Learning Solution – Online Education

There have been a couple of interesting ed-tech stories on the AP wire over the past couple of days that readers of this blog may be interested in learning more about. First, the Houston school district has agreed to pay an $850,000 settlement for providing false information to the federal E-Rate program, the U.S. Department of Justice announced today.

Also, some Kentucky school districts are embracing Internet tools like Twitter and YouTube in class. Apparently, the decision to block those Web sites has been recently re-evaluated, and some school districts are just now being allowed to explore them with students.

You can always keep up with the latest ed-tech news either here, or on the Digital Directions homepage.

After much deliberation, the governing board for the National Assessment of Educational Progress has approved a policy saying that states should include ELLs in testing who have been in the United States for one year. Under the new policy, states and school districts should aim to include 85 percent of ELLs and students with disabilities in their testing samples, reports my colleague Stephen Sawchuk in a story published at edweek.org today. Stephen also reports that the policy says states and school districts must include 95 percent of all students in NAEP testing.

Regulations for the No Child Left Behind Act require states to include ELLs in their regular state tests in reading after the students have been in U.S. schools for one year. States must, however, give their math tests to ELLs during the first test administration after the students enroll in U.S. schools. But for accountability purposes, states are required to report test scores in reading and math only for ELLs who have taken the tests after being in the United States for a year.

Over hundreds of years of lawmaking, good intentions, and bureaucracy, the federal government has spawned a considerable tangle of programs aimed at improving life in some way for the nation’s children and youth. You can find education-related programs, for example, in the departments of agriculture, education, housing and urban development, health and human services, and justice; in the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Corporation for National and Community Service, just to name a few.

To get a read on the extent of that reach, a group of researchers, in a new paper, offer an inventory of all the child-related programs in seven of those agencies. They came up with a grand total of 363 such programs, many of which either overlap or use a confusing array of requirements.

“If you look at it against the services being offered you find a lot of problems with definitions, who’s eligible, and under what circumstances,” said Christopher T. Cross, whose research and consulting firm, Cross & Joftus, took on the inventory project.

Twenty-three programs, for instance, focus on very young children, but the populations they target are all over the map. They variously target children between birth and age 6, 0 to 7, 0 to 8, or 0 to 9, for instance. While 96 programs aim to help poor children and families, the criteria for how poor a family has to be to qualify varies from program to program. And, in Congress, a variety of different committees oversee all those programs, often with no awareness that a similar program may be operating in an agency outside of their committee’s jurisdiction.

“It’s hard for communities to come together to coordinate all these programs in a coherent way,” said Mr. Cross, who was once a part of the federal bureaucracy himself. He served as an assistant secretary for educational research and improvement in the U.S. Department of Education under President George H.W. Bush.

Mr. Cross’ group is not the first to highlight the need for better coordination of child-related services at the federal level. A report out of Teachers College today, in fact, makes a similar call and Mr. Cross says several Obama administration officials are discussing the matter, too.

“It’s just getting it to happen,” said Mr. Cross. The seven-agency inventory his firm created, however, may be one place to start. Check it out for free here.

The U.S. Department of Education expects to put out guidance soon on the civil rights of English-language learners who have disabilities and also those who are gifted.

In a conference call with reporters yesterday, Russlynn Ali, the assistant secretary for civil rights at the Education Department, said the federal government will put out guidance in 17 areas, including some that touch on the education of ELLs. The conference call was a preview to a speech on civil rights that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave in Selma, Ala., yesterday.

Duncan mentioned ELLs both in the conference call and his speech, so I can, at least for the time being, stop pointing out on this blog that the Obama administration isn’t drawing attention publicly to the needs of such students.

I get a sense that educators are hungry for any research findings or models on how best to determine if ELLs have disabilities based on the amount of traffic this blog gets whenever I post something on the subject. The latest tidbit I have to share on the subject is from a book, Why do English Language Learners Struggle With Reading?, published in 2008 by Corwin Press, that the press person for that publishing company just sent me.

The book includes a chapter intended to help reading teachers distinguish if an English-language learner who is struggling to read has only language issues or also has a disability. It offers this tip: “If the majority of ELLs [in one's class] are making little progress, the teacher should focus on improving instruction. If most ELLs are doing well and only a few are struggling, the teacher should look more closely at what is going on with those individual students and consider that they may need additional support.”

Not much, however, comes across my desk that provides information about ELLs who are gifted. Perhaps that’s one of the next hot topics in this field.

Dear Deborah,

This has been an amazing week. The book came out on March 2 and immediately was the best-selling education policy book on Amazon.com. Its wonderful reception is due not to any unusual talent or insight of my own, but to the fact that what I am saying resonates with teachers, administrators, and all who are engaged in the daily work of public education. Teachers feel, with justification, that they are being scapegoated and blamed whenever test scores don’t go up. My book appeared at a time when there was only one narrative about school reform, which privileged the views of businessmen, lawyers, politicians, foundation executives, and government officials who are imposing their ideas without regard to the wisdom and experience of those who must implement them.

A couple of news stories say that I have abandoned almost everything I ever believed, a view that stems from a profile in The New York Times on March 3. A correction to that article was posted the next day, and it read: “An article on Wednesday about a surprising reversal by the education historian Diane Ravitch of almost every position she once took on American schooling misstated the number of books she has either written or edited since leaving government in 1993. It is 18, not 5.” This characterization of my views was simply wrong. I did not do a “U-Turn” (as the New York Times headline had it) nor did I “recant” (as the Education Week headline had it) almost everything I had ever advocated.

I have not changed my fundamental belief that all children should have a great education that includes not just basic skills, but history, literature, geography, civics, the arts, science, foreign languages, and physical education. I have never changed my wish that all children should have well-educated teachers who love their subjects and are well prepared to teach them to their students. I have never changed my skepticism about fads, miracles, and silver bullets, which come and go with great frequency in U.S. education. I have never abandoned my respect for the men and women who teach children and do the daily work that others (including me) talk and write about. I am not opposed to testing, but to the misuse of testing to punish people and close schools.

What did I abandon? The hope that choice and accountability could magically achieve the ends that I believe in. I am not opposed to choice—everyone should be free to choose another school if the school their child attends is not right for the child. And I do not oppose accountability, so long as it is used to help teachers, principals, and schools do a better job, not to punish them.

I would also like to make clear that I was not an architect of No Child Left Behind. As I peruse the blogs, I continue to encounter the claim by critics that I played a key insider role in designing NCLB and am eight years late in renouncing my handiwork. But I had no role in creating NCLB, none whatever. I welcomed it when it was approved, as did nearly 90 percent of Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Its main Democratic sponsors were Senator Ted Kennedy and Congressman George Miller, whose staffs helped to draft the law.

Also, my opposition to NCLB did not happen just now. I wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times on Oct. 3, 2007, (”Get Congress Out of the Classroom“) in which I said that NCLB is “fundamentally flawed.” And I have repeatedly criticized it since then, for instance, in a debate with John Chubb in Education Next and in a Commentary for Education Week (”Time to Kill NCLB”).

All of this is to set the record straight. On the whole, I am staggered, astonished really, by the response to the book. I am especially gratified by the warm reception it has received from teachers. Nothing good can come of any reform that teachers do not embrace: That is one of the lessons of my book.

Diane

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan plans to give a speech today in Selma, Ala., promising to invigorate enforcement of civil rights laws in U.S. schools, which I blogged about over at Politics K-12.

In his prepared remarks, which were circulated to reporters, Duncan mentions that English-language learners are one of the groups of students that Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act must protect, along with minority students and those with disabilities.

For years I’ve heard advocates of ELLs complain that the office for civil rights of the U.S. Department of Education is lackluster in enforcing civil rights law in schools. At the same time, I’ve reported in depth on at least one school district, Salt Lake City, that was forced by the Education Department’s office for civil rights to dramatically improve its programs for ELLs.

I’ll be curious to see if educators notice any big changes in how schools are held accountable to provide equal opportunities to English-language learners after the Obama administration rolls out new civil rights guidance this spring.

For a good look at the state of research on how to teach, check out Elizabeth Green’s story in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. While some experts argue that the way to improve schools is to weed out the worst teachers, Green explores some ongoing efforts to take a different tack and determine what good teachers do differently. She looks at research-based efforts by both charter school practitioners and university-based researchers to study more closely the elements of good teaching—a topic of research that’s surprisingly understudied, according to Green. I’d call this one a must read.

Native Americans told aides of federal lawmakers how they could change the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to better serve Native American students in a “listening session” hosted by the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs this week.

Some of their suggestions at the March 3 gathering on Capitol Hill had to do with how the U.S. Department of Education can help tribes keep their native languages alive.

Kathleen Tom, a tribal council member for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, in Oregon, for instance, called on Congress to authorize creation of an office for Native American languages within the U.S. Department of Education. She envisioned such an office as supporting language-immersion schools and helping high schools and colleges to provide credits for the study of Native American languages.

Representatives of the Navajo Nation asked for the federal education law to recognize the Dine department of education (Navajos call themselves Dine) as the equivalent of a state education agency and eligible to receive federal education dollars directly. Willy Tracey Jr., a Navajo tribal leader, said such a move would enable his tribe to focus more on the teaching of language and culture. Andrew Tah, the superintendent of schools for the Navajo Nation in Window Rock, Ariz., said his tribe would like support from the federal government to develop an assessment tool in Navajo and teach ke, the Navajo concept of character development.

John E. Echohawk, a Pawnee and the executive director of the Native American Rights Fund, in Denver, also asked federal lawmakers to enable tribal education departments to be recognized as the equivalent of state education agencies.

A national survey released earlier this week targets a subject that doesn’t get talked about in education nearly enough: high school guidance counseling. It’s no secret that high school guidance counselors are stretched pretty thin. Across the nation, a typical counselor is responsible for setting 265 students on the right path for life beyond high school. But, in some states, such as California, the student-to-counselor ratio can be three times as high.

What’s interesting about this new survey, which was conducted by the Public Agenda research group, is that it gives some insight into what happens to students when their counselors fall down on the job. The Public Agenda pollsters talked to a nationally representative group of more than 600 adults in their early 20s who had at least some college experience under their belts. More than 60 percent of the respondents said their counselors had done a “fair” or “poor” job of helping them select the right college or career. The survey also showed that the young people who got bad advice in high school were less likely to receive financial aid and less likely to be happy with the college choice. Among those badly advised students, nearly a quarter ended up delaying going to college.

I know a lot of middle-class families already put a lot of energy into directing their children to college, but many other students don’t have that kind of resource at home. In this survey, which was intended to be nationally representative, six out of 10 students came from families in which neither parent had attended college.

This study strikes a chord in me because, 30 or so years ago, I was one of those students with no college-experienced adults to advise me. While I made a decent college choice in the end, I also stopped myself from applying to other schools that I feared were beyond my family’s financial reach. I didn’t really know for sure whether that was the case. I just knew that these schools sounded prestigious and expensive so I backed off. My guidance counselors never told me differently. What I wonder now is how many students in a similar situation might never consider college at all?

The report, “Can I Get Some Advice Here?,” was paid for by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Check out the full text here.

The National Educational Technology Plan was released today by the U.S. Department of Education, and you can view our coverage of it here.

Also, check out Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s speech about the plan given at the annual meeting of the American Association of Publishers.

Florida, Illinois, and New York—three of the five states with the most English-learners in the country—are among the 16 finalists selected by the U.S. Department of Education for a portion of $4 billion in Race to the Top federal stimulus funding.

I make this point because ELLs were never mentioned specifically in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which authorized the stimulus funding for education. So far, I’ve learned of only a few school districts that have targeted stimulus funds for ELLs. That’s even after a group of researchers, calling themselves the Working Group on ELL Policy, made it one of their missions to promote the use of education stimulus aid for ELLs.

If Florida, Illinois, or New York are named in April as winners of the first round of the Race to the Top competition, I imagine that some ELLs might benefit.

The two states with the most English-language learners, California and Texas, however, are not on the list. Texas didn’t apply and California, which has about 40 percent of the nation’s ELLs, was not selected.

I got the ranking for the states with the most ELLs in preK through 12th grade from the Migration Policy Institute, which based its analysis on data for the 2007-08 school year from the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition. The institute reports that the nation had 5.3 million ELLs that school year.

Dear Diane,

They say the best reason for studying history is that it helps you see that the future is still a work in progress. And your new book—The Death and Life of the Great American School System—is an important step toward moving forward. Your clarity and quiet passion, I’m happy to say, are now not directed at me!

The title is brilliant. My first reaction was that, like the Jane Jacobs-titled classic on the American city, it suggests a golden past. (The cover helps.) But public (and private) education never had such a past. And, it’s not enough to say that it served its purposes, but we have new ones. The purposes you and I have in mind were never well served by public education. It didn’t provide the kind of intellectual, social, and political power to “the people” that good education should. It wasn’t even invented to include most of them, and at the time of my birth even white males were just beginning to drop into high school, much less drop out!

But on second glance I realized both you and Jacobs reversed the order! It changes the entire picture. It both resonates with the fear so many have about the dream we held for public education, and its promise, and offers hope, not despair. You have pulled the dream and reality together and turned it into a good and provocative story.

I wince a bit over your critique of my colleague Tony Alvarado, to whom I owe so much. He was open-minded and supportive of passionate teachers who, with a few colleagues, wanted to do something different. He had a kind of blind respect, alongside a properly skeptical trust, for the people who worked with and for him. Unfortunately, he discovered “the truth”—the one best method, the right practice—during his years in New York’s District 2 and thought it could be imposed in San Diego. He made the same mistake that another nice guy, Arne Duncan, is making.

Your discussion of choice, of course, also had me a bit nervous—since it’s one of those essentials I saw/see as key. But it was just one part of a larger strategy. Smallness made it easier for students to become better “known” by adults and for adults to become better known by their students and above all by their colleagues. Not better known as buddies and pals—but for their work. It thus made it more reasonable, it seemed to me, to put more responsibility into the hands of the faculty. It made it more reasonable to hold the faculty responsible as a community to put together strategies that would help the actual students in front of them solve the actual problems facing them. I knew that smallness could also become a management strategy for monitoring productivity, which is why most factories and armies are also broken into smaller units.

But I warned the Gates Foundation people 20 years ago, that if we weren’t careful the next big fad would be big schools. I saw choice as a necessary component of smallness—if it were to serve democracy. Any group of adults who get together to create something for which they are prepared to take responsibility will design something anywhere from slightly different to very different from the work of their colleagues down the hall. And if such schools were going to be coherent and cohesive units, they could not do so if only one of the three constituencies (parents, students, school staff) had choice and voice.

East Harlem is a tightly packed, geographically small area—so one could more or less have choice and neighborhood schools. Since the neighborhood school buildings were not overcrowded, it provided an opportunity to do a little racial integrating, too, drawing parents from the whiter east and west side of Manhattan to interesting District 4 models of schooling.

At its heart was a respect for every individual member of our small communities, aligned with an obligation to get to know each other over time in ways that built trust.

That meant transparency. We had to work in the open, and we had to develop tools of assessment based on accountability to each other that rested on face-to-face agreements and open and public tools. No more “behind the closed door.” My own expert knowledge and history with standardized testing led me to believe that it was a mis-educative force. No one understood the tests, including reporters and politicians. We weren’t even supposed to see them until the day they were given, and the results took many months to get back to us. Yet kids defined themselves in the misguided labels that the tests placed on them. So did we. We began to refer to kids as “non-readers” and “3rd grade readers, and two months” or two years “below grade level” without a basis in reality. We redefined reading itself as whatever one’s score was, despite the fact that psychometricians knew this was voodoo. (We’ve since simplified it to 1,2,3,4!)

We decided to design really tough alternatives that inspired the best from students and teachers. It was “old-fashioned,” but convincing to parents and experts, as well.

But, as you note in Chapter 10 of your book, the so-called “Billionaires Club” wasn’t working on the basis of real kids in real communities; possibly the club members all had been good testers (although many successful people weren’t). And they had precious little respect for those who went into K-12 teaching, unless it was just on the way to becoming a policy wonk. I knew this well and fought it for 45 years. I think I’m almost over the sting of it.

What I treasure in your book, Diane, is that it doesn’t taste of condescension. I can encourage friends to read it without thinking they will be offended. How often is a book written that describes one’s change of mind? It’s rare. Unfortunately, the current scene requires us to spend most of our time on this blog looking for ammunition to prevent the business-takeover rather than to dig out our fascinating disagreements. Since corporations are now fully acknowledged as humans (humanoids?), the opposition looks fiercer than ever. But probably it is not too late.

Deb

P.S. Readers: I hope you’ve got a copy of Diane’s book in your hands as you read this.

The Institute of Education Sciences has some more money to give out to researchers, according to new research grant guidelines posted this week. The grants will be available in 24 topical areas, including cognition and student learning, special education, education policy and finance, and teacher quality.

Most of these study programs have been around a few years, but two are new. One calls for studies on the organization and management of schools and districts. Under this program, which reflects IES Director John Easton’s experience working with Chicago public schools, researchers are being encouraged to study the organizational factors, such as the coherence of the instructional program, the degree of trust in a school, or how much teachers learn from one another, that contribute to successful schools.

“I think all successful programs and policies depend on an understanding of how classrooms are connected to school buildings and how school buildings are connected to districts,” Easton says of the new initiative. “The better we are able to understand these connections, the better we will be able to develop and implement strong programs.”

The second newbie is a program of studies on adult education. According to Lynn Okagaki, the IES commissioner who oversees the research grants program, even though 14 percent of adults have difficulty reading and 22 percent have limited number skills, little is known about how to boost their skills in adult education programs, including those that are targeted to English-language learners.

Also, under the early learning studies program, the institute is looking for researchers to develop and validate easy-to-use measures of kindergarten readiness that cover a variety of the skills that children need to succeed in their first year of school as well as screening procedures to locate children who might need special interventions.

And an interesting strand of work under the student learning in special education study program calls for research that applies new advances in cognitive science to the field of special education.

You can find the official request for application for the research grants here. The special education grants are listed separately. The applications are due in June and September. Researchers who want to catch the first wave of grants need to file a letter of intent by April 29.

If Congress agrees to the Education Department’s budget request for the research agency, the IES expects to spend more than $150 million in the coming fiscal year on new and continuing grants for all of these programs. Though not nearly as much as the department is spending on Race to the Top programs, it’s a healthy chunk of the IES’s funding, nonetheless.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that learning how to revamp tests for English-language learners and students with disabilities might be the toughest question that needs to be tackled with reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, according to an article written by my colleague Alyson Klein about yesterday’s hearing held by the House Education and Labor Committee.

At the hearing, Rep. Robert E. Andrews, D-N.J., asked how the Department of Education would like to change testing for those groups of students.

Duncan mentioned that he has tapped Alexa Posney, the assistant secretary for special education, and Thelma Melendez, the assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education and a former English-language learner herself, to address how best to assess ELLs and students with disabilities.

I’ve blogged about a forum that the department held in Denver in January regarding testing for ELLs.

Ed-tech advocates who have been patiently awaiting the unveiling of the National Educational Technology Plan for months won’t have to wait much longer. A draft of the plan is set to be released soon, possibly as early as Friday, according to the U.S. Office of Education Technology’s Web site, and we will have analysis of it here.

Meanwhile, check out Kathleen Kennedy Manzo’s preview story about the plan.

Three new studies out this morning weigh in on the effects—or lack of effects—of video or digital technology on society’s youngest citizens.

In the most interesting study, (I think, anyway) a group of New Zealand researchers looked at survey data on thousands of teenagers in that country from two separate time periods—2004 and 1987-88. Over both periods, the researchers found that the more time students spent in front of a computer or television screen the less attached they felt to their parents. In the first wave of data, more television time was also linked to lower-quality peer relationships. Science Daily has the details.

In a second study reported in Science Daily, Iowa State University researcher Craig Anderson reviews 130 studies from around the world on how violent video game play affects young people’s behavior. His conclusion is not surprising: Regardless of gender or nationality, young people who are exposed to violent video games are more likely to behave more aggressively, and be less caring, than those who are not. You can find the full study in the March issue of Psychological Bulletin.

The last study, published yesterday in the Archives of Adolescent & Pediatric Medicine, reports on whether toddlers who watched an educational DVD for six weeks improved their word learning. Researchers from the University of California, Riverside, studied 96 12- to 25-month-olds, half of whom watched the DVDs at home and half of whom did not. In the end, there were no real vocabulary differences between the two groups, except in cases where parents intervened to teach the words to their children.

Dear Deborah,

At last! Over the course of our three years of blogging together, I have been writing a book, as you know. Today is publication day for The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. The title is a conscious echo of Jane Jacobs’ important book about urban planning.

You know the feeling. It is both exhilarating and scary, because now the book must stand on its own and face readers and reviewers.

In the book, I trace my evolution from conservative advocate of charters, merit pay, and accountability to what I now think of as “skeptical independent.” I belong to no party, I follow no one’s lead, I ask of every reform proposal: Where is the evidence?

Accountability and choice are now the official strategies for school reform, as they have been since the passage of No Child Left Behind. I look at the evidence for their effectiveness and conclude that we are on the wrong track. The emphasis on accountability is leading to lowered standards (which inflate results), dumbed-down tests (which inflate results), gaming the system (which inflates results), and cheating (ditto). What we have today is a system that borders on institutionalized fraud, where we tell ourselves lies about progress. The emphasis on choice promotes privatization, turning over public school children to private managers who may use screening mechanisms to skim the best students and/or get rid of the weakest, and then trumpet their “results.” This way does not lead to a quantum improvement of American education.

My hope for the book is that it will provoke a counteroffensive against misguided policies. These misguided policies, now embedded in No Child Left Behind and the Race to the Top, have the support of the most powerful people in our society, including our best-known pundits and editorialists.

The first reviews have been encouraging. Valerie Strauss wrote a wonderful column about the book in The Washington Post, and Peter Schrag commented thoughtfully in the Los Angeles Times. However, I take issue with Peter Schrag’s comment that, for every terrific teacher (like the one I describe fondly in the book), there “were (and probably are) two or three stultifying drones who cared little for great books (or math or science) and killed curiosity as readily as the test-bound.” I absolutely do not agree that our schools are overrun with terrible teachers; part of the goal of my book is to discredit the current knee-jerk reaction of editorialists and public officials, who blame teachers for everything that goes wrong in the schools. Blaming the teachers lets everyone else off the hook: families, the media, the popular culture, policymakers, and students themselves. The overwhelming majority of our nation’s teachers are doing the best they can under difficult circumstances, with not enough support from society, parents, or the media.

Deborah, I have learned a lot from you and our readers. I want to take this opportunity to thank you and them for what I have learned while we were bridging our differences.

Diane

It’s been an exciting time to cover educational technology for Education Week and Digital Directions as the push for innovation in our schools and the debates over how to prepare students for the 21st-century workforce intensify. Over the past year, I’ve covered the ups and downs of technology integration in our schools, from the deepening budget woes to the need for professional development to the safety issues raised by the increased use of digital tools by students and teachers, and the slow progress toward integrating technology meaningfully and effectively.

After years of covering curriculum and policy for Education Week, I was surprised at how much my work in those areas prepared me for the issues related to the the ed-tech field. Some of my favorite stories touched on many of these issues, including one chronicling the hard road to reform for Philadelphia’s School of the Future, a recent piece about the complicated requirements of the federal E-rate program, the integration of whiteboards into more classrooms, experimentation with Twitter in the classroom, and the push to enlist technology as a tool for customizing instruction for all students.

There is more big news ahead on the ed-tech front, with the drafts of the National Broadband Plan and the National Educational Technology Plan due out in the coming weeks. My colleagues Katie Ash and Michelle Davis will be keeping you informed on those and other developments.

While I’ll be following the news as well, I will no longer be chronicling it for Education Week. After more than 13 years as a reporter for this great news organization, I am embarking on a new phase in my career helping nonprofits get the word out about their good works. Thanks to all the readers out there for your input, your comments, and your support.

Best of luck in all the good work you do.

A report out this morning suggests the difficulty of the task that curriculum reformers potentially face in agreeing on a common standards that students must meet in order to be deemed “college ready” in language arts.

Researchers at the Regional Education Laboratory Southwest systematically analyzed four such sets of standards to see how well they lined up, in terms of content. Using the American Diploma Project’s standards as a benchmark, the analysts looked in particular at each of the language arts college-readiness standards developed by the ACT and the College Board, as well as another set called Standards for Success, which was developed at the University of Oregon’s Center for Educational Policy in 2003.

It turns out that the four sets don’t overlap much. According to this report, the percentage of standards statements that line up completely or partly with the ADP benchmarks ranges from 34 percent for the ACT’s standards to 77 percent for the College Board’s standards.

And only 5 percent of the ADP content statements completely align with the content in all three comparison sets. If you count the number of statements with a partial match, that share rises to 27 percent. It seems that great minds disagree quite a bit on what students must know to succeed in college.

The researchers also found some variation with respect to the cognitive demand the standards required of students. Overall, though, they found that just over half of the standards statements in each of the four documents rated about 3 for their intellectual demand on a scale of 1 to 4, with 4 representing the most complex skills. At level 3, students are required to demonstrate reasoning, planning skills, and the ability to make complex inferences.

The federal laboratory originally did this analysis for the Commission for a College Ready Texas, which was working on developing college-readiness standards for that state. The report released yesterday by the Institute of Education Sciences, however, is a little more rigorous than the first study.

What would really be interesting, though, would be to see how closely these standards match the English/language arts standards being developed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers as part of their multistate Common Core State Standards Initiative. A final version of those standards is not due out until this spring, but already Kentucky has agreed to adopt the initiative’s K-12 standards in both reading and math.

There’s a new policy brief from the Alliance for Excellent Education about how online learning can address three looming challenges in K-12 education: low high school graduation rates, an imminent lack of funding for schools, and a shortage of high-quality teachers to teach students, especially in the STEM subjects.

“In almost all aspects of American life, technology has been a catalyst in transforming the way we live and work,” says the report. “Integrating a system of efficient technology applications into an effective school model can similarly transform education and enable communities to deal with looming global challenges.”

Tapping into online learning, the brief says, can help address all three challenges in K-12 education.

Of course, there is widespread debate about whether online learning is actually more cost-effective than traditional face-to-face instruction, and many online education advocates say that it should not be pursued for cost savings alone. The brief recognizes this tension but contends that as online learning scales to meet the needs of all students, the “cost-effective gains soon become evident.” After initial start-up and course-development costs have been spent, the results of those dollars can then be duplicated and spread for little to no cost, says the report, and the cost of one teacher can be spread over multiple learning sites, yielding even more savings for schools.

What do you think? Could online learning be the key to addressing some of U.S. education’s biggest challenges? Or is Bob Wise, the president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and author of the brief, expecting too much from online education?