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Congratulations to RFL client New Mexico Public Education Department!
The recent State Teacher Policy Yearbook published by the National Council on Teacher Quality identifies New Mexico as the best practice state for Area 2: Retaining Effective Teachers, Goal 2 – Licensure Advancement. The report states that "In addition to three years’ teaching experience and completing the mentoring requirement, New Mexico requires new teachers to submit a professional development dossier to advance from the probationary to nonprobationary certificate. The dossier is divided into five strands, including evidence of teacher effectiveness and evidence of student learning, and teachers must meet or exceed the standards in all strands to advance."
RFL has been an integral part of the development and implementation of this commended teacher assessment system. When the nine New Mexico Teacher Competencies were refined in 2003, RFL used those competencies to create Criteria for Success for evaluation of the professional development dossiers. RFL trains teachers from throughout the State of New Mexico to use those criteria to review the dossiers, which are submitted through an online system. RFL also provides oversight of the dossier scoring process, including reliability analysis.
Ali Picucci, RFL’s Director of Evaluation, Earns PhD
The University of Texas in Austin recently awarded Ali Picucci a PhD in Sociology with a focus in sociology of education. Her dissertation, The Connection Between Academic Achievement and Depression Among Adolescent Girls and Boys, applies the life course framework to understanding gender differences in the connection between academic performance and mental health.
The premise for this study is based on the paradox that girls perform better in school but get less of a boost to their sense of well being from their achievement relative to boys. The life course perspective focuses both on how different pathways, such as academics and mental health, intertwine and the need to study important transitions, such as the transition from adolescence to young adulthood. This research addresses this transition by considering the consequences of the gender paradox on college enrollment and persistence. The multilevel analyses utilize Waves I, II, and III of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Results indicate that academic performance and depression are positively correlated for girls and negatively correlated for boys. Adolescent gender differences in depression are driven by the high-achieving segment of the student population. High-achieving girls tend to get less of a mental health boost from earning good grades relative to high-achieving boys. This is especially pronounced in high school. The end result is a slight chipping away at the well-documented advantages girls have in postsecondary education.
Dr. Picucci’s employment at RFL began in September of 2004. At RFL, she is responsible for designing and implementing research and evaluation plans for a variety of RFL clients and has experience in national, state, and local program evaluation. Her expertise includes analysis and reporting of data with complex sampling designs, protocol development, and qualitative data analysis and reporting.
Dorian Martin, RFL Program Manager, Co-Authors Article in scholarlypartnershipsedu
The Fall 2008 issue of scholarlypartnershipsedu includes an article co-authored by Dorian Martin, a program manager at Resources for Learning. "Meeting Teacher Demand, Increasing Teacher Performance: Five Years of School University Partnerships" describes a strategic pre-kindergarten–grade 16 (P–16) initiative by the Texas A&M University System, designed to improve statewide recruitment, training, hiring, and retention of elementary and secondary teachers.
This effort, referred to as the Regents’ Initiative for Excellence in Education, engaged parallel implementation among nine university system institutions in partnership with community colleges and public schools statewide. The extensive partnerships that were established were reported to be successful even in the highly decentralized system. Over a five-year period (from 1999-2004), the system produced 50 percent more teachers, as well as increases in the number of teachers in identified high-need fields. Ms. Martin and co-authors completed their research while she served as Executive Director for Organizational Development and Communications for the Institute for School-University Partnerships at the Texas A&M University System. Co-authors include Dr. Toby Marshall Egan, Austin S. Williams, Dr. Eric D. Wilson, Dr. Mike L. Holt, and Dr. William E. Reaves.