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 »
Blogging may help teens dealing with social distress
Ω Blogging may have psychological benefits for teens suffering from social anxiety, improving their self-esteem and helping them relate better to their friends, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association. "Research has shown that writing a personal diary and other forms of expressive writing are a great way to release emotional distress and just feel better," said the study's lead author, Meyran Boniel-Nissim, PhD, of the University of Haifa, Israel. "Teens are online anyway, so blogging enables free expression and easy communication with others."... more »
Boosting your schooling may enhance your IQ
Ω Does improving your educa t ion al so boost your in telligence? Yes—to a greater degree than widely understood, a new study suggests. Although some scholars maintain that education has little effect on intelligence quotient (IQ) scores, others claim that IQ scores are indeed malleable, primarily through intervention in early childhood. The causal effect of education on IQ at later ages is often difficult to uncover because analyses based on observational data are plagued by problems of reverse causation and self-selection into further education. The authors exploit a reform that ... more »
For Kids with Near-Vision Disorder, Treatment Reduces Problems at School
Ω After Effective Treatment for Convergence Insufficiency, Academic Behavior Problems Decrease For children with convergence insufficiency (CI)—who have difficulty focusing on objects close up—effective treatments can help to reduce problems at school, reports a study in the January issue of Optometry and Vision Science, official journal of the American Academy of Optometry. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. "A successful or improved outcome after CI treatment was associated with a reduction in the frequency of adverse aca... more »
KEY TO SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT: READING, WRITING, ARITHMETIC……. AND CHARACTER?
Ω A study of 20 elementary schools in Hawaii has found that a focused program to build social, emotional and character skills resulted in significantly improved overall quality of education, as evaluated by teachers, parents and students. The concept includes organized activities to build character that go beyond more traditional rules or policies to control or punish problem behaviors. But it still takes only about an hour a week away from traditional education, and previous research has documented much lower numbers of suspensions, lower absenteeism, and better reading and math s... more »
Physical Activity and Performance at School
Ω A Systematic Review of the Literature Including a Methodological Quality Assessment Amika Singh, PhD; Léonie Uijtdewilligen, MSc; Jos W. R. Twisk, PhD; Willem van Mechelen, PhD, MD; Mai J. M. Chinapaw, PhD Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2012;166(1):49-55. doi:10.1001/archpediatrics.2011.716 A systematic review of previous studies suggests that there may be a positive relationship between physical activity and the academic performance of children, according to a report in the January issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. Amika Singh... more »
Young children understand the benefits of positive thinking
Ω Even kindergarteners know that thinking positively will make you feel better. And parents' own feelings of optimism may play a role in whether their children understand how thoughts influence emotions. Those are the findings of a new study by researchers at Jacksonville University and the University of California, Davis. The study appears in the journal Child Development. In the study, researchers looked at 90 mostly White children ages 5 to 10. The children listened to six illustrated stories in which two characters feel the same emotion after experiencing something positive (ge... more »
School absenteeism, mental health problems linked
Ω School absenteeism is a significant problem, and students who are frequently absent from school more often have symptoms of psychiatric disorders. A new longitudinal study of more than 17,000 youths has found that frequently missing school is associated with a higher prevalence of mental health problems later on in adolescence, and that mental health problems during one year also predict missing additional school days in the following year for students in middle and high school. The study, published in the journal Child Development, was conducted by researchers at the University ... more »
Striving for Student Success: Shared Accountability
Ω The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act ushered in a new era of accountability in American education: for the first time, schools were held responsible for improving student achievement across all demographic groups. Yet there has always been a concern about holding only the schools themselves accountable for student success — especially given the profound impact of poverty on student achievement. Instead of putting the entire achievement burden on schools, what would it look like to hold a whole community responsible for long-range student outcomes? How can accountability for youth ... more »
A Plan for Transforming Indianapolis Public Schools
Ω The Mind Trust has released what it calls “a bold plan for transforming Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) ” The plan would dramatically shrink and restructure the central administration, send about $200 million more a year to schools without raising taxes, provide universal prekindergarten to all 4-year-olds, give teachers and principals more autonomy in exchange for more accountability, and provide parents with more quality school choices. It is the boldest urban reform plan in the United States. In developing its plan, The Mind Trust engaged local and national experts to analy... more »
CT Early Care/Education: Poor Coordination & Inadequate Funding Limit Access
Ω Connecticut Early Care and Education Progress Report, 2011 Appendix Following Connecticut’s loss in the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge funding competition and the Governor’s call this week for education reform legislation, a report on the state’s early care and education system finds that a lack of central coordination of early childhood programs and stagnant or declining funding levels are leaving many children in need of early care unserved. The organization called on state legislators and Governor Malloy, who has identified increasing access to preschool as a priorit... more »
Abnormality in auditory processing underlies dyslexia
Ω People with dyslexia often struggle with the ability to accurately decode and identify what they read. Although disrupted processing of speech sounds has been implicated in the underlying pathology of dyslexia, the basis of this disruption and how it interferes with reading comprehension has not been fully explained. Now, new research published by Cell Press in the December 22 issue of the journal Neuron finds that a specific abnormality in the processing of auditory signals accounts for the main symptoms of dyslexia. "It is widely agreed that for a majority of dyslexic children,... more »
