eric.ed.gov har udgivet: This brief summarizes the findings of a recent book, “Standards Deviation: How Schools Misunderstand Education Policy” (Spillane, 2004), that examines state and local government relations as the standards move from the statehouse to the district policymakers and teachers who attempt to make sense of them. It takes a case study approach, focusing on a single state, Michigan, and strategically sampled school districts. The study is based on empirical data from a four-year examination of approaches to the use of standards in nine Michigan districts between 1992 and 1996. This overview of the study’s findings first frames the subject of standards-based reform, and then moves to a discussion of the Michigan math and science standards. Variation in the progress of standards among districts is explored next, followed by… Continue Reading →
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eric.ed.gov har udgivet: This report presents an update of the progress of Tapping America’s Potential (TAP), a coalition of 15 of the nation’s leading business organizations, and assesses three years’ progress since 2005 in working towards the goal of doubling the number of students earning bachelor’s degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) by 2015. The report finds that since the initial TAP report that was issued three years ago, 2002-2006 data have become available that show U.S. STEM bachelor’s degrees awarded in that period fall short of what will be required to reach 400,000 by 2015. While the number of STEM degrees awarded has remained relatively flat for three years, the policy changes the business community has called for to attract and retain more undergraduate STEM majors have… Continue Reading →
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eric.ed.gov har udgivet: Four organizations with promising practices in teacher Professional Growth & Support have significantly raised outcomes for low-income students. The charter management networks, Achievement First and Aspire Public Schools, and the two reform organizations, Teach Plus and Agile Mind, have successfully increased student achievement with a sustained focus on teaching effectiveness and capacity. As these organizations respond to the challenges of Common Core standards, invest heavily in teaching capacity through teacher leadership and collaborative planning time, and capitalize on assessment and evaluation data and technology, they exemplify best practices in Professional Growth & Support. They also reinforce what Education Resource Strategies (ERS) terms the Eight Principles of a Strategic Professional Growth & Support System which are presented here. The eight principles summarize ERS research and work with partner… Continue Reading →
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eric.ed.gov har udgivet: Leaders of urban school systems are faced with a daunting fact: Some individual schools achieve incredible results for students from low-income communities, but no urban “school systems” achieve those results for all–or even most–children in an entire city. For generations, students in urban America have been underserved, with few achieving basic proficiency in reading and math, and even fewer completing college. At the same time, as cities and districts face shrinking education budgets while demands for college and career readiness increase, teachers are expected to do more with less. As new promising practices emerge at the classroom, school, district, and city levels, how can more educators and administrators be exposed to what is working elsewhere? For the purpose of this guidebook, personalized learning (PL) means that students’… Continue Reading →
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eric.ed.gov har udgivet: The Study of School Turnaround (SST) examines the change process in a diverse, purposive sample of schools receiving federal School Improvement Grants (SIG) from 2010-11 to 2012-13. With the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), the SIG program underwent three major shifts. First, ARRA boosted total SIG funding in fiscal year 2009 to approximately 6.5 times the original 2009 appropriation through Title I, section 1003(g) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). SIG funds were distributed to states by formula based on each state’s Title I share. States then had to competitively make SIG awards to districts with eligible schools. Second, ARRA targeted funds at only the very worst schools–those that were in the bottom 5 percent of performance and had… Continue Reading →
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eric.ed.gov har udgivet: While the idea of teacher performance-pay is increasingly making its way into policy, the evidence on the effectiveness of such programs is both limited and mixed. The central questions in the literature on teacher performance pay to date have been whether teacher performance pay based on test scores can improve student achievement, and whether there are negative consequences of teacher incentives based on student test scores? The literature on both of these questions highlight the importance of not just evaluating teacher incentive programs that are designed by administrators, but of using economic theory to design systems of teacher performance pay that are likely to induce higher effort from teachers towards improving human capital and less likely to be susceptible to gaming. Also, while there is a growing… Continue Reading →
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eric.ed.gov har udgivet: The United States’ education system needs to take its critical next step: fairly and accurately measuring teacher performance. Successful reforms to teacher pay, career advancement, professional development, retention, and other human capital systems that lead to better student outcomes depend on it. Where can the U.S. find the best-practice know-how for this? To start, it should look to nations that have revamped teacher performance measurement to sustain teaching excellence, and Singapore offers a remarkable example. In the early 2000s, the small but racially and economically diverse nation of Singapore designed and implemented a new, performance-linked method of measuring teacher effectiveness that enables measurement of teachers in all subjects and grades. Singapore had already developed a high-performing education system. But as global economic opportunities for its citizens increased,… Continue Reading →
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eric.ed.gov har udgivet: China has become an exporter of material goods to the world, particularly to the United States. It is time for the exploration of a mutually beneficial relationship in a strikingly different realm, that of human capital in higher education and its contributions to the quality of university teaching. To faculty members and students at U.S. universities the human face of this relationship is Chinese international teaching assistants (ITAs) who are graduate students in science and math, and who are also being supported as teachers of basic undergraduate courses within their academic disciplines. Chinese ITAs are the largest single group of international graduate students, and they make American undergraduate education possible in chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, business, and computer science. The quality of the performance of native English… Continue Reading →
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eric.ed.gov har udgivet: Since established by an Appropriations Act in 2006, the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) competitive grant program in the U.S. Department of Education has supported human capital strategies “to ensure that students attending high-poverty schools have better access to effective teachers and principals, especially in hard-to-staff subject areas” such as science and math. Responding to the national agenda to improve STEM education, in 2012, the fourth cohort of the Teacher Incentive Fund federal grant competition (TIF4) included special consideration for projects designed to improve STEM education by identifying, developing, and utilizing master teachers as leaders of broader improvements (OESE, 2012a). Houston Independent School District’s (HISD) approach to STEM education — described in this report — is an innovative policy response to the national challenges of preparing students for… Continue Reading →
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eric.ed.gov har udgivet: The fourth cohort of the Teacher Incentive Fund federal grant competition (“TIF4”) included special consideration for projects that would identify, develop, and utilize master teachers as leaders of STEM education. In September 2012, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) was awarded a TIF4 grant for $15.9 million to implement a human capital approach to improving STEM education. The TIF4 project schools were among the HISD schools serving grades K-8 with the highest student economic disadvantage and the most risk factors for chronic absenteeism. A human capital approach to strengthening STEM education addressed the TIF4 project schools’ need for high-quality supports for student learning, and the systemic challenges to teacher retention, development, and recruitment in hard-to-staff subjects. This report overviews the performance-based compensation strategies implemented through the TIF4… Continue Reading →
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