September 2002 - Newsletter
Welcome to the third edition of the CPRE-UW enewsletter! I am very pleased with the success of this newsletter. We have steadily added new subscribers and now have a subscription base of over 900. Many people have told me that the information is timely, useful, and valuable. I hope that we continue to meet these standards and we welcome your feedback.
Allan Odden
Co-Director, CPRE
Principal Investigator, School Finance and Teacher Compensation
CPRE-UW STAFF UPDATES
We are pleased that Geoffrey Borman has joined the CPRE-UW research team. Geoffrey, who had been a researcher at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Social Organization for Schools since 1997, came to UW-Madison as an Assistant Professor of Educational Administration in 2001. His work with CPRE will focus on analyses of school and classroom effects and on his newly funded study that will estimate the impacts of Florida's National Board Certified Teachers on student achievement. Geoffrey recently received the National Academy of Education/ SpencerPost-Doctoral Fellowship Award. This fellowship will support his research that explores the consequences of attending high-poverty schools.
Carolyn Kelley, one of the original Teacher Compensation Project research team members, is no longer formally working on the project. Carolyn has assumed the department chair responsibilities for the Department of Educational Administration. In addition to her department chair and instructional responsibilities, Carolyn will continue her research in principal leadership, including an ongoing project with CPRE-UW staff member Steve Kimball.
Richard Halverson, Assistant Professor, Educational Administration, will be participating in CPRE-UW research this year. Rich joined the UW faculty in 2001 and he will be collaborating with Carolyn Kelley and Steve Kimball this year on a project relating to instructional leadership.
CPRE-UW's School Finance project assistant Betheny Gross successfully defended her doctoral dissertation over the summer. Perceptive readers will recognize Betheny as a co-author of several recent CPRE publications. Betheny's connections with CPRE continue through her new position with the University of Pennsylvania, where she is working as a member of the CPRE research staff.
At the request of Assistant Secretary of Education, Grover (Russ) Whitehurst, Allan Odden is giving a lecture on Performance Based Pay and Performance Based Teacher Evaluation in the Senate Rayburn Office Building on October 2, 2002, at 11 am. He will discuss the theories behind these two teacher quality improvement strategies; variation in their design in districts across the country; research on their operation, impacts and validity; and implications for better second-generation programs. This will be the third lecture in a series intended to profile OERI funded research that is empirical, theory based, and useful for education leaders at the state, district and school levels.
REGISTRATION OPEN FOR 2002 NATIONAL CONFERENCE
Many of you already received notice that registration has been opened for the third annual National Teacher Compensation and Evaluation Conference. Registrations are arriving steadily for the November 21-22 conference at the Radisson Hotel O'Hare in suburban Chicago. You can view the tentative conference agenda at our website ( http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/conference/conference/Nov02/agenda.asp ) and register on-line at http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/conference/conference/Nov02/reg/ . We hope to see many of you in Chicago in November!
WEBSITE UPDATES
New Teacher Compensation Cases Available. Since our last newsletter, we have posted three new cases in the Teacher Compensation section of our website. In addition to our cases on performance-based licensure systems in Indiana and North Carolina, we have a case on Connecticut's Beginning Educator Support and Training (BEST) program. It is available in .pdf format at http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/papers/pdf/CT TE 8-02.pdf .
Two new cases relating to knowledge and skill-based pay are available. A new district-level case describes how the LaCrescent-Hokah (MN) school district developed a new knowledge and skill pay system. The case is available in .pdf format at http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/papers/pdf/LaCrescent KSBP 9-02.pdf . Also under the knowledge and skill-based pay category, we have posted a case on the development of Iowa's statewide performance pay program. The case summarizes the process from the initial inception, through the legislative and budgetary processes, and into early implementation. View the Iowa case in .pdf format at http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/papers/pdf/Iowa KSBP 9-02.pdf .
New look for CPRE-UW Website. Our website sees a great deal of traffic, with about an average of over 11,000 page requests and 2500 .pdf downloads a month. Despite our general satisfaction with the site, we wanted to give it a facelift and make some revisions. Our new look includes some navigational improvements and a brighter, more streamlined layout. Check it out at http://cpre.wceruw.org.
NEW PAPERS AND PUBLICATIONS
CPRE-UW staff have several new publications to report since the last newsletter.
Allan Odden has authored a chapter for the 2003 AERA Yearbook. It assesses implementation issues and problems and suggestions for improving performance based evaluations, particularly as a foundation for knowledge- and skill-based pay, from research in such places as Cincinnati, Vaughn Charter School, Washoe County, Newport News and Anoka-Hennepin.
Steve Kimball has a forthcoming article in the Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education. The paper, "The Analysis of Feedback, Enabling Conditions and Fairness Perceptions of Teachers in Three School Districts with New Standards-based Evaluation Systems," is an outgrowth of his doctoral thesis.
The August 2002 edition of Educational Administration Quarterly includes an article by Carolyn Kelley, Herb Heneman and Tony Milanowski. The article, "Teacher Motivation and School-Based Performance Awards" draws primarily from the Teacher Compensation Project's research in Kentucky and Charlotte-Mecklenburg, NC.
Tony Milanowski and Herb Heneman presented a session, "Research on Teacher Evaluation-New Findings," at the Fifth Annual Framework for Teaching Conference in Minneapolis, in June.
The School Finance project has two articles in the Summer 2002 edition of Journal of Education Finance. The first, "A Cost Framework for Professional Development," by Allan Odden, Sarah Archibald, Mark Fermanich and H. Alix Gallagher, was noted in our June newsletter. An abstract of the article is available from our website at http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/finance/research/eii/pdabstract.asp . The second article, "You CAN Get There From Here: How Three Urban Schools Could Use Existing Resources to Afford Comprehensive School Reform," is by Mark Fermanich and Steve Kimball. Using actual budget data from three urban elementary schools, the authors were able to show that the schools could afford to implement several of the most expensive comprehensive school reform models.
RESEARCH UPDATES
The Teacher Compensation Project's preliminary work on relating teacher evaluation systems and student achievement has some promising early results. By linking individual teacher evaluation scores and value-added student learning growth for a particular teacher's students, they have found a positive relationship between teacher evaluation scores and value-added student learning growth in Cincinnati and Vaughn Next Century Learning Center. Work will continue at these sites, and preliminary work will be done in Washoe County (Reno), Nevada schools this coming year. We currently have a paper relating to this work posted on our site, "The Relationships Between Teacher Quality and Measures of Student Achievement: The Case of Vaughn Elementary," available at http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/papers/pdf/Vaughn TE 4-02.pdf .