Educar

El artículo adjunto comenta el documental reciente sobre el sistema de educación pública fracasado, según el cineasta, en EEUU.  Claro, las complejidades del sistema escolar estadounidense (muy decentralizado, altos flujos de imigrantes con habilidades bajas, segregación racial residencial, fuertes inversiones en actividades extracurriculares-banda, deportes-etc.) hace difícil comparar la productividad del sistema de EEUU con los de países europeos chicos y bastante homogeneos (Finlandia, Suecia, ect.) y asiaticos (Japón, Corea del Sur, etc.) que, en su mayoría tienen modelos mucho más centralizados.

Gregory
http://www.cpce.cl/educar/
---------------
NYTimes
Movie Review
Waiting for Superman
Paramount Pictures

The educational reformer Geoffrey Canada with students in a documentary on public schools.
Students Caught in the School Squeeze
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: September 23, 2010

"One of the saddest days of my life was when my mother told me 'Superman' did not exist," the educational reformer Geoffrey Canada recalls in the opening moments of "Waiting for 'Superman,' " a powerful and alarming documentary about America's failing public school system. "She thought I was crying because it's like Santa Claus is not real. I was crying because no one was coming with enough power to save us."

If Mr. Canada, who was born in the South Bronx and grew up to be one of the country's most charismatic and inspiring educators, is not Superman, he must be a close relative. Those who have read Paul Tough's book, "Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America," will know that the 97-block Harlem Children's Zone, which he founded and runs, is no miracle. The zone is astoundingly successful at getting children through high school and into college. But that success, largely dependent on private money, is a costly product of laborious trial and error.

Mr. Canada and Michelle A. Rhee, the chancellor of the Washington, D.C., public school system since 2007 (she is the seventh superintendent in 10 years), are the principal heroes of the film, directed and narrated by Davis Guggenheim ("An Inconvenient Truth"), who wrote it with Billy Kimball.

Ms. Rhee, who has stridently challenged Washington's educational status quo, has closed ineffective schools and has stood up to the unions that have made it nearly impossible to fire a teacher, no matter how incompetent, once tenure has been granted. But the Washington Teachers' Union refused to vote on a measure under which teachers would give up tenure in exchange for higher salaries based on merit. (Ms. Rhee's status is now in jeopardy after one of her chief supporters, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, lost the Democratic primary election to Vincent C. Gray, the chairman of the City Council. Ms. Rhee and Mr. Gray, who have sparred in recent years, met on Thursday.)

"Waiting for 'Superman' " is filled with disturbing statistics. In Illinois, where one in 57 doctors loses his medical license and one in 97 lawyers loses his law license, only one in 2,500 teachers loses his credentials, because of union rules. The film briefly visits a "rubber room" in New York City where idle teachers accused of misconduct wait months and sometimes years for hearings while drawing full salaries at an annual cost of $65 million.

The resistance to change is personified by Randi Weingarten, the fiery and articulate former head of the United Federation of Teachers, who now runs the American Federation of Teachers. Ms. Weingarten, who is somewhat demonized by the film, is the first to admit that public education is in crisis, but she represents thousands of teachers who depend on tenure.

Caught in the squeeze are students. The film's most emotional moments revolve around five children whose futures depend on winning a lottery to a charter school. Anthony, a Washington fifth grader raised by his grandmother in a bad neighborhood, is among 64 applicants for 24 spots at the Seed School, a public charter school from which 9 out of 10 students go on to college. Francisco, a Bronx first grader, is among 792 applicants for 40 spots at the Harlem Success Academy. Applying to the same school, Bianca, a kindergartner, is one of 767 children competing for 35 spots. Daisy, a fifth grader in East Los Angeles who dreams of being doctor, is among 135 applicants for 10 spots at Kipp LA Prep.

Finally, there is Emily, an eighth grader in Silicon Valley, whose problems with math will place her on a lower academic track if she remains at the same high school in her affluent community. Her best hope is to be accepted at an even better charter school nearby where students aren't placed in such tracks.

In his low-key narration, Mr. Guggenheim acknowledges that charter schools have had mixed success in elevating academic standards and preparing children for college. But in the Harlem Children's Zone, the schools become involved with all aspects of the students' lives from a very young age.

Mr. Guggenheim calls dysfunctional schools "dropout factories." For children growing up in poor neighborhoods where parents lack the resources to send them to private schools, the consequences can be dire, not to mention economically wasteful.

Consider the following statistics cited in the film: the annual cost of prison for an inmate is more than double what is spent on an individual public school student. Eight years after Congress passed the No Child Left Behind act, with the goal of 100 percent proficiency in math and reading, most states hovered between 20 and 30 percent proficiency, and 70 percent of eighth graders could not read at grade level. By 2020, only an estimated 50 million Americans will be qualified to fill 123 million highly skilled, highly paid jobs. Among 30 developed countries, the United States ranks 25th in math and 21st in science.

"Waiting for 'Superman' " doesn't explore the deeper changes in American society that have led to this crisis: the widening gap between rich and poor, the loosening of the social contract, the coarsening of the culture and the despair of the underclass. By showing how fiercely dedicated idealists are making a difference, it is a call to arms.

The movie's happy-sad ending observes the moment of decision as the five children wait to learn if they have won the lotteries. It is sad that the direction of a young life depends on the dropping of a numbered ball from plexiglass box.

"Waiting for 'Superman' " is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). It has mild language and incidental smoking.

Waiting for 'Superman' Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles. Directed by Davis Guggenheim; written by Mr. Guggenheim and Billy Kimball; director of photography, Erich Roland and Bob Richman; edited by Greg Finton, Jay Cassidy and Kim Roberts; original song "Shine" by John Legend; produced by Lesley Chilcott; released by Para- mount Vantage. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes.

-
Gregory Elacqua
--
Director
Instituto de Políticas Publicas
Facultad de Economía y Empresa
Universidad Diego Portales
Ejército 260
Santiago, Chile
56-2-676-2800
56-09-6-206-5993
gregory.elacqua@udp.cl

----------------
La Revista Sábado
El Mercurio

sábado 25 de septiembre de 2010       
   
La cota cero
 
Los estudiantes de la cota cero son los que están en el peor de los mundos.  

Sol Serrano

Las familias chilenas  están, a nivel mundial,  entre las que más  aportan a la educación de sus hijos. Eso es nuevo. La educación pagada en Chile fue históricamente muy minoritaria y se restringió a los colegios  masculinos y femeninos, creados a partir de 1830. La educación superior y colegial pública fue gratuita, desde la fundación del Instituto Nacional, en 1813, y de la Universidad de Chile, en 1842, al igual que los liceos provinciales y la educación primaria, desde 1860. La gratuidad de la educación secundaria y superior pública  fue un vehículo de movilidad social, aunque también una política regresiva de alto costo, a la que accedía sólo una élite generalmente compuesta de los jóvenes  de mayores recursos.  El esquema fue longevo. En 1950 no más de un  10% de los jóvenes en edad de hacerlo iba al liceo,  y sólo un 4 % a la universidad en 1960. Aunque no todas las universidades eran públicas, la mayoría recibía un importante apoyo estatal.

La educación pública educó al país, qué duda cabe, pero con grandes inequidades. Las razones históricas de por qué fue así son  complejas y no puede atribuirse sin más a un Estado injusto. En parte la explicación estriba en que la estructura económica chilena no requirió por mucho tiempo  mano de obra  calificada.

Sea como fuera, el país está pagando y pagará por buen tiempo esa inequidad. Educar a toda la población es una tarea larga, y son siempre los recién llegados al sistema los que pagan dolorosamente las exclusiones heredadas.

La espectacular ampliación de la educación superior en Chile trae  buenas y malas noticias. La mala es que la inequidad no termina, pues  los que han disfrutado  de la educación privada perpetúan sus ventajas al obtener  los puntajes más altos y entrar a las mejores universidades, mientras la buena es que  hay un enorme sector de jóvenes que ingresaron a un nivel que les había estado vedado a sus ancestros por 200 años. Esta ampliación se hizo con ayuda estatal y especialmente con el aporte de las familias, pues muchos de ellos ingresan a universidades privadas o institutos profesionales que no tienen apoyo estatal.

La decisión pública de financiar casi exclusivamente la educación superior tradicional, la misma que aspiraba  a ser redistributiva, terminó por producir una distorsión de inequidad, porque muchos de los jóvenes de escasos recursos entraron a universidades privadas. Además, se desincentivó la educación técnico-profesional al no tener esta tampoco financiamiento público relevante.

Sabemos que la mayoría de estos jóvenes son primera generación en la educación superior lo cual, para ellos,  significa una desventaja competitiva importante, la que se inició  en su niñez hogareña  y que la educación no pudo corregir; sabemos que sólo el mejoramiento de todos los niveles podrá corregir esa desigualdad inicial. Pero ello no basta, pues hay muchas generaciones  a medio camino entre  la masificación de la educación y esa calidad que se está, lentamente, construyendo. Ellos son los de la cota cero, los que han invertido muchísimo en educarse, los que no han recibido ayuda estatal, los que pagan el alma en universidades que a veces ni siquiera están acreditadas, los que creen, porque así lo creyeron sus padres, que cualquier universidad es una universidad.

Los estudiantes de la cota cero son los que están en el peor de los mundos. Tienen pocos instrumentos para enfrentar los desafíos académicos de las universidades de calidad y reciben títulos o se matriculan y desertan de universidades de mala calidad, que no van a darles las oportunidades que esperan y merecen. Finalmente, la educación técnico-profesional adquirirá la importancia y prestigio que le corresponde. El mercado terminará por mostrar cuántas más oportunidades abre un buen instituto profesional que una mala universidad. El Estado puede y debe apurar aquello, poniendo mayores incentivos en ese sector.

Es sorprendente que un sistema de educación superior tan diversificado como el nuestro siga teniendo rigideces históricas, categorías antiguas de un modelo en que sólo se educaban unos pocos. Esas rigideces son la verdadera cota mil que tiene estancada a la cota cero: la subvención a las universidades tradicionales y no a las privadas de calidad; el persistente prestigio asociado a carreras de educación superior universitaria, aunque por su mala calidad no garanticen nada, por sobre la técnico-profesional; el ambiguo estatuto de las universidades públicas que, atadas de manos por el sólo hecho de serlo, ansían actuar como privados y ser financiadas como públicas; un sistema de acreditación legitimado en las instituciones de buena calidad, pero que no discrimina con las que no lo alcanzan y termina por no distinguir nada.

Los estudiantes de la cota cero están repartidos en todo el sistema de educación superior, sin suficiente protección. Es a ellos, al margen de donde estén, a los hay que llegar, pues se encuentran a merced de un mercado escaso en transparencia e información y demasiado plagado de ilusiones viejas. Son ellos quienes pagan caro las tensiones entre las inequidades antiguas y las nuevas oportunidades.  De paso, en ellos nos jugamos el futuro.
--------------------------

El Mercurio
 
El bicentenario de la educación

Domingo 26 de septiembre de 2010

Al celebrarse doscientos años de vida independiente, la educación debió ser un foco principal de las conmemoraciones y el análisis. No lo fue, lamentablemente. En efecto, hay mucho que aprender del pasado.
 
José Joaquín Brunner

A lo largo de la mayor parte de nuestra historia republicana, el sistema educacional se construyó y desarrolló bajo una regla de exclusión social. Durante las fiestas del Centenario, por ejemplo, la mayoría de los niños y jóvenes no asistían a la escuela. Los que sí lo hacían apenas cursaban dos o tres años antes de abandonar las aulas. Sólo un pequeño grupo completaba el ciclo secundario. La educación superior casi no existía; en el país, menos de dos mil alumnos cursaban estudios de este nivel mientras aplaudíamos los primeros cien años de la República.

Según denunció don Darío Salas, dos de cada tres jóvenes en edad escolar crecen sin recibir instrucción alguna, vegetan en ocupaciones sin futuro, se agostan en la miseria material y se pudren en la peor de las miserias, la miseria moral.

La educación primaria pudo universalizarse recién en la década de 1960; la educación secundaria, al comenzar el presente siglo. El nivel terciario se mantuvo exclusivo y excluyente -típicamente una formación de y para las élites-, hasta mediados de los años 1980.

A pesar de tan pobres antecedentes, aspiramos a parecernos -en educación y cultura- a los países nórdicos, a Francia o a Alemania. ¡Ay de nosotros!: la Prusia del viejo Federico II era más educada a fines del siglo XVIII que el Chile semimoderno de mediados del siglo XX.

De hecho, el propio Estado, a través de erradas políticas, segmentó tempranamente el sistema público de enseñanza, volviendo inviable una educación común de similar calidad para todos. Distinguió liceos de excelencia -igual como lo hace el actual gobierno- y les adosó unas preparatorias selectivas y de mejor calidad que la escuela común, la que debió limitarse a atender a los niños de familias pobres.

La idea de que la educación desempeñó en Chile alguna vez una poderosa función de integración o cohesión social es un mito de clase ilustrada, la única que hasta los años 60 del pasado siglo se benefició de una educación de mejor nivel. Por su lado, la mayoría de la gente acomodada comenzó temprano a formar a sus hijos en un circuito de educación pagada y segregada del resto del sistema, según observó Amanda Labarca a inicios de los años 1930: "Gran parte del elemento de la alta burguesía dejó de frecuentar los liceos, ora por consideraciones religiosas, por ese afán exclusivista y aristocratizante a que responden los colegios particulares a la moda, ora porque los enemigos del estado docente no han perdido ocasión para exponer al público sus debilidades, defectos y miserias".

En verdad, el estado docente -contrario a la retórica oficialmente aceptada- fue siempre sólo una parte del sistema educacional chileno, el cual desde su origen se constituyó con una fisonomía mixta, segmentando los canales de escolarización según clases sociales y grupos de estatus.

Luego, si hubiésemos observado la historia educacional de la nación desde el promontorio del Bicentenario, quizá habríamos adquirido un sentido más realista de las enormes dificultades que enfrenta hoy este sistema para transformarse en un auténtico canal de movilidad social, dejando atrás su adscripción clasista y la regla educar para dividir.

En cambio, al haber desperdiciado esta oportunidad es probable que continuemos confundidos por los mitos del pasado, pensando que la educación ha sido una fortaleza de la República y no un motivo de sus divisiones, rezagos y dificultades para establecerse plenamente en la modernidad.
-
Gregory Elacqua
--
Director
Instituto de Políticas Publicas
Facultad de Economía y Empresa
Universidad Diego Portales
Ejército 260
Santiago, Chile
56-2-676-2800
56-09-6-206-5993
gregory.elacqua@udp.cl

El estudio experimental más rigoroso hasta la fecha en EEUU (POINT) que examina el efecto de programas de pago por merito de docentes en el rendimiento escolar de sus alumnos demuestra que casi no tienen un efecto. Como señala Helen Ladd, profesor de economía y políticas públicas de la Universidad de Duke, "A lot of the discussion about performance pay is based on a faulty assumption that the reason we don't have higher test scores is that teachers are shirking their responsibilities." Este estudio derriba esta creencia.

Algunos expertos han criticado el estudio porque no explora el impacto del pago por merito en otros resultados. Por ejemplo, Eric Hanushek, economista de Stanford mantiene que "the biggest role of incentives has to do with selection of who enters and who stays in teaching--how incentives change the teaching corps through entrance and exits." Este estudio no dice nada sobre este punto.

Gregory
http://www.cpce.cl/educar/

--------------
Education Week
Published Online: September 21, 2010
Merit Pay Found to Have Little Effect on Achievement
By Stephen Sawchuk

The most rigorous study of performance-based teacher compensation ever conducted in the United States shows that a nationally watched bonus-pay system had no overall impact on student achievement--results released today that are certain to set off a firestorm of debate.

Nearly 300 middle school mathematics teachers in Nashville, Tenn., voluntarily took part in the Project on Incentives in Teaching, a three-year randomized experiment conducted by researchers affiliated with the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University. It was designed to study the hypothesis that a large monetary incentive would cause teachers to seek ways to be more effective and boost student scores as a result.

But it yielded only two small positive findings, limited to 5th graders in the second and third year of the experiment. No effects were seen for students in grades 6-8 in any year of study.

At the same time, however, participating teachers did not report finding the pay program's goals for students out of reach or its impact on school culture damaging, two concerns that have been among those voiced by opponents of performance pay.
Bonus Awards
SOURCE: National Center on Performance Incentives

The implementation of the pay program "did not set off significant negative reactions of the kind that have attended the introduction of merit pay elsewhere," the study's authors write. "But neither did it yield consistent and lasting gains in test scores. It simply did not do much of anything."

The findings arrive in a highly charged teacher-quality policy environment, in which many states and districts, with support from the Obama administration, are overhauling current practices for preparing, evaluating, and compensating teachers.

And they come at a particularly inopportune time for the U.S. Department of Education, which is scheduled to announce a fresh slate of grantees this month under a federal program designed to seed merit-pay programs for teachers and principals.
Union Cooperation

The study, known as POINT for the Project on Incentives in Teaching, was designed by the researchers, with the input of the 76,000-student school district and the support of the local teachers' union affiliate and the Tennessee Education Association. Matthew G. Springer, the director of the Nashville-based center, cited the unions' cooperation as a crucial factor in the study's successful implementation.

The executive director of the Tennessee Education Association said the reputation of the researchers played an important role in the union's decision to sign on. "We thought it was a chance to work with researchers whose processes and reputation we trust, and they were coming at this question with no particular ideology," said Al Mance. "We said, 'OK, this is something we really want to know. We won't have a better opportunity than this.' "

The program was instituted in Nashville between 2006-07 and 2008-09 and covered 296 middle school math teachers in grades 5-8.

Participating teachers, all volunteers, were assigned to either a treatment group eligible to receive significant pay bonuses or a control group earning normal wages. Those in the treatment group were rewarded with bonuses between $5,000 and $15,000 based on whether their students' achievement rose by a specified amount over the course of a year. The gains were calculated using a value-added methodology designed to filter out other aspects that could have influenced the scores.

The teachers were also randomized in clusters, so that there was at least one treatment and one control teacher in every middle school. And the program contained no quotas, so all teachers whose students performed at the specified targets earned the additional pay.

Over the course of the study, attrition reduced the number of participating teachers to only 148, and researchers carefully tracked that pattern over time to make sure it did not change the equivalence of the two groups in such a way as to skew the results. Only one teacher withdrew from the study; most of the attrition occurred because teachers were reassigned or left the district.

On average, students taught by the teachers taking part in the program did not make larger academic gains than those taught by teachers in the normal wage group.The sole exception was in grade 5 in the second and third years of study.

Related Blog
Visit this blog.

In those years, the incentive pay was linked to statistically significant increases in student scores--an increase, the report states, equal to between a third and a half year of learning. But the effect did not appear to persist.

"By the end of 6th grade," the study states, "it does not matter whether a student had a treatment teacher in grade 5."

The researchers performed a number of tests to try to make sense of the grade 5 findings, including to see whether there was evidence of a reallocation of time from other subjects to math, or cheating on the exams. But none of them turned up any firm explanation.

"It really is puzzling," said Mr. Springer. "It just raises questions about what's different about 5th grade and what factors played a role. Was it student development? The curriculum? Teaching or classroom structures?"
A Sparse Field

In interviews, scholars who study performance-based pay and teacher incentives and who were familiar with the POINT findings but not involved in the experiment, widely praised its rigorous design.

"It's a really well-designed study, and it's really important because a lot of the debate about performance pay has been evidence-free," said Steven N. Glazerman, a principal researcher at Mathematica Policy Research, a Princeton, N.J.-based evaluation firm.

The existing empirical research literature on incentive pay has been limited in scope, size, and relevance. Much of the experimental research concerns programs in other countries.

What's more, many of the existing performance-pay programs studied in the United States award far smaller bonuses, and scholars have questioned whether those amounts were enough to affect a change in teacher behavior. ("Merit-Pay Model Pushed by Duncan Shows No Achievement Edge," June 9, 2010.)

But the POINT findings, said some researchers and advocates, appear to put to rest the idea that incentive pay in and of itself is enough to spur better teacher performance.

"A lot of the discussion about performance pay is based on a faulty assumption that the reason we don't have higher test scores is that teachers are shirking their responsibilities," said Helen F. Ladd, a professor of public policy and economics at Duke University in Durham, N.C., about the findings.

Ms. Ladd added, however, that she was "a little surprised" that the findings were not more mixed. She anticipated that teachers might work even harder over the short term to win bonuses. But that supposition was not borne out by the study.

Mr. Mance of the Tennessee Education Association said the study confirms what many teachers and unions have long believed: that teachers are already hardworking. For this study to show positive results, he said, "you'd have to have teachers who were saving their best strategies for an opportunity to get paid for them, and that is an absurd proposition."

Researchers cautioned, however, that the Nashville experiment does not provide answers to many other questions about incentive pay. For instance, it wasn't designed to test the hypotheses that pay incentives might serve as a draw to a different population of teacher-candidates or as an incentive for other candidates to stay in the profession--thus potentially changing the quality of the teacher workforce.

"I personally believe that the biggest role of incentives has to do with selection of who enters and who stays in teaching--how incentives change the teaching corps through entrance and exits," said Eric A. Hanushek, a professor of economics at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. "The study has nothing to say about this."

And because the study looks at an incentive program strictly as pay, it remains unclear how far the findings can be extrapolated to incentives with more features, such as professional development, differentiated roles, or a new teacher-evaluation system.Many well-known incentive-pay models, including Denver's ProComp system and the popular Teacher Advancement Program, sponsored by the Santa Monica, Calif.-based National Institute for Excellence in Teaching, contain such elements. ("Denver Voters Approve Tax Hike to Underwrite Incentive-Based Teacher Pay ," Nov. 11, 2005, and "TAP: More Than Performance Pay," April 1, 2009.)

One finding suggests that the debate over the use of test scores as a measure of student learning and teacher effectiveness remains a top concern for teachers. Surveys of participants for POINT found that a majority generally supported higher pay for teachers whose students made achievement gains. Yet in 2009, about 85 percent said they felt the test-based criteria for determining effectiveness were too narrow.

That lack of buy-in, the study's authors postulated, might have contributed to the finding of no differences in how the control and treatment groups affected instruction.
Inopportune Moment

From a policy perspective, performance pay has experienced a type of renaissance over the past six years, following the introduction in 2004 of the ProComp and in 2006 of the federal Teacher Incentive Fund, or TIF, a program established under the administration of President George W. Bush to seed performance-pay systems.

Since 2008, the Obama administration has embraced TIF and has put its own stamp on performance pay through the Race to the Top competition, which encouraged states to institute new systems for evaluating teachers and for using the results of those evaluations to inform pay decisions.

"While this is a good study, it only looked at the narrow question of whether more pay motivates teachers to try harder," a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Education said in an e-mail. "What we are trying to do is change the culture of teaching by giving all educators the feedback they need to get better while rewarding and incentivizing the best to teach in high need schools and hard-to-staff subjects."

The effects of the report on that policy agenda are not clear, but in the short run at least, proponents of merit pay are likely to steer clear of replicating the features of the Nashville program.

"Anyone about to implement a performance-based pay system will want to pay very close attention to this study, to learn from the POINT program's successes, but especially its shortcomings," said Mr. Glazerman of Mathematica. "These groups bear a heavy burden to figure out how their own programs can demonstrate a greater impact than what we've seen so far."

"I think most people today agree that the existing compensation structure for teachers is broken, but we don't know what a better way is," added Mr. Springer of the Vanderbilt center. "This experiment is one step in the right direction in terms of building our knowledge base, but we need to continue to build that base and test other program designs."

Vol. 30, Issue 05

-
Gregory Elacqua
-- 
Director
Instituto de Políticas Publicas
Facultad de Economía y Empresa
Universidad Diego Portales
Ejército 260
Santiago, Chile
56-2-676-2800
56-09-6-206-5993
gregory.elacqua@udp.cl

Como parte del programa de la reforma educacional "Race to the Top", la administración de Obama ha asignado muchos recursos para la asistencia técnica educativa (ATE) para reestructurar (turnaround) las escuelas que logran sistematicamente resultados acádemicos deficitarios. El secretario de educación, Arne Duncan, dijo en un discurso en 2009 "We need everyone who cares about public education to get into the business of turning around our lowest-performing schools. That includes states, districts, nonprofits, for-profits, universities, unions and charter organizations." Luego de este discurso, una cantidad importante de empresas y organizaciones sin fines de lucro entraron el mercado de las ATEs. Mientras no existen estudios acabados sobre la calidad de los ATEs en EEUU, la evidencia anectodica presentada en el artículo abajo sugiere es bastante heterogenea. Hay organizaciones serias, pero también hay bastante charlatanes que entran en el mercado solo para lucrar.

Los estudios preliminares sobre las ATEs - creadas para apoyar las escuelas para cumplir con las exigencias de la ley SEP - también indica una tendencia similar en Chile. Ver por ejemplo el estudio de UChile (disponible en www.asistenciatecnicaeducativa.cl ) que también propone estandares para evaluar la calidad de las ATEs. Tema muy importante en la discusión actual sobre el Sistema de Aseguramiento de Calidad que propone expandir el papel de las ATEs en el apoyo técnico pedagógico. También existe un problema de cobertura de las ATEs en Chile. La mayoría están concentradas en Santiago, Viña/Valparaiso y Concepción. Ver en foco - educación 1 en www.cpce.cl/publicaciones/serie-en-foco-educacion

Gregory
http://www.cpce.cl/educar/

-----------------------
NYTimes
August 9, 2010
Inexperienced Companies Chase U.S. School Funds
By SAM DILLON

With the Obama administration pouring billions into its nationwide campaign to overhaul failing schools, dozens of companies with little or no experience are portraying themselves as school-turnaround experts as they compete for the money.

A husband-and-wife team that has specialized in teaching communication skills but never led a single school overhaul is seeking contracts in Ohio and Virginia. A corporation that has run into trouble with parents or the authorities in several states in its charter school management business has now opened a school-turnaround subsidiary. Other companies seeking federal money include offshoots of textbook conglomerates and classroom technology vendors.

Many of the new companies seem unprepared for the challenge of making over a public school, yet neither the federal government nor many state governments are organized to offer effective oversight, said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a nonprofit group in Washington.

"Many of these companies clearly just smell the money," Mr. Jennings said.

Rudy Crew, a former New York City schools chancellor who has formed his own consulting company, said he was astonished to see so many untested groups peddling strategies to improve schools.

"This is like the aftermath of the Civil War, with all the carpetbaggers and charlatans," Dr. Crew said.

The Obama administration has sharply increased federal financing for school turnarounds, to $3.5 billion this year, about 28 times as much as in 2007. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is pushing to overhaul 5,000 of the nation's 100,000 public schools in the next few years.

New York is to receive more than $300 million, and New Jersey about $67 million. Expenditures on each failing school are capped at $6 million over three years.

Under federal rules, school districts can hire companies or nonprofits to help, and experts said a significant percentage, perhaps a majority, were likely to hire at least one outside contractor. Sandra Abrevaya, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said the department did not yet know exactly how many districts would do so.

"The department is in daily contact with states and districts to provide technical assistance so they can make smart decisions and select high-quality partners," Ms. Abrevaya said.

Overhauling schools is challenging work, and experts say few efforts succeed. Breaking the cycle of failure in a school that has become a drop-out factory requires an "extreme reset," said Tim Cawley, a managing director at the Academy for Urban School Leadership, a nonprofit group leading several turnaround efforts in Chicago. Usually that means installing a new principal and a newly committed teaching staff, invigorating the school's culture with high expectations and a no-nonsense discipline, adopting a rigorous curriculum, and carrying out regular testing to determine what has been learned and what needs to be retaught, Mr. Cawley said.

In contrast, many new groups seeking contracts are hoping merely to bring in a new curriculum or retrain some teachers, he said, adding, "We call that turnaround lite."

Bob and Megan Tschannen-Moran run one of the new groups. Their company, LifeTrek Inc., based in their home in Virginia, markets life and career coaching sessions to companies, churches and schools.

Ms. Tschannen-Moran is an education professor at the College of William & Mary, but the couple have never led a school overhaul, Mr. Tschannen-Moran said -- although LifeTrek has been hired by a few school districts for strategic planning.

The couple recently founded a Center for Evocative Coaching, and this spring, Ohio put the center on a list of approved school turnaround specialists. In July, the couple changed the name of the center's Web site to schooltransformation.com. The center can help schools by "facilitating new conversations through story listening, expressing empathy, appreciative inquiry and design thinking," its Web site says. Much of the training can be done via conference call, Mr. Tschannen-Moran said.

Mr. Duncan helped set off the stampede in a June 2009 speech, saying that only a handful of groups, nationwide, had any experience in school overhauls.

"We need everyone who cares about public education," he said, "to get into the business of turning around our lowest-performing schools. That includes states, districts, nonprofits, for-profits, universities, unions and charter organizations."

One company that said it had answered Mr. Duncan's call was Mosaica Education, which operates charter schools in several states and overseas. Five of its 10 charter schools in Ohio are in academic emergency, and the company has become embroiled in disputes over its management of charters elsewhere. Its chief executive, Michael J. Connelly, said Mosaica had built a solid record of raising achievement.

In March, the company hired John Q. Porter, a former schools superintendent in Oklahoma City, to lead a new subsidiary, Mosaica Turnaround Partners. Mr. Porter said he attended a vendor fair at Ohio State University in June that had been organized to introduce dozens of new companies and nonprofits to districts preparing school turnarounds.

"It was like a cattle call," Mr. Porter said. "No, actually it was more like speed dating."

Pearson, the giant British publisher, also had representatives at the fair. With 36,000 employees worldwide, Pearson is known in education for textbook brands like Scott Foresman and Prentice Hall.

Last year, it formed the K-12 Solutions Group, and it is seeking school-turnaround contracts in at least eight states. Scott Drossos, the group's president, said that in recent years Pearson had bought smaller companies that built Pearson's capacity to train teachers and could draw on its testing, technology and other products to carry out a coherent school-improvement effort.

In interviews last year, Mr. Duncan said he wanted high-quality, nonprofit charter school management groups, like the KIPP network, which operates 99 schools nationwide, to join the school overhaul work.

But Justin Cohen, a turnaround strategist at MassInsight, a Massachusetts nonprofit organization, said that most successful nonprofit charter operators preferred starting new schools to overhauling failing ones, and that few had accepted Mr. Duncan's invitation.

"The vast majority of people getting into the field are not ready to do the work," Mr. Cohen said.

Recognizing the risks facing school districts that sign contracts with untested groups, the American Enterprise Institute, a nonprofit conservative policy group, issued a report last month urging that districts require performance guarantees, under which contractors failing to meet achievement targets would forfeit payments.

Dr. Crew's new company, Global Partnership Schools, which he formed with Manny Rivera, a former Rochester schools superintendent, has signed a contract with the Pueblo, Colo., district that is backed by a performance guarantee. It stipulates that the partnership will be paid its full fee only if it significantly raises student achievement, Dr. Rivera said. The partnership has also been awarded contracts with districts in Baltimore and Bridgeport, Conn., he said.

Dr. Rivera represented Global Partnership at the June 30 vendor fair in Ohio, tending a booth along with 50 other groups.

"It was just like you were selling pencils," he said. "A lot of these companies don't have a clue about how to change schools."

--
Gregory Elacqua
--
Sub-director
Centro de Políticas Comparadas de Educación
Universidad Diego Portales
56-2-676-8535
56-09-6-206-5993
www.cpce.cl

El 70% de los alumnos universitarios en Chile estudia en instituciones privadas. En el artículo adjunto publicado en The Clinic, Patricio Meller, economista distinguido de la Universidad de Chile, reflexiona sobre la siguiente pregunta: ¿Debiera importar el hecho que muchas de estas universidades tengan dueños con una determinada tendencia religiosa y/o ideológica?  

Gregory
http://www.cpce.cl/educar/

--------------
http://www.theclinic.cl/2010/07/19/la-universidad-de-los-clones/
The Clinic
19 de julio de 2010
La Universidad de los clones
Patricio Meller
Académico Magíster Globalización
Universidad de Chile

El  70% de los alumnos universitarios en Chile estudia en planteles privados. ¿Debiera importar el hecho que muchas de estas universidades tengan dueños con una determinada tendencia religiosa y/o ideológica? Además de conocimiento, las universidades transmiten valores, por lo que si los dueños de alguno de estos centros de estudio sólo contratan a profesores que piensan como ellos y con su mismo tipo de valores, nos enfrentamos  a una verdadera Universidad de los clones. Sus profesionales egresados entonces son perfectos clones, con los mismos valores e ideología que los de los dueños.

La uniforme composición de los alumnos refuerza este concepto, porque parte del aprendizaje universitario se genera en la interacción con los compañeros, lo que exige diversidad. Pero si las universidades reproducen la composición de los colegios, entonces los alumnos se juntan con sus similares y la burbuja universitaria reemplaza a la burbuja colegial.

Así cabe preguntarse ¿cuál es la diferencia entre una universidad y una consultora que contrata profesionales? Más aún, ¿pueden los profesores universitarios plantear ideas distintas a las de los dueños?

El rol de la universidad es educar a los jóvenes para que tengan pensamiento propio, para lo que  -entre otras cosas- se requiere de una sala de clases donde se produzca una suerte de "mercado de las ideas", donde los futuros profesionales sean expuestos a un intercambio amplio, fundamentado y diverso de pensamientos u opiniones. Esto permite que cada joven descubra su propia verdad de entre un set de planteamientos diferentes y no a través de una sola postura dogmática.

De ahí que la responsabilidad de un académico, tanto de universidades privadas como estatales, sea con la sociedad (y con sus pares). No con los dueños de la universidad. Así de tajante.
Por consiguiente, los propietarios de una universidad (privada o estatal)  tienen el derecho a cerrarla, pero no pueden despedir a un buen académico por discrepancias ideológicas. En una consultora, por antonomasia, no hay restricciones al respecto.

Para preservar su función esencial una universidad tiene que evitar que su dueño (empresario privado, administración estatal, o grupo religioso) le restrinja o le imponga a los profesores lo que pueden y lo que no pueden enseñar. Más allá de lo ya expuesto, esto es lo que haría una institución de adoctrinamiento dedicada al proselitismo.

Por eso son imperativos la libertad académica y el pluralismo (tanto en profesores como en alumnos). Pero hay un pluralismo mal entendido: cuando existe un amplio espectro de universidades controladas por grupos con ideologías o valores diferentes y cada joven puede escoger donde estudiar, según sus preferencias, entonces ¿por qué preocuparse de lo que hacen los dueños?

Es que esta es una situación ideal para la generación de clones de diferentes colores, pero que siguen siendo sólo clones. Cada joven universitario TIENE que estar expuesto a conocer posiciones diferentes y discrepantes.

El punto es que este problema se ha tornado cada vez más agudo. Los "responsables de la clonación" no sólo son los dueños (o los rectores estatales), sino que también los mismos profesores universitarios. Las Facultades tienen el sesgo de contratar a profesores que hacen lo mismo que los que ya están adentro. Ó sea traen a nuevos clones. Además, todo esto coexiste con los fundamentalismos académicos (¿se acuerdan de los Chicago boys?).

En síntesis, ¿por qué es problemático para un país que haya Universidades que sólo generan clones? Primero, porque la estabilidad política puede verse afectada ante pugnas entre clones fundamentalistas de distinto signo. Y segundo, tan importante como el punto anterior, porque el crecimiento económico requiere agentes con capacidad innovadora habilidosos, para imaginar cosas nuevas. Los clones, en tanto, sólo están capacitados para repetir como papagayos lo que aprendieron.

Si convenimos que este siglo XXI es el de las ideas, entonces las universidades no debieran estar dedicadas a la clonación, sino que decididamente a la innovación.

--
Gregory Elacqua
--
Sub-director
Centro de Políticas Comparadas de Educación
Universidad Diego Portales
56-2-676-8535
56-09-6-206-5993
www.cpce.cl

Estudio por Ernesto Treviño y Francisca Donoso de la Facultad de Educación de UDP que estima el valor agregado de las escuelas chilenas.

Puede bajar el estudio completo en:
http://www.cpce.cl/descargas/agrupacion_de_escuelas_para_intervencion_de_politica_julio_29_2010.pdf

Gregory
http://www.cpce.cl/educar/
-------
La Tercera
Agosto 01, 2010
Valor agregado por diferentes tipos de colegios en Chile

Por primera vez, una medición revela el puntaje Simce que deberían lograr los colegios según el nivel socioeconómico de sus alumnos.E. Simonsen/ L. Rosenmann/ D.Arce, La Tercera,01/08/2010

Está demostrado que en los resultados en educación, la cuna pesa. Según estudios internacionales, los recursos socioeconómicos del alumno (por ejemplo, el tipo de temas que se conversa en la mesa, la cantidad de libros en el hogar y el nivel educacional de sus padres, etc.) explican alrededor de un 20% de los resultados en las pruebas.

En Chile, según la última prueba Pisa, que elabora la Organización para la Cooperación y Desarrollo Económico, el origen de los alumnos explica el 54% de la diferencia entre escuelas. En otras palabras, las escuelas chilenas son poco capaces de eliminar las desigualdades de origen y lograr que todos los alumnos aprendan.

Pero hay casi 300 colegios que escapan a esa tendencia. Las escuelas Toqui Lautaro, de Nacimiento (municipal), Francisco Ramírez (particular subvencionado), de San Ramón, y el privado Colegio Internacional Alba, de Maipú, encabezan esa lista. Los tres establecimientos, cada uno en su dependencia, son los que logran que sus estudiantes aprendan más, muy por sobre su origen. Son los más efectivos, según determinó un estudio de la Facultad de Educación de la Universidad Diego Portales.

EL PRIMERO EN SU TIPO
El estudio es el primero que midió este indicador de efectividad en el país: cuánto valor agregan las escuelas por sobre el nivel socioeconómico de los alumnos. Lo que no significa que un colegio más efectivo entregue una educación de mayor calidad en términos absolutos. Sino que es capaz de hacer que sus alumnos progresen independiente de su condición de origen.

Para hacer los cálculos, los investigadores tomaron los datos de casi dos mil colegios del país, que cumplieran con ciertas condiciones, como haber rendido el Simce de cuarto básico en los años 2006, 2007 y 2008 y tener registrado datos como el ingreso familiar o el nivel educativo de los padres para 30 o más estudiantes.

Para cada uno, se estimó, en una escala igual a la del Simce, cuánto pesa el capital cultural de los alumnos y los recursos del colegio (especialización de los profesores, libros por alumno o si seleccionan estudiantes). Este indicador se restó al promedio obtenido por el colegio en los test de lenguaje y matemáticas de los tres años.

El resultado: un puntaje que indica cuánto debió haber obtenido cada colegio en la prueba. Dato que se contrastó con el puntaje logrado en la práctica. Con esto, se determinó cuáles eran los establecimientos de excelencia - con aprendizajes significativamente mayores a los esperados-, cuáles eran buenos, cuáles sólo satisfactorios y cuáles deficientes.

DE EXCELENCIA Y DEFICIENTES
Fueron 335 colegios, el 6% de la muestra, lo que lograron resultados de excelencia. Esto es, obtener en el Simce de matemáticas, 14 o más puntos por sobre lo esperado para su nivel. Un selecto grupo compuesto por 207 subvencionados, 124 municipales y sólo cuatro particulares pagados (en negritas en las tablas).

"Estos colegios logran los mayores aprendizajes, considerando el punto de partida de sus alumnos. Son los que se acercan a la excelencia en términos relativos y se deberían mirar con detalle para aprender de ellos", dice Ernesto Treviño, autor, junto a María Francisca Donoso, del estudio.

Otros 365 establecimientos, el 5,3% de la muestra, tuvieron en matemáticas un rendimiento levemente superior al ideal. Este grupo es considerado satisfactorio y obtienen 4,5 o más puntos por sobre lo esperado para su nivel socioeconómico. Acá, hay ocho privados (seis de los cuales se mencionan en la tabla), 217 subvencionados y 141 municipales.

La gran mayoría, 864 colegios, logra sólo un estatus regular dado el nivel de sus alumnos: en el tramo que va desde los 4,4 puntos por sobre el nivel hasta 11 puntos por debajo de lo esperado. Y 385 lo hacen mal, logran apenas 12 o más puntos bajo lo esperado. En este grupo hay 224 colegios municipales, 33 particulares y 130 subvencionados.

En lenguaje, el panorama es similar, aunque ningún colegio privado logra la excelencia (ver nota secundaria).

LOS MÁS EFICACES
Niños que en kínder suman y restan y todas las materias escolares adelantadas en un año; apoyo intensivo a los alumnos que se quedan atrás y un sentido estricto de la disciplina son las claves del Internacional Alba, según su directora Mónica González. En matemáticas, el colegio obtiene 320 puntos, 16 más que lo esperado dado el nivel de recursos de sus alumnos.

Casi la misma diferencia que logra el Instituto de Humanidades Alfredo Silva, de Concepción, donde hay ocho horas de matemáticas a la semana y no seis oficiales. No más de 30 alumnos por curso es el otro común denominador entre estos dos establecimientos, los particulares que figuran como los más efectivos.

En la escuela Toqui Lautaro, la municipal más efectiva, el ingreso familiar de los alumnos no supera los $ 160 mil y la mayoría de los padres terminó la básica. El colegio logra 271 puntos en matemáticas, 43 puntos más que lo esperado.

Similar es el panorama del Francisco Ramírez, escuela subvencionada de San Ramón: allí las familias de los alumnos tienen ingresos menores a 400 mil pesos y sólo terminaron la enseñanza media. El colegio supera los 312 puntos en matemáticas, 65 puntos más que lo esperado. Ambos establecimientos tienen nuevamente un punto en común: los estudiantes se quedan después de la jornada escolar a reforzar las materias.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
El desempeño de los tradicionales top: la mayoría es sólo regular
Establecimientos como The Grange, Cumbres y Santiago College sólo logran lo esperado.
por Elizabeth Simonsen, La Tercera, 1 agosto 2010

Los rankings de los colegios en el Simce están dominados por un reducido grupo de establecimientos que habitualmente comparten los primeros lugares. En las pruebas de cuarto básico de 2006, 2007 y 2008, establecimientos como el Cumbres, Santiago College, Andrée English School y The Grange comparten los primeros lugares.

Los investigadores de la Facultad de Educación de la UDP, liderados por el académico Ernesto Treviño, calcularon también para ellos qué puntaje debieran obtener, según el nivel socioeconómico de sus alumnos y los recursos de la escuela.

Algunos establecimientos, como Internacional Alba y Francisco Ramírez, figuran entre los más efectivos. Pero otros tradicionales no salen bien evaluados.

The Grange, por ejemplo, logra 312 puntos en matemáticas, mientras que, dado el nivel socioeconómico de sus alumnos, debiera superar los 320 puntos.

Lo mismo pasa con el Santiago College, que debería promediar 320 puntos y logra 318; con el Verbo Divino, que logra 317 puntos en matemáticas, lo mismo que lo esperado y con Villa María Academy, que promedia 317 puntos, dos puntos menos que lo esperado.

El Colegio Cumbres y el Andrée English School obtienen en matemáticas sólo dos puntos por sobre lo esperado (320 el primero y 319 el segundo). Mientras que el Instituto Alonso de Ercilla, de Santiago, obtiene en matemáticas cuatro puntos por sobre lo que debiera.

Todos ellos fueron clasificados por los investigadores como de desempeño regular: esto es, no logran más de lo que se espera dado el nivel de sus alumnos. "No agregan valor", dice Ernesto Treviño.

Como establecimientos de mal desempeño, esto es, que logran menos de lo esperado, son clasificados otros colegios particulares, como Everest, Lincoln International Academy y The English Institute. Esos establecimientos logran 12 puntos por debajo de lo esperado.

Colegios de tradicional buen rendimiento en el Simce, como el Madrigal, de La Reina; La Girouette, de Las Condes, y el Instituto Miguel León Prado, de San Miguel, no fueron incluidos en el análisis, porque en alguno de los tres años analizados no tenían datos para más de 30 alumnos.

En promedio, los 122 colegios particulares estudiados lograron 303 puntos en matemáticas. Sin embargo, dado el nivel de sus alumnos, debieran haber llegado a 310 puntos.

En lenguaje, obtuvieron seis puntos menos que lo estimado (310 puntos) y ningún colegio se situó en la categoría de excelencia.

La conclusión, para los investigadores, es que los colegios particulares, si bien obtienen buenos puntajes, son poco efectivos en generar valor agregado en sus alumnos. "Buena parte de sus buenos resultados en Simce se debe al capital sociocultural de las familias", dice Ernesto Treviño.

El bajo grado de efectividad de los colegios particulares, que se estima son la elite del país, es algo que, incluso, ha sido comentado por el encargado de Pisa, Andreas Schleicher, director de la División de Análisis e Indicadores de la Organización para la Cooperación y Desarrollo Económico (OECD).

En su última visita al país, Schleicher comentó la necesidad de elevar el nivel de educación de las elites, ya que, según la última prueba Pisa, sólo uno de cada cien alumnos chilenos está en los niveles superiores de desempeño de matemáticas, mientras como promedio de los países de la OECD, 10 de cada cien están en esa categoría.

--
Gregory Elacqua
--
Sub-director
Centro de Políticas Comparadas de Educación
Universidad Diego Portales
56-2-676-8535
56-09-6-206-5993
www.cpce.cl

El artículo adjunto comenta un estudio experimental reciente que encuentra que un educador de kindergarten de calidad incide en los resultados de los alumnos a lo largo de sus vidas, incluso mucho más que otros insumos de la escuela.    Lo novedoso de este estudio es que analiza el impacto de la calidad de educadores en resultados no cognitivos, como su desempeño laboral.   Raj Chetty, un economista de Harvard señala: "We don't really care about test scores. We care about adult outcomes." La evidencia de este estudio sugiere que en el debate sobre reformas docentes en Chile se debería explorar no solo como podemos mejorar la calidad de nuestros docentes en básica y media, sino también como asegurar que los niños más necesitados tengan aceso a educadores de kinder de calidad.  En el final, el retorno podría ser mucho mayor para el país.

Gregory
http://www.cpce.cl/educar/

-----------------------

NYTimes
July 27, 2010
The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers
By DAVID LEONHARDT

How much do your kindergarten teacher and classmates affect the rest of your life?

Economists have generally thought that the answer was not much. Great teachers and early childhood programs can have a big short-term effect. But the impact tends to fade. By junior high and high school, children who had excellent early schooling do little better on tests than similar children who did not -- which raises the demoralizing question of how much of a difference schools and teachers can make.

There has always been one major caveat, however, to the research on the fade-out effect. It was based mainly on test scores, not on a broader set of measures, like a child's health or eventual earnings. As Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist, says: "We don't really care about test scores. We care about adult outcomes."

Early this year, Mr. Chetty and five other researchers set out to fill this void. They examined the life paths of almost 12,000 children who had been part of a well-known education experiment in Tennessee in the 1980s. The children are now about 30, well started on their adult lives.

On Tuesday, Mr. Chetty presented the findings -- not yet peer-reviewed -- at an academic conference in Cambridge, Mass. They're fairly explosive.

Just as in other studies, the Tennessee experiment found that some teachers were able to help students learn vastly more than other teachers. And just as in other studies, the effect largely disappeared by junior high, based on test scores. Yet when Mr. Chetty and his colleagues took another look at the students in adulthood, they discovered that the legacy of kindergarten had re-emerged.

Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.

All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile -- a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher -- could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too.

The economists don't pretend to know the exact causes. But it's not hard to come up with plausible guesses. Good early education can impart skills that last a lifetime -- patience, discipline, manners, perseverance. The tests that 5-year-olds take may pick up these skills, even if later multiple-choice tests do not.

Now happens to be a particularly good time for a study like this. With the economy still terribly weak, many people are understandably unsure about the value of education. They see that even college graduates have lost their jobs in the recession.

Barely a week seems to go by without a newspaper or television station running a report suggesting that education is overrated. These stories quote liberal groups, like the Economic Policy Institute, that argue that an education can't protect workers in today's global economy. Or they quote conservatives, like Charles Murray and Ramesh Ponnuru, who suggest that people who haven't graduated from college aren't smart enough to do so.

But the anti-education case usually relies on a combination of anecdotes and selective facts. In truth, the gap between the pay of college graduates and everyone else grew to a record last year, according to the Labor Department, and unemployment has risen far more for the less educated.

This is not simply because smart people -- people who would do well no matter what -- tend to graduate from college. Education itself can make a difference. A long line of economic research, by Julie Berry Cullen, James Heckman, Philip Oreopoulos and many others, has found as much. The study by Mr. Chetty and his colleagues is the latest piece of evidence.

•

The crucial problem the study had to solve was the old causation-correlation problem. Are children who do well on kindergarten tests destined to do better in life, based on who they are? Or are their teacher and classmates changing them?

The Tennessee experiment, known as Project Star, offered a chance to answer these questions because it randomly assigned students to a kindergarten class. As a result, the classes had fairly similar socioeconomic mixes of students and could be expected to perform similarly on the tests given at the end of kindergarten.

Yet they didn't. Some classes did far better than others. The differences were too big to be explained by randomness. (Similarly, when the researchers looked at entering and exiting test scores in first, second and third grades, they found that some classes made much more progress than others.)

Class size -- which was the impetus of Project Star -- evidently played some role. Classes with 13 to 17 students did better than classes with 22 to 25. Peers also seem to matter. In classes with a somewhat higher average socioeconomic status, all the students tended to do a little better.

But neither of these factors came close to explaining the variation in class performance. So another cause seemed to be the explanation: teachers.

Some are highly effective. Some are not. And the differences can affect students for years to come.

When I asked Douglas Staiger, a Dartmouth economist who studies education, what he thought of the new paper, he called it fascinating and potentially important. "The worry has been that education didn't translate into earnings," Mr. Staiger said. "But this is telling us that it does and that the fade-out effect is misleading in some sense."

Mr. Chetty and his colleagues -- one of whom, Emmanuel Saez, recently won the prize for the top research economist under the age of 40 -- estimate that a standout kindergarten teacher is worth about $320,000 a year. That's the present value of the additional money that a full class of students can expect to earn over their careers. This estimate doesn't take into account social gains, like better health and less crime.

Obviously, great kindergarten teachers are not going to start making $320,000 anytime soon. Still, school administrators can do more than they're doing.

They can pay their best teachers more, as Pittsburgh soon will, and give them the support they deserve. Administrators can fire more of their worst teachers, as Michelle Rhee, the Washington schools chancellor, did last week. Schools can also make sure standardized tests are measuring real student skills and teacher quality, as teachers' unions have urged.

Given today's budget pressures, finding the money for any new programs will be difficult. But that's all the more reason to focus our scarce resources on investments whose benefits won't simply fade away.

E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com
--
Gregory Elacqua
--
Sub-director
Centro de Políticas Comparadas de Educación
Universidad Diego Portales
56-2-676-8535
56-09-6-206-5993
www.cpce.cl

Los resultados sobre el efecto de los programas que reducen el tamaño de los liceos en algunas ciudades grandes en USA (financiado por el Bill Gates Foundation) han sido bastante mixtos.  Por una parte, los estudios indican que el temaño del liceo no incide en el rendimiento escolar.  Pero, por otra parte, la evidencia muestra que influye en la tasa de graducación en media (secundaria).  Alumnos en liceos chicos, que tienen más atención personalizada de sus profesores, desertan menos que alumnos comparables en liceos grandes.  Quizá un dato para tomar en cuenta en el diseño del programa "Liceos de Excelencia".

Gregory
http://www.cpce.cl/educar/

---------------
Edweek

Published Online: July 1, 2010
Small Schools Still In Flux
Students help one another at the "School of the Future" in Philadelphia. Opened with great fanfare and international spotlight, the $63 million Parkside school of nearly 500 students boasted a partnership with Microsoft Corp., a focus on project-based learning, and laptops for every student.
--Matt Rourke/AP
By Kristen A. Graham, The Philadelphia Inquirer (MCT)

Back to Story

Multi-user Site Licenses from Edweek -- click here to find out how you can save -- Advertisement

New York City went for small high schools in a big way, and the country's largest school system is still high on that education reform strategy.

Oakland, Calif., opened 49 small schools in the last decade, but is closing six.

And in Philadelphia, the superintendent's message is clear--small schools are fine, but don't expect any new ones until inequities at big neighborhood high schools are fixed.

For a time in the mid-2000s, small schools were booming. They were supposed to transform the large, failing American high school, to engage students and boost their achievement to ready them for college.

But the results have been mixed, national and local research shows. Students at small high schools were more likely to graduate, have positive relationships with their teachers, and feel safer. Still, they did no better on standardized tests than did their peers at big schools.

In Philadelphia, where 26 of the 32 small high schools have been opened or made smaller in the last seven years, some schools have thrived. Their presence has transformed the high school mix.

Among the district's current 63 high schools, the 32 small schools enroll roughly a quarter of the 48,000 total enrollment. The rest attend large neighborhood high schools.

Science Leadership Academy (SLA), a small magnet of 480 students in Center City, has drawn national attention for its innovation. A seat in its freshman class is becoming one of the most sought-after places in the city, and its graduates are heading to schools such as Princeton, Georgetown and Syracuse Universities.
See Also
"NYC School Closings Leave Some Students Lost in Transition," June 25, 2010.

Others struggle. High School of the Future was opened with great fanfare and international spotlight, a $63 million Parkside school of nearly 500 students that boasted a partnership with Microsoft Corp., a focus on project-based learning, and laptops for every student.

But only 7 percent of its pupils reached state standards in math last year and 23 percent in reading. There has been upheaval in leadership and curriculum, and some think the school overpromised and underdelivered.

Since her arrival in 2008, Philadelphia Schools Superintendent Arlene Ackerman has been cautious about small schools, saying they are a useful but costly strategy. In Philadelphia, she says, the small schools were opened at the expense of neighborhood high schools.

The math is simple, Ackerman says: Smaller high schools cost more money per student than large, comprehensive high schools.

"I was never on the small-schools bandwagon as the reform," Ackerman said. "I'm very supportive of them. But I don't think we should continue down this road, creating more small high schools, until we have rectified some of the inequities that we now see in some of the large comprehensive high schools."

That's not the view taken by former schools chief Paul Vallas, architect of the movement in Philadelphia.

"My approach with the large comprehensives was to slowly phase them out, knowing you were always going to have problems there," said Vallas, now head of the New Orleans Recovery District. He thinks Philadelphia's small-schools experiment has been successful: "We had to expand choice."

Although the number of high schools doubled under Vallas and charter school growth has soared in the last decade, 72 percent of parents still feel they need more school choices, a recent study by the Pew Charitable Trusts concluded.

And the Philadelphia-based nonprofit Research for Action found that demand for schools other than neighborhood schools exceeds available slots. In 2006-07, 73 percent of eighth graders applied to such schools and 51 percent were not accepted at any of their choices.

What has attracted many Philadelphia families to small schools--better climate, more attention, stronger student-teacher bonds--also caused the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to plow billions of dollars into small high schools around the country.

As the movement gained momentum during her stints in school districts in Seattle, Washington, and San Francisco from the late '90s through the mid-2000s, Ackerman said, she "was always a little worried about what happens when the Gates money leaves."

And the Gates money did dry up. The foundation shifted its priorities away from small schools, saying the investment didn't yield enough results.

As a result, nationally the movement has lost steam. Looming budget crunches and mixed academic results have hurt small schools in places like Milwaukee and San Diego, for example.

But many still see the benefits of small schools.

In Oakland, administrator Jean Wing said small schools remain important to the district, despite plans to close six of its 49 small schools.

"In most cases, the schools that have been closed have been a combination of very low enrollment and, in some cases, low academics," Wing said.

New York has replaced more than 20 large high schools with 216 small ones, often creating several small schools inside one re-purposed building.

A study released last month by the education think-tank MDRC concluded that New York's small schools have increased graduation rates among struggling students.

In Philadelphia, a Research for Action study of the district's small high schools in 2006-07 found that they contributed to student success, especially for struggling pupils.

The Philadelphia research concluded that ninth graders in small schools were less likely to be suspended and more likely to pass algebra than pupils at big schools. Small-school students and teachers were more likely to feel safe.

But not all Philadelphia small schools were created equally. New schools--like School of the Future and SLA--got more support and planning time than "conversion" schools such as Kensington, a formerly large school that in 2005 was divided into three parts.

Kensington Culinary, Kensington Business, and Kensington Creative and Performing Arts all opened with four grades at once and little say in curriculum or freedom in hiring staff. A fourth Kensington school, focused on urban education, will open in September, and activists are more satisfied with the planning time allowed by the Ackerman administration.

The Kensington schools also lacked a strong long-term partner from their inception. Partnering with the Franklin Institute has made a real difference at SLA, according to principal Chris Lehmann.

Franklin Institute chief executive Dennis Wint helped hatch the idea for the school, and is thrilled by what it's been able to achieve. He's so high on the concept that he hopes to "replicate this model, both in Philadelphia and outside of Philadelphia."

Whether the museum would partner with other Philadelphia schools is under discussion internally, Wint said.

Ackerman said she'd be open to the idea--but in "large comprehensive high schools, if we decide we're going with a small learning community or career academy. I am hopeful that the Franklin Institute will look at this as an option."

Both the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University have expressed a desire to partner with the School District on high schools, but plans for those have stalled.

Enlisting community partners is an idea that would appeal to Nijmie Dzurinko, executive director at the Philadelphia Student Union, a youth organizing group that thinks small high schools do a better job of educating students than comprehensive high schools.

Given Ackerman's cautious approach to small schools, organizations like the Student Union have reshaped their strategies. Instead of working for small stand-alone schools, they're moving toward meaningful "small learning communities"--themed academies within big high schools such as West Philadelphia High.

"We've lived through the inequity of small schools in Philadelphia," Dzurinko said. "The answer to that is to equalize access for neighborhood students in high-quality smaller learning environments, something they don't have right now."

Linda Darling-Hammond, an education professor at Stanford University who has done extensive research on small schools, said the movement was "still pretty vibrant," albeit more focused on small learning communities these days.

Small learning communities can work, Darling-Hammond said, but only if they have "a common group of teachers and a common group of students working on a common intellectual agenda."

But to small-schools proponents, it's not time to give up just yet.

Lehmann, of SLA, acknowledged that small schools are not a silver bullet, but said they have proven their value.

"There are wonderful schools that are big schools and do amazing things," Lehmann said. "But a lot of kids need a personalized environment. Small schools are a piece of that puzzle."

As for the argument that small schools are too costly, Lehmann prefers to take the long view.

"When do you want to pay? If small schools can help with the dropout problem and help us close the achievement gap," Lehmann said, "I think we're an investment worth making. I think the payoff is worth it."

Reporting for this series was supported by a fellowship from the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Columbia University.

-------
NYTimes
June 30, 2010
Small Schools

School reform advocates are rightly excited about a persuasive new study showing that New York City's small, specialized high schools are outperforming larger, more traditional schools, significantly narrowing the graduation-rate gap that currently exists between white and minority students across the city.

The study validates the small school policies of the Bloomberg administration, which has shut down 20 large, failing high schools and replaced them with more than 200 small schools, about half of which were the focus of this study.

Some of the large, factory-style high schools that were closed had enrollments of 3,000 or more and graduation rates under 40 percent. The new small schools, overwhelmingly in black and Hispanic neighborhoods, typically serve a little more than 400 students each. These schools have several other things in common. They have a rigorous curriculum. They offer a personalized approach to education, with teachers responsible for keeping close tabs on the performance of their students.

They are organized around themes -- law, science, social justice. They get valuable support from community partners -- colleges, cultural organizations or social service groups -- that give the students extensive experience with a world of adults outside their families.

The study, done by MDRC, a nonpartisan research group and paid for by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, focused on about 21,000 students. Nearly half attended the small schools focused on in the study, and the rest attended schools that were mainly larger and older.

It found that the average graduation rate for students in the small schools was nearly 69 percent, nearly 7 percentage points higher than the rate for students in the traditional schools. That means that the small schools erased about a third of the 20-point graduation-rate gap that currently exists between white students and students of color in New York City.

These findings are especially encouraging given that most of the students studied entered the small high schools reading below grade level. The researchers plan to follow them through college into the world of work. The findings have breathed new life into the small-school movement. It should encourage Mayor Michael Bloomberg to replace more large failing schools and districts elsewhere to follow New York City's example.

--
Gregory Elacqua
--
Sub-director
Centro de Políticas Comparadas de Educación
Universidad Diego Portales
56-2-676-8535
56-09-6-206-5993
www.cpce.cl

Artículo interesante sobre el debate sobre acción afirmativa en las Ues elite en Francia.  Explora algunos de los tradeoffs entre diversidad de alumnos y calidad acádemica.

Gregory
http://www.cpce.cl/educar/
---------------------------
NYTimes
June 30, 2010
Top French Schools, Asked to Diversify, Fear for Standards
By STEVEN ERLANGER

PARIS -- France is embarking on a grand experiment -- how to diversify the overwhelmingly white "grandes écoles," the elite universities that have produced French leaders in every walk of life -- and Rizane el-Yazidi is one of the pioneers.

The daughter of protective North African parents in the tough northeastern suburb of Bondy, Ms. Yazidi is enrolled in a trial program aimed at helping smart children of the poor overcome the huge cultural disadvantages that have often spelled failure in the crucial school entrance exams.

"For now we're still a small group, but when there will be more of us, it'll become real progress," said Ms. Yazidi, 20. But she is nervous, too. "We're lucky, but it's a great risk for us," she said. "We might never make it" to a top school.

Because entrance to the best grandes écoles effectively guarantees top jobs for life, the government is prodding the schools to set a goal of increasing the percentage of scholarship students to 30 percent -- more than three times the current ratio at the most selective schools. But the effort is being met with concerns from the grandes écoles, who fear it could dilute standards, and is stirring anger among the French at large, who fear it runs counter to a French ideal of a meritocracy blind to race, religion and ethnicity.

France imagines itself a country of "republican virtue," a meritocracy run by a well-trained elite that emerges from a fiercely competitive educational system. At its apex are the grandes écoles, about 220 schools of varying specialties. And at the very top of this pyramid are a handful of famous institutions that accept a few thousand students a year among them, all of whom pass extremely competitive examinations to enter.

"In France, families celebrate acceptance at a grande école more than graduation itself," said Richard Descoings, who runs the most liberal of them, the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris, known as Sciences Po. "Once you pass the exam at 18 or 19, for the rest of your life, you belong."

The result, critics say, is a self-perpetuating elite of the wealthy and white, who provide their own children the social skills, financial support and cultural knowledge to pass the entrance exams, known as the concours, which are normally taken after an extra two years of intensive study in expensive preparatory schools after high school.

The problem is not simply the narrow base of the elite, but its self-satisfaction. "France has so many problems with innovation," Mr. Descoings said. Those who pass the tests "are extremely smart and clever, but the question is: Are you creative? Are you willing to put yourself at risk? Lead a battle?" These are qualities rarely tested in exams.

But the schools fear that the government will undermine excellence in the name of social engineering and say the process has to begin further down the educational ladder. The state, they say, should seek out poor students with potential and help them to enter preparatory schools. Of the 2.3 million students in French higher education, about 15 percent attend grandes écoles or preparatory schools. But half of those in preparatory schools will fall short and go to standard universities.

In 2001, Mr. Descoings, 52, who cheerfully admits that he failed the concours twice before passing, began his own outreach program to better prepare less-advantaged students for Sciences Po. Last year, the school accepted 126 scholarship students out of a class of 1,300, and two-thirds of them have at least one non-French parent, he said. But that is a far cry from 30 percent.

One of them, Houria Khemiss, 22, is about to graduate from Sciences Po in law. The daughter of Algerian parents growing up in impoverished St.-Denis in the Paris suburbs, she was pushed by a high school teacher to the special preparatory program. She wants to become a judge, "because then you have a direct impact on people's lives." Many at Sciences Po will become the leaders of France, she said, "and because we are there it gives them another point of view."

Oualid Fakkir, 23, who is graduating with a master's in finance, said, "It's very dangerous for France to close its eyes and say, 'Equality. We have the best values in the world.' It's not enough. There has to also be equality of chances."

But other elite grandes écoles are more specialized than Sciences Po, concentrating on engineering, business management, public administration and science, and they are more concerned about the government's program.

Pierre Tapie, 52, is the head of the business school ESSEC and chairman of the Conférence des Grandes Écoles, which represents 222 schools.

While he shares the government's objective of diversity, he said, there is a long educational track before the concours. "We cannot be the scapegoat of any demagogic decision because we are the finest and most famous part of the whole system," he said. Gen. Xavier Michel, 56, runs École Polytechnique, one of the world's finest engineering schools and still overseen by the Ministry of Defense. Known as X, the school is extraordinarily competitive, and its students do basic training and parade wearing the bicorne, a cocked hat dating from Napoleon, who put the school under the military in 1804.

"The fundamental principle for us is that students have the capability to do the work here, which is very difficult," with a lot of math, physics and science, very little of it based on cultural knowledge, General Michel said. Even now, he said, the school takes only 500 students a year, barely 10 percent of its specially educated applicants. "We don't want to bring students into school who risk failing," he said. "You can get lost very quickly."

Despite the misgivings, in February the Conférence des Grandes Écoles, under considerable pressure, signed on to a "Charter of Equal Opportunity" with the government committing the schools to try to reach the 30 percent goal before 2012 or risk losing some financing.

But how to get there remains a point of contention. There is a serious question about how to measure diversity in a country where every citizen is presumed equal and there are no official statistics based on race, religion or ethnicity. A goal cannot be called a "quota," which has an odor of the United States and affirmative action. Instead, there is the presumption here that poorer citizens will be more diverse, containing a much larger percentage of Muslims, blacks and second-generation immigrants.

The minister of higher education, Valérie Pécresse, argued that French who grow up in a poor neighborhood have the same difficulties regardless of ethnicity.

But the government is examining whether the current test depends too much on familiarity with French history and culture. "We're thinking about the socially discriminatory character, or not, of these tests," Ms. Pécresse said. "I want the same concours for everyone, but I don't exclude that the tests of the concours evolve, with the objective of a great social opening and a better measure of young people's intelligence."

The government, with Mr. Tapie's group, has moved to unify and expand scattered outreach programs from different schools. Copied to some degree from Sciences Po, the program Ms. Yazidi attends tries to reach out to smart children, give them higher goals and help them get into preparatory schools. About 7,000 high school students are currently enrolled, but it is too early to tell whether it will produce a large number of successful applicants.

At one recent session, 10 students, all children of immigrants, were working to pass a special concours for a top business school instead of going right into the job market. Their teacher, Philippe Destelle, pushed them to "look more self-confident" in oral exams and "don't be afraid to have an opinion." He told one, "You have the answers, but you don't trust yourself."

Salloumou Keita, 22, is vocal and social, but worryingly behind on his math. "We have to prove something," he said. "There is a look we always get, a questioning -- 'Can he adapt?' "

Awa Dramé, is 22, French-born of African parents, confident and talkative. "I don't mind being a guinea pig, so long as the experiment works," she said. "Reaching this level was unthinkable before, and I can see myself going higher," she said. "I'm full of dreams."

Nadim Audi and Scott Sayare contributed reporting.

--
Gregory Elacqua
--
Sub-director
Centro de Políticas Comparadas de Educación
Universidad Diego Portales
56-2-676-8535
56-09-6-206-5993
www.cpce.cl

El artículo adjunto describe como ha bajado la influencia de los protestantes en las instituciones de educación superior (y otras) en EEUU.

Gregory
http://www.cpce.cl/educar/
-----------------

NYTimes
June 25, 2010
The Triumphant Decline of the WASP
By NOAH FELDMAN

Cambridge, Mass.

FIVE years ago, the Supreme Court, like the United States, had a plurality of white Protestants. If Elena Kagan -- whose confirmation hearings begin today -- is confirmed, that number will be reduced to zero, and the court will consist of six Catholics and three Jews.

It is cause for celebration that no one much cares about the nominee's religion. We are fortunate to have left behind the days when there was a so-called "Catholic seat" on the court, or when prominent Jews (including the publisher of this newspaper) urged President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 not to nominate Felix Frankfurter because they worried that having "too many" Jews on the court might fuel anti-Semitism.

But satisfaction with our national progress should not make us forget its authors: the very Protestant elite that founded and long dominated our nation's institutions of higher education and government, including the Supreme Court. Unlike almost every other dominant ethnic, racial or religious group in world history, white Protestants have ceded their socioeconomic power by hewing voluntarily to the values of merit and inclusion, values now shared broadly by Americans of different backgrounds. The decline of the Protestant elite is actually its greatest triumph.

Like any ethno-racial or religious group, the population of white Protestants is internally diverse. It would be foolish to conflate the descendants of New England smallholders with the offspring of Scandinavian sod farmers in the Middle West, just as it would be a mistake to confuse the Milanese with the Sicilians, or the children of Havana doctors with the grandchildren of dirt farmers from Chiapas, Mexico.

So, when discussing the white elite that exercised such disproportionate power in American history, we are talking about a subgroup, mostly of English or Scots-Irish origin, whose ancestors came to this land in the 17th and 18th centuries. Their forebears fought the American Revolution and wrote the Constitution, embedding in it a distinctive set of beliefs of Protestant origin, including inalienable rights and the separation of church and state.

It is not as though white Protestants relinquished power quickly or without reservation. Catholic immigrants, whether from Ireland or Southern Europe, faced a century of organized discrimination and were regularly denounced as slavish devotees of the pope unsuited to democratic participation.

And, although anti-Semitism in America never had anything like the purchase it had in Europe, it was a persistent barrier. Protestants like Abbott Lawrence Lowell, a great president of Harvard in the early 20th century, tried to impose formal quotas to limit Jewish admissions to the university. The Protestant governing elite must also bear its own share of responsibility for slavery and racial discrimination.

Yet, after the ideals of meritocratic inclusion gained a foothold, progress was remarkably steady and smooth. Take Princeton University, a longtime bastion of the Southern Protestant elite in particular. The Princeton of F. Scott Fitzgerald was segregated and exclusive. When Hemingway described Robert Cohn in the opening of "The Sun Also Rises" as a Jew who had been "the middleweight boxing champion of Princeton," he was using shorthand for a character at once isolated, insecure and pugnacious. As late as 1958, the year of the "dirty bicker" in which Jews were conspicuously excluded from its eating clubs, Princeton could fairly have been seen as a redoubt of all-male Protestant privilege.

In the 1960s, however, Princeton made a conscious decision to change, eventually opening its admissions to urban ethnic minorities and women. That decision has now borne fruit. Astonishingly, the last three Supreme Court nominees -- Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan -- are Princeton graduates, from the Classes of 1972, '76, and '81, respectively. The appointments of these three justices to replace Protestant predecessors turned the demographic balance of the court.

Why did the Protestant elite open its institutions to all comers? The answer can be traced in large part to the anti-aristocratic ideals of the Constitution, which banned titles of nobility and thus encouraged success based on merit. For many years, the Protestant elite was itself open to rising white Protestants not from old-family backgrounds.

Money certainly granted entrée into governing circles, but education was probably more important to the way the Protestant elite defined itself, which is why the opening of the great American universities has had such an epochal effect in changing the demographics of American elites. Another key source was the ideal of fair play, imported from the ideology of the English public schools, but practiced far more widely in the United States than in the class-ridden mother country.

Together, these social beliefs in equality undercut the impulse toward exclusive privilege that every successful group indulges on occasion. A handful of exceptions for admission to societies, clubs and colleges -- trivial in and of themselves -- helped break down barriers more broadly. This was not just a case of an elite looking outside itself for rejuvenation: the inclusiveness of the last 50 years has been the product of sincerely held ideals put into action.

Interestingly, this era of inclusion was accompanied by a corresponding diffusion of the distinctive fashion (or rather anti-fashion) of the Protestant elite class. The style now generically called "prep," originally known as "Ivy League," was long purveyed by Jewish and immigrant haberdashers (the "J." in the New Haven store J. Press stands for Jacobi) and then taken global by Ralph Lauren, né Lifshitz. But until the Protestant-dominated Ivy League began to open up, the wearers of the style were restricted to that elite subculture.

The spread of Ivy League style is therefore not a frivolous matter. Today the wearing of the tweed is not anachronism or assimilation, but a mark of respect for the distinctive ethnic group that opened its doors to all -- an accomplishment that must be remembered, acknowledged and emulated.

Noah Feldman is a law professor at Harvard and the author of the forthcoming "Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of F.D.R.'s Great Supreme Court Justices."


--
Gregory Elacqua
--
Sub-director
Centro de Políticas Comparadas de Educación
Universidad Diego Portales
56-2-676-8535
56-09-6-206-5993
www.cpce.cl