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January 30, 2013

Misconceptions about international assessments

I had the pleasure of spending time with local school board members at NSBA’s annual Federal Relations Network (FRN) meeting here in DC. It has always been my favorite conference to attend as hundreds of school board members from around the country prepare to meet with their members of Congress on behalf of our public schools.

I enjoy the conference so much because the attendees are so passionate and knowledgeable about education policy and research. However, I noticed that some attendees — like the general public — can have misconceptions when it comes to some issues from time to time, which is understandable since most school board members are not trained educators or researchers. One of those misconceptions relates to international assessments which could impact how well our students are prepared for the global labor market.

All U.S. students are tested while other countries only test their high performing students

There seems to be a widely held belief that international comparisons are unfair to American schools because we educate and test all our students while other countries educate and/or test only their best students. As I wrote in the report More than a horse race: A guide to international assessments this is simply not true. Every industrialized country has now followed our lead and provides an education to all students, including students with disabilities and non-native language speakers, just as our schools have done for decades. Furthermore, as a condition for participating in international assessments each country must test a nationally representative sample of all students. If a country does not meet the sampling requirements then the country’s results are not compared to other countries. While some researchers question the sampling of some countries in some years, there is no evidence that other countries are gaming the system by only testing higher performing students.

Unfortunately, this is not what school board members heard from an expert in one of the general sessions. To the contrary, they were told that Taiwan (aka Chinese Taipei) tested their 7th graders to determine if they would go onto vocational schools or academic schools. It was strongly implied that those students who went onto academic schools in the 8th grade were the only students tested on TIMSS the 4th and 8th grade international math and science assessment.

Again, this is not true for a couple of reasons. For one, students in Taiwan are not tested until after the 9th grade—not the 7th grade– to determine if they will go onto vocational or academic schools. So there is no sorting of students into vocational and academic tracks until after the 9th grade. Even then, 95 percent of 9th graders go onto the 10th grade in either of these schools—not too shabby. Second, even if 8th graders were split between vocational and academic schools under the sampling rules for the international assessments students from both types of schools would have to be tested. So just because students don’t attend a certain type of school doesn’t means that they are excluded from international assessments.

Why is this important?

School board members are not alone. Media, parents, teachers, administrators, business leaders, and as we see even other education researchers can have wrong ideas about international comparisons.

So why is it important? Well, if we as country believe that our students are performing better than they actually are compared to students in other countries we can become complacent. We may not have the urgency we need to ensure our students are prepared for life in the 21st Century. As CPE’s report on a 21st Century Education found, U.S. students need more skills and knowledge, especially in math and science, to adequately compete for good jobs in the international labor market.

Ensuring that international comparisons are properly understood is vitally important for school board members, teachers, administrators, and other policymakers so they know where our students really stand so they have the information they need to make decisions on how to best get our students to where they need to be to compete in the 21st Century. – Jim Hull

Filed under: 21st century education,International Comparisons,Public education — Jim Hull @ 4:15 pm




January 25, 2013

The future is still the future?

Honestly, I’m not a Luddite. But sometimes I feel like I’m playing one here at CPE.

Last year we examined what was known — or more accurately what was not known — about online courses and cyberschools, and their overall impact on student learning. The report, Searching for the Reality of Virtual Schools, found that despite some very exciting things happening in online education, the overall impact of virtual courses and schools on elementary and secondary students is either undocumented or bleak.  We also found that the fault is mostly with inadequate monitoring systems for students working online, with the result that many of them appeared to be dropping in and out of the cyberworld unnoticed and often untaught.

Recent news from Pennsylvania isn’t making us any more hopeful. Earlier this week, an independent education news service in Philadelphia reported on allegations by former employees that a major virtual charter school provider, K12 Inc.

“aggressively recruited children who were ill-suited for the company’s model of online education. They say the schools then manipulated enrollment, attendance, and performance data to maximize tax-subsidized, per-pupil funding.”

K12 operates the Agora cyber charter which enrolls 8,000 of the state’s 32,000 full-time cyber students.  In addition to actively seeking students who are most likely to do poorly online, the former K12 employees further described the company’s practice of skirting attendance requirements while continuing to bill the state for students who are clearly not participating in the instruction.

The charges are part of a class action suit filed by investors in K12 which reported $522 million earnings in 2011. According to the article, most of K12’s revenue was generated by managing public virtual charter schools.  While the investors have their reasons to be unhappy, the real victims here, of course, are the students.

Then yesterday, the Pennsylvania Department of Education released recalculated AYP numbers for all charter schools in the state. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the recalculations were called for after it was revealed that AYP requirements for charter schools were more lenient than those for traditional public schools. The new numbers show that 43 charters met AYP, down from 77 under the former rules.

Of particular interest was that not one — zero — virtual charter schools made AYP.  As we reported last year, Stanford University researchers had earlier looked at Pennsylvania virtual charter schools over the period 2007 and 2010. They found that they consistently performed worse in terms of student gains than the traditional public school the students would have otherwise attended. Obviously, nothing has changed.

A now legendary 1955 documentary heralded the approach of a new technological age, proclaiming that “the future is now.”  I have seen how technology is transforming classrooms for the better, especially when blended with face-to-face instruction with a teacher. But for the idea there will be a brave new cyber world of schooling, the future still seems to be in the future.

Filed under: 21st century education,Charter Schools,CPE,online learning — Tags: , , , — Patte Barth @ 8:00 am




October 12, 2012

New CPE Report Connects High Schools to College Success

The Center’s latest report “High school rigor and academic advising: Setting up students to succeed” has already made some waves. As a matter of fact, the Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, and Education Week have already written extensive articles about the report that show how high schools make a difference in whether or not their students go on to succeed in college.

The study found three main factors that affect postsecondary students’ chances of persisting from their 1st to 2nd year – even when you compare students from similar socioeconomic backgrounds and similar achievement levels.

  • Academic advising: For students in both two-year and four-year institutions, talking to an academic advisor in college either “sometimes” or “often” significantly improved their chances of persisting. Students in two-year institutions increased their chances of staying on track by as much as 53 percent just by meeting frequently with their academic advisor.
  • High-level mathematics: At four-year institutions, lower-income students who began high school with below average achievement were 22 percent more likely to persist if they had taken Pre-calculus or Calculus instead of only completing math up to Algebra II. For similar students in two-year institutions, their chances of persisting increased by 27 percent.
  • Advanced Placement/International Baccalaureate courses: Taking an AP/IB course had a dramatic effect on students’ chances of persisting even when students fail the end-of-course test. Low achieving and low-income students who took an AP/IB course were 18 percent more likely to persist in four-year colleges and 30 percent more likely to persist in two-year colleges. The more courses a student took, the higher their persistence rates.
  • Other high school factors also impacted students’ persistence rates in college, including grade point average and the amount of time spent on homework in high school.

What makes these findings so important is the fact that it provides strong evidence that what high schools do does make a difference in whether their students are successful in college or not. It is no longer satisfactory for our high schools to simply get their students into college. Now, it is vital that our high schools prepare their students to succeed in college. They can do so by providing a rigorous curriculum including college level courses such as AP/IB that all students have access to and not just the top performing students. While the report found that academic advising at the college level had a huge impact on whether students persisted in college, high schools that provide counseling to their students to help them prepare for college can also go a long way to preparing their students for success in college.

High schools that provide such rigorous curriculums and supports would likely see significant improvements in the success of their students in college. However, they would likely see an even greater improvement in the success rates of their lower-income and lower-achieving students who go on to college. That is because low-income and low-achieving students benefit even more from being properly prepared in high school than do their higher-income and higher-achieving peers. So high schools can cut their college success gap nearly in half by providing all students with a rigorous curriculum and strong academic advising. – Jim Hull

Filed under: 21st century education,Achievement Gaps,college,Course taking,High school,Report Summary,research — Tags: , , , , , — Jim Hull @ 3:23 pm




August 30, 2012

New PDK/Gallup poll highlights public perception of public education

The annual PDK/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools was released last week, and while the results are heartening on some fronts, there’s still plenty of room for improvement. Here are some of the most interesting findings from the poll:

Funding: This year, as has been the case for the past few years, Americans cite a lack of financial support as the biggest challenge facing public schools in their own communities. While 35% of respondents nationally listed it as the most pressing issue, almost half (43%) of parents with children in public schools cited lack of funding as the biggest challenge. The next most common responses were lack of discipline and overcrowded schools – with both being cited by less than 10% of both national respondents and public school parents. For information on schools’ budget challenges, see the Center’s report Cutting to the Bone.

Urban Schools: 97% of Americans believe that it’s very or somewhat important to improve public education in urban areas, and almost two-thirds would be willing to pay more taxes to improve urban schools. However, there’s a clear political distinction on that question, with 80% of Democrats willing to pay more taxes, but only 41% of Republicans in favor of it.

Work and College Readiness: Americans largely agree that high school dropouts are not prepared to enter the workforce, with 65% saying they strongly disagree that today’s high school dropout is ready for the world of work. Unfortunately, only 8% strongly agree that high school graduates are ready for college, with most respondents (43%) being  in the middle of strongly agreeing and strongly disagreeing on the issue. We have a wealth of resources on preparing college and career ready graduates including how to prevent kids from dropping out in our high school toolkit.

Evaluating Teachers: There’s no consensus among respondents on the best way to evaluate teachers. 52% favor requiring that teacher evaluations include their student’s test scores, while 47% oppose it. Further, among those that favor it, 48% say student test scores should count for one to two-thirds of an evaluation outcome. Despite disagreements on evaluations, 70% of parents say they have trust and confidence in their children’s teachers. See our reports on teacher evaluation and more in our teacher quality toolkit.

Vouchers and Charter Schools: The biggest shift in opinion compared to previous years has been on the issues of charter schools and vouchers, although in different directions. The support for charter schools had been steadily rising for a decade, and reached a peak in 2011 with 70% of Americans in favor of them. This year, however, the number dropped to 66% in favor. Additionally, in 2011, only 34% of Americans supported vouchers for private schools. This year that number jumped to 44%.  Learn more about the impact of charter schools and their virtual cousins.

Grading Schools: Nationally, only 19% of respondents graded American public schools an A or a B. However, public school parents have a more varied opinion, with 48% of them giving the schools in their own community an A or a B, with another 48% of them grading their own schools a C, D or F. Additionally, when asked to rate the school that their oldest child attends, 77% of parents graded it an A or a B.

When looking at these results as a whole, we can see that Americans want public education to work. They’re largely in favor of giving public schools more funding, and have high opinions of the schools and teachers that they are most familiar with. Americans, however, are also big fans of being able to choose how to educate their children, and until they sense progress, it’s possible that the voucher movement will continue to gain traction. – Ashwini Yelamanchili

Filed under: 21st century education,Data,Public education — Ashwini @ 9:15 am




August 9, 2012

StudentsFirst doesn’t deserve a medal

A couple of weeks ago, the organization StudentsFirst, which bills itself as “a grassroots movement to reform America’s public education,” released a series of Olympic-themed videos on their Youtube page. The most popular spot featured a man, dressed in a “USA EDU” tank top, flopping around while twirling a ribbon as rhythmic gymnasts do, and compared his embarrassing performance to that of the American education system. The video is short, so it’s best if you watch it for yourself.

 

StudentsFirst is led by Michelle Rhee, who founded the organization after resigning as Chancellor of D.C. Public Schools (she is perhaps best known for her appearance in the school reform documentary Waiting for Superman, though her role in D.C.’s “Erasuregate” scandal should also be noted). Rhee herself appeared on Meet the Press in late July to debut the above video. Though it has more than 35,000 views on Youtube, it’s hard to gauge if reaction has been more positive or negative, as both ratings and comments for the video have been disabled.

The whole point of the video is to assert that American public education isn’t fit to compete on the world stage, and that notion is furthered by the graphic that says American students are ranked 17th in science, and 25th in math. Though no source is given for these numbers in the video, they’re from the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Those numbers, however, don’t speak to an underlying cause, which is the fact that the US has the second highest rate of child poverty of developed nations (Romania is first).

When the information from the PISA report is disaggregated and schools with certain levels of child poverty of compared to other countries with similar levels, the US scores markedly improve. That is not at all to say that child poverty is the sole cause of problems within our public education system, but to completely ignore it is disingenuous.

So not only is the video insulting in its depiction of our students, teachers and administrators as slovenly and bumbling simpletons, but it is also misleading. – Ashwini Yelamanchili

Filed under: 21st century education,Achievement Gaps,Assessments,Data,International Comparisons — Ashwini @ 1:11 pm




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