Speed Sourcing: Experts on Call

Reporters pinched for time welcome quick, reliable connections to experts in specific fields who are available to either respond to questions or point us to useful resources and information posted on the web, even the bits and pieces buried within technical reports and federal data archives. Here's a quick take on five 'reliable sources' -- from EWA's Friday afternoon speed sourcing session.

Don't be confused, public radio fans (you know who you are). MPR (www.mprinc.com) is not Minnesota's esteemed radio station. The website coordinates all kinds of national college completion data, along with useful explainers to help decode some of the intricacies of college-linked data, reporting and analysis. One great tool, Grad Rates 101, walks through the basics of how graduation rates are calculated (and how the numbers can change, depending on what's considered). There's also a terrific resource, Quickstats, that MPR supplied to the National Center for Education Stats (www.nces.ed.gov/datalab/quickstats) that lets you plug in your own variables and create charts and graphics. They're best at context for national graduation numbers, community college info, and on understanding student progress in post-secondary education.

You want to learn? Step One: Show up for school. Attendance counts focuses its energies on making this point on a national stage; to date, only a few cities track long-term or chronic attendance (despite collecting daily attendance data for NCLB, which mandates truancy reporting -- but doesn't require record-keeping for explained absences, even those that sum up, over a school year, to a month or more out of school. Attendance counts has data showing that low attendance in Kindergarten leads to low levels of student achievement in elementary school and, for the poorest kids (often facing the greatest challenges) up into 5th grade. Contact them to get a better understanding of how to look at your own district's attendance patterns -- and to learn about model cities like Baltimore, which has revamped many of its school structures (largely folding stand-alone middle schools into K-8 schools) to improve attendance and achievement. Learn more at www.attendancecounts.org.

Special education and how it's funded is a huge topic for most local reporters -- and one that's plenty mysterious and fraught with confusion. For help decoding special ed funding policies in your state, and for understanding the federal mandates on special ed spending (and the proportion the feds actually spend), get in touch with Tom Parrish at he American Institute for Research. Before you do, though, check out the new report soon-to-be-posted to the NASDE website, www.nasdse.org, link to follow, detailing special ed funding for all 50 states. He's a great connector, having worked in 25 of the 50 United States, and can help reporters find published resources (and sometimes, actual human sources) for stories in their states.

Bruce Fuller of The Institute of Human Development at UC Berkeley is a sociologist whose original research aims to inform national education policy. He's recently studied Latino kids "social agility" in school and has long worked in the area of early childhood education, whether via charter schools, traditional publics or private preschools. (See his book Standardizing Childhood for what he calls a "left-wing critique" of universal preschool.) Fuller favors a kind of "mixed market of institutions," blending traditional, charter, and alternative/nontraditional school models, and investigates how that mix can improve the quality of education and advance equity. Contact him at the Institute, http:ihd.berkeley.edu.

Early on at the EWA conference, we heard about using gaming to both motivate and measure student learning. While the folks at UCLA's QUESST aren't quite producing World of Warcraft competition, they do have a pretty nifty game, involving trampolines and fractions, that they're evaluating with middle-school students in central California. I got to test-drive the game, and it's easy to see how the math folds into the play -- and how much fun kids have when they get into the bouncing, clicking and fraction-figuring. They're working on other math-based games for K-12 students -- but the one I'd really like to play is the naval firefighting game they built for the U. S. Navy. Learn more: contact Terry Vendlinski or Ron Deitel at CRESST, via the National Center on Research and Education at UCLA, at www.cresst.org. http://www.cse.ucla.edu/