November 20, 2008
Reading into the Reading First study
The Institute of Education Science's Reading First report is out and everyone's weighing in: Margaret Spellings focused on students' improved decoding skills, the press focused on students' lack of comprehension skills and Mike focuses on the future. Read more here in the latet Flypaper blog entry.
Publications
November 17, 2008
A Byte at the Apple: Rethinking Education Data for the Post-NCLB Era
America brims with education data and these days it seems everyone in education claims--or at least wants--to be guided by data. In A Byte at the Apple, leaders and scholars map the landscape of data providers and users and explores why what's supplied by the former too often fails to meet the needs of the latter. It documents the barriers to collecting good information, including well-meaning privacy laws and the maze of overlapping government units and agencies. Most important, it explores potential solutions--including a future system where a "backpack" of achievement information would accompany every student from place to place.
August 15, 2008
Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism
The most exciting innovation in education policy in the last decade is the emergence of highly effective schools in our nation’s inner cities, schools where disadvantaged teens make enormous gains in academic achievement. In this book, David Whitman takes readers inside six of these secondary schools and reveals the secret to their success: they are paternalistic.
June 18, 2008
High-Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind
This publication reports the results of the first two (of five) studies of a multifaceted research investigation of the state of high-achieving students in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era. Part I examines achievement trends for high-achieving students since the early 1990s; Part II reports on teachers' own views of how schools are serving high-achieving pupils in the NCLB era.
April 10, 2008
Who Will Save America's Urban Catholic Schools?
America's urban Catholic schools are in crisis. Over 1,300 of them have shut down since 1990, mostly in our cities. As a result, some 300,000 students have been displaced--double the number affected by Hurricanes Rita and Katrina. This report, which includes a comprehensive survey of the attitudes of U.S. Catholics and the broader public towards inner-city Catholic schools, examines this crisis and offers several suggestions for arresting and perhaps reversing this trend in the interests of better education.
October 4, 2007
The Proficiency Illusion
NCLB allows each state to define proficiency as it sees fit and design its own tests. This study compares state tests to benchmarks laid out by the Northwest Evaluation Association to evaluate proficiency cut scores for assessments in twenty-six states. The findings suggest that the tests states use to measure academic progress and student proficiency under NCLB are creating a false impression of success, especially in reading and especially in the early grades.
