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December 4, 2012

5 states put time on their side

Five states have entered into a pilot project to add 300 hours of instructional time to the school year.  The participating states — Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Tennessee — had each made more school time part of their approved ESEA waiver from the U.S. Department of Education. The Ford Foundation and the National Center on Time and Learning are providing technical assistance and support for the pilot, which is expected to reach about 20,000 students in 40 schools.

According to an AP story, the overarching goals for adding time are to raise student performance and to also provide a well-rounded curriculum including the arts and other subjects that sometimes take a backseat to reading and math.

There’s a common-sense appeal to the idea that extending time for learning will produce more learning.  A CPE review of research on school time found that to be generally true— with some caveats.

Number one is that the impact of extra time depends how it’s is used. Merely stretching 45 minutes of typical instruction into a bigger slot isn’t likely to make much difference. That’s why it will be important to give teachers their own time for planning.

Last year, CPE’s Jim Hull and Mandy Newport analyzed the amount of time students are required to be in school in different countries (cited in the AP story). They found that contrary to many reports, the U.S. requires about as much or more time than many of our economic competitors. They also found little relationship between time required and outcomes. Just consider the case of high-scoring Finland which requires the least hours compared to low-scoring Italy which requires the most. Note that time required doesn’t necessarily represent the actual instructional time students receive. Nonetheless, this underscores how vital it is to use the time effectively.

The pilot has a three-year timeframe. We’ll be watching to see how much impact it has on student learning and how it compares to investments in teacher professional development, curriculum or other strategies to raise achievement.  As budget conscious school leaders know, time in the school schedule truly is money. Hopefully, these five states will have lessons for schools across the country to make sure time is on our side.

Read more about the TIME Collaborative here.

Filed under: instruction,school organization — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Patte Barth @ 9:14 am




September 11, 2012

How do homeschoolers compare?

I must admit I don’t know very much about homeschooling. I always figured it was an option only a small number of families took advantage of. Which is why I was surprised to learn from CNN that an estimated 4 percent of school aged students are being homeschooled. To put the percentage into context, that is nearly as many students that attend charter schools. It may not be a large percentage, but it’s certainly not inconsequential, which makes evaluating their performance all that more important.

So how do homeschoolers compare to students in traditional public schools when it comes to achievement? Well, when comparing homeschoolers’ achievement to that of public school students I was surprised to see that homeschoolers outperform students in traditional public schools by whopping 36 percentile points in some subjects. That is a huge margin which made me a little suspicious, so I dug a little deeper to find out where the information came from. I looked into the reports CNN cited to back up this claim. One report was from a homeschooling advocacy organization the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA). The other is an article by educationews.com.

The HSLDA report appears to be well done at first glance, but what raises a big red flag is that the report does not name the tests the comparisons were based on. The report only states that achievement results are based on a collection of 15 tests from various testing services that are combined into one score. But what tests would those be? What grades were tested? What subjects were tested? How were these different tests combined into one composite score? These are questions any decent report should answer explicitly. Yet, answers to these questions could not be found in the report. So researchers like me are not able to determine the accuracy of the tools they used to make such claims.

The educationnews.com article, on the other hand, just seemed to throw around some data they found doing a Google search without doing any real research into the rigor of the data they were reporting. For example, besides citing the HSLDA– without any critique– the article also cited ACT scores as proof homeschoolers outperform students in traditional public schools. Keep in mind that when it comes to the ACT (which is like the SAT) the problem is that, for the most part, only those students expecting to go to colleges that require the ACT are taking it – not all students. So many lower performing students do not take ACT which makes the achievement data higher than it really is.

Since the ACT is voluntary for the vast majority of students, the ACT is not an ideal assessment to compare the achievement of students from traditional public schools to those who were homeschooled. This is because it is quite unlikely that the ACT scores results were comparing similar students since homeschooled students are mostly white, non-poor and do not require special education. Public schools educate more minority, poor and special education students who typically start school less prepared than their peers and require more specialized instruction. If these students were homeschooled at the same rate as in public schools, it is quite likely that the achievement scores for homeschooling would be much lower. However, such a comparison would provide a much more accurate comparison of the achievement between public school students and homeschoolers. Unfortunately, CNN did not provide any results from research that made these more accurate comparisons, although I’m not sure if any such research even exists. Even so, after reading the article one still has to wonder how being homeschooled really compares to being educated in a traditional public school.—Jim Hull

Filed under: research,school organization — Jim Hull @ 8:36 am




August 23, 2012

Does the Voucher Study Meet the Gold Standards?

The Friedman Foundation may declare that the new Brookings Institute report on school vouchers uses the ‘Gold Standard’ in research but certainly the foundation’s founder wouldn’t have won his Nobel Prize using such methods.

Yes, Milton Friedman, the father of school choice, would have lauded the finding that school vouchers improve college-going rates for black students, although no other student groups. But he would have known enough not to anoint such research as the ‘Gold Standard’. Not that the author’s did a sloppy job, not at all, it was actually a well done study. The fact of the matter is there were significant limitations to this study, as is common in education research, that prevents this study from reaching the ‘Gold Standard’ status and making the broad conclusion that vouchers should be expanded to improve college enrollment rates.

To reach such a standard groups of students would need to be randomly assigned a voucher and then compare the college enrollment rates of those students who received a voucher to those students who did not.  By doing so isolates the impact of the voucher from other factors that may impact whether a student goes on to enroll in college. In this study they examined the college enrollment rates of New York City students who took part in a lottery to receive a $1,000 voucher to attend just about any private school in New York City through a private voucher program in the late 1990’s. To achieve randomization—the ‘Gold Standard’– they compared the college enrollment rates of those students in the lottery that were offered a voucher to those students in the lottery who were not offered a voucher.

Such comparison would meet the ‘Gold Standard’ since the only difference between the two groups would be whether they received a voucher or not. However, this is not necessarily the case. Due in part to the fact that 22 percent of the students ‘offered’ a voucher never actually used the voucher to attend a private school. This could be for a couple of reasons:

  • Since the voucher didn’t cover the full cost of tuition only those students who had more motivated families that could afford to pay the difference actually used their voucher.
  • The students may not have met the admission standards or other requirements for the private schools they were interested in attending.
  • The students and their families may have just decided their current public school was still the best fit for the student.

Do we know what impact these differences had on the results? No. But once you have such differences in the groups being compared the study no longer meets the ‘Gold Standard’ since these and other differences could account for any differences in college enrollment rates between the two groups.

Just because the study doesn’t meet the ‘Gold Standard’ for research doesn’t mean the study should be ignored. However, many voucher proponents including the authors seem to be blind to the these limitations and make broad claims about the impact vouchers have on future college enrollments. This study may provide some insight into whether vouchers improve college going rates for low-income black students but it certainly does not prove this is the case. Due to some of the limitations, the study actually created more questions than it answered. Future research needs to address these questions before we know for sure what impact vouchers have on college enrollments:

  • Why didn’t all the students who were offered a voucher use their voucher to attend a private school?
  • Is there a difference in college enrollment rates between students who used their voucher and those who were offered a voucher but did not use their voucher?
  • Why did voucher students stop using their voucher while they were still eligible to receive it? Did they remained in public schools?
  • Were students more likely to enroll in college the longer they received a voucher?
  • Was there a difference in the quality of high schools attended by students who were offered a voucher than the high schools attended by students who were not offered a voucher?
  • Why do vouchers improve the college enrollment rates of low-income black students but not low-income Hispanic students?
  • Why would a student who was offered a voucher but never used it be more likely to enroll in college than a student who wanted a voucher but was never offered one?

Without answers to these questions the study adds little insights into what impact expanding voucher programs would have on future college enrollment rates. Unfortunately, since this study failed to meet the Gold Standard policymakers are left with more questions than answers. – Jim Hull

For more insights on the limitations of this study check out the blog post at School Board News Today.

Filed under: college,Public education,research,school organization,vouchers — Tags: , , — Jim Hull @ 3:15 pm




July 3, 2012

Early Warning Indicator Systems: Challenges With Implementation

I recently attended a briefing on Early Warning Indicator Systems (EWIS) in public schools.  I find it fascinating that we can predict that a sixth grader has a 75 percent chance of dropping out of high school if they exhibit just one of these three factors:

  • Poor behavior
  • Poor attendance
  • Failure in English or Math

Dropouts are not  a problem relagated to high schools, as most future dropouts show warning signs as early as elementary and middle school.  As the Center’s report Keeping Kids in School found, half of all dropouts showed warning signs by 8th grade.  Now that we know this, we can target them with specialized help during transitional school years.  If we wait until ninth grade, it could be too late to help, especially since a majority of dropouts leave in the ninth and tenth grades.

Three main problems have to be addressed when implementing these systems in schools.  First, teachers need support.  The way schools operate right now in many schools is that one teacher monitors a large group of students.  For EWIS to work, this has to be flipped.  A group of teachers and mentors have to discuss individual students.  This can be time consuming, but some schools use outside help from mentor/volunteer programs like AmeriCorps to help understand the issues surrounding a student’s absenteeism or behavioral problems.  The second problem is that in some schools, more professional social services will be needed.  This can be costly, but the increased cost of more counselors, social workers, and other professionals will ultimately be returned in savings from preventing students from repeating grades or dropping out.  Finally, the last problem with implementing these systems is integrating them throughout the school.  Schools are organized by grades, or by subjects.  To a student however, their school is the collection of teachers that they see every day.  We need to organize schools so that teachers with the same students can communicate and create consistent behavior standards from classroom to classroom. 

Every school should have consistent and open data on the amount of absenteeism in their schools.  It may take some work, but research shows us how important it is for a student to be in school every day; not just in high school, but in elementary and middle school.  - Kasey Klepfer

Filed under: Dropouts,Graduation rates,High school,Middle school,Public education,research,school organization — KKlepfer @ 12:38 pm




June 15, 2012

CPE Report Highlighted in MSNBC Article

An MSNBC article today highlighted the Center’s Time in School report that examined whether U.S. students spend less time in school than their peers in other countries, particularly higher performing countries such as India, China, Japan, and Korea.

As I stated in the article, most U.S. students spend as much or more time in school each year as students in other countries, even those that outperform us. So simply increasing the time students are in school will not bolt the U.S. to the top of the international rankings.

However, this doesn’t mean increasing time cannot be a powerful tool for increasing student achievement, especially if targeted to those students that would benefit the most and if the additional time is used effectively. This is what the article says is being proposed in Chicago where a large number of students perform below grade level. Using time well can help get those students to grade level and beyond, as we discuss in another Center report, Making Time. However, if the same content will be taught in the same way but in more time then increasing time would just be a waste of time and money.  – Jim Hull

Filed under: International Comparisons,school organization — Jim Hull @ 1:37 pm




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