News

  • February 06, 2013

    Policymakers, administrators, and faculty would benefit from a richer understanding of the variety of pathways students take through community colleges. In accordance, this brief advocates for a “deconstructive approach” to the study of community college student pathways. Such an approach draws upon both quantitative and qualitative data to deconstruct student pathways and elaborate the relationships between various pathways and outcomes of interest, such as successful remediation of skill deficiencies, credential completion, and transfer to a four-year institution.

  • January 24, 2013

    Gov. Jerry Brown's budget proposal aims to transform the way the state distributes money to schools.
    Driving along Pacific Coast Highway, you can see the successive layers of earth and rock that have piled up over millions of years to create California's coastal landscape. You can see a similar but less attractive phenomenon if you look at the way California funds its public K-12 schools.
    Over the last several decades, Sacramento has piled up layer upon layer of funding requirements in education, adding new regulations to the pile while leaving old ones in place.

  • January 14, 2013

    Along with the budget, the governor proposed a set of policy changes—based on a report co-written by former Stanford education professor Michael Kirst, currently the president of the California State Board of Education—that would grant additional funding to schools with a high concentration of low-income and English learner students.
    “It is really a comprehensive overhaul of the school finance system and the largest change since the passing of Proposition 13 in 1978,” Kirst said.

  • January 10, 2013

    The 2013 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Presence Rankings were released this week and record number of CEPA faculty scores high marks on the list. Of the 168 education scholars ranked, 7 CEPA affiliate faculty and faculty made the list: Eric Hanushek (4), Susanna Loeb (42), Caroline Hoxby (45), Michael W. Kirst (48), Rob Reich (66), Thomas Dee (81), Edward H.

  • December 17, 2012

    By Jackie Zubrzycki

    New research attempts to determine the best way to measure principal effectiveness using students' test scores—and finds that the task is trickier than anticipated.

  • December 05, 2012

    The lifting of court-ordered school integration efforts over the last 22 years has led to the gradual unraveling of a key legacy of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. After being freed from judicial oversight, hundreds of large and medium-sized school districts in the South have steadily resegregated, slowly moving away from the ideal of black and white children attending school together.

  • December 04, 2012

    Running one of the nation's largest school districts typically comes with prestige and pay that draw would-be educational superstars, but also pressure and political complexity that cause them to burn out far faster than leaders of the majority of districts.

    A study published in the December issue of the American Educational Research Journal finds in 90 percent of 100 California districts studied, 43 percent of superintendents left within three years—but 71 percent of superintendents left the largest 10 percent of districts, which include those of 29,000 or more students, during that time.

  • November 27, 2012

    Finance policy plays an important role in supporting success in higher education. Most state finance policies have been developed primarily to address selective research and flagship universities, not broad-access schools. This brief identifies fiscal policies that provide disincentives for broad-access schools to improve student success, as well as opportunities to encourage improved performance at these schools going forward.

  • November 26, 2012

    Recent school reform talk has focused importantly on teacher evaluations and on using evaluations for personnel decisions – both positive and negative. But this discussion is almost always too narrow. We should never focus exclusively on teacher evaluations without also including administrator evaluations.

    Parallel attention to administrator evaluations is essential for two reasons. First, it appears that principals have a very significant impact on student outcomes that cannot be ignored as we attempt to improve our schools. Second, it is important that administrators and teachers are working for the same outcomes, particularly when performance incentives are involved.

  • November 18, 2012

    A benefit of the attention to class-based admissions policies is the spotlight it puts on how much education from kindergarten through college favors students with economic and social advantages. Those from the top fifth of households in income are at least seven times as likely to go to selective colleges as those in the bottom fifth. The achievement gap between high- and low-income groups is almost twice as wide as between whites and blacks.

  • November 15, 2012
  • November 15, 2012

    Amid all the hyperbolic proclamations that massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are poised to take over the educational universe, dispassionate and well-trained minds are needed to assess just exactly what is going on with digital and online learning and what we can reasonably expect.

    Funny how the Stanford School of Education reached that same conclusion. Throughout this academic year, a 1-unit course called Education's Digital Future (EDF) is bringing together students, faculty and professionals from Stanford and its community to study how digital education works and which models work better.

  • November 12, 2012

    The teaching diversity gap—there are proportionately fewer minority teachers than minority students nationwide—has been the target of programs aimed at bringing more minorities into teaching. But there's been less attention to the way race affects potential school leaders' pathways to principalship. Given that most principals have taught at some point, you might expect that the principal force would be just as disproportionately white as the teaching force. But it turns out that's not the case.

  • October 31, 2012
  • October 29, 2012

    What would a Romney or Obama presidency mean for schools and universities? At Stanford's Education and Society Theme dorm recently, Hoover Fellow Eric Hanushek and School of Education Professor Emeritus Michael Kirst waded through the candidates' proposals.

    Education briefly took center stage at the second presidential debate, with Republican candidate Mitt Romney and Democratic President Barack Obama trading jabs over school budgets and teaching jobs. And with debates about college tuition, K-12 funding, teachers unions and a swarm of other issues still raging, there's no question that education issues will fill the plate of whichever candidate wins the Oval Office.

  • October 25, 2012

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