Teacher Ed Makes a Difference

I've been away for a month or so but I thought this item was a good one to come back with. It's from Education Week:

Study: Teaching Credentials Still Matter

By Debra Viadero

If you listen to a lot of policy discussions on education, chances are that you've heard one scholar or another stand up to talk about how teacher credentials, such as holding a traditional license or having earned a master's degree, don't seem to matter much when it comes to improving student achievement.

Duke University researcher Helen F. Ladd says that there are two problems with those studies. The studies are: 1) old, and 2) focused mostly on elementary school children.

To gather newer data on the impact of teacher credentials and characteristics on high school students' achievement, Ladd and her research partners took a look at scores from the end-of-course exams that all high school students are required to take in North Carolina. They looked in particular at statewide data for four cohorts of 9th and 10th graders for whom they could find and match up data on their teachers. (The final sample included tens of thousands of students.)The bottom line, the researchers found, was that at the high school level, most measurable teacher credentials do indeed matter. And they have a large enough impact on student achievement, Ladd and her colleagues say, to suggest that they ought to figure into policymakers' decisions on how to raise the quality of instruction in schools.

Read the rest here.

Good News, Bad News

In Idaho, the International Baccalaureate program is being called "anti-American."

In Arizona, ethnic studies courses are being banned and state superintendent of public instruction Tom Horne says he doesn't like Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

The National Writing Project has posted links to some great articles about how writing supports reading.

And finally, here's some research support for using literacy coaches, (especially in schools where teachers have real authority and strong relationships with their peers).

NRC Report on Teacher Ed Finally Appears

Back in 2004, Congress commissioned the National Research Council to do a study of teacher preparation. Given the impact of the NRC report on the teaching of reading, that seemed like an important (possibly even alarming) development. As the months and years went by, I would occasionally visit the NRC website to see if they were making any progress. Once in a while the minutes of a meeting would be posted but eventually it looked as though the project had disappeared into the bureaucratic ether. I thought perhaps it had lost its funding. (I realize that admitting I was following this so closely shows what a nerd I am.) But today the study finally appeared. You can read about it in Education Week or buy a copy here. Now, in 2010, it doesn't seem quite so important, but I'm not sure why.

Random Access

This is from an article at Education Week about the perils of doing randomized experiments in educational settings:

Study of Federal Upward Bound Program at Risk

By Debra Viadero

Congress is weighing plans to scuttle a $5 million evaluation of the national Upward Bound program for low-income high school students because the federal study calls for randomly assigning students to either the program or a control group.

_____________________________

“You can’t tell a kid, ‘You’re going to be in this life-changing program,’ and then say, ‘No you’re only going to be in the control group,’ ” said Susan Trebach, a spokeswoman for the Council for Educational Opportunity, a Washington-based group that represents administrators of Upward Bound and other federal college-access programs. “We already have some people telling us the kids they deal with are devastated.”

Levine on Educational Research

From Inside Higher Ed:

May 7
Filling the Void
“Form triumphs over substance.”

If Arthur Levine’s 92-page report, “Educating Researchers,” could be condensed into a sentence, that would be it. The report, released today, is the third in a series written by Levine, president emeritus of Columbia University’s Teachers College and now president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, where he has continued his inquiries into the state of teacher education.

Now he has turned his focus to the quality of research at education schools, and the methods and practices passed on to aspiring researchers in education doctoral programs — programs that, Levine told Inside Higher Ed, are more interested in the “form” of handing out doctorates than the “substance” of good research to back them up.

More here, or go directly to the report.

AERA Webcasts

AERA has some interesting webcasts from the AERA convention available on their site. They include talks by Deborah Ball ("The Case for Ed Schools, and the Challenge"); Stephen Raudenbush ("How Shall We Study The Cause and Effects of Classroom Teaching?"); and James D. Anderson ("Race-Conscious Student Assignment Policies and the 14th Amendment: An Historical Perspective"). It's almost as good as being there.

A Barely Passing Grade

USA Today has a report about a study funded by NICHD that "take[s] teachers to task for spending too much time on basic reading and math skills and not enough on problem-solving, reasoning, science and social studies." Of course it's the fault of the teachers. Who else could it be?

Study gives teachers barely passing grade in classroom
By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
The typical child in the USA stands only a one-in-14 chance of having a consistently rich, supportive elementary school experience, say researchers who looked at what happens daily in thousands of classrooms.

The findings, published today in the weekly magazine Science, take teachers to task for spending too much time on basic reading and math skills and not enough on problem-solving, reasoning, science and social studies. They also suggest that U.S. education focuses too much on teacher qualifications and not enough on teachers being engaging and supportive.

Funded by the National Institutes of Health, educational researchers spent thousands of hours in more than 2,500 first-, third- and fifth-grade classrooms, tracking kids through elementary school. It is among the largest studies done of U.S. classrooms, producing a detailed look at the typical kid's day.

The researchers found a few bright spots — kids use time well, for one. But they found just as many signs that classrooms can be dull, bleak places where kids don't get a lot of teacher feedback or face time. (Read the rest here.)

Teaching in the the World of Wikipedia

Inside Higher Ed reports that the history department at Middlebury College has begun to prohibit students from citing Wikipedia in papers they write for class. This strikes me as an important issue for English educators because we not only set policies about research and writing practices for our own classes, we also teach about appropriate practices for writing from sources in high school. How do you approach Wikipedia? How about other online sources? Is it enough if students properly "cite the site" or should we be doing more to, in the words of the Middlebury history department chair, "[reduce] the dissemination of misinformation?"

Promising Researcher Award

Guidelines for the NCTE Promising Researcher Award Competition

in Recognition of Bernard O’Donnell

Eligibility

The 2007 Promising Researcher Award Competition is open to individuals who have completed dissertations, theses, or initial, independent studies after the dissertations between December 1, 2004, and January 31, 2007. Studies entered into competition should be related to the teaching of English or the language arts, e.g., language development, literature, composition, teacher education/professional development, linguistics, etc., and should have employed a recognized research approach, e.g., historical, ethnographic, interpretive, experimental, etc. In recognition of the fact that the field has changed in recent years, the Committee on Research invites entries from a variety of scholarly perspectives.

Procedures and Deadlines

1. Entrance: Candidates must submit two (2) copies of a manuscript based on their research. Manuscripts should be written in format, style, and length appropriate for submission to a research journal such as Research in the Teaching of English, College Composition and Communication, Curriculum Inquiry, Teaching and Teacher Education, or Anthropology and Education Quarterly. Normal manuscripts range between 25?50 double-spaced pages. (Tables, figures, references, and appendices are considered part of the “manuscript.”) All pages must be on standard 8 ½" x 11" paper, must have at least 1” margins at the top, bottom, and both sides, and must be in a standard font. Manuscripts in any other form (abstracts, dissertation reports, reprints, or published articles, etc.) cannot be considered in this competition. Although manuscripts should conform to the publication standard of the above-mentioned journals, selection as a Promising Researcher does not guarantee eventual publication in those journals.

Manuscripts should be sent to: NCTE, Promising Researcher Award Competition, 1111 W. Kenyon Road, Urbana, IL. 61801, Attention: Felisa Love.

Manuscripts must be received on or before March 1, 2007. Accompanying all manuscripts must be a written statement verifying that the research was completed within the specified completion dates. This letter must come from someone other than the candidate (e.g., the major professor or a researcher knowledgeable in the field) who agrees to sponsor the candidate.

2. The name, current address, position, and telephone number of the entrant should be transmitted along with the manuscript to facilitate communication between the selection committee and the entrant. This information should be on the cover page only.

3. Judging: Manuscripts received on or before March 1, 2007, will be transmitted to members of the selection committee for evaluation. Results of the judging will be available after May 15, 2007, and entrants will be notified of the results shortly thereafter. Manuscripts will not be returned to the authors.

4. Summary of Dates and Deadlines:

Completion dates for research entered: December 1, 2004 -January 31, 2007

March 1, 2007 - Deadline for receipt of manuscripts (two copies)

May 15, 2007 - Results of final judging will be available