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November 16, 2011

Revamping the GED

Filed under: 21st century education,college,Course taking,High school — Tags: , , , — rstandrie @ 8:29 am

The Common Core standards have, in part, prompted yet another reform: that of the GED. Ed Week reports that the American Council on Education (which created the GED) and education publisher Pearson are redesigning the high school equivalency test.

According to the article, part of the revamping will be to create two different passing points: one that signals high school equivalency, and one that signals college and career readiness. The new exam is due out in 2014. 

I think this is an interesting reform. The Center’s Better Late Than Never report showed that students who received a GED had only slightly better outcomes than dropouts — students who stayed in school and graduated, even late, received a regular diploma experienced much better outcomes in all areas. Improving the GED could improve these outcomes.

I would, however, like to understand what they feel the difference is between a high school education and readiness for college and career. Exactly what would they do other than college or a job? Our report on 21st century education shows that more and more jobs will require post-secondary training. The article doesn’t say much about what is the difference between the rigor of the two passing points, and I’d like to know. I applaud what they’re doing, and hope that both passing points will properly prepare students for college and the workforce. –Rebecca St. Andrie





October 28, 2011

STEM for all

Filed under: 21st century education,High school,Report Summary — Tags: , , , , , , — Jim Hull @ 4:18 pm

You may not think of Advanced Manufacturing, Utilities and Transportation, and Mining when you think of working in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) related field. But according to a report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce these are just some of the industries, historical providers of blue-collar, middle class jobs, that are now looking for STEM workers. And although overall jobs are disappearing from most of these industries there is actually a shortage of STEM workers in these fields.

There is also a supply shortage of more elite STEM occupations, such as scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists, but focusing on the shortage in these high-level occupations overshadows the fact that the demand for workers in STEM occupations is increasing at every level, not just the college-educated.

Yet the problem does not end there. Not only is there a shortage of workers in STEM occupations, but of even greater to concern is the fact there is a shortage of workers in non-STEM fields that require basic competency in STEM skills. Specifically, the report states:

“The concern for STEM shortages tends to focus on the possibility of an insufficient supply of STEM workers, but the deeper problem is a broader scarcity of workers with basic STEM competencies across the entire economy.”

Simply put, math and science education shouldn’t be limited to preparing top students for STEM careers. All students have the basic STEM skills they need to compete in a more technologically demanding job market. The good news from the report is that our K-12 system already produces enough talent in math and science to fill our need for traditional STEM workers.

Yet, 75 percent of these students do not go onto major in a STEM related field in college. To make matters worse, of the students who do start college with a STEM major, just 38 percent graduate with a STEM degree. Although our students are taking the math and science courses in high school to be prepared for STEM work, are those courses are rigorous enough to adequately prepare students for a career in a STEM-related field?  

Either way, the report highlights the fact STEM education should not be reserved for our best and brightest students. In the near future, STEM skills will be a basic requirement for many of the jobs our current students will be applying for. It’s imperative our schools provide all our students the rigorous math and science courses they need to compete in the 21st Century job market. – Jim Hull

To see what percent of jobs will be STEM jobs in your state by 2018, check this out.





October 13, 2011

Using growth in NCLB’s reauthorization

Filed under: Achievement Gaps,Assessments,Growth Models,Testing — Tags: , , , — Jim Hull @ 4:30 pm

On Wednesday, Senator Harkin released his bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), better known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). I haven’t read the bill yet, but I have read that Senator Harkin is proposing to drop the current Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) requirement and instead evaluate schools based on “continuous improvement.” This would mean that all students are no longer expected to be proficient by 2014; instead, they are expected to make a certain amount of academic gains from year to year.

Sounds simple enough. Critics and proponents of NCLB alike have been pushing for the inclusion of a measurement of student growth since NCLB was enacted nearly a decade ago. However, back in 2002 less than a handful of states had the assessments and the data systems in place to measure how much academic gains individual student made from year to year. Now, thanks to NCLB, all states have the capacity to make such calculations. Almost all would agree that including such measures would greatly improve the fairness of any accountability system.  

Yet, incorporating student growth into a federal accountability system is not as straightforward as it seems. First of all, as my report Measuring Student Growth illustrates, there is no single method to measuring student growth. Choosing which method is best depends on the data available and how the data is going to be used. For example, a growth model, which identifies students who are not gaining as much as similar students, will look a lot different than a model that is used to identify students who gained enough in the past year to be on track to reach a certain benchmark such as being college and career ready when they graduate high school.

So before a growth model is used for accountability, policymakers need to state a clear purpose for what the growth data is to evaluate. For example, is the purpose to ensure schools are closing achievement gaps? Is the purpose to ensure all students are college or career ready by the end of high school? Or is it to identify schools where students are making fewer gains than students in schools with similar student populations?  For each of these questions, an adequate answer would require a different growth model.

Second of all, simply moving from a proficiency-based accountability system such as NCLB to a continuous improvement based system as proposed by Senator Harkin overlooks the fact that most state assessments are not designed to effectively measure student growth from grade to grade. Most states have developed their assessments to evaluate if a student is proficient or not proficient each year. As such, many state assessments are unable to reliably determine how much a student has learned from year to year, especially a student who scored at the very high or very low end of the test’s achievement scale. Yes, states can calculate a growth measure using the assessments they now have in place, but in many cases the result will not be as accurate as if the assessments were designed specifically to measure student growth.

These are just two major issues when it comes to including a growth measure for federal accountability. Yes, evaluating schools based on student growth is much fairer than how schools are currently evaluated under NCLB. But just simply including a growth measure does not automatically make it a better accountability system. Policymakers need to set a clear purpose for accountability systems and then incorporate a growth model that would best evaluates whether schools are meeting their goals. From what I know now about the Harkin bill, it is not clear whether the purpose is to ensure all students are college or career ready or if all students are making a year’s worth of gains. Without having a clear purpose for what to hold schools accountable for, adding a growth model will not be any fairer than NCLB. – Jim Hull





September 20, 2011

Relevance, rigor, and real-world consequences

Filed under: college,Course taking,High school — Tags: , , — rstandrie @ 3:51 pm

The Houston Chronicle reports that Georgia is considering “making its high schools more like college.” Students would choose what kind of career they wanted to pursue, and then take a cluster of courses that would prepare them to either enter a job or go to a two- or four-year college. Juniors and seniors would complete an internship in the field they chose, and all students would be able to switch clusters if they decided to change direction.

The proposal leaves me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I applaud its focus on what high school graduates want to do: that the purpose is not just to get kids to graduate from high school, but to leave them prepared for whatever they want to pursue next. We encourage schools and school boards to track how well high school students are prepared for the real world in questions like this at Data First.

On the other hand, the stated assumption that this would replace the “that every student wanted to go to college” bothers me. While I don’t think every job needs college, so much of our research shows that whether a student enters a good job or a good college after high school, they need the same preparation. (You can watch this short video to get an overview. ) While the article states that all students will graduate eligible for college, is there a possibility of this degenerating into a tracking system?

Finally, the question of whether students could, or should, choose a career path that early remains. I agree with Mike Buck, chief academic officer at the Georgia Department of Education, about the strong draw of relevance. “The kids hanging in there until they turn 16 where school may not have always been a lot of fun for them, we get them on a job site where they see how they’re going to apply this,” says Buck. At the same time, Donnie Malone, a Georgia high school senior, pointed out that two years ago he would have picked pre-med but now wants to go into political science or international affairs. Changing majors in college can significantly delay a students’ graduation; would changing career clusters do the same thing?

How would you balance all of these concerns? How would you combine relevance with rigor? And, right now, how do you make sure your students are prepared for a real-world career? –Rebecca St. Andrie





September 16, 2011

It depends on how you define college

Filed under: 21st century education,college — Tags: , , , — rstandrie @ 9:56 am

You’ll probably see some headlines today about the U.S. falling in yet another global ranking: this one about how many young adults finish college. Before you sigh over a declining country, or roll your eyes at an “education-bashing” story, though, take a look at the statistics. They raise a more interesting question than the usual global horse race.

First, it’s true: The U.S. is falling behind. South Korea, Canada, and Japan lead the nations in the number of 25- to 34-year-olds who attained an associate-level, bachelors, or advanced degree. (They had rates of 63, 56 and 56 percent, respectively.) The U.S. is somewhere in the middle of the pack of developed nations with a rate of 41 percent, falling from 12th to 16th place.

So here’s the interesting piece: According to an article examining the results in The Washington Post, this is happening in part because the leading countries are focusing on one- or two-year associate-level degrees, whereas the U.S. is focused on the four-year bachelor’s degree. (The other is a rapid expansion of college attendance in Asia and Europe — a significant factor to consider.)

Combine that with the recent recommendations for measuring and defining community college success rates, and the question comes up again: what should community colleges be doing? Should our focus, too, be on increasing associate-level degrees? Does the workplace currently accept that? How would you define college?

And, most importantly, what about those who start college — any type of college — but don’t finish?

Read our pieces on 21st century education and college and career readiness to get the background for your answers. But how to define — and then attain — a helpful college degree is still a question that needs to be examined. –Rebecca St. Andrie





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