Unleashing the Power of Innovation in Education
In this report, the authors gather creative solutions and ideas from a collection of leading education entrepreneurs about federal and state policy changes that can support the emergence, success, and growth of entrepreneurial problem-solvers while encouraging a determined focus on quality and results. The authors primarily address the specific local, state and federal policy barriers that have thus far precluded thriving entrepreneurial activity in public education. The authors then outline several policy approaches for district and state superintendents, governors, and the new federal administration.
The authors concentrate on those policy changes that enable high-quality entrepreneurs to better succeed at scale because it will allow them to better serve students, teachers and schools. The authors recommend initiatives that prompt local action, rather than issuing broad mandates; focus on state and local changes that require limited federal involvement to have an immediate impact; and, particularly mindful of our current economic climate, offer reforms that remove anachronistic barriers and problematic practices, rather than those that require additional resources.
Recommendations
Use dramatically better information to create a performance culture
The interviewed entrepreneurs identified the lack of a performance culture in K-12 public education as the greatest constraint on their ability to scale and succeed. A critical ingredient of this performance culture—clear metrics that indicate how good a product is or how the authorsll a service is working—is largely missing in public education. Insufficient data means that teachers rarely have the capacity or tools to adjust their instruction based on results. Fifty systems of standards and assessments make it difficult to compare and aggregate performance across states, and the information generated by these systems typically does not make it possible to tie internal systems to results. Proposed federal and state approaches to address these challenges include updating student achievement data systems to maximize their utility for educators; encouraging the formation of consortia of states that adopt common standards; supporting collection and reporting of management data; and a commitment to track a set of high-priority “power metrics” that can be used to assess the quality of entrepreneurial providers as the well as the status quo systems with which they aim to compete.
Open the public K-12 system to a diverse set of providers
In American schools today, local, county, and intermediate school districts largely hold exclusive rights over the provision of education, and a small number of large providers monopolize the marketplace for services and tools. Practical constraints such as budgetary rules and processes and collective bargaining agreements combine with a widespread bias against outsourcing to prohibit or discourage districts and schools from opting for entrepreneurial provision of key services, even when they are superior to current providers. Policy reforms—such as eliminating unnecessary statutory and regulatory constraints upon the location or delivery of schooling, opening the market for licensed providers of principal and teacher training, and devolving purchasing power for some services to school leaders—would help open the supply markets to more new, high-quality providers.
Make districts and other buyers into real “customers”
A public education sector open to entrepreneurship also requires true demand—a set of real “customers” among districts and other potential buyers of education services. Even when an exclusive franchise does not fully block entrepreneurs’ access to markets, spending restrictions, rigid procurement regulations, slow buying cycles, a fragmented set of buyers, and a dearth of investment vehicles make it very difficult for entrepreneurs to have an impact. Granting existing resources in more flexible ways, facilitating investments to free up future savings, and allowing greater collaboration between buyers and sellers would empower districts and schools with real buying power and enable entrepreneurs to better articulate their value.
Use public policy to encourage financing for entrepreneurial ventures
Finally, entrepreneurship can thrive only when there are various types of financing available for new ventures. Few dollars are currently available in the education sector for startups, new tools, or delivery systems, and the capital market lacks many of the elements that make these markets work for entrepreneurs in other industries. Policymakers can use existing public funding streams in ways that better foster innovation by reallocating current funds to encourage recipients to tap entrepreneurial providers, leveraging more private investment, and developing models of performance-based funding to reward and sustain those entrepreneurs that are most successful.
In addition to the recommendations outlined above, several overarching themes also arose from our conversations with leading education entrepreneurs:
* Using the “bully pulpit.” Federal and state leaders have a critical opportunity to communicate a commitment to supporting promising innovations, educate philanthropists and private investors about the success and potential of educational entrepreneurs, and provide a forum for addressing the barriers that hinder even effective ventures.
* Inventorying national and state agencies. This process can be used to assess agencies’ openness to entrepreneurship, evaluate their performance metrics, and eliminate outdated rules and practices that today impose a burden relative to the benefits they convey.
* Engaging foundations and private investors. In this report, the authors focus primarily on the role of state and federal policymakers, but private funders can help jumpstart many of our proposals by providing seed funding for new initiatives and co-funding alongside publicly financed ventures.
* Re-examining the traditional structures of public schooling. Many of our recommendations are designed to make the traditional structures in public education more conducive to entrepreneurship. But by carefully revisiting these institutional assumptions—such as providing almost all instruction via teachers who work on-site with students—policymakers could begin to open up even more opportunities for entrepreneurship.
We should be encouraged and inspired by the current generation of educational entrepreneurs who have challenged our assumptions about what is possible in public K-12 education and provided a higher-quality education to thousands of students. But the current and potential new entrepreneurs are stifled by several unnecessary and outdated state and district policies, and an education system that remains as a whole insensitive to performance and quality. The recommendations here suggest several steps that state superintendents, governors, and the new federal administration can take to make public K-12 education a more enticing and hospitable sector for social entrepreneurship. By removing barriers to innovation and reform and providing greater support for entrepreneurship, the authors can spur the critical and necessary new solutions to many of public education’s greatest challenges.
Full report:
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/05/pdf/education_entrepreneurs.pdf
Free to Teach: What America´s Teachers Say about Teaching in Public and Private Schools
Results from a new Rhode Island public opinion survey indicate strong support for a range of school choice options as a desired alternative to traditional public schools.
The survey results show that, given the choice, three out of every four Rhode Islanders would select a private school, a public charter school, a home school or virtual school environment for their children.
When asked if it were your decision and you could select any type of school, what type of school would you select in order to obtain the best education for your child, here's how likely voters in the state responded:
• 56 percent selected private schools
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• 17 percent selected regular public schools
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• 13 percent selected charter schools
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• 12 percent selected home schooling
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• 3 percent selected virtual schools
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While fifty-six percent of Rhode Island parents said they would like to send their child to a private school, only 11 percent of Rhode Island's students currently attend private schools.
Thirteen percent of Rhode Island parents said they would like to send their child to a charter school, yet charter schools enroll only about 2 percent of the state's students.
While seventeen percent of Rhode Island parents would choose a regular public school for their child, nearly nine of ten – 87 percent -- attend regular public schools.
These statistics highlight the significant disconnect between schooling preferences and actual school enrollments.
While school choice opportunities are currently available for families in Rhode Island, the demand far exceeds current capacity.
The RI Corporate Scholarship Tax Credit Program allows any family with a household income of 250% or less of the federal poverty level the opportunity to apply for tuition assistance at nearly 60 participating K-12 private and parochial schools throughout the state. This program, approved by the General Assembly in 2006, allows eligible Rhode Island businesses to receive a tax credit in return for scholarship contributions. The program is limited to one million dollars in approved tax credits annually.
While close to 90,000 families in the state qualify for scholarship assistance, the program has only been able to provide partial tuition assistance to approximately 300 eligible families due to the current tax credit cap. Advocates of the program hope to see the cap raised in order to allow more eligible families the ability to choose the educational environment for their children, regardless of economic or geographic limitations.
Similarly, the state's public charter schools, another option of choice for families, face an unmet demand. Due to the schools' popularity and limited number of openings, admission applications have greatly exceeded capacity for several years requiring a random lottery system to determine student admissions. This year, Rhode Island charter public schools received 3,454 applications for only 559 openings, leaving more than 2800 students on waiting lists. About 3,100 students currently attend the state's 11 charter schools.
In addition, the survey findings show that school choice is not a partisan issue among Rhode Island residents. The survey results indicate general agreement among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents.
The scientifically representative poll of 1,200 likely Rhode Island voters was conducted on January 23 and 25 by Strategic Vision, an Atlanta-based public affairs agency whose polls have been used by Newsweek, Time Magazine, BBC, ABC News, and USA Today among others. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
The full Rhode Island survey results can be found at
http://www.friedmanfoundation.org/downloadFile.do?id=367
New Millennium Schools: Delivering Six-Figure Teacher Salaries in Return for Outstanding Student Learning Gains
Despite the fact that American students enjoy higher average family incomes and per-pupil funding, they consistently rank near the bottom in international examinations of high school achievement. Many researchers point to the United States’ poor practices of recruiting, training, compensating, and retaining teachers. The highest-achieving countries tend to recruit their teachers from the top 5 percent of university graduates; however, on average, American K-12 schools recruit from the bottom third.
A growing body of research in the United States demonstrates that teacher quality makes a profound difference in student learning. Judging schools on a value-added basis, by measuring academic growth over time, reveals a profound need to attract high-quality teachers into American classrooms in large numbers. Students learning from three highly effective instructors in three successive grades learn 50 percent more than students who have three consecutive ineffective instructors. These results are consistent across subjects and occur after controlling for student factors. Teacher quality is 10 to 20 times more important than variation in average class sizes, within the observable range. Unfortunately, though, poor human resource practices lead high-quality teachers to cluster in leafy suburbs, far from the children most in need.
In this paper, the authors propose a charter school model based on providing value-added merit pay, identifying “master teachers” through value-added assessment, and adding more students to classes taught by master teachers. By giving these high-performing teachers two-thirds of the revenue for additional students, we find that a six-figure salary may well be within reach for master teachers with average class sizes in the low 30s (based on the current and recent historical practice in the United States). With high salaries as incentive, administrators can access new pools of talent and recruit more high-ability graduates into the classroom.
Full report:
http://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/Common/Img/042809%20Ladner-New%20Millennium%20Schools.pdf
Misperceptions of Cost, Complexity of Aid System, Keep Low-Income Students Out of College
Many low-income students miss out on college because they don’t know how much it actually costs or how to get access to billions of dollars in financial aid, according to a report released today by Pew’s Economic Mobility Project.
This matters, say the report's authors, because postsecondary education is among the most important factors in determining whether a person achieves the American Dream of upward economic mobility. The report, Promoting Economic Mobility by Increasing Postsecondary Education, emphasizes that America is no longer a country where a high school diploma is the reliable gateway to getting a decent job and building a good life. It has become increasingly difficult to advance in society without some level of higher education.
“Although in many respects the American Dream is alive and well,” said John E. Morton, managing director of Economic Policy at The Pew Charitable Trusts, “the body of evidence tells us two important things: first, that the lowest rungs of the economic ladder in America are hardest to climb up from, and second, that a college education is the most effective asset people can possess to move ahead.”
The report, co-authored by Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution, and Harry Holzer and Bob Lerman of the Urban Institute, finds that the extensive paperwork involved in applying for financial aid deters the lowest-income students from applying to college, and therefore from working their way out of their economic circumstances.
“The fact is that there just isn’t good information out there for poor and minority families about their options for paying for college,” said Ron Haskins. He noted that students rarely pay the full published price of tuition, citing studies showing that on average a two-year public institution actually costs around $100 per semester when all aid is taken into account. At four-year public and private schools, students spend thousands less on average than the schools’ published tuition.
However, Haskins said, “Without knowledge about available aid, or how to access it, the sticker shock of rising published prices can scare many students off before they even apply.”
While college enrollment has increased exponentially in the last several decades, the enrollment and graduation rates of poor and low-income students remain significantly behind those of their middle- and upper-income peers. Eight in 10 children of parents in the top income quintile enroll in college, and 53 percent eventually graduate. By contrast, barely one-third of children in the bottom quintile attend college, with a mere 11 percent graduating. But when they do get a college degree, children of parents in the bottom quintile are four times more likely to move to the top of the income ladder as adults than those who do not complete college.
The report highlights the complex, cumbersome process of applying for federal financial aid, where students do not know whether they even qualify, much less how much they’re going to get, until very late in the college decision-making process. This lack of timely information imposes a special burden on low-income families who may not have alternative means of paying for college, potentially leading to missed deadlines and lost opportunities. Government and the private sector together distributed a total of $162.5 billion in aid to students in the 2007-2008 academic year, but the evidence shows that it may not have been targeted at the students who needed it most.
To enable all students to pursue the American Dream through a college education, the report presents a set of nonpartisan policy recommendations that includes:
• providing effective guidance for students on choosing and paying for college;
• improving students’ K-12 academic achievement and preparation so that there is a greater likelihood of success for those who do attend college;
• helping students stay in college until they earn a degree; and
• clarifying the goals of federal post-secondary education policy and research to make college enrollment and graduation for students from low-income families a top priority.
The report is one of a series produced by the project on ways to enhance economic mobility in America. “Clearly this paper’s findings demonstrate that the ability to craft policies that make college broadly accessible are at the same time politically realistic and critical to our national civic well-being,” said Ianna Kachoris, manager of the Economic Mobility Project. “Our society is built on the promise that hard work and playing by the rules pay off. Leveling the playing field for people of all income levels to get a postsecondary education is one of the most important things we can do as a nation to help keep that promise.”
To download the report, please visit:
http://economicmobility.org/assets/pdfs/PEW_EMP_POSTSECONDARY_ED.pdf
An Evaluation of the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) in Chicago: Year One Impact Report
Teacher Advancement Program Improves Teacher Retention in Chicago
But No Measurable Impact on Test Scores Found in the First Six Months
The Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) is a whole-school intervention that aims to improve schools by raising teacher quality. It provides teachers with opportunities for professional growth, promotion to school leadership roles without leaving the classroom, structured feedback, and performance-based compensation. More than 200 schools around the country have implemented TAP, and its most recent expansion came via the federal Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF). A new report from Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., focuses on one TIF grantee, the Chicago Public Schools, which began implementing TAP in 2007 and plans to continue adding 10 new TAP schools each year of the grant’s four-year period.
TAP enables teachers to earn extra pay and responsibilities through promotion to mentor or master teacher; they can also earn annual performance bonuses based on the value they add to student achievement and their performance in the classroom.
Early findings from Mathematica’s study of Chicago TAP, which focused on the district’s K-8 schools, include:
* Teachers in TAP schools reported significantly more mentoring and support than their peers in similar schools.
* Teachers in TAP schools had compensation expectations in line with program policies.
* Although TAP led to changes inside schools, these changes did not produce measurable impacts on student test scores through March of the start-up year. Student achievement growth as measured by average math and reading scores on the Illinois Standards Assessment Test did not differ significantly between TAP and non-TAP schools.
The program had a significant impact on teacher retention. TAP teachers were five percentage points more likely to return to their schools than were non-TAP teachers.
“For a popular program that’s being replicated all over the country, we don’t have much independent, rigorous research on its impacts, so this Chicago experience with TAP is going to get a lot of well deserved scrutiny,” said Steven Glazerman, lead author of the study and a senior researcher at Mathematica. “While policymakers will be encouraged by the positive impact on teacher retention, this first-year analysis shows that it’s not a quick fix for schools looking to boost test scores in six months. We’ll have to see what happens in the coming years.”
The study, funded by a grant from the Joyce Foundation, gathered data from student test score files, a teacher survey, a set of principal interviews, and teacher administrative records for the treatment schools and the control schools. The pool of schools to randomize was small, so to complement the experimental analysis the research team created a comparison sample of 18 additional schools by matching them according to size, average teacher experience, and student demographics to the TAP schools.
The report, “An Evaluation of the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) in Chicago: Year One Impact Report,” by Glazerman, Allison McKie, and Nancy Carey, is available at http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/publications/redirect_pubsdb.asp?strSite=pdfs/education/TAP_rpt.pdf
Reading Comprehension Curricula Show No Positive Impacts on Achievement, First-Year Findings of New Federal Evaluation Reveal
To become successful learners, students need to comprehend what they read. Reading comprehension becomes increasingly important as students move into upper elementary grades, when they transition from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” Children from disadvantaged backgrounds, in particular, may have difficulty comprehending text because they often lack general vocabulary and strategies for organizing information and gleaning knowledge from text.
A new federal study of four reading comprehension programs sheds light on the effectiveness of these curricula in helping disadvantaged students improve their reading comprehension. Findings released today reveal that, overall, these curricula had no positive impact on student test scores, and in some cases, had a negative impact. The study, a large-scale randomized control trial conducted by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., for the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, examined the effects of these curricula on 5th grade students. It involved 268 teachers and 6,350 students in 89 schools in 10 mostly large disadvantaged urban districts in 8 states.
Mathematica evaluated four curricula that supplement schools’ core reading curriculum— Project CRISS, ReadAbout, Read for Real, and Reading for Knowledge (see last page for a description of the curricula). These curricula are designed to be used by schools and teachers to improve students’ comprehension skills.
As part of the study, one of the largest and most rigorous of its kind, schools were randomly assigned to one of four intervention groups or the control group. Researchers compared students in each intervention group with the control group. They also compared the combined group of all students receiving any of the curricula with the control group. Comparisons were based on a general reading comprehension test called the Group Reading Assessment and Diagnostic Evaluation (GRADE), tests of comprehension of science and social studies passages, and a composite score based on all the tests.
Main findings from the study include:
* Overall, average test scores in schools randomly assigned to use the four curricula were not statistically significantly higher than scores in control schools. There were no positive effects on the GRADE or on the science or social studies reading comprehension assessments. Furthermore, reading comprehension in schools assigned to use one of three commercially-available curricula (Project CRISS, ReadAbout, and Read for Real) was not significantly different from that of schools in the control group. Students in schools using the Reading for Knowledge curriculum scored statistically significantly lower than control group students on the science reading comprehension assessment and the composite score.
* For certain subgroups, test scores in schools using the selected curricula were significantly lower than scores in control schools, although there was no clear pattern to these findings. These negative effects were found for students in high-poverty schools and students with the lowest initial reading comprehension skills (bottom third). Negative results were also found for students with above-average initial reading fluency skills and students taught by educators with more than five years of experience.
* Over 80 percent of teachers reported using the intervention programs they were assigned to use, and, on average, teachers were observed to be adhering to between 61 and 78 percent of the specific components of the programs.
“While these programs were designed based on research about reading comprehension, until now they had not been rigorously evaluated on a large scale to determine whether they are effective,” said Susanne James-Burdumy, lead author and associate director of research at Mathematica’s New Jersey office. “This report is an important step in efforts to identify curricula that improve reading comprehension. Future reports will assess the extent to which positive impacts on students might develop over time, as well as whether these curricula are more effective after schools and teachers have had one year of experience using them.”
The report, “Effectiveness of Selected Supplemental Reading Comprehension Interventions: Impacts on a First Cohort of Fifth-Grade Students,” by James-Burdumy, Wendy Mansfield, John Deke, Nancy Carey, Julieta Lugo-Gil, Alan Hershey, Aaron Douglas, Russell Gersten, Rebecca Newman-Gonchar, Joseph Dimino, and Bonnie Faddis, presents the background and design of the evaluation and impact results from the 2006-2007 school year—the first year of intervention implementation and data collection. Baseline student assessment data were collected using the GRADE and the Test of Silent Contextual Reading Fluency (TOSCRF). A teacher survey was also administered at baseline. Follow-up data collection included the GRADE, science and social studies reading comprehension assessments developed by Educational Testing Service, and the collection of school and student records. Classroom observations assessed teacher instructional practices.
About the Curricula
The following text briefly describes the key elements of each curriculum examined in the study:
Project CRISS (developed by Creating Independence Through Student-Owned Strategies) focuses on five keys to learning—background knowledge, purpose setting, author’s craft (which involves using text structure to improve comprehension), active learning, and metacognition. The program is designed to be used each day during language arts, science, or social studies periods.
ReadAbout (developed by Scholastic Inc.) teaches students reading comprehension skills, such as author’s purpose, main idea, cause and effect, compare and contrast, summarizing, and inferences, primarily through a computer program. Students apply what they have learned to a selection of science and social studies trade books.
Read for Real (developed by Chapman University and Zaner-Bloser) supplies teachers with a six-volume set of books to teach reading strategies to students (for example, previewing, activating prior knowledge, setting a purpose, main idea, graphic organizers, and text structures). The books can be used before, during, and after reading. Each unit includes vocabulary, fluency, and writing activities.
Reading for Knowledge (created by the Success for All Foundation for inclusion in the study) makes extensive use of cooperative learning strategies and a process called SQRRRL (Survey, Question, Read, Restate, Review, Learn).
Mathematica, a nonpartisan research firm, conducts high-quality, objective policy research and surveys to improve public well-being. Its clients include federal and state governments, foundations, and private-sector and international organizations. The employee-owned company, with offices in Princeton, N.J., Ann Arbor, Mich., Cambridge, Mass., Chicago, Ill., Oakland, Calif., and Washington, D.C., has conducted some of the most important studies of education, health care, family support, employment, nutrition, and early childhood policies and programs.
Complete report:
http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/publications/redirect_pubsdb.asp?strSite=pdfs/education/selectsupplreading.pdf
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