experts, and policy makers think should be known by students who reach a certain educational stage. The Education Next study looked at data from the 2007 NAEP tests in reading and math, given to 8th graders in U.S. public and private schools.  A representative sample of this cohort of students took the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, administered by the Organization for Economic Development (OECD) two years later, as 15-year-olds, in 2009.  The authors established a crosswalk between NAEP and PISA in their analysis, estimating the score on the PISA achieved by students said to be proficient on the NAEP examination. The study, “Globally Challenged: Are U.S. students ready to compete?” is a report of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance.

About the Authors
Paul E. Peterson is the director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.  Ludger Woessmann is professor of economics at the University of Munich.  Eric A. Hanushek is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.  Carlos X. Lastra-Anadón is a research fellow at the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. The authors are available for interviews.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information please visit:  www.educationnext.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT
June Kronholz, junekronholz@me.com
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675, janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, External Relations, Education Next

Performance Learning Centers Give At-Risk Students New Chances to Succeed

Combining online learning and teacher coaching, PLCs enable students to learn at their own pace and earn their diplomas

Cambridge, MA – Performance Learning Centers (PLCs) call themselves an alternative to traditional schools.  Serving teenagers at risk of dropping out, PLCs use a “blended” approach to teaching and learning, combining online learning with a teacher-led classroom.  Most instruction is online in the PLC model, but a teacher-coach is there to answer questions, direct projects, and keep kids on track.  In the three years the 75-seat Hampton, Virginia, PLC has been open, it has graduated 91 students.  There’s a waiting list for admission.  95 percent of the PLC’s online students pass Virginia’s end-of-course history test, which puts them well ahead of both the local school district’s and even the state’s pass rates.

In “Getting At-Risk Teens to Graduation,” scheduled to appear in the Fall 2011 issue of Education Next and currently available at www.educationnext.org, June Kronholz explores the PLC model.  Two national trends are fueling the growth of Performance Learning Centers.  Many states are raising their graduation standards, and they’ve found, Kronholz notes, that simply returning kids to the traditional classroom for a second attempt is often counterproductive.  The second trend is the exponential growth of online learning.  Thirty-two states have virtual schools where online offerings range from one class to an entire high-school curriculum.

The nonprofit dropout-prevention program, Communities in Schools, developed the PLC concept in 2002 and has since expanded the project to seven states and 33 schools.  PLCs are small units within schools, typically consisting of only four or five classrooms, four or five teachers (who are district employees paid the same as other district teachers), and under 100 students, who apply for admission.  PLCs are a part of students’ home school districts and receive the same per-pupil funding as any other district school.  As PLC students earn their diplomas, they raise graduation statistics for those schools, generating buy-in from administrators.

A brochure for the Adult Career Development Center PLC in Richmond, Virginia, describes students for whom the PLC is a good fit:  kids with “poor attendance,” “excessive tardiness,” “academic failure,” “social issues,” and “apathy.”  The three PLCs that Kronholz visited were, nonetheless, quiet and orderly.  The principal of Richmond Technical Center PLC, Wes Hamner, pointed out that there is no security at his school and that the lockers don’t even have locks.

Students in PLCs learn the same course content as their peers in regular district schools, distinguishing the PLC model from “credit recovery” programs designed to boost graduation rates quickly.  Most PLCs use NovaNET, an online curriculum that is marketed by Pearson Education Inc.  The program tests students at the end of each lesson, unit, and course, reinforcing material as needed and letting students who pass tests by at least 80 percent move ahead.

PLCs in Virginia report that 96 percent of their students passed the state’s end-of-course algebra exams, 97 percent reading, 90 percent biology, and 100 percent passed writing, putting the PLCs ahead of state averages in all four subjects.  Kronholz recounts the indelible impact of a PLC on a student in Hampton:  the young woman had laid out her post-secondary plans, including community college, university, and then a career in teaching or nursing.  “Honestly, if it wasn’t for here, I wouldn’t graduate,” she said, and by June, she had.

About the Author
June Kronholz is a former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and education reporter, and currently a contributing editor at Education Next.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information please visit:  www.educationnext.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
William G. Howell, (312) 550-3767, University of Chicago
Martin R. West, (617) 496-4803, Harvard University
Paul E. Peterson, (617) 495-7976, Harvard University
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675, janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, External Relations, Education Next

Public and Teachers Increasingly Divided on Key Education Issues

National Survey shows increased support for vouchers, but public’s views on merit pay, charters, and other policies have not changed, though teacher opposition to reforms intensifies

CAMBRIDGE, MA – The fifth annual survey conducted by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) and Education Next on a wide range of education issues reveals that the opinions of the public have remained largely unchanged since one year ago, despite controversies in Wisconsin, Indiana and many other states.  However, teacher opposition to many reforms has increased, placing them more at odds with views of the general public.

An article, “The Public Weighs In on School Reform,” interpreting this year’s results by William Howell, Martin West, and Paul Peterson, will appear in the Fall 2011 issue of Education Next, and is currently available at www.educationnext.org.

Support for vouchers as a means to expand school choice increased by 8 percentage points between 2010 and 2011, the largest shift of public opinion over the course of the past year.  Forty-seven percent of participants who were asked if they support or oppose “a proposal to give families with children in public schools a wider choice, by allowing them to enroll their children in private schools instead, with government helping to pay the tuition” indicated their support.  “Although public opinion on most issues has remained stable, public support for vouchers has grown noticeably,” West observes.  “Meanwhile, teacher opinion has changed in a direction opposite to that of the public on such issues as merit pay and teacher tenure.”

Public opinion on charter schools showed little change, even though the topic received substantial media attention over the past year.  Forty-three percent of the American public support charters, and among teachers, favorable views of charters increased from 39 percent in 2010 to 45 percent this year.  Only 18 percent of the public opposes charter schools.  Of those surveyed, 39 percent of the public and 18 percent of teachers took a neutral position.

Notably, 33 percent of the public thinks that teachers unions have a generally negative effect on the nation’s public schools, virtually unchanged from 31 percent and 33 percent in 2009 and 2010, respectively.  The share perceiving a positive union impact has hardly budged from 28 percent in 2010 to 29 percent in 2011; 38 percent are neutral on unions’ impact.  Teacher opinion is moving in the opposite direction:  58 percent think they have a positive impact, an increase from 51 percent the previous year.  Meanwhile the percentage of teachers saying that unions have a negative impact on the nation’s schools has dropped to 17 percent from 25 percent in 2010.

Again this year, the poll found that a near majority of the public, 47 percent, favors merit pay – paying teachers, in part, based on the academic progress of their students on state tests.  Only 27 percent oppose the idea.  “Merit pay remains anathema to teachers, however, with only 18 percent in favor, and 72 percent in opposition,” Howell points out.

On teacher tenure, the public’s opposition to it has done nothing more than tick upward from 47 percent in 2010 to 49 percent in 2011.  The poll also shows that 55 percent of the public supports the principle that if tenure is given at all, it should be based on demonstrated success in raising student performance.  Teachers, meanwhile, like tenure more than ever; 53 percent support it, up from 48 percent in 2010, and only 30 percent agree that tenure should be based on student academic progress.

The affluent – defined as college graduates who are in the top income decile in their state – are more critical of unions than is the public as a whole.  Fifty-six percent say unions have a negative impact on their schools (versus 33 percent of the public as a whole).  The affluent like their local schools better than most people do (54 percent grade them A or B versus 46 percent of the public as a whole) but they think less well of public schools nationally (only 15 percent give the nation’s schools the highest two grades) and are more in favor of reforms such as charter schools.  Teachers are much more generous in their evaluation, with 37 percent giving the nation’s schools an A or B.

On questions of school spending, respondents’ opinions depend on how much they know.  For example, 59 percent of the public says that government funding for their district’s public schools should increase.  However, when they were informed about the level of per-pupil expenditure in their community, which averaged $12,300 for the survey’s respondents, enthusiasm for increased spending dampened, with public support falling to 46 percent.

In 2011, support for digital learning among the general public was 47 percent, a modest decrease from 52 percent the year before.  Forty-nine percent of teachers support digital learning, as do 42 percent of the well-to-do.  However, Peterson noted that “when respondents are asked about their own children, high levels of support are shown, with a majority of Americans and roughly two in three teachers indicating a willingness to have one of their children take ‘some academic courses’ in high school over the internet.”

When it comes to school and student accountability, the authors observe, “the public’s appetite for standardized tests appears undiminished.”  More than two in three Americans believe that the federal government should “continue to require that all students be tested in math and reading each year in grades 3-8 and once in high school,” which mirrors the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) testing mandates.  Whereas NCLB allows each state to develop its own tests for determining student proficiency, solid pluralities of all subgroups support the creation of a single national test in both reading and math.

About the Public Opinion Survey
The Education Next-PEPG survey was conducted by the polling firm Knowledge Networks (KN) between April 15 and May 4, 2011.  The survey interviewed a nationally representative sample of some 2,600 American citizens.  In addition to the views of the public as a whole, special attention was given to two potentially influential types of participants in school politics:  teachers (surveyed as a separate representative group for the third year in a row) and the affluent (considered separately for the first time).  Detailed information about the survey protocols is available online at www.knowledgenetworks.com/quality/.

About the Authors
William G. Howell is professor of American politics at the University of Chicago.  Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and deputy director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance.  Paul E. Peterson is the director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information, please visit:  www.educationnext.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Allison Sherry, asherry@denverpost.com
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675,  janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, External Relations, Education Next

Republican Governors Running on Strong Education Records as Candidates for President

Romney and Pawlenty earn high marks for student achievement, Perry can spotlight Hispanic performance

CAMBRIDGE, MA – The three most talked-about governors running for president in 2012 – (former governors) Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty, and (perhaps a current governor) Rick Perry – come from states that outperform the U.S. average on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress tests.  Romney takes top honors for overall student performance in Massachusetts, and Perry can hail the outstanding achievement of Texas Hispanic students.

In an analysis of the leading Republican contenders in the presidential race, Allison Sherry writes, “In staking out platforms in the coming months for what will likely be a feisty GOP primary, Republicans face two quandaries regarding education policy.”  They need to distinguish their positions from Obama’s “centrist education reforms” and “to win over a Republican base that resists a growing federal role in education.”  Her article, “The 2012 Republican Candidates (So Far): What they’ve said and done on education in the past, and what they might do about our public schools if elected” will appear in the Fall 2011 issue of Education Next and is currently available at www.educationnext.org.

Sherry notes that as governor, “Romney proposed education reform measures that lifted the state cap on charter schools and gave principals more power to get rid of ineffective teachers.”  Statewide graduation requirement tests were started during his first year as governor in 2003.  In his third year as governor, 4th and 8th graders scored first in the country in math and English.

In his eight years as Minnesota’s governor, Tim Pawlenty’s “push against the teachers union grew stronger,” Sherry writes, and he called for tying teacher pay to performance, bringing up the state’s standards, and urging state lawmakers to authorize the use of a transparent growth model to see how well schools are really doing to improve student achievement.  Sherry describes Pawlenty’s approach to unions:  “I’ll try to work with you.  That is until you don’t work with me.”

Assuming he runs, Texas Governor Rick Perry is “likely to use his own state’s successes to argue that the federal government should dramatically downsize in education,” Sherry says.  He’ll likely call for the repeal of No Child Left Behind, and let states take charge of their education systems.  Test scores among students of all racial and ethnic backgrounds are higher in Texas than in Wisconsin, for example, which has fewer students qualifying for free- and reduced-price lunch.

Other leading Republican candidates profiled include Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich.  Sherry notes, “Under a Bachmann presidency, expect the U.S. Department of Education to be all but shuttered” and a push for No Child Left Behind to be repealed.  Newt Gingrich’s views have developed through the years, she observes, and include his call for the abolition of the U.S. Department of Education in the 1990s and his push in the 2000s for improvements in math and science education.

Sherry concludes her analysis of the Republican candidates by saying, “What they all have in common is a belief that education needs deep reform that goes beyond anything Democrats have proposed.”

About the Author
Allison Sherry is Washington, D.C., bureau chief for the Denver Post.  She can be reached at asherry@denverpost.com .

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information please visit:  www.educationnext.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675, janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, External Relations, Education Next
Brian A. Jacob, bajacob@umich.edu, University of Michigan

Chicago Study Shows Principals Focus on Retaining Highly Effective Teachers in Dismissal Decisions – if Policies Permit

Reform improves student achievement by providing principals with the tools to manage the quality of personnel in their classrooms

Cambridge, MA – When current U.S. education secretary, Arne Duncan, headed the Chicago Public Schools in 2004-05, the city implemented a new collective bargaining agreement that covered teacher dismissal policy:  principals were given more flexibility to dismiss non-tenured teachers.  Now a new study by University of Michigan economist Brian Jacob finds that when given the authority, principals make dismissal decisions that put a premium on teacher effectiveness and student achievement.  The study will appear in the Fall 2011 issue of Education Next and is currently available at www.educationnext.org.

Jacob found that principals are more likely to dismiss teachers who received poor evaluations in prior years; who are frequently absent; and at the elementary level, who had demonstrated less effectiveness in raising student achievement in prior years than their peers who were not dismissed.

Comparing the characteristics of dismissed versus non-dismissed untenured teachers within the same school and year, Jacob was able to determine how much weight principals place on a variety of teacher characteristics.  Teachers who were given a rating of “satisfactory” in the prior academic year were 22.1 percentage points more likely to be dismissed than teachers in the same school who were given the highest rating, “superior.”  Teachers rated “excellent” were 4.3 percentage points more likely to be dismissed than those rated “superior.”

Teachers who were absent 11 to 20 times between September and March of the current school year were 11.3 percentage points more likely to be dismissed than their colleagues who were never absent, and teachers absent 6 to 10 days were 3.5 percentage points more likely to be dismissed.

Among elementary school teachers for whom direct measures of effectiveness in raising student achievement were available, less effective teachers were also more likely to be dismissed.  Specifically, teachers who were one standard deviation less effective (equivalent to the difference between a teacher at the 35th percentile and an average teacher) were associated with a 7.1 percentage point increase in the probability of dismissal.

Jacob examined dismissal among non-tenured teachers in the school years 2004-05, 2005-06, and 2006-07.  His sample of schools consists of 16,246 elementary school teachers and 7,764 high school teachers working in 588 schools.  He investigated the relationship between teacher value-added data and dismissal in a subsample of 803 elementary school teachers and 1,134 high school teachers for which value-added measures are available.

Comparing the year immediately prior to establishment of the new policy with the first two years of the policy’s implementation (2005 and 2006), Jacob finds that the total separation rate of non-tenured teachers increased by roughly 9 percentage points.  Among other findings are that dismissed teachers who were subsequently rehired by a different school are more likely to be dismissed again than other non-tenured teachers in their new school.  Jacob infers from these results that “many of the initial nonrenewal decisions were not idiosyncratic, stemming from a particularly bad match…but reflected a concern with the teacher’s general productivity.”

About the Author

Brian A. Jacob is professor of education policy and economics at the University of Michigan.  His article is based on a study that is forthcoming in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.  Professor Jacob is available for interviews and can be contacted at bajacob@umich.edu.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information please visit:  www.educationnext.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
James A. Peyser, jpeyser@newschools.org, NewSchools Venture Fund
Janice B. Riddell, janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, External Relations, Education Next

Success is in the Details at High-Performing Charter Management Organizations

A “no excuses” approach to teaching and learning and tight management make the difference

Cambridge, MA – A new analysis of charter schools shows that while there is no “secret sauce,” there are identifiable practices that produce their success.  The highest-performing charters are those that that have most fully embraced a “no excuses” approach to teaching and learning; have created strong school cultures based on explicit expectations for both academic achievement and behavior;  have an intensive focus on literacy and numeracy as the first foundation for academic achievement;  feature a relatively heavy reliance on direct instruction and differentiated grouping, especially in the early grades;  and are increasingly focused on comprehensive student assessment systems.

James A. Peyser, managing partner at the NewSchools Venture Fund, writes that his investigation of the eighteen charter management organizations (CMOs) in the NewSchools Venture Fund portfolio reveals that these common ingredients include “an unflagging attention to detail and an uncompromising commitment to excellence in all things, from the classroom, to the hallway, to the principal’s office.”  His article, “Unlocking the Secrets of High-Performing Charters,” will appear in the Fall 2011 issue of Education Next and is currently available at www.educationnext.org.

Charter schools in the NewSchools’ portfolio achieve proficiency rates in reading and math that are about 9 percentage points higher, on average, than those achieved by schools in their host districts.  When comparing only low-income students, NewSchools charters outperform their district peers by an average of almost 12 percentage points.  Limiting the sample to charter schools open five years or more, NewSchools charters outperform district schools by an average of 14 percentage points.

College-going rates for NewSchools’ graduates are significantly higher than national rates:  84 percent of graduating seniors from its CMO schools last year enrolled in college the following fall, compared to college-going rates of 70 percent nationally and 57 percent for low-income graduates.

The highest-performing CMOs invest more on recruiting and developing talent, as well as building instructional support systems grounded in the use of performance data.  Successful CMOs have tended to add new schools at a steady incremental rate over time, while the low performers tended to grow faster early in their development.  Peyser notes that over the past five years, the size of CMOs’ central office staffs (about 4.5 staff on average per school) has been declining and the size of their education staffs has grown.

Charter management organizations came on the scene roughly a decade after the nation’s first charter school opened in 1991.  NewSchools Venture Fund, a nonprofit grantmaking organization, operates in several major cities across the U.S.  CMOs in its portfolio work exclusively in urban neighborhoods, serve predominantly low-income students, with demographics that are similar to those of their local public school peers.

About the Author

James A. Peyser is managing partner for city funds at NewSchools Venture Fund and a former chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education.  He is available for interviews; please contact him at jpeyser@newschools.org.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information please visit:  www.educationnext.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675,  janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, External Relations, Education Next
Dan Goldhaber, dgoldhab@u.washington.edu, University of Washington Bothell
Roddy Theobald, roddy@uw.edu, University of Washington

Seniority Rules Lead Districts to Increase Teacher Layoffs and Undermine Teaching Quality

“Last in, first out” reduction-in-force policies give greater weight to teacher longevity than effectiveness

Cambridge, MA – Most school districts devote well over half of all spending to teacher compensation, and strained budgets are forcing layoffs of teachers.  In a new study, researchers find that seniority-based layoff policies — the norm in public schools — lead to higher numbers of teacher layoffs than would be necessary if administrators were allowed to make effectiveness the determining factor in issuing layoff notices, rather than length of service.  If districts instead adopted effectiveness-based layoff policies, they would be likely to lay off fewer teachers, achieve the same budgetary savings, and have a higher quality teacher workforce.

Dan Goldhaber and Roddy Theobald of the University of Washington conducted the study, which will appear in the Fall 2011 issue of Education Next and is currently available at www.educationnext.org.  The study analyzes data on the actual outcomes of reduction-in-force (RIF) policies in Washington State in academic years 2008-09 and 2009-10.  The authors’ analysis is based on a sample of 1,717 teachers who received a layoff notice in 2008-09 and 407 teachers who received one in 2009-10.  Teachers who received RIF notices were less likely to hold an advanced degree and their salaries were approximately $15,000 lower than those of teachers who did not receive layoff notices.  The authors find that if the RIF-notified teachers made the average salary in their district, it would only be necessary to lay off 1,349 teachers in order to attain the same budgetary savings, or roughly 20 percent less than the actual number of teachers who received layoff notices.

The authors report that there are large differences in classroom effectiveness between teachers who actually received layoff notices and those who would have received them had an effectiveness-based system been in place.  The impact on student math and reading achievement differed by about 20 percent of a standard deviation, a difference which the authors note is “striking, roughly equivalent to having a teacher who is at the 16th percentile of effectiveness rather than at the 50th percentile.”  This difference corresponds to roughly 2.5 to 3.5 months of student learning.  Effectiveness-based layoffs also would result in more equitably distributed layoffs across student subgroups.  For example, in a seniority-based system, black students are far more likely than other students to have been in a classroom of a teacher who received a RIF notice.

Goldhaber and Theobold estimated teacher effectiveness by linking a subset of teachers to their students’ reading and math test-score results on the Washington State Assessment of Student Learning (given annually in grades 3-8, as well as in grade 10).  Confirming the disproportionate impact of current RIF systems on new teachers, the study finds that approximately 60 percent of teachers receiving layoff notices in 2008-10 had two or fewer years of experience, and approximately 80 percent had two or fewer years of seniority within their current district.  The authors find that if a teacher’s subject specialty is in a shortage area, they are less likely to be laid off, estimating, for example, the probability that a first-year special education teacher receives a layoff notice is 6.2 percent, compared to 17 percent for a first-year health/physical education teacher.  However, this difference “pales in comparison to the difference in probability that a first-year teacher will be dismissed compared to a teacher with 12 or more years of seniority,” which is less than one-quarter of 1 percent.  Seniority-based layoff policies can thereby exacerbate difficult challenges as districts cope with losing shortage-area teachers.

About the Authors
Dan Goldhaber is director of the Center for Education Data and Research at the University of Washington Bothell and a co-editor of Education Finance and Policy.  Roddy Theobald is a researcher at the Center for Education Data and Research and doctoral student in statistics at the University of Washington.  The authors are available for interviews;  please contact Dan Goldhaber at dgoldhab@u.washington.edu and Roddy Theobald at roddy@uw.edu.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information please visit:  www.educationnext.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675, janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, External Relations, Education Next
June Kronholz, junekronholz@me.com (effective 5/20/11;  please contact J. Riddell with immediate questions)

Through Dual Enrollment, High School Students Get an Early Start on College and Careers

Students have the chance to accelerate and gain workforce skills, but roadblocks to dual enrollment remain

CAMBRIDGE, MA – A new analysis of data from the Education Commission of the States (ECS) finds that almost every state has some type of dual-enrollment policy, which allows high school students who are ready for college work to enroll in college courses while completing their high school programs.  Twelve states require their school districts and public postsecondary schools to develop dual-enrollment partnerships.  The U.S. Department of Education reports that as of 2005, 98 percent of community colleges and 77 percent of public four-year colleges were participating in dual enrollment programs.

In “High Schoolers in College,” to be published in the Summer 2011 issue of Education Next, author June Kronholz points out that “dual enrollment promises to speed youngsters through college and into the workforce, cutting college costs for parents and taxpayers alike.”  Among the roadblocks to the wider use of dual enrollment are seat-time and mandatory-attendance laws, which states passed a century ago, often under pressure from labor unions, to keep young people in school and out of the competition for jobs.  Kronholz observes, “The laws haven’t changed much today, but kids have, and by their midteens, many of them — bored with high school or academically beyond it — are ready for the next step.”

Dual enrollment is one of the key means that states take to allow students who are academically advanced a way to obtain a level of academic challenge that many high schools do not provide.  The 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that reading and math scores for the highest-achieving 10 percent of 8th and 12th graders have barely budged in the past five years, which is evidence, Kronholz notes, that many of the country’s brightest youngsters are “stuck in an academic rut.”  One 18-year-old student she visited, who has taken several college courses in nursing through a dual enrollment program at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), said that in high school “I’m only learning in a few of my classes.”  Another IUPUI student, who started taking college courses as a 14-year-old 8th grade home schooler, has completed an entire freshman-year college curriculum over the past four years, including all the math he’ll need toward an engineering degree.  Across the nation, about 240,000 youngsters in grades 4 through 8 take part in university-sponsored talent searches each year and the demand for accelerated options is growing.  Dual enrollment programs are not just for the academically advanced, however;  over the past two decades they have become increasingly diversified, offering an array of opportunities for middle-of-the-pack students seeking a taste of college and students pursuing vocational training.

Funding — particularly who pays for college classes — is the stickiest issue in implementing dual enrollment programs.  With state education budgets under pressure, many states haven’t provided money to pay high-school students’ tuition for college courses.  A few states split their per-pupil funding between the high school and the sponsoring college;  others place the cost on the school district, college, or state board of education;  and in 22 states, it is up to students or their families to pay for college courses.  Kronholz also notes that high schools aren’t always eager to see their brightest students opt out of AP classes for a dual-enrollment program, because “school ratings — and therefore, teacher bonuses — depend in part on how many AP classes they offer, how many kids enroll, and how well they score on the AP exam.”  Other institutional barriers – such as some school districts’ policies prohibiting youngsters from leaving campus during the day – also impede implementation of dual enrollment programs.

About the Author
June Kronholz is a former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and education reporter, and currently a contributing editor at Education Next.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information please visit:  www.educationnext.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675, janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, Education Next
Eric S. Taylor, erictaylor@stanford.edu
John H. Tyler, john_tyler@brown.edu

Study Finds Rigorous Classroom Observations Can Identify Effective Teachers

Cincinnati’s teacher evaluation system pinpoints link between teaching practices and student achievement

Cambridge, MA – A new study of Cincinnati’s Teacher Evaluation System (TES), a rigorous evaluation program based on classroom observations, finds that teachers receiving high ratings (as scored by trained peer and administrative evaluators) are more effective in promoting student achievement growth.  For example, a student who begins the year at the 50th percentile on the state reading and math test and is assigned to a teacher in the top quartile in terms of overall TES scores will perform on average, by the end of the school year, three percentile points higher in reading and two points higher in math than a peer who began the year at the same achievement level but was assigned to a bottom-quartile teacher.

By way of comparison, the authors note that the impact of being assigned to a teacher in the top-quartile rather than one in the bottom quartile in terms of their total effect on student achievement as measured by student-test-based measures of teacher effectiveness is seven percentile points in reading and six points in math.  In other words, the observed teacher practices included in the TES evaluation system appear to capture a little less than half of the overall differences in teacher effectiveness.

These results, based on a study by a team of scholars at Harvard, Brown and Stanford universities, are reported in the Summer 2011 issue of Education Next and available at www.educationnext.org.  Their findings from Cincinnati offer new evidence that “evaluations based on well-executed classroom observations do identify effective teachers and teaching practices.”  During the yearlong TES process, teachers are typically observed and scored four times:  three times by a peer evaluator external to the school and once by a local school administrator.  Both peer evaluators (experienced classroom teachers who serve as full-time evaluators for three years) and administrators must complete an intensive training course and accurately score videotaped teaching examples according to a specific rubric.

The authors point out that the Cincinnati system of evaluation is different from the standard practice in place in most American school districts, where perfunctory evaluations assign the vast majority of teachers “satisfactory” ratings, leading many to “characterize classroom observation as a hopelessly flawed approach to assessing teacher effectiveness.”

The study’s results are based on a sample of 365 teachers in reading and 200 teachers in math.  The researchers analyzed records of each TES classroom observation conducted by the Cincinnati district between the 2000-01 and 2008-09 school years.  In addition to TES observation results, the researchers analyzed students’ demographic, program participation, and test score data from the 2003-04 through 2008-09 school years.  For all teachers in the sample, the average score on the Overall Classroom Practices index (a teacher’s average score across eight standards of teaching practice) was 3.21 (between “Proficient” and “Distinguished” categories), yet one-quarter of teachers received an overall score higher than 3.53 and one-quarter received a score lower than 2.94, indicating, the authors note, that “there is a fair amount of variation from teacher to teacher.”

The researchers also used teachers’ scores on particular elements considered by the TES observation system to discern relationships between more specific teaching practices and student outcomes across academic subjects.  For example, among students assigned to different teachers with similar overall TES scores, math achievement will grow more for those students whose teacher scores relatively better on the classroom management portions of the TES observations.  They note that the data gleaned from the TES observations “allow researchers to connect specific teaching practices with student achievement outcomes, providing evidence of effective teaching practices that can be widely shared.”

About the Authors
Thomas J. Kane is professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  Eric S. Taylor is a doctoral student at the Stanford University School of Education.  John H. Tyler is associate professor of education, economics, and public policy at Brown University.  Amy L. Wooten is a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information please visit:  www.educationnext.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675, janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, External Relations, Education Next
Guido Schwerdt, schwerdt@ifo.de
Amelie C. Wuppermann, wuppermann@uni-mainz.de

Harvard Study Shows that Lecture-Style Presentations Lead to Higher Student Achievement

Widely-used problem-solving pedagogy as implemented in practice is not as effective for raising achievement levels

Cambridge, MA – A new study finds that 8th grade students in the U.S. score higher on standardized tests in math and science when their teachers allocate greater amounts of class time to lecture-style presentations than to group problem-solving activities.  For both math and science, the study finds that a shift of 10 percentage points of time from problem solving to lecture-style presentations (for example, increasing the share of time spent lecturing from 60 to 70 percent) is associated with a rise in student test scores of 4 percent of a standard deviation for the students who had the exact same peers in both their math and science classes – or between one and two months’ worth of learning in a typical school year.

These estimates are based on the actual implementation of teaching practices that the researchers observe in practice.  Thus, while problem-solving activities may be very effective if implemented in the correct way, simply inducing the average teacher employed today to shift time in class from lecture style presentations to problem solving, without concern for how this is implemented, contains little potential to increase student achievement.  On the contrary, the study’s results indicate that there might even be adverse effects on student learning.

Guido Schwerdt, a postdoctoral fellow in Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, and Amelie C. Wuppermann, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Mainz, Germany, conducted the study.  A research article, “Sage on the Stage,” presenting the study’s findings will appear in the Summer 2011 issue of Education Next.

The researchers used data from the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS).  Their sample includes 6,310 students in 205 U.S. schools with 639 teachers (303 math teachers and 355 science teachers, of which 19 teacher both subjects).  In addition to test scores in math and science, the TIMSS data include information on teacher characteristics, qualifications, and classroom practices.  Most important for the analysis, teachers were asked what proportion of time in a typical week students spent on each of eight activities, and the authors’ methodology focused on three of these activities — listening to lecture-style presentations, working on problems with the teacher’s guidance, and working on problems without guidance — as a “good proxy for the time in class in which students are taught new material.”  They divide the amount of time spent listening to lecture-style presentations by the total amount of time spent on each of these three activities to generate a single measure of how much time the teacher devoted to lecturing relative to how much time was devoted to problem-solving activities.

Schwerdt and Wuppermann observe that in recent years, a consensus has emerged among researchers that teacher quality “matters enormously for student performance,” but that relatively few rigorous studies have looked inside the classroom to see what kinds of teaching styles are the most effective.  Their study of teaching styles finds that “teaching style matters for student achievement, but in the opposite direction than anticipated by conventional wisdom:  an emphasis on lecture-style presentations (rather than problem-solving activities) is associated with an increase — not a decrease — in student achievement.”  They report that prominent organizations such as the National Research Council and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, for at least the last three decades, have “called for teachers to engage students in constructing their own new knowledge through more hands-on learning and group work.”  The emphasis on group problem-solving instructional methods has been incorporated into most U.S. teacher preparation programs, and the authors found that teachers in the study’s sample allocated, on average, twice as much time to problem-solving activities as to lecturing, or “direct instruction.”

The researchers recognize that a key challenge in studying the effects of teaching practices is that “teachers may adjust their methods in response to the ability or behavior of their students,” perhaps relying more on lectures when assigned more capable or attentive students.  To address these concerns, they “exploit the fact that the TIMSS study tested each student in both mathematics and science,” which allowed them to compare the math and science test scores of individual students whose teacher in one subject tended to emphasize a different teaching style than their teacher in the other subject.  They found that in both math and science, the positive relationship between lecture-style methods and test score gains was maintained. The estimated .04 standard deviation impact of a greater emphasis on lecturing is based on students who had the same peers in both classes, because that minimizes the chances that teaching styles — and their consequences — might differ depending on the composition of the class.

About the Authors
Guido Schwerdt is a postdoctoral fellow at the Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) at Harvard University and a research at the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich, Germany.  Amelie C. Wuppermann is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Mainz, Germany.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information please visit:  www.educationnext.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675, janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, Education Next
Peter Meyer, pbmeyer@verizon.net

Assessing David Steiner’s Short Reign as New York State’s Education Commissioner

The state won the Race to the Top but his resignation leaves doubts that there will be any will to fulfill its promises

CAMBRIDGE, MA – David Steiner’s elevation to head the state’s education system in October 2009 “had been hailed as a providential pick,” writes Peter Meyer in an article assessing David Steiner’s short reign, to appear in the Summer 2011 issue of Education Next.  Under Steiner’s leadership, the Empire State had come back from a 15^th place finish in the first round of the Race to the Top (RttT) grant competition to win – just six months later — a $700 million grant in round two.  Steiner’s resignation announcement in April “rattled people” and raises questions about whether the will to implement the RttT-inspired reforms will be sustained.

Steiner – an academic with Oxford and Harvard degrees who also had pioneered new teacher training programs as head of Hunter College’s School of Education – had “charged out of the gate galloping,” observes Meyer, instituting greatly tougher benchmarks for the state’s 3-8 tests and initiating a major effort to write a statewide curriculum.  His determined leadership was essential to the dramatic turnaround of New York’s bid for RttT funding.  He and other key stakeholders – including union leaders, the Board of Regents chancellor, and state legislators — came together to hammer out reform goals for the round-two grant submission.  Among the reform milestones they achieved were a new requirement that 40 percent of a teacher’s evaluation be based on student achievement;  raising the charter school cap from 200 to 460;  and higher student achievement goals on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 4^th grade and 8^th grade reading tests and Regents exams.

Meyer observes that it is in this six-month story of education reform leading up to the successful RttT finish — the equivalent of turning a battleship on a dime — that “we can see Steiner’s brilliance – and understand the bittersweet feeling of many New York educators who have lost their leader before they got to the Promised Land.”

In recalling an interview with Steiner four months before his resignation announcement, Meyer suggests that Steiner may have foreshadowed his departure.  Reflecting on the RttT win, Steiner stated, “what we face now, to me, is much more difficult.  Implementation.”  In Meyer’s interview with him within days of his resignation announcement, Steiner stated that he had achieved what he’d been hired to do, which was to “plant a vision” and launch a radical reformation of the New York education system.  With chapter one written, he felt ready to pass the baton to someone else.  Meyer reports that some education reformers speculate that the endless political battles were the main reason for Steiner’s departure, but he notes that regardless of the reasons, “the race is not over: It has just begun.”

About the Author
Peter Meyer, former news editor at Life Magazine, is currently senior policy fellow with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and contributing editor at Education Next.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information, please visit: www.educationnext.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675, janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, Education Next
Paul E. Peterson, (617) 495-8312/495-7976, Harvard University

CAMBRIDGE, MA – A new analysis of two recent reports, one by a committee of the National Academy of Science’s National Research Council (NRC), the other by Alan Ginsburg, a former director of Policy and Program Studies in the U. S. Department of Education, finds that both reports made factual and analytical errors in their examination of the record of Michelle Rhee as Chancellor of Schools for the District of Columbia from 2007-2010.

The analysis of these studies has been prepared by Paul E. Peterson, director of Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance. His review will appear in the Summer 2011 issue of Education Next and is currently available at educationnext.org.  Peterson says that Rhee was in office for too short a period to draw firm conclusions one way or another as to her impact on student performance, but there is no doubt that the reports critical of her tenure have made erroneous claims.

The report by the NRC committee claims that gains in test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) between 2007 and 2009 were no better than in the ten other school districts for which comparable data is available.  Peterson shows, however, that in both reading and math in 4^th grade and, again, in 8^th grade math, gains by D.C. students far outpaced the average gains in the other districts. At the 4^th grade level in math and reading, D.C. students gained 6 scale score points between 2007 and 2009, while the average gain in the other districts was only 1 point and 2.2 points, respectively.  In 8^th grade math, he finds that the D.C. gains were 7 points, as compared to an average of 2.9 points for the other cities.  8^th grade reading scores did not differ significantly between D.C. and the other districts, however.

Alan Ginsburg claims that improvements in NAEP scores under Rhee were no better than the gains made under her two predecessors between 2000 and 2007.  In making that claim he fails to use appropriate NAEP data for 2007 in 8^th grade math, and fails to adjust for national trends in student achievement during this period.  When those corrections and adjustments are made, Peterson shows that students under Rhee made much larger strides toward closing the district-national achievement gap than they did under her predecessors.  For example, “during the Rhee years, 4^th grade students, in both reading and math, gained an average of 3 points each year relative to the scores earned by students nationwide, a gain twice that of her predecessors.”

“These numbers may seem small but over time they add up,” Peterson says. “Had students gained as much every year between 2000 – 2009 as they did during the Rhee era, the gap between D.C. 4^th graders and the nation in math would have decreased from 34 points to just 7 points in 2009.  Similarly, in 8^th grade math,” he writes, “had Rhee-like progress been made each year beginning in 2000, the gap would in 2009 have been just 14 points, with near closure in 2012.”

The NRC report suggests that demographic changes might account for gains in DC test score performance.  But Peterson explores this possibility and shows that no demographic changes that occurred between 2007 and 2009 are likely to have reduced the educational challenges the district faced.

Peterson says that the NRC report also fails to call for the kind of experimental research that would be required if causal connections are to be identified.  For example, the NRC committee acknowledges that 8^th grade teacher absenteeism declined significantly between 2007 and 2009. The days on which 98 percent or more of the teachers were at school climbed from about 68 percent to approximately 85 percent of school days.  The committee says there is no scientific evidence that proves Rhee’s policies caused that absenteeism to decline.  Peterson points out, however, that the committee does not explore the available evidence to see whether a causal connection is probable or propose an experimental research design that could demonstrate whether such a connection exists.

The two reports reviewed are:

National Research Council, “A Plan for Evaluating the District of Columbia’s Public Schools:  From Impressions to Evidence,” a report prepared by the Committee on the Evaluation of the D.C. Public Schools, co-chaired by Christopher Edley, UC Berkeley Law School dean, and Robert Hauser, executive director of the NRC’s Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. The committee has issued a pre-publication version of its report on its website at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13114.

Alan Ginsburg, “The Rhee D.C. Record: Math and Reading Gains No Better Than Her Predecessors Vance and Janey,” at  http://therheedcrecord.wikispaces.com/.

About the Author
Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor Government at Harvard University, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and editor-in-chief of Education Next.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information, please visit: www.educationnext.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675, janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, External Relations, Education Next
Eric A. Hanushek, hanushek@stanford.edu

Cambridge, MA – A new analysis of the economic impact of effective teachers shows that closing just half of the performance gap with Finland, whose students consistently outperform most developed countries, could add more than $50 trillion to the U.S. gross domestic product by 2090.

Eric A. Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, conducted the analysis for Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance.  An article presenting his findings, “Valuing Teachers,” will appear in the Summer 2011 issue of Education Next.  Using the nearly $3 trillion drop in economic output resulting from the recent economic recession as a reference point, the author suggests that the achievement gap between the U.S. and academically top-performing countries “can be said to be causing the equivalent of a permanent recession.”

In his study, Hanushek calculated the economic value related to effective teaching by drawing on a research literature that provides precise estimates of the impact of students’ achievement levels on their lifetime earnings, and by combining these figures with estimated impacts of more-effective teachers on student achievement.

A body of research literature on teacher quality has isolated the impact of teachers on student achievement, apart from other factors, such as the student’s own motivations, support from family and peers, and school resources.  These studies, reports the author, show that “the quality of the teachers in our schools is paramount;  no other measured aspect of schools is nearly as important in determining student achievement.”  However, he writes, “the variations in the quality of teachers, even within schools, are startling, and the implications of quality differences are even more startling.”

A teacher at the 84th percentile of effectiveness, for example, will raise the typical student from the middle of the distribution to the 58th percentile in a single year.  While some of the achievement gains will be lost, the persistent achievement gains will lead to higher earnings over the student’s lifetime.  The value of lifetime earnings for full-time work for the average American is currently $1.16 million.  Hanushek calculates that this highly effective teacher (in the top 16 percent of the teaching force) will shift the typical student’s lifetime earnings up by more than $20,000.  This implies increased earnings for a class of 20 students of over $400,000.  Conversely, he calculates that a very low performing teacher (in the bottom 16 percent of effectiveness) “will have a negative impact of $400,000 compared to an average teacher.”  The impact of even a slightly better-than-average quality teacher – one whose effectiveness ranks at the 60th percentile, for example – still has significant economic results, raising an individual student’s lifetime earnings by $5,300, or a class of 20 students’ aggregate lifetime earnings by a total of $106,000.

Alternatively, considering the economic impacts of effective teachers for the U.S. economy, Hanushek presents a “thought experiment” on the economic gains that would result from replacing the very lowest performing teachers with teachers of average performance.  He finds that replacing the least effective 5 to 8 percent of all teachers with average teachers would bring the U.S. to a level of student achievement equivalent to that of Canada, and replacing the least effective 7 to 12 percent of teachers with those of average effectiveness would “move the United States to the level of the highest-performing countries in the world, such as Finland.”  Such gains would imply higher economic growth and enormous gains in gross domestic product.  The present value of gains over the lifetime of citizens born today would, by his calculations, exceed $100 trillion.

Moving the scale of quality of the United States’ teaching force toward this higher level would, he recognizes, require significant changes in school districts’ employment practices, basing recruitment, compensation, and retention policies on the identification and compensation of teachers according to their effectiveness.  Salaries “several times higher than those paid teachers today would be economically justified,” he writes, “if teachers were compensated according to their effectiveness,” but without reforms to employment practices, “we should expect both our schools and our economy to underperform relative to their potential.”

About the Authors
Eric A. Hanushek is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information please visit:  www.educationnext.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675, janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, Education Next
Jonathan Schorr, jschorr@newschools.org
Deborah McGriff, dmcgriff@newschools.org

CAMBRIDGE, MA – A new report on schools implementing blended, or “hybrid,” instructional methods — which integrate traditional face-to-face teaching with greater use of online instruction — are pointing the way toward more effective and efficient school models.  The report profiles several charter schools that utilize sophisticated computer technology to individualize instruction, reinforce students’ basic skills, and provide immediate data on student progress, all of which helps teachers to fine-tune instruction and students to learn at their own pace.

The article, “Future Schools: Blending Face-to-Face and Online Learning,” by Jonathan Schorr and Deborah McGriff, will appear in the Summer 2011 issue of Education Next and is now available at www.educationnext.org.

The authors visited a selection of charter schools in communities across the country that are using blended or hybrid approaches.  They write that Rocketship Education, for example, a network of three charter schools founded in 2007 in San Jose, California, has “probably done more than any other single place to create the market for ‘hybrid schools.’” Rocketship is building a model in which kids learn much of their basic reading and math skills in a computer lab using adaptive software such as DreamBox, leaving classroom teachers free to focus on critical-thinking instruction and provide extra help when students are struggling.  The software provides teachers with a steady stream of data that will help them adjust instruction to students’ specific needs, and to guide afterschool tutors.  Two of the network’s three schools rank among the 15 top-performing high-poverty schools in the state, and the newest site, opened last year, was the number-one first-year school in the state.

The key advancement in the new hybrid models is that they “use technology intensively and thoughtfully to tailor instruction to individual students’ needs, and provide robust, frequent data on their performance.”  Their use of technology goes far beyond the level of student engagement with computers that has been in place in most U.S. schools to date.  The authors report that much of the enthusiasm for the potential of blended learning comes from School of One, a math program operating inside three New York City public middle schools.  The classroom is an open space that runs the length of the building wing, but is subdivided by bookshelves into workspaces where small groups of students work with the teacher or individually with laptops.  “The first sight that greets the eye,” they observe, “is an airport-style video display, listing not cities and flights, but students’ names and how they will receive their instruction during that period.”  The real power of School of One is its creation of real-time, hourly reports of students’ progress and shortfalls, which are reviewed by teachers at any time before, after, or during the school day.

Another school profiled is the Denver School of Science and Technology, which enrolls a mostly-minority, 47 percent low-income student population and has achieved “national renown” for its results, including the second-highest longitudinal growth rate in student test scores statewide.  Among graduates, 100 percent have been accepted to four-year colleges, and only 1 percent require remedial courses, compared to 56 percent for the Denver district.  The authors also visited High Tech High, whose campus near the San Diego airport they describe as “perhaps the most eye-poppingly technology-rich charter school in the country.”  The school features warehouse-sized buildings delineated with glass walls 15 feet high.  Students use the same computer-aided design systems that they would find in a professional design firm and the hallways are lined by prize-winning robotics projects, with mixed-media art hanging from every wall, door, and metal roof beam.  High Tech High uses an “artificially intelligent assessment and learning system” called ALEKS, which provides teachers with detailed diagnostics that enable them to target areas where students need extra help.  Students begin each session on ALEKS by taking an adaptive assessment that pinpoints their level of knowledge in a given content area, and ALEKS produces a multicolored pie chart documenting student progress that is continually updated for both teacher and student.

About the Authors
Jonathan Schorr and Deborah McGriff are partners at NewSchools Venture Fund, a nonprofit venture philanthropy firm that supports entrepreneurial innovation to improve public education for low-income children.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information, please visit:  www.educationnext.org.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675, jriddell66@earthlink.net, Education Next
Jay P. Greene, (479) 575-3162, jpg@uark.edu
Stuart Buck, (479) 200-3750, stuartbuck@gmail.com

CAMBRIDGE, MA – A new report finds that merit pay plans for teachers have been implemented in no more than 500 school districts out of some 14,000 districts nationwide, only 3.5 percent of the total.  According to the study, even in those districts that have adopted an aspect of merit pay as part of their teacher compensation practices, these merit pay plans are not as rigorous as they tend to be in the private sector.

The number of school districts identified as having some form of merit pay is based upon information provided by the National Center on Performance Incentives (NCPI), which is located at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College and funded by a 5-year, $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences.  The Center systematically gathers data from school districts on their use of performance evaluations for compensation purposes.  The authors identified districts listed on the NCPI website that reported having performance pay programs, and divided the number of such districts by the total number of districts in the United States.  Using this methodology, the researchers estimated that only 3.5% of districts report having merit pay plans.

In the study, to be published in the Spring 2011 issue of Education Next and available at www.educationnext.org, authors Stuart Buck and Jay P. Greene examined the key characteristics of performance pay plans currently in place in school districts, in light of increased attention given to merit pay in national debate and in the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top (RttT) competitive grant program.

The authors found that even in districts that were identified by NCPI as having merit pay plans, “most were so weak that they represented no meaningful change from traditional compensation systems,” which typically are based on the number of years on the job and academic credentials.  They note, for example, that Denver’s Professional Compensation for Teachers (ProComp) plan, widely praised as a national model for merit pay, “awards more money for earning another degree than for demonstrated performance in the classroom.”  The authors further discovered that in some districts, merit pay plans that were about to be implemented were sidelined as the launch date drew near.  For example, Philadelphia was poised to put a pilot merit pay initiative in place in 2000, but the pilot was dropped late in the planning process.  In 2006, Philadelphia received a $20.5 million grant from the U.S. government to develop a merit pay program, but the local union — which had initially supported the program — abandoned it, and the district gave the money to charter schools instead.  Cincinnati’s merit pay plan, proposed in 2002, was overwhelmingly voted down by teachers (1892 to 73), even though the program did not base bonuses on student test scores, but rather on a multifaceted evaluation system that included classroom observations by professional peers and administrators and portfolios of lesson plans and student work.

If performance pay is to be truly effective, the authors suggest, it “must mean in education what it does in other industries – salary increases for the successful, and salary reductions, even dismissals, for poor performers.”  Given state laws governing teacher tenure in most states and salary schedules based on inputs (such as professional development, graduate degrees, national certification) rather than on outputs (such as test scores and graduation rates) merit pay of this kind is unlikely, in the authors’ view, to expand across the U.S.

About the Authors
Stuart Buck is a doctoral fellow in education reform at the University of Arkansas.  Jay P. Greene is the 21st Century Professor of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas and a fellow at the George W. Bush Institute.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy of Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information please visit:  www.educationnext.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675, jriddell66@earthlink.net, Education Next
Jed Horne, (504) 864-3156  jedhorne@gmail.com

CAMBRIDGE, MA – A new report on New Orleans schools after Hurricane Katrina finds the school system substantially changed from its condition five years ago.  Well over half of the city’s 88 public schools are now charter schools that are independently operated but publicly authorized, funded, and evaluated.  Proportionally more public school students — 71% — are in charter schools in New Orleans than in any other U.S. city.  The percentage of students attending a low-performing school has fallen by half, from 67 percent to 34 percent.

In “New Schools in New Orleans,” to be published in the Spring 2011 issue of Education Next and available now at www.educationnext.org, author Jed Horne observes that before Katrina, the system was bankrupt and its management so corrupted that the FBI saw fit to set up a satellite branch within the school board’s central office.  Student performance was at or near the bottom nationally.  The hurricane was the coup de grace.  Some 110 of 127 schoolhouses were destroyed, a catastrophe that also proved to be an opportunity for renewal.

Within weeks of Hurricane Katrina, officials turned the city’s schools over to the state-run Recovery School District (RSD) and gave the RSD five years to turn them around.  The RSD had been established in 2003 to manage “recovery” from decades of academic failure but had taken over only five schools before Katrina.  After the storm, the RSD took control of an additional 63 public schools and immediately began seeking charter organizations to take charge of as many as possible.  The elected Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) retained authority over 16 schools considered still viable after the storm;  12 of these hastily sought and achieved charter status.  The Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) retained oversight of two of the city’s charter schools.

New Orleans’s polycentric administrative structure – with schools run by the state and the school board as well as by autonomous charter organizations – has fostered competition and performance gains.  Furthering these developments, an infrastructure of support organizations has sprung up, key among them firms that align curriculum with toughened state standards and then develop metrics for continuously monitoring individual student achievement.  Overarching local nonprofits such as New Schools for New Orleans and Teach NOLA have coordinated and supercharged the reform initiatives, and national organizations such as Teach for America and the New Teacher Project have expanded their presence in New Orleans.

Recently, New Orleans secured $28.5 million in federal “i3” funds for educational innovation.  The award will go to the RSD and to New Schools for New Orleans primarily to lubricate the takeover and reorganization of failing schools.

December 2010 was a pivotal moment in the course of school restructuring, with a vote by BESE to renew the RSD’s authority over its portfolio of New Orleans schools.  The decision, recommended by state education Superintendent Paul Pastorek, generated lively debate in the city, with some groups contending that diminished OPSB means school control is less local or less democratic.  That view is countered by the author’s observation that local control is, in fact, far greater now that the city’s seven-member school board has been augmented by a growing cohort of charter school board members numbering in the hundreds.  A fall 2010 poll by Tulane University’s Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives found that 60 percent of New Orleans residents opposed returning the schools to the OPSB.

About the Author
Jed Horne educated two sons in Orleans Parish public schools.  He is the author of Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his part in hurricane coverage by The Times-Picayune, the New Orleans daily.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy of Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information please visit:  www.educationnext.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:

Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675, jriddell66@earthlink.net, Education Next
Monica Higgins, (617) 645-1173, monica_higgins@gse.harvard.edu
Frederick M. Hess, rhess@aei.org

CAMBRIDGE, MA –A new study examining the work history of leaders of entrepreneurial organizations in education finds a common element on the resume of many of those leaders: Teach for America.

Teach for America (TFA) was launched by Wendy Kopp in 1989 with two goals: bringing more teaching talent to the nation’s most disadvantaged schools and creating a corps of leaders and change agents to eliminate educational inequity. Since then, TFA has placed more than 24,000 college graduates in teaching positions in some of America’s neediest schools.  The majority of research on TFA has investigated how effective those teachers are in the classroom and how long they remain as teachers. The new study attempts to determine whether TFA corps members who do not remain in the classroom have gone on to become change agents in the field of education.

The study, “Creating a Corps of Change Agents: What explains the success of Teach for America?” by Monica Higgins, Frederick M. Hess, Jennie Weiner, and Wendy Robison, will appear in the Spring 2011 issue of Education Next and is now available at www.educationnext.org.

For the study, the authors used methods that have been applied in research on “entrepreneurial spawning” in other sectors. They identified a group of 49 entrepreneurial organizations within the education sector and then traced the work histories of the founders and the members of the current management team of each organization.  A workplace that appears frequently in these work histories is termed an “originating organization,” or a spawner of entrepreneurial leaders

Researchers found that Teach for America appeared the most frequently as an originating organization for founders of entrepreneurial organizations, beating out the San Francisco Public Schools, Newark Public Schools, Chicago Public Schools, AmeriCorps, the White House Fellows program, McKinsey and Company, and the U.S. Department of Education.  Teach for America appeared in the work history of at least one founder of 7 of the 49 entrepreneurial organizations. The other organizations appeared in the work history of at least one founder of only 2 of the 49 entrepreneurial organizations.

Teach for America also stood out in the work histories of members of the management teams at the 49 entrepreneurial organizations. Fourteen of the 49 organizations had at least one member of the management team who was once a TFA corps member or employee, beating out the New York City Public Schools (10 organizations), KIPP (9 organizations), and Andersen Consulting (7 organizations).

Researchers found that TFA alumni who serve on the management team of entrepreneurial organizations  are most likely to take on roles closely related to instruction and staffing, and that TFA alumni with work experience in New York City and San Francisco are especially likely to become top managers in entrepreneurial organizations.

For more, please see “Creating a Corps of Change Agents: What explains the success of Teach for America?” by Monica Higgins, Frederick M. Hess, Jennie Weiner, and Wendy Robison, in the Spring 2011 issue of Education Next, and available online at www.educationnext.org.

In “Teach for America’s Entrepreneurial Alumni,” a video that accompanies the study, Veronica Nolan and Stephanie Saroki explain what inspired them to lead entrepreneurial education organizations after teaching with Teach for America. The video is also available at www.educationnext.org.

About the Authors
Monica Higgins is professor of education at the Harvard Grad­uate School of Education and author of Career Imprints: Cre­ating Leaders Across an Industry. Frederick Hess is an execu­tive editor of Education Next and author or editor of several books, including Education Unbound and Educational Entre­preneurship. Jennie Weiner and Wendy Robison are doctoral students in Education Policy, Leadership, and Instructional Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy of Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For Immediate Release

Contact:
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675,  jriddell66@earthlink.net – External Relations, Education Next
Paul E. Peterson, (617) 495-8312/495-7976
Ludger Woessmann, woessmann@ifo.de

Significantly better student achievement seen in countries that make use of teacher performance pay

CAMBRIDGE, MA – A new study finds that student achievement is significantly higher in countries that make use of teacher performance pay than in countries that do not use it.  Students in countries with performance-related pay score 25 percent of a standard deviation higher on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests in math; 24 percent higher in reading;  and 15 percent higher in science.  Since one-quarter of a standard deviation is roughly a year’s worth of learning, the study’s author suggests that “by the age of 15, students taught under a policy regime that includes a performance pay plan will learn an additional year of math and reading and over a half a year more in science.”

Ludger Woessmann, a professor of economics at the University of Munich, conducted the study for Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance.  A research article presenting the study’s findings will appear in the Spring 2011 issue of Education Next and is currently available on the web at www.educationnext.org.

The author analyzed a survey conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which identified the developed countries participating in PISA that reported having some type of performance pay plan for teachers.  The OECD survey reported on performance pay policies in place at a time corresponding to the administration of the PISA tests in 2003, which made the study’s comparative data analysis possible.  Using this information, the author examined PISA test scores of 27 countries, 12 of which indicated that they had performance pay and 15 of which did not.

The findings of higher math, reading, and science performance (noted above) among the countries that use performance pay were obtained after adjustments for levels of economic development across countries, student and school background characteristics, and features of national school systems.  A series of sensitivity tests, such as restricting the analysis to variation within continents only, support the results.

The author points out that according to the results of the 2009 PISA tests, released in December 2010 by the OECD, “The United States performed only at the international average in reading, and trailed 18 and 23 other countries in science and math, respectively” while students in China’s Shanghai province “outscored everyone.”  He also notes that in terms of relative performance, “in no subject did the scores for the United States differ significantly” between the 2003 and 2009 PISA test administrations.

About the Author
Ludger Woessmann is professor of economics at the University of Munich and heads the Human Capital and Innovation department at the Ifo Institute for Economic Research.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy of Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information please visit:  www.educationnext.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675,  jriddell66@earthlink.net – External Relations, Education Next
Lesley Turner, (202) 725-5129,  ljt2110@columbia.edu – Columbia University
Sarena Goodman, (516) 702-4053, sfg2111@columbia.edu – Columbia University

New York City’s decision to scrap school-wide bonus pay echoes study findings that school-wide performance pay hampers the incentives for individual teachers to improve performance

Cambridge, MA – An analysis of the first two years of the New York City’s School-Wide Performance Bonus Program found that school-wide merit pay had very little impact, positive or negative, on student reading or math achievement. Under the Program, schools that achieved their goals received bonuses equal to $3,000 per union teacher; those that meet 75 percent of their goal received $1,500 per union teacher.  In the first year of the program, 55 percent of participating schools received bonus payments averaging $160,500 per school; in the second year, 91 percent of schools earned bonus awards, averaging $195,100 per school.  The total bonus pool totaled $14.0 million in the first year and $27.1 million in the second year.

There is some evidence that the program had a positive impact in schools where teachers were few in number, an environment in which it may be easier for teachers to cooperate in pursuit of a common reward.  School-wide bonus programs may be able to provide those incentives in schools with relatively small teaching staffs. They may also be appropriate for schools characterized by a high degree of staff cohesion, in which teachers work collaboratively to improve student learning and it is difficult to isolate the performance of a single teacher.  The early experience with the Program suggests, however, that a heavy reliance on school-wide rewards hampers the effectiveness of merit pay programs in schools with large teaching staffs that are not highly collaborative.

In the program’s first year, the bonus program boost to math scores was 3.2 points on the New York state test, or 0.08 standard deviations, in schools with small cohorts of teachers with tested students (approximately ten or fewer such teachers in elementary and K-8 schools and five or fewer such teachers in middle schools).  Statistically significant at the .1 level, the gain is described by the authors as “modest in size but meaningful.”

The study was co-authored by Sarena Goodman and Lesley Turner, PhD candidates in Columbia University’s Department of Economics.  It will appear in the Spring 2011 issue of Education Next and is available on the web at www.educationnext.org.

The city’s School-Wide Performance Bonus Program, endorsed by both the Department of Education (DOE) and the teachers union, was launched in 2007.  The study’s authors analyzed data from the 2007-08 and 2008-09 academic years.

The randomized design of the bonus program made it possible to test whether eligibility to earn a lump sum bonus, distributed to all teachers within an effective school, could increase student achievement.  The city randomly selected 181 schools out of a group of 309 high-need schools serving kindergarten through 8th grade to participate in the program, the remaining 128 schools serving as the control group for the purposes of the evaluation.  Of the 181 schools, 158 participated in the program.  In order to participate, schools had to gain the support of 55 percent of their full-time United Federation of Teachers (UFT) staff.

The authors note that the schools given the opportunity to participate needed to “out-pace their counterparts in the control group” over the program’s first two years in order to demonstrate that merit pay made a real difference for student achievement.  While both treatment and control groups saw an increase in the average math and reading scores over the two-year period studied, the average scores of all the schools in the treatment group did not exceed those in the control group to a statistically significant degree.  They suggest that in a school with more teachers, “the diffusion of responsibility for test-score gains across many teachers may erode the incentive that any individual teacher has to increase effort in the classroom.”

About the Authors
Sarena Goodman and Lesley Turner are PhD candidates in Columbia University’s Department of Economics.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information please visit:  www.educationnext.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Janice B. Riddell, (203) 912-8675 – External Relations, Education Next
June Kronholz, junekronholz@me.com

Students with exceptional intellectual ability are well served in an innovative Nevada public school

CAMBRIDGE, MA – The Davidson Academy of Nevada is a public school on the University of Nevada, Reno, campus that serves intellectually talented students.  The school has no seat-time requirement, classes are grouped by ability rather than age, and textbooks are all but absent, in favor of original source materials and varied literature that allow for a faster learning pace.  According to June Kronholz, author of a report in the upcoming Spring 2011 issue of Education Next and currently available on the web at www.educationnext.org, the 123 students at the school, ages 10 – 18, are thriving in this learning environment.

The Davidson Academy is the product of Jan and Bob Davidson, computer software entrepreneurs who recognized that highly advanced students need learning settings and methods that public schools too rarely provide.  In 2005, after years spent researching education and operating tutoring programs for the gifted, the couple launched the school with the state’s blessing, but no funding.  The state now supports the school and the Davidsons continue to fund the shortfall between public funding and the full per-student cost.

Federal education policy focuses on bringing as many students as possible up to minimum proficiency standards and offers little by way of mandates or leadership to address the needs of gifted students.  Kronholz states that nationwide, “the scores for the brightest kids have barely moved.”

“Even the best school districts struggle with youngsters at the outer edges of the learning continuum,” notes Kronholz, and there is a dearth of options, nationally, for gifted students.  Davidson accepts applications only from youngsters with an IQ of 145 or higher, an IQ level identified as “highly gifted” by the College of William and Mary’s Center for Gifted Education and that is found in well under one percent of the population.  Such students might complete a whole day’s lessons – at three grades above their age-level — in 90 minutes, or read at the high school level as 5- or 6-year-olds.  Bob Davidson observes that these are “the likely people to make the big discoveries” in the next generation.

One of the school’s key approaches – group students by ability, allowing for flexible placement across grade levels – might inform thinking by other innovative public schools.  “You can’t teach to the middle,” notes math teacher Darren Ripley.  “To say we’re all at an Algebra 2 level just isn’t accurate.”

At Davidson Academy, students must take the state’s standardized reading and math tests, but classes encompass an unusually wide scope of material.  Three weeks into a critical-theory course, for example, Kronholz reports that the class “already had tackled Henry Louis Gates, Harold Bloom, Edward Said, and now was cheerfully plowing through a printout of a dense Jean-Paul Sartre essay on literature.”  Teachers at Davidson Academy are paid on the Reno teaching salary scale, but aren’t union members and do not get tenure.

In today’s difficult economy, states are likely to give even less attention to gifted students, who, like their peers with other special needs, reach their full potential through specialized instruction.  The Davidson Academy not only offers a model for what can be done to meet the special needs of gifted students, but also suggests ideas that might spark innovation in regular public schools.  Says founder Bob Davidson, “Ability groups may fly in the face of closing the achievement gap, but neglecting the country’s brightest kids flies in the face of logic.”

About the Author
June Kronholz is a former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and education reporter, and currently a contributing editor at Education Next.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For more information please visit:  www.educationnext.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Naush Boghossian, (818) 209-2787 – Larson Communications
David Figlio, (847) 467-1503 – Northwestern University

Private school scholarship program leads to immediate and pronounced achievement improvements at neighborhood public schools, with elementary and middle schools most responsive

Cambridge, MA — A new study that examines the impact of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program (FTC)—the nation’s largest private school scholarship program—finds the program has a marked positive effect on the academic performance of students who remain in public schools. The report is available on the web at www.educationnext.org.

In “Does Competition Improve Public Schools?,” co-authors David Figlio and Cassandra M.D. Hart of Northwestern University, analyzed seven years of Florida test score data and found that scores on state math and reading tests rose following the introduction of the FTC program.  In addition, the positive effects of private school competition grew stronger over time, perhaps resulting from increased knowledge of the program and cumulative resource effects.

For every 1.1 miles closer a public school was to the nearest private school, its students’ math and reading scores increased by 1.5 percent of a standard deviation in just the first year alone of the scholarship program.   If as many as 12 additional private schools were close to a public school, the public school test scores rose by almost 3 percent of a standard deviation, roughly equivalent to an additional one month of learning for the average student.

“The threat of losing students—and state funding based upon enrollment—to private schools may give public schools greater incentive to cultivate parental satisfaction by operating more efficiently and  improving outcomes for students,” Hart said. “We saw the biggest impact on public schools that served a disproportionately large number of low-income students, probably because the scholarships were available only to students from low-income families.

The FTC, signed into law in 2001, provides corporations with tax credits for donations they make to scholarship-funding organizations, allowing the corporations to receive dollar-for-dollar tax credits for up to 75 percent of their total tax obligation each year. Florida’s program is set to expand in the coming years.

“An increase in the variety of private schools (religious and secular) also has a positive effect on the performance of students remaining in public schools,” Figlio said.

Scholarship programs similar to Florida’s now operate in several states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Indiana, and are being considered in Maryland and New Jersey.

It is estimated that more than 100,000 students nationwide attended private schools through tax credit programs in 2009.

The analysis uses Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test (FCAT) test-score data from the 1999-2000 school year through the 2006-07 school year. Researchers looked at the test score performance of 92 percent of the public school students who attended schools in Florida with a private competitor within a five-mile radius.

About the Authors

David Figlio is professor of education, social policy and economics at Northwestern University and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Cassandra M.D. Hart is a doctoral student in the Department of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution, and online by Harvard University, that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. The journal’s website is www.educationnext.org.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Naush Boghossian, (818) 209-2787 – Larson Communications
Paul E. Peterson, (617) 495-8312/495-7976 – Harvard University
Eric A. Hanushek, (650) 722-1600 – Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Ludger Woessmann, +49(0)89/9224-1699 – University of Munich, Ifo Institute for Economic Research

New analysis finds U.S. ranked 31st out of 56 countries in the percentage of students performing at a high level of accomplishment, trailing Korea, Canada, the Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Poland and Lithuania, among others

Cambridge, MA — According to the first-ever comprehensive study comparing the percentage of U.S. students in the graduating class of 2009 who have advanced skills in math with the percentages of similar high achievers in 56 other countries, only six percent of U. S. students perform at the advanced level in math, as compared to 28 percent of Taiwanese students and more than 20 percent of students in Finland and Korea.  Overall, the United States ranks 31^st out of 56 countries, falling behind most industrialized nations. The report is available on the web at http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/.

The study, sponsored by the journal Education Next and Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, was co-authored by Eric A. Hanushek of Stanford University, Paul E. Peterson of Harvard University and Ludger Woessmann of the University of Munich.  The authors analyzed state-by-state the percentage of students performing at advanced levels. Most states in the U.S. rank closer to developing countries than to developed countries. Thirteen developed countries have more than twice the percentage of advanced students as does the U.S., including Germany, Canada, the Czech Republic, Japan, Finland and Austria.

The lagging U.S. performance is not just explained by its heterogeneous population. The report also compared to other countries U.S. white students and children of parents with college degrees—two groups against which the case of discrimination cannot be made easily. The analysis found that only 8 percent of white students and 10 percent of students from all races with at least one college-educated parent performed at the advanced level.  By comparison, 18 countries saw 10 percent of all their students performing at the advanced level. The percentage of high-performing students in each state, as well as the ranking of each state in comparison to other countries, is provided in the accompanying table and figure.

Other findings from the study include:

• Just 4.5 percent of the students in California are performing at the highly accomplished level, a percentage that trails 32 countries and is comparable to the performance of students in Portugal, Italy, Israel, and Turkey.
• The lowest-ranking states—West Virginia, New Mexico and Mississippi—fall behind Serbia and Uruguay.
• The only OECD countries—out of 30—producing a smaller percentage of advanced math students than the U.S. were Spain, Italy, Israel, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Chile and Mexico.

“Public discourse has tended to focus on the need to address low achievement, particularly among disadvantaged students, and bring everyone up to a minimum level of proficiency,” said Peterson. “As great as this need may be, there is no less need to lift more students, no matter their socio-economic background, to high levels of educational accomplishment.”

Some attribute the comparatively small percentages of students performing at the advanced level to the focus of the 2002 law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), on the needs of very low-performing students. However, in mathematics, the percentage performing at an advanced level rose after the passage of the law, although not to internationally competitive levels.

“The incapacity of American schools to bring students up to the highest level of accomplishment in math is much more deep-seated than anything induced by recent federal legislation,” Hanushek pointed out.

The analysis uses the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2005 advanced standard to compare U.S. state performances with performance in other countries. Since U.S. students took both the NAEP 2005 and the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2006, it was possible to find the score on the PISA that is tantamount to scoring at the advanced level on the NAEP. The PISA is an internationally standardized assessment of student performance in math, science and reading, established by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

“Maintaining national productivity depends importantly on developing a highly qualified cadre of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and other professionals,” Woessmann observed.

“U.S. Math Performance in Global Perspective: How well does each state do at producing high-achieving students?” is available at hks.harvard.edu/pepg/. “Teaching Math to the Talented: Which countries—and states—are producing high-achieving students?” is available at educationnext.org.

Webinar

Authors Eric Hanushek and Paul Peterson will discuss their results on a webinar Wednesday, Nov. 10, from 12:30-1:45 p.m. EST. Please visit the Education Next site for more information about signing up for the webinar: http://educationnext.org/u-s-math-performance-in-global-perspective-webinar/

About Education Next and PEPG

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution and online by Harvard University, that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. The journal’s website is educationnext.org.  PEPG sponsors research projects, evaluations, conferences, and publications on education policy and governance. The program’s website is hks.harvard.edu/pepg. A grant from the Kern Family Foundation provided support for the preparation of this report.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Naush Boghossian          (818) 209-2787          Larson Communications
Jonah E. Rockoff             (212) 854-9799          Columbia University

Cambridge, MA — A new study that analyzes New York City public schools’ achievement data reveals that test scores of students who enter stand-alone middle schools experience significant drops in their math and English scores on standardized tests compared to their K-8 counterparts. The study, authored by Jonah Rockoff and Benjamin Lockwood, economists from Columbia University, is available today on www.EducationNext.org.  The data also reveal that this achievement gap widens throughout the middle-school years.

The Education Next research article “Stuck in the Middle,” featured in the Fall 2010 issue of Education Next, finds that the steep drop-off in middle-school students’ academic achievement may be linked to the larger number of students in each grade level but cannot be explained by differences in per-pupil spending or class size, which were similar in middle and K-8 schools. They also found that student absence rates increased in stand-alone middle schools, which could also contribute to the achievement gap between these students and their K-8 peers.

“Our evidence shows clearly that middle schools are not the best way to educate students, at least in places like New York City,” Rockoff said. “It raises the question—should we eliminate stand-alone middle schools altogether?”

The study looked at 10 years of data made available for New York City school children. The authors followed students who entered 3^rd grade between the fall of 1998 and the fall of 2002 for six years, until most had completed the 8^th grade.

“When students move to a middle school, their academic achievement falls substantially relative to that of their counterparts who continue to attend a K-8 school,” observed Lockwood. “What’s more, their achievement continues to decline throughout middle school, setting students up for unnecessary long-term disadvantages.”

The analysis revealed that the decline in achievement is roughly 20 to 25 percent of the achievement gap between poor and non-poor students in New York City. Students continue to fall behind through the middle school years, and the outcome is even worse for those students who began middle school at the lower end of the performance spectrum.

Rockoff and Lockwood also examined survey data on New York City parents whose children attended both types of schools and found that parents whose children attend K-8 public schools rated their schools higher on education quality, academic rigor and school safety compared to parents whose children attend stand-alone middle schools.

About the Authors
Jonah E. Rockoff is associate professor of business at the Columbia Graduate School of Business. Benjamin B. Lockwood is research coordinator at the Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate at the Columbia Graduate School of Business.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution, and online by Harvard University, that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. The journal’s website is www.educationnext.org.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Naush Boghossian, (818) 209-2787 - Larson Communications
Paul E. Peterson, (617) 495-8312/495-7976 – Harvard University
William G. Howell, (312-550-3767 – University of Chicago
Martin R. West, (617) 496-4803 – Harvard University

National Survey also reveals increased support for virtual schooling, support for charter schools rises sharply in minority communities

CAMBRIDGE, MA – The fourth annual survey conducted by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) and Education Next on a wide range of education issues released today reveals that the broader public and teachers are markedly divided in their support for merit pay, teacher tenure and Race to the Top (RttT). The poll provides strong evidence from a nationally representative sample that most Americans support merit pay for teachers, while teachers oppose the policy by a large margin; there is strong opposition among the public to teacher tenure, while teachers favor it; and teachers are significantly more opposed to the federal RttT program than the broader public.

Survey questions and responses, along with an essay by survey authors William G. Howell, Paul E. Peterson and Martin R. West interpreting the results, are available online at the Education Next website: www.educationnext.org.

Support for “basing a teacher’s salary, in part, on his or her students’ academic progress on state tests” jumped five percentage points in one year, increasing from 44 percent in 2007 to 49 percent in 2010, while opposition declined from 32 to 25 percent.  However, only 24 percent of teachers supported the idea, while 63 percent expressed opposition.

The poll revealed that those who oppose teacher tenure outnumber those who support it by a margin of almost 2:1.  Forty-seven percent oppose the idea, while 25 percent favor it. Among teachers, 48 percent favored tenure.

Thirty-two percent of Americans think RttT is necessary to improve education, but 22 percent believe it is an unwarranted intrusion into state and local government.  However, 46 percent of those polled expressed no opinion. Support is greater among African Americans and Hispanics who back the program by a margin of 48 percent to 12 percent. Meanwhile, teachers oppose RttT by a 2:1 margin, with only 22 percent saying they like the program, and 46 percent against it.

The PEPG-EdNext poll also revealed a surge in support for virtual schooling. Between 2009 and 2010, the percentage in favor of allowing high school students to take a course on the Internet increased from 42 percent to 52 percent, while opposition fell from 29 percent to 23 percent.

Support for charter schools remained essentially unchanged between 2008 and 2010—rising from 42 percent to 44 percent, while opposition increased from just 16 to 19 percent. The remaining group—36 percent—remained neutral. However, support for charter schools in minority communities rose steeply—from 42 percent to 64 percent among African Americans and from 37 percent to 47 percent among Hispanics.  Among teachers, charter support fell from 47 percent to 39 percent.

“When it comes to school choice, charters and learning on the Internet are ‘in,’ while vouchers are ‘out,’” Peterson commented.

Public backing for school vouchers, meanwhile, has fallen.  While 45 percent of the American public supported vouchers in 2007, only 31 percent did so in 2010.  During this same period, opposition grew from 34 percent to 43 percent.

On many issues—merit pay,  requiring tests to graduate from high school, or maintaining federal testing requirements—partisan differences were relatively small. “When it comes to education reform policies, we detect more than a hint of bipartisanship,” West said.

Stronger partisan differences emerged when respondents were asked about the role of teachers’ unions, teacher tenure, and increased school spending.  On these issues Democrats were markedly more supportive of increased spending, tenure for teachers, and the role teacher unions play in their local community.

The survey also asked the public about spending for education and found that the public is willing to spend more on public education, but not if it means being funded through increased local taxes.

“Despite the recession and the rising deficit, Americans are willing to spend more on education, but they express considerable reluctance to pay more in local taxes for that purpose,” says the poll’s survey director, William Howell. When asked whether they support “more government funding for public schools,” 63 percent of those surveyed said they did, but when asked whether “local taxes to fund public schools in your district should increase,” only 29 percent favored the idea.

For some issues, the survey asked alternative versions of the same question to randomly divided portions of the sample in order to see how responses varied with the way a question was worded or with specific information given to the respondent. For example, 59 percent of the public supported increases in teacher salaries when asked the question outright, but only 42 percent did so when first told current average teacher salaries in their states.

Other findings from the survey include:

• Toughen State Testing and Standards – Fifty-eight percent of the public thought states should toughen their testing and standards, but only 33 percent of teachers felt that way.
• Tax Credits – Tax credits for public and private school expenses continued to draw strong support in 2010—55 percent favored the idea, while only 20 percent opposed it, with the remaining taking the neutral position. Opinion remained unchanged from two years previously.
• Teacher Unions – More Americans believe teacher unions are blocking school reform (33 percent) rather than helping it (28 percent). But 39 percent take no position at all.
• Maintain Federal Testing – More Americans (62 percent) believe Congress should continue testing requirements in math and reading than oppose the idea (12 percent), with 26 percent taking a neutral position. But only 50 percent of teachers supported maintaining these requirements.

About the Public Opinion Survey
The PEPG-EdNext survey was conducted by the polling firm Knowledge Networks between May 11 and June 8, 2010.  The findings are based on a nationally representative stratified sample of 1,184 U.S. adults (age 18 years and older) and oversamples of 684 teachers and 908 residents in zip codes with at least one charter school in the year 2009-10. The margin of error for responses given by the full sample in the PEPG-EdNext survey is roughly 2 percentage points.

The research was funded with a generous grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as well as by grants from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the William E. Simon Foundation. The report incorporates data from earlier polls that were supported in part by the National Center on School Choice, which is funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) (R305A040043).  All opinions expressed represent those of the authors and not necessarily the institutions with which they are affiliated, the U.S. Department of Education or the foundations that supported the research. All errors in this paper are solely the responsibility of the authors.

About the Authors
William G. Howell is the Sydney Stein Professor of American Politics at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago.  Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard University, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and editor-in-chief of Education Next. Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and executive editor of Education Next.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Naush Boghossian          (818) 209-2787          Larson Communications
Martin West                         (617) 496-4803          Harvard University

Cambridge, MA — A Harvard University study released today provides the first evidence from a nationally representative sample of Americans that the public, and especially parents, grade their local schools on the basis of student achievement and not on the percentage of students at the school who are African American or Hispanic. The findings, available here, also reveal that poor, minority and less educated citizens are just as informed about school quality as the public as a whole. However, both parents and the general public give lower grades to schools with a high percentage of students from poor families.

Harvard’s Matthew Chingos, Michael Henderson and Martin West asked a nationally representative sample of American adults to identify their local elementary and middle schools and to grade them on the “A” to “F” scale traditionally used to evaluate students.  The authors then linked the grades given to each school to the school’s characteristics, including its size, the size of classes at the school, the racial and ethnic composition of the students, the percentage of students from poor families, and the percentage of students performing at proficient levels in reading and math on state tests.

The peer-reviewed study, which is featured in the Fall 2010 issue of Education Next, is the first to compare Americans’ subjective ratings of local schools to actual data on student achievement at the same schools. The analysis reveals that citizen ratings of local schools reflect publicly available information on the level of student achievement in the schools.

“Parents care most about whether students at their local school are performing well.  While they also rate schools with fewer poor students more highly, we found no signs that the grades parents gave their school is influenced by its racial or ethnic composition,” observed Martin West, one of the study’s authors.

The researchers found that citizens who are less educated, of lower income, or minority are no less able than better-educated, higher-income, or white citizens to evaluate the schools on the basis of student achievement.  As Matthew Chingos explained, “We found no evidence that traditionally disadvantaged groups are less informed about student achievement when rating their local schools.”  

In light of the ongoing push to establish common academic standards across states, the authors examined data from the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress to see whether citizen ratings of school quality are responsive to the level of student performance relative to the nation as a whole or only relative to other schools within the same state.  They found no evidence that citizens or parents have information about school quality beyond the information provided by state testing systems. In other words, citizens appear to be evaluating schools based on local comparisons or on information provided by their state testing system with­out taking into account the relative rigor of state standards.

The study uses data from a 2009 survey of parents and other adults conducted by Education Next and the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. The survey was administered to a nationally representative sample of 3,251 American adults in February and March of 2009. Of the elementary and middle schools the survey respondents rated, 14 percent received a grade of “A,” 41 percent received a “B” grade, while 36 percent received a “C.”  Seven percent were given a “D” and 2 percent an “F.”  These subjective ratings were compared with data on actual school quality as measured by the percentage of students in each school who achieved “proficiency” in math and reading on states’ accountability exams during the 2007-08 school year.

The authors employed geo-coding techniques to identify the closest five elementary and middle schools to a nationally representative sample of American adults.  After first selecting the specific schools they considered to be their local elementary and middle school, survey respondents were asked to grade those schools. The study found that if a school had 25 percent more students performing at a proficient level in math and reading, the school was rated a half grade higher by parents.

The analysis also incorporates data from the National Center for Education Statistics on the racial/ethnic composition of each school, the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (an indicator of family poverty), the average number of students in each grade (a measure of school size), and the school’s pupil-teacher ratio (an measure of class size) in the 2007-08 school year.

Matthew M. Chingos is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance. Michael Henderson is a doctoral candidate in Harvard’s Department of Government. Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and an executive editor of Education Next.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution, and online by Harvard University, that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. The journal’s website is www.educationnext.org.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Naush Boghossian          (818) 209-2787          Larson Communications
Mike Antonucci          (916) 422-4373          Education Intelligence Agency

Cambridge, MA — A first-ever national analysis of state spending per teacher on political advocacy by the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) released today found that the national teachers unions and their state affiliates spent more than $100 per teacher in five states, with Oregon at the top of the list at $360 per teacher during the 2007-08 election cycle. The report, authored by Mike Antonucci, director of the Education Intelligence Agency, and available on the web at www.educationnext.org, also found that political spending from teachers union dues topped $1 million during the 2007-08 period in 14 states, with California on top at $12.6 million.

In “The Long Reach of Teachers Unions: Using money to win friends and influence policy,” featured in the Fall 2010 edition of the Education Next journal, Antonucci also reveals that teachers unions have become a force in matters beyond education policy, including weighing in on domestic policy issues such as taxation, healthcare, gay marriage and redistricting.

“The unions’ influence over education policy is well known, but their influence over government is not. Teachers unions are by far the largest political contributors,” said Antonucci. “For the first time, we have put dollar figures on what has always been known anecdotally: The unions exert a great deal of influence on domestic policy, due to the sheer amount of money they spend on political advocacy, and at times pushing political agendas that are at odds with those of their members.”

Antonucci reports that with a 2010 budget of $355.8 million for the NEA and $165 million for the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the unions have become political kingmakers, applying their influence directly through lobbying and election campaigns, but also indirectly through a network of “front groups”—friendly organizations to which they give substantial contributions. The NEA in particular is a driving force supporting attempts to raise state taxes or defeating tax cut or limitation measures.

Although the NEA has a politically diverse membership, it spends its money almost exclusively in support of liberal causes. According to an NEA survey, 36 percent of respondents were “not at all” involved with the union at any level.

Antonucci’s analysis is based on a national database of officially reported campaign spending created jointly by the Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute on Money in State Politics. The database reveals that the NEA, which represents about 2.3 million K-12 public school teachers and about one million education support workers, spent $56.3 million during the 2007-08 election cycle, making it the largest campaign spender in the nation. The American Federation of Teachers ranked 25^th in campaign spending with almost $12 million.

The five states in which the two unions spent more than $100 per teacher were Oregon, Colorado ($173.98), Montana ($141.74), Utah ($140.60) and South Dakota ($132.15)—states in which there were hotly-contested political campaigns during the 2007-08 election cycle. Massachusetts came in sixth with $81.24 per teacher, followed by North Dakota ($68.17), California ($41.21), Washington ($40.75) and Minnesota ($40.04). The full chart available here shows the total expenditures by the NEA and AFT in each state as well as what those expenditures translate into per teacher. The analysis uses the 2009 U.S. Digest of Education Statistics for the total number of K-12 teachers in each state, though the NEA and AFT represent non-teacher members as well.

Antonucci follows the money and the impact it has on policy. For example, in South Dakota, the money committed by the NEA to defeat an initiative went a long way in such a small media market.  When a 2008 initiative, Measure 10, which would have banned the use of tax money for campaigns or lobbying and restricted political contributions by government contractors was defeated, its committee chair Jim Anderson noted, “We’ll be able to prepare accordingly next time, knowing that the real opposition to ethics reform in South Dakota is NEA union officials back east.”

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution and online by Harvard University, that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. The journal’s website is www.educationnext.org.

CONTACT:

Naush Boghossian   (818) 209-2787   Larson Communications naush@larsonpr.com
Thomas Dee   (610) 690-5767   Swarthmore College dee@swarthmore.edu
Brian Jacob   734-615-6994 University of Michigan bajacob@umich.edu

Cambridge, MA — Just as the Obama administration has signaled that it has made reauthorizing the landmark No Child Left Behind (NCLB) federal law a priority in 2010, an Education Next analysis by professors Thomas Dee and Brian Jacob shows that NCLB is responsible for marked gains in math skills, particularly among Latino and low-income students, but produced no improvements in reading achievement.

The impact NCLB has had on student achievement since its implementation in 2002 has always been difficult to gauge. Since the law applied to all public school students, there was no comparison group and it was impossible to determine which of countless factors contributed to student achievement.

However, authors Dee and Jacob conducted groundbreaking research, to be published in the summer issue of Education Next and available now online at www.educationnext.org, comparing test score changes in states that did not have NCLB-style accountability systems (both publicizing performance and attaching consequences to the performance) in place before 2002 to changes in those that already did when NCLB was implemented.

Dee’s and Jacob’s findings suggest that “the accountability provisions of NCLB generated large and statistically significant increases in the math achievement of 4th graders and that these gains were concentrated among Hispanic and low-income students.”

“Specifically, we find evidence that the accountability provisions of NCLB generated large and broad gains in the math achievement of 4th grad­ers and somewhat smaller gains for 8th graders,” said the authors.  “Our results suggest that NCLB accountability had no impact on read­ing achievement for either group.”

The study relied on test-score data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as “The Nation’s Report Card.”  Data were available in 39 states for 4^th-grade math, 38 states for 8^th-grade math, 37 states for 4^th-grade reading and 34 states for 8^th-grade reading. The scholars found that NCLB raised the percentage of students who reached a basic level of proficiency by 10 percentage points in 4^th grade math and by 6 percentage points in 8^th grade math.  The percentages reaching full proficiency in math increased by 6 percentage points in 4^th grade, but no detectable gains were identified for the percentage reaching full proficiency in 8^th grade math.  Those identified as fully proficient in 4^th grade reading increased by 2.5 percentage points, but no other significant reading impacts were identified. NCLB impacts on Hispanic math performance were even greater.

The research also found that NCLB increased achievement among higher-achieving students, casting doubt on concerns that the law has harmed this group.

The authors say that as lawmakers consider a redesign of NCLB, they may need to pay more specific attention to understanding what causes differing results by grade and subject.

“Understanding these differences, according to the analysis, will be critical as policymakers discuss the future design of NCLB,” Jacob said. “Our results, much like earlier evaluations of state-level school accountability policies, show that we need to look closely at what’s happening within our schools that can cause these changes in achievement.”

Thomas Dee, currently an associate professor of economics at Swarthmore College, will be professor of public policy and economics at the University of Virginia this fall and Brian Jacob is professor of education policy and economics at the University of Michigan.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution and online by Harvard University that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. The journal’s website is www.educationnext.org

For Immediate Release

CONTACT:
Naush Boghossian (818) 209-2787 Larson Communications
Carlos Lastra-Anadón (617) 955-7388 Harvard University
Antonio Wendland (617) 495-7976 Harvard University

Cambridge, MA — As President Barack Obama urges states to raise academic standards and not “lowball” student expectations, an Education Next report by researchers Paul E. Peterson and Carlos Xabel Lastra-Anadón shows that standards in most states remain far below those of the proficiency standard set by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Meanwhile, the findings conclude that the U.S. Department of Education rewarded two states that have historically implemented among the lowest standards in the country—Tennessee and Delaware—with highly competitive Race to the Top (RttT) funds.

By comparing the percentage proficient according to the 2009 NAEP with that reported by each state according to its own assessment, the researchers are able to ascertain empirically the rigor of each state’s standards in reading and math in 4th and 8th grades. Tennessee, with the lowest standards among all states, received a grade of ‘F’, and Delaware came in 36th with a C-. Five states—Hawaii, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Mexico and Washington—received an ‘A’ An ‘F’ was given to Alabama and Nebraska as well as to Tennessee. The grade given each state is presented in the attached table.

The report, which will be published in the fall issue of Education Next but which can be seen online now at www.educationnext.org, shows that only a very few states have changed their standards significantly since they first set them. Colorado raised its standards from a ‘D’ to a ‘B-’ between 2003 and 2009, while South Carolina let its standards fall from ‘A’ level to a ‘C-’, and Arizona standards fell from a ‘B-’ to a ‘D’. But changes in most states have been marginal. Tennessee has always received an ‘F’, while Delaware’s standards have fallen from a ‘C’ in 2003 to a ‘C-’ in 2005 and subsequently.

“Our findings raise questions about whether RttT places too much emphasis on promises and not enough on past performance,” Peterson said. “But, the proof will be in the pudding. If Tennessee and Delaware, now that they have been given RttT money, finally begin to raise their standards, they will win over those of us who are critical of the process.”

In more encouraging findings, the analysis reveals that despite widespread perceptions that state standards are falling nationwide, they are rising noticeably in reading. Math continues to suffer, however, with declining standards.

The report measures a state’s performance on the NAEP, specifically the percentage of students who are deemed proficient by these standards, and compares them with the percentage of students who are deemed proficient by each particular state’s adopted standards. States that have a similar percentage of students proficient on their own tests as on the NAEP test for their state were given an ‘A’, because they had set their standards close to the “world class” level set by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. States whose students’ scores showed them to be substantially less proficient on NAEP tests as compared to their own state tests were given lower grades, the exact grade depending on how much lower their standards were than the world-class NAEP standard.

Peterson and Lastra-Anadón’s analysis supports Obama’s criticism that standards are too low in most states. Twenty-seven states earned a ‘C’, eight were given a ‘D’, and three an ‘F’.

According to Lastra-Anadón, “setting high standards for proficiency is the first step in the journey toward improving the learning of a high percentage of students. NAEP says that less than one-third of students are proficient in reading and a similar proportion in math nationwide and concealing this fact by states setting standards too low does not help students or the nation.”

Paul E. Peterson is the director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, where Carlos Xabel Lastra-Anadón is a Harvard Research Fellow.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution and online by Harvard University, that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. The journal’s website is www.educationnext.org

For Immediate Release: April 27, 2010
Contact: Gary Ritter, University of Arkansas, garyr@uark.edu, 479-575-4971
Brian Kisida, Nathan Jensen, Joshua McGee, University of Arkansas, 479-575-3172

STANFORD — New research conducted by Gary Ritter and associates at the University of Arkansas finds that the charter sector and the traditional public-school sector are not very different in the level of segregation experienced by students. The research is published in “A Closer Look at Charter Schools and Segregation,” which will appear in the Summer 2010 issue of Education Next and is now available online.

The new findings contradict the conclusions drawn by the authors of a study released in January 2010 by the UCLA-based Civil Rights Project (CRP). The authors of the CRP study, “Choice without Equity,” concluded that charter schools are much more segregated than traditional public schools. Ritter finds that “when examined more appropriately, the data actually reveal small differences in the level of overall segregation between the charter school sector and the traditional public-school sector.”

The basic flaw in the CRP study is that it compares the racial composition of charter schools, which tend to be located in inner cities, with that of traditional public schools, which are located in all different kinds of environments. “Based only on enrollments aggregated to the national and state level, the authors repeatedly highlight the overrepresentation of black students in charter schools in an attempt to portray a harmful degree of segregation,” co-author Brian Kisida explains. “This comparison is likely to generate misleading conclusions for one simple reason, as the authors themselves point out…  ‘the concentration of charter schools in urban areas skews the charter school enrollment towards having higher percentages of poor and minority students.’”

Ritter continues, “Instead of asking whether all students in charter schools are more likely to attend segregated schools than are all students in traditional public schools, we should be comparing the levels of segregation for the students in charter schools to what they would have experienced had they remained in their residentially assigned public schools.”

The CRP report includes an analysis of whether charter or traditional schools are more segregated within 39 metropolitan areas, however, the analysis does not take into account the fact that charter schools are disproportionately located in low-SES urban areas within those metropolitan areas.

The authors of the new study modified the analysis conducted by the CRP so that the percentage of students in segregated charter schools in just the central city would be compared to the percentage of students in segregated traditional public schools within the same central city for 8 large metropolitan areas. The results confirm that the Civil Rights Project’s report overstates the relative level of segregation in the charter sector.

For example, the Civil Rights Project reports that, in the metropolitan area surrounding the District of Columbia, 91.2 percent of charter students are in segregated schools, compared with just 20.9 percent of students in traditional public schools. However, the reanalysis shows that, if the comparison is restricted to students in the central city, the percentage of charter students attending segregated schools stays roughly the same, but the percentage of students attending segregated traditional public schools jumps to 85 percent.

After re-analyzing the data for all 39 metropolitan areas, the authors of the re-analysis conclude, “Using the best available unit of comparison, we find that 63 percent of charter students in these central cities attend school in intensely segregated minority schools, as do 53 percent of traditional public school students.”  They note that this re-analysis likely underestimates the true levels of segregation in the traditional public schools that the charter school students would otherwise attend because, even within central cities, charter schools are more likely to open in neighborhoods that are more segregated.

Please read “A Closer Look at Charter Schools and Segregation: Flawed comparisons lead to overstated conclusions,” by Gary Ritter, Nathan Jensen, Brian Kisida, and Joshua McGee, available online at EducationNext.org.

Gary Ritter is professor of education policy at the University of Arkansas.  Nathan Jensen, Brian Kisida, and Joshua McGee are research associates in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

For Immediate Release: March 3, 2010
Contact: Elizabeth Cascio, Dartmouth College, (603) 646-4096, Elizabeth.Cascio@Dartmouth.edu

STANFORD–A new study by Dartmouth economist Elizabeth Cascio finds that state funding of universal kindergarten has some long-term benefit for white students but does not necessarily yield clear benefits for African American students.  The results of Cascio’s research appear in the forthcoming issue of Education Next.

Cascio found that white children who participated in state-funded universal pre-kindergarten were less likely to be high school dropouts and likely to be incarcerated or otherwise institutionalized as adults. College attendance also increased among whites, but by a smaller amount than the dropout rate.  Cascio found no positive effects for African Americans in any of these areas, despite comparable increases in their enrollment in public kindergartens.

The study also showed no discernible impact for either group on many of the long-term outcomes desired by policymakers, including minimizing grade retention and dependence on public assistance and positively impacting later employment and earnings.

Cascio’s study sheds light on the likely consequences of any new universal program by estimating the impact of earlier state interventions to introduce kindergarten into public schools. In the 1960s and 1970s, many states, particularly in the southern and western parts of the country, began offering grants to school districts operating kindergarten programs. Districts were quick to respond. The average state experienced a significant increase in its kindergarten enrollment rate within two years after an initiative. To understand the long-term impacts of universal kindergarten, Cascio investigated programs in the 24 states that introduced state funding for universal kindergarten after 1960.

In considering why African Americans might not have benefited as much as whites from state’s kindergarten funding initiatives, Cascio hypothesizes that kindergarten funding may have disproportionately drew African Americans out of higher-quality education settings.  Cascio found that the introduction of state funding for kindergarten prompted a reduction in Head Start participation among African Americans. Head Start has historically been an important education provider for five-year-olds in the absence of public kindergarten.

Overall, the study’s findings suggest that, in the absence of higher-quality alternatives, participation in a low intensity preschool program may have some limited positive long term effects.

“Even a weak program may be better than no program at all, as can be seen in the results for whites,” Cascio writes. “When alternatives already exist for many disadvantaged children, however, universal programs may not yield additional benefits for that group.”

Read “What Happened When Kindergarten Went Universal?” available online at www.educationnext.org.

Elizabeth U. Cascio is assistant professor of economics at Dartmouth College.

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:
Caleb Offley (585) 319-4541
Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6010
www.hoover.org

For Immediate Release: February 10, 2010
Contact:
Tim R. Sass, 850-644-7087, tsass@fsu.edu
Ron Zimmer, 517-355-6613, rzimmer@msu.edu

STANFORD–In the first-ever analysis of the impacts of charter school attendance on educational attainment, educational researchers Kevin Booker and Brian Gill of Mathematica Policy Research, Tim R. Sass of Florida State University, and Ron Zimmer of Michigan State University find that attending charter high schools is associated with higher graduation rates and college attendance. The findings, which will be published in the spring issue of Education Next and are now online at www.EducationNext.org, show that students attending charter high schools in Florida and Chicago have an increased likelihood of successful high-school completion and college enrollment when compared with their traditional public high school counterparts.

In Chicago, students who attended a charter high school were 7 percentage points more likely to earn a regular high school diploma than their counterparts with similar characteristics who attended a traditional public high school. The graduation differential for Florida charter schools was even larger, at 15 percentage points.

The findings for college attendance are remarkably similar in Florida and Chicago. Among the study population of charter 8th graders, students who attended a charter high school in 9th grade are 8 to 10 percentage points more likely to attend college than similar students who attended a traditional public high school.

The results, point out the researchers, are comparable to those of some studies which find that attending a Catholic high school boosts the likelihood of high school graduation and college attendance by 10 to 18 percentage points.

In exploring the various factors that might play a role in the charter schools’ positive effect on educational attainment, the research team focused in on the fact that grade configurations in charter schools often differ from those of traditional public schools. In the traditional public school sector in both Florida and Chicago, high schools are almost always separate from middle schools, which is not the case for charter schools. In 2001-02, about 30 percent of Florida charter 8th-grade students attended schools that also offered at least some high-school grades. In Chicago, nearly half of the 8th-grade charter students could attend at least some high-school grades without changing schools. The researchers point out that this raises the possibility that the positive effects of attending a charter high school on educational attainment could simply reflect advantages of grouping middle and high school grades together, thereby creating greater continuity for students and eliminating the disruption often associated with changing schools.

The state of Florida and the city of Chicago were selected for study because both locations have the necessary data and data systems in place to support the research. The Florida data, which cover four cohorts of 8th grade students for the study from the school years 1997-98 to 2000-01, came primarily from the Florida Department of Education’s K-20 Education Data Warehouse (K-20 EDW), an integrated longitudinal database covering all public school students in the state of Florida.  The K-20 EDW includes detailed enrollment, demographic, and program participation information for each student, as well as reading and math achievement test scores.  The Chicago data, which cover five cohorts of students who were in 8th grade during the school years 1997-98 to 2001-02, were obtained from the Chicago Public Schools. The data include 8th-grade math and reading test scores and information on student gender, race/ethnicity, bilingual status, free or reduced price lunch status, and special education status.

To address the issue of student self-selection into charter schools, the researchers compared high school and postsecondary outcomes for 8th-grade charter students who entered charter high schools with outcomes for 8th-grade charter students who entered conventional public high schools, ensuring that both the comparison group and the treatment group of students were once charter choosers.

• Read “The Unknown World of Charter High Schools” available online at www.educationnext.org.

• Watch the Education Next Video:  Brian Gill talks with Education Next about the impact of charter schools on high school graduation and college attendance rates.

Kevin Booker is researcher at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. Tim R. Sass is professor of economics at Florida State University. Brian Gill is senior social scientist at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. Ron Zimmer is associate professor at Michigan State University.

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:
Caleb Offley (585) 319-4541
Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6010
www.hoover.org

For Immediate Release: January 27, 2010
Contact: Michael Henderson:  henders3@fas.harvard.edu, 337-852-0860

STANFORD—In a decade in which many school voucher programs have been limited or rolled back in Washington, DC, Utah, Arizona, and Florida, the Louisiana legislature in 2008 passed a new voucher program for New Orleans. In 2009-10, the second year of the voucher program, 1,324 New Orleans students attended 31 private schools using vouchers with a maximum value of over $7,000.

In “In the Wake of the Storm,” which is now available at www.EducationNext.org and will appear in the Spring 2010 issue of Education Next, Harvard researcher Michael Henderson tells the story behind the passage of voucher legislation in Louisiana and identifies the election of Bobby Jindal, a popular governor committed to school choice, as the most critical factor. “Passage of a voucher bill required political change. That change came in the fall of 2007, when Bobby Jindal, a Republican and strong supporter of vouchers, was elected governor,” Henderson writes.

Henderson concludes that, while the program came close on the heels of Hurricane Katrina, the storm only set the stage for the possibility of reform.

Jindal’s efforts were helped by a term limit law that changed the face of the state legislature in 2007 and by the support of a number of African American legislators from New Orleans. The governor also lined up votes from white legislators from the state’s rural areas.

As Henderson explains, “Winning over those votes depended on a popular governor committed to expanding choice, his willingness to put his political capital to work for the proposal’s success, and adept navigation of the legislative process.”

• Read “In the Wake of the Storm” available online at www.educationnext.org.

• Watch Education Next’s video interview with Michael Henderson, “How Vouchers Came to New Orleans”

Michael Henderson, a native of Louisiana, is research fellow at Harvard University’s Program for Education Policy and Governance and graduate student in the Department of Education.

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:
Caleb Offley (585) 319-4541
Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6010
www.hoover.org

For Immediate Release: January 19, 2010
Contact: Andy Smarick, (443) 534-6550, asmarick@edexcellence.net

STANFORD—As states catch their breath after rushing to meet the January 19 deadline for submitting applications for the first round of Race to the Top grants, education researcher Andy Smarick of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute warns that the administration must take steps to ensure that Race to the Top funds are spent in ways that promote reform.

In his article, “Toothless Reform?” which is now available at www.EducationNext.org and will appear in the Spring 2010 issue of Education Next, Smarick reviews the impact of the federal government’s education stimulus spending to date. Finding that “local policy prerogatives and dire financial conditions trumped federal pleas for reform and led to the spending of massive amounts of aid on preserving the status quo and protecting existing jobs and programs,” Smarick urges policymakers to heed the lessons learned from that experience and to focus on reducing the gulf between reforms promised and reforms delivered when it comes to the Department of Education’s $4.35 billion Race to the Top fund.

The government’s stimulus plan (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA) has already funneled $75 billion in education funds to states and school districts. Because policymakers wanted to ensure that these funds were well spent, Smarick explains, governors were asked to provide assurances that their states were advancing important reforms.  Secretary Duncan continuously reminded states that he expected these funds to be used to innovate and improve student learning, not merely prop up the status quo.

However, notes Smarick, it is now clear that the lion’s share of ARRA education dollars was used to fill existing budget holes rather than to pursue education reforms.  According to a study released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) last year, federal stimulus funds were being used for “retaining staff and current education programs” rather than advancing reforms. The American Association of School Administrators (AASA) conducted a survey of administrators and found that stimulus funds were being used to protect jobs and programs, not to accomplish reform.

Smarick’s article explores how the goal of reform was displaced by the goal of job and program preservation.  He then argues that unless the federal government is very careful, the forces and factors that led to these distressing spending patterns—like huge state budget deficits, local resistance to federal education guidance, and interest group focus on jobs—could similarly influence the Race to the Top, compromising its ultimate impact.

The solution is for the federal government to approach state applications with great skepticism and go to great lengths to ensure that states intend to faithfully carry out their reform promises.  “When state proposals hit Arne Duncan’s desk, the secretary must become the toughest schoolmarm in America.”

Smarick concludes, “In retrospect, it’s easy to see why the new federal funds didn’t lead to reform. Though $75 billion now appears to be a lost cause, it did buy important lessons. If properly applied, these lessons could contribute mightily to the ARRA’s final major initiative”–Race to the Top.

• Read “Toothless Reform” available online at www.educationnext.org.
• Watch Education Next’s video interview with Andy Smarick, “Will Education Stimulus Spending Promote School Reform?”
• Listen to Andy Smarick and Joe Williams (of Democrats for Education Reform) discuss efforts to ensure that Race to the Top funds are used to promote school reform in “Race to the Top Forecast”

Andy Smarick is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:
Caleb Offley (585) 319-4541
Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6010
www.hoover.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 15, 2010

Contact:
Richard Whitmire, richard.whitmire@gmail.com
Donna Tambascio, dtambasc@wellesley.edu, 781-283-2552 [for Susan Bailey]

STANFORD— After decades of concern that girls were being shortchanged in male-dominated schools, there has grown a rising chorus of voices worrying about whether boys are the ones in peril.

In “Gender Gap,” available online and appearing in the forthcoming Spring 2010 issue of Education Next, Richard Whitmire, author of Why Boys Fail, and Susan McGee Bailey, principal author of the 1992 report How Schools Shortchange Girls debate whether schools are now shortchanging boys.

Among the points considered by Whitmire and Bailey in the article:

• Dropout and graduation rates, grades, and many test scores show boys faring poorly compared to girls. They go to college at lower rates and then graduate at lower rates.

• In 9^th grade, where poorly prepared boys first encounter the full force of the college readiness curriculum, there is a bulge of students who are held back to repeat the grade. Nationally there are 113 boys in 9^th grade for every 100 girls. Among African Americans, there are 123 boys in 9^th grade for every 100 girls.

• In Minnesota, 58 percent of bachelor’s degrees were earned by women, 69 percent of master’s degrees were earned by women, and 62 percent of associate’s degrees were earned by women.

• A study tracking graduates of the Boston Public Schools found that, for every 167 women in four-year colleges, there were only 100 men.

• A considerable number of boys get into selective private colleges due to gender preferences granted males by admissions officers. In November, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights announced an investigation into the practice.

However,

• Boys outperform girls in math and science on NAEP.

• Women outpace men in BA, MA, and PhD completion, but are significantly behind men in MBAs and earn law and medical degrees at slightly lower rates than men.

• Only 15 of the Fortune 500 companies are headed by female CEOs and women hold only 17 of 100 seats in the U.S. Senate

Read “Gender Gap,” in which Richard Whitmire, author of Why Boys Fail, and Susan McGee Bailey, principal author of the 1992 report How Schools Shortchange Girls debate whether schools are now shortchanging boys.

Also online at www.EducationNext.org:

• Watch “Boys and School”—Education Next editor Mike Petrilli’s video interview with Richard Whitmire.

• Listen to an excerpt from Why Boys Fail—author Richard Whitmire reads from the introduction of his new book.

Richard Whitmire, a former USA Today editorial writer, is author of Why Boys Fail.

Susan McGee Bailey, executive director of the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College, was principal author of the 1992 AAUW report How Schools Shortchange Girls.

For Immediate Release: January 12, 2010

Contact: Margaret Raymond, (650) 725-3431, macke@stanford.edu

STANFORD—As Education Week magazine prepares to release its annual report card for states, Quality Counts 2010, education researcher Margaret Raymond and a team of researchers from CREDO at Stanford University warn that one set of grades on the report card is not reliable.

Quality Counts assigns grades to states in six areas, including “chance-for-success,” which attempts to measure a state’s capacity for helping young people succeed. But according to Raymond and her colleagues, the Chance-for-Success Index does not accurately measure the school system’s contributions to outcomes for students.

“Nowhere do the Quality Counts editors show how or why the Chance-for-Success Index is a good predictor of success,” Raymond and her colleagues write in “Quality Counts and the Chance-for-Success Index,” which appears in the forthcoming issue of Education Next and is now available online at www.EducationNext.org. “Instead, they provide statistics that divert attention away from the things that actually do matter, such as high-quality teaching, a good range of school options, and success in early elementary schools.”

While grades on the Chance-for-Success Index are sometimes interpreted as measures of school quality, researchers from CREDO found that the grades are closely related to measures of family income and the level of education achieved by parents in a state, and do not represent the contribution of a state’s schools to the success of its youngsters.

Raymond and her team removed the family background variables from the Quality Counts Chance-for-Success Index to create a new index that includes only school-related factors. States’ rankings changed substantially, suggesting that the original index was giving credit (or blame) to schools for the background characteristics of the students they serve.

The states that gain the most in the revised index, are Florida and Texas, which moved up 14 places in the rankings. Hawaii was the state to fall farthest in the new rankings, dropping 18 places, from 26^th place to 44^th place.

Raymond and her colleagues recommend that the Quality Counts report card be updated so that the Chance-for-Success Index better measures a state’s capacity for helping its young people succeed. “Narrowing the scope of the Chance-for-Success Index to factors both causally related to school achievement and under the control of state education officials or school districts would improve its value and deliver the right signals to states.”

Read “Quality Counts and the Chance-for-Success Index,” available online at www.EducationNext.org.

Margaret Raymond is director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University.

For Immediate Release: November 18, 2009

Contact: David Bass, dbass@carolinajournal.com

STANFORD – In a time of penny pinching inspired by tight state and local education budgets, investigative reporter David Bass warns that taxpayers are picking up the tab for a large number of ineligible students who participate in the federal school-lunch program because the process for verifying eligibility for the program is fundamentally broken. Even more problematic may be the effect on school funding formulas, on research, and on accountability measures of misidentifying these students as poor. Bass’s findings appear in “Fraud in the Lunchroom,” in the forthcoming issue of Education Next, which is now available at www.EducationNext.org.

The federal government’s National School Lunch Program (NSLP) serves 31 million American children each day a free- or reduced-price lunch, at an annual cost of $8 billion.  Parents who apply for school lunch benefits report their yearly income on the application, and no proof of income is required, but school districts are required to try each year to verify the incomes of 3 percent of participants considered “error prone,” meaning households whose reported incomes are very close to the income eligibility limitation.

According to Bass, verification summaries obtained from 10 of the nation’s largest school districts show a high percentage of those asked to provide proof of income could not or would not comply. Of the 10 districts, all but one had a rate of reduced or repealed benefits above 70 percent (for those in the verification sample for the 2007-08 school year). Most of the benefit reductions and repeals were due to participants’ failure to respond to the mailing, which automatically revoked their benefits.

Determining the extent of program fraud and error is important, as the entitlement is associated with other streams of federal, state, and local taxpayer dollars, Bass notes. Eligibility data are widely used as proxies for poverty rates, thereby influencing funding for myriad government programs and informing both school district policies and policy research. For instance, NSLP participating rates serve as the main criteria for the allocation of federal Title I funds to schools. State governments and school districts also dole out extra funds to schools according to free- and reduced-price lunch percentages.

According to Bass, accountability systems and research may also be affected if the lunch program data are not a valid indicator of socioeconomic status. The National Association of Educational Progress (NAEP) uses the scores of students eligible for the lunch program to track the performance of states in educating low-income children over time, and No Child Left Behind requires that schools meet performance benchmarks for program-eligible students in order to make adequate yearly progress. Academic researchers also make use of NSLP participation data, raising the question of whether researchers could be producing skewed results if program participation is not a reliable indicator of income.

Read “Fraud in the Lunchroom?” available online at www.EducationNext.org.

For Immediate Release: November 12, 2009

Contact:
Robert M. Costrell, University of Arkansas (479) 575-5332
Michael Podgursky, University of Missouri-Columbia, (573) 882-7741

STANFORD — A 30-year veteran public school teacher who moves and splits her employment between two state retirement systems is at risk for losing well over one-half of her pension wealth, according to new research from economists Robert M. Costrell of the University of Arkansas and Michael Podgursky of the University of Missouri-Columbia.

In examining pension plans in six states, Costrell and Podgursky find that compared to a neutral cash balance system, the type of defined benefit pension system which covers almost all public school teachers redistributes about half the pension wealth of an entering cohort of teachers to those who subsequently retire in their mid-50s from those who leave the system earlier. Costrell and Podgursky’s findings appear in the winter issue of Education Next and are available now at www.educationnext.org.

One of the main reasons for this inequality in benefits is that teachers who teach into their 50s can start collecting a pension immediately, while teachers who leave earlier often must defer their pension until age 60 or later, collecting fewer payments over their retirement.

In the six states they studied, Costrell and Podgursky found that a hypothetical teacher who starts teaching at age 25 and spends 15 years in her first job before moving to another state and teaching for 15 more years, loses substantial amounts of net pension wealth.  In Ohio, for example, the loss by age 55 of a teacher who moves when she is 40 would be more than $520,000 or 74 percent of her net pension wealth.  In Missouri, the loss would be more than $400,000 or 65 percent.

Population shifts between states are expected to dramatically change public school enrollments in coming years.  The federal government projects that states such as Nevada and Arizona will see enrollment growth in excess of 40 percent between 2005 and 2017. Louisiana, Vermont, and Rhode Island expect enrollment declines of 10 percent or more over the same period. Heavily populated states such as Michigan and New York anticipate declines of between 5 and 6 percent. One would expect to see teachers moving from low-enrollment to high-enrollment states if the labor market is well-functioning.  However, most state pension systems create severe disincentives that, in effect, handcuff teachers to a single state.

This holds true for public school administrators, as well, who are included in teacher retirement systems.  Even as the market for administrators in urban school districts is increasingly becoming national in scope, they are forced to suffer similar pension penalties for moving. And these impediments may be even more problematic for charter school organizations that successfully operate schools in more than one state. When they replicate school models, it is often beneficial to be able to move staff from one location to another in much the same way business firms relocate managers. Current retirement benefit systems make such moves inordinately costly in states where charter school employees are required to participate in the state’s teacher pension plan.

As states grapple with escalating pension problems, Costrell and Podgursky recommend they consider systems with smoother wealth accrual, such as a cash balance plan that calculates employee retirement benefits based on cumulative contributions with a guaranteed rate of return, or a hybrid such as TIAA-CREF, which has features of both cash balance and defined-contribution plans.  Hybrid plans have proven popular in higher education where the benefits of academic mobility have led many state and private universities to offer more portable retirement plans. Such systems are more transparent, tie benefits more closely to contributions, and do not penalize mobility or job shopping among young teachers.

Now online at Educationnext.org:

• Read Robert M. Costrell and Michael Podgursky’s article “Golden Handcuffs.”

• Watch “Teacher Pension Reform” — Education Next editor-in-chief Paul E. Peterson’s video interview with Robert Costrell.

• Listen to “Pension Reform Would Be Good for Teachers” — Robert M. Costrell and Michael Podgursky’s discussion about how to fix current teacher pension systems.

Robert M. Costrell is professor of education reform and economics at the University of Arkansas. Michael Podgursky is professor of economics at the University of Missouri–Columbia.

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:
Caleb Offley (585) 319-4541
Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6010
www.hoover.org

For Immediate Release: November 10, 2009

Contact:
Dave Marcotte (410-455-1455), marcotte@umbc.edu
Benjamin Hansen (805-284-5935), benjamin.econ.hansen@gmail.com

STANFORD — At a time when Education Secretary Arne Duncan has made clear his view that American students spend too little time in the classroom, and as Hawaii has come under sharp criticism from the Obama administration for shortening its school year in response to budgetary pressures, researchers Dave Marcotte and Benjamin Hansen summarize new evidence that expanding instructional time is as effective as other commonly discussed educational interventions intended to boost learning.

Dave Marcotte is professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Benjamin Hansen is a research associate at IMPAQ International, LLC. Their article, “Time for School?” appears in the forthcoming issue of Education Next and is now available online at www.EducationNext.org.

In studies conducted in 2007 and 2008 Marcotte and Hansen found significant effects on test scores from year-to-year changes in the length of the school year due to bad weather—a “snow day” effect. The researchers compared how schools fared on state assessments in years when there were frequent cancellations due to snowfall to the performance of the very same schools in relatively mild winters. The percentage of students passing math assessments fell by about one-third to one-half a percentage point for each day school was closed.  The effect of additional instructional days was quite similar to the effect of increasing teacher quality and reducing class size.

“There can be no doubt that expanding the amount of time American students spend in school is an idea popular with many education policymakers and has long been so. What makes the present different is that we now have solid evidence that anticipated improvements in learning will materialize,” Marcotte and Hansen write.

As education policymakers consider lengthening the school year, it is important to recognize that expanding instructional time offers both opportunities and hazards for another reform that is well established, the accountability movement, the authors note. “Educators, policymakers, parents, and economists are sure to agree that if students in one school learn content in half the time it takes comparable students at another school to learn the same content, the first school is doing a better job. Yet state and federal accountability systems do not account for the time students actually spent in school when measuring gains, and so far have no way of determining how efficiently schools educate their students.  Depending on the financial or political costs of extending school years, the authors note, those with a stake in education might think differently about gains attributable to the quality of instruction provided and gains attributable to the quantity.”

Read “Time for School?” now online at www.EducationNext.org.

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:
Caleb Offley (585) 319-4541
Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6010
www.hoover.org

For Immediate Release: November 5, 2009
Contact: James W. Guthrie, Vanderbilt University (615) 322-7372

STANFORD — Despite an economic downturn and new data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released last month that show no learning gains in math for American 4th graders, the nation’s public schools will likely have more money and a larger and better paid labor force than they had in 2009, according to education researchers James W. Guthrie and Arthur Peng of Vanderbilt University.  Their findings appear in the forthcoming issue of Education Next.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) has increased the federal government’s contribution to public education revenue from an average of 10 percent to close to 15 percent of the national total.  As recent news reports have detailed, over half of the jobs created or saved by the federal stimulus package (325,000 out of 640,000 jobs) have been in public education.

All this federal support, however, could contribute to an even higher trajectory for future spending on public education than has been the case in the past, regardless of the diminishing returns in terms of student outcomes. Based on historic spending trends and estimating that the federal government’s stimulus contribution will grow to approximately $90 billion, Guthrie and Peng project that national per pupil revenues could increase at a rate of nearly 2.5 percent annually over the next ten years.

Yet, reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have been level for four decades. And, for a half century, nearly one-third of the nation’s high-school students have failed to graduate with their class each year, while graduation rates for black and Hispanic students are even lower.

The $37 billion in the stimulus package that is intended to offset reduced state and local education revenues, which were down 4.6 percent for the first quarter of 2009, will cushion what would otherwise have been the first significant per-pupil spending reduction in 60 years, explain Guthrie and Peng.

Persistent claims that school districts are in fiscal jeopardy, often reported by the media, are misleading, say the researchers, driven by the fact that school-district budget cycles aren’t synchronized with state and federal legislative appropriations processes. Because it is increasingly rare for legislative bodies to enact spending bills before the beginning of the fiscal year on July 1, school districts, worried about their financial vulnerability and needing to comply with personnel notification deadlines (usually in April or May), issue layoff notices and hold mandatory public hearings, even if the probability of actual personnel layoffs is slender. Such public threats trigger a media frenzy, alarm employees and parent advocates, and fuel the public perception that schools are in financial risk.

For the past one hundred years, public schools have had more money and more employees per student in each succeeding year. Teacher salaries have increased more than 42 percent over the past 50 years and health and retirement plans have become more expensive. Moreover, school-related revenues and employment levels have continued to increase even when the economy has turned down, unlike what typically happens in sectors such as manufacturing and retail sales, where recessions trigger cutbacks in personnel and profits. Education employment has risen far faster than student enrollment in U.S. public elementary and secondary schools. Since the 1970s, employment in public education has increased more than 4 fold, rising from more than 200,000 to nearly 900,000, while enrollment has remained relatively constant, hovering above 50 million.

Public education revenue has been insulated from the direct effects of economic ups and downs by a number of politically constructed conditions, including a privileged legal status in most state constitutions, multiple state and federal revenue sources, and stable tax support, such as property taxes, at the local level. In most states, too, education employee unions have locked in extended labor contracts, often bridging or outlasting economic recessions, which effectively counter any threat to revenue levels. Additionally, the misguided practice of using spending amounts as a measure of school quality has helped protect local school-funding levels from any effort to reasonably adjust them.

“Many posh suburbs actively compete on this dimension, proudly proclaiming their per-pupil-spending status ranking relative to competitor districts,” write Guthrie and Peng. Citizens, parents, and others who have purchased homes in such districts perceive the value of their property to be linked to high spending levels.

Read “The Phony Funding Crisis” available online at www.educationnext.org.

James W. Guthrie is professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University and director of the Peabody Center for Education Policy.  Arthur Peng is research associate at the Peabody Center for Education Policy.

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:
Caleb Offley (585) 319-4541
Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6010
www.hoover.org

For Immediate Release: October 27, 2009
Contact: Andy Smarick, (443) 534-6550, asmarick@edexcellence.net

STANFORD — As the Obama administration pushes states, districts, and education organizations to embrace school “turnarounds” and prepares to spend billions of dollars in federal funds on such efforts, education researcher Andy Smarick of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute warns that the evidence strongly suggests that this policy is not the solution for the nation’s mounting number of failing schools.

“We need to begin this discussion by acknowledging that the vast majority of persistently low performing schools remain that way despite interventions,” says Smarick.  His article, “The Turnaround Fallacy,” appears in the forthcoming issue of Education Next and is now available online at www.EducationNext.org.

To illustrate, Smarick points to national data on the results of No Child Left Behind-mandated school restructuring for schools that fail to meet minimum achievement targets for five years or more.  According to a report from the U.S. Department of Education, of the schools required to restructure in 2004-05, only 19 percent were able to exit improvement status two years later.

To get a perspective on the value of turnaround strategies more broadly, Smarick also looked at research from the private sector.

“Education leaders seem to believe that, outside of the world of schools, persistent failures are easily fixed,” Smarick writes. “Far from it: The limited success of turnarounds is a common theme in other fields.” He points to research by the American Enterprise Institute on the success rates of Total Quality Management (TQM) and Business Process Reengineering (BPR), the two most common approaches to organizational reform in the private sector.  Both have failed to generate the desired results two-thirds of the time or more.

If failure is also the norm for turnaround efforts in the business world, where flexibility and competitive pressure are present, Smarick argues that we should have little confidence that turnaround strategies will be successful in urban school districts, which are subject to severe political and regulatory restrictions.

A better solution is being tried by reform-minded district superintendents who are closing the lowest performing schools and making room for new school start ups and replication of high-performing charter school models that are recording impressive achievement gains.

For decades, states and districts have tried to fix their worst schools, investing incalculable resources into these efforts.  The NCLB restructuring provision provided more resources and gave districts four specific strategies to address these schools and a fifth option that allowed even more interventions.  And yet, we still have thousands of failing schools.  Now the current administration wants to invest billions more in these turnaround efforts.

Instead, Smarick argues that the charter model ought to be applied as a solution.  Schools that fail to live up to expectations should be closed, new schools should be started in their place, and the best schools should be expanded and replicated.

“Our relentless preoccupation with improving the worst schools actually inhibits the development of a healthy urban public-education industry,” Smarick says.

Read “The Turnaround Fallacy” available online at www.educationnext.org.

Watch Education Next’s video interview with Andy Smarick, “Should failing schools be fixed or closed?”

Andy Smarick is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:
Caleb Offley (585) 319-4541
Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6010
www.hoover.org

For Immediate Release: October 14, 2009

STANFORD — On the heels of protests this past week against D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s round of teacher firings, Education Next offers a behind-the-scenes look at the most dramatic education reform attempt in the history of the nation’s capital.

In “D.C.’s Braveheart,” available online and appearing in the forthcoming Winter 2010 issue of Education Next, former Wall Street Journal reporter June Kronholz digs into the substance and controversy of the Rhee-driven reforms.

In the excerpt below, Kronholz captures Rhee’s unyielding commitment to radically changing a broken school system–and the cost it is exacting.

Six weeks into the job Rhee called her staff together with the message that “we are not here to do the bureaucracy better.”

“That’s what all of our friends are doing in reform all around the country: They’re trying to make the trains stay on the track and go faster.” Rhee told her staff. “We are here to derail those trains.”

If upheaval is the goal, Rhee has succeeded. Teachers say she has set black teachers against whites and young teachers against veterans with her controversial 2008 contract offer.  Congressional Democrats worry that she has put them between a policy goal, school improvement, and their teachers-union allies. Education reformers are nervous that her outta-my-way approach will wound their movement if it backfires.

…Two years after Rhee’s arrival, [however], scores on district-administered tests are up: 49 percent of elementary school students were reading at grade level, a 21-percentage-point jump in two years, according to test results released in July 2009. Among secondary-school students, 40 percent were at grade level in math, up 13 points.

When asked to name her most significant achievement in her two years in Washington, Rhee tells Kronholz, “We have begun–begun–begun–to establish a culture of accountability,” with a long pause between each “begun.”

Read “D.C.’s Braveheart,” former Wall Street Journal reporter June Kronholz’s profile of D.C. Superintendent Michelle Rhee, now online at www.EducationNext.org.

**New Podcasts at Educationext.org**

• Listen to the new Education Next podcast featuring Education Next’s editor-in-chief Paul E. Peterson and Thomas B. Fordham Institute President Chester E. Finn, Jr. discussing Chancellor Rhee and the education politics in Washington, D.C.

• Listen to a special interview with Jason Kamras, deputy to Chancellor Rhee in charge of human capital. Kamras talks with Education Next about the new teacher evaluation system DCPS put in place this year.  Now all DCPS teachers will be evaluated based on student test scores (when available) and classroom observations (by principals and master educators), and poorly performing teachers may be fired, regardless of tenure.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:
Caleb Offley (585) 319-4541
Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6010
www.hoover.org