Murphy Educational Consulting (MEC)

There are a lot of free sites out there with evaluation information…  for current research on evaluation check out the excerpt below:

Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation is a peer-reviewed scholarly
journal freely accessible on the Internet at http://PAREonline.net PARE
has just published:

Unexpected Testing Practices Affecting English Language Learners and
Students with Disabilities under No Child Left Behind
Mark Fetler

The testing and accountability requirements of the No Child Left Behind
Act impose sanctions on schools for not making adequate yearly progress
in student achievement. The sanctions may encourage inappropriate
practices intended to raise scores of low performing student subgroups.
This article considers evidence and consequences of misclassification of
English language learners as students with disabilities.

Questions?  Contact:
Lawrence M. Rudner & William D. Schafer
Co-editors

coeditor@pareonline.net
Practical Assessment Research and Evaluation

My brother-in-law showed me a website that he knew I would appreciate, not so much for it’s content, but for the impressive data display.  I was skeptical, but once I started clicking through the presentation, I was hooked!  The display of data was so interactive and compelling, that I kept clicking until the display was finished.  It’s called Gapminder.  Click here to see it for yourself!

I immediately started thinking about all the ways I would love to use such a data display for educational research.  Here are two topics that I read recently that I would love to see presented using Gapminder:

In the Public Education Weekly NewsBlast (June 13, 2008):

SCHOOL SIZE NOT KEY TO SMALL HIGH SCHOOL SUCCESS, STUDY FINDS
A new study by Education Resource Strategies, “Strategic Designs: Lessons for Leading Edge Small Urban High Schools,” examines nine high-performing small urban high schools throughout the country to better understand how they achieved their success. The report by Karen Hawley Miles and Regis Shields finds that the success of small urban high schools rests less on their smaller size and more on how they use their resources strategically. The high-performing schools in the study — all schools with flexibility over their resources — proactively manage people, time, and money, and demonstrate that it’s not just how much money is spent that impacts student learning, but how well resources are used.
http://www.educationresourcestrategies.org/small_schools.htm

In Eduwonkette (June 15, 2008)

In a new paper, “The Persistence of Teacher-Induced Learning Gains“, Brian Jacob, Lars Lefgren, and David Sims estimate how much of the teacher effect fades out over time. It turns out that kids lose more of these short-term test score gains that we (or at least I) thought:
“Our estimates suggest that only about one-fifth of the test score gain from a high value-added teacher remains after a single year. Given our standard errors, we can rule out one-year persistence rates above one-third. After two years, about one-eighth of the original gain persists.”

If you have the courage and interest to try using this on your own, the software has been bought by google (i love google!)  and is free for you to use.  Their first output is now up and running as a free Google Gadget called Motion Chart. It allows evryone to make a gapminder-like bubble graph that you can publish on your web-page or blog.   » Read more about Motion Chart…

A new report was released today,”The Broader, Bolder Approach to Education”.  (Click here for the reports website)

The report was created by a  new task force of national policy experts with diverse religious and political affiliations, in public policy fields including education, social welfare, health, housing, and civil rights.  The task force was Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, with the task of considering the effectiveness of the NCLB law in the nation’s approach to education and youth development policy.

1. Continued school improvement efforts:

• reduce class sizes in early grades for disadvantaged children
• attract high-quality teachers in hard-to-staff schools
• improve teacher and school leadership training
• make college preparatory curriculum accessible to all

2. Developmentally appropriate and high-quality early childhood, pre-school and kindergarten care and education with a focus on:

• academic skills
• social skills
• behavioral skills

3. Routine pediatric, dental, hearing and vision care for all infants, toddlers and schoolchildren to address gaps in:

• the absence of primary care physicians in low-income areas
• parents’ inability to miss work for children’s routine health services.

4. Improving the quality of students’ out-of-school time, emphasizing solutions such as:

• longer school days
• after-school programs
• summer programs
• school-to-work program

it’s a wonderful report and highlights many of the frustrations that those of us face when working in schools where students have significant social and economic disadvantages.

It will be interesting to see where the next president goes with NCLB.  Currently both are stating a level of support for the law.  With a taskforce this large, this well networked and this powerful, I can only hope that enough politicians will listen in order to see a true impact on educational legislation.  The deadline for all students to be ‘proficient’ is right around the corner and we need some serious restructiring before we come face to face with a deadline that we have no potential to meet.

I have to say that Obama first entered my field of vision was when I heard a speech of his on the Southside of Chicago, talking in a very real way about the inequity of much urban public education in this country.  And he wasn’t talking about it is a policy-NCLB kind of way, but about real people, real children and real injustices.  I have never heard a political figure at his level talk about educational issues in such a real and moving way.

So what does Obama’s potential candidacy mean for education?  We won’t know for sure until it happens, but here are some glimpses…

Alexander Russo is a very prolific writer who maintains two blogs, one about national issues and one with issues specific to Chicago:

This Week in Education, which is hosted by Scholastic and The Chicago Schools Blog, which is hosted by Catalyst.

Yesterday in ‘This Week in Education’, Russo posted several links to speeches in which Obama talked about his views on education.  Click here for the link to the actual blog post, which is also quoted below.

Every week I read about 25 education, evaluation and and social justice newsletters and blogs so that I can stay abreast of what’s happening in the field.  I will periodically highlight one of these blogs.

NCTE, the National Council on Teacher of English has an excellent newsletter, the NCTE Inbox, that highlights issues related to literacy, as well as other general education topics.  Click here to see this week’s newsletter.

One topic that stood out to me was a study that looked at why students drop out of school.  NCTE Inbox summarizes the research report below:

Dropouts Give Reasons
A poll of 500 young adults in Michigan found that fewer students would drop out of high school if they took classes they found relevant and if they had more direction in developing their goals.  Detroit Free Press, May 30, 2008

This stood out to me because I think it’s very hard for teachers to teach in a way that makes direct connections to the students life, past, current and future.  Often teachers were not taught this way when they were in school, and have little experience learning in this manner.  So even when they want to present material in a way that is engaging, they just don’t know how.  And considering how overwhelming the first year of teaching can be, crafting excellent lessons can seem like an impossible goal without an excellent and accessible coach or mentor.