Effective School Districts: An Analysis by Researchers at Stanford University Shows Hoboken has the Lowest Growth Rate in Hudson County, and Among the Lowest Growth Rates in the State of New Jersey and the Entire Nation (bottom 13%)

Hudson County Growth Rates (see full data below)
CLICK TO ENLARGE 

How would you feel is after 5 years of schooling (Grades 3 to 8),  your child advanced the equivalent of 6 years? In Chicago where new data shows this is occurring, parents, teachers, school officials and taxpayers are thrilled. Now, how would you feel if after 5 years of schooling you found out your child advanced only 4.1 years? That is the case of what is occurring in Hoboken, NJ. 
In the 5 years between Grades 3 and Grade 8, students in that district are advancing only 4.1 grade years. The lowest rate in Hudson County, and one of the lowest rates  in the State of New Jersey and in the nation. 

An article in the New York Times by Emily Badger and Kevin Quealy spotlights the work of researchers at Stanford University should be of great interest. The researchers not only used state test scores but a host of other data to present one of the most comprehensive studies yet on student success and effectiveness of school districts in delivering a quality educational experience for children. -Dr. Petrosino 

In some public school systems like the Chicago Public Schools system, enrollment has been declining, the budget is seldom enough, and three in four children come from low-income homes, a profile that would seemingly consign the district to low expectations. In fact, some would characterize the Hoboken Public Schools in this manner (although not accurate). But students in Chicago are learning faster than those in almost every other school system in the country, according to new data from researchers at Stanford University. Not so in Hoboken, a much smaller district, much better funded and far less children from low-income homes. 

In Hoboken, New Jersey after 5 years of instruction from Grade 3 to Grade 8, students advance only 4.1 grade years. This is by far the lowest effective rate of all districts in Hudson County, many of which have much higher percentages of low income students and less well funded schools than Hoboken. Hoboken has one of the highest cost per student allocations in the State of New Jersey and far above any national average. Hoboken also has a declining percentage of students from low income families. 

Data based on some 300 million elementary-school test scores across more than 11,000 school districts, tweaks conventional wisdom in many ways. Some urban and Southern districts are doing better than data typically suggests. Some wealthy ones don’t look that effective. Many poor school systems do.

5 Year Effective Growth Rate- Hoboken (NY Times)

This picture, and both Chicago’s and Hoboken’s place in it, defy how we typically think about wealth and education in America. It’s true that children in prosperous districts tend to test well, while children in poorer districts on average score lower. But in this analysis, which measures how scores grow as student cohorts move through school, the Stanford researcher Sean Reardon argues that it’s possible to separate some of the advantages of socioeconomics from what’s actually happening in schools.

“One question we’ve been asking ourselves is: Do urban public school systems simply reflect the poverty of the kids in the schools, or do they overcome those effects to any degree?” said Michael Casserly, the executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents large urban districts. This new data shows that student in Chicago overcome them while children in Hoboken, NJ do not. 

Educators have long debated whether it’s better to evaluate students and schools on proficiency levels or growth rates. Mr. Reardon’s data makes possible a national database of both. 

Districts with high growth are scattered across the country, in contrast with sharp geographic divisions on proficiency tests like the NAEP which show Northern schools ahead of those in the Deep South. School systems across Arizona and Tennessee that appear to test well below national averages are in fact over performing in growth. 

District Effectiveness Data (Stanford University/NY Times)
Hudson County, New Jersey (data obtained 2018)

Name of School District	Growth Rate After 5 Years (Yrs.)	National %
East Newark	5.7	92
Guttenberg	5.6	90
Harrison	5.2	71
Jersey City	5.1	66
North Bergen	5.1	66
Kearny	4.9	58
Secaucus	4.8	48
West New York	4.8	47
Bayonne	4.7	40
Weehawken	4.7	41
Union City	4.6	38
Hoboken	4.1	13

Average Growth Rate: 4.87 yrs
Standard Deviation for Average Growth Rate: 0.38 yrs

  New Jersey 5 Year Efficiency Rating by Anthony Petrosino on Scribd
(note: scroll through all the data for NJ School Districts- Hoboken is on p.11) 
Hoboken ranked 428 out of 442 ranked NJ school districts 

States Should Demand “Absolute, Unequivocal Accountability from Charter Schools" says Education Secretary

The following is a recent article from the NY Times reporter Sam Dillon concerning a recent report by a Stanford University think tank on charter schools around the country and reaction by the Obama administration, specifically, the Education Secretary Arne Duncan. A link to the article is provided at the end of this post. One key area is in a speech the secretary gave in which he says that states "should scrutinize plans for new charter schools to allow only high-quality ones to open. In exchange for the autonomy that states extend to charter schools, states should demand “absolute, unequivocal accountability and close charter schools that fail to lift student achievement". It will be interesting to see how this plays out nationally. -Dr. Petrosino

The Obama administration has made opening more charter schools a big part of its plans for improving the nation’s education system, but Education Secretary Arne Duncan will warn advocates of the schools on Monday that low-quality institutions are giving their movement a black eye. “The charter movement is putting itself at risk by allowing too many second-rate and third-rate schools to exist,” Mr. Duncan says in prepared remarks that he is scheduled to deliver in Washington at the annual gathering of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Mr. Duncan’s speech will come at a pivotal moment for the charter school movement. The Obama administration has been working to persuade state legislatures to lift caps on the number of charter schools.

At the same time, the movement is smarting from the release last week of a report byStanford University researchers that found that although some charter schools were doing an excellent job, many students in charter schools were not faring as well as students in traditional public schools.

“The charter movement is one of the most profound changes in American education, bringing tremendous new options to underserved communities,” Mr. Duncan is to say in the speech, the text of which was provided to The New York Times by his advisers.

But, the speech says, states should scrutinize plans for new charter schools to allow only high-quality ones to open. In exchange for the autonomy that states extend to charter schools, states should demand “absolute, unequivocal accountability,” the speech says, and close charter schools that fail to lift student achievement.

Mr. Duncan’s speech calls the Stanford report — which singles out Arizona, Florida, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio and Texas as states that have done little to hold poorly run charter schools accountable — “a wake-up call.”

Click here for the full Stanford Report on Charter Schools

Stanford University Report Shows Hoboken School District Students Completing Grades 3 to 8 Are Now 1.27 Grade Levels LOWER than Students with Similar Socioeconomic Status

The Hoboken Public Schools are not improving substantively despite a long term coordinated effort on social media to communicate such a message. In fact, the current data indicates that an 8th grade student educated in the Hoboken Public Schools will be 1.27 grades behind an 8th grader from a similar socioeconomic level school. Put another way, 8th graders in the Hoboken Public Schools are leaving with an education equivalent of that of a 6th grader in the month of March from the same socioeconomic strata. 



The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University has built the first national database of academic performance. As the project states,  "the educational opportunities available in a community, both in and out of school, are reflected in students’ average test scores. They are influenced by opportunities to learn at home, in neighborhoods, in child-care, preschool, and after-school programs, from peers and friends, and at school." 

Recall, last year, the analysis by researchers at Stanford University showed Hoboken had the lowest growth rate in Hudson County and was among the lowest growth rather in the State of NJ and the nation. Simply put, for the 2018 report, in the 5 years between Grades 3 to 8, students in the Hoboken School district were advancing only 4.1 grade years. 

The 2019 report indicates that for the years between Grades 3 to 8, students in the Hoboken School district are now advancing 1.27 grades LOWER than districts with similar socioeconomic status. This indicates results have not improved over last year and, in fact have shown decline. 

  Hoboken Schools Stanford 2019 by Tony Petrosino on Scribd

Classes should do hands-on exercises before reading and video, Stanford researchers say

A new study from the Stanford Graduate School of Education flips upside down the notion that students learn best by first independently reading texts or watching online videos before coming to class to engage in hands-on projects. Studying a particular lesson, the Stanford researchers showed that when the order was reversed, students' performances improved substantially.

While the study has broad implications about how best to employ interactive learning technologies, it also focuses specifically on the teaching of neuroscience and underscores the effectiveness of a new interactive tabletop learning environment, called BrainExplorer, which was developed by Stanford GSE researchers to enhance neuroscience instruction.

The study buttresses what many educational researchers and cognitive scientists have been asserting for many years: the "exploration first" model is a better way to learn. In addition to these published findings, the researchers spoke at an American Educational Research Association meeting earlier this year about another study that used instructional video instead of text and obtained the same results. The team is now conducting follow-up studies.

"With this study, we are showing that research in education is useful because sometimes our intuitions about 'what works' are simply dead wrong," said Blikstein.

The study was funded with support from the National Science Foundation.

David Plotnikoff writes frequently for the Graduate School of Education.

Full Article HERE

Report Offers New Framework to Guide K-12 Science Education, Calls for Shift in the Way Science Is Taught in U.S

Date: July 19, 2011 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Report Offers New Framework to Guide K-12 Science Education, Calls for Shift in the Way Science Is Taught in U.S. WASHINGTON – A report released today by the National Research Council presents a new framework for K-12 science education that identifies the key scientific ideas and practices all students should learn by the end of high school. The framework will serve as the foundation for new K-12 science education standards, to replace those issued more than a decade ago. The National Research Council is the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering; all three are independent, nongovernmental organizations. The committee that wrote the report sees the need for significant improvements in how science is taught in the U.S. The new framework is designed to help students gradually deepen their knowledge of core ideas in four disciplinary areas over multiple years of school, rather than acquire shallow knowledge of many topics. And it strongly emphasizes the practices of science – helping students learn to plan and carry out investigations, for example, and to engage in argumentation from evidence. The overarching goal of the framework, the committee said, is to ensure that by the end of 12th grade, all students have some appreciation of the beauty and wonder of science, the capacity to discuss and think critically about science-related issues, and the skills to pursue careers in science or engineering if they want to do so -- outcomes that existing educational approaches are ill-equipped to achieve. “Currently, science education in the U.S. lacks a common vision of what students should know and be able to do by the end of high school, curricula too often emphasize breadth over depth, and students are rarely given the opportunity to experience how science is actually done,” said Helen Quinn, committee chair and professor emerita of physics at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Stanford, Calif. “The new framework is designed to address and overcome these weaknesses. It builds on what is known to work best in science education, based on research and classroom experience both in the U.S.and around the world. It provides a blueprint that will guide improvements in science education over many years." The framework was developed by an 18-member committee that included experts in education and scientists from many disciplines. The committee publicly released a draft in summer 2010 to obtain and incorporate feedback from the broader community of scientists, science educators, educational policymakers, and education researchers. The framework is the first step in the development of new K-12 science education standards. The framework lays out the broad ideas and practices students should learn and will serve as the basis for specific standards, which will be developed in a process led by a group of states and coordinated by the nonprofit educational organization Achieve Inc. When the standards are finished, states may voluntarily adopt them to guide science education in their public schools. In addition to serving as the foundation for the development of new standards, the framework can be used by others who work in K-12 science education, such as curriculum and assessment developers, those who train teachers and create professional development materials, and state and district science supervisors. Science as Both Ideas and Practices The framework specifies core ideas in four disciplinary areas -- life sciences; physical sciences; earth and space sciences; and engineering, technology and the applications of science -- that all students should understand by the time they finish high school. For example, among the core ideas in the physical sciences are “matter and its interactions” and “energy.” Students’ knowledge of these ideas should deepen over time, and the framework specifies aspects of each idea that students should know by the end of grades two, five, eight, and 12. The framework also identifies seven crosscutting concepts that have explanatory value across much of science and engineering, such as “cause and effect” and “stability and change.” These concepts should be taught in the context of core ideas from the disciplines of science, the report says, but teachers should use a common language for these concepts across disciplines, so that students understand the same concept is relevant in many fields. These concepts should become familiar touchstones as students progress from kindergarten through 12th grade. Just as important are scientific and engineering practices, which have been given too little emphasis in K-12 education, the committee said. The framework specifies eight key practices that students should learn, such as asking questions and defining problems, analyzing and interpreting data, and constructing explanations and designing solutions. These practices should be integrated with study of the disciplinary core ideas and applied throughout students’ K-12 education. These three dimensions must be used together for students to understand how science works, the committee stressed. For example, students should use the practices -- such as conducting investigations and then analyzing and interpreting the data -- to deepen their knowledge of the core ideas. Putting the Framework to Use The report offers guidance to those who will use the framework to develop new science education standards. The standards should set rigorous learning goals that represent a common expectation for all students. They also should be limited in number to reflect the framework’s focus on a small set of core ideas and practices, and should include guidance about what does and does not need to be taught. Developing new standards is a key step in making K-12 science education more coherent and effective, but it is far from the only one, the committee said. Curricula will need to incorporate the framework’s ideas and practices, and teacher preparation and professional development programs should provide ways for teachers to deepen their own conceptual understanding of the practices and ideas of science. Assessments will need to be linked to the shared goals outlined by the framework and related standards. And time, space, and resources for science learning need to be made available. “For all students to have the opportunity to learn the ideas and practices we’ve described, many other players and parts of the system will need to change, some in fundamental ways,” said Quinn. The study was sponsored by Carnegie Corporation of New York. The National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council make up the National Academies. They are private, nonprofit institutions that provide science, technology, and health policy advice under a congressional charter. The Research Council is the principal operating agency of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. For more information, visit http://national-academies.org. A committee roster follows Contacts: Sara Frueh, Media Relations Officer Shaquanna Shields, Media Relations Assistant Office of News and Public Information 202-334-2138; e-mail news@nas.edu Pre-publication copies of A Framework for K-12 Science Education are available from the National Academies Press; tel. 202-334-3313 or 1-800-624-6242 or on the Internet at http://www.nap.edu. NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education Committee on a Conceptual Framework for New Science Education Standards Helen Quinn (chair)1 Professor Emerita of Physics SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory Menlo Park, Calif. Wyatt W. Anderson1 Professor and Dean Emeritus Department of Genetics University of Georgia Athens Tanya M. Atwater1 Professor Emeritus Department of Earth Science University of California Santa Barbara Philip Bell Associate Professor Life Center, and Director Science and Mathematics Learning Institute University of Washington Seattle Thomas B. Corcoran Co-director Consortium for Policy Research and Education Teachers College Columbia University New York City Rodolfo Dirzo1 Bing Professor in Ecology Department of Biology Stanford University Stanford, Calif. Phillip A. Griffiths1 Director Emeritus and Professor of Mathematics Institute for Advanced Study Princeton, N.J. Dudley R. Herschbach1 Emeritus Professor of Science Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology Harvard University, and Professor Department of Physics Texas A&M University College Station Linda P.B. Katehi2 Chancellor University of California Davis John C. Mather1 Senior Astrophysicist NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, Md. Brett D. Moulding Director Utah Partnership for Effective Science Teaching and Learning North Ogden Jonathan Osborne Shriram Family Professor of Science Education Graduate School of Education Stanford University Stanford, Calif. James W. Pellegrino Professor of Cognitive Psychology and Education University of Illinois Chicago Stephen L. Pruitt (until June 2010) Chief of Staff Office of the State Superintendent of Schools Georgia Department of Education Atlanta Brian Reiser Professor of Learning Sciences School of Education and Social Policy Northwestern University Evanston, Ill. Rebecca R. Richards-Kortum2 Stanley C. Moore Professor of Bioengineering Rice University Houston Walter G. Secada Professor and Chair Department of Teaching, and Senior Associate Dean School of Education University of Miami Miami Deborah C. Smith Assistant Professor of Science Education Department of Curriculum and Instruction Pennsylvania State University State College STAFF Heidi Schweingruber Co-Study Director Tom Keller Co-Study Director 1 Member, National Academy of Sciences 2 Member, National Academy of Engineering