Education and Literacy, Employment and Labor
Minnesota is one of a handful of states that requires decisions about who to hire, promote or even lay off in public schools to be made solely based on years on the job. This executive summary highlights survey results that show voters overwhelmingly want performance, not seniority, to drive public school staffing decisions.
Researchers conducted the survey in December 2011. Respondents included registered voters in Minnesota and the total sample size was 1,000, stratified by age and gender to correspond with state population estimates.
Major findings include:
- Minnesotans agree on how to measure teacher performance
- Minnesotans want to make teacher layoffs based on performance
- Minnesotans agree on how to measure principal performance
- Minnesotans want to compensate teachers based on performance
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Midwestern)-Minnesota
Dual enrollment in high school is viewed by many as one mechanism for increasing college admission and completion of low-income students. However, little evidence demonstrates that these students discretely benefit from dual enrollment and whether these programs narrow attainment gaps vis-à-vis students from middle-class or affluent family backgrounds. Using the National Education Longitudinal Study (N = 8,800), this study finds significant benefits in boosting rates of college degree attainment for low-income students while holding weaker effects for peers from more affluent backgrounds. These results remain even with analyses from newer data of college freshman of 2004. This report conducts sensitivity analyses and found that these results are robust to relatively large unobserved confounders. However, expanding dual enrollment programs would modestly reduce gaps in degree attainment.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
The "Bennett Hypothesis" is the theory that : The availability of federal loans -- particularly subsidized loans offering a below-market interest rate and payment of interest as long as the student is enrolled in school -- provides "cover" for colleges to raise their prices, because students can offset a price increase, or at least a portion of that increase, with federal loans.
This report examines research that attempts to prove or disprove the Bennett Hypothesis, with a focus primarily on the impact of federal grants and loans on college and university tuition price increases. Section two presents a brief overview of federal student financial aid programs, recent trends in tuition prices, and the economic theory behind financial aid and tuition prices. Section three reviews some of the research that has analyzed the veracity of the Bennett Hypothesis over the years.
Section three also describes studies with similar methodologies but contrary findings. The research suffers from limitations in the data used, particularly in the measures of federal aid used as predictors. There are also limitations in the data analysis methodologies employed, including the researchers' inability to fully control for all of the complex factors that go into the decisions that institutions make when determining tuition prices. More details about these issues are presented in this section. The final section summarizes what this body of research tells us about the relationship between federal student aid and tuition prices.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
Minnesota public education -- from preschool to college and everything in between -- is poised for a breakthrough. Education requires fundamental and systemic change to meet the needs of an increasingly competitive and global workforce, and growing diverse populations. This is the case particularly for Minnesota where great schools can prepare all kids for thriving futures.
This poll captures the opinions of over 400 teachers and hopes to bring about change that will eliminate the current situation of nation-trailing achievement gaps and high school graduation rates.
Building off of the success of MinnCAN's 2012 statewide public opinion poll, where 1,000 Minnesotans were interviewed on public education, this report takes a similar approach to dig deeper with district school teachers through a 28-question poll. The topics discussed were: effective teaching, educator evaluations, professional development and school staffing decisions.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States (Midwestern) / Minnesota
After two decades of standards-based reform, a new education paradigm has begun to take hold -- the rise of competency education. This new vision builds on the strong foundation of new college and career ready standards, challenging stakeholders to design an education system that emphasizes mastery of content standards and the transferable skills critical to success in college and today's workforce.
A competency education system puts students at the center, replacing rigid time-based structures with flexible learning environments that ensure students receive the support and extra time they need to succeed. This highly-personalized approach provides clear, individualized pathways to student proficiency that help mobilize stakeholders around the collective goal of college and career readiness for all students.
A growing number of states and districts have begun to embrace this vision for education, leading to an explosion of new policies, pilot initiatives, and tools designed to help schools implement competencybased approaches.The success of the competency movement depends heavily on the federal government's willingness to partner with states and districts as they design education systems that put students at the center.
A true partnership will grant states the flexibility to innovate and develop equally ambitious accountability and assessment policies that better align with student centered education to ensure all students graduate with the knowledge and skills to succeed.
This paper is the first in a series to help policymakers define the appropriate role for the federal government supporting competency education in the nation's K-12 schools.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
Some 60 percent of the nation's 13 million community college students are unprepared for college-level courses and must enroll in at least one developmental course....[and] less than a quarter of students in developmental math courses earn a degree or credential within eight years.
Faced with a long sequence of pre-college-level, non-credit courses, often repeating math material they've failed before, half of them quit within the first few weeks of enrolling in the courses. They quit because they believe they aren't smart enough to do math, that the class itself has little relevance to their personal or academic goals, and that they don't really belong in the course or in college at all.
And because such students cannot get to graduation if they cannot get past mathematics, the result is not just a dropped class, but the end of college and the economic insecurity that often results from not earning a degree.
This report examines the success of the Pathways programs created by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching which is currently being taught in 28 different community colleges nationwide. The Pathways program differs from traditional developmental math courses in that it is a yearlong class for academic credit with fewer students dropping out, most earning college credit toward graduation, and some even discovering a predilection for mathematics.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
Some 60 percent of the nation's 13 million community college students are unprepared for college-level courses and must enroll in at least one developmental course....[and] less than a quarter of students in developmental math courses earn a degree or credential within eight years.
Faced with a long sequence of pre-college-level, non-credit courses, often repeating math material they've failed before, half of them quit within the first few weeks of enrolling in the courses. They quit because they believe they aren't smart enough to do math, that the class itself has little relevance to their personal or academic goals, and that they don't really belong in the course or in college at all.
And because such students cannot get to graduation if they cannot get past mathematics, the result is not just a dropped class, but the end of college and the economic insecurity that often results from not earning a degree.
This report examines the success of the Pathways programs created by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching which is currently being taught in 28 different community colleges nationwide. The Pathways program differs from traditional developmental math courses in that it is a yearlong class for academic credit with fewer students dropping out, most earning college credit toward graduation, and some even discovering a predilection for mathematics.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) is a rapidly expanding network of public charter schools whose mission is to improve the education of low-income children. As of the 2012 -- 2013 school year, 125 KIPP schools are in operation in 20 different states and the District of Columbia (DC). Ultimately, KIPP's goal is to prepare students to enroll and succeed in college.
Prior research has suggested that KIPP schools have positive impacts on student achievement, but most of the studies have included only a few KIPP schools or have had methodological limitations. This is the second report of a national evaluation of KIPP middle schools being conducted by Mathematica Policy Research. The evaluation uses experimental and quasi-experimental methods to produce rigorous and comprehensive evidence on the effects of KIPP middle schools across the country.
The study's first report, released in 2010, described strong positive achievement impacts in math and reading for the 22 KIPP middle schools for which data were available at the time. For this phase of the study, we nearly doubled the size of the sample, to 43 KIPP middle schools, including all KIPP middle schools that were open at the start of the study in 2010 for which we were able to acquire relevant data from local districts or states. This report estimates achievement impacts for these 43 KIPP middle schools, and includes science and social studies in addition to math and reading. This report also examines additional student outcomes beyond state test scores, including student performance on a nationally norm-referenced test and survey-based measures of student attitudes and behavior.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
