Insight

Springtime in education research

May 8, 2008 10:24 AM

One amazing thing about education research is just how much of it there is. It’s like grass in spring, sprouting in such abundance it suddenly seems to be everywhere.

The American Education Research Association held its annual conference in New York in March, and even the indefatigable education blogger “Eduwonkette” couldn’t keep up. There were more than 500 sessions with four or five new research papers presented in each. Meanwhile, she wrote, a competing research society has just been formed.

Not to be outdone, the 33-year-old American Education Finance Association (AEFA) had its annual conference in Denver two weeks after the AERA, with another 60 sessions with three or four new papers presented at each.

Now, some people say reading education research is like watching grass grow. But in truth the new work is often interesting and relevant. AEFA organizers made a special effort to invite practitioners as well as researchers this year. (UFT President Randi Weingarten gave a keynote address.) So here is a sample of some fresh research.

NCLB at the crossroads

No Child Left Behind’s goal of 100- percent student proficiency in math and reading and an end to the educational performance gap by 2014 may sound like accountability but in truth is completely unrealistic. “We all lie,” said Michael Rebell, who led New York’s Campaign for Fiscal Equity, when we endorse that 100-percent proficiency goal. He and Richard Rothstein, author of the influential 2006 book “Class and Schools,” presented a joint session at AEFA where they proposed rethinking accountability.

No state is on target to meet the 100 percent proficiency goal and in fact many have lowered their standards in an effort to meet the target, Rebell said. Instead, Congress should establish as its mandatory goal for 2014 the “more achievable aim” of providing “fair, equal and meaningful educational opportunities for all children” by that year.

How to measure equal educational opportunity? Rothstein is developing ways to measure the achievement gap not only in math and reading but in critical thinking, access to the arts, differences in physical health, emotional well-being, and work and citizenship readiness. To do this he uses dozens of U.S. government databases and proposes expanding the National Assessment of Educational Progress test.

The UFT has also proposed broader accountability measures. With them, as Rothstein argues, incentives for distorting the NCLB goals — teaching to the test, for example — would diminish.

Grievance arbitration: does it really hurt schools?

In 2005, the New Teacher Project (TNTP) published a widely circulated study that said teacher contract regulations and the threat of personnel grievances forced schools to hire large numbers of teachers they didn’t want and put up with poor performers. But in a careful analysis of three large metropolitan school districts, La’Tara Osborne-Lampkin of Florida State University found no evidence of that at all.

She could find very few administrators who had grievances filed against them, and none claimed that grievance and arbitration processes affected their decisions in teacher placement or dismissal. Administrators, teachers and union leaders all said that most issues are resolved informally in “preconferences.” That may indicate that administrators are “more concerned with resolution than they are fearful about the process or outcome,” she wrote.

Osborne-Lampkin also found no evidence that the grievance and arbitration processes weigh into principals’ decisions to accept or reject a teacher’s transfer request and, in fact, “administrators, principals, union leaders, and teachers overwhelmingly report good experiences with the overall process.”

All of this makes one wonder who the New Teacher Project people actually talked to. (A new TNTP study just came out criticizing New York City’s Absent Teacher Reserve pool negotiated in the last UFT-DOE contract. It makes similarly questionable claims. See story on page 2.)

Out-of-field teaching

Just because all teachers are certified doesn’t mean they are teaching in their area of certification. Tammy Kolbe of the University of Maryland presented research showing that out-of-field teaching is “prevalent and persistent even after NCLB,” even in districts that claim 100 percent of their teachers are highly qualified and certified.

In her findings, Kolbe said 26.5 percent of secondary school math teachers are not math-certified, and that figure rises to 36.1 percent in high-minority school districts. Unionized school districts have lower levels of out-of-field teaching.

There is also the phenomenon she called “near-field” teaching, in which teachers teaching out-of-license are in something close to their area of expertise. In physics instruction, for example, she found most out-of-field teachers were in fact certified in biology, chemistry or math.

Kolbe found that the longer teachers are in a school and the more teaching experience they have, the less likely they are to be teaching out-of-field.

Paras and secretaries: Giving support staff their due

School support personnel — or what he calls “education core service workers” — are essential to school improvement, Jewell Gould, AFT director of research, found in a paper presented with two colleagues from UC Santa Barbara. But there is very little understanding of “the complexities entailed in the daily routines of core service workers,” nor of just how fast their jobs and responsibilities are changing.

“Although these workers are highly visible and their work is critical to the day-to-day functioning of schools, their absence in the literature regarding school restructuring and school improvement has been an oversight that has often made their roles in schools appear extraneous,” Gould writes. His research included school secretaries, paraprofessionals, aides, custodians and cafeteria workers — up to 50 job titles in some of the largest school districts.

Some districts cut back on school support personnel in order to spend more on professional development to meet NCLB mandates. But when that happens, the loss of trained support staff such as special education paras can cut into student learning. Conversely, when a school expands the roles of support staff, taking into account all the adults in the school, it can change the culture in the school to one of shared leadership, he finds.