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Study: Charter competition boosts public schools

June 8, 2012 by

Milwaukee public schools improve when they face competition from an independent charter school, according to a study by Hiren Nisar, now an analyst at Abt Associates. Black and low-achieving students show the greatest gains.

Milwaukee’s district-sponsored charters don’t trigger significant improvement in traditional public schools, concluded Nisar, who did the research for his University of Wisconsin doctoral thesis. He theorizes that principals don’t feel as much pressure to make changes that will persuade parents to keep their children at the traditional school.

 

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The bee is on!

May 31, 2012 by

Throwing Things is blogging the National Spelling Bee.

Six-year-old speller Lori Anne Madison didn’t make the semi-finals. She failed to spell “ingluvies,” which means “the crop or craw of birds.”

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How to pop the college tuition bubble

January 14, 2012 by

“For a growing number of students, entering the lucrative college-educated realms of the economy is like being smuggled across the border—you can get to the promised land if you try hard enough, but you arrive in a state of indentured servitude to the shady operators who overcharged you for the trip.” So writes Ed Sector’s Kevin Carey, who offers A Radical Solution For America’s Worsening College Tuition Bubble. The only way to control college costs is to introduce competition, Carey writes.

New providers of higher education could be made “eligible for payment via Pell grants, federal loans, or other current and imagined federal aid systems if they agree to a few baseline conditions,” such as price regulation and transparency. “They would be required to provide public information about how much their students learn, and have their access to federal aid rescinded if students are not learning enough.”

. . .  a pair of well-known Stanford professors are currently teaching an Artificial Intelligence course to about 200 Stanford students—and more than twenty thousand students around the world, online. The non-Stanford students won’t receive credits from Stanford, but they will receive official documentation from the professors as to how they scored on course tests and their overall rank. Under this new system, those professors would be free to set up their own business teaching Artificial Intelligence over the Internet, and students would be free to pay them with federal aid. Other providers might take advantage of the fast-growing body of open educational resources—free online courses, videos, lectures, and syllabi—and add value primarily through mentoring, designing course sequences, and assessing learning.

To remain eligible for federal financial aid, old-line colleges would have to accept transfer credits granted by the new providers.

And because they will be inexpensive and attached to verifiable data about how much students are learning, they will make a compelling value proposition when competing with traditional colleges that have no such data, charge more money, and are weighed down by legacy expenses and change-resistant cultures.

Existing colleges and universities will have to adapt or die, Carey writes.

Making sure those new-style credits are transferable will be tricky. Colleges today often reject credits earned at other accredited institutions.

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Us vs. them

January 12, 2012 by

Education Week’s Quality Counts 2012 report is titled “Global Challenge: Education in a Competitive World.”

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Elite schools ease up on homework

October 25, 2011 by

Some ultra-competitive private schools are assigning less homework to avoid overstressing students, reports the New York Times.  Of course, that means cutting back to only four hours a night or perhaps even 3.5 hours.

Dalton invited Harris Cooper, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Duke University, to speak last spring about the link between homework and learning. “At five hours a night,” he said of the homework burden, “they likely won’t do any worse if they only bring home four.”

. . . Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at the Stanford School of Education, co-authored a 2007 paper that looked at 496 students at one private and one public school and found that those with more than 3.5 hours of homework a night had an increased risk of physical and mental health issues, like sleep deprivation, ulcers and headaches. In a separate study of 26 schools, Ms. Pope said, 67 percent of more than 10,000 students reported that they were “often” or “always” stressed out.

“At some point, we say too much is too much,” Ms. Pope said. “In our study, that’s 3.5 hours.”

Not all schools are scaling back: Some parents equate heavy backpacks and sleep deprivation with excellence.

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U.S. college edge is shrinking

September 14, 2011 by

The U.S. leads the world in college-educated workers, but competitors are catching up, according to an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development study of developed countries. The U.S. is the only G-20  country in which new workers are less educated than those who are retiring, notes Ed Week‘s Inside School Research.

“It’s not that the United States is doing worse; its that other countries are starting to do what the United States has been doing for a very long time,” said Andreas Schleicher, the head of the indicators and analysis division at the OECD’s Directorate for Education.

China’s young workers are much more educated than the older generation. And there are lots of them. In 2009, 36.6 percent of the world’s new college students were Chinese; 12.9 percent were American.

ISR-OECDchart.jpg

 

Schools will be blamed for America’s slide in competitiveness, predicts Walt Gardner on Reality Check. Pressure will increase to move to the business model of education, he adds.

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Study: U.S. students lag in math, reading

August 19, 2011 by

Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete? asks Harvard’s Paul E. Peterson and colleagues in Education Next.  In math, 32 percent of U.S. students test as proficient. Students in 22 countries perform significantly better.

. . .  58 percent of Korean students and 56 percent of Finnish students performed at or above a proficient level. Other countries in which a majority—or near majority—of students performed at or above the proficiency level included Switzerland, Japan, Canada, and the Netherlands.

Massachusetts is the only state in which (slightly) more than half of students are proficient in math.

Fifty percent of Asian-American students, 42 percent of whites, 15 percent of Hispanics and 11 percent of blacks test as proficient in math.

All students in 16 countries outperform U.S. whites, the study finds. In addition to the usual suspects, that includes Germany, Belgium, and Canada.

I’d like to see more analysis of Canadian schools. The culture is a lot closer to ours than Korea or Finland. If Canadians can learn math, Americans should be able to learn math.

The U.S. does better in reading.  Whites read about as well as all students in Canada, Japan and New Zealand. Once again, Massachusetts’ students are the most likely to be proficient.

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Study: Vouchers work

March 25, 2011 by

School vouchers improve outcomes for students — and induce public schools to improve, claims Greg Forster in an analysis of 10 studies that used random assignment of students.

Nine studies find that vouchers improve student outcomes, six that all students benefit and three that some benefit and some are not affected. One study finds no visible impact. None of these studies finds a negative impact.

In addition, 18 of 19 empirical studies found public schools improved in response to vouchers. Only in Washington D.C., where the program was   “designed to shield public schools from the impact of competition,” was there no visible improvement.

Voucher benefits “are sometimes large, but are usually more modest in size,” Forster concluded. “This is not surprising since the programs themselves are modest — curtailed by strict limits on the students they can serve, the resources they provide, and the freedom to innovate.”

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Competition improves public schools

November 19, 2010 by

Threatened with losing students to private schools, Florida public schools improved, concludes a Northwestern study by David Figlio and Cassandra Hart.

Starting in 2002, the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program (FTC) has provided funding to help low-income parents pay for private school.  Corporations donate money to fund the scholarships in exchange for a tax credit.

The scholarship is quite generous; it covers approximately 90 percent of tuition and fees at a typical religious elementary school in Florida and two-thirds of tuition and fees at a typical religious high school. As a result, the program greatly increased the accessibility of private schools to low-income families. In the first year, some 15,585 scholarships were awarded, increasing the number of low-income students attending private schools by more than 50 percent. For the 2009–10 school year, the FTC program awarded scholarships to 28,927 students.

Public schools located near private schools increased reading and math scores more than public schools that had little competition.

For every 1.1 miles closer to the nearest private school, public school math and reading performance increases by 1.5 percent of a standard deviation in the first year following the announcement of the scholarship program. Likewise, having 12 additional private schools nearby boosts public school test scores by almost 3 percent of a standard deviation. The presence of two additional types of private schools nearby raises test scores by about 2 percent of a standard deviation. Finally, an increase of one standard deviation in the concentration of private schools nearby is associated with an increase of about 1 percent of a standard deviation in test scores.

Test scores rose more for elementary and middle schools than for high schools, perhaps because the scholarship made K-8 private schools affordable but didn’t cover as much of the tuition at private high schools.

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It’s how you play the game — to win

November 8, 2010 by

Eleven-year-old soccer players should play to win, writes Barry Rubin on Pajamas Media. Under a coach who tells kids that winning doesn’t matter, his son’s team has lost every game.

He never criticizes a player or suggests how a player could do better. My son, bless him, once remarked to me: “How are you going to play better if nobody tells you what you’re doing wrong?” The coach just tells them how well they are playing. Even after an 8-0 defeat, he told them they’d played a great game.

And of course, the league gives trophies to everyone, whether their team finishes in first or last place.

“Sports should prepare children for life, competition, the desire to win, and an understanding that not every individual has the same level of skills,” Rubin believes.

Asked to coach for a day, he put the best players in at forward and goal and kept them in, giving weaker players the chance to play for at least half the game as defenders. He gave the team a pre-game pep talk:

Every week you’ve been told that the important thing is just to have a good time. Well, this week it’s going to be different. The number one goal is to win; the number two goal is to have a good time. But I assure you: if you win, you will have a much better time!

The team took a 1-0 lead.  Told that defense was critical, the weaker plays “performed heroically, holding off repeated attacks on their goal.”

One shouted from the sidelines something I thought showed real character: “Don’t let the good players do all the work!” Instinctively, he recognized that some players are better, but he wanted to bring everyone’s level up rather than down. I’m tempted to say he was going against what he was being taught in school.

They played hard and they won. They were thrilled.

If you don’t care about winning, you’re merely handing triumph to the other side. In a soccer league that might not matter, yet in personal life, your level of achievement and satisfaction is going to depend on giving your best effort.

That works for Western civilization too, Rubin writes.

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