Hot Topics in Education
As an extension of our research advocacy, each month NCEA gathers and shares the latest research and data from across the country on issues affecting K-12 students on the path to college and career readiness (CCR). To examine Hot Topics resources organized by NCEA focus area, use navigation keys provided to the right on this page.
March 2010 Archive
6th Annual “Advanced Placement” Report to the Nation
The College Board produced this report on the national results of Advanced Placement course-taking and assessments. According to the report, the number of students taking Advanced Placement courses has doubled in the past decade, with rising numbers of poor and minority students taking the college-readiness courses. The College Board notes that schools nationwide have expanded the number of AP courses they offer and have reduced the prerequisites for students to participate in the courses, but officials also note that more students are failing Advanced Placement exams. Read More…
America’s Private Public Schools
This analysis by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute finds that more than 1.7 million American children attend what they dubbed "private public schools" -- public schools that serve virtually no poor students. In some metropolitan areas, as many as one in six public-school students -- and one in four white students -- attends such schools, of which the U.S. has about 2,800. Read More…
Chasing the College Acceptance Letter: Is It Harder to Get into College?
This report from the Center for Public Education finds that if students are well prepared in high school by earning the right credentials, they will get into a good college. That means students should earn decent grades, take college-preparatory courses, and perform well on their college entrance exams. A higher GPA isn’t the key to improving students’ chances. Better college entrance exam scores and, more importantly, more rigorous courses, will. The credentials earned by students from low-income families lag behind students from higher-income backgrounds. If high schools significantly improve the college preparedness of minority and low-income students, the college-going gap that still exists between students based on family characteristics could shrink. Read More…
Collaborating for Student Success (Part 1): Effective Teaching and Leadership
The first of three reports to be released by the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher was released this month. Part 1 examines views about responsibility and accountability; what collaboration looks like in schools, and if and to what degree it is currently practiced. Sixty-seven percent of teachers and 78 percent of principals surveyed said more collaboration among teachers and school leaders would have a “major impact” on student achievement. Read More…
Common Data Standards Project - Statement of Purpose
The Council of Chief State School Officers and the State Higher Education Executive Officers jointly issued this statement outlining their effort to collaborate with their members, the U.S. Department of Education, and national educational entities toward the development of model data standards for K-12 and postsecondary education. The goal of this collaborative effort is to leverage and create model data standards that will attract widespread, voluntary adoption and ultimately enhance policy-making and student achievement. Initially, the project will focus on data related to the transition from high school to postsecondary education. Read More…
Crisis Data Management: A Forum Guide to Collecting and Managing Data About Displaced Students
This report from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics provides guidelines that can be used by elementary and secondary education agencies to establish policies and procedures for collecting and managing education data before, during, and after a crisis. Read More…
The Alliance for Excellent Education released this report as part of an extended project to look at the special challenges of maintaining high quality leadership and instruction in rural high schools. One third of the nation’s high schools are rural and the number of rural schoolchildren is on the rise. A shortage of teachers trained to deliver a rigorous college- and career-prep curriculum, difficulty in addressing the needs of an increasingly diverse student body, limited social service support, and less access to teacher professional development create other challenges in ensuring that all students in rural areas graduate from high school prepared. Read More…
Don’t Leave Accountability Behind: A Call for ESEA Reauthorization
Aspen Institute’s No Child Left Behind Commission and the Alliance for Excellent Education issued this report arguing that, despite the promise of education reform efforts such as Race to the Top and the state-led common standards movement, improvement can only be sustained if Congress and the Administration update and improve the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), currently known as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The report outlines the reasons ESEA reauthorization is necessary to support long-term reform and ensure strong accountability for student outcomes and improvement. Read More…
This report from the Center for American Progress finds that expanded learning time models have enabled many schools and their partners to collaborate more intensively and more strategically than they did when the schools were operating on a traditional school schedule. Beyond providing the essential ingredient of more time, expanded learning time has catalyzed schools to redesign their approach by developing a school-wide academic focus in response to student data. Extended learning time schools are taking advantage of the additional time they now have to plan and implement new instructional strategies to better align core academics, enrichment, support services, and family engagement strategies closely to their instructional focus. Read More…
Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades: Why Some Schools Do Better
This report from researchers at EdSource and Stanford University provides the findings of EdSource's large-scale study of 303 middle grades schools in California. Using students' test scores as one part of evaluations for teachers, principals, and superintendents is associated with better academic performance at middle schools, according to the report. Other common practices of high-performing schools included: setting measurable goals for boosting test scores; having a school-wide focus on improving student achievement; aligning instruction and curriculum; focusing on preparing students for academic demands in the future; and using data to monitor student progress and improve instruction. Read More…
How Federal Policy Can Reverse the “Widget Effect.”
The New Teacher Project (TNTP) released this blueprint for how federal education funding could be better used to address students' most pressing need: effective teachers. The policy brief follows up on their 2009 report on the “Widget Effect” and illustrates how current funding priorities designed to improve teacher quality inadvertently reinforce the tendency of school systems to treat teachers like interchangeable parts rather than acknowledging and responding to differences in teacher effectiveness. It urges policymakers to use the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) to refocus Title II spending (High Quality Teachers and Principals) on four overarching goals for improving teacher effectiveness. Read More…
This publication was a companion to the one above and released by the Alliance for Excellent Education at the same event. This guide provides parents and community members with suggestions on how to determine whether their local high school is adequately preparing all of its students for a successful future and what they can do to help turn that vision into reality. Read More…
Mind the (Other) Gap: The Growing Excellence Gap in K-12 Education
The Center for Evaluation and Education Policy takes a look at excellence gaps for top students. Academic gaps between girls and boys, between white students and disadvantaged minority students, between poor students and their better-off peers, and between English-language learners and their English-speaking counterparts have only widened, stagnated, or declined by a hair since the late 1990s. Read More…
Performance Counts: Assessment Systems that Support High-Quality Learning
This paper by Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University was released at an event sponsored by the Council of Chief State School Officers, an organization also involved in developing the Common Core State Standards Initiative and promoting consortia to develop common assessments. The paper describes what a student assessment system could look like if built from the principles and best practices found in effective systems in the U.S. and high-achieving nations around the world. Read More…
This report from the Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy highlights the role that practice-based teacher preparation programs play in improving the ranks of the teaching profession in Massachusetts. The report promotes practice-based teacher preparation programs as a means for attracting highly qualified professionals as well as recent college graduates with degrees in high need subject areas like mathematics and science to consider a career in teaching. Read More…
Principles for a Comprehensive Assessment System
This policy brief from the Alliance for Excellent Education outlines basic criteria for new assessment systems that support instruction and are aligned to standards for college and career readiness. The paper was designed to inform federal policy activities, such as the $350 million competitive grant investment in new state assessments, states forming consortia to build new systems, and the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act which will likely set guidelines for assessments and their use. Read More…
Research to Practice: The Future of the Regional Education Labs
The federal government has historically placed substantial responsibility for translational research in the hands of the Regional Educational Laboratories (RELs). Grover "Russ" Whitehurst at the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy argues that there are three possibilities for the type of activity that the RELs can most usefully carry out within the practical limits of their funding and their broad missions of regional assistance. Read More…
This report, from the Retaining Teacher Talent study conducted by Learning Point Associates and Public Agenda, suggests that what teachers think are good indicators of effectiveness—and what they think will make them more effective—are not always aligned with what policymakers or researchers think. The report highlights the teacher perspective on policy issues of assessing, rewarding, and improving teacher effectiveness, with the goal of keeping teachers at the heart of debates about the profession. Read More…
STEM Coursetaking Among High School Graduates, 1990 – 2005
This Research Brief from MPR Associates uses data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) High School Transcript Study (HSTS) to examine student course taking in STEM subjects during high school. It compares STEM course taking among the 2005 HSTS cohort, the most recent data currently available, with that of the 1990 and 2000 HSTS cohorts. The study suggests positive gains have been made in STEM subjects that are considered important to U.S. competitiveness. In 2005, students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics earned more credits in STEM subjects than their counterparts in 1990. Read More…
Teacher Layoffs: Rethinking “Last-Hired, First-Fired” Policies
The National Council on Teacher Quality used its database to examine district policies, some mandated by state law, for making layoff decisions. The overwhelming majority of school districts use seniority as the most important determinant of layoff decisions. It has been assumed that a seniority system produces the best results for children, under the assertion that the most experienced teachers are better teachers. This assumption has proven not to be, on average, true. Research finds that teachers in their third year of teaching are generally about as effective as long-tenured teachers. The paper includes recommendations to help school districts navigate difficult layoff decisions while keeping student needs front and center in the process. Read More…
The High School Senior Class of 2003-04: Steps Toward Postsecondary Enrollment
The National Center for Education Statistics, in this report, examines the extent to which students in the senior class of 2003-04 took various steps toward postsecondary enrollment. These steps include preparing for and taking college entrance tests, seeking information about college entrance requirements, and applying for college admission. The tables present estimates for all students and by a wide range of student, family, and high school characteristics. Read More…
The Numbers We Need: How the Right Metrics Could Improve K–12 Education
This policy brief from the American Enterprise Institute argues that successful organizations use extensive data analysis to guide decisions, but few K–12 districts have the metrics needed to do the same. The paper outlines several steps that, if implemented, could make data-driven management in education a reality and lays out key measurements districts should collect to make data analysis an effective tool for improving education. The author argues that in addition to student achievement data, districts need reliable measures that illuminate performance in areas like human resources, procurement, and data management. Read More…
The Online Learning Imperative: A Solution to Three Looming Crises in Education
This new brief from the Alliance for Excellent Education details how the use of online technology in today’s secondary school classrooms can strengthen the teacher workforce, improve student outcomes, and allow states to do more despite flat education budgets. It cites research on the student learning improvements from various types of online instruction and the benefits to school administrators for improving teacher quality. Read More…
Transforming Schools to Meet the Needs of Students
This policy brief from the Center for American Progress provides an overview of the most recent research related to learning time, outlines current on-the-ground efforts to expand learning time and the lessons learned from these initiatives, and argues for making expanded learning time an essential part of a comprehensive school improvement strategy under ESEA. Read More…
Who Will Teach? Experience Matters
This report was issued by the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future showing that Baby Boom teachers who made lifelong commitments to education are retiring, and in many cases are taking their hard-earned wisdom with them. It contends that every state will be impacted by these shifts. Schools that have depended on a core of veteran teachers are already seeing those teachers retire, and in some cases are creating new work arrangements for teachers at or nearing retirement. Read More…