Teach For America Keeps Forward Momentum After 24 Years

Growth is fueled by a common vision, regional independence, data-driven improvement, and pioneering alumni

CAMBRIDGE, MA—In a new analysis, June Kronholz examines the recipe that has made Teach For America’s nearly quarter century record of growth possible.  Among the key reasons, she finds, are TFA’s accountable, analytical, and adaptable managerial practices.  “Still Teaching for America” will appear in the Summer issue of Education Next and is now available at www.educationnext.org.

TFA placed 10,400 teachers in 2012 and its plans call for expansion to 15,000 teachers by 2015.  Its teachers worked in 3,200 public schools in 2013.  Of the 48,000 applicants for TFA openings in 2012, which included 11 percent of Yale’s graduating class, only 8,200, or 17%, were accepted.  TFA reports that 550 alumni have become school principals, 100 are system leaders, and 70 hold elected offices.  Almost three-quarters of TFA’s revenues came from philanthropy in 2011—$194 million, up $40 million from 2010.  To meet the new goals, including projects in another 18 countries, TFA will need revenues of a half billion dollars a year.

TFA founder, Wendy Kopp, has recently passed the baton to two co-chief executives, Elisa Villanueva Beard and Matt Kramer.  Kopp became TFA’s board chair and is chief executive of Teach For All, a sister organization she co-founded in 2007 to assist entrepreneurs in Britain, Germany, India, China, and other countries.

There are probably a number of reasons for TFA’s growth, say those interviewed, but the success of the organization’s approach depends on a nimble, decentralized managerial structure with some key features.

• State-level TFA executive directors are held accountable for raising their entire operating budgets (schools pay the corps members’ salaries).  Chicago TFA, for example, has 500 corps members in 187 schools, a staff of 64, and an operating budget of $12.8 million.  Kronholz reports that Chicago executive director Josh Anderson already is on pace to meet his 2015 goals and is setting 2017 targets.  He also sets his region’s education agenda; among his plans is an “inspire zone” in seven contiguous neighborhoods, concentrating corps teachers in zones, installing alumni as principals, and inviting in high-performing charter networks to help leverage the impact.

• TFA frequently uses outside consulting organizations to analyze its work and then implements pilot projects to test recommended changes.  In 2011, for example, a firm’s studies and surveys pointed to gaps in TFA’s teacher coaching practices.  TFA launched a pilot project that added content and classroom-management coaches in Houston and several other cities.  It has since cut the number of corps members that each coach oversees from 50 to 30.

• When the data show that something isn’t working, TFA adapts, redesigning its approaches.  It also implements new programs when progress toward goals is too slow.  For example, an annual alumni survey showed a disconnection between members’ interest in becoming superintendents and the numbers moving into such posts.  TFA initiated a part-academic, part on-the-job fellowship to prepare former corps members for district posts; some 160 alumni applied for 20 spots; 25 districts asked for fellows.

Kronholz notes that TFA is sometimes criticized for placing teachers in disadvantaged districts for just a short time (a two-year term is required).  Its managerial practices seem to promote a longer view among many corps members, however.  TFA reports that 63 percent of its teachers go into education as a career.

About the Author

June Kronholz is an Education Next contributing editor and a former Wall Street Journal education reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor.  She is available for interviews.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform.  Other collaborating institutions are the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.  For more information about Education Next, 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.

CONTACT:
Matthew M. Chingos mchingos@brookings.edu  Brookings Institution
Paul E. Peterson  ppeterso@gov.harvard.edu  Harvard University
Antonio Wendland  pepg_administrator@hks.harvard.edu  617-495-7976

What Works Clearinghouse Gives Voucher Study Highest Rating

Study Finds School Vouchers Boost College Enrollment for African Americans by 24%

CAMBRIDGE, MA— The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), an initiative of the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, announced today that “The Effects of School Vouchers on College Enrollment: Experimental Evidence from New York City” meets WWC standards without reservations.

The study, conducted by Matthew M. Chingos of the Brookings Institution and Paul E. Peterson, Director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, was singled out as a well-implemented randomized control trial.

The What Works Clearinghouse reviews individual studies and assesses the quality of the research design and technical details about the study’s design and findings. The full WWC evaluation of the study is available here.

“The Effects of School Vouchers on College Enrollment: Experimental Evidence from New York City” is the first-ever experimental study of  college-enrollment outcomes of school voucher programs. It found that the percentage of African American students who enrolled part-time or full-time in college by 2011 was 24 percent higher for those who had won a school voucher lottery while in elementary school, and had used their voucher to attend a private school.

An analysis of the study, “The Impact of School Vouchers on College Enrollment,” will appear in the Summer issue of Education Next and is now available online.

About the Authors
Matthew M. Chingos is a fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy.  Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford 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 careful examination of evidence relating to school reform.  Other collaborating institutions are the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.  For more information about Education Next, please visit:  www.educationnext.org

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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

“Parent Trigger” Laws Spark Debate Over Strategies for School Reform

Laws give parents more leverage for demanding school improvement, but will they result in legal battles or better schools?

CAMBRIDGE, MA—Parent trigger laws allow a majority of parents at a low-performing school to vote to convert a school to an independently-run charter school or force major staff changes.  In a forum released today by Education Next, Ben Austin and Michael J. Petrilli discuss the hurdles parent trigger groups face and whether parents really can turn around chronically failing schools.  “Pulling the Parent Trigger” is now available at www.educationnext.org.

Ben Austin, whose Parent Revolution group championed the nation’s first parent trigger law in California in 2010, states that “politicians across the political spectrum find common ground around the simple notion of giving parents power over the education of their own children.”  Without an “organized parent effort applying pressure to the system,” he writes, bureaucratic inertia keeps low-performing schools the same year after year.

Parent trigger laws give parents in disadvantaged neighborhoods more power at the table where decisions are made, Austin notes, as they permit a 51 percent parent majority to force a school turnaround or conversion to a charter school.  In Adelanto, California, for example, the school board recently approved the parents’ petition to convert Desert Trails Elementary School to a charter this fall, managed by a highly qualified, nonprofit charter operator.

Austin argues that the parent trigger is a more effective tool for low-income parents than policies that focus on expanded school choice (including public and private schools).  He notes that low-income parents need improved schools for their children in their neighborhoods, and they often lack the financial resources and/or access to information that wider school choice options require.  He stresses that meaningful change for low-income families rests on public school improvement, the sole focus of parent trigger laws.

Petrilli agrees that strengthening parent power over their children’s education is imperative, but doubts that trigger laws will result in significant improvement in schools, even if parent groups are able to surmount formidable opposition from the education bureaucracy.  The lawsuits and negative publicity that bedeviled the movement in California, for example, show that “successfully pulling the parent trigger is going to be a slow, expensive slog anywhere that school boards choose to resist.”

Even if triggers are successfully pulled, both charter school conversions and school turnarounds are problematic, Petrilli notes.  Public schools that have converted to charters often come to be seen as “faux charters” that gain a few operational freedoms, but not enough to make a difference.  School districts and boards often are indifferent to these converted charters and the schools do not thrive;  districts are also reluctant to embrace turnarounds that they did not want.

A more constructive reform strategy, argues Petrilli, is to continue to expand school choice through new, high-quality options.  With more independent charter schools, growing digital learning options, and the expansion of opportunities for private school choice via taxpayer-funded scholarship programs, the nation will have “lots more excellent options from which parents can choose,” and school choice at scale might “finally force districts to improve.”

About the Authors

Ben Austin is executive director of Parent Revolution and former deputy mayor of Los Angeles.  Michael J. Petrilli is vice president for policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.  The authors are available for interviews.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.  For more information about Education Next, 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.

School Funding Practices Keep Dollars in Districts for “Phantom Students”

Protection clauses and hold-harmless provisions discourage districts from adapting to make the best use of funds when enrollments decline

CAMBRIDGE, MA—Members of the general public might conclude that declining student enrollment results in lower school budgets.  In many cases they would be wrong, report Marguerite Roza and Jon Fullerton in a new analysis of widespread school funding practices that disconnect revenues from school enrollments.  “Funding Phantom Students:  State policies insulate districts from making tough decisions” will appear in the Summer issue of Education Next and is now available online at www.educationnext.org.

The authors examine four common practices that allow public funds to flow to schools for students who have left the district.  These include:  “protection” clauses against declining enrollment;  hold-harmless provisions for districts competing with charter schools;  subsidies to small districts;  and minimum categorical allocations.  “In each case,” the authors write, “affected districts receive funds in excess of what they would receive if only the students on their rolls were funded.”  Among examples of such practices are:

• California funds districts on the basis of average daily attendance (ADA) but uses the previous year’s ADA as the basis for funding.  According to the Public Policy Institute of California, the total cost of this protection in 2005-06 was $402 million, or enough “phantom students” to comprise the state’s third-largest district.

• Massachusetts regularly inserts a “hold harmless” provision into the budget that does not allow state aid to operating districts to go down, regardless of enrollment changes.  The state also provides partial tuition reimbursement to districts that lose students to charter schools for six years, essentially providing districts with 225% of a year’s tuition for each full-time equivalent student lost.

• Connecticut districts receive revenues based on the enrollments of students living in their region, regardless of whether students attend a district’s schools or switch to charters or technical schools.  Double funding students cost the state $186 million in 2008.

Policies intended to protect districts from the effects of shifting enrollments “weaken the incentives that should drive change and adaptation as enrollments fluctuate,” observe Roza and Fullerton.  School district administrators tend to focus on high “fixed costs” involved in running schools and they refer to personnel salary and benefits as their largest fixed cost.  “Few in other industries consider personnel costs fixed,” observe the authors, and in fact, “administrations could shrink, pay raises could slow, and schools could be closed if enrollment declines.”

Roza and Fullerton outline several policy options that states could take to encourage greater efficiency in the use of public dollars.  These include:

• Fund schools on the basis of a specified dollar amount for each student so that its allocation automatically rises and falls with enrollment.

• Limit districts’ practice of making long-term commitments that they may not be able to fulfill by, for example, encouraging them to shift to defined-contribution pension programs and modifying tenure systems to allow for staffing adaptations.

• Limit state restrictions on use of funds requiring a certain number of students to be in class with a certain number of teachers.  Encourage development of online learning capacity and rethink service delivery to maximize student learning and minimize cost.

Adopting more nimble expenditure structures, write Roza and Fullerton, will increase district leaders’ ability “to seek out and adopt promising solutions to their cost challenges as scale changes.”

About the Authors

Marguerite Roza is director of the Fiscal Analytics Unit at Georgetown University and senior research affiliate at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington.  Jon Fullerton is executive director of the Center for Education Policy Research 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 careful examination of evidence relating to school reform.  Other collaborating institutions are the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.  For more information about Education Next, 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.

Teacher Preparation Programs Face More Scrutiny as Common Core Era Begins

New analysis points to the importance of training and transparent assessments of teacher preparation programs as keys to improving quality

CAMBRIDGE, MA—Teacher education has faced increasing criticism in recent years, sparked by uneven student achievement across the U.S.  In a new analysis, Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), examines the extent to which teacher education has moved away from the rigors of specific training in favor of ambiguous personal and social goals that leave new teachers unprepared.  “21^st-Century Teacher Education: Ed schools don’t give teachers the tools they need” will appear in the Summer issue of Education Next and is now available online at www.educationnext.org.

Walsh writes that neither the general public nor most policymakers are aware that today’s education schools tend to deemphasize practical training for the classroom.  In a 2006 volume of essays published by the American Educational Research Association (AERA), for example, training is described as a “technical transmission activity” and an “oversimplification of teaching and learning, ignoring its dynamic, social and moral aspects.”  In early reading as in other subjects, education schools have largely ignored teaching methods developed over years of research and practice, Walsh notes.

The widespread adoption of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) makes improvement in teacher training urgent.  Walsh emphasizes that better consumer education—informing aspiring teachers and school districts about the quality of programs across the nation—can play a key role in motivating institutions to “change in the direction of effective training.”  NCTQ is currently examining and rating the essential elements of teacher preparation programs based on measurable, objective criteria.  These include:

• The fundamental requirements of each teacher preparation program—admissions standards, content area course requirements, and the alignment of elementary teachers’ reading and mathematics curricula with the Common Core standards;

• The process used to determine that teacher candidates are ready for the classroom; the importance given to high quality student teaching programs that prepare teachers to manage a classroom, develop assessments, employ data to improve instruction, write a lesson plan, and differentiate instruction;

• The degree to which programs track outcomes, including evaluations and student achievement data that reflect the effectiveness of an institution’s graduates.

Changes in states’ policies also are needed to spur improvement in teacher preparation, Walsh notes.  Examples include:

• Require, as Illinois has done, that teacher preparation programs admit only students in the top half of their class, to encourage an improvement in candidate quality;

• Place teacher candidates with mentor teachers of demonstrated effectiveness, as Indiana and Tennessee require;

• Make funding of teacher preparation programs at public institutions contingent on meeting key outcomes, as 10 states do for public institutions as a whole;

• Cap the number of teaching licenses in areas of oversupply, such as elementary education, and lower tuition for high-need areas such as special education and STEM fields;

• Make on-the-ground inspections of teacher education programs rigorous and public, as the United Kingdom does, for example, and include former Pre-K-12 school leaders and teachers among the inspectors.

Strategies such as these, Walsh writes, “establish an important and unambiguous principle:  teacher education exists to serve the needs of Pre-K — 12 schools and public financial support should depend on its ability to do so.”

About the Author

Kate Walsh has served as president of the National Council on Teacher Quality since 2003.

She is available for interviews.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.  For more information about Education Next, 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.

CONTACT:
Matthew M. Chingos mchingos@brookings.edu Brookings Institution
Paul E. Peterson  ppeterso@gov.harvard.edu Harvard University
Janice B. Riddell (203) 912-8675 janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, External Relations, Education Next

Study Finds School Vouchers Boost College Enrollment for African Americans by 24%

First systematic analysis of long-term results for voucher recipients tracks 99% of students in original program

CAMBRIDGE, MA—The first-ever experimental study of the long-term outcomes of school voucher programs has found that the percentage of African American students who enrolled part-time or full-time in college by 2011 was 24 percent higher for those who had won a school voucher lottery while in elementary school, and had used their voucher to attend a private school.  An analysis of the study, “The Impact of School Vouchers on College Enrollment,” will appear in the Summer issue of Education Next and is now available online at www.educationnext.org.

Matthew M. Chingos of the Brookings Institution and Paul E. Peterson, Director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, tracked college enrollment information for students who participated in the School Choice Scholarship Foundation (SCSF) program that began in 1997, matching records for these students when entering grades 1 – 5 to college enrollment information in the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC).  Of 2,666 students in the original SCSF sample, the researchers obtained information for 2,637 students, or 99% of the cohort, “greatly reducing the potential for bias due to attrition from the evaluation,” they note.

The treatment group included 1,358 students who received a voucher offer; the control group included 1,279 students who did not receive a voucher offer.  The average treatment group member used a voucher for 2.6 years.

SCSF offered three-year vouchers of $1,400 annually.  All students eligible for SCSF were socioeconomically disadvantaged; the vast majority was African American or Hispanic.  While the impact of vouchers on African American students was large, the impact of a voucher offer on the college enrollment rate of Hispanic students was found to be a statistically insignificant 2 percentage points.  Numbers of white and Asian students in the program were too small to permit reliable analysis.

Other key findings included:

• Among African Americans, 26% of those in the control group attended college full-time at some point within three years of expected high school graduation; among those in the treatment group, the voucher offer increased this rate by 7 percentage points, a 25% increment.

• Among students using the voucher to attend a private elementary school (most students attended Catholic schools), the estimated impact on full-time college enrollment was 8 percentage points, or roughly 31%.

• The offer of a voucher raised the proportion of African American students who enrolled in a private four-year college by 5 percentage points, an increase of 58% as compared to the control group.

Chingos and Peterson observe that the impact of voucher use on college enrollment for African Americans is larger than other research has found from class-size reductions, and greater than that identified from exposure to a highly effective teacher.

About the Authors

Matthew M. Chingos is a fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy.  Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford 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 careful examination of evidence relating to school reform.  Other collaborating institutions are the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.  For more information about Education Next, 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.

Online Teacher Education a “Disruptive Innovation” that Delivers Quality at Lower Cost

Programs open doors to teaching for talented candidates who need alternatives to campus-based model

CAMBRIDGE, MA—A new analysis examines two online programs in teacher preparation, one at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education (MAT@USC) and the other at Western Governors University’s Teachers College (WGU).  Author Meredith Liu writes that in contrast to sustaining innovations, by which education schools might add some new faculty or online course offerings but not change their brick-and-mortar model, fully-online degree programs offer the potential to “transform the industry into one that has lower costs and higher quality, and is more widely accessible.”  “Disrupting Teacher Education” will appear in the Summer 2013 issue of Education Next and is now available online at www.educationnext.org.

Teacher education programs operate under the traditional university business model, Liu observes, by which education schools are viewed as “cash cows” that are expected to generate more revenue than they require.  This inhibits large-scale innovation in areas such as digital learning.  Some of the key features of the pioneering MAT@USC and WGU programs include:

• Course content is offered over the Internet, delivered via interactive, web-based lectures and discussion sessions among students and their professors.  MAT@USC uses an advanced cloud-computing platform developed and managed by 2U, an online learning company.

• In-classroom student teaching (20 weeks) is required, arranged through cooperative agreements with school districts in degree candidates’ local areas.

• Graduates are certified first in each university’s home state (USC-California and WGU-Utah) and can apply their teaching licenses to many other states through reciprocal agreements (subject to particular state statutes which might require short-term courses).

• The programs are attracting large numbers of non-traditional students.  70 percent of WGU’s students, for example, come from geographically diverse populations, including rural areas, and 36 is the average student age.  Students who work can keep their regular jobs, saving opportunity-costs.  Graduates are well received in the profession;  in a survey of employers of WGU graduates, for example, 100 percent of respondents believe the program prepared graduates equal to or better than other schools of education.

• USC’s program offers a master’s degree with a teacher licensing option (for students who already have bachelor’s degrees but not teaching certification) or a master’s for in-service teachers (who wish to gain a salary boost);  it does not offer a B.A. degree program which combines, for example, a major in math with teaching certification.  WGU offers both a baccalaureate and a master’s degree program.

• MAT@USC offers traditional credit-hour courses, but at WGU, courses are competency-based, allowing students to prove that they have mastered content through a combination of tests, portfolios, and observations.  The average WGU student completes the bachelor’s degree in two and one-half years.

• The USC program costs $40,000 for its 13-month master’s degree, whereas WGU charges a flat rate of $2,890 for each 6-month term, during which students can take as many courses as they want.

Both of these programs, Liu observes, point toward a future where a broader range of talent is welcomed into the teaching field and professional preparation is improved, which would be “welcome news for the nation’s students.”

About the Author

Meredith Liu is a visiting fellow at Innosight Institute.  She is available for interviews.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform.  Other collaborating institutions are the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.  For more information about Education Next, 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.

Do We Need a New Education Policy for Hispanics?

Debate focuses on how best to foster academic success for youth in the nation’s fastest growing immigrant group

CAMBRIDGE, MA—Over the past two decades, the Hispanic population has become the nation’s largest immigrant group and has accounted for 56 percent of total U.S. population growth.  In a forum released today by Education Next, Nonie Lesaux of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and Juan Rangel of a Chicago charter school organization, UNO, discuss whether these changing demographics call for substantial reforms in the current instructional practices designed to address Hispanic students’ needs, or whether improving education practices across the board is the best way to meet the needs of Hispanics.  “How Can Schools Best Educate Hispanic Students?” is now available at www.educationnext.org.

Rangel argues that as was the case with previous immigrant groups, “Hispanic immigration carries a set of serious challenges that will test our community’s ability to prosper in the United States.”  But he does not believe that highly specialized programs for Hispanic students are needed.  He urges public schools to embrace their mission of serving as “the mediating institution to transition immigrant families into successful Americans.”  For example, charter schools in the UNO network are 95 percent Hispanic, but “are not Hispanic schools; they are classic American schools” that emphasize American civics and citizenship.  There is “no better process for the education of an immigrant class than providing a great teacher, a core curriculum, a disciplined school culture, and strong accountability,” says Rangel.  “These are sorely missing in America’s public schools, hurting all children, especially immigrant students.”

Rangel points to UNO’s choice of Structured English Language Immersion for its students as being both more effective and financially viable than conventional Bilingual Transition Programs.  UNO’s programs are built on an unconventional school day and calendar.  Schools have a 7.5-hour school day; a 191-day school year; and a hybrid year-round calendar that shortens the summer to just five weeks.

Lesaux’s research indicates that the nation needs to “change our design and planning for teaching literacy,” which will require a focus on “teaching both specialized vocabulary and the specialized structures of language that make school texts difficult.”  Instructional practices for English Language Learners (ELLs) that focus on basic reading and conversation skills are not sufficient.

Most of today’s Hispanic students are U.S.-born children of immigrants, Lesaux notes, and “Hispanic students in the U.S. are overwhelmingly growing up in poverty and attending high-minority schools,” leading to achievement- and opportunity-gaps between Hispanics and their peers from middle-income backgrounds.  The 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) shows, for example, that only 18 percent of Hispanic students in grades 4 and 8 scored at or above proficient in reading.

For these reasons, Lesaux explains that policymakers and education leaders should rethink the way that specialists are used to augment instruction for English language learners in today’s linguistically diverse schools.  She argues that the academic growth of all of our children depends upon “making sure that ELLs and their classmates are in strong and supportive language- and content-rich classrooms all day long, day after day and year after year.”  She suggests that such a “classroom-wide, universal approach focused on building up academic vocabulary and knowledge,” would benefit Hispanic students and keep pace with the standards-based accountability movement.

About the Authors

Nonie K. Lesaux is Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  Juan Rangel is President of UNO Charter School Network.  The authors are available for interviews.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform.  Other collaborating institutions are the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.  For more information about Education Next, 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.

College Courses Can Use Technology To Improve Access and Reduce Costs

Experimental study shows students learn as much online as do peers in traditional courses

CAMBRIDGE, MA—While increasing attention is being given to the rising cost of a college education, there has been little systematic research on the potential for online learning to deliver high-quality instruction on a more cost-effective basis.  Now a new experimental study has shown that students enrolled in a large “hybrid” introductory statistics course at six public university campuses, featuring online learning modules with lecture periods as supplements, learn as much as students in traditional lecture-only course formats, at substantial cost savings.

The study, “Online Learning in Higher Education:  Randomized trial compares hybrid learning to traditional course,” was conducted by William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, Kelly A. Lack, and Thomas I. Nygren and is now available online at Education Next (www.educationnext.org).

The researchers worked with campuses in New York and Maryland to examine the effectiveness of an interactive statistics course developed at Carnegie Mellon University.  Most of the instruction was delivered through interactive online materials, although the online instruction was supplemented by a one-hour-per-week face-to-face session in which students could ask questions or obtain assistance.  Course systems of this type take advantage of data collected from large numbers of students in order to offer each student customized instruction and to enable instructors to track students’ progress.  Students were, with their permission, randomly assigned to take the class in a traditional or hybrid format.  Students who chose to participate had broadly similar characteristics to other students registered for introductory statistics, with any differences that did exist being quite small.

Among the study’s findings were these:

• Hybrid-format students reported spending 1.7 fewer hours per week in total time devoted to the course.  This finding is consistent with non-experimental evidence that interactive online courses can achieve the same learning outcomes as traditional-format instruction in less time, with important implications for scheduling and expected rate of course completion.

• Hybrid format students performed slightly better, achieving pass rates 3 percentage points higher, standardized-test scores about 1 percentage point higher, and final-exam scores 2 percentage points higher. (These differences were not statistically significant.)

• The effect of the hybrid-format course did not vary when controlling for race/ethnicity, gender, parental education, primary language spoken, score at the standardized pretest, hours worked for pay, or college GPA.

• Students gave the hybrid format a modestly lower overall rating than their counterparts gave the traditional-format course, but there were no notable differences in students’ reports of how much the course raised their interest in the subject matter.

“The public is losing confidence in the ability of the higher-education sector in particular to control costs,” note the authors, adding that “all of higher education has a stake in addressing this problem, including the elite institutions that are under less immediate pressure than others to alter their teaching methods.”  While finding that “students in the hybrid format pay no ‘price’ for this mode of instruction” in terms of educational outcomes, the researchers’ cost simulations find that substantial savings would result from the hybrid course model, primarily reflecting reduced professorial compensation.  They estimate savings in compensation costs for the hybrid model ranging from 36 percent to 57 percent compared to the all-section traditional model (where professors teach all course sections), and 19 percent compared to the lecture-section model (where professors give a large lecture and students are assigned to smaller sections led by teaching assistants).

The authors worked with six public university campuses.  The individual campuses included, from the State University of New York (SUNY):  the University at Albany and SUNY Institute of Technology; from the University of Maryland: the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Towson University; and from the City University of New York (CUNY):  Baruch College and City College.

The authors do not suggest that online learning is a “panacea” for the nation’s education problems, but note that “well-designed interactive systems in higher education have the potential to achieve at least equivalent educational outcomes while opening up the possibility of freeing up resources that could be redeployed more productively.”

About the Authors

Matthew M. Chingos is a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy and senior research consultant at Ithaka S+R (the strategy and research arm of ITHAKA).  William G. Bowen is senior advisor, Kelly A. Lack is a research analyst, and Thomas I. Nygren is a former business analyst at Ithaka S+R.  The authors are available for interviews.

About Education Next

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

School district costs for teachers’ health insurance rose at an average annual rate of 4 percent above inflation from 2004 to 2012

Early results from Wisconsin’s Act 10 indicate promise of significant savings

CAMBRIDGE, MA—Rising health insurance costs for teachers have placed increasing pressures on school budgets, but specific quantification of those costs has been scarce.  Now a new study, analyzing published and unpublished data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), has found that health insurance costs for teachers in 2012 were, on average, 26 percent above those for private-sector professional employees ($8,559 for teachers versus $6,803 in the private sector); when adjusted for higher participation rates in health care plans among teachers versus private-sector professionals, the costs are 16 percent higher for teachers ($9,838 versus $8,490 in the private sector).  School district costs for teachers’ insurance rose at an average annual rate of 4 percent above inflation from 2004 to 2012.

Recognizing that recent battles over collective bargaining in Wisconsin and other states have focused significantly on health insurance costs, the study also examines new data from Wisconsin to quantify the impact of that state’s recent change in collective bargaining law, finding a reduction in district health insurance costs of 13 to 19 percent.

Robert M. Costrell and Jeffery Dean conducted the study, which will appear in the Spring, 2013 issue of Education Next as “The Rising Cost of Teachers’ Health Care,” and is now available online at www.educationnext.org.

Comparing unionized and non-unionized workers in both the public and private sectors, the authors find that “unionization is associated with higher total premiums, higher employer costs and lower employee contributions in both the public and private sectors.”  Widely varying teacher unionization across states helps explain large differences in employer and employee health insurance costs.

In states with strong unions, such as Wisconsin, note the authors, “district insurance costs can be very expensive.”  With the passage of Governor Scott Walker’s proposed Act 10 into law, Wisconsin can be seen as a “natural experiment in changing teacher union strength,” they state.  Wisconsin’s teacher health insurance costs have long been very high; average employer costs for participating teachers in 2011 were $8,311 and $19,356 for single and family coverage, respectively, or about 50 and 80 percent higher than the national averages for teachers.  At the same time, Wisconsin teachers’ contributions to insurance premiums have been low:  in 2011 they made no contribution at all for single coverage in 43 percent of the state’s districts, nor for family coverage in 31 percent (among private sector professionals, the non-contributory rates for single and family plans were 17 percent and 9 percent).

Act 10 removed benefits from local collective bargaining, giving districts greater freedom to shop for less expensive plans and establish higher employee contributions.  Using data from the Wisconsin Association of School Boards (WASB), the researchers examined the change in health insurance costs in 2012, after implementation of the Act.  They found a sharp drop in employer premiums from 2011 to 2012.  When they adjust their savings estimates to account for the expected growth in premiums that would have occurred (using average growth from 2007 to 2011) they estimate savings of $2,614 for family coverage and $1,304 for single coverage, or savings of 13 to 19 percent from the projected district premiums for 2012.

The authors note that the Wisconsin results from the first year of Act 10 are likely to be underestimates of school district savings, as some districts are under insurance contracts that predate the Act.

About the Authors

Robert Costrell is professor of education reform and economics at the University of Arkansas and fellow at the George W. Bush Institute.  Jeffery Dean is distinguished doctoral fellow at the University of Arkansas.  The authors are available for interviews.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.  For more information about Education Next, 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/.

Substitute Teachers are a Large Presence in American Schools

Regular teacher absences are costly to school budgets and student learning

CAMBRIDGE, MA—According to a 2009-2010 report from the U.S. Department of Education based on data from surveys of 57,000 schools, U.S. teachers take off an average of 9.4 days each or 5% of regular school days, during a typical 180-day school year, and substitute teachers are called to fill in for absent teachers.  This means that the average public school student has substitute teachers for more than six months of his or her school career.  In a new analysis, June Kronholz discusses recent research on teacher absences and the impact that the reliance on substitutes has on school budgets and student learning.  “No Substitute for a Teacher” will appear in the Spring 2013 issue of Education Next and is currently available online at www.educationnext.org.

Kronholz cites findings from the National Council on Teacher Quality’s database on collective-bargaining agreements in 113 large school districts, which show that district contracts give their teachers an average of 13.5 days of sick and personal leave per school year.  Contracts in some cities are far more generous; for example, in Columbus, teachers are granted 20 paid days off; in Boston, 21 days; in Hartford, 25 days; and in Newark, 28 days.  By contrast, private-sector employers offer an average 10 days of time off or 4% of work days during a 260-day work year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Researchers estimate large impacts of teacher absences on student learning.

• Duke researchers Charles Clotfelter, Helen Ladd, and Jacob Vigdor found that being taught by a sub for 10 days per year has a larger effect on a child’s math scores than if he’d changed schools, and about half the size of the difference between students from well-to-do and poor families.

• Columbia researchers Mariesa Herrmann and Jonah Rockoff concluded that the effect on learning of using a substitute for even a day is greater than the effect of replacing an average teacher with a terrible one—that is, a teacher in the 10^th percentile for math instruction and the 20^th percentile in English instruction.

These and other recent studies find that:

• Teachers in bigger schools were absent more often than those in smaller schools

• Teachers in low-income schools were absent more often than those serving higher-income families

• Elementary school teachers took off more time than did those in high schools

• Tenured teachers took off 3.7 more days than did those without tenure

• Female teachers under age 35 averaged 3.2 more absences than did men

• Teachers who had a master’s degree or graduated from a competitive college took less leave then those who didn’t

• Teachers in traditional districts take off more time than those in charters.  37 percent of teachers are absent more than 10 days at district elementary and middle schools compared to 22 percent at charters.

The financial cost of substitute teachers—who are typically paid in the $60 – $100 per day range—is substantial.  Raegen Miller, now vice president of research partnerships at Teach for America, has estimated the cost of substitute teachers at $4 billion annually, or about 1% of total K-12 spending.  In Fairfax County, Virginia, for example, whose 13,000 teachers are offered 11 days off per year, the district budgeted $19 million for substitutes in 2012.  Substitute costs are in addition to the financial burden of guaranteed leave time:  teachers typically are given a lump sum payment for any unused leave when they retire.

Credential requirements for substitutes vary widely.  If a college degree is required, Kronholz writes, it often has no relation to the subjects that a substitute will teach.  Some districts only require substitutes to have a high school diploma or its GED equivalent, since maintaining classroom order is usually the district’s chief concern.

In private schools, the use of substitutes is typically much less, as colleagues fill in for absent teachers during their own non-teaching hours, which “keeps the class on pace when, say, one social-studies teacher can fill in for another.”  Researchers have found that teachers are absent more often when their fellow teachers are, too.  Excessive absenteeism suggests struggling schools, where teacher absences and student absences feed off one another until neither group shows up.  Or it suggests weak management and unhappy workers.  If an organization is effective, people show up.

About the Author

June Kronholz is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and a regular contributor to Education Next.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform.  Other collaborating institutions are the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.  For more information about Education Next, 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.

“No Excuses” Charter Schools Confront High Bar of Expectations as Graduates Enter College in Record Numbers

KIPP and others focus on factors critical to raising their students’ college-completion rates

CAMBRIDGE, MA— By 2015, more than 10,000 students from major “No Excuses” charter-schools will be on college campuses across the United States in contrast to the current year, in which the cohort numbers around 1,000.  This large vanguard of students will test the recipe that high-expectations charters, including KIPP, Achievement First, YES Prep, Uncommon Schools, Mastery, Aspire, and others have used to prepare low-income and minority students for success in college.

The effort to launch first-generation, low-income black and Hispanic kids successfully into the world with college degrees in hand will offer something of a referendum on the “No Excuses” model, says author Robert Pondiscio.  The article, “ ‘No Excuses’ Kids Go To College,” will appear in the Spring 2013 issue of Education Next, and is currently available online at www.educationnext.org

In his analysis, Pondiscio writes that these schools all share a set of familiar characteristics:  more and longer school days, a college prep curriculum for all students, strict behavioral and disciplinary codes, and a strong focus on building a common, high-intensity school culture.  The signature feature of these charters is high behavioral and academic expectations for all students, the vast majority of whom are low-income, urban black and Hispanic kids.  For years, a central motif of No Excuses schools has been their college acceptance rates.  Houston-based YES Prep, for example, has made much of the fact that 100 percent of its graduating seniors have been accepted to college.

However, in 2011 KIPP released its College Completion Report, which changed the existing narrative from “college acceptance” to “college completion.”  The report was notable for its transparency, and revealed that only 33 percent of the earliest cohorts of KIPP middle school students graduated from college within six years.  While this rate is four times the 8 percent average college completion rate of low-income black and Hispanic students and slightly higher than the figure (31%) for all U.S. students, it is still considerably below KIPP’s goal of seeing 75 percent of their graduates earn a four-year college degree—comparable to the rate at which top-income quartile students graduate.

The report began a general conversation around how much accountability should be attributed to a student’s K-12 education, to his or her college, or to the students themselves.  It also has spurred some 20 colleges, such as Pennsylvania’s Franklin and Marshall (F&M) to develop programs to support “first-gen” students, working in collaboration with KIPP.  Once admitted, often after a three-week summer program, students are placed in a mentoring program, where they meet in groups one or two hours each week.  “It is not an easy or natural transition to college for the students urban charters serve,” notes Pondiscio.  “Feeling comfortable enough to go to professors’ office hours and not feeling out of place among other students are challenges to be overcome.”  The colleges are also engaged in a larger effort to connect high performing charters to leading liberal arts colleges.

Scholars and practitioners also are increasingly focused on the non-academic traits college graduates need, such as grit, self-control and optimism.  This leads to unresolved questions about whether the No Excuses graduates have what it takes to thrive once they get to college and what steps might be taken to strengthen elements of the No Excuses approach.  Not every college is prepared, interested, or has the resources to go the extra mile to smooth the college transition for low-income kids of color.  There is also some thinking that if No Excuses schools are successful in turning out academically prepared graduates with “grit,” shouldn’t these students need less support, not more, on college campuses?

But No Excuses charters are prepared to build a deep, broad safety net for these kids who don’t have the baseline expectation that comes from being in a well-off and well-educated family, where kids have grown up “assuming” they would go to college.

About the Author

Robert Pondiscio is a former South Bronx 5^th grade teacher and the executive director of Citizenship First, a civic education initiative.  He is available for interviews.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform.  Other collaborating institutions are the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.  For more information about Education Next, 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.

New Generation of Teachers Seeks Greater Role in Education Reform

Changing demographics and ideas fuel challenges to conventional teachers union positions

CAMBRIDGE, MA—A new analysis examines the growing array of groups spawned by the “teacher voice” movement, which promotes opportunities for teachers to have much greater involvement in shaping and improving their profession than they have had under the traditional union-dominated system.  More than half of all teachers now have fewer than 10 years of experience, and this younger generation is driving the movement.  The report, “Taking Back Teaching,” by Richard Lee Colvin will appear in the Spring 2013 issue of Education Next and is currently available online at www.educationnext.org.

Regardless of their approach, Colvin writes, “all of the groups unabashedly embrace the idea that some teachers are more effective than others,” and they tend to favor teacher evaluations and alternatives to rigid seniority systems.  The teachers in these groups typically think of themselves as “solutions-oriented problem solvers” rather than school district adversaries.  Colvin cites recent national surveys that show decreasing support among teachers for their unions.  Education Sector’s 2011 survey, for example, found that more than 40 percent of teachers want their unions to focus more on teacher performance and student achievement and less than half consider unions to be absolutely essential.  The 2012 annual survey conducted by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance found that only 43 percent of teachers have a positive view of unions, and the percentage of teachers holding negative views doubled in one year to 32 percent.

The new teacher organizations work to amplify the voices of classroom teachers in several ways:

1) Urging and preparing top classroom teachers to weigh in on the implementation of controversial policy issues.

• Educators for Excellence (E4E), founded in 2010, has attracted the support of 4,500 teachers in New York City and Los Angeles who have signed its manifesto of principles—calling for using value-added data in evaluations; school choice; merit pay; higher hurdles to achieving tenure; and the elimination of seniority-driven layoffs.

• Hope Street Group, a consulting firm that was instrumental in formulating Race to the Top, sponsors a Teaching Fellows program that awards $5,000 stipends for teachers who are involved in implementing reforms, such as rigorous teacher evaluations, in their respective states.

2) Trying to keep successful teachers in the profession by giving them opportunities to assume leadership roles within their schools and districts.

• The 8,000-member Teach Plus, the largest of the teacher voice groups, was started in 2007 and has since expanded to Los Angeles, Memphis, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Washington, D.C.  The group runs a Teaching Policy Fellowships program that involves teachers in policy formation and a Teacher Turnaround Team (T3) initiative, where teachers earn a stipend to take lead roles in school improvement efforts.

• Leading Educators, based in New Orleans and now expanding to Kansas City and Detroit, focuses on providing teachers with training in management, leadership, and problem-solving.

3) Pushing local unions to become more democratic.

• New Teachers Los Angeles (NewTLA) operates as a reform-motivated caucus within the local teachers union.  Last year, the caucus helped 85 of its members get elected to the 350-member union House of Representatives and promoted the election a union president who appears to be amenable to reforms;  the union has since agreed to grant individual schools flexibility over the school calendar, hiring and assignment of teachers.

Colvin notes that the teacher unions are wary about the new groups.  American Federation of Teachers president, Randi Weingarten, has said that E4E “tends to be a wedge against the union,” and she emphasizes that the union thinks these groups should organize within unions, not as independent entities.  Recently, E4E provoked the ire of the United Federation of Teachers when its recommendations for reforming the appeals process on performance ratings were adopted.  It is evident, Colvin observes, that the unions “recognize the threat” from growing public demands for improved school performance and teachers’ shift away from industrial-style union practices.

About the Author

Richard Lee Colvin was formerly Executive Director of Education Sector and is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation.  He is available for interviews.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform.  Other collaborating institutions are the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.  For more information about Education Next, 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.

Widely Publicized Critique of Virtual Schools Seriously Flawed

Evidence used in report on K12 Inc. presents misleading information about how much students learn

CAMBRIDGE, MA—Full-time virtual schools, which have expanded over the past decade and now enroll approximately 250,000 students, have attracted a level of scrutiny that is given to many educational innovations, particularly when a for-profit element is involved.  A recent report by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) on the largest for-profit operator of these schools, K12 Inc., has urged states to “slow or put a moratorium on the growth of full-time virtual schools.”  However, a new analysis shows that NEPC uses misleading performance measures and financial criteria to discredit K12, thereby failing to make a persuasive case for stifling the virtual school sector’s growth.

The analysis of the NEPC report, prepared by Matthew M. Chingos of the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, will appear in the Spring 2013 issue of Education Next and is currently available online at www.educationnext.org.

It is not possible for parents or policymakers to ascertain virtual school quality from the data included in the NEPC report, Chingos writes.  NEPC notes, for example, that 70 percent of 8^th-grade students at K12 schools met proficiency standards in reading, as compared to 77 percent in all public schools in the same states in which K12 operates.  Such statewide “snapshot” comparisons leaves unexamined the more relevant comparison to the scores at the neighborhood schools of the K12 students—the schools they would have likely attended had the choice of a full-time virtual school not been available.  Moreover, it provides inadequate information as to whether the virtual students have backgrounds similar to the students with whom they are being compared.

The report says that K12 schools spend more on instructional costs but less on teacher salaries and benefits, and more on administration but less on administrator salaries and benefits.  It refers to these differences as “cost advantages” and “disadvantages.”  But Chingos points out that K12 schools receive an average of $7,393 in public revenue per student, 37 percent less than the district school average of $11,708.  To call that a cost advantage, he says, “is like telling a poor person that he has a ‘cost advantage’ relative to a wealthier individual.”

The report under review is “Understanding and Improving Full-Time Virtual Schools,” by Gary Miron and Jessica L. Urschel, July 18, 2012, available at: http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/understanding-improving-virtual

About the Author

Matthew M. Chingos is a Fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy.  He is available for interviews.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform.  Other collaborating institutions are the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.  For more information about Education Next, 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.

Increasing Instructional Time for Algebra Boosts Student Performance and Graduation Rates

Taking two periods of Algebra in 9^th grade has long-run positive effects on lower-achieving students

CAMBRIDGE, MA – A new study of the Chicago Public Schools’ (CPS) double-dose algebra policy for struggling 9^th grade students—the first such study to examine long-term impacts of this intervention—has found substantial improved outcomes for intensive math instruction on college entrance exam scores, high school graduation rates, and college enrollment rates.

“Double-dose” algebra—providing two consecutive periods of math instruction for under-achieving 9^th grade students—is considered a potentially promising alternative to the “algebra for all” policy, which encourages more students to take algebra and at earlier ages, but may put struggling students at higher risk of failure.  Today, nearly half of large urban districts in the U.S. report double-dose math instruction as the most common form of support for students with lower skills.

Beginning in 2003, Chicago Schools implemented a double-dose program, and short-term effects were smaller than had been hoped.  Examining longer-term effects, however, the study’s authors found that double-dosed students’ scores on the math portion of the ACT (taken in the spring of 11^th grade) were 0.15 standard deviations higher, the equivalent of closing roughly 15% of the black-white achievement gap.  General educational attainment of these students rose:  four-and five-year high-school graduation rates increased by 17 percent and college enrollment rates increased by 30 percent.

“One theory for low high-school completion rates is that failures in early courses, such as algebra, interfere with subsequent course work, placing students on a path that makes graduation quite difficult,” write authors Kalena Cortes, Joshua Goodman, and Takako Nomi in the article, “A Double Dose of Algebra,” which will appear in the Winter 2013 issue of Education Next and is now available online at www.educationnext.org.

The researchers found that the benefits of double-dosing were largest for students whose reading skills were weaker than their math skills.  This finding, they suggest, reflects the additional time spent building verbal and analytical skills; students assigned to double-dose algebra reported more frequently being asked to give written explanations of how they solved a math problem and discussing possible solutions with other students.  Double-dose algebra was found to have “positive effects across the board,” as students earned modestly higher GPAs across all of their non-math courses after 9^th grade.

Students also scored nearly 0.20 standard deviations higher on the verbal portion of the ACT, were substantially more likely to pass trigonometry and chemistry classes by 11^th grade, and earned higher grade point averages (GPAs) after 9^th grade.

Using data that tracked students from 8^th grade through college enrollment, the researchers focused on the first two cohorts of students in the program (2003 and 2004), a total of more than 41,000 students.  The primary results are based on comparing the outcomes for students just above and just below the score cutoff for double-dose assignment (11,507 students).

The CPS students in the program were primarily from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and minority groups; about 90 percent were black or Hispanic.  The findings, note the authors, suggest that the double-dose intervention is “extraordinarily promising when targeted at the appropriate students.”

About the Authors

Kalena Cortes is an assistant professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A & M University.  Joshua Goodman is assistant professor public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.  Takako Nomi is assistant professor of education at St. Louis 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 careful examination of evidence relating to school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.  For more information about Education Next, 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/.

Gregory F. Branch  gfb017000@utdallas.edu The University of Texas at Dallas
Eric A. Hanushek  hanushek@stanford.edu Stanford University
Steven G. Rivkin  sgrivkin@uic.edu University of Illinois at Chicago
Janice B. Riddell (203) 912-8675 janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, External Relations, Education Next

Study Quantifies Individual Principals’ Contributions to Student Achievement Growth

Analysis of Texas data shows that students gain between two and seven months of additional learning in schools with effective principals

CAMBRIDGE, MA—While it is widely believed that good school principals have a positive impact on student achievement, there has been little systematic research to date on the effect of strong school leadership.  Now a new study has found that highly effective principals raise the achievement of a typical student in their schools by between 0.05 and 0.21 standard deviations, the equivalent of between two and seven months of additional learning each school year.  Ineffective principals lower achievement by the same amount.

“For student outcomes, greater attention to the selection and retention of high-quality principals would have a very high payoff,” note the authors, Gregory F. Branch, Eric A. Hanushek and Steven G. Rivkin.  Their analysis, “School Leaders Matter,” will appear in the Winter, 2013 issue of Education Next and is now available online at www.educationnext.org.

Specifically, the authors measure how average gains in student achievement, adjusted for individual student and school characteristics, differ across principals—both in different schools and in the same school at different points in time.  They found that a principal in the top 16 percent of the quality distribution will produce annual student gains that are at least 0.05 standard deviations higher than will an average principal for all students in their school, or roughly two additional months of learning.  “The conservative estimates are somewhat smaller than those associated with having a highly effective teacher,” they state, “but teachers have a direct impact on only those students in their classroom, whereas differences in principal quality affect all students in a given school.”

In addition to examining principals’ impact on student achievement on standardized tests, the study explored patterns of change in the composition of schools’ teaching staff (reflecting the ability of effective principals to recruit and retain teaching talent), as well as the movement of principal talent across schools.  Key findings include:

• Less-effective teachers are more likely to leave schools run by highly effective principals.

• Good principals are likely to make more personnel changes in grade levels where students are under-performing, supporting the belief that “improvement in teacher effectiveness provides an important channel through which principals can raise the quality of education.”

• Particularly in high-poverty schools, the most-effective and least-effective principals tend to leave schools, whereas principals of average ability tend to stay put.

• A substantial share of the ineffective principals in high-poverty schools tends to move on to take principal positions in other schools and districts, rather than leave the profession.

The authors also looked at the dynamics of the principal labor market, and noted that, constrained by salary inertia and the absence of good performance measures, the market does not effectively weed out principals who are least successful in raising student achievement.  This is especially true in schools serving disadvantaged students.

The study examined 7,420 individual principals of Texas elementary and middle schools over the period 1995-2001 and made use of 28,147 annual principal observations.  Student scores from grades 3 through 8 on the math portion of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) were the focus of the study.

About the Authors

Gregory F. Branch is program manager at the University of Texas at Dallas Education Research Center. Eric A. Hanushek is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.  Steven G. Rivkin is professor of economics at University of Illinois at Chicago.  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 about Education Next, 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.

October 17, 2012

CONTACT:

Chester E. Finn, Jr.  cefinnjr@aol.com Thomas B. Fordham Institute
Michael B. Horn      mhorn@innosightinstitute.org Innosight Institute
Janice B. Riddell (203) 912-8675 janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, External Relations, Education Next

Digital Learning Sparks Debate over the Pace of Change

Needed in American Schools

The potential for digital learning to boost student achievement seems boundless, but will the long-established organization of schooling embrace or hinder it?

CAMBRIDGE, MA—More than 2 million K-12 students are enrolled in online courses today, and that figure is projected to increase five-fold by 2014.  Even so, the much-heralded expectations for education technology to truly transform teaching and learning are not yet fully realized.  In a forum released today by Education Next, Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Michael B. Horn discuss the question of whether technology will be powerful and attractive enough to change long-standing tradition, or whether we first must alter a host of other entrenched practices.  “Can Digital Learning Transform Education?” is available at www.educationnext.org.

Finn states that digital learning is “more than the latest addition to education reformers’ to-do lists.”  Fulfilling digital learning’s enormous potential to boost student achievement, he says, “will require a wholesale reshaping of the reform agenda itself, particularly in the realms of school finance and governance.”

Digital learning offers the potential for more cost-effective use of taxpayer funds for education, Finn observes, as the influence of good teachers can grow exponentially through technology, and students can customize the learning process to fit their needs.  Fundamental change is needed first, though—changes like “moving money as students move, and paying for unconventional forms of instruction.”  Rather than today’s system, which focuses on “input regulations” such as textbook mandates; seat time rules; cumbersome, outdated certification requirements; and professional development units, public officials should place greater emphasis on vastly improved data systems, better teacher evaluations, curricular quality, and meaningful accountability.

Horn agrees that the factory-model structure of American education must change, but he puts stock in the inexorable pull of technological innovation rather than in the push of dramatic policy reform.  Directly confronting the established system—for example, by advocating for pay-for-performance measures for the entire education system rather than just the emerging digital learning one—will invite battles (which are likely to be lost) with interest groups that protect the system.

Online learning is a “disruptive innovation,” states Horn.  As innovations—such as the personal computer—improve over time, “people gradually abandon their old solutions and adopt the disruptive innovations.”  These dynamics are in play with online learning, as it gradually disrupts the century-old classroom system.

“Policies governing digital learning will and should be adopted piecemeal,” he says, leading toward systemic change.  Proponents of digital learning must choose battles carefully, so that “as online learning continues to develop, it can do so within a newly imagined regulatory framework that puts students and their learning at the center.”

About the Authors

Chester E. Finn, Jr. is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a contributing editor of Education Next.  Michael B. Horn is executive director of the education practice of Innosight Institute and executive editor at Education Next.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform.  Other collaborating institutions are the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.  For more information about Education Next, 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.

October 11, 2012

CONTACT:

Jonathan Butcher (602) 462-5000 JButcher@goldwaterinstitute.org Goldwater Institute

Janice B. Riddell (203) 912-8675 janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, External Relations, Education Next

School Choice Expands in Variety and Scope,

Despite Tumultuous Legal Landscape

Thirteen states enacted new K-12 school choice programs in 2011 and more than two dozen states are considering similar bills

CAMBRIDGE, MA – A bumper crop of school choice programs was passed into law in the last year, but education associations and teacher unions wasted no time in challenging virtually every new law in court.  “In almost every instance,” writes Jonathan Butcher in a new article, “school-choice advocates had little time to celebrate before looking for an attorney.”  Despite the legal challenges, programs that seek to implement wider school choice are increasingly varied, bold, and inclusive.  “From Wisconsin to California, more students were included in the new laws, and the laws gave them more options,” says Butcher.  “School Choice Marches Forward” will appear in the Winter 2013 issue of Education Next and is now available online at www.educationnext.org.

Butcher highlights the growing variety of recently enacted programs that expand parents’ options for their children’s education.  These include

• A tax-credit scholarship program in North Carolina
• Maine’s new charter school law (41 states and the District of Columbia now have charter schools)
• The passage of “parent trigger” legislation in California, Texas, and Mississippi (and Louisiana in 2012)
• An expansion of Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s voucher program
• A new voucher program in Indiana with broad eligibility rules.

While to date, voucher programs have been restricted to low-income students, the Indiana program is the first to provide vouchers on a sliding scale for middle-class families with incomes up to $63,964.  Despite a lawsuit filed by the state teachers union, the program has drawn 3,919 students from 185 school districts, the largest inaugural enrollment yet in a voucher program.

Education Savings Accounts (ESA) “continue to push the envelope of education reform,” notes Butcher, raising the possibility that “the system can successfully enable parents to shape a child’s entire schooling experience.”  Last year Arizona created the first ESA program for K-12 students in the U.S.  In contrast to vouchers (which are used for private school tuition), ESAs are accounts that families can use for a variety of education expenses—including tuition, online classes, tutoring, educational therapy services—or to contribute to a 529 college savings plan.  The state teachers union and school boards association filed suit against the program, but it was upheld in court earlier this year.

“Parent trigger” laws are among the boldest of new initiatives and they provoke considerable controversy.  As passed in California, Texas, and Mississippi, trigger laws allow parents to petition to convert a school to a charter school, close the school, or replace school leadership.  Louisiana recently passed a trigger law as part of a package of reforms that included voucher program expansion.

Ben Austin, director of the Los Angeles based organization leading the parent trigger movement, notes that his group, Parent Revolution, is pro-charter but “unambiguously” opposed to vouchers, providing evidence, says Butcher, that “student- and parentcentric reforms” draw support from parents with diverse views on education reform.  As Austin observes, “What normal people care about and what policymakers are beginning to care about is the very simple idea of giving parents real power over the educational destiny of their own children.”

About the Author

Jonathan Butcher is Education Director for the Goldwater Institute.  He is available for interviews.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.  For more information about Education Next, 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/.

September 20, 2012

MEDIA CONTACT:

Janice B. Riddell     (203) 912-8675 janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu External Relations, Education Next

(NOTE:  This advisory is available in Spanish here.)

New Survey Shows Majority of Independent Voters Favor Charter Schools, feel Unions do ‘More Harm than Good’

Overall, public says teacher salaries and tenure should be based heavily on student test performance; public has less confidence in teachers than previously reported

CAMBRIDGE, MA – Both Republicans and Democrats can take comfort in the latest findings about political independents contained in the most recent nationally representative survey released today by the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University (PEPG).  More political independents lean Democratic than lean Republican, but the views of independents on educational issues appear closer to those ones articulated by Republicans than those traditionally espoused by Democrats.

When asked for their political affiliation, 41 percent of all those interviewed in May 2012 said they were independents, as compared to 34 percent who said they were Democrats and 25 percent who said they were Republicans.  Further, 52 percent of the independents said they leaned toward the Democratic Party, and 40 percent said they leaned toward the Republican Party, with the rest saying they did not lean in either direction.

But 56 percent of independents thought teacher unions had “done more harm than good,” 54 percent supported school vouchers, and only 34 percent favored raising teacher salaries, once they had been informed about average salary levels in their state.

“With Barack Obama and Mitt Romney running neck-in-neck,” observes PEPG director Paul E. Peterson, “the nation’s eyes are trained on independent voters, who will likely decide the presidential election.  Romney’s education plan may not be unattractive to this group.”  Just one-third of independents report that President Obama has done an “excellent” or “good” job of handling education issues, while the rest assigned him a “fair” or “poor” rating.

No issue divides Republicans from Democrats as sharply as their views on teacher unions;  in the survey, 71 percent of self-identified Republicans say unions have a negative impact on schools, while only 29 percent of self-identified Democrats take that position.

Other key findings from the survey include:

• 54% of the public believes student performance on tests should factor in decisions on teacher tenure and teacher salaries.  Teachers, however, remain unenthusiastic about assigning student test scores much weight; 44% prefer being evaluated by principals.

• A higher percentage of Hispanic adults thought more highly of public schools than did others.  Nearly 40 percent of Hispanic adults give the nation’s public schools a grade of an “A” or a “B”, whereas less than 20 percent of whites and African Americans give the nation’s schools one of these top two grades.

• The survey suggests that public “trust in teachers” is actually weaker than other pollsters have reported.  For the first time, respondents were asked to break its assessment of teachers into four categories indicating degrees of trust and confidence (in addition to answering to a simple yes/no question about trust in teachers).  58 percent of the public has “little” trust or only “some” trust in teachers, with just 42 percent of the public having “complete” or “a lot of” trust in teachers.  That compares to 72 percent who answer yes rather than no when simply asked if they have trust in teachers (a result found in both the PEPG and other polls).

• Support for increased spending in their local district drops from 61 percent to 41 percent when those interviewed are told how much is currently spent;  support for increasing taxes to pay for schools falls from 35 percent to 24 percent among the general public.

• When asked about their feelings on school vouchers, 50 percent of respondents expressed support, and the other 50 percent were opposed.  Meanwhile, 62 percent supported the concept of charter schools, although the survey showed that public knowledge about charter schools is very limited.

The full findings from the sixth annual PEPG survey conducted in May 2012 is available on the home page of www.educationnext.org.  Also available is an article interpreting the key findings, “Reform Agenda Gains Strength:  The 2012 EdNext-PEPG survey finds Hispanics give schools a higher grade than others do,” by William G. Howell, Martin R. West, and Paul E. Peterson, which will appear in the Winter, 2013 issue of Education Next.

About the Public Opinion Survey

The Education Next-PEPG survey was conducted by the polling firm Knowledge Networks during April and May of 2012.  The survey interviewed 2,993 Americans, including a nationally representative sample of 1,727 and over-samples of Hispanics, African Americans, parents, and teachers.  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 the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University.  Paul E. Peterson is the director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.  The authors are available for interviews.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform.  Other collaborating institutions are the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.  For more information about Education Next, 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.

Review of Florida Test Scores Confirms Substantial Gains over Past Decade

After the end of social promotion in 3^rd grade, Florida shown to have boosted student performance

CAMBRIDGE, MA – A new study of Florida test score gains confirms the state’s position as one of the country’s most rapidly improving school systems over the period 2002 to 2009.  Although Florida’s record of steady improvement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (a national test administered to students in all states) has won plaudits from observers across the country, critics have alleged the improvement in 4^th grade test scores was apparent, not real.  They said the gains were inflated by the retention of low-performing 3^rd graders after 2002, when Florida ended “social promotion” by requiring students who failed 3^rd grade tests to repeat that grade.

Those claims are shown to be seriously overstated in an analysis of 3^rd grade performance conducted by Marcus Winters of the Manhattan Institute and the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, which will be released by Education Next and will be available at www.educationnext.org.  By looking at the individual test scores of each student in Florida, Winters is able to identify gains in performance at the 3^rd grade level that were not influenced by the “anti-social promotion” policy.

Taking advantage of Florida’s detailed information on the student performance of all students, Winters isolates test scores on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) for those who are completing third grade for the first time.  By doing so, he excludes from the analysis all those who remained at this grade level as a result of the new anti-social promotion policy.

Winters finds improvement gains in both reading and math, with the largest gains observed in math.  While the gains among these initial 3^rd graders are not as dramatic as the 4^th grade gains which had captured national attention, Winters found “the gains among initial 3^rd graders were very substantial,” about 0.36 standard deviations between 1998 and 2009, or roughly a full additional year of academic progress.   The scores are “more than enough to justify Florida’s claims that its gains have outpaced those in most other states.”

Winters identified even greater progress by the most disadvantaged students.  For example, those in the bottom decile (lowest 10 percent) improved by more than half a standard deviation, about a year and one half worth of improvement.

Several critics of Florida’s education reform policies have previously opined that Florida’s 4^th grade scores were almost certain to shoot upward once low-performing students were retained in third grade.  By looking at 3^rd grade performances, Winters shows that these claims, while partially correct, are overstated.  After adjusting Florida’s NAEP scores to account for the retention policy, only D.C. and Delaware made larger test score improvements.  In 1998, Florida’s 4^th grade NAEP reading scores were one grade level below the national average; by 2005, their adjusted scores were above the national average.  It is those remarkable gains whose validity has been questioned.

As to possible explanations for the substantial test-score gains made by Florida students on FCAT and NAEP, Winters notes that studies have shown positive effects for each of the major accountability and school choice reforms introduced during 1998 to 2006 – such as implementing a school voucher program for use by students who have attended failing schools two years in a row and tax credits targeted for low-income students’ scholarships.  Studies also have shown that the retention policy – the focus of those who charge that Florida’s exceptional gains are inflated – has itself “had a positive impact on the performance of students who were retained.”

Winters’s analysis, “Florida Defeats the Skeptics:  Test scores show real progress in the Sunshine State,” will appear in the Fall issue of Education Next and will be available at www.educationnext.org.

About the Author

Marcus Winters is senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s Center for State and Local Leadership and an assistant professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.  He is 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 about Education Next, 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.

Teacher Evaluations Found to Improve Midcareer Effectiveness

When teachers in Cincinnati were evaluated rigorously, student performance on math tests improve

CAMBRIDGE, MA –A new study shows that Cincinnati’s rigorous Teacher Evaluation System (TES) has had a direct and lasting effect on midcareer teachers’ performance.  Students taught by a teacher in the years after she had been through the evaluation program scored 0.11 standard deviations higher in math, on average, than the students she taught in the years before her evaluation (as measured by end-of-year 4^th through 8^th grade state tests).  This difference is equivalent to about 3 – 4 months of additional instruction or a gain of about 4.5 percentile points for the average student.  The Cincinnati evaluation is a yearlong process and a teacher’s students also scored 0.05 standard deviations higher in the year their teacher was being evaluated, a difference of 1.5 – 2 months of additional instruction.

Researchers Eric S. Taylor and John H. Tyler note that to the best of their knowledge, their study is the first to test the hypothesis that practice-based teacher evaluation programs can help to improve teacher performance, in addition to their value in identifying teachers’ strengths or weaknesses.  Well-designed performance evaluation “can be an effective form of teacher professional development,” the authors observe.  Their analysis, “Can Teacher Evaluation Improve Teaching?” will appear in the Fall issue of Education Next and is available at www.educationnext.org.

In 2000, Cincinnati launched TES, a thorough process by which teachers’ performance is assessed through classroom observations and a review of work products.  Teachers are observed and scored four times:  three times by a peer evaluator (an experienced teacher) and once by a school administrator.  Both peer evaluators and administrators complete an intensive training course, learning to accurately score videotaped teaching examples according to a specific rubric.  TES is costly (about $7,500 per teacher evaluated, primarily for evaluators’ salaries) and its approach “contrasts starkly with status quo ‘principal walk-through’ styles of class observation,” note the authors.

Currently, all teachers newly hired by the Cincinnati school district, regardless of prior experience, take part in a TES evaluation during their first year.  In their fourth year they are evaluated again, prior to receiving tenure (assuming successful evaluations), and once every five years after achieving tenure.  For tenured teachers, evaluation scores determine eligibility for some promotions or additional tenure protection, or, in the case of very low scores, placement in a peer assistance program with a small risk of termination.

The researchers’ analysis includes only teachers hired before TES was introduced in the 2000-2001 school year and who were teaching 4^th through 8^th grade in the years 2003-04 through 2009-10.  The group evaluated included 105 experienced teachers hired by the district in the school years from 1993-94 through 1999-2000.  Evaluating this sample of teachers allowed the authors to measure the effect of evaluation on performance separate from any gains that come from increased experience, and permitted them to make comparisons of the achievement levels of a given teacher’s students both before and after the TES assessment.

The authors observe that the teachers in their study experienced their first rigorous evaluation after 8 to 17 years on the job, and may have been particularly receptive to comments from peer evaluators, rather than solely from administrators.  The TES impact was found to be largest for teachers who were the weakest prior to evaluation.  The researchers note that their findings suggest well-structured evaluation systems can be cost-effective expenditures that “not only serve (a) sorting purpose but also enhance education through improvements in teacher effectiveness.”

About the Authors

Eric S. Taylor is a doctoral student at Stanford University.  John H. Tyler is professor of education, economics, and public policy at Brown University.  This article is based in part on a forthcoming study in The American Economic Review.  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 about Education Next, 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.

New Report Identifies 165 Public High Schools That Admit Students Based on Top Academic Records

Schools disproportionately serve Asians and African Americans; Whites and Latinos underrepresented

CAMBRIDGE, MA – A new report investigates 165 public high schools in the United States that are dedicated to teaching top achievers.  These high schools are sometimes known as “exam schools” in reference to their selective admissions criteria, which can include entrance exams.  Researchers Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Jessica Hockett have explored these institutions, asking if their “whole school” focus on high achievers might play a larger role in educating top students in a national climate “consumed with gap closing.”  Their analysis, “Exam Schools from the Inside,” will appear in the Fall issue of Education Next and is available online at www.educationnext.org.

Finn and Hockett’s investigation shows that the schools are more racially diverse, taken as a whole, than is widely believed.  African Americans comprise 30 percent of their enrollment versus 17 percent in the larger public high school population.  Asian Americans comprise 21 percent of their enrollment, compared with 5 percent of all high-schoolers.  Hispanic students are underrepresented, however, as are white students.  Academically selective public high schools are 35 percent white and 13 percent Hispanic, as compared to 56 percent and 20 percent, respectively, in the public high school universe.  Economically, the exam school student body is only slightly less poor than the U.S. public high school population.

Some exam schools – such as Stuyvesant, Boston Latin, Thomas Jefferson and Illinois Math and Science Academy – are well known, but the sector as a whole (enrolling 136,000 students, about 1 percent of the total high school population) is little understood.  The schools spark controversy;  some people think that they are elitist or exclusive while others believe that selectivity contradicts the mission of public education.  The schools are vulnerable to budget cuts, even though they are vastly oversubscribed by eager applicants.

The authors surveyed the schools’ leaders and visited 11 schools, finding them to be “serious, purposeful places:  competitive but supportive, energized yet calm.”  Students want to be at these schools and behavior problems are minimal.  Surveyed schools reported a 91% graduation rate.

Most exam schools offer AP or International Baccalaureate (IB) courses, but many also (or instead) feature other kinds of specialized offerings.  Schools with a STEM focus or university affiliations, for example, offer courses that few traditional high schools provide – such as Human Infectious Diseases, Chemical Pharmacology, and Vector Calculus.

With few exceptions (chiefly in Louisiana), exam schools are not charter schools.  Most teachers in exam schools are subject to the provisions of collective-bargaining contracts, but almost on in five is not (or not fully) subject to seniority-based staffing decisions.  Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents indicated that teacher-hiring decisions are made at the school level or jointly by school and district.

These “whole school” models appear to offer the kind of dedication to high achievement, as well as reinforcement from similarly focused peers, that serve students with exceptional abilities well.  Whether the U.S. creates more schools of this kind or widens its offerings of specialized programs in regular district schools, the authors observe that “If the best of such schools are hothouses for incubating a disproportionate share of tomorrow’s leaders in science, technology, entrepreneurship, and other sectors that bear on society’s long-term prosperity and well-being, we’d be better off as a country if we had more of them.”

About the Authors

Chester E. Finn, Jr. is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a contributing editor of Education Next.  Jessica Hockett is an educational consultant specializing in differentiated instruction, curriculum design, and teacher professional development.  This article is based on the authors’ forthcoming book, Exam Schools:  Inside America’s Most Selective Public High Schools (Princeton University Press), a joint undertaking of the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.  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 about Education Next, 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/.

Public Schools still have more money and employees per pupil than they did in 2000, but are now feeling a financial squeeze

Bold action is needed to protect students without raising costs

CAMBRIDGE, MA – After four years of economic slowdown, the United States appears – for the first time in decades – to be headed toward fewer per-pupil resources and significant labor-force reductions.  Although both the number of school employees and expenditures per pupil have risen steadily for many decades, that trend has come to an end.  There have been nine recessions in the United States since 1955, but before the current period of recession followed by slow growth, public education employees were significantly impacted by layoffs in only one economic downturn, in 1982-83.  However, from June 2008 to March 2012, public schools shed more than 250,000 jobs, or roughly 3 percent of their total workforce.

The need for contraction in public education is bound to continue, write James W. Guthrie and Elizabeth A. Ettema in “Public Schools and Money:  Strategies for improving productivity in times of austerity.”  Their analysis will appear in the Fall issue of Education Next and is available at www.educationnext.org.  Fiscal austerity stemming from state budget shortfalls is becoming a “new normal,” they state, and “if not thoughtfully considered, budget-balancing decisions could damage learning opportunities for schoolchildren.”

The U.S. now spends nearly $700 billion annually on K-12 schooling, more money in the aggregate than any other nation in the world, including China and India.  U.S. per-pupil spending is higher than in every country except Switzerland.  Job expansion has dominated school spending increases.  Thirty years ago there was one professional educator employed for every 18.6 public school students; today the figure is one for every 15.4 students.  In spite of increased expenditures, U.S. high school achievement levels have improved only marginally and still trail many other nations in math and science.

School districts have scant experience taking cost-saving actions such as layoffs or benefit reductions, which are “legally cumbersome and politically treacherous,” note the authors.  As a result, “bad budget cutting has already begun” in California and Washington.  These states’ governors have taken cost-cutting approaches that harm students:  reducing the length of the school year in order to forestall layoffs.  Compensating for lost school time is difficult for students, particularly those who are the most disadvantaged.

Guthrie and Ettema suggest practices that place a premium on teachers’ classroom effectiveness and principals’ managerial authority.  These include:  link achievement gains to performance evaluations, which will incentivize teachers to leverage their impact via technology; use “activity-based cost” (ABC) accounting; empower principals as school-level CEOs; adopt performance-based dollar distribution formulas and school-level financial budgeting; and outsource operational services where proven to save money.

At the same time, the authors call for states and districts to discontinue costly practices that do not enhance student achievement, such as paying educators for out-of-field master’s degrees and following “last in, first out” personnel provisions.  Widespread “regulations that mandate inefficiency,” should end, such as legislatively precluding outsourcing, requiring intergovernmental grants to “supplement not supplant” existing spending, and prohibiting end-of-budget year surplus carryover.

Governors must choose to focus on students’ needs in taking difficult cost-cutting actions.  Absent the will to do so, students will suffer the most and, the authors caution, the past quarter century’s momentum to render America’s schools more effective “is in serious jeopardy.”

About the Authors

James W. Guthrie, currently superintendent of public instruction in Nevada, is senior fellow and former director of education policy studies at the George W. Bush Institute, where Elizabeth Ettema is research associate in education policy.  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 about Education Next, 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

Paul E. Peterson (617) 495-8312 pepeters@fas.harvard.edu Harvard University
Eric A. Hanushek  hanushek@stanford.edu Stanford University
Ludger Woessmann  woessmann@ifo.de University of Munich
Janice B. Riddell  (203) 912-8675  janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu External Relations, Education Next

Student Achievement Gains in U.S. Fail to Close International Achievement Gap

U.S. ranks 25^th out of 49 countries in student test-score gains over 14-year period, report 3 scholars at Harvard, Stanford and the University of Munich

CAMBRIDGE, MA – A new study of international and U.S. state trends in student achievement growth shows that the United States is squarely in the middle of a group of 49 nations in 4^th and 8^th grade test score gains in math, reading, and science over the period 1995-2009.

Students in three countries – Latvia, Chile, and Brazil – are improving at a rate of 4 percent of a standard deviation annually, roughly two years’ worth of learning or nearly three times that of the United States.  Students in another eight countries – Portugal, Hong Kong, Germany, Poland, Liechtenstein, Slovenia, Colombia, and Lithuania – are making gains at twice the rate of U.S. students.

The report, “Is the United States Catching Up? International and state trends in student achievement,” will be released by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG).  Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson, and Ludger Woessmann conducted the study, which is available at www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/.  An article based on the report will appear in the Fall issue of Education Next and is available online at www.educationnext.org.

Compared to gains made by students in other countries, “progress within the United States is middling, not stellar,” notes Peterson, Harvard professor and PEPG director, with 24 countries trailing the U.S. rate of improvement and another 24 that appear to be improving at a faster rate.  While U.S. students’ performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests improved in absolute terms between 1995 and 2011, U.S. progress was not sufficiently rapid to allow it to catch up with the leaders of the industrialized world.

Rates of improvement varied among states.  Maryland had the steepest achievement growth trend, followed by Florida, Delaware, and Massachusetts.  Between 1992 and 2011, these states posted growth rates of 3.1 to 3.3 percent of a standard deviation annually, well over a full year’s worth of learning during the time period. The U.S. average of 1.6 standard deviations was about half that of the top states.

The other six states among the top ten improvers were Louisiana, South Carolina, New Jersey, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Virginia.  States with the largest gains are improving at two to three times the rate of states with the smallest gains – such as Iowa, Maine, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin.

The study raises questions about education goal setting in the United States, which “has often been utopian rather than realistic,” according to Eric Hanushek, who cites the 1990 Governors’ goal calling for the U.S. to be “first in the world in math and science by 2000” as an example.  More realistic expectations would call for states to move closer to annual growth rates of the most-improving states.  These gains would, over a 15-20 year period, “bring the United States within the range of the world’s leaders.”

Other findings include:

• States in which students improved the most overall were also the states that had the largest percent reduction in students with very low achievement.
• Southern states, which began to adopt education reform measures in the 1990s, outpaced Midwestern states, where school reform made little headway until very recently.  Five of the top 10 states were in the South and no southern states were in the bottom 18.
• No significant correlation was found between increased spending on education and test score gains.  For example, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey posted large gains in student performance after boosting spending, but New York, Wyoming, and West Virginia had only marginal test-score gains to show from increased expenditures.

International results are based on 28 administrations of comparable math, science, and reading tests over the period 1995-2009.  The authors adjusted both the mean and the standard deviation of each international test, allowing them to estimate trends on the international tests on a common scale normed to the 2000 NAEP tests.  Student performance on 36 administrations of math, reading, and science tests in 41 U.S. states was examined over a 19-year period (1992-2011), allowing for a comparison of these states with each other.  For more information on the study and its methodology, please see an unabridged version of the report, which are available at www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/ and at www.educationnext.org.

About the Authors

Eric A. Hanushek is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard and director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance.  Ludger Woessmann is head of the Department of Human Capital and Innovation at the Ifo Institute at the University of Munich.  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 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.

CONTACT:
Nelson Smith  nelson.smith@frontier.com
Janice B. Riddell (203) 912-8675 janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu External Relations, Education Next

States and Cities Taking Steps to End the District Monopoly on Public School Facilities
Movement growth prompts districts to accommodate charter needs – but bigger structural changes are needed

CAMBRIDGE, MA – In some school districts across the United States, public school buildings sit vacant while nearby charter schools searching for space are turned away.  “The school district monopoly over public education facilities is an accident of history,” writes Nelson Smith, one that would not have happened “if there had been more than one choice of provider when the laws were being written.”

In a new report, Smith explores policy initiatives that some states and cities have taken to make taxpayer-funded facilities available to serve all public school students, whether they are enrolled in traditional or charter public schools.  His article, “Whose School Buildings Are They, Anyway?  Making public school buildings available to charters,” will appear in the September issue of Education Next and is currently available at www.educationnext.org.

“While states deliver straightforward capital support to traditional school districts, their support for charter facilities is often halfhearted and ineffective,” Smith states.  Traditional districts retain an “iron grip” on ownership and deployment of school buildings.  Of the 42 jurisdictions with charter laws (41 states and the District of Columbia), only 17 provide some kind of direct facilities aid, either capital grants or per-pupil funding, and just 3 of those provide more than $1,000 in annual per-pupil capital funding.  Scarcity of facilities was listed as the greatest external barrier to growth of charter management organizations in a National Charter School Research Project survey.

Real accountability for student performance in charter schools – the current rate of non-renewed charters is 6.2 percent – does create risk, an early argument against capital support for charters, Smith notes.  However, he reports, “charter schools have become successful participants in the same bond markets that finance district facilities.”  The Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) reviewed 229 rated charter-school issuances and found only one default, a rate of 0.4 percent.  An Ernst & Young study of 430 loan transactions by 15 community-development financial institutions (CDFIs) involving 336 charter schools found a foreclosure rate of 1 percent, lower than the corporate sector debt-default rate of about 3 percent.

“State legislatures should put the full faith and credit of the state behind all kinds of public schools,” Smith states, as has Colorado.  Louisiana used its post-Katrina FEMA settlement as core funding for a $1.8 billion public school renovation program that included traditional district and charter public schools.  In 2011, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels signed legislation that allows charters to lease or purchase for $1 any unused, closed or unoccupied school building that is maintained by a school corporation.

Among other promising initiatives to promote charter school access to facilities are:

• Coalitions, such as Breakthrough Schools in Cleveland, which unites several high-performing charters.  Following a $1.5 million sale of four vacant school buildings to the charter coalition, district COO Patrick Zohn noted:  “There’s not really a robust aftermarket for pre-owned school buildings.  Come on down.  We’re dealing, dealing, dealing.”

• “Compacts” to ensure facility and resource equity between districts and charter schools, such as those brokered by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in fourteen cities, including Los Angeles, New York, New Orleans, Hartford, and Sacramento.  The Nashville agreement, for example, promises to “include charter schools in the long-term strategic plans of the district including, but not limited to, student assignment planning and facility usage.”

• Lengthening the five-year charter term to make charter schools more attractive to lenders and align their legal life spans with those of mortgages and bonds.  Arizona and Washington, D.C., for example, have 15-year charter terms, with high-stakes reviews required at least every five years, and Colorado charters can be granted 30-year terms with appropriate oversight and accountability.

While proposing a number of possible strategies, Smith says “there should be no further delay in creating state laws and regulations that level the playing field between charters and other public schools.  Even with existing rules of ownership, there is no excuse for bolting the doors to unused school buildings.”

About the Author

Nelson Smith, former president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, is a consultant on education policy.  He is 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 about Education Next, 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.

CONTACT:
Finley Edwards  fedwards@colby.edu Colby College
Janice B. Riddell  (203) 912-8675 janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu External Relations, Education Next

School Start Times Found to Affect Student Achievement

North Carolina study suggests a one-hour later start time in middle school would reduce achievement gaps

CAMBRIDGE, MA –In recent years, many parents have called for later start times in middle- and high-school, yet there has been little rigorous evidence to date directly linking school start times and academic performance.  A new study finds that delaying middle-school start times by one hour, from roughly 7:30 to 8:30 a.m., would increase standardized math and reading scores by 2 to 3 percentile points.  The effects are more than twice as large for students in the bottom third of test-scorers than for those in the top third, suggesting that later start times may be an especially relevant policy change for districts striving to close achievement gaps.

The study of middle school students in the Wake County, North Carolina public school system (WCPSS), the 16^th-largest public school district in the United States (146,687 current students), was conducted by economist Finley Edwards.  His report, “Do Schools Begin Too Early?  The effect of start times on student achievement,” will appear in the May issue of Education Next and is available online at www.educationnext.org.

The effects of changes in start times “are large enough to be substantively important,” Edwards states.  For example, the effect of a one-hour later start time on math scores is roughly 14 percent of the black-white test-score gap, 40 percent of the gap between those eligible and those not eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, and 85 percent of the gain associated with an additional year of parents’ education.

“Results from Wake County also suggest that later start times have the potential to be a more cost-effective method of increasing student achievement than other common educational interventions such as reducing class size,” notes Edwards.  If all schools started at the same later time, for example, the cost in Wake County for moving each student in the two earlier bus times to a single, later bus schedule would be roughly $150 per student each year.  By comparison, a Tennessee study of class sizes finds that reducing class size by one-third increases per pupil expenditures by $2,151 per student each year (1996 dollars).

The study also finds that later middle school start times are associated with reduced television viewing, increased time spent on homework, and about 25 percent fewer absences.  The benefits of a later start time are seen particularly among students ages 13-14 and appear to persist through at least the 10^th grade.  Students whose middle schools started one hour later when they were in 8^th grade continue to score 2 percentile points higher in both math and reading when tested in grade 10.

The study’s finding that the start-time effects are pronounced beginning at age 13 is consistent with the theory that hormonal changes in adolescence (typically beginning at 13 or 14) make it difficult for students to get enough sleep when school starts early, leading to sleep deficiencies that many studies have found to be associated with a decrease in cognitive performance.

Three methods were used in the research: 1) comparing the reading and math scores of students with similar characteristics (such as race, years of parents’ education, and free or reduced-price lunch status) who attend schools that are similar, except for differing start times;  2) examining the district’s 14 middle schools that changed their start times by 30 minutes or more during the study period (2000-2006), and comparing test scores at the same school for respective grade levels when start times changed;  and 3) analyzing individual student achievement before and after start times changed (e.g., comparing the scores of 7^th graders at a school with a 7:30 start time in 2003 to the scores of the same students as 8^th graders in 2004, when start time was 8:00).

About the Author

Finley Edwards is visiting assistant professor of economics at Colby College.  He can be contacted for interviews at fedwards@colby.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 about Education Next, please visit:  www.educationnext.org.

Researchers Report Findings Showing Lasting Impacts of Effective Teachers
Teachers who raise test scores have long-term effects on students’ college enrollment and earnings as adults

CAMBRIDGE, MA – A study showing the large impacts that highly skilled teachers have on students’ academic achievement and lifetime earnings is available on the Education Next website, www.educationnext.org.  Researchers Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman of Harvard University and Jonah E. Rockoff of Columbia University analyzed school-district data from grades 3–8 for 2.5 million children, and linked those data to information on student outcomes as young adults.  Their study has received widespread attention since its release as an academic paper in January, 2012.  The article, “Great Teaching:  Measuring its effects on students’ future earnings,” is accompanied by four commentaries from experts on the study’s policy implications.

The Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff study finds that, on average, a 1 standard deviation improvement in teacher value added (equivalent to having a teacher in the 84^th percentile rather than one at the median) for one year raises a student’s earnings at age 28 by about 1 percent. They estimate that the effect of such a teacher on an entire class of students is more than a $1.4 million increase in cumulative lifetime earnings.

Relative to the median, a teacher at the 84^th percentile increases math and English scores by 12 and 8 percent of a standard deviation, respectively — equivalent to approximately 3 months of additional instruction.  Students of highly skilled teachers are more likely to attend college, attend higher-quality colleges, earn more, live in higher socioeconomic status (SES) neighborhoods, and save more for retirement.  They are also less likely to have children during their teenage years.

The authors address three criticisms of value-added (VA) measures of teacher effectiveness that Stanford University education professor Linda Darling-Hammond and her colleagues present in a recent article:  that VA estimates are inconsistent because they fluctuate over time;  that teachers’ value-added performance is skewed by student assignment, which is non-random; and that value-added ratings can’t disentangle the many influences on student progress.

Chetty and his colleagues show, using quasi-experimental tests, that “standard VA measures are not biased by the students assigned to each teacher.”  Using over 20 years of student achievement data, the researchers found that changes in the quality of the teaching staff “strongly predict changes in test scores across consecutive cohorts of students in the same school, grade, and subject.”  The most pronounced effects were seen in the departure of ineffective teachers (bottom 5 percent) and arrival of highly effective teachers (top 5 percent).  As a result, they conclude that “value-added metrics successfully disentangle teachers’ impacts from the many other influences on student progress.”

In response to the criticism that teacher impacts on student test scores are inconsistent over time, the authors show that “although VA measures fluctuate across years, they are sufficiently stable” that selecting teachers even based on a few years of data would have substantial impacts on student outcomes, such as earnings.

The study’s policy implications are addressed by Douglas Harris of the University of Wisconsin-Madison;  Chris Cerf, acting commissioner of education for the State of New Jersey with Peter Shulman of the New Jersey Department of Education;  Dale Ballou of Vanderbilt University;  and Eric A. Hanushek of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.  In particular, the discussants point to the importance of finding policies that raise the quality of teaching.  The political difficulties of implementing actual policies that reflect value-added evidence are noted.  Hanushek observes, nonetheless, that the costs of retaining ineffective teachers “are large enough that failing to address them is simply inexcusable.”

About the Authors

Raj Chetty is Professor of Economics at Harvard University.  John N. Friedman is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.  Jonah E. Rockoff is Associate Professor of Business at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business.  For further information on the study, see http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/value_added.html.  The authors can be reached for interviews via the contact information above.

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 about Education Next, 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/.

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

Low Family Income Not a Major Reason For Poor Student Achievement

Although income and achievement are correlated, the Broader, Bolder Approach to school reform errs in ignoring other, more important factors

CAMBRIDGE, MA – Family income is associated with student achievement, but careful studies show little causal connection.  School factors – teacher quality, school accountability, school choice – have bigger causal impacts than family income per se, according to a new analysis by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG).

The analysis, prepared by PEPG director Paul E. Peterson, calls into question the Broader, Bolder Approach (BBA) to educational reform that has been advanced by a group of education scholars, teacher union leaders, and non-profit groups.  The BBA recommends that proposals to enhance teacher quality, school accountability and student choice be dropped in favor of policies that would redistribute income and provide support services to families outside the regular school day.

Peterson focuses on a paper presented by Duke University Professor Helen F. Ladd, a BBA co-chair, which was given as the presidential address before the Association of Public Policy and Management in Washington, D.C. in November of 2011, and is widely regarded as the key scholarly work underpinning BBA.  Peterson’s article, “Neither Broad Nor Bold:  A narrow-minded approach to school reform,” is available at www.educationnext.org and will appear in the Summer, 2012 issue of Education Next.

BBA’s mission statement holds: “Weakening that link [between income and achievement] is the fundamental challenge facing America’s education policy makers.”  Peterson agrees that the connection between income and student performance “is no less true in the Age of Obama than it was in the Age of Pericles.” But, he points out, most of the connection is not causal, but due to other factors.  He cites a study by Julia Isaacs and Katherine Magnuson (Brookings Institution, 2011), that examines an array of family characteristics – such as race, mother’s and father’s education, single parent or two-parent family, smoking during pregnancy – on school readiness and achievement.  The Brookings study finds that the distinctive impact of family income is just 6.4 percent of a standard deviation, generally regarded as a small effect.  In addition, Peterson calls attention to earlier research by Susan Mayer, former dean of the Harris School at the University of Chicago, which also found that the direct relationship between family income and education success for children varied between negligible and small.

Responding to Ladd’s claim that the gap in reading achievement between students from families in the lowest and highest income deciles is larger for those born in 2001 than for those born in earlier decades, Peterson points out that the achievement gap between income groups was growing at exactly the same time the federal government was rapidly expanding services to the poor – Medicaid, food stamps, Head Start, housing subsidies, and many other programs.

“A better case can be made that any increase in the achievement gap between high- and low-income groups is more the result of changing family structure than of inadequate medical services or preschool education,” Peterson says.  In 1969, 85 percent of children under the age of 18 were living with two married parents; by 2010, that percentage had declined to 65 percent.  The median income level of a single-parent family is just over $27,000 (using 1992 dollars), compared to more than $61,000 for a two-parent family; and the risk of dropping out of high school increases from 11 percent to 28 percent if a white student comes from a single-parent family instead of a two-parent family.  For blacks, the increment is from 17 percent to 30 percent, and for Hispanics, the risk rises from 25 percent to 49 percent.

Peterson notes that most of the proposals to lift student achievement that Ladd and her BBA colleagues offer, such as expanded social services, preschool, and summer programs, ignore the many hours children spend at school and amount to a “potpourri of non-educational services (that) have never been shown to have more than modest effects on student achievement.”  He points out that many school reforms – merit pay, school vouchers, and student and school accountability – have been shown to have had equivalent or larger impacts.  For example, school accountability initiatives have raised student performance by 8 percent of a standard deviation.  Initiatives to improve teacher quality have the potential of raising student performance by 10 to 20 percent of a standard deviation.

About the Author

Paul E. Peterson is director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University 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 on Education Next, please visit: www.educationnext.org

CONTACT:
Jonathan Butcher  (602) 462-5000, JButcher@goldwaterinstitute.org, Goldwater Institute
Joel Medley, joel.medley@dpi.nc.gov, North Carolina Office of Charter Schools
Janice B. Riddell  (203) 912-8675, janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu, External Relations, Education Next

Policy Obstacles Stall, But Do Not Stop, Progress of Charter Schools
in South Carolina
Lessons from past 15 years show difficult political and financial path charter schools face

CAMBRIDGE, MA – The first charter school opened in Minnesota in 1992, and today forty-two states and the District of Columbia have charter school laws.  In a new analysis of the charter school experience in South Carolina, Jonathan Butcher and Joel Medley observe, “despite the proliferation of charter laws and new schools around the country, charters and their authorizers still spend their first several years in a fight for survival.”  The Butcher and Medley article, “Cheating the Charters:  Political and Financial Lessons from South Carolina,” is available at www.educationnext.org and will appear in the Spring, 2012, issue of Education Next.

South Carolina was among the first states to pass a charter school law, in 1996; today it has 44 charters (2 percent of total public school enrollment), as compared to hundreds of charter schools in some other states, such as California, Arizona, and Florida.  After a dozen years of fits and starts, during which only local school districts were permitted to authorize charters, legislators created an alternative authorizer, the South Carolina Public Charter School District (CSD) in 2008.  This agency was allowed to authorize charters anywhere in the state.

The CSD schools operated with a severe funding disadvantage from the outset, receiving little more than the Base Student Cost (BSE) allocation, with no support that would make up for their lack of municipal tax revenue that is the largest source of funds for South Carolina’s traditional public schools.  In 2008-09, the BSE was $2,476 per student, while the average per-pupil expenditure for traditional public schools in South Carolina totaled $9,162.  Even when federal Title I funding for low-income students was added to the mix, the CSD per-pupil average was below $4,000, less than half the state per-pupil average.  The next year, BSE funding was reduced further, to $1,630.

CSD Superintendent Wayne Brazell observes, “The funding level was so low and the opposition from so many traditional public-school groups was so fierce that many potential (charter school) parents took a ‘wait and see’ stance.” CSD implemented even more stringent cost cutting and found ways to make short-term loans to charter schools in order to stay afloat.  By 2010, it had become one of the largest districts in the state.  Its enrollment more than doubled from 2,464 students in 2008-09 to 6,086 in 2009-10.  Don McLaurin, CSD board chair, notes, “We proved that people want this;  they signed up in droves, and that put a lot of pressure on the legislature to find more money for us.”

In 2010, a boost to South Carolina’s charter movement came with the election of a strong charter supporter into the state superintendent’s office, an event that CSD’s McLaurin calls “a game changer.”

Also in 2010, Representative Phillip Owens, the chair of the House Education and Public Works Committee introduced a bill aimed at establishing a more sustainable funding policy for CSD, and despite being stalled by opponents representing traditional districts, the 2011-12 state budget included a funding increase for CSD schools. Virtual schools received an additional $1,750 per student, while brick-and mortar charters received an additional $3,250.  With final per-pupil amounts in each school varying dependent on grade level, Title I status, and supplemental funds for students with disabilities, the average CSD student is now funded at approximately $5,000, a solid improvement but “still much lower than the average traditional school student.”

In August 2011, the CSD approved seven charter school applicants to open in the fall of 2012.  The authors note that strong leadership in the state and district superintendents’ offices, along with more district and school staff experience, will allow schools to concentrate less on basic survival and more on effective operations and better student outcomes.

About the Authors

Jonathan Butcher is education director for the Goldwater Institute and served as the CSD’s director of accountability from 2009 to April 2011.  Joel Medley is the director of the North Carolina Office of Charter Schools and was the Charter Schools Education Associate at the South Carolina Department of Education from 2008 to 2010.  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

CONTACT:

Patrick J. Wolf   (479) 445-9821  pwolf@uark.edu University of Arkansas
John F. Witte   (608) 445-5026 witte@lafollette.wisc.edu University of Wisconsin
David J. Fleming   (920) 205-7041 david.fleming@furman.edu Furman University
Janice B. Riddell  (203) 912-8675 janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu External Relations, Education Next

Milwaukee School Voucher Program has more Students with Disabilities than Previously Reported

Study shows that 7 to 14 percent of voucher students have disabilities, as compared to 2 percent estimate by Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction

CAMBRIDGE, MA – A new study estimates that between 7.5 and 14 percent of students in Milwaukee’s voucher program have disabilities, a much higher rate than the one provided by the Wisconsin State Department of Public Instruction (DPI), which has stated, “about 1.6 percent of choice students have a disability.”

The report, “Special Choices:  Do voucher schools serve students with disabilities?” is available at www.educationnext.org.  The authors are professors Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas, John Witte of the University of Wisconsin, and David Fleming of Furman University.

The new research is significant in that it affords an unusual opportunity to obtain high quality information on the participation rate in school voucher programs by students with disabilities.  It is sometimes argued, particularly by critics of voucher programs, that private schools exclude most students with disabilities.  The scarcity of information reflects the fact that private schools, unlike public schools, do not receive additional funding for students with disabilities, and consequently are not required by federal law to follow complex procedures for the identification of those students.

The Milwaukee voucher program is the largest and longest-running urban school choice program in the U.S., established in 1990 and now serving over 22,000 low-income students who attend 107 private schools using $6,000 vouchers toward tuition.

In a five-year study (2006-11), the three researchers used three different methods to identify the percentage of voucher students who would have been identified as in need of special education had they been enrolled in public school.

Their first method analyzed information on 1,475 students (20% of the total 7,338 sample) who had attended schools with a voucher for part of their education but had also been in public schools.  Among this group of students they found that 9.1 percent were identified as disabled when attending a private school, but 14.6 percent were identified as disabled when attending Milwaukee’s public schools.  The authors conclude that the rate of identification is 5.5 percent higher by public schools than by private schools, when the exact same students are being classified.

Their second method relies on reports from principals at private schools, who say that 7.5 percent of their students have disabilities.

The third method is based on interviews with parents of students in grades 3 through 9. According to parents, the disability rate among voucher students is 11.4 percent, as compared to 20.4 percent in the public schools.

The authors suggest that the 7.5 percent estimate from private school officials is “a lower-bound estimate, since several principals (said) they resist labeling students as disabled.”

Parent satisfaction with special education services was similar for both voucher students and public school students.  When parents of students with disabilities were asked “how well do the facilities at the child’s school attend to his/her particular needs?” about half the parents reported.  Fifty percent of the parents of voucher students said they were doing “very well” as compared to 52 percent of public school parents.

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

Students who attend middle schools at risk of dropping out of high school
As compared to students in K-8 elementary schools, middle school students also score lower on achievement tests.  Losses amount to as much as 3.5 to 7 months of learning.

CAMBRIDGE, MA – A new study of statewide data from all Florida public schools finds that moving to a middle school in grade 6 or 7 causes a substantial drop in student test scores relative to those of students who remain in K-8 schools, and increases the likelihood of dropping out of high school.

In the past ten years, urban school districts such as New York City, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Charlotte-Mecklenburg have reorganized some middle schools along the once-prevalent K-8 model.  The study’s findings support these school conversions and “are also relevant to the expanding charter school sector, which has the opportunity to choose grade configurations” when schools are established.  An article presenting the research, “The Middle School Plunge: Achievement tumbles when young students change schools,” is available at www.educationnext.org and will appear in the Spring, 2012 issue of Education Next.

Data on state math and reading test scores for all Florida students attending public schools in grades 3 to 10 from the 2000-01 through 2008-09 years were analyzed.  The researchers also conducted a test-score analysis separately for schools in Miami-Dade County, which is Florida’s largest district (345,000 students) and offers a wide range of grade configurations up through grade 8.  They find that “the negative effects of entering a middle school for grade 6 or grade 7 are, if anything, even more pronounced in Miami-Dade County than they are statewide.”

The research, conducted by Martin R. West at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Guido Schwerdt of the University of Munich’s Ifo Institute, found that students who make school transitions at grade 7 experience drops in achievement of 0.22 and 0.15 standard deviations in math and reading, respectively.  For those making the transition at grade 6, math achievement falls by 0.12 standard deviations, and reading achievement falls by 0.09 standard deviations.  These declines in achievement amount to between 3.5 and 7 months of expected learning over the course of a 10-month school year.

The relative achievement of middle-school students continues to decline through grade 8.  For example, students who entered in 6^th grade score 0.23 standard deviations lower in math and 0.14 standard deviations lower in reading by the end of 8^th grade than would have been expected had they attended a K-8 school.

Nor do the researchers find evidence that students who attend middle schools make larger achievement gains than their K-8 peers in grades 9 and 10, by which time most Florida students have entered high school.  On the contrary, they show that entering a middle school in 6^th grade increases the probability of dropping out of high school by grade 10 by 18 percent (1.4 percentage points).

The negative effects of entering a middle school are somewhat smaller outside of urban districts, but they remain substantial even in rural areas.  Among student subgroups, the study finds that black students suffer larger drops both at and following the transition to middle school;  there are only insignificant differences in effects for students of different ethnicities in reading.

Principal surveys indicate that aspects of school climate, such as safety and order, are worse in Florida middle schools than in K-8 schools.  The authors surmise that students in grades 6-8 who remain in K-8 schools “may benefit from being among the oldest students in a school setting that includes very young students, perhaps because they have greater opportunity to take on leadership roles.”

About the Authors

Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and deputy director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) at Harvard’s Kennedy School.  Guido Schwerdt is a postdoctoral fellow at PEPG and a researcher at the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich, Germany.  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 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

The Battle Over Common Core Math Standards:  Will A Larger Federal Role Help or Hinder Curriculum Improvement?

Standards raise the bar in many, but not all, states, and still do not reach the highest international level

CAMBRIDGE, MA – More than 40 states have now agreed to adopt the Common Core standards in English Language Arts and math.  In a forum released today on the website, www.educationnext.org, former U.S. Department of Education official Ze’ev Wurman and Johns Hopkins University professor of mathematics W. Stephen Wilson offer differing opinions about the standards.  Wurman and Wilson address key issues raised – including 1) how much the standards will improve on those currently in place in various states, 2) whether they will resolve deep disagreements over what skills constitute sound math education, and 3) whether they might have the unintended consequence of removing incentives for further improvement.

Both Wurman and Wilson acknowledge the urgent need for improvement in math curricula if the U.S. is to become more competitive internationally.  Wilson notes the dramatic withdrawal from arithmetic in the elementary grades that has occurred over the past two to three decades, reflecting the mistaken but increasingly popular view that learning whole number operations (such as the multiplication tables) to the point of instant recall is bad for a student, not necessary to higher math, and impedes students’ ability to understand mathematical principles.

While arithmetic is “the foundation,” Wilson states, and “has to be done right,” at present “fewer than 15 states are explicit about the need for students to know the single-digit number facts…to the point of instant recall.”  Only seven states expect students to know explicitly the standard algorithm for whole number multiplication, and “often states expect students to develop their own strategies or a variety of strategies for dealing with fractions.”

Both experts recognize that there are clearer and more rigorous sets of standards than Common Core in place in several states, among them California, Florida, Indiana, Minnesota, and Washington.  Nonetheless, Wilson views Common Core math as a vast improvement over existing standards in more than 30 states, doing “a pretty good job with arithmetic,” and ranking in terms of quality in the top 20 percent of current state standards.

Wurman finds many gaps in the Common Core standards and sequencing problems that will impede college readiness.  The standards do not expect Algebra I to be taught in grade 8, “reversing the most significant change in mathematics education in America in the last decade,” and contrary to the practice of the highest-achieving nations.

The authors address whether the new system of federal involvement that Common Core establishes is the most effective route to world-class math education.  Wurman notes that Common Core might have the unintended effect of removing incentives for states to continually improve.  Within the existing American system where each state sets its own standards, states that aspire to raise the bar are likely to do so, accounting for the level of excellence that some have reached.  Common Core will, he fears, make math standards an apparently settled matter, leading to a drift toward easier standards over time.

The Common Core math standards might also lose strength in their implementation through the sheer force of popular pedagogical trends.  In other countries, notes Wilson, the statement, “learn to multiply whole numbers,” has an agreed-upon meaning and it is understood that students should learn the standard algorithm.  In the U.S., “some people will declare wriggle room and try to avoid the standard algorithm.”  He states, “Without a unified, concerted effort to teach real mathematics, there isn’t much chance of catching up” to the highest-achieving countries, even if states say they’ll adopt Common Core.

Wurman observes that the Common Core math standards are grade-by-grade specific and hence more detailed than the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) 2000 standards, which replaced the organization’s “unfocused and mostly math-less” 1989 standards, but without significantly strengthening them.  However, he notes that the Common Core standards do resemble those of NCTM “in setting their sights lower than our international competitors.”

About the Authors

Ze’ev Wurman was a U.S. Department of Education official under George W. Bush, is currently an executive with MonolithIC 3D Inc., and is coauthor with Sandra Stotsky of “Common Core’s Standards Still Don’t Make the Grade” (Pioneer Institute, 2010).  W. Stephen Wilson is professor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins University, served on the National Governors Association-Council of Chief State School Officers “feedback group” for the Common Core standards, and was mathematics author of Stars by which to Navigate? Scanning National and International Education Standards in 2009: An Interim Report on Common Core, NAEP, TIMSS, and PISA.  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 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

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