Does Shortening the School Week Impact Student Performance?
Ω Public schools face difficult decisions on how to pare budgets. In the current financial environment, school districts employ a variety of policies to close budget gaps and stave off teacher layoffs and furloughs. An increasing number of schools are implementing four-day school weeks hoping to reduce overhead and transportation costs. The four-day-week policy requires substantial schedule changes as schools must increase the length of their school day to meet state-mandated minimum instructional hour requirements. Although some schools have indicated that this policy eases financ...more »
Teacher collaborations strengthen skills, competence, and a school's overall social capital.
Ω Students improve academically when their teachers are engaged in frequent and meaningful collaboration, according to a report in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The paper's author, Carrie R. Leana, a professor of organizations and management at the University of Pittsburgh, found that a school's social capital is "a significant predictor of student achievement gains above and beyond teacher experience or ability in the classroom. Related article Ω Ω
Do Student Outcomes Depend on Which Schools Are Closed in a Shrinking District?
Ω In the last decade, many cities around the country have needed to close schools due to declining enrollments and low achievement. School closings raise concerns about the possible negative impacts on student achievement, neighborhoods, families, and teaching staff. This study, published in Journal of Urban Economics examines an anonymous urban district that, faced with declining enrollment, chose to make student achievement a major criterion in determining which schools would be closed. The district targeted low-performing schools in its closure plan, and sought to move their stu... more »
First-Year Principals in Urban School Districts
Ω Principals new to their school face a variety of challenges that can influence their likelihood of improving their schools' performance and their likelihood of remaining the principal. Understanding the actions that principals take and the working conditions they face in the first year can inform efforts to promote school improvement and principal retention, but the research on first-year principals' experiences is limited. This report examines the actions and perceived working conditions of first-year principals, relating information on those factors to subsequent school achiev... more »
Challenges and Opportunities Facing Principals in the First Year at a School
Ω First-year principals' decisions influence school performance and their own success as school leaders. RAND conducted this study to examine first-year principals' actions and working conditions, and how those factors relate to school achievement and principal retention. RAND found that principals' use of time did not affect key outcomes but that their ability to foster teacher capacity and cohesiveness did. The study found no single strategy for principal success but suggests that a principal's effectiveness as a manager of human capital is likely to contribute to improved school ... more »
Incorporating Child Assessments into State Early Childhood Quality Improvement Initiatives
Ω This Rand Corporation study identifies five strategies for incorporating child assessments into the design, implementation, and evaluation of initiatives designed to raise the quality of care in early care and education settings such as quality rating and improvement systems. Key findings: • Promoting successful child development is the ultimate goal of initiatives to improve the quality of early care and education (ECE) programs. • There are multiple approaches to incorporating child assessments into state early childhood quality improvement initiatives, including quality rating... more »
Preschoolers Believe In the Person Doing the Pointing
Ω If you want a preschooler to get the point, point. That's a lesson that can be drawn from a new study in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. As part of their investigation of how small children know what other people know, the authors, Carolyn Palmquist and Vikram K. Jaswal of the University of Virginia, found they were able to mislead preschoolers with the simple introduction of a pointing gesture. "Children were willing to attribute knowledge to a person solely based on the gesture they used to convey the information," says P... more »
Progress of Charter Schools in South Carolina
Ω 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, “Cheating the Charters: Political and Financial Lessons from 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.” South Carolina was among the first states to pass a charter school law, in 1996; toda... more »
Professional Development: No significant effects
Ω This is a study of the impact on middle grades student achievement of a teacher professional development program. The program, Quality Teaching for English Learners (QTEL), is an approach to improving the teaching of English language learner students. The program aims to enhance the ability of teachers to work with English language learner students and increase the quality of instruction for all other students in the mainstream classroom. QTEL summer institutes consist of seven days of professional development to provide a foundation for using new tools and processes for the acade... more »
An Examination of Performance Based Teacher Evaluation Systems
Ω This study of performance-based teacher evaluation systems in five states that had implemented statewide systems as of 2010/11 finds considerable variation among them. However, all five states’ systems include observations, self- assessments, and multiple rating categories. In addition, the evaluation rubrics in each state reflect most of the teaching standards set out by the Inter-state Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium. Ω
Retirement Patterns of California Educators
Ω This study examines retirement patterns of California educators from 1995/96 to 2009/10. It finds that - the percentage of educators over age 60 doubled, - educators were more likely to retire when a school district’s local revenue decreased, - the percentage of retired educators returning to work increased. Ω
Do College-Prep Programs Improve Long-Term Outcomes?
Ω This paper analyzes the longer-run effects of a college-preparatory program implemented in inner-city schools that included payments to eleventh- and twelfth- grade students and their teachers for passing scores on Advanced Placement exams. Affected students attended college in greater numbers, were more likely to remain in college beyond their first year, more likely to earn a college degree, more likely to be employed, and earned higher wages. This is the first credible evidence that implementing college-preparatory programs in existing urban schools can improve both the long-... more »
School Principals: Estimating the Effect of Leaders on Public Sector Productivity
Ω Although much has been written about the importance of leadership in the determination of organizational success, there is little quantitative evidence due to the difficulty of separating the impact of leaders from other organizational components – particularly in the public sector. Schools provide an especially rich environment for studying the impact of public sector management, not only because of the hypothesized importance of leadership but also because of the plentiful achievement data that provide information on institutional outcomes. This paper analyzes principal value-... more »
Predicting children's language development
Ω We depend on a barrage of standardized tests to assess everything from aptitude to intelligence. But do they provide an accurate forecast when it comes to something as complex as language? A study by Diane Pesco, an assistant professor in Concordia’s Department of Education, and co-author Daniela O’Neill, published earlier this year in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, shows that the Language Use Inventory (LUI) does. Developed by O’Neill at the University of Waterloo, the LUI assesses the language of children 18 to 47 months old. In answering a series of qu... more »
I CAN Learn® : no discernible effects on math achievement for high school students.
Ω The latest High School Math report from the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) reviews the research on the pre-algebra and algebra components of I CAN Learn®, a computer software system that provides math instruction through a series of interactive lessons. The I CAN Learn® curriculum includes more than 100 self-paced lessons in which students must demonstrate mastery before they can progress to the next lesson. Teachers provide individualized instruction based on student performance. The WWC reviewed 11 studies that investigated the effects of I CAN Learn® on high school students. O... more »
Deaths triple among football players
Ω *Morning temperatures thought to play a role* Heat-related deaths among football players across the country tripled to nearly three per year between 1994 and 2009 after averaging about one per year the previous 15 years, according to an analysis of weather conditions and high school and college sports data conducted by University of Georgia researchers. The scientists built a detailed database that included the temperature, humidity and time of day, as well as the height, weight and position for 58 football players who died during practice sessions from overheating, or hyperther... more »
The Comprehensive Longitudinal Evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program: Summary of Final Reports
Ω The Comprehensive Longitudinal Evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program: Summary of Final Reports Research by the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP), based in the University of Arkansas’ Department of Education Reform, revealed a pattern of school choice results that range from neutral (no significant differences between the The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), also called the “Choice” program, and Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS)) to positive (clear benefit to Choice). Although the researchers have examined virtually every possible way that school cho...more »
Milwaukee School Voucher Program has more Students with Disabilities than Previously Reported
Ω * Study shows that 7 to 14 percent of voucher students have disabilities, as compared to 2 percent estimate by Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction * A new study, *“Special Choices: Do voucher schools serve students with disabilities?,”* 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 new research is significant in that it affords an unus... more »
Preschools Get Disadvantaged Children Ready for the Rigors of Kindergarten
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
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 »
