McREL Blog

What I Wish I Had Known about Student Motivation

“You’re a smart kid; I just wish you’d apply yourself in my class.”

Most teachers have uttered a similar phrase. I know I did. I remember one student particularly well; we’ll call him Jerry. His quick answers and witty insights—when he paid attention—told me he was smart enough to be doing better than he was.

My pep talks with Jerry never did much good, though. Sometimes, the more I goaded, the less he tried, which frustrated my ambitions of channeling Robin Williams’ character in Dead Poet’s Society, inspiring students to hang on every word of Nathaniel Hawthorne or Emily Dickinson. It felt like even if I stood on my desk dramatically reciting “O Captain! My Captain!” Jerry’s response would’ve been the same: meh.

Sending students the wrong message

Years later, while digging into research on student motivation, I realized what I had gotten wrong. Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has shown that telling students they are smart actually lowers their motivation and achievement. In an experiment, Dweck and her colleagues treated two groups of students quite differently. They consistently praised one group for its ability, saying things like, “Wow. You got eight right; you must be really smart.” They praised the second group for effort: “Wow. You got eight right; you must have worked really hard.”

The students hearing continual praise for their ability developed a “fixed-mindset” and came to believe that achievement or “smarts” was innate, not developed through effort. Consequently, they began to avoid challenging tasks, fearing that if they tried and failed, they no longer would appear smart. On the other hand, 90 percent of the students hearing praise for their effort took on more challenging tasks and found they actually enjoyed the work.

My first mistake, then, was telling Jerry he was smart.

My second was trying to guilt trip him. I played on the fact that Jerry seemed to like me, saying, “Come on, you really should read The Scarlet Letter. Do it for me.”

The right kind of teacher talk

Edward Deci, who spent his career researching intrinsic motivation, found that motivation stems from two deep psychological needs: competence and self-determination. We enjoy challenging activities if we choose them. Even positive feedback from teachers can undermine motivation if it comes across as coercing students (“You should keep up the good work.”). What’s more effective is providing feedback on how students measure up to a defined standard.

What I realized, too late, was that teacher talk is incredibly important. When teachers aren’t thoughtful about what they say in classrooms or write on papers, they can chip away at students’ intrinsic motivation to learn.

Here are a couple of examples I’ve drawn from research showing “should” and “should nots” when it comes to teacher talk.

Say this (growth mindset) . . . "Your practice is really paying off. You're getting your math facts down."

Not this (fixed mindset) . . . "Wow, that was quick! You blazed right through those problems! You’re a math whiz."

Say this (growth mindset) . . . "You seem frustrated and tired right now. That means your brain is working hard. We’ll keep at it, and I know you’re going to get it."

Not this (fixed mindset) . . . "Not everyone is a natural at this. Let’s do a few more problems and then move on to something you’re better at."

If I could do it over again with the benefit of hindsight, I’d tell Jerry something like this: “You’ve got a lot of potential. Right now, it’s going to waste. I’d like to help you unleash it, but that’s up to you.”

What kind of teacher talk did you hear when you were a student?

Read about Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset.

Learn more about Edward Deci and self-determination theory.

Written by Bryan Goodwin, author of “Simply Better: Doing What Matters Most to Change the Odds for Student Success.”

Teachers still want “apples”

An apple for a teacher is the education cliché, but do you know why? As far back as the 16^th century, parents of students in Scandinavia, and eventually in the United States, gave fruit to their child’s teacher to show their appreciation. But it was also, in part, a form of payment to help low-salaried teachers feed their families. Today, the salary scale remains, but the appreciation seems lost, resulting in U.S. schools having a harder time than ever keeping good teachers. In fact, according to a McKinsey & Company study, 14 percent leave teaching after only one year, and 46 percent leave before their fifth.

 

Why teachers leave

 

When teachers enter the field, they have high expectations of making a difference. Too often, however, they quickly realize that they don’t have the professional support, feedback, resources, or modeling of what it takes to help their students succeed. Instead, teachers must teach to the tests, fight bureaucracies, and monitor cafeterias and hallways in addition to their daily lesson planning, classroom management, and administrative tasks.

 

But it’s not just the heavy workload. In a July 2011 speech, as reported in The Huffington Post, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that teachers should earn between $60,000 and $150,000 a year. In reality, however, teachers earn an average $39,000 a year. But because salary is often indicative of the value society places on the profession, the emphasis on compensation may point to another issue. According to the McKinsey & Company study, the top-ranked education countries in the world—Singapore, Finland, and South Korea—“bestow enormous social prestige on the profession” (p. 6). Based on the current state of the profession, can we say the United States does the same?

 

How to get them to stay

 

Give teachers time. Many schools are adjusting their school schedules to create more instructional and non-instructional time for teachers, such as extended school days or half days for students. Hiring paraprofessionals can also assist teachers with administrative tasks or small group activities. The U.S. Department of Education is offering states the ability to waive some NCLB requirements, which eases the stress of testing requirements.

 

Address the compensation gap. To raise the quality of the entire teaching workforce, the level of teacher compensation is critical. However, changing the composition of the salary scale (e.g., merit pay, pay-for-performance) isn’t a cure-all; all levels of compensation need to be initially raised to recruit and retain high-quality teachers, according to an Economic Policy Institute issue brief.

 

Establish supportive work environments. In a report from the Center for Comprehensive School Reform (2007), teachers commented that they derive greater satisfaction from their work when they are empowered by school leaders to make decisions about scheduling, selection of materials, and professional development. In addition, regularly scheduled observations that coach teachers to higher levels of performance promote better teaching and higher student achievement.

 

Teachers, have you stayed or left and why? If you decided to leave, what would have changed your mind?

 

Do you agree or disagree that these are appropriate “apples” to keep high-quality teachers? If not, what are?

 

Read our hot topic on teacher retention for more information and other resources.

The American tradeoff: More teachers, lower salaries

According to a recent analysis, compared to an average teacher, a good teacher (in the 84th percentile) generates as much as $400,000 in increased future earnings for her class of 20 students. So if we define the benefits of teachers in financial terms alone, it would appear that paying six figures to attract and retain great teachers in the classroom might be defensible given the three- to four-fold return on that investment for society. 

So why don’t we pay teachers more? 

One might assume it’s because we invest too little in public education. The reality, though, is quite the opposite. As I note in my latest column in Educational Leadership, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development reports that in the last 40 years the United States has more than doubled its spending on K–12 education and now outspends almost every other country in the world—devoting 4 percent of GDP to K–12 education compared with, for example, Japan’s 2.6 percent. 

Strangely, though, while more dollars were funneled to education, average teacher salaries actually declined about 2 percent per year since 1970 when calculated in terms of per capita GDP. U.S. teacher salaries now rank fourth from the bottom among 34 competitor countries in terms of teachers’ relative spending power. 

It’s probably no coincidence that this decline in salaries occurred at the same time that U.S. schools went on a hiring spree. Between 1980 and 2007, the number of teachers increased by 46 percent, more than twice the rate of student enrollment growth (21 percent). As a result, teacher-student ratios fell from 18.7 to 15.7. However, had they remained constant and funding increases had been funneled into teacher salaries, the average teacher would now make $78,574, instead of $52,578. 

Class-size reduction initiatives have been one of the driving forces in creating our uniquely American teaching corps of low-salaried classroom teachers teaching smaller classes amid a supporting cast of higher-paid specialists. Yet as John Hattie notes in Visible Learning, reducing class sizes—from say, 25 to 15 students—still has only a small effect on student achievement. And even that small benefit assumes that teacher quality remains constant as districts scramble to fill vacancies for teachers. 

Certainly, smaller classes make managing behavior and grading papers less burdensome for teachers. But when given the choice between having a few more students and making a few thousand dollars more per year, most rank-and-file teachers would gladly accept the larger classes and paychecks. As Marquerite Roza, a researcher at the University of Washington, reports in her book Educational Economics, a study in Washington State asked teachers if they preferred a $5,000 raise, class size reduction, a teacher’s aide, or increased preparation time (four investments of roughly equal value). Fully 83 percent of teachers said they preferred a raise over class-size reduction, 88 percent preferred a raise to a teacher’s aide, and 69 percent preferred the raise to increased preparation time. 

While no one goes into teaching to get rich, it’s clear that great teachers are worth a great deal more than most are currently paid. So perhaps it’s time we re-think our approach to smaller classes (and smaller teacher salaries) so that we can find and reward great teachers with salaries that reflect their real benefit to students and society.

Easy antidote to grade inflation?

As I wrote recently in Educational Leadership, grade inflation appears to be a real phenomenon with costly consequences for students. From 1992–2006, the percentage of American high school students who reported earning an A or A-minus average nearly doubled (from 18.3%–32.8%). An analysis of student work in Oregon concluded that most high school students receiving Bs (and many receiving As) are not doing work on par with college expectations for entry-level students. Perhaps as a result, more than 30 percent of freshmen drop out of college each year, costing taxpayers in excess of $1 billion per year in wasted grants and state appropriations to colleges.

Is there any way to stop grade inflation? One solution, some offer, is to open up the “black box” of teacher grades, which can be as carefully guarded as secret recipes, making it difficult to determine what actually goes into a student grade. As a result, one teachers’ A can be another’s C grade.

More than 20 years ago, in Spain’s Basque Country, a small high school stumbled onto what appears to be a simple antidote to grade inflation. In 1990, a small school in the Gipuzkoa province purchased new software that began automatically placing on report cards, with little apparent forethought from school officials, information about where students stood relative to the average grade in their class. Immediately, student grades shot up 5 percent (an increase, according to researchers who later analyzed the school’s data, on par with lowering class sizes from 22 to 15). Presumably, as students and their parents began to understand that a grade of say, an 85, wasn’t all that special compared to other students in the class, they began to work harder. And as a whole, the entire school began to perform better on Spain’s national exam.

Incidentally, this sort of value-neutral information about students’ relative performance is exactly the kind of feedback that motivation researcher Edward Deci has noted strikes the perfect balance between providing information to guide performance while not diminishing motivation by coming across as coercing, such as saying to a student, “You shouldwork harder in my class.” Reporting how students are doing relative to their peers seems to be a simple way to open up the black box of grades while inspiring students to work harder. It encourages a student to think, “If the average grade in my class is 85, surely I can do at least that well … if not better.” 

For the school in Spain, though, there was one problem.

After just one year, parents and teachers complained that the information was creating too much competition among students. Average class grades were removed from report cards and student performance swiftly sank back to prior levels.

What do you think? Should revealing where students stand relative to their peers be encouraged … or shunned? 

 

Killing with kindness?

For as long as letter grades have been around, so too, have fears of grade inflation. As far back as the 1890s, Harvard University professors were wringing their hands about students earning “sham” grades that would “seriously cheapen” the university’s reputation if the outside world were to learn of them.

That so many people could worry about the same phenomenon for so long begs the question of whether such concerns are merely successive generations of curmudgeons grumbling about the declining standards of youth or grounded in reality.

As I write in my latest column in Educational Leadership, recent data suggests that such concerns today may be indeed have some basis in fact. Here are but two data points:

• Nearly twice as many high school students reported earning an A or A-minus average in 2006 than in 1992 (32.8 percent versus 18.3 percent).
• In 2007, two federal reports found that the performance of U.S. high school students on the reading portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) had declined between 1992 and 2005, even as average student GPA rose from 2.68 to 2.98.

Some critics dismiss these data because they rely on student self-reports of their grades, which, itself could suggest an equally troubling conclusion: that today’s students are more “truth challenged” than in the past. Test companies which collect these data, however, say their analyses suggest that self-reports are sufficiently reliable to use for research purposes.

The real question, though, may well be whether today’s grades accurately assess student learning. Here, too, the data are troubling.

In Oregon, reviewers analyzed the in-class work of 2,200 high school students against university professors’ standards for college-entry work and found that most B students and some A students were not doing work on par with entry-level college standards.

If we accept, as many researchers do, that grade inflation is a real phenomenon, we might ask why it occurs. Here are two possible explanations:

1. Many teachers (as many as half by one estimate) base class grades on factors such as effort, behavior, and attitude that are only indirectly related to learning. In low-performing schools, in particular, grades seem to have as much to do with managing behavior as assessing learning.
2. Educators may inflate grades out of sympathy for students who are underprepared for success: feeling caught between a rock and a hard place of either inflating grades or flunk large numbers of students, they opt for inflating grades.  

But do inflated grades help anyone? Nationwide, 30 percent of students at four-year colleges drop out after just one year of school, incurring enormous personal costs and racking up more than $1 billion per year in wasted state appropriations and student grants. How many of these students received unrealistically high marks in high school, only to discover in college that their high schools might have actually been killing them with kindness? 

Bryan Goodwin is vice president of communications at McREL. He is the author of Simply Better: What Matters Most to Change the Odds for Student Success (ASCD, 2011).

Changing our perception of—and response to—bullying

Nelson Munz. His image may come to mind for many of us when we think about bullies. (For those of you who don’t watch, or are too high-brow to admit to watching, The Simpsons, Nelson is the quintessential bully on the show, known for his mocking, doorbell-chime hah-hah laugh.)   

That’s how many of us may think of bullies—as a social outcast waiting in the back hallway to extort lunch money from wimps. Sure, we’ve probably all known (and perhaps even handed over milk money to) a Nelson Munz or two, but the reality is that most bullies aren’t like him at all. 

As I report
in the September 2011 issue of Educational Leadership, most bullying is psychological, not physical. And it’s often popular kids who do the bullying—including girls.

Not only is the popular perception of bullying off the mark, so too, researchers note, are our common responses to it. Often, we tend to focus on the victims, encouraging them to stick up for themselves or find adults to help.

But that appears to be the exact wrong approach—and a key reason that so many anti-bullying programs are ineffective. Rather than seeing bullying as a psychological aberrance, we must see and treat it as a natural social phenomenon. To combat bullying, adults enlist the support of the entire school community, including teachers, parents, and student bystanders, who witness an estimated 85 percent of bullying cases, to create a school culture in which bullying is no longer socially beneficial, but rather socially unacceptable.

To learn more about current research on bullying, read the entire article here.

The next frontier of education: Implementation

In my latest “research says” column in Educational Leadership, I report that a new slew of “gold-standard” studies has unearthed (somewhat inadvertently) that in a lot of cases, educators really aren’t very good at the whole implementation thing. The studies, commissioned by the Institute for Education Sciences within the U.S. Department of Education, were carefully constructed with impressive sample sizes and rigorous statistical analyses. They found little or no effects for several popular education programs, such as Odyseey Math and Rick Stiggins’ Classroom Assessment for Student Learning. 

Yet, almost without exception, the programs in question were so poorly implemented that it’s difficult to determine if they—or the poor implementation—were the reason for the weak results. In other words, the programs might have actually worked had they only been implemented with fidelity.'

This may be true of many education approaches and reforms, which ultimately get thrown on the trash heap because we believe they don’t work, when in reality, they may work just fine when they’re implemented well.

On the upside, we have seen a lot of improvements in education (for example, great teaching and curricula that challenge and engage students, to name just two) that can have a tremendous impact on student success … when done well. In fact, most of the big impact approaches aren’t new at all. For decades, we’ve known that teachers setting high expectations, being a “warm demander,” and intentionally matching instructional strategies to learning goals really do work. We just need to do these things correctly and stick to them.

Educators might take some solace in knowing that they’re not alone in struggling to do what everyone knows must be done. Businesses have the same trouble. Everyone in the airline industry knows Southwest Airline’s open secrets of success, such as their “all aboard” seating; yet few, if any, competitors have been able to effectively follow Southwest’s formula. Doing things right, of course, is a thorny challenge. Yet, as I write about here, it’s not impossible—in fact, we know quite a lot about the keys to good implementation.       

So the good news is this: we don’t need to wait for silver bullets, or Superman, or some yet-to-be invented innovation to improve our schools. As we show in the video below, we simply need to do better what decades of research says matters most to change the odds for student success.

 

Bryan Goodwin is the author of a new book from ASCD, Simply Better: Doing What Matters Most to Change the Odds for Student Success.

Saying no to fads—in dieting and education reform

In a new documentary film, Joe Cross, an affable Aussie, who after tipping the scales at 310 pounds and contracting a rare auto-immune disorder, decides to spend 60 days drinking only fruit and vegetable juices. The film follows Cross as he traverses America, Johnny Appleseed style, to inform patrons of truck stops and small town diners about the wonders of an all-juice diet.

At first, Cross seems to be hocking yet another fad diet (unsuccessfully, judging by the puckered faces of juice drinkers) that’s based, like many fad diets, on a reductio ad absurdum: fruits and vegetables are good, so cut everything else from your diet. Other diets, of course, proclaim that protein is good, so eat as much meat as you want, just cut out carbs. Some food producers would have us believe that fat is the enemy, so eat what you want, as long as it’s fat-free (Voila! Guiltless cookies!).

The truth, we know, lies somewhere between: with a balanced diet and exercise. 

Like the diet industry, education has had its fair share of fads, past and present, which similarly, have taken good ideas to their illogical extremes. Here are but a few:

• Too much lecturing is bad; therefore, no lecturing is good.
• Self-guided learning is good; therefore, classrooms should be completely open—free of uniform curricula, grade-level expectations, doors, and even walls.  
• Good teachers help most kids learn more, so better teachers alone will ensure all kids succeed. 

Simply Better: What Matters Most to Change the Odds for Student Success offers not a new “fad diet” for education, but rather the education reform equivalent of a “healthy lifestyle”—those things that decades of research says are most likely to have a big effect on student achievement. At the core of the book is the What Matters Most framework (a sort of “food pyramid” for education), which comprises five components that research shows matter most for improving student outcomes.

Guarantee challenging, engaging, and intentional instruction. The first key to student success is a teacher who challenges students, develops a positive relationship with them, and is intentional in his or her use of a broad repertoire of teaching strategies.

Ensure curricular pathways to success. Students benefit most from a curriculum that provides both challenging and personalized learning experiences to prepare them for life success.

Provide whole-child student supports. Good teaching and curriculum alone won’t help all students succeed; many need cognitive, emotional, and learning supports to address factors such as home environment, background knowledge, and motivation that are vital to learning.

Create high-performance school cultures. Great schools can help to overcome the effects of poverty by ensuring high-quality learning experiences in every classroom and providing a school-wide culture of high expectations for learning and behavior.

Develop data-driven, high-reliability district systems. To ensure consistency in student learning experiences, districts need to put data systems and standard operating procedures in place to provide real-time responses to student struggles.

One might look at these five components and see nothing remarkable or new about them. After all, haven’t we known the importance of something like good instruction for decades? What is remarkable, though, is the powerful effect that getting these five areas right could have for students. 

Cross’ documentary ultimately clarifies that juice alone is not the key to good health: a balanced diet with plenty of exercise is. His interviewees all seem to understand this. What’s missing for them, though, is a belief that they can change their behaviors, stick to a better diet, and be happy. The most redeeming feature of Cross’ film lies in showing ordinary people who have changed their lifestyles and are happier now without all the funnel cakes, hot dogs, and stuffed-crust pizzas.

Like losing weight, when it comes to raising student achievement, the answer is not a magic pill or quick fix. Rather, it’s staying focused on simply doing better what we know must be done. The hopeful news, as illustrated in Simply Better, is that ordinary schools nationwide have stayed focused on what matters most, doing it well, and creating extra-ordinary results for students.

How well is your school addressing the components of the What Matters Most framework? Take McREL's free, online survey to find your bright spots and biggest opportunities for improvement.

What’s good for the body is good for the mind

First Lady Michelle Obama tours the country speaking of healthy eating habits, Dr. Oz answers your health questions on daytime TV, and the USDA recently updated the food pyramid. As obesity rates rise, healthy living is front page news. Then why are schools cutting physical education (PE) programs? That answer has also been front page news: budget cuts and falling academic scores. Schools need to do more with less, and cutting PE leaves more time and money for academics. In California alone, according to a policy brief released in May by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, 1.3 million teens in California do not participate in any school-based PE classes.

However, research shows that PE may be just what students need to perform better at school. Researchers Kathryn L. King, MD, and Carly J. Scahill, DO, from the Medical University of South Carolina Children’s Hospital implemented a program among 1^st through 6^th graders at low-performing schools in South Carolina that incorporated academic skills into physical activity. For instance, younger children used scooters to trace shapes on the ground, and older children climbed a rock wall outfitted with changing numbers to help them solve math problems. Students were engaged in this program for 40 minutes a day, five days a week. At the end of the year, test scores improved from 55 percent to 68.5 percent proficient.

John Medina, author of Brain Rules (2008), cites a similar study that examined the brain power of children before they began an exercise program. The children began jogging 30 minutes two or three times a week and, after 12 weeks, their cognitive performance had improved significantly. Perhaps just as important, when the exercise program was taken away, children’s scores plummeted back to pre-activity levels.

Because students are expected to learn more and more information at an increased rate, they need all the brain power they can create. Scores keep falling regardless of the programs and strategies schools implement—not unlike a “check engine” light that keeps appearing because, no matter how many times you take it to the shop, the mechanic isn’t fixing the actual problem. Maybe the mechanic is even making the problem worse.   

Have you noticed the academic effects of cutting physical education in your school? Is more academic time a viable reason to cut ancillary programs?

New review of McREL's The Future of Schooling

Dave Orphal, over at the Learning 2030 blog, offers this nice review of McREL's latest book, The Future of Schooling, available from Solution Tree Press.

In his review, Orphal praises the book for its timeliness. He notes, for example, that one of the critical uncertainties identified in the book---whether the outcomes of education will be standardized or differentiated---is currently playing out in the "movement to national common core standards" being countered by critiques from "Sir Ken Robinson and Daniel Pink who argue that standardization is exactly the wrong direction to go."

Orphal also praises the book for its balanced view on these issues, noting that the authors take "great pains to not reveal where they stand in some of the hottest educational debates raging the country." He adds, "Neither pro-Rhee nor pro-union; neither pro-testing nor pro-authentic assessment; neither pro-charter nor anti-charter, there is plenty in this book to anger every side of our overly partisan educational reform circles."

Our intent is not to anger anyone. Rather, it's to provoke thinking about what the future may hold, to move people out of their comfort zones so that they can begin to prepare themselves for what may lie ahead. As we write in the book, "Some of these potential futures may capitvate and energize you; others may dishearten and frigthen you. Some may do all of the above. That's the point." 

Read Orphal's entire review here.

Teacher evaluation wars: How North Carolina gave peace a chance

As a growing number of cash-strapped districts face staffing cuts, district leaders are pondering the potentially negative impact of “first in, first out” rules for layoffs. The concern, of course, as highlighted in a recent study by Dan Goldhaber at the Center for Education Data and Research is that letting teachers go based solely on seniority will likely result in some good teachers losing their jobs while less effective ones remain in the classroom. And as Marguerite Roza at the Center on Reinventing Public Education has determined, laying off teachers at the bottom of the pay scale requires larger job cuts to balance budgets. The impact on students of letting go the newest teachers instead of lowest-performing ones, according to Goldhaber, could be an estimated 2.5 to 3.5 months of learning per year.

So why don’t districts take teacher performance into account when making difficult reduction-in-force decisions?

One reason is collective bargaining rules—those hundred page documents that dictate all sorts of rules and procedures about hiring and firing teachers. Another is that many districts, even if they could dismiss ineffective teachers, often don’t know who they are.

For starters, as The New Teacher Project has noted, many teachers are not evaluated every year. On top of that, when teachers are evaluated, a sort of “grade inflation” exists with many current teacher performance evaluations. An examination of teacher evaluations in Colorado, found for example, that nearly 100 percent of teachers receive favorable ratings on their performance reviews.

To cut through the confusion, many reformers (as well as the federal Race to the Top program) have called for teacher evaluations to be based on actual student test results. Using just the right combination of data and statistics, the thinking goes, would allow us to create a “quarterback rating” of teachers, so we would let us know which ones are great, which ones need improvement, and which ones should be shown the door.

However, using this approach is fraught with all sorts of design challenges—for example, how do you measure the performance of an art teacher, a guidance counselor, or an eighth grade social studies teacher, when there are often no standardized exams in those subjects? Moreover, in New York City, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, serious concerns have emerged over the accuracy of the student data and whether teachers are even being tied to their own students. 

In addition—and this is no small obstacle—calls for tying teacher evaluation to student achievement quickly become mired in contentious debate, with battle lines being drawn between teacher groups, leaders, and reformers.

It doesn’t have to be so difficult, though.

A few years ago, officials in the state of North Carolina took a different approach. From the start, they brought everyone together—teachers, school leaders, academics and researchers. They started with a premise on which everyone could agree: the challenges of the 21st century require everyone to rethink teaching and learning, and, as a result, teachers must develop new skills to prepare all children for the future. In other words, North Carolina did not base its reform efforts on a punitive notion of ridding the state of bad teachers, but rather, on a positive vision that by working together, teachers, administrators, and policymakers could transform education for the state’s children.

Working together, North Carolina defined new, rigorous standards based on research about good teaching. Then they designed an evaluation system that aligned to those standards. The result is a set of “stretch” goals for teachers with clear a roadmap for how to get there. Leaders of the states’ teachers association and school leaders agree that the system, while ambitious, is also reasonable and fair. Read more about the efforts here and here.

The North Carolina experience demonstrates that states and districts are likely to get farther, faster if they base conversations about teacher evaluation on three basic assumptions on which, I think, we can all agree:

1. Every child deserves a great teacher.
2. No one becomes a great teacher overnight; it takes practice, clear guidance, and coaching.
3. And as with any profession, not everyone has what it takes to be a great teacher. 

Bottom line: Teacher evaluations should be as much about developing teachers as they are about grading them. If we start from these premises, the North Carolina experience suggest that as John Lennon once sang, we can give peace a chance, and more important, give our teachers the support they need, and our kids the teachers they deserve.

Bryan Goodwin is McREL's Vice President of Communications and Marketing.

Putting a little mystery in teaching

Want to hear a simple, surefire way to get kids interested in what you're teaching?

First, think back to your childhood. For kids, the world can be a wonderful, mysterious place. That's why, as any parent knows, children are naturally full of questions. Why is the sky blue? Why do I dream? Why do birds fly south for the winter? The list goes on and on.

As we grow up, we solve these mysteries and fill our heads with facts. Over time, we start to forget what made things so interesting to us in the first place. As teachers, it's easy for us to take a Joe Friday "just-the-facts, ma'am" approach to teaching. As a result, we blow the suspense for children. We come right out and tell them the answers to the mystery, rather than building their interest by posing questions such as, "Have you ever seen a shooting star? What do you suppose that is?"

A few years ago, Robert Cialdini,  a psychologist at Arizona State University, wrote an article titled, "What's the secret device for engaging student interest? Hint: The answer is in the title." After sifting through dozens of dry science articles, Cialdini found that engaging science writers take a different approach: they pose a question, for example, "What are the rings of Saturn made of? Rock or ice?" Then they build suspense and mystery before finally resolving the mystery. The answer, in this case (spoiler alert!), is both.

Teachers, can, of course, do the same thing in their classrooms. Instead of coming right out and providing kids with the answers, they can build suspense in all kinds of subject areas, not just science. For example, in social studies, a teacher might offer this mystery: How could a rag tag army of volunteers (the American revolutionaries) defeat the world's greatest superpower at the time (the British empire)? In math, a teacher might get kids wondering how to calculate the area of a circle. Gee ... wouldn't it be great if there were some kind of "magic" formula for that?

At two upcoming events---a lecture here in Colorado on Jan. 15 and a free, national, NASA-sponsored webcast on Jan. 20---McREL staff members will offer up some big space science mysteries (and their answers), helping teachers think about how to design their lessons around these mysteries.

So as you plan your next lesson, you might ask yourself, what's the mystery here?

Bryan Goodwin is McREL's Vice President of Communications and Marketing.

The Rise of Randomized Trials ... Stay Tuned

In his This Week in Education blog today, Alexander Russo wonders if the education community will finally "move off its duff" and begin conducting more scientifically based research. 

His point is well taken: unfortunately, there's still not a lot of top-quality, "gold standard" research out there to help educators answer important questions about which programs or approaches work and which don't.

The good news, though, is that's beginning to change. We are on the verge of seeing a deluge of new randomized control trials emerging in the coming months from the Institute of Education Sciences regional laboratory program (for which McREL adminsters the laboratory for the Central region of the U.S.).

To see a list of these studies (23 in all, three from the REL Central at McREL), go here.

And stay tuned.

“Superman”: You’ve heard the hype; have you read the research?

Even before its October 8 release, “Waiting for ‘Superman’” was everywhere—on the cover of Time, on “Oprah,” in news commentaries across the country. The film’s message—which presents charter schools as a (if not the) solution to our school systems’ ills and teacher unions as part of the problem—has resonated nationwide. But, as those who work in education know, reform is a tricky subject and not one to be answered in 111 minutes. 

In a New York Review of Books critique of the film, Diane Ravitch made this point by referring to a charter school study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), which indicated that “17 percent were superior to a matched traditional public school; 37 percent were worse than the public school; and the remaining 46 percent had academic gains no different from that of a similar public school” (p. 1).

So what did you think of “Waiting for ‘Superman’”? Do you have a charter school experience to share?

If you’d like to read up on the topic, here are links to some related articles and reports:

Charter Schools: Inputs and Impacts in Charter Schools: KIPP Lynn

The Harlem Children’s Zone, Promise Neighborhoods, and the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education

The Challenge of Leading Two Generations within the Teachers Union

The real lesson from NYC small schools

Smaller isn’t better; personalized is better

An MDRC study that came out in June reporting on the impact of New York City’s small schools of choice initiative has recently appeared in the spotlight again, thanks to a September 27 commentary in Education Week from Michelle Cahill of the Carnegie Corporation and Robert Hughes of New Visions, a public education network affiliate in New York City. It was also picked up in this morning’s Public Education Network newsletter.

The title of the Ed Week commentary, “Small Schools, Big Difference,” may raise some eyebrows, though, especially for those who remember the Gates Foundation’s $1 billion misadventure with small schools.

The disappointing results of this effort eventually prompted then-director of the Foundation’s education programs, Tom Vander Ark, to tell Education Week that, “I visited 100 great schools and made the observation that they were all small, autonomous, and assumed that was a path to school improvement. It turns out that giving a failing school autonomy is a bad idea.”

Yes, the small schools in New York City are showing promise—their students (the vast majority of whom are poor and minority) have a 6.8 percent higher graduation rate than a similar group of students in the city’s mostly large, comprehensive high schools.

All of that is good news and worthy of further examination and, probably, replication.

The headline given to Cahill and Hughes’ Ed Week commentary, however, is only partially correct. The authors of the MDRC report actually caution against concluding simply that small schools are better. They write,

Students enrolled in SSCs [small schools of choice] did not just attend schools that were small. SSC enrollees attended schools that were purposefully organized around smaller, personalized units of adults and students, where students had a better chance of being known and noticed, and teachers had a better chance of knowing enough about their charges to provide appropriate academic and socioemotional supports.

In other words, saying that smaller schools lead to higher achievement is sort of like saying wearing sneakers leads to weight loss. What’s more important is what you do in the schools (or your sneakers). (In fairness to Cahill and Hughes, their commentary is more nuanced than the headline given to it).

The real takeaway of the MDRC report is that creating learning environments where students know their teachers and pursue studies that interest them (most of the small schools are designed around career themes) is what has shown promise, not the size of their student population.

Indeed, the same could be said of the Gates’ small schools initiative; as David Marshak, a professor of education at Western Washington University, observed in a February 19, 2010 commentary in Education Week, many of the small schools funded by the Gates Foundation did show gains in student achievement; the key to their success was “a culture of personalized education.”

Incidentally, this finding mirrors a key conclusion of the McREL report, Changing the Odds for Student Success: What Matters Most, in which we observe that a key principle for curriculum design is to provide students with multiple, intrinsically motivating, pathways to college and career readiness.

Bryan Goodwin is McREL’s Vice President of Communications.

How do you teach science to students with visual impairments?

Imagine a big ball of rock and ice hurtling through space that grows a tail as it approaches the sun. Can you picture that?

Well, maybe not. You might wonder, what kind of tail? Is it long like a monkey’s, curled like a pig’s, or bobbed like a poodle’s?

Well, none of those, I might tell you. It’s more like a jet condensation trail, only a little wider and not as long—relatively speaking, that is.

But what if you’d never actually seen a con trail—or a monkey or poodle tail for that matter. We could go on like this forever, playing a sort of 20 questions game, each of us becoming more exasperated.

Obviously, if I could just show you the image of a comet, you would quickly understand what I’m describing. That’s the challenge science teachers face, though, when trying to help students with visual impairments grasp difficult science concepts: They can’t rely on simple images from textbooks. They must help students use manipulative and tactile tools to “see” what they’re learning.

For the past three years, McREL has been working with Edinboro University, Tactile Learning Adventures, and the Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind to develop an intervention to help teachers create tactile graphics and written descriptions for visually impaired students.

The project, titled ACE (for Adapted Curriculum Enhancements) and funded through a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, has created and studied the effectiveness of materials and lessons designed to help grades 6–12 mainstream teachers adapt lessons for students with visual impairments.

So how do you help a student with visual impairments visualize a comet? Here’s a hint: it involves a Styrofoam ball, some ribbons, and a hair dryer.

View this lesson and download other free lessons and materials from the ACE website at http://www.ace-education.org/.

Bryan Goodwin is McREL's Vice President of Communications and Marketing.

Can we predict the future of education?

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” ~ Yogi Berra.

Clearly, change is in the air these days in education, whether we’re Waiting for Superman, racing to the top, dotting our three i’s, or wondering how tea party politics may change the face of Washington.

In light of all these changes and uncertainties, the question on many minds is likely, where is it all leading?

The most truthful answer anyone can give to that question is this one: nobody knows for sure.

It’s simply not possible to predict how all of these various trends will come together to shape a new future. That doesn’t mean, though, that we can’t prepare ourselves for it. The trick is to consider multiple, alternative futures and begin to envision how we—or our districts, schools, or students—might flourish in each.

In a new book from McREL to be released this month by Solution Tree Press, we analyze current and emerging trends in a wide array of areas, including politics, the economy, technology, and society. After analyzing these trends, we offer, not a prediction of the future, but four, very different scenarios for what the future may hold.

The scenarios in the book, titled The Future of Schooling: Educating America in 2020, are designed to provoke readers to ponder many “what if,” questions, including:

• What if the current, multibillion-dollar federal investment in education succeeds in identifying and scaling up numerous innovations that transform schooling as we know it?
• What if, on the other hand, investing billions of new dollars fails to create dramatic improvements in education? Will the public continue to support public schools as we know them?
• What if online learning becomes as commonplace in the schools of tomorrow as chalkboards were in the schools of yesterday?
• What if technology allows students to proceed at their own pace along individualized pathways, measuring their progress in real time at each step of the way?
• What if the world’s best teachers are able to broadcast their lessons to thousands of students each day?

The reality is that the world of education is changing rapidly. While we don’t know exactly what lies ahead, it’s nearly impossible to imagine the world standing still and education in 10 years looking exactly the same as it does today.

The good news is that when confronted with this uncertainty, we don’t have to throw up our hands in hopeless desperation (or stick our heads in the sand). Rather, we can begin preparing today for what tomorrow may bring.

Learn more or purchase a copy of the book on the Solution Tree website here: http://www.solution-tree.com/Public/Media.aspx?ShowDetail=true&ProductID=BKF433

Bryan Goodwin is McREL's Vice President of Communications and Marketing.

Summit School District finds "secret" to narrowing achievement gaps

In the popular mind, Summit County, Colorado, in the heart of Colorado ski country, might seem worlds apart from the usual challenges many other school districts face—a place where perhaps privileged, ski sweater-clad youngsters gather ’round roaring fireplaces to sing John Denver songs.

The reality, however, is until recently, Summit School District had one of the largest achievement gaps in the state—with the English language learning children of the county’s influx of immigrant workers achieving at much lower rates than its nonminority students.

Over the past two years, McREL has worked extensively with teachers and administrators in the district to help them narrow their achievement gaps while increasing overall student performance.

So what’s the secret to these initial successes? A bold new program? A whiz bang technology? A new silver bullet?

Nope.

The “secret” has simply been to focus on delivering consistent, high-quality instruction in every classroom.

Teachers across the distict have been working hard to adapt the effective instructional practices they already know to the needs of English language learners. In keeping with some of the key ideas of McREL’s Changing the Odds for Student Success: What Matters Most report, they've been adopting “growth mindsets” for students, delivering challenging instruction, and providing students with the support they need to meet high expectations.

In the words of Superintendent Millie Hamner, the district has been simply “focusing on keeping best instructional practices and student learning first on our minds, in our agendas, and in our hearts.”

Read the entire Summit School District story here.

Download the free Changing the Odds report here.

Bryan Goodwin is McREL's Vice President of Communications & Marketing.

Should educators let boys be boys?

As the father of three daughters, I sometimes forget how little boys play. My girls spend their free time acting out complex dramas, pretending to be strict teachers (with hearts of gold), exasperated mothers, cousins inheriting mansions from long-lost aunts, insolent children being sent to boarding school—their playtime has all of the dizzying social complexities of a 19th century Russian novel.

Every once in a while, though, when exchanges between neighbor boys playing in their backyards drift in through the open windows of my home, my own youth comes rushing back to me.

“Bang! You’re dead! I shot you.”

“No, you didn’t. You missed me.”

“Bang! Bang! Bang! Now I shot you.”

“Nuh uh. You’re out of bullets.”

Many educators are unnerved by this sort of play. They fear that boys who play cops and robbers when they’re young will grow up to be violent and aggressive, exhibiting anti-social, if not, criminal, behavior. To curtail boys’ more aggressive and violent play (read: to make them play more like girls), many schools have banished violent play from classrooms and playgrounds. 

Yet, as reported in a recent article in LiveScience.com, educators may need to learn to “work with, rather than against” boys’ aggressive tendencies.

The article cites the work McREL Principal Researcher Elena Bodrova, whose research on early childhood education calls out the importance of dramatic play on children’s social and intellectual development. Through sophisticated forms of imaginative play (including games like cops and robbers), children learn to delay gratification (by remaining, for example, in the “role” of policeman even when they want to play a robber), consider the perspective of others (e.g., by playing jailer one day and prisoner the next), and control their impulses.  

Letting boys work through their natural aggressive urges can help them learn to set limits on their own behavior—learning to draw a line, for example, between pretend and real violence, like biting, hair pulling, or hitting. In addition, boys’ play, which often involves "bad guys," may also help them to work on their impulse control, according to Mary Ellin Logue, a researcher at the University of Maine quoted in the article. Boys, says Logue, “are trying really hard to be good, but it’s really hard to be good. These bad guys give them a way to externalize that part of them that they are trying to conquer.”

Read the LiveScience article, "Battling the Boys: Educators Grapple with Violent Play," here.

Learn more about Bodrova’s work and McREL’s approach to early childhood development here.

Bryan Goodwin is McREL's Vice President of Communications and Marketing.

Catch a glimpse of real 21st century skills

Last week, I caught a glimpse of the future and realized that, like my own parents, I’ll probably have no idea what my kids actually do at work when they grow up.

This glimpse came courtesy of a Minnesota Public Radio story, which covered McREL’s NSF-supported “nanoteach” initiative to bring instruction in nanotechnology to high school classrooms nationwide.

In case you’re not familiar with nanotechnology (I’ve only recently learned about it myself), it’s the science of creating structures and manipulating matter at the molecular level. It promises breakthrough innovations for “everything from improved cancer treatments to more effective sunscreen,” reports MPR’s Dan Gunderson.

If that sounds farfetched or like something out of Star Trek, consider this other tidbit from Gunderson's story: “the government predicts nanotech will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the next five years.”

The challenge, then, is getting today’s student students prepared for these jobs of the not-so-distant future. Moreover, nanotechnology will likely change our world. That means that students, even those who have no interest in pursuing nanotech careers, should understand both the promise and peril of this rapidly emerging technology.

Read the MPR story.

Visit the Nanoteach Website.

Bryan Goodwin is McREL’s Vice President of Communications and Marketing.

Three simple steps for adapting lessons for English language learners

At some time or another, we’ve all probably all had the frustrating experience of trying to converse with someone in a foreign language. We may catch snippets and phrases here and there, generally getting the gist of what’s being said to us. But when it comes time to open our mouths and speak, we’re tongue tied. Our vocabulary ("I don't know how to say sprint; I'll just say run instead"), conjugation (“Let’s see … what’s the third-person plural of correr?”), and dialect fail us (“Shoot. I still can’t roll my r’s.).

At this point, a fear begins to grip us. We worry that our conversation partners may judge by our underdeveloped language skills that our intellect is similarly on par with a toddler.

That judgment would be wrong, of course. Just because we’re not yet conversant in a second language, doesn’t mean we can’t grasp difficult concepts.

Teachers face a similar challenge when they have English language learners in their classrooms. While those students’ language skills may not yet be fully developed, they are still very much capable of grasping complex content. And all learning can’t stop while students acquire their language skills—if it does, students’ will find themselves well behind their peers once their language acquisition catches up to their intellect.

In a new article for TeachHub.com, Jane Hill and Cynthia Bjork, authors of training-of-trainer materials that support the book, Classroom Instruction that Works for English Language Learners, identify three simple steps for adapting lessons for English language learners students to ensure they continue learning content while learning English:

Step 1: Know the stages of second-language acquisition. All learners progress through five stages of language acquisition, write Hill and Bjork: pre-production, early production, speech emergence, intermediate fluency, and advanced fluency. Knowing where their students are in this continuum helps teachers to plan their assignments accordingly.

Step. 2: Tier student thinking across the stages of second-language acquisition. Hill and Bjork’s article provides a matrix that overlays the levels of thinking from Bloom’s (new) Taxonomy to the stages of language acquisition. They recommend teachers use this matrix to plan homework and class assignments accordingly.

Step 3. Set expectations. In this stage, teachers combine stage one and two, identifying their students’ level of language acquisition and assignment at-home and in-class practice assignments accordingly.

By knowing where students are on this continuum and scaffolding their learning to the next stage of the continuum, teachers can ensure their students are gaining valuable knowledge while at the same time advancing in their language acquisition.

Read the whole article here.

Follow these links to learn more about McREL’s English language learners instructional leadership academies, workshops, and books and manuals.

Bryan Goodwin is McREL's Vice President of Communications & Marketing.

Choice is a matter of degree

by Bryan Goodwin

Everyone likes choices, right? For years, Burger King has enticed us with offers to "have it your way." Our cable and satellite services give us hundreds of channels (most of which we never watch). And online retailers, like Vans, now let us custom-design our own shoes.

If choices make us happier customers, shouldn't we also give kids lots of choices about what they learn ... to make them happier and more motivated learners?

Not necessarily. As I discuss in a column in this month's issue of Educational Leadership, giving students some choices about what to learn (for example, choosing between books or reading passages) can motivate them, but giving too many choices can backfire.

As researchers Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper discovered in an experiment with college students, too many choices actually creates a sort of deer-in-headlights effect for students. Iyengar and Lepper found that when they gave students only six choices of topics on which to write an extra credit essay, they were far more likely to do the assignment (and do it well) than students given the choice of 30 possible topics. It seems the mental strain of choosing the best topic (and perhaps ensuing self-doubt over whether they had chosen correctly) caused the students with too many choices to invest less energy in the assignment or to simply abandon it altogether.

The bottom line appears to be this: choices for students are good, but as with all things, they should be doled out in moderation.

Read the full article to learn more about what the research says on student choice and project-based learning.

Bryan Goodwin is McREL's Vice President of Communications and Marketing.

A more measured approach to measuring school performance

By Bryan Goodwin

In an op-ed piece appearing in the August 25 issue of Education Week, Douglas Reeves, chairman of The Leadership and Learning Center, and McREL President and CEO Tim Waters liken current education accountability efforts to judging a person’s health based solely on weight.

“For almost a decade, the complex enterprise of education has been reduced to box scores,” they write. “Good schools have high scores, bad schools have low scores."

Had Michelle Obama’s campaign to fight obesity taken a similarly superficial approach, she might have just called for an annual weigh-in of every child, shaming and blaming those who tipped the scales to unacceptable levels. That would certainly cause kids to shed a few pounds—but also create a new generation of eating disorders and diet pill abusers. Fortunately, the first lady called for a more thoughtful path, calling for Americans to help their children to eat healthier food, exercise more regularly, and monitor their health more frequently.

Yet in education, we continue to operate under a “testing=learning” formula, which Reeves and Waters note, “is as superficial as the formula that ‘health=weight.’”

“If we want to avoid the educational equivalent of anorexia and pill-popping—teaching focused only on test content and test-taking strategy—then the accountability equation must include causes, not merely effects,” they write. “The accountability equation should be ‘learning=teaching+leadership.’ And an effective accountability system would measure all three elements of that equation.”

With Congress set to take up the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (the key piece of federal education funding legislation) this year or next, education accountability appears to be at a crossroads, write Reeves and Waters. We have the opportunity to either move forward with more thoughtful and sophisticated systems of monitoring progress or cling to outdated, simplistic, and harmful approaches.
Read the entire article— which offers several considerations for policymakers—here (Ed Week subscription required).

Bryan Goodwin is McREL’s vice president of communications and marketing.

Suprising insights into rural student mobility

by Bryan Goodwin

Hollywood movies often paint small town and rural America as idyllic, tight-knit communities where few people move in or out, and a new face in town—like Kevin Bacon’s surly mug in the film Footloose—is enough to really get folks talking. If your impressions of rural life are based on 80s movie musicals, though, it’s probably time to update those perceptions.

A new study conducted by Andrea Beesley for the REL Central—the federally funded education laboratory that McREL administers for the federal Institute of Education Sciences—has found that rural areas are actually places of high mobility, often higher than suburban or urban areas.

Research shows that, for a variety of reasons, highly mobile students tend to have lower achievement, higher dropout rates and be the subject of more frequent disciplinary action. To make matters worse, rural schools often have smaller staffs and fewer financial resources, making it difficult for them to meet the needs of highly mobile students.

The study, which calculated student mobility percentages by locale (city, suburb, town, and rural) in five states (Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming) found that:

• Districts with extremely high student mobility were often rural, had higher than average shares of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, and were on or near American Indian reservations.
• In Wyoming, rural locales had higher mobility than town or city locales.
• In North Dakota, mobility rates were higher in both towns and rural areas than in cities and suburbs.

Download the (free) report here.
Read Education Week reporter Sarah Sparks’ take on the report here.

Bryan Goodwin is McREL's Vice President of Communications.

Could it really be that simple?

By Bryan Goodwin, VP, Communications

 

Overwhelming and depressing. That's sometimes how this business of improving schools can feel.

 

I spend a fair amount of time at education conferences, where I often hang out at the McREL booth in the exhibit hall. In most big shows, the exhibit hall features rows upon rows of vendors selling new gadgets, programs, books—you name it.

 

I often see educators roaming the aisles of the hall with furrowed brows, their heads already swimming with new ideas they've heard in conference sessions now being confronted with a bazaar of new products and programs. Add to that the countless articles, reports, and blogs, and the whole overload of information can be overwhelming, if not distracting.

 

In a new McREL report that was released today, I wrote that, “like the crackles and whistles that break up the signal of a faraway AM radio station, the preponderance of reports, information, and ideas in the field of education may have the effect of drowning out the big ideas—the key underlying principles of what’s most important when it comes to improving the life success of all students."

 

The depressing part of this business is that much of what educators have been trying to do for the past few decades doesn't appear to have made much of a dent in closing achievement gaps or reducing dropout rates. That may be because, as several researchers have noted, the problem is not that too few programs work, but that too many things work, but only sort of—demonstrating benefits for students no greater than that of average classroom teachers left to their own devices.

 

With our new report, we take a different approach. Last year, a team of McREL researchers and I spent several months combing through thousands of articles and research studies on education to find practices that demonstrate the largest effects on student achievement.

 

The report, titled Changing the Odds for Student Success: What Matters Most, goes beyond merely identifying what works, and instead identifies what matters most—those influences and approaches that stand clearly above the rest. The report distills these influences into five “high-leverage, high-payoff” areas for improving students’ chances for life success:

1. Guaranteeing challenging, engaging, and intentional instruction
2. Ensuring curricular pathways to success
3. Providing whole-child student supports
4. Creating high-performance school cultures
5. Developing data-driven, “high-reliability” systems.

Sure, these five areas are not exactly earth shaking. People have been talking about most of them, in one way or another, for decades.

Therein lies not the rub, but the good news. The "solution" for improving every students' opportunities for life success has not eluded us. It's been hidden in plain sight. What's most needed is not some new approach, program, or innovation; rather, it appears to be simply focusing on these key principles for producing student success.

Of course, the simplest things are often the most difficult to do. Getting from here to there will require a relentless focus on effectively doing what stands out from decades of research about how to improve student outcomes.

The report is available free at www.changetheodds.org. I invite you to download it, read it, and let us know what you think.

Data Snapshot: National Differences in ELL NAEP Mathematics Scores

By Jane Barker

Most of the commentary following the release of national NAEP scores last week focused on flat performance among the nation’s 4th grade students. Of course, reading past the byline yields more interesting fodder for discussion.

In the case of English Language Learners, NAEP captures national variation in achievement that's difficult to ignore - and explain. Using NAEP data and published ETS ELL statistics, I pulled together a couple of graphs comparing 4th grade ELL performance among those states with the nation’s largest ELL populations (Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New York, and Texas) and those states with the nation’s fastest growing ELL populations (Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, Nebraska, North and South Carolina, and Tennessee). Among the latter states, rates of ELL population growth between 1994 and 2005 ranged from just over 300 percent (Nebraska) to just shy of 715 percent (South Carolina).

While you might expect both groups to demonstrate relatively similar patterns of achievement over time, NAEP outcomes suggest otherwise. Clearly, this is more than a demographic story: several states with fast-growing ELL populations seem to be doing fairly well (North and South Carolina, Kentucky) in comparison to more heavily populated states that are lagging behind the national leaders (Arizona, California, Illinois, New York). And internal variation within each group? All over the board. Critics have pointed out that NAEP is sensitive to differences in curricula and standards in addition to more controversial policies (namely, distribution of instructional resources and social promotion).  Obviously, graphs are just a starting point, but it’s worth pointing out that an honest NAEP discussion should serve as a starting point for uncomfortable questions about educational equity.

Jane is a Research Associate within McREL's Research & Evaluation department.

NCLB and Science/Social Studies Instruction in High-Risk Schools

Unsurprisingly, NCLB reauthorization hasn’t garnered much press recently. As this recent Education Week column points out, the stimulus package took the heat off of Congress, leading to speculation that any proposed reauthorization bill won’t gain much traction this year. Legislation aside, the NCLB debate is ongoing. Case in point: the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, or CALDER, recently organized a conference inviting researchers to consider differences in educational outcomes and delivery since the passage of NCLB. Presentations from the conference, co-hosted by the National Center on Performance Incentives, were recently posted here.

 

Findings presented at the conference touch upon a range of subjects, worthy of at least a few minutes’ perusal (if not a few hours’). Dale Ballou and Jeffrey Springer, both of Vanderbilt, contributed a representative presentation on science and social studies instruction in high-risk schools. Conventional wisdom suggests that schools struggling to meet AYP goals would be tempted to neglect instruction in subjects which do not impact accountability outcomes – social studies, and until recently, science. Using data from South Carolina, which adopted a no-stakes science and social studies test in 2003, and Virginia, which incorporated science and social studies test results in accreditation requirements beginning in 1998, the authors present conclusive evidence to the contrary.

 

Essentially, post-NCLB science and social studies scores improved at pace with math and reading scores in each state. In Virginia, the scores for these subjects improved at a faster rate in high-risk than in low-risk schools, except among scores designated as ‘advanced’, where the gap widened slightly. While scores improved in South Carolina, the gap remained relatively constant between low- and high-risk schools. The only evidence of trade-off: high-risk South Carolina elementary schools, where the authors found that reading instruction displaced non-core subjects. On average, South Carolina schools studied managed to close this gap by high school, which may suggest that the extra reading instruction paid off. While the authors caution that their results can’t be generalized to all states, their study lends weight to the argument that accountability requirements which reward improvement in math and reading don’t always come at the expense of science and social studies.

Charter school market at a crossroads?

by Bryan Goodwin

The Wall Street Journal reports that the number of charter schools in the U.S. is likely to mushroom in the next few years as a result of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan warning states that if they’re unfriendly to charter schools, they shouldn’t expect to see much of the $5 billion in federal stimulus for schools. Not surprising, many states are now scrambling to create charter-friendly environments.

Last month, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University, released a nationwide study analyzing charter school performance. The report was notable for a number of reasons—starting with its methodology. To control for any possible “cherry picking” (i.e., enrolling easier-to-teach students), the study compared the mathematics performance of students in charter schools with their “virtual twins”—students with similar demographic, socioeconomic, and special needs status—in traditional public schools.

Using this analysis, the study painted a mixed picture.

It found that only about one in six (17%) of the 2,400 charter schools studied were actually successful in helping their students perform better than their “virtual twins” in traditional public schools. About half (46%) offered little or no bump for their students compared with their “twins.” And nearly two-fifths (37%) appeared to have a negative impact on achievement; their students learned at lower rates than their comparable peers in traditional schools.

Whither market forces?

So what happened to the market forces of choice and competition that were supposed to make charter schools better than public schools? It appears that these market mechanisms have blunted in at least two significant ways.

First, according to the Stanford researchers, too few charter school authorizers are shutting down low-performing charter schools. Consider, for example, that in states where multiple agencies are licensed to grant charters, charters turned in their lowest performance—presumably because weaker schools have been able to shop around for more permissive entities under which to operate.

Second, it seems that parents, who were supposed to pull their kids from ineffective schools and create market-based incentives to provide better outcomes, have yet to become informed consumers of schools. Conversely, parents choose charters schools on the basis of more than just the academic performance of their students. Indeed, the Stanford study notes that it is often parents and communities who most strongly resist closing low-performing schools, arguing that shutting down their school “does not serve the best interests of currently enrolled students.”

A fragmented market

At the moment, the charter school market resembles what Harvard professor Michael Porter describes in Competitive Strategy (a common business school primer) as a “fragmented market.” No single provider—or even handful of providers—has achieved significant market share. According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools Web site, 77.5 percent of charter schools are “free-standing,” not associated with an education or charter management organization, such as Edison or KIPP.

My own quick scan of charter school Web sites (see below) suggests that combined, the top four largest charter and education management organizations operate 320 schools—or just 6.9 percent of the 4,618 charter schools nationwide. Throw in the next six on the list and you find that the top 10 companies still only control 11.4 percent of the market.

Top 10 charter or education management companies*

1. Edison Schools (97 schools)
2. KIPP (82 schools)
3. Imagine Schools (73 schools)
4. Big Picture Learning (68 schools)
5. National Heritage Academies (57 schools)
6. White Hat Management (51 schools)
7. EdVisions (40 schools)
8. Aspire (21 schools)
9. (tie) Green Dot (19 schools), Charter Schools USA (19 schools)

Shakeout coming?

Fragmented markets, like this one, can be ripe for “shakeouts”—with increased competition forcing smaller, less effective companies out of business. After the dust settles, usually just a handful of big players are left (consider, for example, video rental stores, roadside motels, and airlines).

So can federal stimulus dollars infused into the charter school market create more competition and ultimately a “survival-of-the-fittest” shakeout?

Probably not.

Simply incentivizing states to allow more charters is not likely to change the underlying conditions that Porter says creates fragmented markets:

• Low barriers to entry—The abundance of charter school authorizers, especially those with lax oversight, makes it easy for a variety of providers, regardless of their demonstrated competence, to enter the market.

• Few economies of scale—For the moment, given that most costs of running a school are tied to salaries and personnel, operating in multiple locations doesn’t offer much advantage in terms of marketing, curriculum development, or teacher training; this could change, however, if parents or authorizers were to demand better demonstrated results (which are typically expensive to document) of charter school operators.

• Diverse market needs—Because parents often enroll their children in charter schools to serve the unique needs of their child, it could be difficult for any single type of charter school to serve a large population of students.

• Local regulation—Charter schools are typically authorized by local districts or state granting agencies, each with their own criteria or rules, which may favor local, “mom and pop” providers.

Killing charters with kindness?

A fragmented market is not always a bad thing—it can provide fertile ground for innovation and experimentation. However, as Duncan told a gathering at the annual conference of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools that “The charter movement is putting itself at risk by allowing too many second-rate and third-rate schools to exist.”

Ironically, a little more regulation and oversight (anathema in the eyes of some charter proponents) might help to create a more mature market, allowing the effective 17 percent of charter models become the norm, not the exception. By more regulation, I don’t mean red tape restricting hiring policies or the number of hours the schools can operate, but rather, as suggested by the Stanford report, encouraging charter authorizers to raise the bar by more consistently closing ineffective schools (which is, after all, the second half of the charter school “bargain”—less red tape for better results).

States might take that a little further, entering into multi-state compacts that could both raise the barriers to entry by demanding higher results from charter schools, while at the same time, creating a consistent set of criteria for charter applications across multiple that could make it easier for effective charter providers to enter new markets.

To help authorizers make better decisions and parents make more informed choices, better information is needed across the system. The Stanford report recommends, for example, that national metrics be created that would allow for better comparisons of schools and identification of high and low performers. Such metrics could allow parents to more accurately gauge a school’s contribution to their children’s academic success and weigh that value against other less tangible benefits they may perceive their school provides.

While some charter authorizers may have adopted a laissez-faire approach to regulation early on to encourage the growth of the market, the movement may now be at a cross roads. Those who support it may need to decide whether a proliferation of new charter schools is in their best interest, as quantity comes at the expense of quality. More to the point, they should decide whether a continued hands-off approach to regulation is in the best benefit of the charter market or conversely, killing it with kindness.

* I didn’t include Expeditionary Learning or Core Knowledge on this list, both of those organizations offer curriculum to charter schools (35 and 23 schools, respectively by my count), but don’t function as management organizations, actually running the schools. If I’ve missed any CMOs or EMOs, please let me know. I’d be happy to update this chart.

Bryan Goodwin is McREL's Vice President of Communications & Marketing.

Summer Brain Drain Revisited

As part of Atlantic Monthly’s annual ‘ideas’ issue, out this month, Derek Thompson offers up a provocative list of not-so-quick fixes for the nation's educational system ("10 Crazy Ideas for Fixing Our Education System"). While Thompson's list mixes solutions old and new, readers might be surprised by the suggestion topping the list: the elimination of summer vacation.

Perhaps his suggestion is a bit extreme, but Thompson’s reasoning has a basis in sound research. Several high-profile studies from the past few years have noted that achievement gap margins tend to widen over the summer break. For a good summary of the reasons why, see this article in yesterday’s Washington Post. Middle class children are more likely to have books in the home and to attend high-quality summer programs in the summer, offsetting the loss in reading skills that occurs while students are on vacation. The 2007 study cited in the article found that differences in summer experiences explained two-thirds of the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged 9th graders.

Even high-quality programs are more likely to focus on reading than math, which explains why the reading achievement gap is more prevalent at summer’s end. Children (and adults) have more difficulty retaining specific processes than basic concepts over long periods of time – e.g., solving a quadratic equation versus reading a passage for comprehension. As a result, the greatest summer losses across the board are typically in math computation and spelling.

For more information on the effort to promote summer learning, check out the National Center for Summer Learning (www.summerlearning.org) ahead of the July 9th National Summer Learning Day. In addition to research and policy briefs, the site offers suggestions for effective programming, leveraging community partnerships, and professional development options.

What went wrong in Miami?

The Miami Herald reported recently that former superintendent Rudy Crew’s “$100 million investment in Miami-Dade County’s lowest performing public schools failed to boost student achievement, according to the school district’s final report on the program.”

“The School Improvement Zone” focused on eight low-performing high schools and their feeder schools for a total of 39 schools. The effort extended the school day by one hour and the school year by 10 days and required 150 minutes of reading instruction each day. On paper, the Zone effort appears to have focused on the right things, such as improving reading instruction and giving kids and teachers extra time for learning (a la promising schools such as KIPP).

Yet, three years and $100 million later, the district had little to show for its effort. According to a 166-page internal report from the district’s program evaluation office, annual academic growth rates for 8th graders attending Zone schools was actually lower than students in comparison “control” group schools.

So, what exactly happened?

To be fair, some of the Zone schools, especially elementary schools, did improve student achievement, just not markedly over comparison schools. And it's important to note that schools in the comparison or “control” group weren’t sitting idly by; many were focused on improving reading instruction through the federal Reading First program. In effect, the most significant (and costly) difference between the Zone schools and others in the district was the additional time added to the school day and calendar.

Why didn’t the extra time help?

For starters, some students played hooky. The evaluation report notes “excessive absences” (even more than might be expected for the end of school) among students in Zone schools during the added days. It also notes that some students—especially those who were high achieving, felt like their required 10 extra days of school was punishment for a crime they did not commit.

One might also ask whether 60 minutes a day is really enough extra time to offer struggling students the support they need when other schools, such as K.I.P.P., provide as much as 60 percent more instructional time over traditional public schools (staying open from 7:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on weekdays, every other Saturday morning, and for three additional weeks in the summer).

The anemic results of the Miami Zone schools may offer a cautionary tale for those, like President Obama and Arne Duncan, who have advocated for longer school days and calendars. While more instruction may sound like a good idea, U.S. schools already appear to offer students more instructional time than many other higher-performing nations. Moreover, lengthening the school calendar by half measures—tacking on an extra hour a day and some poorly attended days in the summer—is probably insufficient to provide struggling students the extra support they need to succeed.

To top it off, such changes—or any large-scale change, for that matter—are likely doomed to failure if they do not address school culture. Consider these data from Miami:

• 34 percent of teachers in Zone schools said “staff morale is high” versus 55 percent in control schools

• 43 percent of parents of children in Zone schools think their “school maintains high academic standards” versus 62 percent in control schools

• 56 percent of students in Zone schools said “this school is safe” versus 70 percent in control schools

In the conclusion of their report, evaluators noted that low morale among staff in Zone schools likely contributed to the effort’s “lack of efficacy.” Attempting to reform struggling schools without changing their culture is like trying to lose weight simply by buying a new track suit and joining a new gym; it may be an important first step, but only as effective as the changes in values, beliefs, and behaviors that must accompany it.

Motivation, Feedback and Achievement: Exploring Recent Headlines

Practice makes perfect – so why are so many middle school students more intent on honing their video game reflexes this summer than their math skills? Research suggests that academic motivation tends to decline in American schools as students reach middle school – a quandary for educators, given the links between intrinsic motivation, practice, and achievement (for a practical take on this subject, see David Brooks’ recent New York Times op-ed, “Genius: The Modern View”). Teaching students to delay gratification is critical to this effort – making the development of self-regulation a hot topic in early education. While educators have struggled to determine whether or not instructional strategies can successfully teach children to internalize intrinsic motivation prior to middle school, evidence suggests that focusing on effort rather than ability (‘you’re working hard’ vs. ‘you’re good at this’) is an especially beneficial practice. Other voices have called for parents and educators to explicitly teach children about the malleability of intelligence and the relationship between practice and achievement.

These are complicated issues. As we are all aware, motivation varies by context, culture, and personal predilection: a student intrinsically motivated to finish a Harry Potter novel may simultaneously rely on extrinsic motivation (conveniently enhanced by threat of a pop quiz) to finish Wuthering Heights. Unfortunately, extrinsic motivators (grades, social pressure) begin to break down in middle school, making the development of internal drive all the more valuable. Think this might be an interesting topic for light summer reading? Richard Nisbett’s new book, Intelligence and How to Get It, offers a thought-provoking discussion of the sources of individual variation in student motivation.

A Denver school’s “Rap to Roots” program … the rest of the story

Last week, the top, front-page headline of the Denver Post read “Rhythm Scholars: Rap helps kids boost their academics—from multiplication to Shakespeare.” The story described an afterschool “Rap to Roots” program at the Wyatt-Edison Charter School in Denver’s inner-city Five Points neighborhood. The Post reported that the program “debuted this month in Colorado after success in cities such as Cleveland and Chicago."

In a nutshell, the program aims to boost kids’ academic achievement by using rap music to motivate students to stay in school and to teach them about literary conventions, technology, and African-American history. The article reported that the program “did significantly better in standardized testing, attention spans in the classroom, and some [students] improved their writing skills.”

The story got noticed both in and outside Denver. Colleen O’Connell, the Post reporter who wrote the article, said that a national TV news network contacted her, expressing interest in covering the story. The next day, ASCD Smart Brief picked up the story and blasted it out to 175,000 readers. And within hours of the article being posted on the Post Web site, more than 80 comments had been posted, ranging from favorable support to equating the use of rap in schools with the demise of Western civilization.

My first reaction to the story was mixed. On the one hand, I could appreciate what the program was trying to do: offer urban kids an opportunity to express themselves creatively, motivate them, and provide them with a positive way to spend after-school hours (“Rap to Roots” is part of the school’s “Open Door Youth Gang Alternatives” program).

On the other hand, the rap lyrics written by one of the program’s 13-year-old scholars didn’t seem to be on par with the expectations of Colorado’s new language arts standards, which require seventh graders to “write fully-developed literary … text” and to “edit writing for correct grammar, capitalization, punctuation, spelling, [and] sentence structure … .” 

I worried that this nifty idea might be just another example of well-meaning people setting low expectations for urban kids. So I contacted Michael Schenkelberg, the program’s director, to get, as the late Paul Harvey used to say … the rest of the story.

First off, I learned that the program is more of an adaptation than an adoption of what Schenkelberg had been doing in Cleveland under the auspices of The Initiative for Cultural Arts in Education (ICARE), supported by the Young Audiences of Northeast Ohio, a nonprofit arts-in-education organization. ICARE is essentially an artist-in-residence program. It places artists in classrooms for weeks at a time, during which they collaborate with teachers to enhance classroom learning through arts education that can include dance, music, drama, and visual arts.

An evaluation study of the ICARE programfound that the longer students were exposed to the program, the higher they scored on standardized reading, math, and science tests. In addition, 87 percent of teachers said that their students worked more creatively because of the ICARE program. While the study produced correlational, not causal data, the findings suggest the program may have some positive effect on student learning.

However, in contrast to ICARE, the Rap to Roots program is—at least in its initial iteration—strictly an afterschool program that is, for the moment at least, focused on one type of artistic expression. Instead of placing artists in residence in a single classroom, guest artists work with students from multiple grades (fourth through eighth). Those differences, Schenkelberg explained, make it difficult to involve classroom teachers in offering feedback on student work, which might help them take their writing to the next level.

Indeed, at this point, the student work produced through the program is really just a means to a larger end: providing kids with a creative outlet that sparks their interest to learn and stay in school. Someday Schenkelberg hopes to expand the program to look more like the ICARE program—perhaps by bringing in local artists, musicians, and writers to work side-by-side in classrooms with teachers whose students have often seen their arts programs cut or scaled back.

Bottom line: while the Post should be commended for its efforts to provide a “good news” story on education (and place it on the front page), its headline writers probably connected a few too many dots in proclaiming “Rap helps kids boost their academics.”

Nonetheless, “Rap to Roots” shows promise, especially if the program is able to successfully replicate the components that made ICARE successful in Cleveland. Moreover, Schenkelberg should get credit for recognizing that all students deserve an opportunity to explore and develop their creative sides.