Brookings: Topics - K-12 Education

How Blogs, Social Media, and Video Games Improve Education

Darrell M. West — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Executive Summary

The appearance of collaboration tools such as blogs, wikis, social media, and video games has altered the way individuals and organizations relate to one another.[i] There is no longer any need to wait on professionals to share material and report on new developments. Today, people communicate directly in an unmediated and unfiltered manner.

These developments have lowered information costs and altered the dynamics of information dissemination. On some platforms, communications costs have dropped virtually to zero. No longer are communications one way or based on organizational hierarchies. Rather, organizational expression moves in many directions at once and interacts with a wide range of personnel involved in the process.[ii]

The emergence of new platforms has been particularly dramatic in classroom transmissions. As Stanford University communications professor Howard Rheingold notes, “Up until now, ‘technology’ has been an authority delivering the lecture which [students] memorized. If there is discussion, it’s mostly about performing for the teacher. Is it possible to make that more of a peer-to-peer activity? Blogs and forums and wikis enable that. So a lot of this is not new, but it’s easier to do [and] the barriers to participation are lower now.”[iii]

Alan Daly, at the University of California at San Diego, predicts that education innovation “will shift away from experts and capacity building to focus on networks. The budget crisis will continue indefinitely. We have to start thinking about the expertise that resides in the system, and we have to be connected in order to make use of it.”[iv] Daly believes education “is moving away from large-scale prescriptive approaches to more individualized, tailored, differentiated approaches.”

Yet despite the wealth of communications opportunities offered by these changes, their impact on learning and instruction is still not clear. How do these technologies affect students, teachers, parents, and administrators? Do they enable new approaches to learning and help students master substantive information? In what ways have schools incorporated electronic communications in the learning process and messages to external audiences?

[i]Jana Hrdinova and Natalie Helbig, “Designing Social Media Policy for Government,” Issues in Technology Innovation 4 Brookings, (January 2011).

[ii]Darrell West, Digital Schools: How Technology Can Transform Education, Brookings Institution Press, 2012.

[iii]Howard Rheingold, phone interview by author, July 22, 2011.

[iv]Alan Daly, phone interview by author, April 19, 2011.

Downloads

Download the Paper

Authors

Darrell M. West

Image Source: Jeffrey Coolidge

Choosing Blindly: Instructional Materials, Teacher Effectiveness, and the Common Core

Matthew M. Chingos and Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Evidence shows that instructional materials have large effects on student learning. However, little research exists on the effectiveness of most instructional materials, and very little systematic information has been collected on which materials are being used in which schools.

In this new report, Russ Whitehurst and Fellow Matthew Chingos argue that this problem can be efficiently and easily fixed by states, with support from the federal government, non-profit organizations, and private philanthropy. Here are highlights from their recommendations:

State education agencies should collect data from districts on the instructional materials in use in their schools. The collection of comprehensive and accurate data will require states to survey districts, and in some cases districts may need to survey their schools. In the near term, many states can quickly glean useful information by requesting purchasing reports from their districts’ finance offices. Building on these initial efforts, states should look to initiate future efforts to survey teachers, albeit on a more limited basis.
The federal government’s National Center for Education Statistics should aid states in this effort by developing data collection templates for them to use through its Common Education Data Standards (CEDS), and providing guidance on how states can use and share data on instructional materials.
Organizations with an interest in education reform should support this effort. For example, the National Governors Association (NGA) and Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) have put their reputations on the line by sponsoring the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Research based on current and past state standards indicates that this initiative is unlikely to have much of an effect on student achievement in and of itself.
The Data Quality Campaign (DQC) should use its influence in this area to encourage states to collect information on the use of instructional materials and support them in their efforts to gather these data. The DQC should also help states use the data once they have been collected.
Philanthropic organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation for Education could have a major impact by providing the start-up funding needed to collect data on instructional materials and support the research that would put those data to use.

Downloads

Download the Report

Authors

Image Source: Tetra Images

Education Reform Experiences on the Ground: Implementing a Learning Agenda

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 10:30:00 -0400

Event Information

April 2, 2012
10:30 AM - 12:00 PM EDT

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

For the first time, the city of Buenos Aires is systematically measuring learning by implementing a district-wide assessment of all students and teachers, drawing heavily from the education reform efforts underway in the District of Columbia. Requiring everyone to participate in teaching and learning evaluations, city officials in Buenos Aires plan to use the assessment results to help inform their ongoing education reforms.

On April 2, the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at Brookings hosted a discussion on what happens when education reform policies are applied on the ground. Maria de las Mercedes Miguel, director general of education planning for the city of Buenos Aires, discussed the opportunities and challenges of implementing new policies aimed at measuring learning outcomes in order to make smart investments in education. Sir Michael Barber, chief education advisor at Pearson International and author of Deliverology 101: A Field Guide for Educational Leaders (Corwin Press, 2010), and Carey Wright, D.C. Public Schools’ chief academic advisor, offered their perspectives on implementing a learning-focused reform agenda, comparing experiences and lessons from Washington, D.C. with those of Buenos Aires. Brookings Senior Fellow Rebecca Winthrop, director of CUE, moderated the discussion.

After the program, participants took audience questions.

Audio

0402 learningagendainlatinamerica

Transcript

Event Materials

Participants

Moderator

Panelists

Sir Michael Barber

Chief Education Advisor
Pearson International

Maria de las Mercedes Miguel

Director General of Education Planning
City of Buenos Aires, Argentina

Carey Wright

Chief Academic Advisor
District of Columbia Public Schools

The 2012 Brown Center Report on American Education

Tom Loveless — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

The 2012 Brown Center Report on American Education distills the results of studies to examine the state of education in the United States. In particular, the report focuses on education policy, student learning measures, trends on achievement test scores and education reform outcomes.

Highlights from three of the studies featured in the report are:

Predicting the Effect of the Common Core State Standards on Student Achievement: The Common Core will have little to no effect on student achievement. The quality or rigor of state standards has been unrelated to state NAEP scores, Loveless finds. Moreover, most of the variation in NAEP scores lies within states, not between them. Whatever impact standards alone can have on reducing within-state differences should have already been felt by the standards that all states have had since 2003.

Measuring Achievement Gaps on NAEP: The Main NAEP consistently reports larger SES achievement gaps than the Long Term Trend NAEP. The study examines gaps between students who qualify for free and reduced lunch and those who do not; black and white students; Hispanic and white students; and English language learners and students who are not English language learners.
Misinterpreting International Test Scores: Educators & policymakers often misinterpret International Test Scores in three ways: 1) Dubious Conclusions of Causality, 2) The Problem With Rankings, and 3) The A+ Country Fallacy. The errors are usually committed by advocates of a particular policy position who selectively use data to support an argument, argues Loveless.

Tom Loveless discusses the report in this video:

Downloads

0216_brown_education_loveless

Authors

Tom Loveless

Image Source: Catherine Ledner

Teaching America: The Case for Civic Education

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 09:30:00 -0500

Event Information

January 9, 2012
9:30 AM - 11:30 AM EST

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

Congressional approval ratings stand at an all-time low and grassroots movements such as Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party are mobilizing citizens to engage in the democratic process and push for change. But do America's young people have the tools they need to assess candidates for public office and influence the policy process? The statistics say no. According to a new book edited by David Feith, young Americans know little about the Bill of Rights, the democratic process, or the civil rights movement. Three of every four high school seniors aren’t proficient in civics, nine of ten aren't proficient in U.S. history, and the problem is aggravated by a lack of civic education at the university level.

On January 9, Brookings hosted a discussion of Teaching America: The Case for Civic Education (Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2011). Contributing authors laid out their proposals for strengthening civic education in a discussion moderated by Brookings Senior Fellow William Galston. This event is part of the Governing Ideas series intended to broaden the discussion of governance issues through forums on history, culture, legal norms and practices, values and religion.

After the program, panelists took audience questions.

Participants

Moderator

Panelists

David Feith

Chairman, Civic Education Initiative
Assistant Editorial Features Editor, The Wall Street Journal

John Bridgeland

CEO & President
Civic Enterprises, LLC

Seth Andrew

Founder and Superintendent
Democracy Prep Public Schools

Peter Levine

Director, CIRCLE
Research Director, Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service, Tufts University

Adm. Michael Ratliff

President
Jack Miller Center

Tackling the Challenges of Secondary Education

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 09:00:00 -0500

Event Information

December 6, 2011
9:00 AM - 11:00 AM EST

Root Room
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
1779 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

Post-primary learning opportunities are essential for combating poverty and creating economic mobility, making secondary education the next great challenge for global education. The demand for secondary education around the world has grown as more children enter and progress through primary school. Additionally, secondary education links primary school to higher education, and connects school systems to labor markets. However, despite global progress in secondary enrollment, both access and quality remain major concerns.

On December 6, the Center for Universal Education at Brookings hosted a discussion on improving youth learning opportunities and outcomes, and the priority of secondary education in the global development agenda. Albert Motivans of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics provided an overview of the 2011 Global Education Digest: A Focus on Secondary Education. Sir John Daniel, president and CEO of Commonwealth Learning, and Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Kevin Watkins discussed the need to ensure education equity, meet the growing demand for qualified teachers, and solve financing challenges. Kavitha Cardoza, a senior reporter with WAMU 88.5 who covers education issues throughout the Washington, DC Metropolitan area, moderated the discussion.

After the discussion, participants took audience questions.

Audio

Tackling the Challenges of Secondary Education

Transcript

Event Materials

Participants

Moderator

Kavitha Cardoza

Senior Reporter, WAMU 88.5

Panelists

Albert Motivans

Head, Education Indicators and Data Analysis, UNESCO Institute for Statistics

Sir John Daniel

President and Chief Executive Officer, Commonwealth of Learning

Owen Ozier

Economist, Development Economics Research Group
The World Bank

School Choice and Education Reform

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:30:00 -0500

Event Information

November 30, 2011
10:30 AM - 12:00 PM EST

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

Large numbers of parents choose where their children are educated by moving to a school district or neighborhood that gives them access to good public schools, but school selection through residential choice is not an option for parents who are poor or unable to relocate. These parents are forced to take whatever is available to them through their local school district, and the schools that serve them do not have to worry about competition. While some districts are satisfied with this status quo, others have embraced policies that make school choice widely available and expose schools to the consequences of their popularity.

On November 30, the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings hosted a discussion exploring the critical role of school choice in the future of education reform. Senior Fellow and Brown Center Director Russ Whitehurst previewed the Education Choice and Competition Index – an interactive web application that will score large school districts based on thirteen categories of policy and practice – and announced the Index’s initial rankings of the 25 largest school districts in America.

Following his remarks, Joel Klein, the executive vice president of News Corporation and the former New York City Schools chancellor, delivered a keynote address offering his reflections on the successes and challenges surrounding the expansion of public school choice in New York City.

After the program, speakers took audience questions.

Video

Human Rights Issues will not Trump U.S.-China Dialogue

Audio

School Choice and Education Reform

Participants

Panelists

Joel Klein

Executive Vice President, CEO, Education Division, News Corporation
Former New York City Schools Chancellor

The Education Choice and Competition Index: Background and Results 2011

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Editor’s Note: Exploring the critical role of school choice in the future of education reform, Grover (Russ) Whitehurst introduces the Education Choice and Competition Index (ECCI), an interactive web application that scores large school districts based on thirteen categories of policy and practice. The intent of the ECCI is to create public awareness of the differences among districts in their support of school choice, provide a framework for efforts to improve choice and competition, and recognize leaders among school districts in the design and implementation of choice and competition systems.

Access the interactive web application »

INTRODUCTION

Within the last 15 years, there have been notable increases in avenues for school choice, including the ability of parents to choose a regular public school other than their assigned school, charter schools, virtual schools, and private schools via voucher or scholarship programs funded through tax credits.

As noted in a previous report by the Brown Center, Expanding Choice in Elementary and Secondary Education, education choice exercises a powerful pull on parents of school children: a quarter of parents of school-aged children report that they moved to their current neighborhood for the school. Another 11 percent of families choose to pay for their children to attend private schools. Charter schools and homeschooling account together for another 6 percent. Fifteen percent of school-aged children attend parent-selected public schools (i.e., schools to which the parents apply for their child’s enrollment). Thus more than 50 percent of parents of school-aged children have engaged in some form of school choice, albeit primarily in the form of residential choice and private school tuition: two socially inequitable means of determining where a child attends school. There is little doubt based on the long waiting lists for popular public schools of choice that many more parents wish to exercise choice than are currently able to do so, and schools of choice consistently generate more positive evaluations from parents than assigned schools.

Further, a number of studies indicate that public schools tend to improve when they are exposed to choice and competition. That poor families are least likely to be able to exercise choice means that the school districts that serve those families are least subject to competitive pressure and least likely to change.

Barriers to choice are typically imposed bureaucratically and legislatively, e.g., through charter school caps, restricting public school enrollment to the immediate neighborhood of a family’s residence, and allowing school districts to determine whether virtual education courses should be funded. But these same bureaucratic and legislation mechanisms can also be levers for expanding choice, e.g., having school funding follow children, allowing district-wide open enrollment in public schools, permitting charter expansion, funding virtual courses.

Expanding school choice and competition is desirable not only because parents want to exercise choice and schools respond to competitive pressure, although those are compelling reasons. It also provides an alternative to top-down efforts to improve schools through regulation. Often education reform is seen as selecting between two opposing paths, centralizing control in Washington though efforts such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top or devolving recently accumulated federal power to states and local school districts. Both courses of action have drawbacks.

Top-down federal control imposes significant regulatory burdens on schools, is inflexible and far removed from the consumers and providers of education services, and has to date had only relatively small effects on raising student achievement. Local and state control, in contrast, is often undermined by special interests that control school bureaucracies. The ability of taxpaying parents of school-aged children to leave school districts with which they are dissatisfied is severely constrained for the low-income and otherwise immobile populations that are most likely to find themselves served by low-performing schools. Introducing substantial school choice and competition within the boundaries of public school districts provides an alternative to both increasing top-down control from Washington and a return to the status quo of the past century in which local and state school bureaucracies carried out their missions with little accountability either to the federal government or taxpayers and parents.

We believe that progress in expanding choice can come from exposing differences among school districts in the degree to which they provide parents with choice and generate competition among schools. Accordingly we have developed an Education Choice and Competition Index (ECCI) that provides an informative and consumer-relevant measure of the degree of choice and competition within the geographical boundaries of large school districts. Information from the ECCI is conveyed through a public website.

Past measures of K-12 choice and competition have been designed as research instruments and focused on the quantity of competition experienced by individual schools as measured by their geographical proximity to schools that compete for the same population of students (e.g., Belfield & Levin, 2002; Figlio & Hart, 2010). The measures have not attempted to gauge the quality of competition on dimensions such as the availability of choice, the degree to which parental choices are satisfied, the financial consequences for traditional public schools of loss of enrollment, the quality of information provided to parents, or the availability of transportation options. Nor have the measures attempted to index quality of choice and competition at the district level. Finally, they have neither been designed for public use nor motivated by the goal of increasing public demand for more choice and competition within school districts. The ECCI fills these gaps.

INDEX FRAMEWORK

The framework for the ECCI is derived from our previous report, Expanding Choice, in which a key recommendation from our expert panel is that:

“Whatever the education delivery design the public has chosen to put in place in a particular school jurisdiction, parents should be afforded the maximum degree of choice, provided with valid information on the performance of the education programs that are available, and have their preferences for education programs reflected in the funding of those programs.”

The ECCI takes this foundational recommendation and translates it into a scoring rubric for school districts based on thirteen categories of policy and practice that our Task Group has identified as important to the availability and quality of choice and to the extent to which choice creates competition among providers of education services. The data on which districts are scored are derived from best available sources. Federal statistics from the National Center for Education Statistics are preferred. For categories for which no federal data are available information is derived from school district websites or interviews with district staff. The following sections briefly describe these categories and why they are important. A detailed scoring guide is also available.

Availability of Alternative Schools

A desirable component of school competition is the presence of options in addition to traditional public schools. In our framework, alternative schools can be of several types, including charter schools, magnet schools, denominational schools, and affordable private schools. While the availability of choice among traditional public schools within a school district can be a positive influence on competition in and of itself, school district bureaucracies often have, by intent, a homogenizing influence on schools within their purview. Curriculum, the teacher workforce, levels of parent involvement, length of school day and year, school autonomy, quality of facilities, and per pupil budgets are similar across regular public schools within most school districts. In contrast, alternative schools vary considerably on these dimensions. In economic theory, competition produces efficient markets. Competition on the features of schooling can only occur to the extent that there is both choice of schools and variation in features – thus our inclusion of the availability of alternative schools as a major category[1] in our index since such schools create variation in features.

Policies on Virtual Education

Whereas most forms of school choice are geographically bound and thus carry significant time and transportation burdens if families do not wish to send their child to their neighborhood school, virtual education (schooling delivered through the web) has the advantage of being able to expand choice for everyone and the potential to lower costs and increase effectiveness to boot. But under current K-12 models of virtual education, a state or, more typically, the local school district is able to determine whether the virtual schooling meets its standards and is acceptable as a credit towards graduation. At the local district level, this places the bureaucracy that may be most disrupted by the introduction of virtual education in the position of gatekeeper. These same local self-interests can easily manifest themselves at the state level through routine political processes. In this context, we think it is particularly important for the expansion of choice and competition that school districts have policies that allow students to enroll in virtual courses that count towards graduation or matriculation without extra costs to families, and that they have followed through on these policies as indicated by reasonable levels of student participation.

Funding Follows Students

In our framework, a primary driver of competition among schools is the loss or gain of funding that comes from changes in enrollment. A school that is unpopular with students and losing enrollment should lose funding. Likewise, a popular school should gain funding as it attracts more students. But in many school districts a school with declining enrollment may actually gain resources in the form of smaller class sizes and fewer administrative burdens whereas a popular school may be bursting at the seams and under-resourced. The competitive effects of school choice cannot be realized in a system in which schools that lose students win and schools that gain students lose. Yet, that is the situation in many school districts that nominally provide some degree of choice. Accordingly, we score districts on whether they have an explicit student-based funding formula and the proportion of their total budget that is allocated to schools based on that formula.

Restructuring or Closing Unpopular Schools

The prospect of closure or restructuring of an unpopular school is, along with student-based funding, an anchor of choice-based competition. Changes in student-based funding may not be immediately obvious or consequential to staff, whereas the prospect that the school will be closed or restructured if it continues to decline in popularity is hard to ignore. We score districts on whether they have a published policy citing low or declining enrollment due to parental choice as a reason for closing or restructuring schools and whether they have a history of actually closing schools on that basis.

Assignment Mechanism

Our framework places considerable emphasis on the processes by which students are assigned to schools, treating it as a major category for evaluating choice and competition. The antithesis of choice is an assignment mechanism based on residence, with little or no chance of parents being able to enroll their child in a school other than the one in their neighborhood. In contrast, the paragon of assignment systems is one in which students are assigned to schools through an application process in which parents express their preferences and those preferences are maximized. We score districts based on where they stand with respect to these two poles.

Application

Among school districts in which parents can choose among regular public schools and/or charter schools, some have different applications for different schools, including in some cases different timetables. In contrast, the ideal process has a common application for all public schools within a district’s boundaries, including charter schools. There are variations between these extremes that are captured in our scoring rules. It is difficult for the parent to choose the school she really prefers for her child, and impossible for a district to implement an assignment mechanism that maximizes parental preference, if individual schools have their own application processes and timetables. In such situations, which bear a resemblance to applying to colleges under early-decision rules, only the most committed and informed parents can navigate the system, create multiple applications for their child, and deal with possible bird-in-the-hand conflicts in accepting an admission offer that has a timetable for a decision in advance of other admission offers being due. We consider a unified application process to be a major category for evaluating choice and competition.

Comparable Standards and Assessments

Another feature of an ideal choice system is that all schools supported with public funds are subject to comparable standards and assessment regimens. Common standards and assessments provide transparency for choice and allow schools to be compared on a common metric. Public schools have to comply with this prescription at least in regard to the requirements for standardized testing under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. But private and denominational schools that receive public funds through voucher and tax-deductible scholarships do not. In our framework, parents should be able to shop for schools based at least in part on student outcomes. They cannot comparison-shop across the public and private sectors unless there are comparable assessments and public reporting of results. Of course, public school districts cannot impose reporting requirements on private and denominational schools within their geographical borders. However, states could as a condition of receiving taxpayer funding to support student tuition.

Gain Scores

Ideally, parents will choose schools based on their performance in raising student achievement not just the absolute outcomes that students achieve. If parental choice of schools is based primarily on the latter, then schools that serve populations of advantaged parents are nearly always going to look better and be preferred. That is why we believe the information presented to parents as a basis for judging school performance should include student achievement gains based on longitudinal data on academic growth of individual students. This measure will make it more probable that parents will choose schools that are more likely to boost the achievement of their children, and will provide a basis for competition among schools on the dimension of the quality of teaching and learning.

Accessible Online Information

The quality of information to support school choice is as much a function of how it is presented to parents as its substance. Information that is difficult to obtain, confusingly presented, or that doesn’t permit easy comparisons among schools interferes with the choice process and promotes choices that do not accurately reflect the parents’ intent. We believe that information about the choice process and school performance data should be easily accessible on a district website, presented clearly, permit side-by-side comparisons of schools, and be sufficiently complete that there isn’t a population of “in the know” parents with a clear advantage in making an informed choice of schools.

Additional Performance Data

Currently the data on school performance that most school districts make available to the public is limited to what fulfills the federal reporting requirements under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which is essentially the proportion of children meeting achievement targets at each grade, disaggregated by student demographic characteristics such as race. This information is useful but falls far short of what parents need and would like to know about schools before they make a choice. Best practice for districts includes the provision of additional information on such things as student and teacher absentee rates, measures of parental satisfaction, and course offerings. Also important in a system of open enrollment is information on school popularity as revealed through the ratio of applications to slots. Publishing popularity scores on schools in districts that have open enrollment plans could, we believe, have a significant influence on school leaders at both the building and district levels. Who wants to be the principal of the least popular school in the district? Who wants to be the district superintendent who continues to fund schools that are manifestly unpopular with parents? And of course it can be a significant boon to parents who are trying to determine what is frequently only available by word of mouth.

Understandable Performance Data

Performance data is only useful to parents if it is understandable. Ideally, performance data should be available with text explanations providing parents enough information to interpret the data. The data should also allow for side-by-side comparisons of schools. Performance data that is presented in graphical or tabular form with minimal or confusing text explanations is hardly better for parents than no performance data at all.

Transportation

If a student is physically unable to get to a school of choice there is no meaningful choice except through the vehicle of virtual education. An ideal choice system is one in which students are provided transportation to any school of their choosing within district borders on the same terms as for the neighborhood school. Otherwise stated, if students qualify for busing if they live more than one mile from a traditional public school, they should qualify for busing to a school of choice that is more than one mile from their residence.

School Quality

School choice is a sham if all schools are low performing. In that scenario little competition is likely to result. Why would a parent want to get up early to get her child to a more distant school if that school is no better than the neighborhood school? Thus the ECCI captures information of the average school quality within districts.

FIRST YEAR RESULTS

The 2011 version of the ECCI includes overall and category scores for the 25 largest school districts in the U.S. We assign letter grades to districts based on their overall scores to provide an easily graspable sense of the degree to which districts meet the ideals on which the scoring framework is based. Subsequent versions of the ECCI will expand to include at least the largest 100 school districts. All the results from the ECCI are available online. The ECCI website allows sorting of districts on their overall scores as well as on each of the 13 categories that contribute to the summary assessment. It provides detailed results in each category. And it allows side by side comparisons of districts. Here we describe some highlights.

The high score overall goes to New York City, with Chicago in second place. Both received letter grades of B. The low score goes to Orange County, Florida, which received a grade of D. New York performed particularly well in its assignment mechanism, its provision of relevant performance data, and its policies and practices for restructuring or closing unpopular schools. Chicago, in contrast to New York, has more alternative schools, a greater proportion of school funding that is student-based, and superior web-based information and displays to support school choice. If the best characteristics of Chicago were transferred to New York and vice versa, both would receive letter grades of A.

Low performers, including Orange County, are distinguished from higher performers, including New York and Chicago, by the absence of choice. In other words students receive an assignment to a school by the district based on their place of residence and there is little or nothing the parents can do about it. Under our scoring rules and the conceptual model on which they are based, everything pivots off choice. Thus a district that doesn’t support choice cannot score well even if it does a good job within some categories of the scoring system. Orange County, for instance, has better treatment of virtual education than either New York or Chicago by virtue of the state of Florida’s establishment of the Florida Virtual School (which is open to all public school students in the state). Further, we find its school information website to be easier to understand and navigate than New York’s. But in the absence of parental choice among its regular public schools, these attributes are merely bells and whistles.

The side by side comparison of district practices and characteristics is a critical design feature of the ECCI website. It allows districts and those who wish to influence district policies to benchmark the districts and to see what has and can be accomplished in districts that are performing well.

CONCLUSION

The ECCI provides a snapshot of the quality of education choice and competition within large school districts and allows for comparisons of choice and competition policies and practices across districts. The ECCI identifies areas in which school districts can change policies to expand choice such as adopting an assignment mechanism that maximizes the chance that parents will be able to enroll their child in the school they really prefer and enhancing the quality of information on school performance to support parents in making school choice. A fundamental rationale for school choice is its effects in creating a vibrant marketplace for better schools. There is evidence that it presently does so, but its effects are muted by administrative and legislative requirements that reduce choice and buffer schools from the effects of competition. With a quarter of America’s youth not graduating with a regular high school degree, with those students who remain in school performing at mediocre academic levels compared with students in many of the nations with which we compete, and with the costs of our public education system among the highest in the world, we believe that reform requires something other than more of the same. The wide availability of school choice based on valid information on school performance and with consequences for schools based on their popularity is, we believe, a foundation for progress. The intent of the ECCI is to create public awareness of the differences among districts in their support of school choice, provide a framework for efforts to improve choice and competition, and recognize leaders among school districts in the design and implementation of choice and competition systems.

[1] Major categories are double weighted in our scoring process. The three major categories are Alternatively Available Schools, Assignment Mechanism, and Application Process.

Downloads

Download the Report

Video

Expanding Choice in Education

Authors

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst

Image Source: Gary John Norman

The Federal Role in Education Research: Providing Relevant Information to Students, Parents, and Educators

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee:

I am Russ Whitehurst. I direct the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. Prior to holding my present position, I was the founding director of the Institute of Education Sciences within the U.S. Department of Education. Before entering government service I had a long career as a researcher and academic administrator.

Thank you for the invitation to testify. I am pleased that there is such interest and leadership in addressing the quality of education research in America.

Everyone in this room knows that education is important. I expect that all of us have had an experience with a teacher, a class, an educational institution, or through independent learning that has changed our lives. I certainly have. The American dream of opportunity and advancement and the educational system of the United State are inextricably connected. This has been true throughout our history. Indeed, well before the country was founded it was typical for colonial villages that had grown to more than a few hundred people to establish and fund a public school, with the first dating to 1639. Since that time, we have continued to value education and invest in it. But in an age of globalization and the advent of a knowledge based economy, the imperative to educate and educate well is stronger than it has ever been. The evidence that nations with a better educated populace experience higher growth rates is compelling, and during the current economic downturn the unemployment rate in the U.S. for young adults with just a high school diploma has been three times the rate for those with a college degree.

High quality education research is critical to the nation’s effort to deliver better education and a future of opportunity to our citizens. Without good evidence on the condition of education, what works and what does not, fundamental processes of learning and instruction, and breakthrough instructional technologies we are destined to embrace education policies that move us forward, backward, and sideways without even knowing in which of those directions we’re heading. Without good education research, our approaches to education reform are more akin to fashion and fancy — the width of a man’s tie or the length of a woman’s skirt — than to anything that is rational and benefits from a systematic examination of evidence.

Think of what federal investments in agricultural research have accomplished. My grandparents were farmers during the transition from the way things had always been to farming based on the knowledge produced by agricultural research. I remember well my grandfather coming back from a meeting with an agricultural extension agent excited about what new seeds and new approaches to crop rotation could do for the family farm. And because he was an early and eager adopter of research-based approaches to farming, he was always ahead of his neighbors in wringing a living from his land. These days America is the breadbasket for the world, largely because we invested in agricultural research and figured out how to disseminate the knowledge derived from that research to those who farm. We are on the cusp of a transformation of education to an evidence-based field that will have many similarities to the changes in agriculture that my grandparents experienced. The actions this Committee takes as it shapes the federal role in education research will have far reaching effects on the quality and productivity of our schools, and through that on our economy and future.

Mr. Chairman, the Education Sciences Reform Act, which originated in this subcommittee in 2001 and currently governs the education research enterprise at the Institute of Education Sciences within the U.S. Department of Education, made great strides towards improving the quality and independence of federally sponsored education research. Prior to that legislation, the federal stewardship of education research was widely viewed as a failure. To that point, in 1999 the National Academies of Science came to the conclusion that:

One striking fact is that the complex world of education - unlike defense, health care, or industrial production - does not rest on a strong research base. In no other field are personal experience and ideology so frequently relied on to make policy choices, and in no other field is the research base so inadequate and little used.

Since the National Academies report and as a direct result of Education Sciences Reform Act we have seen considerable progress in the quality and relevance of education research. Evidence for this comes from numerous sources, not the least of which is the Office of Management and Budget. OMB’s most recent program assessment of the Institute of Education Sciences concluded that:

Since its creation by the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002, IES has transformed the quality and rigor of education research within the Department of Education and increased the demand for scientifically based evidence of effectiveness in the education field as a whole.

Let me give you some examples of things we’ve learned from recent education research that are very important to improving America’s schools and student achievement.

On teachers
- Teachers vary dramatically in effectiveness — a very effective compared to a very ineffective teacher can create achievement gains for a child in one year that can wipe out a third of the achievement gap between white and black students
- On-the-job performance is the single strong predictor of how good a teacher will be in the future — almost every other observable characteristic of teachers is at best only weakly predictive of how they will perform in the classroom, e.g. whether they are regularly certified or not, were trained in a school of education or not, got a high or low score on a certification exam, received a lot of professional development or a little, and were mentored as novices or not tells us almost nothing about how effective they will be as teachers
- Most professional development programs for teachers are a waste of time and money
On the organization of schools, choice, and competition
- No excuses charter schools in urban areas do a dramatically better job than traditional public schools in raising student achievement
- Armed with good information on school performance and the ability to choose schools, low-income parents choose better schools than the ones to which their school district would assign their children, and their children do better academically as a result
- Schools that are subject to competition from other schools for students improve more than schools not subject to competition
On standards, accountability, and curriculum
- The quality of state standards for what students should know bears no relationship to student achievement — states with the best standards can have low levels of achievement relative to states with weak standards and vice-versa
- No Child Left Behind-type accountability for schools and districts raises student achievement modestly, with the effects focused in mathematics in the earlier grades
- Curriculum choices can make a sizable difference — for example the difference between using the most effective vs. the least effective elementary school mathematics curriculum, each costing about the same, is as much as a third of a year of learning over the course of one school year
- Presently available educational technology programs as used in schools do not raise student achievement
On the effectiveness of federally funded education programs
- There is a long-list of federal education programs that have no measurable effect on student outcomes, including
  - The 21st Century Community Learning Centers Program (afterschool)
  - Even Start
  - Head Start (for outcomes at the end of first grade)
  - Upward Bound
  - Reading First
On basic learning and instructional processes
- Spacing the occasions when students are asked to study related content rather than massing the study of that content into a short time frame remarkably increases learning and retention
- Testing students on the content of their classroom assignments produces substantially more learning than the same amount of time spent restudying the material

I could provide many more pages of example of things we know now about education that we did not know 15 years ago. If knowledge is power, we’re in much better shape than we used to be and that augurs well for the future.

The Education Sciences Reform Act is overdue for reauthorization. I will not take you through a to-do list for reauthorizing the law, one reason being that the National Board for Education Sciences has already generated such a list and I’m supportive of the Board’s recommendations. Let me simply suggest four principles that should underlie the reauthorization.

If It Ain’t Broke Don’t Fix It — There are various groups, with the American Educational Research Association being the most prominent, that would have you make fundamental changes in the law that appeal to their interests. They would, for example, have you change the definitions of what constitutes rigorous research and evaluation to lower the methodological bar their members confront when trying to obtain federal grant money, and they would have you separate the National Center for Education Statistics from the Institute of Education Sciences in order to create another federal entity that they can try to influence and with which they could curry favor. The key question you should ask of advocates of any significant changes in the language in the bill is, “What evidence do you have you that the current language has had bad effects?” ESRA a pretty good piece of legislation and most efforts to change it are going to come from organizations that want a return to the wonderful days of yesteryear when education research produced little of value except funding for education researchers.
Independence Is Fundamental — One of the most important advances in the Education Sciences Reform Act was to create a greater degree of independence between the Department’s research arm and the political leadership of the Department. I led the Department’s research office for 8 years under two secretaries and multiple lesser political appointees. I had good relationships with the political leadership of the Department and we worked well together, but I needed every bit of independence granted me by statute along with a fair amount of grit to keep my office and its functions from being politicized. I think this is in the nature of the beast rather than the personalities or political parties involved. Anything you can do to further arm future IES directors with independence from political direction will be positive. At the same time, the IES director needs to be inside the tent in order for the Department to benefit from education research and to have education research informed by insights on federal policies.
The Regional Educational Lab Program (the RELs) Is Broken and Should be Fixed — The REL program goes back to 1966 and the very first Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Since then, year in and year out, the RELs have pulled down a significant proportion of the total federal investment in education R&D with little to show of value from that investment and a lot to show that should be an embarrassment. I don’t think any amount of tinkering with the legislative language that authorizes the RELs or aggressive intervention by the Institute of Education Sciences can fix what is wrong with the program. But there is a function the RELs are intended to serve that is desperately needed: helping states answer questions about the effectiveness and productivity of their own education programs using state administrative data. The goal of having statewide longitudinal education databases in every state was pursued vigorously in the George W. Bush administration. The Obama administration has added substantially to funding for this effort through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. In the near future all states will have data warehouses with longitudinal student achievement data linked to a variety of education input variables. However, having data available and being able to use it are two different things. Only a few states have the staff capacity within their state education office to conduct analyses of longitudinal data to address policy questions. This means that most policy initiatives fly blind, both in original design and subsequent appraisal. RELs might be assigned through legislation to carry out this task, but they have multiple masters (including the federal government, their own boards, the governors and state legislatures in their region), they vary substantially in their capabilities, and they have no easy way to prioritize among various claims on their resources. It would be much better in my view to eliminate the REL program and substitute for it a research voucher program for state education departments. The current REL budget would be split among states, taking some account of state population but making sure that smaller states receive a cut of the pie that is large enough to be useful. The states could spend their vouchers to contract for research on issues of high interest to them. The research plans and products would undergo methodological review at IES to assure quality, but would otherwise be independent of the Department. The current RELs could compete for this work. If they could do the work well they would prosper. If they could not they would have to go into another line of work. It is a marketplace solution to a problem that has proven intractable to previous legislative and administrative solutions.
You Get What You Pay For — Although federal budgetary support for education research has increased in the last decade, it remains a pittance when compared with levels of investment in research, evaluation, and statistics in other areas of the economy. For example, more than 40% of the discretionary budget of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is invested in knowledge production and dissemination through the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, and many other operational components. In the U.S. Department of Education, the corresponding investment is less than 1%. In education research and development, no less than in R&D in health or transportation or communication or energy or agriculture, the public gets what it pays for.

Finally, I want to address the federal role in incorporating the findings from educational research into program mandates. NCLB uses the phrase “scientifically-based research” 111 times, and includes many mandates for states and local education agencies to base their practices on the findings from such research. The most extreme example is the now defunct program, Reading First, which dictated how early reading instruction was to be delivered at a very granular level based on research findings. There is no evidence that children are reading better as a result. It is a fundamental mistake, in my view, for Congress to dictate how states and LEAs should use findings from research. Even if the research were absolutely definitive, which it seldom is; and Congress could translate it into legislation without distortion, which it can’t; and bureaucrats in the U.S. Department of Education could implement it unimpeachably, which is unlikely; science is dynamic. We shouldn’t accept a process that requires Congress to rewrite legislation in order to bring education practice in line with evolving research findings.

Instead of telling states and local education agencies what they should do and appealing to research as the justification, Congress should focus on creating incentives for practitioners and policy makers to want to incorporate findings from the best research into their programs. Those incentives should be around the performance of schools. If those who are responsible for the management of schools are held accountable for schools’ performance, and if research findings are both readily consumable and provide a obvious boost to school performance, then the research will be utilized. When my grandfather learned about research findings that would give him a leg up in the yield from his farm he didn’t need to be told by big government that he had to base his practices on that research. It was in his self-interest to do so because he was accountable for earning a living from his farm. Likewise, education providers will use research when it helps them do something for which they’re accountable.

There are two ways to fashion an accountability system that will create a demand for research findings. One is top-down regulatory accountability as we’ve seen in NCLB — Washington says, “Here are your targets for student achievement. If you don’t meet them the following unpleasant things will happen.” The other approach is bottom-up market place accountability — Parents are given choices of where to send their children to school and good information on school performance. Funding follows the child. Schools that aren’t performing well lose students and funding. The managers of those schools are motivated to improve their performance and seek solutions, including those from good research.

I’m in favor of the market-based approach to creating demand for education research and I urge you to consider it in the context of the reauthorization of ESEA.

We know much more about what works and what doesn’t in education than we did 15 years ago as a result of advances in research, but our level of ignorance dwarfs our understanding by orders of magnitude. It has been so in the early years of the transformation of other fields to evidence-based practice. Moving education to a point at which our research base is sufficient to assure a good education for every student is the work of a generation, not of a few years. We’ve started and we’re moving in the right direction. I appreciate this Committee’s understanding of the importance of the work and the critical role the federal government plays in advancing it.

Authors

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst

Publication: House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education

Using Technology to Personalize Learning and Assess Students in Real-Time

Darrell M. West — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 10:10:00 -0400

Executive Summary

In 1915, famed educator John Dewey wrote a book entitled Schools of Tomorrow in which he complained that the conventional public school “is arranged to make things easy for the teacher who wishes quick and tangible results.”[i] Rather than fostering personal growth, he argued that “the ordinary school impressed the little one into a narrow area, into a melancholy silence, into a forced attitude of mind and body.”[ii]

In criticizing the academies of his day, Dewey made the case that education needed to adopt new instructional approaches based on future societal needs. He claimed that 20th century schools should reorganize their curricula, emphasize freedom and individuality, and respond to changing employment requirements. Failure to do so would be detrimental to young people. In one of his most widely-quoted commentaries, Dewey predicted that “if we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.”[iii]

Writing nearly a century ago, it would have been inconceivable for him to envision the current world of electronic resources, digital textbooks, instructional games, interactive blogs, and social media. Yet his basic message remains highly relevant today. If schools don’t re-invent themselves to engage students and train them for needed areas, it will be difficult for the United States to compete in the global economy.

Imagine schools where students master vital skills and critical thinking in a personalized and collaborative manner, teachers assess pupils in real-time, and social media and digital libraries connect learners to a wide range of informational resources. Teachers take on the role of coaches, students learn at their own pace, technology tracks student progress, and schools are judged based on the outcomes they produce. Rather than be limited to six hours a day for half the year, this kind of education moves toward 24/7 engagement and learning fulltime.

In this paper, I examine new models of instruction made possible by digital technologies. Pilot projects from across the country are experimenting with different organizations and delivery systems, and transforming the manner in which formal education takes place. By itself, technology will not remake education. Meaningful change requires alterations in technology, organizational structure, instructional approach, and educational assessment.[iv] But if officials combine innovations in technology, organization, operations, and culture, they can overcome current barriers, produce better results, and reimagine the manner in which schools function.[v]

[i] John Dewey, Schools of Tomorrow, New York: Dutton, 1915, p. 18.

[ii] John Dewey, Schools of Tomorrow, New York: Dutton, 1915, p. 20.

[iii] John Dewey, Democracy and Education, New York: Macmillan Company, 1944, p. 167.

[iv] Darrell West, The Next Wave: Using Digital Technology to Further Social and Political Innovation, Washington, D. C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2011.

[v] Darrell M. West, Digital Schools: How Technology Can Transform Education, Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, forthcoming, 2012.

Downloads

Download the paper

Authors

Darrell M. West

Image Source: Thomas Tolstrup

New Assessments for Improved Accountability

Derek Neal — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

INTRODUCTION

Over the past decade, educational reforms have increased efforts to hold teachers and schools accountable for student test scores. Schools without significant progress on test scores have been subject to reductions in funding and even replacement of school leadership. The purpose of these actions is to increase student achievement by raising teacher effectiveness and bringing up the performance of low-performing schools. Yet critics of these accountability systems have argued that they will not lead to meaningful increases in student learning because of incentives to “teach to the test” at the expense of more valuable classroom activities, leading students to have deficits in critical thinking skills.

Based on work he has done for The Hamilton Project, Derek Neal of the University of Chicago outlines a plan to create better assessments and accountability systems to avoid these perverse incentives. The new assessment system would use two different styles of examinations: one traditional test to evaluate student achievement, and a new examination to evaluate teacher performance. Neal provides guidelines for the development of this innovative approach to assessment and details how teacher performance can be measured using a relative scale. An ideal accountability system would combine these new assessments with non-test metrics such as classroom observations, school inspections, and parental input in order to also capture students’ social and emotional development.

Downloads

Download the Policy Brief

Authors

Derek Neal

Publication: The Hamilton Project

The Power and Pitfalls of Education Incentives

Bradley M. Allan and Roland Fryer — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 17:19:00 -0400

ABSTRACT

There is widespread agreement that America’s school system is in desperate need of reform, but many educational interventions are ineffective, expensive, or difficult to implement. Recent incentive programs, however, demonstrate that well-designed rewards to students can improve achievement at relatively low costs. Fryer and Allan draw on school-based field experiments with student and teacher incentives to offer a series of guidelines for designing successful educational incentive programs. The experiments covered more than 250 urban schools in five cities and were designed to better understand the impact of financial incentives on student achievement. Incentives for inputs, such as doing homework or reading books, produced modest gains and might have positive returns on investment, and thus provide the best direction for future programs. Additionally, this paper proposes directions for future incentive programs and concludes with implementation guidelines for educators and policymakers to implement incentive programs based on the experiments’ research findings and best practices. Incentive programs are not enough to solve all the problems in America’s educational system, but they can definitely play a role in the larger solution.

Downloads

Authors

Bradley M. Allan
Roland Fryer

Publication: The Hamilton Project

Organizing Schools to Improve Student Achievement: Start Times, Grade Configurations, and Teacher Assignments

Brian A. Jacob and Jonah E. Rockoff — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

ABSTRACT

Education reform proposals are often based on high-profile or dramatic policy changes, many of which are expensive, politically controversial, or both. In this paper, we argue that the debates over these “flashy” policies have obscured a potentially important direction for raising student performance—namely, reforms to the management or organization of schools. By making sure the “trains run on time” and focusing on the day-to-day decisions involved in managing the instructional process, school and district administrators may be able to substantially increase student learning at modest cost.

In this paper, we describe three organizational reforms that recent evidence suggests have the potential to increase K–12 student performance at modest costs: (1) Starting school later in the day for middle and high school students; (2) Shifting from a system with separate elementary and middle schools to one with schools that serve students in kindergarten through grade eight; (3) Managing teacher assignments with an eye toward maximizing student achievement (e.g. allowing teachers to gain experience by teaching the same grade level for multiple years or having teachers specializing in the subject where they appear most effective).

We conservatively estimate that the ratio of benefits to costs is 9 to 1 for later school start times and 40 to 1 for middle school reform. A precise benefit-cost calculation is not feasible for the set of teacher assignment reforms we describe, but we argue that the cost of such proposals is likely to be quite small relative to the benefits for students. While we recognize that these specific reforms may not be appropriate or feasible for every district, we encourage school, district, and state education leaders to make the management, organization, and operation of schools a more prominent part of the conversation on how to raise student achievement

Downloads

Authors

Brian A. Jacob
Jonah E. Rockoff

Publication: The Hamilton Project

Promoting K-12 Education to Advance Student Achievement

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 09:00:00 -0400

Event Information

September 27, 2011
9:00 AM - 1:00 PM EDT

Park Ballroom
Park Hyatt Hotel
1201 24th St., NW
Washington, DC

Great teachers and great schools have the ability to transform the living standard of Americans. Over the past century, investments in education have boosted the productivity and earnings of American workers, forged a path out of poverty for many families, and developed a productive and innovative workforce. However, those gains have stagnated and even declined in recent years. Despite one of the highest rates of per-pupil spending among industrialized countries, the United States ranks as mediocre on most measures of student achievement.

On September 27, The Hamilton Project at Brookings hosted a forum to highlight new policy ideas and perspectives on how to improve student performance in K-12 education. The Hamilton Project released a new strategy paper and three new policy proposals by outside experts focusing on the use of incentives in education, opportunities for organizational changes to improve performance, and a new approach to accountability for teachers and students. The program concluded with a discussion on the path forward in education reform with Teach for America Founder and CEO Wendy Kopp and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, moderated by David Leonhardt, D.C. bureau chief of the New York Times.

Following each panel, the participants took questions from the audience.

Strategy Paper:

Improving Student Outcomes: Restoring America's Education Potential – Michael Greenstone, Adam Looney, and Paige Shevlin

Policy Papers:

The Power and Pitfalls of Education Incentives – Bradley M. Allan and Roland Fryer

New Assessments for Improved Accountability – Derek Neal

Organizing Schools to Improve Student Achievement: Start Times, Grade Configurations, and Teacher Assignments – Jonah Rockoff and Brian Jacob

Audio

Transcript

Event Materials

Participants

Panelists

Robert E. Rubin

Co-Chair Council on Foreign Relations
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary

Roger C. Altman

Founder and Chairman
Evercore Partners

Author: Roland Fryer

Professor of Economics, Harvard University
CEO, EdLabs

Discussant: Peter Gorman

Senior Vice President, Education Services, News Corporation
Former Superintendent of Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools

Discussant: Tom Boasberg

Superintendent
Denver Public Schools

Discussant: Robert L. Hughes

President
New Visions for Public Schools

Discussant: Michael Mulgrew

President
United Federation of Teachers

Author: Brian Jacob

Professor of Education Policy
University of Michigan

Author: Derek Neal

Professor of Economics
University of Chicago

Discussant: Jonah Rockoff

Professor of Business
Columbia University

Moderator: David Leonhardt

D.C. Bureau Chief
New York Times

Wendy Kopp

Founder and CEO
Teach for America

Randi Weingarten

President
American Federation of Teachers

Improving Student Outcomes: Restoring America’s Education Potential

Michael Greenstone, Adam Looney and Paige Shevlin — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:48:00 -0400

For decades, investments in public education have boosted U.S. productivity and earnings, forged a path out of poverty for many families, helped disadvantaged students narrow the learning gap with their peers, and developed a workforce that continues to be among the most productive and innovative on Earth. More recently, this engine of growth has lost momentum. While per-pupil spending has continued to rise, educational attainment and performance have stagnated over the last thirty years. Because workforce skills are closely linked to productivity and compensation, the stagnation in education has contributed to static or even declining earnings for many Americans.

In this paper, The Hamilton Project provides a dual-track approach to improving future educational outcomes: 1) tackling structural barriers to unlock the largest gains in student achievement and 2) in the near term, implementing relatively simple cost-effective reforms that improve student performance. The first approach examines opportunities for structural changes to America’s educational system—a new way of doing business. These include generalizing the best practices of top performing charter schools and changing the current systems for identifying, hiring, and retaining highly-effective teachers. The second approach focuses on smaller, cost-effective reforms that could be implemented without dramatically re-thinking how schools operate, such as student incentive and early childhood education programs, and managerial and organizational changes at the school and district levels. In today’s environment of tight school budgets, it is essential not just to know how different approaches impact student performance, but also how much they cost. To this end, The Hamilton Project outlines a metric for comparing educational interventions and calls on policymakers to identify and test more policies and programs in a consistent way. Taken as a whole or piecemeal, we believe these types of reforms hold the potential to reinvigorate our existing system of education.

Downloads

Download Full Paper

Authors

Publication: The Hamilton Project

Obama Administration Guts No Child Left Behind

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 13:16:00 -0400

The White House announced details today of its long-signaled intent to use waivers to states to sidestep the requirements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and to advance its own education agenda. States that adopt “college- and career-ready standards” (a code phrase for the national learning standards promoted by the administration), teacher and principal evaluation systems based on student test scores, and turn-around strategies for the lowest performing schools will be allowed to design and implement their own accountability systems and will have greater flexibility in how they spend federal dollars.

The political calculus is straightforward. States and school districts are chaffing under the accountability provisions of NCLB, in large part because the law took what in the ordinary course of federal action would have been an aspiration goal (“every child proficient in reading and math by 2014”) and turned it into an actual requirement, with teeth. States are no where close to getting there, and having exhausted the remedies that can be derived from gaming the law, they are eager for relief from Washington. The administration, no longer having billions in stimulus funds with which to bribe states to adopt its education policies, is substituting relief from the requirements of law as its carrot. It expects Congressional leaders, who are none too happy with this usurpation of their authority, to be relatively powerless to act because doing so would involve crossing swords with their state governors and education chiefs, most of whom will want the waivers.

But this is a dangerous and internally conflicted path for the administration to go down. It is dangerous because it takes boilerplate secretarial waiver authority, present in almost all major legislation and intended to allow an administration, with informal congressional approval, to tweak laws to make them fit realities on the ground, and turns it into a virtually limitless authority for the executive branch to substitute its preferred policies for the law of the land. Imagine the person as president you could least imagine being suited to that position armed with this precedent.

It is internally conflicted because it provides further leverage for states to adopt common national standards—which the administration touts as essential to comparability between states—but gives away common accountability in exchange. Standards and accountability go together like Sonny and Cher. Separate them and, well you know what happens. So we’re to have the same college- and career-ready standards for what children should learn in Minnesota and Mississippi, but different definitions of what schools and teachers are to be held accountable for accomplishing against those standards? Where does that get us? It is like the federal government requiring that car manufacturers meet common standards for fuel efficiency but allowing each automobile maker to have its own definition of miles per gallon.

The federal role in K-12 education is not working nearly as well as is needed. It must be seriously rethought and restructured. Congress is about this work. The administration can address the pressing issue of too many schools being identified as in need of improvement by such simple means as setting back the proficiency deadline from 2014 to 2016, or capping the percentage of schools within a state that are subject to the accountability provisions of NCLB. It would surely get the nod from Congressional committees for pursuing such temporary and practical fixes. In contrast, gutting NCLB and setting its own policy direction using the waiver authority is misguided, confused, and will prove to be counterproductive.

Authors

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst

Are We Short-Changing our Future? The Economic Imperative of Attracting Great Teachers

Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 12:13:00 -0400

Great teachers have the ability to transform and enrich the lives and living standards of Americans. According to recent research, a student’s kindergarten teacher has long-lasting influence on important lifetime outcomes, such as future earnings. These effects are so important that the difference between having an above-average kindergarten teacher and a below-average kindergarten teacher could translate into a difference of more than $300,000 in future earnings for a classroom of 20 students (Chetty et al. 2010). Therefore, continuing to attract and retain the most effective teachers is a necessary step in raising the achievement of American students. But attracting highly-effective teachers is an increasing challenge as today’s teachers are asked to do more than ever before and because the most salient form of teacher pay—salaries—has been in relative decline.

The State of U.S. Education

A strong educational system and the role of teachers have never been more important for America’s workforce. Less-skilled workers are disproportionately unemployed and have experienced declining wages, and the return to a college degree has never been higher.¹ Unfortunately, the United States is in a period of stagnating educational achievement. Despite a doubling of per-pupil expenditures and decades of education reform in the United States, student achievement has only inched forward. Test scores, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), have barely budged in 35 years, and the United States ranks low relative to other developed countries on measures of achievement. For example, on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which compares students across 34 countries, American 15 year-olds ranked a disappointing 25th in math, 17th in science, and 14th in reading.² These challenges contribute to low high school and college completion rates for American students. Since the 1970s, college completion rates for many groups have increased slowly or not at all and, if those with GED qualifications are excluded, the proportion of the population finishing high school has actually fallen. At the same time, the value of education in the labor market is at an all time high. Relative to someone with a high school diploma, for example, those with a college degree earn twice as much each year—equivalent to about $570,000 more over a worker’s lifetime.

The Importance of Effective Teaching

Almost everyone, from policymakers to parents to teachers, agrees that reforms in the K-12 educational system are necessary to developing a more educated workforce and a stronger economy. In the last 15 years, advances in data availability and computing power have unleashed an explosion of research that begins to identify what works and what doesn’t in education policy—all of which can help guide policymakers achieve better bang for the buck with education spending. For example, strong evidence supports the effectiveness of a subset of charter schools and expanding access to early childhood education. While there are certainly a variety of factors that affect student outcomes, including home environment and socioeconomic factors, this evidence suggests that there are many avenues to improving achievement through changes in the classroom.

In terms of delivering large potential gains, effective teaching is among the most important influences on student achievement. Research finds that teachers vary substantially in their effectiveness, even within the same school. These differences arise not just in the effect of teachers on test scores, but also in terms of their impact on the lives of children long after they leave the classroom—including impacts on their future employment prospects and earnings.

A primary challenge to improving teaching quality is continuing to recruit and retain the best and the brightest in our workforce to become teachers. While no one pursues a teaching career solely for the financial rewards, compensation does matter for attracting and keeping teachers with outside options and who must support their own families. Continuing to attract a broad pool of applicants has become harder over time in part because teaching salaries—the most visible form of compensation for new teachers—have declined relative to salaries in other professions.

The Relative Decline in Teacher Wages

The graph below shows that full-time teaching salaries have remained flat over time while the wages of comparable workers have increased substantially. After taking account of the experience, education, and other characteristics of workers, the pay gap between teachers and non-teachers has expanded. In the 1970s teachers made about 7 percent less than non-teachers, after controlling for education and other characteristics or about $3,800 per year. Over the last decade, that gap has increased so that teachers earn about 19 percent less than non-teachers—a difference of almost $11,000 a year.

Furthermore, compared to other countries, the relative salaries of American teacher appear low. In a recently released report, the OECD calculated the ratio of the average salaries of teachers with 15 years' experience to the average earnings of full-time workers with a college degree and found the United States ranked 22nd out of 27 countries.

Of course, in addition to salaries, public school teachers generally receive more favorable health and retirement benefits than many private-sector workers, though detailed data are hard to come by. Even though non-wage benefits have historically been more generous for teachers, it is not clear that these benefits have increased by enough to offset the relative decline in wages demonstrated above.

But the relevant question is whether the combination of relatively low salaries and relatively high deferred benefits is the right formula to attract and retain talented young people with many alternative career opportunities other than teaching. Given the evidence that great teachers have profound effects on the life-time outcomes of their students, it is important that compensation policies are designed to attract high-quality applicants and retain many of the outstanding teachers currently in the profession.

Conclusion

Over the last 30 years, educational attainment and achievement have stagnated and, in the face of an increasingly competitive global economy, have contributed to a decline in the earnings of many Americans. The question is not whether additional reforms to our educational system are needed, but which reforms provide the most cost-effective ways of improving student achievement.

In a forthcoming Hamilton Project strategy paper (for release on September 27th), we provide a dual-track approach to improving student performance:

1.The first approach examines opportunities for structural changes to America’s educational system—a new way of doing business. These include generalizing the best practices of top performing charter schools and changing the current systems for identifying, hiring, and retaining highly effective teachers.

2.The second approach focuses on smaller, cost-effective reforms that could be implemented without dramatically re-thinking how schools operate, such as student incentives, early childhood education, and managerial and organizational changes at the school and district levels.

The Great Recession has highlighted the importance of a strong education and yet many of our children are not graduating with the skills necessary to successfully compete in today’s global marketplace. To help address these issues, The Hamilton Project will release three new policy proposals and host a forum, “Promoting K-12 Education to Advance Student Achievement,” on September 27th in Washington, DC. In addition to broader discussions on the educational system, the event will highlight new proposals on the use of incentives in education; a new approach to accountability for teachers and students; and opportunities for organizational changes to improve student performance.

Education has traditionally been a key component of the American Dream—that each generation can do better than the last. A hallmark of that success has been the ability of any American family to give their child a high-quality education in public schools. In order to maintain this foundation, new policies and new ways of thinking will be necessary to ensure that America’s educational system is prepared for the demands, now and in the future, of an increasingly competitive world economy.

[1] Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney, “Trends: Reduced Earnings for Men in America”
[2] Howard L. Fleischman; Paul J. Hopstock; Marisa P. Pelczar; and Brooke E. Shelley, “Highlights From PISA 2009: Performance of U.S. 15-Year-Old Students in Reading, Mathematics, and Science Literacy in an International Context”

Authors

Publication: The Hamilton Project

All Children Reading: An International Literacy Day Event

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 09:30:00 -0400

Event Information

September 8, 2011
9:30 AM - 4:30 PM EDT

Ronald Reagan Building, Pavilion Room
United States Agency for International Development
1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW
Washington, DC

Learning to read is fundamental for success in school and life. Young children must acquire basic literacy skills that will serve them as they progress in their studies and in the working world. Yet in many developing countries, too few students are learning to read during the critical first years of school. Recent estimates indicate that the average child in a low-income country is learning at about the same level as a child in the fifth percentile of a high-income country.

On September 8, the Center for Universal Education at Brookings, the Education for All-Fast Track Initiative, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) will mark International Literacy Day by hosting a series of discussions on how a range of education stakeholders are addressing the challenge of improving literacy, particularly at lower primary levels, to help fulfill the promise of quality education for all.

After each panel, participants will take audience questions.


USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah emphasizes the importance of measuring successful quality universal education programs by teacher effectiveness and child outcomes.		Congresswoman Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) states the multiple benefits of achieving universal education, including more democratic societies, better health outcomes, and economic growth.

After the program, Administrator Shah and Congresswoman Lowey discuss their mutual interest in furthering the universal education agenda.		USAID Deputy Chief of Staff David Barth shows Administrator Shah and Congresswoman Lowey children’s books Sesame Workshop showcased at the event. (D-MA)

All photos by Sam Kittner

Transcript

Event Materials

Participants

Panelists

Richard Whelden

Director, Office of Education
U.S. Agency for International Development

The Honorable Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.)

U.S. House of Representatives

Rajiv Shah

Administrator
U.S. Agency for International Development

Dan Wagner

UNESCO Chair in Learning and Literacy, Professor of Education and Director, International Literacy Institute
University of Pennsylvania

Moderator: Luis Crouch

Lead Education Specialist and Coordinator, Global Good Practices Team
Education for All Fast-Track Initiative Secretariat

Abel Fernandes de Assis

National Director for Quality Assurance Department, Ministry of Education
Government of the Republic of Mozambique

Ato Fuad Ibrahim

State Minister for General Education
Government of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia

Mator Kpangbai

Deputy Minister for Instruction, Ministry of Education
Government of the Republic of Liberia

Guillermo Lopez

Director General, Primary Education, Ministry of Education
Government of the Republic of Nicaragua

Moderator: Karen Cator

Director of the Office of Educational Technology
U.S. Department of Education

Anthony Bloome

Education Technology Specialist, Office of Education
U.S. Agency for International Development

François Gérin-Lajoie

President
Paul Gérin-Lajoie Foundation

Cory Heyman

Chief Program Officer
Room to Read

Sakil Malik

Director of Global Operations
International Reading Association

Jane Meyers

President
Lubuto Library Project, Inc

Debbi Winsten

Partner Relations Manager
Literacy Bridge

Moderator: Steven J. Klees

Harold R. W. Benjamin Professor of International and Comparative Education
University of Maryland

Patrick Collins

Acting Head of Basic Education
U.S. Agency for International Development

Robert Prouty

Head
Education for All Fast-Track Initiative Secretariat

John P. Comings, EdD

Principal International Technical Advisor
Education Development Center

Amy Jo Dowd

Senior Education Research Advisor
Save the Children

Sylvia Linan-Thompson

Senior Education Research Analyst
RTI International

Audrey-Marie Schuh Moore

EQUIP 2 Director
FHI-360

President Obama Rewrites the No Child Left Behind Act

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 13:38:00 -0400

The White House has announced its plan to grant waivers of the provisions of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to states that agree to put in place the education reforms favored by the administration. Thus states that agree, for example, to adopt the Common Core state standards for what students should learn and to evaluate teachers for tenure based on student test gains will be freed from the consequences facing schools that fail to meet adequate yearly progress goals under NCLB. The reforms the administration seeks as a condition of granting waivers are the same that it put forward in its Blueprint for reauthorizing NCLB, and that it advanced in its Race to the Top competition using the $5 billion in discretionary funds made available to it by Congress under the Stimulus Act.

There is no question that schools are being over-identified by NCLB as requiring intervention. Whether the proportion is the hyperbolic 80% predicted by Secretary Duncan or half that, as seems more likely, states and districts cannot handle that many schools being branded as needing improvement, either administratively or politically. Something needs to be done if the whole accountability system isn’t to be seen as a joke and its provisions widely flaunted. If Congress won’t or can’t act, then it is reasonable for the administration to indicate that it invites waiver requests. NCLB clearly grants the secretary of education the authority to grant waiver requests from states that can successfully propose alternative means of improving the quality of instruction and enhancing student achievement.

It is one thing for an administration to grant waivers to states to respond to unrealistic conditions on the ground or to allow experimentation and innovation. Similar waiver authority has been used to advance welfare and Medicaid reform going back to the Reagan administration, and to allow a few districts and states to experiment at the margins of NCLB in the Bush administration. It is quite another thing to grant state waivers conditional on compliance with a particular reform agenda that is dramatically different from existing law. The NCLB waiver authority does not grant the secretary of education the right to impose any conditions he considers appropriate on states seeking waivers, nor is there any history of such a wholesale executive branch rewrite of federal law through use of the waiver authority.

The administration is surely counting on the support of the congressional delegations of individual states to support the waiver request from their state. And with the majority of states likely to submit waiver requests, the administration may well have the political clout it needs to overcome the ire of key committee chairs whose authority to legislate has been undercut.

If you’re a fan of greater presidential control of education (and domestic policy in general), it’s celebration time. If you like the separation of powers or thought that the reauthorization of NCLB might be an opportunity to put more control of schooling in the hands of parents at the expense of district, state, and federal bureaucracies, this is not your party.

Authors

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst

Reviewing the Evidence on Class Size

Matthew M. Chingos — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 09:51:00 -0400

There is little doubt that reducing class size can boost student achievement in some circumstances. What is much less certain is how much of a difference class-size policies can make, and whether the impacts are large enough to justify the costs of hiring additional teachers and building new classrooms.

In a recent paper published by the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, Russ Whitehurst and I review the research evidence on class-size reduction (CSR). We find that there are relatively few high-quality studies, and that these studies show mixed results. We argue that any benefits of CSR need to be considered in the context of its substantial costs relative to the benefits that might be produced by alternative uses of the same resources.

In a review of our paper published by the National Education Policy Center, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach of Northwestern University describes our review of the class-size literature as “misleading,” arguing that it “puts too much emphasis on studies that are of poor quality or that do not focus on settings that are particularly relevant to the debate on class-size policy in the United States.”

Applying Schanzenbach’s standard for high quality studies yields only three studies of class size in the United States that are worthy of examination. Two of these, the Tennessee STAR experiment and a non-experimental evaluation of the Wisconsin SAGE program, indicate positive effects of smaller classes. The third, a rigorous quasi-experimental study of schools in Connecticut, finds no benefits of smaller classes.

These three studies are a reasonable starting point for an academic discussion of whether smaller classes have the potential to raise achievement. Clearly they do, at least in Tennessee in the 1980s and possibly in Wisconsin in the 1990s as well (but not in Connecticut). But the most significant CSR policies under consideration are not small pilot programs like those in Tennessee and Wisconsin, but rather, statewide mandates imposed at costs upwards of billions of dollars.

Large-scale CSR policies require the recruitment of many new teachers. Reductions in average teacher quality, as might be expected from hiring a large crop of inexperienced teachers, could offset any direct benefits of smaller classes. An evaluation of California’s statewide CSR policy found that it increased the shares of teachers that were new and not fully certified. And my evaluation of Florida’s CSR mandate found no evidence of positive effects on student outcomes.

The California and Florida evaluations certainly have significant limitations, but in my view they provide preliminary evidence that large-scale policies are unlikely to produce benefits as large as those found in Tennessee. But applying Schanzenbach’s standard for studies leaves us with no studies of these kinds of large-scale policies. It seems awfully hard to make a case for large-scale CSR policies if we know essentially nothing about their effectiveness.

Even more important than the effectiveness of a policy is its cost effectiveness. As Russ Whitehurst and I argue in our paper, the right question to ask about any policy is not whether it has any effect at all, but whether it is the most effective use of limited resources. Unfortunately, there is little rigorous evidence on the relative cost-effectiveness of various education policies. There is a clear need for such evidence, but in the meantime it seems unwise for policymakers to mandate widespread adoption of a costly policy with uncertain benefits.

CSR may well be cost-effective in some circumstances, especially if it is implemented in a targeted way. For example, a district may find it sensible to provide small classes for its most disadvantaged students or its newest teachers. But CSR mandates take exactly the opposite approach in that they apply across-the-board and take away schools’ autonomy to decide whether reducing class size is the best use of limited resources.

The NEPC review makes several other claims with which I disagree. I respond to them here:

The review incorrectly asserts that Florida provided additional funding to all schools, when in fact all CSR funding was provided at district level (in roughly equal amounts per pupil to each district). As a result, my district-level results indicate the effect of CSR as compared to equivalent additional resources, but my school-level results (which also indicate no effects of CSR) do not hold funding equal because districts were free to allocate their CSR funds however they saw fit. Additionally, the review mentions that other policies were enacted in Florida during the CSR period. However, these policies will not contaminate my results unless they differentially impacted the treated and comparison groups of districts/schools that form the basis for my analysis.
The review argues that studies of class size in middle school are “less relevant in the current policy context that is focused on early grades,” when in fact current policy discussions about class size span include middle school grades. For example, Florida’s CSR mandate applies to all grades, PK-12.
The review raises a “practical problem with the cost-savings calculations,” which is that teachers are not easily divisible. For example, a school with 100 students in a given grade cannot reduce class size by one student—it must choose between five classes of 20, four classes of 25, or three classes of 33-34. However, this practical problem only applies to districts that are unable to manage school-level enrollment with class size in mind. Additionally, it indicates the desirability of allowing schools and districts to manage enrollments in ways that maximize productivity.
The review argues that the Brookings report “mischaracterizes the STAR findings as unusually large relative to other studies,” such as Angrist and Lavy’s study of schools in Israel. Our contention that the Israel results are on the “lower end of the range of those found in the STAR study” is taken directly from Angrist and Lavy’s statement in their original paper that “our estimates of effect size for fifth graders are at the low end of the range of those found in the Tennessee experiment. The effect sizes based on estimates for fourth grade reading scores are only about half as large as those for fifth graders.”
The review claims that the Brookings report “states that CSR is the ‘least cost-effective’ policy.” We never make this claim ourselves. We do report the results of the only study that carefully compares the cost effectiveness of different educational policies (including CSR), which finds CSR to be the least cost-effective policy of those studied.
The review argues that the Brookings report “bases much of its argument on the impractical and questionable assumption that any reduction in the teacher workforce can be made on the basis of instructional quality instead of according to the terms of teachers’ current contracts.” This claim ignores the vigorous debates over “last in first out” policies that are currently being debated in statehouses across the nation. Clearly, the “terms of teachers’ contracts” are not set in stone. The key point is that the effects of an increase in class size are likely to depend on how the increase is implemented. Firing only the least experienced teachers will likely have more harmful effects than basing personnel decisions on performance measures.

Authors

Matthew M. Chingos

Publication: Education Next