Cool People You Should Know: Meredith Phillips

Meredith Phillips teaches at UCLA's School of Public Affairs. You probably know her name from the incredibly useful edited book, The Black-White Test Score Gap, that she co-edited with Sandy Jencks.

From her website, here's what she's up to these days:

Phillips is currently working on three major research projects. With funding from the Mellon foundation, she is conducting a five-year longitudinal study of how students' experiences at an ethnically diverse, highly-selective university influence their major choices, course-taking patterns, and academic progress.

With funding from the U.S. Department of Education, she is following a diverse sample of fifth-graders over the transition to middle school in order to examine the "oppositional culture" hypothesis.

And with funding from the Russell Sage Foundation, she is using the Schools and Staffing Survey to describe how school quality changed over the 1990s and how school quality overlaps with neighborhood quality.

Cool people you should know: Marigee Bacolod

Marigee Bacolod is a labor economist who teaches at the University of California - Irvine. She is doing really important work on teacher labor markets. Below, I excerpt three key findings from a recent paper published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, which you can find here:

• "Work conditions play a relatively more important role in determining where new teachers end up choosing to teach, rather than differences in relative teacher wages. Schools with more poor students attract significantly fewer teachers. This is especially true among female teachers.
  
  
• On the other hand, relative teacher wages play a more important role than work conditions at the occupational entry decision, when male and female new college graduates are deciding to teach.
  
  
• This paper also presents findings on the sorting of teachers across schools by ability. Conditional on choosing to teach, those with higher scholastic aptitude (in terms of SAT scores and college GPA) are significantly less likely to teach in central city schools compared to suburban schools."
  

Cool People You Should Know: Doug Harris

Doug Harris is an economist who teaches at the University of Wisconsin - Madison's School of Education. He writes about a wide range of ed policy issues, so you should check out his papers and see if anything suits your fancy. He has a terrific website and most of them are available there. You can also read about his cool findings in yesterday's post.

Since Harris has a chapter you should read ("Educational Outcomes of Disadvantaged Students: From Desegregation to Accountability") in the new American Education Finance Association Handbook of Research in Education Finance and Policy, let me blurb that volume here. 40 chapters strong and including just about every education policy topic imaginable, this is the mother of all research handbooks. For those of us who complain that we can't find good literature reviews to use as course materials, the whining stops here. More details and order form at the link above.

Cool people you should know: Karolyn Tyson

Karolyn Tyson is a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work focuses on the developmental trajectories of African-American children and the ways that schools are organized to either support or inhibit black students' academic and social growth.

Cool findings:

• Based on a study of eight North Carolina public high schools, Tyson found that evidence of a "burden of acting white" was limited to a small subset of schools. Arguing that Fordham and Ogbu's study was flawed because of its lack of a comparison group, she found that peer pressure against high achievement is prevalent among teenagers regardless of race. You can read about her study of "acting white" in this NY Times article.
  
  
• How schools are organized helps to predict when this stigma becomes race-oriented, producing a burden of "acting white" for black students, and when it becomes class-based, producing a burden of "acting high and mighty" for low-income whites. In particular, racially and socioeconomically polarized tracking patterns were associated with these twin burdens.

Cool people you should know: Jennifer Russell

There have been a number of pop books claiming that American childhood has fundamentally changed and is not just about "kid stuff" anymore - but what are academics saying about this question?

Enter Jennifer Russell, a new professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Education. As a doctoral student at Berkeley's School of Education, Russell's dissertation research examined the extent to which kindergartens have shifted from a developmental model emphasizing social skills and play to a year of formal academic instruction. Part of her dissertation focused on how state and local policies, like testing and accountability, influence kindergarten teachers’ instructional practices. Great topic, and really important questions - we'll all stay tuned for her forthcoming papers.

Cool people you should know: Randy Reback

Randy Reback is an economist at Barnard College. He studies loads of stuff, including school accountability, school finance, school choice, and teacher labor markets. You can find his papers here. Some of his cool findings are reported in this post on educational triage, but here are some more:

• The presence of teacher certification programs in colleges affects who goes into teaching: The addition of teacher certification programs that could be completed within four undergraduate years could increase rates of entry into public school teaching by at least 50% among recent graduates of certain selective colleges.


• School choice programs affect housing prices: Reback found that residential properties appreciate significantly in school districts where students are able to transfer to preferred school districts, whereas residential property values decline in districts that accept transfer students.

Cool people you should know: Claudia Buchmann and Claudia Goldin

Plenty of folks will tell you what to name your kids if you want them to assume particular stations in life - so here's my advice: if you want your daughter to be an exceptional social scientist who studies gender, go with Claudia.

Claudia Buchmann (left) is a sociologist at Ohio State, and Claudia Goldin (right) is an economist at Harvard. Both have written recently on the growing female advantage in completing college - see my post on Friday for their cool findings, and the links above for their papers.

Cool people you should know: Jesse Rothstein

Jesse Rothstein is a Princeton economist who has written on a formidable range of topics: racial segregation, affirmative action in law schools, school choice, the value of SATs in predicting college performance, and the effects of students loans on career choices. You can find his papers here.

Cool findings:

* The SAT’s role as a predictor of freshman grades is quite sensitive to students’ background characteristics. Characteristics of students’ schools are particularly important, and account for a large share of the SAT’s predictive power.

* For example, SAT scores are much less predictive of collegiate grade point averages (GPAs) among same-race students from demographically-similar schools than they are in the population at large. For example, racial minorities and students from schools with high concentrations of Blacks, Hispanics, or low-education parents earned lower freshman grades than did White students from high income schools, even when SAT scores were similar.

* High school grades are equally predictive across and within demographic categories, suggesting that grade inflation does not erode the value of GPA comparisons across high schools.

(There is a good policy brief on his site that says more about this study - the bullets above are from this brief.)

Cool people you should know: Linda Renzulli

A charter school scholar to keep an eye on is Linda Renzulli, a sociologist at the University of Georgia. Renzulli has written a number of papers on the social and political conditions that influence the founding of charter schools, and you can find her papers here. She's currently working on a study comparing teacher satisfaction in charter and traditional neighborhood schools.

Cool findings:

• In her study of the state-to-state diffusion of charter school legislation, Renzulli found that states were more likely to pass their own charter school legislation (between 1991 and 1999) when neighboring states already had charter legislation.
  

• In another study, Renzulli found that the number of nonreligious private schools in a county was a strong predictor of the number of applications submitted to open charter schools, i.e. counties with more nonreligious private schools have more charter school applications.
  

Cool people you should know: Doug Lauen

Cool people you should know #3!

This week I've been talking about school choice, so who better to introduce to you than an up and coming school choice researcher. Doug Lauen is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation was about the causes and consequences of Chicago's public school choice programs. For all of you school choice junkies, you can find his papers here.

In his most recent paper, Lauen addressed a gaping hole in school choice research. Most research has focused on individual students and families, and ignored the role of one's surroundings - for example, how disadvantaged one's neighborhood is - in affecting one's likelihood of choosing a non-neighborhood public school or a private school. Lauen takes into account not only individual characteristics, but contextual characteristics. Some of his findings:

• Attending a predominantly black elementary school, living in a predominantly black neighborhood, or living in a neighborhood with a high degree of concentrated disadvantage decreases the chances of attending a selective enrollment school.
  
• Affluence has the opposite effect, increasing students' chances of attending a selective school.
  

Cool people you should know: Tom Corcoran

Cool people you should know returns.

Tom Corcoran is Co-Director of the Center for Policy Research in Education. I once heard him described as "every researcher's favorite practitioner, and every practitioner's favorite researcher," and that pretty much sums it up. He understands the daily rhythms of teachers' lives and gets the ways that schools work.

Fun facts: Corcoran served as the policy advisor for education for Governor Florio of New Jersey (and survived the politics of the Quality Education Act that pre-dated the Abbott v. Burke decision) and director of evaluation and later chief-of-staff of the New Jersey Department of Education.

Here is a link to some of his recent publications. My top pick is an older brief on professional development, "Helping Teachers Teach Well" (1995). His "best practices for professional development" are telling about the ways that our treatment of teachers has changed over the last 12 years:

"A number of experts and organizations have suggested that the most promising professional development programs or policies are those that:

• support teacher initiatives as well as school or district initiatives. These initiatives could promote the professionalization of teaching and may be cost-effective ways to engage more teachers in serious professional development activities.
  
• are grounded in knowledge about teaching. Good professional development should encompass expectations educators hold for students, child development theory, curriculum content and design...
• demonstrate respect for teachers as professionals and as adult learners. Professional development should draw on the expertise of teachers and take differing degrees of teacher experience into account."
  

Cool people you should know: Charlie Clotfelter

The first ever cool people you should know!

Charlie Clotfelter is a professor of public policy and economics at Duke. He has studied more things than I can mention here, but two of his most important strands of work focus on teacher quality and school desegregation. Since this is teacher quality week, I'll focus my attention there, but see his book After Brown as well.

Findings on teacher quality:

• Race and experienced teachers: Most of the research on who is taught by inexperienced teachers focuses on how new teachers are more likely to teach in schools with more black kids. Clotfelter and colleagues Sunny Ladd and Jake Vigdor show that even within the same school, black kids are more likely to be taught by inexperienced teachers than white kids. (See publication #3 at the link for more info.)

• Teacher credentials and student achievement: Clotfelter et al., using better data than previously available (a 10 year time frame and data for all teachers in North Carolina), find that a teacher's experience, test scores and regular licensure all have positive effects on student achievement, with larger effects for math than for reading. Of particular interest is their finding that the benefit of experience peaks at 21-27 years of teaching, though like much other research, they find that much of the returns to experience occur in the first few years of teaching.

Introducing "Cool people you should know"

What's wrong with the current market for educational research?

1) The winner take all phenomenon: Whether it's the market for music, books, or anything else, attention flows to people based on their relative position (think Harry Potter, Norah Jones, or the difference between being on versus off the NYT Book Review Bestsellers list). Attention breeds more attention, and it snowballs. This is also true in educational research. We know a lot about a small number of researchers. There's a lot more out there, though.

2) The Beltway problem: To be fair about Beltway bashing - all "policy reports" aren't coming from inside the Beltway, and undoubtedly there are some useful and rigorous reports being produced. But a lot of them would never see the light of day if they were peer-reviewed. For journalists and lay consumers of educational research, it's often difficult to tell the difference between "good" and "bad" research. (Disclaimer: this is not to say that I'm the authority on research quality. I'm not. But I do have some opinions. You should weigh in, too.)

3) The mystification tendency: There's too great a divide between researchers and teachers. Researchers don't (or don't know how to) translate their work for broader audiences. Yet new policies are justified to educators in terms of "the research," without ever telling teachers where or to whom they might look if they wanted to learn more about "the research."

"Cool people you should know" is my humble attempt to address these problems. From time to time, I'll profile a researcher you may not know about, but should. I'll list some of their coolest findings, with the hope that the good work these folks are doing finds its way into popular parlance.

Cool people to date:
1) Charlie Clotfelter
2) Tom Corcoran
3) Doug Lauen
4) Linda Renzulli
5) Jesse Rothstein
6) Claudia Buchmann and Claudia Goldin
7) Randy Reback
8) Jennifer Russell
9) Karolyn Tyson