NEPC Resources on Foundation Involvement in School Reform
NEPC Review: Pathways to Success: Exploring the Long-Term Outcomes of Alumni from Summit Public Schools (Summit Public Schools, September 2021)
Summit Public Schools reports that its alumni graduated from college at nearly double the national average and self-reported high levels of well-being, fulfillment, and workplace satisfaction. It also reports that alumni from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds now make more than $60,000 per year on average working full time. Although the study may provide some information useful to Summit’s internal decision-making, its serious methodological issues prevent it from having any implications for practice or policymaking in general.
New Concerns Raised About a Well-Known Digital Learning Platform
Review of Reimagining Learning: A Big Bet on the Future of American Education
Philanthropic involvement in K-12 education is growing, and it increasingly shapes the direction of reforms pursued throughout the country. A recent report from the NewSchools Venture Fund offers a thought experiment on how philanthropists can make a “big bet” over the next decade on innovative schools—a broad category that generally includes schools with a high degree of education technology use and so-called personalized approaches to learning that likely utilize digital platforms. Unfortunately, the report fails to provide a meaningful examination of research or a thorough basis for its recommendations. This critique focuses on six key concerns regarding the report: it fails to consider human capital constraints or to sufficiently consider obstacles confronting classroom technology usage, it overlooks equity concerns and past problems with dependence on external professional services, and it ignores both the potential for disruptive reform churn and the danger of philanthropic efforts altering public education systems in undemocratic ways. For these reasons, the report’s usefulness to policy and practice is limited.
Review of State Policy Report Card
On January 7, the advocacy organization StudentsFirst released a State Policy Report Card assigning letter grades to states based on whether state policies in 24 areas matched the StudentsFirst policy preferences of school choice, test-based accountability and greater centralization of governance. As is common with the “grading the states” genre, the report card is designed to provide a simple news hook in the “grade.” While the relative rankings are predictable, based on the organization’s stated policy goals, the exercise of assigning grade labels to states is a political act designed to advance a particular agenda rather than a serious academic exercise. Despite errors in the data collection, the report does provide a compilation of the selected policy actions by state. However, given the biased purpose of the undertaking, it provides no useful policy examination or guidance to policymakers. As a member of a growing genre, however, each “state grades” report undermines the news value of these reports in the aggregate. In comparing various reports in this genre, all but three states can claim an A or a B in some education report card, and all states have also received Ds or Fs on some education report card.
NEPC Review: Have We Identified Effective Teachers? (Gates Foundation, January 2013)
The Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project was a multi-year study of thousands of teachers in six school districts that concluded in January 2013. This review addresses two of the final MET research papers. One paper uses random assignment to test for bias in teachers’ value-added scores. The experimental protocol was compromised, however, when many students did not remain with the teachers to whom researchers had assigned them; other students and teachers did not participate at all. This prevents conclusive answers to the questions of interest. The second paper examines how best to combine value-added scores, classroom observations, and student surveys in teacher evaluations. The data do not support the MET project’s premise that all three primarily reflect a single general teaching factor, nor do the data support the project's conclusion that the three should be given roughly equal weight. Rather, each measure captures a distinct component of teaching. Evaluating teachers requires judgments about which components are the most important, judgments that are not much informed by the MET’s masses of data. While the MET project has brought unprecedented vigor to teacher evaluation research, its results do not settle disagreements about what makes an effective teacher and offer little guidance about how to design real-world teacher evaluation systems.