Scholars and academic researchers in town for the American Educational Research Association annual meeting will be offered ripped-from-the-headlines topics on the slate of more than 2,000 seminars planned for the next five days.
Sessions range from such in-the-news topics as “rethinking teacher evaluations” and “implications of federal Race to the Top funding for school districts” to the arcane: “decolonizing art-based education research with indigenous populations” and “revisiting ecological contexts of urban children’s play.”
“People come to present research and share findings and to learn about new insights into how to improve education,” said AERA president Carol D. Lee.
AERA, which is the world’s largest educational research association, draws professional researchers as well as graduate and undergraduate students, and even high school students, who conducted research projects and will use the meeting, held mostly at the Colorado Convention Center, to present their findings.
The local participants include Denver Public Schools Superintendent Tom Boasberg, who will be involved in a discussion about Race to the Top funding.
And Ed Wiley, University of Colorado assistant professor of education, will give an analysis of DPS’s professional compensation system for teachers.
Other researchers will be discussing the very studies that are being cited by Colorado lawmakers debating a controversial bill to tie 50 percent of teacher and principal evaluations to student test scores.
Andy Porter, education dean at the University of Pennsylvania, helped develop The Vanderbilt Assessment for Leadership in Education, or Val-Ed, the country’s leading principal-evaluation system. This afternoon he’ll participate in a roundtable discussion about its “psychometric properties, norms and proficiency standards.”
“It’s front and center right now,” said Porter, who added that the system is being used in thousands of schools and has been included in states’ Race to the Top applications.
The Val-Ed system hasn’t yet been linked to student academic growth, but that’s in the works, Porter said. It’s part of a trend that Colorado and other states are following and that’s being pushed by the federal government.
“Twenty years ago, evaluations would have been done not at all on the basis of what students are learning,” he said. “Today you are getting a heavy emphasis on learning. I think we will get a good balance some day. But if you are leaving the student out of the equation, that is a mistake.”
Speakers at the meeting include notable names from the educational field such as Linda Darling-Hammond, the Stanford professor who worked on crafting President Barack Obama’s education policy; Madame Xiaoya Chen, China’s minister of education; and Marshall Smith, senior legal counsel for U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.