Tag: College completion

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Latest Edu-Reads

Howard Blume and Sonali Kohli look back on what’s happened in the wake of last year’s teacher strike in Los Angeles.

Educators for Excellence surveyed teachers on their opinions on pay, the profession, and performance.

Phyllis W. Jordan on the risks of including surveys in formal accountability systems.

Alex Spurrier on Blaine Amendments and why the Supreme Court may rule against them.

EdBuild identifies the 50 most segregating school district boundaries.

Nick Allen on helping low-income students succeed in postsecondary education by focusing on “match” and “fit.”

“Most predictions on the future of work suggest sustaining employment will depend on workers’ abilities to master new skills on the job. Short-term training programs tend to develop specialized skills, which may get an individual a job in the near term, but not necessarily include the foundational competencies that can affect income mobility — where it counts — on the job.” That’s Jim Jacobs on the pitfalls of short-term training programs.

Andy Rotherham on whether we’re asking textbooks to do too much on their own.

Buried in this Chicago Sun-Times dive into the Chicago Teachers Union finances is this sentence:

Asked about the union’s political activities, Jennifer Johnson, the CTU’s chief of staff, says the CTU’s work is “inherently political.” But she notes that members can decide whether their dues go to the union’s PACs.

Um, isn’t Johnson totally giving up on the unions’ argument in the 2018 Janus case? If all teachers union work is inherently political, as Johnson seems to admit here, then the court made the correct decision in Janus.

The California Legislative Analyst’s Office has an update on school district budgets, student enrollment, and staffing:

Overall Teacher Workforce Has Been Increasing. School districts had about 295,000 full‑time equivalent (FTE) teachers in 2018‑19, an increase of about 18,000 (6.4 percent) over the 2013‑14 level. Coupled with the effects of declining student attendance, the statewide student‑to‑teacher ratio, in turn, has been dropping over the past several years. In 2018‑19, it stood at about 21:1—comparable to the level prior to the Great Recession. Similarly, by 2018‑19, the statewide student‑to‑administrator ratio (237:1) had dropped below pre‑recession levels. Given the return of staffing levels to pre‑recession levels, coupled with declining student attendance, the pressure to hire additional teachers and reduce class sizes is likely to subside over the coming years. 

The LAO recommends that California use one-time budget surplus money to pay down pension and healthcare obligations, while the Governor’s office has other ideas. John Fensterwald digs into that dynamic.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

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Latest Edu-Reads

Beth Hawkins has your must-read of the week with the incredible true story of the Rosenwald schools. Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, partnered with Booker T. Washington to build more than 5,000 schools for black communities across the South. Researchers from the Federal Reserve “concluded that the Rosenwald schools significantly bolstered literacy, earnings and South-to-North migration among rural blacks.” Check out the full story here.

“Dallas ISD is in fact retaining its best teachers at rates above the state’s and the district’s retention rates before the implementation of TEI. Overall, the district has kept 93% of teachers rated “Proficient II” or above. The district has retained 100% of its master-level teachers.” That’s from an update on how Dallas is doing on retaining its best teachers.

Education Strategy Group has a new resource on how states can boost FAFSA completion rates.

InsideHigherEd reports on a new study finding that many programs at public and nonprofit colleges would also fail the “gainful employment” test.

A new brief by John V. Winters concludes, “Working in a locality where a greater share of the population has a college degree is correlated with higher wages and better employment outcomes even controlling for individuals’ own education and other characteristics. Studies based on various natural experiments suggest that this positive relationship is causal.” That is, education is not just a benefit to individuals, it also has wider societal benefits.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

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Latest Edu-Reads

After Memphis instituted universal screening for its gifted and talented programs, it saw a dramatic uptick in the number of black and Hispanic students who were identified.

Dana Goldstein’s New York Times piece on how textbooks differ across states is well done (and laid out beautifully). History may be written by the victors, but apparently it also has to cater to the whims of state boards of education.

Newark charter schools are producing large gains in reading and math achievement.

Matt Barnum has a helpful rundown of what the research says on what works (and doesn’t) to help students complete college.

Mary Wells offers five ways districts need to change to support autonomous schools.

This two-part conversation with Rick Hess about the complex nature of educational reform and philanthropy is worth your time. Here’s part one and part two. Mostly, it made me think of all the strange career incentives that are baked into our educational system.

How basketball is changing, in one graph.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

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Latest Edu-Reads

I missed it earlier, but this paper by E. Jason Baron is an important addition to the school funding debate. In Wisconsin, districts have to hold separate bond referenda if they want to raise operational spending (for things like instruction and supports) or capital spending (for school facilities). This allowed Baron to conclude that bond referenda focused on operational spending led to higher teacher pay and higher retention rates, not to mention increases in test scores and postsecondary enrollment. In contrast, however, the referenda focused on facilities were unrelated to changes in student outcomes. As I warned when the latest NAEP results came out, not all school spending is equal. And just because we’re spending more money on education in general, that doesn’t mean it’s going toward the things that actually produce gains for students.

Here’s a conversation between Bonnie O’Keefe, Brandon Lewis, and Jenn Schiess on school performance frameworks and the Chalkbeat story on GreatSchools’ ratings.

A report from Morgan Polikoff and Jennifer Dean finds that the materials on lesson-sharing websites Teachers Pay Teachers, ReadThinkWrite, and Share My Lesson are often weak and pitched below grade-level of the targeted students.

The WSJ reports on an open secret in the 403(b) world: Teachers are being targeted by predatory financial companies, and their school district employers are at best willing collaborators in these schemes.

Can we improve the standardized testing process by providing better, more tailored information to parents and teachers? EdNavigator tried a cool experiment of mailing “packets” of information (plus McDonald’s gift cards!) to high-performing Louisiana students. Read about their results here.

College graduation rates rose 6.6 percentage points from the entering class of 2006 to entrants in 2013, according to new data from the National Student Clearinghouse.

Speaking of boosting college completions, check out this story from Erica Bruenlin at the Colorado Sun. About 35 percent of Colorado’s public high school juniors and seniors were enrolled in college-level courses in 2017-18, up from 19 percent in 2012. Moreover, about 2,700 high school students completed some form of postsecondary credential in 2018, up 37 percent from the year prior.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

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College Attainment Gains By State

Last month, I wrote about how college attainment rates are climbing nationally. But what about individual states?

In fact, every state has rising college attainment rates. A report over the summer by Ithaka S+R found that every state increased its college attainment rate from 2005-2017, led by especially strong gains in Maine, Iowa, and Indiana. The graph below shows the gains by state. (Click on the graph to see the larger image, or, better yet, go read the original report.)

Many states have set goals for future attainment rates, but, to put it mildly, those goals have been set without consulting historical trends. The state attainment goals–say, 60 percent of adults with a college degree by the year 2025–have tended to cluster right around the 60 or 70 percent mark, regardless of how close the state is to reaching those targets already. If states wanted to be smarter about how they set their targets going forward, they should be looking backward at their own recent progress and adjusting accordingly.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman  

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Will Bachelor’s Degree Attainment Rates Keep Rising?

In 1950, 34.3 percent of American adults had a high school diploma or higher. Over the next 30 years, that percentage would double.

Today, about the same percentage of adults (34.2 percent) have a bachelor’s degree or higher. Will that percentage double over the next 30 years?

That may seem like a crazy question. College is different than high school, for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that we’ve decided to draw an arbitrary line at 12th grade. After that point, we expect individuals to pay for some or all of their education costs. That arbitrary distinction may be changing, albeit slowly.

But so far at least, high school and college attainment rates are following nearly the same path. The change in the high school attainment rate in the first half of the 1900s looks nearly identical to where we are today in terms of college attainment.

On a grand scale, the high school attainment rate looks like a pretty standard S-curve. After relatively modest gains in the 1910s and 1920s, growth rates started to accelerate in the 1970s and 80s before inevitably slowing down a bit since then:

If you look at only the left half of the high school attainment graph, that’s pretty much where we are in terms of bachelor’s degree attainment. Just like the early years for high school attainment, the growth in bachelor’s degree attainment was pretty slow for a long time but has picked up in recent decades. The data only go through 2017 so far, but in terms of college attainment gains, the 2010s are on track to be the best decade on record:

In fact, the early stages of the high school and college attainment trends look extremely similar. They’re just a couple generations apart. To show what this looks like, I overlaid the high school attainment rate from 1910-1960 versus the college attainment rate from 1975 to today, and the graph below is the result. The two have a correlation of 0.96, and the college attainment results (the red dots) are tightly hugging the blue trend line representing the change in high school attainment from a couple generations prior. 

As I wrote in 2015, the key question is what happens next. Do the college attainment rates stay on the linear trend they have been on, or do they start to look more like the S-curve path that high school attainment eventually followed?

There are a lot of factors that will answer that question. Mortality and immigration matter here, of course, but so do education policies. In the last half of the twentieth century, we created things like compulsory attendance laws, the GED, and the GI Bill to accelerate our attainment rates, to name just a few contributors. At the high school level, we got better at tracking enrollment and completion rates, and we eventually started holding high schools accountable for graduating their students.

All of these efforts are further behind at the higher education level. It’s an open question whether we’ll make the equivalent policy adjustments in higher education as we did in K-12, but the answers to that challenge matter both to the individuals graduating today and to our broader society going forward.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

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College Dropouts Outnumber K-12 Dropouts

Four years ago, I wrote about an eye-opening statistic: More American adults have dropped out of college than out of K-12 education. I recently updated the data, and the long-term trends are continuing:

In pure, raw numbers, college dropouts are now a bigger problem than high school dropouts*. As of 2017, there were almost 31 million college dropouts compared to 22.5 million Americans with less than a high school diploma. Over the last decade, the number of K-12 dropouts has fallen by over 5 million people, while the number of college dropouts has risen by nearly 3 million. As I predicted, this divergence will only accelerate as older generations with lower educational attainment rates are gradually replaced by new generations with higher attainment rates.

Last year I wrote about how this trend should shape the future work of education reformers. My conclusion at the time still stands:

We’ve had some success in boosting low-level basic skills and getting more students through K-12 education, but we need a different set of policy solutions, and a broader perspective, if we’re going to carry that progress through to higher-level skills and higher college completion rates. Finding those answers will matter both to the individuals in our education systems today and to our broader society going forward.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

*Note: “K-12 dropouts” here includes all Americans over age 25 who have less than a GED or high school diploma. “College dropouts” takes all Americans over age 25 who list “some college, no degree” as their highest level of educational attainment and subtracts out anyone over age 25 still enrolled in higher education seeking their first postsecondary credential or degree.