Search

In an environment of tight resources, tough academic challenges, and increasingly stiff competition from new education providers, smart leadership may matter more than ever for the success of America's school districts. Against this backdrop, "Education Week" introduces the first of what will be an annual "Leaders To Learn From" report--a way to recognize forward-thinking education leaders and share their ideas. This 2013 report profiles 16 district-level leaders--superintendents, assistant superintendents, and others, including a union president--who seized on creative but practical approaches and put them to work in their school districts.

Poverty, neglect, or family stress can make it especially difficult for young children to develop the self-discipline and habits of mind they will need to succeed in the classroom and beyond. Armed with research and a commitment to the whole child, Washington state has transformed the way its agencies work together and in partnership with researchers to address the effects of early adversity on learning and to help disadvantaged children build resiliency and other so-called executive-function skills they need to learn and grow. In the process, officials hope to create a national model for rapidly translating new research in fields like cognitive and neuroscience into usable practice.

A mantra in recent years has been to blame the teachers' unions for many of the problems that beset public education. Americans only need look at Wisconsin, where the governor and lawmakers pushed through legislation curtailing the collective bargaining rights of teachers and other public employees. This special report examines the attempts by a small but growing number of districts and unions to work together to enhance the knowledge and skills of teachers and, in turn, improve the achievement of schoolchildren. Articles in this supplement include: (1) "New Attitudes Shaping Labor-District Relationships" (Stephen Sawchuk); (2) "Contract Yields New Teacher-Evaluation System" (Stephen Sawchuk); (3) "Value-Added Formulas Strain Collaboration" (Sarah D. Sparks); (4) "Union-District Collaboration a Never-Ending Process" (Stephen Sawchuk); (5) "States Urged to Promote Union-District Cooperation" (Sean Cavanagh); and (6) "Memphis Collaboration Is Poised to Bear Fruit" (Christina A. Samuels).

As concern mounts that U.S. students lack sufficient understanding of science and related fields, it has become increasingly clear that schools can't tackle the challenge alone. This special report explores the field often called "informal science education," which is gaining broader recognition for its role in helping young people acquire scientific knowledge and skills. Opportunities abound outside the classroom to learn about science, and to inspire a passion for it. Zoos and science museums, robotics clubs, science competitions, and online games are just a few of the options to engage American youths. In this special report, the authors examine what informal science education looks like in practice, and what one knows about its impact, its potential, and the challenges it faces.

Children who enter kindergarten with a small vocabulary don't get taught enough words--particularly, sophisticated academic words--to close the gap, according to the latest in a series of studies by Michigan early-learning experts. The findings suggest many districts could be at a disadvantage in meeting the increased requirements for vocabulary learning from the Common Core State Standards, said study co-author Susan B. Neuman, a professor in educational studies specializing in early literacy development at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Vocabulary is a deceptively simple literacy skill that researchers and educators agree is critical to students' academic success, but which has proved frustratingly difficult to address. The consensus among researchers and educators has been that students must close such vocabulary gaps to succeed academically and deal with rigorous content.

An explosion in the variety and availability of cognitive-enhancing drugs, from prescriptions like Ritalin to commercial drinks like NeuroFuel, raises concerns for scientists and educators alike--not just over the potential for abuse, but also over what educators and researchers consider, and how they approach, normal achievement. Evidence is still limited--but growing--that some chemicals can boost attention, memory, concentration, and other abilities related to academic performance. Researchers at the Society of Neuroscience conference here questioned whether it is safe and fair to allow healthy people to boost their brain function chemically, or use drugs to correct environmental factors like poverty or bad instruction. Those can lead to brain deficits similar to factors that characterize medical conditions like attention-deficit disorders. The author reports on the advent of "smart drugs" that raises safety, ethical concerns.

While "personalization" has become a buzzword in education, it can be hard to determine what really makes a subject relevant to individual children in the classroom. An ongoing series of studies at Southern Methodist University suggests learning students' interests upfront and incorporating them into lessons can get struggling students to try harder and substantially improve their performance in algebra. The studies, which were discussed at a recent meeting at Carnegie Mellon University, highlight one way to boost learning in algebraic expression, a concept considered critical in the Common Core State Standards but which educators say is perennially challenging to students. The study found that personalized math problems not only made it easier for students to understand what was being asked, but also helped boost the confidence of students who may have been intimidated by the subject.

The 1,000-student Allegheny Valley district in Pennsylvania boasts generations of alumni and a community so involved with the schools that high school graduation becomes an open celebration in downtown Springdale Borough. Yet the district hasn't asked for a tax increase in three years, and it is pushing out a message to older residents about energy conservation, equipment reuse, and other cost savings. Allegheny Valley is located in one of more than 900 counties where residents 65 and older now edge out school-age children. Out of more than 3,000 counties and county equivalents nationwide, seniors outnumber schoolchildren by more than 2-to-1 in 33 counties, recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau show. Educators in such counties are grappling with ways to keep the older community engaged in and supportive of their schools, from bringing older residents into classes to reframing education issues to address safety and economic concerns. The combination of rising life expectancy and falling overall fertility in the United States means that, by the middle of this century, the nation will join Europe, Japan, and other areas across the globe where people 65 and older outnumber those 17 and under, according to the Census Bureau. The general demographic trend may mean it's harder to have publicly financed education in an aging America. Older Americans expand the overall tax base of a district and can lead to higher school budgets, but as voters they favor lower taxes and spending on schools. Voters 65 and older often give priority to health-care and police programs over education, but do tend to be interested in the way school quality affects property prices. Officials in the Allegheny Valley district, besides being judicious in their budget requests, try to guard against waning voter support by working to include older residents--many of whom attended the schools or enrolled their own children decades before--in academic presentations, a seniors' brunch on campus, and Veterans Day festivities.

Neuroscience exploded into the education conversation more than 20 years ago, in step with the evolution of personal computers and the rise of the Internet, and policymakers hoped medical discoveries could likewise help doctors and teachers understand the "hard wiring" of the brain. That conception of how the brain works, exacerbated by the difficulty in translating research from lab to classroom, spawned a generation of neuro-myths and snake-oil pitches--from programs to improve cross-hemisphere brain communication to teaching practices aimed at "auditory" or "visual" learners. Today, as educational neuroscience has started to find its niche within interdisciplinary "mind-brain-education" study, the field's most powerful findings show how little about learning is hard-wired, after all. In contrast to the popular conception of the brain as a computer hard-wired with programs that run different types of tasks, brain activity has turned out to operate more like a language. Different parts of the brain act like the letters of the alphabet and by the time a child is 8 months old, the letters are there--the basic connections have formed in the hippocampus or the prefrontal cortex, say--but then through experience, those neural letters activate in patterns to form words, sentences, and paragraphs of thought. That analogy offers a whole different idea of how the brain develops, both normally and abnormally. Moreover, mind-brain-education researchers say, helping teachers and students understand how the brain changes in response to experience may be the best way to link neuroscience findings to classroom experience.

A national survey finds that, when it comes to sexual harassment in school, many students do not know where to draw the line. Based on the first nationally representative survey in a decade of students in grades 7-12, the study conducted by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), found that 48 percent of nearly 2,000 students surveyed had experienced verbal, physical, or online sexual harassment at school during the 2010-11 school year. The students' reports reveal constantly shifting school environments--mostly unseen by the adults on campus--in which students use everything from gossip and teasing to groping or more severe physical attacks to enforce gender stereotypes, bully, and retaliate. Researchers found that while students generally do not see themselves as sexual harassers, 14 percent of girls and 18 percent of boys reported that they had harassed another student, either in person, online, or both. The report says that 44 percent of those who sexually harassed another student considered it "no big deal," and that another 39 percent said they were trying to be funny. What makes matters worse, the researchers noted, is that prevention programs often do not address the complexities of the problem. Many school-based anti-harassment programs focus on teaching students to develop healthy romantic relationships, but the AAUW study suggests that approach may miss the point: Only 3 percent of students who had sexually harassed another student said they acted because they wanted a relationship with the victim.

Researchers and policymakers agree that teachers' expectations of what their students can do can become self-fulfilling prophecies for children's academic performance. Yet while the "soft bigotry of low expectations" has become an education catchphrase, scholars and advocates are just beginning to explore whether it is possible to prevent such expectations from taking root by making teachers and students aware of their beliefs about students. The National Urban Alliance for Effective Education, which works with school districts to train teachers to give students of all income levels and all racial and ethnic groups the same enriched instruction that students receive in gifted education programs, this year launched a program in Bridgeport, Connecticut; Greene County, Georgia; San Francisco; and Newark, New Jersey, to bring students and teachers together for lessons on cognitive development, instructional strategies, and lesson planning, with the students then modeling the instruction in a classroom for the teachers. The joint professional development course is intended to teach students to think critically about how they learn and are taught, while at the same time countering what the alliance's chief executive officer, Yvette Jackson, called a "focus on weakness." Prior research shows that teachers, particularly those who are white middle-class, tend to overemphasize academic and social challenges for poor and ethnic-minority students, sometimes overlooking students' potential to succeed. The idea behind involving students in professional-development workshops is to help teachers look at their students in a new way--and vice versa.

As policymakers debate the merits of new tests and intervention strategies to improve student achievement, some districts are exploring a more basic warning sign: Are students even showing up? A growing consensus of research points to chronic absence--defined by the national policy group Attendance Counts as missing 10 percent of school or more--as one of the strongest and most often overlooked indicators of a student's risk of becoming disengaged, failing courses, and eventually dropping out of school. Most districts collect attendance data on their students, but few know what to look for when they review it, said Hedy N. Chang, the director of Attendance Counts, a national policy group. In Maryland, schools are required to report any student who misses more than 20 days of school. In 2009, district officials, researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Baltimore Education Research Consortium, as well as more than 100 representatives from foundations and corrections and social service agencies, joined forces to create the districtwide Baltimore City Student Attendance Work Group, which studies the problem and suggests solutions. The district has moved to require an attendance monitor in every school, as well as districtwide incentives for students to come to school more often and education for parents and teachers on the importance of attendance. The district is also getting the students involved in spreading the word about the importance of school attendance.

After five years of providing critical reviews of education-related reports by nonacademic think tanks, education professors Alex Molnar and Kevin G. Welner hope to expand their own reach with a new, broader research center. The new National Education Policy Center, based at Welner's academic home, the University of Colorado at Boulder, will consolidate his Education and the Public Interest Center and Molnar's Education Policy Research Unit, previously at Arizona State University. It will review existing research, conduct new research, and, for the first time for both groups, make policy recommendations. Molnar and Welner, the new center's director, already are well known in the academic community for the centers they have been running, which study the effects of private and for-profit influences on education and of policy interventions, such as charters and other forms of school choice. Their highest-profile venture, though, is the Think Tank Review Project, launched in 2006 with the aim of countering what its founders saw as "a hodgepodge of private "think tanks" at both the state and national levels [that] wield significant and very often undeserved influence in policy discussions by cranking out an array of well-funded and slickly produced--yet ideologically driven--research." The launch of the new center, coinciding with its publication of a book collecting 21 of the review project's 59 critiques of think tank research, renews the debate over the quality of education research in both the think tank and academic sectors--as well as questions about the objectivity of the review project itself.

Ten years after the San Diego school district gained national attention for its short-lived "Blueprint for Student Success," a crowd of district officials last week rolled out a new improvement plan that is almost the opposite of its controversial predecessor. The city's blueprint reforms--largely dismantled after a charismatic and aggressive superintendent, Alan D. Bersin, left in 2005--were among the most closely watched and hotly debated of the early years of the No Child Left Behind Act. Some experts say the story of the demise of the blueprint campaign and the rise of San Diego's new improvement effort may hold lessons for advocates of similar wholesale interventions using federal Race to the Top and School Improvement Fund grants. The old plan called for intensive professional development in the district-chosen reading program, double- and triple-length reading classes, and extended learning time for struggling schools, all closely monitored by the superintendent. In contrast to the approach then, the district will make its new plan only after holding more than 75 comment sessions throughout the community. Each building principal will decide on interventions to implement with the school's teachers and parents, and they will share successful programs informally, through site visits to other schools.

As part of an effort to improve the quality of educational research and make it less balkanized, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) have introduced a common set of evidence standards for federally funded work. The criteria will guide all new research at the IES, the U.S. Department of Education's main research agency, and all NSF research in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. The new guidelines distinguish three interconnected types of education studies: (1) Core knowledge, including foundational research, early-stage, and exploratory research; (2) Design and development research, to create interventions or strategies; and (3) Impact evaluations, including how those interventions work under ideal situations, as well as real-life settings with different groups of students.

The first round of this year's high-school-match notifications in New York City's massive, district-wide school choice process went out to students this month, sparking celebration, consternation, and a renewal of concerns about unequal access to the city's best schools. The Big Apple's school-matching system is certainly on a New York scale, with a formula so complex that its 2003 design helped earn its creator, Alvin E. Roth, the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics. The city's 8th graders and their families pore through a 600-page directory of profiles of more than 700 potential schools, of which they can rank up to a dozen by preference. Overall, about 53 percent of students, whether high- or low-performing, got into their first-choice schools--but the students differed widely in their choices. Fewer than a third of the low-achieving students ranked academically selective schools as their first choices. In turn, lower-achieving students were half as likely as other students to get into those schools.

Emerging technology and research on learning have the potential to dramatically improve assessments, if educators and policymakers take a more balanced approach to using them. That's the conclusion of two years of analysis by the Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment in Education, a panel of top education research and policy experts that was launched in 2011 with initial funding from the Educational Testing Service. In a report that was set for release this week, the commission lays out a 10-year plan for states to develop systems of assessment that go beyond identifying student achievement for accountability purposes and toward improving classroom instruction and giving greater insight into how children learn.

At a time when more high schools are looking to their graduates' college-remediation rates as a clue to how well they prepare students for college and careers, new research findings suggest a significant portion of students who test into remedial classes don't actually need them. Separate studies from Teachers College, Columbia University, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education come to the same conclusion. The problem is coming to the fore as more states move to align their academic standards for college and career readiness with the Common Core State Standards and federal Race to the Top requirements and more high schools receive data on how their graduates are faring in colleges.

America's high school graduation rate has notably improved, according to figures released last week by the National Center for Education Statistics. The "averaged freshman graduation rate" rose to 78.2 percent of public school students receiving a diploma in 2010, up from 75.5 percent the year before. In 2006, the rate was 73.4 percent, and in 2001, it was 71.7 percent. The new report reflects the best performance in decades by high school students. It is the highest graduation rate since 1970, when the figure hit 78.7 percent. Also improved was the dropout rate, calculated as the proportion of students who drop out in any given year; it fell from 14.6 percent in 1972 to 11 percent in 1992 to 3.4 percent for the class of 2010. Thirty-eight states showed a graduation-rate increase of 1 percentage point or more in the most recent analysis. Overall, 3.1 million students received a diploma in 2010.

Boosting early retirement in cash-strapped districts does not hurt students' math and reading scores, according to new studies released at the American Economic Association meeting, but pension-incentive programs may cost schools some of their most effective teachers. Separate studies of teachers in California, Illinois, and North Carolina paint a complex picture of the choice increasingly faced by education leaders: Keep your most experienced--and expensive--teachers, or encourage them to retire to ease budget woes. Illinois' 5+5 program allowed any teacher age 50 or older, and with at least five years of experience, to qualify for pension benefits immediately if he or she retired at the end of the 1992-93 or 1993-94 school year and paid a one-time fee. The average teacher who took advantage of the program had 29 years' experience, compared with incoming teachers who had on average less than three. Some middle schools even ended up replacing their exiting teachers with fewer teachers overall. Yet the less-experienced teachers did not lead to lower test scores.

Running one of the nation's largest school districts typically comes with prestige and pay that draw would-be educational superstars, but also pressure and political complexity that cause them to burn out far faster than leaders of the majority of districts. A study published in the December issue of the American Educational Research Journal finds in 90 percent of 100 California districts studied, 43 percent of superintendents left within three years--but 71 percent of superintendents left the largest 10 percent of districts, which include those of 29,000 or more students, during that time. While superintendent turnover has not received as much focus from researchers or policymakers as teacher or principal turnover, stability at the central office has been linked to a greater likelihood of success for new education initiatives, which typically take five to seven years to mature. One analysis of more than 2,700 districts by the Denver-based Midcontinent Research for Education and Learning, or McREL, found that a one standard deviation improvement in the quality of a superintendent, as measured by researchers' criteria, was associated with a 9.5 percentile-point gain on state tests for the average district, and that student achievement growth was linked to longer tenures of district leaders.

The stress of a spelling bee or a challenging science project can enhance a student's focus and promote learning. But the stress of a dysfunctional or unstable home life can poison a child's cognitive ability for a lifetime, according to new research. Those studies show that stress forms the link between childhood adversity and poor academic achievement, but that not all adversity--or all stress--is bad for students. Research from Harvard University's Center on the Developing Child in Cambridge, Mass under Dr. Jack P. Shonkoff and from other experts finds that positive stress--the kind that comes from telling a toddler he can't have a cookie or a teenager that she's about to take a pop quiz--causes a brief rise in heart rate and stress hormones. A jolt can focus a student's attention and is generally considered healthy. Similarly, a child can tolerate stress that is severe but may be relatively short-term--from the death of a loved one, for example--as long as he or she has support. "Adults help children develop strategies to help cope with these stressors," Dr. Shonkoff said. "Whether it's reading or managing stress, adults provide the scaffolding for children to build those skills themselves."

Students may say a teacher's lesson is boring, a researcher says, when frustration is really what they feel. While boredom is a perennial student complaint, emerging research shows it is more than students' not feeling entertained, but rather a "flavor of stress" that can interfere with their ability to learn and even their health. An international group of researchers argues this month in Perspectives on Psychological Science that the experience of boredom directly connects to a student's inability to focus attention. Boredom is one of the most consistent experiences of school and one that can be frustrating and disheartening for teachers. According to findings in the High School Survey of Student Engagement, conducted by the Indiana University Bloomington, boredom is nearly universal among American students. Of a representative sample of more than 275,000 high school students surveyed in 27 states from 2006 to 2009, 65 percent reported being bored in class at least once a day.

If it's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease, middle-class children are more likely than their lower-income peers to grow up learning how to make the gears of the education system turn smoothly. Working-class parents, meanwhile, tend to raise their children to avoid conflict and be self-sufficient in problem-solving, an Indiana University researcher says. The findings, the latest from a longitudinal study of Pennsylvania students, suggest parents of different classes may teach their children very different approaches to navigating the school system and championing their own education, priming them for later academic challenges or success. The study, presented at the American Sociological Association conference in Denver this month, comes as the National PTA expands an initiative intended to help parents learn education advocacy. As part of an ongoing series of studies in an outlying suburb in Pennsylvania, sociologist Jessica McCrory Calarco of Indiana University in Bloomington observed and interviewed 56 white students from 3rd through 5th grades and their working- and middle-class families, and then conducted follow-up interviews when the students were in 7th grade. Through observations of classroom interactions with teachers, and interviews with the students and their parents, the researcher tracked students' confidence and their ability to seek help from teachers, clarify assignments or concepts they didn't understand, and resolve problems around academic issues--what Ms. McCrory Calarco called educational advocacy. While the study is small, its findings build on studies suggesting that students' ability to seek help and successfully navigate the school system can make a big difference in their academic achievement. In addition, research by special education professors David W. Test and Catherine H. Fowler, both of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, found that students who participated in programs that improved their help-seeking and advocacy skills became more engaged and better-behaved in school.

Students today may have less time for free play, but new research suggests their imaginations have actually sharpened compared with those of children two decades ago. In an analysis published in May 2011 in the "Creativity Research Journal" and posted online in May, researchers from Case Western University in Cleveland found elementary school children in 2008 were significantly more imaginative and took greater comfort in playing make-believe than their counterparts in 1985 in spite of having less time either during or after school for free play. The Case Western researchers found that across 14 studies spanning 23 years, children showed no difference in the organization or emotional engagement of their play or storytelling. There was a marked increase, on a one-to-five scale, in the quality of imagination they displayed during the sessions. Children who rate highly in imaginative and emotional play are not necessarily more intelligent than other children, but they do show better coping skills, creativity, and problem solving than students who rate low on the play scale.

While programs to improve students' working memory are among the hottest new education interventions, new studies are calling into question whether exercises to improve this foundational skill can actually translate into greater intelligence, problem-solving ability, or academic achievement. Working memory is the system the mind uses to hold information during decisionmaking and analysis. As much as half of the variation in individual intelligence can be explained by differences in working-memory capacity, research shows. Working memory has come to be considered by researchers and educators as a key leverage point in boosting brainpower overall--and programs designed to strengthen it are already finding their way into some schools and homes. But a systematic review of 23 studies on working-memory training programs, published online by the journal "Developmental Psychology," found such training produced few long-term benefits to working-memory skills and no improvements to other cognitive skills like verbal ability, attention, word decoding, or arithmetic. And a randomized, controlled study to be published online next week in the "Journal of Experimental Psychology: General," found that improving on a key task used in working-memory training did not lead to improvements on any of a battery of 17 cognitive-ability measures, including problem-solving intelligence, multitasking, and perception speed.

Educators often look for ways to bring quiet children out of their shells, but emerging research suggests schools can improve academic outcomes for introverted students by reducing the pressure to be outgoing and giving all students a little more time to reflect. A 2011 study found teachers from across K-12 rated hypothetical quiet children as having the lowest academic abilities and the least intelligence, compared with hypothetical children who were talkative or typical in behavior. Interestingly, teachers who were identified as and who rated themselves as shy agreed that quiet students would do less well academically, but did not rate them as less intelligent. A shy student, once he or she overcomes the fear, may turn out to be an extrovert, invigorated by being the center of attention. By contrast, an introverted child may be perfectly comfortable speaking in class or socializing with a few friends, but "recharges her batteries" by being alone and is most energized when working or learning in an environment with less stimulation, social or otherwise.

For a generation of children immersed in technology, emerging research suggests that while the temptation to multitask may be pervasive, the ability to control it could be the real bellwether of academic success. The pervasiveness of technology and social media, coupled with a fear of missing out on something important, has led students to pay "continuous partial attention" to everything. Simply put, the brain can't be in two places at once. Not only can people not process two tasks simultaneously, but it also takes longer to multitask than it would to do the individual tasks one after the other, according to Steven G. Yantis, the chairman of the psychological and brain sciences department at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. It's fine to walk and chew gum at the same time, but when a person tries to do two things at the same time that each require a choice, there's a brief "bottleneck" in the prefrontal cortex--the decisionmaking part of the brain--that delays the second task, he said. In education, that delay can cause students to miss information or simply fail to fully take it in. Research shows teachers shouldn't necessarily take students' word for it that having multiple media helps, rather than hurts, their concentration.

Generally, boys and girls become more polarized through their first years in school. Now, researchers have started to explore how to span that sex divide and are finding that more-equitable coed classrooms can have social and academic benefits for boys and girls alike. While children of both sexes play together as toddlers, by the end of kindergarten, they spend only 9 percent of their playtime with children of the other sex, according to research by Lise S. Eliot, an associate professor of neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School. "Separation is a fact of human childhood and is equally common among young monkeys and apes," Ms. Eliot says in the 2009 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt book "Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps and What We Can Do About It." That early separation, she says, creates "two separate cultures that persist throughout childhood." But researchers at the American Educational Research Association's annual conference, held in Vancouver, British Columbia, last month, stressed that while all children naturally develop gender identity, classroom demographics and teacher practices can make a big difference in how and whether students develop sex-based stereotypes and prejudices.

In the continuing debate about American competitiveness in the global economy, politicians and educators alike have pointed not to students' test scores, but to their creativity and ingenuity, as models for the rest of the world. Teaching creativity has been a hot-button topic this fall, from the National Academy of Education's annual meeting in Washington to a Learning and the Brain conference in Boston. Yet researchers are just beginning to determine what makes some students more creative than their peers, and how the classroom environment can nurture or smother that ability. Creativity is considered one of five "minds" or ways of thinking--along with discipline, synthesis, respect, and ethics--that will be essential for young people to succeed in the future. Other emerging research on creativity seems to point to two critical aspects of creativity that can be hard to teach: (1) the willingness to take risks and learn from failure; and (2) the ability to transfer ways of solving problems between seemingly unrelated situations. Educators can help spark creative thinking by exposing students to creative work; providing an atmosphere in which unique and creative work is valued; and encouraging students to be intellectually curious and adventurous. When students know they can explore and take risks safely, they are better able to connect disparate information and develop insights.

While policymakers and researchers alike have focused on improving students' transition into high school, a new study of Florida schools suggests the critical transition problem may happen years before, when students enter middle school. The study, part of the Program on Education Policy and Governance Working Papers Series at Harvard University, found that students moving from grade 5 into middle school show a "sharp drop" in math and language arts achievement in the transition year that plagues them as far out as 10th grade, even risking thwarting their ability to graduate from high school and go on to college. Students who make a school transition in 6th grade are absent more often than those who remain in one school through 8th grade, and they are more likely to drop out by 10th grade. The Florida findings are "almost identical" to the results of a smaller, 2010 study of New York City public schools. In it, Columbia University researchers found that students who started in K-5 or K-6 schools performed slightly better than their K-8 peers in math and language arts in 5th grade, but when they moved to a middle school, the K-8 and middle school students changed places, and the achievement gaps between those groups increased through 8th grade.

The author reports on a "flip model" of instruction that has gotten national media attention lately, thanks to its promotion by Khan Academy, the high-profile nonprofit online-tutoring library created by Salman A. Khan, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate who was looking for a way to help his young relatives with their homework. The model--in which teachers introduce lectures online for students to access at home and then use class time for group practice and projects normally relegated to homework--is not unique to Khan Academy, however. The "flip model" of schooling calls for students to watch lectures online for homework and use class time for discussions, problem-solving, and labs. Critics, though, argue the model is too reliant on online materials and will prove difficult to use in schools without major technology infrastructure. Yet only recently has technology advanced enough to allow teachers to assign and track individual students using online material at home, and the flip model is still in the earliest stages of being formally studied.

A new neuroscience twist on a classic psychology study offers some clues to what makes one student able to buckle down for hours of homework before a test while his classmates party. The study published in the September 2011 edition of "Proceedings of the National Academy of Science," suggests environmental cues may "hijack" the brain's mechanisms of self-control in some people and some circumstances. The findings add to a growing body of research suggesting that a student's ability to delay gratification can be as important to academic success as his or her intelligence--and that educators may soon know how to teach it.

This article reports on a simulation training program for school leaders at Syracuse University. The project is creating a series of parent, teacher, student, and community-member roles to help principals and teachers learn how to handle tricky conversations. Supported by a three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, the project has developed 15 principal and 13 teacher simulations, and is rolling out a school leadership training curriculum based on them this fall. Initial research on the live simulations found participants improved significantly in their awareness of and responsiveness to different races and cultures, and slightly improved their moral and ethical judgment after going through the simulations as gauged on standardized measures.

The use of analytic tools to predict student performance is exploding in higher education, and experts say the tools show even more promise for K-12 schools, in everything from teacher placement to dropout prevention. Use of such statistical techniques is hindered in precollegiate schools, however, by a lack of researchers trained to help districts make sense of the data, according to education watchers. Predictive analytics includes an array of statistical methods, such as data mining and modeling, used to identify the factors that predict the likelihood of a specific result. They have long been a standard in the business world--both credit scores and car-insurance premiums are calculated with predictive analytic tools. Yet they have been slower to take hold in education. Experts in predictive analytics in higher education and business say education may have a long way to go to develop the data infrastructure and staff capacity to make the tools useful on a broad scale. The statistical methods used to calculate credit scores and car-insurance premiums are now being used to predict which students are likely to drop out and which teacher candidates are good fits for jobs.

As Congress debates how to structure the next iteration of federal school accountability, a new national study has raised serious concerns about the effectiveness of test-based incentives to improve education. A blue-ribbon committee of the National Academies' National Research Council undertook a nearly decade-long study of test-based incentive systems, including the "adequate yearly progress" measures under the No Child Left Behind Act, high school exit exams, teacher merit-pay programs, and other testing-and-accountability initiatives. While the panel says it supports evaluating education systems and holding them accountable, on the whole it found the approaches implemented so far have had little or no effect on actual student learning, and in some cases have run counter to their intended purposes. The results are likely to add fuel to ongoing debates across the country over how to fairly evaluate schools and teachers for student progress and whether to tie consequences for students and teachers to results from current forms of testing. The study, released May 26, drew a mix of reactions.

Math problems make more than a few students--and even teachers--sweat, but new brain research is providing insights into the earliest causes of the anxiety so often associated with mathematics. Experts argue that "math anxiety" can bring about widespread, intergenerational discomfort with the subject, which could lead to anything from fewer students pursuing math and science careers to less public interest in financial markets. Mathematics anxiety is more than just disliking math, however; someone with math anxiety feels negative emotions when engaging in an activity that requires numerical or math skills. Anxiety has become a hot topic in education research, as educators and policymakers become increasingly focused on test performance and more-intensive curricula, and neuroscience has begun to provide a window into how the brain responds to anxiety. Anxiety can literally cut off the working memory needed to learn and solve problems, according to Dr. Judy Willis, a Santa Barbara, California-based neurologist, former middle school teacher, and author of the 2010 book Learning to Love Math. When first taking in a problem, a student processes information through the amygdala, the brain's emotional center, which then prioritizes information going to the prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for the brain's working memory and critical thinking. During stress, there is more activity in the amygdala than the prefrontal cortex; even as minor a stressor as seeing a frowning face before answering a question can decrease a student's ability to remember and respond accurately. Moreover, a series of experiments at the Mangels Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory and Attention at Baruch College at the City University of New York suggests this stress reaction may hit hardest the students who might otherwise be the most enthusiastic about math.

This article reports on new research which shows that, when students succeed at cheating on tests, they get duped into thinking they're smarter than they really are. In four experiments detailed in the March "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences", researchers from the Harvard Business School and Duke University found that cheaters pay for the short-term benefits of higher scores with inflated expectations for future performance. The findings come as surveys and studies show a majority of students cheat--whether through cribbing homework, plagiarizing essays from the Internet, or texting test answers to a friend's cellphone--even though overwhelming majorities consider it wrong. The Los Angeles-based Josephson Institute Center for Youth Ethics, which has been tracking student character and academic honesty, has found that while the number of students engaging in specific behaviors has risen and fallen over the years, the number of students who admit to cheating on a test the previous year has not dipped below a majority since the first study in 1992. In the most recent survey, conducted in 2010, the study found that a majority of students cheat sometime during high school, and the likelihood of cheating increases the older students get. While most academic interest in cheating has focused on how students cheat and how to stop them, the Harvard-Duke study adds to emerging research suggesting that the mental hoops that students must leap through to justify or distance themselves from cheating can cause long-term damage to their professional and academic habits. The findings also point to aspects of school climate and instructional approach that can help break the cycle of cheating and self-deception.

Massive federal education competitions like the $650 million Investing in Innovation fund have heightened interest in practical education research, but even the most promising findings aimed at improving student learning face a long, uncertain path to become something more concrete and usable for the classroom. Unlike fields such as physics or genetics, education science historically has not benefited from a large cadre of engineering and implementation firms ready to test lab results in a market context and launch successful programs quickly. To the contrary, experts say, the education and business communities often have trouble pulling in the same direction. "The path to the market from something that shows promising implications in the lab is fraught with complications," said Larry Berger, the chief executive officer and co-founder of the New York City-based Wireless Generation, at the first Education Venture Fair held last month, in Washington.

The new and rapidly growing field of educational data mining is using the chaff from data collected through normal school activities to explore learning in more detail than ever, and researchers say the day when educators can make use of Amazon.com-like feedback on student learning behaviors may be closer than most people think. Educational data mining uses some of the typical data included in state longitudinal databases, such as test scores and attendance, but researchers often spend more time analyzing ancillary data, such as student interactions in a chat log or the length of responses to homework assignments--information that researchers call "data exhaust." Analysis of massive databases is not new to fields like finance and physics, but it has started to gain traction in education only recently, with the first international conference on the subject held in 2008 and the first academic journal launched in 2009. Experts say such data mining allows faster and more fine-grained answers to education questions that ultimately might change the way students are tested and taught. Data resources one would not necessarily think would be useful can turn out to be very powerful for making inferences. For example, research from the Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Mellon University found small changes in the length of time a student took to answer individual test questions signaled the student was struggling, cheating, or had given up in favor of filling in answers randomly. Research that draws on educational data mining may also compress the lag time between undertaking a study and getting usable results, addressing a common critique from educators.

At a time when policymakers are demanding budget cuts and more innovative approaches to schooling, pressure is building for loosening up constraints on class sizes. After dropping for decades, average class sizes in American schools may be growing again as schools cope with budget shortfalls. Although some educators see the rising numbers as a worrisome trend, others see an opportunity for innovation. The national ratio of students to their teachers fell between 1980 and 2008, from 17.6 to 15.8 students per public school teacher, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Because the statistics count special education and other specialized teachers who normally have much smaller classes than regular teachers do, the U.S. Department of Education estimates the current average class size at more like 25 students. That number is likely to rise, given states' and districts' financial constraints, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said last month at a Washington forum. Nearly all the states that have changed their class-size laws since 2008 have relaxed restrictions, in many cases specifically to ease districts' budget burdens, according to the Denver-based Education Commission of the States. Yet what constitutes "evidence-based" reduction has been at the crux of the class-size debate for more than a quarter-century. Proponents of reducing class size argue that it is the simplest, most direct way to improve student achievement, while skeptics argue that the small, generalized reductions that result from most state policies don't provide enough improvement to justify their cost.

When a federal court in 2005 rejected an attempt by the Dover, Pennsylvania, school board to introduce intelligent design as an alternative to evolution to explain the development of life on Earth, it sparked a renaissance in involvement among scientists in K-12 science instruction. Now, some of those teaching programs, studies, and research centers are starting to bear fruit. The National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, and other groups have increased research investment on identifying essential concepts for teaching evolution, including creating the Evolution Education Research Centre, a partnership of Harvard, McGill, and Chapman universities, and launching the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the subject, Journal of Evolution: Education and Outreach. Though only one of a long series of skirmishes in a conflict that goes back almost as far as public education in America, the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, which took place five years ago this month, engaged the professional science community because it put on trial for the first time the scientific validity of intelligent design. The concept posits that the development of humans and other living things was designed by an unnamed guiding force, rather than being the result of natural selection based on random variations. The school board in Dover argued that there were weaknesses in the theory of evolution, and that students should be exposed to the idea of intelligent design. Judge John E. Jones III of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania flatly rejected that argument, noting that evolution is one of the most strongly supported theories in all of science, backed by broad evidence from across the field. By contrast, he concluded that "the overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID [intelligent design] is a religious view, a mere relabeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory," in his 139-page finding of fact. The district chose not to appeal the ruling, limiting its legal jurisdiction. But, along with the rejection of efforts in Arkansas and Georgia to undermine evolution's validity through disclaimer labels on textbooks and fights over state science standards in Kansas around the same time, the ruling ignited an unprecedented push by scientists and education researchers to become more directly involved in integrating evolution concepts in science classes. One of the instructional-improvement projects is Evolution Readiness, a program devised by a team of researchers from the Concord, Massachusetts-based Concord Consortium and Boston College. It pairs computer modeling of natural selection with classroom activities and readings on evolution concepts.

New studies on how language learning occurs are beginning to chip away at some long-held notions about second-language acquisition and point to potential learning benefits for students who speak more than one language. New National Science Foundation-funded collaborations among educators, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and linguists have started to find the evidence to back up that assertion. Researchers long thought the window for learning a new language shrinks rapidly after age 7 and closes almost entirely after puberty. Yet interdisciplinary research conducted over the past five years at the University of Washington, Pennsylvania State University, and other colleges suggest that the time frame may be more flexible than first thought and that students who learn additional languages become more adaptable in other types of learning, too. "There has been an explosion of research on bilingual-language processing," said Judith F. Kroll, the principal investigator for the Bilingualism, Mind, and Brain project launched this month at Penn State's Center for Language Science in University Park, Pennsylvania. The five-year, $2.8 million project is intended to bring together neuroscientists, linguists, and cognitive scientists to compare the brain and mental processes of different types of bilingual people, such as a Mandarin-English speaker whose languages include different writing systems or a deaf English speaker whose signed and written languages involve different modes of communication.

The author reports on the U.S. Department of Education's "What Works Clearinghouse" that goes beyond "gold standard" research and sets standards for accepting other types of studies. As part of the Institute of Education Sciences' push to make research more relevant to educators, the federal clearinghouse has devised standards by which it can consider two new methods for rigorous research. In addition to the randomized, controlled trials now considered the gold standard, education researchers are now able to use "regression-discontinuity," a method that uses a cutoff point rather than random assignment to form comparison groups, and "single-case studies" in certain situations. In clearinghouse reviews, studies that adhere to the new standards are now considered, along with randomized, controlled trials, to result in the "strongest evidence" to guide educators and policymakers. The standards, which have been in development for more than three years, were posted on the clearinghouse website over the summer and are already being used to evaluate incoming research, according to Rebecca A. Maynard, the IES commissioner for the National Center for Education, Evaluation and Regional Assistance. However, the clearinghouse plans to tweak the standards further this fall and has asked researchers to weigh in on their usability.

While efforts to reduce chronic absenteeism typically focus on adolescents, experts say that the early grades are the place to start. Statistics show that rates of absenteeism in kindergarten and 1st grade can rival those in high school. An average of one in 10 pupils in grades K-12 nationwide is considered chronically absent, defined as missing 10 percent or more of school. Reducing absenteeism is important because studies link it to an increased likelihood of poor academic performance, disengagement from school, and behavior problems. Moreover, research by the National Center for Children in Poverty shows that the same risk factors that make students more likely to become chronically absent, such as poverty-related mobility or an unstable home life, only serve to intensify the problems caused by missing school. Hedy N. Chang, an early-absenteeism researcher and the director of Attendance Counts, said high kindergarten absences are the norm nationwide, but tend to get less attention from educators and policymakers than secondary school truancy. Yet missing school early, when pupils are learning the most basic skills, can hamstring them in later grades and contribute to poor attendance throughout their academic careers.

The recent high-profile data-confidentiality fights in Arizona and Los Angeles have researchers worried that access to educators may become a difficult path. In the course of a decadelong federal lawsuit over English-language-learner programs in Arizona, lawyers for state schools chief Tom Horne subpoenaed the raw data from three studies commissioned by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. In gathering the data, researchers from the University of Arizona, collected comments on teachers' and administrators' experiences with the ELL programs and promised that the names of teachers, schools and districts would be kept confidential. Judge Raner C. Collins of the U.S. District Court in Tucson ruled on Aug. 19 that the names of schools and districts could be released, but not those of individual study participants. The second case is in California where a "Los Angeles Times" team released the actual teacher names in its study on the effectiveness of individual teachers based on their students' test scores, in a series of articles and a matching database. In both cases, the release of data thought to be confidential has sparked firestorms in the research community and with the public at large. However, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said he is a strong advocate for transparency and if he had the power, he would make public not only data tying teachers to student performance but student-attendance data to "hold parents accountable." He believes that the truth is always hard to swallow, but it can only make someone better, stronger, and smarter. He advises that districts and teachers should work together to find an official way to release sensitive data, rather than having it released as the "Times" did.