What if, at the push of a button, you could find out how the very first days of a child’s life affect how he or she makes that critical early adjustment to school? What if you could see the impact of low birth weight or teen parentage on a kid’s early literacy skills? And what if you could control for those risk factors to reveal the difference that programs like Head Start can make?

In Philadelphia, those are precisely the kinds of questions researchers are setting out to resolve. Of course, their answers don’t come at the push of a button or the click of a mouse. Rather, they come from an archive of linked data, called the Kids Integrated Database (KIDS), that gives researchers access to just about everything the city of Philadelphia knows about its young children.

And the city knows a lot. Municipal agencies amass a wealth of administrative data—population-based information about public programs and the people they serve—that can, when integrated, tell researchers and policymakers volumes about what works and what doesn’t.

The idea behind KIDS is breathtakingly simple: to link the records of individual children in the various databases maintained by separate city agencies. Funded by the William Penn Foundation and created by three Penn professors—Cartographic Modeling Lab Director Dennis Culhane, Penn GSE Professor John Fantuzzo, and Center for Mental Health Policy Director Trevor Hadley—KIDS links at least six databases maintained by the Department of Public Health, the Department of Human Services, the Office of Emergency Shelter and Services, and the School District.

Is Big Brother Watching?
“What this project has done is to create a single mechanism,” explains Culhane. “Previously, researchers had to go to each of these agencies individually. The main difference now is that we are taking a systematic approach instead of pursuing these data requests on an ad hoc basis—so that the process doesn’t have to be reinvented every time.”

On the surface, that’s a simple idea, but its execution was no small achievement. For starters, Culhane and his colleagues at the Cartographic Modeling Lab had to design the mechanics of the system, figuring out a way of linking data created at different times, by different people, for different purposes.

For example, all four School District databases (attendance, achievement, standardized testing, and special education) assign children with a single identifier that follows them through their entire school career, but that kind of transparency is the exception, not the rule, at City Hall. To create a unified system, programmers wrote an algorithm that assigned to each individual a unique identifier that was applied systemwide to that particular young person. Once they were done, they’d built an infrastructure, a system of linkages that, in effect although not in fact, merges information from more than a half dozen sources.

With a system as powerful as KIDS, concerns about Big Brother intruding into the private lives of citizens were inevitable. After all, much of the material is deeply personal—health records and details about family life and accounts of social service interventions.

As Culhane explains, such concerns arise largely from misconceptions about how sensitive data are handled. Each agency has its own regulations regarding identified information, and anyone making use of that has to observe those regulations to the letter. It helped that Penn researchers—including everyone on the KIDS team—have been working with city databases for years and thus have an insider’s understanding of each agency’s protocol for ensuring confidentiality. Nonetheless, each agency required that both the KIDS project team and any researcher who makes use of the system sign its particular confidentiality agreement.

Better Than Government Work
But, as anyone familiar with the complexities of municipal government will understand, Culhane had landed the easy job.

Negotiating the project with the city meant that the KIDS team had to make some compelling arguments about its potential value to City Hall. For one, the system would provide immediate payoffs by enabling the city to track its services and interventions closely—showing, for instance, when kids were being overserved and when they were falling through the cracks. Equally attractive were the down-the-road benefits the city would enjoy in the competition for federal and state funds, where understanding the effectiveness of interventions is critical: with KIDS, Philadelphia would be the only municipal jurisdiction in the country set up to provide that kind of information.

Nonetheless, the KIDS team had to negotiate a lot of red tape. To forge a workable agreement, Fantuzzo and his colleagues had to devise a way of satisfying federal regulations that prohibit agencies from integrating data unless that information serves an important administrative purpose.

The solution they found reflects their commitment to building a dynamic and truly collaborative process that will survive over time—and that will put the needs of the agencies at the heart of the research agenda. They located decision-making with a Policy Review Committee, whose members are recruited from each participating agency. Researchers looking for access to KIDS have to make a compelling case to the committee that their particular project addresses a concern of real importance to the city.

Fantuzzo explains, “The committee provides a safeguard that research will not be conducted for esoteric purposes, but rather that it will be important, relevant, and with clear policy implications.”

Moreover, he continues, “The Policy Review Committee sets up a dynamic process in which researchers and high-level policymakers have conversations with one another. It creates an important, ongoing transaction between researchers and the frontline people responsible for the welfare of the children in the city.”

In fact, it’s that promise of collaboration—of the university and the city talking to one another about how to improve the lives of Philadelphia’s children—that gets Fantuzzo most excited about KIDS. “We have all this information about young children in these silos,” he explains, “and the agencies that collect it all have mandates to provide data to Washington. But it’s all government work.

“What we did was to ask, ‘Who is generating the research agenda? Why can’t the data be used to talk about child well-being?’ We want the people who collect the information to be involved in creating the agenda.”

A Comprehensive Case Study
As a research tool, what is most impressive about KIDS itself is its extraordinary descriptive power. The infrastructure that Culhane’s lab built enables Fantuzzo’s researchers to paint a richly detailed picture of a particular cohort of children through their interactions with official Philadelphia.

Take the Early Childhood Experiences and School Success study. The study had its beginnings in 2000, when a team of Penn GSE researchers began to take a close look at the preschool experiences of the children entering kindergarten in the School District of Philadelphia. When Fantuzzo released their first findings in September 2002, he described them as “an evidence base for hope.” And, indeed, what his research team had found was an impressive vindication of the value of formal early learning experiences: kids who had attended Head Start and other preschool programs maintained higher skills throughout the year, achieving habits and motor skills that are more advanced than those of their peers.

Fast forward a couple of years, and that same project is still chugging away: each year, as a new crop of youngsters makes its way into kindergarten, their teachers fill out a questionnaire that details the students’ preschool experiences, giving Penn researchers an abundance of data that will help address the question of whether the differences found in Kindergarten hold in grade 3.

But now, with KIDS at its disposal, the project team can look back into a child’s very first years. That retrospective examination will enable researchers to paint a more complete picture of children’s lives before they even reach the District, detailing risk factors like teen parentage, low birth weight, placement out of home, etc.

Says Heather Cohen, a Penn GSE doctoral student collaborating with Fantuzzo on this project, “We already know that kids benefit from formal preschool, but with KIDS, we can look at specific questions about the impact of formal programs.” Do certain populations of children—kids living in single-parent homes, for instance, or special ed kids—take particular benefit from programs like Head Start?

In a similar study on the impact of foster care on school adjustment, Penn GSE doctoral student Staci Peckham and Fantuzzo are hoping to pinpoint which services are associated with resilient outcomes—and to shed some light on the question of what works for children whose lives have become entangled in the foster care system. Yet another set of researchers is looking at special needs children being served by both the behavioral health and the special education systems in an effort to determine which combinations of services result in the best educational outcomes for this vulnerable population.

Once completed, this trio of evaluations—all on high-priority issues—should serve as a comprehensive case study to demonstrate how KIDS can help answer previously unanswerable questions. While all three studies are local in focus, the KIDS team hopes that their impact will extend far beyond the banks of the Schuylkill River.

Says Fantuzzo, “KIDS is an infrastructure for creating good multidimensional intelligence about kids and about how city governments are succeeding in helping them—and it does so without creating a new billion-dollar program. I’d like to see the day when people are asking us, ‘How did you navigate through all the regulations? How did you build trust? How did you do this?’ I’d love to have people coming to us to find out how we did it so they can replicate it in their community.”



Also from Fantuzzo’s Team

The Importance of Play
The preschool years are a critical time for children to develop the skills they’ll need for success in school—not least among them, the ability to work and play well with others.

Focusing on low-income children enrolled in a large urban Head Start program, John Fantuzzo, Yumiko Sekino, and Heather L. Cohen examined children’s competence in peer play and its relationship to self-control, autonomy, and language. Their findings, reported in An Examination of the Contributions of Interactive Peer Play to Salient Classroom Competencies for Urban Head Start Children, show that children who interact well with their peers are more likely to have stronger emotional control and language development skills, while those who engaged in disruptive play are more prone to negative emotional and behavioral outcomes.

This article appears in Psychology in the Schools, 41(3) and is available from www.interscience.wiley.com.

Learning Begins at Home
In 2002, Penn GSE researchers developed the Parent Involvement in Children’s Education Scale (PICES) to determine the involvement of parents of Head Start preschoolers. A Multivariate Examination of Parent Involvement and the Social and Academic Competencies of Urban Kindergarten Children, by Christy McWayne, Virginia Hampton, John Fantuzzo, Heather L. Cohen, and Yumiko Sekino, describes a study that applied the PICES instrument to a kindergarten sample drawn from 307 low-income, ethnic minority students and their primary caregivers in a large, urban school district.

According to the authors, “parents who actively promote learning in the home, have direct and regular contact with school, and experience fewer barriers to involvement have children who demonstrate positive engagement with their peers, adults, and learning.”

This article appears in Psychology in the Schools, 41(3) and is available from www.interscience.wiley.com.

What are the best tactics that teachers can employ to improve student learning? How can students become better independent learners?

Many urban districts attempt to address these questions by relying on more scripted or directive curricula, but Penn GSE researchers working with schools in West Philadelphia see teacher professional development as the best road to improved student performance.

When Penn contracted as one of seven “private” providers charged with improving student achievement in some of the School District of Philadelphia’s most challenged schools, serious work on professional development was put into practice as the cornerstone of school improvement. Penn GSE partnered with three low-performing local elementary schools in fall 2002 and linked them with the Penn Alexander School—the preK-8 neighborhood public school recently created by Penn, the school district, and teachers’ union—to form the Penn Partnership Schools (PPS) Initiative.

That partnership drew up a “shared accountability” model aimed at building school communities where examination of teaching practice is the norm, teaching strategies align with standards, and teachers and Penn consultants work together to adopt approaches that clearly improve student performance. This is no simple task, according to PPS Associate Director Jeanne Vissa, who explains that this “reculturing of the schools” started with a commitment by all PPS teachers to 120 hours of professional development each year.

The First Step
Shared accountability is characterized by collective responsibility for student learning among teachers, administrators, Penn partners, parents, and the students themselves. It demands that the entire school community deepen its knowledge about learning standards, that teachers have the skills to teach to them, and that there is regular discussion about the quality of student work as demonstrated in ongoing assessments.

As befits a partnership, one of the first steps the PPS team took was to listen to the people on the front lines: teachers were surveyed about critical needs and, in the first year of the initiative, teachers designed individualized professional development plans around Penn-provided continuing education courses.

Cross-Partnership professional development was scheduled so that teachers from the four schools could work together on learning new strategies and solving common teaching dilemmas. But the heart of the initiative lay in a combined mentoring-seminar format that has evolved over time with the support of Penn faculty, graduate students, and teacher-consultants. For example, Partnership teachers who want help with an instructional strategy they’ve discussed in, say, a literacy seminar can request that their seminar leader model this technique in the classroom. Facilitators also provide individual feedback based on careful in-class observation. At first, seminar facilitators were not easily accepted into classrooms but as of now are providing “at the elbow support” to many of the Partnership teachers, who value the one-on-one collegiality and helpful perspectives.

The experienced facilitators proved invaluable when the District introduced a new “Shared Reading” instructional approach in 2003. Observing firsthand that the teacher workforce interpreted this new instructional component as nothing more than “read-aloud” time, Penn facilitators spotted the confusion and helped teachers implement the new approaches in ways that enriched their curriculum with effective and diverse strategies for reading instruction.

Signs of Success
PPS is even using student assessment as an opportunity for community-building and professional development. Partnership leaders and classroom teachers were concerned that the district’s assessment tools for measuring student performance were not adequately aligned to Pennsylvania State performance assessments. So they created their own assessment tools, which are derived from State standards and targeted to measure student progress in higher-level, critical thinking tasks.

As a result of adopting a common set of professional development goals and instructional foci in the Partnership schools, Penn’s professional development facilitators and the Partnership principals are reporting considerable improvement in the quality of discourse among teachers, especially around the subject of instruction and the relationship between assignments, questioning techniques, and expectations. Even so, principals have been hard-pressed to find time for “walk-through” observations—which have been adopted as a component of the Partnership’s shared accountability model to ensure that effective practices are making their way to all classrooms. Given the latest round of district budget cuts, which have further stretched principals to accomplish even more with less, Penn partners are helping principals develop cross-school teams of teacher leaders who can participate in walk-throughs and take the pulse of improvements in classroom learning.

Challenges notwithstanding, marked changes have been taking place in PPS classrooms. One goal of Penn’s work was to encourage a diversity of teaching approaches, including full-class activities, small-group learning experiences, and individual learning. Today, more classrooms are arranged with opportunities for small-group instruction, and facilitators are helping create even more such opportunities through the use of student-experts. Equally heartening is the presence of student work in the corridors indicating that students are engaging in more tasks that require critical thinking.

And more is on the way. In 2004-2005, PPS schools will be creating “workshop” structures in the classroom, designed to provide more opportunities for guided reading, literature circles, writing, science inquiry, and mathematics investigations. Other signs that “shared accountability” is taking hold are the emergence of teacher voices in the design of professional development and the growing number of collaborative presentations on promising practices being made by Penn partners and teachers at local and national conferences.

Whether these initiatives will be enough to “reculture” the schools so that they can sustain a shared accountability model on their own is still an open question, but early reports have been promising. For an effort that is in only the third year, the evaluation is, of necessity, preliminary. That said, student test scores show that the Penn Partnership schools, as a group, made among the highest gains in literacy among the district’s privately managed schools.

The paper describing the PPS work, School Improvement through University-Public School Partnership: The Penn Partnership Schools Initiative, by Jeanne Vissa and Nancy Streim, was originally presented at the American Educational Research Association’s April 2004 conference.



The Report Card: Is the Penn Partnership Making the Grade?

Four years into the collaboration at the Penn Alexander School (PAS) and two years into the Penn Partnership Schools initiative, all four schools have encouraging news on student performance. Scores from the citywide Terra Nova tests show that almost every grade at PAS scored above the national median in every subject.

In language skills, the first and second grades scored above the 80th percentile—a particularly impressive achievement given the significant number of non-native English speakers in those grades. The third grade, which was the only cohort to register a drop in scores, nonetheless placed in the very respectable 72nd percentile. That grade saw a 33 percent increase in new students from a variety of educational backgrounds this year. Math scores also showed good progress, with the seventh grade scoring in the 61st percentile (compared to their 46th percentile ranking as sixth-graders). The third grade scored at the 72nd percentile.

The other Partnership schools posted steady, though less dramatic, progress. In language skills, the trio leads other public schools managed by EMO providers, and in reading and math they are in the middle of the pack.

The discrepancy between the improvement at PAS and at the other schools may be attributed to the lack of control over teacher hiring at the latter—a restriction that’s meant much effort has been devoted to achieving buy-in from teachers. That effort, coupled with the placement of new principals in two of the schools this year, is expected to create an even more receptive environment for the intensive focus on literacy and math.

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, higher and adult education. The following pages present a sampling of recent studies and findings from Penn GSE faculty and researchers.

States Struggle to Leave No Child Behind
Writing in The State Context for Implementing the No Child Left Behind Act, Margaret Goertz looks at the context—at the district, state, and federal levels—in which NCLB’s accountability provisions are playing out. With a particular focus on assistance to schools in need of improvement, she considers the intersection of state and federal accountability policies, state and district support for low-performing schools, and the fiscal context for reform.

While finding that NCLB has the potential to improve American schools, Goertz sees a worrisome lack of fiscal capacity, particularly in a period when state coffers are shrinking. She concludes, “The NCLB Act provides incentives for schools to strengthen their educational programs. The federal government must now acknowledge and address the need to build capacity at all levels of the system to make these changes happen.”

This piece appears in The Challenge for Education Reform: Accountability, Resources, and Policy, the published papers of the Aspen Institute Congressional Program conference held in February 2004. Copies of Goertz’ paper are available from insites@gse.upenn.edu.

Race & The Ivory Tower
In Developing Trust, Negotiating Power: Transgressing Race and Status in the Academy, Marybeth Gasman, C. Gerstl-Pepin, Sibby Anderson-Thompkins, L. Rasheed, and K. Hathaway investigate and engage the experiences of graduate students of color through a collaborative project involving two white faculty members and three African-American doctoral students. Through face-to-face meetings and e-mail correspondence, the collaborators use narrative inquiry to create a forum in which issues of race and status often dismissed or silenced in the academy can be discussed.

This autobiographical method highlights the experiences and concerns of both faculty and students regarding issues such as cultural biases built into curricula, the lack of faculty mentors for African-American students, and the influence of stereotypes in academic settings. The authors also provide models for creating comfortable learning spaces for students, particularly through methods of collaboration that transgress power boundaries in order to establish inclusive discussion.

This article appears in Teachers College Record, 106(4).

Debunking Some Myths about Teacher Quality
Just about everyone—from the man on the street to Ivory Tower academics—agrees that one of the critical challenges to American education is placing qualified teachers in classrooms nationwide. But much of what is done to redress this problem is, according to Richard Ingersoll, based on flawed reasoning.

In Four Myths about America’s Teacher Quality Problem, Ingersoll outlines the most widely held views about what ails teaching—restrictive certification standards, the shortages of teachers coming out of education programs, the low quality of pre-service preparation, and the lack of accountability once teachers are on the job—and then proceeds to debunk them. For Ingersoll, a full understanding of these problems can only stem from a rigorous examination of the social contexts in which they occur, especially the organization of schools and the character of the teaching occupation.

This chapter appears in Developing the Teacher Workforce: 103rd Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, edited by M. Smylie (University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Why Did the E-learning Boom Go Bust?
In the 1990s, e-learning was touted as one of the major innovations on the educational scene. Promising a student-centered approach to learning, it was capable of going anywhere at any time and of being individualized to each student’s personal learning style. That promise attracted venture capital and a lot of press.

Ten years later, the e-learning boom—like its dot-com cousin—has gone bust. In Thwarted Innovation: What Happened to E-Learning and Why, Robert Zemsky and William Massey explore just what happened. Their findings challenge three of the claims that early enthusiasts made for the new technology: that the market would inevitably emerge once the technology was on-line, that “kids would take to the e-learning like ducks to water,” and that e-learning would transform the way faculty teach.

“In retrospect,” the authors write, “the rush to e-learning produced more capacity than any rational analysis would have said was needed.... The hard fact is that e-learning took off before people really knew how to use it.”

The full report is available at http://www.irhe.upenn.edu/WeatherStation.html.

Where’s Dad?
Increasing the quantity and quality of the interaction between fathers and their children is a central concern of numerous organizations and programs, but the lack of structured measures of father involvement has hampered the efforts of researchers and policymakers. In response, Vivian Gadsden and her colleagues at the National Center on Fathers and Families (NCOFF) have developed the Fathering Indicators Framework (FIF), which provides a range of markers that can be used to assess the engagement of fathers.

Fathering Indicators for Practice and Evaluation: The Fathering Indicators Framework, a chapter in Conceptualizing and Measuring Father Involvement, describes NCOFF’s formulation of the FIF and outlines its possible uses. Gadsden and the other authors provide detailed explanations of each indicator and the multiple data sources that can be used for assessment. By offering measurable quantities, the framework serves as a valuable tool for practitioners, researchers, and policymakers interested in identifying and impacting behaviors critical to father-child engagement.

This chapter appears in Conceptualizing and Measuring Father Involvement, edited by Randal D. Day and Michael E. Lamb (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004).

Boyz 2 Men
Young African-American males often adopt what Howard Stevenson calls “exaggerated macho identity stances” to help them cope in a society that makes so little room for the full expression of African-American life. This strategy, based on feelings of hypervulnerability, represents the best efforts of young men to manage rejection and the anxiety and anger that accompany it.

In Boys in Men’s Clothing: Racial Socialization and Neighborhood Safety as Buffers to Hypervulnerability in African American Adolescent Males, Stevenson describes a recent study of African-American boys whose history of anger and aggression had landed them in a disciplinary school. The research, which was designed to determine the influence of neighborhood safety and racial socialization on hypervulnerability, suggests that, together, both factors are associated with lower levels of anxiety and anger among boys in anticipating rejection as well as lower levels of anger in actually receiving it. Boys whose families have provided both a high measure of racial socialization and a safe neighborhood, however, seem to have high anxiety levels in anticipation of rejection.

Observing that African-American boys “need what all boys need—care and compassion,” Stevenson concludes with a brief description of the Preventing Long-term Anger and Aggression in Youth (PLAAY) project, which has been designed to influence emotional functioning through the integration of athletic movement and racial socialization.

This chapter appears in Adolescent Boys: Exploring Diverse Cultures of Boyhood, edited by Naomi Way and Judy Chu (New York: New York University Press, 2004).

The Lives of Black Folks
Starting with the first African known to have set foot on American soil—the Moroccan slave Estaban who accompanied the Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca in 1528—African American Lives paints a new picture of American history. In her contribution to this volume, Marybeth Gasman has written a biography of Charles S. Johnson, the Chicago-trained sociologist who became the first black president of Fisk University as well as a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights movement. Situating Johnson among other black intellectuals of his time, Gasman demonstrates the scope of his achievement and the key role he played in the struggle for black equality in the United States.

“A Biography of Charles S. Johnson” appears in African American Lives, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. This volume features some 600 biographies drawn from the forthcoming eight-volume African American National Biography.

Picture Books for the “Real World”
One of the challenges of public education in urban settings has been overcoming a sense of disconnection between the world of school and the “real world.” Despite efforts to emphasize cultural diversity, students often express feelings of disengagement from education because it does not seem relevant to their lives.

Story-reading, Story-making, Story-telling: Urban African American Kindergarteners Respond to Culturally Relevant Picturebooks, by Larry Sipe and Patricia Daley, studies the potential of storytelling techniques to help children feel that their cultural experiences connect with and contribute to their education. Sipe and Daley examine interactive storybook readalouds in which African-American kindergarten students are encouraged to collaborate with the storyteller and with other students in the process of meaning-making. The authors stress that using books for, by, and about African Americans in these reading sessions presents opportunities for children to engage the literature and tell their own stories. If teachers who read stories act as bridges between text and audience by encouraging and incorporating student responses, Sipe and Daley add, children are likely to develop a sense that what they bring with them into the classroom is of value, making them more likely to engage the learning process.

This chapter appears in Exploring Culturally Diverse Literature for Children and Adolescents: Learning to Listen in New Ways, edited by J. May and D. Henderson (New York: Allyn & Bacon).

For the Boys
In all the recent discussion about boys’ lives and educational experiences, few have paid attention to the ways that boys’ developing sense of self may be influenced by the variously gendered academic and social curricula of schools.

In Boys’ Selves: Identity and Anxiety in the Looking Glass of School Life, Peter Kuriloff and Michael Reichert set out to shed some light on how boys form a sense of self-concept and the role that their schools play in that process. Their exploratory study showed a strong inverse relationship between self-concept and social anxiety.

A series of follow-up interviews with a sample of 27 boys of divergent backgrounds elaborated on these findings. Their qualitative study suggested that “all else being equal, these boys developed their self-concepts based in part on how they saw themselves reflected in the mirror of the school’s social relations.”

The authors conclude with a discussion of strategies that schools might pursue on the way to “becoming more generous sites of security and possibility for all boys.”

This article appears in Teachers College Record, 106 (3).



Language Studies

Say It in Broken English
With the growing influence of globalization making English language skills an increasingly useful asset, English instruction is being introduced to students in other countries at earlier stages of their education. This trend makes scrutinizing the processes of language teaching and learning even more important and informative.

Yuko Goto Butler examines the influence of Korean elementary teachers’ accents on student perception and comprehension of English in Perception Versus Reality: How Important Is It That Korean Elementary School Teachers Speak “Good English?” The study registered children’s responses to readings of varying difficulty recorded in American- and Korean-accented English by the same speaker. While results showed that the students rated the American-accented teacher more highly in several categories of language use and indicated a preference for this teacher, listening comprehension scores were higher for students who listened to the grade-appropriate Korean-accented recording. Butler suggests that incorporating varieties of English into early language instruction and focusing on the unique strengths of non-native English speaking teachers could be beneficial to young students.

This article appears in Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, 19(1), 2003.

The Meaning of it All
How do young readers make sense of unfamiliar words? In a study involving 61 fourth-graders, Yuko Goto Butler investigated the students’ ability to infer and explain word meanings in context and examined the strategies they employed in doing so.

In How to Make Sense of Word Meanings in Context: “Meaning-making” Skills among Young Readers of English, Butler describes how two sets of students—native English speakers and those learning English as a second language—negotiated the challenge of unfamiliar words. Her findings showed that, although the non-native speakers had more difficulty in inferring meanings than did their native-speaking counterparts, the differences between the two groups disappeared once researchers controlled for the size of the students’ receptive vocabulary.

This piece appears in Studies in Language Sciences, 3, edited by Y. Oshima-Takane, Y. Shirai, and H. Shirai (Tokyo: Kuroshio Publishing).

Moral Education: A Teacher Centered Approach.
Joan Goodman and Howard Lesnick. (2003).
In describing the ordinary moral questions that arise in every classroom, every day, this book reveals the richness of moral education, its centrality, and its pervasiveness. Through the voices of children, parents, teachers, and administrators, it considers the conflicting assumptions and priorities of those interested in moral education and provides an instructional approach that respects the diversity of viewpoints.

The Education Gospel: The Economic Power of Schooling.
An examination of the American faith that education can cure the nation’s social and economic problems, this book argues that the ongoing race for personal advancement and the focus on worker preparation have squeezed out civic education and learning for its own sake. The challenge, the authors show, is to create learning environments that incorporate economic and civic goals while preventing the further descent of education into a preoccupation with narrow work skills and empty credentials.