Education Research Report

President-elect Barack Hussein Obama’s mark on history is clear and undeniable. For the last 20 months, I have watched and listened to so many people, particularly Black Americans, who just could not believe that in their lifetime a Black man would be elected as our Nation’s leader. His mark on history is so vast and so deep that it was a little difficult trying to decide what the theme of this essay should be. How could I isolate one single important legacy of the many President-elect Obama has provided to choose from? I pondered this question deeply as my 10 year old daughter and I did our “Get out the Vote” canvassing on Election Day. My answer came that night. I was overcome with incredible emotion on Election night as I heard and watched CNN declare Senator Obama as the next President of the United States. Many of the feelings stirred in me that night — feelings of pride, feelings of overwhelming joy, feelings of utter disbelief and feelings of exasperating relief — were also evident in the expressions of my 18 year old daughter, who voted for the first time and in the expressions and jubilation of my 16 year old twin boys, who rarely care about anything political. As President-elect Obama spoke on Election night, I could see the hope in the eyes of my children — the same hope that has been one of the primary themes of his campaign. I thought how profound it must be for my children to see him, to hear him, to see his family, and to see crowds of diverse people around the world rejoicing and cheering for him. What a wonderfully lasting image for Black children to dream about on that monumental night in the history of this great country.

The impact that President-elect Obama will have on Black youth in particular will be astounding. And no where will this be felt more, I believe, than in the area of education. Not only is President-elect Obama’s commitment to education unwavering and strong, his life and his victory this week are strong testaments to the value of education and what education can do to advance the hopes, dreams and successes of all. He understands that public education in America is in crisis. He understands the devastating drop-out rates. He understands the horrifically low proficiency levels, particularly in reading skills and in math. He understands that teachers are undervalued and underpaid. He understands that we need to put real money and real commitment into the education of our youth. And he understands that all of these hardships in public education have fallen, disproportionately, on Black youth, particularly Black males. President-elect Obama believes access to a meaningful and adequate education is the key to success in life. And as a living example of the power of education as the true social and economic equalizer, President-elect Obama represents our most promising hope and opportunity for true and lasting educational reform….

Complete essay:

http://www.blackprof.com/2008/11/president-elect-obama’s-legacy-of-quality-education-for-our-children/

Present, Engaged, and Accounted For

The Critical Importance of Addressing Chronic Absence in the Early Grades

At the core of school improvement and education reform is an assumption so widely understood that it is rarely invoked: students have to be present and engaged in order to learn. That is why the discovery that thousands of our youngest students are at academically at-risk because of extended absences when they first embark upon their school careers is as remarkable as it is consequential. Schools and communities have a choice: we can work together early on to ensure families get their children to class consistently or we can pay later for failing to intervene before problems are more difficult and costly to ameliorate.

Common sense and research suggest that attending school regularly is important to ensuring children develop a strong foundation for subsequent learning. During the early elementary years, children are gaining basic social and academic skills critical to ongoing academic success. Unless students attain these essential skills by third grade, they often require extra help to catch up and are at grave risk of eventually dropping out of school. Moreover, when chronic absence occurs (missing 10% – nearly a month – or more of school over the course of a year counting both excused and unexcused absences), everyone pays. The educational experiences of children who attend school regularly can be diminished when teachers must divert their attention to meet the learning and social needs of children who miss substantial amounts of school.

Chronic absence in the early grades reflects the degree to which schools, communities and families adequately address the needs of young children. Attendance is higher when schools provide a rich, engaging learning experience, have stable, experienced and skilled teachers and actively engage parents in their children’s education. Chronic early absence decreases when educational institutions and communities actively communicate the importance of going to school regularly to all students and their parents, and reach out to families when their children begin to show patterns of excessive absence. Attendance suffers when families are struggling to keep up with the routine of school despite the lack of reliable transportation, working long hours in poorly paid jobs with little flexibility, unstable and unaffordable housing, inadequate health care and escalating community violence. At the same time, communities can help lower chronic absence by providing early childhood experiences that prepare children and families for entry into formal education.

Although chronic early absence can be a significant issue for entire school districts and particular elementary schools, it has largely been overlooked. The United States does not have a mechanism in place to ensure that schools across the country monitor and report on levels of chronic early absence. Elementary schools often track average daily attendance or unexcused absences (truancy) 1, but few monitor the combination of excused and unexcused absence for individual students. High overall school-wide attendance rates can easily mask significant numbers of chronically absent students. While a growing interest in state data systems with universal student identifiers creates an opportunity to collect such data systematically, many districts have yet to develop the capacity for tracking absences for individual students. As a result, many school districts do not know the extent to which chronic early absence is a problem in any or all of their schools.

Full report:

http://www.nccp.org/publications/pdf/text_837.pdf

A Guide to Assessing and Increasing School Engagement

Students who are disengaged from school are at risk for many poor outcomes beyond poor academic achievement. They are at risk of skipping classes, sexual activity, substance use, and ultimately dropping out of school. A new Child Trends brief, Assessing School Engagement: A Guide for Out-Of-School Time Program Practitioners, provides information on why school engagement matters, how out-of-school time programs can affect school engagement, and how to measure engagement. The brief includes specific measures of school engagement from three surveys and a list of additional resources.

Complete report:

http://www.childtrends.org/Files//Child_Trends-2008_10_29_RB_SchoolEngage.pdf

New program teaches preschoolers reading skills, getting along with others

A study funded by the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies shows that it's possible to teach preschoolers the pre-reading skills they need for later school success, while at the same time fostering the socials skills necessary for making friends and avoiding conflicts with their peers.

The findings address long standing concerns on whether preschool education programs should emphasize academic achievement or social and emotional development.

"Fostering academic achievement in preschoolers need not come at the expense of healthy emotional development," said Duane Alexander, M.D., director of NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), which provided much of the funding for the study. "This study shows that it's possible to do both at the same time."

The study appears in the November/December issue of Child Development and was conducted by Karen Bierman, Ph.D., distinguished professor of Psychology at Penn State University.

In recent years, education officials and researchers who study early childhood education have struggled with whether to emphasize academics in preschool programs or to instead try to advance preschoolers' social skills, explained the NICHD project officer for the study, James Griffin, Ph.D., deputy chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch. The current study marks the first attempt to develop a curriculum that addresses both concerns equally, Dr. Griffin added.

In the study, the researchers compared the progress of students who received a traditional Head Start curriculum to those who received a curriculum with enhancements in the areas of social and emotional learning and pre-reading skills. The new program is known as the REDI (Research-Based, Developmentally Informed) Head Start program. The researchers developed the REDI curriculum by combining a program that fosters social and emotional development (Preschool PATHS) with curriculum components that promote language development and pre-reading skills. A program of the Administration for Children and Families, Head Start fosters school readiness through the provision of comprehensive services, including education, health, mental health, parent involvement, nutrition and services to children with disabilities.

Like traditional preschool programs, the REDI program emphasizes such pre-reading skills as learning the alphabet, and learning to manipulate the sounds that letters represent. Earlier research has shown that children with such skills are more successful at learning to read than are children who lack them. The REDI program also allows ample time for teachers to read interactively with children, asking them questions and encouraging their active involvement in story telling, which builds the vocabulary and language skills needed for later school success.

In the REDI program, many of the reading sessions focus on social problems and involve fictional characters who learn to master the emotional frustrations and conflicts common among groups of preschoolers. For example, in one lesson, Twiggle the Turtle learns techniques for controlling his temper. An older turtle happens by after Twiggle has just shoved a classmate who knocked over his building blocks. The older turtle teaches Twiggle, that, instead of shoving someone, he should go into his shell, take a deep breath, say what's bothering him, and say how it makes him feel. From this, the children learn that when a conflict erupts, they stop what they're doing, cross their arms, take a deep breath, state the problem, and tell the other child how it makes them feel.

"The lesson teaches them to take a time out from their emotions, to avoid acting impulsively," Dr. Bierman said. "Stating what's bothering them, and how they feel, is the basis for self control and problem solving in stressful social situations."

Other lessons involve learning how to recognize such emotions as anger and sadness in oneself and others, sharing, and taking turns.

The study took place at 44 Head Start centers in Central Pennsylvania. Half the centers used the REDI program enhancements, half used the traditional Head Start program without the enhancements.

When compared to children in the traditional Head Start program, children in the REDI program scored higher on several tests of emotional and social development than did children in the traditional program. This included skills in recognizing emotions in others, and responding appropriately to situations involving a conflict. Moreover, parents of children in the REDI group reported fewer instances of impulsivity, aggression and attention problems than did parents of children in the traditional program.

Children in the REDI program also scored higher than children in the traditional program on several tests of pre-reading skills: vocabulary, blending letter sounds together to form words, separating words into their component letter sounds, and in naming the letters of the alphabet.

Supportive teachers, peers can ease negative effects of frequent moves in elementary school

When children change schools in elementary school, dips in academic performance and classroom participation can follow. But having a supportive teacher who encourages other students to accept newcomers can go a long way toward helping children make a smooth transition.

That's the conclusion of a new longitudinal study that found that moving during 2nd to 5th grade can lead to declines in academic performance and classroom participation, but is not always accompanied by declines in attitudes toward school.

The study, conducted by researchers at Western Washington University and the University of Washington, appears in the November/December 2008 issue of the journal Child Development. It seeks to expand our understanding of how moving during the elementary school years may contribute to disengagement with school just before the significant changes of adolescence.

"Our findings support the notion that school changes can negatively affect children, but we also show that supportive social contact with a teacher and peers can influence both academic and behavioral outcomes," according to Diana H. Gruman, assistant professor of psychology at Western Washington University and the study's lead author. "We suggest that teachers can play a critical role in mitigating the negative effects of mobility through their own caring response and by addressing the peer acceptance of newcomers in the classroom."

Researchers followed 1,040 elementary school students for four years to determine how moving disrupts children's attitudes toward school and their behavior in the classroom, such as how much they participate and whether they are cooperative. Although work in this area has been hampered by the difficulties involved in maintaining contact with students who move, the researchers in this study were able to keep in touch with 94 percent of the students. Many children who move also experience other stressors, such as poverty and divorce, but the study separated out those stressors.

The researchers found that not all mobile students suffer negative consequences. In an effort to identify protective factors, they looked at the role of students' ties with teachers and peers at school. They found that children who are accepted by their peers are more likely to do well academically and have better attitudes toward school.

But perhaps the most important factor in the equation was that of the teacher: Teachers who were supportive of mobile students had an especially strong influence on their attitudes toward school, particularly for children who moved a lot. In addition, teacher support had a positive influence on children's behavior in the classroom.

The findings have implications for educators, suggest the researchers. They call for effective interventions for students who transfer to include intensive tutoring to address any academic deficits children may have. They also recommend teacher training to raise awareness of the hardships faced by mobile students and encourage caring responses that address peer acceptance in the classroom.

Families, friends, schools and neighborhoods contribute to adolescent alcohol misuse

Characteristics present in the four social environments in which young people live—families, peers, schools, and neighborhoods—contribute both positively and negatively to whether teens misuse alcohol, with risk from one area possibly being magnified or decreased by attributes of another.

That's the finding of a new longitudinal study conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of California at Davis, and the University of California at Irvine. The study appears in the November/December 2008 issue of the journal Child Development.

Previous research on teen drinking has focused mostly on individuals' ties to friends and family members. This study suggests the need for a more inclusive view of the social world of adolescents and highlights the importance of examining the connections between all of the social environments in which they live.

The researchers used data from 6,544 teens ages 11 to 17 enrolled in three public school systems in North Carolina, surveying them every six months for a total of five times. The adolescents were in grades 6, 7, and 8 when they were first surveyed, and in grades 8, 9, and 10 at the end of the study. The study used information from the teens to measure their misuse of alcohol, including heavy drinking, and to gauge negative consequences associated with drinking, such as getting into fights.

The study also collected information by telephone from parents of the teens and data from the U.S. Census. The information was used to describe the family, peer, school, and neighborhood environments of the adolescents in four areas: whether they had role models who used alcohol; how close the teens were to others in their social environments; social constraints on alcohol misuse, such as parental supervision; and the stressors in each adolescent's social environment.

The researchers found that characteristics present in all four social environments—family, peers, schools, and neighborhoods—played a role in whether teens misused alcohol. They also found that the adolescents generally were more likely to misuse alcohol the more they were exposed to alcohol use by others in their social environments.

Other characteristics of those environments tended to increase or decrease the risk associated with alcohol misuse. For example, the risk for teens of being exposed to drinking by schoolmates weakened when parents supervised their children. On the other hand, the risk of exposure to drinking by schoolmates grew when there was conflict in the family and when more family members drank. These findings underscore the important role played by families in teens' use of alcohol, throughout adolescence.

"Our findings affirm what social ecological theories suggest: Adolescents are embedded in a social world of family, friends, schoolmates, and neighbors, all of whom matter to adolescent development," according to Susan T. Ennett, associate professor of health behavior and health education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the study's lead author. "And adolescent alcohol misuse is socially conditioned behavior."

Research shows that time invested in practicing pays off for young musicians

A Harvard-based study published October 29 in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE, led by Drs. Gottfried Schlaug and Ellen Winner has found that children who study a musical instrument for at least three years outperform children with no instrumental training—not only in tests of auditory discrimination and finger dexterity (skills honed by the study of a musical instrument), but also on tests measuring verbal ability and visual pattern completion (skills not normally associated with music).

41 eight- to eleven-year-olds who had studied either piano or a string instrument for a minimum of three years were compared to 18 children who had no instrumental training. Children in both groups spent 30-40 minutes per week in general music classes at school, but those in the instrumental group also received private lessons learning an instrument (averaging 45 minutes per week) and spent additional time practicing at home.

While it is no surprise that the young musicians scored significantly higher than those in the control group on two skills closely related to their music training (auditory discrimination and finger dexterity), the more surprising result was that they also scored higher in two skills that appear unrelated to music—verbal ability (as measured by a vocabulary IQ test) and visual pattern completion (as measured by the Raven's Progressive Matrices). And furthermore, the longer and more intensely the child had studied his or her instrument, the better he or she scored on these tests.

Studying an instrument thus seems to bring benefits in areas beyond those that are specifically targeted by music instruction, but that is not the end of the story. Although this research sheds light on the question of whether connections between music and other, unrelated skills do exist, more studies examining the causal relationships between instrumental music training, practice intensity, and cognitive enhancements are needed.

Investing in Teachers Produces Results for Chattanooga Schools

Hamilton County, Tennessee, is home to one of the nation's most widely touted school reform success stories. Beginning in 2001, eight low-performing elementary schools began an ambitious upward trek. With $5 million from the Chattanooga-based Benwood Foundation and funding from several other local organizations, school and community officials launched an intensive teacher-centered campaign to reform the inner-city Chattanooga schools. The effort, now known as the Benwood Initiative, drastically improved student achievement, and education observers took notice. Former U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige cited Benwood's success in his 2003 annual report to Congress. And national media outlets have trumpeted the Benwood story since, including the Washington Post, Reader's Digest, and Education Week.

Most of these accolades have focused on a distinct approach to improving teaching in low-performing schools. In short: get better teachers. To some extent, this is what happened. School district officials reconstituted the faculties of the Benwood schools, requiring teachers to reapply for their jobs and hiring replacements for those who didn't make the cut. Community officials established financial incentives to attract new talent, including free graduate school tuition, mortgage loans, and performance bonuses. The press, policy makers, and education organizations have pointed to these incentives as the source of Benwood's success. "They're offering cold cash ... and they're getting results," declared the Dallas Morning News in 2003. Two years later, Arizona Senator Jon Kyl cited Benwood's "incentive package" as evidence of the wisdom of merit pay for teachers.

But the argument that these initiatives brought a flood of new and better teachers into the schools' classrooms has been overstated. Most of the teachers who reapplied for their jobs were hired back, and less than 20 of the 300 teachers in the Benwood schools received bonuses in the first year of the much touted financial incentive plan.

Benwood's success has had at least as much to do with a second, equally important reform strategy: helping teachers improve the quality of their instruction. A new analysis of "value-added" teacher effectiveness data indicates that over a period of six years, existing teachers in the eight Benwood elementary schools improved steadily. Before the Benwood Initiative kicked off, they were far less effective than their peers elsewhere in the Hamilton County district. By 2006, a group of mostly the same teachers had surpassed the district average.

This improvement was by design. The Benwood Initiative was about much more than pay incentives and reconstitution; the district invested heavily in mentoring programs to train teachers, in additional staff to support curriculum and instruction, and in stronger and more collaborative leadership at the school level. At the same time, the Benwood Initiative was buoyed by better labor-management relations and a host of other reform efforts at the district level.

These findings have implications for other districts looking to turn around low-performing schools. There is no doubt that disadvantaged students are disproportionately likely in American education to be taught by less experienced, less qualified, less effective teachers. But solving that problem is not merely a matter of redistributing teachers from one school to another.

As the Benwood Initiative demonstrates, individual teacher effectiveness is not a fixed trait. School systems can take many steps, as Hamilton County has, to improve teachers' work in classrooms. …  

Entire article:

http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/k_v90/k0810sil.htm

SUCCESS AT SCALE IN CHARTER SCHOOLING

Teachers may be the most important element of an effective school, but does that mean that K-12 improvement must wait on the ability of schools or systems to recruit, nurture, and retain outstanding teachers? Such a strategy implies that widespread excellence hinges on the ability of publicly funded school systems to attract more than 3.3 million superstars—or more than 200,000 such hires a year. The challenge of recruiting our way to excellence is a daunting proposition. Steven Wilson, a senior fellow with Education Sector and former chairman and CEO of Advantage Schools, is skeptical that it is a feasible one.

In an American Enterprise Institute working paper he notes that even today’s successful charter schools have succeeded by creating a “No Excuses” culture reliant on their ability to attract talented and passionate recruits, but he questions whether these models are capable of working at the scale that the nation requires. Indeed, given the limited talent pool of promising hires and the exhausting demands these schools make of faculty, Wilson considers whether such models can ever effectively serve more than a handful of the nation’s students.

Complete paper:

http://www.aei.org/docLib/20081021_Wilson_FAEP_Rev.pdf

Special Education in America

This report examines key issues facing students with disabilities ranging from the demographics of the population, educational settings, overrepresentation of certain groups, achievement, high school completion, and transitions to adulthood.

Full report:

http://www.edweek.org/media/eperc_specialeducationinamerica.pdf

SETDA Releases Next Report in Class of 2020: Action Plan for Education Series: Technology-Based Assessments Improve Teaching and Learning

Calls for Proactive Use of Data to Drive School Reform Efforts

The State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA), representing all 50 states and DC, has released the “Technology-Based Assessments Improve Teaching and Learning” report focusing on the use of technology-based assessment systems to provide classroom teachers with innovative approaches for improving instruction for all students. Additionally, the report calls on states to redefine its role as “Data Compliance Officers” to “Data Leaders” - supporting the use of relevant, timely data at the school and district levels to improve instruction and teacher quality and drive school reform efforts.

Many schools and districts that have shown strong gains in student achievement are utilizing low-stakes formative assessments to monitor individual student progress. In addition, these formative assessments have the potential to provide generalized data that is useful at the district and state level to inform systemic changes in policies and to drive school improvement efforts.

The report highlights over 15 examples from states and districts using technology-based assessments to individualize instruction to:

• Improve student achievement

• Remediate before it’s too late

• Track individual student growth and progress, and

• Achieve school improvement goals.

The Report’s Key Recommendations include:

Leadership

· Incorporate innovative, consistent and timely assessments into daily instruction.

· Ensure sufficient technology infrastructure and technical support is available to all teachers and administrators.

· Create new instructional design principles for engaging diverse student capabilities and needs.

· Provide teacher training for the proper uses of data to improve teaching to ensure each child’s potential is reached.

· Provide leadership from the federal, state, and district regarding teachers’ use of data as a “carrot and not a stick.”

· Use technology and formative assessment to strengthen the home and school connection by communicating with parents on student progress.

· Provide a separate funding stream to support leadership and teacher training regarding the use of data to change teaching practices.

Technology Infrastructure

· Ensure the data flowing into the classroom for the improvement of instruction is user-friendly, timely, and accurate.

· Ensure that computers and other technologies are used continuously and seamlessly in instruction & assessment.

· Ensure software is available and scheduled in such a way to ensure easy access to quality tutoring for all students.

· Using technology to immediately post results on the state’s electronic management system for transferability.

Full report:

http://www.setda.org/c/document_library/get_file?folderId=270&name=DLFE-261.pdf

No Child' Law Gets an 'F' from Education Professor

The controversial No Child Left Behind law has forced teachers in low-income school districts to craft a curriculum that marginalizes writing at the expense of teaching to the test, resulting in educators who feel straitjacketed by a high-stakes test, according to a U. of I. education professor who has studied the issue.

Sarah J. McCarthey, a professor of language and literacy in the department of curriculum and instruction in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has studied the impact of the 7-year-old law on teachers’ writing instruction in both high- and low-income schools. She discovered that teachers, especially those in low-income schools, are increasingly jettisoning writing from their language arts block in favor of reading comprehension, one of the subjects along with mathematics used to benchmark a school’s progress through an annual battery of federally mandated tests administered by the states. The federal government then uses the test score data to either reward states with federal education funds or to impose punitive measures.

McCarthey, who published her findings in an article titled “The Impact of No Child Left Behind on Teachers’ Writing Instruction” in the October issue of Written Communication, said that because the federal government uses only math and reading scores to measure a school’s progress, there’s little incentive for schools to teach students non-tested subjects such as writing, music, art and science.

“Writing instruction has been neglected at the expense of teaching to the test,” McCarthey said, noting that from a pedagogical standpoint, that strategy is somewhat counterintuitive, considering that reading and writing are complementary cognitive activities.

“Being able to write well can make a student a better reader,” she said. “But only teaching reading isn’t going to make that student a better writer.”

The effect on writing instruction has hit underperforming lower-income schools the hardest. In those schools, teachers often had pre-packaged teaching materials foisted upon them by their district, McCarthey said.

“Because they were deemed an underperforming school based on the test results, the district had to legislate the curriculum they were using in both reading and writing. So when they taught reading and writing, they had to use this canned material.”

For teachers in struggling schools, the imposition of a district-mandated, one-size-fits-all curriculum turns all the fun and spontaneity of learning into a forced march.

“Both teachers and students became so tired of focusing on and preparing for the test that by test time, they were mentally exhausted,” McCarthey said. “For teachers still on probation or in their first three years of teaching, that loss of control over curriculum inevitably leads to a loss of morale and, in some cases, turnover.”

McCarthey found that younger teachers in low-income schools felt more pressure to teach to the test than their more experienced counterparts in high-income schools.

“Young teachers in low-income schools are monitored to a greater degree than teachers in high-income schools,” she said. “When that happens, there’s that much more pressure to perform. Veteran teachers have the latitude to be a little more cavalier, but younger teachers felt much more beholden to the test because the stakes were so high for them.”

The problem is compounded because the best veteran teachers invariably end up in higher-income schools, leaving the least prepared and least experienced teachers disproportionally assigned to schools with the greatest needs and challenges.

“Our most-qualified veteran teachers are not ending up where they’re needed most,” McCarthey said. “They’re typically in the higher-income schools because they can afford to pay them more money.”

For all of its negatives, McCarthey did note that one positive consequence of No Child Left Behind was that teachers were forced to lavish attention on low-achieving students.

“This is actually one of the benefits of the law, that teachers are thinking a lot more about their low achievers,” she said.

But even that benefit has a downside that is symptomatic of the unintended consequences brought about by the law.

“The flip-side is that average and high-achieving students in high-income schools don’t receive the attention they deserve,” she said. “So we’re undermining their educational progress by not challenging them enough.”

Changing the Game

The Federal Role in Supporting 21st Century Educational Innovation

To resolve dramatic disparities in educational achievement and ensure future American workers are globally competitive, the federal government needs, as it has in the past, to change the game in public education.

A robust new federal Office of Educational Entrepreneurship and Innovation within the Department of Education would expand the boundaries of public education by scaling up successful educational entrepreneurs, seeding transformative educational innovations, and building a stronger culture to support these activities throughout the public sector.

America's Challenge

Significant educational achievement gaps and stagnating attainment threaten the nation’s ability to fulfill its promise of equal opportunity and successfully compete in the global economy. In both reading and math, fourth graders from urban public schools—whose students are disproportionately poor and minority—are roughly a year-and-a-half behind their suburban peers. U.S. 15-year-olds trail their peers in 23 other countries in math and 11 other countries in reading. Slipping trends in educational attainment point to a real possibility that young Americans today may be less well educated than the previous generation, and experience lower living standards as a result.

A New Federal Approach

The federal government should catalyze a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship in public education through a new Office of Educational Entrepreneurship and Innovation (OEEI) within the U.S. Department of Education. With a small and nimble staff and an independent review board, OEEI would strategically collaborate with entrepreneurs, innovators, philanthropists, and state/local governments to:

Scale up successful educational entrepreneurs such as charter school networks, human capital suppliers, providers of technology and out-of-school supports, and capacity-building intermediaries through a new Grow What Works fund of up to $300 million annually

Foster transformational educational innovations by investing $150 million annually into longer-term, high-risk but high potential payoff educational R&D through the new Education Innovation Challenge

Build a stronger culture of entrepreneurship and innovation at the federal level and nationwide by eliminating barriers to new and innovative educational approaches, highlighting educational issues of national significance, and building networks of educational entrepreneurs to help them exchange best practices; identify high-quality human capital; and realize potential synergies. …

Read the full report Changing the Game:

http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2008/~/media/Files/rc/reports/2008/1016_education_mead_rotherham/1016_education_mead_rotherham_brief.pdf

State Leaders Urge Integration of Career Technical Education into School Reform Efforts

State education leaders are calling for the complete integration of career and technical education programs into the middle and high school curricula as a means to offer all students a range of learning experiences that encompass academic, career and 21^st century skills. The recommendation comes from a year-long study of the state of career technical education (CTE) in American education reform by state board of education members. The report, Learning to Work, Working to Learn, is being published by the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE).

The traditional concept of vocational education with its emphasis on skill training and non-academic instruction—auto repair and cosmetology, for example—has evolved in recent years into a career-focused and academically demanding 21^st century workforce preparation program now known as career technical education. This transformation offers educators significant opportunities to expand the breadth and depth of educational opportunities to students both in their K-12 learning and post-secondary careers.

“The modern day career technical education program is not your father’s vo-tech shop class,” explained Brenda Welburn, NASBE Executive Director. “We simply cannot make effective high school reforms without incorporating CTE into these improvement plans. CTE prepares students to succeed in the global workforce and offers those students most in danger of dropping out of high school with multiple educational and career opportunities.”

Among the other recommendations that will be distributed to national, state, and local education leaders is a focus on incorporating CTE coursework into existing state academic standards and to develop multiple assessments to measure skill and knowledge attainment. The report also suggests facilitating partnerships between industry leaders and schools, better state recruitment and compensation strategies for CTE instructors, and improving the transitions for students from high school to their post-secondary careers.

The panel’s work was supported through a generous contribution by Crossland Construction, one of the premier construction companies in the country based in Columbus, Kansas.

The full report and recommendations, Learning to Work, Working to Learn, is available for $14 by calling (800) 220-5183 or via the Internet at www.nasbe.org.

Compendium of Strategies to Reduce Teacher Turnover

This report provides a description of the Compendium of Strategies to Reduce Teacher Turnover, a searchable database of selected profiles of retention strategies implemented in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont. Note – it is NOT the Compendium itself.

Full report:

http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/regions/northeast/pdf/REL_2008052a.pdf

Is ADHD more likely to affect movement in boys or girls?

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) appears to affect movement in boys more than it does in girls, according to a study published in the November 4, 2008, issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. ADHD is one of the most common mental disorders found in children. Symptoms include impulsiveness, hyperactivity, such as not being able to sit still, and inattention or constant daydreaming. Few studies have been done that compare ADHD and movement in both boys and girls.

Researchers tested the movement abilities of 132 boys and girls with ADHD and 136 without the disorder. The children were between the ages of seven and 15 years and were tested for how fast and how well they could tap their toes, walk on their heels, maintain balance and keep a steady rhythm during a task compared to scores typical for their age.

The study found that girls with ADHD and the control group of children without ADHD were twice as likely to be able to control their movements for their age compared to boys with ADHD, who showed continued difficulties.

"Our findings suggest that the differences between boys and girls with ADHD show up not only in behavior and symptoms but also in development of movement control, likely because girls' brains mature earlier than boys' brains," said study author E. Mark Mahone, PhD, with the Kennedy Krieger Institute and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD.

"More studies related to ADHD and movement are needed that look at boys and girls separately and at younger ages," said Mahone.

Teacher Qualifications More Equally Distributed Across New York City Public Schools

Recent changes – including new laws and new routes into teaching with lowered cost for individuals to enter the profession – have dramatically changed the characteristics of teachers, particularly in large urban districts. A new study in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management explores how these changes affect who enters teaching and where they teach in large urban districts. Results show that teacher qualifications are much more equally distributed across New York City public schools now than they were previously.

The study found that teacher qualifications are more equally distributed across New York City public schools in 2005 than they were in 2000. Similarly, schools with disproportionate numbers of poor students and students of color have teachers whose qualifications are much stronger than they were five years ago.

The researchers contend that this outcome largely results from policy changes in New York state and New York City that dramatically altered the qualifications of new teachers. These changes in the qualifications account for a modest improvement in the average math achievement of students in the poorest elementary schools.

The results also suggest that recruiting teachers with stronger observed qualifications, i.e. high math SAT scores or those who are certified could substantially improve student math achievement.

“Recruiting more qualified teachers should be a part of a more general strategy to improve the quality of classroom teaching,” the authors conclude.

Alcohol advice needs to play a greater role in sex education for teenagers

Alcohol and attitudes are two of the key factors that health professionals need to be aware of when they are dealing with sexually active teenagers.

Researchers from the University of Sheffield, UK, found considerable differences between the way that boys and girls aged 14 to 16 viewed a series of sexual scenarios.

"The girls who took part in our focus groups were more likely to see their partner's point of view and were more aware of the complex nature of relationships than the boys" says nurse researcher Dr Mark Hayter.

Ten focus groups were held with 35 teenagers who had accessed nurse-led sexual health outreach clinics for contraception. These clinics are often held in conjunction with youth clubs in areas where teenage pregnancy rates are high.

The participants were presented with a series of scenarios – a girl and a boy both reluctant to have sex, a girl who had had a numbers of partners and a girl who felt pressured to have sex because her friends had paired off with two boys leaving her with a third.

"The objective of this study was to explore the broad gender-based attitudes and opinions towards all of the case studies, not just to explore any differences between attitudes towards any one particular case study" explains Dr Hayter, who carried out the research with Christina Harrison, a sexual health specialist nurse from Doncaster Primary Care Trust.

"Male and female attitudes clearly differed. The girls' responses were more empathic and complex because they face more complex social pressures when it comes to having sex. The young men on the other hand appeared to follow behaviour patterns that included pressuring girls to have sex, often with the use of alcohol.

"We also noticed that the boys often used aggressive language about relationships - an element that was missing from the girls' focus groups. For example they suggested that a girlfriend who slept around would probably pay a physical price and that using tactics like getting a girl drunk were acceptable.

"In one of the boys' focus groups there was even a suggestion that it was OK for a boy to force his girlfriend to have sex and the group started trying to differentiate between 'just a bit of pressure' and 'proper rape'."

The researchers concede that the focus group format could have encouraged stereotypical male and female behaviour, but point out that in the real world teenagers' behaviour is shaped by the sort of peer pressure displayed during the sessions.

Sexual health is a major issue in all cultures, with increasing numbers of young people between 13 and 18 being affected by sexually transmitted infections (STIs), unplanned pregnancies and abortions.

"Studies from the USA, Europe and Asia all indicate that adolescence is a time of sexual vulnerability" says Dr Hayter. "The UK certainly reflects this trend and has one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancies and STIs in Europe. In some areas it is common to see pregnancy rates of up to 19 per 1000 in the 13-16 age group."

Distinct trends can also be seen from the international literature, including sexual activity at a younger age and increased risk taking, such as unprotected sex with new or casual partners. This behaviour is strong influenced by social and contextual factors closely related to peer pressure, alcohol use and gender power.

"Nurses working in sexual health clinics used by young people should be aware of the ways in which their clients think about sex and relationships" concludes Dr Hayter.

"Providing information and contraception is only one element of promoting sexual health.

"When it comes to female clients, nurses should develop interventions that can strengthen self-esteem and teach young girls how to respond positively to the social pressures they face around sex.

"It would also be helpful to encourage young male clients to empathise with their female partners.

"Last, but definitely not least, clinics need to treat alcohol use by their clients as a higher priority, integrating advice and help about harmful drinking into their sexual health promotion work."

Cascading effect of even minor early problems may explain serious teen violence

How do minor behavior problems and experiences early in life lead to serious acts of violence in teenagers? A group of researchers has found that the answer may lie in a cascading effect in which early life experiences lead to behaviors and new experiences that lead to yet other experiences that culminate in serious violent behavior.

The researchers found that children who had social and academic problems in elementary school were more likely to have parents who withdrew from supervision and monitoring when the children entered middle school. When this happened, children were more likely to make friends with other children who had deviant behavior, and this ultimately was more likely to lead teens to engage in serious and sometimes costly acts of violence. Interestingly, violent outcomes in girls followed largely the same developmental path as those for boys.

"The findings indicate that these trajectories are not inevitable but can be deflected at each subsequent era in development, through interactions with peers, school, and parents along the way," notes Kenneth A. Dodge, William McDougall Professor of Public Policy and psychology and neuroscience, director of the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University, and the study's lead author. "Successful early intervention could redirect paths of antisocial development to prevent serious violent behavior in adolescence."

Dodge conducted the study with researchers in the Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group at the Pennsylvania State University, the University of Washington, Tufts University, the University of Alabama, and the University of South Carolina. The study appears in the November/December 2008 issue of the journal Child Development.

The scientists followed 754 children from 27 schools in four areas of the United States, collecting annual reports by the children, their parents, peers, and observers, as well as school records from kindergarten through 11th grade. Through a novel approach that goes beyond measuring risk factors in a summary fashion, the study suggests how serious violence develops across the life span from early childhood through adolescence.

The researchers found that children who are born into economically disadvantaged environments were more likely to have parents who practiced harsh and inconsistent parenting, perhaps because of the stress of their circumstances. This parenting, in turn, was more likely to lead to early, minor social and cognitive problems in the children when they started school. From there, the behavior problems cascaded.

The researchers caution that their model should not be used to conclude that an antisocial 5-year-old is destined to be a violent teenager, noting that while the risk is substantial, it is not certain. In contrast, the study points to ways that this trajectory can be deflected by life events, and it cites implications for preventive intervention.

In child care, relationships with caregivers key to children's stress levels

How children are affected by out-of-home care depends not only on the qualities of their teacher and the classroom, but also on the nature of the children's relationship with their caregivers. That's the finding of a new study on the level of the stress hormone cortisol in children in full-day child care.

Cortisol, the primary stress hormone in humans, tends to be at its highest levels in the early morning and gradually declines over the course of the day. But recent research has found that many preschoolers in full-day child care have increases in cortisol from morning to afternoon.

This study found that children in classrooms with closer to 10 children were more likely to show cortisol decreases from morning to afternoon, while children in classrooms with closer to 20 children tended to show greater increases in cortisol across the day. Children with more clingy relationships with their teachers showed greater rises in cortisol from morning to afternoon, and children with more conflicted relationships with their teachers showed greater cortisol boosts during a one-on-one session with their teachers. Conflicted relationships were said to occur when teachers tried to control resistant children, when children perceived their teachers as unfriendly, or when teachers or children reported that the teachers found the interaction frustrating.

This unusual increase of cortisol levels is of potential concern because long-term or frequent elevations in cortisol can have negative health consequences. Research with animals and human children suggests that secure relationships with parents protect children from rises in cortisol in stressful situations.

This study, by researchers at Washington State University, Auburn University, the Washington State Department of Early Learning, and the Pennsylvania State University, appears in the November/December 2008 issue of Child Development.

The study looked at 191 preschoolers attending 12 child care centers in a small southeastern U.S. community to determine if the quality of teacher-child relationships could predict increases in cortisol in the children. Teachers described their relationships with the children in their care on a questionnaire and children talked about their relationships with their teachers in interviews. Researchers also collected saliva samples from the children in classrooms to determine changes in their cortisol levels from morning to afternoon. They also collected saliva outside of class before and after a series of mildly difficult tasks designed to look like challenges the children might experience in the classroom and before and after a non-challenging interaction with the teacher.

"This study sheds additional light on an as yet incompletely understood phenomenon¬ among many young children attending full-day child care," according to Jared A. Lisonbee, assistant professor of human development at Washington State University and lead author of the study. "Additionally, the study begins to situate child care-cortisol research in the context of a broader literature on the role of relationships in shaping how children function and how they react to stress."

Maturation Process Plays More of a Role in Learning and Development of College Students

How well young people learn and develop during their college years may be due more to the normal process of maturing rather than the college experience itself, according to a new student assessment tool developed by researchers at Indiana State University.

The University Learning Outcomes Assessment (UniLOA) is an indicator of student growth, learning and development, said Mark Frederick, assistant to the vice president of student affairs for research and assessment. The assessment results can be used by faculty, administrators and student affairs personnel to support evaluation, planning and program development.

The survey examines seven areas of a student’s life - critical thinking, self-awareness, communication, diversity, citizenship, membership and leadership, and relationships.

“We looked for areas of study that could be shared across campus - areas that both student affairs and the academic community could get behind,” said Will Barratt, associate professor of educational administration.

Unlike many instruments that survey students’ attitudes, feelings or beliefs the UniLOA is designed to measure actual behaviors. According to Frederick, The survey also differs in what it measures from the widely used National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). The NSSE measures primarily the collegiate environment and infrastructure, the UniLOA measures strictly learning outcomes, not inputs or the collegiate environment.

“The UniLOA is both a diagnostic and a prescriptive instrument, guiding institutions in the development of supports, services, interventions, and programs aimed at improving behaviors consistent with the seven areas,” Frederick explained.

The survey can be administered in paper or electronic format, which is typically completed by students in 20 minutes.

In the pilot program, data was collected from more than 3,000 students, representing 65 private and public institutions of higher education across the nation during a 24-month period. While the UniLOA is still in its initial stage of “roll-out,” results from different institutions show an extremely high degree of reliability.

“The results have been very consistent,” said Barratt. “The findings and patterns that have emerged have looked the same campus after campus.”

Among the many findings, citizenship has a much lower score than any of the other areas measured in the survey.

“It was surprising that there wasn’t a great deal of growth in this area despite what universities are doing,” Barratt said.

According to the findings, students belonging to two or three formally organized organizations or activities score higher on citizenship, membership and leadership, and relationships than those belonging to more or fewer organizations. Further, students holding two leadership positions score higher in citizenship, membership and leadership than those holding fewer or more positions.

“Keep in mind, there’s more to citizenship than just voting,” Barratt said.

The survey also found that females engage in meaningful behaviors consistent with self-awareness and communication at a greater rate than males, while males engage in behaviors consistent with citizenship and membership/leadership at a rate greater than females.

Membership in Greek organizations also played a role in student development. Students reporting membership in a fraternity or sorority score higher on critical thinking, diversity, citizenship, membership and leadership, and relationships than students not affiliated, Frederick said.

The impact of military service on the student education experience was another surprise to the researchers.

Students with prior enlisted-level military service report engaging in behaviors consistent with the studied domains less frequently than those serving in the military reserves, and far less than those reporting no military experience at all.

“The reason for lower levels of behaviors in the various areas might be due to the reality that prior military students enter college after departing a highly prescribed experience, and when those established, prescriptive expectations no longer exist in their lives, there is a bit of foundering, rather than intentional, self-directed behavior consistent with growth, learning, and development,” Frederick said.

Other findings include:

• Student ethnicity produces different score profiles for critical thinking, self awareness, communication, and membership and leadership. This result, according to researchers, could reflect subtle cultural differences in how students' behaviors indicate holistic growth, learning, and development or the degree to which learning experiences are available and accessible to different ethnic groups.

• Scores in all areas correlate more with the educational level of the mother than the father. However, socioeconomic status, as measured by receiving a Pell Grant, does not appear to be a factor impacting scores in any of the areas surveyed.

• There are substantial differences between majors in critical thinking, communication, and citizenship with students in humanities, pre-medicine/dentistry, and social sciences scoring higher than students majoring in general studies, pre-law, and recreation/sports/leisure. Undeclared majors score the lowest.

Because they are behaviorally-based measures, each item of the UniLOA is designed to suggest specific programs that can be implemented to increase positive student behaviors.

For example, the lowest scored UniLOA item, goal setting, suggests that both stand alone workshops for students on goal setting and partnering with faculty members to create opportunities in classes to have students set learning goals and to self evaluate on their own progress toward those goals would be means by which students can better develop goal setting behaviors.

“We need to help students in this area so they can succeed after graduation. Goal-setting in an integral part of life, Frederick said.

Ideally, Frederick said, institutions should assess all first-year students at the beginning and end of the first semester to establish baseline behaviors and then re-assess all students at the end of each academic year from sophomore year and beyond.

The ultimate goal of the survey is to encourage colleges and universities to embrace a holistic approach to the student experience -- shared learning outcomes of the classroom and student activities.

“We need to make the higher education experience seamless,” Barratt added.

Complete report:

http://www1.indstate.edu/studentaffairsresearch/NationalNormsReport08Digest.pdf

“Realistic Expectations” Urged for KIPP Schools

Expert says existing research offers positive but mixed picture

\With its reputation for high standards, highly committed teachers and longer school days, the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) has been widely hailed as a model for urban education. A new policy brief concludes that available evidence indicates that KIPP is indeed providing good opportunities for students, but it also warns that some claims are exaggerated; the current evidence incomplete and policymakers should proceed with cautious optimism.

The policy brief What Do We Know About the Outcomes of KIPP Schools? is written by Professor Jeffrey R. Henig, an expert on urban education reform and charter schools at Teachers College, Columbia University. It was released today by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

KIPP, which is a charter school provider, operates nearly 50 schools in the U.S., including ones in Washington, D.C., Houston, and New York City. KIPP schools have drawn praise for their work with urban, poor and minority students. A large-scale study of KIPP using a randomized design is underway, but it is not expected to be completed for five years. Because policymakers and others are already looking to the KIPP model for guidance, Henig’s brief takes a close look at the seven strongest existing studies, which together offer several important insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the model.

Henig’s brief presents several positive findings:

· Students who enter and stay in KIPP schools do tend to perform better than comparable students in more traditional public schools.

· The better performance does not appear to be attributable to selective admissions.

· KIPP students tend to be minorities, and many have performed poorly in previous schools.

But the brief also raises at least two serious questions:

· KIPP student turnover appears to be high and “selective.” Those who leave tend to be lower-performing students to begin with and to have performed less well while at KIPP. “Such attrition, if it were taken into consideration, would reduce the size of gains in reports that simply compare KIPP eight graders with those in their host districts,” Henig writes. But the evidence, he adds, is not enough to suggest that attrition alone accounts for the academic advantages that KIPP students appear to enjoy.

· While the enthusiasm of KIPP teachers is high, heavy demands on them and on KIPP leaders tend to promote high teacher turnover “and an unrelieved pressure to find and train new people,” Henig writes.

Henig notes that the extended-day policy at KIPP schools – 9.5 hours per day, plus summer and Saturday classes – has attracted a great deal of attention. But hard evidence does not yet link KIPP’s longer school day to the program’s success. Moreover, attempts to transport this part of the model to other schools may be met with objections from many parents and taxpayers.

Henig writes that KIPP is a model worth studying. However, at this point he does not recommend treating it as a prototype or a substitute for broader, systemic school reforms. It offers “a possible source of information and guidance” to education policy questions. But, he concludes, “Policymakers and others should have realistic expectations. There are significant unanswered questions about how expansion might affect outcomes, especially in relation to the difficulty of sustaining any gains attributable to KIPP’s heavy demands on teachers and school leaders.”

Find Jeffrey R. Henig’s report What Do We Know About the Outcomes of KIPP Schools? on the web at:

http://www.greatlakescenter.org/docs/Policy_Briefs/Henig_Kipp.pdf

Conduct Disorder in Adolescent Girls Associated With Family Characteristics, Parental Behaviors

Nearly 10 percent of adolescent girls in the United States meet the criteria for conduct disorder, a diagnosis describing youths who persistently exhibit behaviors that violate rules and rights of others – truancy, fighting, stealing, lying, cruelty or property destruction are examples of this. Conduct disorder is less prevalent in girls than in boys, although it is the second most common psychiatric diagnosis among adolescent females. Many of these teenage girls with conduct disorder may grow up to have poor adjustment in adulthood, with mental and physical health problems and difficulties parenting.

A recent study, conducted by researchers at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and published in the October issue of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health, sought to determine if three domains of social context – neighborhood, family characteristics and parenting behaviors – were associated with conduct disorder in adolescent girls.

“Our findings indicate that conduct disorder in adolescent girls is not significantly associated with neighborhood quality, but is, in fact, correlated with family characteristics and types of parenting behaviors,” said Kathleen Pajer, MD, MPH, the study’s lead author and principal investigator in The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. “Minority race, neighborhood quality and family poverty had some effect on conduct disorder in adolescent girls, but not once family interactions with the girl and her parents’ own history of delinquency, conduct disorder or criminality were taken into account.”

Conduct disorder and delinquency share some characteristics. An adolescent caught doing one illegal act is deemed delinquent, and conduct disorder describes that a youth has engaged in multiple deviant behaviors over a long period of time.

“Social context, such as poverty in the neighborhood, has long been known to affect rates of delinquency, but very few studies have examined whether social contexts are associated with conduct disorder in girls,” said Pajer, also an associate professor of Pediatrics and Epidemiology at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. “Our results are somewhat different than studies on the role of social context in delinquency.”

Pajer concludes, “Our findings may help us develop better treatment for girls with conduct disorder. Some interventions designed for delinquent girls or boys may not be successful in treating conduct disorder in adolescent girls.”

Data for the study were obtained from nearly 100 participants (15-to 17-year-old girls) in a large mid-Western city. Half of the girls were diagnosed with conduct disorder, while the other half, a demographically matched group, had no psychiatric disorder.