The Education Blog

Education Week reports that California and other states are developing long-term plans to move away from traditional paper textbooks towards digital resources, some of which are available at not cost as open source materials.

The Obama Administration has made STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education one of its priorities. Wired News provides an excellent round-up of the various programs currently underway:

“We’re going to show young people how cool science can be.”

Those were some of the inspiring words by President Barack Obama at the launching of the new “Educate to Innovate” campaign on Monday this week. This initiative aims to increase science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) literacy amongst students to improve our national standing from average (or in some cases, below average) to the top. $4.35 billion in Federal grants will be offered to schools who can innovate in STEM education and the private sector is stepping up with an additional $260 million in related funding and programs…

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 that the Common Core Standards Initiative, an effort spearheaded by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association, proceeds apace:

Academic scholars, teachers, state officials, school administrators, and at least one librarian fill the ranks of the newly announced “work groups,” for developing K-12 standards in English-language arts and math… The two teams will have the duty of completing the second phase of common state standards. The first phase was the drafting of college- and career-readiness standards, a draft of which was released a few months ago.

Meanwhile, Ed Week reports here that at least seven states have suspended or slowed their own development of state standards in an apparent attempt to take a ‘wait and see’ approach to the national standards movement.

(For some background, see my prior posts on this topic.)

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has published this report on the state of public charter schools in the U.S. Among the reports findings:

• There are fourteen communities where more than 20% of public school students are enrolled in charters (versus six in 2005-06)
• Seventy-two communities have at least 10% of public school students enrolled in charter schools
• The ten districts with the largest number of students in public charter schools represent 22% of the total U.S.  charter school population (approximately 304,494 students out of 1.4 million)

Gordon MacInnes of The Century Foundation has published this brief on the topic of using student test scores to measure teacher effectiveness, a proposition that has been advanced by a number of school reformers. This very controversial topic recently returned to news headlines after the New Haven (CT) teachers’ union signed a contract that includes student performance in the evaluation process tied to teacher salary.*

Among the reasons MacInnes gives for NOT using student test scores to ‘grade’ teacher performance:

• Students are not randomly assigned to teachers (nor to schools) – some teachers might only be assigned students perceived to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’
• Standardized tests are evaluated for reliability and validity based on their intended purpose,  such as assessing 4th Grade math proficiency, not for evaluating teachers
• Compensating teachers according to individual performance might lessen the impetus for teachers to collaborate and share best practices

*See this New Haven Register (CT) article for more information on the contract signed by New Haven teachers.

Recently, NEWSWEEK published this cover story by former US Secretary of Education (and current Republican senator) Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. Sen. Alexander argues that four-year bachelor’s degrees are outmoded and too expensive to maintain in the current economic climate. He concludes:

Expanding the three-year option or year-round schedules may be difficult, but it may be more palatable than asking Congress for additional bailout money, asking legislators for more state support, or asking students for even higher tuition payments. Campuses willing to adopt convenient schedules along with more-focused, less-expensive degrees may find that they have a competitive advantage in attracting bright, motivated students.

 

In the same issue, NEWSWEEK published this very interesting debate between five researchers and policy makers from around higher education. Both these articles are well worth reading.

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.

Jay Mathews reports in the Washington Post:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan, in prepared remarks circulating in advance of a speech Thursday, accuses many of the nation’s schools of education of doing “a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom.”

The full text of Duncan’s speech can be found here.

UPDATE: As expected, Sec. Duncan’s speech has elicited much reaction. Here are examples from Education Week, Inside Higher Ed, and Reuters.

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