News
- May 25, 2016
- May 10, 2016
"I think we like to think, 'Here we have this problem, but it's fixable. We know we could figure it out.' It's not clear we've figured it out," said Reardon, a professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford. "There's some deep ... problems that we as a society haven't faced up to yet."
- May 04, 2016
Schooling policy in the U.S. is in flux. And the future of America’s state economies is at stake.
The No Child Left Behind Act that drove much of the overall policy discussion became increasingly dysfunctional and was belatedly replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act. A key element of this new act is returning the locus of educational policy to individual states. That move is not without risk.
- May 04, 2016
We may be living at a time when education should be readily available for everyone, but knowledge still appears to be hard to come by. A new research suggests that black and Latino students are still a few grade levels behind their white classmates.
Stanford University conducted an educational study on the test scores of around 40 million US students and discovered that students of color had lower scores than white students. In addition to that, the academic-achievement gap between white and colored students was even greater in wealthy university towns like Evanston in Illinois and Berkeley in California.
- May 04, 2016
Sean Reardon, the author of the Stanford study—”The Geography of Racial/Ethnic Test Score Gaps”—noted that Lexington is among the richest communities in the nation.
Just below Lexington on the chart are other wealthy Massachusetts suburbs—including Belmont, Boxborough, Carlisle, Concord, Newton, Shrewsbury, Sudbury and Wincester—all of which achieve more than three grades above the national average.
“On average, school districts in Massachusetts, whether they’re poor or middle class or affluent, tend to do better than similar school districts around the country in terms of test scores,” he said.
- April 29, 2016
Mr. Reardon said the analysis should not be used to rank districts or schools. Test scores reflect not just the quality of schools or their teachers, but all kinds of other factors in children’s lives, including their home environment; whether they attended a good preschool; traumas they have experienced; and whether their parents read to them at night or hire tutors.
- April 29, 2016
We don’t administer a single standardized exam to all U.S. students, so a clear picture of the differences in academic performance across schools and districts has been elusive up until now, said Sean Reardon, the Stanford education professor who devised the statistical methods that make it possible to compare the mandatory tests administered in different states.
- April 29, 2016
- April 13, 2016
- 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 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.