{"id":72208,"date":"2023-08-28T03:30:16","date_gmt":"2023-08-28T07:30:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/?post_type=bu-article&p=72208"},"modified":"2023-08-27T23:27:17","modified_gmt":"2023-08-28T03:27:17","slug":"a-world-of-data","status":"publish","type":"bu-article","link":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/magazine\/articles\/2023\/a-world-of-data\/","title":{"rendered":"A World Of Data"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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Marcus Winters analyzes decades of data to reveal which education reforms are working\u2014and which are not<\/h4>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\n\t<\/div>\n\n\t\n
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August 28, 2023<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\t
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In February 2019, Marcus Winters published a scathing op-ed about New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio in the New York Post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFour years and $773 million later, Hizzoner announced this week that Renewal Schools has come to an end,\u201d Winters wrote about the decision to end one of de Blasio\u2019s marquee education programs. \u201cMore objective observers had seen this coming for quite some time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In case it wasn\u2019t clear: Winters, a BU Wheelock associate professor and chair of educational leadership and policy studies, counts himself as one of those observers. As a quantitative researcher, Winters tries to cut through the political noise to reveal underlying data that tells us what\u2019s working in our school systems\u2014and what isn\u2019t. In a 2017 study published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a free-market think tank, he found that although Renewal Schools showed a slight boost in student test scores, a third of the schools were still underperforming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Renewal Schools program, which directed additional funds and services to underperforming schools, also cost more than the previous administration\u2019s policy of grading schools\u2019 performances and closing those that continued to fail. Long before that contrast had developed, Winters had even met with the de Blasio team to explain his findings that when Mayor Michael Bloomberg\u2019s education department gave schools an \u201cF\u201d grade, those schools began performing better the next year. \u201cEvery time we\u2019ve looked at this, we\u2019ve seen this positive effect,\u201d he told them. Yet that policy was abandoned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The intersection of education and politics can be messy, fraught with partisan agendas, red tape, and budget constraints. Decisions aren\u2019t always made strictly by what the numbers say. And Winters knows that de Blasio\u2019s team might have seen other consequences to the Bloomberg policy\u2014including clashes with the teachers\u2019 unions\u2014that they wished to avoid. \u201cNo one\u2019s doing exactly what researchers say they should do, nor should they,\u201d he says. But, he adds, it\u2019s frustrating when data consistently points in one direction and policy moves in the other. \u201cThey moved away from Bloomberg\u2019s policy precisely when we were getting evidence that it was working really well,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though the acceptance and interpretation of quantitative education research can vary, Winters has seen its use expand greatly during his career. And with ever-increasing amounts of data available, there\u2019s growing demand for policy researchers across the education spectrum, from local school districts to philanthropic and nonprofit organizations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHow we use evidence to inform existing policies and future policies can, hopefully, keep us going in the right direction and also can stop us from making mistakes,\u201d Winters says. In recognition of this trend, he and a group of colleagues have designed a master\u2019s program in education policy studies that welcomed its first cohort this fall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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An Unorthodox Path<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Winters began studying education in 2002, as a research associate at the Manhattan Institute. \u201cThe more I got into education, the more I enjoyed it,\u201d he says. \u201cThis is an area that\u2019s extremely important, so it has a lot of resources attached to it\u2014and a lot of emotions.\u201d He saw a field where rigorous quantitative research could have a significant impact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His timing was fortuitous. Michael Lewis\u2019 book Moneyball, published in 2003, revealed how the Oakland Athletics were using analytics to make baseball decisions, upending an industry that had long relied on observations and gut instincts. \u201cMoneyball came about in part because the whole world was moving toward a quantitative analysis of things,\u201d Winters says. \u201cEducation research has definitely had that trajectory.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, the idea that analysts who hadn\u2019t played professional baseball could offer new insights on the game wasn\u2019t popular with many baseball lifers and the infusion of data experts in education was met with similar skepticism. When Winters, who has never taught in a K\u201312 classroom, submitted one of his first studies\u2014on a Florida policy of retaining students in third grade based on test scores\u2014to Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (EEPA), a leading journal, he got a terse response. \u201cThe letter from the editor was pretty nasty,\u201d Winters recalls. \u201cThey pushed back on the idea of using quantitative methods to study that issue\u2014of doing it broadly instead of within a specific context.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was the mind-set in the education policy research world at the time, Winters says. And though he still sees that sentiment in some areas, much has changed. \u201cToday, EEPA is almost an economics journal\u2014it\u2019s primarily quantitative based,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m on the board of that journal now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s especially important to have worked in K\u201312 in order to study it. The more context you have helps you develop research questions, but doesn\u2019t necessarily help you to answer those questions very well.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So when Winters decided to go back to college to further his expertise in the quantitative analysis of education, he didn\u2019t consider education programs. \u201cI looked around and asked, \u2018Who\u2019s doing what I think is the most interesting, compelling work?\u2019 And it was labor economists.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2008, he graduated from the University of Arkansas with a PhD in economics. \u201cI didn\u2019t get the PhD for a love of microeconomics,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was really in order to learn how to study schools better.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After a brief return to the Manhattan Institute, Winters moved into academia where he could focus on policy research and publishing in academic journals. \u201cI want my work to be impactful both within the academic literature and also within policy conversations,\u201d he says. In 2010, he joined the faculty at the University of Colorado\u2013Colorado Springs College of Education, before moving to BU Wheelock in 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A New Frontier of Data<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEarly in my career, data was really difficult to come by,\u201d Winters says. But in today\u2019s data-rich era, quantitative researchers have access to more information than ever before, allowing for a breadth of research that would have been unimaginable two decades ago. Standardized test results now span several decades and provide a core set of data for researchers. Increasingly, that information can be matched with attendance and discipline records, courses taken, and even survey results to further our understanding of education policies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As these pools of data grow, researchers can analyze students and teachers in new ways and over longer periods, strengthening findings or revealing new trends along the way. For example, with some states considering making personnel decisions based on teachers\u2019 valued-added measures\u2014essentially their ability to elevate students\u2019 test scores\u2014Winters looked at data from Florida to project the impact of such a policy. What he and his coauthor discovered was that students of teachers who would have been dismissed based on their value-added score performed worse than other students. Another benefit of more data: those same students can be followed through high school graduation. Now, some states are tracking students beyond school, meaning that researchers could, for example, connect teachers to the earnings of their students years later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Winters also focuses on school choice and accountability. \u201cThere have been a lot of policies developed over a long period of time that don\u2019t seem to be aligned with high productivity for the public school system,\u201d he says. \u201cSome of those policies have had reasons underlying them, but I think it\u2019s fair to say if we were going to start a school system over, you probably wouldn\u2019t replicate what we have now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIdeally we would have a public school system that is both flexible and accountable,\u201d Winters says. That idea guides much of his research as he analyzes the effectiveness of new policies or debunks arguments against reforms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a 2018 paper for EEPA, Winters turned to teacher pension systems and found that young, risk-averse teachers would prefer a retirement plan that provided consistent growth across their career rather than a more traditional pension system tied to their final salary. \u201cTeachers are the most important components within the school system,\u201d Winters says. \u201cI think that schools should have flexibility on how they work with teachers, how they retain the best ones, and remove the least effective ones.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One data set that Winters has spent more than a decade studying comes from Florida\u2019s public school system. The state was the first of 19 to implement a policy of retaining students in third grade if they failed a reading proficiency exam. Winters wondered whether that strategy helped the students. With access to test results and students\u2019 school records in the years after third grade, Winters tracked their progress and saw that retained students made immediate improvements in their reading and math skills. He\u2019s revisited this data multiple times since first publishing his results in 2007, tracking those same students into high school. Those third-grade gains helped the students reach high school but, as Winters and his coauthors found, did not make them any more likely to graduate from high school. Those results\u2014early gains that taper off\u2014might provide future avenues for research, and could help inform retention policies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rising Demand<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as other baseball teams quickly copied the Oakland A\u2019s stat-based approach, quantitative research has spread through education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cStates and districts are adopting more of the Moneyball-style of using research to understand their own school systems,\u201d Winters says. \u201cThere\u2019s an ever-increasing need for people doing this sort of work.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So Winters and his BU colleagues Stephanie Curenton, director of the Ecology of School Readiness Lab, and Nate Jones, an associate professor of special education, set out to design a program that will prepare BU Wheelock students for research-intensive careers, whether they\u2019re performing their own studies or synthesizing the work of others. Students in the program will take qualitative and quantitative research methods courses, while exploring their interests, such as pre-K, STEM, higher education, or other fields.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cResearch can be a really strong tool\u2014if you understand how it works, what its limitations are, and what its benefits are,\u201d Winters says. \u201cHaving more of those people working at high levels in government and in education-related areas can only make the system stronger.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taking the politics out of education reform<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marcus A. Winters is an associate professor and chair of educational leadership and policy studies. He\u2019s also program director for policy, planning, and administration. In 2019, he helped design and launch one of BU Wheelock\u2019s newest programs, a master\u2019s in education policy studies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMoneyball came about in part because the whole world was moving towards a quantitative analysis of things. Education research has definitely had that trajectory.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ONE LESSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cQuantitative research has spread through education with more states and districts using a Moneyball- style approach to study whether they\u2019re making the right policy calls\u2014or not.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In February 2019, Marcus Winters published a scathing op-ed about New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio in the New York Post. \u201cFour years and $773 million later, Hizzoner announced this week that Renewal Schools has come to an end,\u201d Winters wrote about the decision to end one of de Blasio\u2019s marquee education programs. \u201cMore […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9090,"featured_media":46702,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"bu_prepress_billboard":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term_manual":""},"tags":[],"bu-publication":[6613],"magazine-article-category":[],"magazine-topic":[],"news-article-category":[],"news-topic":[],"bu_edition":[6925],"media_type":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/72208"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/bu-article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9090"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72208"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/72208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72209,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/72208\/revisions\/72209"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72208"},{"taxonomy":"bu-publication","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-publication?post=72208"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-article-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-article-category?post=72208"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-topic?post=72208"},{"taxonomy":"news-article-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-article-category?post=72208"},{"taxonomy":"news-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-topic?post=72208"},{"taxonomy":"bu_edition","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu_edition?post=72208"},{"taxonomy":"media_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-kayla.cms-devl.bu.edu\/wheelock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media_type?post=72208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}