Wong

by Princine Lewis
Vanderbilt will be the home of the first federally funded national center to take a wide-ranging look at school choice – 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.

Peabody College  has won a $10 million U.S. Department of Education grant to fund the Center on School Choice, Competition and Achievement. The grant – a cooperative agreement between the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences and Vanderbilt – 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,” said Chancellor Gordon Gee. “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, National Bureau of Economic Research, Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) and Stanford University School of Education.

“The current state of research provides hardly definitive answers to a lot of questions about school choice – 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 Kenneth Wong, professor of public policy and education and associate director of the Peabody Center for Education Policy, who will serve as director of the new center.

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 – parents, researchers, teachers, principals and legislators – 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.

Congressman Jim Cooper, who represents Nashville in the U.S. House of Representatives, congratulated Vanderbilt on what he called a “remarkable grant.”  In a statement made in conjunction with the announcement of the federal award, Cooper said: “It’s my hope that the results of this comprehensive study on school choices and achievement will provide valuable information that leads to the goal we all seek – better schools for our kids.”

Posted 9/13/04