Category Archives: Research

I’m pretty young and haven’t had the chance to visit a lot of places. Still, I think of passports as pieces of paper that allow you to travel to other countries. The Foundation for Educational Choice offers a different and thought-provoking twist, though, with a new report called “School Passports: Making the Stimulus Pay Off for Students and State Budgets.” In a nutshell, the basic idea is to transform the federal Race to the Top program into “a $4 billion tuition scholarship or education voucher program to enable public school students in 50 states to attend private schools of their choice.” After noting that allowing such a program to happen would require Congress to change federal law, the report breaks down the estimated impacts at the national level and then state-by-state.

Kids are out of school. Christmas is 5 days away. Nobody is writing about education now. It seems like just about everybody has packed it up to go on vacation until 2011. But you get one more post from me before the holidays steal the last bit of your attention away. And it could be a highly practical payoff if you’re willing to invest a very brief moment of time. Last-minute shopper looking for a gift or stocking stuffer for that education reformer in your life? Try one of these new books: Stretching the School Dollar: How Schools and Districts Can Save Money While Serving Students Best by Rick Hess Educational Economics: Where Do School Funds Go? by Marguerite Roza Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning by Paul Peterson The Neighbor’s Kid: A Cross-Country Journey in Search of What Education Means to Americans by Philip Brand …And the one I’m really waiting for (though you probably will have to drop a picture of the book in the stocking, as the actual published copy isn’t due out until January: (H/T Mike Petrilli, Flypaper) The Bee Eater: Michelle Rhee Takes On the Nation’s Worst School District. For this I might […]

The Mackinac Institute for Public Policy’s Michael Van Beek — who is essentially the Michigan equivalent of my friends in the Education Policy Center — brought some interesting news to my attention with a recent posting: The Traverse City Area Public School district is raising transparency to a new level by posting on its website the contracts it proposes to unionized employees. At present, only the proposed transportation employee union contract is available, but eventually, all of them will be. So what, you say, that’s more than 1,000 miles away. Why should little Eddie in Colorado care? Glad you asked for me. Several months ago my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow wrote an issue backgrounder called “Colorado Education and Open Negotiations: Increasing Public Access to School District Bargaining.” He noted that only one of 42 bargaining districts in our state have policies that ensure public access to the union negotiating process.

Quick hit for today from The Associated Press, highlighting results from a new education survey: An overwhelming majority of Americans are frustrated that it’s too difficult to get rid of bad teachers, while most also believe that teachers aren’t paid enough, a new poll shows. The Associated Press-Stanford University poll found that 78 percent think it should be easier for school administrators to fire poorly performing teachers. Yet overall, the public wants to reward teachers — 57 percent say they are paid too little, with just 7 percent believing they are overpaid and most of the rest saying they’re paid about right. A full copy of the survey data is available here. When asked about problems facing American schools today, reuspondents listed the following as “extremely” or “very” serious, in descending order:

Interesting results from a survey by the Foundation for Educational Choice came out recently, gauging opinions and understanding of education issues of voters in six different states: Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Mississippi, New Jersey and New York. Taking a look at the full results (PDF) is fascinating. A few items about school choice jump out. Respondents in all states strongly support charter schools and private school tax credit programs and also favor vouchers. But interestingly, there was a lot of skepticism about virtual schools. Maybe if voters in these states were more familiar with online education as we are in Colorado, their opinions would change.

Yesterday’s Denver Post featured an interesting story on a successful program at Denver’s Abraham Lincoln High School and its feeder schools to engage parents: The collaboration is focused on aligning academics and empowering parents — providing them with training, taking them to visit colleges, encouraging them to volunteer and getting them to attend parent-teacher conferences. Not long ago, it was typical for only 100 parents to attend parent-teacher conferences at the high school. This year, an estimated 1,500 parents showed up. Wow, that’s a huge improvement! No doubt parental involvement is an important contributing factor to student success. That includes the research-based findings that show students fare better when their parents actively choose the school their children attend. And even better if they make a well-informed choice. That’s one of the main reasons my Education Policy Center friends have created and maintain the very valuable School Choice for Kids website. So yeah, my first instinct would be to hesitate at my mom and dad showing up at every parent-teacher conference. (Kind of like my hesitation at having to eat broccoli and other green vegetables for dinner.) But on the other hand, odds are that kind of interaction is only going […]

Thanksgiving is football season, so I thought it would be a perfect time to highlight the intersection of education reform and… baseball. Yes, that’s right. Writing on the Education Next blog, Harvard professor Paul Peterson brought my attention to a great new consensus report from the Brookings Institution on the role of value-added in teacher evaluations. Value-added? You know what I’m talking about. Measuring how much students gain and improve academically in a teacher’s classroom. Specifically, the Brookings report takes on four major areas: Value-added can be valuable without supporting every possible use of the information — including releasing it to the public Since the interests of students and teachers don’t align, their consequences from value-added should be different, too Value-added measurements turn out to be as reliable as high-stakes performance measures used in non-education fields Teacher evaluation systems that use value-added prove to be more reliable than systems that do not use it

I only have time for a short posting this morning, but thought you should be aware of the newly-released results of the 12th-grade NAEP (National Achievement of Educational Progress) test scores. Instead of weighing in, I’ll point you to the analysis of a few others. First, Fordham’s Checker Finn writes: The big news, alas, isn’t news at all, which is that proficiency levels remain dreadfully low in both reading and math (worse in math), that gains have been tiny, that college readiness is nowhere near what it ought to be, that the achievement gap hasn’t narrowed by a micron….

Not everyone can be super-smart at math, but a brand new Harvard study (PDF) by Paul Peterson, Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann shows how virtually every state in the USA is not educating enough top-flight math performers. If you look at the 56 nations who take the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), 30 do better than America in the share of students who rank advanced in math. Even our best state doesn’t crack the top 10 or 15. Can’t we be more competitive? The neat part of the Harvard study is seeing how individual states stack up against the other PISA-tested nations. (The authors found a valid way to compare results on our NAEP test with PISA.) Top-ranking Massachusetts, where 11.6 percent of 8th-graders (and 12.4 percent of white 8th-graders) rate as advanced in math, comes in behind 16 entire nations. That includes not only Taiwan, Korea and Finland, but also our neighbors to the north: Canada! Even if you include only the advanced math rate among students with a college-educated parent, seven other nations still outperform Massachusetts. What about Colorado, though?

One argument in education I’m already tired of is what’s the impact of union collective bargaining on student learning. Do unions help or hinder achievement? The problem is it’s an oversimplified question, as I once explained a long time ago. But the ever insightful Mike Antonucci from the Education Intelligence Agency put forward an interesting twist to the question on his Intercepts blog. The real effect of teachers’ union contracts, he says, is the 20.7% cost premium for states (including Colorado) with collective bargaining. To take it a step further, it would be good to control this finding for the cost of living to see how much of the premium remains. On that note comes an interesting story from California (H/T Joanne Jacobs): a school employees union “is protesting a program to place parents in volunteer positions on campus.” I guess it comes down to whether you think our K-12 system is primarily a taxpayer-funded jobs program or a means to help educate students and prepare them for the future. I vote for the latter. Whichever priority you choose has consequences–including the cost of education. Definitely something that deserves a closer look.