SPRING 2004

Style Matters:
What to Do about the “Black Thang” in Education
By Howard Stevenson


“No child left behind” is such an important mandate that it raises the passions of even the most sober academics. Like many slogans, it touches the heart of parents and teachers and counselors across the political spectrum. It also clearly raises concerns that accountability without resources cannot secure such a promise. But even if resources were adequate, another concern emerges: Will a focus on test-taking accountability without consideration of a child’s community context and culture lead to “educational orphaning”? Will the exigencies of educational politics leave children of color stranded outside of the mainstream knowledge of classrooms and schools? (1)

What does society make of those little and loud Black, Brown, and White girls and boys who intrude upon the boundaries of civic and social etiquette? Will their ways of intruding and their ways of making sense of the world be accounted for in formal learning? Will the ways they influence, and are influenced by, their context and culture be left behind in our quest to ensure they can “perform” in reading, writing, and arithmetic?

“Ways of being” is a hard concept to wrap one’s head around: it is the noise humming in the background of teacher-student, parent-teacher, school-neighborhood relations. Not so obvious as to be commented on, it is a significant phenomenon nonetheless and may explain why so many subtle interpersonal conflicts go awry. As a concept, “ways of being” signifies the styles of communication that a particular group uses to influence the world. A group is a group because it has a common history, a common language, and common experiences that are collectively transmitted in varying ways across time and contexts. “Ways of being” is a fluid rather than a static concept that could describe the styles of a gang or of African Americans as a group or of Ivy League university professors.

My premise here is that while culture may be defined differently by psychologists, anthropologists, and educators, there still exists the notion of “ways of being” that influence the perceptions and decisions of children and adults of color and greatly affects their interactions with social institutions and their personnel.

The challenges of educating urban youth cannot wait until we clarify our academic definitions of culture. Rather, we must face the ways of being in front of us and see them as relevant without benefit of a nationally randomized trial, governmental commission, congressional hearing, or the latest school reform agenda. Having spent most of my research, clinical, and educational career with families and youth of African-American descent, I feel more comfortable addressing my comments to this group, although I believe my basic insight holds for other socially constructed racial groups.

Both the Individual and the Collective
Countless commissions have been called to study cultural competence and mental health resources available to children and youth, and many of them have identified the lack of such competence in the research and delivery of emotional and psychological services to children of color and their families. The call for cultural competence in psychology and education has come from many different quarters and from many different institutions (2), and the reports agree that children and families of color, in both urban and rural contexts, have the worst access to health services. But calling for cultural competence is not the same as studying it, learning it, engaging with it, and refusing to be afraid of it.

Looking back at 50 years since Brown v. Board of Education, what concerns me most is that we have so little understanding of how different ways of being affect the educational process. The challenge begins not with what happens in classrooms between, say, White teachers and Black students. It begins with the denial among many professionals, professors, and principals that ways of being actually exist, that they differ across different ethnic groups, and that they deserve special attention in the learning process. Perhaps we are afraid of stereotyping, or of appearing politically incorrect, or of just revealing our own ignorance.

Out of a fear of essentialism, educators commonly avoid discussion of “The Black Thang.” That is, they worry that if they start to talk, write, and teach about Black style in the context of education, they risk being accused of believing that “All Black folk do this or that” and of relying upon stereotyping and gross overgeneralization. Alternately, their critics may say, “How can you narrow the diversity of an individual’s expression into a single category of behaviors that define a group?”

My response to this justifiable fear and hesitancy is “both-and.” That is, individuals are not just individualistic and not just collectivistic. The reality is that Black youth operate as individuals and as a collective, and our learning processes must consider both of these orientations in the classroom. As we learn about these ways of being and the cultural, historical, and emotional meanings behind them, we may realize that they are neither the exclusive property nor a defining characteristic of African Americans. Our fear that we will be accused of stereotyping will not be diminished simply by declining to understand how their ways of being represent voice and mobility to many Black youth. Educators must be courageous enough to examine personal, unexplored fears of racial tension and tenacious enough to mine the fertile pedagogical data found in the cultural expressions that emanate from young Black, Brown, and White mouths and movements.

In an atmosphere where under-resourced test-taking accountability prevails, educational systems will emphasize the individual at the expense of the collective and, as such, will dismiss the ways of being of culturally different students of color who are loud and dark and move around too much. This dismissal may occur not necessarily out of malice, but out of a desire for the efficiency of excluding extraneous, non-academic experiences. The choice of conformity over creativity, by definition, leads to the exclusion of outliers, and those on the periphery who have been disenfranchised will not find “education as conformity” to be much of a match for their ways of being, knowing, or doing.

Teaching Us What They Know
Style is a way to communicate to others what is most meaningful. Far more than a way of saying what I mean, style is a way of doing what I mean. Many urban classrooms increasingly resemble foreign-exchange programs as some teachers and students try to explain themselves to each other. Still, a classroom where teachers and students are slowly and painstakingly asking one another, “Do—you—understand—the—words—that—are—coming—out—of—my—mouth?” is actually a very heartening (albeit elementary) one—particularly when the alternative is a setting where no one even cares to ask the question.

Last February during Black History month, the African-American boys in a group therapy/Black psychology class held as part of the Preventing Long-term Anger and Aggression in Youth (PLAAY) project made it clear that they knew their Black history. During a discussion of Rosa Parks, the great heroine of the Civil Rights movement, the “oldheads” leading the group began to speak eloquently about the power of her singular defiance against a racist, caste-like social structure. But the students interrupted, wanting to set the record straight: “Rosa Parks didn’t do anything. All she did was sit her Black ass down!” they explained.

We were shocked, aghast, confused, hurt, angry, pissed, pissed, hurt, and pissed! Did I say the oldheads were pissed? Following a heated exchange, it became clear that these 12- to 16-year-old boys were not trying to piss us off but were sharing their knowledge of the Civil Rights movement. They were participating in the cultural demand of the class—that is, to teach us what they know and vice-versa—and eventually, we realized this was the best teaching moment we could have been given. Taking advantage of their passion to defend their knowledge with evidence, we were able to add to their knowledge, to explain what Rosa Parks meant from our perspective, and to dare them to watch several video documentaries on the Civil Rights movement. We reached them, or some of them, and disrupted their secure knowledge of Rosa Parks. And we learned something in the process as well. Both-and.

Now, this story will make better sense if you have seen the movie “Barbershop.” Rather than explain it to those of you who have not seen it, I dare you to watch it and e-mail me what you think about my Rosa Parks story. The message to take home, though, is that disenfranchised, disrespected, and apathetic Black youth are getting an education about their history and their culture—but by whom? And how are the popular media so successful in rooting their “lessons” so deeply and engendering such passionate apologetics?

Style matters and we shouldn’t be afraid of it. Big business knows how to co-opt cultural imagery for the purpose of profit, but educators need to do better than that. Urban education is the last bastion of institutional authority to integrate popular culture into its daily marketing, curricular, and matriculation processes. To entertain the reality of the “Black thangs” would not mean staging cultural hip-hop dance parties during math class.

I daresay the little and loud Black and Brown and White boys and girls demand that we recognize the ways that cultural style mediates what constitutes meaningful knowledge. We should be talking not simply about the teaching of reading, writing, and arithmetic, but about who is doing the teaching, and how they teach, and whether those who are taught see the power of their own style in the learning process.

Penn GSE Associate Professor Howard C. Stevenson is a psychologist whose research focuses on ways of improving the psychological adjustment of children and adolescents by mobilizing the cultural strengths of families, communities, and neighborhoods. His most recent book, Playing with Anger: Teaching Coping Skills to African American Boys Through Athletics, was published in 2003.

(1) By “context,” I am referring here to the context of school identities within larger contexts of communities with political histories. By “culture,” I refer to the culture of students and families of color in urban neighborhoods with intergenerational emotional histories.

(2) American Psychological Association (2003). Guidelines on multicultural education, training, research, practice, and organizational change for psychologists. American Psychologist, 58(5): 377-402; Delpit, L. D. (1996). Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York: New Press; Neal, L. V. I., A. D. Mccray, et al. (2003). The effects of African American movement styles on teachers' perceptions and reactions. Journal of Special Education 37(1): 49-57; Stevenson, H. C. (2003). The conspicuous invisibility of black ways of being: Missing data in new models of children’s mental health. School Psychology Review, 32(4): 520-524; and U. S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2001). Mental health: Culture, Race, and Ethnicity—A supplement to mental health: A report of the Surgeon General. Rockville, Md.: U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Center for Mental Health Services.



Youth and Community

For over a decade, the notion of “developmental assets”—that is, the social and psychological strengths that enhance the welfare of young people—has provided an invaluable framework for researchers in the field of community building.

In a recent volume exploring the asset-building approach to youth development, Raymond Lorion and Harris Sokoloff draw on their experience with two local communities—an affluent suburban township on Philadelphia’s Main Line and a high-poverty urban neighborhood. In the former, town leaders, shaken by the Columbine tragedy, were concerned about the safety of students in grades 7–12. Meanwhile, at a high-poverty West Philadelphia elementary school, parents and educators wanted to understand—and resolve—the significant academic and behavioral problems faced by their young people.

Relating the experiences of these distinct communities, Building Assets in Real-World Communities, co-written by Lorion and Sokoloff, considers the practical impact of the developmental assets framework on the day-to-day life of young people, their families, and communities and also examines the larger implications, both scientific and political, for the developmental and mental health sciences.

This chapter appears in Developmental Assets and Asset-Building Communities: Implications for Research, Policy, and Practice, edited by Richard M. Lerner and Peter L. Benson (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers).

Heads Up:
Researchers to Build Integrated Head Start Curriculum
By Nancy Brokaw


Created in the heady days of the 1960s, Project Head Start was a centerpiece of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. When the President proposed the idea, the program he described was intended to “rescue low-income children from the poverty which otherwise could pursue them all their lives.” To put these young Americans on “an even footing with their classmates,” the Johnson Administration conceived a comprehensive program that would meet their emotional, social, health, nutritional, and psychological needs.

Head Start was inspired by the observation that poor children—particularly those who lived in urban areas—run a disproportionate risk of lagging behind their more affluent peers, both academically and socially. That insight has been confirmed over the years by a body of research demonstrating that the literacy and developmental problems facing low-income children have a profound impact on their later academic achievement and social adjustment.

But as the call for evidence-based programming intensified through the 1990s, policymakers began demanding hard evidence about what works for the population of young, disadvantaged children the program serves. In 2001, nearly 40 years after Johnson first launched Head Start, the White House convened a summit on early childhood cognitive development, out of which grew a large-scale research initiative designed to determine the best ways to prepare preschool children for later academic success. Two years later, that initiative got underway as Penn GSE and seven other institutions across the country received federal funding for a variety of projects, including research to test preschool curricula, to examine Internet-based teacher training, and to foster parental involvement in improving children’s readiness to enter school.

A number of these projects will focus on curricular issues, but only the program based at Penn GSE will design and evaluate an integrated curriculum incorporating reading, math, approaches to learning, and social and emotional skills. Called the Evidence-Based Program for the Integration of Curricula (EPIC), this five-year project carries a $5.8-million price tag. Led by Penn GSE Professor John Fantuzzo, the project team comprises a group of experienced researchers and practitioners from a number of universities and institutions around the country.

Over the years, Head Start has been supremely successful in “addressing children’s comprehensive needs and giving them a sense of what school is about,” says Fantuzzo, a psychologist who specializes in early childhood development. “With EPIC, we now have a wonderful opportunity to add to that success by developing scientifically tested curricula that could help preschoolers get a leg up academically.”

Gathering the Building Blocks
 With funding from an NICHD planning grant, Fantuzzo’s team spent the past year identifying the high-quality curricula available in emergent literacy, numeracy, and behavioral/emotional adjustment. That work provided the building blocks for their current task: connecting those curricula, which have until now been taught in isolation from one another, into a single, fully integrated curriculum.

The selections they made begin with Early Literacy and Performance Measures Curriculum, which incorporates a reading and language curriculum, developed by team member and director of Johns Hopkins’ Early Learning Program Barbara Wasik, and an assessment program. For the numeracy component, the team chose KIDSCOUNT, an evidence-based program and assessment component developed by another member of the EPIC team, Penn GSE Associate Professor Douglas Frye.

The Emotional Learning Links curriculum, developed by team member and Drexel University Professor Myrna Shure, homes in on three sets of skills: emotional awareness and expression, understanding of other perspectives, and understanding of the consequences of behavior and the alternative responses to conflict. Its companion Behavioral Learning Links curriculum, co-designed by Penn GSE Professor Paul McDermott and Fantuzzo, draws on decades of research that demonstrates learning behaviors are teachable—and at the preschool level.

The final component of the EPIC curriculum focuses on family involvement, an important concept in Head Start and many other early childhood programs. Heading up this initiative, Penn GSE Associate Professor Vivian Gadsden will work with families to ensure that what happens at home supports what children are learning in the classroom. This piece of the EPIC curriculum will provide parents with the tools they need to help their children, including home-school extensions for both mothers and fathers.

Constructing and Testing a New Curriculum
 Perhaps the most delicate operation facing the EPIC team is the challenge of weaving together the various components to create one coherent—and effective—program. To build their integrated curriculum, the researchers have adopted an additive approach, which will rely on careful evaluation to determine what works.

In the first year of the study, two sets of curricula—one focusing on cognitive skills and the other onbehavioral/emotional—will be tested independently. Working with the School District of Philadelphia, the team will partner with two groups of exemplary teachers to pilot the integrated cognitive and social/emotional curricula.

The second year will be devoted to parallel field trials. From 20 randomly selected Philadelphia Head Start classrooms, five will be assigned as a control group, five will receive the integrated literacy and numeracy curriculum, five the literacy curriculum only, and five the numeracy curriculum only. In a parallel experiment, trials will be held to test the behavioral and emotional learning links curriculum.

Before the school year begins, the research team will draw on what it has learned so far to construct a fully integrated curriculum that merges the literacy/numeracy and behavioral/emotional components. Once teachers, aides, and parents have received training, the fully integrated curriculum will be rolled out in six Head Start classrooms in January. Two additional classes will serve as controls for continued evaluation. At the beginning and end of the semester, participating children will be assessed in all areas.

In the final phase of the project, a two-year longitudinal study will follow participants as they progress from pre-kindergarten into kindergarten. From the moment the school bell rings in September, 45 Philadelphia Head Start classes will participate in an experiment to determine how well the new curriculum works. Classrooms will be selected randomly, with one third receiving the fully integrated curriculum, the second third getting the integrated literacy and numeracy curriculum alone, and the remaining serving as a control group.

As in year 3, students will be assessed at the beginning and end of the year to determine their progress, but in this phase, assessments will continue into the kindergarten year. Children in all three groups—fully integrated curriculum, literacy/numeracy only, and control—will receive follow-through testing to ascertain the longer-term impact of the curriculum. At the same time, the research team will be assessing classroom context, and parents will shed light on family culture through a detailed questionnaire aimed at defining the specifics of the child’s home life.

Taking the KIDS’-Eye View
 Throughout the complex evaluation process, the EPIC team will be relying on the kind of sophisticated database measurement instrument unavailable to the visionary educators who designed the original Head Start program: the Kids’ Integrated Database System (KIDS). An earlier collaboration between the city of Philadelphia and Penn researchers, KIDS links the databases of the city’s many administrative, educational, social, and health agencies to enable the exchange of information about more than 250,000 Philadelphia children.

The brainchild of Dennis Culhane, the director of Penn’s Cartographic Modeling Laboratory and a professor at the University’s School of Social Work, and Fantuzzo, KIDS is the only municipal database of its kind in the country. Indeed, according to McDermott, “No one in the country has the kind of data that Penn—in partnership with the city of Philadelphia—has available.”

Access to KIDS will enable the researchers not only to study the impact of the curriculum on individual children, tracking their progress through the system, but also to control for what happens to these young children outside the classroom—in the family and around the neighborhood. The database gives researchers a kid’s-eye view of the world. Using these data, they will be able to trace such influences as parental characteristics (ages, education level) as well as environmental factors (the level of gang activity in the neighborhood, crime and drop-out rates, the concentration of dangerous housing, etc.). With this information, the EPIC team will be able to disentangle the impact of environment on the effectiveness of the curriculum.

It is that kind of detailed analysis that will reveal just how well EPIC plays out in the real world of Philadelphia classrooms. If it succeeds, preschoolers enrolled in the city’s Head Start and comprehensive day care programs will reap the benefits of a program designed to address the whole of their developmental needs—academic, social, and behavioral.

But the vision that drives Fantuzzo and the EPIC team isn’t strictly local. Rather, their hope is that the lessons learned will extend far beyond the School District of Philadelphia. With partnerships that reach across the country, the research team hopes, over time, to build a mechanism for applying the integrated curriculum to diverse populations in cities from coast to coast. Along the way, they hope that EPIC can serve as a safeguard of the Head Start promise that all American children enter school on the same strong and sure footing.



More from the EPIC Team

The Educational Impact of Emotions
A Multivariate Analysis of Emotional and Behavioral Adjustment and Preschool Educational Outcomes, by John Fantuzzo, Rebecca Bulotsky, Paul McDermott, Samuel Mosca, and Megan Noone Lutz, examines the relationship between emotional/behavioral adjustment and learning/social outcomes for preschool children attending an urban Head Start program. This article appears in School Psychology Review, 32.

PALing Around
Peer-Assisted Learning Interventions with Elementary School Students, by Cynthia Rohrbeck, Marika Ginsburg-Block, John Fantuzzo, and Traci Miller, details a meta-analysis of evaluations of peer-assisted learning (PAL) programs that produced significant improvement in elementary school students’ achievement and finds that PAL had a positive impact—especially among younger, urban, low-income, and minority students. This paper appears in Journal of Educational Psychology, 95(2).

Urban Fathers Speak Out
The label “urban father” is often shorthand for an African-American or a Latino man who grew up in a poor, mother-headed household, received a less-than-stellar education, and now has children out of wedlock. In Situated Identities of Young, African American Fathers in Low-Income Urban Settings: Perspectives on Home, Street, and the System, authors Vivian Gadsden, Stanton Wortham, and Herbert Turner III examine who these men are and what motivates them to take part in their children’s lives. This article appears in Family Court Review, 41(3), July 2003.

Desire & False Belief
The Relation Between Desire and False Belief in Children’s Theory of Mind: No Satisfaction? by Margalit Ziv and Douglas Frye, examines young children’s understanding of desire while assessing whether its dominance over belief can explain children’s difficulty with false belief. Finding no correspondence between the two, the authors suggest that desire cannot explain children’s difficulty with false belief and even that desire and belief stem from different sources. This piece appears in Developmental Psychology, 39(5).
 

Philadelphia Faces the Challenge:
A Qualified Teacher in Every Classroom
By Liz Schmitt

Inspired by Education Week’s “Quality Counts” campaign, Penn GSE Assistant Professor Ruth Curran Neild and colleagues recently undertook a four-year study on the state of Philadelphia’s public schools. Sponsored by the non-profit organization Research for Action, the report they compiled is the most comprehensive on any urban district nationwide. Entitled Once & For All: Placing a Highly Qualified Teacher in Every Philadelphia Classroom, it highlights over-reliance on lesser-qualified teachers, teacher attrition rates, and inequities in the assignment of teachers across the district. While the statistics revealed are not good news for Philadelphia, the report may signal a positive turning point for the city’s school system and usher in an era of collaboration among the district, the community, and Penn GSE.

The Truth about Teacher Certification
While Pennsylvania has some of the nation’s highest standards for teaching certification, Philadelphia’s schools have not reaped the rewards of these requirements. In fact, the percentage of fully certified teachers across grade levels in the city declined during the past four consecutive school years. According to the report, “In October 1999, 93.3 percent of the district’s teachers were certified to teach in Pennsylvania. Just three years later, certification rates had fallen to 88.5 percent.” The lowest teacher certification rates are seen in the highest-poverty middle schools.

Of greater concern is the large number of emergency-certified teachers—candidates who have not yet passed their Praxis exams but who are hired and given two to three years to do so. At the beginning of the 2002–03 academic year, almost one-half of the new teachers hired between June and October had been emergency certified. Neild and her colleagues point out that during that year, fewer than half of these teachers passed the basic mathematics test; fewer than 60 percent passed the writing test; and just over two-thirds passed the reading test. According to Neild, these statistics, which are relatively new, debunk the myth that uncertified teachers are high-level college graduates who did not have the time to take the Praxis exams.

The weak academic background of these emergency-certified teachers “heightens the probability that they will have difficulty managing a classroom, developing curriculum and assessments, and diagnosing learning difficulties.” Additionally, due to the structure of teacher placement in Philadelphia, they are most likely to work in the highest-poverty schools, where students most need teachers with classroom management experience, diagnostic capabilities, educational skills, and specific subject-area knowledge.

The Price of High Turnover
Moreover, the report maintains, “high levels of turnover at individual schools impede the development of a coherent educational program, institutional memory, and staff cohesion.” The national teacher turnover rate at high-poverty public schools is 16 percent and nine percent at low-poverty schools. But more than 25 percent of teachers new to Philadelphia schools in 1999–2000 left the year after they started—and more than half had left the district three years later.

While emergency-certified teachers are more likely to leave the district, attrition among newly certified teachers is substantial as well. Certainly some of these are teachers who determine that they are not cut out for education or leave for more appealing jobs in suburban communities, but the report indicates that this high attrition rate can be attributed largely to dissatisfaction with compensation, working conditions, student discipline, and the leadership in school buildings.

From the recruiting standpoint, district-level turnover rates provide the most critical information. For Neild, however, school-level turnover is equally significant since individual schools are affected by both departures and transfers. Again, high-poverty schools are the hardest-hit, particularly in the middle and K–8 grade schools.

The Newest Teachers Get the Hardest Assignments
Approximately seven percent of Philadelphia’s teaching force is brand-new in any given year. But due to the centralized hiring and placement process and transfer allowances granted to veteran teachers, new teachers are disproportionately concentrated in high-poverty schools. Again, “the situation is particularly dire at the city’s middle schools. It is not uncommon for 20 percent of the staff at the highest-poverty middle schools to have experienced less than a full year of teaching in the district.” Since these schools are likely to have the highest number of new teachers, they also tend to have the highest number of emergency-certified teachers.

In addition to inequities in the distribution of new teachers, the notoriously late centralized hiring and placement process creates a disadvantage for them: they have little time to familiarize themselves with their school, classroom, and neighborhood; meet their colleagues; or plan lessons. Many also reported that there was little in the way of a formal orientation or induction process.

The Next Step
The reaction to Once & For All has been, says Neild, enormously positive—District CEO Paul Vallas even made it required reading for staff. Indeed, the report confirmed many of the steps already take by the district. During his tenure, Vallas has significantly decreased the number of emergency-certified teachers hired and initiated a Campaign for Human Capital, aimed at expanding the pool of prospective teachers and retaining veterans already in the district. The campaign includes monetary incentives for student teachers, tuition reimbursements for all teachers, expanded marketing efforts, targeted recruitment efforts, a mentoring program, a system-wide core curriculum, and improvements in working conditions.

Even those challenges that still need to be addressed are “on the radar screen,” according to Neild: site selection of teachers, recruitment of teachers to high-poverty schools, closer and greatly expedited scrutiny of credentials and qualifications, and greater accountability on the part of administrators at individual schools.

To address and develop solutions, Neild is planning a comparative study between Philadelphia and a number of other cities examining policies regarding, in particular, site selection. She and her colleagues have also created a survey to gauge the satisfaction of new teachers with their working conditions; those who respond will be encouraged to participate in confidential web-surveys throughout the academic year.

Neild also hopes that wide distribution of the Once & For All report may spark collaborative research efforts among researchers in cities across America. After all, the problems she and her colleagues describe are not unique to Philadelphia—but are all too common in high-poverty urban districts nationwide.

Once & For All is part of the Learning from Philadelphia School Reform research project to assess the effectiveness of school improvement in Philadelphia. Written by Neild, Elizabeth Useem, Eva F. Travers, and Joy Lesnick, it can be downloaded from the Research for Action website at www.researchforaction.org/PSR/PublishedWorks/TQReport03.pdf.

Liz Schmitt is a graduate student in the Higher Education Division at Penn GSE.



Also from Ruth Curran Neild

High-Poverty Secondary Schools and the Juvenile Justice System: How Neither Helps the Other and How that Could Change, by Robert Balfanz, Kurt Spiridakis, Ruth Curran Neild, and Nettie Legters, looks at high school students who passed through the justice system in a large mid-Atlantic city and finds that both the educational and juvenile justice systems frequently conspire to exacerbate their academic problems. This study appears in Deconstructing the School-to-Prison Pipeline: New Directions for Youth Development #99, edited by Johanna Wald and Daniel J. Losen (Jossey-Bass).

The Effects of Magnet Schools on Neighborhood High Schools: An Examination of Achievement among Entering Freshmen investigates the impact of academically selective magnet schools on the performance of ninth-graders in neighborhood high schools. This article appears in The Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, 9(1), January 2004.

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:
Helping Urban Children Learn the Mysteries of Math
By Leah J. Ploussiou


A new initiative, undertaken by a partnership of three universities and four urban school districts, is setting out to revitalize mathematics education in urban schools and, in the process, to prove to urban students that math counts. Called MetroMath: The Center for Mathematics in America’s Cities, the project is not about improving test scores, but rather about making connections between classroom mathematics and everyday life, about working with teachers and communities to get students to see math as relevant.

Funded with a five-year, $10-million grant from the National Science Foundation, MetroMath is designed to build understandings of how urban children learn mathematics, equip urban teachers with the most effective instructional strategies, and take advantage of existing resources in urban communities to improve math education. Along with Penn GSE, the participating institutions are Rutgers-Newark, the City University of New York Graduate Center, and the school districts of Philadelphia, New York City, Newark, and Plainfield, New Jersey.

Penn GSE Assistant Professor Janine Remillard, who is a co-principal project investigator, notes, “The Center’s mission is to develop a core of leaders in math education working with urban schools and communities. The interdisciplinary design of the Center assumes that improving math education requires knowledge from a variety of perspectives in mathematics, mathematics education, urban studies, and cognitive science.”

The Center will focus on everything from teacher professional development and graduate programs, to research, to issues critical to mathematics education in America’s cities. Slated to open in late spring 2004, the Center will link research areas and connect researchers and graduate students. It will conduct research on strategies for urban community involvement and directly engage parents and neighborhood leaders in community projects. It will offer, over the next five years, two-year seminars and mentored internships for 50 graduate students and 100 working teachers.

One of three key strategic program areas, research will focus on gathering the information needed to achieve efficacy in mathematics education for all students in urban environments. Graduate students and faculty will collaborate in creating a comprehensive, research-based framework addressing urban children’s mathematical learning and development; urban teachers’ learning, development, beliefs, and expectations; and community interactions with and influences on children, teachers, and schools in relation to mathematics.

The Center’s other initiatives are designed to cultivate leaders in the field, with two programs that will forge new pathways to leadership for urban K–12 mathematics education. To equip the next generation of doctoral-level mathematics educators with the necessary tools for success in urban schools, MetroMath will launch a novel, two-year, intensive, multi-university, multi-disciplinary program—the Seminar/Practicum on mathematics learning in urban environments. Participating faculty will bring a wide range of expertise in specialties including mathematics, mathematics education, cognitive science, urban studies, and urban education.

To directly affect classroom teaching in urban schools, MetroMath will establish the Mathematics Institute for Leadership in Education (MILE). MILE will develop teachers’ knowledge of math, how it is learned, and how it may best be taught; enhance teachers’ educational leadership skills and understanding of urban communities; and prepare teachers for further career possibilities. Both MILE and the Seminar/Practicum are envisioned to be replicable at other urban locales throughout the country.

On the community level, the Center will encourage parents to help in actual instruction and to advocate for strong schools. Churches and civic associations will be tapped as well to promote successful mathematics learning, an approach that has worked in literacy campaigns.

Leah J. Ploussiou is a doctoral student in the Higher Education Division at Penn GSE.



More on School Leadership, Curriculum & Math

 So You Want To Be a Principal?
The demands of high-stakes testing and accountability, heightened by the national No Child Left Behind agenda, have underscored the need for school principals with the knowledge, skills, and disposition to promote student achievement. In response, Penn GSE recently launched the Educational Leadership Program for Aspiring Principals (ELPAP).

Building a Comprehensive and Holistic Model for Leadership Preparation: What We Have Learned, by Judy Brody, Jeanne Vissa, John Weathers, and Warren Mata, takes a comprehensive look at the development of ELPAP and presents a preliminary evaluation of its effectiveness. The authors describe how the program’s design drew on research-based suggestions from current literature on school leadership development and incorporated the experiences of Penn instructors and practitioners as well as research about leadership in successful organizations in non-educational settings.

The paper incorporates the findings from the beginning stages of an ongoing formal evaluation in an attempt to analyze how the program might improve its own efforts and subsequently inform best practice models of principal preparation programs.
This paper was presented at the American Education Research Association’s Annual Conference in April 2003 and is available upon request from jbrody@gse.upenn.edu.

Changing School Culture at the District Level
Until recently, researchers have neglected the role of school districts in improving teaching and learning, concentrating primarily on specific characteristics of schools themselves. But impatience with the slow pace of school-by-school reform has generated greater interest in system-wide reforms and in the role of the central office.

Changing District Culture and Capacity: The Impact of the Merck Institute for Science Education Partnership, by Tom Corcoran and Nancy Lawrence, contributes to that discussion with a presentation of findings from a 10-year evaluation of the Merck Institute for Science Education (MISE) and its partnership with four districts in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Their report, published by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, examines the work of MISE and the impact of the partnership with the four districts and provides a framework for thinking about the development of district capacity to support instructional change. This report is available at www.cpre.org/Publications/rr54.pdf.

Learning Math at Home & Abroad: How It Adds Up
Continued research on the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) reveals the absence of simple, cross-national relationships between specific instructional variables and student achievement, cautioning policymakers to understand the important relationships among curriculum, accountability, distribution of resources, and other sources of influence on student achievement.

What Explains Differences in International Performance? TIMSS Researchers Continue to Look for Answers, by Deborah I. Nelson, highlights key issues for improvement of mathematics and science instruction and offers insights for future international data collection to clarify differences in policy and practice and their links with student achievement.

Research cited in this study notes a significant relationship within all TIMSS nations among the content of curriculum, its implementation, and student achievement: at the core of this relationship is the time devoted to instruction on specific topics. This study addresses the implications from TIMSS for improvement of standards, textbooks, and course offerings in the United States and also examines the differences concerning classroom instruction and education equity in the United States compared to other higher-achieving nations. This paper is available at www.cpre.org/Publications/rb37.pdf.

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.

Dear Mr. President...
 With candidates on both sides of the political spectrum debating the crisis in public education, a group of concerned citizens—scholars, teachers, students, parents, and, yes, politicians—add their voices to the discussion in Letters to the Next President. Among the 44 contributors to this volume, Richard Ingersoll weighs in with Leaky Buckets and Revolving Doors. Drawing on data that demonstrate that almost half of new teachers leave the profession within the first five years, Ingersoll argues that the teacher shortage is in reality a turnover problem—and one that will be solved only through workplace improvements.

This chapter appears in Letters to the Next President: What We Can Do about the Real Crisis in Public Education (New York: Teachers College Press).

The Effect of Accountability Systems
 As state accountability systems change to comply with the No Child Left Behind Act, new research raises a host of concerns for state policymakers. Redesigning Accountability Systems for Education, by Susan H. Fuhrman, reviews key issues for states implementing new accountability systems.

Summarizing a book of the same title, edited by Fuhrman and Richard F. Elmore, in which the authors assess the effectiveness of new accountability systems, this policy brief offers suggestions for policymakers working to improve accountability systems and supports the practice of continuous refinement to maximize the chances of academic improvement and minimize undesirable side effects. This CPRE policy brief is available at www.cpre.org/Publications/rb38.pdf.

Learning about Learning
 In Learning in Education, Stanton Wortham explores the place of theories of learning in the educational endeavor, finding three broad areas—behavior, mind, and society—into which these theories fall. Looking first at behaviorist thinking, he describes an educational theory that defines teaching as the shaping of a student’s behavior through reinforcement. Despite 50 years’ worth of research demonstrating that behaviorism is an inadequate description of how learning takes place, it is very much in evidence in the classroom—“because,” observes Wortham, “it works. If you have control over effective reinforcers, you can shape people’s behavior.”

Countering the behaviorist model, cognitivists believe that people base their actions not simply in response to reinforcements, but on their mental representations of the world. In this view, true learning does not just produce the right behavior but rather develops deeper understandings.

Just as cognitivists argue that people are not merely animals to be shaped by Skinner boxes, social cognitivists define people as far more than lone thinkers in splendid isolation from society. Social cognitivist theories envision learning not primarily as the creation of mental models but rather as a transformation that occurs through participation in social activity.

“Learning in Education” appears in Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Volume 1, edited by L. Nadel (New York: Macmillan/Nature Publishing Group).

Coping in a Fast-Paced World
 Despite the close parallels in the development of children with and without intellectual disabilities, certain behaviors are found with so much greater frequency among children with intellectual disabilities that they are commonly considered characteristics of the condition. Included among these are repetitive behaviors, also described as perseverative, and passive behaviors or disengagement from activity. Considered maladaptive impediments to developmental progress, these behaviors are generally targeted for educational intervention. In “Maladaptive” Behaviours in the Young Child with Intellectual Disabilities: A Reconsideration, Joan Goodman and Margaret Inman Linn raise the possibility that repetition and passivity, though clearly present in young children with intellectual disabilities, may be misconstrued as always being an impediment to progress. Indeed, these behaviors may, for a mind that moves slowly, be adaptive responses to coping in a world that moves quickly. This article appears in International Journal of Disability, Development and Education, 50(2), June 2003, and is available at www.tandf.co.uk/journals/.

Learning from the Real World
 Hello, Central
 In The Use of Research Evidence in Instructional Improvement, Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) Co-director Tom Corcoran describes how central office and school staff in three urban districts made decisions about instructional improvement strategies and about how much weight they gave to evidence. The study looked at three sets of strategic decisions that each district faced as it tried to improve student performance. This CPRE policy brief is available at www.cpre.org/Publications/rb40.pdf.

School Community Building
 In Developing Communities of Instructional Practice: Lessons from Cincinnati and Philadelphia, Jonathan Supovitz and Jolley Bruce Christman look at the development of communities within schools as a central strategy to improve teaching and learning and discuss how such communities can enhance the quality of instruction. The authors outline lessons learned from large-scale evaluations of major district reform efforts in Philadelphia and Cincinnati. This CPRE policy brief is available at www.cpre.org/Publications/rb39.pdf.

America’s Choice Writers Workshop
 Teacher and Coach Implementation of Writers Workshop in America’s Choice Schools, 2001 and 2002, by CPRE researchers Amy J. Bach and Jonathan A. Supovitz, focuses on the progress of teachers and literacy coaches to implement the writers workshop component of the America’s Choice design.

From 2001 to 2002, America’s Choice made substantial progress in teachers’ implementation of writers workshop, showing higher classroom observation ratings in 2002 as a result of design improvements and refinements in training coaches. But close analysis shows an ongoing pattern of disparity between implementation in elementary schools with stronger fidelity and in middle schools with weaker fidelity—with the latter challenged by inflexible class schedules, bombardment by additional initiatives detracting focus from America’s Choice, and the presence of only one literacy coach to roll out the America’s Choice model.

Concluding with a focus on teacher and coach ratings, the authors report weak performance of coaches’ understanding and implementation of America’s Choice. The report is available at www.cpre.org/Publications/AC-07.pdf.

Mapping a Course to Learning
 By examining how a handful of schools are using student performance data to improve both teachers’ instruction and organizational support for instructional improvement, Mapping a Course for Improved Student Learning: How Innovative Schools Systematically Use Student Performance Data to Guide Improvement discusses building better road maps for teachers and school leaders in order to guide such decision-making. CPRE researchers Jonathan Supovitz and Valerie Klein draw on examples from innovative educators who use data creatively in making strategic decisions to develop and describe a theory of what a system of school data might look like. This CPRE report is available at www.cpre.org/Publications/AC-08.pdf.

Responding to Sexual Assault
 Writing in The Role of Police as First Responders, Maureen Rush and Jeanne Stanley, emphasize that first responders to the scene of a sexual assault—most often police officers—can have a powerful impact on victims. The authors argue that a compassionate and professional approach can help ensure “the best outcome for victim care and criminal prosecution” and offer detailed, research-based insights about the best way of handling the entire range of interactions, including first contact, medical exams, investigations, prosecution, and ongoing support. This piece appears in Sexual Assault: Victimization Across the Life Span, A Clinical Guide (St. Louis: G.W. Medical Publishing, 2003).

I Yam What I Yam
 Recent social science research has been concerned with identity formation and, with respect to education, how it is that students negotiate their identities within the context of and in response to schooling. Although identities can shift, most individuals’ social identities tend to stabilize over time.

In Accomplishing Identity in Participant-Denoting Discourse, Stanton Wortham explores how student and teacher behavior in classrooms can contribute to this stabilization of identity. This article appears in Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 13(2).

Education & the African-American Community
The United Negro College Fund and the Response to Brown v. Board
The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board provided an occasion for Black college leaders to assess the role their institutions had to play in the larger society. How did they understand that role, and how did they present it to potential donors?

Marybeth Gasman’s recent article in the History of Education Quarterly explores the United Negro College Fund’s (UNCF) preparation for the Brown decision and its response in the immediate aftermath of the ruling. Writing in Convincing Words: Fundraising Language Used by the United Negro College Fund in the Aftermath of the Brown Decision, Gasman examines the fundraising materials used, the Fund’s attitude toward the Court’s decision, and the response of the UNCF member college presidents to the decision.

What strategies were evident in the UNCF’s appeals? How did the UNCF attempt to deflect the idea that, with desegregation, all-Black institutions were irrelevant? How was the UNCF able to support both integration and the livelihood of its member institutions? And what changes, if any, did the Fund anticipate for the future?

This article appears in History of Education Quarterly, 44(1), Winter 2004.

Art for Kids’ Sake
A Renaissance on the Eastside: Motivating Inner-City Youth Through Art, by Marybeth Gasman and Sibby Anderson-Thompkins, takes aim at San Antonio’s Artists in the Making program, which brought children together with professional artists in small after-school art classes. Based on interviews with those children and case histories of four of the participants, the authors conclude that “art programs can help children to become more resilient, give them the skills to be independent, and most important, foster an ability to step outside of their personal situations and take control of their lives and their futures.” This case study appears in The Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, 8(4), 2003.

Of God and Mammon
In America, the church has been the epicenter of philanthropy in the black community. Taking that experience as a model, Darryl Holloman, Marybeth Gasman, and Sibby Anderson-Thompkins argue that a formalized structure, like that of the church, could aid colleges as they engage in fundraising in the Black community. Their article, Motivations for Philanthropic Giving in the African American Church: Implications for Black College Fundraising, draws on historical inquiry and qualitative interviews to explore the lessons that the church has to teach academics. This article appears in the Journal of Research on Christian Education, 12(2), Fall 2003.

Computer Learning 2.0
 With the explosion of computer-based learning in the last decade, the need for research in the field has grown up virtually overnight. Parents, principals, teachers, and policymakers all clamor for evidence-based answers to the practical problems associated with knowledge media (computers, networks, etc.), while researchers engage in developing the theoretical underpinning of scientific research.

Bridging Theory and Practice in Learning Environment Research: Scientific Principles in Pasteur’s Quadrant, co-authored by Frank Fischer, Lisa Bouillion, Heinz Mandl, and Louis Gomez, focuses on how to integrate practical problem-solving in this area into the process of scientific inquiry. Describing their work as “a conversation starter,” the authors argue that researchers will do best to steer clear of an either/or approach to their study of knowledge-based learning environments. In other words, rather than choosing to pursue either the basic or the applied research route, they should seek to integrate the two approaches—one to illuminate the cognitive and social processes of learning and the other to improve the real-life settings where people do their actual learning.

This article appears in the International Journal of Education Policy, Research, & Practice, 4(1), Spring 2003.

Evidence Matters
The Proper Place for Experiments
 From the United States to China, researchers are staging place-randomized trials designed to evaluate the efficacy of social interventions. Unlike traditional RFTs, which originated in the medical arena and generally focus on individuals, these trials look at places—villages, police hot spots, housing developments, hospital units, schools, etc.

Estimating the Effects of Interventions That Are Deployed in Many Places—by Robert Boruch, Henry May, Herbert Turner, Julia Lavenberg, Anthony Petrosino, Dorothy de Moya, Jeremy Grimshaw, and Ellen Foley—provides some examples of place-randomized trials and a discussion of the challenges inherent in such experiments. In a broad-based analysis, the authors stage a lively defense of the practice, arguing that these trials make statistical, political, and ethical sense. Without them, the authors conclude “we will have to depend on ignorant advocates for change, on the one hand, and ignorant opponents of change, on the other. People deserve better.”

This article appears in American Behavioral Scientist 47(5), January 2004, which can be ordered at http://www.sagepub.com/.

Randomized Field Trials in Education
 As a contributor to the compendious International Handbook of Educational Evaluation, Robert Boruch weighs in with his thoughts about the place of science in the ongoing effort to determine what works in the classroom.

Randomized Field Trials in Education presents a cogent explanation of the value of randomized controlled trials in educational settings. Boruch is one of the organizers behind the International Campbell Collaboration, which synthesizes the results of trials in education, crime and justice, and social welfare. In this article, he offers some examples of trials that have been conducted specifically in educational settings, discusses ethical standards to be applied, and walks the reader through the various elements that comprise a well-conducted experiment.

This chapter appears in International Handbook of Educational Evaluation, edited by Thomas Kellaghan and Daniel L. Stufflebeam (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003).

The View from Abroad
 Lost in Translation?
With the emergence of English as the lingua franca of the 21st century, scholars—among them Yuko Goto Butler—are turning their attention to English learners and those teaching them. In Learning Climates: A Case of 4th Grade Students in an English-only District in California, Butler and Michele Bousquet Gutierrez investigate how English-language learners perceive their abilities (as well as the perceptions of others about their capabilities). Focusing on the intersection between perceptions and performance in reading English, the authors conducted a structured interview that revealed positive feelings about bilingualism among both those who read well and those who struggle. The two groups differed, though, in a number of ways: language-mixing behavior, ability in their native tongue, fathers’ proficiency in English, and views of the influence of their first language on their English reading.

Butler has also begun publishing initial findings from a more recent project on the introduction of English-language education at the elementary school level in Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. The Role of Teachers in English Language Education at the Elementary School Level in Taiwan, Korea, and Japan appears in Selected Papers from the Twelfth International Symposium on English Teaching, published by the English Teachers’ Association in Taipei.

Learning Climates appears in Bilingual Research Journal, 27(2) and is available at http://brj.asu.edu/content/vol27_no2/art2.pdf.

Bilingual Education/Educación Bilingüe
 Two articles by Nancy Hornberger, Bilingual Education Policy and Practice in the Andes and Criteria for Determining the Success of a Bilingual Education Program in Peru, have been translated into Spanish for the Universidad Pedagogica Nacional website. The former, which first appeared in Anthropology & Education Quarterly 31(2), explores the ideological paradox of an educational system that is at once assimilationist and pluralist and concludes with a discussion of the implications for educational practice. The latter article, originally published in Peruvian Journal of Social Science 1(3), considers the impact of an experimental bilingual education project conducted in several Quecha-speaking communities of rural Peru.

Both translations appear currently on the Bilingual Intercultural Education Diploma page of the Pedagogical University of Mexico website at http://interbilingue.ajusco.upn.mx.

Bridges to the Future: India
 In a dual-use program designed to benefit both out-of-school and regular students in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, Penn GSE’s International Literacy Institute is collaborating with World Links, a Washington-based NGO, in implementing a technology-based education program for teachers, students, and out-of-school youth and adults.

The Bridges to the Future Initiative (BFI) will introduce technology to be used during the school day by regular students and after hours, by nearby residents with little or no education. According to Penn GSE Professor Dan Wagner, “ICT [information and communications technologies] can bring high-quality, high-interest local-language media directly to the learner, regardless of age or school status—a breakthrough in promoting a truly literate society.”

BFI has also developed a prototype multimedia software package geared to low-literacy Indians—both out-of-school youth and adults seeking to expand their literacy skills. The software’s design combines literacy and numeracy instruction with information on topics such as clean water, HIV-AIDS, nutrition, vocation, and agriculture.

More information on these and other BFI projects is available at literacy.org/bfi_ili/.

The University/Public School Partnership
In July 2002, Penn GSE initiated a three-year partnership with three low-performing West Philadelphia elementary schools with the goal of dramatically improving student achievement. In Do Universities Have a Role in Managing Public Schools: Lessons from the Penn Partnership Schools, Penn Partnership Schools Network Co-Directors Nancy Streim and Jeanne Vissa consider how a research university like Penn can help create learning communities characterized by shared accountability for student learning and strong student outcomes.

This article appears in the on-line journal Penn GSE Perspectives on Urban Education 2(2), at www.urbanedjournal.org.

Website Focuses on University-Assisted Schools
In October 2003, Penn GSE welcomed educators from around the country to its From the Ground Up conference on university-assisted schools. Some of the biggest names in the field—Anthony Bryk from the Center for School Improvement at the University of Chicago; Hugh Mehan, director of CREATE at the University of California, San Diego; and Penn GSE’s own team headed by Dean Susan Fuhrman and Associate Dean Nancy Streim—joined for a discussion of university involvement in public education.

The conversation they initiated is continuing at the newly launched From the Ground Up website at www.gse.upenn.edu/schools. Designed to serve as a source of information on university/public school partnerships, the site is a place to share the latest research, news, and events, and features an electronic forum as well as links to schools, publications, and other resources.

On the Bookshelf


Charles S. Johnson. Leadership beyond the Veil in the Age of Jim Crow.
Marybeth Gasman and Patrick J. Gilpin. (2003). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
An impresario of the Harlem Renaissance and a Chicago-trained sociologist, Charles S. Johnson was a visionary who linked the everyday struggles of blacks with the larger intellectual and political currents of the day. This biography argues that the milestones for blacks in 20th-century America—the Harlem Renaissance, the struggle for equal education, the Civil Rights movement—would have been inconceivable without Johnson’s contributions.

Moral Education: A Teacher Centered Approach.
Joan Goodman and Howard Lesnick. (2003). Boston: Pearson Allyn & Bacon.
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.

Redesigning Accountability Systems for Education.
Susan Fuhrman and Richard Elmore (Eds.). (2004). New York: Teachers College Press.
A practical resource for those grappling with government-mandated accountability systems, this book gathers together the emerging knowledge and lessons learned by scholars. Among the issues addressed are the effect of accountability policies on schools’ ability to improve, the significant variations of systems in different states, the validity of assessment measures, and ways to avoid penalizing schools for socioeconomic problems and other factors out of their control.