Caroline Minter Hoxby - Getting the most out of education data

Martin A. Davis, Jr. / February 23, 2006

Winner of the 2006 Prize for Distinguished Scholarship

Editor's Note: Earlier this month the Fordham Foundation announced the winners of fourth Fordham Prizes for Excellence in Education: Distinguished Scholarship, and Valor. This week, we profile the Distinguished Scholarship winner-Caroline Minter Hoxby of Harvard University. Next week we'll profile the winners for Valor-Michael Feinberg and Dave Levin, founders of KIPP.

Harvard economist Caroline M. Hoxby isn't interested in proving or disproving anyone's agenda; she's all about applying thoughtful analysis to questions about student learning. "I like to stay out of politics and to do my research," she says. And Hoxby would have her wish were it not for one detail: she's as adept a storyteller as she is a number-cruncher. And this fact, inevitably, keeps her in the media spotlight.

Hoxby caught Harvard's attention early. She completed her undergraduate work there in 1988, and the school wasted little time bringing her back as a faculty member in 1994, just after she earned her doctorate in economics from M.I.T. She gained tenure just three short years later.

She first came to national prominence in 2000 when she published "Does Competition Among Public Schools Benefit Students and Taxpayers?" in the American Economic Review. Though written for, and in the language of, economists, that work quickly found a broader audience, namely partisans in the school choice debate. Her paper compared urban areas having only one or a few large school districts to those with many smaller districts. She

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Caroline Minter Hoxby - Getting the most out of education data

Un-capped potential

February 23, 2006

An eleventh-hour compromise between Wisconsin's Governor Jim Doyle, a Democrat, and Republican state House Speaker John Gard just might resuscitate Milwaukee's voucher program. Following months of political stalling, the governor and speaker worked out an agreement that would expand the cap on students in the program from roughly 15,000 to 22,000. It would also require voucher schools to work toward improving their quality (see here for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's series on this sticky issue). Gard correctly noted, "The schools would be devastated if we didn't pass the bill. You would see a number of schools close." But that outcome doesn't seem to bother many in the state legislature, where Democratic opposition to vouchers remains strong. The New York Times's John Tierney did find one young Democrat willing to buck the partisan trend in favor of better options for urban kids. Jason Fields, a first-term representative and supporter of the voucher program, asks, "If the Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of the little guy, where do we get off opposing a chance to help those with the least of all?" We suspect the folks at Fields's local teachers union might have an answer.

"DPI rationing plan would sting schools," by Alan J. Borsuk, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, February 20, 2006

"Let Your People Stay," by John Tierney, New York Times, February 21, 2006 (paid subscription required)

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Un-capped potential

The right stuff

February 23, 2006

At a time when schools of education are struggling to justify their very existence (see here), you might think they would seize on the No Child Left Behind Act as an opportunity. Here's a law aimed at achieving greater social justice by improving the learning of poor and minority children; helping to accomplish such a worthy goal would be an inspiring mission for any teacher preparation program, right? Ha. Listen to Barry Wilson, president of the Iowa Association of Colleges for Teacher Education: "I would say in many ways it's not a good time to be a teacher....Going to teach at a school identified as needing improvement is very challenging. In a sense, your school has been tarred. Teachers are blamed." Well, that's one (cynical) way of looking at it. Given that kind of leadership, it's not surprising when a young teacher candidate reports, "My largest fear as I enter the teaching field is that I will be overwhelmed with NCLB." We wonder where she picked up that notion. Perhaps this phenomenon isn't all bad; it takes a different breed of teacher to succeed in the age of accountability. People such as student-teacher Ben Nickels, who isn't cowed by the challenges. "Seeing kids learn is a lot of fun to me," he explains. Now that's a positive disposition.

"Fewer opt to be teachers," by Lynn Campbell, Des Moines Register, February 17,

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The right stuff

No cartoon controversy

February 23, 2006

At what point does cultural sensitivity compromise standards? That's the question recently faced in St. Paul, Minnesota, by Higher Ground Academy, a charter school that has a 70 percent Muslim population. As many Westerners are now aware, visual depictions of Muhammad are strictly forbidden in Islam, and among more-traditional Muslims, the ban extends to all humans and animals. So how, the principal wondered, could the school teach art without offending the values of many of its families? He consulted with the local imam and hired a nonprofit arts group, ArtStart, to solve the problem. The state requires that K-3 students "understand the elements of visual art, including color, line, shape, form, texture, and space." So out went figure drawings, masks, and puppets, and in came landscapes and geometric patterns. Parents and students appear content. Is this a triumph of market-based education reform, with a savvy principal giving his customers what they want? Or is it a capitulation of the common school ideal, the first step toward the Balkanization of American schools?

"The Art of Compromise," by Doug Belden, St. Paul Pioneer Press, February 17, 2006

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No cartoon controversy

Mathews says the unspeakable

February 23, 2006

In a President's Day op-ed, Washington Post education writer Jay Mathews makes a simple but strong case for that well-worn phrase, "teaching to the test," which has, according to Mathews, been undeservedly slandered. A Google search of "teaching to the test" yields over 59 million hits, almost all of which are negative. But Mathews rightly points out that when teachers teach to their own tests, nobody has a problem-people trust that individual teachers have students' best interests at heart. But it is individual teachers, thousands of them (who presumably still have students' best interests at heart), who design the state tests that elicit such ire. And teachers aren't actually teaching to tests anyway; they're teaching to state standards. Very few people are against standards-based education, because having standards simply makes sense. If we weren't so busy playing semantic games, Mathews explains, we could "instead turn the discussion to what methods of instruction work best or how much time our children should spend studying." Of course, that's much less fun than throwing bombs and making speeches.

"Let's Teach to the Test," by Jay Mathews, Washington Post, February 20, 2006

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Mathews says the unspeakable

A new twist on differential pay

February 23, 2006

Terence Braxton is in trouble. The Escambia County, Florida, middle school gym teacher is accused of taking bribes from his students. Before his syndicate was shut down, individual youngsters could buy their way out of class activities by paying Braxton a dollar a day. Official charges accuse Braxton of taking about $230 from six students, but authorities believe perhaps 250 students had, at one time or another, paid the dollar fee. If six kids coughed up $230, Braxton's take from 250 middle schoolers would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $9500. But in Gadfly's view, Braxton is being falsely accused of a "crime" he didn't commit. If anything, the gym teacher should be applauded for providing his students a valuable lesson in American government-and in life. Money buys influence, and in the real world, when successful people don't want to do something (sit-ups, run the mile, pay taxes on their Indian casino profits) they pay to get out of it. The sooner these youngsters understand that, the better, and Braxton ought to be commended for providing the instruction.

"Get out of gym for a buck?,"by Melissa Nelson, Associated Press, February 19, 2006

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A new twist on differential pay

The Toolbox Revisited: Paths to Degree Completion from High School to College

February 23, 2006

Clifford Adelman
U.S. Department of Education
February 2006

A college degree is a good predictor of economic success. In 2003, full-time workers with bachelor's degrees were paid an average salary 62 percent higher than full-time employees with only high school diplomas. Other studies show university grads succeeding in other ways, as well: they have lower smoking rates, for example, and are far less likely to be incarcerated. Adelman's study, which replicates an earlier Ed Department examination, reaches back to the K-12 system and seeks to identify the behaviors of secondary school students that lead to the completion of a bachelor's degree. It started with a sample of eighth graders in 1988 and tracked them through 2000. (The earlier study tracked the high school class of 1982 through the year 1993.) It "looks for the features of academic history that are realistically subject to change by institutions." Rather than worry about immutable characteristics such as socio-economic status, Toolbox Revisited is concerned with identifying how schools can revamp their policies and curricula to push more young people into the degree-earning ranks. Its major finding is that students who enter universities with strong academic backgrounds, and those who have taken challenging "Gateway" courses that count for college credit (like AP), are more likely to graduate with a postsecondary degree. Seventy-five percent of students in the class of 1992 who took Precalculus received bachelor's degrees, compared to only 7 percent of those who never advanced

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The Toolbox Revisited: Paths to Degree Completion from High School to College

Tough Love for Schools: Essays on Competition, Accountability, and Excellence

February 23, 2006

Frederick M. Hess
The AEI Press
2006