Report Tracks Public School Performance Impact of Teacher Qualifications, Homework, Reading at Home Studied

By DAWN GAGNON; OF THE NEWS STAFF

BANGOR – Students at Maine’s higher performing public schools tend to do more homework and reading at home than their peers at lower-performing schools.

They also tend to have more experienced and highly qualified classroom teachers, and more instructional time, especially at the elementary level and in kindergarten through grade eight English and language arts.

These are among the findings released this month in “The Identification of Higher and Lower Performing Maine Schools: School Profiles and Characteristics,” a report by David L. Silvernail, co- director of the Maine Education Policy Research Institute.

The Legislature established the institute, housed at both the University of Southern Maine in Gorham and the University of Maine, in 1995.

Its mission is to gather and analyze education data, and conduct research for lawmakers in such policy areas as school finance reform, student performance, school size, student aspirations, education standards, and high- and low-performing schools, to name a few.

The institute is jointly funded by the state and the University of Maine System.

One purpose of Silvernail’s study was to help state lawmakers and education policymakers determine if the state is getting the biggest bang for its educational buck, especially in light of the state’s shift to the Essential Programs and Services school funding model, Silvernail said Thursday.

The report was released to the wider public this month at the request of the Legislature’s education panel, which commissioned it.

“What I tried to tell the [education] committee over and over again is that it’s really how you use those resources,” Silvernail said.

The EPS model is based on the notion that all schools should have the resources they need to ensure all children achieve high standards of learning. Those standards in Maine are set forth in the Maine Learning Results.

The online version of Silvernail’s report, which can be seen at MEPRI’s Web site, includes individual profiles for all the schools studied.

Another purpose of the study, he said, was to serve as a “conversation starter” for schools, communities and parents looking for ways to boost student performance. Silvernail said he hoped to see higher-performing schools serve as mentors for their lower- performing counterparts.

“My hope is that [school leaders] will first look at their schools – what’s our profile, what are we doing and how are we doing?” he said.

“I’m actually hopeful that parents have started looking at it,” Silvernail said, adding that much can be learned from Maine’s higher performing schools. Given that students at higher-performing schools tend to do more homework and reading at home, he said, “It really takes parents working on that.”

In his study, Silvernail analyzed three years’ worth of Maine Educational Assessment test scores for nearly 500 public schools. The MEA was used because it is the only statewide measure of Maine’s Learning Results, a set of skills and knowledge students must master in order to graduate.

He also looked at characteristics of the schools’ students and community, including the number of students who are considered economically disadvantaged.

In order to make the higher-performing list, however, schools had to do more than score well on the MEA test. They also needed to score higher than expected, given their community’s education and poverty levels, and their students’ previous performance.

Besides homework and reading at home, common themes among higher- performing schools included the importance to students of academics, art and sports, especially in the upper grades.

Higher-performing schools also had more teachers with master’s degrees or better. And the better performing kindergarten-through- eighth-grade level schools had a lower ratio of administrators to teachers.

Top high schools also tended to have lower dropout rates, more students taking Advanced Placement courses and passing AP tests, and higher Scholastic Aptitude Test scores. More students also indicated they planned to pursue higher education after high school.

A factor that did not make a difference, Silvernail found, was pupil to teacher ratios, which in Maine are relatively low, he said.

Silvernail’s report and individual school profiles can be found at http://www.usm.maine.edu/cepare/.

(c) 2007 Bangor Daily News. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.