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Coshocton district in Ohio takes part in an unusual experiment that pays students who pass or scores high in the state exams. Pupils here in grades 3 through 6 earn $15 for every "proficient" score and $20 for "accelerated" or "advanced" scores. With annual tests given in five subjects, students can earn up to $100 if they ace their exams. Running counter to decades of research in motivational psychology, the idea of paying students for their test performance is anathema to many educators. Administrators and teachers argue that, in an era when the federal No Child Left Behind Act and other accountability programs are putting unprecedented pressure on schools to show that students' test scores are improving, bold measures are in order. However, the experiment is controversial because some psychological studies suggest that giving students external rewards, such as cash, can extinguish any internal desire to learn for the sheer joy of it. But Eric P. Bettinger, the researcher who heads up Coshocton experiment says whether rewards harm students' motivation, it only depends on who the population is, what the subject is, and how the motivation is. Critics also argue that the experiment is unfair to those who are not chosen to participate. To address this, the schools officials advisory committee agreed to hold a public lottery each year to choose which grades in which schools would participate. Parents, teachers and district officials are hoping that the results of the experiment will be beneficial to all.

Just before the Fourth of July weekend in 1966, the U.S. Office of Education quietly released a report that would shake the beliefs upon which many educators and social reformers had staked their work. Titled "Equality of Educational Opportunity," the mammoth, 737-page study reached the unsettling conclusion that school might not be society's great equalizer after all. On the eve of the 40th anniversary of that study, now better known as the Coleman Report, researchers continue to grapple with many of the same questions about how family background contributes to disparities in children's school performance. The report found that black children started out school trailing behind their white counterparts and essentially never caught up--even when their schools were as well equipped as those with predominantly white enrollments. What mattered more in determining children's academic success, concluded the authors, was their family backgrounds. Four decades later, scholars say that much has changed in American education and much has not. While social science has found more sophisticated ways to chart disparities in children's schooling and achievement, it has failed to make them go away.

Many national policymakers and experts believe that professional development, which teachers often have regarded as wasted time, is potentially an important tool for improving student learning. Some of the current attention to professional development grows out of several studies in recent years that have highlighted the central role that teachers play in student learning. The federal No Child Left Behind Act reflects that recognition. Besides calling upon schools to staff classrooms with "highly qualified" teachers, the law says schools should annually increase the percentages of teachers in their buildings who receive "high quality" professional development. Experts know that programs focused on the academic content that teachers must cover and on how students think about that content are more effective than those that impart more generic teaching techniques. They know that longer-lasting professional development tends to produce better results. They also know that such programs work best when they link to teachers' daily classroom experiences--the tasks their students will have to do, for example, or the texts they will use. To a lesser degree, researchers also have a hunch that it is important for teachers to engage in learning sessions collectively--maybe with other teachers from the same department or grade--so that they can meet later to reflect on what they learned. (Contains 3 charts.)

Out amid the weed-choked factory lots and the bare yards of housing projects in Birmingham, Alabama, Steve Orel has become a kind of hero. The 50-year-old Orel runs the World of Opportunity School out of an old industrial building. Affectionately known as WOO, the school is a private, shoestring operation that offers students who have fallen through the cracks in public high schools a last chance at getting the high school education or the job skills they need to build a future. This article describes how a term paper Orel wrote suggesting Birmingham students were being "pushed out" of high school by administrators desperate to boost test scores had cost him his job with the government-sponsored adult education program. Orel managed to reopen the school, at first with the help of a local Roman Catholic charity. The $87,000-a-year program now operates as an independent nonprofit organization, and Orel earns less than half the annual salary he made as a public employee.

This article discusses how Roland G. Tharp and his colleagues from the Center for Research on Education, Diversity, & Excellence, a federal research center at the University of California, identify methods to help "nonmainstream" pupils make academic gains. Tharp has identified five standards that he says mark effective instruction in classrooms with high concentrations of students from backgrounds outside the U.S. cultural mainstream. These standards are: (1) Teachers and students "producing" together, whether they are producing knowledge or some tangible product; (2) Developing students' language and literacy competence in all subjects; (3) Connecting school and learning to students' lives, or "contextualizing" knowledge; (4) Teaching complex thinking; and (5) Teaching through conversation rather than relying almost exclusively on lectures.

In the mid-1990s, a pair of Canadian researchers videotaping children on playgrounds made a simple observation that helped shift experts' views about bullying: When children bullied other children, they rarely did it alone. Research now suggests that bullies, their victims, bystanders, parents, teachers, and other adults in the building are all part of an ecology in schools that can either sustain or suppress bullying behaviors. And finding a solution to the problem requires a similarly broad, multilevel response, an interdisciplinary group of researchers argued earlier this year in a special issue of "Educational Researcher." Understanding the full measure of bullying is especially important now as districts, states, and federal education officials step up their efforts to combat the scourge in schools. Most recently, Massachusetts became the 42nd state to enact an anti-bullying law. However, finding a program that's been shown to work in every school context won't be easy. Studies of schoolwide anti-bullying programs in the United States have yielded only mixed success in reducing bullying behaviors. An article in the February issue of "Educational Researcher" reports that there is not a single, large-scale clinical trial of a schoolwide bullying-prevention program, a fact that highlights the need to conduct rigorous randomized trials in this area. It suggests that bullying will be reduced and/or stopped when prevention and intervention programs target the complexity of individual, peer, school, family, and community contexts in which bullying unfolds.

At a time of mushrooming interest in Advanced Placement (AP) tests, a new book, "AP: A Critical Examination of the Advanced Placement Program," assembles studies on how capable the program is of meeting the increasingly diverse expectations held up for it. Growing out of a symposium held at Harvard in 2007, the book focuses on AP science courses in particular and offers evidence on whether they give students an academic edge in college or persuade them to earn degrees in science-related fields. It examines whether the bonus points that colleges and high schools assign to students' AP grades are warranted, if the program shortens the time it takes to earn a degree, and whether just expanding access to the college-level courses is enough to prepare disadvantaged students for college. Begun in the 1950s to let gifted students undertake college-level work in high school, AP courses have since become "the juggernaut of high school education." Growing at a rate of 9.3 percent a year in the past two decades, enrollment in AP courses well outpaces the 1 percent yearly increase in the number of students graduating from high school, the book says. The interest stems in part from rankings that judge schools' quality based on how many AP courses they offer. Students also increasingly see AP credits as a ticket to college. And education reformers hope that expanding access to AP courses among disadvantaged student groups might help close academic-achievement gaps. President George W. Bush in 2006 also called for training 70,000 more high school teachers to teach AP courses in math and science as part of a broader initiative to boost the numbers of students entering the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

Once a passionate advocate for injecting greater competition and accountability into the U.S. education system, the New York University scholar Diane Ravitch realized three years ago that her views had evolved to a point where she was contradicting herself on a regular basis. Like any good historian, she decided to set the record straight. Her newest book, "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education," which was published last week by Basic Books, is the result of that effort. In 308 pages, it lays out the reasons for Ms. Ravitch's about-face on charter schools, school choice, and other market-oriented reform strategies in education, and explains why she no longer supports the federal No Child Left Behind Act and other endeavors designed to hold schools and teachers accountable for their students' test results. Along the way, the book also skewers much of President Barack Obama's agenda for improving the nation's schools; the recent involvement in the field of major foundations, including the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; vaunted school improvement efforts in New York City and elsewhere; and the growing emphasis on using test-score data to guide educational decision making. Because it's not often that the field's most influential thinkers publicly reverse themselves, Ms. Ravitch's book started attracting attention from major news organizations, prominent educators, and influential think tanks even before its official publication date. Ms. Ravitch established her credentials as a conservative voice on education as far back as 1978, with the publication of her second book, "The Revisionists Revised." In it, she critiqued what she called "radical attacks" on education from the left. In the nearly 20 other books she has written, co-written, or edited over the years, she has also weighed in against progressive education and attempts on both the left and the right to make textbooks and standardized tests "politically correct." In reality, though, Ms. Ravitch has always been more complex in her views than her passionate, sometimes acerbic writings might suggest. The writer was a Democrat when she served in the first Bush administration, and her former husband, Richard Ravitch, a veteran mover and shaker in Democratic circles, is now the lieutenant governor of New York.

Many educators and parents would agree that it's important for parents to spend time in their children's classrooms, to closely monitor homework, or to read to children at home. Try telling that, though, to a 13-year-old, argues Nancy E. Hill, an education professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the university's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In a series of studies and a new book "Families, Schools, and the Adolescent," Hill makes the case that both research and policy initiatives aimed at promoting parent involvement fail to take into account the distinct needs of adolescents, a group of students that seems biologically driven to break free of parental vigilance.

With the death last week of Theodore R. Sizer, precollegiate education lost one of its most influential thinkers and a founder of the contemporary movement to improve schools. Mr. Sizer died Oct. 21 at his home in Harvard, Mass., of colon cancer. He was 77. Over his long career, Mr. Sizer was dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, headmaster of the Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools, chairman of the education department at Brown University, and founding director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. More recently, he helped start the Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School in Devens, Mass.

In comments on the proposed federal guidelines for stimulus funds, some researchers say there's no evidence for the policies touted. Among education researchers, one complaint about the U.S. Department of Education under former President George W. Bush was that it relentlessly promoted "scientific research in education," while at the same time endorsing some policies that lacked solid research evidence. With recently published draft guidelines for federal economic-stimulus money and Title I aid, critics are beginning to ask whether much has changed under the Obama administration. For their part, department officials are not yet answering the criticism. They did not respond to repeated requests from Education Week to address such complaints. The lack of research reflected in some of the department's school-improvement initiatives is a disappointment, though, to researchers and advocates who were encouraged by President Barack Obama's Inauguration Day pledge to "give science its rightful place" in government decisionmaking. The evidence behind Race to the Top's call for giving priority to states that don't impose caps on the growth of charter schools, likewise, is far from definitive, various commenters said.

When researchers from the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP) met with Boston secondary school teachers three years ago, the teachers told them they had a problem. Students struggled to understand their textbook lessons because they continually tripped up on--or glossed over--the academic words they came across. The researchers' solution--which SERP researchers last month began making widely available for free to schools around the country--is a program called Word Generation. It consists of short, engaging vocabulary-boosting lessons that are taught each day by different teachers across the middle school curriculum. A rigorous evaluation of the program has yet to be done, but preliminary studies point to promising results. After 12 weeks of lessons, students who took part in the program scored as well on vocabulary tests as nonparticipating students who were two years older, according to Catherine E. Snow, the Harvard University scholar who is leading the Word Generation project. The early studies also showed that, while all students improved, the effects were strongest for English-language learners, who represent one-fifth of the 55,800-student Boston district's enrollment. Word Generation is the first "use inspired" product for the SERP Institute, which was formed by the National Academies with financial help from a wide range of private foundations in 2003 as a vehicle for improving educational research, and getting educators to use it, by conducting studies that are rooted in real-world problems.

The author reports on a study released in April 2009 that suggests that California's high school exit exams are affecting some student demographic groups more than others. The California study, which was released by the Institute for Research on Education Policy and Practice at Stanford University, is the latest in a small spate of studies pointing to trade-offs from policies that require high school students to pass state tests to graduate. While proponents see the exams as a way to spur students to higher levels of achievement, critics worry that the requirements come down harder on students from poor families, minority groups, or underresourced schools. The California study gauges the effect of the Golden State's 6-year-old graduation policy on the first three graduating classes to take the new exit exams in four of the state's largest districts. Collectively enrolling 110,000 high school students, the districts serve students in Fresno, Long Beach, San Diego, and San Francisco. Researchers found that, after 2004, when 10th graders took the exit exams for the first time, graduation rates across the four districts declined by 3.6 to 4.5 percentage points each year.

A decade after Eric D. Harris and Dylan B. Klebold fatally gunned down 13 people and wounded 23 others at Columbine High School, researchers are still sifting for answers to questions raised by the elaborate and notorious attack. Books and studies being published to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the April 20, 1999, massacre at the Jefferson County, Colorado, school probe what drove the suburban teenagers to kill 12 schoolmates and a teacher, before turning their guns on themselves. The authors of this small spate of publications look for parallels between those slayings and the dozens of other school shootings that occurred before and since, and search for ways to prevent such tragedies from happening again. In this article, the author examines the issues raised by such attacks and discusses the lessons learned from these tragedies.

Like a steady drip from a leaky faucet, the experimental studies being released this school year by the federal Institute of Education Sciences are mostly producing the same results: "No effects," "No effects," "No effects." The disappointing yield is prompting researchers, product developers, and other experts to question the design of the studies, whether the methodology they use is suited to the messy real world of education, and whether the projects are worth the cost, which has run as high as $14.4 million in the case of one such study. But proponents of the methodology say those critics ought to pay more attention to the message than to the messenger.

This article reports that two University of Pennsylvania researchers are questioning a basic tenet of national efforts to enhance U.S. economic competitiveness: the idea that colleges and universities are producing too few mathematics and science teachers to meet the demand in the nation's classrooms. Richard M. Ingersoll, a professor of education and sociology at the university, and David Perda, Ingersoll's research partner, calculate that colleges and universities are producing 2 1/2 times more math and science teachers than schools require to replace those who are retiring. They say that once analysts factor in the "reserve pool" of teachers--in other words, those who left teaching and are returning to the field, or students who earned education degrees but never taught--the supply is sufficient to replace all the math and science teachers leaving their jobs, for whatever reason, in a given year. The findings are important because they suggest that national efforts aimed at expanding the pipeline of new math and science teachers are misdirected. If policymakers really want to ensure that those subjects are being taught by skilled teachers, they ought to focus on retaining the much larger pool of science and math teachers who are already in schools.

A recent book assembles a collection of studies on one of the great mysteries of contemporary American education: Why did national progress in narrowing the achievement gap separating African-American and white students stall from the late 1980s until 2004? "Steady Gains and Stalled Progress," published by the Russell Sage Foundation of New York City, offers no solid answers to that question. But the volume's studies do whittle down some popular explanations and point to a lineup of likely suspects. Like its influential predecessor, the Russell Sage Foundation book empirically explores various hypotheses for the test-score trends. Those possible explanations include: growing income inequality, differences in quality among teachers of black and white students, growth in racial isolation in schools, trends in parental education, and cultural differences.

With Barack Obama making history by becoming the United States' first mixed-race president, his inauguration is calling attention to the nation's growing multiracial population, whose youngest members are showing up with increasing frequency at schoolhouse doors. Yet while the growth of the U.S. population of children with mixed-race backgrounds has been long in coming, little is known about how such children are doing in the classroom. Few studies have examined the distinctive challenges they may face growing up--challenges like those Mr. Obama chronicled in his own best-selling memoir. And even fewer have tracked the educational progress of mixed-race children.

A team of researchers said in a provocative new study that the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards ought to take into account student-learning gains in deciding which teachers are skilled enough to merit receiving its advanced teaching credential. Created in 1987, the board has conferred its credential on nearly 64,000 teachers, and 42 states offer financial incentives to encourage teachers to undergo the lengthy, voluntary certification process. The process draws for the most part on performance-based measures of teaching practice, such as essay responses to pedagogical questions, samples of the written feedback that teachers give students, and videotapes of classroom lessons. In the new paper, though, researchers from Harvard University, Dartmouth College, and the Los Angeles Unified School District make a case for combining the current measures with newer, "value added" calculations that take into account the test-score gains that students make in applicants' classes, or at least lending more weight in the assessment process to the individual tests that link most closely to improved student achievement.

As value-added research designs gain in popularity and undergo increasing scrutiny, experts are beginning to wave cautionary flags about how best to make use of them in education. Value-added techniques for measuring student achievement appeal to administrators and policymakers at all levels of education because they quantify the gains that students make from one school year to the next rather than relying on reporting percentages of students who get passing or proficient scores at the end of the school year. Theoretically, that means that teachers or schools get credit only for the value they add to students' learning trajectories, and that they do not get penalized for any learning gaps that students bring with them on the first day of school. In an April 22-24 conference at the University of Wisconsin, researchers from a variety of academic disciplines presented studies that both bolstered the method's credibility and introduced caveats about its usefulness in schools. One reason that some researchers are skeptical about using the methodology to reward or punish teachers is that the results can vary sharply over time. Missing test-score data, an issue with any standardized assessment system, can also pose particular problems with value-added models because they rely on data from several school years, thus compounding the overall amount of data that will be missing, according to experts.

Findings released this week from three years of studies by neuroscientists and psychologists at seven universities help amplify scientists' understanding of how training in the arts might contribute to improving the general thinking skills of children and adults. The idea that the arts, and music in particular, could make children smarter in other ways gained currency in the 1990s, after a pair of researchers published a study showing that college students performed better on some mathematical tests after listening to a 10-minute Mozart sonata. The news led to some widely reported, if fleeting, efforts to promote music learning. Georgia legislators, in fact, even voted to provide parents of newborns with tapes of classical music. But most neuroscientists viewed such policy moves as premature: The studies never definitively determined whether exposure to music, or other arts, causes changes in the brain that sharpen other kinds of thinking skills. Left unsettled, experts say, is whether the arts make people smarter or whether smart people simply gravitate to the arts.

According to a new report, the South region in the U.S. now has a "new majority" in its public schools: students from low-income families. Poor children, for the first time in at least 40 years, now constitute 54 percent of students in public schools across that part of the country. While that makes the South the nation's first geographic region to reach that milestone, researchers said the West is not far behind. If current population trends continue, the report adds, students from low-income households will constitute more than half of K-12 enrollment in public schools nationally within 10 years. With this trend, educators are concerned that this new majority of students will eventually fail in school. [This article was produced by Editorial Projects in Education, Bethesda, MD.]

College and university programs that prepare the nation's education researchers suffer from mission muddle, a lack of common and rigorous standards, and inadequate resources, asserts a hard-hitting report set for release. The report is all the more damning because it comes from one of the field's own, Arthur E. Levine, who stepped down in 2005 after 12 years as the president of Teachers College, Columbia University, one of the country's best-known education schools. The new report, 92 pages long, is based on a four-year study of the schools, departments, and colleges of education that offer doctoral degrees in research. What Levine found was "worse than what he expected." While some programs were excellent, he said, others produced scholars without the expertise to conduct the research needed to guide the nation's school improvement undertakings. The report offers recommendations that, if acted on, could reshape the landscape of doctoral programs in education research. They include: (1) reserving the Ph.D. degree in education for researchers; (2) shuttering doctoral programs that are not up to snuff; (3) setting common standards for both studies in the field and the programs that prepare researchers; (4) concentrating programs to develop scholars who discover new knowledge in the most research-oriented universities; and (5) strengthening connections between research and policy and practice.

In 1958, a group of international scholars met in Hamburg, Germany, and hatched an idea for a huge study to measure student learning around the globe. They saw the world as one big educational laboratory, with each country acting as its own naturally occurring experiment. If tests could gauge the effects of those experiments, the researchers reasoned, the results might yield a bonanza on how best to teach children. Nearly 50 years later, the project they had in mind is called the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS--one of the biggest and most influential assessment programs in the world. Yet it still has not delivered on its early promise, say experts who attended a conference aimed at rekindling the original vision of the program's founders. "It sort of became a cognitive Olympics instead," said Judith Torney-Porta, a professor of human development from the University of Maryland College Park, referring to the country-by-country rankings for which the TIMSS reports are best known. The program, she said, "seemed to miss out on becoming a major contributor of international studies in identifying effective practices and adapting them." Seamus Hegarty, the chairman of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, or IEA, which oversees TIMSS and other international studies sees that that two things seem necessary in order to move forward: (1) better, more systematic secondary analyses; and (2) researchers must relate their findings to policy interests.

Five years into an eight-year study of its high school improvement efforts, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is shifting its strategy for evaluating the $1.3 billion grant program. The foundation's initiative, which is underwriting change efforts in more than 1,800 schools, is the nation's largest privately funded attempt to improve high schools. Initially focused on creating hundreds of smaller, more personalized schools and schools-within-schools, the program now encompasses a more complex mix of policy measures to reform high schools. Gates' decision to halt the study that began in 2001 worries some scholars, who say the field will lose valuable insights into an initiative of historic proportions. A Gates Foundation director states that the trouble with the old strategy was that the schools that were sampled no longer represented the foundation's grant portfolio, which had evolved in response to gaps and problems that were uncovered. A data-monitoring system would give Gates baseline information on all its schools, rather than just a few, and do it more quickly than the previous study could. Experts, however, credit the series of evaluations with providing valuable insights into what happens over time when educators start small schools or carve smaller learning communities out of larger schools.

This article discusses how a U.S. education research arm earned qualified praise for playing a difficult role. Concerned about the credibility of federally financed education studies, Congress passed a law in the fall of 2002 that replaced the U.S. Department of Education's top research office with the Institute of Education Sciences. This article discusses some actions made by Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, the head of the IES. He de-emphasized the competitive grant program for field-initiated studies, which let researchers across the field propose their own study ideas, and replaced it with more-focused grant programs in cognitive science, early-childhood education, and other areas. He shut down the far-flung Educational Resources and Information Center, or ERIC, clearinghouse system and created a leaner, more centralized ERIC to replace it. The federally funded regional education laboratories were revised, and the national research-and- development centers likewise were trimmed and given new missions and more-specific research tasks. The IES also put into place a new peer-review process that looks more like the procedure used at the National Institutes of Health to screen study proposals. IES over the past six months or so has been stepping up its efforts to be more relevant to practitioners, tinkering with the What Works Clearinghouse, making plans to develop practical policy guides, and forming task forces on urban education that put researchers in touch with educators from the trenches. The efforts appear to be mollifying some critics, and some are increasingly hopeful that education research will prove useful to practitioners.

A new report concludes that, judging by most indicators of well-being, life has improved over the past 10 years for the nation's children--except when it comes to their education and health. According to the Foundation for Child Development's "2006 Child Well-Being Index" released last week, children's educational achievement levels largely "flat-lined" since 1975, while measures of their overall health have fallen since the mid-1980s. The foundation, a New York City-based philanthropy that works to improve social conditions for children, has contracted with researchers from Duke University over the past five years to compile an annual index giving a single measure for gauging children's quality of life. To put it together, scholars compiled statistics dating from 1975 for 28 indicators in seven domains: (1) education; (2) health; (3) safety and behavior; (4) community connectedness; (5) social relationships; (6) emotional and spiritual well-being; and (7) family economic conditions. To measure safety and behavior, for instance, the researchers studied data on violent victimization, drug and alcohol use, and births to teenage mothers. Previous reports by the group highlighted the decline in children's health, a trend that the researchers largely attributed to growing childhood obesity. The researchers focused this report, the group's third, on education which they measured mostly through reading and mathematics scores on the congressionally mandated National Assessment of Educational Progress.

After years of efforts aimed at boosting girls' achievement in science and mathematics, researchers, writers, and educators are now expressing alarm about the plight of boys. Even boys themselves have jumped into the debate. In December 2006, Doug Anglin, a 17-year-old senior at Milton High School in Milton, Massachusetts, filed a federal civil rights complaint contending that his school discriminates against boys by making it easier for girls to succeed. In some ways, the gender patterns now generating worries are not new. On National Assessment of Educational Progress tests in reading, for instance, boys at every age tested--9, 13, and 17--have trailed behind girls since at least 1971. The congressionally mandated NAEP also tests nationally representative samples of students in Mathematics. On those tests, boys have had a razor-thin lead over girls at all three age levels since 1992. What is new, though are trends at the college level in the United States. According to a report published by the National Center for Education Statics, men went from being the majority to the minority of the nation's undergraduate population between 1970 and 2001. Experts say the trend is troubling because high-level skills are more important than ever.

Nearly four months after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to their hometown, Jonathan and Shelley Midura are packing up the family's van and heading back from this Washington suburb to New Orleans. They just have to figure out where their three children will go to school. In this article the family shares their thoughts and feelings on changing schools.

Students learn more from certified teachers than they do from uncertified teachers, even when the uncredentialed teachers are Teach For America recruits from some of the nation's top colleges, a Stanford University research team concludes from a study of test scores in Houston. Findings from the study, which researchers presented in Montreal on April 15, 2005 during the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association, have refueled the fierce, continuing debate in research and policy circles over programs that let new teachers into the field without traditional training. The Stanford team arrived at its conclusion after analyzing seven years of test-score data for 4,400 4th and 5th graders in Houston, a district that leans heavily on the Peace Corps-style Teach For America program to fill teaching positions in hard-to-staff schools. However, critics said the study left out important information and analyses. They said the researchers omitted information on the number of teachers involved in some of the analyses, and analyzed other data in a way that might confuse teachers' experience with their certification status. Indeed, two other studies have suggested that Teach for America recruits may be as effective as or better than other teachers in their schools and districts. In the more recent of those reports, researchers from Mathematica Policy Research Inc., of Princeton, New Jersey, found that elementary students taught by Teach for America recruits in eight cities learned more mathematics over the course of a school year than their peers whose teachers were hired through more traditional routes. In reading, the two groups of students fared about the same.

After meeting as a community to set policy on schools and other matters since 1766, residents of Deerfield, New Hampshire, are altering that democratic process to make room for modern demands. This article describes the decision in Deerfield to discontinue holding the traditional New England annual school district meeting. Instead, by a thin margin, Deerfield residents voted to follow a 1997 New Hampshire law known as Senate Bill 2, which allows towns to opt to break their public-voting meetings into two events: a hearing where citizens hear the issues and decide which ones to bring to a vote, and a separate session where voters simply show up throughout the day to cast ballots. This article describes and compares how the residents of Deerfield approach addressing various education policy issues under the old and new systems.

This article discusses how a lifetime of research has led Edmund W. Gordon to the conviction that it is the out-of-school extras that nurture children's intellect. A half-century ago, the noted psychologist Edmund W. Gordon and his physician wife, Susan, opened a children's health clinic here in central Harlem. For as little as a quarter, poor families in the community could go to the Harriet Tubman Clinic for Children on St. Nicholas Avenue to get a child a checkup or vaccination. Now, in his ninth decade, Gordon is back doing good in Harlem. This article talks about "supplementary education" as coined by Edmund w. Gordon, which refers to the whole gamut of out-of-school educational experiences that shape children's intellectual development. This article also discusses Gordon's aim to close the achievement gap separating African-American and Hispanic children from their higher-achieving white and Asian-American peers.

This article reports on the effectiveness of school uniform policies. At Stephen Decatur Middle School, it is the school's policy that all students wear the standard school attire consisting of khaki pants with polo shirts in white, burgundy, or navy blue. Some of the shirts also sport an embroidered Decatur eagle, an optional embellishment. Principal Rudolph Saunders' instincts tell him that students behave better when they're dressed alike, that they fight less and focus on their schoolwork more. Plus, the uniform puts all students on a more equal social footing, regardless of whether they come from comfortable middle-class households or one of the group foster-care homes that lie in Decatur's attendance zone. Yet national studies on the effectiveness of school uniform policies tell a story distinctly different from educators' experiences at Decatur. Research shows that uniform policies do not curb violence or behavioral problems in schools. They do not cultivate student self-esteem and motivation. They do not balance the social-status differences that often separate students and they do not improve academic achievement. (In fact, uniforms may even be associated with a small detrimental effect on achievement in reading, research shows.)

Five-and-a-half years ago, against the advice of his wife and his academic colleagues, Samuel C. Stringfield stepped out of his ivory tower. The then-50-year-old education researcher, a nationally known expert on school improvement, became a member of the Baltimore city school board. Until the time came when he left the board and the Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk, located at Johns Hopkins University, for the University of Louisville in Kentucky. At Louisville, he is now a distinguished university scholar and the co-director of the school's Nystrand Center of Excellence in Education. This article discusses the roles he played on the Baltimore city school board and the University of Louisville. In this article, the author discusses the lessons that Stringfield learned from his unusual vantage point as a researcher in the nitty-gritty world of urban school board politics.

Five years ago, Robert E. Lee High School was a big school with big problems. Overcrowding at the 3,100-student school forced some students to use air-conditioning units for chairs. Hallway fights broke out daily. At least half the freshmen disappeared from the roll books before reaching 12th grade. The thing to do, school leaders decided, was to get small. This article describes Lee High School's transition from being overcrowded to being subdivided into 10 smaller learning communities.

Although education researchers have spent years pondering what makes a good school or a good lesson, not much thought has gone into what makes a good researcher. Does the job require extensive training in a wide range of research methods? Or is it better to become an expert in just one? Should a budding education researcher steep himself or herself in a particular discipline, such as psychology or sociology, or is it best to become a generalist? Is there a core of knowledge that every researcher in education ought to master? There's no consensus on the answers, but the questions are being weighed in national meetings, in foundation-driven efforts, and on campuses nationwide. The topic has taken on new urgency as the federal government campaigns to transform education into an "evidence-based" practice, with a heavy emphasis on research that meets the definition of "scientifically-based." Grover Whitehurst, Director of the Institute of Education Sciences, proposed earmarking $18 million in federal grants to underwrite new pre- and post-doctoral training programs for researchers interested in studying education. The question addressed here is "Are education schools up to the task?" Appended to this article is "Researchers-in-Training," by Heather D. Hill, David S. Lustick, and David F. Feldon, who describe their experiences in education research.

The author reports the finding of a study released by the National Research Council, which is an arm of the National Academies, a scientific body created to advise the federal government on scientific matters. After six years of study, a national panel of prominent scholars has concluded that teachers from alternative programs appear no worse--or better--than those from traditional college-based preparation programs. Studies commissioned by the committee and others show that differences among various alternative-certification programs are often as great as those between alternative programs and the traditional ones. The report adds that a more fruitful line of research is to compare particular aspects of such programs, such as the timing of students' field experiences, the level of teachers' content knowledge, or program selectivity, and how they affect K-12 students' learning. According to the panel, the lack of solid evidence to answer the perennial debate over alternative-certification vs. traditional college-based programs reflects the generally thin research base in the field over how best to prepare the nation's 3.8 million teachers. A growing body of evidence suggests that teachers are the single most important school-based influence on children's learning. Yet experts disagree on the best way to train the estimated 200,000 people who complete some sort of U.S. teacher-preparation program each year, according to the report from the Committee on the Study of Teacher Education Programs.

The author reports findings from a federal study of 77 middle schools which suggest that even intensive, state-of-the-art efforts to boost teachers' skills on the job may not lead to significant gains in student achievement right away. The "Middle School Mathematics Professional Development Impact Study," which was released in April, is the second major experimental study by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences to find that a high-quality professional-development program failed to translate into any dramatic improvements in student learning. A two-year study of efforts to improve teachers' instructional skills in early reading reached a similar conclusion in 2008. The results are already providing some intellectual ammunition for finding better ways to select and retain effective teachers--and shedding those who are ineffective--as the best way to improve instructional quality in schools. But other scholars said it is too soon to issue a verdict on the effectiveness of professional development.

Spurred by a succession of reports pointing to the importance of algebra as a gateway to college, educators and policymakers embraced "algebra for all" policies in the 1990s and began working to ensure that students take the subject by 9th grade or earlier. A trickle of studies suggests that in practice, though, getting all students past the algebra hump has proved difficult and has failed, some of the time, to yield the kinds of payoffs educators seek. Simply sticking students in courses without preparing them ahead of time for the class does not seem to work as an intervention. It seems to work with adequately prepared students, but not for the most challenged students. The research news has not been completely bad, however. Michigan State University researcher William H. Schmidt, in a not-yet-published study, analyzes data on 7,000 7th and 8th graders across the United States who took part in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study in 1995. He compared the performance of 8th graders with that of "feeder classes" of 7th graders from the same school to calculate how much students gained in mathematics over the course of that pivotal 8th grade school year. What Mr. Schmidt found was that the learning gains were greatest for students who moved from either a general math class or a prealgebra class into a full-blown algebra class. His findings are in keeping with a larger body of studies from the 1990s and early 2000s that suggested algebra was, for many students, the primary gateway to advanced-level mathematics and college. The problem was that too many students--particularly those who were poor or members of disadvantaged minority groups--were turned away at the gate, screened out by ability-grouping practices at their schools.

Offering a counter-narrative to the school improvement prescriptions that dominate national education debates, a new book based on 15 years of data on public elementary schools in Chicago identifies five tried-and-true ingredients that work, in combination with one another, to spur success in urban schools. The authors liken their "essential supports" to a recipe for baking a cake: Without the right ingredients, the whole enterprise just falls flat. The book is a capstone effort for the Consortium on Chicago School Research, which was founded 20 years ago at the University of Chicago by Anthony S. Bryk and others to undertake independent research on that city's 409,000-student school system. Besides Mr. Bryk, who left the consortium in 2003 to lead the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, in Stanford, California, the book's authors are Penny Bender Sebring and Elaine Allensworth, the consortium's interim co-executive directors; Stuart Luppescu, its chief psychometrician; and John Q. Easton, the consortium's former director and now the director of the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education. Based on a series of studies drawn from the database that the consortium has built up over the years, the five ingredients are: (1) Strong leadership, in the sense that principals are "strategic, focused on instruction, and inclusive of others in their work"; (2) A welcoming attitude toward parents, and formation of connections with the community; (3) Development of professional capacity, which refers to the quality of the teaching staff, teachers' belief that schools can change, and participation in good professional development and collaborative work; (4) A learning climate that is safe, welcoming, stimulating, and nurturing to all students; and (5) Strong instructional guidance and materials.

A report from Education Sector raises questions about the ability of charter schools and charter-management organizations (CMOs) to scale up as dramatically as their supporters might hope. "The extraordinary demands of educating disadvantaged students to higher standards, the challenges of attracting the talent required to do that work, the burden of finding and financing facilities, and often aggressive opposition from the traditional public education system have made the trifecta of scale, quality, and financial sustainability hard to hit," concludes the report, "Growing Pains: Scaling Up the Nation's Best Charter Schools." As hard-hitting as the findings seem to be, the report is at the center of a controversy over whether the final text--released by the Washington think tank on Nov. 24--was watered down. The main author, Education Sector co-founder Thomas Toch, asked to have his name removed from the final product. He said in an interview that it did not fully reflect his sense of the current conditions or future prospects for CMOs. Charter schools are an important addition to the public education landscape and the best CMOs have produced great results. But the CMO movement has created only a few hundred schools in a decade, and even with more funding it would be difficult for CMOs to expand much faster without compromising the quality of their schools. In addition, the report omits some candid quotes from industry executives about the fragile economics undergirding some charter school networks and about how the credit crisis has affected the ability of charter school networks to raise money, as well as statistics showing the difficulty some CMOs have had in reducing central-office costs. Officials at Education Sector, however, denied that they had sanitized the report, one of a succession of studies the think tank has done that examine both the problems and the promise of charter schools.

Many educators and parents would agree that it is important for parents to spend time in their children's classrooms, to closely monitor homework, or to read to children at home. Try telling that, though, to a 13-year-old, argues Harvard University researcher Nancy E. Hill. In a series of studies and a new book, Hill makes the case that both research and policy initiatives aimed at promoting parent involvement fail to take into account the distinct needs of adolescents, a group of students that seems biologically driven to break free of parental vigilance. Hill said having parents involved in a field trip is not wholly consistent with what an adolescent wants. Moreover, studies are beginning to show that such activities may not be nearly as important for promoting educational success as other things parents might be doing at home at this stage in their children's development. When disentangled, the studies geared to middle schools showed that, while parent involvement was still important to students' learning, the kind of activity mattered. Helping with homework, for instance, did not have much of an impact at all in secondary school. Visiting the school, volunteering, and attending school events seemed to be just moderately related to student achievement. Twice as effective as the things parents did at school were the efforts they made at home, apart from helping with homework, to support schooling. However, a research by Belkis Suazo deCastro and Sophia Catsambis suggests that parents' at-home efforts to impress upon their children the importance of schooling do not have the same effect on everyone. Minority students' future outlook and college plans were not as strongly related to such parental actions as were those of their white counterparts. Hill said schools have a role to play in preparing kids to go to college. In addition to asking parents to volunteer and check their children's homework, middle schools ought to be sketching out for parents--particularly those who have never been to college--the educational pathways that lead from middle school to high school to college. Better family-school partnerships might yield the biggest payoff.