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September 23, 2011

Are our top students being left behind?

Filed under: Achievement Gaps,Public education,Report Summary — Tags: , , , , — Jim Hull @ 1:35 pm

It’s déjà vu all over again. Back in 2008 the Fordham Institute claimed in this report that our nation’s best students were being hurt by current education reform efforts, particularly NCLB. Fast forward to earlier this week where Fordham released another report to once again try to show that our education reforms are being targeted at our low performing students at the expense of our top students. The similarities don’t end with both studies examining the performance of high achieving students. In both reports Fordham’s conclusions don’t fit what their own data says.

In the 2008 study Fordham argued our top students were being left behind because their gains were not as large as the gains low performing students made post-NCLB. I argued then that their own data didn’t fit their claim. Once again, Fordham’s claim that our top students are being left behind doesn’t fit their own data. As a matter of fact, according to Fordham’s report the gap in math scores between low- (those scoring below 10th percentile) and high-performing (those score above the 90th percentile) did not significantly change as students moved from 3rd to 8th grade or from 6th to 10th grade. The good news is that all students made consistent gains. Unfortunately for low-performing students, their performance still lagged way behind. The story is a bit different in reading where gaps did close between the lowest and highest performing students. However, Fordham sees this gap closing as a negative even though high performing students continued to make significant gains between the 3rd and 8th grades.

Just as I argued in 2008, this is how gaps should be narrowed, where everyone improves but the lowest performers improve at a faster rate. However, Fordham didn’t agree with me then and I’ll safely assume they won’t agree with me now. We will just have to agree to disagree because I don’t believe the data shows our best students are being short changed simply because our lowest performers are making more progress than our highest performing students.

Now that doesn’t mean our schools or our education policies should focus solely on our lowest performing students. Educators and policymakers need to ensure that all students have an opportunity to reach their highest academic potential before they go onto college or the workplace. Yet, neither Fordham study provides compelling data that our schools are short changing our highest performing students.

Yes, educators and policymakers need to focus on our highest achieving students. International test scores show we have a much smaller proportion of advanced students than the leading countries such as South Korea and Finland. But the same international tests show we also have a much larger proportion of very low performers than most other industrialized nations. And students with such low achievement have little chance to go onto any sort of postsecondary education or find a good job that pays a living wage and offers benefits. So we need to at least sustain the gains our highest achievers are making since many will be our country’s future innovators, policymakers and business leaders. At the same time, we need to accelerate the gains our lowest achieving students are making so they at least have the minimal skills necessary to either go onto earn some sort of postsecondary degree/certificate or find a good job. Doing so is not a zero-sum game. If we provide our teachers with the training, resources, and support they need, they can improve the performance of all students. – Jim Hull





September 14, 2011

SAT scores dropped while ACT scores rose

Filed under: college,Course taking,High school,Report Summary — Tags: , , , , — Jim Hull @ 2:25 pm

Today’s 2011 SAT results provide conflicting findings on how prepared high graduates are for the rigors of college courses. On one hand, last month’s ACT results showed a slight increase in scores while this year’s SAT results show a fairly significant decline. Unfortunately, there is no clear reason for these conflicting results, especially as more students are taking both the ACT and the SAT. It could be that students are just getting more comfortable taking the ACT because it is specifically designed to be aligned with what students actually learned in high school, like the standardized tests they have been taking throughout their academic careers. The SAT is designed as a reasoning test with more abstract concepts, which may be different from what students are familiar with.

No matter the reason, the drop in SAT scores over the past several years is a cause for concern. Yes, more students are taking the SAT than ever before—which is a good thing—but that can cause scores to drop. Yet, more students are also taking the ACT and those scores have increased. With no clear national explanation, it is important for districts and individual schools to examine their own ACT and SAT results to gain a better understanding of how prepared their students actually are for college. Keep in mind that college entrance exams such as the ACT and SAT are just one indicator schools and districts can use to determine how prepared their students are for college but it is an important tool.

To learn more on how to use ACT and SAT scores and other indicators to determine how well your schools are preparing their students for college check out this video on the Center’s Data First Web site. – Jim Hull

Selected Findings

National Scores

  • The nation’s graduating Class of 2011 had an average composite score of 1500, which was lower than 2010 (1506) and much lower than in 2006 (1518), when the writing assessment was first introduced.
    • At a score of 1500, an average high school graduate has about a 75 percent chance of getting admitted into a good college*.
  • Scores declined on all three sections over the past year. Scores decreased by three points on the Critical Reading section (497), by two points on the Writing section (489) and one point on the Math section (514) from the year prior. 
  • Scores declined for most racial/ethnic groups.
    • The average combined Hispanic student score was 1358 in 2011, which is six points lower than in 2010 and 12 points lower than 2006.
    • The average Black student score was 1272 in 2011, which is five points lower than in 2010 and 19 points lower than in 2006.
    • The average White student score was 1576 in 2011, which is four points lower than the 2010 score and six points lower than in 2006.

College Readiness

  • Nearly half (43 percent) of 2011 high school graduates scored higher than 1550, which is the SAT’s new benchmark to be considered “college ready.”
    • A student who scores a combined 1550 or higher has a 65 percent chance of earning a B-minus grade point average in their freshman year courses.
  • While more than half (53 percent) of White students were college ready, just 23 percent of Hispanic students and even fewer (15 percent) of Black students reached the SAT’s college readiness benchmark.
  • Those students who took AP or Honors courses nearly doubled their chances of being college ready. Eighty-three percent students who took AP or Honors math reached the “college ready” benchmark on the math section, compared to 40 percent of students who did not take AP or Honors math.

Core Course Rigor

  • Seventy-five percent of SAT test takers completed the recommended “core” college-preparatory curriculum, which is an increase from 70 percent in 2001.
    • Just 66 percent of Black students and 69 percent of Hispanic students completed the core curriculum, compared to 80 percent of white students.
  • High school graduates who completed at least the core curriculum scored 143 points higher on the combined SAT score than students who did not complete the core curriculum.
    • A 143 point decrease in the combined SAT score for an average student decreases his or her chances of getting admitted into a good college from 75 percent to 67 percent.*
  • High school graduates who took AP or Honors courses scored significantly higher than all test takers not only in that subject area but in all three SAT sections.
    • Those who took AP or Honors English scored 163 points higher than all test takers.
    • Those who took AP or Honors Math scored 206 points higher than all test takers.

Test Takers

  • Nearly 1.65 million students from the class of 2011 took the SAT sometime during their high school career. This represents about a 6 percent increase from 2010.
  • In 25 states, at least 40 percent of high school seniors took the SAT sometime during their high school career.
  • Slightly more minority students are taking the SAT.
    • In 2011, 29 percent of SAT test takers were Hispanic or Black, compared to 20 percent in 2006. However, the increase may be due at least in part to reporting, since the percent of students who marked “No Response” to being asked their race/ethnicity decreased from 9 percent to 4 percent during this same period.
    • Furthermore, the percent of test takers who were White decreased slightly between 2006 and 2011 from 56 percent to 53 percent.
  • The vast majority (80 percent) of SAT test takers want to earn at least a bachelor’s degree. 

* Data based on calculations from the Center for Public Education’s Chasing the College Acceptance Letter: Is it harder to get into college.





August 26, 2011

More research on rural schools

Filed under: Course taking,English Language Learners,Public education,research — Tags: , , , — Jim Hull @ 8:49 am

In the nation’s imagination, rural schools are usually typecast as homogenous, outdated, and identical.  In truth, there are an equal percentage of minority rural students as there are rural students period, around 20%.  As far as the antiquated myth goes, due to their distance from and limited access to many of the physical resources that urban and suburban areas enjoy (say teachers or advanced coursework), rural schools are often at the fore of digital learning initiatives. And perhaps the most misleading fallacy, rural schools are not identical.  Their virtues, as well as their challenges are site-specific.  Consider for example the disparate needs of effective ELL teachers in New Mexico versus Vermont, where the percentage ratio of rural minority students is 81.6: 2.6.   

Earlier this month, I blogged on the ease with which research entities overlook rural schools and the Department of Education’s highlighting of rural education for the month of August 2011.  In this entry, I’d like to discuss three papers dealing with rural schools, also released this month.  Though these reports have different angles on rural reform, four shared themes emerge: the need to build regional capacities and forge partnerships, attention to teacher recruitment and retention, flexibility in federally mandated reforms, and greater enrollment of rural students in post-secondary education.

In brief, the Center for American Progress’s (CAP) report, titled, Make Rural Schools a Priority, focuses on rural policy priorities for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.  Transforming the Rural South, produced by the State Collaborative on Reforming Education (SCORE), relates the challenges of southern states where the largest percentage of underperforming rural schools are located.  And the Education Commission of the States (ECS) issued a summary document of recommendations generated from their first ever, National Summit on the Role of Education in Economic Development in Rural America, May 4th 2011.

Why is building regional capacities so important for rural school districts that take great pride in their unique communities and cultivate identity from surroundings?  SCORE calls on school districts to form regional partnerships and pool intellectual resources, which will thus enable them to go after philanthropic and federal grants to advance their own home-grown school reform efforts, otherwise out of reach. ECS recommends partnerships between school districts, institutions of higher education, local municipalities, and businesses to foster academic and career alignment and a college-going culture.

Such partnerships can also help teacher recruitment and retention, which is of grave concern, as the average rural teacher makes only 86 cents to the urban teacher’s dollar—pay allegedly appropriate for the lower costs of living, in housing that is often substandard.  Districts must partner with others to recruit highly effective teachers who can serve as content specialists across district lines.  Both CAP and ETS advise that pipelines be built to recruit teachers and administrators for sparsely populated districts lacking their own capacity to do so.  This infrastructure can start in the postsecondary setting, where teacher prep programs would expose candidates to actual teaching settings in rural communities, a dual strategy to promote effectiveness, and one reminiscent of those recently released by the National Council on Teaching Quality (NCTQ). 

In rural areas where teacher recruitment is an ever-present issue, turning around schools by way of firing the entire teaching staff is a deeply flawed solution.  This being one of the Obama administration’s four Race to the Top turnaround strategies, it stands to reason that rural school districts require more flexibility in implementing reforms.  There are countless reform efforts that rural schools would benefit from, not limited to those aforementioned, like better bandwidth and dual-credit high school classes. What’s most pressing of course is that these issues stay at the fore of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s mind, and think-tanks alike, beyond the month of August.—Juile McCabe





August 24, 2011

Comparing states to other countries: A fair comparison?

Filed under: International Comparisons,NAEP,Public education,Report Summary,research — Tags: , , , — Jim Hull @ 11:37 am

Can U.S. compete if only 32 percent of students are proficient in math? This was the headline over at MSNBC.com last week in reference to a new report that compared each state’s math and reading performances to that of 65 other countries. Researchers at Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance made the comparison by comparing the results of the 2007 8th grade NAEP assessments, which all states participated in, to the 2009 PISA results that 15-year olds (mostly high school sophomores) in the U.S. and 64 other countries participated in. Although the same students did not take both assessments and the assessments were taken in different years, the researchers claim that such a comparison is a fair representation of the Class of 2011 math and reading performance.

I’ll admit I’m not an assessment expert or a statistician, but I am a little skeptical of how fair that comparison is. For one, reliably comparing different assessments is quite difficult. These researchers took a fairly simplistic approach that just looked at the percent of 8th graders achieving at NAEP’s Proficient level (32 percent) in math and then looked to see at what score did the top-performing 32 percent of U.S. students score at on the 2009 PISA test. Then they used that PISA score to represent achieving ‘proficiency’ on NAEP for other countries. The same comparison was done for reading.

A similar study being conducted by NCES, scheduled to be released next year, takes a more comprehensive approach. In this study, they will compare NAEP to TIMSS results by having a sample of 8th grade students in each state take both the NAEP and TIMSS assessment in math and science. This will likely provide a more accurate comparison of how states truly compare to other countries, since they are using results from two assessments taken by the same students in the same year, unlike the Harvard study.

I could go on about the possible limitations of making such linkages, but such arguments would be fairly technical and wouldn’t change the main finding from the Harvard study: too few U.S. students are proficient in math. As I stated in The Proficiency Debate: A guide to NAEP achievement levels, NAEP’s ”proficient” level is a fairly high, although reachable, standard, and is not the same as being “on grade level.” With that being said, the data makes it quite obvious that a significant number of countries have a far greater proportion of their students obtaining higher level skills than the U.S. and that in some states very few student are acquiring these knowledge and skills. As the Harvard report states, if all states were able to increase the proportion of students obtaining these skills to that of the proportion of Canada, the U.S. could increase its GDP by nearly $1 trillion per year over the next 80 years. Sounds like a great argument for states to increase their investment in education instead of cutting funding. This is a more effective alternative to cutting our nation’s deficit than simply cutting spending and raising taxes.– Jim Hull





August 17, 2011

More students ‘college ready,’ according to ACT report

Filed under: college,Data,High school,Report Summary — Tags: , , , — Jim Hull @ 3:55 pm

There was a slight increase in the percent of 2011 high school graduates ready for college English, math, social science, and science courses, according to The Condition of College & Career Readiness 2011 report released today. 

It is good news that the percent of students considered “college ready” increased, especially since it has been increasing for several years. This shows our high schools are graduating more students ready to succeed in college. This is likely because more students are taking more rigorous courses. As the Center’s Chasing the College Acceptance Letter found, those students who take more rigorous courses increase their chances of getting into a good college at a greater rate than students who simply improve their grades.

However, the results also show that progress has been slow and gaps between groups of students persist. The progress needs to accelerate exponentially to close the gap between the percent of students who want to go onto earn a 4-year degree (83 percent) and those who are “college ready” (25 percent) so they are adequately prepared for such college level work when they enter college. Yes, high schools are on the right track, but there is much more work to be done to truly meet the needs of their students. – Jim Hull

Key Findings

College Readiness

  • Just 25 percent of 2011 high school graduates were college ready in all four ACT subject tests (English, Reading, Math, and Science), which is a 1 percentage point increase from 2010 and a 4 percentage point increase from 2006.
    • Of the states that had at least 40 percent of their graduates take the ACT, Minnesota had the highest percentage (36 percent) of students college ready in all four subjects.
    •  Students who achieve these benchmarks are ready to succeed in first-year, credit-bearing college courses in the specific subjects ACT tests, according to ACT research. “Success” is defined as a 75% likelihood of earning a ‘C’ or better in the relevant course.
  • Black and Hispanic students were much less likely to be college ready than their White peers.
    • Just 4 percent of Black students and 11 percent of Hispanic students reached all four ACT college readiness benchmarks, compared to 31 percent of White students.
  • The percent of students who scored at or above the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks increased from 43 percent to 45 percent in math and from 28 percent to 29 percent in science between 2010 and 2011.
    • There was no change in the percent of students who were college ready in English (66 percent) and reading (52 percent).   
  • Minnesota was the only state where at least 50 percent of students were able to meet at least three of the four College Readiness Benchmarks.
    • In eleven states, between 40 and 49 percent of students met three out of four benchmarks.
    • Nationally, 40 percent of 2011 graduates met three out of four benchmarks.

Core Course Rigor

  • Seventy-four percent of ACT test takers completed the recommended “core” college-preparatory curriculum, which is an increase from 71 percent in 2010.
  • High school graduates who completed at least a core curriculum earned composite test scores 2.2 to 3.1 points higher than students who did not complete a core curriculum.
    • A three point decrease for an average student decreases his or her chances of getting admitted into a good college from 72 percent to 62 percent.*
  • In math, students who took courses through at least Trigonometry were nearly three times more likely to meet the math college readiness benchmark than students who stopped at Algebra II and geometry.
  • Black and Hispanic students were less likely to have completed a core curriculum than White students.
    • While 76 percent of White students complete a core curriculum, just 69 percent of Black students and 72 percent of Hispanic students did so.

Test Takers

  • About 49 percent of all 2011 high graduates took the ACT, compared to 42 percent in 2007. The ACT has seen a 25 percent increase of test takers just since 2007. 
  • More minority students are taking the ACT.
    • In 2011, nearly 25 percent of ACT test takers were Hispanic or Black, compared to 19 percent in 2007. However, the increase may be due at least in part to reporting, since the percent of students who marked “No Response” to being asked their race/ethnicity decreased from 13 percent to 5 percent during this same period.
    • Furthermore, the percent of test takers who were White remained relatively the same between 2007 and 2011, at about 60 percent.
  • The vast majority (83 percent) of ACT test takers want to earn at least a bachelor’s degree. These aspirations do not differ significantly by a student’s race/ethnicity. 

For more information on how to use college entrance exam scores to evaluate your school, check out the Center’s Date First Web site.

The ACT National and State Reports:

http://www.act.org/news/data/11/index.html

* Data based on calculations from the Center for Public Education’s Chasing the College Acceptance Letter: Is it harder to get into college.





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