Many in the research, policy, and media worlds have taken for granted the existence of a phenomenon known as the “plateau effect,” wherein test scores rise in the early years of a test-based accountability system and then level off. The theory holds that the first few years of score gains, in which teachers and students are rapidly adjusting to the new test, are “low hanging fruit,” and that scores plateau in later years once the “easy” ways of making gains have been exhausted. But the most comprehensive study of the plateau effect to date, released today by the Center on Education Policy (CEP), calls this phenomenon into question.
Drawing from its database of reading and math test results from all 50 states going back as far as 1999, CEP researchers looked for evidence of a plateau effect in 55 trend lines from 16 states with six to ten years of consistent test data. The study revealed several main findings:
In the current testing context, one cannot assume the existence of a plateau effect when trying to predict state test score trends.
The largest gains did not consistently show up in the early years of a testing program.
A clear upswing in test results was apparent after the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).
In the three states with longer trend lines, gains generally did level off after nine or ten years, but the data were too limited to know whether this is a consistent pattern in state test performance.
The full report, State Test Score Trends Through 2008: Is There a Plateau Effect in Test Scores?, is the second in a series of 2009 CEP reports analyzing student achievement trends.
The report, along with more information and data, is available on the Center’s website at http://www.cep-dc.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=document_ext.showDocumentByID&nodeID=1&DocumentID=282
Part I of the report is available here:
http://www.cep-dc.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=document_ext.showDocumentByID&nodeID=1&DocumentID=280
What Will It Take to Turn Around Low Graduation-Rate High Schools?
New Report Identifies Key State, District and School Level Factors for Success
The federal government has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to stimulate significant progress in solving the nation’s graduation crisis, according to Graduating America: Meeting the Challenge of Low Graduation-Rate High Schools, a new report released by Jobs for the Future and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University.
While high schools with low graduation rates exist in every state and many communities across the country, they are concentrated in a subset of 17 states that produce approximately 70 percent of the nation’s dropouts. Data from these states are used to develop new analytic tools for examining the characteristics of schools, districts, and states that make certain approaches more likely to succeed in certain places.
“The go-it-alone approach of leaving it to failing schools to fix themselves has not worked,” said report coauthor Robert Balfanz of the Everyone Graduates Center. “With the federal government ready to invest billions of dollars into turning around low-performing schools, the time is right to form the federal-statelocal and community partnerships needed to transform or replace the low graduation-rate high schools that drive the nation’s dropout crisis.”
“To successfully transform or replace low graduation-rate high schools, states and districts need access to the growing knowledge base of what works and where it works,” said report co-author Adria Steinberg, of JFF. “It would be a waste of precious resources to quickly scale up interventions that were successful in one place without carefully analyzing the conditions that make success possible, and understanding which innovations work under what circumstances.”
“Graduating America: Meeting the Challenge of Low Graduation-Rate High Schools” examines three major factors that should be considered when making choices about improvement strategies: patterns of geographic spread and concentration; state, district, and school characteristics; and socioeconomic, demographic, and political trends in the community.
Immediate federal action would make a significant difference in efforts to help hundreds of thousands more high school students earn a diploma and prepare for postsecondary education. The report’s authors make the following recommendations to the federal government:
• Require states seeking ARRA “Race to the Top” funding to use analytic data on graduation rates and low graduation-rate high schools as part of their plans for turning around failing schools.
• Build the capacity of states, districts, and schools to implement appropriate high school reform strategies.
• Designate additional federal innovation funding for development and replication of effective school designs to use in transforming or replacing low graduation-rate high schools.
• Target federal financing to high schools, districts, and states with the most pressing dropout problems.
The 17 states identified in this report are: Alabama, Florida, Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio, Tennessee, Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, California, Illinois, Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina,
To download Graduating America: Meeting the Challenge of Low Graduation-Rate High Schools:
http://www.jff.org/Documents/graduating_america_072209.pdf
National Education Standards: To Be or Not to Be?
With another drive for national education standards gathering steam, a new publication from Educational Testing Service (ETS), reviews the debate, details previous and current efforts, discusses the challenges and explores avenues for moving the nation toward greater commonality.
The report, National Education Standards: Getting Beneath the Surface, is the latest in a regular series of Policy Perspectives from ETS's Policy Information Center, and is written by noted educational researcher Paul Barton. The report covers issues such as: what must be considered in creating national education standards, what problems must be addressed, and what trade-offs might be required among conflicting objectives.
"The most daunting issue," says Barton, "is the huge degree of variation that now exists in our educational system." For example, Barton points out that:
• States set very different standards to determine student proficiency. According to North Carolina's standards, 88 percent of the state's eighth-graders are "proficient" on its state National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scale while neighboring South Carolina sets a much higher bar, resulting in only 30 percent of its eighth-graders reaching this level.
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• In student achievement, the lowest scoring 17-year-olds do no better in math and reading than the top scoring 9-year-olds. In addition, the spread in achievement scores in reading within a grade is as large, or larger, than the difference in average scores between grades 4 and 12.
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• Evaluations of the state content standards and tests by the Fordham Foundation and the American Federation of Teachers found large variations in quality. Even when states teach the same material from the first to the eighth grade, they may teach the material at different grades.
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• A review of the textbooks used in 10 states showed that only four of 108 possible learning expectations for fourth-graders were common across those states.
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While there is increasing advocacy for creating common or national standards, there is seldom any detail given about the nature of the standards sought, Barton contends. "Some want federal standards and others national. Some talk about the content of instruction, some about a national test, and some about both. Certain groups push for voluntary standards and others for a single cut-point on a test that can be used for accountability. People are speaking from different pages and it will be necessary to get on the same page before there can be significant progress," says Barton.
Getting everyone on the same page is one of the goals of the Common Core State Standards Initiative. The Initiative, developed by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association (NGA), is a state-led process to develop two sets of common core state standards in English-language arts and mathematics: one for grades K–12, and one for college students and the workforce. The standards will be research- and evidence-based, internationally benchmarked, aligned with college and work expectations and include rigorous content and skills.
"This is no longer a debate — it is a necessity. The development of a common core of state standards builds directly on recent efforts of leading organizations and states that have focused on developing college- and career-ready standards and ensures that these standards can be internationally benchmarked to top-performing countries," stated CCSSO Executive Director Gene Wilhoit. "The common core state standards will be fewer, clearer, and higher, making them more accessible to educators, students, parents, and the public."
The report reviews the nation's recent history with standards and testing and identifies some lessons that can be learned to avoid past mistakes. For example, the current system of content standards, curriculum and tests does not tie the components together in most states. The report also:
• Describes the on-going and significant disagreements over the best methods to teach math and reading, and points out topics, such as evolution, where we can expect even more controversy. Can these differences be accommodated in national standards?
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• Points out that much of what we know about the courses that students take is limited to course titles — Algebra 1, for example. Yet, the content of an algebra course can vary tremendously across schools.
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• Looks at ways federal funding can be used to develop common standards without federal control.
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• Offers some ways to greater utilize NAEP, which currently serves as the nation's report card.
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"There seems to be widespread dissatisfaction with the present system," says Barton. "As the Secretary of Education put it, ‘we have 50 different goal posts now.' However, this is not an advocacy document but an effort to help people who are grappling with the issue by providing information that can help."
Full report:
http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/PICNATEDSTAND.pdf
Study claims pay bump for teachers with master’s degrees could be put to better use
In this recessionary climate of depressed revenues and budget cuts for education, school districts across the U.S. “would be foolhardy” not to rethink paying teachers for master’s degrees, according to a new report.
“On average, master’s degrees in education bear no relation to student achievement,” say education researchers Marguerite Roza and Raegen Miller in their short paper, Separation of Degrees: State-By-State Analysis of Teacher Compensation for Master’s Degrees.
The brief was produced jointly by the Center on Reinventing Public Education and the Center for American Progress.
“During this time of fiscal stringency, it should raise eyebrows when a state automatically allocates such large sums of the average per-pupil expenditure in a manner that is not even suspected of promoting higher levels of student achievement,” say the authors.
In hard dollars, this means New York state spends an extra $416 per student (for a total of $1.121 billion a year) just because 78 percent of its teachers hold master’s degrees. In Washington state, the analogous numbers are $319 per pupil (or $330 million a year total) for the 56 percent of its teachers with a master’s. These expenditures, respectively, represent 2.78 percent and 3.30 percent of the total federal, state, and local money devoted to education in each state.
Roza and Miller chart these numbers for each state and suggest that the money now committed to the master’s bump in pay could be better spent, writing that: “Teaching candidates with salient and meaningful master’s degrees should be given preferential attention when competing for jobs, all else being equal. A master’s degree in engineering, for example, should be construed as evidence that a candidate possesses a deep understanding of a subject matter that is relevant to teaching mathematics or science.”
The authors acknowledge that changing long-established pay practices and contractual schedules will not be easy. But they argue that from a strategic point of view, this master’s bump in pay “makes little sense because these monies could be channeled into teacher compensation in ways that lead to improved student performance.”
Seeing the issue in the context of how a financial crisis can inspire education reform focused on benefiting students, Roza and Miller conclude:
“In the fiscal climate ahead, school systems serious about improving results for students will have no choice but to reconsider their long-automated ways of spending money, uncover how much money is at stake, and compare current ways of spending to alternative ones with greater potential to benefit students.”
This is the fourth “Rapid Response” brief in the $CHOOLS IN CRISIS: MAKING ENDS MEET series, designed to bring relevant fiscal analyses to policymakers amidst the current economic crisis.
Separation of Degrees: State-By-State Analysis of Teacher Compensation for Master’s Degrees is available at
http://www.crpe.org/cs/crpe/view/csr_pubs/289
Drivers of Choice: Parents, Transportation, and School Choice
Transportation is clearly a consideration to be factored into any discussion of school choice. Yet we know very little about how much it matters in family’s decisions about their children’s school, and almost nothing about how much of a barrier it is to school choice, especially for low-income families. How far does the average family want their child to travel to school? Would they be as comfortable letting their younger children travel as far as they might a middle or high school student? What transportation options are available to low-income families? These are the kinds of questions we tried to address in this study, in order to obtain meaningful data to help shape school transportation policy.
This project first surveyed the landscape of transportation and school choices. It examined the density of large districts in the U.S. The project team contacted large school districts to find out their policies on transportation and choice, then examined district budgets to see how much they actually spend on transportation. Most importantly, the project surveyed families in two cities—Denver and Washington, D.C.—to find out their travel patterns and school choice options. The study breaks down that data, collected from households earning less than $75,000 in annual income, to determine how much transportation is a barrier to choice.
This report addresses the following questions:
* How far do children travel to school?
* Is transportation a big barrier to choice for families, especially for low-income families?
* Would families make different school choices if they had better transportation options?
* How do these choices vary by income, age of child, type of school, and location?
* Do families know their districts’ transportation policies?
• Given these results, how might district transportation policies better adapt to a choice environment?
Full report:
http://www.crpe.org/cs/crpe/download/csr_files/pub_dscr_teske_jul09.pdf
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