Holding students back: An international analysis
A new international analysis of countries that hold high proportions of students back to repeat a grade versus those that do not suggests grade repetition is a bad idea. Countries like the United States that have relatively high rates of students repeating a grade do relatively poorly on the tests, while those that have low retention rates do much better. 
Sarah Sparks at Education Week summarizes the report, from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development:
“In comparing the results of the Program for International Student Assessment in 65 member and partner countries, OECD researchers found that differences among countries’ grade-retention trends could explain as much as 15 percent of the difference among their average scores on the 2009 PISA.”
A chicken-and-egg question arises: Is it just the case that students are already higher achievers in the countries with low retention rates and high PISA test scores, and thus don’t need to repeat a grade as often as students in other countries? Perhaps. But Sparks notes that Finland and Korea, which both do well, have banned grade retention (so even if a student did fail a grade, repeating wouldn’t be an option).
Here in the United States, the debate over whether to promote struggling students or hold them back is still raging in many places, and we have written about the high rates of grade retention at many charter schools here at Hechinger. Counterintuitive as it may seem, the evidence – which now includes this report – has largely suggested that social promotion is better for students in the long run than holding them back. Will this report settle the question though? Probably not.
Back to the future: Private funders and the effort to improve teaching
Andrew Carnegie
Private funders have been trying to influence and improve the teaching profession for more than 100 years, and a new report on philanthropic support of teaching outlines that history. The report is funded by the Ford Foundation, and is glowing about the role that private funders, from the Carnegie Corporation to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, have played. (The Hechinger Report receives money from several funders mentioned in the report, including these last two.) But although it’s not very objective, the report raises some interesting and sometimes ironic historical facts. Here are some excerpts:
“Funders supported the establishment of normal schools or other training programs to prepare teachers. In 1875, for example, the Peabody Education Fund, created by George Peabody, founded the Peabody Normal School, which today is the Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. Twelve years later, Grace Dodge founded the New York School for the Training of Teachers, which became Teachers College, now part of Columbia University.”
Carnegie got involved by creating the Carnegie Corporation, for distributing grants, along with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, “originally intended to be a “professorial pension fund” for retired teachers.
After some foundations helped to start teacher training programs, other private funders became concerned about their quality:
“Carnegie Corporation funded an examination of teacher preparation programs by James B. Conant, the former president of Harvard University. His examination and critique of teacher preparation programs, published as The Education of American Teachers in 1963, was scathing. Among other things, he charged that teacher candidates were drawn from the least prepared students, that there was little interaction between subject-matter faculty and faculty from schools of education, and that poor supervision of practice teachers was the norm. He went on to describe the ‘foundation’ courses commonly included in teacher training programs as ‘pathetic.’”
Then they began looking at salaries: “In a series of reports about teachers in the 1950s, Ford called for a merit pay system to replace salary schedules. One report stated, ‘The weakness of the typical salary structure in teaching is not simply that it is in general too low but it is too rigid—too narrow from top to bottom, too unrelated to ability and performance and too prone to treat all teachers and all teaching assignments as if they were essentially identical.’”
These days, funders are worried about many of the same issues that bothered them half a century ago, but their strategies are different:
“More focus on evaluation, more funder involvement and more support for non-traditional actors surged in the mid- to late-1990s with the emergence of venture philanthropy and strategic philanthropy. Similar in approach, both are based on a business model and typically include developing comprehensive, research-based plans, setting clear goals and identifying metrics for measuring progress. They also entail close working relationships between funders and grantees and preference for new actors over traditional institutions that are often seen as part of the problem instead of a source for innovative solutions.”
You can download the report here.
Is dropping out of high school deadly?
Dropping out of high school can certainly restrict your options in life, but a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that the deaths of a quarter of a million Americans in 2000 were due to low education levels.
A New York Times article today about the study focused on the number of people who died because of poverty, but low education levels took more lives, according to the researchers. Here’s an excerpt from the study’s abstract:
“Approximately 245,000 deaths in the United States in 2000 were attributable to low education, 176,000 to racial segregation, 162,000 to low social support, 133,000 to individual-level poverty, 119,000 to income inequality, and 39,000 to area-level poverty.”
New website showcases rocketing college costs
For parents and students struggling to figure out how to best compare the price tags of different colleges, life just got a little easier. The Department of Education unveiled on Thursday the College Affordability and Transparency Center, which houses several lists of colleges and their prices.
The new website also showcases how much tuition has changed at some institutions in recent years, highlighting some astronomical leaps. Tuition growth at most universities has outpaced inflation, currently around 3.5 percent, for the past two decades. In recent years, though, some private colleges have struggled with poor returns on endowment investments and public schools have been continually slammed with budget cuts from the state level, even as enrollment in many places has surged. The result is an even faster growing price tag for students.
The top offender in tuition increase for public two years institutions, for instance, was the Charles A. Jones Skills and Business Education Center in California. In 2007-2008, tuition was $1,300 per year. By 2009-2010, that figure had leapt to $3,900 – a 200 percent increase. Itawamba Community College in Mississippi had the largest net price jump, going from $3,842 in 2006-2007 to $10,543. That’s a 174 percent increase.
Dozens of other schools saw tuition and net prices – the average price students pay after scholarships and grants are taken into account – going up less dramatically, but still notably, rising over 30 percent.
Schools that have had the highest tuition and/or net price increases in the past three years are going to have to explain why that is to the Department of Education in a report that also explains what they’re going to do about their rocketing costs.
Yet many public institutions around the country are looking at steep hikes again this year, as higher education budgets are getting hit hard. Recently, CNN Money took a look at the ten biggest increases on the horizon.
Arizona’s state university’s future was among the bleakest, with tuition expected to go up by 22 percent at the University of Arizona, 19.5 percent at Arizona State University and 15 percent at Northern Arizona University, as a result of a $198 million budget cut. Florida’s universities will have a 15 percent tuition increase for the third year in a row and The University of Washington is considering a 20 percent hike.
For all schools, the College Affordability and Transparency Center breaks down the cost by the type of institution as well as by sticker price and net price.
Perhaps not surprisingly, both sticker prices and net prices range hugely. The Universidad Teologica del Caribe comes in as the cheapest among private not-for-profit four year institutions, with the average student only paying $82 dollars. On the other end of the spectrum, at California’s Art Center College of Design, students are looking at an annual bill of $39,672.
Impact evaluations under fire again
The New York Times has a front page piece today on Impact, the controversial teacher evaluation system where teachers can be (and have been) fired for poor performance.
The piece, set in Washington, D.C., mostly focuses on criticisms of Impact, with teachers complaining that:
-The system doesn’t take into account the economic backgrounds of students enough.
-Some classroom observers (who decide on the all-important ratings) are more interested in finding flaws than helping teachers improve.
-Teachers can get have their ratings docked for “trivial” issues.
It was just under a year ago that Impact made the news when more than 160 teachers were laid off in D.C. based on the new system. Professor Aaron Pallas took on Impact at that time, suggesting the calculations were “botched” and stirring up a lot of comments.
Despite the criticisms, 20 states and thousands of districts are studying the Impact system for possible adoption, according to the Times.
Are Obama’s higher education goals enough?
A new report out from the Center on Education and the Workforce underscores a point that politicians, like President Obama, have started drilling in their speeches: America is falling behind its peer countries when it comes to education. This paper, The Undereducated American, highlights in particular the dearth of American college graduates in the workforce.
Introduced two years ago, Obama’s American Graduation Initiative, which has seen very little federal action thus far, calls for the United States to have the highest percentage of college graduates in the world by 2020. The report says it is “firmly in line” with Obama’s postsecondary education policies, in that the country should strive to become number one again. But there are some key differences between the two plans on how to get there.
Originally, Obama unveiled his initiative with the goal of increasing the number of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees by 5 million. By this spring, the number was up to 8 million.
But The Undereducated American has a higher number to shoot for – and only a few years longer to get there: “In order to make up for lost ground in postsecondary attainment and respond to future economic requirements, the U.S. will need to add an additional 20 million postsecondary educated workers to the economy by 2025.”
According to authors Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose out of those 20 million postsecondary educated workers, 16 million of them will have to earn degrees. The other 4 million would have some college, but not graduate. They write, “Today, two third of young people in their late teens attend college for at least a year. We estimate that to meet the demand for more skilled workers… the number of youth attending college for at least a year will need to rise to 86 percent by 2025.”
The Obama administration has also placed a particular emphasis on community colleges and their importance in reaching its 2020 goal. But the report argues that the breakdown should heavily favor bachelor’s degrees over associate degrees, 15 million to 1 million, in order to fix some growing income inequalities.
In 1980 for instance, salary for those with a bachelor’s degree was 40 percent larger than those with a high school degree. By 2010 that it was 74 percent larger and if recent trends continue, by 2025 those with a bachelor’s degree will earn 96 percent more than those with a high school diploma.
Not only would adding 20 million postsecondary-educated people to the workforce start to reverse this trend, it would also boost the country’s GDP by $500 billion, adding $100 billion in tax revenue as well, the report says.
Doing all this is not impossible, the authors say. And if we can succeed, “It will make our level of education attainment comparable with other developed nations.”
For more information about higher education across the globe, check out The Hechinger Report’s newest blog: Lessons from Abroad.
Taking a look at subgroups within a subgroup
The No Child Left Behind Act has received almost universal praise for its requirement that schools, districts and states disaggregate test scores according to things like race and socioeconomic status. Schools can’t hide behind high overall performance if a subgroup is doing poorly and, in theory, they are thus compelled to zero-in on traditionally disadvantaged students.
Two new papers from the College Board Advocacy & Policy Center underscore the importance of disaggregation in education statistics, and demonstrate how far we can–and maybe should–break down our numbers to determine where and how to target our resources.
The first paper, “The Educational Experience of Young Men of Color: A Review of Research, Pathways and Progress,” provides a thorough overview of the educational attainment of minority males. It also delves into differences among races and even among ethnicities within these races. Cuban males, for instance, have a 6 percent dropout rate. Compare that to 13 percent for Dominican males, or 25.8 percent for Salvadoran males.
The report even goes a step further, looking at the difference between U.S.-born and foreign-born Latinos and Asian/Pacific Islander males. Almost across the board, foreign-born students are more likely to drop out. For example, the dropout rate for Salvadoran males born in the U.S. is 10.1 percent. For immigrants, it’s 41.1 percent. In fact, the only ethnicity with no difference in dropout rates based on where students were born is Japanese males, with a 2.6 percent dropout rate for both subcategories. You can check out all of the figures on pp. 19-20 of the report.
The second paper, “The Educational Experience of Young Men of Color: Capturing the Student Voice,” includes the perspectives of 92 African-American, Asian-American/Pacific Islander, Hispanic/Latino and Native-American students at over three dozen colleges across the country.
Are start-up charters a better bet than traditional school turnarounds?
Opening up new charter schools is a more promising strategy than trying to turn around traditional public schools that are failing, according to a caveat-laden analysis in the most recent Education Gadfly from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
The study’s author, David Stuit, looked at 81 cases of charter start-ups opening near failing regular public schools. Because of the small sample size, the results aren’t statistically significant–which is to say, there are no results at all. The study has the additional caveat of having not measured for potential selection bias in who goes to the charter school and who stays behind in the regular school. That said, it might be worth doing at a scale large enough to yield statistically significant results and thus know whether this is a real phenomenon.
School districts around the country, armed with federal funds, are grappling with how best to turn around failing schools–a notoriously difficult task. There’s no fail-proof turnaround method, of course. For every success story, there are many more failures. Perhaps that’s not surprising, given that the same has long been true in the business world. A December 2010 Fordham Institute study found that just one percent of charter and regular public-school turnarounds were “successful,” which Fordham defined as schools whose students reached or exceeded the statewide average for test scores.
In Stuit’s latest analysis, he found that 19 percent of charter schools (15 schools in the sample) were able to get test scores above the statewide average, while only five percent of regular public schools accomplished the same.
Even if it is true that start-up charters are more likely to succeed than district turnarounds–something the current evidence doesn’t prove–a 19-percent success rate isn’t exactly awe-inspiring. But these results do raise questions about how we allot our money for school reform, especially with billions now devoted just to turnarounds, as well as how we think strategically about district-wide improvement.
As Stuit sums it up: “When contemplating whether to put one’s energy and resources into turning around failing schools or closing them and replacing them with charter start-ups, the answer for most cities will probably be ‘both, and’ rather than ‘either, or.’ My preliminary evidence suggests, however, that the charter start-up route is somewhat more promising. Still and all, reformers will need to get a whole lot better at implementing both strategies successfully lest all of this add up to ‘nothing much.’”
Are texting, multitasking teens losing empathy skills? Some differing views
Gary Small (photo by Justin Snider)
Psychiatrist Dr. Gary Small recently expressed a sentiment that may have crossed the minds of parents and educators who see how much time teenagers spend chatting online and texting: He worries they may not be learning empathy skills.
The digital world has rewired teen brains and made them less able to recognize and share feelings of happiness, sadness or anger, said the UCLA professor of psychiatry and aging, who has also studied adolescent brains.
“The teenage brain is not fully formed,” Small said, speaking at a Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media seminar on digital learning in Santa Monica, Calif., last month. “I’m concerned that kids aren’t learning empathy skills. They’re not learning complex reasoning skills.”
Small noted that up to 60 percent of synapses in the brain are pruned away between birth and adolescence if they aren’t used. He cited the oft-quoted Kaiser Family Foundation study from 2010 that showed teens spend half their waking hours with technology, from cell phones to computers and/or television.
The study found that typical eight to 18-year-olds devote an average of seven hours and 38 minutes to using entertainment media across a typical day, or more than 53 hours a week. Thanks to multitasking, they are actually packing a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes’ worth of media content into those seven and a half hours.
Small’s fears aren’t universally shared, however. Other top researchers at the conference, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, said they’ve come to opposite conclusions when speaking with teens.
“Teens aren’t exchanging media interaction for face-to-face interaction,” said Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist who directs the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s research on teens, children and families. Teenagers told Pew researchers that they’d rather be with their friends in person than talking with them over electronic devices, Lenhart said.
Amanda Lenhart (photo by Justin Snider)
While the Pew Research Center found texting by teens has increased dramatically–and that the average teen sends out over 100 text messages a day–Lenhart does not believe that face-to-face communication is disappearing or being displaced by the electronic kind.
Lenhart also said she knows of no studies that show a relationship between teenage technology use and teens’ ability to empathize with peers and adults.
Prof. Small, she said, may have been theorizing “more on supposition than actual causal studies, or even strong, large-sample correlational work.”
Scientists don’t yet know how many of the brain’s connections are associated with empathy, according to Small. He said research has found that teenage brains–including the amygdala, which controls whether a person picks up on nonverbal cues and his or her ability to understand others’ points of view–are quite malleable.
Small also cited a 2007 article by Steven J. Kirsh and Jeffrey R. W. Mounts in the journal Aggressive Behavior. The study found that playing violent video games reduced the chances that players could identify happy faces.
Contrary to these findings, Lenhart said teens interviewed by Pew in focus groups were sensitive to the ways in which mediated communication–texting and social-network-site interactions–did not provide the same social cues as other interactions.
“They are certainly in-tune enough with nonverbal cues to recognize where they are absent,” she added.
To cope with the absence of these cues, many young women told researchers they used emoticons–or emotional graphics–in texts or emails to show how they felt, she said.
Teenagers are able to hone their empathy skills online, however, and how youth relate to others often doesn’t have to do with whether they know the people personally, said Carrie James, a research director and principal investigator at Harvard’s Project Zero who also presented her findings at the conference.
When teens make choices online, young people do think about themselves most often, said James, who also directs the MacArthur Foundation-funded GoodPlay Project, which is investigating the ethical character of young people’s digital-media activity.
Teens also often think about people they know well, such as close friends or family, and they do consider their feelings when making choices online—such as by commenting on their Facebook profiles or by posting and tagging their friends in photos.
It doesn’t mean that they recognize how their actions might affect people they don’t know well, James added.
“What’s truly rare among the young people we’ve interviewed is ‘ethical thinking’—a capacity to think about the effects of one’s actions on more distant, unknown people and on larger communities,” James said.
The digital age, Small said last year, has rewired all of us to expect a new level of communication that can be both exciting and distracting at once.
“Many of us escalate from multitasking to partial continuous attention: we’re constantly scanning the environment for the next exciting bit of information—the next text message, IM, email, or even land-line phone call. That next ping or buzz or ring interrupts our focus and charges up the dopamine reward system as we anticipate something new and more exciting than the task at hand,” Small said in a contribution to a New York Times “Room for Debate” on digital distraction.
The Hechinger Report would love to hear more thoughts about how the digital world is affecting teenagers in classrooms. Has anyone else noticed that today’s wired teens seem to be having some trouble showing empathy?
—Jennifer Oldham and Liz Willen
Updated: Facts and opinion from Steve Brill’s new book
Steve Brill, the entrepreneur and journalist who wrote the New Yorker story about New York City’s teacher rubber rooms, says he knows what’s wrong with failing American schools after two years of reporting on the subject: teacher union contracts. He is not alone in this, of course, but he’s about to publish a book this summer, Class Warfare, that will expound on this conclusion and may result in the same blast of attention to the issue that came after the release of the film “Waiting For Superman” last year.
Last night at a New American Foundation panel in TriBeCa, Brill gave a preview of the book, and talked about the problems with last in-first out and his approval of the charter school movement. He also discussed several “noble facts” which he believes should end the debate over the right course in education reform. Those in the education realm, including those on Brill’s side, may be less certain on some of his points, however, so I thought I’d explore a couple in more detail here:
He disputed the claim by charter critics that charter schools “cream” more highly-achieving students from their neighborhoods, leaving the harder-to-educate students to the regular public schools. Researchers who look at charter schools, however, even those who tend to support the movement, have been careful in designing studies to compare charter school performance with that of regular public schools because of a phenomenon known as selection bias.
Here is how a study by the National Center on School Choice at Vanderbilt explains it: “Selection bias is a valid concern when studying schools of choice because students who select charter schools may be atypical of the larger population of traditional public school students in ways that may influence achievement. If selection bias is not controlled for statistically, the charter school effect may reflect the unobservable reasons, such as personal motivation or ambition, that a student switched to a charter school rather than the true effect of attending a charter school.”
Related to this, Brill asserted that charters educate the same proportion of special education students as the regular public schools. This has not been the case in several large districts, however. In Los Angeles, the percentages were 12 percent in the regular schools, compared to 6 percent in charters. A similar disparity has been found in cities in Massachusetts, and in New Orleans.
What do you think? Are there certain facts that educators, reformers and others can all agree on?
UPDATE:
A reader who was at the panel on Tuesday, writes with a correction. He says that Steve Brill actually said “knowable facts,” which in retrospect make much more sense than what I heard.
He also commented that he isn’t sure Brill was arguing that charters don’t cream students, that rather, he understood him as disputing the claims of critics who attribute all charter school success to creaming.
