When students are underachieving, school policymakers often examine class size, curriculum and funding, but University of Missouri researchers suggest establishing relationships may be a powerful and less expensive way to improve students' success. In a review of the research they show that students with positive attachments to their teachers and schools have higher grades and higher standardized test scores.
"In this era of accountability, enhancing student-teacher relationships is not merely an add-on, but rather is fundamental to raising achievement," said Christi Bergin, associate professor in the MU College of Education. "Secure student-teacher relationships predict greater knowledge, higher test scores, greater academic motivation and fewer retentions or special education referrals. Children who have conflicted relationships with teachers tend to like school less, are less self-directed and cooperate less in the classroom."
The authors summarized a range of research on attachment-like relations with parents, teachers and schools. They found that student attachment influences school success through two routes: indirectly through attachment to parents which affects children's behavior at school and directly through attachment to teachers and schools. Children with healthy attachment are able to control their emotions and are more socially competent and willing to take on challenging learning tasks in the classroom.
"To be effective, teachers must connect with and care for children with warmth, respect and trust," said David Bergin, associate professor of educational psychology, and the other author of the article. "In addition, it is important for schools to make children feel secure and valued, which can liberate them to take on intellectual and social challenges and explore new ideas."
To help enhance student relations, the authors offer research-based tips for teachers and schools:
Teachers
• Increase warm, positive interactions with students
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• Be well prepared for class and hold high expectations
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• Be responsive to students' agendas by providing choices
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• Use reasoning rather than coercive discipline that damages relationships
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• Help students be kind, helpful and accepting of one another
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• Implement interventions for difficult relations with specific students
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Schools
• Provide a variety of extracurricular activities for students to join
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• Keep schools small
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• Keep students with the same teachers and/or peers across years
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• Decrease transitions in and out of the classroom
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• Facilitate transitions to new schools or teachers
New Project Zero Study - 'The Qualities of Quality: Understanding Excellence in Arts Education' - Highlights Importance of Arts Educators Focusing on Quality, and Need for Alignment of Purposes
Many children in the United States have little or no opportunity for formal arts instruction and access to arts learning experiences remains a critical national challenge. Additionally, the quality of arts learning opportunities that are available to young people is a serious concern. Understanding this second challenge - the challenge of creating and sustaining high quality formal arts learning experiences for K-12 youth, inside and outside of school - is the focus of a new report from Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
"The Qualities of Quality: Understanding Excellence in Arts Education" addresses the multiple challenges of achieving and sustaining quality in arts education, across major as well as emerging art forms in rural, urban, and suburban settings. The report is available as a free download from Project Zero at http://www.pz.harvard.edu/ and The Wallace Foundation at http://www.wallacefoundation.org/ .
Steve Seidel, lead principal investigator on the study, said, "Access and quality are the two great challenges for arts education. In the study, we found that while quality is a persistent challenge, many arts educators demonstrate that, with thoughtful, careful analysis, constant dialogue, and dogged persistence, it is possible to achieve and sustain high quality arts learning experiences for young people in and out of school settings."
Edward Pauly, director of research and evaluation at The Wallace Foundation, which commissioned the study, said: "In this difficult economic environment, arts educators need to use scarce resources to create high quality arts learning experiences. This timely report points the way for educators to focus on quality."
Major themes and findings of the study included:
Reflection and dialogue is important at all levels. An overarching theme across many of the findings of this study is that continuous reflection and discussion about what constitutes quality and how to achieve it is not only a catalyst for quality, but also a sign of quality.
The report includes dialogue tools to help arts educators build and clarify their own visions of high quality arts education, identify markers of quality in their own programs and practices, and seek alignment across decision-makers at all levels who help to shape a program's pursuit of quality.
The drive for quality is personal, passionate, and persistent. For most of the people surveyed in this study, ideas about what constitutes quality in arts education are inextricably tied to fundamental issues of identity and meaning and to their values as artists, educators, and citizens in the world.
Quality arts education serves multiple purposes simultaneously. Most of those interviewed believe good arts programs tend to serve several purposes simultaneously. Though arts programs differ widely in their contexts, goals, art forms, and constituencies, a hallmark sign of high quality arts learning in any program is that the learning experiences are rich and complex for all learners, engaging them on many levels and helping them learn and grow in a variety of ways.
Quality reveals itself "in the room" through four different lenses. There are multiple dimensions of quality in arts learning experiences. Four lenses were found to be especially useful in focusing attention on different aspects of excellence in arts education settings: learning, teaching, classroom community, and environment.
Foundational decisions matter. Arts education programs are based on foundational, program-defining decisions that give a program its identity and provide parameters within which quality is pursued. These decisions include: (1) Who teaches the arts? (2) Where are the arts taught? (3) What is taught and how? and (4) How is arts learning assessed?
Decisions and decision-makers at all levels affect quality. Critical decision-makers include people quite far away from the classroom (e.g., administrators, funders, policymakers); those just outside the room (notably program staff and parents); and those who are in the room (students, teachers, artists). While all decisions can have an important effect on quality, decisions made by those "in the room" have tremendous power to support or undermine the quality of the learning experience.
The study addressed three questions: How do U.S. arts educators, including leading practitioners, theorists, and administrators, define high quality arts learning and teaching? What markers of excellence do educators and administrators look for in the actual activities of art learning and teaching in the classroom? And, how do a program's foundational decisions, as well as its ongoing day-to-day decisions, affect quality? To answer these questions, researchers interviewed leading arts practitioners, theorists and administrators, visited exemplary arts programs across a range media and settings, and reviewed published literature.
Characteristics of Public School Districts in the United States: Results from the 2007-08 Schools and Staffing Survey
This report presents selected findings from the school district data file of the 2007-08 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). SASS is a nationally representative sample survey of public, private, and Bureau of Indian Education-funded (BIE) K-12 schools, principals, and teachers in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The public school sample was designed so that national-, regional-, and state-level elementary, secondary, and combined public school estimates can be made. Public schools include both traditional public and public charter schools.
The School District data file includes responses from school districts to the School District Questionnaire along with the "district items" taken from the Public School Questionnaire (With District Items) completed by the subset of public schools that were not associated with "traditional" school districts. These schools include state-run schools, traditional public schools in single-school districts, and independent charter schools.
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009320.pdf
Study Evaluates the Growth of Management Structures for Charter Schools
A new study by the University of Southern California’s Center on Educational Governance has found that growing numbers of charter schools are operating as networks through nonprofit groups called Charter Management Organizations (CMOs).
The comprehensive national study maps the landscape of 25 CMOs around the country - such as Green Dot Public Schools in Los Angeles and the nationwide Imagine Schools - by gathering data on how these management organizations operate and how they plan for and implement growth. In the first of what will be a series of reports, researchers focused on CMO’s age, origin, geographic scope, grades served and number of schools that are part of each organization’s structure.
CMOS provide an umbrella structure for three or more charter schools to operate under, according to the criteria of the research study. In this initial study, researchers created a framework for defining a CMO and found that most CMOs are striking a balance between oversight and independence of the individual schools; The question remains as to an optimal size for CMOs.
The focus on CMOs is relevant to broader discussions of education policy and reform because a major reason behind the creation of charter schools was to avoid the entrenched bureaucracy that stifles innovation in many school districts around the country. Since 1991, when Minnesota passed the nation’s first charter school law, “mom and pop” stand-alone charter schools have been the norm. Starting in the late-1990s, however, charters have found greater power in numbers operated through CMOs. This changes the discussion about “schools of choice” – now, there are “networks of choice.”
“CMOS have been touted as a way to overcome financial and operational hurdles that stand-alone charter schools often struggle with, as well as a way to create pressure on districts for systems change,” said Joanna Smith, Assistant Director of USC’s Center on Educational Governance. “But there is a general lack of knowledge about what CMOs actually are, how they operate and how they grow, so our study increases that knowledge so that policy makers, foundations, charter authorizers and others can make informed decisions.”
The Center on Educational Governance is at the USC Rossier School of Education. Study researchers conducted over 50 interviews with leaders from 25 CMOs currently operating in 26 of the 41 states with charter school laws. The research was funded through a grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement, and it aims to create a baseline of information about this newly emerging form of chartering.
“With the proliferation of charter schools, currently numbering around 4,300 nationwide, there has been a growing awareness of the need for a more financially viable model for charter school management and organization, as well as the desire to replicate successful programming,” said Priscilla Wohlstetter, Professor in USC’s Rossier School of Education.
The research team at USC’s Center on Educational Governance came up with specific criteria to define CMOs in order to prevent overlap or confusion. They defined CMOs as nonprofit organizations that manage a network of charter schools, in order to differentiate them from for-profit education management organizations that may provide only one of a menu of school needs. The sample included only CMOs that have at least three campuses in operation during the 2008-2009 school year, and that have plans for further expansion.
The team started with a pool of 40 CMOs, but some of these management organizations didn't meet the definition criteria, others declined to participate and the rest didn't respond to requests to participate in the study.
Some of the key findings:
- CMOs provide more infrastructure than stand-alone charter schools but are smaller and have fewer levels of hierarchy than traditional school districts._- CMO home offices generally support, rather than direct, the individual schools they oversee by giving them significant autonomy while expecting them to adhere to the CMO’s mission and vision._- The CMOs studied spent significant time and dedicated extensive resources towards teacher recruitment, training and leadership development.
The CMOs in the study included those with ties to California, New York, Texas, Oregon, Louisiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Washington D.C., among others. They were typically comprised of small networks of ten or fewer schools that served a student body of between 1,000 and 5,000 students. (A list of CMOs is available upon request).
Ten of the 25 CMOs started out as a single charter school that expanded to a network due to demand or success. In the other 15 CMOs, founders established the network structure prior to or concurrent with opening the first charter school. More than half of the CMOs studied have developed within a city or region of one state, and only two CMOs have opened schools nationwide (in five or more states).
The majority of the CMOs had a K-12 configuration. Six CMOs focused on middle and high school grades (e.g., 6th-12th grades). Three CMOs had an elementary/middle-school model and two CMOs had high school only configurations.
Excluded from the study were charter organizations that ran online charter schools, and school districts in which all public schools were charter schools. Also excluded were agencies that were created to serve a broader purpose but which also ran one or more charters.
The study is available at http://www.usc.edu/dept/education/cegov/focus/charter_schools/publications/other/Intro%20to%20CMOs.pdf
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