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There is a strong and politically bipartisan push to increase access to government-funded pre-K. This is based on a premise that free and available pre-K is the surest way to provide the opportunity for all children to succeed in school and life, and that it has predictable and cost-effective positive impacts on children's academic success. The evidence to support this predicate is weak. There is only one randomized trial of a scaled-up state pre-K program with follow-up into elementary school. Rather than providing an academic boost to its participants as expected by pre-K advocates, achievement favored the control group by 2nd and 3rd grade. It is, however, only one study of one state program at one point in time. Do the findings generalize? The present study provides new correlational analyses that are relevant to the possible impact of state pre-K on later academic achievement. Findings include: (1) no association between states' federally reported scores on the fourth grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in various years and differences among states in levels of enrollment in their state's pre-K program five years earlier than each of those years (when the fourth-graders taking NAEP would have been preschoolers); (2) positive associations (small and typically not statistically significant) between NAEP scores and earlier pre-K enrollment, when the previous analysis is conducted using NAEP scores that are statistically adjusted to account for differences between the states in the demographic characteristics of students taking NAEP; and (3) no association between differences among states in their gains in state pre-K enrollment and their gains in adjusted NAEP scores. Under the most favorable scenario for state pre-K that can be constructed from these data, increasing pre-K enrollment by 10 percent would raise a state's adjusted NAEP scores by a little less than one point five years later and have no influence on the unadjusted NAEP scores. Unabashed enthusiasts for increased investments in state pre-K need to confront the evidence that it does not enhance student achievement meaningfully, if at all. It may, of course, have positive impacts on other outcomes, although these have not yet been demonstrated. It is time for policymakers and advocates to consider and test potentially more powerful forms of investment in better futures for children.

The mission of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is to provide rigorous evidence on which to ground education practice and policy and to encourage its use. The Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 (ESRA) requires that the Director of IES, on a biennial basis, transmit to the President, the National Board for Education Sciences, and the appropriate congressional committees, and make widely available to the public, a report containing: (1) a description of the activities carried out by and through the National Education Centers during the prior fiscal years; (2) a summary of each grant, contract, and cooperative agreement in excess of $100,000 funded through the National Education Centers during the prior fiscal years, including, at a minimum, the amount, duration, recipient, purpose of the award, and the relationship, if any, to the priorities and mission of IES; (3) a description of how the activities of the National Education Centers are consistent with the principles of scientifically valid research and the priorities and mission of IES; and (4) such additional comments, recommendations, and materials as the Director considers appropriate. The 2008 report discusses critical components of IES progress, recommendations for continued investments, and lessons learned. The report concludes that recent explosion of knowledge from education research is tied to a combined focus on rigor and relevance, and that moving education to a point at which the research base is sufficient to assure a good education for every student is the work of a generation, not of a few years. The director encourages continued forward movement. Four appendixes of Grant and Contract Awards are included: (1) National Center for Education Research; (2) National Center for Education Statistics; (3) National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance; and (4) National Center for Special Education Research. (Contains 42 footnotes and 2 figures.) [For the previous edition of this report, see ED497040.]

In this document, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Director, Grover J. Whitehurst, presents results of the 2004 Long-Term Trend Reading and Mathematics Assessments. The 2004 results are based on a representative sample of over 28,000 public- and private-school students assessed in reading and mathematics, at ages 9, 13, and 17.

This paper explains the mission of the Institute of Education Sciences and outlines the activities the Institute is undertaking. It also shares the reflections of the Director of the Institute of Education Sciences on the fit, and sometimes misfit, between the current activities of the education research community and the needs of practitioners and policy makers. The statutory mission of the Institute of Education Sciences is to provide decision makers and the general public with information on: (1) the condition and progress of education in the United States; (2) practices that improve academic achievement and access to education opportunities; and (3) the effectiveness of Federal and other education programs. These three functions are the responsibility of the organizational units of the Institute of Education Sciences: the National Center for Education Statistics, the National Center for Education Research, and the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance. Both the statutory mission of the Institute and its conceptual model point it toward applied research. Consequently, the primary focus of the Institute of Education Sciences is on work that has a high consideration of usepractical, applied work that is relevant to practitioners and policy makers. The preponderance of issues identified as high priority areas that the Institute is addressing relate to questions of effectiveness. Such questions are addressed most rigorously with randomized field trials, considered the only sure method for determining the effectiveness of education programs and practices. Although randomized trials are the gold standard for determining what works, they are not appropriate for all questions, and can be enhanced with results from other methods. A look at recent education research has indicated that randomized trials represent only about 6% of the research reported in American Association of Educational Research journals, although they predominate in the "Journal of Educational Psychology." These findings show a mismatch between what education decision makers want from research and what the education research community is providing. The Institute of Education Sciences is working to correct this mismatch through its focus on what works in education. (SLD)

A recent analysis of Even Start, the federal family literacy program, has concluded that the relative emphasis in many local programs has shifted too far toward background issues of family functioning and too far away from focused efforts to enhance literacy skills (Haslam, 1998). In keeping with this analysis, the time seems to be right for a renewed emphasis on children's literacy within family literacy programs. Noting that the last decade has seen an explosion of research in the development of reading in children and on the precursors within the preschool period of reading readiness which has provided fundamental insights into the nature of reading, this paper seeks to present a brief survey of this new knowledge base, with the particular aim of highlighting work that is relevant to family literacy programs. The paper focuses on examining research on emergent literacy and its components. The data examined indicate that there are a number of interventions for preschool and early grade school children that make a significant impact on the key emergent literacy skills of children. The paper then discusses policy implications for family literacy programs. Contains a figure and 167 references. (NKA)

The 2016 Education Choice and Competition Index (ECCI) is the fifth release of an annual compilation of data on the condition of K-12 school choice in the geographical areas served by the nation's 100 largest school districts. The ECCI captures information on: (1) the extent of choice; (2) the characteristics of the process by which parents and students choose schools, measured against an ideal; (3) the degree to which district funding and management processes favor the growth of popular schools at the expense of unpopular schools; and (4) the availability of subsidies for the costs of choice for poor families, particularly for transportation. This report is arranged in two parts. The first presents findings from the 2016 ECCI. The second part draws lessons from trends in the ECCI and from related research. Those lessons, which are the author's interpretations of the contextualized findings from the ECCI, are intended for policymakers and others concerned with the future of school choice in the U.S. [For the 2015 report, see ED614749.]

This report compares various measures of school segregation and reviews research findings on the extent of school segregation, trends in school segregation over time, and the relationship between academic achievement and segregation by income and race. The role of school quality in mediating and moderating the associations between school segregation and academic achievement is examined through observational and experimental research findings. Findings include: (1) there are a number of ways of measuring segregation for different groups, and geographical scales. Scholars studying segregation often use different indices, define their groups in different ways, and use different areas as the basis for assessing schools. It is important to be clear which particular aspect of segregation is the focus of any inquiry. Policymakers in particular need to be very careful in the way they use and interpret empirical results; (2) in terms of historical trends, school segregation within school districts declined sharply in the 1960s and 1970s, following civil rights legislation and court-ordered integration. A previously separate school system for black and white students became more integrated, especially in the South. But while the extent of racial segregation within school districts declined, segregation between school districts increased slightly over the same general period, in part because of "white flight" to suburban school districts; (3) the diversification of schools in recent decades has been largely driven by an increase in the Hispanic and Asian American populations. Only half of the students currently enrolled in public schools are white, compared to four in five in 1968. There has inevitably been a steep drop in the number of majority-white schools, to just below 60 percent. This renders measures of segregation based on attendance at "majority-white" schools less instructive. Both black and white students have become much more likely to share classrooms with Hispanics, but, since the 1980s, only marginally more likely to share classrooms with each other. Segregation strongly reflects local demographics and housing patterns. For example, rural and suburban schools are more heterogeneous than urban schools; (4) school segregation by family income (as distinct from race) is also at high levels and has increased since 1990, both within and between school districts. Race and economic status are of course correlated. Black students are four times as likely to be in a high-poverty school as a low-poverty one; for whites, the ratio is the other way round; (5) charter schools, which are open enrollment public schools managed outside the framework of the traditional school district, are generally more racially and economically segregated than traditional public schools. In particular, charter schools often enroll more black and poor students than traditional public schools in the same areas, and are more likely to be at one extreme or the other of racial and economic composition than traditional public schools. But there is significant variation between different cities and school districts; (6) it is difficult to disentangle the effects of race and poverty because they are correlated. Much of the research that examines the impact of school segregation on student outcomes confounds race and family income. But because most black families are not poor and most poor families are not black, and because government integration policies based on family income can pass legal muster whereas those based on race cannot, it is important to try to understand the effects of racial vs. economic school segregation on student outcomes (7) differences among schools in racial composition are associated with small but still meaningful differences in student achievement. However, the effect of racial composition on student achievement is primarily expressed though the correlation of race and family socioeconomic status. Thus, considering only school-level variables, it is poverty rather than race per se that impacts the achievement of students attending a school; (8) interventions that involve providing low-income and minority students with greater access to schools that are higher performing and more diverse (through school choice or housing policy) demonstrate positive impacts that appear to be mediated by the quality of schools rather than their racial composition; and (9) charter schools with a strong academic focus and "no-excuses" philosophy that serve poor black students in urban areas stand as contradictions to the general association between school-level poverty and academic achievement. These very high-poverty, high-minority schools produce achievement gains that are substantially greater than the traditional public schools in the same catchment areas. This is further evidence that school quality is a primary mediator of academic achievement rather than the racial or economic makeup of a school's student body.

In the United States, public policy and expenditure intended to improve the prospects of children from low-income families have focused on better preparing children for school through Head Start and universal pre-K. This school readiness approach differs from the dominant model of public support for early care and learning in Northern Europe, which places more emphasis on supporting families. It also differs from other government programs in the U.S., such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, that support low-income parents of young children by boosting income. Empirical comparisons of the impact on school achievement of boosting family income vs. providing free pre-K for four-year-olds, summarized in this paper, suggest that supporting family income is a more cost effective expenditure. A policy midpoint between more money for families vs. more money for pre-K is more money for families to spend on their young children. All these policy options should be on the table and subject to test as the nation moves towards increased attention to and investment in the early years.

The nation's PK-12 education ecosystem is poised to embrace programs intended to enhance soft skills. Soft skills are generally defined by exclusion as personal qualities other than the formal knowledge transmitted by schools that affect student adjustment, i.e., the effort that students put into their work and their social skills. Such soft skills are far too important for the education reform effort associated with them to suffer the fad-like fate of far too many education reforms of the past. There are danger signs in that regard. The goals of this report, which will extend over subsequent reports, are: (1) to raise important questions in the context of the expansion of efforts by schools to enhance the soft skills of their students and measure outcomes; (2) to suggest what prudent school officials and policymakers should do with respect to incorporating soft skills into the school curriculum given the number of unanswered critical questions about how to proceed; and (3) to spur the organizations and individuals that are at the forefront of the movement to increase their interest and investment in the many unknowns of soft skills reform. The embrace of soft skills by education reformers is well in advance of the development of conceptual, instructional, measurement, and accountability models of soft skills that are appropriate to education settings. It will take time to develop a productive program of work that can be incorporated into school reform. In the meantime, prudent policy and incremental experiments in practice are in order. Contains endnotes.

The traditional delivery system for public K-12 education in the U.S. is being disrupted by forces from without (e.g., forms of competition, including charter schools) and from within (e.g., new regulatory requirements, including meaningful teacher evaluation and the Common Core). As in any sizable sector of the economy, challenges to the status quo in education are often met by organized advocacy efforts. Because education in this country is by-and-large a public enterprise, champions of change and defenders of the status quo must turn to elected and appointed officials to advocate for their desired outcome. Do such advocacy efforts succeed in influencing the public policy that governs education? This report sheds light on that question by examining the influence and approach of advocacy organizations in three states that recently enacted or considered school reform legislation: Louisiana, Tennessee, and North Carolina. It builds upon research conducted for a previous report which focused exclusively on Louisiana. In the prior report, the authors introduced a new method to study influence: the Survey with Placebo (SwP), which asks respondents to rate the influence of a non-existent advocacy group (the placebo), along with actual entities engaged in advocacy. By comparing the scores of real organizations with those of the placebo group, a scale of influence with a known zero point is generated, allowing researchers to quantify the amount of influence any organization exercises. This study also employs the SwP technique, amended slightly based on lessons learned from its first use. Because the examined advocacy groups represent a diverse range of missions, utilize a variety of advocacy tactics, and focus efforts on different stages of the policymaking process, the researchers also employ a Critical Path Analysis (CPA) to differentiate advocacy organizations in terms of the paths through which they exercise influence. Applying these two methods to the case studies in Louisiana, North Carolina, and Tennessee provided several compelling findings with respect to the influence process and success of advocacy efforts, and also with regards to the future use of such measures in evaluating advocacy. Key findings with respect to the influence process: (1) The advocacy organizations we studied are a clearly recognized influence within each of the respective states. They have an impact on the introduction of policy into the legislative arena, the content of legislation, and the votes of members of the legislature; (2) Perceived influence closely tracks outcomes. When the policy of interest is not passed into law, opponents are credited with substantially greater influence than in sites where the policy is successful; (3) The effort to influence political outcomes, just like politics itself, is local. For example, approaches appropriate to a state in which the governor is the dominant political force with respect to the legislation of interest, as was the case in Louisiana, will be different than in a state in which the legislature is more powerful, as was the case in North Carolina; and (4) Coordination among advocacy organizations that have related policy goals strengthens total impact. In Louisiana, for example, one of the advocacy groups focused on obtaining coordination and cooperation among all groups supporting the legislation. This allowed each group in the coalition to focus on what it could do best and provided opportunities for working through any conflicts in policy goals among the advocacy organizations out of the public eye. Key findings with respect to methods and measures: (1) The Survey with Placebo (SwP) can detect meaningful differences in the perceived influence of advocacy groups and between the actual influence groups vs. the placebo organization; (2) Respondents to the SwP typically separate their own positions as supporters or opponents of the legislation from their ratings of influence. Overall, organizations on the winning side of a legislative battle are perceived by respondents to be more effective than those on the losing side; and (3) Critical Path Analysis (CPA) with advocacy group leaders and with those playing critical roles in the political process reveals significant information that cannot be gathered through the SwP. The expense and labor required to conduct the CPA makes it impractical to pursue on a regular basis, but interested parties may consider leveraging this method in sites where they are particularly interested in developing a better understanding of the advocacy environment and the specific strategies that advocates deploy. The Study of Effective Education Advocacy Survey is appended.

The Brookings Institution releases an annual Education Choice and Competition Index (ECCI) that chronicles how school choice is manifested in the nation's 100+ largest school districts. The ECCI scores and ranks districts on the degree to which families within the district's borders have access to: (1) maximum choice; (2) a choice process that maximizes the match between parental preference and school assignment; (3) funding and management processes that favor the growth of popular schools at the expense of unpopular schools; and (4) subsidies for the costs of choice for poor families, particularly for transportation. This report accompanies the fifth release of the ECCI. This report highlights some interesting findings and provides a commentary that focuses on the tension between the psychology of choice as it is experienced by parents, the design goals of centralized computer-based assignment mechanisms, and the politics of school choice. [For the 2014 report, see ED614748.]

The Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings releases an annual Education Choice and Competition Index (ECCI) that chronicles how school choice is manifested in the nation's 100+ largest school districts. The ECCI scores and ranks districts on the degree to which families within the district's borders have access to: (1) maximum choice; (2) a choice process that maximizes the match between parental preference and school assignment; (3) funding and management processes that favor the growth of popular schools at the expense of unpopular schools; and (4) subsidies for the costs of choice for poor families, particularly for transportation. This report accompanies the fourth release of the ECCI covering the 2013-2014 school year. This report highlights some interesting findings and provides a commentary that focuses on the need for both access to and quality of choice. [For the 2013 report, see ED614747.]

The evidence is clear: better teachers improve student outcomes, ranging from test scores to college attendance rates to career earnings. Federal policy has begun to catch up with these findings in its recent shift from an effort to ensure that all teachers have traditional credentials to policies intended to incentivize states to evaluate and retain teachers based on their classroom performance. But new federal policy can be slow to produce significant change on the ground. The Obama Administration has pushed the creation of a new generation of meaningful teacher evaluation systems at the state level through more than $4 billion in Race to the Top funding to 19 states and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) accountability waivers to 43 states. A majority of states have passed laws requiring the adoption of teacher evaluation systems that incorporate student achievement data, but only a handful had fully implemented new teacher evaluation systems as of the 2012-13 school year. As the majority of states continue to design and implement new evaluation systems, the time is right to ask how existing teacher evaluation systems are performing and in what practical ways they might be improved. This report helps to answer those questions by examining the actual design and performance of new teacher evaluation systems in four urban school districts that are at the forefront of the effort to meaningfully evaluate teachers. Overall, the authors' analysis leaves them optimistic that new evaluation systems meaningfully assess teacher performance. Despite substantial differences in how individual districts designed their systems, each is performing within a range of reliability and validity that is both consistent with respect to prior research and useful with respect to improving the prediction of teacher performance. With modest modifications, these systems, as well as those yet to be implemented, will better meet their goal of assuring students' access to high-quality teachers.

Exploring the critical role of school choice in the future of education reform, the Education Choice and Competition Index (ECCI) is an interactive web application that scores large school districts based on thirteen categories of policy and practice relevant to choice. The intent of the ECCI is to: create public awareness of the differences among districts in their support of school choice; provide a framework for efforts to improve choice and competition; and recognize leaders among school districts in the design and implementation of choice and competition systems. The 2013 ECCI reveals substantial year-to-year stability among districts in their commitment to and design of school choice. Thus the correlation between this year's and last year's aggregate district scores is 0.95. This stability is also evident in terms of the top-scoring districts. For 2013, just as for 2012, the top-scoring district nationally is the Recovery School District in New Orleans, which receives a score of 83 out of a possible 100 points on the ECCI. Although most districts marched in place in 2013, a few implemented new choice policies that moved their scores and ranks substantially. The most interesting among these is Denver, which moved from 24th to fifth place on the basis of a new unified choice system in which parents exercising school choice complete only one form on one timeline for all public schools, including every charter school in the district. [This report was written with Sarah Whitfield. For the 2012 report, see ED614744.]

School districts occupy center stage in education reform in the U.S. They manage nearly all public funding and are frequently the locus of federal and state reform initiatives, e.g., instituting meaningful teacher evaluation systems. Financial compensation for district leaders is high, with many being paid more than the chief state school officers who oversee the entire systems in which they serve. Despite the centrality of school districts in all the ways described, one knows very little from existing research about how important they are to student achievement relative to other institutional components for delivering education services, including teachers and schools. Neither does one have information on the size of the differences in effectiveness among districts or whether there are districts that show exceptional patterns of performance across time, e.g., moving from low to high performing. The authors begin to fill these information gaps in the present report by analyzing 10 years of data involving all public school students and school districts in Florida and North Carolina. They find that school districts account for only a small portion (1% to 2%) of the total variation in student achievement relative to the contribution of schools, teachers, demographic characteristics of students, and remaining individual differences among students. There are also districts that have displayed exceptional patterns of performance in terms of student achievement over the last decade, including districts that beat their demographic odds every year, districts that consistently underperformed, districts that had nose-dive declines, and districts that experienced transformative growth. These findings provide an empirical justification for efforts to improve student achievement through district-level reforms and should be a tantalizing fruit for those who want to better understand why some districts are better than others and translate that knowledge into action. (Contains 6 figures and 7 endnotes.)

Exploring the critical role of school choice in the future of education reform, the Education Choice and Competition Index (ECCI) is an interactive web application that scores large school districts based on thirteen categories of policy and practice relevant to choice. The intent of the ECCI is to: create public awareness of the differences among districts in their support of school choice; provide a framework for efforts to improve choice and competition; and recognize leaders among school districts in the design and implementation of choice and competition systems. The ECCI is substantially expanded for 2012, with 107 school districts versus 25 in 2011. These 107 districts include the 100 largest districts in the U.S. in terms of student enrollment plus eight additional mid-sized districts that are of interest because of their choice and competition policies. There were also adjustments in the scoring rules for 2012. The two most substantive are an increase in the requirements for the availability of choice and an increase in the proportion of total funding that must follow children to schools. [This document was written with Sarah Whitfield. For the 2011 report, see ED526966.]

During his 2012 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama offered several recommendations on education policy, including one specifying that all states increase the age of compulsory school attendance to 18. Approximately 25 percent of public school students in the U.S. don't obtain a regular high school diploma, a tragedy for them and a heavy burden for the nation and the communities and states in which they live. Certainly, America needs to address this problem, but is raising the compulsory school attendance (CSA) age a viable solution? In a new paper, Russ Whitehurst and Sarah Whitfield perform original analysis to investigate if CSA ages actually affect graduation rates. Their data show that states with higher CSA ages do not have higher high school graduation rates than states with lower CSA ages. Other key findings include: (1) The costs of raising the CSA age for additional teachers and classrooms are likely to be minimal because compliance with a higher CSA age will be low; (2) Raising the CSA age does little to address the root causes of high dropout rates and is unlikely to produce increases in high school graduation rates that will be noticeable to state policymakers and taxpayers; (3) There is no consistent relationship between the leniency in the laws governing the CSA age and rates of school attendance; (4) Raising the CSA age may induce some portion of the population of eventual school dropouts to stay in school a few weeks or months longer in order to reach the legal age at which they can leave school. They may benefit as a result but not nearly so much as they would if they persisted until graduation; and (5) There are a number of interventions and policies that target students and schools that experience high dropout rates that have been shown to be effective in increasing persistence and high school completion. Any effort to meaningfully reduce dropout rates needs to include such interventions. Appended are: (1) Comparison of Methods; (2) Data Sources; and (3) Statistical Results. (Contains 23 endnotes.)

Evidence shows that instructional materials have large effects on student learning. However, little research exists on the effectiveness of most instructional materials, and very little systematic information has been collected on which materials are being used in which schools. In this new report, Russ Whitehurst and Fellow Matthew Chingos argue that this problem can be efficiently and easily fixed by states, with support from the federal government, non-profit organizations, and private philanthropy. Here are highlights from their recommendations: (1) State education agencies should collect data from districts on the instructional materials in use in their schools. The collection of comprehensive and accurate data will require states to survey districts, and in some cases districts may need to survey their schools. In the near term, many states can quickly glean useful information by requesting purchasing reports from their districts' finance offices. Building on these initial efforts, states should look to initiate future efforts to survey teachers, albeit on a more limited basis; (2) The federal government's National Center for Education Statistics should aid states in this effort by developing data collection templates for them to use through its Common Education Data Standards (CEDS), and providing guidance on how states can use and share data on instructional materials; (3) Organizations with an interest in education reform should support this effort. For example, the National Governors Association (NGA) and Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) have put their reputations on the line by sponsoring the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Research based on current and past state standards indicates that this initiative is unlikely to have much of an effect on student achievement in and of itself; (4) The Data Quality Campaign (DQC) should use its influence in this area to encourage states to collect information on the use of instructional materials and support them in their efforts to gather these data. The DQC should also help states use the data once they have been collected; and (5) Philanthropic organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation for Education could have a major impact by providing the start-up funding needed to collect data on instructional materials and support the research that would put those data to use. (Contains 32 endnotes.)

Exploring the critical role of school choice in the future of education reform, Grover (Russ) Whitehurst introduces the Education Choice and Competition Index (ECCI), an interactive web application that scores large school districts based on thirteen categories of policy and practice. The intent of the ECCI is to create public awareness of the differences among districts in their support of school choice, provide a framework for efforts to improve choice and competition, and recognize leaders among school districts in the design and implementation of choice and competition systems. [This report was written with Sarah Whitfield.]

Class size is one of the small number of variables in American K-12 education that are both thought to influence student learning and are subject to legislative action. Legislative mandates on maximum class size have been very popular at the state level. In recent decades, at least 24 states have mandated or incentivized class-size reduction (CSR). The current fiscal environment has forced states and districts to rethink their CSR policies given the high cost of maintaining small classes. The substantial expenditures required to sustain smaller classes are justified by the belief that smaller classes increase student learning. The authors examine "what the research says" about whether class-size reduction has a positive impact on student learning and, if it does, by how much, for whom, and under what circumstances. Despite there being a large literature on class-size effects on academic achievement, only a few studies are of high enough quality and sufficiently relevant to be given credence as a basis for legislative action. (Contains 31 footnotes.)

In this report, the authors present the results of a national public opinion survey on education news. From December 6 to 19, 2010, they conducted telephone interviews with 1,211 adults aged 18 years or older (including an over-sample of parents) in the continental United States. They asked a series of questions about their education news consumption focusing on where respondents got their information, how they assessed media sources, and how they envisioned the future of education reporting and school communication. Among the results were: 73 percent wanted more information on teacher performance; 71 percent wanted more on student academic performance; 69 percent wanted more reporting on school crime or violence; 68 percent wanted more on school curricula; and 66 percent wanted more both on school finances and school reform (66 percent). Survey methodology and questions are appended.

The new normal for local, state and federal governments is fiscal austerity. Although President Obama supported education during his State of the Union address and in his budget proposal to Congress, cash-strapped localities and states--which foot most of the bill for educating America's children--may have to balance their budgets with cuts to schools and teachers. The recession exposed a long-developing structural imbalance between public expenditure versus raising the revenue for public services. Especially on education, reality has set in, with a vengeance. Cutting public expenditure is not necessarily a bad thing. There are, however, some activities that have become so fundamentally governmental and so critically important to the nation's future that they require special care during a period of severe budget trimming. Education is one such example. The Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings has recently developed proposals to ensure that federal investments in education have impact. These proposals present the dual advantage of low costs of implementation at the federal level coupled with the promise of considerable leverage at the state and local level. Two of those proposals are presented in this brief: increasing digital and virtual education and expanding consumer information on higher education.

America's economic productivity and competitiveness are grounded in education. The public schools and the higher education institutions alike are falling behind those of other nations. This paper recommends four policy proposals that offer substantial promise for improving American education, are achievable and have low costs. These recommendations are: (1) Choosing K-12 curriculum based on evidence of effectiveness; (2) Evaluating teachers in ways that meaningfully differentiate levels of performance; (3) Accrediting online education providers so they can compete with traditional schools across district and state lines; and (4) Providing the public with information that will allow comparison of the labor market outcomes and price of individual postsecondary degree and certificate programs.

Education journalism is going through a gut-wrenching transformation of its business model and its organizational structure, even as the ways in which news is delivered are changing rapidly. Old business models have collapsed, and new ones are struggling to find their footing. Digital technologies have fundamentally altered the way news is delivered. People are accessing information through Kindles, iPads, mobile devices, laptops, RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, and desktop computers. Much of the content consumers once paid for when it was delivered on paper is available for little or nothing in digital form. The result is a media ecosystem that is dramatically different from earlier eras. In trying to imagine ways of improving and expanding the coverage of education, we have canvassed the views of leaders in the field and conducted case studies of specific ventures. This paper summarizes new trends in education coverage and how major news organizations are re-imagining their futures. It outlines the development of niche publications, news aggregators, social media, and new content providers. We also look at alternative business models, including subsidized content, for-profit models, and indirect public subsidies. We conclude that while education journalism faces great challenges, it is transforming into a new digital form that looks and behaves differently than the models to which we're accustomed. It has clear strengths, including immediacy, interactivity, and diversity. But these virtues must be linked more effectively to the delivery of an old-fashioned product, namely in-depth substantive reporting. We also note the enduring importance of what remains the most important source of education news for millions of our citizens, the "old" media. The key challenge for national leaders is to build on strengths of new media platforms, while finding ways to develop high-quality coverage that is crucial for democratic governance. (Contains a bibliography.)

The challenge of creating evidence-based practice bedevils a number of fields. In education, the federal government has historically placed substantial responsibility for translational research in the hands of the Regional Educational Laboratories (RELs), which were established in 1966 as part of the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). President Lyndon Johnson, whose administration oversaw the creation of the ESEA and the RELs, had expansive aspirations for a federal role in education. The ESEA was to provide federal funding for reform, focused on children from low-income families. The knowledge base for reform was to be created by new national research and development centers, and the RELs were to be the translators of scientific knowledge for practitioners. That original vision was not realized as a result of several enduring impediments: (1) No science to translate; (2) Low funding levels; (3) Need to lobby; (4) Who is in charge?; and (5) Quality control. Some of the historical challenges to the RELs have ebbed substantially. First, and most importantly, there is now science to translate. For example, the What Works Clearinghouse, an activity of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), has within the last 6 years conducted systematic reviews and reported the evidence on approximately 500 separate branded education interventions and programs and identified about 20 percent as having positive or potentially positive evidence of effectiveness. Second, the Obama administration is strongly committed to education reform, and the present leadership of IES sees the RELs as critical to that effort. Third, the quality control issues that have plagued the RELs over much of their existence have been lessened considerably by the independent review procedures instituted under their current contracts. Finally, while the principal work carried out by the RELs under their current contracts, rigorous evaluations of interventions relevant to their regions, is not, in the author's view, their ideal function, it caused many RELs to hire new staff with solid science credentials. This has, in turn, reinvigorated a culture of science within the organizations that house the RELs and provided a solid base for the next steps in their evolution. What direction should that evolution take? The author sees three possibilities: (1) Status quo; (2) Analysis of statewide administrative data; and (3) Improving process systems within schools and districts.

News coverage is important to every policy area. While some people have personal knowledge of certain topics, many rely on mass media for direct, up-to-date, and in-depth reporting. This is especially the case with education because only a third of American adults currently have a child in elementary or secondary school. What most people know about schools comes from newspapers, radio, television, the Internet, or blogs--or from memories of their own experiences, often from long ago. Yet despite the importance of media coverage for public understanding of education, news reporting on schools is scant. As the authors note in this report, there is virtually no national coverage of education. During the first nine months of 2009, only 1.4 percent of national news coverage from television, newspapers, news Web sites, and radio dealt with education. This paucity of coverage is not unique to 2009. In 2008, only 0.7 percent of national news coverage involved education, while 1.0 percent did so in 2007. This makes it difficult for the public to follow the issues at stake in our education debates and to understand how to improve school performance. In the conclusion of this report, they make a number of recommendations to improve the coverage of education. The disappearance of education news coverage is so pervasive and rooted in so many different causes that it will take a concerted effort on the part of all involved (news organizations, education administrators, government leaders, school boards, parents, students, and community leaders) to slow, much less reverse, this trend. Study Methodology is appended. (Contains 4 footnotes.)

It was generally hypothesized that two procedural deficiencies underlie the failure of most preschoolers to produce informative referential communications or to understand that ambiguous communications directed toward them are faulty. The first is a deficiency in understanding the difference rule (the fact that an informative message should describe the difference between a referent and other similar events with which it may be confused). The second concerns role combination (the fact that the roles of speaker and listener are complementary and that experience gained in one mode is relevant to performance in the other). It was expected (1) that if the child is taught the difference rule, role-switching will enhance transfer of speaking experience to listening, or vice-versa; (2) that difference-rule training alone should be successful intramodally but not cross-modally; and (3) that role-switching alone should have no effects. The design for testing these specific hypotheses involved orthogonal variation in the number of role-switching episodes children received and variation in the way they received difference-rule feedback training (in the speaking mode, the listening mode, or not at all). A total of 60 kindergarten children from two private schools were first tested on two stimulus discrimination tasks. One week after initial testing, subjects participated in similar speaking and listening tasks and evaluation tasks. Results are discussed. (RH)

Studied effects of an interactive book-reading program with children attending day-care centers whose language development was delayed by 10 months. Children were read to by teachers and parents; read to by parents only; or in a control group. Educationally and statistically significant effects of the reading intervention were found at posttest and follow-up for expressive vocabulary. (TM)