Research of Interest

REVIEW OF PARENT POWER: GRASS-ROOTS ACTIVISM AND K–12 EDUCATION REFORM

The authors of this American Enterprise Institute report interviewed 28 leaders and practitioners of four national educational reform organizations to catalogue opportunities for and barriers to “parent power.” The report unevenly reflects the competing conceptions of “parent power” underlying the national debate on education reform. One conception, embraced uncritically by the authors and the new wave of well-funded national advocacy organizations, sees parents primarily as “consumers” of educational services who seek better choices in a more privatized education marketplace. An alternative, dismissed and overlooked by the authors but embraced by a long tradition of community organizers and public education advocates, views parents as the citizen owners-managers of a public education system that is a central institution of democratic civic life. These competing visions arise from sharply different histories and politics and give rise to dramatically different prescriptions for reform. The report suffers from an inadequate and slanted literature review; highly selective sampling; a serious lack of objectivity; disturbing characterizations of urban parents as “ignorant,” under-engaged and resistant to change; and a failure to contend with empirical evidence that challenges their views on “what parents want.” Its failure to adequately examine and document the full range of “grass-roots activism,” organizing, and history reflects both its blinders and its narrow political objective: to provide a briefing paper for the side it has chosen in what it calls “the fight.”

The Benefits of Florida's Test-Based Promotion System

State and municipal policymakers are increasingly addressing the practice of social promotion in schools—moving children along to the next grade whether or not they have mastered the curriculum—by mandating test-based grade promotion. This paper draws conclusions about the effects of a policy limiting social promotion. To do so, it employs a methodology known as regression discontinuity, which is capable of producing causal estimates of policy effects to study the impact of Florida’s test-based promotion policy on later student achievement. Under this program, students must take an exam to automatically pass from third to fourth grade (some students scoring below the automatic promotion threshold may still advance at teacher discretion). Students who are retained in third grade also receive a rigorous remediation regime aimed at improving their long-term performance. By studying the long-term performance of children who just barely passed the test, as well as those who were just barely left behind, it was possible to compare two essentially identical populations: one set of students who moved forward despite only borderline understanding of the material; and another set who stayed behind a year and received tutoring, mentoring, and other remedial interventions.

Total Paradigm Shift Needed to Save K–12 Education in the United States

The U.S. education system is broken, yet our efforts and finances are focused on trying to fix what we perceive to be wrong with the students and the teachers. The structure and management of public schools and the actual process of educating students in the classrooms contradict each other, philosophically and practically. This dichotomy between belief and practice is the cause of the current educational chaos, which will not end until there is a complete paradigm shift in our school structure and management.

The current system engages in a form of bullying of students and teachers with unrealistic expectations that each student should be able to learn the same measurable amount of knowledge and skills taught within the specified time frame of a grade level. An expectation that all children will develop at the same rate physically would be considered ludicrous, and yet our school system is designed with the expectation that all children will develop at the same rate cognitively, or be chastised for failing to do so.

Center for Public Education National School Boards Association: Searching for the Reality of Virtual Schools

Americans currently consume 3.6 zettabytes of digital information per day. Put another way, that’s 3.621 or 3,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. For the visual learners, picture the equivalent in paper stacked seven feet high across the U.S. including Alaska.1
The place of digital content in public education is therefore not a matter of debate; it is inevitable. But school leaders and education policymakers do need to consider how to manage the influx of online learning opportunities in order to make sure students get their full benefit and not end up lost in cyberspace.
In this report, the Center for Public Education describes various ways digital learning is offered to students, from individual online courses to full-time virtual schools. In addition, we examine current state and district policies that govern its administration, including funding and accountability; and we discuss what is known -- and more importantly, what is not known -- about the effect of online learning on student outcomes. We conclude with a list of questions for state and local policymakers to ask when considering policies to expand online learning.
The timing of this report is key. K-12 online learning is growing rapidly. Close to two million online courses are taken by public school students annually (Queen et al., 2011). The number of students in full-time online schools is four times what it was a decade ago, and grew by 50,000 to the current 250,000 in the last year alone (Watson et al., 2011).