News
- March 25, 2014
- March 19, 2014
- March 18, 2014
Thomas Dee, professor of Stanford Graduate School of Education, is elected to Board of Directors at the 39th Annual Conference of Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP).
- March 17, 2014
The study—commissioned by the San Francisco district and conducted by Sean Reardon at Stanford—compared the progress of English-learners as they moved from kindergarten through elementary grades and into middle school by looking at their scores on California's annual English-language proficiency tests, the rates at which they were reclassified as English-fluent, and their scores on state exams. The study also looked at the differences in effectiveness between the district's two largest groups of ELLs: Chinese speakers and Spanish speakers.
- March 12, 2014
By Eric A. Hanushek
There is a small community that closely watches the various school finance court cases that are always creating background noise for education policy discussions. This community was rewarded last week with a new decision from the Kansas Supreme Court. Importantly, its decision in Gannon v. Kansas potentially signals a new direction for these cases. Instead of deciding whether or not the Kansas legislature had dedicated sufficient funds to its local schools, it chose to highlight the importance of student outcomes.
- March 04, 2014
The 2014 conference theme is New Players in Education Finance and Policy. Both K-12 and higher education are in the midst of rapid and fundamental change: proliferation of new technology; new sources of investment capital and start-up vendors offering potentially game changing products/services; new public-private partnerships; venture philanthropy; continued growth of new sources of teachers and school leaders; the emergence of ‘big data.’ What is the impact of these trends on the education sector and the prospects for improving effectiveness and equity? How can research help make sense of this fast-changing environment?
- February 28, 2014
- February 24, 2014
Stanford research has found that high-quality English instruction helps student performances across other subjects – including math – in future years. Great English teachers boost their students' achievements in math, a very different subject, according to Stanford researchers. The researchers found that students of good language arts teachers had higher than expected math scores in subsequent years – a crossover effect.
- February 21, 2014
- February 18, 2014
- February 13, 2014
In the 15 years since voters essentially banned bilingual education in state schools, teaching English learners to read, write and do arithmetic first in their native language has nearly disappeared from California classrooms.
Since Proposition 227 overwhelmingly passed in June 1998, it's been all about learning English, first and foremost - but not in San Francisco. Nearly 30 percent of the city's 17,000 English learners are in bilingual education programs, compared with 5 percent on average statewide, according to the most recent data available.
- February 11, 2014
- February 09, 2014
Yet these scholarly groups consistently find distinct and lasting gains for poor children, as I discovered in
tracking of 14,162 youngsters nationwide with Stanford University economist Susanna Loeb. The minuscule gains experienced by middle-class children largely fade out by fifth grade, according to a second longitudinal study overseen by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Still, gains for poor children persist with greater strength when they attend high-quality preschools and then enter comparatively robust elementary schools.Politicians such as de Blasio ignore these consistent findings when arguing, as he did last year, that subsidized pre-K should be “for everyone, doesn’t matter if you’re wealthy, doesn’t matter if you’re poor, doesn’t matter what color you are.” But empirically, a child’s home environment sharply conditions the efficacy of preschool. - February 06, 2014
“To be honest, I don’t find this study particularly convincing, and I say that as someone who is quite sympathetic to the idea that there are technological solutions to the plagiarism problem that are readily available and affordable and worth studying further,” said Dee, who is also a research associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Dee described the report as containing “suggestive, descriptive evidence,” not “convincing causal evidence” that Turnitin was primarily responsible for the drop in unoriginal writing. - February 05, 2014
- February 04, 2014