Arts Education in Michigan: Fostering Creativity and Innovation

In the fall of 2011, Quadrant Arts Education Research, in partnership with Michigan Youth Arts, the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, the Michigan Department of Education, and ArtServe Michigan, began a statewide study of arts education in Michigan schools. The project was designed to create a never-before-available picture of arts education in Michigan and institute baseline information for tracking and measuring future progress. This landmark study provides essential data on student access, teacher training, assessment and accountability in arts education in K-12 schools in Michigan. The data provides the groundwork to drive future arts education policy decisions that effect all Michigan students.The principals of 4163 schools, including 718 private and 293 charter schools, were asked to complete an online survey detailing numerous building-level specifics on arts education in their schools

AdvancED Systemic Process Approach vs Michigan Department of Education Non-Systemic Process Approach to School Improvement

The author of this correlational study examined the differences in academic achievement and school improvement between Michigan schools accredited by AdvancED, which uses a systemic process approach for school improvement, and schools accredited by the Michigan Department of Education, which does not use a systemic process approach. The data for the study was a random sampling of Education YES! self-reports, fed by the School Systems Review (SSR) completed by Michigan-accredited schools and the Interim Self-Assessment (ISA) completed by AdvancED-accredited schools. Schools that follow a systemic process were more likely to be successful than schools that do not. In addition to the SSR and ISA, the author examined the statewide Top-to-Bottom list for comparison. Supplemental tools, the School Lookup tool and the MI School Data portal, provided triangulated data to support the advantages of using a systems approach. The researcher used a comparative quantitative quasi-experimental methodology, which, to date, had not been used to determine the success of AdvancED-accredited schools in Michigan. The findings provide support for the principal arguments addressed in the research that AdvancED-accredited schools score higher in improvement than schools that do not implement systemic reforms

Building a Better Child Care System: What Michigan Can Do to Help More Parents and Children Access Quality Care

In August 2016, with support from the Max and Marjorie Fisher Foundation, the Michigan Department of Education Office of Great Start and Citizens Research Council of Michigan released a report to improve and inform the federal application to renew Michigan's Childcare Subsidy Program. The Michigan program has been under-subscribed, resulting in unused funding being returned to the federal government — the only state in the U.S. to have done so in 2015. Given the substantial challenges families face in Michigan, the report outlined recommendations that will create a positive impact on both parents, as well as the childcare providers themselves. Creating change in childcare will requirement considerable changes, not just to better support parents, but also to bolster the early education workforce overall

An investigation of the relationship between Michigan Department of Education school achievement rankings and school\u27s percentage of economically disadvantaged students

The primary purpose of this study was to compare the Michigan Department of Education’s (MDE) school ranking system, the Top to Bottom Ranking, to the school’s percentage of economically disadvantaged students as measured by the percentage of free and reduced-price lunch. In addition, finding that a correlation exists, the study sought to identify an alternate method of reporting school effectiveness, taking into consideration the school’s percentage of economically disadvantaged students. Utilizing the current Top to Bottom Ranking system, the Michigan Department of Education assigns an array of requirements, sanctions, and rewards, depending on where a school building ranks. This ranking system does not take into account the factor of the socio-economic status of the students attending the school. It was the intent of the study to show an inverse correlation between a school’s percentage of economically disadvantaged students and the school’s relative ranking on the Top to Bottom list. Additionally, the study aimed to provide an alternate solution for reporting and classifying school quality. Specific research questions included 1) Does an inverse correlation exist between a school’s rank and its economically disadvantaged (ED) population? and 2) Is it possible to create a ranking system that uses the MDE metrics of a building’s student achievement scores, students achievement change, and students achievement gap while factoring in a school’s percentage of economically disadvantaged student population? Using a Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient on the 2011-12 and 2012-13 MDE’s school data-based information, a significant correlation, -0.7525514 and -0.7379997, respectively, confirmed a p-value \u3c 0.0001. Furthermore, using quantile regression, a new ranking model was created allowing one to control for an acceptable correlation between a school building’s ranking and a school’s percentage of economically disadvantaged

Maintenance Required: Charter Schooling in Michigan

Michigan's charter sector has tremendous potential, but achieving that potential requires significant improvements

A Regional Case Study: Effective Administrator Feedback to Inform Teacher Performance

In 2013, the Michigan Department of Education required all public school districts to adopt a state-approved evaluation system. The Department’s rationale for this change was to increase teacher accountability and thus to improve student achievement. Because schoollevel administrators are responsible for implementing district policy and acting as the primary evaluators of teacher performance, the authors conducted a study to identify the type of administrator feedback principals give in observations and evaluations. In this 3-year study, evaluation data were collected from random districts within a rural Michigan Intermediate School District and analyzed for average total score and manner of feedback. Three primary results emerged. First, the rating count and average score per element rated varied widely; second, evaluators frequently provided comments with each rating; and finally, these evaluators’ comments were not actionable for teacher performance improvement. The results of this work suggest a need for clarity around the definition and purpose of feedback in teacher performance evaluations

Extending the Utility of Public Use Microdata

Applied demography employs population studies in the effort to answer real world questions and provide insights for the problems that business and civic leaders face on an ongoing basis. To answer these questions the applied demographer sometimes performs primary research, but more often they attempt to leverage and extend the use of publicly available data to answer the questions presented in an efficient and timeconstrained manner. The work described here looks at a problem presented by the Michigan Department of Education and the solution presented by the Michigan State Demographer. The problem required estimates for a single-year age group at a nonstandard poverty level. These data are not published by the U.S. Census Bureau, but a novel solution was developed to serve an intermediate need until a custom tabulation of Census data could be delivered. With the delivery of a custom tabulation of Census data, there was a unique opportunity to test the results of the interpolation against what would be a gold standard dataset. The results reveal that the process of interpolating estimates devised as a solution could produce estimates that could be useful for a variety of purposes