The 2019 School Access and Quality Summit will convene social science researchers and K-12 practitioners for a thoughtful discussion on how to measure and improve school performance.
Participants will attend conference sessions, workshops, and group activities that explore some of the most pressing questions around school quality: what is the best way to measure school quality? What measures do parents and students value most? How can schools and districts communicate school quality to the public?
Through these conversations, we hope to spark long-term partnerships and prompt continuous interaction between rigorous research and policy design, implementation, and evaluation.
Welcome Remarks
9:30 - 9:45 am
Harvard University Graduate School of Education
Measuring Success
9:45 - 10:20 am
Former New Jersey State Commissioner of Education
Blueprint Access and Quality Update
10:45 - 11:45 am
Lightning Round: K-12 School Performance Frameworks
12:15 - 1:30 pm
Chicago Public Schools
Atlanta Public Schools
Louisiana Department of Education
Research and Policy Breakout Session: The Right Information at the Right Time: Communicating about School Quality with Families
1:30 - 2:15 pm
In unified enrollment cities, the choice process offers more opportunities than ever for parents and families to decide where their child attends using the information available to them. How should school finders embed quality information to support these decisions? What data defines quality and what is the most digestible format for stakeholders? In this session, leaders from Camden, Chicago, and Oakland will outline their cities’ efforts to ensure parents have timely, relevant information about school quality to support their decision making.
Harvard Graduate School of Education
Chicago Public Schools
Research and Policy Breakout Session: Iterative Assessment to Improve Preschool Math Instruction
1:30 - 2:15 pm
Socioeconomic disparities in math proficiency are observable when children enter kindergarten, and these disparities persist through the school years. Cognitive science suggests that this social inequality depends upon specific skills that all normally-developing children ages three to five can learn. Steve and coauthors designed a procedure that enables teachers to assess the skills of each child and tailor instruction to child-specific levels of skill. The procedure is iterative: assess, teach, re-assess, and teach, with three assessments per school year. Children in classrooms randomly assigned to this procedure gained substantially more in numerical proficiency. The program did not delay the growth in print literacy and, perhaps surprisingly, increased verbal proficiency.
University of Chicago
Research and Policy Breakout Session: The Stanford Education Data Archive: Measuring Academic Performance and Learning Rates in Every School in America
1:30 - 2:15 pm
The Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA) is an initiative aimed at harnessing data to help scholars, policymakers, educators, and parents learn how to improve educational opportunity for all children. SEDA data are publicly available (https://edopportunity.org), and include measures of average academic performance and learning rates for most public schools and districts in the country. The measures are placed on a common national scale, making it possible to compare of educational opportunity and school effectiveness across the U.S. Sean will describe the construction and interpretation of measures included in SEDA, as well as some of the patterns evident in the data.
Research and Policy Breakout Session: Can Successful Schools Replicate? Scaling Up Boston's Charter School Sector
2:15 - 3:00 pm
Can schools that boost student outcomes reproduce their success at new campuses? Elizabeth and her coauthors study a policy reform that allowed effective charter schools in Boston to replicate their school models at new locations. Estimates show that replication charter schools generate large achievement gains on par with those produced by their parent campuses. The average effectiveness of Boston’s charter middle school sector increased after the reform despite a doubling of charter market share. An exploration of mechanisms suggest the highly standardized practices in place at charter schools may facilitate replicability.
Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education
Research and Policy Breakout Session: Accountability Innovation in Louisiana
2:15 - 3:00 pm
Louisiana is exploring new and innovative measures of school quality. These measures include a high school “promotion power model” developed in partnership with Mathematica to measure the effect individual high schools have on student long-term outcomes such as graduation, credential attainment, college enrollment and persistence, and workplace earnings. Louisiana is also developing the “interests and opportunities” measure of how schools provide equitable access to enriching experiences. This session will explore how Louisiana is pursuing these innovations and why innovation is needed.
Louisiana Department of Education
Research and Policy Breakout Session: Federalism, Race, and the Politics of Turnaround: U.S. Public Opinion on Improving Low-Performing Schools
2:15 - 3:00 pm
Public support for school improvement policies can increase the success and durability of those reforms. However, little is known about public views on turnaround. Beth and coauthors deployed questions and embedded experiments in a nationally representative 2017 survey to uncover opinions regarding (a) which level of government should lead turnaround and (b) state takeover of troubled districts.
University of Virginia
Lightning Round: K-12 School Performance Frameworks
3:15 - 3:45 pm
Denver Public Schools
Case Consultancy Workshops
3:45 - 5:30 pm
Reception
5:30 pm
MIT Museum
265 Massachusetts Ave Cambridge, MA 02139
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