[10] Thier, M. (In press). Curbing ignorance and apathy (across the political spectrum) through global citizenship education. Berkeley Review of Education.
After a historically inexplicable presidential election, Americans must grapple with the causes, not just the effects, of a Trump presidency. Responding to a campaign that bombarded the electorate with nonsensical rhetoric and a seemingly endless array of –isms, this essay argues for expansive global citizenship education (GCE) in K-12 schools. GCE can provide the knowledge, skills, behaviors, and dispositions to live, learn, and work amid the opportunities and challenges that globalization bring. The essay explores benefits of, and risks of not, endorsing this progressive approach to education that can pay dividends for students, communities, and a democratic nation.

Heeding a groundswell of researcher and practitioner interest in students' interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, we evaluated three measurement approaches for creativity and global citizenship. We designed a 10-criteria evaluative framework from seminal and cutting-edge research to compare extant self-reports and situational-judgment tests (SJTs) from each construct and to design two discrete-choice experiments (DCEs). We detailed opportunities, challenges, and tradeoffs for each approach's design considerations, possibilities for bias, and validity-related issues. Researchers rely heavily upon self-reports to measure constructs, such as creative thinking and global citizenship. We found evidence that the self-reports evaluated were susceptible to some biases more than others. We found SJTs and DCEs to mitigate some concerns of bias and validity present in self-report, and make recommendations to develop these formats.

Nonprofit education and management programs often recognize the efficacy of including experiential learning opportunities such as study abroad in their curricula. In addition, higher education institutions increasingly prioritize global citizenship as a learning outcome. However, challenges abound for educators who want to evaluate study-abroad courses that expect students to acquire or deepen their levels of global citizenship. This study seeks to evaluate the impact of a short-course study abroad program on students’ global citizenship orientation. Findings: students grapple with global citizenship in various ways while immersed in such a course and can express conflicting views, further confounding understanding of how to best measure global citizenship. We discuss implications for students expressing more of an observational role than an inclination to act on global issues.

[4] Thier, M., & Ledger, S. Standards and poor: Evidence of global citizenship orientation in Australian and U.S. education standards.

[3] Ledger, S., Bailey, L., Thier, M., & Pitts, C. Powerful voices shaping the future of global education.

[2] Thier, M., Beach, P., Martinez, Jr., C. R., & Hollenbeck, K. Take care when cutting: Five approaches to disaggregating data on rural schools.

Researchers neglect or incorrectly define geographic locale, impairing policy formulation, enactment, and evaluation. To examine researchers’ neglect for geographic locale, we systematically reviewed 108,504 peer-reviewed articles. Barely 3% of those articles addressed rurality; nearly no articles (0.2%) addressed remoteness. Our in-depth review of 10 highly esteemed journals identified 4,001 articles that addressed rural schools, although 91% of them failed to define rural. Given the epidemic failure in reporting geographic locale with any precision, we developed five statistical approaches to operationalize rurality and remoteness. Using the National Center of Education Statistics’ Urban-Centric codes with national data on Advanced Placement access, we found important variations in (a) proportional school counts as rural/remote, (b) effect sizes, and (c) characterizations of schools’ advantage or disadvantage. We discuss implications for policymakers and researchers who might otherwise draw inappropriate inferences from inadequate definitions of rural and/or remote places.

[1] Lucero, A., McClure, H. H., Martinez, Jr., C. R., & Thier, M. The role of cultural orientation and parent-child relationships in immigrant Latina/o adolescent academic achievement.

Completed Evaluation Reports
& White Papers (n = 5)

[5] Thier, M. (In press). Can Qatar buy sustainable excellence in education? In Y. Zhao & B. Gearin (Eds.), Imagining the future of education: Dreams and nightmares. Routledge.

Qatar, the world’s wealthiest nation per capita, faces interrelated education challenges. Despite a goal of trading fuel exportation for knowledge exportation, Qatar’s intelligentsia is lost to brain drain. Growing a new intellectual class is difficult: only 12% of the country’s 2.3 million residents are Qatari. The rest of the population is comprised of foreign workers. Qatari men have few incentives to pursue higher education because they can easily acquire low-skilled, public-sector jobs that feature shorter workdays, better pay, and more job security. The private sector demands education credentials. Qatari women, meanwhile, tend to be better educated, but are not welcomed in all labor sectors. To address these challenges, the ruling Al-Thani family has spent an estimated $33 billion USD to establish Education City, a “mega-university” of cherry-picked programs from Western nations.It is too early to tell if this unprecedented program will succeed, but Qatar’s reform efforts illustrate how its pre-Colonial and Colonial history continues to shape its capitalist present. 

[4] Gearin, B., Hameed, S. A., Christensen, M., & Thier, M. (In press). Educating for nationalism in an age of educating for economic growth. In Y. Zhao & B. Gearin (Eds.), Imagining the future of education: Dreams and nightmares. Routledge.

After World War II, many Western nations shifted missions from educating for common culture and democratic participation to educating for global economic competition. In hindsight, focusing on “college and career readiness” over “civics and human decency” looks like a misstep. The recent uptick in right-wing nationalist movements suggests that the continuation of democracy cannot be taken for granted, even in economically powerful and historically liberal nations. To explore tensions between educating for nationalism and educating for prosperity, we consider parallel reform efforts in Indonesia and Singapore, raising feasibility questions about trying to achieve “college and career readiness” simultaneously with “civics and human decency.”

[3] Thier, M., Fitzgerald, J., & Beach, P. (In press). Partitioning schools: Federal vocational policy, tracking, and the rise of 20th-century dogmas. In G. Lauzon (Ed.), Educating a working society: Vocationalism, the Smith-Hughes Act, and modern America. Charlotte, NC: Information Age.

This chapter traces the history of major U.S. education policies that deposited students inequitably into tiers. Overall, we review federal education policy contexts from the Common School movement in the mid-1800s to the passage of the Common Core State Standards in 2010. We: 

1. highlight roles that landmark legislation (e.g., Smith-Hughes Act, 1917) and impactful reports (e.g., Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, 1918) played in producing a two-tiered high school system in the United States

2. demonstrate the maturation of that system amid Civil Rights-era policies (e.g., Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965) and how the controversial report, A Nation at Risk (1983), crystallized divisions within schools

3. situate academic tracking amid the policy churn of the new millennium: No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Act of 2006, Race to the Top in 2009, and the Common Core State Standards.

[2] Beach, P., Thier, M., Fitzgerald, J., & Pitts, C. (In press). Cutting-edge (and dull) paths forward: Accountability and Career Technical Education under the Every Student Succeeds Act. In G. Lauzon (Ed.), Educating a working society: Vocationalism, the Smith-Hughes Act, and modern America. Charlotte, NC: Information Age.

As the No Child Left Behind Act demonstrated, the measures in state accountability systems influence what knowledge and skills are prioritized in schools. NCLB’s emphasis on testing students in literacy and numeracy clearly left behind school outcomes related to career and technical education. With the arrival of ESSA, career readiness may have a chance to catch up. In this chapter, we explore the status of college and career readiness indicators, mainly through case studies of four states’ Elementary and Secondary Education Act flexibility waivers and California’s decision not to file a waiver. First, we contextualize the current state of college and career readiness, highlighting the flexibility ESSA provides states in creating accountability systems and measuring school quality. Second, we present lessons from five state’s accountability systems. Third, we examine the Linked Learning Alliance, International Baccalaureate’s Career-Related Programme, and Washington State’s CTE Course Equivalency Frameworks as examples that can enable individual schools and districts to foster integrated pathways, develop structured policies, or offer programs in which students’ educational experiences reflect a balanced emphasis on readiness for multiple future pathways, rather than pitting college or careers as mutually exclusive alternatives.

[1] Thier, M. Globally speaking: Global competence. (2015). In Y. Zhao (Ed.), Counting what counts: Reframing education outcomes. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree. Pp. 113-132.

A limitation with the current definition and measure of quality of education is its failure to consider the fact that in the globalized world, the ability to interact across cultural, linguistic, and political boundaries has become essential. One’s perspective of, attitude toward, and ability to work with people from different cultures and different nations have direct impacts on one’s own success as well as the well-being of the world as a whole. This chapter explores various measures of global competence and the degree to which they would be useful and/or suitable for use in K-12 schools. This chapter received the Outstanding Graduate Student award from the American Educational Research Association’s special interest group in Educational Change.

[5] Thier, M., Fukuda, E., Knight, S., Sykes, J., & Chadwick, K. L. (2017). Alignment and coherence of language acquisition development in the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme. The Hague, Netherlands: International Baccalaureate.

The International Baccalaureate (IB) has authorized more than 1,300 schools in about 145 countries to offer its Middle Years Programme (MYP) to learners aged 11 to 16. One of the MYP’s unique features is its focus on second-language acquisition, which the MYP codifies in its Language Acquisition Guide (MYP Guide). This study examined the alignment and coherence of the MYP Guide, and involved five phases: a literature review, a within-document analysis, a cross-document analysis, a progression analysis and a discrepancy analysis. Examining literature review findings alongside results from within- and cross-document analyses, researchers determined that the IB could consider attending to specificity and exemplification in some areas, but not universally across the MYP Guide. The researchers also recommended that the IB begin conversations about the scope and purpose of change before making any decisions about what in the MYP Guide requires revision, how to approach that revision and to what extent revision is advisable.

[4] Thier, M., Beach, P., Lench, S. C., Austin, E., & Coleman, M. (2016). More than one C: Educating students to be ready for Careers and College. Prepared for the California Education Policy Fund. Eugene, OR: Educational Policy Improvement Center.

This policy brief from EPIC discusses the United States’ bias toward college-going as the gold standard and how to counteract that singular mode of thinking. EPIC outlines why definitions of K–12 success should balance an emphasis on each C (college and career). EPIC also shows the related pitfalls of districts failing to attend to the issues that are most salient for their communities. To avoid those dangers, EPIC recommends democratizing postsecondary pathway access to ensure equity, localizing districts’ definitions of success to suit community needs, and personalizing educational experiences so students can become ready on their own terms.

[3] Beach, P., Thier, M., Lench, S. C., & Coleman, M. (2015). From accountability to actionability: Making sense of multiple measures through Local Control Accountability Plans. Prepared for the California Education Policy Fund. Eugene, OR: Educational Policy Improvement Center.

EPIC’s latest policy brief reviews promising practices from California districts as well as insights from research on multiple measures to provide recommendations that improve how California districts generate, present, and use data in their Local Control Accountability Plans (LCAPs). LCAPs represent a promising shift in school accountability policy by requiring districts to develop strategic plans designed to meet local needs. Inherent to the success of LCAPs is the use of multiple measures to describe a district’s theory of action and to assess the effectiveness of subsequent implementation efforts. However, the sheer volume of information within LCAPs can make it difficult for stakeholders to ascertain a district’s plan for improving student outcomes and for knowing when a district is performing well and when they are not. To realize the full potential of LCAPs, districts must help stakeholders make sense of “multiple measures.” Together, the three recommendations below can help districts develop a coherent theory of action, present actionable information, and define what success means locally. We recommend that districts (a) use multiple measures to develop greater coherence between inputs, processes, and outcomes linked to specific LCAP goals; (b) employ the matrix approach to monitor progress over time and as a communication tool for internal stakeholders; and (c) create infographics and narrative descriptions as a means to communicate critical information to external stakeholders. Understanding how districts and their stakeholders make sense of multiple measures and use data generated from LCAPs to improve the college and career readiness of students might determine the success or failure of California’s revised accountability system. However, LCAPs can benefit districts and schools regardless of the accountability implications. LCAPs can become the vehicles to improve the college and career readiness of students by harnessing community assets and tapping into the expertise of educators through informative and useful data.

[2] Beach, P., Thier, M., Lench, S. C., & Coleman, M. (2015). Defining a new North Star: Aligning Local Control Accountability Plans to college and career readiness. Prepared for the California Education Policy Fund. Eugene, OR: Educational Policy Improvement Center.

In this policy brief, EPIC recommends that college and career readiness serve as the “North Star” in California’s recently reformed accountability system. A district seeking to use its Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP) to promote a college- and career-going culture should take the following steps: (a) adopt, modify, or generate a consistent and shared definition of college and career readiness; (b) evaluate the current LCAP for alignment to that definition; and (c) revise the LCAP to align with college and career readiness as its new North Star. By following these steps, district leaders will help ensure that the goals and actions outlined in their LCAP describe a coherent system instead of a collection of eight competing priorities.

[1] Conley, D. T., Beach, P., Thier, M., Lench, S. C., & Chadwick, K. L. (2014). Measures for a college and career indicator: Final report. Prepared for the California Department of Education Public Schools Accountability Act advisory committee. Eugene, OR: Educational Policy Improvement Center.

In 2012, California Senate Bill 1458 added a measure of college and career preparedness to the Academic Performance Index. The Public Schools Accountability Act Advisory Committee was charged with making recommendations to the State Superintendent of Public Instruction and the State Board of Education regarding measures that could serve as indicators of college and career preparedness at the high school level. EPIC was commissioned to evaluate potential measures identified by the Committee. This project also featured six topic-specific papers: on college admission exams, advanced coursework, course-taking behavior, innovative measures, career preparedness assessments, and multiple measures.