This Week's Education Research Report

Education Research Report:

Preschools Get Disadvantaged Children Ready for the Rigors of Kindergarten

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 16 hours ago

Ω Preschools help children prepare for the rigors of grade school—especially children who come from a minority family, a poor family, or whose parents don’t provide high-quality interactions. The results of a new study of over 1,000 identical and fraternal twins, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, confirm that preschool programs are a good idea. Of course, many children from poor families excel in school. But it’s no secret that many do not. People used to think this had to do with the lower-quality schools in poor neighborho... more »

New Report Shows Federal Program Helping Major Cities Turn Around Low-Achieving Schools

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 20 hours ago

Ω A new report by the Council of the Great City Schools finds that urban school districts mounted an unprecedented number of school turnaround efforts in the 2010-2011 school year with funds from the revamped federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program. While the nation’s big-city schools have seen significant academic gains in the past several years, there are still pockets of schools that are not responding to districtwide reforms and need special intervention. Increasingly, urban school districts are utilizing SIG funds to turn around these schools, implementing some of the t... more »

Girls' Verbal Skills Make Them Better at Arithmetic

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 23 hours ago

Ω While boys generally do better than girls in science and math, some studies have found that girls do better in arithmetic. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that the advantage comes from girls' superior verbal skills. "People have always thought that males' advantage is in math and spatial skills, and girls' advantage is in language," says Xinlin Zhou of Beijing Normal University, who cowrote the study with Wei Wei, Hao Lu, Hui Zhao, and Qi Dong of Beijing Normal University and Chuansheng Chen of the Univ... more »

California Charter Schools Don’t Narrow Black-White Achievement Gap

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago

Ω In a recent report, the California Charter School Association claims that the state’s charter schools are narrowing the Black-White achievement gap. Not so, explains Arizona State University professor David Garcia, an expert on charter school research, in a review of the CCSA study conducted for the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado Boulder. Garcia finds flaws in the report’s methods, and he explains that the gap is “largely unaffected by charter enrollment.” Further, Garcia pours cold water on the report’s claim that innovative practices are a... more »

Incentive programs that merely pay teachers for student test scores produce limited results

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago

Ω *Other incentives are more popular with teachers, produce better outcomes and can be used to spread expertise to colleagues. * 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... more »

Report on School Leadership is Poorly Researched and Misleading, says New Review

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago

Ω A review by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) of a recent report that proposes a range of state policies designed to make school principals more effective finds that the report ignores existing research on the subject, lacks evidence for the approaches it advocates, and sidesteps both state and professional policies that directly address the sorts of problems it purports to remedy. The Center for American Progress (CAP) report, Gateways to the Principalship: State Power to Improve the Quality of School Leaders, was reviewed for NEPC’s Think Twice think tank review proje... more »

Overpaid Teachers Report from Heritage/AEI is Based on Bad Stats, Groundless Assumptions

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago

Ω A recent report from the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute, Assessing the Compensation of Public School Teachers, claims public school teachers are paid 52 percent more than fair market rates. While attention-grabbing, this contention is based on a faulty assessment that relies on “an aggregation of spurious claims” to make its case, according to a labor market expert. The Heritage/AEI report was authored by Jason Richwine and Andrew Biggs. It pits the wages and benefits of teachers against those of similarly educated and experienced private-sector workers and... more »

Looking Again at Long-Term Teacher Effects and ‘Value-Added’

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago

Ω Can short-term measures of teacher effects indicate long-term effectiveness? A recent, highly publicized report, The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood, concludes that elementary school teachers’ so-called value-added effects on their students show up years later in those students’ teenage pregnancy rates, college success and career earnings. A new review of that study, conducted for the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), found that while the study is impressive in many ways, more evidence is needed to prove a key part of it... more »

Can Charters and Equity Goals Coexist?

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago

Ω *NEPC reports offer guidance and model legislation to ensure charter schools promote equity and not inequality* While our society is more diverse than ever before, schools are more segregated today than they were 30 years ago. School choice policies that allow children to enroll in schools outside of their neighborhood have the potential to reduce segregation and many of the inequities that flow from that segregation. Yet some of the nation’s most segregated K-12 schools are public charter schools. A new report from the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), Chartering Equity... more »

Review of state policies on teacher induction

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago

Ω In this report New Teacher Center (NTC) summarizes existing policies for each state, related to 10 key criteria most critical to the provision of universal, high-quality induction and mentoring support for beginning educators. The latest evidence suggests that beginning teachers are more common in our schools today than at any other time in at least the last twenty years. In 1987-88 the typical teacher had 15 years of experience; by 2007-08, the typical teacher had but one year in the classroom. As policymakers work on strengthening accountability and expectations for teachers, t... more »

Attending middle school increases risk of dropping out of high school

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 day ago

Ω * 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.* A new study of statewide data from all Florida public schools, “The Middle School Plunge: Achievement tumbles when young students change 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 suc... more »

A Review of Gifted and Talented Education in the United States

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 2 days ago

Ω Gifted and talented education programs provide children who have been identified as having high ability in some intellectual or creative characteristic with a supplemental curriculum to their traditional coursework. Despite the popularity of these programs, the literature lacks a comprehensive review of gifted education in the United States. This policy brief aims to fill this void by providing national and state-level statistics on participation rates, funding appropriations, and policies on gifted education. Since many of the operational details of these programs are determine... more »

When the Bell Tolls: The Effects of School Starting Times on Academic Achievement

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 2 days ago

Ω A number of high schools across the United States have moved to later bell times on the belief that their previous bell times were too early for the “biological clocks” of adolescents. In this article the author asks whether doing so improves academic performance. The author first focused on the Twin Cities metropolitan area, where Minneapolis and several suburban districts have made large policy changes but St. Paul and other suburban districts have maintained early schedules. He used individual-level ACT data on all individuals from public high schools in this region who took ... more »

Do More Effective Teachers Earn More Outside the Classroom?

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 2 days ago

Ω The authors of this study examined earnings records for more than 130,000 classroom teachers employed by Florida public schools between the 2001–2 and 2006–7 school years, roughly 35,000 of whom left the classroom during that time. A majority of those leaving the classroom remained employed by public school districts. Among teachers in grades 4–8 leaving for other industries, a 1 standard deviation increase in estimated value added to student math and reading achievement is associated with 6–8 percent higher earnings outside teaching. The relationship between effectiveness and ea... more »

Can you recognize an effective teacher when you recruit one?

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 2 days ago

Ω * Study reveals that districts could benefit from collecting a broader set of information on teacher candidates* Research on the relationship between teacher characteristics and teacher effectiveness has been underway for over a century, yet little progress has been made in linking teacher quality with factors observable at the time of hire. A recent study suggests that one can predict economically significant variation in teacher effectiveness using a broadened set of information on new recruits. The researchers administered an in-depth survey to new math teachers in New York Ci... more »

Decline in natural world, wild animals in illustrated books for kids

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 2 days ago

Ω Was your favorite childhood book crawling with wild animals and set in places like jungles or deep forests? Or did it take place inside a house or in a city, with few if any untamed creatures in sight? A new study has found that over the last several decades, nature has increasingly taken a back seat in award-winning children's picture books -- and suggests this sobering trend is consistent with a growing isolation from the natural world. A group of researchers led by University of Nebraska-Lincoln sociology professor emeritus J. Allen Williams Jr. reviewed the winners and honor ... more »

Indicators of School Crime and Safety, 2011

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 2 days ago

Ω *Indicators of School Crime and Safety, 2011* examines crime occurring in school as well as on the way to and from school and presents data on crime and safety at school from the perspectives of students, teachers, and principals, drawing from an array of sources. A joint effort by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and National Center for Education Statistics, this annual report examines crime occurring in school as well as on the way to and from school. It provides the most current detailed statistical information to inform the Nation on the nature of crime in schools. This repor... more »

My Teaching Partner-Secondary Studied

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 2 days ago

Ω My Teaching Partner-Secondary (MTP-S) is the focus of a newly released What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) quick review. The study, An Interaction-Based Approach to Enhancing Secondary School Instruction and Student Achievement, examined the effects of the MTP-S program on student achievement. Researchers compared test scores of students taught by teachers randomly assigned to receive MTP-S with those of students taught by teachers who received regular in-service training. The study analyzed data from two student cohorts. The first cohort included about 1,300 students whose test sc...more »

High-school dropouts falling further behind

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 3 days ago

Ω Complete article "While the U.S. job market is showing signs of improvement, one sizable group of workers has been falling further behind: high-school dropouts. Some 1.8 million more college graduates have found work since January 2010, when the recovery began producing jobs, but about 128,000 high-school dropouts lost work in the same period, according to the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics. Less than 40% of the 25 million Americans over age 25 who lack a high-school diploma are employed. Those who are working don't earn much. High-school dropouts earn about $23,... more »

Evaluation of the Effectiveness of the Alabama STEM Initiative

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 3 days ago

Ω Full report Partly motivated by the 1996 National Assessment of Educational Progress scores, which were below the national average for Alabama’s grade 4-8 students in mathematics and grade 8 students in science, the Alabama State Department of Education (ALSDE) developed a statewide initiative to improve mathematics and science teaching and student achievement in kindergarten through grade 12 (K-12). The Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI) is a two-year intervention intended to better align classroom practices with national and statewide teaching standards—an... more »

Research highlights national, international 'excellence gaps' in education

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 4 days ago

Ω News media and think tanks often call attention to achievement gaps in education, highlighting test-score differences between racial, ethnic and socio-economic groups. A related issue that gets little attention is the "excellence gap," the fact that minority and underprivileged students make up a disproportionately small share of top scorers on national and international assessments. Research from scholars at Indiana University and Michigan State University -- presented today, Feb. 18, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science -- provides ne... more »

No kids in public school? You still benefit

Jonathan Kantrowitz at Education Research Report - 1 week ago

Ω Quality public schools benefit everyone – including those without school-aged children – and therefore everyone should play a role in maintaining them, according to a study by two Michigan State University scholars. Senior citizens and others who don’t have children in school often argue they should be exempt from paying school taxes because they don’t benefit from the schools. But that’s not true, argues Zachary Neal, sociologist and lead researcher on the study, which appears in the Journal of Urban Affairs. “Those without kids in school are getting just as much benefit from pu... more »