Holliday Reflects on the Achievement Gap

This from the Commissioner: Fears and Challenges

Almost two years ago, I revitalized the Commissioners Raising Achievement and Closing Gaps Council (CRACGC). This council recently published recommendations to ensure equity in access and outcomes. The recommendations from the council will become a required component for a new group of schools and districts that will be identified as part of our No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waiver request.

This new group of schools will be called “focus schools.” The Kentucky Department of Education will identify those schools that have the largest achievement gaps. These schools will be required to address achievement gap issues through school and district plans. Targeted interventions will increase with each year that the school or district does not meet targets to close achievement gaps.

My biggest fear is that, even with our best efforts through state accountability, a commissioner of education will be writing an article in another 40 years documenting that not much progress has been made ensuring equity of access and outcomes for ALL children.

What will the collective WE do differently over the next 5-10 years? The collective WE must involve communities in addressing poverty and access. The collective WE must address early childhood education, since that is where the gap can best be closed. The collective WE must address jobs and hope in our most challenged communities. We cannot rely solely on teachers and schools to make a difference (we tried that with No Child Left Behind). We cannot mandate equity. Equity must be a belief that a community holds dear and then takes action to accomplish.

You are part of the collective WE. What will YOU do?

Where Achievement Gap Mania Came From

For a short piece, Hess gets the political history of the achievement gap about right. He leaves out the fact that the achievement gap was deliberately created in the first place. And he failed to mention the backlash from the publication of the Bell Curve which added fuel to the fire. But otherwise...

This from Rick Hess at Striaght up:

Last week's National Affairs essay "Our Achievement Gap Mania" has raised a little ire. One thing that might be useful is to situate the debate a bit, both in terms of how we got here and why I have the temerity to suggest that the moral philosophy behind gap-closing is less compelling than proponents seem to imagine.

In the 1960s, in the famed Coleman Report, sociologist James Coleman examined the first large-scale collection of data on school characteristics and student achievement to conclude that schooling had little effect on students' life outcomes and that parents' involvement in their children's lives affected achievement and eventual success much more powerfully than did schooling. An extensive reanalysis by sociologist Christopher Jencks and a team at Harvard similarly concluded that the outcomes of schooling depended almost entirely on "the characteristics of the entering children. Everything else--the school budget, its policies, the characteristics of the teachers--is either secondary or completely irrelevant."

These discouraging conclusions set the stage for decades of lethargic schooling, in which educators excused disappointing results by blaming circumstances beyond their control. The result, in the1980s and then increasingly in the 1990s, was frustration among policymakers and would-be reformers insisting that educators do better. Doubtless, a child's physical, family, and community circumstances had an impact on their readiness for school and the likelihood that they'd succeed, but reformers on the right and left recoiled at the casual acceptance in education circles that zip code was destiny.

Reformers demanded that schools seek to do better by those hard-to-serve students who were too often passed over or ignored. So far, so good. But, as with so much else in schooling, a sensible and healthy impulse was stretched into caricature.

In some form or other, the No Child Left Behind Act was probably inevitable. For too long, inadequate instruction in essential skills and abysmal performance by poor, black, and Latino children have been tacitly accepted as the status quo. NCLB was largely the product of bipartisan frustration among Washington policymakers tired of educators seemingly refusing to accept responsibility for mediocre results. With that support, NCLB passed the U.S. House on a 381-41 vote and the U.S. Senate, 87-10. Achievement gap mania, as a bipartisan project, can be fairly traced to the passage of NCLB. It was NCLB, after all, whose very title formally proclaimed "An Act to close the achievement gap."

The U.S. got the particular NCLB that it did because George W. Bush ran in 2000 as a "compassionate conservative." Eager to showcase his compassion, he drew upon his record as an education reform in Texas to make the case for educational accountability. However, testing, standards, and accountability alone could too easily seem soulless for a Republican trying to reassure moderates. Thus, Bush spoke not merely of accountability but pledged to "leave no child behind." Bush strategist Karl Rove explained, in Courage and Consequence, that, "When Bush said...that the absence of an accountability system in our schools meant black, brown, poor, and rural children were getting left behind, it...deepened the impression that he was a different kind of Republican whom suburban voters could be proud to support."

That pledge provided much common ground between Bush and congressional Democratic warhorses Senator Ted Kennedy and Rep. George Miller, as well as the influential and left-leaning Education Trust...

Measuring the Gap under SB 1

The new SB1 test got a first reading before the Board of Education in February and is scheduled for a second reading in April. We are in a 60-day window set aside for public comment, so let's talk about it.

One of the issues that has worried me is, How should the achievement gap be measured?

This is important because we know that however the state calculates it, teachers will plan their strategies based on whatever focus is likely to provide the best test score results. One approach might induce teachers to focus on a small subset of the kids who are said to be “in the gap.” A different approach would broaden that focus.

KSN&C spoke to KDE testing guy Ken Draut, at the AdvanceEd Conference in December, and learned of KDE’s plans to use ACT benchmarks to measure the gap. Uh oh.

Generally, KDE is looking at what they call a balanced accountability approach.

Achievement score data would come from five days of testing with the new SB1 Test for grades 3-8 built around the new Kentucky Core Achievement Standards, as they are implemented. Scores will be calculated around “proficiency,” meaning that cut scores will be set to determined performance levels. Novice = 0; Apprentice = 0.5; Proficient = 1.0; and Distinguished = 1.5. The + .5 amount given to students scoring in the Distinguished range is thought of as a Bonus, and it will be offset by a negative .5 for each Novice student in the group.

But what about measuring the achievement gap?

Draut told conference attendees that “we really feel like, in the gap world, we got a really innovative model to measure gap.” Draut explained that KDE had three problems with measuring the gap which they have tried to address.

1. The number of different sub groups, which can number to as many as 45 different goals.
2. A lot of the kids fall into more than one group. For example, 80 percent of Kentucky’s African American kids are receiving free and reduced lunch. 80 percent of our ELL kids are in the free and reduced lunch group. 70 percent of our special education students receive free and reduced lunch. As a result, we end up counting one student multiple times. So under the present system, a single student might be counted four times. Miss one target and you are likely to miss four.
3. Comparing “closed gap to group.” Draut said, “You want to close African American to White; American Indian to white… Because of the way testing works, you can end up with a “wavy” pattern.” For example, in JCPS one year, the white kids at Southern Middle School dropped backwards and the African American kids stayed the same, the Courier-Journal reported that Southern Middle was closing the gap. And the opposite can happen (which was our experience at Cassidy) where white kids can go up 8 points and African American kids go up 6 points, but the gap increases.

To address this, KDE plans to present all of the gap students’ data, but will create a new single group of underperforming “gap kids” who would only be counted one time. Instead of comparing the gap kids to the group, it would be measured against the goal of 100 percent proficiency, or what is called “gap to goal.” The gap is to be divided by the number of years schools are given to reach their goal and schools would be awarded points based on the percentage of that goal they were able to close. A school that had a six goals to meet and closed three of them would earn 50 percent of their points.

Growth is to be measured by using a regression of the reading and mathematics scores, the only tests given every year from grades 3-8. It will compare a student’s progress to other students who have been performing similarly. Given a proficient 5th grade student with a scale score of 230, who then earns a score of 240 in 6th grade: the model asks if this level of growth is typical of other Kentucky students, above average, or below average, and awards points accordingly.

KSN&C caught up after his presentation.

KSN&C: Ken, as you may be aware, a number of statisticians…like Skip Kifer, say that the modeling that underlie the statistics of the ACT Benchmarks are a bunch of crap, basically. [chuckles]

Draut: Right.

KSN&C: Are you concerned about that?

Draut: Well, this is how we answered the board the other day: It’s you guys. You guys drive this. If you say the ACT is a bunch of crap, lets’ throw it out…

KSN&C: Well, not the ACT. Just the benckmarks.

Draut: Well, I’m just saying, if you all say it, and then you put something else in, we’ll line right up, because we’re trying to get them ready for you.

KSN&C: OK, but you lost me. Tell me who “you” is. Because you’re saying the board…

Draut: Universities.

KSN&C: Oh.

Draut: You see, we’re driven by the universities. We can’t get our kids into the universities unless we meet your criteria.

KSN&C: So if the universities say, this standard isn’t appropriate, or the metric’s wrong, or something, then that’s going to be a problem for you guys.

Draut: Well, we’ll put in whatever you say, but I tell you, what the issue is, and we’ve said this to several people, tell us what you’d replace it with.

KSN&C: Uh huh.

Draut: Just tell us.

KSN&C: So, the benchmarks are useful, because they are there…But you have to know what they mean or they’re meaningless. And you can’t replace it with the ACT really, because that cuts out middle school and…causes you some other problems.

Draut: Right.

KSN&C: So, then what do I replace it with. I’ve got a bad yardstick, but it’s the best one I’ve got?

Draut: And what are the universities going to accept to get the kids in the door? Because whatever the universities accept, that’s what I’ve got to get my kids ready for.

KSN&C: Are you getting that kind of pushback from the universities?

Draut: No

KSN&C: So the question’s been raised but nobody’s pushing the issue?

Draut: No. It’s kinda like just what you said, tell me what’s in its place?

KSN&C: And nothing comes to mind.

Draut: So now you open up fifty years of research saying, hey, we can tell you it works. It does predict…

KSN&C: Do we know the degree to which those benchmarks are bad, or in what direction they are bad? Or is it that we just don’t know?

Draut: I think that you’d have to do some reading, both the pro and con, when I read, and I’ve heard Skip, but when I read the ___of it, it makes a lot of sense. And when I hear Skip it makes sense, too. I can’t get a sense of which one’s right…But that whole issue is driven by CPE and the universities because if you’re sitting there in the university saying we’re only going to take the kids that make the CPE benchmark, and we’re only going to take the COMPASS, then we say, OK, and we line up with you. But if universities change…and say, you know, we’re not going to use ACT, we’re going to use some new testing, then we’ll realign everything [to that]. ..But I think it would be useful to look at both the pro and the con.

For a few months now, I've been pondering Draut's position that decisions made at CPE should drive the model ultimately adopted by the Kentucky Board of Education. Generally I agree that we can not lower standards and KDE must hit college-ready targets. But I'm much less convinced that CPE ought to dictate how the achievement gap in measured in our elementary and middle schools.

NOTE: It is my understanding that the EXPLORE can predict results on the PLAN test, but not the ACT. The PLAN test can predict performance on the ACT but not performance in college. The ACT can predict performance in college up to a point, and its arguably not the best way, but is made better by the inclusion of other measures.

Education should lift all children

Some of us have been advocating a comprehensive approach to closing the achievement gap for a while now.

In the early days, such an "outrageous" comment would have been vilified by a curious combination of right-wing and left-wing attack dogs. Using a logical fallacy called the "hasty conclusion," they argued that if one school could turn themselves around; the rest could too. The Bush administration (and to a large extent KDE) dismissed any suggestion that schools did not control all of the variables contributing to the gap as excuse-making - or worse.

Now comes former Bushie, Susan Neuman, once assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, to tell us its going to take more than shaming schools to get the job done.

This from Susan B. Neuman in the Detroit Free Press:

Six years after the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind law, there is frustratingly little evidence that it will close the achievement gap between low-income, minority children and their middle-class peers. Despite the heroic attempts of many dedicated educators, NCLB-inspired school reforms, like so many others before, have failed and will continue to fail to change the trajectory of our disadvantaged children.

As President George W. Bush's assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education during NCLB's passage and initial implementation, I began my journey believing that raising standards would be enough to help low-income children succeed. I have learned that closing the achievement gap requires much more. The failure is not a result of the president's espoused "soft bigotry of low expectations," but because many children grow up in circumstances that make them highly vulnerable.

Schools educate middle-class children well but struggle to function as remedial, clinical institutions. Once a child starts falling behind in school, catching up is mostly a pipe dream.

In their 1995 book "Meaningful Differences," Betty Hart and Todd Risley calculated it would take approximately 41 hours of extra intervention per week to raise language scores of poor children to those of their well-off counterparts by age four -- and that's before starting preschool!

The impetus for change built into NCLB was to effectively "shame" schools into improvement. We now see that the shame game is flawed.

Schools fail not because they lack resources, or quality teachers. School influences are overwhelmed because so many children are molded by highly vulnerable and dysfunctional environments. The rhetoric of leaving no child behind has trumped reality.

A child born poor will likely stay poor, likely live in an unsafe neighborhood, landscaped with little hope, with more security bars than quality day care or after school programs. This highly vulnerable community will have higher proportions of very young children, higher rates of single parenting, and fewer educated adults. The child will likely find dilapidated schools, abandoned playgrounds, and teachers, though earnest, ready to throw in the towel. The child will drop further behind, with increasingly narrow options.

Shaming schools has become the cure to everything but the common cold, distracting attention from the devastating effects of poverty. We need to move beyond touting school reform as the magical elixir. It is important, but we need to mobilize other institutions to help solve this problem.

I've now joined with a group of national experts, from diverse backgrounds, areas of expertise and political beliefs, calling for a "broader, bolder approach" to education. Our proposals ( http://www.boldapproach.org/) certainly include improving schools, but tie changes in classrooms to changes in the world outside.

For example, as a researcher and government official, I've seen highly successful early childhood programs where teachers focus relentlessly on prevention, effectively changing the odds for poor children. But such programs are too rare.

A broader, bolder approach must also ensure routine pediatric, dental, hearing and vision care for all infants, toddlers and schoolchildren. Many of the most intractable problems faced by young children and their parents can be traced to maternal health-related behaviors. Programs such as the nurse-family partnership project
have shown stunning effects on young mothers' ability to care for their infant's nutritional, health and social needs.

I've also seen hospital and health center services that show low-income parents and children the pleasures of looking at books together. They demonstrate that pediatricians' literacy-promoting interventions can dramatically improve the language of young children.

A broader, bolder approach also needs high-quality out-of-school support. Disadvantaged students often lose ground after school and during summers. All this suggests that perhaps schools don't have exclusive rights to education.

If we are to take seriously the prospect of really leaving no child behind, we need to support education whether delivered in K-12 schools, in clinics, child-care centers, community-based organizations, libraries, church basements or storefronts. By using the science of what we know works, we can help millions of children growing up in highly vulnerable circumstances to achieve a more promising future.

Most notable among the Bold Approach folks is Richard Rothstein, who was among the first to surface this issue with his 2000 financial fungibility study. Rothstein suggested that the focus of educational research and policy-making has been too narrowly focused on school investments and closing gaps would only be accomplished through a more comprehensive approach.

Black-White Gap Widens Faster for High Achievers

The most difficult issue surrounding closing the white-black test score gap is finding those factors that are good for all children, but that disproportionately benefit disadvantaged children.

When schools finally began addressing this problem (in the mid-90s) we quickly found that the implementation of typical school programs had the tendency to produce gains - but the white kids we growing faster than the black kids - thus expanding the achievement gap, rather than narrowing it. Initially some schools approached the problem by lowering standards, or by placing all of their resources in traditional remediation programs. Both approaches failed.

As resources moved away from top students, now comes a study that suggests the students who lose the most ground academically in U.S. public schools may be the brightest African-American children. As African American students move through elementary and middle school the test-score gaps between them and their better-performing white counterparts grow fastest among the most able students and the most slowly for those who start out with below-average academic skills.

Some researchers believe the patterns have something to do with the fact that African-American children tend to be taught in predominantly black schools, where test scores are lower on average, teachers are less experienced, and high-achieving peers are harder to find.

Education Week reports:

For his analysis, Sean F. Reardon, an associate professor of sociology and education at Stanford University, analyzed reading and mathematics scores for nearly 7,000 elementary students taking part in a federal study known as the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort. From kindergarten to 5th grade, he found, the achievement gaps grew twice as fast among the students who started out performing above the mean than they did among lower-performing children.

A second report from economists Steven G. Rivkin and Eric A. Hanushek (whose testimony in school finance cases like Young v Williams should come with a warning label) shows "The higher the initial achievement score, the researchers found, the more scores diverged over time between black and white students."

“It appears on average to be worse for a child to be in a school with a high black enrollment share, but it’s not clear why,” said Mr. Rivkin. “It could be important given the recent [U.S.] Supreme Court decision on desegregation,” he added, referring to a ruling in June of last year that sharply limited schools from using race to assign students to schools."

A third paper by Lindsay C. Page, a Harvard University researcher, found that differences between the schools that black and white students attend began playing an increasingly important role in recent decades in the growth of racial achievement gaps at the national level.

That analysis also determined that the national gap, which narrowed in the 1970s and 1980s and then widened again in the 1990s, tracked closely to changes in the percentages of white and black parents with more than a high school education.

This mirrors findings from Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phllips who found the greatest gains made by black students came between 1968 and 1980 and were explained by the civil rights movement, the War on Poverty and school-based improvements. The trend was reversed following "Reaganomics."

As Brandeis University law and social-policy professor Thomas Shapiro understood, "the wealth gap is not just a story of merit and achievement; it's also a story of the historical legacy of race in the United States."

Changing that legacy will require a fully-funded and efficient system that provides the resources students need to attain high standards; greater access to pre-school and kindergarten programs, more help for English-language learners and special needs students, and additional school days. It may also require attention to the social needs of the poor. It will require a comprehensive approach.

But the most recent meeting of the Kentucky legislature revealed no understanding of the problem or any motivation to fix it.

How Can the Achievement Gap Be Closed?

A Freakonomics Quorum by Stephen J. Dubner:

The black-white gap in U.S. education is an issue that continues to occupy the efforts of a great many scholars. Roland Fryer and Steve Levitt have poked at the issue repeatedly; a recent study by Spyros Konstantopoulos looked at class size as a possible culprit, to little avail.

We gathered a group of people with wisdom and experience in this area — Caroline Hoxby, Daniel Hurley, Richard J. Murnane, and Andrew Rotherham — and asked them the following question:

How can the U.S. black-white achievement gap be closed?

Growing an Achievement Gap

Some thoughts from Gerald Bracey in the Huffington Post, a while back.

The Bush administration has claimed lately that rising test scores and a narrowing black-white test score gap reflect the success of No Child Left Behind. Even if this is true -- and it is not at all clear that it is--the achievement gap, broadly conceived, is growing. Let me explain.

I recently visited an elementary school in Fairfax County, Virginia. Although Fairfax is generally affluent, the homes in this neighborhood are modest. The parents are workers -- in food, in dry cleaning, in construction, in lawn care. The school contains students from 40 nations and its ethnic makeup is 39 percent Hispanic, 32 percent Asian, 6 percent black, 18 percent white, 5 percent other. More than half don't speak English well, half qualify for free or reduced price meals and the mobility rate is double that of the district as a whole.

Yet, because it manages decent scores on the Virginia Standards of Learning Tests, the school is fully state accredited and has met the No Child Left Behind law's requirements for Adequate Yearly Progress.

But all the above doesn't really give you a feel for how the school operates or its successes.

The school burbles. It's a sound that emanates from kids who are content to be where they are. Student artwork covers the hall walls. Classrooms walls are richly decorated. Some students are painting a huge cafeteria mural showing the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids at Giza and other wonders of the world. In a hall, I meet a group returning from "butterfly release day." They had watched as caterpillars transformed themselves into butterflies and had just gone outside to set them free. Science from the real world not from a book. Students sometimes worked in small groups, sometimes alone and sometimes listened to the teacher talk to the whole class. Questions were plentiful.

It's as if the school lives under a shield. As if being part of an affluent district, though not affluent itself, offers cover, a Strategic Defense Initiative, from state and federal dictates.

Unfortunately, in many impoverished districts, no such armor protects the children or the teachers. In such districts children endure an endless diet of math and reading test-prep worksheets. Bubble-kids -- those perceived to be on the threshold of passing the test -- get extra time in reading and math, sometimes in gym class. "Sure things" and "hopeless cases" get identified and ignored. Science, if it happens at all, will happen in the two dimensions of a book.

Thinking about those butterflies, I was reminded of a California superintendent's retort on being asked why her district wouldn't be making any more whale watching field trips: "Kids are not tested on whale watching, so they're not going whale watching." Music? Art? Social studies? Plays? Chess club?

In some such schools today, principals patrol the halls listening to make sure that the teachers are all following the exact sequence laid out by the scripted reading programs. One teacher who gave a creative answer to a question while using the highly programmed Open Court reading series was severely reprimanded by her principal. "But it was a teachable moment," she said. To which he replied "There are no teachable moments in Open Court!" Some principals have contracts specifying that test scores must show a certain increment each year. They administer copious "formative evaluations" which are merely mini-tests to see if the kids are making progress towards the big tests at the end of the year.

The outcome of this gun-barrel focus is the gap I mentioned at the outset. It was described well recently by the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, Chester Finn, a longtime public school critic, and initially a supporter of No Child Left Behind. "It's increasingly clear that making schools and teachers focus narrowly on test results, especially in basic skills, squeezes a lot of the juice out of the curriculum and out of the educational experience itself...America's true competitive edge doesn't come from producing more engineers than India. It arises from the creativity, rebelliousness, and drive that result from a broad liberal education and the values and convictions that accompany such teaching and learning."

Kids facing an infinite series of phonics exercises are not enjoying that broad liberal education. They're not growing butterflies or watching whales. If the reading and math scores in the drilled schools rise, some people will claim success. Others will say, "At least they're getting more of an education than they used to." Somehow, I don't think so.

Much of Learning Gap Blamed on Summer

Rich-poor reading divide in Baltimore

linked to what happens over break.

It’s been a truism for decades that students’ learning slips during the summer, and that low-income children fall farther behind than their classmates, but no one had connected the longitudinal data dots to show just what the cumulative consequences of the summer slide might be. Until now.

A recent study by sociology professor Karl L. Alexander and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore concludes that two-thirds of the reading achievement gap between 9th graders of low and high socioeconomic standing in Baltimore public schools can be traced to what they learned—or failed to learn—over their childhood summers.

The study, which tracked data from about 325 Baltimore students from 1st grade to age 22, points out that various characteristics that depend heavily on reading ability—such as students’ curriculum track in high school, their risk of dropping out, and their probability of pursuing higher education and landing higher-paying jobs—all diverge widely according to socioeconomic levels.

“I call this the Harry Potter divide,” said Alan B. Krueger, a professor of economics and public policy at Princeton University, referring to a 2000 poll by the Princeton, N.J.-based Gallup Organization that asked adults if any of their children were reading the wildly popular series of eponymous books. The poll results showed a wide gap in the responses, based on income.

“Children from low [socioeconomic-status] backgrounds don’t get that reading enrichment,” said Mr. Krueger, who was chief economist of the U.S. Department of Labor in the Clinton administration.

...The study, which appeared in the April issue of the American Sociological Review, makes use of data from reading tests that were administered to the same students twice yearly, enabling researchers to isolate reading comprehension gains made during the school year with those made—or lost—during the summer.

Although the limited national data available on the subject had suggested that the gap between rich and poor would be wide, Mr. Alexander said the numbers on summer from his Baltimore study took him aback.

“What surprised me was the size of the summer learning difference,” he said....

This from Education Week (subscription).

Kentucky student test scores up since 2002: in Reading and Math, in Elementary, Middle and High School

But the improvements aren't necessarily due to the

No Child Left Behind Act, researchers say.

Student achievement nationwide has increased since the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, but that federal law is not necessarily the reason, according to researchers who looked at results from 50 states.

These gains fall well short of the law's goal of getting all students performing at grade level or better by 2014, said the report, released Tuesday by the Center on Education Policy, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit. (CEP Press Release here.)

"...[T]here is more evidence of achievement gaps between groups of students narrowing since 2002 than of gaps widening. Still, the magnitude of the gaps is often substantial," the researchers wrote.

...The researchers claim independence from partisans battling over No Child Left Behind, which is up for reauthorization by Congress this year. Their only expressed opinion is regarding the need for better, more consistent and more transparent data. Researchers declined to credit or criticize No Child Left Behind, noting that states and school districts also have been carrying out their own reforms.

...But a statement from federal Education Secretary Margaret Spellings praised the news. "Under President Bush's leadership … in five short years, we've seen encouraging results, especially in our elementary schools. Students are making remarkable gains in reading and math, and the achievement gap that once seemed intractable is now narrowing in many of our nation's schools." She added: "Now is the time to reauthorize" the law.

In an earlier interview, Spellings said the law had pushed many states to take meaningful measurement of student learning and compelled schools to address the achievement gap.

Even so, at this pace, thousands of schools will fall well short of the law's 2014 full proficiency target.

Critics say the law is underfunded, overly punitive and unrealistic in its goals.


This from the Los Angeles Times, and this from the New York Times.
~

Biggest gains found in elementary math

Using the percentage of students reaching proficiency and effect sizes, the report finds that the biggest improvements since 2002 were seen in elementary level math, where 22 of 25 states with comparable data demonstrated moderate-to-large gains on both measures, and no state showed a moderate-to-large decline. When looking at only at the percentage of students scoring proficient, 37 of 41 states with trend data in elementary math showed moderate-to-large gains.

Reading performance has also increased since 2002, especially at the elementary level.
~

In Kentucky

Only 13 states had sufficient pre- and post-NCLB data to make fair comparisons but that gorup included Kentucky.

From 1999 to 2006, post-NCLB gains exceed pre-NCLB gains on 11 of 12 comparisons.

...................preNCLB/postNCLB................preNCLB/postNCLB
Reading 4th.....% gain 1.3.... 2.7 .......effect size......0.03.....0.06
Reading 7th.....% gain 1.7.... 2.0 .......effect size......0.03.....0.05
Reading 10th...% gain 1.7.... 3.3 ......effect size......0.04..... 0.07
Math 5th .........% gain 2.7.... 5.3 ......effect size......0.08..... 0.11
Math 8th..........% gain 1.0... 2.0 ......effect size......0.05 ....0.06
Math 11th........% gain 1.7.... 2.0 ......effect size......0.06 ....0.04

In Elementary, Middle and High School Math and Reading, Kentucky showed moderate to large gains in the percentage of students reaching proficient which was confirmed by the effect size.
~
The study is unique as it includes verified data from all 50 states – much of which is available for the first time in the report – and investigates achievement trends both before and after the passage of NCLB. The report also limits its analysis to testing data that is comparable from year-to-year, eliminating data in grades and subjects where states have made significant changes to their assessment systems.

The report also uses two methods for evaluating achievement, including the percentage of students considered proficient – the primary measure of adequate yearly progress under NCLB – and effect sizes, a measure based on average test scores that addresses some of the limitations of the percentage proficient measure. Using either method, the report finds that the number of states showing achievement gains since 2002 is far greater than the number showing a decline.

In addition, yearly gains are generally greater after 2002 in states where comparable data prior to 2002 was available. However, the report notes that the gains cannot be attributed directly to No Child Left Behind, as considerable federal, state and local reform efforts have all been underway prior to and since 2002.

“American educators and students were asked to raise academic achievement, and they have done so,” said Jack Jennings, president & CEO of the independent, private nonprofit Center on Education Policy. “The weight of evidence indicates that state test scores in reading and mathematics have increased overall since No Child Left Behind was enacted. However, there should be no rush to judgment as there may be many factors contributing to the increased achievement.”
~

Why have percentage proficient gaps in both reading and math

narrowed more often than they have widened since 2002?

One possible explanation: A primary purpose of NCLB is to highlight and address differences in the achievement of student subgroups. The law has forced states, districts, and schools to disaggregate test scores by subgroup and report them to the public. This, in turn, has raised educators’ awareness of the need to better serve historically low-performing subgroups and increased pressure on educators to do so. According to CEP’s case studies of school district implementation of NCLB, disaggregation of data has also encouraged some districts to develop special programs or devote more resources to raising achievement for lower-performing subgroups (CEP, 2006).

Home life affects students in school

Published on Mon, Nov. 27, 2006

By Richard Day

(At Issue: Nov. 14, 2006, Race disparities persist in U.S. by Stephen Ohlemacher of the Associated Press, in the Lexington Herald-Leader)


The U.S. Census Bureau recently reported that decades after the civil rights movement, racial disparities in income, education and home ownership persist and may be growing again. Median income for black households had remained about 60 percent of the income for white households since 1980. In dollar terms, the gap has grown from $18,123 to $19,683. Last year, data showed average incomes in white households to be two-thirds higher than those for blacks. Despite claims that "trickle down" economic policies create more jobs and help poor families, the evidence provides reason for doubt.

Closing educational achievement gaps is probably the nation's best avenue to racial equality, but gaps persist after more than a decade of intense effort and despite the highest levels of school accountability in our nation's history.

This trend can't be too surprising to anyone with a sense of American history. The collective effects of slavery, Jim Crow and persistent social attitudes designed to keep down African-Americans have played powerful roles. In that sense, the achievement gap was deliberately created -- over many decades -- by majority rule.

It is instructive to remember that achievement gaps were closing in the wake of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society social programs. As Harvard social-policy professor Christopher Jencks reported in his exhaustive book, The Black-White/Test Score Gap, the greatest gains made by black students came between 1968 and 1980 and were explained by the civil rights movement, the War on Poverty and school-based improvements.

What happens to a student outside school -- such as access to health care and a safe home environment -- matters when it comes to achievement in school. Direct and indirect benefits to black student achievement contributed to 0.6 standard deviation growth for blacks on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, with a corresponding 0.1 standard deviation growth for whites.

This demonstrates the very definition of gap closing: finding ways to accelerate the learning of disadvantaged students while continuing growth among all students.

Unfortunately, President Ronald Reagan's economic policies reversed that, and the gap began to grow again. Reagan's decisions were informed by the prevalent social science view at that time: that school resources had little impact on student achievement.

Jencks, for example, argued in his influential 1972 book, Inequality, that reducing cognitive inequality would not do much to reduce economic inequality. He has since reversed his position, now stating that changes in education and earnings would reduce racial differences in crime, health and family structure.

New data prompted him to conclude that reducing the black-white test score gap is probably necessary and sufficient for reducing racial inequality in educational attainment and earnings. President Bush's economic policies echo those of Reagan. The best feature of Bush's education legislation, No Child Left Behind, may well be its title. It expresses the goal that schools will educate every student and will be evaluated by the performance of all subgroups of students, not just schoolwide averages. But NCLB is underfunded by billions of dollars, which, when combined with conservative economic policies, casts serious doubts about its success.

As Brandeis University law and social-policy professor Thomas Shapiro understood, "the wealth gap is not just a story of merit and achievement; it's also a story of the historical legacy of race in the United States." Changing that legacy will require more than strong leadership that motivates teachers to work harder and more effectively. It will require a fully funded and efficient system that provides the resources students need to attain high standards; greater access to pre-school and kindergarten programs, more help for English-language learners and special needs students, and additional school days.

There are a growing number of schools in low-income neighborhoods that are defying the odds and raising the performance of their students to top levels. It is being achieved with a combination of culture building, high expectations and hard work that focuses on each student's individual needs. But if one looks broadly at the performance of our schools, it is clear that much remains to be done. The census data demonstrate the cost to our nation if we fail to close achievement gaps across the board.

© 2006 Lexington Herald-Leader and wire service sources.
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