Report: Scholarships for in-state college students lengthen time to degree
Programs meant to keep high-achievers close to home by providing scholarships to in-state public universities reduce students’ chances of graduating on time, according to a study released on August 8th by researchers at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
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.
Round-up of leading thinkers on parent-trigger laws
Parents in Adelanto, Calif., scored a victory for advocates of the “parent-trigger” law last week. The law allows public-school parents who gather signatures from a majority of their peers to transform a school into a charter. They can also opt to remove a consistently failing school’s staff or close the school entirely.
(To read more about the development, see these stories from the Los Angeles Times and Colorlines.)
A judge deemed that organizers in Adelanto had gathered valid signatures from more than 50 percent of parents. The decision marks the most successful execution of the law to date, although the school district can still appeal.
First introduced in California two years ago, so-called “parent-trigger” laws have since spread to other states. There are now variations on the law in Connecticut, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio and Texas.
The Adelanto school in question, Desert Trails Elementary, had been classified as low-performing for years. Compared to schools with similar demographics, Desert Trails falls in the bottom 30 percent of schools in California when it comes to standardized test scores.
The Hechinger Report compiled comments from leading thinkers on the decision, pro and con.
John Rogers, an associate professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and director of UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access (IDEA), said in an interview:
“There have been millions of dollars pumped into this initiative and parent trigger ideas thus far. After all of that you have this one contentious and unclear result. It’s hard to imagine that this points to an idea that’s going to spread rapidly … The parent trigger has offered an appearance of empowering parents by focusing on a model of parent mobilization that does not promise the sort of deep development and community-wide formation of strong parent organizations that alternative processes have proven to develop.”
The nonprofit group Parents Across America, which advocates for greater parent involvement in public education policy, said in a release:
“Although Parents Across America strongly supports true parent empowerment, we oppose the Parent Trigger process. While the Parent Trigger allows parents to voice discontent with a school, it gives them no opportunity to choose among more positive reforms, and fails to promote the best practices for parent involvement from the ground up.”
Blogger RiShawn Biddle, who edits the website Dropout Nation, wrote:
“The fact that the families are actually looking to transform Desert Trails into a charter school they will operate on their own — instead of simply looking to hand off the school to a chain — is also a strong stand for families taking … powerful roles in shaping teaching, curricula, and school cultures on behalf of their kids.”
Ben Boychuk, a policy advisor at The Heartland Institute, a nonprofit that seeks free-market solutions to social and economic problems, said in an interview:
“The main thing is that proponents of the parent trigger needed to get a real win on the board and I think the court decision in the Adelanto case is a solid win.”
As Sean Cavanagh of Education Week wrote last week, parent-trigger laws are headed to the silver screen this fall. “On Sept. 28, the movie ‘Won’t Back Down,’ a fictional account of frustrated parents seeking to transform a school in Pittsburgh, will open in theaters around the country. The trailer to the film (see the clip below) says that it is ‘inspired by actual events,’ leading to speculation that it will closely mirror real-life examples of parents attempting to use trigger policies to take control of low-performing schools in Compton and Adelanto, Calif. The movie, distributed by 20th Century Fox and produced by Walden Media, stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as a parent and Viola Davis as a teacher who work together to marshal support in the community for a petition to overhaul the school and resuscitate it academically.”
Ed in the Election: Biden at the AFT and Romney’s VP options
Vice President Joe Biden attacked Mitt Romney and other Republicans’ views on education Sunday in a speech to the country’s second largest teachers union. Addressing about 2,500 delegates from the American Federation of Teachers at the group’s national conference in Detroit, Biden spoke of Romney as someone who would make cuts to education in favor of tax breaks for the rich, according to the Associated Press.
Specifically, Romney supports GOP plans to cut funding for college student loans and the Head Start preschool program, Biden said.
“We believe you rebuild a country from the middle out. [Republicans] think it has to come from the top down,” he said. “Unlike our Republican friends, we don’t see you as the problem. We see you as the solution.” The AFT has already endorsed President Barack Obama for re-election.
The Romney campaign argued back that Biden’s speech showed the Obama administration did not stand up to teachers unions. “Instead of putting students first, this administration has put the union bosses that fund their political campaigns ahead of what’s best for our children,” said spokesman Sean Fitzpatrick.
Governors at a Colorado gathering of the Republican Governors Association—some of whom are thought to be on the list of potential vice-presidential candidates for Romney—praised Romney and the GOP’s policies in general. As speculation of whom Romney will ultimately select for his ticket continues, some have pointed out that he has several options with a track record of prioritizing education reform, such as Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana.
At the Colorado event, Jindal and Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico both discussed the improvements their states had made in education and voiced their support for Romney’s education platform.
“We cannot have the world’s greatest economy, we cannot have the world’s greatest quality of life and the world’s greatest military unless we reform our education systems,” Jindal said, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Can Twitter replace traditional professional development?
Twitter and Facebook might soon replace traditional professional development for teachers. Instead of enduring hours-long workshops a few times a year, teachers could reach out to peers on the Internet in real time for advice on things like planning a lesson (or salvaging a lesson that’s going wrong), overcoming classroom management problems, or helping students with disabilities.
Or, at least, that’s what a group of Internet-savvy educators who convened in New York City this week are hoping.
A presenter at the #140edu conference. (photo courtesy of @mbteach, via Twitter)
“Being connected [through social-networking sites] is an opportunity for growth anytime, anywhere,” said Steve Anderson, director of instructional technology for the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools in North Carolina, speaking yesterday at the second annual #140edu conference, a reference to Twitter’s 140 character limit for tweets. A teacher can go on Twitter, he added, and “learn 10 new things.”
Traditional forms of on-the-job training for teachers have been much-maligned in recent years by experts and by teachers themselves. “Many times professional development is like herding cattle: We’re taking everybody in the same direction. We’re going to learn the same thing,” said Eric Sheninger, principal of New Milford High School in northern New Jersey.
For-profit companies, nonprofits and universities make lots of money providing training to schools, but little research exists on what types of professional development for teachers work best. Increasingly, schools and districts are adopting what experts say are more promising ways of training teachers that involve more coaching and teacher collaboration.
But some educators who attended the #140edu conference want to push the envelope further, to make teacher training even more individualized and self-directed. Among the attendees were teachers and principals who keep blogs documenting their daily travails and successes in the classroom, which work as guideposts for others and forums where they can glean tips. Some have thousands of Twitter followers and Facebook friends.
Kyle Pace, an instructional technology specialist for the Lee’s Summit School District, near Kansas City, gave an example of how personal networks and crowd-sourcing on the Internet could improve on the old ways of training teachers:
“A teacher could be teaching a lesson on the Civil War. That lesson could bomb. They could go to their network, pose a question, ask for a resource. In the next period they could have new resources, things to try immediately,” he said.
“Traditional professional development can’t offer that immediacy of being a connected educator,” Pace added.
In-person interaction shouldn’t be completely discarded, however, said Sheninger, who says he has revolutionized his school partly through help from people he met via Twitter. “I value my face-to-face connections more than I do my virtual ones,” he said. “Technology flattens our ability to connect with people. It just makes things easier. It’s not the only way I connect with people.”
Indeed, at the conference, a room set aside for in-person mingling and chatting was often more crowded than the auditorium where panelists were giving their talks.
Ed in the Election: Romney’s student loan plan and Obama’s improv
Mitt Romney, if elected president, would once again shake up the student-loan market, according to The Washington Times. Since March 2010, under legislation pushed by the Obama administration, private-sector banks haven’t had a role in federal loans, which now come directly from the U.S. government.
While the Obama administration says the move saves students money, Romney advisors have argued that there are problems with it.
Romney “is not interested in re-creating the previous program,” Scott Fleming, a member of Romney’s education policy group, told The Times. “He is simply looking for affordable and efficient alternatives to replace a system that relies exclusively on Treasury borrowing that leaves American taxpayers at risk for an increasing default rate.”
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama veered off script this week when talking about education during his address to the National Urban League Convention in New Orleans. After hitting some of his usual talking points—how his administration has invested in early childhood programs, led lots of states to change policies around teacher effectiveness, and tried to make higher education more affordable through tax breaks and expanded Pell grants—Obama introduced the “first-ever White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans.”
The initiative, officially established Thursday, will create a new office dedicated to coordinating community and federal work aimed at helping African-American students get through high school and on to college and careers.
“Of course, that means all of you all have got to hit the books,” Obama said, to laughter.
“I’m just saying. Don’t cheer and then you didn’t do your homework,” he continued, to applause and more laughter. “Because that’s part of the bargain, that’s part of the bargain—America says we will give you opportunity, but you’ve got to earn your success. You’re competing against young people in Beijing and Bangalore. They’re not hanging out. They’re not getting over. They’re not playing video games. They’re not watching Real Housewives. I’m just saying. It’s a two-way street. You’ve got to earn success.”
And then, to even more laughter and applause, Obama said: “That wasn’t in my prepared remarks. But I’m just saying.”
Ed in the Election: Obama’s master teachers and Romney’s higher-ed legacy
The Obama administration on Wednesday announced plans to create a corps of “master teachers” in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). This teacher corps would start with 50 teachers across the nation and expand to reach 10,000 within four years, with members earning an extra $20,000 each annually in return for making a multi-year commitment.
The proposal comes with a $1 billion price tag; Congress will have to approve it in President Obama’s 2013 budget request. But the administration will set aside $100,000 of an existing fund immediately to help school districts identify and support high-performing STEM teachers. (TV host Bill Nye the Science Guy was also out on the campaign trail this week promoting the president’s education policies.)
“If America is going to compete for the jobs and industries of tomorrow, we need to make sure our children are getting the best education possible,” Obama said in a statement. “Teachers matter, and great teachers deserve our support.”
An aide to Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, told the Associated Press that there are already more than 80 teacher-quality programs funded by the government. “Republicans share the president’s goal of getting better teachers in the classroom,” said Kline spokeswoman Alexandra Sollberger. “However, we also value transparency and efficient use of taxpayer resources.”
Mitt Romney saw his education track record in Massachusetts scrutinized once again this week. The Associated Press examined the former governor’s plan for overhauling the state’s higher-education system, which called for privatizing three schools and closing six others, while restructuring the administration of public universities to help close a $3 billion state budget gap.
“But when Romney left office four years later, not a lot had changed,” the AP reported. “Romney’s restructuring plan was stymied by a Democratic-run state Legislature where many lawmakers were irked about his bitter feud with William Bulger, the University of Massachusetts president and one of the state’s most powerful and entrenched Democrats.”
In the end, Romney’s main legacy was a university scholarship program for students who score in the top 25 percent in their district on state standardized tests.
Romney also discussed education on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania this week. “We’re not providing our kids the education they need,” he said. “I want more choice in education. I will put our kids first and our unions behind, give the kids the best schools in the world.”
Practice versus theory: Is teacher education headed for a revolution?
Should colleges that train teachers focus on educational theory, instructing future educators in how children develop and how the brain learns? Or should they focus on the more practical skills teachers need to run classrooms and teach children algebra? Is it possible for training programs to do both well?
These are questions that have become increasingly controversial as debates about how to reform U.S. public education have focused on improving the quality of teachers. Groups like the National Council on Teacher Quality have issued critiques of education schools, and new programs like Relay (a graduate school for teachers that is “practically focused”) are putting pressure on more traditional schools of education to pay greater attention to the practical side of teaching.
“Unless we rethink teacher education, we are faced with a critical stance toward us that I think is going to overwhelm us,” said Gary Natriello, a professor of sociology and education at Teachers College (TC), Columbia University. He was speaking at a conference on Thursday, July 19th, hosted by TC to discuss, in part, how to infuse more practical skills into teacher training without losing the theoretical foundation that helps teachers understand how children learn, and which can help them adapt to the various situations that come up in classrooms. (The Hechinger Report is published by an independent institute based at TC.)
The way teacher training programs, including TC, have traditionally worked, as Elizabeth Green of GothamSchools explained in a 2010 New York Times Magazine piece, is like this:
“Education schools divide their curriculums into three parts: regular academic subjects, to make sure teachers know the basics of what they are assigned to teach; ‘foundations’ courses that give them a sense of the history and philosophy of education; and finally ‘methods’ courses that are supposed to offer ideas for how to teach particular subjects. Many schools add a required stint as a student teacher in a more-experienced teacher’s class. Yet schools can’t always control for the quality of the experienced teacher, and education-school professors often have little contact with actual schools. A 2006 report found that 12 percent of education-school faculty members never taught in elementary or secondary schools themselves. Even some methods professors have never set foot in a classroom or have not done so recently.”
As a result, teachers can emerge from education schools armed with a lot of theoretical ideas about child development or content knowledge about rules of mathematics, but little sense of how to apply them in the real life of a classroom.
In figuring out how to solve this problem, Deborah Loewenberg Ball, dean of the education school at the University of Michigan, invoked medical education in a presentation at the conference—as did many other presenters. A medical student learning how to treat heart attacks, for example, would most likely learn about the cardiovascular system in a classroom and then practice using a defibrillator on a mannequin—under the watchful eye of a professor who might explain how the concepts they learned in class connect to the practical experience—before being allowed to treat a patient.
New cognitive research also shows that people learn more effectively when they can connect abstract ideas to physical experiences—a finding that might apply to how teachers learn to do their jobs, too, not just to how their students learn how to read or multiply. But letting teachers-in-training “practice” on real children may not always be ethical or that useful, at least at first, when they’re still trying to grasp the basics.
So teacher educators are experimenting with programs that include more classroom observations, which are paired with debriefing sessions in which prospective teachers dissect what they’ve seen, and role-playing, where teachers-in-training try out lessons on their professors. And new (and not so new) technologies, including videos of lessons that can be deconstructed in class, also offer potential ways to include a try-it-on-the-mannequin step in teacher training.
One new program that presenters promoted, LessonSketch, uses cartoon simulations to demonstrate teaching skills, complete with thought-bubbles hovering over cartoon-teachers as they instruct cartoon-students. Unlike in a real classroom, the simulations can offer “Choose Your Own Adventure” options, where the teacher might make one choice and face a series of classroom consequences, or make another with a different set of outcomes.
So is teacher education headed for the revolution that critics have been calling for? Maybe.
“We are really ready for some new things, and some fresh thinking,” Natriello said.
Online tests and the digital divide: Will poor children be left behind?
Within three years, most states will start doing standardized testing online. The Hechinger Report has been examining potential benefits and problems that may arise when schools shift to testing on computers. One of the biggest concerns—even among advocates for online exams—is that the new tests could further disadvantage poor children who already struggle to keep up with their more affluent peers in school.
“Lots of kids are really comfortable with technology, but there’s a cross-section of kids that don’t have a lot of access,” said Douglas Levin, director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association, which is helping states get ready for the switch from paper and pencil. “There is a fear that for kids who do not have regular access to this technology, the test may be measuring the kids’ comfort with technology, and not” their academic knowledge.
A recent article in The New York Times noted that, according to the Federal Communications Commission, “[a]bout 65 percent of all Americans have broadband access at home, but that figure is 40 percent in households with less than $20,000 in annual income. Half of all Hispanics and 41 percent of African-American homes lack broadband.” Still, many households, whether poor or wealthy, have computers at home. Indeed, experts are now worried that more disadvantaged children may be spending too much time on computers.
But the digital divide is not just an issue for children at home. Although the vast majority of schools have computers with Internet access, urban schools and those that serve large proportions of poor children are slightly less likely to have them than their counterparts in less urban and more affluent areas, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Fewer computers may make it more difficult for schools that serve poor children to help them learn the skills needed to succeed on the tests. The ratio of students to instructional computers with Internet access is 3.1 for schools where fewer than 35 percent of students are eligible for subsidized lunch. It is 3.2 for schools where three-quarters or more of students are low-income. However, the number of computers in all schools, poor and affluent, has skyrocketed in recent years—nearly tripling between 1995 and 2008—and will likely continue to grow as districts increasingly embrace educational technology in the classroom.
But there may be other ways that more affluent schools and students will get ahead. Derek Neal, an economist at the University of Chicago, believes that new online tests “may lead to more expensive coaching, because now school districts and parents will be spending money on developing software.”
Virginia began testing its students online a decade ago. In Fairfax County, Derek Kelley, the school district’s coordinator for instructional technology integration, says district officials have noticed a difference (if small) for some students with less access to technology.
They’ve dealt with the problem by creating a technology curriculum extending from kindergarten to sixth grade in which students learn the skills needed to take online tests in the course of learning their other academic subjects. In kindergarten, they might learn to use a mouse and turn on a computer. By sixth grade, they’re learning how to choose which software they need to complete a project, Kelley said.
“That helps level the playing field,” he said.
Test developers are less worried that a digital divide in homes and schools could translate into poor test outcomes for disadvantaged students. “The level of computer sophistication to respond to online testing is really pretty minimal,” said Joe Willhoft, the director of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, a group of states that is using federal funding to create new online tests. “You need to know how to use the up and down arrow[s], and maybe if it’s writing, you need to tap something on the keyboard.”
Ed in the election: Romney at the NAACP and Michelle Obama in Miami
Mitt Romney (Photo by Gage Skidmore)
Mitt Romney spoke at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People annual convention this week, where he tried to make the case that he was the best presidential candidate for African Americans. He promised, among other things, to close the country’s achievement gap and touted his education record as governor of Massachusetts, where test scores rose for all demographics during his tenure, but particularly for minority students.
Romney also discussed working with the Black Legislative Caucus when he vetoed a bill that would have capped the number of charter schools in the state.
“Charter schools are so successful that almost every politician can find something good to say about them,” Romney said. Indeed, the charter school movement has found supporters on both sides of the aisle – including President Obama. But research on how well they work is not conclusive; some studies indicate they do no better than traditional public schools.
And, although Massachusetts indisputably improved its academic performance under Romney, some argue that he was unable to form the partnerships to make major policy changes.
“There is a core movement in Massachusetts around accountability and responsibility, and Mitt Romney was a vocal advocate for that,” Hardin Coleman, dean of the School of Education at Boston University, told the Washington Times, in an article that looks at Romney’s education successes and failures as governor. “But he certainly wasn’t new in that field. He spoke to those issues as governor, but what is commonly understood here in Massachusetts is that he was not effective in building coalitions in bringing [his policy objectives] to bear.”
Michelle Obama in Pueblo, Colorado (Photo by Christopher Dilts for Obama for America/via Flickr)
First Lady Michelle Obama came under fire this week for plans to hold a campaign event at a Miami high school, where students are out for the summer. Two Republican school board members said holding a political event at a Barbara Goleman Senior High in Miami Lakes was “inappropriate,” according to The Miami Herald, and asked that the event be canceled.
“The use of public schools whose only focus should be to educate our children for political gain is downright wrong,” school board member Renier Diaz de la Portilla said in a statement. “Don’t these liberals have boundaries? Our schools are places for learning not places for politicking.”
The event was allowed to take place as planned, however. School board attorney Walter Harvey explained to the Herald that the Obama campaign was “essentially renting the facility” and that the district couldn’t discriminate against requests from political campaigns.
Immigrants happy, anxious about Obama’s order to stop deporting students
The Obama administration’s announcement on June 15th that it will stop deporting young undocumented immigrants who meet certain criteria prompted celebrations and fuming by those on both sides of the immigration debate. But as the news has sunk in, the people who will actually be affected by the policy change—undocumented immigrants age 30 or younger who have lived here at least five years, have no criminal record, and are in school or have a high school diploma—are reacting with both joy and a degree of wariness.
Immigrants at a protest march in Los Angeles (photo courtesy of Jonathan McIntosh)
“Undocumented students say they are anxious to see how the policy will be put into effect—they have been disappointed by the Obama administration before. But they think it is a big step in the right direction,” the Chronicle of Education reported last week.
Obama’s order is similar to the DREAM Act, a bill that would provide a path to legal residency for immigrant college students (or young adults who join the military) who are in the United States illegally. The bill has been reintroduced in Congress every year for the past decade.
In California, which has a large population of young immigrants from Asia and Latin America who will likely be affected by the policy change, many are calling and emailing advocacy groups with questions. “There’s just a real hunger and thirst for more information,” Betty Hung, policy director for the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, told California Watch. The groups are warning immigrants to be wary of fraudsters offering to help with their applications.
For many immigrants, high tuition costs may still bar their access to a college education. The vast majority of states require undocumented immigrants to pay out-of-state tuition at public institutions. In New York, Obama’s order has led immigrant advocates to push for a stalled bill that would give undocumented students access to financial aid, but it seems unlikely it will pass, according to Gotham Schools.
At the same time, some are speculating that Obama’s order could make a more comprehensive overhaul of the immigration system more difficult. There are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, but only about 800,000 of them will be affected by the new policy, according to calculations by the Obama administration. “Did the president hurt immigration reform’s long-term prospects by doing a short-term fix that conservatives saw as an end run around congressional authority and the Constitution?” the Christian Science Monitor asked in an article published on the day of the announcement.
Another group that will be directly affected by the order is colleges and universities. On July 10th, the presidents of more than 100 research universities sent a letter to Obama and four Congressional leaders that suggested Obama’s order—which would likely expand the number of people applying to attend their schools—hadn’t entirely satisfied this constituency. In the letter, the presidents expressed concern than many high-performing international students are unable to stay and work in the United States once they graduate.
“The US cannot afford to wait to fix our immigration system,” they wrote. “We ask you to work together to develop a bipartisan solution that ensures our top international graduates have a clear path to a green card, so they can stay and create new American jobs.”
