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High Expectations
Personalized Pathways

High Stakes for High Achievers: State Accountability in the Age of ESSA (Part I)

Michael J. Petrilli David Griffith Brandon L. Wright Audrey Kim
Foreword by:
Chester E. Finn, Jr.
8.31.2016
8.31.2016

No Child Left Behind meant well, but it had a pernicious flaw: It created strong incentives for schools to focus all their energy on helping low-performing students get over a modest “proficiency” bar. Meanwhile, it ignored the educational needs of high achievers, who were likely to pass state reading and math tests regardless of what happened in the classroom. Those most hurt by this approach were high-achieving, low-income students.

The Every Student Succeeds Act offers a powerful opportunity to change that. Fordham’s latest report, High Stakes for High Achievers: State Accountability in the Age of ESSA, examines the extent to which states’ current (or planned) accountability systems attend to the educational needs of high-achieving students; it also explains how states can take advantage of ESSA to create systems that serve all students.

Key findings include:

  • Only four states base at least half of their schools’ summative ratings on growth for all students, which should be the primary way that a school's effect on achievement is measured. Seven states and the District of Columbia assign no weight to this measure.
     
  • Only five states treat high-achieving students as a subgroup and separately report their results at the school level.
     
  • Fourteen states and the District of Columbia rate or plan to rate schools’ achievement using a model (such as a performance index) that gives additional credit for students achieving at an “advanced” level. Draft federal regulations appear to make these models illegal under the new law.
     
  • Overall, state accountability systems do very little to encourage schools to pay attention to high-achieving students. Arkansas, Ohio, Oregon, and South Carolina are the only states that can be considered leaders on this issue.

The report offers a number of recommendations to state policy makers, who have the opportunity to dramatically upgrade current accountability systems, as well as one recommendation for the U.S. Department of Education, which is currently in the process of finalizing its ESSA regulations: Allow states to rate academic achievement using a performance index that gives schools additional credit for getting students to an advanced level.

High-achieving students were an afterthought when No Child Left Behind was crafted fifteen years ago. Let’s not make the same mistake again.


Table 1: Results for States without Summative School Ratings

(Click on any of the following state names to view its profile.)

Ohio
South Carolina
Illinois, Kansas, New Jersey, Tennessee
California, Maryland, Montana, New York, North Dakota

Table 2: Results for States with Summative School Ratings

(None)
Arkansas, Oregon
Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Wyoming
Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, Washington, West Virginia
Michigan, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia

Click here to download a presentation of the report's findings!

Policy Priority:
High Expectations
Personalized Pathways
Topics:
Accountability & Testing
ESSA
High Achievers
Download

Mike Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, executive editor of Education Next, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow for Education Commission of the States. An award-winning writer, he…

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David Griffith is a senior research and policy associate at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, where he helps manage a variety of projects in Fordham’s research pipeline. A native of Portland, Oregon, David holds a bachelor’s degree in politics and philosophy from Pomona College and a master’s degree in public policy from Georgetown University. Prior to joining Fordham, he worked as a staffer for Congressman Earl Blumenauer…

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Brandon Wright is the Editorial Director of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He is the coauthor or coeditor of three books: Failing our Brightest Kids: The Global Challenge of Educating High-Ability Students (with Chester E. Finn, Jr.), Charter Schools at the…

View Full Bio
Audrey Kim

Related Resources

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High Expectations
,
Personalized Pathways

High Stakes for High Schoolers: State Accountability in the Age of ESSA (Part II)

Michael J. Petrilli, David Griffith, Brandon L. Wright 11.15.2016
NationalReport
view

States should use ESSA to do right by high-achieving students

Chester E. Finn, Jr. 8.31.2016
OhioThe High Flyer
view

Failing Our Brightest Kids: The Global Challenge of Educating High-Ability Students

Chester E. Finn, Jr., Brandon L. Wright 9.15.2015
NationalBook
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