Tag: School choice

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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 

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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 

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Robin V. Harris has a great story about Polly Williams, considered the “mother of school choice,” a Milwaukee-area Democrat, black activist and community organizer, and the longest-serving woman in the Wisconsin state legislature.

Last year Galileo Learning reached a record-breaking goal, offering scholarships to upwards of 15 percent of their campers. Here’s how the Bellwether team helped.

Here’s a cool data visualization tool from the Urban Institute that lets you look up individual schools to see how student demographics have changed over time.

Speaking of diversity, a new study finds that voters in local school board elections often look very different than the student body in their school district. As Matt Barnum notes in his Chalkbeat write-up, part of the problem is due to school board elections being off-cycle from national presidential elections. The smaller, less-diverse turnout in school board elections tends to elect less-diverse school board members who, in turn, support policies that are less likely to benefit black and Hispanic students.

Timothy Shanahan on the “last mile problem” in reading instruction.

Brandon Lewis on how districts can differentiate their own local school rating systems from the ratings put out by their state.

Checker Finn compares the quality checks on test-based accountability systems versus subjective evaluations of student work:

When we seek alternatives to the proctored and monitored exam form of high-stakes accountability, however, the challenges multiply. Nearly always, those alternatives—whether classroom work, teacher-administered exams, student projects, performances, portfolios, you name it—are judged subjectively, almost always by adults who know the kids’ identities and academic track records, and most of the time by adults who also have reasons to seek student success, whether it’s because they care about a kid passing and graduating or they’re being hassled by parents or principal or they know that the school’s passing or graduation rate is on the line.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

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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

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Alex Spurrier’s op-ed on school choice in Louisville includes this zinger: “For too long, low-income families in Louisville have had to settle for what other people think is best for their children, while the affluent can vote with their feet and their pocketbooks.”

Jennifer Schiess on how school performance frameworks can be designed for system management and accountability.

Speaking of which, a new study by Sade Bonilla and Thomas Dee finds that NCLB waivers had a positive effect in “focus schools” in Kentucky.

Tyler Cowen and Ben Southwood find that the rate of scientific progress is slowing down. They write, “To sum up the basic conclusions of this paper, there is good and also wide-ranging evidence that the rate of scientific progress has indeed slowed down, In the disparate and partially independent areas of productivity growth, total factor productivity, GDP growth, patent measures, researcher productivity, crop yields, life expectancy, and Moore’s Law we have found support for this claim.”

This tool from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce is fun to play around with. It lets you see return on investment at different points in time for 4,500 higher education institutions across the country. For example, I noticed that my alma mater, the University of Iowa, has a 10-year net present value of $132,000, good for 1,457th nationwide. Meanwhile, Iowa’s community colleges perform much better on this metric. Northwest Iowa Community College in tiny Sheldon, Iowa (with a total population of 5,188 residents) has a 10-year ROI of $209,000, good for 170th nationwide.

In contrast, four-year baccalaureate institutions like Iowa State University, the University of Iowa, and Drake University score much higher on the 40-year ROI calculations. This sort of stuff is fun to play around with, but it also has implications for how we evaluate programs and institutions to decide whether they’re “successful” or not.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

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Interested in autonomous district schools that enjoy the flexibility and innovation of charters, while remaining in their local district? My Bellwether colleagues Mary Wells and Tresha Francis Ward created a toolkit for that.

Of the 11 million children with working moms, more than half spend more time in family childcare than any other setting. Sara Mead profiles a new report from All Our Kin looking at the conditions needed to help family childcare providers (and the kids they serve) thrive.

Cara Jackson on the conditions in which it makes sense to conduct an experimental study on students.

Daniel DiSalvo cites some of our work at TeacherPensions.org to note that most teachers in the Chicago strike will never benefit from the pension system that’s wreaking havoc on the district’s finances.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman