Fall 2003

The Higher Purpose of Higher Education
Matthew Hartley and Elizabeth Hollander


Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently, Stanley Fish, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, made a thorough-going critique of civic education in institutions of higher education. Calling into question the purposeful development of civic capacity in principal and in practice, he wrote, “My main objection to moral and civic education in our colleges and universities is not that it is a bad idea (which it surely is), but that it’s an unworkable idea.”(1)

One of the more vigorous expressions of the collegiate service-learning movement that Fish or other critics may find distasteful is Campus Compact, the national coalition of more than 900 college and university presidents formed in 1985. To promote the practice of civic education, Campus Compact has implemented a range of initiatives—from producing an introductory toolkit and course instruction book, to sponsoring faculty training sessions, to awarding grants to encourage service-learning—designed to make public and community service a fundamental component of American higher education. Campus Compact serves as an exemplar of the notion that an enduring purpose of higher education in America is that it be an incubator of democracy.

Colleges and universities have traditionally aimed to foster citizenship, serve our democratic society, and sustain our humanity. In the colonial era, colleges trained the children of wealthy patrons to perpetuate religious and civic leadership in particular locales, and today we are seeing a resurgence of efforts by the academy to promote civic engagement—whether by encouraging individual acts of student volunteerism or developing comprehensive institutional efforts requiring administrative leadership. Many colleges and universities now seek to embed service in the curriculum, encourage scholarly work that addresses local concerns, and even take on the role of institutional citizen within the community. But despite waxing interest in civic education and engagement, such activities are far from mainstream on our campuses and remain contested.

The World Has Problems and the Academy Has Departments
 Fish’s first assertion, that civic education is a bad idea, reflects the dominance, inherited from the 19th century, of disciplinary aims over all other concerns, including societal ones.

In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the purpose and scope of higher education were explicitly linked to the fortunes of a fledgling democracy, but with the industrial revolution and the establishment of the land-grant universities, the German university model became pre-eminent in America. Questions of science and modern society brought with them academic departments and the rise of disciplines. Soon narrow disciplinary foci began to fracture the university community, and although the purpose of the academy was still to serve society—ensuring, to borrow a phrase from Daniel Coit Gilman, Johns Hopkins University’s first president, “less misery among the poor, less ignorance in schools, less bigotry in the temple, less suffering in the hospital, less fraud in business, less folly in politics”—the shift in emphasis from local to societal problems was significant. The civic purposes that had been central to many institutions were competing with an increasingly crowded field of institutional imperatives. Research began to overshadow teaching (2) and the search for new knowledge presented a powerful purpose that eclipsed all others. The ideal of the Ivory Tower came to dominate the academy.

To the world beyond the ivied walls, however, academics who want students to breathe only the rarified air of disciplinary theory sound a bit like the two sociologists who came upon a man who had been set upon by thieves, beaten, and left unconscious at the side of the road. Turning to one another they exclaimed, “The man who did this needs our help!” The point of the old joke is not that efforts to understand the root causes of social ills aren’t valuable—they clearly are—but that academics should consider ways to address the community needs immediately before them.

The perceived distance between the work of the academy and the exigencies of daily life over the past two decades has spawned a veritable cottage industry of higher education criticism. Misperceptions about the work of the academy have caused the traditional appeals for public support of higher education because of its contribution to the public good to lose their resonance. We see the fruits of this misunderstanding in unprecedented cuts now being made in public higher education across the country. In at least two states, Colorado and Massachusetts, governors have made serious attempts to privatize flagship public research universities—allowing them to raise their tuitions to reflect the value of their education provided they forgo public support.

Part of the problem is that members of the academy have done a poor job of informing external constituents (e.g., legislators, corporate leaders, taxpayers, the public at large) of the civic role they play, the knowledge they can bring to pressing issues of the day, and the impact of civic education on their students. Too much effort is put into trying to secure funds at both the state and federal level, without making a clear case about the public benefits of college beyond obtaining a job. Sustaining the future of the civic engagement movement in higher education will require giving it a much more public face.

The Midwife of Democracy
Fish’s second assertion, that civic education is an unworkable idea, underscores the challenges of measuring the impact of college. The nascent research on service-learning and civic engagement clearly indicates that institutions can influence students’ knowledge of politics and the systemic nature of social problems. Studies by Alexander Astin, at the University of California at Los Angeles, show that students who participate in service activities (even as a requirement) grow more concerned about social issues, enjoy learning, and do at least as well in their non-service courses as their non-participating peers. (That is, service work as an extra-curricular activity is not a drain on their academic work.) Others, like Scott Keeter, at George Mason University, are developing tools to measure the civic behaviors of college students. Longitudinal studies are needed to determine the impact on behaviors of graduates.

What is clear is that students feel such work is valuable. Volunteerism by college students is increasing, with estimates now that fully a third of all undergraduates are volunteering. In addition, a recent study showed that the link of volunteerism to class discussion leads to deeper civic engagement by students.

According to the Keeter study:
[C]lassroom discussion can play a critical role in youth involvement. Student volunteers who are encouraged to talk about their volunteer work in class are much more likely to stick with it. Fully 63 percent of high school students and 58 percent of college students who volunteered within the last year had an opportunity to talk about their service work in the classroom.
This group is twice as likely to volunteer regularly as those who don’t get the chance to talk about their experiences (64 percent vs. 30 percent, respectively). They are also much more likely than those without such discussions to work on a community problem (47 percent vs. 32 percent), to participate in a run, walk, or bike ride for charity (27 percent vs. 15 percent), or to influence someone’s vote (50 percent vs. 34 percent). These findings remain valid even when a lot of other factors are taken into consideration.(3)

Attempting to promote civic engagement is full of uncertainties. Fish’s article, provocatively entitled, “Aim Low,” echoes the statement of another educator generations ago. Cardinal Newman, in The Idea of a University, castigated the assault on the liberal arts ideal by quipping to proponents of vocational education: “The Philosophy of Utility, you will say, Gentlemen, has at least done its work; and I grant it,—it aimed low, but it has fulfilled its aim.”

Higher education can do better. The mere fact that equipping students for lives of political and civic agency is difficult to measure or may pose pedagogical or even ethical dilemmas is insufficient reason to abandon the effort. Many essential human activities—forging the bonds of friendship, expressing passion or ideas through the arts, and parenting—are fraught with uncertainty and potential danger. Of course, colleges and universities are not the answer to the dilemma of preparing young people for lives of political engagement but they are an answer. Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago during the 1930s, once observed: “The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference and undernourishment.” Higher education has a responsibility to help nourish civically engaged students. The work will be contested, the outcome may be uncertain, but the imperative is clear.

John Dewey, the great educator of the early 20th century sums it up best; “Democracy must be reborn in every generation, and education is its midwife.”

Penn GSE Assistant Professor Matthew Hartley focuses his research on organizational change at colleges and universities. His book, A Call to Purpose: Mission-Centered Change at Three Liberal Arts Colleges, was published in 2002.

Elizabeth Hollander is Executive Director of Campus Compact, a national coalition of more than 900 college and university presidents committed to the civic purposes of higher education. For more on Campus Compact, see www.compact.org.

(1) Fish, Stanley. “Aim Low.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 16, 2003.

(2) McCall, R.B. "The Concept and Practice of Education, Research, and Public Service in University Psychology Departments." American Psychologist, pp. 379-388, Vol. 51, 1996.

(3) Keeter, S., Zukin, C., Andolina, M. & Jenkins, K. The Civic and Political Health of the Nation: A Generation Portrait, September 19, 2002.



Also by Matthew Hartley

Service-learning teaches students powerful lessons in compassion but, as currently practiced, has not helped diminish their deep cynicism about national politics. In Civic Renewal: A Powerful Framework for Advancing Service-Learning, Hartley and coauthor Elizabeth Hollander argue that by looking to the framework provided by the civic renewal movement, service-learning can expand from simply promoting individual acts of charity to encouraging civic engagement among college students. “In our view the future of service-learning depends on demonstrating significant measurable positive outcomes for students and communities. The civic renewal frame helps us to do that because it…is not satisfied with simply counting student hours spent in the community. Education for civic engagement provides structured, intentional ways to encourage students to think more systemically about how social policy is made and how to bring about social change.” This piece appears in Building Partnerships for Service-Learning, by Barbara Jacoby et al. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003).

A recent survey of 146 postsecondary institutions found that, in the past five years, 55 percent have formed change task forces as part of their comprehensive change effort. Writing in The Promise and Peril of Parallel Governance Structures, Hartley presents the experience of Summit College—a pseudonymous liberal arts college—in adopting change task forces as the central strategy in its effort at institutional transformation. In his analysis of these decision-making structures, Hartley identifies both their promise and their peril. Unburdened by day-to-day operational issues, the task forces could focus clearly on the change agenda, provide a “change friendly” environment, and become powerful change coalitions. The case shows, however, that these task forces can form parallel government structures that devolve into “shadow” governance structures. This article appears in American Behavioral Scientist, 46(7), March 2003, available at www.sagepub.com/journal.aspx?pid=171.

The Rules of Evidence
By Nancy Brokaw


In the United States, clinical trials are the only legal means for determining the effectiveness of a new drug. Also known as randomized field trials (RFTs), these studies compare the effects of a new drug to those of the current treatment or, if none exists, a placebo. To guarantee that the only difference between the test group and the control group is the new treatment, participants are assigned at random, and to ensure that wishful thinking doesn’t influence results, no one—neither patient nor doctor—knows who is in which group. In the medical arena, RFTs are the ultimate in evidentiary proof.

If Penn GSE Professor Robert Boruch has a say in the matter, the day is not so far distant when RFTs will take on the same pivotal role in the evaluation of social interventions.

To that end, in 1998, Boruch joined with a number of colleagues in the social, behavioral, and education sciences to establish the international Campbell Collaboration (C2). A non-profit organization, C2 brings together, at one accessible site, syntheses of scientific evaluations of the effects of social and educational policies and practices. These syntheses, called systematic reviews, are intended as a tool for policymakers and others by presenting the preponderance of evidence on a given social program or reform.

With a rigorous set of protocols for determining which RFTs make the cut, C2 has the potential to wield considerable influence in setting standards of research, particularly in a social policy climate increasingly focused on “scientifically based reform.” For education researchers, the stakes, in terms of federal and foundation dollars, are sky high.

The First and Marvelous Product of C2
 The idea behind C2 is elegantly simple: bring together all the scientifically conducted trials on a particular topic—Scared Straight or after-school programs or the impact of welfare reform on family structure—and, based on an analysis of all those trials and the data they present, evaluate whether or not the programs work as advertised.

Take the case of Scared Straight, a program in which prisoners lecture at-risk youth about doing time. In 2002, C2 Crime and Justice Group Coordinator Anthony Petrosino, based at Harvard University, took a close look at the studies of that program and created a review that Boruch calls “the first and marvelous product of the Campbell Collaboration.”

Says Boruch, “There are probably 200 Scared Straight ‘studies’ out there, plus another 200 throat-clearing essays, plus God knows how many anecdotes.” To tease out the scientific studies, Petrosino conducted a hand search of the literature, combed through 16 electronic databases, and canvassed experts in the field. Of the 487 citations unearthed, only 30 were evaluations, and, of those, only 11 were deemed potential randomized trials. In the end, nine of those 11 met Petrosino’s criteria. (Only studies that had randomly assigned participants either to the program or to the no-program control group made the cut.)

His report, available at the C2 website at www.campbellcollaboration.org/Fralibrary.html, includes thumbnail descriptions of those nine studies as well as a detailed assessment of the methods used in each and a comprehensive report on the different findings. Using various statistical techniques, Petrosino combined the results of all the RFTs into his own meta-analysis. What he discovered wasn’t good news for the efficacy of Scared Straight. Petrosino writes:

These randomized trials, conducted over a 25-year period in eight different jurisdictions, provide evidence that “Scared Straight” and other “juvenile awareness” programs are not effective as a stand-alone crime prevention strategy. More importantly, they provide empirical evidence—under experimental conditions—that the programs likely increase the odds that children exposed to them will commit offenses in the future.

In a final irony, duly noted by Petrosino in his concluding remarks, Scared Straight continues unabated—despite the negative marks. So popular are these interventions that, in one of the studies cited, the response to the report was to end the evaluation, not the program.

A Numbers Game
 For sheer numbers, RFTs in the hard sciences far outstrip those in the social sciences. By way of illustration, consider C2's older sibling, the international Cochrane Collaboration. Cochrane does for health care what C2 does for the social sciences. Founded in 1992, Cochrane contains more than 250,000 entries in its library of existing randomized and possibly randomized trials. By comparison, the C2 library of trials—called the Campbell Collaboration Social, Psychological, Educational, and Criminological Trials Registry (C2SPECTR)—contains some 12,000 entries.

To the question of whether there are enough trials out there to create the kind of comprehensive resource C2's founders envision, the answer is mixed. To be sure, education and the other social sciences don't run nearly as many randomized trials as the health sector does, but it turns out that the number of RFTs required to conduct a systematic review is surprisingly modest.

According to Boruch, "the typical number of trials included in Cochrane's systematic reviews in health care is not 200. It's not 26." He pauses, "it's six." By that standard, the Scared Straight review, which pulled on nine studies, is well ahead of the curve.

Just the Facts
 Judging from the current clamor for "hard evidence," there should be more RFTs in the social sciences on the way. Boruch cites a variety of hopeful signs that scientific methods are gaining ground in the social sciences: randomized trials on the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) program that show it has "zippo" impact; the state of Tennessee's STAR experiment investigating the impact of class size reduction; and studies of privately funded voucher programs in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Dayton, Ohio.

In 2002, educational researchers—and Boruch and his C2 colleagues in particular—had even more to cheer about when the U.S. Department of Education (D.O.E.) announced the creation of a national What Works Clearinghouse. The D.O.E. awarded a five-year, $18.5-million contract to a special joint venture—between C2 and the American Institutes for Research—to develop a national What Works Clearinghouse. The What Works databases will summarize evidence on the effectiveness of different programs, products, and strategies intended to enhance academic achievement and other educational outcomes (See But Does It Work?)

And the What Works Clearinghouse is by no means the only product of an increasingly data-hungry culture. Just look at the No Child Left Behind legislation and the recent creation of the Institute of Education Sciences. The clamor for scientific approaches to education research bodes well for those committed to randomized field trials for social interventions.

Gold Standard or Three-Dollar Bill?
But the educational research community isn’t exactly united behind the use and proliferation of randomized field trials. One oft-heard complaint is that, by definition, RFTs address only causal questions (to what extent does the discreet factor A affect the outcome B) that don’t necessarily pertain to the rough-and-tumble world of classrooms and schools. Boruch readily acknowledges that not all education research can be subject to RFTs for the simple reason that not all the questions to be asked are causal. The questions of why and how cannot always be answered by experimental research but, rather, require what might be called more “basic” types of social research (qualitative, ethnographic, or historical). For instance, educators need to know more than just whether policies influence practice—they need to know how.

But even with that qualification, critics argue that the complexity of educational settings effectively thwarts the design of a classic scientific experiment: there are simply too many variables to rule out all but the one being tested. In this view, any given intervention is just one among many factors that go into determining an outcome.Randomization fans counter that this is precisely the point: the discipline of science demands that researchers ask the narrow question, does A affect B? They further argue that this construct is not to be dismissed lightly. Indeed, they will point to the Tennessee STAR class size trials that suggest that reducing class size from 24 to 16 students in kindergarten through grade 3 has an impact on student achievement.

At this juncture, Boruch offers a critique of the education of educational researchers. Citing the experience of medical research, he says, “Medical people, health care people are better trained than education people. They go through residency programs, licensing, repeated examinations for certification.” More and more, schools of education are responding to that need by providing deeper research training in data analysis.

Critics also charge that RFTs often produce results of limited applicability. In this view, the education system is highly fragmented, made up of distinctive organizations—all with their own culture and politics—from which change must be crafted organically. One might contend, for instance, that information garnered in a field trial of, say, an instructional strategy in mathematics will pertain only to the specific environment in which the trial was conducted. In other words, educators and policymakers simply can’t extrapolate from the particular to the world at large. Just because a particular intervention takes Philadelphia by storm, doesn’t mean it will play in Peoria.

For policymakers, that question—“will it work in my town?”—can be the make-or-break issue, and studies that have been replicated across a variety of contexts make a powerful argument for a given proposal. A mayor of a large New England city doesn’t care whether a proposed reform worked beautifully in rural Alabama—or even urban California; he needs to know it will succeed on his home turf.

Ironically, this is precisely the challenge C2 is designed to address. By synthesizing studies across settings, the systematic review serves as a kind of nerve center where the raw data about what works and what doesn’t can be combined into one integrated analysis. The studies brought together in the Scared Straight meta-analysis were conducted in eight states—California, Illinois, Kansas, Michigan (the site of two studies), Mississippi, New Jersey, Texas, and Virginia—and over a 25-year period (1967 to 1992). They looked at a fairly diverse population: averaging in age from 15 to 17, participants were racially diverse (ranging from 36 to 84 percent white), although only one study included girls. Most had already been in contact with the juvenile justice system. Singly, any one of these studies might provoke second thoughts in New Jersey or Texas; taken together, the results from these disparate studies form a powerful argument that those contemplating the creation of a Scared Straight program in their community might do well to heed.

Unnatural Acts
For many educators, the mere mention of RFTs evokes a nightmare scenario of mad scientists experimenting wantonly on innocent students and teachers. Says Boruch, “In some sectors, the response I get is, ‘Doing these trials is immoral.’”

One educational researcher, speaking from experience, describes the moral indignation he encountered when he tried recruiting participants for a controlled experiment to study district-level initiatives to improve student achievement. Driven by an overriding concern for students, districts leaders, understandably reluctant to withhold what might be promising programs, felt they were “engaging in unnatural acts.”

His experience is by no means unique. During a recent panel discussion of educational research at a national conference, the most heated discussion was reserved for the issue of scientifically conducted trials in the schools. One participant, who had years of statistical training under her belt, described her efforts to introduce random assignment into an educational setting—only to run into an ethical wall when members of the control group complained about unequal access to resources.

But although these difficult questions arise in some circumstances, many research questions don’t involve such painful choices. In fact, when the efficacy of a particular program is in doubt—and no one knows whether or not it works—randomized experiments can be invaluable. In these cases, such ethical qualms overlook the very real possibility that programs billed as ameliorative may, like Scared Straight, end up doing more harm than good. Surely, if there’s any moral to be taken from Anthony Petrosino’s investigation of the still-popular program, it’s that good intentions aren’t enough.

More information about the Campbell Collaboration is available at www.campbellcollaboration.org.

The Fourth Annual Campbell Collaboration Colloquium is slated for February 18-20, 2004, in Washington, D.C. The agenda includes presentations on systematic reviews developed by Campbell participants and on methodological research and developments. More information is available at the website or from 2004colloquium@campbellcollaboration.org.



But Does It Work?

In August 2002, the U.S. Department of Education awarded a five-year, $18.5 million contract to the Campbell Collaboration and the American Institutes for Research to develop a national What Works Clearinghouse (WWC).

Designed for educators, policymakers, and the public, WWC serves as a central resource for evaluating prospective programs based on scientific evidence on their effectiveness. Through a set of web-based databases, it will include: reviews of potentially replicable programs intended to enhance student outcomes, information about the evaluationstudies cited in the intervention reviews, scientifically rigorous reviews of test instruments used to assess educational effectiveness, and evaluators (individuals and organizations) willing to conduct evaluations.

The Clearinghouse has recommended a series of documents to be used as standards for the preparation of WWC Evidence Reports. According to Dr. Larry Hedges, chair of the advisory group that developed the standards, “For the first time, researchers and the education community as a whole have at their disposal a set of highly scientific and credible research review tools that can begin to answer the crucial question: What works in American education?”

The first WWC Evidence Reports will examine the effects of the following programs: interventions for beginning reading; curriculum-based interventions for increasing K-12 math achievement; preventing high school dropout; programs for increasing adult literacy; peer-assisted learning in elementary schools; interventions to reduce delinquent, disorderly, and violent behavior in and out of school; and interventions for elementary English language learners.
 

Just Say No: Evaluating the Impact of Abstinence Education
By Simi R. Wilhelm

In Miami, educators at the Recapturing the Vision abstinence education program are holding mock weddings, etiquette lessons, and makeovers for pre-teen girls in an effort to get them to wait to have sex until marriage. They are fueled by government dollars and the knowledge that sexual activity has been declining among non-married youth since 1991. But it is a new federally funded study, led by Penn GSE Professor Rebecca Maynard, that will tell them, and many others across the country, if policymakers and legislators can attribute that decline to their efforts.

Since 1998, a total of $87.5 million in combined state and federal dollars has been made available under the Title V Social Security Act to promote abstinence among American youth. Motivated by increased sexual activity and “serious public health and socioeconomic consequences,” the legislation aimed to reduce overall sexual activity among youth, lower the rates of STDs and non-marital pregnancies, and encourage a commitment to abstinence.

Federal funding, along with matching state funds, is available only for education programs that fit a prescribed set of criteria—criteria that have generated some controversy. Eligible programs must teach that “monogamous relationships in the context of marriage are the expected standard,” send “an unambiguous abstinence message,” and not endorse or promote contraceptive use. Almost every state has taken advantage of the funding and, over the past four years, thousands of grants have been dispensed to social and religious agencies, media firms, and schools.

A Study with Statistical Power
Answering the federal government’s call for an independent evaluation of these programs, Maynard and her colleagues at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., have been looking at a select group of 11 programs. Their evaluation aims to discover: (1) the underlying theories of abstinence education programs, (2) the operational and implementation experiences of local communities and schools that have received this funding, and (3) the impacts of these programs “on the attitudes and intentions of youth to remain abstinent, on their sexual activity, and on their risks of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.” Controversy aside, it is hoped that Maynard’s study can fill the gap in understanding the impacts of abstinence education programs in particular and of different programmatic strategies on youth behavioral choices in general.

This study, which differs from previous ones in its statistical power and long-range data collection, features a rigorous research design involving a large sample size of 400 to 700 youths who will be enrolled over a 36-month period. The study is experimental in nature, with participants randomly assigned to the program or to a control group. “The experimental design,” the authors write, “offers the only means of measuring, with a known degree of certainty, how successful the programs are overall and how well they serve key subgroups of youth.”

The Popular Kids Are Doing It
The final report isn’t due out until the summer of 2005. In the meantime, The Evaluation of Abstinence Education programs Funded under Title V Section 510: Interim Report, published in April 2002, addresses the first two study questions: that is, the underlying theories of abstinence education and the operational experiences of the programs studied.

As to the first question, preliminary findings show that the underlying theory of abstinence programs does take into account the many factors that shape youth behavior—youth attitudes, values and personality, family attitudes, peer relationships, and social influences. Based on these assumptions, these programs approach the problem of premature sexual initiation either by meeting young people’s development needs as a way to combat social influences and peer pressures or by performing a benefits assessment of risky behaviors. In addition, programs like Miami’s Recapturing the Vision base their emphasis on marriage on the theory that premature sexual activity in teens results from an undervaluation of marriage.

In identifying the operational lessons learned, Maynard and her colleagues found that the presence of government funding has changed the approaches to teenage pregnancy prevention. Despite initial debate, all 50 states applied for funding, and most are currently using monies to promote abstinence. And the education programs they have introduced don’t rely on a single message of abstinence but, rather, make use of a wide range of innovative strategies—everything from self-esteem development and goal-making to sessions on aspiring to marriage—to communicate their message.

Most participants report positive experience with the programs, especially those that also deliver youth development services that enhance the basic message. Young people also responded favorably to staff who are unambiguously committed to the abstinence message. For delivering services and programs, schools are the best, but often the most resistant, partners. Despite their access to broad cross-sections of youth, schools may also face skepticism among teachers and principals, competing health and sex education policies, and competing priorities.

But the biggest challenges of all are peer pressure and parents. “Abstinence education programs,” the study reports, “face real challenges addressing peer pressure and the communication gulf between parents and children.” Young people use sexual activity as an important criterion for peer classification: as one middle-school student quoted in the report explained, “A lot of people fall into [the] are-doing-it crowd, and those would be the popular kids in our school.”

Constructive activities, particularly during after-school hours, can help youth combat that kind of peer pressure, as can good communication between parents and children. But neither of those remedies is necessarily available. Several communities studied provided little in the way of after-school activities for adolescents, and although many programs try to address peer pressure through parents, the response has been disappointingly low.

A PDF of this report is available at www.mathematica-mpr.com/PDFs/evalabstinence.pdf.
Simi R. Wilhelm is a doctoral student in the Higher Education Management Division at Penn GSE.



More on the Family Front

What role do fathers have to play in their children’s learning? How can fathers who struggle with literacy themselves engage with a child beginning to read? How can literacy programs serve those fathers?

Writing in Expanding the Concept of ‘Family’ in Family Literacy: Integrating a Focus on Fathers, Vivian Gadsden kicks off a discussion of such questions. Focusing on low-income, African-American fathers who participated in the Father and Literacy Study, Gadsden, who is the director of the Penn GSE-affiliated National Center on Fathers and Families, asks what are the issues faced by these young, poor men that impede their engagement with their children.

Opening with an overview of the recent research, practice, and policy analyses on the involvement of fathers with their families, Gadsden summarizes past and current studies of father-child interactions around literacy and delineates the conceptual issues involved in creating a framework of family literacy that includes fathers as learners and supporters of literacy development.

Reflecting on fathering and family literacy, Gadsden writes, “In general, family literacy programs ultimately focus on the ways adults can facilitate children’s literacy. However, through NCOFF’s work..., it became apparent that, in order for family literacy programs to attend to the needs of multiple family members, they must consider the distinct needs of adults and children, along with approaches to promote parental and individual adult interactions around literacy and children’s literacy achievement.”
This piece appears as a chapter in Family Literacy: From Theory to Practice, edited by Andrea DeBruin-Parecki and Barbara Krol-Sinclair (Newark, DE: International Reading Association).

Research Illuminates Philadelphia’s Struggle to Keep Good Teachers
 


The percentage of fully certified teachers has dropped throughout the Philadelphia public schools over the past four years and high-poverty schools suffer the most from teacher turnover, according to a report co-authored by Penn GSE faculty member Ruth Curran Neild.

The report, titled Once & For All: Placing a Highly Qualified Teacher in Every Philadelphia Classroom, found that, despite an economy in the doldrums and aggressive teacher-recruitment efforts, the percentage of fully certified teachers in Philadelphia has declined from 93 percent to 89 percent since 1999, with high-poverty schools especially hard-hit.

But, according to Neild and her colleagues, Philadelphia’s performance reflects trends nationwide. When it comes to teacher turnover rates and certification levels, the city is no better or worse than other major urban districts, and as for starting salaries and teacher experience levels, it is on par with many districts in the state and region.

Described as the most comprehensive analysis of teacher quality, assignment, and credentialing in Philadelphia’s public schools to date, the study was conducted by a group of scholars for Learning from Philadelphia’s School Reform. That research project, a four-year undertaking, has been designed to measure and help the public understand the impact of the 2001 state takeover of Philadelphia schools, the school management partnerships undertaken with external for-profit and non-profit organizations, and the reforms initiated by the state and city-appointed School Reform Commission and School District CEO Paul G. Vallas.

“The data in this report give us cause for concern about teacher attrition, reliance on lesser-qualified teachers, and inequities in the assignment of qualified teachers to the highest poverty schools in Philadelphia,” says Neild. “The good news is that the district’s ambitious recruitment efforts, which were jump-started by CEO Paul Vallas—and boosted by the tight labor market and drop in demand for teachers in other districts—have led to an increase in teacher applications, even in high-need subject areas.”

The study also found that uncertified teachers who took state licensure tests during 2002-03 failed those basic skills tests in alarmingly high numbers. Fewer than half (49 percent) of emergency-certified teachers passed a basic skills test in math, only 58 percent passed in writing, and 67 percent in reading.

Why They’re Leaving
Based in part on a new data set provided by the Philadelphia public schools, Neild and her colleagues found that about half of all new teachers left the district after three years—with about one-quarter (27 percent) leaving after only one year in the classroom. As a result, teachers with the lowest qualifications are filling a disproportionate number of vacancies at the lowest-performing schools. Some of those schools, particularly those that were privately managed or converted to charter schools as a result of the state takeover, have seen an elevated level of teacher turnover.

The research team identified three major reasons for the high turnover rates and the difficulty in attracting highly qualified teachers:

• A cumbersome hiring and school assignment process. Under a highly centralized system, new teachers are assigned only after all transfers are processed with the result that the timeline for hiring, placement, and summer training is excessively delayed. The problem is aggravated by annual budget uncertainties, a union contract that requires the processing of transfer requests by current teachers before school placements of new teachers can begin, and the end-of-August “melt” of many new recruits and some veterans to suburban districts.
• Inadequate induction for new teachers. During their first week on the job, new teachers do not receive the basic support they need. For example, many principals are so slow to assign mentors that by late October of 2002, nearly 40 percent of the new teachers reported they had not yet met with their mentor teacher.
• Salary disadvantages for teachers who stay. While Philadelphia’s starting salary and hiring bonus are competitive with those in surrounding districts, top salaries are significantly lower. In Philadelphia, only 1 percent of teachers earn more than $70,000 compared with more than 30 percent in Montgomery County and almost 50 percent in Bucks County.


What the District Is Doing
Under Vallas, the School District of Philadelphia has undertaken a number of promising initiatives designed to recruit and retain teachers, including:

• Incentives for those interested in pursuing teaching careers to join the Philadelphia system.
• Expanded outreach and marketing efforts.
• Changes in the hiring process.
• Intense focus on addressing areas of teacher shortage.
• Enhanced preparation for new teachers and additional training for teachers and principals.
• A commitment to high standards for teacher qualifications.


According to the report, the initial results are encouraging. Applications for teaching positions rose dramatically during the first half of 2003, and principals responded favorably to the three-day summer training on teacher retention strategies and have developed a plan for retention activities in their schools.

Although the district gets high marks for aggressively addressing issues of teacher quality and retention, it nonetheless faces significant challenges next year as negotiations for a new teachers’ contract begin. To build on recent initiatives, the district will have to find a way to incorporate new policies for site selection and teacher placement into the new collective bargaining agreement.

Particularly for the highest-poverty schools—where attracting and holding on to qualified teachers can daunting—the district must institute a series of policies and incentives to improve staffing shortages. The report argues that it may be necessary to substantially improve compensation and working conditions for teachers and further warns that the upcoming contract negotiations may once again raise the thorny issue of site-selection of teachers. The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers is committed to maintaining teacher transfer rights based on seniority, while the Vallas team, along with many principals, prefer greater school authority over the staff selection.

Citing the widespread protests by parents, community organizations, and advocacy groups against the state takeover and subsequent privatization efforts, the report raises the question of whether teacher staffing is sufficiently galvanizing issue to rouse these constituencies, along with business leaders, to the point that they have a de facto place at the bargaining table.

Led by Research for Action (RFA), a Philadelphia non-profit, the Learning from Philadelphia’s School Reform research team includes investigators from the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education and the Wharton School, the Philadelphia Education Fund, Swarthmore College, Rutgers University, the Consortium on Chicago School Research, and other organizations. The project will continue to examine issues related to teacher quality and the effects of the state takeover and major school reforms on Philadelphia schools and young people. Lead funding was provided by the William Penn Foundation with additional support from the Samuel S. Fels Fund, The Pew Charitable Trusts, and other sources.

Once & For All: Placing a Highly Qualified Teacher in Every Philadelphia Classroom was written by Neild; Elizabeth Useem, director of research and evaluation at the Philadelphia Education Fund; Eva F. Travers, professor of Education, Swarthmore College; and Joy Lesnick, a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.

Bound copies of the report can be obtained from Research for Action for $10 each (bulk orders at $8 each) by contacting Research for Action, 3701 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, 215- 823-2500 ext. 508, or info@researchforaction.org. Reports, articles, and single-page fact sheets are available on the RFA website at www.researchforaction.org and on the Philadelphia Education Fund website at www.philaedfund.org.

In Practice: Making Changes with Research on Resiliency
By Vinay Harpalani


One of the major goals of school reform is to improve the academic performance of low-resource, urban students. Toward this end, most efforts focus on the organization and functioning of schools. Debates over school management, teacher accountability, and standardized testing have all been salient issues in educational policy. However, the Center for Health, Achievement, Neighborhood Growth, and Ethnic Studies (CHANGES) at Penn GSE is investigating a different approach to improving school achievement—one that is more student-centered.

Research at CHANGES focuses on resiliency, the ability of students to do well in spite of adverse circumstances. Under the direction of Penn GSE Professor Margaret Beale Spencer, CHANGES has undertaken a multifaceted, longitudinal study to examine how resiliency-promoting factors, including monetary incentives and identity intervention programming, have an impact on academic performance. This study, called the Achievement-Linked Programming and Health Advocacy (ALPHA) Initiative, began in the Philadelphia public schools and has expanded to Trenton, New Jersey. Among the initiative’s different features are monetary incentives for students who perform well in school, health education programming for marginally performing students, and contextual and psychosocial assessments for all of these students.

One major component of ALPHA is the Scholarship Through Academic Resiliency (STAR) program in Trenton High School. This program provides monthly stipends of $50 to $75, depending on grade level, to high-performing (A/B) students from low-income backgrounds. Eligible students who apply to the program are randomly assigned to either of two groups: an immediate stipend-receiving group of students who begin receiving monthly payments upon enrolling in STAR and a delayed stipend-receiving group who do not receive these payments until they have participated for a time. The aim is to see if the two groups perform differently during their first year in the program.

Results from the Philadelphia public high schools, where CHANGES conducted an identical program evaluation, indicated that students who received stipends immediately were significantly more likely to maintain A/B grades during their initial year; this difference disappeared in the second year, when both groups received stipends. Researchers are still collecting data from Trenton to see if this effect is replicated there. But the current findings suggest that monetary incentives do have an impact on performance, especially in the first year of receipt.

Another component of the ALPHA Initiative is the Health Information Providers and Promoters (HIPP) program, which provides similar monthly stipends to marginally performing (C/D) students at Trenton High School. To earn their stipend, students attend after-school health education classes and become information providers for their families and communities. HIPP, which also began in Philadelphia, aims to improve the academic performance of these students by equipping them with a resilient and responsible sense of identity. Like the STAR program, HIPP identifies two groups receiving different levels of program exposure and corresponding stipend amounts.

As a part of ALPHA, students participating in both the STAR and HIPP programs complete an annual psychosocial survey that assesses their school, family, and neighborhood experiences and their feelings about these experiences. A related CHANGES project, the Neighborhood Assessment of Community Characteristics program examines the neighborhoods where students live and identifies risk and resiliency-promoting factors therein.

Through its various components, the ALPHA Initiative seeks a deeper understanding of risk, resiliency, and the impact of intervention programming on youth. By identifying strategies that promote resiliency, CHANGES aims to help low-income, urban adolescents and their families cope effectively and succeed in spite of the numerous challenges they face.

For more information on CHANGES, visit www.gse.upenn.edu/changes/.

Vinay Harpalani is a Ph.D. candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Development at Penn GSE and a Master of Bioethics candidate at Penn’s medical school. He serves as a research apprentice at CHANGES.



You Are What You Learn: Curriculum & Social Identity

 As the students and teachers in Mrs. Bailey and Mr. Smith’s ninth-grade English and history classes worked with each other—usually five days a week, 80 minutes a day, from September to June—they consistently participated in at least two types of processes. One involved their developing relationships and social identities. On the first day, they could tell that five students were boys and 14 were girls; that 15 students were black, three were white, and one was Asian; and that both teachers were white. But they did not yet know whether the students would behave in ways that were stereotypically expected for their gender and ethnicity. Nor did they know which students would be “cooperative” and which “disruptive”; which would be “clowns” and which “resistant”; or whether the teachers would be “easy” or “strict,” “pushovers” or “disciplinarians.” Within a couple of months, however, everyone had a presupposable classroom identity. Some of these identities were hybrid or unstable, and some changed during the year. But at any point, there was a substantial consensus about who various people were.

The second type of process going on in the classroom involved learning the curriculum. At the same time the students and teachers were being socially identified, they were also discussing the curriculum. Over the year, the students learned many facts and learned to make arguments about broad curricular themes. For instance, they learned to make arguments about how society should be organized—specifically, about whether individuals should subordinate their desires for the good of the group or whether the society should maximize individual satisfaction. This learning took place, in large part, through the same classroom discussions that established the social identities of both the teachers and the students.

Writing in Curriculum as a Resource for the Development of Social Identity, Stanton E.F. Wortham describes these two classroom activities—the development of social identity and learning the curriculum—and argues that they sometimes mediated each other. Particular students developed identities, in part, because discussions of certain curricular themes provided categories that the teachers and students used to identify them. Curricular themes facilitated identity development because they described particular types of people and the social roles that such people typically adopt. The students and teachers did more than learn these categories of identity as the content of the curriculum. They also used such categories to organize their relationships with particular students. Thus, the interactional construction of students’ identities depended, in part, on categories that were drawn from the curriculum. This article describes in detail how this interdependence between social identification and the curriculum occurred, analyzing how one student’s emerging social identity depended on curricular categories.

This article appears in Sociology of Education, 76.

Research Notes
Through their own studies and their work in various School-related research centers, Penn GSE faculty and researchers explore the issues at the forefront of American education today—urban education, equity and diversity, educational opportunity and educational excellence, and the management of complex organizations. They engage in high-impact research, innovation, and training in public education, as well as in literacy, psychology, social policy, and higher and adult education. The following pages present a sampling of recent studies and findings from Penn GSE faculty and researchers.

No District Left Behind
 With its requirements for more testing, more ambitious improvement goals, and more sanctions for failing schools, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act has raised the stakes for schools nationwide. Mapping the Landscape of High-Stakes Testing and Accountability Programs, by Margaret Goertz and Mark Duffy, describes the types of assessment and accountability policies that states had in place when NCLB was enacted—and the ways that selected school districts in eight states have responded.

The authors identify four challenges facing states as they implement NCLB: As assessment programs expand, how will the states absorb the additional costs, and how will districts already using more performance- or instruction-based assessments accommodate the additional test burden? Assuming that districts rely increasingly on a single-test strategy, will the educational community successfully develop one test to serve multiple purposes? With the increasing threat of sanctions, will educators attend to the right kinds of student performance data, and will they know how to act on those data? Does the emphasis on assessment and accountability—at the expense of capacity-building programs such as professional development—provide sufficient motivation to teachers to reach their schools’ student achievement goals?

This article appears in the winter 2003 issue of Theory into Practice, which can be ordered from www.coe.ohio-state.edu/TIP/.

Education “Reform”: Twenty Years and Counting
 In Riding Waves, Trading Horses: The Twenty-Year Effort to Reform Education, Susan H. Fuhrman presents an overview of the various movements that have dominated the national scene since the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued A Nation at Risk 20 years ago.

First came the “excellence” movement, in which states mandated comprehensive packages of reforms. Reacting to these top-down directives, educators then advocated “restructuring,” characterized by in-school reforms. This movement was, in turn, followed by a third wave, the “standards” movement, which incorporated “top-down” standards mandated by state legislators and “bottom-up” initiatives developed by teachers and local educators. Further complicating the scene have been such structural reforms—all theoretically compatible with standards reform—as charter schools, voucher programs, privatization, and state or mayoral takeovers.

“There is,” writes Fuhrman, “some evidence that the standards movement is having desired effects,” but she cautions that, among other concerns, the reforms have come to be “dominated by what was originally only one theme: test-driven accountability.”

She concludes by outlining the challenges that remain: the ongoing inequities of the American educational system, the difficulty of improving the system at scale, and the need to bring coherence to the system.

This piece appears in A Nation Reformed? American Education 20 Years after A Nation at Risk, edited by David T. Gordon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press).

Advancing Mental Health for Children
 Approximately one in six children in the United States lives in poverty and, as such, is especially liable to encounter psychological adjustment problems. In 1999, the Surgeon General outlined an agenda to focus on the mental health needs of these children, and in Forging Strategic Partnerships to Advance Mental Health Science and Practice for Vulnerable Children, John Fantuzzo, Christy McWayne, and Rebecca Bulotsky respond with a proposal that provides both a conceptual framework that accommodates the government’s priorities and an application of that framework into programmatic research.

Their “child-centered, partnership-based, and population-focused” framework forges strategic partnerships to advance mental health science and practice for vulnerable children. The application illustrates a program of empirical research targeting the particularly difficult problem of child maltreatment and capitalizing on the strategic resources offered by Head Start. This model provides a framework for child-oriented psychologists, including school psychologists, to respond to the magnitude of challenges facing vulnerable children within educational settings.

This article appears in Emerging Models for Promoting Children’s Mental Health, a special edition of School Psychology Review. It can be ordered from www.nasponline.org/publications/index.html.

KIDS for Philadelphia’s Kids
 John Fantuzzo of Penn GSE, Dennis Culhane of Penn’s School of Social Work, and Trevor Hadley of Penn’s School of Medicine were awarded an $800,000 grant from the William Penn Foundation for a two-year research project designed to improve the lives of young children in the city.

Collaborating with city government and the School District, these Penn researchers will create the Kids’ Integrated Database System (KIDS). The country’s first municipal database for children, KIDS will allow researchers to examine high-priority issues in early childhood development, including school readiness, foster care and school success, and the effectiveness of special education and behavioral health service system.

KIDS will streamline and merge separate databases maintained by the public schools and by the city’s human services and public health departments. Data on the educational needs, health and welfare of more than 250,000 Philadelphia children will be shared across agencies for the first time.

According to Penn GSE Professor and principal investigator John Fantuzzo, this database can “produce findings with clear policy and practice implications. KIDS represents one of the most practical yet underutilized opportunities for informing policymakers of what works for whom and at what cost.”

Plays Well with Others
 The Penn Interactive Peer Play Scale (PIPPS), a teacher-rating instrument of interactive play behaviors of young children living in low-income urban areas, has been shown to be effective for preschoolers. But is it valid for kindergartners?

As reported in The Validity of the Penn Interactive Peer Play Scale with Urban, Low-Income Kindergarten Children, Virginia Hampton and John Fantuzzo determined that the PIPPS demonstrates empirically identical constructs for preschool and kindergarten children, yielding three dimensions of interactive peer play: Play Interaction, Play Disruption, and Play Disconnection. Hampton and Fantuzzo find that the PIPPS holds up in comparison to a standardized instrument that assesses social skills and academic competence. Children who displayed highly interactive peer play ranked high both in teacher ratings for social skills and in academic competence, whereas those disruptive or disconnected in play were viewed by teachers as having more problem behaviors and had lower academic achievement as compared to their peers.

The PIPPS also was found to predict first-grade academic performance, with children who played well receiving higher teacher ratings of academic success than did those who did not. The authors conclude with a discussion of the implications of their research for policy and practice in enhancing children’s school readiness.

This article appears in Emerging Models for Promoting Children’s Mental Health, a special edition of School Psychology Review. It can be ordered from www.nasponline.org/publications/index.html.

The Ethics of Care
 Public health programs designed to prevent mental health disorders are born of genuine concern for those who suffer from such disorders. But those served are not, by definition, symptomatic. Indeed, they are often unaware they are even at risk. To further complicate matters, they rarely have a say in the implementation of the treatment they receive—and sometimes don’t even know they are being treated.

In Ethical Considerations in Prevention? Raymond P. Lorion, writing with Michael B. Blank and Paul Root Wolpe, questions the ethics of implementing an intervention for people who are oblivious to its very existence. Concerned about the erosion of public confidence in public health programs (such as vaccinations) and the growing suspicion of public health programs, the authors urge the adoption of specific guidelines for public health ethics, specifically the addition of informed consent to recruitment and implementation procedures.

This piece appears as a chapter in Encyclopedia of Primary Prevention, edited by Thomas P. Gullotta and Martin Bloom (London: Elsevier Publishers).

Community Psychology & LGBTQ Kids
 As community psychologists move their discipline out of the clinic and into the community, they simultaneously expand services to underserved populations. In An Applied Collaborative Training Program for Graduate Students in Community Psychology, Jeanne L. Stanley describes in detail a university-organization partnership that formed the basis for a collaborative outreach training program between community psychology graduate students and a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth center.

Over the course of two semesters, the two groups launched “the Café project” to create a social meeting spot within an urban LGBTQ youth-operated center. The café doubled as part of the graduate students’ coursework, serving as the community outreach project for their community psychology class. Semistructured interviews with the youth and the students provided first-person accounts and perspectives of the project as an effective learning tool for training students in community psychology and in working with LGBTQ youth.

Stanley cites benefits for both parties: the graduate students gained experience in applying theoretical knowledge to a real-life community and in working with LGBTQ youth. The youth themselves not only gained their own center but also received support through their interactions with one another and the community psychology students.

This case study appears in the American Journal of Community Psychology, 31(3/4) and is available at www.kluweronline.com/issn/0091-0562/contents.

Independent Schools: At the Intersection of Class & Race
How African-American Youth Cope...
 How do youth from diverse backgrounds manage in an elite boys’ school? Boys of Class, Boys of Color: Negotiating the Academic and Social Geography of an Elite Independent School, by Peter Kuriloff and Michael C. Reichert, draws on intensive, guided interviews of a sample of 27 representative youth—blocked for race, class, and academic performance—to suggest some answers to that question.

Strategies adopted by the students to navigate the school’s academic geography included hard work, unwavering commitment, a will to win, a “cool” style, self-knowledge as learners, and, for some, a transformative love of learning. Although many marginalized students struggled, the African-Americans among them managed most effectively as they developed intragroup discourses of race and class that enabled them to take up the school’s offers of hegemonic habitus and privileged cultural capital without “selling out.”

This article appears in the Journal of Social Issues, 59(4) and is available from www.spssi.org/jsi_issueinfo.html.

...And How the Schools Can Help
 Growing out of work by Penn GSE Professor Howard Stevenson on the well-being of African-American males, the Success of African-American Students (SAAS) in Independent Schools project has, for the past five years, been examining the experiences of African-American students attending independent schools. Undertaken at the request of concerned independent school educators, SAAS received funding from the schools themselves as well as from the National Institute of Mental Health.

In The Success of African-American Students in Independent Schools, Edith G. Arrington, Diane M. Hall, and Stevenson describe the insights offered by SAAS research. The authors assert that promoting black students’ connection to the school community and their emotional health is key to their academic success; that schools socialize students not only racially but also academically; and that, for black youth, the experience of racism is a reality that can compromise the quality of their school experiences and tax their emotional resources.

This article appears in Independent School 62(4).

Eureka! Educators Experimenting with Science Find Success
 Penn-Merck Improves Science Teaching
In 1999, the Penn-Merck Collaborative launched the Middle Grades Partnership Project, a five-year project in the School District of Philadelphia to promote effective inquiry-based science teaching in grades 5 through 8. Designed to increase teacher knowledge of science content and the use of inquiry-based instruction, the project recently issued a five-year evaluation report.

Principal Investigators Nancy Streim, Teresa Pica, and Carlo Parravano studied five cohorts of middle-school teachers as they participated in a 13-month cycle of activities. Their evaluation revealed that Penn-Merck’s nine-month graduate seminar, two summer institutes, and ongoing classroom assistance, did indeed help broaden teachers’ knowledge of science concepts and instructional strategies as well as facilitating their integration of science with other areas of the curriculum and advancing their role as change agents and mentors for other teachers at their schools.

Funded by the National Science Foundation Teacher Enhancement Program, Merck and Co., and Penn, the Penn-Merck Collaborative has fostered partnerships among Penn GSE, Penn’s Schools of Engineering and Applied Science and Veterinary Medicine, the Merck Institute for Science Education, and Philadelphia elementary and middle schools.

An evaluation of the Collaborative’s first five years, which focused on teachers at the elementary level, is also available. For more information, contact Nancy Streim at nstreim@gse.upenn.edu.

The Merck Institute’s Success Story
 Since 1993, the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) has been evaluating the Merck Institute for Science Education’s (MISE) partnership with four school districts in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. During that time, the CPRE evaluations have provided MISE staff with ongoing feedback on the progress of their work and assessments of their impact on schools, teachers, and students. In the summary report on a decade’s worth of evaluation, The Merck Institute for Science Education: A Successful Intermediary for Educational Reform, CPRE Co-Director Tom Corcoran describes a partnership that moved the science curriculum away from the textbook and toward a more inquiry- centered program.

Guided by an activist strategy and a board of advisors that included leading scientists and science educators, the MISE partnership was, Corcoran reports, “a success story that offers important lessons to other intermediary organizations working with school districts to improve teaching and learning.” A PDF of this report can be downloaded from the CPRE website at www.cpre.org/Publications/rr52.pdf.

“Big Ideas” from the NSES
 Introduced in 1996, the National Science Education Standards (NSES), with their emphasis on teaching “big ideas” to diverse populations through inquiry-based instruction, carried major implications for the preparation of teachers. In “Evidence of the Influence of the National Science Education Standards on the Professional Development System,” Jonathan Supovitz takes a macro perspective for examining the influence of the NSES on the system of professional development.

He concludes that, overall, the results are uneven. Although Supovitz cites broad influence on in-service professional development programs, he has found far less evidence that the standards have shaped either state and district policy or the programs at institutions of higher education.

This piece appears in What Is the Influence of the National Science Education Standards? published by the National Academy Press, and can be downloaded at books.nap.edu/html/nses_influence/partsII&III.pdf.

Out-of-Field Teaching and the Limits of Teacher Policy and Reform
 The failure to ensure that the nation’s classrooms are all staffed with qualified teachers is one of the most important problems in contemporary American education. Over the past decade, many reports and national commissions have focused attention on this problem and, in turn, numerous reforms have been initiated to upgrade the quality and quantity of the teaching force.

Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Schools and Staffing Survey, Richard Ingersoll focuses on the problem of underqualified teachers in the core academic fields at the 7th- to 12th-grade level in a report titled Out-of-Field Teaching and the Limits of Teacher Policy. The report, published jointly by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education and the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, examines data on how many classes are not staffed by minimally qualified teachers and to what extent these levels have changed in recent years. The results show that although almost all teachers hold a bachelor’s degree and a full teaching certificate, the levels of out-of-field teaching are high, with too many teachers assigned to teach subjects that do not match their training or education.

The report draws out the lessons and implications of these failures for the prospects of the No Child Left Behind Act to successfully address the problem of underqualified teachers in classrooms in the coming years.

For more information, contact ddemski@gse.upenn.edu.

A Closer Look at the Myth of Teacher Shortages
 Over the past decade, Richard Ingersoll’s various research projects on teacher supply, demand, and quality have revealed the realities of school staffing problems and teacher shortages. His most recent report, The Myth of Teacher Shortages, published jointly by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education and the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, expands on a theoretical perspective drawn from organizational theory and the sociology of organizations.

Ingersoll’s operating premise is that in order to understand the causes and consequences of these social problems, it is necessary to examine them from the perspective of the organizations—the schools and districts—within which teachers work. Employee supply, demand, and turnover are central issues in organizational theory and research. However, little work has been done to apply this theoretical perspective to understanding school staffing problems and policy.

The report shows that by “bringing the organization back in,” the issue of school staffing problems is reframed from a macro-level issue—involving inexorable societal demographic trends—to an organization-level issue, involving manipulable and policy-amenable aspects of particular schools. A close look at the data from this perspective, Ingersoll argues, shows that the conventional wisdom concerning teacher shortages is largely a case of a wrong diagnosis and a wrong prescription.

For more information, contact ddemski@gse.upenn.edu.

The Role of Coaching in America’s Choice Schools
 Schools throughout the nation are increasingly relying upon the leadership of coaches to establish an effective professional development environment to train teachers on techniques and practices. The Consortium for Policy Research in Education recently examined multiple aspects of the coach’s role in the implementation of the America’s Choice school design in 27 schools across the United States.

The report, The Heart of the Matter: The Coaching Model in America’s Choice Schools, by Susan Poglinco, Amy Bach, Kate Hovde, Sheila Rosenblum, Marisa Saunders, and Jonathan Supovitz, reveals consistent factors and influences that either hindered or perpetuated effective coaching and subsequently impacted teachers’ implementation of standards. The authors found that the key factor to effective coaching is clearly defining the coach’s role and understanding the relationship among the coach and the teachers, principal, and leadership team.

A PDF of this report can be downloaded from www.cpre.org/Publications/AC-06.pdf.

Systemic Reform Efforts Improve Student Learning in Duval County
 A recently released report by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education titled The Impact of Standards-based Reform in Duval County, Florida: 1999-2002 examines the effects of a school system’s efforts to bring about widespread improvements in student learning.

Authors Jonathan Supovitz and Brooke Snyder Taylor study elementary and middle school reading, writing, and mathematics results from the spring of 1999 to the spring of 2002 on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test in Duval County, relative to seven other counties in Florida.

Results indicate positive effects in Duval County elementary schools, yet indistinguishable differences or negative effects in middle schools. These findings support the authors’ hypothesis that Duval’s efforts to systemically change the practices of teachers and school leaders across its system are improving the achievement of its elementary schools at a faster rate than in other comparable districts, and to date, growth in middle school performance has been comparable to that of other counties.

A PDF of this report can be downloaded from www.cpre.org/Publications/Duval.pdf.

Language Learning for a New Century
 In Language Education in the 21st Century: A Newly Informed Perspective, Teresa Pica describes how language education has become increasingly informed and improved by the joint efforts of teachers and researchers as they work together to address questions of mutual interest and concern. Through relationships that are numerous and diverse in emphasis and scope, teachers and researchers are contributing to the design of an empirically grounded pedagogy, reshaping long-dominant prescriptive methodologies, and revitalizing language education for the 21st century.

This paper appears in Language in the 21st Century, by Humphrey Tonkin and Timothy Reagan (Amsterdam: John Benjamins).

Robots of the World, Unite!
 In Less Like a Robot: A Comparison of Change in an Inner City School and a Fortune 500 Company, Paul Skilton-Sylvester takes a look at how the schoolwork asked of elementary school children compares to the ways that work is changing in the information economy. His findings show that the traditional contradiction between socially progressive education and the classroom as a preparation for work is, at least in some areas, waning and that work done by many different specialists in the past is being put back together, allowing workers to do “more of the whole job” and leaving them feeling “less like a robot.”

This article appears in the American Educational Research Journal, 40(1).

Bad Business
 At small colleges, annual fund goals are typically based on short-term need rather than on long-term plans. In The Relationship of Annual Giving and Endowment Payout to Future Tuition Dependency at Private Master’s Universities, Vince Maniaci has developed a metric that supports the argument that this practice hinders overall fundraising, increases financial vulnerability, creates internal tension, ignores strategic planning, and perpetuates a lack of discipline in the budget process.

His research found that institutions relying on four percent or more of their operating revenue from annual fund saw an increase in tuition dependency over 10 years, whereas those that relied on endowment payout saw a decrease. Says Maniaci, “What emerged from the study was a benchmark, but more important a sense of the psychology driving the bad business practice attributable to many presidents. The psychology is related to the highly subjective time discount of many presidents, i.e., the executive tendency to spend rather than save.”

The piece—Maniaci’s doctoral dissertation for Penn GSE’s Executive Doctorate in Higher Education Management program—recently received the John Grenzebach Award for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in Philanthropy for Education. The Grenzebach Award is cosponsored by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education and the American Association of Fund-Raising Counsel Trust for Philanthropy.

The Cost of Violence
 Judging from the statistics, violence is as American as apple pie. An American male between the ages of 15 and 24 is, for example, four to five times more likely to be the victim of crime than is his counterpart in most other industrialized nations. In the last 15 years, more American children have been killed by handguns than the total number of U.S. soldiers who died in Vietnam. Among African-American youth, homicide is the leading cause of death.

Writing in Vulnerability to Violence: A Contextually-Sensitive, Developmental Perspective on African American Adolescents, Margaret Beale Spencer, Davido Dupree, Michael Cunningham, Vinay Harpalani, and Michelle Munoz-Miller take a close look at what such levels of violence mean to its young victims. Based on data gathered from a sample of African-American adolescents living in a southern city, the authors analyze the impact of violent crime on that population. In a comparison of the ways that victims and non-victims report clinical symptoms associated with violence or trauma, they found that these symptoms might not arise entirely from actual victimization but, rather, from multiple stressors experienced over time.

In their conclusion, the authors argue that the most important policy implication of their study is that “public funding should allow mental health support and services to be available to students without requiring a diagnosis for a particular disorder.”

This article appears in Journal of Social Issues, 59(1).

On the Bookshelf


Tagengo shakai-no gengo bunka kyoiku [Language and cultural education in a multilingual society].
Yuko Goto Butler. (2003). Tokyo: Kuroshio Publishing.
Written in Japanese, this book examines in-service teachers’ training for those who work with students with limited English proficiency in California. Butler’s book is intended to reach not only academic communities but also Japanese teachers and policymakers who are struggling with educational reforms and who are considering how best to educate the growing number of non-Japanese-speaking children in Japan.

Supporting Alma Mater: Successful Strategies for Securing Funding from Black College Alumni.
Marybeth Gasman and Sibby Anderson-Thompkins. (2003). Washington, DC: CASE Publications.
Alumni giving rates at predominantly white institutions range between 20 and 60 percent, while historically black colleges typically fall below the 10 percent level and often drop below five percent. What accounts for the giving gap? Certainly not the absence of a tradition of philanthropy among African Americans, who contribute generously to the black church. Rather, the problem must arise from the way black colleges ask for support. To determine how colleges approach their alumni—and how alumni respond—Marybeth Gasman and Sibby Anderson-Thompkins conducted an in-depth survey of black-college fundraisers, alumni staff, and alumni themselves.

Continua of Biliteracy: An Ecological Framework for Educational Policy, Research and Practice in Multilingual Settings.
Nancy Hornberger (Ed.). (2003). Cleveden, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Biliteracy—the use of two or more languages in and around writing—is an inescapable feature of life and schools worldwide, yet it is one that most educational policies and practices continue blithely to ignore. The continua of biliteracy, featured in this book, offers a comprehensive yet flexible model to guide educators, researchers, and policymakers in designing, carrying out, and evaluating educational programs for the development of bilingual and multilingual learners, with each program adapted to its own specific context, media, and contents.

Listening: A Framework for Teaching Across Differences.
Katherine Schultz. (2003). New York. Teachers College Press.
How can teachers learn to embrace and learn from the diversity of their students? Rather than preparing teachers to follow blueprints, Katherine Schultz offers a conceptual framework for “deep listening,” illustrating how successful teachers listen for the particularities of individual students, for the rhythm of the whole class, for the broader contexts of students’ lives, and for acts of silence. Listening in this manner brings together knowledge of individuals, an understanding of a student’s place within the classroom, and mastery of subject matter and pedagogy.

Playing with Anger: Teaching Coping Skills to African American Boys Through Athletic Training.
Howard C. Stevenson (Ed.). (2003). Westport, CT: Greenwood.
With background for readers to understand why youths perceive violence as the only way to react, Howard Stevenson’s Playing with Anger presents “culturally relevant” interventions that can teach coping skills to African-American boys with a history of aggression. Developed in the Preventing Long-Term Anger and Aggression in Youth (PLAAY) project, these interventions and preventative actions include teaching coping skills and anger management via athletics such as basketball and martial arts.