Food Sales in Schools and Childhood Obesity
Ω The vast majority of American middle schools and high schools sell what are known as “competitive foods,” such as soft drinks, candy bars, and chips, to children. The relationship between consumption of sugar-sweetened drinks and snacks and childhood obesity is well established, but it remains unknown whether competitive food sales in schools are related to unhealthy weight gain among children. The authors of this study examined this association using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class. They found that children’s weight gain between fifth and ei... more »
Academic Achievement in Public and Catholic Schools
Ω This article examines two critical questions related to equality of educational opportunity. First, does the academic advantage that was observed in Catholic high schools more than two decades ago continue to hold for contemporary students in Catholic middle schools? Second, how closely do different school sectors adhere to the common school ideal? Answers to these questions are central to efforts to reduce educational inequalities. The study reported here relies on data from sixth- and eighth-grade students in the Chicago School Study, a longitudinal survey of Chicago public s... more »
The Geography of Inequality: Why Separate Means Unequal in American Public Schools
Ω Persistent school segregation means not only that children of different racial and ethnic backgrounds attend different schools but also that their schools are unequal in performance. This study documents the extent of disparities nationally in school performance between schools attended by whites and Asians compared with those attended by blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans. It further examines the geography of school inequality in two ways. First, it analyzes the segregation of students between different types of school profiles based on racial composition, poverty, and met... more »
Contracts in the classroom
Ω While contracts are an indispensable tool in the modern workplace, a new study has found that they may also be very effective in contemporary classrooms. According to a new article published in SAGE Open, courses in which students design their own course based on a contract lead to both higher grades and higher student satisfaction than traditional points-based courses. The article, "Use of Contract Grading to Improve Grades among College Freshmen in Introductory Psychology," details this study. Researchers Dana Lindemann and Colin Harbke assigned a total of 40 college freshmen e... more »
Decade of Research Points to Five Must-Haves for Effective Principals
Ω School leadership doesn't just happen. Effective principals employ five key practices, according to The School Principal as Leader: Guiding Schools to Better Teaching and Learning, a Wallace Foundation Perspective that distills lessons from school leadership projects and major research studies supported by the foundation since 2000. "After more than a decade of investment in school leadership, we can confirm the empirical link between school leadership and improved student achievement. We hope that this Wallace Perspective can contribute a new and deeper understanding of effectiv... more »
Private Education Management Organizations Continue to Grow – But Results are Mixed
Ω * New report shows 778,000 students attend schools operated by private education management organizations – more than 40 percent of all students in charter schools* *A mere 27 percent of U.S. online schools run by for-profit companies achieved Adequate Yearly Progress * Across the nation, almost 300 private companies referred to as “education management organizations” are taking a big bite out of the public school apple. According to a new report, EMOs now operate 35 percent of all public charter schools, and these schools account for more than 40 percent of all charter school stu... more »
Creating Teacher Incentives for School Excellence and Equity
Ω Do teachers think like salesmen or assembly line workers? Does a financial reward tied to a production goal or sales target motivate teachers to teach better, and do students benefit from these financial incentives? The answer is that few or no gains come from such teacher incentives. This is because pay-for-performance schemes don’t respond to what teachers care most about, but other incentives might be much more successful, according to Creating Teacher Incentives for School Excellence and Equity, issued today by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of C... more »
Revisiting the Age-Old Question: Does Money Matter in Education?
Ω This policy brief revisits the long and storied literature on whether money matters in providing a quality education. Increasingly, political rhetoric adheres to the unfounded certainty that money doesn’t make a difference in education, and that reduced funding is unlikely to harm educational quality. Such proclamations have even been used to justify large cuts to education budgets over the past few years. These positions, however, have little basis in the empirical research on the relationship between funding and school quality. The brief, discusses selected major studies on thr... more »
Common Core State Standards Implementation Planning
Ω Preparing for Change, a National Perspective on Common Core State Standards Implementation Planning. The early stages of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) initiative were largely occupied with debates over the merits of the standards and the feasibility of their adoption by the states. As the movement has matured, the focus of attention has shifted toward issues related to practical implementation, such as the readiness of teachers to actually enact the new standards in the classroom. To gauge state progress toward implementing the CCSS, Education First and the Editorial Pro... more »
Most studies of charter schools use unsophisticated methods that tell us little
Ω Some two decades into the grand national experiment with charter schools, how much do we really know about them? Not all that much. And not nearly as much as we easily could, say researchers from the University of California, San Diego Division of Social Sciences. Writing in the journal Science, UC San Diego educational economist Julian Betts and Richard Atkinson, president emeritus of the University of California and former director of the National Science Foundation, find that most studies of charter schools "use unsophisticated methods that tell us little about causal effects.... more »
Quality Counts 2012
Ω *Maryland Ranks First for Fourth Straight Year* *Special Theme Explores American Education from a Global Perspective Grades and Highlights Reports Issued for All 50 States and D.C.* The nation and many states face continuing challenges in delivering a high-quality education to all students, according to Quality Counts 2012, the 16th edition of Education Week's annual examination of issues and challenges facing America's public schools. In addition to the in-depth package of articles on this year's theme, Quality Counts 2012 offers fresh data and analysis from the EPE Research... more »
State Reports Profiling First-Year Progress Under Race to the Top
Ω The U.S. Department of Education has released state-specific reports profiling first-year progress on comprehensive education reform under Race to the Top. The reports document reform efforts underway in Delaware, D.C., Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and Tennessee, the 12 grantees that secured Race to the Top funding in 2010 through the competition's first two phases. State Reports StateReport*Delaware*Year 1 Report [image: download files] PDF (2.35M)*District of Columbia*Year 1 Report [image: download files] PDF (... more »
National Sexuality Education Standards: Core Content and Skills, K–12
Ω The goal of the National Sexuality Education Standards: Core Content and Skills, K–12 is to provide clear, consistent and straightforward guidance on the essential minimum, core content for sexuality education that is developmentally and age-appropriate for students in grades K–12. The development of these standards is a result of an ongoing initiative, the Future of Sex Education (FoSE). Forty individuals from the fields of health education, sexuality education, public health, public policy, philanthropy and advocacy convened for a two-day meeting in December 2008 to create a st... more »
Barriers to Outdoor Activity for Children in Child Care Centers
Ω Three-fourths of preschool-age children in the United States attend child care, and many are not getting enough outdoor physical activity, which may be due in part to parental and societal values about injury prevention and kindergarten readiness. The study, “Societal Values and Policies May Curtail Preschool Children’s Physical Activity in Child Care Centers,” will be published in the February 2012 Pediatrics and published online Jan. 4. A team led by Kristen Copeland, MD, division of General and Community Pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and a Robert ... more »
‘Tiger mothers’ should tame parenting approach
Ω The Eastern view of parenting, as defined by best-selling author and self-described “tiger mother” Amy Chua, is that children should be pushed to excel at all costs. Parents needn’t worry about their happiness, she argues, only their success. But now a Michigan State University scholar is refuting that theory. In her research, Desiree Baolian Qin – who, like Chua, is a Chinese mother – found that high-achieving Chinese students were more depressed and anxious than their white counterparts. And contrary to the tiger mother philosophy, Qin said, a child’s happiness is vitally impor... more »
Digital learning: How much does it cost?
Ω The latest installment of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Creating Sound Policy for Digital Learning series investigates one of the more controversial aspects of digital learning: How much does it cost? In this paper, the Parthenon Group uses interviews with more than fifty vendors and online schooling experts to estimate today's average per-pupil cost for a variety of schooling models, traditional and online, and presents a nuanced analysis of the important variance in cost between different school designs. These ranges—from $5,100 to $7,700 for full-time virtual schools, and... more »
Measures of Effective Teaching
Ω **This report presents an in-depth discussion of the analytical methods and findings from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project’s analysis of classroom observations. A nontechnical companion report describes implications for policymakers and practitioners. Together, these two documents on classroom observations represent the second pair of publications from the MET project. In December 2010, the project released its initial analysis of measures of student perceptions and student achievement in Learning about Teaching: Initial Finding...more »
THE LONG-TERM IMPACTS OF TEACHERS
Ω TEACHER VALUE-ADDED AND STUDENT OUTCOMES IN ADULTHOOD Many policy makers advocate increasing the quality of teaching, but there is considerable debate about the best way to measure and improve teacher quality. One method is to evaluate teachers based on their impacts on students’ test scores, commonly termed the “value-added” (VA) approach. A teacher’s value-added is defined as the average test-score gain for his or her students, adjusted for differences across classrooms in student characteristics such as prior scores. School districts from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles have be... more »
CHARTER SCHOOLS CLOSURE RATE TOPS 15 PERCENT
Ω Refuting assumptions and statements by opponents and proponents alike about the state of America’s charter schools, The Center for Education Reform released today an unprecedented analysis of and data documenting the high level of accountability that marks the nation’s charter schools. The report, The State of Charter Schools: What We Know – and What We Do Not – About Performance and Accountability, finds that charter schools historically have experienced a 15 percent closure rate. The report is the first-ever national analysis regarding the number of charter schools that have cl...more »
Practical philosophy sessions offer valuable lessons
Ω Children could learn valuable lessons in moral citizenship, such as making moral judgements and informed choices, through taking part in philosophical dialogue, according to researchers at Strathclyde. A study of more than 130 primary and secondary pupils found that taking part in practical philosophy sessions improved the children’s listening skills, gave them greater respect for other people, encouraged them to consider other perspectives and ideas they may not otherwise have thought about and helped them analyse problems so that they are thought through before making decision... more »