Quotable

"As much as I love accolades that have come to me, it's just not me. What it amounts to is $1,000 for extra resources now or $50,000 a year in jail when they can't find jobs and turn to crime. It's an investment, and that's necessary." --Julie Williams, Principal, Maplewood High School, Nashville, TN

Tennessean:??How three troubled Metro schools got back on track

Notable

864 : The number of articles (culled from The New York Times, Washington Post, and Education Week) used in an analysis of the reach and influence of think tanks' and universities' education research. The study was done by Holly Yeytick of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Education PR:??Who Produces the Educational Research Mentioned in the News Media?

Graduation rates. We all know that defining and measuring them has been the source of much contentious discussion in recent years. A common graduation-rate measure for all states was finally codified into federal regulations in 2008, but the debate is hardly over. Should those graduation rates be used as part of school accountability systems? If so, how? Won't doing so just create incentives for schools to graduate kids who haven't met the standards? After all, what does it mean to be a high school graduate anyway? We decided to put together a primer, "The Great Graduation-Rate Debate ," to explain this rather complicated topic in plain English. We cover: the main variables that differentiate graduation rates, how they're calculated, where the information comes from, the impact of NCLB on this debate, and, of course, the key questions that still linger. We hope that you'll find this to be a valuable resource as this issue undoubtedly continues to rise. Read the full report here .

National Council on Teacher Quality and National Math and Science Initiative
June 2009

Qualified science and math teachers are in short supply and this report explains how state laws and regulations can encourage individuals to teach in the STEM disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and math.

The report, released by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) and the National Math and Science Initiative, comes as Ohio is slashing funding for STEM initiatives.

The report tackles the problem of maintaining sufficient STEM teachers by addressing weaknesses in state standards for teacher preparation. Methods for getting the right people into STEM classrooms are listed in a report full of what states should do.

The report argues that laws and regulations should make it more challenging to teach in STEM fields, while also creating incentives/making it more appealing. For example, across the country, passing grades for entry teacher tests are as low as 40 percent. The Council recommends raising the minimum passing grade to 60 percent. In addition, elementary teachers need more math and science coursework. Elementary teacher candidates should be required to take math classes "specific to [their] needs" and they should know how to teach math. The report also recommends strengthening elementary licensing tests. Loopholes in middle-school licensure need to be closed and future middle-school teachers should pass licensure requirements for grades 7-12.

Since traditional education-school models are not working to attract enough STEM teachers, the report also says states should consider alternative ways to allow teachers to qualify. Flexible compensation packages, signing bonuses, and incentive programs should be used to entice qualified people to the teaching profession.

Read the report here.

Institute for Education Sciences
June 2009

The National Center for Education Statistics just released the Nation's Arts Report Card, previously covered by Fordham's D.C. team here and here. The report details the state of the nation's art education after testing 8,000 eighth-grade students in visual arts and music. The findings, as noted by Fordham, were overwhelmingly average with student scores ranging from 105 and 194, out of a possible 300 for the visual arts section. Other significant findings included achievement gaps between white/Asian students and black/Hispanic students and between male and female. The report indicates students have not shown much improvement in the arts, which may be caused by the increased emphasis on reading and math skills.

It is unclear what these results mean for discussions of national standards and assessments. Arts education and students' knowledge of visual art and music appear to be on shaky footing. Regardless, the Arts Report Card is a timely reminder that we cannot put content standards in danger by focusing too much on so-called 21^st century skills (see Fordham President Chester E. Finn, Jr. on the subject here). Finn and Diane Ravitch co-edited a book, Beyond the Basics: Achieving a Liberal Education for All Children, that describes why education should be a liberal education, and in a chapter on the arts, Dana Gioia, a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, stated, "The real purpose of arts education is to awaken us to the full potential of our humanity both as individuals and citizens in society."

In Ohio, the biennial budget has just been finalized. Between the larger provisions on school funding and choice are provisions on academic standards that are just as significant. But the arts receive very little mention except for a promise that they will be revised in some as yet unknown way. Whatever that revision may be, we cannot forget that the arts are important, and Ohio students deserve standards that recognize that importance within the development of a truly comprehensive content-rich curriculum.

Read the Arts Report Card here, and read Beyond the Basics here.

Consortium on Chicago School Research
June 2009

Chicago is the third largest city in the country and the hometown of our nation's president and as such, has naturally been playing a much larger role in the political realm. The educational research world must have noticed because Chicago and the Chicago Public School System have also had a large presence in several recent reports.

One of these recent reports, by the Consortium on Chicago School Research, discusses teachers and why they leave the district.. The report states that while CPS's district-wide turnover is normal compared to other districts, a closer look reveals that in Chicago, half of the teachers leave their school buildings every five years. It can be easily conceded that such turnover would impair effectiveness for any school and leads to the obvious question: why?

According to the study, younger, new teachers are more likely to leave than older teachers, with the exception of the oldest teachers leaving for retirement. Low-achieving, low-income, predominantly African-American schools have more turnover. Larger percentages of teachers stay in schools where they feel a "climate of collective responsibility and innovation." It is important to note that the report's authors acknowledge several flaws in the study. There is no data for charter schools and since they are only assessing CPS, they cannot tell where a person goes if he/she leaves a CPS school and does not transfer to another CPS school.

Thus, while turnover in CPS looks average when compared to other districts, it might not be average. President Obama is taking his education cue from Chicago (as indicated in an interesting, antique piece of New York Times election coverage, see here, citing Fordham's own Mike Petrilli!) and so should districts and states like Ohio by taking steps to ensure that effective, qualified teachers remain in their schools.

Read the report here.

The New Teachers Project, with authors Daniel Weisber, Susan Sexton, Jennifer Mulhern, and David Keeling
June 2009

This revelatory study, with as much detail, rigor, and thoroughness as one could want, proves what we've long suspected: the formal process of teacher evaluation as it exists today is soft. Evaluations have made teachers into "widgets" because they are all treated the same. Three school districts in Ohio-Akron, Cincinnati, and Toledo-are among the study's group of 12 districts in four states. The data, which comes from new surveys and compilations of teacher evaluation records, plus 130 interviews with district leaders, reveals a system of perfunctory and meaningless back-patting. Even different evaluation methods do not make results more meaningful. Toledo uses a binary rating system (satisfactory/unsatisfactory), and gave only three teachers an unsatisfactory rating over five years. In Akron, which uses a system with five ratings, teachers identified 5 percent of their colleagues as "poor performers," but not one teacher actually received an unsatisfactory rating in an evaluation. Not only does the system fail to identify poor teachers, it also leaves no room to recognize truly exceptional teachers. Cincinnati did the best job identifying "distinguished" teachers by giving only 54 percent of teachers their highest rating. The authors briefly describe some of the legal and organizational hurdles that block useful evaluation, and suggest that the process be reformed in a way that treats evaluation more like a routine check-up and less like, say, a one-time polio test everyone passes but nobody really worries about.

Read the study here.

IFF
April 2009

"Change we can measure" is an unmistakable reference to "Change we can believe in," the slogan of a candidate who is now our nation's president. This president has appointed Arne Duncan as his Secretary of Education, and the schools whose change is measured in this report are the ones that Arne Duncan left for 400 Maryland Avenue-the Chicago Public Schools (including charters).

IFF, formerly the Illinois Facilities Fund, describes the schools as a mixed bag, with elementary schools performing better than most high schools and an overall lack of "performing" schools across grade levels. But IFF also points out that the schools have made encouraging improvements since the last report in 2004.

While IFF's purpose is simple - to find out if every child in Chicago has access to a "performing" school - the methodology is slightly more complicated. The city is broken up into 77 different neighborhoods. The public schools in each neighborhood are assessed on the basis of performance (62.5 percent of students at a school must meet the state standard on the Illinois Standard Achievement Test in order to qualify as "performing") and capacity (how many students they can enroll). These public schools are ‘attendance area' schools, meaning they draw their enrollments from their surrounding area or neighborhoods. Then IFF categorizes the 25 worst neighborhoods in Chicago as those with the highest levels of students without access to a performing school.

The report found that 57.6 percent of CPS attendance-area elementary schools were performing, a jump from 42 percent in 2004. However, this still leaves 57,000 elementary students without access to a performing school. The high-school situation is much more dire, with no schools meeting the Illinois standard for performance. Thus many elementary students in a performing school do not have the opportunity to move on to a performing high school. In more encouraging news, CPS reforms have led to an increase of 46,516 spots for students in performing elementary schools since 2004. Additionally, the charter movement has provided 13,845 more performing spots with charters being a "bright spot," albeit a dimly-lit one, for the system.

So, as Arne Duncan continues his nationwide campaign for education reform (see here, here, here, and here), his old schools must listen and continue to search for ways to provide every student in Chicago with access to the best possible education just as other cities, and states like Ohio, must commit to doing the same.

Read the report here.

Center on Education Policy
June 2009

The newest report from the Center on Education Policy (CEP) addresses the belief that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) causes teachers to neglect students who are either high- or low-achieving. This debate centers on educators having motivations incentives under NCLB to focus on the middle-of-the-road children, so called "bubble kids," as these are the ones most likely to fall below or reach the proficient level.

Mining data from all 50 states, the report finds that basic and advanced students did not suffer and have better achievement levels across all grades. The center did note, however, that the proficient- and above-level students saw the most gains. The study also found that the lowest gains were made in high schools -- possibly because teenagers may be less likely to obey authority, there may be fewer teachers who teach to the achievement tests and/or fewer Title I funding dollars go to high schools.

Hampering the analysis is the non-uniform nature of individual state data. As the study points out, each state has its own tests and it is often difficult to define basic, proficient, and advanced students. Ohio, for example, has five levels of placement - limited/below basic, basic, proficient, accelerated, and advanced. Notably, this system will change as the new biennial budget reduces the placement ratings to three by disposing of the basic and accelerated levels. Data assessment is crucial to figuring out what works and state data must be readily available and easy to comprehend. National standards would allow organizations to compile more accurate statistics, which could be used to figure out measures (paid for by taxpayers) that are working. Therefore, it is encouraging to see that Ohio and 45 other states are joining forces in the Common Core State Standards Initiative (see here).

For the report, see here. Also, Fordham's June 2008 report, "High-Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind," offers some additional insights into the debate (see here).         

Alliance for Excellent Education, with author Lyndsay M. Pinkus
June 2009

The concept of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) ought to be scrapped in high schools in favor of other measures, argues this policy brief from the Alliance for Excellent Education. AYP leads to states tailoring their tests and schools simply for basic achievement rather than college-and-career readiness. Author Lyndsay M. Pinkus believes that AYP should be replaced with several different variables linked to achievement, including attendance, course success, and promotion rates. SAT, ACT, and Advanced Placement (AP) test scores are offered as indicators of high-school students' potential beyond graduation. The report discusses states, such as Kentucky, which have managed to tackle the strenuous task of following high-school students to college or a post-graduation career. Pinkus does acknowledge, however, that tracking students has its difficulties, especially when graduates leave the state. The policy brief determines that the most appropriate course to begin the journey away from AYP is to research the ways attendance and other indicators can be implemented in a productive fashion.

Ohio's new biennial budget includes a revision of the state's standards and assessments, which is a vital component of measuring student achievement. The Ohio Graduation Test (OGT) will be replaced with a combination of the ACT or other college entrance test, end-of-course exams, and a senior thesis. These alterations, especially the transition from the OGT to ACT or other college entrance exam, are good ideas, but the details of these budget provisions are largely unclear. There is also a concern that schools will fail to require challenging thesis projects. Overall, Ohio is ahead of many states in preparing high-school students for life after graduation, but it can still improve by focusing on the policy brief's reporting on the limits of AYP and the importance of college-and-career readiness.

For the report, see here.