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What follows is a summary of a Twitter thread I started a few days ago. Feedback suggested it might be useful to compile it here. Here are 12 rough, off-the-cuff ideas about how we might collectively remake academia. Just to get the party started. Please throw yours in too! 1. Hey professor: Ask yourself "What new knowledge does this article contribute to the world? Does the method actually address the research question?" If the answer is no or it does not, for pete's sake please don't be so self-serving as to submit it for publication. 2. Publish for the sake of knowledge dissemination, not in the pursuit of tenure. There should be penalties for publishing bad work! 3. At least 1 out of every 5 publications should contribute a lesson for policy or practice at some level. 4. For every three articles placed in academic journals, write at least one executive summary for public dissemination. For those of you at UW, consider this part of the Wisconsin Idea. You could ask...

You may have noticed the recent near radio silence from Sara on our blog. No, she isn't on a secret mission and hasn't left academia to join the NSA. She, however, has been busy as a bee this past year, starting with giving birth to our daughter , being named a W.T. Grant Scholar , and engaging in important academic research . My pride in her commitment to, excellence in and passion for issues of educational and social inequality is coupled with a recognition of her unwillingness to see academic research relegated to dusty and sometimes impenetrable academic journals. Sara has been aggressive and public with her research and committed to engaging in and communicating her work in a policy relevant manner. That fits a critical need in public policy conversations. That's why I was quite pleased to see Sara's name mentioned among the ranks of the most prominent academics in the nation in the "EduScholar" rankings issued by the American Enterprise Institute's...

Hi folks-- sorry for the long absence-- I'm hoping to hire a postdoc (or doctoral student) in the next year and wondering if any of our readers might be interested? Here are details... Sara ---------------------------- Wisconsin Scholars Longitudinal Study Position Announcement: Funding for Junior Researcher of Color Graduate Project Assistantship or Postdoctoral Fellowship Sara Goldrick-Rab, Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Sociology at UW-Madison, seeks a talented junior researcher of color to join the Wisconsin Scholars Longitudinal Study in 2011 as it prepares to enroll its second cohort of students. The WSLS is the first-ever longitudinal randomized controlled trial of need-based financial aid. It is a mixed-methods study following two cohorts of Wisconsin Pell grant recipients through college and into the workforce. It is led by an interdisciplinary team of researchers, including co-director Douglas N. Harris, and includes collection of administrative,...

On Friday, I wrote a blog item ( 'Misleading Manifesto' ) chiding a group of urban superintendents for misstating educational research in a 'manifesto' published in Sunday's Washington Post . Teacher quality *is* important -- but it does not matter MORE THAN family income and concentrated poverty. I am convinced that too many educational reformers are happy to 'spin' the truth for rhetorical purposes. I think this is exactly what we saw in this manifesto. While this may help to simplify messaging, target solutions at a more narrowly construed problem, and focus in on what education leaders have direct control over, it carries an inherent policy danger along with it. That danger is two-fold: (1) teacher policy reforms may be set up for failure by overstating their potential impact; and (2) more comprehensive strategies desperately needed to combat rising income inequality and growing poverty in our nation may be discounted and ignored. For me, this isn't...

I'm sorry, but the "manifesto" published in today's Washington Post really pisses me off because it is built upon a false premise. It is authored by a number of urban school superintendents, including Chicago's Ron Huberman, New York City's Joel Klein, Washington DC's Michelle Rhee, and New Orleans' Paul Vallas. And it -- intentionally? -- misstates educational research. "[T]he single most important factor determining whether students succeed in school is not the color of their skin or their ZIP code or even their parents' income -- it is the quality of their teacher." No. That is patently false. Now, listen here. I work for a teacher-focused, non-profit organization, the New Teacher Center (NTC). Wouldn't it be powerful to go out and say that teachers matter more than ANYTHING else? But they don't. In terms of school-based variables, they do. But in terms of all variables that impact students, they simply do not. No researc...

Today, Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. released the final report of its IES/U.S Department of Education -funded randomized controlled trial (RCT) of comprehensive teacher induction. It shows a statistically significant and sizeable impact on student achievement in mathematics (0.20 standard deviations) and reading (0.11 standard deviations) of third-year teachers who received two years of robust induction support. That's the equivalent of moving students from the 50th to 54th percentile in reading achievement and from the 50th to 58th percentile in math achievement. As a basis of comparison, I note that in 2004, Mathematica conducted a RCT of Teach for America (TFA). In that study , it compared the gains in reading and math achievement made by students randomly assigned to TFA teachers or other teachers in the same school. The results showed that, on average, students with TFA teachers raised their mathematics test scores by 0.15 standard deviations (versus 0.20 standard d...

The recent decision by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) to hold a news conference condemning Arizona's new immigration law was somewhat unpredictable, and according to at least a few observers, unwise. For example, Rick Hess told the Chronicle of Higher Education it wasn't "smart politics" to "baldly politicize the role of research." The Chronicle 's editors fanned the flames further by titling its article, "Education-research group puts itself on the border of advocacy." Oh, the horror--research and advocacy meeting, having coffee, perhaps even deciding to date. The children which could result are feared by PhDs everywhere, particularly those evil twins: Compromised Objectivity and Biased Conclusions. Of course academia trains us to think, like Hess, that research is worthy only when fully divorced from politics. Our research questions should be derived from theory, stemming only from the reading of great books and dusty...

Congratulations to my wife, Sara Goldrick-Rab , who was one of only four academics named yesterday as a 2010 William T. Grant Scholar ! UPDATE: University of Wisconsin-Madison press release . The W. T. Grant Scholars Program supports promising early-career researchers from diverse disciplines, who have demonstrated success in conducting high-quality research and are seeking to further develop and broaden their expertise. Candidates are nominated by a supporting institution and must submit five-year research plans that demonstrate creativity, intellectual rigor, and a commitment to continued professional development. Every year, four to six Scholars are selected and each receives $350,000 distributed over a five-year period. The four new William T. Grant Scholars and their research projects are: Elizabeth Oltmans Ananat, Ph.D. , Assistant Professor, School of Public Policy, Duke University -- “Economic and Social Determinants of the Educational, Occupational, and Residential...

Education Next apparently has provided a platform for school choice advocate George Mitchell to shill for voucher schools outside of the state of Wisconsin. Here is his latest spin on a study that shows the high school graduation rate to be 12 points higher in seven Milwaukee voucher schools compared with 23 Milwaukee public high schools. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story by Erin Richards provides the crucial quote regarding causation from the study's author, John Robert Warren , a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota: "We still don't know whether it's going to the voucher school that causes you to be more likely to graduate, or if it's something about the kinds of families that send their kids to voucher schools would make them more likely to graduate," he said. Then there's the whole question of which and how the voucher and public high schools were chosen for purposes of comparison. More questions than answers. Unlike Mitchell, I ...

The Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management -- an organization not widely known outside of academia and technical policy circles -- puts on truly meaty conferences. I've attended three APPAM conferences to date, including the Annual Fall Research Conference going on in Washington, DC this week. Education is merely one strand at APPAM, but the sessions feature some of the biggest names in educational research addressing some very policy relevant issues. The current conference features sessions on value-added modeling, school choice, teacher certification and teacher induction, teacher performance pay, financial aid, college persistence, and more. The session I attended yesterday on "Using Value Added To Assess Teacher Effectiveness" was excellent. It featured four papers each of which I will undoubtedly oversimplify in this brief blog post. (I encourage you to seek out the papers and read them closely -- below I've linked to those that are available.) ...

Friday's Chronicle reports on a new study that points out how difficult it can be to identify which colleges and universities have no-loans policies designed to enhance affordability. Author Laura Perna and her colleagues find that the majority of elite institutions with these policies fail to advertise them in ways that are accessible to low-income students and families-- effectively maintaining their status as "bastions of privilege." The researchers then go on to make several helpful suggestions about how colleges could change their tactics to increase awareness and uptake of their progressive efforts. But they could've gone one step further and discussed the incentives colleges have to maintain the status quo-- that is, to continue making their current and former students and staff feel good with liberal actions, garnering attention in elite venues such as the New York Times , without fundamentally changing their overall enrollment demographics or costing too mu...

Once upon a time, college students could pay their tuition with a mix of family support, financial aid, and perhaps a little work. Today, family support and aid are woefully inadequate for a broad swath of undergraduates, and full-time work is common. Is working while in college truly necessary? Are the earnings used for academic expenses related to postsecondary education, or are they frittered away on life's pleasures? Since a handful of studies indicate a negative association between working long hours and rates of degree completion, these questions have taken on broader significance. Unfortunately, few studies track students' income and expenditures in systematic ways. To better understand spending patterns, and attempt to tease out the reasons for those patterns, one would ideally have longitudinal data collected for a large sample of students, and complemented by in-depth interviews with a sub-sample of students to delve more deeply into the reasons underlying decisio...

New research led by Tony Milanowski of the University of Wisconsin-Madison provides more evidence that increasing teacher pay may not be the best approach to attract new teachers to high-need, hard-to-staff urban schools. A key finding of the study -- published in the International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership -- which explored job factors important to pre-service educators was that " working conditions factors , especially principal support, had more influence on simulated job choice than pay level." 'Policy implications' include: "[M]oney might be better spent to attract, retain, or train better principals than to provide higher beginning salaries to teachers in schools with high-poverty or a high proportion of students of color." "[I]nduction programs and curricular flexibility are important to new teachers. The finding that induction programs are attractive, combined with evidence that such programs can be effective in reducing tea...

Given the recent spate of federally-funded studies showing no effect of a variety of educational innovations and interventions, my predicted answer to the question ('Can Teachers' Talent Translate Elsewhere?') posed in this Houston Chronicle story is "no." I worry, however, that the basic premise of the federally funded Talent Transfer Initiative is faulty and builds upon the notion of teaching (as reinforced by popular culture) as an individual rather than as a collective pursuit. Can 'superteachers' walk into dysfunctional school cultures and work magic that can result in a quantifiable impact on student learning? Some surely can. (It's too bad we can't clone Jamie Escalante and Frank McCourt, isn't it?) More important to ask is, should we expect them to? What is more desperately needed than an expensive scheme to redistribute 'superteachers' is a serious attention to teaching and learning conditions . My New Teacher Center coll...