The Education Blog

Vanderbilt University’s National Center on Performance Incentives has just announced the publication of a text entitled Performance Incentives: Their Growing Impact on American K-12 Education, edited by Matthew G. Springer. The book’s Web site states:

The concept of pay for performance for public school teachers is growing in popularity and use, and has resurged to once again occupy a central role in education policy. [This text] offers the most up-to-date and complete analysis of this promising—yet still controversial—policy innovation.

In related news, the think tank Public Agenda has published a new study that finds:

Seventy-one percent of Gen Y teachers are open to rewarding teachers based on incentive pay, whereas only 10 percent of Gen Y teachers think that student performance on standardized tests is an “excellent” measure of teacher success.

I’ve posted on this topic in the past.

I’d also like to note that Dr. Ed Wiley, a quantitative research expert on the faculty of the U. of Colorado at Boulder*, has conducted research into accountability-based teacher pay programs, including Denver Public Schools’ ProComp. For an introduction to the quantitative models that underlie many ‘pay for performance’ schemes, I recommend this report by Dr. Wiley. (PDF format)

*Disclosure: I am a doctoral candidate at CU – Boulder and have studied with Dr. Wiley.

Education Week reports:

A majority of Chicago students affected by school closings were sent to schools that were low-performing, just like those they left behind—moves that had no significant impact on performance for most students, a study released today…

“Certainly, when schools were closed for academic reasons, the idea was to try to change their educational prospects and what they might obtain. Unfortunately, we didn’t find that,” said Julia Gwynne, a senior research analyst with the consortium and the report’s co-author. “The main reason why that seems not to have occurred was because most students did not attend schools that were substantially better than the ones that were closed.”

US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has expressed strong support of school turnarounds – see this post from June 2009.

In this post last April, I described a new push by US governors and state educational commissioners to develop national education standards for K-12. Now, Education Week reports in this article that:

As 48 states charge ahead with plans to adopt common academic standards, the U.S. Department of Education will enlist experts and the public to help design a $350 million competition for the next step: the development of common tests.

In coming weeks, top Education Department officials will travel to Atlanta, Boston, and Denver for a series of meetings that will solicit testimony from testing experts, including those with research and technical know-how, as well as to hear from the public

In May of this year, Amazon announced a partnership with six universities and a number of textbook publishers. College students would be given Kindles with textbooks pre-loaded onto the devices. The goal of the project was to determine how students’ experiences using the ebook reader compared with traditional paper textbooks.

The AP (via USA Today) reports that students’ response to the Kindle have been, to quote the article, “lukewarm.”

See my previous post about efforts to replace textbooks with digital resources.

USA Today reports:

Researchers studying how to improve graduation rates at public colleges and universities have come up with a surprising and counter-intuitive finding: Many students may fail to complete a bachelor’s degree not because the work is too hard — but because they’re not challenged enough.

It’s well known that colleges with the most selective admissions criteria tend to have the highest graduation rates. But even when researchers compared groups of students who had similar academic qualifications, they consistently found that those attending schools with the more demanding academic requirements were more likely to graduate.

I’ve purposely titled this post “When colleges fail to graduate students…” to prompt you to think about the notions underlying this wording, which we hear and read in the media often… Do colleges MAKE students graduate (or not graduate)? What role do students play in their own collegiate success or failure? There’s not easy answer to this question, but this article in the NY Times argues that colleges, like all organizations, have unique cultures, and sometimes, these cultures are more or less supportive of graduation:

[Under-matching] refers to students who choose not to attend the best college they can get into. They instead go to a less selective one, perhaps one that’s closer to home or, given the torturous financial aid process, less expensive.

About half of low-income students with a high school grade-point average of at least 3.5 and an SAT score of at least 1,200 do not attend the best college they could have. Many don’t even apply. Some apply but don’t enroll. “I was really astonished by the degree to which presumptively well-qualified students from poor families under-matched,” Mr. Bowen told me.

They could have been admitted to Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus (graduation rate: 88 percent, according to College Results Online) or Michigan State (74 percent), but they went, say, to Eastern Michigan (39 percent) or Western Michigan (54 percent). If they graduate, it would be hard to get upset about their choice. But large numbers do not…

In effect, well-off students — many of whom will graduate no matter where they go — attend the colleges that do the best job of producing graduates. These are the places where many students live on campus (which raises graduation rates) and graduation is the norm. Meanwhile, lower-income students — even when they are better qualified — often go to colleges that excel in producing dropouts.

Educational Week reports:

Teachers raise their games when the quality of their colleagues improves, according to a new studyRequires Adobe Acrobat Reader offering some of the first evidence to document a “spillover effect” in teaching.

Authors C. Kirabo Jackson and Elias Bruegmann based their findings on an analysis of 11 years of data on North Carolina schoolchildren. The study is due to be published in October in American Economics Journal: Applied Economics, a peer-reviewed journal.

“If it’s true that teachers are learning from their peers, and the effects are not small, then we want to make sure that any incentive system we put in place is going to be fostering that and not preventing it,” said Mr. Jackson, an assistant professor of labor economics at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. “If you give the reward at the individual level, all of a sudden my peers are no longer my colleagues—they’re my competitors. If you give it at the school level, then you’re going to foster feelings of team membership, and that increases the incentive to work together and help each other out.”

The Jackson and Bruegmann paper is available from the National Bureau of Economic Statistics (subscription required).

CNN reports:

…A special analysis put out last week by the National Center for Education Statistics [compares] 15-year-old U.S. students with students from other countries in the Organization for Economic Development.It found the U.S. students placed below average in math and science. In math, U.S. high schoolers were in the bottom quarter of the countries that participated, trailing countries including Finland, China and Estonia.

According to the report, the U.S. math scores were not measurably different in 2006 from the previous scores in 2003. But while other countries have improved, the United States has remained stagnant.

In science, the United States falls behind countries such as Canada, Japan and the Czech Republic.

The report is available here.

Dan Vergano of USA Today writes:

Science enjoys the best and the worst of times today, celebrated as the secret sauce behind economic growth, but embattled in high-profile areas such as climate change, stem cells and evolution.

“Science is more essential for our prosperity, our security, our health, our environment, and our quality of life than it has ever been before,” said President Obama, in April at the National Academy of Sciences.

At the same time, Obama noted, federal funding of physics and related sciences has fallen by nearly half since the 1980’s, U.S. schools trail in math and science versus Japan, England, South Korea and others. “And we have watched as scientific integrity has been undermined and scientific research politicized in an effort to advance predetermined ideological agendas,” he said.

USA Today reports:

Even as high school graduates in recent years have grown increasingly better prepared for college, too many members of the class of 2009 cannot adequately perform all of the academic skills they will need to succeed, a report says.

Just 23% of students, up from 22% last year, earned test scores suggesting they can earn at least a C in first-year college courses in English, math, reading and science, says the report, released today by the non-profit Iowa-based testing company ACT. It’s based on scores of 1.48 million 2009 high school graduates who took the ACT’s college entrance exam.