ACCOUNTABILITY ~ TRANSPARENCY ~ COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
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Research of Interest
Our volunteer FEC Research Watchers have developed a nice list of research articles and papers that support many of the issues we follow. Search by date or tag.
THE TEACHING PENALTY: An update through 2010
Published on:
Wed, 03/30/2011
Effective teachers are demonstrably the most important resource schools have for improving the academic success of their students (Hanushek and Rivkin 2006; Rice 2003). Yet for many school leaders, recruiting and retaining talented and effective classroom teachers remains an uphill battle. For decades, a small and declining fraction of the most cognitively skilled graduates have elected to enter the teaching profession (Corcoran, Evans, and Schwab 2004), while rigorous national standards and school-based accountability for student performance have pushed the demand for talented teachers to an all-time high. Whether teacher salaries are sufficient to attract the best graduates into teaching remains an open question (Bacolod 2007; Stronge, Gareis, and Little 2006; Moulthrop, Calegari, and Eggers 2005), but there is little doubt that the recent fiscal crisis in the states has reenergized the debate over teacher compensation. Many commentators have suggested that teacher salaries and benefits are too high, and that downsizing is necessary to keep public budgets at a sustainable level. Others have argued for a radical restructuring of teacher pay, most notably linking pay increases to performance (Leigh and Mead 2005; Gordon, Kane, and Staiger 2006; and Solmon and Podgursky 2000). As this debate proceeds, sound evidence on the comparability of teacher pay is critical to ensuring we maintain and improve the quality of the teaching force in the United States.
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Do public school teachers really receive lavish benefits?
Published on:
Thu, 02/09/2012
When most people think of the perks of teaching, an image that comes to mind is a shiny apple presented by a gap-toothed pupil. But a recent paper by Jason Richwine of the Heritage Foundation and Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute claims that public school teachers enjoy lavish benefits that are more valuable than their base pay and twice as generous as those of private-sector workers (Richwine and Biggs 2011). According to Richwine and Biggs, this makes teachers’ total compensation 52 percent higher than fair-market levels and amounts to $120 billion “overcharged” to taxpayers each year.
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The 2012 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning?
Published on:
Sat, 02/18/2012
Despite all the money and effort devoted to developing the Common Core State Standards — not to mention the simmering controversy over their adoption in several states—the study foresees little to no impact on student learning. That conclusion is based on analyzing states’ past experience with standards and examining several years of scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
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Four things lecture is good for
Published on:
Thu, 02/16/2012
A lot of my posts here are about alternatives to the traditional lecture-oriented classroom. Based on that, and on somewhat testy comments like these that I leave lying around the internet, you might get the idea that I am firmly anti-lecture. But that’s not entirely true. There are times and places where lecture works quite well, even better than the alternatives. Here are a few purposes for which I think lecture is well-suited: Modeling thought processes. The benefit of hearing an expert learner lecture on a subject is that, if the lecture is clearly given, the audience can gain some insights into what makes the expert an expert. A good lecture does more than convey facts or put problems on the board — it lays bare the cognitive processes that an expert uses to assimilate those facts or think his or her way through those problems.
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Science Achievement: Institute of Education Sciences
Published on:
Thu, 02/16/2012
This review focuses on science interventions, including curriculum-based interventions, instructional techniques, and products that deliver content and monitor student progress.
Items reviewed are intended to improve outcomes in:
| • Science achievement |
Grade/Age Range: Kindergarten through High School
Population: All
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Gains and Gaps: Changing Inequality in U.S. College Entry and Completion
Published on:
Thu, 12/01/2011
We describe changes over time in inequality in postsecondary education using nearly seventy years of data from the U.S. Census and the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth. We find growing gaps between children from high- and low-income families in college entry, persistence, and graduation. Rates of college completion increased by only four percentage points for low-income cohorts born around 1980 relative to cohorts born in the early 1960s, but by 18 percentage points for corresponding cohorts who grew up in high-income families. Among men, inequality in educational attainment has increased slightly since the early 1980s. But among women, inequality in educational attainment has risen sharply, driven by increases in the education of the daughters of high-income parents. Sex differences in educational attainment, which were small or nonexistent thirty years ago, are now substantial, with women outpacing men in every demographic group. The female advantage in educational attainment is largest in the top quartile of the income distribution. These sex differences present a formidable challenge to standard explanations for rising inequality in educational attainment.
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The Widening Academic Achievement Gap between the Rich and the Poor: New Evidence and Possible Explanations
Published on:
Fri, 07/01/2011
In this chapter I examine whether and how the relationship between family socioeconomic characteristics and academic achievement has changed during the last fifty years. In particular, I investigate the extent to which the rising income inequality of the last four decades has been paralleled by a similar increase in the income achievement gradient. As the income gap between high- and low-income families has widened, has the achievement gap between children in high- and low-income families also widened?
The answer, in brief, is yes. The achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families is roughly 30 to 40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than among those born twenty-five years earlier. In fact, it appears that the income achievement gap has been growing for at least fifty years, though the data are less certain for cohorts of children born before 1970. In this chapter, I describe and discuss these trends in some detail. In addition to the key finding that the income achievement gap appears to have widened substantially, there are a number of other important findings.
First, the income achievement gap (defined here as the income difference between a child from a family at the 90th percentile of the family income distribution and a child from a family at the 10th percentile) is now nearly twice as large as the black-white achievement gap. Fifty years ago, in contrast, the black-white gap was one and a half to two times as large as the income gap. Second, as Greg Duncan and Katherine Magnuson note in chapter 3 of this volume, the income achievement gap is large when children enter kindergarten and does not appear to grow (or narrow) appreciably as children progress through school. Third, although rising income inequality may play a role in the growing income achievement gap, it does not appear to be the dominant factor. The gap appears to have grown at least partly because of an increase in the association between family income and children’s academic achievement for families above the median income level: a given difference in family incomes now corresponds to a 30 to 60 percent larger difference in achievement than it did for children born in the 1970s. Moreover, evidence from other studies suggests that this may be in part a result of increasing parental investment in children’s cognitive development. Finally, the growing income achievement gap does not appear to be a result of a growing achievement gap between children with highly and less-educated parents. Indeed, the relationship between parental education and children’s achievement has remained relatively stable during the last fifty years, whereas the relationship between income and achievement has grown sharply. Family income is now nearly as strong as parental education in predicting children’s achievement.
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Estimating Principal Effectiveness
Published on:
Tue, 12/01/2009
Much has been written about the importance of school leadership, but there is surprisingly little systematic evidence on this topic. This paper presents preliminary estimates of key elements of the market for school principals, employing rich panel data on principals from Texas State. The consideration of teacher movements across schools suggests that principals follow patterns quite similar to those of teachers – preferring schools that have less demands as indicated by higher income students, higher achieving students, and fewer minority students. Looking at the impact of principals on student achievement, the authors find some small but significant effects of the tenure of a principal in a school. More significant, however, are the estimates of variations in principal effectiveness. The variation in principal effectiveness tends to be largest in high poverty schools, consistent with hypothesis that principal ability is most important in schools serving the most disadvantaged students. Finally, considering principal mobility, the authors find that principals who stay in a school tend to be more effective than those who move to other schools.
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The State of State Science Standards 2012
Published on:
Tue, 01/31/2012
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A Critical Review of Research on Formative Assessment: The Limited Scientific Evidence of the Impact of Formative Assessment in Education
Published on:
Sun, 03/01/2009
The existence of a plethora of empirical evidence documenting the improvement of educational outcomes through the use of formative assessment is conventional wisdom within education. In reality, a limited body of scientifically based empirical evidence exists to support that formative assessment directly contributes to positive educational outcomes. The use of formative assessments, or other diagnostic efforts within classrooms, provides information that should help facilitate improved pedagogical practices and instructional outcomes. However, a review of the formative assessment literature revealed that there is no agreed upon lexicon with regard to formative assessment and suspect methodological approaches in the efforts to demonstrate positive effects that could be attributed to formative assessments. Thus, the purpose of this article was two-fold. First, the authors set out to clarify the terminology related to formative assessment and its usage. Finally, the article provides a critical analysis of the seminal literature on formative assessment, beginning with Black and Wiliam (1998), and extending through current published materials.
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