A new report published in the journal The Annals of the Unsurprising reports that a child’s performance relative to other students on their third grade state tests in reading and math predicts where he or she will rank in tenth grade.
I’m only half joking. The report is from the National Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER). But the finding largely confirms what previous analyses have found, that “academic mobility,” the ability of a student to escape the lowest quartile of achievement, for example, is quite limited. This new report confirms that lack of mobility does not appear to vary very much across a large and diverse number of states and school districts.
The report tracks mobility and graduation rates of 2.5 million public school students across fourteen years of school district data in six states: Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Oregon, Texas, and Washington. The big question: “Do initially low-achieving students gain in the schools districts’ performance distribution compared to initially high-achieving students during the K–12 career?” Do they gain in the statewide comparisons?
No. They do not. Third grade tests predict where a child will be in tenth grade with 80 percent certainty.
The authors note there is already a “robust literature” demonstrating that “large gaps in student achievement (as measured on standardized tests) at the elementary school level between advantaged and disadvantaged students continue to persist to the end of students’ K–12 educational careers.” However, they note, the literature on the ability of individual districts to move students is “surprisingly thin.”
The states in the study are significant, with substantial differences in the percentage of black and Hispanic students (from very few to nearly half of the sample size) in a given state. There are also substantial differences in the percentage of students in those states’ school districts who are receiving free or reduced-price lunch, have IEPs, or are geographically mobile. “While our sample is not designed to be representative of the United States as a whole, the six states we examine are diverse along many dimensions and provide substantively different evaluation contexts,” the authors note.
Different contexts, same results. “There is this lore out there that there are some districts that are doing much better jobs than other districts at addressing the needs of, say, disadvantaged students,” Dan Goldhaber, one of more than a dozen credited authors of the report told Education Week, which was the first to report the findings. But the study turned up little evidence of it. “I find that to be kind of a depressing finding,” he said.
The report shows a weaker correlation with high school graduation rates; students who remain at lower achievement levels mostly graduate. That’s good news, but with a caveat. “It could be interpreted as showing that school systems are doing a good job of helping most students graduate, or as showing that states have low standards for graduation,” the report concludes. One “novel and troubling finding” is that low-income students (those on free and reduced-price lunch) show much lower academic mobility that kids who are better off financially. Given that the weight of much education prioritizes outcomes among high-poverty students, it’s particularly concerning that they show much lower academic mobility than “non-FRL” students. Differences in academic mobility among urban students are smaller than their suburban and rural counterparts, “although a notable result is that low-performing students who attend urban schools in third grade are much less likely to graduate from high school than their suburban or rural counterparts,” the authors note.
In sum, the analysis of differences in academic mobility by student race and ethnicity, FRL status, and school setting “replicate largely familiar patterns in the literature—white students, and especially Asian students, have relatively high academic mobility, whereas Hispanic students, and especially black students, have lower academic mobility,” the authors conclude.
But you knew that.
SOURCE: Wes Austin et al., “Where are Initially Low-performing Students the Most Likely to Succeed? A Multi-state Analysis of Academic Mobility (Preliminary Draft),” CALDER (2020).
