Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) Arizona State University

A new report recommends a series of sweeping changes and new investments to turn around America's worst-performing schools. A review of the report commends it for making "a major contribution" to the debate over school reform, but warns that it has an overly optimistic timeline, relies too much on punitive sanctions, offers key recommendations that reach beyond what the current research knowledge can support, and pays little attention to the role students might play in the reform process.

Despite obstacles, models exist to increase the engagement of parents whose children are English Language Learners. Parents of English Language Learners face "daunting barriers" to becoming engaged with their children's schools and education, but schools and policy makers can and should respond with a variety of measures to foster parental involvement

Schoolhouse commercialism report finds schools, young people vulnerable to new advertising trends

The results of an important new study concluding that states' progress in raising test scores was stronger before No Child Left Behind was approved in 2002, compared with the four years following enactment of the law.

Methodology is too weak to support findings that test scores have meaningfully risen since passage of federal law
A report released last month has been used to argue that student achievement has increased following the implementation of the federal No Child Left Behind law. The report, however, suffers from important weaknesses. Although the report’s authors acknowledge some of these weaknesses, other key problems were not addressed, a new review of the report finds.

Even if questionable findings are accepted, they represent only minuscule reductions in public school costs.
TEMPE, Ariz and BOULDER, Colo. -- A report on programs to subsidize private school attendance with public funds claims that school choice "allows students to attend the schools of their choice at a lower cost than they would incur in the public school system." It claims that these programs have, cumulatively over 15 years, "saved" taxpayers nearly half a billion dollars.

More than twice as likely as those in regular schools to leave after one year, research finds.
TEMPE, Ariz and BOULDER, Colo. -- As many as 40 percent of newer charter school teachers end up leaving for other jobs, a new study concludes. The report, "Teacher Attrition in Charter Schools," by Gary Miron and Brooks Applegate, of the Western Michigan University Evaluation Center, was released by the Education Policy Research Unit at Arizona State University and by the Education and the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Merit-pay systems for teachers, although currently popular with policy makers, are no panacea, a new policy brief from the Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) and the Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) concludes.

Richard Allington
In Whole language high jinks: How to tell when 'scientifically-based reading instruction’'isn't, Louisa Moats contends that she provides "the necessary tools to distinguish those [programs] that truly are scientifically based... from those that merely pay lip service to science" (p. 10). This review finds that Moats exaggerates the findings of the National Reading Panel (NRP), especially the effects of systematic phonics on reading achievement. She also ignores research completed since the NRP report was issued seven years ago. Perhaps most disturbingly, she touts primarily commercial curriculum products distributed by her employer – products that have far fewer published studies of effectiveness than the products and methods she disparages

A recent report from the Manhattan Institute purports to show that teachers are better compensated than editors, reporters, architects, psychologists, chemists, economists, and mechanical engineers. The report relies on hourly earnings data from the National Compensation Survey (NCS) in an attempt to provide an apples-to-apples comparison of pay for a standard unit of work.

TEMPE, Ariz and BOULDER, Colo. -- The widely-touted Report Card on Education, 1983-1984 to 2004-2005 falls far short of valid or useful research, a new review finds.  The reviewer concluded that the report's "ineptness and naiveté in measurement and data analysis have thwarted any attempt to draw legitimate conclusions."

Tempe, Ariz. - Commercial forces in the nation's schools "beat a strategic retreat that, paradoxically, secured their standing," according to "The Ninth Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercialism Trends: 2005-2006."
The report, covering the period from July 1, 2005, through June 30, 2006, says that despite a voluntary, soft-drink industry ban on the sale of sugared soda products in schools, school house commercialism remains a pervasive phenomenon in America's public schools, in many forms.

A recent report that argues school choice, in the form of private-school vouchers and charter schools, will improve the quality of teachers relies on selectively cited research and ignores a number of other factors that have a bearing on teacher quality, a new review of the report finds.

TEMPE, Ariz. - Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), the school evaluation system central to the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, is fundamentally flawed and should be suspended until the premises underlying it can be confirmed or refuted by solid, scientific research, according to University of Vermont Professor William J. Mathis.