Educating Researchers

Tonight, I've been reading Arthur Levine's newest installment in his series of policy reports based on the results of a four-year study of America’s education schools. After targeting teacher education and school administrators' training, he turned his critical eye on the preparation of educational researchers. As a Ph.D. student in educational policy and research, I found myself nodding repeatedly, especially at this:

"The problem is that the doctoral programs offered and the degrees awarded by education schools are a mishmash. Programs for the preparation of researchers and the education of practitioners generally look very much alike . . .The blurring in purpose of the Ed.D. and Ph.D. leads to a larger problem in the preparation of education researchers. It encourages a
commensurate blurring in the programs to prepare researchers and practitioners. More often than not, they enroll in the same doctoral programs. The result is that practitioners too often receive an education designed for researchers, and future scholars take their course work with
practitioners who have little interest in research or rigorous scholarly studies."

I just finished my first course in my Ph.D. program in educational policy, planning, and leadership. The course, Educational Research, was designed to provide the foundations of research design. There was a handful of Ph.D. students in the class, but the group consisted mainly of Ed.D. students. And the latter group for the most part had absolutely no interest in learning about research design and didn't understand most of the course content. The professor had to revisit topics such as internal validity several times, taking class time away from new topics in order to help these students learn the basics. The course was taught from the perspective of learning about research in order to interpret it (i.e., the practitioner's perspective), not from the perspective of conducting research yourself. These are the frustrations when the two groups of students are indiscriminantly mixed in classes.

Check out Levine's report -- there's a link on this page.

New Report: Performance-Pay for Teachers

A new report from the Center for Teacher Quality supports performance-pay plans that advance student achievement and the teaching profession. This new study proposes rewarding small teams of teachers who raise student achievement together; rewarding teachers who accept challenging assignments in high-needs schools; and redesigning pay systems so that teacher success, not seniority or graduate degrees, determines maximum teacher pay. The report, Performance-Pay for Teachers: Designing a System that Students Deserve, is the first to be issued by TeacherSolutions, an initiative of the Center for Teaching Quality; a link to the report is provided below.

Homeland Defense - No Child Left Behind the Lines?

Chris Whittle, founder of the Edison Schools, weighed in on education reform in "Homeland Offense," a policy brief published by WestEd. Whittle uses a military metaphor to call for radical school redesign and business approaches to education. It's a strange, offbeat work of fiction drawn from Whittle's equally odd "Crash Course." There's a link to the policy brief below. You've been warned.

The Economics of Early Child Education

At the National Press Club earlier this month, a group of business leaders, economists, and philanthropists launched a modest, $3.1 million, ten-year project to make early education a top U.S. priority. Entitled Partnership for America's Economic Success, the partnership is now in the midst of a two-year research phase, and is commissioning about 15 studies to discern the economic benefits of early education and policy options for public and private financing, among other things.

This project is the latest signal of corporate America’s increasing interest and involvement in young children’s education. Concerns over global competition and the need for an innovative and better-trained workforce are fueling this interest. Early education is viewed as a sound economic investment that will yield a healthy rate of return. Invest in kids is not just a slogan. . . it's now workforce policy.

This project has benefited immensely from the leadership of Susan Urahn and her staff at the Pew Charitable Trusts, which manages and helps fund the Partnership for America’s Economic Success. The Trusts have made considerable contributions to early childhood education. Their State Policy Initiatives program, for instance, has funded rigorous, policy-focused research and supported public education campaigns that demonstrate the value of high-quality preschool for all three- and four-year-olds. The Trusts has invested over $50 million to advance this goal since 2001, launching pre-K campaigns in over a dozen states. And progress has been made: over the past two years, states have increased preschool funding by over $800 million.

"Secondary-Postsecondary Learning Options"

I spent my lunch-hour today listening to an informative webinar on “Secondary-Postsecondary Learning Options,” a catch-phrase coined by the American Youth Policy Forum (www.aypf.org) to describe schools and programs that link secondary education with two- and four-year institutions of higher education and allow high school students to participate in college-level courses. The webinar was presented by the Educational Policy Institute (www.educationalpolicy.org), which excels in disseminating knowledge of educational opportunity policy issues to a wide audience of policymakers and practitioners.

I particularly enjoyed the comments of Betsy Brand, the president of the American Youth Policy Forum, who shared her thoughts on the common characteristics of successful SPLOs: supports for students; transferability of academic credit; and rigor of classes. Providing support for secondary students pursuing college-level credits is essential for their success, and Betsy pointed out that the most successful programs had a “caring adult advisor” assigned to each student. She also noted that academic assistance and tutoring and the presence of a peer support network were also characteristics of successful SPLOs. The transferability of credit, while a common characteristic of these programs, can also pose a problem: Credits are too often not portable between institutions of higher education, even within the same state, and too often the responsibility for figuring out which credits transfer and which don’t fall on the student. The solution, Betsy suggested, is the use of articulation agreements at the local level but also, ideally, at the state level. The rigor of the curriculum is also important, supported in large part by the proper preparation of teachers and faculty who teach the courses.

Much of this webinar was inspired by The College Ladder, a recent publication of the American Youth Policy Forum, which is available on the AYPF website. In the spirit of full disclosure, I was one of the reviewers of this publication.

Who's Who in Education Policy: A Primer by Christopher Swanson

Thank you, Christopher Swanson, for identifying the movers and shakers in US education policy in Influence: A Study of the Factors Shaping Education Policy. Swanson asked leading education policy experts to identify and rate highly influential agents or “Influentials” across four different categories – Studies, Organizations, People, and Information Sources. Topping the list of studies was the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), while the US Congress, US Department of Education, and the Gates Foundation were top contenders in the Organizations category. Top-ranked person? Bill Gates, of course, who kept company in the People category with Mike Smith of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Chester Finn, Jr., of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, and Kati Haycock of the highly influential Education Trust. NAEP took the top spot in the most influential information source, followed by Education Week. Other information sources viewed as influential include the New York Times, the Washington Post, Public Education Network’s PEN Weekly NewsBlast, the Fordham Foundation’s Education Gadfly, and Eduwonk.

Still Children Left Behind?

The BIG news this week was the release of data from the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Also known as "The Nation's Report Card," NAEP is the only national standardized continuing assessment. It assesses the performance of students aged 7, 12, 14, and 17 in reading, math, science, writing, US history, civics, geography, and the arts.

Given the tremendous investment in NCLB over the past six years, a positive change in student performance, including a narrowing of the achievement gap between students of different ethnicities and socio-economic backgrounds, would have been expected. But, no. Instead, as the Education Trust pointed out in a quick and dirty analysis published on the day the Department of Education released the report, reading achievement in our nation's high schools has actually declined since 1998 and there is a similar trend in science achievement. And the large achievement gap between students of color and white and Asian students still exists in similar proportions as it did in the pre-NCLB era. Ironically, these findings were released simultaneously with the Department's 2005 High School Transcript Study, which reported, among other things, that more students are enrolling in higher-level courses and the average GPA is on the rise (appoximately a third of a letter grade higher than in 1990).

So, what gives? The Education Trust staff point a finger at disparities in teacher quality, pointing out that high-minority, high-poverty schools have lower teacher quality than their peers. Their point is well-taken, given the research to date that supports the strong relationship between teacher quality and student achievement. There is a growing momentum to address this issue of teacher quality. Look at, for instance, the recent report of the Commission on No Child Left Behind that called for improving the effectiveness of teachers. And the President's FY08 budget included a huge increase in funding for the Teacher Incentive Fund program, which encourages school districts and States to develop "innovative performance-based compensation systems that reward teachers and principals for raising student achievement." Improving teacher quality will be a significant issue in this and coming years.