Educators are finding that kids aren’t coming to school prepared to learn because they are not getting proper rest, discipline, and attention from their parents.

According to Graeme Paton in the The Telegraph, in order to help parents, Britain will be handing out leaflets to remind them to make sure kids get the proper amount of sleep, are well fed, have time set aside for homework, have quality time spent with them and come to school prepared with the proper supplies.

The campaign will be called “Ready to Learn Everyday” and will be led by the National Association of Head Teachers. It will consist of a series of four leaflets, with the first including information about ‘school readiness’.

School heads are finding that kids generally are no longer “school ready”. Particularly, children in their first year are not able to communicate properly in school due to lack of communication at home. NAHT president Bernadette Hunter said this is due to parents’ work demands combined with over-exposure to technology such as the television, video games and the internet.

She says that while many of the ‘unprepared’ pupils are from impoverished backgrounds, that this is also a problem with children who come from middle class families.

 ”Increasing numbers of children are coming to school not prepared to learn. Lots of head teachers are reporting children staying up too late at night, not getting enough sleep, coming into school tired and unable to concentrate and, in some cases, not having a proper breakfast.”

“We also have a minority of children coming from families that lack the structure to make sure that the children have everything they need to bring to school like their reading books, homework and PE kit.”

Not getting the proper amount of sleep is an especially crucial problem that needs to be addressed since studies have shown that sleep deprivation has impacted academic achievement levels worldwide. Research from Boston College showed the problem is most prevalent in richer countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom.

Parents tend to underestimate the impact of an insufficient amount of sleep on academic  performance. Lack of sleep can have the same repercussions as lack of food, leading to lack of concentration and reduced ability to learn.

In some cases teachers have had to alter their lesson plans because students are not well rested and cannot keep up with the pace of the class, negatively affecting the entire class’s progress.

The post Schools Enlist Parents to Improve Students’ Readiness Every Day appeared first on Education News.

by John Jensen, PhD

The debate over high-stakes testing pits the need for assessing student progress  against the negative effects of doing so. Three recent articles offer a glance into it.

In a guest post for Education Week (“Monty Neill: Building a Successful Test Reform Movement”, May 14, 2013), Monty Neill proposes halting or reducing state-level testing, citing as reasons teaching to the test, cost, school climate, time from teaching, narrowing the curriculum, and increased juvenile incarceration.

In the same issue, Michael Petrilli (“Am I Part of the Cure … or the Disease?”, May 14, 2013)  maintains that not testing but student achievement is the point, but that even small gains in test-verified reading and math enhance life trajectories, and teaching quality is what limits better instruction.  Acknowledging that testing can generate temptations of cheating, a culture of fear, and narrowing of the curriculum, he would retain it nonetheless but suggests a goal of improving mediocre schools even a little, and teaching systematically the skills making the most difference.

Deborah Meier (“Problem vs. Solution: A Response”, Education Week, May 16, 2013) regards the testing issue as a distraction from more fundamental problems such as a public polarized by a growing gap between rich and poor, and that the wealthy steer resources to the schools their own children attend.  She holds that a competitive education marketplace produces outcomes woefully wrong for children, that public education should address problems one at a time in light of the entire spectrum of needs.

So apart from altering the nation’s political makeup, we face two immediate problems–one improving education and the other finding out how well we do it. Both matter. Though a school’s quality may be low, how we test may depress even that.

There are many dogs in the fight about testing.  Picture a  round table discussion of stakeholders. At the table are a parent, teacher, district administrator, state legislator, and federal official. Each asserts, “I need to know X, and here’s why.”  They are arguing over competing priorities when one of them points her thumb over her shoulder.

Seated against a wall is a student.  Everyone falls silent as they realize he heard everything they said.  Someone addresses him.

“So what do you want?”

“I just want to learn something,” he answers quietly.

The stakeholders try to resume their discussion but find no traction. Their urgency evaporates as they realize how superficial are their demands compared to the substance of the student’s need. The student is the elephant in the room. They look at each other and wonder, “How can we even begin to find a way to resolve this?”

By way of answer, consider a different analogy.  Imagine you are on a research team investigating gases rising from the earth in a remote location.  Your helicopter malfunctions and sets you down unexpectedly close to the emissions, and disembarking, your team realizes that it is in danger.  Everyone must rapidly grab something and move away quickly.  Before you are three canisters, one labeled AIR, another WATER, and a third  FOOD.

Which do you seize? Your life may depend on your choice, and you recall the rule of three, that in general humans can live 3 minutes without air, 3 days without water, and 3 weeks without food.  Knowing that in the toxic air of your  surroundings you could be dead in three minutes, you grab the AIR canister first.  Only after you have air under control do you pick up anything else.  You secure your prime value before even considering a secondary one.

Back in the classroom, we search among the canisters concerned with testing to find the one labeled AIR.  What is the most essential factor, the one we wish to establish with certainty, the one we refuse to sell off for the sake of a lesser value, the one to which we add others only if they do not detract from the first?

Finding an answer everyone can accept is, I believe, a direction that eventually resolves the dispute over testing. We first agree on our criterion value.  I would like to nominate one on the basis of two axioms:

Axiom 1.  Students progress through their own effort.  Instruction works as it enables students to focus attention and apply effort on tasks that generate learning.  The essence of instruction is directing students’ attention and effort.

Axiom 2.  Effort is propelled by motivation.  Aside from the sheer time available for their effort (jeopardized by countless intrusions including test-associated tasks), how students apply themselves arises directly from their interest, enthusiasm, ownership, sense of progress, and so on–signals of their motivational state directly preceding effort. If kids are bored and distracted and you want to teach them something, you either alter their motivation or forget about accomplishing anything.         If in a psychological sense all behavior originates from a state that makes the behavior possible, we settle on students’ inner motivation as the key condition we must enhance.

A common complaint about testing, however, is exactly its effect on motivation.  For teachers to appreciate this better, I would like them to experience an activity I often presented in training workshops in the 1970s.  It goes like this.  I’ll trust your imagination to figure out the lesson involved:

‘“We’re going to start off by giving you a spelling test for college freshmen,” the consultant announces to start off a morning. ”We’ll assign you to activities later based on the scores you get. Please take out a blank sheet of paper.”

People groan but cooperate.  In a serious tone the consultant then reads the words while people write them:

asinine, braggadocio, accommodate, diarrhea, chauffeur, desiccate, impostor, inoculate, hors d’oeuvres, liquefy, mayonnaise, moccasin, obbligato, narcissistically, rococo, benefited, rarefy, resuscitate, sacrilegious, supersede, titillate, and paraphernalia.

“Please exchange papers,”  the consultant says crisply, and then spells each word on the board.  Checkers mark off wrong answers on the paper they have, and hand it back to its owner.

“How many got none wrong?” the consultant asks, writing a zero on the board.  I’ve never seen zero wrong, but if people miss none, their number is jotted beside the zero.  Under it the consultant lists numbers 1-20.

“How many got  (number) wrong?” he or she says, going down the column. Everyone raises their hand at some point to acknowledge their number of mistakes.  Most scores tend to fall around half wrong with some missing as many as 17 of 20.

People laugh, moan, and remember emotionally how it felt to be measured by their mistakes. The exercise concludes with a discussion of its implication for instruction–how discouraged they remembered feeling when they were in school, how they may have refused to try, how they preferred to be graded down than be humiliated by trying and failing, how disheartened they were at being labeled poor at anything, and so on.

If we wish both to teach and assess in a way that enhances motivation, how can we?

Competency-based  instruction offers a clue. You declare it acceptable for students to have different competencies to practice even if they do much work together. You identify a discrete skill or chunk of knowledge you want them to know, tell them exactly the work needed and the signal marking its completion, and check it off when it’s done.  Developed this way, their record shows unbroken success.  Wherever they are on the continuum, they just work steadily at the next step.

This approach frees students from a peculiar psychic burden. If I have five units of knowledge to acquire and accomplish that, my working memory tells me “I got five.” My score matches my effort.  I own the five and take pride in it.

This changes if  I am told, “We expected you to get ten but you only got five.”

Only? My success becomes failure for a reason beyond my control, and my effort is devalued. I feel like a failure solely because someone measures me against a standard that does not serve me personally.

Think about yourself.  Intuitively, do you mark your knowledge by  knowing something or by not-knowing something else?  Surely the former.  Not-knowing measures are inherently antithetical to students’ natural motivation.  While they spontaneously compare themselves to peers, they regard this measure of their not-knowing as fair. They are constituted to emulate standards demonstrated by peers,  but for this they only need objective information.

For schoolwork, a wall chart serves adequately by counting up cumulatively the contents of each one’s growing bank of knowledge. They can use the differences between them if they wish, but no one drives them to feel bad. (And check me if I’m wrong about this, but do not some teachers still believe that imposing bad feelings on students is their bottom-line motivator?  I infer this from observing students who actively fear their teacher.)

Once acknowledging positive motivation as our preferred long-term resource,  we don’t even hint to a student that his effort is of secondary importance. We are clear that if we organize his effort so it’s effective, recognize the effort, and count up its outcome objectively, he is more likely to repeat it. The objective count of  his progress on the specified tasks reveal exactly what he has learned. If his motivation and effort-driven success remain our primary values, we have no need to confine him under someone else’s web of meaning.

In my next article, I will show how to arrange effort for optimal motivation while accounting for its results in a way that fulfills stakeholders’ needs for information.

John Jensen is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of the three-volume Practice Makes Permanent series (Rowman and Littlefield). He will send a proof copy of the volumes to anyone on request: jjensen@gci.net

The post John Jensen: De-fogging High Stakes Testing, Part 1 appeared first on Education News.

Teachers and parents spoke out at the Denver Public Schools board meeting about the district’s decision not to renew 250 non-tenured teachers’ contracts, reports Zahira Torres of the Denver Post.

 “Teachers, parents and children filled the board room and an overflow area waiting for their turn to talk about a variety of issues including the board’s expected vote on replacing Smiley Middle School, which is being shut down, with McAuliffe International School. But the majority of the speakers, nearly 100, at the meeting were there to talk about the district’s decision not to renew the contracts of certain non-tenured teachers”.

The Denver School District has approximately 1,900 non-tenured teachers. Around 250 of those teachers found out that their contracts would not be renewed, and 80 teachers would not be eligible to be rehired.

Kate Hoffman is one of the teachers that was categorized as ineligible for rehire even though her fourth grade students had the third-highest median growth percentile for writing in the district. She told the board that DPS is:

 “… losing passionate, hard working educators to a game of administrative politics…This is not good for our kids…It’s not good for the already publicly scrutinized educational system and it’s not good for Colorado.”

Hoffman’s comments were among the public’s in a board meeting that lasted seven hours. The meeting concluded with the decision to delay the vote on whether to approve the non-renewal of teacher contracts. Six of seven trustees voted to revisit the issue in a week.

Board member Jeannie Kaplan said she wanted more time to review the documents provided by the teachers before she makes a decision. It concerned her that many teachers said they were not getting the support and guidance that they needed from administrators.

Board President Mary Sewell disagrees with Kaplan’ concerns and members who believe teachers may have been evaluated unfairly. She was the sole member to cast a vote against the delay and believes that the process has been careful and accurate and that the Board should move forward with a vote.

Superintendent Tom Boasberg asserts that the decisions are based on a review of student progress data, classroom observations of the teachers by the principals and trained peer evaluators.

 ”Every year we have questions and concerns from teachers who are not renewed, and I certainly appreciate that these are thoughtful, caring, committed people but they’re not great teachers,” Boasberg said.

Sarah Young, a parent of three children, thinks parents’ perceptions should play a role in the evaluation. She says no one knows whether the students are being challenged better than parents.

The post Denver Dumps 250 Non-Tenured Teachers, Public Reacts appeared first on Education News.

The Departments of Justice and Education have teamed up to mandate new campus speech codes that are unconstitutional and violate the First Amendment, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

An extremely broad definition of sexual harassment has been mandated by the Departments of Justice and Education which, says FIRE, will make virtually every student in the United State a potential harasser. The plan was outlined in a letter sent to the University of Montana that was said to serve as a “blueprint”  for every college and university that is federally-funded throughout the United States.

 “The letter states that “sexual harassment should be more broadly defined as ‘any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature’” including “verbal conduct” (that is, speech). It then explicitly states that allegedly harassing expression need not even be offensive to an “objectively reasonable person of the same gender in the same situation”—if the listener takes offense to sexually related speech for any reason, no matter how irrationally or unreasonably, the speaker may be punished.”

This is a complete change from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights’ previous stance on sexual harassment from 2003. Then they stated that harassment must go beyond verbal expression or symbols, and that the conduct must be evaluated as harassing by a reasonable person.

The punishable forms of ‘harassment‘ by the federal government now include any expression related to sexual topics that offends anyone. This could include things as harmless as a presentation on safe sex, a debate about sexual morality, a performance of “The Vagina Monologues”, a discussion of gay marriage or a classroom lecture of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita — or a joke that is sexually themed that is overheard by someone who finds it offensive for any reason.

The regulations are so broad that harassment also includes an invitation to go out on a date or a flirtation that is not welcomed by the recipient.

 ”The federal government has put colleges and universities in an impossible position with this mandate,” said Lukianoff. “With this unwise and unconstitutional decision, the DOJ and DOE have doomed American campuses to years of confusion and expensive lawsuits, while students’ fundamental rights twist in the wind.”

This makes almost every student on campus a harasser. Mary Lou Byrd from the Washington Free Beacon found that college students are worried about this decision:

 “My take on this is that the definition of sexual harassment on college campuses is too broad,” said Joseph Pareres, a junior in Manhattanville College. “This definition puts students at risk of being accused of sexual harassment for no valid reason.”

The post Federal Campus Speech Codes Broad, Unconstitutional appeared first on Education News.

The Dallas School Board has changed their dress code so students no longer have to tuck in their shirts. This change has been put in place so that attention is not drawn to overweight students who may not be able to accommodate the dress code regulations, reports Ryan Grenoble at the Huffington Post.

The DISD board has had to keep on top of trends in order to keep the dress code up to date. Unfortunately, obesity seems to be one of the biggest trends in Texas:

 “A survey conducted by the Center for Disease Control in 2011 found 16 percent of Texas high school students were obese, making it one of the most overweight in the nation, just behind Alabama, Kentucky, and Oklahoma.”

The previous rule requiring students to tuck in their shirts into their pants, shorts, or skirts did not accommodate overweight students who were physically unable to properly tuck in their shirts. The Dallas school board was afraid that this would cause unwanted, negative attention and lead to ridicule for overweight students.

“In a 2010 report, The Obesity Action Coalition found 58 percent of overweight high school boys experienced daily bullying as a result of their size, with 63 percent of girls reporting the same.”

Carla Wade of WFAA found that parents also agree that students should not have to tuck in their shirts:

““Because that way, people can’t make fun of each other about what they are wearing,” said Ana Zetina, who was waiting to pick up a sibling outside Dallas’ Woodrow Wilson High School on Friday.”

The Dallas School Board felt embarrasment talking about the rule and struggled with how to discuss the issue in an open, honest and transparent manner. Board President used the word ‘healthiness’ instead of overweight:

 ”Now, I am always one to say tuck in your shirts, but it was brought to my attention that if you are, uh healthy, tucking in your shirt shows your healthiness. … For a middle-school student, it could be a self-esteem issue if they are made to tuck in their shirt, because if they wear it loose, their healthiness might not show as much.”

Other board members used the word ‘fluffy’ instead of ‘healthy’ in the meeting. Clearly, none of the members seemed comfortable addressing the issue in a straightforward manner. According to NBC local affiliate WOAI, the board members never used the words “fat” or “obese”.

Students were asked their thoughts at Wilson High School and they were much more straight forward.

“In all respect,” Ruth Blaker said, “the tucked-in shirt makes the muffin top a little more accentuated.”

“It’s embarrassing for some kids who are heavier-set,” Jake Whitten said.

None of the students interviewed had their shirts tucked in.

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Georgia Institute of Technology announced that it will offer a two-year master’s degree in computer science in the format of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), reports Douglas Belkin of the Wall Street Journal.

Georgia Tech is the first top-tier school to offer this type of online program for a graduate degree. The program will be offered through Udacity, a widely-used MOOC platform.

The course is available to anyone, but in order to obtain the degree from Georgia Tech the student must gain admission and pay the course fees, which will amount to between $6,000 and $7,000. Students must have a bachelors degree in computer science or the work equivalent and earn a grade of B or higher in the first two classes.

The program’s startup cost to create online lectures runs between $200,000 and $300,000. However, the school estimates that it will only have to hire one teacher for every hundred students as opposed to one for every ten or twenty students, allowing the school to keep costs low.

This program comes at an exciting time as the cost of education is growing rapidly and there is a need for computer scientists.

 “There is currently a significant shortage of computer scientists in the country, and the government projects that there will be for years to come. Through 2018, the demand for computer software engineers is projected to increase by 34%—among the most of any occupation in the country, according to a 2010 Bureau of Labor Statistics report.”

The university hopes to admit everyone who meets university requirements. Eventually it is estimated to enroll 10,000 students into the program, which is nearly half the size of Georgia Tech’s student body on campus, according to Justin Pope of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Some worry that the quality of education will falter on such a large scale. Georgia Tech assures that the university will be able to maintain its high standards.

 ”This is a full-service degree,” Bras said. “We have our name reputation and excellence behind it. These people will be assessed graded, take exams, have help, will have access to individuals that answer questions.”

Another concern of faculty expressed by Benjamin Flowers, an architecture professor and chair the graduate curriculum committee, is that the degree will lose some of it value since there will be such a large turnout of graduates.

 ”One of the key attributes of educational distinction has always been that you control the number of people that have degrees from your institution,” Flowers said. “Are we producing something that’s of genuine value and in demand, or is it something we’re producing because there’s an arms race in place and we’re trying not to be left behind?”

With admission standards being comparable to the traditional Georgia Tech computer science masters program, the school assures that the program will not be an easier route to a Georgia Tech credential.

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Language teacher turned consultant Joe Dale is convinced that it’s not necessarily the traditional techie types who are on the front lines of a digital revolution in schools — he thinks it’s the language teachers.

It might not seem like as natural a fit for language teachers to embrace technology as it is for teachers of science, math and engineering-heavy subjects, but Dale has seen that developing tools like social media, video software and online conferencing translate well to the language classroom.

And the web, despite being full of video, graphics and glitz, is still primarily driven by words. Dale writes in The Guardian Professional’s Teacher Network that the “MFL Twitterati,” a collection of foreign language teachers, is a perfect example of a group of education professionals using technology to augment their practice:

The ‘MFLtwitterati‘ – a grassroots community of UK-based modern foreign language teachers on Twitter – has proved to be an invaluable testbed for ideas on using new technologies. Over time the group has developed a strong ethos of sharing innovative classroom practice, encouraging each other to experiment and feedback their findings for further discussion and reflection.

It’s hard to measure the precise impact of these online tools, says Dale, but the proliferation of forums and collaborative groups who constantly share up-to-date tools, apps and best practices is a testament to their value.

Language teachers have successfully used blogging, audio/video software and conferencing — from Google+ to Skype — to share expertise and to integrate unique language practice into curricula.

Not everyone is an early adopter, though. Traditionalists exist, and some language teachers are more reluctant to embrace new technologies than others.

The issue now is the widening gap between those who pro-actively use technology to promote creativity and collaboration, and those who only tick the ICT [education technology] box with the same old ‘drill and kill’ websites (that focus on excessive repetition of simple, isolated skills) and MS Office.

Being slow to hop on the ed tech train is a mistake, Dale argues, because it’s leaving the station whether teachers like it or not:

Technology is not going away and language teachers need to embrace its full potential to engage our 21st century learners.

Education technology and foreign languages aren’t a new marriage — as early as 1983 there was evidence that the discipline began to embrace tech. Vol. 1, No. 1 from June, 1983 of the journal for CALICO — Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium — reports the following:

One thing is manifest. Anything having to do with computers is a hot topic at foreign-language meetings these days. Computers were the subject of one of the Northeast Conference’s Winter Workshops in February of 1983, and the Pre-Conference Workshop on computers at the October 1982 meeting of the Massachusetts Foreign Language Association (MaFLA) was certainly not unique in being oversubscribed.

The post On Education Technology, Language Teachers May Be Leading appeared first on Education News.

A study shows that reading and math skills at age seven can predict how much money an adult will make, reports Lindsay Abrams at The Atlantic.

This surprising discovery was even unexpected by one of the lead researchers Stuart Ritchie, reports Rebecca Klein at the Huffington Post:

 “A lot of psychologists — including us before we did the study! — would have guessed that, since general intelligence is so important, specific skills like reading and math wouldn’t have any extra effects on SES beyond it,” Ritchie wrote. “But we found that these effects do exist — so no matter how smart people were … being better at reading and math at age seven was still significantly linked to SES aged 42.”

The study was lead by Stuart Ritchie and Timothy Bates of the University of Edinburgh. They wanted to what degree academic skill played into the overall equation for a successful life.

They looked at different measures of success at various points in the lives of over 17,000 residents of England, Scotland and Wales who were followed for 50 years after their birth. The measures focused on five different points in the participants lives. The first was socioeconomic class at birth, and researchers looked at the parent’s occupation and whether they owned or rented a home and what size it was.

The second measure was reading and math skills at age seven and how interested students seemed to be in learning subjects. The third measure was intelligence at age eleven and participants’ IQ scores. The fourth was academic motivation at age sixteen — specifically, they looked at how strongly participants agreed with statements such as “School is a waste of time”.

Finally the researchers looked at the students’ adult socioeconomic status at age 42. This included occupation, income and homeowner status.

The results showed that how much money people made at midlife was predicted by math skills at age seven, with a grade level boost in reading corresponded with a salary $7,750 higher at age 42.

Early reading ability proved to also be an indicator, but only girls. The good news is that according to Bates:

 “Math and reading are two of the most intervention-friendly of topics: Practice improves nearly all children.”

The study, titled “Enduring Links From Childhood Mathematics and Reading Achievement to Adult Socioeconomic Status,” is available in Psychological Science via SAGE Journals.

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Tuesday the Los Angeles Unified District School Board voted to ban suspensions for “willful defiance”. Starting next year alternative disciplinary measures will be taken for infractions such as dress code violations, eating in the classroom and mouthing off to teachers instead of the traditional suspension, reports Vanessa Romo on Takepart.com.

This change is being instituted with the knowledge that taking kids out of the classroom does not prove to be an effective method when disciplining students with behavioral issues. LAUSD officials also hope that it will help eliminate racial profiling in the classroom.

The U.S. Department of Education conducted a study that showed African-American students are suspended over three times as often as white students.

 “In LAUSD, African-American children make up nine percent of the student body, but they account for 26 percent of all suspensions, nearly half of which are for willful defiance offenses.”

The district has yet to outline a budget, causing administrators to worry about the reality of the plan. In order to have effective support for students, the schools would likely need to hire addition personnel.

Lack of staff in schools is already a problem:

 “Currently in LAUSD, the school personnel-to-students ratio is at an all-time high. Public elementary schools must have more than 1,150 students before an assistant principal is assigned. Ideally, said Perez, there should be one for every 700 students. She calls the counselor ratio “horrendous.” The average high school counselor is responsible for 500 students.”

Despite the fact that it will require a lot of work from the schools, the benefits are well worth it, as demonstrated in East Los Angeles at Garfield High School. The students, faculty and community groups all signed “promise letters” to do whatever it takes to turn the school around and avoid a district take over. After three years with long hours put in by teachers developing behavioral plans for individual students, as well as alternative disciplinary methods in the classroom, the school was able to raise its API score by 114 points and keep control.

Takepart.com’s Kristen Kloberdanz reports another successful switch from traditional suspensions to a restorative justice system in the Oakland Unified School District.

The system includes a three tier model including prevention, repairing harm and alternatives to suspension with support for re-entry. The first tier ensures that the students are made to feel they are important and that they are learning in a caring environment. The second replaces suspension with counseling, peer circle groups, and peer mediation. The third welcomes students back to school with open arms who have been expelled from other schools or previously incarcerated.

“In 2007, restorative justice was tested at an Oakland middle school that had a high expulsion and suspension rates. Within three years, suspensions were reduced by 87 percent and there were no more expulsions. This year a three-tiered model of whole school restorative justice, which includes professional development and coaching, is being provided to 13 OESD pilot sites.”

The post Los Angeles Bans Suspensions for Acts of ‘Willful Defiance’ appeared first on Education News.

The foundation of the school choice movement is a desire to empower parents with the ability to send their children to a high-quality school regardless of where the family lives. School choice advocates frequently charge that one’s zip code shouldn’t determine the quality of one’s education — as wealthy neighborhoods tend to have good schools and poorer neighborhoods do not — and that opening up great schools to all is democratic, egalitarian and will help drive education reform.

But critics of school choice argue that this leaves poorer and predominantly minority students left back in traditional public schools as families who put a premium on education flee using choice — and that those families who take their children out of public schools move them into less diverse schools.

Matthew Chingos of the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy has concluded that data shows it is unlikely that a relationship exists between school choice and segregation.

By comparing changes in charter enrollment with changes in minority students’ exposure to non-minority students using information from the Common Core of Data, Chingos found that there’s no significant relationship. He didn’t stop there:

I also used an alternative measure of segregation called a “dissimilarity index” and obtained similar findings: no consistent relationship between changes in charter enrollment and changes in segregation. Finally, I conducted a more sophisticated panel data analysis that uses all nine years of data to estimate the relationship between charter enrollment and segregation using only the changes within counties over time^. Once again, using both the exposure and dissimilarity indices, the results consistently indicated no meaningful relationship between choice and segregation.

Critics may not be completely satisfied, and Chingos recognizes that it’s still possible that school choice and segregation are related — but that it’s very unlikely:

The lack of any consistent relationship between charter enrollment and segregation does not eliminate the possibility that such a relationship exists, but suggests that it is unlikely. For there to be a relationship, it would have to be the case that counties where charter enrollment increased experienced an increase in segregation as a result but then adopted policies (or experienced other changes) that counteracted the increase in segregation. In my view, that is not a very plausible explanation for these results.

The growth of charter schools and school choice has been consistent over the last 15 years, with ~1% of students enrolled in charters in 2000 and more than 3% by 2010. Arizona — and cities such as Washington, DC and New Orleans — has been aggressive in promoting school choice, with Florida, Ohio, Georgia, Illinois and others making up a total of 17 states with school choice programs.

The post Does School Choice Increase Segregation? No, Says Brookings appeared first on Education News.