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Angela Johnson

Scott J. Peters, Angela Johnson.

Prior research has documented substantial inequity across, racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines within the population of students identified as gifted. Less attention has paid to the equity of gifted identification for student learning English or those with disabilities and what effect state policies toward gifted education might have on these rates. This paper attempted to fill that void by analyzing data from the Office of Civil Rights Data Collection and Stanford Education Data Archive along with original coding of state gifted education policies. Our findings show that while both groups are substantially underrepresented, state mandates for schools to offer services, requirements for formal gifted education plans, and regular audits for compliance are correlated with much higher rates of gifted service availability and equity for English learners and students with disabilities. We also describe the location and characteristics of the top 5% most equitable schools for English learners and students with disabilities.

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Mark Murphy, Angela Johnson.
This study examines the effects of English Learner (EL) status on subsequent Special Education (SPED) placement. Through a research-practice partnership, we link student demographic data and initial English proficiency assessment data across seven cohorts of test takers and observe EL and SPED programmatic participation for these students over seven years. Our regression discontinuity (RD) estimates at the English proficiency margin consistently differ substantively from positive associations generated through regression analyses. RD evidence indicates that EL status had no effect on SPED placement at the English proficiency threshold. Grade-by-grade and subgroup RD analyses at this margin suggest that ELs were modestly under-identified for SPED during grade 5 and that ELs whose primary language was Spanish were under-identified for SPED.

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Angela Johnson, Elizabeth Barker.

Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, schools are required to provide a free and appropriate public education to students with disabilities and show that the students are making academic progress. This study compares within- and across-years academic growth from kindergarten to 4th grade for students who were ever in special education (ever-SPED) to students who were never in special education (never-SPED). We follow one cohort of about 4,200 students for five years and assess the students up to three times per year. Although ever-SPED students started kindergarten with lower math and reading test scores and grew less in both subjects than never-SPED students during the kindergarten school year, ever-SPED students grew more than never-SPED students during the 1st and 2nd grade school years in math and 1st, 3rd, and 4th grade school years in reading. However, ever-SPED students lost more learning during every summer than never-SPED students. This led the test score disparities between the two to grow from under 0.5 standard deviations in kindergarten to 1.0 standard deviation in 4th grade. These findings suggest that summer learning opportunities are crucial for improving educational outcomes for students with disabilities.

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Angela Johnson.

This study reports achievement levels and fall-to-spring gains in grades K to 8 for three groups of English Learners (ELs): (a) ever-ELs who were ever eligible for service; (b) current-ELs who continue to require service; and (b) dually-identified students eligible for both EL and Special Education services. I leverage unique data that include 186,139 ever-ELs and their never-EL peers in 1,520 schools. All three EL groups have lower mean math and reading achievement than the average of all students in kindergarten. Compared to the all-student average, ever-ELs and current-ELs make larger gains in the early grades but smaller gains in the middle grades. Dually-identified students make smaller gains than the all-student average across all grades in math and in kindergarten and 1st grade in reading. The expanding achievement gaps in the middle grades suggest better academic support is urgently needed for all multilingual students, especially dually-identified students.

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Angela Johnson.

This paper reports math and reading academic achievement and growth in grades 2 to 8 for Hispanic participants and nonparticipants of a Spanish-English dual language program. I apply a piecewise multilevel growth model to administrative data from a large school district that enrolls a substantial English Learner student population. Dual language participants started 2nd grade with lower achievement than nonparticipants. In math, dual language participants grew faster than nonparticipants during each school year in grades 2 to 5 but lost more learning during subsequent summers. Thus, despite growing faster in the beginning, dual language students did not learn more than their peers in the long run, and the gap between dual language students and the national average was not closing. In reading, dual language participants grew slightly more slowly during school years but lost less learning during the summers, closing the gap between themselves and the national average. These findings suggest that programs aimed at addressing achievement gaps need to consider summer as well as school-year learning for historically-underserved student populations.

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Angela Johnson, Megan Kuhfeld, James Soland.

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.

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Angela Johnson, Megan Kuhfeld, Greg King.

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.

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Angela Johnson, Diana Mercado-Garcia.

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.

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Megan Kuhfeld, James Soland, Beth Tarasawa, Angela Johnson, Erik Ruzek, Jing Liu.

With 55 million students in the United States out of school due to the COVID-19 pandemic, education systems are scrambling to meet the needs of schools and families, including planning how best to approach instruction in the fall given students may be farther behind than in a typical year. Yet, education leaders have little data on how much learning has been impacted by school closures. While the COVID-19 learning interruptions are unprecedented in modern times, existing research on the impacts of missing school (due to absenteeism, regular summer breaks, and school closures) on learning can nonetheless inform projections of potential learning loss due to the pandemic. In this study, we produce a series of projections of COVID-19-related learning loss and its potential effect on test scores in the 2020-21 school year based on (a) estimates from prior literature and (b) analyses of typical summer learning patterns of five million students. Under these projections, students are likely to return in fall 2020 with approximately 63-68% of the learning gains in reading relative to a typical school year and with 37-50% of the learning gains in math. However, we estimate that losing ground during the COVID-19 school closures would not be universal, with the top third of students potentially making gains in reading. Thus, in preparing for fall 2020, educators will likely need to consider ways to support students who are academically behind and further differentiate instruction.

 

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Angela Johnson, Megan Kuhfeld.

The belief that additional time allows children to become more ready for school has affected public policy and individual practices. Prior studies estimated either associations between school entry age and academic growth or causal effects on achievement measured at one or two points. This paper contributes novel causal evidence for the impacts of kindergarten entry age on academic growth in the first three years of school. We embed regression discontinuity into a piecewise multilevel growth model and apply it to rich assessment data from three states. Being a year older leads to higher initial achievement and higher kindergarten growth rates but lower growth rates during 1st and 2nd grades. Effects do not differ by gender or race.

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