Investing in Equal Opportunity: What Would it Take to Build the Balance Wheel?

In this policy brief, Jennifer King Rice revisits Horace Mann's vision of education as the balance wheel of society. She describes the current school system with its own inequities, far from the needed counter-balance to the opportunity gaps that arise from poverty, discrimination and other outside-school forces. Professor Rice then considers the alternative: how the system would look if it were fully committed to the goal of equal opportunity. She identifies resources and supporting policies that would be required for such a system, extending to a range of socioeconomic and other factors. Recognizing that the opportunity gap goes well beyond school control, she explains how efforts to promote equity must include a broader set of services. The brief describes resources both within the traditional education sphere and reaching beyond it, expanding the role of education in addressing all students’ needs. Her recommendations for policymakers include: Recognizing the broader goals of education such as civic responsibility, democratic values, economic self-sufficiency, and social and economic opportunity; Ensuring that all schools have the fundamental resources necessary for student success, especially for those students with disadvantaged backgrounds; Expanding the services and resources offered to schools in high-poverty neighborhoods, providing wrap-around services such as nutritional supports and health clinics; and Promoting a policy context supportive of equal opportunity and sensitive to local circumstances

NEPC Review: The Costs of Online Learning

Schools and school systems throughout the nation are increasingly experimenting with using various instructional technologies to improve productivity and decrease costs, but evidence on both the effectiveness and the costs of education technology is limited. A recent report published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute sets out to describe &ldquo;the size and range of the critical cost drivers for online schools in comparison to traditional brick-and-mortar schools&rdquo; (p. 2). The study divides online learning into two broad categories&mdash;virtual schools and blended-learning schools&mdash;and, based on data from 50 experts, reports that &ldquo;the average overall per-pupil costs of both models are significantly lower than the $10,000 national average for traditional brick-and-mortar schools&rdquo; (p. 1). These findings, however, are undermined by a general lack of clarity about the models being studied and problematic data and methods. While the report addresses an important topic, the utility of its cost estimates are limited. Of more value are the qualitative findings about how various cost drivers affect the overall costs of online learning. The study would be more useful if it provided a rigorous analysis of a set of well-defined promising models of online learning as the basis for its cost estimates.</p

Assigning Triaged Patients to Treatment Rooms in a Hospital Emergency Department

The assigning of new arrivals at a hospital emergency department to treatment rooms was examined. New patients are summarily triaged and assigned to a treatment room based on severity of their symptoms, the grade of a treatment room, and an exponential benefit curve that encourages the solver to schedule the most severe cases early. SAS’s OPTMODEL modeling language was employed to build the model and SAS’s MILP solver was used to perform the scheduling. Up to thirty patients were optimally assigned to depict the example of a large emergency department

NEPC Review: Measures of Last Resort: Assessing Strategies for State-Initiated Turnarounds

The stated goal of this report is to strengthen the evidence base on state-initiated turnarounds and to provide guidance to help states use turnaround strategies more effectively. The report draws on multiple sources of information to develop a conceptual framework and profile of state-initiated turnaround strategies, to array the evidence on the effectiveness of turnaround initiatives, and to identify key elements of a successful turnaround strategy. However, given multiple methodological limitations, the report fails to elevate either the research base or the policy discourse. Specifically, the methods used to carry out the original research (e.g., analysis of state policies, interviews with stakeholders, and illustrative cases) are neither explained nor justified. Likewise, the methods employed in the eight evaluations selected to assess the effectiveness of turnaround approaches are not described, and the evidence base produced by these evaluations is not sufficient to support the sweeping claims made in the report. Equally important, the report neglects to consider relevant research on the specific mechanisms (e.g., school reconstitution, intensive professional development, private management systems) that states use when they employ the broad turnaround strategies discussed in the report. As a result of these problems, the report does not enhance the evidence base or provide the substantive guidance state policymakers require to make informed decisions about the use of various school turnaround strategies.</p

Virtual Schools in the U.S. 2014: Politics, Performance, Policy, and Research Evidence

This second annual report in a series on virtual education is organized in three major sections. Section I examines the policy and political landscape associated with virtual schooling and describes the current state of affairs related to finance and governance, instructional program quality, and teacher quality. The authors analyze to what extent, if any, policy in the past year has moved toward or away from the 2013 recommendations. Section II reviews the research relevant to virtual schools. It finds that despite considerable enthusiasm for virtual education in some quarters, there is little credible research to support virtual schools&rsquo; practices or to justify ongoing calls for ever-greater expansion. Section III provides a descriptive overview of full-time virtual schools and their expansion based on data gathered from state, corporate, and organizational sources. Details on enrollment include the student characteristics of race/ethnicity, sex, free and reduced- price lunch eligibility, special education designation, ELL status, and grade level. Other information includes student-teacher ratios. In addition, details on student achievement include Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) ratings, state ratings, and graduation rates.</p

Virtual Schools in the U.S. 2013: Politics, Performance, Policy, and Research Evidence

This national study, which comprehensively reviews 311 virtual schools operating in the United States, finds serious and systemic problems with the nation’s full-time cyber schools. Despite virtual schools’ track record of students falling behind their peers academically or dropping-out at higher rates, states and districts continue to expand virtual schools and online offerings to students, at high cost to taxpayers. The advocates of full-time virtual schools are several years ahead of policymakers and researchers, and new opportunities are being developed and promoted largely by for-profit entities accountable to stockholders rather than to any public constituency. The report’s authors conclude that continued rapid expansion of full-time cyber schools is unwise. More research is needed; and to enable such research, state oversight agencies need to require more, and better refined, data. Financial controls and funding unique to cyber schools need to be established

Virtual Schools in the U.S. 2023

Over the past two and a half decades, digital technologies and virtual education have moved quickly to the top of the K&ndash;12 public education reform agenda. Proponents, including business leaders, school reform organizations, foundations, and for-profit and nonprofit service providers, argue that virtual technology will revolutionize teaching and learning, dramatically reduce the cost, and expand the availability of high-quality education. If this sounds too good to be true, it could be because it&rsquo;s not true. Virtual Schools in the U.S. 2023 is NEPC's ninth comprehensive report on the performance of U.S. virtual schools. It provides scholarly analyses of the characteristics and performance of full-time, publicly funded K&ndash;12 virtual schools; reviews the relevant available research related to virtual school practices; provides an overview of recent state legislative efforts to craft virtual school policy; and offers policy recommendations based on the available evidence.</p

Spectral Typing of Late Type Stellar Companions to Young Stars from Low Dispersion Near-Infrared Integral Field Unit Data

We used the Project 1640 near-infrared coronagraph and integral field spectrograph to observe 19 young solar type stars. Five of these stars are known binary stars and we detected the late-type secondaries and were able to measure their JH spectra with a resolution of R\sim30. The reduced, extracted, and calibrated spectra were compared to template spectra from the IRTF spectral library. With this comparison we test the accuracy and consistency of spectral type determination with the low-resolution near-infrared spectra from P1640. Additionally, we determine effective temperature and surface gravity of the companions by fitting synthetic spectra calculated with the PHOENIX model atmosphere code. We also present several new epochs of astrometry of each of the systems. Together these data increase our knowledge and understanding of the stellar make up of these systems. In addition to the astronomical results, the analysis presented helps validate the Project 1640 data reduction and spectral extraction processes and the utility of low-resolution, near-infrared spectra for characterizing late-type companions in multiple systems.Comment: Accepted to Astronomical Journal, 25 pages, 8 figure

Virtual Schools in the U.S. 2017

In the five years since the first NEPC Annual Report on Virtual Education was released in 2013, virtual education continues to be a focal point for policymakers. Proponents argue that virtual education can expand student choices and improve the efficiency of public education. In particular, full-time virtual schools (also sometimes referred to as virtual charter schools, virtual academies, online schools or cyber schools) have attracted a great deal of attention. Many believe that online curriculum can be tailored to individual students more effectively than curriculum in traditional classrooms, giving it the potential to promote greater student achievement than can be realized in traditional brick-and-mortar schools. Further, the promise of lower costs&mdash;primarily for instructional personnel and facilities&mdash;makes virtual schools financially appealing to both policymakers and for-profit providers. The 2017 NEPC Annual Report contributes to the existing evidence related to virtual education, and so to debates surrounding it. It provides objective analysis of the characteristics and performance of full-time, publicly funded K-12 virtual schools; available research on virtual school practices and policy; and an overview of recent state efforts to craft new policy.</p

Rapid spread of complex change: a case study in inpatient palliative care

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Based on positive findings from a randomized controlled trial, Kaiser Permanente's national executive leadership group set an expectation that all Kaiser Permanente and partner hospitals would implement a consultative model of interdisciplinary, inpatient-based palliative care (IPC). Within one year, the number of IPC consultations program-wide increased almost tenfold from baseline, and the number of teams nearly doubled. We report here results from a qualitative evaluation of the IPC initiative after a year of implementation; our purpose was to understand factors supporting or impeding the rapid and consistent spread of a complex program.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Quality improvement study using a case study design and qualitative analysis of in-depth semi-structured interviews with 36 national, regional, and local leaders.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Compelling evidence of impacts on patient satisfaction and quality of care generated 'pull' among adopters, expressed as a remarkably high degree of conviction about the value of the model. Broad leadership agreement gave rise to sponsorship and support that permeated the organization. A robust social network promoted knowledge exchange and built on an existing network with a strong interest in palliative care. Resource constraints, pre-existing programs of a different model, and ambiguous accountability for implementation impeded spread.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>A complex, hospital-based, interdisciplinary intervention in a large health care organization spread rapidly due to a synergy between organizational 'push' strategies and grassroots-level pull. The combination of push and pull may be especially important when the organizational context or the practice to be spread is complex.</p