Hamilton Project K-12 Education Forum, September 27th in DC

The Hamilton Proejct • Press Release/Media Advisory • September 21, 2011

Media Advisory

Hamilton Project to Host September 27th Forum

Promoting K-12 Education to Advance Student Achievement

What: The Hamilton Project at Brookings will host a forum to highlight new policy ideas and perspectives on how to improve student performance in K-12 education. The event will highlight three new policy proposals by outside experts focusing on the use of incentives in education, opportunities for organizational changes to improve performance, and a new approach to accountability for teachers and students. Denver Public Schools Superintendent Tom Boasberg, United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew, and New Visions for Public Schools President Robert Hughes will provide diverse feedback on these proposals. The forum will conclude a discussion on the path forward in education reform with Teach for America Founder and CEO Wendy Kopp and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, moderated by David Leonhardt, D.C. bureau chief of the New York Times.

The full agenda and registration are available here. Please let us know if you plan to attend an we'll reserve a seat for you.

When: The forum will be held on Tuesday, September 27 from 9:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Where: The Park Hyatt Hotel Ballroom, 1201 24th Street, NW, Washington, DC.

About Us: The Hamilton Project is an economic policy initiative at the Brookings Institution that produces research and policy proposals on how to create broad-based economic growth by enhancing individual economic security, and by embracing a role for effective government in making needed public investments. Learn more at www.hamiltonproject.org.

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New Hamilton Project Papers for Release on September 27, 2011

Improving Student Outcomes: Restoring America's Education Potential – Michael Greenstone, Adam Looney and Paige Shevlin (Hamilton Project Strategy Paper)

Historically, a key driver of the U.S. economy has been its education system, which raises the productivity and earnings of American workers. Over the last three decades, however, the pace of educational attainment has slowed and achievement has stagnated. At the same time, per pupil spending has skyrocketed. A wave of new research has helped identify strategies for improving student achievement in cost-effective ways. In a new strategy paper, The Hamilton Project addresses the importance of structural changes in K-12 education, including new ways to attract and retain great teachers and more discrete cost-effective changes that can be implemented within the current structure. These range from starting school later to offering students incentives.

The Power and Pitfalls of Education Incentives – Bradley M. Allan (EdLabs) and Roland Fryer (Harvard University)

There is widespread agreement that America’s school system is in desperate need of reform, but many educational interventions are ineffective, expensive, or difficult to implement. Recent incentive programs, however, demonstrate that well-designed rewards to students can improve achievement at relatively low costs. This paper draws on school-based ﬁeld experiments with student and teacher incentives to offer guidelines for designing successful education incentive programs. Incentives for inputs, such as doing homework or reading books, produced modest gains and might have positive returns on investment, and thus provide the best direction for future programs. Additionally, this paper proposes directions for future incentive programs and concludes with guidelines for educators and policymakers to implement incentive programs based on the experiments’ research findings and best practices.

New Assessments for Improved Accountability – Derek Neal (University of Chicago)

Although assessments are needed to hold schools and teachers accountable for student performance, the current assessment system is flawed, because tests have not been designed for use accountability systems. Modern assessments are constructed to be similar from year to year which makes teaching to specific tests far easier. This leads to gains on certain tests without real improvements in learning. The author provides guidelines for an improved accountability system to address this issue. Teachers and schools can be ranked according to assessments that are not as predictable, combined with non test-based metrics like classroom observations, school inspections, and parental evaluations.

Organizing Schools to Improve Student Achievement: Start Times, Grade Configurations, and Teacher Assignments – Jonah Rockoff (Columbia Graduate School of Business) and Brian Jacob (University of Michigan)

Education reform debates often center on expensive, politically controversial, and dramatic changes in policy. This has obscured an important direction for raising student performance —namely, reforms to school management and organization that make sure the “trains run on time” and improve administrative decisions that affect the instructional process. Such reforms may substantially increase student learning at modest cost, and discuss three reforms that evidence suggests have highly favorable benefit-cost ratios: later start times for older students, restructuring the stand-alone middle school, and ensuring teachers are assigned the students and classes in which they are most effective.