NASHVILLE, Tenn. ñ Vanderbilt University will be the home of the
first federally funded national center to take a wide-ranging look at
school choice ñ from its impact on student achievement and
instructional quality to whether it meets the needs of special
education and disabled students and its effects across racial and class
lines.
The university’s Peabody College of education and human development
has won a $10 million U.S. Department of Education grant to fund the
Center on School Choice, Competition and Achievement. The grant ñ a
cooperative agreement between the U.S. Department of Education’s
Institute for Education Sciences and Vanderbilt ñ will pay out
approximately $2 million per year for five years.
"This grant is an important and exciting development for Vanderbilt
and helps demonstrate why Peabody College is widely regarded as one of
the top education schools in the country," Vanderbilt Chancellor Gordon
Gee said. "We competed against a number of top institutions, and the
fact that we prevailed in securing funding to help tackle one of our
nation’s most challenging issues says volumes about our exceptional
faculty."
Partners in the new center include some of the world’s top
universities and research organizations: The Brookings Institution,
Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, the
National Bureau of Economic Research, the Northwest Evaluation
Association (NWEA) and the Stanford University School of Education.
"The current state of research provides hardly definitive
answers to a lot of questions about school choice ñ will it raise
student achievement? Satisfy parents and students? Improve
instructional and curricular quality? Segregate students along racial
or class lines? Be limited by political and legal constraints? These
are just some of the questions we want to answer," said Vanderbilt
professor Kenneth Wong, who will serve as director of the new center.
Wong is a professor of public policy and education and associate
director of the Peabody Center for Education Policy.
A multidisciplinary team from the partnered institutions including
economists, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists,
curriculum experts, psychometricians, statisticians, public finance
analysts and legal scholars will attempt to answer these questions
surrounding school choice. A big part of their work will also be
collecting data that can be shared and analyzed by researchers from
different disciplines and institutions.
"I am excited about the opportunity for Vanderbilt and Peabody
to make a major contribution to the body of research on school choice,"
said Camilla Benbow, Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and
Human Development at Peabody College. "With several choice options
emerging in school districts around the country, it is important that
everyone ñ parents, researchers, teachers, principals and legislators ñ
learn as much as we can about the effects of school choice on student
achievement."
The center’s first major project will include randomized field
trials on the effects of charter schools on student achievement,
teacher recruitment and teaching quality, reading instruction and
parental involvement. A second project will focus on the effects of
competition on public schools and systems using the nation’s largest
student achievement growth database, which is housed at NWEA, as well
as accountability data gathered from several states and school
districts.
The first round of research is expected to start before the end of the year.
Other studies will take a look at issues such as how recent
immigrants balance their children’s schooling needs with their own
ethnic identities and how other nations have designed and implemented
choice-based programs.
In addition to research, the center plans to offer a leadership
institute for heads of non-traditional public and private schools as
well as a leadership development program for district school principals
and assistant principals on how to compete in a changing education
marketplace that includes school choice.
For more news about Vanderbilt, visit the News Service homepage at www.vanderbilt.edu/News.
Media contact: Princine Lewis, (615) 322-NEWS
Princine.l.lewis@vanderbilt.edu