Education First and the Editorial Projects in Education (EPE) Research Center released a report examining state Common Core State Standards planning activities in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia. This report presents results from a summer 2011 survey of state education agency (SEA) representatives. This study is intended to inform state policymakers, SEA staff, and other stakeholders interested in better understanding the progress states have made toward implementing common standards. This work should also be of particular use to those providing technical assistance or resources to states regarding CCSS implementation.
Northwest Regional Comprehensive Center
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The Alliance for Excellent Education released a brief calling on the U.S. Department of Education to ensure that proposals approved through the waiver process do not supersede the department's more rigorous 2008 high school graduation rate regulations. In addition, the Alliance recommends that the Department only approve waiver applications that give equal weight to high school graduation rates and measures of student achievement, while also allowing states to use additional measures of college and career readiness in their accountability systems.
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The Rural School and Community Trust released their biennial report examining the condition of rural education in the United States. The report notes that nearly one in four American children attend rural schools and enrollment is growing at a faster rate in rural school districts than in all other places combined. In addition, rural schools show increasing rates of poverty, diversity, and students with special needs. These widespread trends are most evident in the South, Southwest, and parts of Appalachia.
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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation released a brief for policymakers and practitioners wanting to understand the implications of the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project's interim analysis of classroom observations.
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The National Bureau of Economic Research released a study examining two issues:
- Whether value-added (VA) provides unbiased estimates of teachers' impacts on student achievement.
- Whether high-VA teachers improve students' long-term outcomes.
The authors analyzed school district data from grades 3–8 for 2.5 million children linked to tax records on parent characteristics and adult outcomes. They found no evidence of bias in VA estimates using previously unobserved parent characteristics and a quasi-experimental research design based on changes in teaching staff. Students assigned to high-VA teachers are more likely to attend college, attend higher ranked colleges, earn higher salaries, live in higher SES neighborhoods, and save more for retirement. They are also less likely to have children as teenagers. Teachers have large impacts in all grades from 4 to 8. On average, a one standard deviation improvement in teacher VA in a single grade raises earnings by about 1% at age 28. Replacing a teacher whose VA is in the bottom 5% with an average teacher would increase students' lifetime income by more than $250,000 for the average classroom in the sample. The authors conclude that good teachers create substantial economic value and that test score impacts are helpful in identifying such teachers.
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The New America Foundation released a brief highlighting the appropriations process and recently enacted fiscal year 2012 education funding. It includes an analysis of funding for major education programs, an explanation of key budget developments and laws that shaped this year's funding, and a retrospective timeline of the 2012 appropriations process. It also includes tables comparing 2012 funding to earlier House and Senate proposals, prior year funding levels, and the president's 2012 budget request.
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The Wallace Foundation released a report summarizing a decade of foundation research and work in school leadership to identify what it is that effective school principals do. It concludes that they carry out five key actions particularly well, including shaping a vision of academic success for all students and cultivating leadership in others.
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The National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality (TQ Center) created an online database promoting information sharing and collaboration as states and districts work on developing performance-based evaluation systems, often combined with measures of student growth and learning. The State Database of Teacher Evaluation Policies collects information on state-level teacher evaluation policies across multiple states and organizes the information under the eight key components of a comprehensive teacher evaluation system.
