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Hoxby's study examined 43 charter schools throughout the city. The schools she researched are noted on this map with red stars.

New York City charter school students are performing so well on state tests that they may soon catch up to students in Scarsdale, the upscale suburb north of the city, according to an extensive update of a multi-year charter study released today.

The optimistic projection stems from researchers’ finding that the boost charter schools give does not taper off, but is steady throughout elementary school and middle school and even into high school.

“It seems to be really stable as an effect,” said Stanford University economist Caroline Hoxby, who directed the study.

Hoxby and her team studied 43 charter schools in New York City serving elementary, middle and high school students. They compared students who applied and were accepted into charter schools in 2000 by random lottery to those who applied but did not receive a seat.

By the time charter school students reached the eighth grade, in 2008, they scored on average 30 points higher on state math tests than students who remained in traditional public schools, the researchers found.

That’s almost the equivalent of closing the average achievement gap between students in traditional public schools in Harlem and students in Scarsdale, the affluent New York suburb north of the city where students take the same standardized tests. The average Harlem-Scarsdale math score gap is between 35 and 40 points, so the charter school students close that gap by about 86 percent. (more…)

The importance of raising teacher quality and a ramped-up declaration of support for charter schools are the education points getting attention from Bill Gates’ first annual letter about the state of his philanthropic giving. But here’s another really important point that Gates makes about his efforts to improve American education:

Unlike scientists developing a vaccine, it is hard to test with scientific certainty what works in schools. If one school’s students do better than another school’s, how do you determine the exact cause? But the difficulty of the problem does not make it any less important to solve. (Emphasis mine.)

A hint at how the foundation might improve educational research is in my feature on the Gates Foundation’s new direction from late last year:

One initiative will invest about $7 million in a partnership between three research groups, the Educational Testing Service, the Rand Corporation, and a University of Michigan research group, which will study ways to measure teacher effectiveness. The goal is to find “fairer, more powerful, and more reliable measures” than current standardized tests provide, the foundation’s director of education programs, Vicki Phillips, said.

Updating the shoebox-with-a hole-in-the-top outside the principal’s office, SchoolTipline lets children and parents report bullying to school administrators anonymously. If the school doesn’t read the tip, it even sends a reminder email a few days later.

Administrators using the service are willing to take the risk that they might get a few bad tips in with the good ones, the site’s founder told Teacher Magazine, because it makes children feel comfortable sharing things who might otherwise stay silent. Schools can require that students set up a log-in before sending a tip, which SchoolTipline says will help deter false tips.

Following up on an anonymous tip seems tricky, but at least it brings to the adults’ attention situations that can be hard to spot; principals can alert teachers to keep an eye out for certain kinds of behavior, increasing the likelihood of catching a bully in the act.

A handful of New York City schools are listed on the site, but none appear to be actively using it. Interested schools can sign up for a free pilot, and anyone can send an automatic email to a school suggesting they sign up.

Meanwhile, a study published in this month’s Archives of General Psychiatry found that early childhood behavior patterns can help predict which children will be bullied, perhaps making intervention possible:

The study found that children who were aggressive at 17 months of age were more likely to become victims in preschool than their less aggressive peers. Children exposed to harsh parenting were more likely to be chronic victims, as were those from poorer families.

“These results suggest that early preventive interventions should target both child- and parent-level risks, and focus on alternatives to harsh and aggressive interactions,” the author wrote.

How does your school, or your child’s, handle bullying?

Forget safety or motivation – the real reason to give a child a cell phone is to promote literacy. Newsweek reports that though many parents and English teachers worry that texting is the downfall of standard English, linguistic studies show a link between fluent texting and literacy skills:

In one British experiment last year, children who texted—and who wielded plenty of abbreviations—scored higher on reading and vocabulary tests. In fact, the more adept they were at abbreviating, the better they did in spelling and writing. Far from being a means to getting around literacy, texting seems to give literacy a boost.

Kids who got cell phones earliest had the highest scores. Language skills build upon language exposure – of any kind – says David Crystal, author of Txtng: the Gr8 Db8, who studied texting language and found it both not very deviant and part of the on-going evolution of language.

As long as kids learn how to code-switch, or choose the appropriate form of language for a given situation, we can accept – or even embrace – the ways they play with language on their cell phones.

(Via Joanne Jacobs)

America’s schools systematically fail to educate black males as well as they educate other students, according to a new report by the Schott Foundation for Public Education, Given Half a Chance: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males.

If Black students did poorly in all schools, we would plausibly seek solutions to the problem of their achievement among those students themselves. The same would be the case if, in schools with majority Black enrollments, Black students did poorly and the other students did well. But in reality, Black students in good schools do well. At the same time, White, non-Hispanic students who attend schools where most of the students are Black and their graduation rates are low, also do poorly. The crisis of the education of Black males sits squarely in the middle of the crisis America faces as we work to create a world-class public education system that will support and maintain the values of a fair and equitable democratic society.

According to the report, in New York State, 39 percent of black male students graduated from high school in 2005-06, compared to 75 percent of white male students, and far more black male students performed at the Below Basic level on all sections of the NAEP tests compared to white male students. Also, as the report points out, on the eighth grade NAEP reading assessment, “virtually none reach the Advanced level.” Furthermore, black males in New York State are about 5 times less likely to be placed in Gifted and Talented programs, and nearly 3 times more likely to be classified as mentally retarded.

(more…)