News
- April 13, 2016
“We think this manipulation was mainly to help students avoid the risk of dropping out, rather than a response to the school or teacher-specific incentives created by accountability systems or incentive pay,” said Dee, faculty director at Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
- April 13, 2016
- April 12, 2016
There are a number of different social goals in play here,” Thomas Dee said. “We may value consistency in scoring procedures as a mark of fairness. On the other hand, we may think as well that proximity to the threshold has a natural variance and if teachers have additional information, that [manipulation] may be a good thing.
- March 22, 2016
Equality of opportunity is an ideal that finds a place in almost all theories of a just society. This ideal is also prevalent in our own political discourse, especially in debates about education policy. Given the myriad and significant dimensions of individual and collective well-being that flow from education – including health and access to health care, rewarding employment, income, leisure time, and civic participation – equality of opportunity matters deeply in the education realm.
- March 09, 2016
Thomas Dee and two Stanford doctoral alumni analyzed data from 44 online courses to identify why some retained more students than others. Why do so many students fail to complete massive open online courses (MOOCs) while a small number manage to finish?
- March 07, 2016
The transition [from middle school to high school] can be a difficult one for disadvantaged children. Taking ethnic studies not only improved the academic performance of students but also promoted their academic engagement and discouraged dropping out.
- March 06, 2016
Middle-class, mixed-income neighborhoods have become less common as more neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and concentrated affluence have developed. These are not new trends, but this latest increase in segregation exacerbates the increase of economically polarized communities that has occurred over the last four decades.”
- March 06, 2016
If you grow up in a community where everyone is pretty affluent, you don’t understand the conditions of a big part of the country, sean reardon said. You don’t understand how hard it is to get by on a minimum-wage job. I think it can damage our sense of social empathy.
- February 29, 2016
The difference in the rate at which black, Hispanic, and white students go to school with poor classmates is the best predictor of the racial-achievement gap.
- February 10, 2016
We can put an end to our edu-masochism: If researchers spend more effort on assessing our own states' successes and failures in improving student performance and less on trying to draw lessons from countries with very different social and educational contexts, they are sure to spark a much more productive national educational policy debate than we have had in the past decade.
- February 08, 2016
Can a teacher’s worth be measured by how much his students’ test scores improve? And should teachers who don’t move that needle very much be fired? These are two of the most controversial questions in education. Some school districts have plunged ahead with “yes” answers to both.
- February 08, 2016
"If there is going to be inclusive economic development across the world, attention must focus on school quality and having all students achieve basic skills," wrote Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, in a new study published in Science magazine.
- January 26, 2016
- January 25, 2016
“We found that a disproportionate share of low-performing teacher exits are from high-poverty schools,” explained Thomas S. Dee, professor of education at Stanford and an author of the study. “Our results indicate that DCPS is able to accurately identify low-performing teachers and consistently replace them with teachers who are more effective in raising student achievement, particularly in high-poverty schools.”
- January 25, 2016
Students achievement increased when ineffective teachers were asked to leave.
Schools across the country, especially those in low-income neighborhoods, struggle to recruit and retain teachers, an effort made more difficult by the nationwide teacher shortage and a dwindling number of people entering the profession.
A growing body of evidence shows that teacher turnover, especially the high turnover rates in many of the most underserved communities, reduces student achievement.
So why is one urban school system proactively asking teachers to leave?
- January 20, 2016