State takeovers don’t work.  

Researchers at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute examined takeovers starting in the late 1980s using 5 sources of data, including the NAEPs.  Their conclusion:  “Overall, we find no evidence that state takeover improves academic achievement.”

Still, school/district takeovers have become more frequent, including the recent near-takeover of Boston’s schools resulting from a highly critical review.  In 2019 Rhode Island’s Department of Education (RIDE) took control of the Providence Public School District (PPSD) after our even more painful Johns Hopkins report.  

Pearl's data, research and analysis partners include the Annenberg Institute at Brown University  with a mission to equalize and improve educational opportunities through actionable knowledge, human development and broad engagement and its National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA). Both organizations consulted with ISU and ITI in the planning and development, and establishing success metrics for the statewide tutoring program.

In addition to the obvious educational and developmental harms, school closures could cost this generation of students $17 trillion in lifetime earnings, a December report from the World Bank, UNESCO and UNICEF estimated. “Student test scores, even starting in first, second and third grade, are really quite predictive of their success later in school, and their educational trajectories overall,” Susanna Loeb, the director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, which focuses on education inequality, told The Times. “The biggest reason to be concerned is the lower achievement of the lower-achieving kids,” she added, as those students may be less likely to graduate from high school or attend college.

Representing a wide variety of disciplines and backgrounds, the scholars join the Brown community this year to guide student-centered learning and engage in high-impact research.

As the 2022-23 academic year begins at Brown and more than 3,203 new undergraduate, graduate and medical students arrive on College Hill, the University also welcomes a group of 62 dynamic new scholars and educators to the Brown faculty.

With research and teaching expertise on topics ranging from global health security to climate change, brain science to diaspora studies, and architecture to algorithms, Brown’s newest faculty members represent a wide range of fields, backgrounds and viewpoints. Welcoming faculty with such diversity of experience comes at a time when Brown is developing an operational plan for significantly growing its research enterprise.

Teacher professional development absorbs billions of dollars each year and lots of teacher time, yet there’s hardly any evidence that teacher training actually improves teaching. A massive 2014 meta-analysis by the federal Institute of Education Sciences, for instance, evaluated 643 studies of PD in K-12 math instruction and found just two that met the evidentiary bar set by the What Works Clearinghouse and had positive results. Linda Darling-Hammond, a former president of the American Education Research Association, has frankly noted that the “training [educators] receive is episodic, myopic, and often meaningless.” Well, Brown University’s John Papay and Nathaniel Schwartz and Harvard’s Heather Hill—all scholars at the Annenberg Institute—think folks like me are unduly pessimistic on this score. They’ve dug into PD to see what’s working and what we can do better (see their brief here). I thought it worth sharing their take.

We’ve created this annual report to give you a taste of the work that we have going on at the Institute. We welcome you to read on to learn more about how we are pursuing equitable, transformative education for just and flourishing societies, and then to join us in our work going forward.

We look forward to the coming academic year and to work with you and others to reach these important goals.

Teach For America, the organization I lead, launched a tutoring initiative in fall 2020 following research that shows that high-dose, high-quality tutoring is one of the most effective ways to combat learning loss. One study that looked at the impact of having a well-trained tutor meet three times a week with a group of up to four students found it came close to providing the equivalent of nearly five months of learning. A 2021 meta-analysis from researchers at Brown University concluded tutoring has a more significant effect on student achievement than smaller class sizes, vacation or summer classes and longer school days or years.

When students test out of an English-learner program, or are reclassified as proficient in English, they report a higher sense of self and a greater belief in their ability to complete challenging academic tasks, a new study finds.

Past research has examined how exiting students out of English-learner programs—and removing the label of English-learner—impacts students’ academic outcomes. Monica Lee, a senior research associate at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, and her co-author James Soland of the University of Virginia, wanted to look at what reclassification means for social-emotional learning, or SEL, outcomes.

College students have the power to transform the tutoring landscape and overcome one of the biggest hurdles in bringing tutoring to scale.

Performance-based funding – a policy in which states fund public colleges based on certain student outcomes, such as how many students graduate – hasn’t benefited all students equally in Tennessee and Ohio. That’s according to a study in which we analyze U.S. Department of Education data on public colleges and universities in these states between 2004-2015.

We compared institutions in Ohio and Tennessee to institutions in states that did not have performance-based funding policies during the same time frame. In some cases, Black, Hispanic, Native American and Alaska Native students did in fact earn more certificates as well as associate and bachelor’s degrees. However, the gap between them and white and Asian students grew even wider for bachelor’s degrees in Ohio and for certificates in Tennessee.

The academics found that there was often a tradeoff between “good teaching” where kids learn stuff and “good teaching” that kids enjoy. Teachers who were good at raising test scores tended to receive low student evaluations. Teachers with great student evaluations tended not to raise test scores all that much.

“The teachers and the teaching practices that can increase test scores often are not the same as those that improve student-reported engagement,” said David Blazar, one of the study’s co-authors and an associate professor of education policy at the University of Maryland College Park. 

Blazar’s study, “Challenges and Tradeoffs of ‘Good’ Teaching: The Pursuit of Multiple Educational Outcomes,” was co-written with Cynthia Pollard, a doctoral student at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. It was publicly posted in June 2022 as a working paper of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University.