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States and districts are increasingly incorporating measures of achievement growth into their school accountability systems, but there is little research on how these changes affect the public’s perceptions of school quality. We conduct a nationally representative online survey experiment to identify the effects of providing participants with information about their local school districts’ average achievement status and/or average achievement growth. In the control group, participants who live in higher status districts tend to grade their local schools more favorably. The provision of status information does not fundamentally alter this relationship. The provision of growth information, however, reshapes Americans’ views about educational performance. Once informed, participants’ evaluations of their local public schools better reflect the variation in district growth.
The “achievement gap” has long dominated mainstream conversations about race and education. Some scholars warn that the discourse around racial gaps perpetuates stereotypes and promotes the adoption of deficit-based explanations that fail to appreciate the role of structural inequities. I investigate through three randomized experiments. Results indicate that a TV news story about racial achievement gaps (versus a control or counter-stereotypical video) led viewers to express more exaggerated stereotypes of Black Americans as lacking education (study 1: ES=.30 SD; study 2: ES=.38 SD) and may have increased viewers’ implicit stereotyping of Black students as less competent than White students (study 1: ES=.22 SD; study 2: ES=.12 SD, n.s.). The video did not affect viewers’ explicit competence-related racial stereotyping, the explanations they gave for achievement inequalities, or their prioritization of ending achievement inequalities. After two weeks, the effect on stereotype exaggeration faded. Future research should probe how we can most productively frame educational inequality by race.
Nearly one in five U.S. students attends a rural school, yet we know very little about achievement gaps and academic growth in rural schools. This study leverages a unique dataset that includes longitudinal test scores for more than five million 3rd to 8th grade students in approximately 17,000 public schools across the 50 states, including 900,000 students attending 4,727 rural schools. We find rural achievement and growth to be slightly above public schools. But there is considerable heterogeneity by student race/ethnicity. For all grades and subjects, White-Black and White-Hispanic gaps are smaller in rural schools than gaps nationwide, and White-Native American gaps are larger in rural schools than gaps nationwide. Separate analyses by racial/ethnic subgroup show that rural Black, Hispanic, and Native American students are often growing slower than their respective subgroup national average. In contrast, White students are often growing faster than the national average for White students.
Many interventions in education occur in settings where treatments are applied to groups. For example, a reading intervention may be implemented for all students in some schools and withheld from students in other schools. When such treatments are non-randomly allocated, outcomes across the treated and control groups may differ due to the treatment or due to baseline differences between groups. When this is the case, researchers can use statistical adjustment to make treated and control groups similar in terms of observed characteristics. Recent work in statistics has developed matching methods designed for contexts where treatments are clustered. This form of matching, known as multilevel matching, may be well suited to many education applications where treatments are assigned to schools. In this article, we provide an extensive evaluation of multilevel matching and compare it to multilevel regression modeling. We evaluate multilevel matching methods in two ways. First, we use these matching methods to recover treatment effect estimates from three clustered randomized trials using a within-study comparison design. Second, we conduct a simulation study. We find evidence that generally favors an analytic approach to statistical adjustment that combines multilevel matching with regression adjustment. We conclude with an empirical application.
Summer learning loss (SLL) is a familiar and much-studied phenomenon, yet new concerns that measurement artifacts distorted canonical SLL findings create a need to revisit basic research on SLL. Though race/ethnicity and SES only account for about 4% of the variance in SLL, nearly all prior work focuses on these factors. We zoom out to the full spread of differential SLL and its contribution to students’ positions in the eighth grade achievement distribution. Using a large, longitudinal Northwest Evaluation Association dataset, we document dramatic variability in SLL. While some students actually maintain their school-year learning rate, others lose nearly all their school-year progress. Moreover, decrements are not randomly distributed—52% of students lose ground in all 5 consecutive years (ELA).
Clustered observational studies (COSs) are a critical analytic tool for educational effectiveness research. We present a design framework for the development and critique of COSs. The framework is built on the counterfactual model for causal inference and promotes the concept of designing COSs that emulate the targeted randomized trial that would have been conducted were it feasible. We emphasize the key role of understanding the assignment mechanism to study design. We review methods for statistical adjustment and highlight a recently developed form of matching designed specifically for COSs. We review how regression models can be profitably combined with matching and note best practice for estimates of statistical uncertainty. Finally, we review how sensitivity analyses can determine whether conclusions are sensitive to bias from potential unobserved confounders. We demonstrate concepts with an evaluation of a summer school reading intervention in Wake County, North Carolina.
We provide the first estimated economic impacts of students’ access to an entire sector of public higher education in the U.S. Approximately half of Georgia high school graduates who enroll in college do so in the state’s public four-year sector, which requires minimum SAT scores for admission. Regression discontinuity estimates show enrollment in public four-year institutions boosts students’ household income around age 30 by 20 percent, and has even larger impacts for those from low income high schools. Access to this sector has little clear impact on student loan balances or other measures of financial health. For the marginal student, enrollment in such institutions has large private returns even in the short run and positive returns to state budgets in the long run.
English Learners (ELs) lag behind their peers in postsecondary attainment. As the EL population in the U.S. continues to grow, so does concern over their underrepresentation in higher education. Research shows that Early College High Schools have a significant impact on high school and college outcomes for students from low income and racial/ethnic minority backgrounds, but how similar opportunities might extend to ELs remains unknown. We report findings from the first three years of an intervention that offers Early College opportunities in high schools serving large EL populations. Leveraging an exogenous policy change and rich administrative records, we examine the outcomes of pre- and post-program cohorts of ELs (N=15,090) in treated and untreated high schools. We find a large, significant impact on the number of college credits earned in 12th grade but no effect on immediate college attendance after high school. The probability of attending a four-year college significantly decreased.
This study presents a framework that uses academic trajectories in the middle grades for identifying students in need of intervention and providing targeted support. We apply a set of academic college readiness benchmarks to rich longitudinal data for more than 360,000 students in 5900 schools across 49 states and the District of Columbia. In both math and reading, each student was assessed up to six times (fall and spring of 6th, 7th, and 8th grade). We show that student-level and school-level demographic characteristics significantly predict academic trajectories. Compared to White and Asian students, higher proportions of Black and Hispanic student are consistently off-track for college readiness throughout middle school. Among students who started 6th grade on track, being male, Black, Hispanic, and attending schools with a higher percentage of students who are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch are positively associated with falling off track.
While teacher evaluation policies have been central to efforts to enhance teaching quality over the past decade, little is known about how teachers change their instructional practices in response to such policies. To address this question, this paper drew on classroom observation and survey data to examine how early career teachers’ (ECTs’) perceptions of pressure associated with teacher evaluation policies seemed to affect their enactment of ambitious mathematics instruction. As part of our analysis, we also considered the role that mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT) and school norms regarding teaching mathematics shape the potential influence of teacher evaluation policies on ECTs’ instructional practices. Understanding how the confluence of these factors is associated with teachers’ instruction provides important insights into how to improve teaching quality, which is one of the most important inputs for student learning.