The class of 2011, the first group of students exposed to the Michigan Merit Curriculum (MMC) for their entire high school careers, saw mixed results.

The introduction of the MMC reduced graduation rates slightly for students who entered high school with weak academic skills. For those who entered with strong skills, there was no effect of the MMC on high school completion rates.

Performance on standardized tests rose slightly for students who entered high school with strong skills. The impact on test scores was small or negative for those who entered high school with weak skills. The best-prepared students saw better performance in science, reading and math. All students experienced declines in writing scores, according to an analysis released Monday by the Michigan Consortium for Educational Research (MCER).

The consortium is a partnership between the University of Michigan, Michigan State University and the State of Michigan. The results of its research are being presented at a conference at the Kellogg Center in East Lansing on Oct. 22.

Results show that the merit curriculum reduced the five-year graduation rate among lower-achieving students by approximately 4.5 percentage points (from 49 percent to 44.5 percent). The merit curriculum also appears to have prompted some students to extend their stay in high school beyond the traditional four years, perhaps in an effort to meet the more rigorous curricular requirements.

Kenneth Frank

In 2006 Michigan adopted the merit curriculum, a set of high school graduation requirements that emphasize math and science. The goal was to increase the rigor of high school courses and better prepare students for college. The first students covered by the curriculum started ninth grade in the fall of 2007 and would have been scheduled for an on-time graduation in spring 2011.

“These findings are for the first set of students subject to the new requirements. The results may change as schools and teachers gain experience with the curriculum,” said Susan Dynarski, a professor at U-M’s Ford School of Public Policy, School of Education and Department of Economics. “As more students complete their high school years, we will find out whether the curriculum boosts college attendance and success, a key goal of the reform.”

Additional findings indicate large gaps across income groups and Michigan’s districts in high school graduation and college attendance. Four-year high school graduation rates range from less than 50 percent to over 90 percent across Michigan’s largest school districts. Fifty-seven percent of low-income freshmen graduate high school within four years, compared to 85 percent of students with higher incomes. And 31 percent of low-income students attend college within five years of entering high school, compared to 61 percent of students with higher incomes.

The Michigan Merit Curriculum also appears related to some personnel changes. Additional results released at the conference show that the teaching staff at Michigan’s high schools has shifted toward merit curriculum subjects, with those teaching these topics rising from 58 percent in 2004 to 71 percent in 2011.

“Between 2004 and 2011, the overall number of high school teachers in Michigan fell. However, with the introduction of the MMC it appears that schools and districts focused their limited resources on teachers who taught core academic subjects,” said Kenneth Frank, a professor in the College of Education at MSU.

Barbara Schneider

The merit curriculum requires that students take Algebra 1, Geometry and Algebra 2, as well as Biology 1 and either Chemistry or Physics. Students must take four years of English Language Arts and complete two years of a foreign language.

“The findings of this first study are important and must be seen as a diagnostic tool for our teachers, administrator and education leaders,” said State Superintendent Michael P. Flanagan. “The Michigan Merit Curriculum is the right direction and must be maintained. We need to delve deeper now and see how we can help schools deliver it successfully to every student in Michigan.”

The study uses data from 700,000 students enrolled in Michigan’s public high schools to examine the effects of the merit curriculum. The research was funded by a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education.

Joining Dynarski and Frank on the study are Brian A. Jacob, professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at U-M, and Barbara Schneider, professor at the College of Education and Department of Sociology at MSU. They will present their findings Oct. 22 at a conference that runs from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., with a keynote speech scheduled for 1 p.m. by Flanagan.

Additional reports are available on the MCER website: www.michiganconsortium.org.

The policy hitch: Often those who benefit most from nature-based tourism endeavors are people who already have resources. The truly impoverished have a harder time breaking into the tourism business.

The study, published in the current edition of PLoS One, looks at nearly a decade of burgeoning tourism in the Wolong Nature Reserve in southwestern China. China, like many areas in the world, is banking on tourism over farming to preserve fragile animal habitat while allowing people to thrive. But until now, no one has taken a close look at the long-term economic implications for people.

Wei Liu, lead author and doctoral student at MSU’s Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, and his colleagues took advantage of the center’s 15-year history of work in Wolong to study the complex interactions of humans and nature.

“This study shows the power of having comprehensive long-term data to understand how everything works together,” Liu said. “This is the first time we’ve been able to put it together to understand how changes are being made.”

Frank, one of six co-authors, has a joint appointment in measurement and quantitative methods and fisheries and wildlife. He has used his expertise on social network analysis to study the affects of relationships within a wide array of social contexts, especially school organizations.

Read the full release from MSU News.

Frank recently spoke with Alex Galarza and Andrea Zellner on MSU’s GradHacker podcast about his support of the breakthough pedagological method. (Cued in at the 19-minute mark.) Zellner is a Ph.D. student in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology.

“The most frustrating part is teaching labs,” Frank told the hosts. “People pick up different elements at very different paces.” As a remedy, Frank began recording his lectures and telling students to watch them before coming to class and/or to use them in class to walk them through their processes. Class time is then spent answering specific questions about the material and improving student understanding.

Flipped classrooms have shown results already across the country. According to an article in the Detroit Free Press, Clintondale High School, which has been known to have some of the lowest levels of performance in the state, had shocking levels of improvement during the 2010-11 school year, when they implemented the flip. In the nine month span, freshmen failing rates dropped from 52 to 19 percent in English and from 44 to 13 percent in mathematics.

The con of this strategy is that advanced students often quit coming to class in the college setting. If they feel confident they can do the labs on their own, they may choose not to leave the comfort of home.

“I struggled with it, and I’ve come to accept that,” Frank commented, saying his colleagues still support him. “[As for those attending,] I really think they can learn better. They can stop it [the video], pause it – they can work in groups.”

Frank currently uses this method in his CEP 933 course, and plans to implement it in his seminar specialty classes in the future.

The authors of a new volume on the topic, Assessing Teacher Quality: Understanding Teacher Effects on Instruction and Achievement, include several researchers affiliated with the Michigan State University College of Education. To understand teacher effects, they argue, we also need a close examination of instructional processes and school context, among other things.

“This book examines what we know about school-level accountability in order to inform new policies designed to promote teacher quality and effectiveness” said the book’s editor Sean Kelly, a visiting assistant professor in the MSU Department of Educational Administration.

Chapter authors or co-authors include College of Education professors Spyros Konstantopoulos, Peter Youngs and Kenneth Frank, as well as doctoral graduates Ben Pogodzinski (’09), Min Sun (’11) and Chong Min Kim (’11).

An interdisciplinary collection featuring new quantitative as well as qualitative research, education icon Diane Ravitch calls Assessing Teacher Quality “a valuable corrective to the current frenzied enthusiasm among policymakers for untested methods of teacher accountability.”

Visit Teachers College Press for more information.

Ken Frank, professor of measurement and quantitative methods, is one of three speakers participating in a symposium, “Social Networks and Sustainability,” at this year’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Frank develops mathematical models of social networks, which allow scientists to analyze the effects of social networks using universal, formal terms.

Read more in MSU News.

U-M’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy received the grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences to study the effects of the Michigan Merit Curriculum and the Michigan Promise Scholarship on student outcomes. Researchers from the Ford School and U-M’s School of Education will work with investigators at MSU’s College of Education on the project.

Read more.