For better or for worse, Education Week’s annual Quality Counts feature, now celebrating its thirteenth birthday, is the closest thing we have to a comprehensive annual report card on American K-12 education. Unfortunately, it’s fraught with methodological weaknesses.
For better or for worse, Education Week’s annual Quality Counts feature, now celebrating its thirteenth birthday, is the closest thing we have to a comprehensive annual report card on American K-12 education. Unfortunately, it’s fraught with methodological weaknesses. (Last year’s was too.) The state-by-state grades--which will inevitably grab most of the headlines--are actually the least reliable component. The grading is at times arbitrary (teacher experience is used to measure teacher quality, an unproven correlation), unfair (is the annual income of someone who graduated high school in 1965 really a good reflection of a state’s education system in 2010?), and redundant (NAEP scores are factored into both the Chance for Success and K-12 Achievement indices, and both children’s family income and statewide adult income are factored into Chance for Success). Such problems are nicely illuminated by CREDO’s Margaret Raymond in a new piece in Education Next. Raymond also recalculates some of the state grades on a fairer scale, with striking results. We’re glad to see people are beginning to cast a critical eye on QC. Still and all, the raw data that EPE gathers are valuable and reward analysis. Also deserving a look is this year’s focus theme--common standards, of course--and a new “Math Progress Index.” The report is available here--free to online subscribers, or in print for a small fee.
Editorial Projects in Education
January 2010
Finally, a strong, modern, quality-centered metric by which to judge the strength of state charter laws! The Center for Education Reform did pioneering and valuable work in this area but its metric is limited and somewhat archaic, having more to do with schools’ freedom from regulation than with their performance or their states’ accountability expectations. In this new report, the Alliance compares actual state charter laws with a model law that they developed, and ranks the forty states with such laws on elements like quality, accountability, and funding equity. “Quality control” measures (e.g., requiring performance-based contracts and having comprehensive charter school monitoring and data collection processes) are weighted the most heavily. Minnesota, DC, and California came out on top; Iowa, Alaska, and Maryland at the bottom. The indicators are presented separately so that state policyma kers, charter advocates, foes, and researchers alike can zero in on the elements that matter most to them. There’s a minor methodological quibble, however, which is more one of adequate explanation than analytical error; NAPCS fails to differentiate which scores derive specifically from state laws and which also derive from practice, which they took into consideration in three of the categories (e.g., on charter caps, they consider also if the state is at or approaching the cap). You can find the report itself and an accompanying online database of its contents here.
National Alliance for Public Charter Schools
January 2010
If you read only the coverage of this study, you’d come away with a vastly more negative view of TFA graduates than you should. So let’s put the record straight. The study asks whether the TFA experience “make[s] citizens”? The authors seek to compare the “civic engagement” of TFA “graduates” (those who finished two years of TFA), “dropouts” (those who began the program but did not finish it) and “non-matriculants” (those who were accepted but declined). They find that though graduates display the highest attitudinal scores on civic awareness, non-matriculants actually perform the most service. They attribute this difference to such factors as post-TFA burnout and disillusionment with TFA itself. That may be so, but TFA is an organization dedicated to recruiting and keeping talent in our nation’s classrooms, not creating Mother-Teresas-in-tr aining, even if Wendy Kopp commissioned the study herself. It is upon those metrics--and the effect that TFA teachers have on student achievement--that we should be evaluating the program. Even if you accept the premise of this inquiry, however, the findings are no black mark against TFA. For example, though “only” 89 percent of graduates said they voted in the last presidential election (compared to 92 percent for all three groups), that’s still 50 points higher than their similarly-aged peers. The lesson is that TFA doesn’t turn disengaged students into participatory citizens; rather, it tends to select the civic-minded from the get-go. You can order a copy here.
Doug McAdam and Cynthia Brandt, Stanford University
Social Forces
February 2010
This report adds to the pile of evidence that good charter schools elicit positive student achievement--and that something about New York City’s approach is worth understanding if not emulating. A follow-up to its June 2009 national study, CREDO undertook this one exclusively in Gotham. Lo and behold, it found that NYC charters have a significant positive effect on overall student achievement. In math, 51 percent of charter schools showed learning gains statistically larger than those shown by traditional district-operated schools, while 33 percent showed no difference and 16 percent fared worse. Gains in reading were less striking but still impressive. The study also disaggregated results by the number of years a student attended a charter, and found that, while first year charter pupils perform slightly worse than their district agemates in reading (and better in math), after three years their gains significantly outpace traditional school pupils in both subjects. Moreover, black and Hispanic charter school students perform significantly better than their traditional school counterparts. You can read it here.
Center for Research on Education Outcomes
January 2010
For better or for worse, Education Week’s annual Quality Counts feature, now celebrating its thirteenth birthday, is the closest thing we have to a comprehensive annual report card on American K-12 education. Unfortunately, it’s fraught with methodological weaknesses. (Last year’s was too.) The state-by-state grades--which will inevitably grab most of the headlines--are actually the least reliable component. The grading is at times arbitrary (teacher experience is used to measure teacher quality, an unproven correlation), unfair (is the annual income of someone who graduated high school in 1965 really a good reflection of a state’s education system in 2010?), and redundant (NAEP scores are factored into both the Chance for Success and K-12 Achievement indices, and both children’s family income and statewide adult income are factored into Chance for Success). Such problems are nicely illuminated by CREDO’s Margaret Raymond in a new piece in Education Next. Raymond also recalculates some of the state grades on a fairer scale, with striking results. We’re glad to see people are beginning to cast a critical eye on QC. Still and all, the raw data that EPE gathers are valuable and reward analysis. Also deserving a look is this year’s focus theme--common standards, of course--and a new “Math Progress Index.” The report is available here--free to online subscribers, or in print for a small fee.
Editorial Projects in Education
January 2010
Finally, a strong, modern, quality-centered metric by which to judge the strength of state charter laws! The Center for Education Reform did pioneering and valuable work in this area but its metric is limited and somewhat archaic, having more to do with schools’ freedom from regulation than with their performance or their states’ accountability expectations. In this new report, the Alliance compares actual state charter laws with a model law that they developed, and ranks the forty states with such laws on elements like quality, accountability, and funding equity. “Quality control” measures (e.g., requiring performance-based contracts and having comprehensive charter school monitoring and data collection processes) are weighted the most heavily. Minnesota, DC, and California came out on top; Iowa, Alaska, and Maryland at the bottom. The indicators are presented separately so that state policyma kers, charter advocates, foes, and researchers alike can zero in on the elements that matter most to them. There’s a minor methodological quibble, however, which is more one of adequate explanation than analytical error; NAPCS fails to differentiate which scores derive specifically from state laws and which also derive from practice, which they took into consideration in three of the categories (e.g., on charter caps, they consider also if the state is at or approaching the cap). You can find the report itself and an accompanying online database of its contents here.
National Alliance for Public Charter Schools
January 2010
If you read only the coverage of this study, you’d come away with a vastly more negative view of TFA graduates than you should. So let’s put the record straight. The study asks whether the TFA experience “make[s] citizens”? The authors seek to compare the “civic engagement” of TFA “graduates” (those who finished two years of TFA), “dropouts” (those who began the program but did not finish it) and “non-matriculants” (those who were accepted but declined). They find that though graduates display the highest attitudinal scores on civic awareness, non-matriculants actually perform the most service. They attribute this difference to such factors as post-TFA burnout and disillusionment with TFA itself. That may be so, but TFA is an organization dedicated to recruiting and keeping talent in our nation’s classrooms, not creating Mother-Teresas-in-tr aining, even if Wendy Kopp commissioned the study herself. It is upon those metrics--and the effect that TFA teachers have on student achievement--that we should be evaluating the program. Even if you accept the premise of this inquiry, however, the findings are no black mark against TFA. For example, though “only” 89 percent of graduates said they voted in the last presidential election (compared to 92 percent for all three groups), that’s still 50 points higher than their similarly-aged peers. The lesson is that TFA doesn’t turn disengaged students into participatory citizens; rather, it tends to select the civic-minded from the get-go. You can order a copy here.
Doug McAdam and Cynthia Brandt, Stanford University
Social Forces
February 2010
This report adds to the pile of evidence that good charter schools elicit positive student achievement--and that something about New York City’s approach is worth understanding if not emulating. A follow-up to its June 2009 national study, CREDO undertook this one exclusively in Gotham. Lo and behold, it found that NYC charters have a significant positive effect on overall student achievement. In math, 51 percent of charter schools showed learning gains statistically larger than those shown by traditional district-operated schools, while 33 percent showed no difference and 16 percent fared worse. Gains in reading were less striking but still impressive. The study also disaggregated results by the number of years a student attended a charter, and found that, while first year charter pupils perform slightly worse than their district agemates in reading (and better in math), after three years their gains significantly outpace traditional school pupils in both subjects. Moreover, black and Hispanic charter school students perform significantly better than their traditional school counterparts. You can read it here.
Center for Research on Education Outcomes
January 2010
