AGI Topics

AGI Projects on Quality Instruction

The "High School Value Added" project is a collaboration with the Massachusetts State Department of Education. Using data from the MCAS test for 8th and 10th graders, the AGI is identifying high schools in the state that produce the greatest learning gains in reading and English language arts from the end of 8th grade to the end of 10th grade. Harvard faculty and students working with the AGI will conduct case studies in a selected group of schools in order to understand what they did in order to produce the measured gains. Gains among students receiving special education services are a special focus.

AGI Conference Reports: In 2008, the AGI published its first research report based on the June 2008 Annual Research-to-Practice conference "GETTING IT DONE: Raising Achievement and Closing Gaps in Whole School Systems: Recent Advances in Research and Practice". The AGI is currently working on its second report based on the June 2009 conference "Why Teachers Improve (and How): High School Supervision and Professional Community Toward Excellence with Equity".

Video Presentations on Quality Instruction

Title	Presenter(s)	Date	Realplayer format	PowerPoint
Foundations for Success	Jason Snipes	June 2006	video	powerpoint
Teacher Quality Matters!	Tom Kane	June 2006	video
Teacher Recruitment, Retention and Assignment	Brian Jacob	June 2006	video
Class-to-Class Instructional Quality Differences and How They Matter	Ronald Ferguson	June 2006	video	powerpoint
The Critical Importance of Staying On Track: Findings from CCSR and MDRC Studies	Janet Quint	June 2006	video	powerpoint
School Quality and the Black-White Achievement Gap	Steven Rivkin	June 2006	video
Talking About Race in Education	Mica Pollock	June 2006	video
Five Critical Challenges of High School Reform	Janet Quint	June 2006	video
Examining the Effectiveness of Scaling Up First Things First	Ed Deci	June 2006	video
What Works in What Context and How?	Charles Payne	June 2006	video
How English teachers lead students to code-switch linguistically.	Rebecca Wheeler	June 2007	video	powerpoint
Accountability and School Improvement	Richard Elmore	June 2007	video	powerpoint
Teacher Assignment in Low-income Schools	Susan Moore Johnson	June 2007	video	powerpoint
Institutional and Everyday forms of Discrimination and Achievement Outcomes	Amanda Lewis	June 2007	video	powerpoint
How do we get get educators to consider and engage in the topic of race and opportunity?	Mica Pollock	June 2007	video
How Instruction and Peer Culture Affect Student Engagement in Several Domains: Evidence from the Tripod Project	Ron Ferguson	June 2007	video	powerpoint
Longer Days in Better Schools: The Expanded Learning Model	Christopher Gabrieli, Robin Harris, Carol Johnson, Jeffrey Riley	December 2008	video
Beyond the Bubble: Helping ALL Students to Excel	Richard Elmore, Tom Hehir, Michelle Burgos, Yvonne Allen	April 2008	video
Problems in High Schools that Attempt to Improve	Karin Chenoweth	June 2009	video	powerpoint
Project Based Learning: Manor New Technology High School, Manor, TX	Steve Zipkes	June 2009	video	powerpoint
Project Based Learning: Naperville Central and North High Schools, Naperville, IL	Jodi Wirt and Nina Menis	June 2009	video	powerpoint
High Poverty and Vocational Schools: Brighton High School, Boston, MA	Joyce Campbell	June 2009	video	powerpoint
Building Capacity to Serve English Language Learners in U.S. Schools	Jana Echevarria, Nonie K. Lesaux, Donna Dooley, Paul Reville	April 2009	video
High Poverty and Vocational Schools: Worcester Technical High School, Worcester, MA	Sheila Harrity	June 2009	video	powerpoint
High Poverty and Vocational Schools: Brockton High School, Brockton, MA	Maria Lefort	June 2009	video	powerpoint
Project Based Learning: Robert A. Taft Information Technology High School, Cincinnati, OH	Anthony Smith	June 2009	video	powerpoint
Why Improving High School Instruction is so Difficult	Jon Saphier	June 2009	video	powerpoint
Profiles of Progress and Performance at the Conference?s Featured High Schools	Ronald Ferguson	June 2009	video	powerpoint
English Language Arts: Randolph High School, Randolph, MA	Bill Conard	June 2009	video	powerpoint
English Language Arts: Amherst Regional High School, Amherst, MA	Kristen Iverson	June 2009	video	powerpoint
English Language Arts: Boston Latin Academy, Boston, MA	Lydia Francis-Joyner and Miranda Lutyens	June 2009	video	powerpoint
Math: TechBoston High School, Boston, MA	Mary Skipper	June 2009	video	powerpoint
Math: Lynn English High School, Lynn, MA	Kathy Bonnevie	June 2009	video	powerpoint
Math: Naperville Central and North High Schools, Naperville, IL	Jodi Wirt and Nina Menis	June 2009	video	powerpoint
Thurgood Marshall Academy Public Charter School, Washington, DC	Alexandra Pardo	June 2009	video	powerpoint
Paint Branch High School, Montgomery County, MD	John Haas	June 2009	video	powerpoint
Lee High School, Houston, TX	Steve Amstutz	June 2009	video	powerpoint
Wrapup: Marian Brooks, Karin Chenoweth, Jim Connell, Richard Murnane	Marian Brooks, Karin Chenoweth, Jim Connell, Richard Murnane	June 2009	video

Papers on Quality Instruction

Title Abstract	Author(s)	Date	Paper
A Problem-Solving Approach to Designing and Implementing a Strategy to Improve Performance
The job of school district leadership teams is to solve system-level performance problems. Graduation rates, achievement differences between racial and ethnic groups, college readiness, and early grade literacy are but a few of the problems faced by today’s district leaders. Since 2003, faculty members of the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP) at Harvard University have worked with more than a dozen district leadership teams on improving performance across their entire systems using the PELP Coherence Framework.1 The Framework places the instructional core (all of the dimensions of teaching and learning) at the center of a school district’s work and connects it to the interdependent pieces of the organization through a strategy to improve performance (Exhibit 1). A number of districts have used the Coherence Framework to successfully diagnose organizational problems, but have asked for more help with strategy design and implementation. In response, we developed a companion tool to help teams work through a problem-solving process that facilitates the design and implementation of a strategy for continuous improvement2 (Exhibit 2). In addition to describing the process, this note provides key questions that leadership teams should answer for each step in the process, as well as illustrative examples (Exhibit 3).	Stacey Childress, Geoff Marietta	June 12, 2008	paper
A Program to Close the Fourth Grade Literacy Black-White Achievement Gap
Applied Dissertation, Nova Southeastern University, Fischler School of Education and Human Services. The purpose of this study was to narrow the achievement gap between Black and White students on the state English language arts test in Grade 4. The researcher sought to answer 4 questions: (a) Will the intervention result in a 5 percentage point narrowing of the achievement gap? (b) Will working with a coach improve teacher effectiveness? (c) Will professional development, provided by the literacy coach, impact teacher skill in implementation of balanced literacy strategies? (d) Will teachers', coaches', and principals' awareness of the achievement gap affect school policy and instruction? The researcher posed the hypothesis that coaching and implementation of balanced literacy would increase student achievement and therefore narrow the achievement gap. The researcher conducted an action research study from November 2004 to June 2005 at a school that was selected based on the existence of achievement gaps between the Black and White students. The researcher trained the coach and teachers during focus group meetings to look at data, assess student work, and work collaboratively to improve their practice. The researcher used a text and education journal to conduct a study group on the achievement gap with the study participants. The results of the study indicated that coaching and implementation of balanced literacy did not narrow the achievement gap for 4th graders on the state English Language Arts exam by the expected 5 percentage points. The results also indicated that coaching and collaborative practice among teachers did improve teacher effectiveness in meeting students' individual needs and implementation of balanced literacy; and the study group increased awareness of the achievement gap that affected teacher practice and school leadership decisions for program implementation.	Charlene B. Smith	2006	paper
Black Americans reduce the racial IQ gap: Evidence from standardization samples
It is often asserted that blacks have made no IQ gains on whites, despite relative environmental gains, and that this adds credibility to the case that the black/white IQ gap has genetic origins. Until recently, there have been no adequate data to measure black IQ trends. We analyze data from nine standardization samples for four major tests of cognitive ability. These suggest that blacks have gained 5 or 6 IQ points on non-Hispanic whites between 1972 and 2002. Gains have been fairly uniform across the entire range of black cognitive ability.	William T. Dickens, James R. Flynn	2006	paper
Code-switching: Insights and Strategies for Teaching Standard English in Dialectally Diverse Classrooms
When African American students write "I have two sister and two brother," "Dad jeep out of gas," or "My mom deserve a good man," teachers traditionally diagnose “poor English,” finding that the students are “having problems,” or making “errors” with plurality, possession, or verb agreement, etc. In response, the teacher “corrects” the child’s writing, showing them the “right” way to convey these grammatical points. However, research and longstanding student performance have demonstrated that the traditional correction methods fail to teach African American students the requisite Standard English skills. Linguistic research offers an explanation and a solution. When traditional approaches assess student language as “error-filled,” they misdiagnose student writing performance: students using vernacular language ("My goldfish name is Scaley," etc.) are not making errors in Standard English -- they are following the grammar patterns of the home dialect. This paper documents and illustrates how and why traditional English techniques miss-assess African American students' writing performance. It then a) details a linguistically-informed approach to fostering Standard English mastery in African American classrooms -- contrastive analysis (CA) and code-switching (CS), b) identifies key contrasts between the traditional and the code-switching classroom and c) includes a transcript of one urban educator using contrastive analysis to teach Standard English possessive forms. The paper then sketches a range of scenarios, suggesting how code-switching positively transforms the dialectally diverse classroom. It concludes by reporting NCLB results from a code-switching classroom. An appendix of “graphic organizers” and lesson plans for code-switching is included.	Rebecca S. Wheeler	2000-2007	paper
Cultivating New Routines
Separately as well as in network-based projects, we should expect school districts across the nation to launch a number of important activities over the next few years aimed at narrowing achievement gaps. Research can help by informing, monitoring, documenting and evaluating them. Hopefully, various action-research teams will begin to form in which people from districts come together with professional researchers based on mutual interests and shared commitments. Toward that end, this paper has offered a number of ideas that seem to this author worth considering.	Ronald F. Ferguson	2003	paper
Dynamic Inequality I: Using NELS88 To Analyze Schooling Outcomes Over Time
This paper uses the three years of data in NELS88, from 8th to 10th to 12th grades, to estimate growth functions. The paper begins with an conceptual analysis of dynamic inequality, where initial differences in schooling outcomes are magnified over time — not necessarily in a linear way, but with sudden increases in inequality at particular stages implying non-linear patterns over time. The paper first estimates linear growth functions, relying on the “improved” school finance and its expanded conception of both school and non-school resources. The results, estimated with three-level hierarchical linear models, confirm the divergence of growth trajectories over these 5 years, though including all measures of school and non-school resources sometimes eliminates the divergence (especially among schools). Furthermore, outcomes diverge for different groups defined by gender, race/ethnicity, and class measures, with (for example) black and Latino students, and those with low parental aspirations, diverging from their peers. Finally, experiments with non-linear (quadratic) growth trajectories reveal that on the average they are concave with respect to years in school, as hypothesized by the model of dynamic inequalities, though the dispersion of growth trajectories around the averages are unexpected. The results also reveal that initial black-white and Latino-white differences in outcomes grow wider over time. However, in some cases the parameters reflecting this divergence are reduced by the effects of school resources and measures of student engagement and motivation. One implication is that a reallocation of the most effective school resources, and efforts to restructure schools to improve the motivation and engagement of students, might eliminate more of the growing racial and ethnic gaps.	W. Norton Grubb	May 2006	paper
Foundations for Success: Case Studies of How Urban School Systems Improve Student Achievement
	Jason Snipes, Fred Doolittle, Corinne Herlihy	September 2002	paper
High Poverty Schools and the Distribution of Teachers and Principals
Although many factors combine to make a successful school, most people agree that quality teachers and school principals are among the most important requirements for success, especially when success is defined by the ability of the school to raise the achievement of its students. The central question for this study is how the quality of the teachers and principals in high poverty schools in North Carolina compares to that in the schools serving more advantaged students. A related question is why these differences emerge. The consistency of the patterns across many measures of qualifications for both teachers and principals leaves no doubt that students in the high poverty schools are served by school personnel with lower qualifications than those in the lower poverty schools. Moreover, in many cases the differences are large. Additional evidence documents that the differences largely reflect predictable outcomes of the labor market for teachers and principals. Hence, active policy interventions are needed to counter these forces if the ultimate goal is to provide equal educational opportunity.	Charles Clotfelter, Helen Ladd, Jacob Vigdor, and Justin Wheeler	December, 2007. Forthcoming in NC Law Review	paper
Missing the Inner Intent: The Predictable Failures of Implementation
This chapter describes the continued failure of urban schools to appropriately implement reforms, examines some of the reasons for that and proposes the development of implementation standards as a partial response.	Charles Payne	August 2005	paper
MULTIPLE RESOURCES, MULTIPLE OUTCOMES: TESTING THE “IMPROVED” SCHOOL FINANCE WITH NELS88
This paper develops an expanded approach to educational production functions based on the “improved” school finance, in which school resources are distinguished as simple, compound, complex, and abstract. Using NELS88 data to estimate these production functions for a variety of outcomes, many different types of school resources affect outcomes, prove to be the most powerful explanatory variables.. As expected, non-school resources — certain dimensions of family background, and variables measuring student ability to benefit from instruction — affect outcomes as well. The specific patterns of these results provide a substantial agenda for reforming high schools, particularly in changing curricula, improving instruction and making it more constructivist, and reforming school climate. The results also provide a number of insights into the magnitude and causes of racial, ethic, and class-related gaps in schooling outcomes. These gaps are larger for test scores than for measures of progress through schooling, clarifying that the emphasis on test scores has focused on those schooling outcomes that are most difficult to change. In addition, a large proportion of overall gaps in test scores, often half or more, is explained by the various measures of school and non-school resources, so that these gaps are really due to differences in school and non-school resources. And when prior tests scores are included, most gaps vanish completely. The implication is that efforts to close these different gaps must concentrate on those complex school resources that influence outcomes powerfully, as well as to those dimensions of students motivation and engagement that should respond to school reforms.	W. Norton Grubb	June 2006	paper
Note on the PELP Coherence Framework
In today’s accountability environment, public school districts face an imperative to achieve concrete performance goals related to student achievement. In order to accomplish these goals in all schools, not just some schools, the organizational elements of a district – its culture, structure and systems, resources, stakeholders, and environment – must be managed in a way that is coherent with an explicit strategy to improve teaching and learning in every classroom, in every school. Leaders who have tried to implement a district-wide strategy for improving the achievement of all students know how difficult it is to achieve this coherence. The PELP Coherence Framework is designed to help district leaders identify the key elements that support a district-wide improvement strategy, bring those elements into a coherent relationship with the strategy and each other, and guide the actions of people throughout the district in the pursuit of high levels of achievement for all students.	Stacey Childress, Richard Elmore, Allen S. Grossman, Caroline King	January 31, 2007	paper
Pathways to a Four-Year Degree: Determinants of Transfer and Degree Completion
	Alberto F. Cabrera, Kurt R. Burkum, Steven M. La Nasa	2005	paper
School Quality and the Black-White Achievement Gap
Substantial uncertainty exists regarding the impact of school quality on the black/achievement gap. In this paper we use data from both the Texas Schools Project (TSP) panel data and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey (ECLS) to investigate the contribution of schools to the racial achievement gap in both elementary and middle school. Following a decomposition of changes in the achievement gap into between- and withinschool components, we investigate the effects of specific school variables including teacher experience, student turnover and student racial composition on the black/white differential. One issue that we examine in some detail is the possibility that changes in the racial achievement gap and the effects of specific school characteristics vary by initial achievement and by gender. Our results differ noticeably from the other recent analyses of the black-white achievement gap by providing strong evidence that school quality has a substantial effect on the differential. We find that the majority of the expansion of the achievement gap with age occurs within rather than between schools and the aforementioned school characteristics explains much of the growth in the achievement gap.	Eric A. Hanushek, Steven G. Rivkin	June 2006	paper
Teaching Inequality: How Poor and Minority Students are Shortchanged by Teacher Quality
In 2004, with support from the Joyce Foundation, the Education Trust collaborated with three states—Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin—and their three biggest school systems—Cleveland, Chicago, and Milwaukee—to examine the distribution of teacher quality in those states. In partnership with the Education Trust, teams of stakeholders in each jurisdiction colleced data on teacher distribution and identified patterns. In every case, they found large differences between the qualifications of teachers in the highest-poverty and highest-minority schools and teachers serving in schools with few minority and low-income students. The states and districts and the Education Trust then devised strategies to achieve a more fair distribution to ensure equity in access to quality teachers for low-income and minority students. The report includes the data analysis and findings and recommendations.	Heather G. Peske, Kati Haycock	June 2006	paper
The Academic Achievement Gap in Grades 3 to 8
Using data for North Carolina public school students in grades 3 to 8, we examine achievement gaps between white students and students from other racial and ethnic groups. We focus on successive cohorts of students who stay in the state’s public schools for all six years, and study both differences in means and in quantiles. Our results on achievement gaps between black and white students are consistent with those from other longitudinal studies: the gaps are sizable, are robust to controls for measures of socioeconomic status, and show no monotonic trend between 3rd and 8th grade. In contrast, both Hispanic and Asian students tend to gain on whites as they progress through these grades. Looking beyond simple mean differences, we find that the racial gaps between low-performing students have tended to shrink as students progress through school, while racial gaps between high-performing students have widened. Racial gaps differ widely across geographic areas within the state; very few of the districts or groups of districts that we examined have managed simultaneously to close the black-white gap and raise the relative test scores of black students.	Charles T. Clotfelter, Helen F. Ladd, Jacob L. Vigdor	April 2006	paper
The Role of Family Socioeconomic Resources in the Black-White Test Score Gap Among Young Children
This paper reviews evidence on the family origins of racial differences in young children’s test scores and considers how much of the gap is due to differences in the economic and demographic conditions in which black and white children grow up. Our review of the literature finds that the estimated size of the gaps varies considerably across studies. However, a surprisingly consistent result is that a collection of measures related to family socioeconomic resources appears to account for a little less than half a standard deviation of the black-white test score gap, regardless of the assessments used or the populations studied. We discuss the policy implications of these findings and suggest avenues for future research.	Katherine Magnuson, Greg J. Duncan	2006	paper