Friday Notes

A few brief notes on some smaller stories this week:

-A lot of people seem to be discussing the new report released yesterday finding that students who didn't submit test scores to colleges performed virtually the same as students with similar GPAs who did.  It seems like most people and most of the coverage (e.g. NPR, The Chronicle, and EdWeek) are interpreting this to mean that SAT/ACT test scores don't predict performance in college beyond what we know from test scores. But, as many have pointed out on Twitter, one glance at the tables on pages 47 (below) and 56 show the error in this interpretation.  In reality, in a number of the groups examined, students with higher test scores earn higher grades in college and are far more likely to graduate than than those with lower test scores and identical high school GPAs.  Somehow, though, students who don't submit test scores to test-optional schools do about as well as those who do despite having earned significantly lower scores.  What this says to me isn't that test scores don't matter but, rather, that non-submitters are savvy and that the act of choosing not to submit their test scores tells us something about their abilities and future chances of success.

-Another day, another wild-eyed report about how it's impossible to fire teachers.  Yawn.  Not only do I not buy that administrators can't fire a teacher if they really try, but I'd bet my life savings that at least 90% of teachers who are fired aren't officially "fired".  Looking for a dissertation topic?  Go figure out how Principals go about dismissing teachers . . . most non-educators don't understand how much soft power administrators wield and how persuasive they can be when they suggest that a certain teacher look elsewhere for work.

-A new Pew report illustrates why it worries me so much when people argue that X person/people shouldn't go to college: the widening gap in college v. non-college outcomes (and keep in mind that is despite dramatic increases in college enrollment over this time that have made colleges far less exclusive than they were decades ago).  And income isn't the only thing that's changed, a wide range of social outcomes have as well -- take a look at how the relationship between income and marriage has reversed in the second picture.

-Here's the story on a fascinating chart (below) that makes us all look foolish for debating whether we want our system to be more like Korea's or Finland's

-Morgan Polikoff discusses some studies that found some positive impacts of standards-based reform.  On the one hand, I'm not sure how one could read the research and not conclude that the U.S. needs more coherent standards like the rest of the developed world.  On the other hand, I remain deeply skeptical that standards matter all that much.  They seem like step 1 in a 10,000 mile journey.

Next week, I'll offer some thoughts on the biggest changes I've seen in the education debate and the following week I'll start a multi-part series examining the ways in which urban poverty impacts students' performance in school . . .

Is It OK to be a Public Intellectual?

Nick Kristof's column the other day about the lack of interaction between Academia and the public sure ruffled some feathers.  That's probably partly due to long list of provocative quotes in the column, including the following:

A basic challenge is that Ph.D. programs have fostered a culture that glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience. This culture of exclusivity is then transmitted to the next generation through the publish-or-perish tenure process. Rebels are too often crushed or driven away.

Many academics frown on public pontificating as a frivolous distraction from real research,” said Will McCants, a Middle East specialist at the Brookings Institution. “This attitude affects tenure decisions. If the sine qua non for academic success is peer-reviewed publications, then academics who ‘waste their time’ writing for the masses will be penalized.

All the disciplines have become more and more specialized and more and more quantitative, making them less and less accessible to the general public

Political science Ph.D.’s often aren’t prepared to do real-world analysis

Many academic disciplines also reduce their influence by neglecting political diversity. Sociology, for example, should be central to so many national issues, but it is so dominated by the left that it is instinctively dismissed by the right.

On the whole, I agree with Kristof.  Faculty aren't expected, encouraged, or rewarded for communicating with the public.  Which, I think, is a big problem (as you could probably guess given that I'm spending my time writing here).  I've written in the past that about the personal experience I've had with this, and I continue to dislike the degree to which academics are discouraged from interacting with the public.

It's easy to go off on tangential arguments here about who should write what when and for how long, but let's not miss what I think is the largest problem here: the active discouragement.  There are plenty of good reasons that academics should strive to be "public intellectuals," but I don't think we should expect every Professor out there to spend oodles of time reaching out to the public, nor do I think it should be a tenure requirement to do so.  But I do think academics should be rewarded for doing so.  At the very least, it shouldn't be seen as a negative for one to use his/her time this way.  I cringe every time I hear somebody gasp at the time an academic is wasting writing for a popular audience.

One of the few counter-examples to this trend is is Rick Hess's edu-scholar rankings, which seem to receive more attention each year -- this year I noticed press releases from quite a few schools touting the number of Professors in their college who'd made the list.  Overall, though, interaction with the public is still largely discouraged.

I do think the responses from academics were interesting, though.  These include Daniel Willingham, who writes that communicating applications of research isn't the job of most professors and should often be left to others with different skill sets; Corey Robin, who writes that quite a few Professors blog and write in the popular press and that many grad students aspire to do so, echoing Erik Voeten, who runs down a list of ways in which different Professors communicate with the public.

I think these are all fair points.  Not all faculty need to be out in the public sphere, and pure academic research certainly has value.  But, again, none address the degree to which faculty are actively discouraged from communicating with the public.  The fact that some people do so anyway doesn't change that fact.  Nor does the fact that many grad students want to communicate with the public, since the problem here isn't lack of desire but, rather, lack of opportunity.

And I think the argument that there are outlets within academia to communicate is rather shaky.  Voeten, for example, points to the journal Perspectives on Politics as the new vehicle for Political scientists to communicate with the public (which Kristof omits), so I decided to check it out.  Here's an excerpt from the first abstract I read from the current issue:

In an effort to bring empirical clarity and epistemological standards to what has been a deeply-charged, partisan, and frequently anecdotal debate, we use multiple specialized regression approaches to examine factors associated with both the proposal and adoption of restrictive voter access legislation from 2006–2011 . . . Further, we situate these policies within developments in social welfare and criminal justice policy that collectively reduce electoral access among the socially marginalized.

Sorry, but that's academic-speak.  That is not how one communicates with the public.  People don't say "empirical clarity" or "multiple specialized regression approaches" or "situate these policies within" in everyday life.  So I remain unconvinced that many journals speak directly to the public.

Or maybe this just proves Willingham right: many Profs simply don't have the skills to communicate with the public.  I have to admit, though, that his argument just brings to mind the scene in Office Space where Tom Smykowski explains that the company needs his people skills to communicate between the engineers and the customers:

All kidding aside, though, I think the issue merits serious consideration by everybody involved in academia.  All can (I hope) agree that more research needs to be translated to practice, but this could happen in any number of ways.  Maybe academic journals should publish more readable (i.e. ~10 page jargon-free) essays for the public to read.  Maybe public outreach should count in tenure reviews.  Maybe some Professors should be classified as "public intellectuals" and have different expectations.  Or we could try any number of other ideas.  But I don't think that denying the problem exists will get us anywhere.

Ultimately, we need to find a way to make it okay for people to be public intellectuals if they wish to do so.

The Two Camps in Education Reform

My one-time classmate, Morgan Polikoff -- now an Assistant Professor at USC -- weighs in today with his first blog post on why he's optimistic about American students' performance.  All in all, it's a good start -- I think he makes a lot of good points and I'm definitely intrigued to see where he goes from here.

But . . .

There's just one little thing that really bothers me about the post.

Morgan divides the education world into two camps: those who dislike our current system and want to change things and those who don't. I agree that, for the most part, those two camps exist.  But Morgan misunderstands and/or misstates the fundamental difference between these two.

Personally, I find myself agreeing and disagreeing with both at different times (the subject of another forthcoming post), but I'm guessing most people who've regularly read my blog over the years think I'm in the latter because I've spent more time criticizing the former. So, today, I'll put on my hat as a critic of advocates of charter schools, merit pay, vouchers, more testing, etc. and explain why I don't feel the way Morgan thinks I do.

Why do I get frustrated with the arguments of these folks at times? According to Morgan, it's because I like things the way they are and don't want them to change.

False.

And I mean really false.

In reality, I like very little about the American education system. The last thing on Earth I want to see is no change. Not only do I believe we pale in comparison to many other nations, I believe those countries fall far short of what an education system could and should be.

In other words, I dislike our system. I loathe our system. I abhor our system. I wish we could (figuratively) blow it up and start from scratch.

I suspect that I feel more strongly about that than a lot of people in the second camp, but I think you get the point: I don't like things the way they are, and I certainly don't want things to stay the same.  At the same time, though, I'm not sold on all the recent reforms advocated by the former group.

In other words, the difference between the two camps is not that one wants to change things and the other doesn't, it's that they want to change things differently.

I think it often appears that one side is advocating for change and the other resisting it because only one side's ideas are getting widespread traction right now.  Everybody is familiar with the changes proposed by the former camp because there are a few big ones that have been debated and implemented (and debated again) all over the country.  It's far tougher, meanwhile, to pinpoint the preferred reforms of the latter camp.  I think that's true for two reasons: 1.) there aren't a handful of reforms on which everybody in the latter camp agrees and for which they strongly advocate, and 2.) they've found themselves constantly on the defensive the past decade or more (arguably ever since the passage of NCLB).

Some have characterized the former as "reformers" and the latter as "defenders of the status quo" or even "defeatists" (to which the retort has been that it's actually "deformers" vs. realists).  That's a simple dichotomy to understand.  But it's false.

The question at hand isn't why one camp wants to change our system and the other doesn't, it's in which directions each camps envisions us heading.

I'm Back

Hi Everybody,

Long time, no see.  I've written just one post in the past 11 months, and not a whole lot the previous year, so I'll forgive you if you thought I'd disappeared.

The last couple years have been a whirlwind of activity between the job search, moving to a new state, starting a new job, and finishing my dissertation (finally!), and I've been trying to figure out how blogging fits into all that.  I've finally found the answer: I have to make it fit.

I've constantly waited for the right moment to start blogging again only to wait another day, week, month, or semester, and I'm now tired of waiting.  I'm going to start blogging again today.

Why?  I'm not sure there's a great reason, though pieces I've read recently about poverty and education, the Professoriat, and the two camps in education have certainly gotten the juices in my brain flowing again.  So I'll plan to start with those topics.

As always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts and comments . . .

Corey

A Brief Note on the Misapplication of Campbell's Law

I'll make this brief, but I felt compelled to point out the flaw in the way people are applying Campbell's Law to education when I saw Andy Rotherham's latest post on Eduwonk.

Here's what he wrote about Campbell's Law:

if you don’t think public educators can handle real accountability without resorting to cheating (e.g. the constant refrain of “Campbell’s Law) then you have a pretty low opinion of public school educators. In most walks of life there are high-stakes consequences attached to professional and behavioral decisions. And yet most people are able to play by the rules.

Here's what Campbell's Law actually says:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

I don't know to whom he's referring and what others are actually saying about Campbell's Law, but if he's accurately representing their sentiment then a lot of people are misapplying the lessons of Campbell's Law.

The central insight of Campbell's Law is that it's a really bad idea to make all of our decisions based on any single measure, not that people will always cheat in high-stakes situations (or, for that matter, that tests are inherently bad).  It's not about high-stakes versus low-stakes or accountability versus trust, it's about relying on one measure versus utilizing multiple (or no) measures.

So, in short, what we should learn from Campbell's Law is that we shouldn't use only testing data to make decisions in education.

A Clarification on Respecting Teachers

Last week, I wrote about the dismissive attitude toward teaching Kindergarten on How I Met Your Mother, and I wanted to offer one short clarification based on a personal conversation I had.

In that piece I wrote two things that were meant to make the same argument but may sound like different arguments.

First, I wrote that "Virtually all the reform efforts of the past few years have focused on teacher quality because everybody agrees it's so important; but nobody's willing to actually treat teachers like they're important."

I then concluded by arguing that we couldn't possibly get the school system we want "if quitting is the only way for teachers to reach their potential".

Upon reading the piece, a friend contacted me to point out that he didn't think bad teachers deserved respect, which led to a discussion differentiating respecting teachers from respecting teaching.

The former would mean that people who are currently teaching aren't receiving enough respect from society. While I think this is true in many cases (there are obviously some who don't do much to earn our respect -- though they should still be respected as human beings), it was not the intent of my last piece to argue that being nicer to current teachers would solve our problems (though it wouldn't hurt).

Rather, my intent was to focus on the latter construct -- respect for the act of teaching itself.  The largest policy problem I saw evidenced in the dialogue of the show was that multiple people were dismissing the job of kindergarten teacher as beneath that of any elite person.  Lily leaves her job to work in the art world; Marshall is a lawyer; Ted is an architect/professor; Barney does something vague in finance; and Robin is a newscaster.  And the job of kindergarten teacher simply isn't worthy of any of them.

In the long-run, we flat-out will not be able to recruit or retain the best and the brightest if the status of teaching remains so low.  The billions of dollars, oodles of effort, and reams of policy papers we've recently expended on improving teacher quality will all be for naught if teaching is beneath the elite.

*Just* A Kindergarten Teacher

Tonight's episode of How I Met Your Mother features an argument between Marshall and Lily about her career that speaks volumes about the current state of America's educational system.  (In case you don't watch the show, Marshall and Lily are college sweethearts who are now married thirty-somethings with a baby -- Marshall is a lawyer and Lily is a kindergarten teacher).

Lily is upset because she's told by an acquaintance that she's "just a kindergarten teacher" and the following exchange ensues (video at the bottom):

Marshall: Oh my God! Lily! What is the big deal?  Ok, so what? So he said you were just a kindergarten teacher.  Why do you let that bother you?
Lily: Because he was right; I am just a kindergarten teacher.  And, yes, I have a degree in art history, and I was meant to do something with it -- but I didn't. Somewhere along the line I forgot to pursue my dream and, and now I'm old, and I'm a Mom, and it's just too late for me.

At this point -- particularly knowing the cutesy relationship they have and how much Marshall adores Lily -- I expected Marshall to respond by saying something like "Lily, that's one of my favorite things about you: few people are more important or incredible than kindergarten teachers"

Marshall instead responds by emphatically saying "No, it's not too late. You're going to quit your job, tomorrow, and you're gonna go back and pick up right where you left off with that art stuff . . ."

Maybe I'm overreacting to a few moments in a sitcom, but this seems indicative of one of the largest problems with our efforts to improve our educational system.  Virtually all the reform efforts of the past few years have focused on teacher quality because everybody agrees it's so important; but nobody's willing to actually treat teachers like they're important.

After all, who's going to want to be just a teacher?  Certainly not the best and the brightest.  And what teacher is going to be empowered or respected enough to change the system if teachers are viewed as second-class citizens?  If we want to recruit, retain, and develop the best teaching corps in the world (like we say we do), we can't keep demeaning and demoralizing them.  If we're going to justify every new pet policy (which always seem to place teachers under even more scrutiny) by talking of teachers' vast importance, we can't then act like they aren't worthy of our attention.

Our teachers deserve better.  Our kids deserve better.  And our country deserves better.  And we won't get it if quitting is the only way for teachers to reach their potential.


Cross-Posted at Blog of the Century

Here's the clip, but the quality is poor -- you'll probably have to turn up your volume to hear anything.

UPDATE: The video has been blocked by FOX, who made a copyright claim. A 36-second clip sure seems like fair use to me, so this distresses me (and I'm not sure why FOX would claim a show that aired on CBS). YouTube says I get a "copyright strike" if I challenge and lose, so I'm going to let this one go unless somebody knows a copyright lawyer who can advise me whether I'm in the right or not.

Why Does Massachusetts Rank Highly?

In last week's debate, Mitt Romney took credit for Massachusetts' position atop some education rankings. And, yes, it's generally true that Massachusetts ranks at or near the top.  More specifically, the state has frequently had the highest average score on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

But the more important question is why Massachusetts ranks so highly.  Was it something that Romney did while Governor, or are there other factors at play?

The second question is really quite easy to answer.  It's almost certainly something other than Romney's actions.  For two reasons:

1.) Children in Massachusetts earned really high test scores both before and after Romney was Governor:

	2002	2011
1.)	Vermont (272)	Massachusetts (275)
2.)	Massachusetts (271)	New Jersey (275)
3.)	Montana (270)	Connecticut (275)
4.)	Nebraska (270)	Vermont (274)
5.)	Maine (270)	Montana (273)

2.) We know from decades of research that non-school factors influence achievement far more than in-school factors.  So it's exceedingly unlikely that a few state-level policy tweaks, implemented for a mere four years, could impact student performance dramatically enough to boost Massachusetts to the top of the nation.

We can also argue to what extent the high test scores mean the state's schools are a success.  We could certainly measure student and school performance in myriad other ways.  And even if we look only at test scores, we can go beyond the averages.  Massachusetts has one of the largest gaps in achievement between upper- and lower-income students, for example.  Though, again, that likely has little to do with Romney -- the state ranked 5th in 2002 and 6th in 2011 (measured as the average 8th grade reading score of those not eligible for free/reduced price lunch minus the average score of eligible students).

That said, I wanted to explore this a little more in-depth, so I went to the NAEP website and delved into the 8th grade reading scores.  The first thing you'll notice on the site is the map of state results (below) which shows striking regional disparities in test scores.  If we assume that Governors are almost solely responsible for the average test scores in their states, we could only conclude that virtually all Northern governors are education geniuses and almost all Southern Governors education dunces.  Which, of course, is preposterous -- there are clearly larger issues at play here (issues out of the hands of the various Governors).

What are these issues?  The socio-economic status of the states' residents would be at the top of the list (certainly, a Governor would have some power to influence that over the course of one or more terms -- but that change would be both slight and slow).  To examine this, I downloaded the state NAEP scores from the NAEP data webpage and demographic data from census website so that I could compare the two.

Unsurprisingly, a fairly strong correlation exists between a state's average 8th grade reading score and a state's median household income (r = .43).  When we plot all the states' average test scores and median household incomes on the graph below, we see a few outliers -- Montana, Kentucky, and Vermont score much higher than we'd expect given their average incomes while California, Hawaii, Nevada, and Alaska score much lower -- but Massachusetts is right about where we'd expect it to be (note that the best fit line would run right through Massachusetts if we deleted the outliers).  Massachusetts has relatively wealthy residents and high-scoring students.  Not a surprise.

Massachusetts stands out even more if we look at the education levels of the population.  The percentage of adults with a bachelor's degree in a state is very strongly correlated (r = .65) with the average NAEP score in that state, and Massachusetts ranks at the top of both categories.  Once again, we see some outliers -- both positive (Kentucky, Wyoming, and Montana stick out) and negative (Mississippi, Louisiana, New Mexico, California, and Hawaii don't look too good), but find Massachusetts right about where we'd expect.

So, yes, Romney was correct when he said that Massachusetts ranks at the top.  But it's exceedingly unlikely he had much to do with that.  Massachusetts' residents were and are wealthy and highly educated relative to the residents of other states, and that mostly explains why their children perform so well on tests.


cross-posted on Blog of the Century

It's All About Vocabulary?

The edusphere is abuzz about this NY Times piece on early vocabulary growth that ran over the weekend. Though the piece focuses on the current controversy surrounding test-based admissions to the top high schools in NYC, it's mostly based on the famous Hart and Risley book in which the authors conclude that children from families on welfare hear 32 million fewer words and 560,000 fewer encouragements than children of professional families between birth and age 4 -- and that these differences lead to subsequent differences in vocabulary and achievement.

To reinforce the importance of this early vocabulary growth, the article quotes a charter school principal saying that the "word deficit" is the greatest challenge the school faces and quotes E.D. Hirsch saying that "there is strong evidence that increasing the general knowledge and vocabulary of a child before age six is the single highest correlate with later success".

This all leads Robert Pondiscio to write that "Demography isn't destiny. Vocabulary is destiny".

Ok, stop.  Just stop.

Yes.  Vocabulary is important.  And vocabulary growth in the early years is crucially important.  Every person or organization responsible for raising young kids should aim to use and explain as many words words and concepts as possible.

But, c'mon.  Let's not get carried away.

The second we identify something -- anything -- as the "single" most important, we do ourselves and our nation's children a disservice.  I understand the allure of boiling everything down to the simplest solution possible, but life just doesn't work that way.

And arguing that vocabulary -- rather than demography -- is destiny?  That's just silly.

For starters, we have what economists would call an "endogeneity problem" in that statement.  An awful lot of what's driving the vocabulary of a child entering kindergarten is also driving the success of that kid later in school: parenting, myriad environmental conditions and social factors in the child's home and neighborhood, health, peers, genetics, and a thousand other things.  In other words: a child with a large vocabulary at age 4 is likely to succeed in school partly b/c of that vocabulary, but more so because the conditions that created that vocabulary will almost certainly continue to foster intellectual growth and social development throughout his/her school years.

Second, an awful lot of what drives vocabulary growth is demography.  The education level of one's parent(s) and other adult supervisors, the amount of stimulation available in one's surroundings (including the number of different objects one can learn about), the noise level inside and outside of one's home, the levels of stress to which a child and his/her family are exposed, the number of books available, and hundreds of other home, neighborhood, and family factors correlated with socio-economic status all result in a child learning more or fewer words.  So arguing that vocabulary is more important than demography in school is like arguing that strength is more important than weightlifting in football.

So, please, let's stop trying to reduce everything to the one, most important factor (which is surely more important than the factor the last person discussed).  The fewer things we focus on, the more distorted those measures become.  And the simpler we make the problem seem, the more simplistic our solutions.  Vocabulary certainly deserves some of our attention.  Now let's discuss what else deserves our attention instead of how much less they deserve it.

The Differences Between High- and Low-Performing Schools: Not What You Might Expect

Last Thursday, the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools (a research center led by Vanderbilt's Peabody College with partners at UNC-Chapel Hill, Florida State, Wisconsin-Madison, Georgia State, and the Educational Development Center, funded by a five-year, $13.6 million federal grant, which aims to identify and then explore ways to scale up, characteristics of effective high schools) released a new report examining the differences between high-and low-performing high schools in Broward County, Florida.

As only one small piece of the puzzle, we shouldn't get carried away with the findings.  But I was struck with what was -- and was not -- included in their list of differences between the schools.  Below is the Executive Summary's list of differences:

We identified one major theme that cut across all ten components: personalization for academic and social learning. In the area of personalization, our findings show that the higher value-added (VA) schools made deliberate efforts through systematic structures to promote strong relationships between adults and students as well as to personalize the learning experience of students. In addition, the higher VA schools maintained strong and reliable disciplinary systems that, in turn, engendered feelings of caring and, implicitly, trust among both students and teachers. Leaders at the higher VA schools talked explicitly about looking for student engagement in classroom walkthroughs as well as in their interactions with students. Teachers at the higher VA schools were more likely to discuss instructional activities that drew on students’ experiences and interests. The higher VA schools also encouraged stronger linkages with parents (p. 5).

Included: "soft" factors like trust and relationships.

Not included: virtually everything currently discussed in ed policy circles (school choice, teacher evaluations, merit pay, data-driven decision-making,  etc.)

Now, to be fair, many of factors were off the table because the study examined four schools located in the same county which had much in common (no differences in merit pay or district leadership, for example).  And there's always the possibility that implementing some of these reforms could change the factors included in the list even if they're not currently present in the schools.

Nonetheless, even when the measuring stick is value-added scores -- the latest, greatest measure being pushed on schools -- many of the factors emphasized by those pushing for its use don't seem to be drivers of the differences.

Most interestingly, the two low-scoring schools had higher scores on some measures of teaching practices and instructional quality than the two high-scoring schools.  Here's the summary from the research team on this topic:

Taken together, our indicators of the quality and nature of instruction across the schools -- CLASS-S*, course matrices, student shadowing, and interviews with multiple school stakeholders -- reveals no major differences in instructional quality across the four schools.  We cannot turn to evidence in the area of Quality Instruction to explain the differences in value-added achievement between our high- and low-VA schools" (p. 32).

While we certainly shouldn't base our policy decisions on one study examining four schools in one county, I do think it's fair to say that this confirms what we should've known all along -- that high-quality instruction (like every aspect of schools) is not sufficient when trying to create high-performing schools.  I should also note that, in many areas, larger differences existed between the honors and regular tracks within the schools than between the high- and low-scoring schools themselves.

Again, I don't want to get carried away with the results of one small-scale study (and I'll refrain from addressing the other 50 or so topics covered by the report at the moment), but I do think that, at this point, we can take two important lessons from this ongoing research:

1.) Regardless of the amount of press coverage, foundation money, or policy directed toward a particular aspect of school reform, not a single factor is sufficient to create a high-quality school.

2.) Even though it's easy (and, arguably, practical) to focus on the simplest, starkest issues, the most subtle, nuanced, and complicated ones are often at least as important.

From a 10,000 foot vantage point, the potential benefits of creating more charter schools, or implementing a merit pay plan or new curriculum are easy to see.  But, on the ground, it probably matters more how than whether those things are implemented -- without strong relationships, trust, and commitment, it's unlikely any reform will turn around a school or district.

That fact is really difficult for policymakers to swallow because there's no easy way to change those types of things: what is Congress supposed to do in order to make make teachers at the local elementary school get along better with their students?  The relationship between policy and the factors discussed in the report is so indirect that it's easy to just ignore them and focus on simpler solutions.  We should all try to resist that temptation.



*"the Classroom Assessment Scoring System for Secondary classrooms (CLASS-S), [is] an observational tool developed by researchers at the University of Virginia, to observe and assess the quality of teacher-student interactions in classrooms. Based on development theory and research suggesting that interactions between students and adults are the primary mechanism of student development and learning (Greenberg, Domitrovich, & Bumbarger, 2001; Hamre & Pianta, 2006; Morrison & Connor, 2002; Pianta, 2006; Rutter & Maughan, 2002), the CLASS-S focuses not on the presence of materials, the physical environment, or the adoption of a specific curriculum but on what teachers do with the materials they have and on the interactions teachers have with their students. The observation tool looks specifically at interactions between teachers and students across four domains: Emotional Support, Classroom Organization, Instructional Support, and Student Engagement" (p. 12).