Teach Effectively!

Speaking to researchers attending a conference sponsored by the US Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that educational reforms should be be predicated on research about effectiveness.

“Education reform is not about sweeping mandates or grand gestures,” Duncan told the group of researchers who conduct research for IES, which is an independent section of the Education Department. “It’s about systematically examining and learning, building on what we’ve done right, and scrapping what hasn’t worked for kids.”

Continue reading ‘US ED Secy Duncan: Effectiveness data should drive reforms’

I took considerable pleasure today in reading an article by Maria Glod of the Washington Post in which she reported about plans to develop national standards in reading and mathematics for students in US schools. In her article, entitled “46 States, D.C. Plan to Draft Common Education Standards,” Ms. Glod described efforts by the governors of most US states to describe a framework of knowledge and skills that would characterize a high-school diplomate who is ready for the world of work or higher education or, ideally, both.

Forty-six states and the District of Columbia today will announce an effort to craft a single vision for what children should learn each year from kindergarten through high school graduation, an unprecedented step toward a uniform definition of success in American schools.

The push for common reading and math standards marks a turning point in a movement to judge U.S. children using one yardstick that reflects expectations set for students in countries around the world at a time of global competition. Today, each state decides what to teach in third-grade reading, fifth-grade math and every other class. Critics think some set a bar so that students can pass tests but, ultimately, are ill-prepared.
Continue reading ‘Progress on US standards’

Jennifer Jennings and Andrew Beveridge reported that exempting students from tests, a controversial practice sometimes employed with students with disabilities, may have deleterious effects on the performance of younger students with disabilities. Here’s the abstract:

Analyzing data from a large urban district in Texas, this study examines how high-stakes test exemptions alter officially reported scores and asks whether test exemption has implications for the academic achievement of special education students. Test exemption inflated overall passing rates but especially affected the passing rates of African American and Hispanic students because these students were more likely to be exempted. Furthermore, our results suggest that tested special education students in Grades 3 through 8 performed better academically than they would have if they were not tested. However, taking the high-stakes test provided no academic benefit to special education students in Grades 9 through 11.

I rarely work on topics related to high-stakes testing, so I am not well-enough informed to comment on this paper; however, I thought it was interesting enough to merit mention here. What do readers make of this finding?

Jennings, J. L., & Beveridge, A. A. (2009). How does test exemption affect schools’ and students’ academic performance? Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 31, 153-175.

News sources around the US are abuzz with how state and local education agencies will spend the influx of funds for special education that comes with the US government’s increases in IDEA funding under the stimulus plan.

• Schools getting stimulus aid, but is it too late? from AZ Central.com
• Schools’ stimulus a puzzle from the Daily Tribune – Columbia, MO
• State schools to get $118M from the News Sentinel – Knoxville, TN
• A boost for poor, special-needs kids from the Star Tribune – Minneapolis, MN
• Berkeley Unified Will Receive $2.4 Million in Stimulus Funds Next Month from the Daily Planet – Berkeley, CA

Given that these funds may be pretty fleeting (here today, gone in a couple of years?), how wise is it to invest in more teachers whom the LEAs will have to dismiss or materials that are likely to need replacement in just a few years? I’d say, “NOT!”

Why not invest in staff development, using the two-year span to ensure that virtually all teachers know how to measure progress in easy-but-rigorous ways (e.g., curriculum-based measurement), implement school-wide discipline programs, and present lessons in systematic and (dare I say it?) instructive ways?

Here are some relevant links: Research Institute on Progress Monitoring and Student Progress; School-wide Positive Behavioral Interventions & Supports.

Over on Reading Rockets Kathleen McLane has an entry about monitoring progress that’s got a good intro and some valuable links. Take a look at it. There’s also video about progress monitoring in action, a link to a Web cast featuring Roland Good, Mary Ruth Coleman, and Michael C. McKenna discussing assessment including progress monitoring, and an opportunity to ask CBM guru Lynn Fuchs questions about monitoring progress (click the dropdown menu to select Professor Fuchs as the target of your question).

E. D. Hirsch, author of several books worthy of mention, provided a column for the page opposite the editorial page of the New York Times on 22 March to which I’d like to call attention. Under the headline “Reading Test Dummies,” Professor Hirsch argues that the problem with contemporary, high-stakes tests isn’t that they test knowledge, but that they test the wrong knowledge.

Professor Hirsch leads by quoting President B. Obama’s expression of concern for developing assessments that “don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on on test.” Then he suggests that instead of discarding the tests, we should change their content.

These much maligned, fill-in-the-bubble reading tests are technically among the most reliable and valid tests available. The problem is that the reading passages used in these tests are random. They are not aligned with explicit grade-by-grade content standards. Children are asked to read and then answer multiple-choice questions about such topics as taking a hike in the Appalachians even though they’ve never left the sidewalks of New York, nor studied the Appalachians in school.

Continue reading ‘Hirsch on reading tests’

David J. Hoff of Ed Week posted an article reporting that there appears to be increasing support among US government officials for a common set of standards for academic outcomes. For those of us who are concerned about effective instruction, this is very welcome news. To be sure, national standards would have to be conceptualized very carefully, ensuring that they describe important competencies (not recitation of bits). Given the way that states have manipulated local standards, it is important to identify those core areas where we want educated students to be capable of demonstrating facility.

Absent agreed-upon foci for teaching, American education is likely to continue to meander, wander, and be subjected to fads and whims. Agreement about common goals and specification of widely accepted indicators of those goals would go a long way to providing a measuring stick against which educational methods could be compared. Then, it would easier to determine what methods are relatively more effective.

Anyway, here’s Mr. Hoff’s lead:
Continue reading ‘National standards would help US education become more effective’

The IRIS Center will contribute expertise about curriculum-based assessment to a pending webinar about response-to-instruction.

WestEd’s SchoolsMovingUp website will feature another free webinar, “Response to Intervention: Online Professional Development Modules and Resources for Classroom Assessment,” on Wednesday, February 18, from 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Pacific Time (1:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time).

This interactive webinar will highlight free online professional development modules and resources provided by the IRIS (IDEA ‘04 and Research for Inclusive Settings) Center for Training Enhancements to support the validated practice of monitoring students’ progress and curriculum-based assessment, a cornerstone of Response to Intervention (RtI). The presenters – Silvia DeRuvo, Senior Program Associate at the California Comprehensive Center at WestEd; Kimberly Skow, Project Coordinator of The IRIS Center; and Debbie DeBerry, practicing School Psychologist in Hardeman County, Tennessee – will discuss how these online professional development resources have been used to assist teachers in the essential practice of progress monitoring. This webinar is cosponsored by SchoolsMovingUp, the IRIS Center, and the California Comprehensive Center at WestEd.

Jump to the IRIS Center for more.