Swift & Change Able

Education Week published a story today about a new study that contends that all students improve academically in schools that do not make Adequate Yearly Progress goals under the “No Child Left Behind Act,” not just those who are close to the goal of proficient.

Education Week:

A new study offers evidence to dispute the notion that the federal No Child Left Behind Act is pressuring educators in struggling schools to focus on the “bubble kids”—students who fall just below the passing threshold on state tests—at the expense of students at the high and low ends of the achievement spectrum.

For the study, which is to be published Oct. 31 in the magazine Education Next, researcher Matthew G. Springer scoured three years of test-score data on 300,000 elementary and middle school students in an unnamed Western state for signs that students in the middle testing range got a disproportionate boost in test scores after the 2002 law took effect.

“I didn’t see anything that seemed to indicate that educational triage is taking place,” said Mr. Springer, a research assistant professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.

Rather, he found, the schools identified as having fallen short of their performance goals succeeded in raising achievement for the entire range of students at risk of failing, without sacrificing the academic progress of the most gifted students.

We are doing the math on which western state has 300,000 elementary and middle school students available for such a study.

Meanwhile, the response from the federally funded center for education standards and testing:

“I can tell you anecdotally, after visiting many states in the last several years, that focusing on the bubble kids is an explicit strategy for many districts and schools,” said Margaret Heritage, the assistant director for professional development at the National Center on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing, located at the University of California, Los Angeles.

We’ve heard such anecdotes too. But is that all we get for millions of federal education dollars spent to subsidize the study of education policy and practice in the largest state in the union? (The answer is no, CRESST does a lot of other work, but this was apparently the best they could come up with on this issue). Anecdotes can be powerful, but weighing anecdotes against data on 300,000 kids is a no-brainer.

There is other quantitative research (based in Chicago) that runs counter to Springer’s work. See the Ed Week piece for the Chicago researchers’ response. It says a great deal about the current state of education policy that so much time and attention is being spent on the effects of federal education law on the study of both the lowest and the highest achieveing students.

More to come on this issue, certainly. Stay tuned.