Office of Planning and Research

ESE Research Update, May 2016

Research and Reports from ESE

• The Department contracted with American Institutes for Research (AIR) to develop a set of 10-year projections of teacher supply and demand to inform planning. As described in their final report, Massachusetts Study of Teacher Supply and Demand: Trends and Projections, the statewide demand for teachers is projected to decrease by approximately 5.8 percent over the next 10 years, due largely to a decline in student enrollment. Projections indicate that there will be a surplus of general education and vocational/technical teachers, but a shortage of educators to teach the state's special education students and English language learners. The researchers also indicate that the supply of teachers is expected to meet demand over the next 10 years in most regions across the state, except for the Commissioner's districts, where supply is expected to decline significantly, leading to teacher shortages. Additionally, demand for teachers from racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds is expected to increase, while the demand for white teachers is likely to decrease.

Research on Massachusetts education policy

• In January, researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Harvard Kennedy School released Can States Take Over and Turn around School Districts? Evidence from Lawrence, Massachusetts, which measures the impact of the state receivership of the Lawrence Public Schools on student outcomes. The authors found that the first two years of Level 5 turnaround resulted in large achievement gains in math and modest gains in reading for all students, including English language learners. The researchers also examined the impact of the district's Acceleration Academies: intensive small-group instruction provided to students during school vacation, which was a key component of Lawrence turnaround efforts. The study found that these academies led to especially large gains for participating students in both math and reading.

• MIT researcher Elizabeth Setren released a December 2015 study titled Special Education and English Language Learner Students in Boston Charter Schools: Impact and Classification, which uses admission lottery results to measure the impact of attending a Boston charter school for students with disabilities and English language learners (ELLs). The study found that the Boston charters produced substantial gains for students with disabilities and ELLs on state math and reading assessments and helped narrow the achievement gap for students with disabilities and ELLs. The report also indicates that students with disabilities and ELLs were proportionally represented in the Boston charter lotteries, and that the Boston charter schools tended to move applicants with disabilities to more inclusive settings at higher rates than traditional public schools.

• AIR's National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) used longitudinal data from five states, including Massachusetts, to investigate the impact of changes in state standards and assessments on value-added measures of teacher performance. In their March 2016 report, The Common Core Conundrum: To What Extent Should We Worry That Changes to Assessments and Standards Will Affect Test-Based Measures of Teacher Performance?, researchers compare the stability of teacher rankings over time when there is and is not a change in the standards and assessments and examine the degree to which teacher value-added in stable years is an accurate predictor of student achievement during transition years. Overall, the study found little evidence that value-added measures are less stable in transition years, relative to non-transition years, especially in math. The researchers concluded that teacher value-added measures from non-transition years can be used to accurately predict student achievement in transition years.

• In February, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Human Resources Research Organization (HumRRO) partnered to release a pair of research briefs that examine the extent to which the grades 5,8, and high school components of four assessment systems—the ACT Aspire, MCAS, PARCC, and Smarter Balanced—align with the Criteria for Procuring and Evaluating High Quality Assessment framework released by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) in 2014. The researchers enlisted dozens of educators and content experts to review the content and depth of each assessment and determine whether it was an excellent, good, limited, or weak match to each CCSSO criterion. MCAS and PARCC both scored well in most areas, but overall PARCC was viewed as a better match to the criteria. A full summary of the ratings of the high school portions of the assessments on each of the CCSSO criterion is available on pages xi to xii of HumRRO's Evaluating the Content and Quality of Next Generation High School Assessments, Similarly, a full summary of the ratings of the grades 5 and 8 components of the assessments on each of the CCSSO criterion is available on pages 15 to 18 of The Fordham Institute's Evaluating the Content and Quality of Next Generation Assessments.

• Researchers at Harvard's Center for Education Policy Research published a February 2016 report titled Teaching Higher: Educators' Perspectives on Common Core Implementation, which includes the results of teacher surveys performed across five states, including Massachusetts. Teachers in all five states have made significant changes to their lesson plans and instructional materials in response to the implementation of the Common Core State Standards. Most teachers and principals have implemented the new standards; 73 percent of teachers indicated that they have embraced the new standards "quite a bit" or "fully," and 69 percent of principals indicated that they believe that the new standards will lead to improved student learning. In math, the researchers also found that three markers of successful implementation were associated with statistically significantly higher student performance on Common Core aligned assessments: additional teacher professional development days, more classroom observations with explicit feedback tied to the Common Core standards, and the inclusion of Common Core-aligned student outcomes in the teacher evaluation process. The study did not find similar markers in the case of English language arts.