Guide to Education Grants

Another Student Loan Resource:
For weeks education researchers and policy-makers have been trying to come to a consensus on the best way to come to terms on policy that affects higher education standards. Although strides have been made, according to a May 22, 2007 article written by David Glenn, titled “Education Researchers and Policy Makers Still Not in Sync, Scholars Say,” that appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Education researchers have begun to do more work that is relevant to policy makers, and policy makers have begun to pay more intelligent attention to education research — but there is still a long way to go on both fronts, scholars said on Monday during a conference at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.”
 
Different Agendas, Different Positions
 
According to Glenn “Politicians and school superintendents tend not to pay careful attention to education research because they are in office for only a short time, because they are constrained by donors and activists, and because the governance of the American education system is highly fragmented, said Kenneth K. Wong, a professor of education and political science at Brown University.
 
“On the ‘supply side,’ education researchers in academe are too often rewarded for sheer scholarly output, rather than for answering the questions that are most urgent to policy makers and schoolteachers, said Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, a professor of the history of American education at Harvard University and a former dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.”
 
Suggestions Made by Researchers to Policy-Makers:
 
Glenn reported:
 

“Scholars on opposite sides of a dispute — say, about the educational effectiveness of charter schools — should work together in a process of ‘adversarial collaboration,’ said James S. Kim, an assistant professor of education at Harvard. The scholars would agree in advance on a methodology and on what sorts of evidence would confirm or disprove their hypotheses. If done well, Mr. Kim argued, such collaborations would reduce the public perception that education research is financed and conducted by ideologues with predetermined conclusions.
Blue-ribbon committees on education topics should include a roughly equal balance of classroom teachers and academic researchers, said Mr. Kim. He contrasted the National Reading Panel, a federally supported committee that released a controversial report in 2000, with a similar high-profile committee in England in the late 1990s. The two committees made similar recommendations, Mr. Kim said, but the English report had a much easier time gaining acceptance by teachers. In the United States, he said, ‘there is not much opportunity now for teachers to work together to define excellence in their practice,’ as doctors did when medicine became professionalized in the early 20th century.
When No Child Left Behind is reauthorized, the law should tighten its language related to scientifically based research, argued G. Reid Lyon, executive vice president for research and evaluation at the Whitney International University system, a for-profit institution affiliated with Best Associates, a Texas merchant bank. Instead of allowing money to be spent on programs ‘based on’ scientific research, Mr. Lyon said, the law should restrict spending to programs that have actual ‘evidence of effectiveness,’ based on randomized trials or other careful studies. Mr. Lyon, a former White House education adviser, tried and failed to place that more-restrictive language in No Child Left Behind in 2001. With the tighter standard, he said, the controversies surrounding the federal Reading First program might have been avoided.
The federal government should create national tests of student academic achievement, argued Dan D. Goldhaber, an associate professor of public affairs at the University of Washington. ‘This might seem far afield’ from the conference’s topic, Mr. Goldhaber said. But he said that such tests would create a uniform ‘outcome measure’ for studies of education reform. So a study by a local university of reforms in Cincinnati, for example, could easily be compared with studies of similar reforms in other cities.
The field of education research should develop a prestigious, high-quality flagship journal, argued several speakers. Mr. Goldhaber said that a flagship journal would make it easier for policy makers and the news media to quickly assess the quality of controversial education studies. Jeffrey Henig, a professor of political science at Columbia University and a professor of education at its Teachers College, agreed that such a journal is needed, but worried that no association or university was in a position to make it happen. ‘Who has the incentive to create such a thing?’ he asked.”
It is important to keep up to date on student loan news. What goes on in government and in your state can have a great impact on your student loans and your college education. For all the information you need about student loans, go to www.nextstudent.com.
 
Be sure to tune in next Wednesday for my next blog on student loan legislation in the news.
  
Student Loan Girl
 
 
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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Student Loans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.