Why haven’t we already solved this problem? That question popped into my head as I read the Fordham Institute’s new report authored by Stéphane Lavertu, The Leaky Pipeline: Assessing the college outcomes of Ohio’s high-achieving low-income students. I found myself nodding vigorously in agreement at his conclusions and recommendations, which build on prior work in important ways. But it also fed my growing frustration with our slow progress in this area.
But first, the study: Lavertu’s work studies educational outcomes for high-ability, low-income (HALO) students in Ohio. He focused his analyses on one set of outcomes: college-going rates (although he provides evidence that college-going correlates highly with SAT performance and college graduation).
I suspect it will be tempting for readers to overgeneralize the findings to all high-ability students, but part of the study’s power is the tight focus on HALO students. That’s important because we have decades of documentation about the long-term underperformance of these students (see this good example, among many others).
The report is detailed, reporting results down to the district level, which is a real strength. For example, Stéphane notes the exact number of students impacted by certain policies (or lack thereof). That approach grounds the report in the proper context: We’re talking about real students and their educational trajectories here, not just complex statistics.
But even with the careful, sophisticated analyses, my take-aways are straightforward:
- Peer achievement matters.
- Advanced coursework matters in high school.
- Advanced coursework also matters in middle school.
These results track with previous research and my own personal experience. When I worked at Indiana University, the administration asked my team to examine several years’ worth of student data to determine the extent to which dual-enrollment and AP predicted college GPA and graduation. Long story short: They mattered a little for higher-income students, but they mattered a lot for lower-income students. This made sense to us: Higher-income students likely had a range of advanced learning opportunities in their K–12 experiences, causing dual-enrollment and AP to have a significant but relatively minor value-added; for lower-income students who likely don’t have those opportunities, dual-enrollment and AP can be lifelines.
Lavertu also found evidence that HALO college-going rates often vary significantly. As he notes, “…Columbus City Schools has the highest number of HALO students residing within its boundaries, and these students’ rate of college-going is 18 percentage points lower than the state average for [similar] students…in third grade. That’s 40 HALO third graders in Columbus alone, every year, who won’t go to college but would have if they resided in an Ohio district of average quality (where HALO students’ college-going is still significantly lower than that of their wealthier high-achieving peers)” (p. 42).
At first glance, 40 students may not seem like a lot, but that represents potential impact in only one grade level in only one district (the state’s largest, but still). Extrapolate that number to all grades and other underperforming districts, and you have a lot of students whose talents are not being developed. And that would be 40 more students if the district were only average, not if the district were high-performing regarding HALO students.
Lavertu also surmises that, “Grouping high-ability students together and offering advanced coursework requires enough high-achieving students to make it financially viable, and it requires access to a supply of teachers with the requisite expertise. Many HALO students reside in districts that don’t meet these conditions” (p. 42). His analyses didn’t examine this feasibility issue directly, and I’m not sure it’s completely accurate. The teacher expertise issue is definitely a factor (it appears to be the major limiting factor for implementation of automatic enrollment policies, for example), but I have become skeptical about the financial viability argument. Same number of students and same number of teachers, right?
From my perspective, the key question is not, “Why are some districts not seeing positive HALO student outcomes to the degree of similar districts?” Such a question validates the “this is so hard to do” bias against advanced services that pervades K–12 schools. The question we should be asking instead is, “What do the underperforming districts need to do to improve outcomes for their HALO students?”
In that vein, the report concludes with recommendations that include expanding advanced services for HALO services and facilitating open enrollment so HALO students can access advanced education in other public districts if their current district does not provide those services. In a separate preface, the Fordham Institute’s Aaron Churchill and Mike Petrilli suggest several interventions inspired by both this study and other recent Fordham work: expanding advanced education at every level, especially for younger students to prepare them for advanced work in middle and high school; expanding open enrollment; using automatic enrollment to ensure HALO students receive advanced services; and creating more specialized magnets located in communities with large concentrations of HALO students.
These are all commonsense recommendations with solid empirical support. So to return to the question with which I started this essay: Why haven’t we already solved this problem? We know these strategies work. We know how to implement them. If done well, they do not need to cost substantially more than not doing them. Do we just lack the will to address the needs of HALO students? We don’t have to call a plumber. We can fix this leaky pipeline ourselves!
