News
- June 24, 2015
A Stanford University randomized trial examined a simple, inexpensive program called Ready4K!, which simply sent three text messages a week to parents to encourage them to read to their preschoolers — and it was astonishingly successful. Parents read more to children, who then experienced learning gains — and this was particularly true of black and Hispanic children. And because this was text messaging, the cost was less than $1 a family for the whole school year.
- June 24, 2015
Poor whites tend to live in more affluent neighborhoods than do middle- class blacks and Latinos, a situation that leaves those minorities more likely to contend with weaker schools, higher crime and greater social problems, according to a new study.
- June 24, 2015
“I was surprised by the magnitude,” said Sean Reardon, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and the paper’s lead author. “I thought comparing people at exactly the same income level would get rid of more of the neighborhood differences than it did.”
- June 23, 2015
- June 16, 2015
- June 02, 2015
- June 01, 2015
- May 21, 2015
Researchers at Stanford University Graduate School of Education will share in a $1.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences to launch a three-year study of virtual schooling in Florida.
The study will explore how virtual schooling options affect students’ course progression, academic achievement and teacher effectiveness. Virtual schools have expanded rapidly in many states including Florida.
- May 13, 2015
Congratulations to Ken Shores for receiving the National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship 2015. Ken is a doctoral candidate in the Administration and Policy Analysis program at Stanford University. He received his B.S. in Economics from the University of Rhode Island in 2003. Prior to coming to Stanford, he was a teacher for five years in Pueblo Pintado, a small Navajo community in the northwest region of New Mexico. He also taught for two years in Quito, Ecuador. Ken studies patterns and trends of educational inequality and the political tools at our disposal for addressing these inequalities. Currently, he is investigating the effects of court-ordered school finance reform using factor methods applied to panel data, and he is developing techniques for constructing welfare-adjusted NAEP scale scores..
- April 29, 2015
- April 24, 2015
- April 09, 2015, Capitol
“This type of evaluation system can help drive and sustain improvements in performance, but they have to be well communicated to teachers,” said Thomas Dee, an education researcher at Stanford University and co-author of a study that found the D.C. system to be an effective means of encouraging low-performing teachers to improve their practice.
- April 01, 2015, Forbes
“The sooner the better” is the perfect tag line for early childhood education. There is no magic bullet to ensure a lifetime of self-fulfillment in personal and career terms. But rigorous research shows that high-quality early childhood education is an extraordinarily powerful means to promote continued success in school, in the workplace, and also in social and civic realms.
It may seem surprising, but the experiences of children in their early years have disproportionately large impacts relative to experiences during their school years and beyond. If children lag in those early years, chances are that they will never catch up. Remediation of deficiencies in learning of all types is far more difficult and expensive than learning early on. The good news is that high-quality programs focused on early childhood years can have powerful long-term impacts for all racial and economic groups across the country.
Professor Susanna Loeb at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, in collaboration with Daphna Bassok, wrote an extensive review covering studies on early childhood education and achievement gaps based on it. The White House issued a report last December that also summarizes research from a wide variety of studies, and includes proposed actions to meet national needs in this arena.
- March 31, 2015
- March 24, 2015, Slate
When people say Americans are dividing along class lines, they usually mean it as a metaphor. But it's also true in a literal sense. When it comes to where we live, the rich, poor, and shrinking middle class have been moving further apart. Cornell University's Kendra Bischoff and Stanford University's Sean Reardon report that in 1970, 65 percent of U.S. families resided in middle-income neighborhoods. By 2009, that number was down to 42 percent. Meanwhile, the fraction of households in very affluent or very poor neighborhoods more than doubled.
- March 17, 2015
