While the U.S. Department of Education said the new rates can’t be compared to previous numbers, officials said the graduation rates provide an accurate ranking of states. Georgia, which has previously boasted graduation rates of about 80 percent, found itself near the bottom, with a graduation rate of 67 percent, even lower than neighboring states Alabama and Mississippi. “It’s disappointing,” Tim Callahan, spokesman for the Professional Association of Georgia Educators, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We were using sort of a feel-good calculation.”

And in Ohio, where state-calculated graduation rates have been climbing for several years, the state’s interim superintendent Michael Sawyers told the Newark Advocate that he’s “surprised and somewhat disheartened” to see that the graduation rate for black, Hispanic and low-income students is far lower than the 85 percent rate for white students. New Jersey, which had the highest graduation rate in the nation in a ranking by Education Week in June, tied with six other states for 12^th place. “I’m not sure there is any material difference between being in the top 12 versus the top eight,” said State Education Commissioner Chris Cerf to The Record. “It shows New Jersey is doing extremely well compared to the rest of the nation, and has significant room to improve.”

The move to a uniform system reflects a broader trend in education reform, as states also launch the new Common Core State Standards, which will allow more accurate comparisons of academic achievement. Under the new graduation metrics, all state scores are based only on the percent of students who graduate in four years, and data is adjusted for students who drop out or do not earn a regular diploma. Previously, states or outside agencies often included all students that graduated in any given year in calculating graduation rates, regardless of how long it had taken a student to finish.

The new data shows that even states with high graduation rates overall aren’t doing as well at graduating some student groups. Connecticut has an 83 percent graduation rate, one of the highest in the northeast. But when it comes to low-income students, only 62 percent graduate. (Connecticut also has one of the widest test score gaps in the nation between low-income students and their more affluent peers.) Minnesota has one of the largest gaps in achievement between black and white students, with a graduation rate for white students 15 percentage points higher than black. And in South Dakota, where 83 percent of all students graduate, less than half of Asian, Pacific Islanders, and American Indians earn their diplomas.

“By using this new measure, states will be more honest in holding schools accountable and ensuring that students succeed,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. “These data will help states target support to ensure more students graduate on time.”

The lowest graduation rate was in Washington, D.C., where 59 percent of all students, and only 39 percent of students with disabilities, graduate high school on time. But D.C. does a better job of graduating black students than Minnesota and Oregon, and graduates a larger percentage of low-income students than Nevada and Alaska, all states with higher overall graduation rates.

Several states have relatively stable numbers across racial and income lines. Iowa, which claimed the highest graduation rate of 88 percent, had little variation in rates for different student groups, as did Texas and Arkansas.

For the first time in decades, more than 50 percent of the nation’s teaching force is comprised of teachers who have been in the classroom under 10 years, Teach Plus found in “Great Expectations: Teachers’ Views on Elevating the Teaching Profession,” which looks at the changing demographics of U.S. teachers.

From “Seven Trends: The Transformation of the Teaching Force,” by Richard Ingersoll and Lisa Merrill (May 2012)

The national survey asked 1,015 new and veteran teachers their views on some of the most contentious issues in U.S. public education, like teacher evaluations and class size, to see if attitudes are shifting with an influx of newer teachers.

Despite differences in experience, teachers are generally united when it comes to working conditions. The majority of both newbies and veterans agree that class sizes should not be increased, even if doing so would provide districts with more funding to raising salaries. The two groups are also in agreement about keeping the school day shorter and said that increasing pay is key to elevating public respect for the profession.

On the topic of teacher evaluations, though—one of the most highly debated issues in education reform—the two demographics have mostly differing views. They agree that current teacher evaluations are ineffective at improving instruction, but 71 percent of less experienced teachers say their evaluation should be tied to student test score growth, compared to only 41 percent of veteran teachers.

Those who began teaching in the last decade are also more supportive of changing compensation and tenure systems, and more likely to think the use of student data is important to teach more effectively.

Celine Coggins, founder and CEO of Teach Plus, said a new generation of teachers has been exposed to the magnitude of the achievement gap, which may influence their attitudes and their belief in the importance of data.

“Closing gaps among racial groups and across income levels motivates the commitment to teaching for so many,” Coggins said.

In 1987, the majority of teachers had 15 years of experience, according to a study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. Now, with about half of new teachers leaving urban classrooms within three years, teachers with just one year of experience are the most common in U.S. classrooms. And each year, 200,000 new teachers enter the profession, 65 percent of whom are recent college graduates.

Mark Teoh, director of research and knowledge at Teach Plus, said that these new teachers were most likely students during or after the introduction of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, and said their attitudes show they are more accustomed to testing and accountability than their more experienced colleagues.

At a time when states are introducing the Common Core standards and new evaluation methods, Teoh says these shifting teacher attitudes could influence education reform, as policymakers hear “what kind of profession these teachers want to see, and what kind of workforce they want to be a part of.”

The report also highlights problems that come with a younger, less experienced teaching force. Teach Plus recommends including teacher opinion in policymaking and encouraging newer teachers to take on leadership roles.

“There’s definitely room and a hunger for these teachers to be part in the policy process itself,” Teoh said. “They’re the ones who are there all the time, and they can provide the feedback, guidance and perspective that [are] needed.”

For more than a decade the study tracked students who received privately-funded vouchers in the late 1990s. African-American students in that group were 24 percent more likely than those in a control group to attend college and 58 percent more likely to attend private four-year colleges. Hispanic students who received vouchers were also more likely to enroll in college, but only by a small, statistically insignificant, amount.

The study’s authors—Brookings’ Matthew M. Chingos and Harvard’s Paul E. Peterson, a voucher advocate—compared the college matriculation rates of about 1,300 students who received a voucher to a similarly-sized control group who did not win vouchers in a lottery. The study is unusual in that it focused on long-term educational attainment rather than short-term test-score trends.

Vouchers have resurged in popularity over the last two years, but it’s unclear whether the New York study has much relevance for states like Indiana, Wisconsin, and Louisiana, which have recently expanded or created voucher programs. The designs of those states’ programs, as well as the overall quality of their private-school sectors, vary significantly.

The study’s authors argued their research illustrates the promise of vouchers in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. But Rutgers professor Bruce D. Baker critiqued the study in a blog post, saying other factors—apart from vouchers—could have contributed to the higher college-going rates for African-Americans at the private schools.

More information and context about vouchers can be found in a recent Hechinger Report article.

Retention policies are controversial because the research is mixed for students who are held back, but a report published on August 16th by the Brookings Institution suggests that at least for younger children who struggle with reading, repeating a grade may be beneficial.

The report, which examined a decade-old retention policy in Florida, was authored by Martin West of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He argues that “the decision to retain a student is typically made based on subtle considerations involving ability, maturity, and parental involvement that researchers are unable to incorporate into their analyses. As a result, the disappointing outcomes of retained students may well reflect the reasons they were held back in the first place rather than the consequences of being retained.”

West comes to the following conclusion:

“Retained students continue to perform markedly better than their promoted peers when tested at the same grade level and, assuming they are as likely to graduate high school, stand to benefit from an additional year of instruction.”

The spread of stricter retention policies is connected to a wider movement to ensure all children are reading proficiently by third grade. The idea is based on research showing that children who don’t reach that target are often left behind as their classes move from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.”

(photo courtesy of David Shankbone)

Retention is not the only, or even the main, instrument in the toolbox promoted by advocates in the reading-by-third-grade movement. Intensive interventions, including pulling struggling readers out of class for individual or small-group tutorials, have become increasingly popular in many schools around the country. More states are also enshrining efforts to identify struggling readers and provide them early interventions in the law, as Education Week has reported.

Even so, the use of retention, even as a last resort for students who aren’t reading well enough on time, is still fraught with problems, many experts say. A report on third-grade literacy policies by the Education Commission of the States (ECS), published in March 2012, outlined what can go wrong with strict retention policies:

“While some researchers have found that retained students ‘can significantly improve their grade-level skills during their repeated year,’ others have found that less than half of retained students meet promotion standards after attending summer school and repeating a grade. Some research points to other negative effects, including a greater likelihood of bullying and victim behavior, or dropping out of high school.”

That is, assuming that retained students are no less likely than their peers to graduate from high school—which Professor West does—is not necessarily a good idea, according to the research.

In addition, the ECS report noted that minority and low-income students make up a disproportionate share of the students who are held back. “This raises serious questions about equity and the potential for prejudicing teachers’ attitudes toward the academic capabilities of retained students. Given these disparities, some view grade retention as punishing disadvantaged students who also may not have received the same quality of instruction as their more advantaged peers,” the ECS report said.

Educators have also questioned policies in which a decision to hold a student back is based solely on test scores.

In New York City, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg touted his ending of “social promotion” in the 2003-04 school year, educators quietly ignored the policy change. In the years after social promotion was officially ended, the number of third-graders held back actually decreased significantly over time (from 3,601 in the first year to 480 in 2008-2009, according to the city’s statistics). This year, the mayor had a “change of heart” and ended the policy.

As one Florida superintendent, Doug Whittaker, put it to Education Week last March in a story about the spread of retention policies: “After 10 years, I don’t like it. I don’t think it’s good for kids … I don’t care how the adults frame it: The people making those decisions forget what it’s like to be 8 years old.”

The study’s authors examined a Massachusetts program launched in 2004 by then-Gov. Mitt Romney that waives tuition for top students who agree to attend in-state public colleges or universities. They found that, while the program has accomplished its goal of keeping more of these students enrolled in Massachusetts, the students’ probability of graduating on time was 40 percent lower than if they’d attended higher-quality private institutions.

Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government (photo by Shahnaz Maqbool)

“Our working hypothesis is that these kids are giving up opportunities to go to campuses that are more competitive and much better resourced than the public system is,” said Joshua Goodman, an assistant professor of public policy at the Kennedy School and coauthor of the study.

The result, he said, is that the students vie for limited faculty time and often can’t get into courses they need to graduate within four years of enrolling.

The report concludes that students have a poor understanding of the comparative quality of colleges and universities, and that public institutions need to be improved in other ways than by simply trying to elevate the quality of students.

The Massachusetts scholarship program offers free tuition to the top 25 percent of high-school students in every district, based on scores on the 10th-grade Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS tests.

Because the cost of attending public universities in Massachusetts is chiefly composed of mandatory fees, not tuition, the savings for these students amount to a maximum of about $1,700 a year. Goodman speculated that many of the students also would have been eligible for financial aid at private colleges and universities.

“Trending Toward Reform: Teachers Speak on Unions and the Future of the Profession,” released Tuesday by Education Sector, a nonprofit education think tank located in Washington, D.C., reveals that teachers are more likely to think unions should help with and even lead reform efforts than they were five years ago.

In 2007, 32 percent of teachers said that unions should focus more on improving teacher quality. In 2011, that number was 43 percent.  Just 14 percent of teachers thought that union involvement would be an obstacle in reform efforts while 62 percent said unions could be “helpful partners in improving schools.”

Yet, when it came down to the specifics of how the teaching profession should be improved, teachers didn’t necessarily agree with many of the in-vogue education trends,  such as merit pay, overhauling teacher evaluations to include student test scores and eliminating tenure.

For instance, only a third of teachers are in favor of rewarding those whose students get high test scores. Forty-six percent liked the idea of giving more money to teachers whose students make more academic progress than other similar students, which is similar to how many merit pay programs across the country are structured.

Far more teachers were in favor of raising the salaries of teachers who work in low-performing schools (83 percent) or who teach in hard-to-fill subject areas like math or science (58 percent). In other words, teachers are likely to support differentiated pay, but in the areas where they have the most control, said Sarah Rosenberg, a co-author of the study.

Few teachers are happy with the idea of eliminating tenure altogether, which traditionally is earned after a certain number of years in the profession and provides a degree of job protection. Critics argue tenure policies make it nearly impossible to fire poor teachers. While teachers agree that tenure shouldn’t protect bad teachers, only a third would be willing to trade it for a $5,000 bonus, according to the survey.

Still, a growing number of teachers believe that unions should play a role in making it easier to fire ineffective teachers. “Teachers pay the greatest price for incompetent teachers,” one teacher wrote in response to the survey. “Year after year, [other teachers] pick up the slack.”

Released today, “California’s Economic Payoff: Investing in College Access & Completion” finds that for “every dollar California invests in students who go to college, it will receive a net return on investment of [$4.50].” Returns for college graduates were double those who went but dropped out before completing a degree. And for college graduates, the money spent by the state on their education is paid back, on average, by the time they’re 38 years old.

California’s higher education system has been hit with a slew of budget cuts totaling billions of dollars since the recession started. The state’s colleges and universities have raised tuition and eliminated entire degree programs. Although it never addresses the budget crisis explicitly, the report will help interested groups make the case for California to devote more funding to higher education.

The California Civil Rights Coalition, for one, plans on using the report in its advocacy, said statewide coordinator Claudia Pena. “To the extent that California invests in its future, we’ll see a reduction on poverty, incarceration and unemployment,” she said. “We actually cannot afford to deny this investment in education without continuing to increase the disparities in education.”

The return-on-investment that the report calculates is based in part on a projection of increased tax revenues for the Golden State. As students with some college experience or a college degree earn more money than high-school graduates and dropouts, they’ll contribute more in state taxes later on. The authors also point to the fact that those in college are far less likely to cost the state money down the line, as well, whether through welfare programs or incarceration.

The findings are particularly important due to California’s demographics, according to one of the report’s co-authors, Jon Stiles. The state’s two largest age groups are 15-19-year-olds and 20-24-year-olds. And, unlike the rest of the country, the majority of these individuals are Latino or black. “That means California is going to have to take the lead in solutions in dealing with this young population,” Stiles said.

The tax breaks, and other aid that goes to students who do not meet the federal definition of financial need, were the subject of this story by The Hechinger Report, which appeared on the front page of USA Today last November.

Education Sector said that before 2001, nearly 83 percent of higher-education tax benefits went to families making less than $75,000. Today, nearly a quarter of the tax benefits go to families earning between $100,000 and $180,000.

The share of the tax credit enjoyed by middle-income families, meanwhile, has sharply declined.

Education Sector analyst Stephen Burd said the tax breaks should be eliminated.

“Providing billions of dollars in tax benefits to upper-middle income families who would send their children to college without the help is a luxury that the government can no longer afford,” Burd said.

The report cites U.S. Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the government will have spent about $55 billion on tuition tax-break programs between 2010 and 2014.

“The principal perspective: at a glance” takes a look at the small but growing body of research on principals’ influence of student achievement to make the case that school leadership cannot be neglected. “Education policy and education research [have] focused primarily on teachers,” said Jim Hull, senior analyst at the Center for Public Education and the study’s author. “The impact principals have on student outcomes has largely been ignored until recently … [Policymakers] should focus more on recruiting and retaining effective principals in the schools that need them most.”

Things are changing, though, Hull said, with the principal position receiving more attention than ever before. The Hechinger Report has also found that whether in charter or traditional public schools, training and retaining good leaders are top priorities, if also major challenges.

In part, the focus is a result of recent federal policies. Almost all of the schools that received federal School Improvement Grants (SIG)—reserved for the lowest-performing institutions in the country—had to fire principals in an effort to turn their schools around.

It’s also partly because of advances in research. The studies that Hull examined for his report all measured principal effectiveness slightly differently, but each relied on student test-scores—more specifically, value-added measures in which a student’s test-score is predicted based on his or her characteristics and past test-scores. A school is held responsible for getting the student to reach at least his or her predicted result. Researchers attempt to take into account all of the factors that influence a student’s performance but that are outside a principal’s control.

“There are a lot of other variables to come in to [play that] really impact the performance of the school, and to be able to isolate the impact of the principal is quite difficult,” Hull said.

Hull’s report, which combs the primary research on principal effectiveness, concludes that principals have a clear impact on student achievement, he said, especially at challenging, high-poverty schools. Not only do effective principals help raise student test-scores, but they also make a difference on other indicators, such as reducing the number of student suspensions and absences or increasing graduation rates.

Ineffective principals drive effective teachers out of a school—or out of the district entirely. Effective ones are able to work with teachers to help them improve while simultaneously recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers.

Hull also found that effective principals observed teachers more often and made more unannounced visits to classrooms than their less-effective peers. And, notably, “effective principals almost always provided immediate feedback to their teachers,” he said.

Photo by tcoffey

In October, Hechinger Report writer Jill Barshay reported on computer instruction in kindergarten classrooms in a story that ran in Education Week and newspapers across the country. Last week she was a guest on American RadioWorks, where she spoke with executive editor and host Stephen Smith about the story.