Latest Edu-Reads

Bellwether’s first early childhood newsletter came out last week. You can subscribe for updates here.

“While the average causal effect of hosting a student teacher on student performance in the year of the apprenticeship is indistinguishable from zero in both math and reading, hosting a student teacher is found to have modest positive impacts on student math and reading achievement in a teacher’s classroom in following years.” That’s from a new paper by Dan Goldhaber, John M. Krief, and Roddy Theobald about the impact of being an apprentice to an student teacher.

This Tampa Bay Times piece on how school choice is dividing Florida Democrats along racial lines is a must-read for anyone who cares about the choice issue, or the 2020 election.

Re Florida school choice, a new NBER study finds that the state’s private school choice program boosted outcomes for public school students.

Here’s Bonnie O’Keefe on the school choice politics in Newark.

The Oscars uses ranked-choice voting. Now so will Maine.

A new policy brief from AIR looks at the lasting benefits and strong cost-benefit returns of early college high schools.

That said, young college graduates aren’t faring as well today as their peers did in the past:

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

Latest Edu-Reads

My Bellwether colleagues are launching an early childhood newsletter. You should sign up!

Here’s Nisha Smales on the complex pathways early childhood educators take into the classroom.

Rising teacher pension costs are eating into expenditures on teacher salaries. Primarily, this seems to be about reductions in staffing rather than outright cuts to individual salaries.

The 13th annual CALDER conference has some interesting new research papers. I’m especially partial to this Charles Clotfelter, Helen Ladd, and Mavzuna Turaeva study on between- and within-school segregation in North Carolina.

EdSource on dual enrollment gaps in California.

I’m (very!) late to it, but this Nat Malkus report on the evolution of career and technical education is fascinating. For example, check out Table 6 on the changes in CTE concentrators by gender.

“In Mississippi, nearly 33,000 students — almost all of them African American — attend a school district rated as failing, like Holmes. White students account for less than 5 percent of enrollment in these districts, according to a Hechinger Report analysis of state data.” That’s Bracey Harris taking a deep dive on academic segregation in Mississippi.

USA Today takes a look at private placements for public school students with a disability. They find, “In California, Massachusetts and New York, for instance, the share of white students in private placement exceeds the share in public special education by about 10 percentage points. And in both California and Massachusetts, low-income students with disabilities were only half as likely to receive a private placement as their wealthier special education peers.”

John Arnold has a reminder on the long-term trends in childhood poverty rates:

“Hand-washing is one of the most important tools in public health. It can keep kids from getting the flu, prevent the spread of disease and keep infections at bay.” That’s from this old NPR story about a doctor who championed hand-washing before his time.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

Do Charter Schools Harm Traditional Public Schools?

It seems logical that motivated families leaving traditional public schools in favor of charter schools or private schools would harm the traditional school system. But that’s not what the research says, at least so far.

The graph below comes from a new Mathematica brief looking at studies that measured the causal effect of school choice on traditional public schools. As the graph shows, 10 studies that met Mathematica’s evidence bar found no effects of charter schools on traditional schools, nine found positive effects, two studies reported mixed results, and three found negative effects.

The studies included here were mainly looking at the early-stage phase-in of charter schools in various districts, and it’s possible that the balance might tilt away from charters as they grow their market share. But the evidence thus far suggests that charters either have no effect or perhaps even a slightly positive effect on traditional public schools.

In a separate brief, Mathematica looked at the effects of school choice on racial and economic integration. They concluded, “Among the studies with charter schools, 2 studies found that charter schools increased integration, 5 found no effect on integration, and 3 found that they decreased integration. Most studies we reviewed that found effects on integration tended to report small effects.”

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

Busy, Busy Bellwether

My Bellwether colleagues have been busy putting out some awesome new content recently. Some highlights:

Julie Squire, Melissa Steel King, and Justin Trinidad have a new deck on private schools and the “microschool” movement. Justin takes a deeper look at two low-cost private school models, Cristo Ray and Build UP.

Ashley LiBetti has advice for what would be the nation’s largest teacher residency program, and interviews Kathy Glazer, the President of the Virginia Early Childhood Foundation (VECF), which is bringing the apprenticeship model to early childhood.

Jennifer Schiess argues that North Carolina lawmakers missed an opportunity to increase their investment in early childhood education.

Bonnie O’Keefe and Brandon Lewis write about four ways states can improve their assessments.

And in conversations about juvenile justice facilities, Max Marchitello wishes we spent more time talking about the educational services provided to students in those facilities.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

Thoughts on Recent Edu-Reads

A typical teacher pension formula multiplies some factor (usually around 2 percent) times the employee’s salary and years of experience. It might look like this:

Pension = 2 percent X salary X years of experience

In the education context, we know that high-poverty schools tend to employ teachers with lower salaries and fewer years of experience. Pensions literally multiply those problems together. Max Marchitello explains and gives an example from West Virginia.

Technically speaking, Ohio school districts aren’t contributing toward teacher retirement benefits.

Tomas Monarrez, Brian Kisida, and Matthew M. Chingos have new work out on the intersection of charter schools and school segregation. They find that charters do contribute to segregation, a bit, but charters are not the primary driver and there’s wide variation across states and geographies. Here’s the Matt Barnum write-up or the Education Next version from the authors.

Even as someone with concerns about private school choice programs, I was reluctant to tout research showing that private school choice programs seemed to have a negative effect on student achievement in states like Indiana, Ohio, and Louisiana. I wondered if those results were driven more by alignment issues than quality ones. That is, it may be the case that private schools were no better or worse than public schools, but public schools were simply more focused on preparing students to pass state achievement tests. The Urban Institute is out with a new study this week supporting this theory. They found that private school choice programs in Florida and Milwaukee improved college enrollment and graduation rates (although not in Washington, D.C.). Personally, I think the debate over private schools comes down to a values question rather than being resolved by purely objective outcomes data.

Cara Jackson on how teacher residency programs can improve the diversity of our teacher workforce.

For-profit colleges have “got a friend in Trump.”

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman