| À margem das pesquisas | |
| Estudo aponta que educação não escolar de jovens e adultos é "quase inexistente" nas pesquisas de pós-graduação, aparecendo associada a outros temas A educação de adultos ocupa pouco espaço como tema nas pesquisas de pós-graduação das universidades brasileiras. Mas, quando se fala em educação não escolar de jovens e adultos, o panorama é ainda mais crítico. O assunto é tratado de forma marginal e, quase sempre, associado a outras práticas sociais.
A conclusão é de uma pesquisa que fez um balanço da produção de conhecimentos nas áreas de educação, ciências sociais e serviço social. O trabalho analisou a produção discente nos programas de pós-graduação no campo da educação não escolar de adultos entre 1999 e 2006.
De acordo com Sérgio Haddad, da ONG Ação Educativa, coordenador da pesquisa, o tema da educação não escolar está associado a muitos temas da vida cotidiana das pessoas.
"No entanto, a análise da dimensão educativa dessa modalidade, tendo como foco a prática, a metodologia e as características desse modelo de formação, é praticamente inexistente nos estudos de mestrado e doutorado no país", disse Haddad à Agência Fapesp.
A educação não escolar diz respeito aos processos de socialização e aprendizado das pessoas, que podem ocorrer na família, no trabalho, em centros comunitários e em outras instâncias que não a escola.
Segundo o pesquisador, é um equívoco associar a educação não escolar apenas à ideia de pessoas que não tiveram acesso à educação escolar. "O debate sobre educação permanente, sobre outras instâncias de formação, em que temas amplos poderiam ser trabalhados, foi perdendo dinamismo com a supervalorização da escola. Entendemos que é cada vez mais necessário voltar a essa discussão, que é fundamental no processo de formação do indivíduo", afirmou.
Haddad destaca que a escolarização é uma base importante inclusive para desenvolver outras áreas. Mas, segundo ele, a escola ganhou uma relevância tão grande - principalmente a partir do processo de redemocratização do país na década de 1980 - que tudo que não era de sua competência passou a ser.
"Exige-se que a escola englobe toda a formação moral, a educação para a saúde, cidadania, e acabam esquecendo outros espaços formativos. Há um diálogo entre as duas formações, o que permite que as pessoas desenvolvam processos complementares de formação escolar ou não escolar", destacou.
Segundo o professor, há uma "redução analítica" da educação não escolar nos estudos analisados. "Uso a imagem do iceberg para ilustrar. O iceberg tem uma parte submersa, pouco conhecida, mas que é a base de tudo. Normalmente, nosso olhar é voltado para a parte visível desse iceberg, que é a escola", disse.
Haddad coordenou a pesquisa Educação não escolar de adultos: um balanço da produção de conhecimentos, apoiado pela Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (Fapesp) por meio da modalidade Auxilio à Pesquisa - Regular, que contou com a participação de 12 pesquisadores especialistas de várias instituições de ensino superior do país e centros de pesquisa.
Segundo ele, que é professor aposentado da Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP), na pesquisa foi possível identificar a educação não escolar nos trabalhos analisados a partir de palavras-chave, como "educação popular", "não formal", "continuada", "permanente", entre outras.
Inicialmente, o grupo buscou trabalhos em bancos de dissertações e de teses disponíveis digitalmente nas universidades, na Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (Capes) e no Google. "No primeiro momento, a seleção foi feita com base em resumos nas áreas de educação, do serviço social e ciências sociais", explicou.
Como a educação não escolar de adultos não é um campo específico de estudos, ou seja, um campo teórico definido, a busca por esse assunto levou o grupo a incorporar uma série de outras palavras-chave.
"Rádios comunitárias", "participação em movimentos populares", "economia solidária", "educação ambiental", "educação política" e "qualificação profissional" foram algumas das palavras utilizadas para formar a base de dados e estabelecer critérios de inclusão dos estudos.
De acordo com Haddad, foi possível identificar algumas linhas de abordagem. "Uma mais voltada para o desenvolvimento profissional, outra para as práticas de cidadania, outra na área econômica que se refere também ao desenvolvimento sustentável, como agroecologia, além de práticas educativas nas áreas de saúde e educação ambiental e fortalecimento de identidades como as questões de gênero, raciais e outras", citou.
"O objetivo final da pesquisa foi criar um banco de dados com os documentos e estudos analisados, para ver como o tema é tratado na produção discente, e disponibilizar todo esse material a partir de uma biblioteca digital, que foi financiada pela FAPESP e está abrigada na Ação Educativa", disse.
Dimensão educativa
A partir da identificação dos títulos, os trabalhos foram classificados em 14 áreas temáticas relacionadas à educação não escolar de adultos. Foram analisados 341 trabalhos em educação, serviço social e ciências sociais, entre dissertações e tese. Segundo Haddad, houve uma grande dificuldade para conseguir os trabalhos em arquivos digitais.
"Fizemos contatos com os programas de pós-graduação, com os autores e com os orientadores e solicitamos cópias ao Programa de Comutação bibliográfica (Comut), que permite a obtenção de documentos técnico-científicos disponíveis nos acervos das principais bibliotecas brasileiras e em serviços de informação internacionais", explicou.
O passo seguinte foi entregar os documentos aos pesquisadores parceiros especializados em cada área para analisar as pesquisas e produzir artigos sobre os documentos levantados. Cada autor identificou os principais temas abordados, seus conteúdos, agente educador, público alvo, relação com a educação escolar, entre outros aspectos. Os artigos podem ser lidos na e-curriculum, revista eletrônica de Educação da PUC-SP.
"O sistema de coleta permitiu montar a biblioteca digital, que acolheu não só os artigos, mas também os documentos. Isso permitiu colocar à disposição as análises e todo o material bruto.", disse Haddad.
"Se a educação não escolar tem relação com a saúde, por exemplo, o enfoque educativo está nas práticas sanitárias, na formação do agente de saúde e em como os agentes trabalham com o desenvolvimento familiar", afirmou.
O próximo passo da pesquisa, segundo o coordenador, será analisar as práticas. "Estamos entrando em contato com organizações da sociedade civil para fazer uma análise de suas demandas e ações que dizem respeito, em sua maioria, à educação não escolar", disse Haddad.
"A ideia é confrontar essas práticas com os nossos estudos, fazendo um levantamento dos principais temas e das principais orientações metodológicas e políticas, para que sirvam de referência para novas pesquisas e aprofundamentos nessa área", disse.
A pesquisa contou também com o apoio do Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq). | |
3 de setembro de 2010
educacao de jovens e adultos
Os contrastes entre o desenvolvimento e o subdesenvolvimento na Índia
| "Uma característica marcante da ciência indiana é a concentração da atividade científica em institutos especializados, e não nas universidades" Wanderley de Souza é professor titular da UFRJ e diretor de Programas do Inmetro, ex-secretário Executivo do MCT e ex-secretário de Estado de Ciência e Tecnologia do Rio de Janeiro. Artigo publicado no "Monitor Mercantil":
Nada melhor do que visitar a Índia com certa frequência e participar das atividades de Ciência e Tecnologia em suas instituições para se ter uma melhor ideia do processo de desenvolvimento pelo qual passa o país.
Antes de tudo, é importante assinalar a maneira carinhosa com que o indiano trata os brasileiros. Os mais cultos procuram sempre lembrar os laços históricos que nos ligam, sobretudo a partir da cidade de Goa. Bastar visitar uma loja de frutas em Bangalore e encontrar a fruta de conde, caju, jaca, manga, banana, entre outras, para lembrar as aulas de história que falavam "do caminho das Índias". O mesmo se aplica a dezenas de flores.
Por tudo isto, apesar da diferença linguística significativa, é fácil se comunicar com os indianos. Mesmo após várias semanas do final da Copa ainda é possível verificar a presença de bandeiras do Brasil em casas e em carros que circulam pelas cidades indianas. Por tudo isto, é mais do que acertada a decisão do Ministério de Ciência e Tecnologia do Brasil em priorizar as relações científicas entre os dois países.
É sempre bom lembrar alguns dados para deixar mais claro o interesse estratégico que devemos ter em relação à Índia. Com um PIB da ordem de US$ 785 bilhões e crescendo em torno de 7,4% ao ano, ocupa a posição de 12ª economia mundial. É o sétimo país em área geográfica, o segundo em população (atualmente de 1,1 bilhão de habitantes, mas crescendo e com projeção de ultrapassar a China em 2020), é o quarto em poder de compra.
Áreas de grande riqueza convivem lado a lado com áreas de grande pobreza, o que assusta alguns acostumados com separações geográficas mais nítidas em outros países. O tráfego confuso, onde predomina o barulho das buzinas e a convivência pacífica nas ruas de automóveis, carroças, bicicletas, tuk-tuk, riquixás, vacas e até camelos, caracteriza uma cidade indiana.
O sistema científico indiano é responsável pela publicação de cerca de 3,2% de todos os trabalhos científicos publicados em revistas científicas internacionais, ocupando a décima posição no mundo (cabe lembrar que o Brasil ocupa hoje a 13ª posição).
A ciência indiana tem grande tradição e vários dos seus pesquisadores gozam de grande prestígio internacional. Menciono apenas Chandrassekhara Raman, que mostrou que a energia de um fóton pode sofrer transformação parcial quando interage com a matéria, e que foi agraciado com o Prêmio Nobel de Física de 1930.
Cabe lembrar que a independência da Índia ocorreu apenas em 1947. Jawaharlai Nehru, que governou o país entre 1947 e 1964, deu grande impulso à atividade científica, criando várias instituições responsáveis pela formação de milhares de pesquisadores de excelente qualidade.
Mais recentemente, o primeiro-ministro Manmohan Singh vem ampliando significativamente o apoio à atividade científica e os recursos para esta área devem passar de 1% para 2% do PIB em três anos.
Um amplo programa que conta com cerca de um 1,6 milhão de bolsas está sendo implementado em diferentes níveis para estimular a juventude indiana a se interessar pela atividade científica.
A participação do eminente e ativo químico indiano C.N. Rao como presidente do Comitê Assessor de Ciência e Tecnologia do primeiro-ministro é a garantia de um crescimento da atividade de C&T indiana com foco nas principais áreas da ciência contemporânea e vinculação direta com o desenvolvimento econômico e social do país.
Uma característica marcante da ciência indiana é a concentração da atividade científica em institutos especializados, e não nas universidades. Mudar este perfil é fundamental para um crescimento mais rápido, já que a universidade é o local mais dinâmico no processo de formação de recursos humanos qualificados. (Monitor Mercantil, 25/8)
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1 de setembro de 2010
Middle Schools
Stuck in the Middle
Jonah Rockoff talks with Education Next.
Middle school. The very words are enough to make many Americans shudder with memories of social anxiety, peer pressure, bad haircuts, and acne. But could middle schools also be bad for student learning? Could something as simple as changing the grade configuration of schools improve academic outcomes? That’s what some educators have come to believe.
States and school districts across the country are reevaluating the practice of educating young adolescents in stand-alone middle schools, which typically span grades 6 through 8 or 5 through 8, rather than keeping them in K–8 schools. The middle-school model began to be widely adopted almost 40 years ago. Now, reformers in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Maryland, and New York, and the large urban districts of Cincinnati, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, are challenging the notion that grouping students in the middle grades in their own school buildings is the right approach.
Why the turn against middle schools? For more than three decades, American public education embraced this organizational model. Between 1970 and 2000, the number of public middle schools in the U.S. grew more than sevenfold, from just over 1,500 to 11,500. These new middle schools displaced both traditional K–8 primary schools and junior high schools (which first appeared a century ago and served grades 7–8 or 7–9). From 1987 to 2007, the percentage of public-school 6th graders in K–6 schools fell from roughly 45 percent to 20 percent.
Neither the middle school nor the junior high has ever been popular among private schools, which educated only 2 percent of their 6th and 7th graders in these types of schools in 2007. And maybe the private schools have had it right all along. For the last two decades, education researchers and developmental psychologists have been documenting changes in attitudes and motivation as children enter adolescence, changes that some hypothesize are exacerbated by middle-school curricula and practices.
These findings are cause for concern, but there is reason to doubt their conclusions. Because the studies use data from a single school year to contrast students in middle schools and K–8 schools, most of the available research cannot reject the possibility that differences between the groups of students, rather than in the grade configuration of their schools, are actually responsible for the differences in behavior and achievement.
To provide more rigorous evidence on the effect of middle schools on student achievement, we turned to a richly detailed administrative dataset from New York City that allowed us to follow students from grade 3 through grade 8. Some of these children attended middle schools and some did not. Because we could follow the same children over a period of time, we could do a better job of ruling out the role of influences other than middle-school attendance on educational outcomes.
What we found bolsters the case for middle-school reform: in the specific year when students move to a middle school (or to a junior high), their academic achievement, as measured by standardized tests, falls substantially in both math and English relative to that of their counterparts who continue to attend a K–8 elementary school. What’s more, their achievement continues to decline throughout middle school. This negative effect persists at least through 8th grade, the highest grade for which we could obtain test scores.
We found that the middle-school achievement gap cannot be explained by a scarcity of financial resources for the schools. Instead, the cause is more likely to be related to other school characteristics, especially the fact that middle schools in New York City educate far more students in each grade. Although our conclusions about the reasons for the middle-school gap are tentative, we are quite confident that the evidence shows that middle schools are not the best way to educate students—at least in places like New York City.
Data and Methods
Our study was based on data for New York City school children who were in grades 3 though 8 during the 1998–99 through 2007–08 school years. We were able to follow students who entered 3rd grade between the fall of 1998 and the fall of 2002 for six years, until most had completed the 8th grade. We have data about the grade configuration and other characteristics of their schools, individual academic achievement as measured by annual standardized test scores in math and English, and a variety of personal characteristics. In particular, we know each student’s gender, ethnicity, whether they received free or reduced-price lunch through the federal lunch program, whether they were English language learners or received special education services, and their record of suspensions and absences from school.
Elementary schools in New York City typically serve students until grade 5 or grade 6, while a smaller portion of elementary schools run through grade 8. This means that most students move to a middle school in either grade 6 or grade 7, while some never move to a middle school. Of the 3rd graders in our initial sample of students, 62 percent were in a K–5 school, 24 percent were in a K–6 school, and 7 percent were enrolled in a K–8 school. The small fraction of remaining students attended K–3, K–4, or K–7 schools and are excluded from our analysis.
To isolate the impact of attending a middle school from the many other factors that influence student achievement, we combined two basic strategies. Most importantly, we tracked the performance of individual students over time to see how their performance evolved relative to that of their peers as they progressed from grades 3 to 8, in essence, using each student as his or her own control group. This step alone provides much stronger grounds for conclusions about the effects of attending a middle school than previous research.
A lingering concern, however, is the possibility that different types of students choose to attend middle schools than choose to continue in a K–8 school. If students do sort themselves into middle schools because of some unobserved characteristic that causes changes in academic achievement over time, we would incorrectly attribute differences in achievement to the middle schools instead of to characteristics of the students themselves. We reduced the likelihood of making this mistake by using a statistical technique that effectively takes the choice to switch schools out of the students’ (or parents’) hands. Specifically, we ran a statistical model that used the last grade served by the school that a student attended in grade 3 to predict whether the student attended a middle school. We then used that prediction to place each student into one of the two groups we are comparing, that is, students who attend middle schools and those who do not. Our key assumption in taking this approach is that there are no unobservable factors that cause a drop in student achievement at precisely the same time as students must leave the elementary schools they attended in grade 3. While we cannot definitively rule out the existence of such factors, we do not know of any plausible alternatives that would explain our findings.
The Middle-School Disadvantage
What determines a student’s level of academic achievement is complex. But the simple fact is that students who enter public middle schools in New York City fall behind their peers in K–8 schools. This is true both for math and English achievement. Even more troubling, the middle-school disadvantage grows larger over the course of the middle-school years. With the transition into a middle school, students set out on a trajectory of lower achievement gains.
The achievement gap between middle-school students and K–8 students is put in stark relief in Figure 1, which displays our estimates of the impact of attending a middle school on student achievement as measured by standardized tests in math and English Language Arts. The graphs show how well students who attend a middle school perform relative to how we would expect them to perform if they attended a K–8 school. We report those differences, in standard deviations of student achievement in math and reading, for the 3rd through 8th grades. We separate students who enter a middle school in grade 6 from those students who enter a year later, in grade 7.
No matter whether students enter a middle school in the 6th or the 7th grade, middle-school students experience, on average, a large initial drop in their test scores. Even after accounting for a host of other factors that influence student achievement, students who eventually attend middle schools go from scoring better than their counterparts in K–8 schools in the year prior to transitioning to middle school to scoring below where we would expect if they were not attending a middle school. Math achievement for 6th graders transitioning to middle school falls by 0.18 standard deviations, and English achievement falls by 0.16 standard deviations. Contrast that decline with the 6th-grade test scores for students who will enter middle school the following year, in the 7th grade. Their test scores in both subjects continue to improve relative to their peers in K–8 schools. When these 6th graders move to a middle school in the 7th grade, however, we see the same dramatic fall in academic achievement: math scores decline by 0.17 standard deviations and English achievement falls by 0.14 standard deviations. Just how large are these effects? Consider that decrease in achievement associated with middle school entry—between 0.14 and 0.18 standard deviations—is roughly 20 to 25 percent of the achievement gap between poor and non-poor students (as measured by free lunch receipt) in New York City (about 0.7 standard deviations).
Moreover, these are not temporary dips followed by rebounds in learning. Throughout the middle-school years, students fall further behind. After two years in a middle school, on average a student who entered in the 7th grade will score 0.10 standard deviations in math and 0.09 standard deviations in English below what we would expect if he had gone to a K–8 school. After three years in a middle school, a student who entered in the 6th grade will underperform on 8th-grade assessments by 0.17 standard deviations in math and by 0.14 standard deviations in English.
A particularly distressing finding from our study is that students with lower initial levels of academic achievement fare especially poorly in middle school. To investigate the possibility of different effects on students with higher and lower initial achievement levels, we separated students into two groups: one group had grade 3 test scores above the citywide median, the other group scored below the median. Although we found substantial drops in achievement during middle school for both groups of students, the first-year drop and cumulative deficit were, respectively, 50 percent and more than 200 percent greater for students who start at the lower end of the achievement distribution.
We also found evidence that student absence rates increased when students entered middle schools and were significantly higher in grade 8 than for students who never entered a middle school (see Figure 2). More specifically, our estimates indicate that students were missing almost two additional days of school per year than would have been the case had they attended a K–8 school. Thus, increased absences may be one mechanism through which middle schools lower student achievement. There is little chance, however, that absences could explain a large share of the overall effect of attending a middle school.
To be sure, the population of public school children in New York City is different from that of many other school districts around the country. These differences might mean that middle-school attendance would have smaller or larger effects on other students than we estimate it to have on New York City’s public school children. For example, students with fewer educational resources at home may be more strongly affected by changes in their school environment. If that is the case, studying New York City students, who arguably come from less advantaged backgrounds than, say, the students in New York City suburbs, may have led us to find a larger middle-school effect than had we followed a more-affluent student population. While we encourage readers to be cautious about applying our findings without qualification to all public schools, we also encourage school districts to support research that can identify middle-school effects in other settings, especially since we find the consequences of attending a middle school for student achievement to be substantial and troubling.
Explaining the Trouble with Middle Schools
Why might New York City’s middle schools be detrimental to academic achievement? We find little support for the notion that differences in resources, such as per-pupil expenditures and class size, could explain the middle-school achievement gap. In middle schools serving grades 6–8 and grades 7–8, average per-pupil expenditures were $10,094 and $11,082, respectively, while per-pupil expenditures in K–8 schools were roughly equivalent, at $10,950. Nor do students experience a large decline in per-pupil spending when they move to a middle school. Average per-pupil expenditure in K–5 schools was $10,144 (compared to the $10,094 for grade 6–8 middle schools) and $9,680 in K–6 schools (compared to $11,082 in grade 7–8 middle schools).
Nor can we attribute the disparity we see to differences in class size. The average class size is slightly smaller for 5th graders in K–5 schools than for 6th graders in 6–8 schools (24 vs. 25 students); students in K–8 schools see similar growth in class size between grades 5 and 6. Class size is actually larger for grade 6 students in K–6 schools than for grade 7 students in 7–8 schools (24 vs. 23 students).
What about the possibility that the relative age of students in a school, especially during adolescence, can influence how students learn? In other words, does being the youngest students in a school have negative effects on the educational experience of those students? We could not find evidence in our data to support this explanation for the initial drop in test scores upon transitioning to a middle school. In our study sample, about one-third of new 7th graders moved out of a school serving grades K–6 and entered a middle school for 7th and 8th graders, becoming the youngest cohort in the school, while roughly half of new 7th graders entered a grade 6–8 middle school as part of the school’s middle cohort of students. We find that the effect of entering a middle school was essentially the same for both of these groups.
At least part of the problem with middle schools may be that they usually combine students from multiple elementary schools. In the New York City schools we studied, the average cohort size was 75 students in K–8 schools, 100 students in K–5 and K–6 schools, and over 200 students in middle schools for grades 6–8 and 7–8 (see Figure 3). We went back to our data and analyzed the effect of these cohort size differences on test scores. What we found was that cohort size has a pronounced influence on student achievement during these school years. We estimate that an 8th grader who attends school with 200 other 8th-grade students will score 0.04 standard deviations lower in both math and English than he would if he attended a school with 75 other 8th graders, the average cohort size for a K–8 school. This 0.04 standard deviation deficit represents roughly one-quarter of the largest test-score declines we attribute to middle-school attendance.
Given the data we have, we can only speculate about why it is harder to educate middle school–aged students in large groups. Developmental psychologists have shown that adolescent children commonly exhibit traits such as negativity, low self-esteem, and an inability to judge the risks and consequences of their actions, which may make them especially difficult to educate in large groups. The combining of multiple elementary schools and their students also disrupts a student’s immediate peer group. And middle schools often serve a more diverse student population than many students encountered in elementary school. Yet while it seems plausible that these changes in environment would matter, we could not find any evidence in our data that any one hypothesis can explain the drop in learning among students moving to middle schools.
Even though a full explanation of the middle-school achievement gap eludes us, there does seem to be a consensus among New York City students and their parents that educational quality in the city’s public middle schools is lower than in the boroughs’ K–8 schools. We reached this conclusion after examining responses to a citywide survey of parents of children in grades K–8 and students in grades 6 and higher, which was conducted at the end of the 2006–07 and 2007–08 school years as a part of the city’s new school accountability system.
On average, New York City parents of students in middle schools gave their schools lower marks on measures related to education quality than parents whose children attend K–8 schools. Figure 4 shows that parent evaluations of school safety, academic rigor, and overall educational quality was much lower among those whose children attended middle schools than among parents with children in K–5, K–6, and K–8 schools. It is important to note that this is not simply a product of the challenges of educating adolescents. There is little perceptible decline in satisfaction among parents in K–8 schools as their children age, a consistency we would not expect if educational quality simply cannot withstand the onslaught of puberty.
The students’ opinions are consistent with their parents’ assessments, although the lack of data on students below grade 6 prohibits us from more direct measurement of the degradation of education quality in middle schools. The clearest pattern that emerges from student reports is that 6th and 7th graders in middle schools think their schools have less academic rigor, less mature social behavior among the students, are less safe, and provide lower-quality education than do 6th graders in K–6 or K–8 schools.
The Longer View
We don’t yet know whether the troubling slide in test scores for middle-school students persists through the end of high school, a question that is certainly worth studying. Unfortunately, our data do not allow us to follow the students in our study further than grade 8. If the decline does continue, middle schools not only hurt student achievement in the short term but set students up for unnecessary longer-term disadvantages.
Of course, it is possible that transitioning to high school could be more difficult for students who come from K–8 schools than for middle school students. If K–8 students experience a larger drop in achievement upon entering high school, that could bring the two groups of adolescents back into parity. But it is hard to recommend closing the middle-school achievement gap by bringing everybody down. The better option is to address the trouble with middle schools—or do away with them altogether.
Jonah E. Rockoff is associate professor of business at the Columbia Graduate School of Business. Benjamin B. Lockwood is research coordinator at the Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate at the Columbia Graduate School of B
Value -Added for teacher accountability?
Some Scholars Slam Value-Added for Teacher Accountability
Value-added gauges of teacher effectiveness are highly error-prone and shouldn't make up more than a minimal part of a teacher's evaluation, contends a report released this week authored by a high-powered list of academics.
Problems with the gauge include the non-random assignment of students and teachers to classrooms, as well as the fact that value-added can't distinguish between the contributions of multiple teachers over time and seem to be unstable from year to year.
"Such scores should only be a part of an overall comprehensive evaluation," the authors wrote. "Some states are now considering plans that would give as much as 50 percent of the weight in teacher evaluation and compensation decisions to scores ... Based on the evidence, we consider this unwise."
The report comes as the latest salvo in the ever-increasing debate about the appropriate use of the value-added measures in making judgments about teachers' performance.
Many of the report's authors are measurement experts: Eva Baker, a co-director of the National Center for Evaluation Standards and Student Testing, at UCLA; Paul Barton, an associate director of the National Assessment of Educational Progress; Edward Haertel, a former president of the National Council of Measurement in Education; Helen Ladd, a professor at Duke University; Robert Linn and Lorrie Shepard, both professors at the University of Colorado; and Richard Shavelson, a former president of the American Educational Research Association, among others.
Some of these academics also contested the Race to the Top guidelines for similar reasons last year.
In this report, the researchers say even though value-added measures purport to take socioeconomic factors into account, other differences can skew the estimates—like inequitable access to health, special services, smaller classes and better resources. "Each of those resource differences may have a small impact on a teacher's apparent effectiveness, but cumulatively they have greater significance," the report states.
The report presages ill effects if value-added is made too much a part of evaluation systems. Among other things, the report argues such pressure would narrow the curriculum further; cause teachers to focus more heavily on areas that are likely to improve scores; and make it less likely that teachers would want to work with low-income students with lower test scores.
In interviews, other academics who work on value-added methods said that the report's caution about the misuse of value-added information is wise. Douglas Harris, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who's written extensively about value-added, said that it makes sense to use other measures, like classroom observations of teacher practice, to counterbalance or offset test scores so that teachers aren't unduly pressured to focusing exclusively on topics likely to appear on tests, or to instruct in a way that emphasizes factual recall over higher-order analysis.
But Harris also had some reservations about the report's conclusions.
"The only reason we can have this debate is that value-added gives us observations of lots of different students, and we can think of them being a sample, and have a confidence interval around the results," he said. "You can't even estimate the error with other measures [such as teacher observations], so we're holding value-added to a higher standard than the other approaches."
The study of the correlation between teacher observation measures and student achievement is still in its infancy. One of the few studies to make this link, based on Cincinnati's teacher-evaluation system, did find a difference in teacher effectiveness that was picked up by classroom scorers.
And since most uses of value-added have never been studied in depth, it's hard to say definitely what effects they'd have on teaching and learning, he added.
Daniel Goldhaber, a professor at the University of Washington, in Bothell, said that the report didn't note that there are few alternatives for measuring teachers' influence on instructional outcomes.
"I think people are right to point out the potential flaws of [value-added modeling], but it should be compared against what we have, not some nirvana that doesn't exist," he said.
But both researchers took pains to note they don't endorse the public reporting of teachers' value-added scores in Los Angeles as part of a controversial Los Angeles Times series.
Some of the states that have won Race to the Top grants, such as Rhode Island and Florida, have committed to basing at least 50 percent of a teacher's evaluation on student achievement. Those states will have to confront the problem that only a portion of teachers currently instruct in tested grades and subjects, however.
NYC Study Gives K-8 Schools an Edge Over Middle Schools
A new study of New York City public school students suggests that moving to middle school can be more detrimental to students’ continued academic progress than staying in a K-8 school.
According to the study, which was posted online today by the journal Education Next, students who move from elementary school to middle school experience a bigger dip in mathematics and language arts achievement than their K-8 counterparts do, and they tend to be absent more often.
Moreover, the report says, the earlier students move to a middle school, the greater the gap between them and their K-8-attending peers–and that gap only widens as students age.
“Middle schools surfaced because people said we’re going to specialize and serve these kids more appropriately, but it’s not certain that that’s what they’re actually doing,” said Jonah E. Rockoff, an associate professor of business at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business in New York City. “I wouldn’t view this as definitive, but if I was running a school system, I would see this as cause for serious further investigation.”
Mr. Rockoff’s article is scheduled to be published in print in the fall issue of Education Next, a journal published by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. He and his Columbia University co-author, Benjamin B. Lockwood, analyzed data on successive cohorts of all New York City students entering third grade at non-charter district schools from fall 1998 to fall 2002. They followed individual students for six years, until most graduated 8th grade, and compared the characteristics of the schools where they spent elementary grades and those attended for the middle level. Most New York City elementary schools serve kindergarten through grades 5 or 6, with a smaller proportion of K-8 schools spread across every borough except Staten Island and Queens, which have only a handful between them.
The researchers found students in K-5 or K-6 schools performed slightly better than their K-8 peers in math and language arts in 5th grade, but when they made the move to a middle school, the situation reversed. Students who entered middle school in 6th grade began to lag behind K-8 students in both subjects. By way of comparison, researchers said the gap between the two groups of students was substantial, about a fifth the size of the achievement gap that separates the city’s low-income students from their more-affluent peers.
The researchers also found students who entered middle school in 7th grade performed better than those who entered in 6th grade, but still saw a precipitous decline in comparison to peers who attended a K-8 school. Moreover, the achievement gap between middle school students and K-8 students increased through 8th grade.
In addition, the study found that while all schools saw increased absences in higher grades, middle school absences accelerated at a faster pace than K-8-school absences. On average, students missed two more days per year in middle schools than they would have had they attended a single school. However, unlike previous studies, the Columbia researchers did not find differences in the number of suspensions at schools of different configurations.
Mr. Rockoff speculated that middle school achievement may be lower because 6-8 schools in his study had larger grade cohorts than K-8 schools did; the study found the average number of students in a given grade at a middle school was more than double the number at the same grade in a K-8 school. He suspects students may have a more difficult transition to a new school where the number of other students in the same grade is much larger than that at their previous school.
By contrast, Mr. Rockoff recalled his own middle school experience in a small New Jersey school district: “We had one elementary, one middle school, one high school; the cohort stayed exactly the same at each school, and your peers were exactly the same as you went from one school to another.”
Patti Kinney, an associate director for middle-level services at the National Association of Secondary School Principals, based in Reston, Va., said districts often choose grade configurations based on logistical concerns rather than academics. Small districts may have only one school per grade level, while large urban districts consolidate in upper grades to use buildings and staff more efficiently. In either case, Ms. Kinney agreed that schools have to adjust their support structure to deal with larger grade cohorts.
“I guess the mantra is ‘smaller is better.’ You don’t want students to be anonymous,” Ms. Kinney said. “If you just take a bunch of kids in … they’re not going to be as successful as schools that create teaming and build smaller communities within the larger community.”
Questions in the Research
The New York City study is the latest volley in an ongoing battle over how to organize schools. Earlier this year, a study by the Mountain View, Calif.-based EdSource and Stanford University found no connection between grade configuration and achievement, as did a 2006 report on Philadelphia school configurations led by another Columbia University researcher.
Mr. Rockoff acknowledged, though, that the new study has a few holes. First, it does not include charter schools, which often have smaller cohorts within the same 6-8 grade span. One example is the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, charter middle schools, some of which showed higher test scores in the same grades than other district schools in New York. Second, the researchers were only able to track students through 8th grade, leaving open the possibility that students graduating from a K-8 school would face a similarly large drop in achievement when they transitioned to a new school for the first time in high school.
“It could be that the middle school kids get hit by the stick in 6th grade and the K-8 kids get hit with the stick in high school, but everyone gets hit with the stick,” Mr. Rockoff said. Yet, he argued, later problems with high school transitions would not negate problems in middle school transitions. “From a policymaker’s perspective, it points in the same direction; you don’t want to force a lot of kids to switch schools at age 12,” Mr. Rockoff said.
David Hough, dean of education at Missouri State University in Springfield, said the results “most definitely, unequivocally” align with what he is finding as he develops a database of more than 1,600 middle-level schools. Students at K-8 schools on average have higher math and reading test scores, better attendance, and fewer behavior problems than do students in middle school, Mr. Hough said. However, he credits the difference to the “more nurturing environment” provided by multiple grade levels—which he said mixes students of different ages and makes it more likely siblings will attend the same school—rather than the size of any one grade.
Ms. Kinney said the research was interesting, but inconclusive given that research on middle-level grade configuration “keeps coming back and forth.”
“After reading so much research with all these studies, I keep coming back to what’s happening in the school. I think the bottom line is you’ve got to look at what you’re doing with the students at that age level regardless of the grade configuration,” Ms. Kinney said.
Formula to Grade Teachers’ Skill Gains in Use, and Critics
Michelle A. Rhee, center, the Washington schools chancellor, fired about 25 teachers partly over poor value-added evaluations.
By SAM DILLON
How good is one teacher compared with another?
Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times
Karen Caruso teaches in Los Angeles, where some teacher ratings are made public.
A growing number of school districts have adopted a system called value-added modeling to answer that question, provoking battles from Washington to Los Angeles — with some saying it is an effective method for increasing teacher accountability, and others arguing that it can give an inaccurate picture of teachers’ work.
The system calculates the value teachers add to their students’ achievement, based on changes in test scores from year to year and how the students perform compared with others in their grade.
People who analyze the data, making a few statistical assumptions, can produce a list ranking teachers from best to worst.
Use of value-added modeling is exploding nationwide. Hundreds of school systems, including those in Chicago, New York and Washington, are already using it to measure the performance of schools or teachers. Many more are expected to join them, partly because the Obama administration has prodded states and districts to develop more effective teacher-evaluation systems than traditional classroom observation by administrators.
Though the value-added method is often used to help educators improve their classroom teaching, it has also been a factor in deciding who receives bonuses, how much they are and even who gets fired.
Michelle A. Rhee, the schools chancellor in Washington, fired about 25 teachers this summer after they rated poorly in evaluations based in part on a value-added analysis of scores.
And 6,000 elementary school teachers in Los Angeles have found themselves under scrutiny this summer after The Los Angeles Times published a series of articles about their performance, including a searchable database on its Web site that rates them from least effective to most effective. The teachers’ union has protested, urging a boycott of the paper.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan weighed in to support the newspaper’s work, calling it an exercise in healthy transparency. In a speech last week, though, he qualified that support, noting that he had never released to news media similar information on teachers when he was the Chicago schools superintendent.
“There are real issues and competing priorities and values that we must work through together — balancing transparency, privacy, fairness and respect for teachers,” Mr. Duncan said. On The Los Angeles Times’s publication of the teacher data, he added, “I don’t advocate that approach for other districts.”
A report released this month by several education researchers warned that the value-added methodology can be unreliable.
“If these teachers were measured in a different year, or a different model were used, the rankings might bounce around quite a bit,” said Edward Haertel, a Stanford professor who was a co-author of the report. “People are going to treat these scores as if they were reflections on the effectiveness of the teachers without any appreciation of how unstable they are.”
Other experts disagree.
William L. Sanders, a senior research manager for a North Carolina company, SAS, that does value-added estimates for districts in North Carolina, Tennessee and other states, said that “if you use rigorous, robust methods and surround them with safeguards, you can reliably distinguish highly effective teachers from average teachers and from ineffective teachers.”
Dr. Sanders helped develop value-added methods to evaluate teachers in Tennessee in the 1990s. Their use spread after the 2002 No Child Left Behind law required states to test in third to eighth grades every year, giving school districts mountains of test data that are the raw material for value-added analysis.
In value-added modeling, researchers use students’ scores on state tests administered at the end of third grade, for instance, to predict how they are likely to score on state tests at the end of fourth grade.
A student whose third-grade scores were higher than 60 percent of peers statewide is predicted to score higher than 60 percent of fourth graders a year later.
If, when actually taking the state tests at the end of fourth grade, the student scores higher than 70 percent of fourth graders, the leap in achievement represents the value the fourth-grade teacher added.
Even critics acknowledge that the method can be more accurate for rating schools than the system now required by federal law, which compares test scores of succeeding classes, for instance this year’s fifth graders with last year’s fifth graders.
But when the method is used to evaluate individual teachers, many factors can lead to inaccuracies. Different people crunching the numbers can get different results, said Douglas N. Harris, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. For example, two analysts might rank teachers in a district differently if one analyst took into account certain student characteristics, like which students were eligible for free lunch, and the other did not.
Millions of students change classes or schools each year, so teachers can be evaluated on the performance of students they have taught only briefly, after students’ records were linked to them in the fall.
In many schools, students receive instruction from multiple teachers, or from after-school tutors, making it difficult to attribute learning gains to a specific instructor. Another problem is known as the ceiling effect. Advanced students can score so highly one year that standardized state tests are not sensitive enough to measure their learning gains a year later.
In Houston, a district that uses value-added methods to allocate teacher bonuses, Darilyn Krieger said she had seen the ceiling effect as a physics teacher at Carnegie Vanguard High School.
“My kids come in at a very high level of competence,” Ms. Krieger said.
After she teaches them for a year, most score highly on a state science test but show little gains, so her bonus is often small compared with those of other teachers, she said.
The Houston Chronicle reports teacher bonuses each year in a database, and readers view the size of the bonus as an indicator of teacher effectiveness, Ms. Krieger said.
“I have students in class ask me why I didn’t earn a higher bonus,” Ms. Krieger said. “I say: ‘Because the system decided I wasn’t doing a good enough job. But the system is flawed.’ ”
This year, the federal Department of Education’s own research arm warned in a study that value-added estimates “are subject to a considerable degree of random error.”
And last October, the Board on Testing and Assessments of the National Academies, a panel of 13 researchers led by Dr. Haertel, wrote to Mr. Duncan warning of “significant concerns” that the Race to the Top grant competition was placing “too much emphasis on measures of growth in student achievement that have not yet been adequately studied for the purposes of evaluating teachers and principals.”
“Value-added methodologies should be used only after careful consideration of their appropriateness for the data that are available, and if used, should be subjected to rigorous evaluation,” the panel wrote. “At present, the best use of VAM techniques is in closely studied pilot projects.”
Despite those warnings, the Department of Education made states with laws prohibiting linkages between student data and teachers ineligible to compete in Race to the Top, and it designed its scoring system to reward states that use value-added calculations in teacher evaluations.
“I’m uncomfortable with how fast a number of states are moving to develop teacher-evaluation systems that will make important decisions about teachers based on value-added results,” said Robert L. Linn, a testing expert who is an emeritus professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
“They haven’t taken caution into account as much as they need to,” Professor Linn said.
Educação de qualidade: do palanque à ação
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A "Carta-Compromisso pela Garantia do Direito à Educação de Qualidade" apresenta propostas para a construção de um sólido projeto nacional
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O papel prioritário da educação para o desenvolvimento do Brasil é uma unanimidade. No programa da maioria dos candidatos às próximas eleições, o tema aparece em destaque. Mas será que esse discurso bem-intencionado para atrair votos vai se transformar em ações concretas que permitam o salto qualitativo de que a educação brasileira tanto precisa?
Cabe aos eleitores e à sociedade exigir uma resposta efetiva a essa urgência nacional. Com tal preocupação, um grupo de parceiros de peso, comprometidos com a questão educacional, lançou esta semana a "Carta-Compromisso pela Garantia do Direito à Educação de Qualidade".
O documento, que será entregue aos candidatos à Presidência, a governos estaduais e ao Congresso, apresenta propostas para a construção de um sólido projeto nacional de educação que tenha continuidade no futuro, independentemente de quem estiver no poder.
Ir além dos avanços educacionais já alcançados, que precisam ser reconhecidos, é decisivo para o futuro do Brasil. O país encontra-se em uma situação favorável para a promoção de uma educação inclusiva e de qualidade para todos, pois vive um momento privilegiado de crescimento econômico.
É hora, portanto, de elevar os investimentos em educação e mostrar, nos orçamentos públicos, a relevância do setor, que precisa ser integrado ao programa maior de desenvolvimento nacional.
Além de aumentar progressivamente o percentual do PIB investido em educação pública, os futuros governantes e parlamentares precisam ainda assumir compromissos inadiáveis, como a valorização dos profissionais de educação.
Mudar a condição docente é peça-chave para a melhoria da qualidade da educação brasileira. Isso significa promover formação, remuneração e novas perspectivas de carreira para os professores, que são atores indispensáveis para ajudar o Brasil a alcançar novos patamares de justiça social e desenvolvimento.
Incluir, até 2016, todas as crianças e jovens de 4 a 17 anos na escola; universalizar o atendimento da demanda por creche nos próximos dez anos; superar o analfabetismo dos jovens de 15 anos ou mais; garantir a aprendizagem para todos; alfabetizar plenamente todas as crianças até os 8 anos de idade; estabelecer padrões de qualidade para todas as escolas brasileiras e ampliar as matrículas na educação profissional estão ainda entre os avanços imprescindíveis levantados na carta-compromisso.
Na condição de agência das Nações Unidas que tem a educação como mandato central e parceira do Brasil em importantes projetos de cooperação no setor, a Unesco, ao lado de entidades como ABC, Anpae, Anped, Andifes, ANPG, Campanha Nacional pelo Direito à Educação, Cenpec, CNTE, Contee, CNBB, CNE, Consed, Unicef, OAB, SBPC, Todos pela Educação, Uncme e Undime, conclama os candidatos às próximas eleições a aderir à proposta da carta-compromisso e a sociedade a cobrar dos eleitos o seu cumprimento.
O compromisso dos futuros governantes e parlamentares pode ser um primeiro passo na resposta à sociedade, que há muito anseia pela superação da enorme dívida histórica com a qualidade do ensino.
É dever de cada candidato demonstrar efetivamente aos eleitores como irá enfrentar o problema educacional brasileiro se eleito. E é direito de cada brasileiro ter acesso a essa informação antes de votar.
VINCENT DEFOURNY, 50, doutor em comunicação, é representante da Unesco (Organização das Nações Unidas para a Educação, a Ciência e a Cultura) no Brasil.