SOE News

Brian Jacob

Brian Jacob, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Education Policy, professor of education, professor of public policy, and professor of economics, has co-authored a thorough evaluation of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, The Impact of No Child Left Behind on Student Achievement. With co-author Thomas Dee of Swarthmore College, Jacob’s research finds that NCLB reforms generated statistically significant increases in the average math performance of 4th graders as well as improvements at the lower and top achievement percentiles. There was also evidence of improvements in 8th grade math achievement, particularly among traditionally low-achieving groups and at the lower percentiles. However, the authors find no evidence that NCLB increased reading achievement in either 4th or 8th grade.

Jacob and Dee also looked at NCLB’s effects by race, gender, and free-lunch eligibility and found only modest impacts among disadvantaged subgroups in math, therefore making minimal progress towards closing achievement gaps.

“The prior evidence on the achievement effects is quite limited. Earlier studies have either focused on single districts or states, relied on state developed assessments that are subject to ’score inflation’, or used weak research designs that confound the impact of NCLB with other social, educational and economic factors, “said  Jacob. “We believe this new research sheds much-needed light on the results of what was arguably the most far-reaching education policy initiative of the last forty years.”

The reearch is published as a National Bureau of Economics Working Paper. The U-M Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy issued a press release and Education Week posted an article on its website.

Ed Silver

Edward Silver, William A. Brownell Collegiate Professor of Education and professor of mathematics at LSA, will receive the 2009 Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Department of Mathematics, Science, and Technology at Teachers College, Columbia University. He will receive the award at a ceremony on November 16, 2009, following which he will give a presentation, “Hit Me with Your Best Shot: Examining What Teachers Do When Teaching Mathematics for Understanding.”

Brian Rowan, Burke A. Hinsdale Collegiate Professor in Education, discusses Michigan’s public K-12 education in a video posted on the university’s news site: (more…)

Dean Deborah Loewenberg Ball, William H. Payne Collegiate Professor in Education and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, is a member of a working group of the National Academy of Education (NAEd) that has released a new white paper on teacher quality (pdf) calling for improvements in teacher recruitment, preparation, and ongoing professional development.

Deborah Loewenberg Ball

Based on current research evidence, the paper outlines several recommendations for improving teacher quality. According to the paper, the quality of teaching is not simply determined by an individual’s knowledge or ability, but also by the preparation teachers receive and the environments in which teachers work. Improving teacher quality thus entails policies concerning recruitment, early preparation, and retention (including attention to working conditions), as well as professional development.

The paper calls for school districts, states, and the federal government to continue to experiment with various approaches to teacher recruitment, while collecting data that can be used to improve approaches that are promising and end those that are not. Tools should be developed that can reliably establish that new recruits to teaching have the skills they need to be successful from the start.

States, school districts, and the federal government should also support research on a variety of approaches to teacher preparation. Investments should be made in research and development on the core practices and skills that early career teachers require, and preparation programs should then focus on these skills.

The paper states that although teacher recruitment is important, retention is of even greater concern. Thus, states and the federal government should encourage and fund experimentation with a wide range of teacher retention strategies. This should include strategies that target individual teachers, such as financial incentives, as well as strategies that target schools and districts through initiatives to improve school leadership, mentoring, and the provision of high-quality opportunities for professional growth. The federal government should also support the development of robust and valid measures of teacher quality that can be used in identifying which teachers are effective and should be retained.

Finally, the paper recommends that districts, states, and the federal government take steps to improve teachers’ access to high-quality professional development that is appropriate to the grades, subjects, and students they are teaching. In particular, the federal government should invest in research and development to strengthen professional development strategies.

In addition to Ball, other members of the Teacher Quality working group include Chair Suzanne Wilson, College of Education, Michigan State University;  Anthony Bryk, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; David Figlio, Department of Economics, University of Florida; Pamela Grossman, School of Education, Stanford University; Jacqueline Jordan Irvine, Division of Educational Studies, Emory University; Judith Warren Little, Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley; Susanna Loeb, School of Education, Stanford University; and Andrew Porter, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania.

Lisa Kurtz (2008 CERT, AB)

Lisa Kurtz, a 2008 SOE alumna, has been selected by the Alliance for Excellent Education, a federal policy and advocacy organization, to speak at an event on November 3, 2009, at which they will release a brief on the need to reform teacher education. The group’s focus is on advocating for underserved secondary students. The brief is titled Teaching for a New World: Preparing High School Educators to Deliver College-and Career-Ready Instruction.

Kurtz teaches mathematics at Grosse Pointe South High School. At the event, she plans to focus on how the University of Michigan prepared her, especially in methods and literacy, and on how she implements her education and training in her classroom.

Update on November 6, 2009: Materials, including audio and video, are available.

Magdalene Lampert

Magdalene Lampert, George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor in Education, has been selected by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as one of five senior partners who will guide the development of the program’s agenda. The first topic is expected to be high failure rates among students in developmental mathematics in community colleges.

The other partners are Louis M. Gomez, the Faison Chair in Urban Education, University of Pittsburgh; James W. Stigler, professor of psychology, University of California, Los Angeles; Uri Treisman, director of the Charles A Dana Center and professor of mathematics and public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin; and Guadalupe Valdés, the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education, Stanford University.

“With the help of these partners, each of whom brings expertise to the work, Carnegie will convene the right mix of practitioners, researchers, social entrepreneurs, policy makers, and other stakeholders—including students—to map the dimensions of a problem, identify promising solutions, and to advocate and support the efforts of a community engaged in continuous evidence-based improvement,” Carnegie President Anthony S. Bryk said. “These five partners will be integral to these efforts.”

Lampert’s research has focused on understanding and portraying the world of classroom practice to the academic community, providing images of teaching practice that make the proposed reforms in mathematics education concrete, identifying elements of teaching that novices need to learn to do, and experimenting with interactive multimedia tools for both analyzing and representing the work of teaching. She is assisting the Carnegie Foundation in focusing its attention on learning teaching, drawing from her current work investigating how teacher education can be structured to enable learning in, from, and for practice.

On October 22, 2009, at Columbia Teachers College, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan identified SOE’s teacher education program as a “first-rate teacher preparation program” in a speech in which he discussed the necessity for deep and meaningful reform of preparation programs for aspiring teachers–he called for “a sea-change in our schools of education.” He identified three educational challenges facing our country: 1) the education that Americans received in the past is inadequate for today’s information and knowledge-based society; 2) educational disparities betray our ideal of education as the great equalizer; and 3) we are at the beginning of a massive exodus of Baby Boomers from the teaching force.

To keep America competitive, and to make the American dream of equal educational opportunity a reality, we need to recruit, reward, train, learn from, and honor a new generation of talented teachers. But the bar must be raised for successful teacher preparation programs because we ask much more of teachers today than even a decade ago. Today teachers are asked to achieve significant academic growth for all students at the same time that they instruct students with ever-more diverse needs. Teaching has never been more difficult, it has never been more important, and the desperate need for more student success has never been so urgent. Are we adequately preparing future teachers to win this critical battle?

I am urging every teacher education program today to make better outcomes for students the overarching mission that propels all their efforts. America’s great educational challenges require that this new generation of well-prepared teachers significantly boost student learning and increase college-readiness. President Obama has set an ambitious goal of having America regain its position as the nation with the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. But to reach that goal, both our K-12 system and our teacher preparation programs have to get dramatically better. The stakes are huge—and the time to cling to the status quo has passed.

SOE’s Teacher Education Initiative encompasses many of our innovative efforts to reassess and teach the necessary and complex combination of skills and knowledge that produce high quality teachers.

Deborah Loewenberg Ball

Dean Deborah Loewenberg Ball, William H. Payne Collegiate Professor in Education and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, and Bob Moses, president and founder of the Algebra Project sat together for an interview that is printed in the October 2009 issue of Phi Delta Kappan. They each talk about their background before discussing why mathematics education in general, and algebra in particular, are vital to children’s success. While they each lament the condition of the U.S.’s educational system and its role in creating and preserving inequity, they also offer hope and insights for improving the state of education.

The article, Equity and Mathematics: An Interview with Deborah Ball and Bob Moses, is available from the Phi Delta Kappa website. A PDF is available to members, non-members have the option to buy the article.

Susan Dynarski

Susan Dynarski, associate professor of education and associate professor of public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, was quoted in an October 13, 2009, article on the Inside Higher Ed website, In Search of Evidence, and Acceptance.  The subject is a meeting convened in Phoenix, Arizona on October 8 and 9, 2009, by the University of Phoenix, the University of Southern California, and the Lumina Foundation for Education. This meeting brought together a variety of scholars and higher education administrators to begin framing an agenda for a new research center that the University of Phoenix is creating.

The University of Phoenix, a for-profit institution, has a large data collection—15 terabytes of data on students’ academic outcomes—to fuel the new research center.

About for-profit institutions, Dynarski said: “These institutions are potentially labs for innovation, because there’s experimentation going on” in terms of learning techniques and student support services, but “the studies that would let us glean insights into that aren’t happening.” She said for-profit institutions have an opportunity to become leaders in higher education research.

Deborah Loewenberg Ball

On October 8, 2009, Dean Deborah Loewenberg Ball, William H. Payne Collegiate Professor in Education and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, gave a lecture that was the inaugural event for the University of Utah’s Center for Science and Mathematics Education. Ball was interviewed for an article that appeared in the October 8, 2009, Salt Lake Tribune.

…improving math education has been a divisive national discussion, but Ball has been credited for serving as a bridge builder, particularly in her capacity as a member of the Presidential National Mathematics Advisory Panel.

Ball supports the formation of centers like the U.’s, designed to explore ways to fix U.S. kids’ sagging performance in math and science.

“We have a problem with a lack of coordination,” Ball said. “Centers can help bring together expertise so you don’t have these multiple initiatives that cancel each other out. This will leverage more strengths for math education, at least in your state.”