Office of Planning and Research

ESE Research Update, January 2014

Reports from ESE

  

Report to the Legislature: Study of the Cost of Implementing the Student Discipline Law (November 2013)

  

The Status of the Massachusetts Educator Workforce (December 2011)

a report from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (ESE) that focuses on first-year teachers in Massachusetts and includes data on their preparation, placement and retention. The goal of the report is to help guide teacher recruitment and retention efforts, especially in hard to staff areas, and help to improve the support ESE, preparation programs and school districts provide to first-year teachers. The report finds that first-year teachers teach a disproportionate share of high-needs students and have lower retention rates than more experienced teachers. High poverty schools and schools in Level 4, the second lowest performance level of the state accountability system (there were no level 5 schools at the time of the analysis for this report), hire a disproportionately large share of first-year teachers. In 2012-13, new teachers comprised 12 percent of the teaching staff in high poverty schools, compared to 5 percent in low poverty schools. Almost 16 percent of instructors at Level 4 schools are new teachers, compared to less than 10 percent for schools in higher accountability levels. First-year teacher retention rates are lowest among Level 4 schools. Only 58 percent of first-year teachers in Level 4 schools are retained for one year, and only 42 percent remain teaching in the same school for two years.

Other Sources

• Charter School Demand and Effectiveness by the Boston Foundation and NewSchools Venture Fund is a report that explores charter school demand in Boston and the effects of charter attendance on MCAS scores among middle and high school students. The study relies on Boston's charter school admissions lotteries to explore the causal effect of charter school attendance on proficiency levels. Researchers found that the percentage of sixth graders who applied to at least one charter school increased from about 15 percent in 2010 to 33 percent in 2013, while ninth grade charter applications increased from 11 percent to 15 percent over the same time period. The report also found that the causal impact of attending a year at a Boston charter school is large and positive in ELA and mathematics in both middle school and high school. A year of attendance at a charter school translated to a 12 percentage point increase in math test scores and 6 percentage points in ELA in middle school and 10 points in both subjects in high school.

• In the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR) SDP Human Capital Diagnostic for Boston Public Schools, researchers combined student scheduling, demographic, and MCAS test score data with school and human resources information to investigate questions concerning teacher placement retention, and school performance in Boston Public Schools (BPS). They found that schools with the highest average MCAS math scores were least likely to hire new teachers: among schools in the top quartile of average MCAS achievement, new teachers comprised 8 percent of these schools' teaching staffs in the 2006-07 through 2009-10 school years. By comparison, 11 percent of the teachers in bottom-quartile schools were new teachers. Researchers also found that math teacher growth scores increased most during the first three years of teaching and then plateaued after year four at about 0.14 standard deviations higher than the average value for new teachers. Researchers found that among novice teachers who began teaching in 2006-2007, 55 percent were still teaching in BPS three years later, and 43 percent were still teaching in the same school.

• Issue Brief: Advancing Comprehensive Reform: Rethinking District Use of Title I Resources is a Rennie Center policy brief that presents select district responses to Massachusetts' waiver from the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) which allowed districts to rethink the use of Title I and Title IIA funding to support student learning and serve a greater proportion of low-achieving students. The brief presents three case studies of districts taking advantage of the new Title I flexibility provisions, including Westfield, Stoughton, and Dedham Public Schools. Common themes arose across these districts: They extended instructional time through longer days, years, or summer programming; they expanded the grade levels served; they opted for school- and district-wide Title I programming to reach more students; and finally, they used Title I resources to hire specialists to oversee the analysis and regular use of data in schools. The brief concludes with three recommendations for districts from these case studies: 1) use of federal resources to align with existing district strategic plans; 2) reliance on student performance data to identify low achieving students for additional support; and 3) collaboration between central office and school leadership and school-level teams to make decisions.

• Condition of Education in the Commonwealth: 2013 Data Report is the first annual data report by the Rennie Center on the progress and proficiency of Massachusetts students from birth to childhood. The indicators in this report are from state education databases and focus on four areas: birth through third grade; fourth grade through eighth grade; ninth grade through high school graduation; and post secondary to career. The brief reports that 57 percent of third graders in 2013 performed at proficient or higher on the ELA MCAS (down 4 percent from 2012); in 2013, 55 percent of eighth graders scored proficient or above on the math MCAS (up 3 percent from 2012); in 2012, 85 percent of high school students graduated from high school in four years (up 1.3 percent from 2011); and in 2012, 39 percent of Massachusetts adults held a bachelor's degree or higher.

New Additions to the ESE Library

• Pallant, Julie (2013) SPSS Survival Manual, 5th Edition: A step by step guide to data analysis using IBM SPSS