This paper offers an opportunity for state leadership to reflect upon their efforts and share their insights into re-engineering the policy and practices of our K-12 systems that were built over hundreds of years. In this paper, we introduce the concept of competency education and explain why the traditional time-based system is holding back our children and our nation. We will discuss the important initial steps taken by states in introducing competency education. Then we will draw on interviews with state leadership about their strategies, lessons learned, and the emerging policy infrastructure that is needed for full alignment with competency education. We close with some thoughts about creating a culture of competency within state agencies.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States
Educators have long asserted that the middle grade years (typically, grades six through eight) are a time of both great importance and vulnerability in students' K-12 schooling. Anecdotal and empirical evidence suggest that students encounter new social and emotional challenges, increased academic demands, and major developmental transitions during the middle grade years. In this study, we investigate whether and how students' achievement and attendance change between grade four and eight and identified moments during this period when students' achievement and attendance suggest that they will struggle to graduate from high school within four years.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Northeastern)-New York-New York County-New York City
This report contributes to the discussion of charter schools by providing evidence for charter students' performance in Massachusetts for six years of schooling, beginning with the 2005-2006 school year and concluding in 2010-2011.
With the cooperation of the Massachusetts Department of Education, CREDO obtained the historical sets of student-level administrative records. The support of Massachusetts DOE staff was critical to CREDO's understanding of the character and quality of the data received. However, it bears mention that the entirety of interactions with the Department dealt with technical issues related to the data. CREDO has developed the findings and conclusions independently.
This report provides an in-depth examination of the results for charter schools in Massachusetts. It is also an update to CREDO's first analysis of the performance of Massachusetts's charter schools, which can be found on the organization's website.
This report has three main benefits. First, it provides an updated rigorous and independent view of the performance of the state's charter schools. Second, the study design is consistent with CREDO's reports on charter school performance in other locations, making the results amenable to being benchmarked against those nationally and in other states. Third, the study includes a section on charter performance in the Boston area, where much attention has focused.
The analysis presented here takes two forms. We first present the findings about the effects of charter schools on student academic performance. These results are expressed in terms of the academic progress that a typical student in Massachusetts would realize from a year of enrollment in a charter school. The second set of findings is presented at the school level. Because schools are the instruments on which the legislation and public policy works, it is important to understand the range of performance for the schools. These findings look at the performance of students by school and present school average results.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States (Northeastern) / Massachusetts
Education and Literacy, Employment and Labor
This report explores the conditions under which middle-school teachers in New York City leave their schools, and the consequences of this turnover. The focus on middle schools stems from the widely-held view that the middle grades are a critical turning point in the lives of children, and that many New York City school children lose academic momentum in these grades, setting them on trajectories of failure as they move towards high school and life beyond it. This report is based on a survey of more than 4,000 full-time middle school teachers working in 125 of the nearly 200 middle schools in New York City serving children in grades six through eight in the 2009-10 school year. The participating teachers reported whether they had considered leaving their current school or leaving teaching during that school year, and the reasons that they considered leaving. The report links their responses to teachers' reports about their own backgrounds and experiences, to the demographic characteristics of the schools in which they teach, and to the collective perceptions of all of the teachers in a school about that school as a workplace. This report is part of a three-year, mixed-methods study of teacher turnover in New York City middle schools.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Northeastern)-New York-New York County-New York City
Ohio's charter-closure law is touted as one of the toughest in the nation because it requires the automatic closure of charter schools that consistently fail to meet academic standards. The law has been showcased by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) in its "One Million Lives" campaign, which calls for tougher state laws to close failing charter schools.
The widespread attention and support of the NACSA campaign has pushed Ohio's closure law into the spotlight as a model of accountability for low-performing charter schools. However, The Plain Dealer's editorial board, in a commentary on NACSA's praise of Ohio's charter school accountability standards, pointed out what NACSA did not: Ohio's charter school laws, while they may have stronger mandates for closure than those of other states, are still replete with loopholes.
Since the charter-closure law went into effect in 2008, 20 schools across the state have met closure criteria, and all are currently listed as closed by the Ohio Department of Education (ODE). But an investigation of the schools by Policy Matters revealed that eight schools -- and the management companies that run them -- have found ways to skirt the closure law and remain open, severely undermining the law's effectiveness and highlighting the lax accountability that prevails in Ohio's charter sector. For-profit managers -- the Leona Group, Mosaica Education and White Hat Management -- operate six of the reopened schools.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Midwestern)-Ohio
Community and Economic Development, Education and Literacy
Large-scale public school closures have become a fact of life in many American cities, and that trend is not likely to stop now. This report
looks at what happens to the buildings themselves, studying the experiences of Philadelphia and 11 other cities that have decommissioned large numbers of schools in recent years: Atlanta, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Kansas City, Mo., Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Tulsa and Washington.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Midwestern)-Missouri-St. Louis County-St. Louis, North America-United States (Midwestern)-Missouri-Jackson County-Kansas City, North America-United States (Midwestern)-Michigan-Wayne County-Detroit, North America-United States (Midwestern)-Illinois-Cook County-Chicago, North America-United States (Midwestern)-Ohio-Cuyahoga County-Cleveland, North America-United States (Midwestern)-Ohio-Hamilton County-Cincinnati, North America-United States (Midwestern)-Wisconsin-Milwaukee County-Milwaukee, North America-United States (Northeastern)-Pennsylvania-Allegheny County-Pittsburgh, North America-United States (Southern)-District of Columbia-Washington, North America-United States (Southern)-Georgia-Fulton County-Atlanta, North America-United States (Southern)-Oklahoma-Tulsa County-Tulsa
Education and Literacy;Race and Ethnicity
Part of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's Breaking Barriers series, the report shows how states, districts, and schools systematically deny opportunity for black males through policies and practices regarding curriculum offerings, teacher preparation and compensation, discipline, and special education. The report issues a call for action and legal justification for Public Reciprocity in Education for Postsecondary Success (PREPS).
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
It is very hard to support effective teaching without good information about actual teaching practice. The MET project has sought to build and test measures of effective teaching so that school systems can clearly understand and then close the gap between their expectations for effective teaching and the actual teaching occurring in classrooms.
But good information is hard to produce. It requires the right measures, the right measurement processes, strong communications, and an awareness of how information can be distorted. When given the right type of attention, measures can help set expectations and align effort.
It will require care and attention for teacher evaluation measures to serve both professional development and accountability purposes. To help states and districts navigate the work of implementing feedback and evaluation systems that support teachers, we offer nine guiding principles based on three years' of study, observation, and collaboration with districts. Our prior reports tested, and ultimately supported, the claim that measures of teaching effectiveness could be valid and reliable. These principles, explained on the following pages, fall into three overarching imperatives, as shown in Figure 1: Measure Effective Teaching; Ensure High-Quality Data; and Invest in Improvement. Note the cyclical presentation. Well-designed evaluation systems will continually improve over time.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States
