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.

Education for Citizenship
When Benjamin Franklin founded the University of Pennsylvania, he envisioned a pragmatic, secular institution that would provide students with an education for citizenship. Three hundred years later, Franklin’s ideal of an engaged university may finally be bearing fruit. So argue Matt Hartley, Ira Harvaky, and Lee Benson in “Building Franklin’s Truly Democratic, Engaged University: Twenty Years of Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.”

They give a nod to the complex factors working against such efforts—atomized organizational structures; career emphasis on research and teaching; the academy’s valorization of theoretical knowledge; and a lively, opposing argument that the job of higher education is to convey knowledge and skills, not to shape values.

In examining the Penn experience, the authors thus contend that “the institutionalization of civic engagement is the product of both structural and ideological change.” Tracing Penn’s path to engagement, they first describe the university’s former, contentious relationship with its West Philadelphia community and its subsequent shift in thinking.

This article appears in Metropolitan Universities: Civic Engagement at Traditional Research Universities 17(3).

The Case Method for Elementary Preservice Science Teachers
Elementary school teachers who do not feel well-equipped to teach science—and there are quite a number of them—do not, in general, teach as well as those who have positive experiences with and/or expectations of science education.

Searching for a way to help preservice teachers improve their self-efficacy, Susan Yoon, et al. explore the possibility that they could learn about teaching science through case study—that is, through watching, discussing, and internalizing the techniques used by an experienced teacher.

The authors caution that the case study method may not be universally effective and call for follow-up studies with larger and more diverse populations. Nonetheless, they argue that the multimedia case study may prove a fruitful approach by offering preservice teachers greater opportunity to observe and analyze a variety of pedagogical techniques in practice.

“Exploring the Use of Cases and Case Methods in Influencing Elementary Preservice Science Teachers’ Self-Efficacy Beliefs” appears in Journal of Science Teacher Education 17 (2006)

Understanding Inequities in College Access
Despite substantial investment in student financial aid by an array of entities (federal and state governments, colleges, and universities), college access and choice remain stratified by socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity.

Explanations for this phenomenon vary widely as experts, depending on their orientation, apply either an economic model of human capital investment or a sociological model of status attainment. To forge a clearer understanding of the phenomenon, Laura Perna has proposed a multilevel conceptual model that integrates both economic and sociological approaches.

Outlined in “Studying College Access and Choice: A Proposed Conceptual Model,” Perna’s model is centered around the human capital investment model, in which decisions are based on a cost-benefit analysis, but nests the calculations of cost and benefit in four contextual layers: the individual’s habitus; the family, school, and community context; the higher education context; and the social, economic, and policy context.

Perna argues persuasively that this model can help paint a far more nuanced picture of college choice: “Through its recognition of the multiple layers of context, the proposed conceptual model incorporates the perspectives of four major stakeholders in the college choice process: students (and their parents); K-12 institutions; higher education institutions; and public policy makers.” Moreover, she contends that it can help as well illuminate some of the under-studied aspects of student college choice (such as the experience of more narrowly defined populations and the effectiveness of policies and programs).

This chapter appears in Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, Vol. 21, edited by J.C. Smart (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2006).

Also from Laura Perna
“College Affordability: Implications for College Opportunity” considers the growing financial obstacles to, and consequently reduced choices in, pursuing higher education, especially for students in the lowest quintiles. Measured in constant dollars, most families’ wages are down and their expenses are up; at the same time, college costs are rising and the federal Pell grants are not fully funded. The authors argue that both the government and higher education bear some responsibility for increasing college affordability—and hence college opportunity. Government and institutions of higher education should control costs, while government policymakers should increase the availability of need-based grants. Finally, Perna and Li contend that the financial aid process needs to be made more transparent: “[t]he perception that college is not affordable is driven in part by the challenges that are associated with easily estimating financial aid eligibility and awards.” This article, co-written with Chunyan Li, appears in NASFAA Journal of Student Financial Aid, 36(1).

Understanding the Relationship between Information about College Prices and Financial Aid and Students’ College-Related Behaviors argues that while, at first glance, both government and private sources provide ample information about college financial aid, a closer look reveals that many students and their families remain under-informed. Drawing on her proposed conceptual model of study college access and choice, Perna discerns potential explanations for this disconnect, arguing that information must be relevant and accessible, not merely available.Researchers must consider “the multiple levels of context that shape individuals’ college-related perspectives, decisions, and behaviors” in order to provide the most accurate, relevant, and useful information on financial aid. This article appears in American Behavioral Scientist 49(12).

When Johnny Won’t Read
Very few children like every book they encounter. While educators tend to view opposition to a story as a “roadblock to understanding,” Lawrence Sipe and Caroline McGuire posit that teachers can analyze children’s resistance to stories and use that analysis to help their students become better readers.

Sipe and McGuire detail six different types of resistance to stories. These range from intertextual (“That’s not how the story goes!”) to literary critical (critical evaluation of the author’s construction of the story). Resistance to a story does not necessarily mean that students are not engaged with it. Rather, the authors write, “resistance suggests that students are coming to see themselves in positions of confidence and expertise with respect to texts and able to draw on their own experiences and knowledge for interpretation and critique.”

Teachers can use students’ resistance to deepen classroom discussion about literature, to broaden students’ literary horizons, and to reflect upon their own practice. For example, if a student rejects a book because it is a fantasy book, the teacher can use this resistance to initiate a conversation about their expectations—and expected dislike—of such books. Students may also resist stories in which they do not see themselves or their communities reflected; this too can generate deeper classroom discussion.

The researchers conclude that “considered in this way, resistance may be central to children’s becoming critical readers rather than passive consumers of texts.”

“Young Children’s Resistance to Stories” appears in The Reading Teacher, September 2006.

“Doing Diversity” in Independent Schools
The mission statements of many independent schools allude to the schools’ commitment to diversity. But what exactly does “diversity” mean, and whose job is it? To address those questions, Diane Hall and Howard Stevenson examine the experience and responsibility of addressing diversity issues in independent schools.

In many independent schools, for example, White people are in the majority, in terms of both numbers and power, while Black people are often in “token” positions—a state of affairs that can have negative consequences for both parties.

Hall and Stevenson recommend a number of concrete—although perhaps difficult—steps to define “diversity” more clearly and to demonstrate a school-wide commitment to it (i.e., that diversity is not one person’s job, but something that involves and affects the entire school). “Overall,” they conclude, “the goal is to create a climate in which all members of the community are involved in defining the school’s culture.”

“Double Jeopardy: Being African-American and “Doing Diversity” in Independent Schools” will appear in TC Record in 2007.

Teacher Turnover in Special and General Education
Reliable statistics on the number of teachers who leave teaching are scarce, as are valid comparisons with attrition rates in other professions. In Teacher Turnover in Special and General Education, Erling Boe, Lynne Cook, and Robert Sunderland present their research on the attrition rate in schools, with a special focus on special education, and suggest possible ways in which the consequences of attrition can be mitigated.   

The authors define three types of attrition: exit attrition (leaving teaching entirely), teaching area transfer (switching from general to special education, or from teaching science to teaching English), and school migration (moving from one school to another).

Overall, they found that the rates of exit attrition among teachers, contrary to general perception, are lower than those for other professions. Many teachers who leave teaching, moreover, do so not because of job dissatisfaction, but because of personal reasons or workforce reductions. Many continue to work in education, if not in the classroom.
Turning their attention to special education, they found that teacher turnover is no more prevalent in that area than in general education, suffering the same liabilities as other areas of teaching. However, rates of teacher turnover have risen, and teacher turnover of all types is costly for schools.

“Teacher Turnover in Special and General Education: Attrition, Teaching Area Transfer, and School Migration” has been published by the Center for Research and Evaluation in Social Policy, 2004, and is available from CRESP, University of Pennsylvania, 3440 Market Street, Suite 465, Philadelphia, PA 19104.

Also from Ed Boe
Findings reported in “The Chronic and Increasing Shortage of Fully Certified Teachers in Special Education” show that the shortage of fully certified special education teachers (SETs) increased at a higher rate than that of general education teachers (from 7.4 percent in 1993-94 to 12.2 percent in 2001-02), while the need almost doubled. That shortage was exacerbated by the entry of new teachers, only 44.4 percent of which were fully certified. Data for this study were drawn from the Schools and Staffing Surveys (1987-88 through 1999-2000) and the Data Analysis System for special education school years 1987-88 through 2001-02. This article, which was co-written with Lynne Cook, appears in Exceptional Children, 72(4).

Helping Bilingual Learners
To better understand the challenges faced by bilingual children in the U.S., Yuko Butler and Kenji Hakuta set out to shed light onto the different strategies employed by native English-speakers (NE) and bilingual English-learning students (L2).

Designed to examine what causes students to experience difficulty reading and to compare the causes of difficulties experienced by NE and L2 students, their study featured number of assessments that integrated psychological, linguistic, educational, and socio-cultural perspectives. Participants were 61 NE and L2 fourth-graders enrolled in an English-only district in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“L2 students who are strong readers in English had similar characteristics with strong NE readers,” the authors found, “and the same holds for struggling readers in both groups.” The only differences observed between the L2 and NE students were in their receptive vocabulary size and vocabulary-related skills. That finding, Butler and Hakuta write suggests that “instructional support for vocabulary learning (not only helping students increase their vocabulary size but also other skills such as context-based lexical inference skills) would be particularly helpful for L2 students.”

“Cognitive Factors in Children’s L1 and L2 Reading” appears in Academic Exchange Quarterly, March 2006.

Domestic Violence & First Responders
From 1999 to 2001, a Penn GSE team headed by John Fantuzzo collaborated with a large-county police department to develop a data collection protocol to be used by officers responding to domestic violence. Simple enough to be completed on the scene, the Domestic Violence Event Protocol (DVEP) was designed to capture the fundamental characteristics of domestic violence (demographics, means of assault, injuries, presence of children). Officers received police academy training and annual continuing education workshops.

Among the findings the DVEP revealed were that the majority (79 percent) of the victims were female and 38 percent African American. Approximately 40 percent of both victims and perpetrators were married. Children were present 44 percent of the time.

The purpose of this study was to determine the efficacy of the DVEP in measuring the exposure of children to domestic violence and understanding its impact on them. On that count, the researchers report that this particular instrument demonstrated high internal consistency, with checks on reliability coming from several independent sources, and that police officers trained in its use “can serve effectively as sentinels in a comprehensive public health surveillance system.”

“Domestic Violence and Children’s Presence: A Population-Based Study of Law Enforcement Surveillance of Domestic Violence,” by John Fantuzzo, Rachel Fusco, Wanda Mohr, and Marlo Perry, appears in Journal of Family Violence.

HBCUs Rebuild in New Orleans
“A Rising Tide: New Orleans’s Black Colleges and Their Efforts to Rebuild after Hurricane Katrina,” by Marybeth Gasman and Noah Dresner, looks at the impact of Hurricane Katrina on three historically Black universities—Dillard University, Xavier University of New Orleans, and Southern University of Louisiana.

The authors start from the premise that these Black colleges are vital to the future of New Orleans, and indeed the South—and they marshal substantial evidence for that argument. For example, Xavier places more Blacks in medical school than any other institution in the country; the U.S. News and World Report has ranked Dillard among the top 25 Southern comprehensive colleges, and Southern University’s open admissions policy provides low-income students with an avenue out of poverty.

The three schools, all built on low ground, suffered catastrophic damage in Katrina’s wake and suffered yet another blow when classes resumed and fewer of their students were able to return to campus (at Tulane, 88 percent vs. 75 percent at Xavier, 50 percent at Dillard, and 44 percent at Southern). Only Southern showed growth in fall 2006 enrollments, with 83 percent of its pre-Katrina student body returning, largely due to its the strategy to remake itself as an on-line college. The schools are also bedeviled by a lack of capital—with relatively small endowments, all three have had to terminate both faculty and staff. And research has suffered as well. For example, Dillard had to defer a number of large research projects, losing several science professors along with the funding.
 
What lessons do these three universities have to teach about rebuilding after natural disasters? Particularly for the private institutions, communicating the level of devastation as well as the pace of recovery has been key to securing funds, both private and public. “Students, employees, local citizens, and the nation as a whole,” the authors write, “need to hear that work is being done to recover from tragedy—that the institution is vital and regaining its livelihood.” For Southern, the lesson has been one of adaptability: “if the past approach to education is not possible..., it is imperative and perhaps crucial to retool and re-envision the institution’s delivery of education.”
This article appears in Multicultural Review, December 2006.

Also from Marybeth Gasman
In “Researching Historically Black Colleges: A History with Archival Research,” Matthew Paris and Marybeth Gasman have found and linked the historical records—which can be difficult to unearth—to a general history of historically Black colleges and universities. This article appears in Multicultural Review, 15 (2).

Toward Better Treatment for Adolescent Substance Abusers
Recent improvements in the assessment of adolescent substance use make it clear that substance use disorders (SUD) encompass diverse drugs, behavioral patterns, origins, and lifestyles. It is also now clear that it would be useful to classify adolescents with SUD in a treatment-oriented typology, so researchers can look into what treatment options work with whom and under what conditions.

In a study of 205 adolescents, aged 12 through 18, who had SUD and were in alcohol and other drug treatment, Kathleen Meyers, Paul McDermott, Alicia Webb, and Teresa Ann Hagan identified seven subtypes of adolescents with SUD.  They based their typology on dimensions of delinquency, psychosocial problems, chemical dependency, and sexual risk behavior, and also looked at whether certain patterns were distinctive among youth court-mandated to treatment.

“Mapping the Clinical Complexities of Adolescents with Substance Use Disorders: A Typological Study” describes each profile type in terms of relative problem severity, prevalence for youth mandated to treatment through the courts, demographics, and performance on external measures of mental health and substance use disorders.

The authors discuss the need for triage to multiple treatments, with varying levels of intensity for different subgroups of adolescents. They also argue that, with the development of cost-effective, replicable services by setting and by youth typology, managed care and state government might then be able to develop an empirically guided treatment cost-containment strategy.

This article appears in Journal of Child & Adolescent Substance Abuse, 16(1).

“Don’t Love No Fight”
Concerned about the impact of repeated exposure to violence on urban adolescents, the Physicians for Social Responsibility introduced “Peaceful Posse,” a program for young men in one Philadelphia neighborhood. Although the program proved to be popular, was it became clear that there were many aspects of the participants’ lives which the program staff did not fully understand.

Peter Kuriloff, working with Michael Reichert and Brett Stoudt, analyzed interviews with 10 core members of the Peaceful Posse to deepen the understanding of the boys’ lives. They posit that as long as programs seek to “fix” participants—without addressing the root causes of their negative behaviors—prevention is not likely to be effective.

The interviews revealed that the boys’ experiences and attitudes fell into five broad categories: the need to fight to maintain social standing or personal safety; attempts to avoid fighting; exposure to physical and verbal violence in school; attempts to create a coherent personal narrative even in the face of continual disruption; and the adoption of a “public pose of bravado” to mask vulnerability and ensure physical and psychological survival. 

Writes Kuriloff, “The key role of identity as an embodiment of the hopes of the young men helped the program to better appreciate this particularly important locus of healing for urban youth exposed to violence.”

“‘Don’t Love No Fight’: Healing and Identity among Urban Youth” appears in The Urban Review 38(3).

“Until All of Us Are Home”
Project HOME is well-known in Philadelphia for both its high-quality services to the homeless and its committed and iconic leader, Sister Mary Scullion. However, leadership at Project HOME is considerably more complicated than the presence of an iconic leader would suggest.

In this ethnographic study, Kathy Hall captures the evolution and nuances of the organization’s shared leadership model. Residents sit on the board of trustees, and each Project HOME site holds meetings regularly in which residents’ concerns and ideas are aired and then brought to meetings of staff from all sites. “At Project HOME,” Hall writes, “leadership is a collective process…shared leadership is both dependent upon and gains its power and authority from a shared sense of mission.”

While the “shared sense of mission” remains strong, the implementation of shared leadership has become more challenging as Project HOME has grown. Residents and employees who participated in the ethnography applaud the growth, but also voice some regret for the necessary changes it has produced. There has been some decline in intimacy, some increase in complexity.

“Until All of Us are Home”: The Process of Leadership at Project HOME is a publication of the Leadership for a Changing World program of New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.