State report cards are a hot topic in Ohio, but most of the attention has been focused on the system used for traditional district and charter schools. Many Ohioans are unaware that state law requires the State Board of Education to have a separate report card system for dropout prevention and recovery charter schools (DPRS).
State report cards are a hot topic in Ohio, but most of the attention has been focused on the system used for traditional district and charter schools. Many Ohioans are unaware that state law requires the State Board of Education to have a separate report card system for dropout prevention and recovery charter schools (DPRS). During the 2016–17 school year, there were eighty-nine dropout-recovery schools operating in Ohio: seventy-six brick and mortar schools serving just over 10,000 students, and thirteen online schools serving nearly 4,000 students. Together, these schools account for 12.5 percent of Ohio’s charter school enrollment.
DPRS report cards contain four indicators:
Unlike traditional schools, DPRS are not assigned letter grades, either on each individual component or an overall grade. For every component listed above, they receive a designation of “exceeds standards,” “meets standards,” or “does not meet standards.” To calculate the overall rating, they are awarded points for their performance on each measure, and the points are totaled based on the weighting of each indicator: Graduation rate and student growth are worth 30 percent each, and test passage rate and gap closing are worth 20 percent each. The final total is used to place a DPRS in one of the three categories mentioned above. Schools that do not meet standards for two of the three most recent school years are subject to Ohio’s automatic closure law—unless the school is in its first two years of operation.
Earlier this month, the state board adopted significant changes to the administrative rules surrounding this system as part of its five-year rule review process. These changes will have a serious impact on DPRS going forward. Here’s a look at three of those changes.
The definition of a dropout prevention and recovery school
Previously, the Ohio Administrative Code identified a DPRS as one where a majority of students were enrolled in a dropout prevention and recovery program. This included students between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four who were at least one grade level behind their peers or experienced crises that “significantly interfered” with their academic progress. Conversion charter schools that were sponsored by a district but not included in the district’s traditional state report card could also be deemed DPRS.
Under the new rules, DPRS identification shifts from a majority of students participating in dropout-recovery programs to much higher percentages. During the upcoming 2018–19 school year, schools with 50 percent of their students enrolled in dropout prevention programs can still apply to the department for a DPRS designation. But for the 2019–20 school year, the minimum percentage of students will increase to 65 percent—and by 2020–21, it’ll be 75 percent.
In layman’s terms, it’s about to become a lot harder for schools to earn a DPRS designation. This matters because the title means that a school is evaluated based on the DPRS report card, which has far lower standards than the traditional state report card to accommodate for their focus on serving at-risk young people.
Though it was never openly discussed, this rule change could be a response to ECOT, which attempted to reclassify itself as a DPRS earlier this year in order to sidestep closure. Regardless, the new rules are a clear attempt to ensure that dropout prevention policies apply only to schools that are legitimately serving at-risk students. As ODE staff told the State Board of Education, the previous rules permitted a school to be evaluated with a DPRS report card even if 49 percent of its students weren’t in dropout recovery programs. Even worse, districts could sponsor conversion schools that enrolled students who were at risk for dropping out because of poor attendance, disciplinary problems, or suspensions. These districts were then granted waivers from having the school’s data included in the district’s traditional report card—pushing the door wide open for districts to escape accountability by funneling chronically absent or behaviorally difficult students into schools with considerably lower standards.
Increasing graduation rate performance levels
Dropout prevention and recovery schools are responsible for educating students who aren’t on track to graduate, so it’s important for the DPRS report card to take into account extended timeframes. That’s why six-, seven-, and eight-year graduation rates are added to the four- and five-year rates that traditional districts and charters are subject to. In the table below, you’ll find the original rules regarding graduation rates for a DPRS report card.
These standards are considerably lower than those for traditional district and charter schools, who earn F grades if they graduate less than 79 percent of their students in four years. Although it’s understandable why DPRS report cards have easier targets, these numbers still seem remarkably low. The state board agreed, ratcheting up the minimum graduation percentage in every category. Take a look:
These changes not only increase the graduation rate expectations considerably, they also require schools to increase the number of students who graduate each year in each cohort. That’s different than the previous rules, which had the same expectations for the five- through eight-year rates. Since this indicator accounts for 30 percent of a school’s overall rating, it’s possible that doing poorly on it could cause more schools to earn an overall “does not meet standards” designation—and too many years with such a label leads to automatic closure.
Test participation requirements
The state board added new provisions as well, the most significant of which mandates that if less than 75 percent of students who are between the ages sixteen to twenty-one and enrolled in a dropout prevention and recovery program take the exams used for measuring student growth (which, remember, are different than state tests), the school will be rated as “does not meet standards” on the student growth indicator. That measure, like the graduation rate indicator, accounts for 30 percent of a school’s overall rating—which means that schools who fail to test enough students could face stiff consequences.
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The state board’s changes to DPRS report cards are significant and likely to seriously impact the sector over the next few years. Despite the potential drama, though, these are important changes that will require the schools that serve Ohio’s at-risk students to be accountable for serving them well—and to weed out any bad actors who benefitted from the previous rules.
In a pattern now becoming all too familiar, the State Board of Education recently got spooked by the prospect of tougher standards and delayed action on lifting grade-promotion standards under the Third Grade Reading Guarantee for 2018–19. The decision should not have been a gut-wrenching one, since state law requires the board to gradually lift standards each year after initial implementation. As most loyal Gadfly readers know, the reading guarantee is an early-intervention policy that aims to ensure that children can read fluently before entering fourth grade.
At issue at the June board meeting were the standards students need to meet to be promoted. But what exactly are Ohio’s promotional standards? What exams and test scores determine promotion—or retention, if falling short? Are they rigorous benchmarks, or are they relatively easy for students to meet?
The first thing to know about promotional standards is that they currently have little to do with proficiency on state exams. That might be surprising, given the guarantee’s stated purpose “to make sure that students are on track for reading success by the end of third grade.” Rather what we see from figure 1 is a significant discrepancy between promotional and proficiency rates, especially in the past two years. In 2013–14 and 2014–15—the first two years of the reading guarantee—Ohio administered its old third-grade ELA tests that had low proficiency bars, thus explaining the smaller gaps. But the gap has widened as Ohio has now shifted to new state tests with higher proficiency standards. In 2016–17, for example, a remarkable 94 percent of students met the requirements necessary for promotion, yet just 64 percent reached proficiency on the state’s third grade English language arts (ELA) exams.
Figure 1: Percent of students reaching proficient or above on third grade ELA exams versus percent meeting the Third Grade Reading Guarantee promotional requirements, 2013–14 to 2016–17
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Source: Ohio Department of Education
What explains the gap between promotional and proficiency rates? The answers lie primarily in Ohio policy. Consider the following issues.
Exclusions
The discrepancy reflects in part the impact of students who are included in proficiency rates but excluded from promotional calculations. English language learners and certain students with disabilities, for instance, are exempted under state law from the guarantee’s promotional requirements. Yet most (if not all) of these students are included in proficiency calculations. This “deflates” the proficiency rate to a certain extent if they score less than proficient on the state assessment. To put it another way, Ohio’s proficiency rate may have been a few percentage points higher had it reflected only students included in the promotional rate. Nevertheless, these reasonable exclusions play a minor role in explaining the discrepancy: From 2013–14 through 2016–17, just 5 to 7 percent of students have been excluded from the promotional requirements, leaving 20 to 30 percentage-point gaps in the past two years that still require explanation.
Promotional standards
The most significant factor explaining the gap is that Ohio policymakers haven’t matched promotional and proficiency standards. State law doesn’t necessarily require equivalency between the two—at least not in the early years of implementation. Rather a statute calls on the State Board of Education to set gradually higher promotional standards until they eventually match the proficiency benchmark (no specific timetable is given). To set the promotional bar, the state board has recently relied on reading “subscale” scores on third-grade ELA exams, thus excluding results on the writing section. Although this is a very literal interpretation of the “reading” guarantee, it’s not apparent that state law permits this; it refers explicitly to the ELA assessments in its promotional provisions. In any case, the board has established standards using reading subscale scores set below the proficient, or “on grade level,” benchmark since 2015–16.
Starting in 2017–18, the board shifted gears slightly and began setting promotional standards based on both overall ELA scores and reading subscales. Students can be promoted if they meet one or the other standard. But even this action raises questions: Why didn’t the board lift reading subscale scores in 2017–18? According to Hannah news service, a state official explained last July that the reading subscales are now being treated—somewhat puzzlingly—as an alternative assessment (more below) that students can use to meet promotional requirements, with the full ELA exam now being seen as the main test. Because state law only directs the board to increase the ELA standards for promotion—and is silent about raising benchmarks on alternatives—it’s lawful to maintain the same subscale benchmarks each year.
The upshot of this twisty tale: About one in five students over the past couple years have been promoted to fourth grade even though they don’t reach proficiency benchmarks. That will continue until the state board aligns promotional standards with proficiency.
Table 1: Scores needed to meet promotional standards on state third-grade ELA tests
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Notes: For 2013–14 and 2014–15, Ohio used ELA scaled scores (below proficient) from its “old” state exams to set promotional standards. The state’s achievement levels are as follows (from lowest to highest): limited, basic, proficient, accelerated, and advanced. At its June 2018 meeting, the State Board of Education proposed but did not pass a resolution to adopt 677 as the ELA promotional score for 2018–19; no mention is made in the resolution about reading subscale scores.
Alternative assessments
Finally, we must not forget that state law also allows for grade promotion when students meet an “acceptable level of performance” on alternative reading assessments. Currently, the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) approves—at its own discretion—four alternatives (not including the reading score on the state assessment) that schools may offer for the purposes of meeting promotional requirements. It’s not clear how exactly ODE, the board, or test developers work to align promotional scores on alternatives with state exams. Indeed, there has been some questioning around this very issue. (Several districts recently claimed the alternative promotional scores are too stringent!) That’s something the board—or the governor or legislature—should demand answers on, so long as state law allows the use of alternative assessments. Nonetheless, such alternatives have permitted thousands of students to move to the next grade, even though they did not demonstrate acceptable reading skills on state exams that they have multiple opportunities to take. In 2015–16 and 2016–17, ODE reported that 8.3 and 4.3 percent of students, respectively, used alternative tests to gain promotion—a final factor that helps to explain the proficiency-promotion gap.
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Six years ago this month, Governor Kasich signed into law the Third Grade Reading Guarantee, telling the press, “Kids who make their way through social promotion beyond the third grade, when they get up to the 8th, 9th, 10th grade … they get lapped, the material becomes too difficult.” Research backs up his point, indicating that pupils struggling to read early in life have great difficulty catching up, and many eventually drop out of school. Halting the grade-promotion train, at least momentarily, is the right thing to do. Young children who have difficulty reading deserve the instructional time and help needed to get the fundamentals nailed down. To implement the policy properly, Ohio needs to set clear, high standards for promotion, lest children fail to receive the supports they need to move on. Regrettably, it appears that some policymakers have been more interested in fiddling with promotional standards and playing games with alternative tests than focusing on ensuring students are proficient. Here’s hoping—or is it wishing?—that the board will at last approve a higher bar when it meets in July. After all, it’s the law.
“K–12 education in America is ripe for real deregulation,” writes Michael McShane in his recent paper on school regulations. Hailing from an organization founded by the famed economist and champion of limited government Milton Friedman, his main argument comes as little surprise. But in this measured and insightful paper, McShane discusses the tradeoffs of regulatory approaches and offers several suggestions on ways policymakers can pursue deregulation in K–12 schools.
To set the stage, McShane first describes the tradeoffs to regulatory action. Regulations can serve the greater good. For example, they can help curb monopoly power (anti-collusion laws), mitigate negative externalities (pollution regulations), or address inadequate consumer information (food and drug safety rules). Yet regulatory solutions also have drawbacks, and the paper covers at least three important ones. First, they can open avenues for interest groups to “capture” public rulemaking bodies, resulting in regulations that paradoxically benefit special interests—e.g., teacher unions or any number of educational associations—over the broader public. Second, the sheer number of regulations, piled on top of each other, can have undesirable effects. In education, for example, prospective charter schools may be unwilling or unable to wade through the raft of compliance paperwork needed to operate, resulting in less competition and innovation—and of course depriving students of opportunities to attend quality schools. Third, “screening” regulations can impose opportunity costs that often go unrecognized. For instance, educator licensing deters a certain number of potentially high quality teachers from entering the profession.
With these tradeoffs in mind, McShane then turns to specific steps that policymakers can take when approaching deregulation in K–12 education. I agree with him on two key points, but we’re of different minds on a third.
One commendable idea is to focus on the “worst actors” when undertaking regulatory action, rather than issuing blanket rules that affect all schools across the board. McShane explains: “This [approach] places harm reduction, not micromanagement, at the core of regulators’ jobs.” In my view, teacher evaluation is one example of where this tactic may have yielded better results. It’s possible that test-based evaluation systems would’ve gained more traction had policymakers focused on deploying them in the state’s lowest-performing schools—those most in need of dramatic reform. Instead, states applied this policy to everyone, including high-performing schools and teachers in non-tested subjects. This has bred resentment and all sorts of technical problems, leading states to roll back their evaluation policies.
Another shrewd piece of advice is to “use carrots before sticks.” Here, the paper draws readers’ attention to matters of “adverse selection,” which in education commonly revolves around school admissions policy. The idea is that schools are incentivized to admit easier-to-serve students before more costly special-needs children. Instead of regulating admissions, McShane offers the idea of providing extra support to schools when they serve pupils with greater educational needs—often known as weighted student funding. These funding weights, whether for low-income pupils or those with disabilities, should apply to public schools (to encourage them to serve out-of-district students), as well as private-school choice programs.
As for our area of disagreement, McShane encourages states to allow districts and schools to select their own assessments, including norm-referenced tests like Terra Nova or NWEA. He argues that this approach would give schools greater flexibility to innovate around curriculum and instruction, rather than being motivated to focus on state standards. But there are three significant costs that should be kept in mind. First, with an array of tests being used across the state, parents and the public will have difficulty understanding or comparing performance. Can we be sure that higher (or lower) performance between schools using different tests isn’t a product of varying test content or scoring methods? Some analysts already question the comparability of paper-and-pencil versus online formats for the same test. How much harder will it be when completely different exams are given? Second, allowing schools to determine the exams upon which they’ll be evaluated is a conflict of interest; it opens the door for schools to “game the system” by choosing the lowest-level tests. Third and in a similar vein, this proposal could raise civil rights concerns if schools serving less advantaged students select low-quality tests that encourage poor instruction and gloss over inadequate outcomes. This is one reason why many civil rights groups have supported standardized exams at a statewide level in the federal testing debates.
In the business world, U.S. companies disclose financial information using the same currency, consistent formats (balance sheet, etc.), and generally accepted accounting rules. Though surely imperfect, these reporting rules help to protect the integrity of financial statements, allow for more efficient comparisons of company performance, and help to build the trust needed to invest in American businesses. Likewise, parents and communities benefit when schools transparently disclose academic results using a common yardstick. Students, too, stand to benefit when states deploy high quality assessments that encourage rigorous instruction in math and English language arts.
Overall, McShane is on the mark that the pendulum has swung too far toward regulatory approaches in education. Thankfully, in states like Ohio, lawmakers are taking steps to move towards more flexible arrangements. But sorting out which laws, rules, and regulations matter, which don’t, and what should apply to whom remains more art than science. As he writes, “regulators can be more honest about the tradeoffs in their work.” That pearl of wisdom is a great place to start.
SOURCE: Michael Q. McShane, Rethinking Regulation: Overseeing performance in a diversifying educational ecosystem, EdChoice (2018).
Two years ago, JPMorgan Chase & Co. launched a $75 million five-year initiative called New Skills for Youth (NSFY). The goal was to expand access to high-quality career and technical education programs that can lead students to postsecondary degrees, credentials, and well-paying jobs.
As part of the initiative, the company partnered with the Council of Chief State School Officers, Advance CTE, and Education Strategy Group to run a multi-year grant competition for states interested in strengthening their CTE sectors. In 2016, twenty-four states and Washington, D.C., were awarded grants worth $100,000 as part of phase one, which required states to conduct a comprehensive needs assessment and develop a three-year action plan. In early 2017, phase two began after ten states were awarded $2 million apiece to expand and improve career pathways for high school students over the course of three years. These states include Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Wisconsin.
The first year of phase two is now complete, and a recently released 2017 snapshot outlines the “notable progress” that selected states made in designing, enhancing, and scaling high-quality career pathways. Here’s a look at how a few of these states addressed four of the most crucial aspects of high-quality CTE.
Access and equity
In order to truly leverage the potential of CTE, it’s vital that all students, regardless of their background or needs, have the opportunity to enroll in high-quality programs. The NSFY state that best exemplifies progress in this area is Delaware, where Delaware Pathways—a state-wide initiative aimed at engaging students in career exploration and training—has transformed the state into a national leader in career pathways. Last year, Delaware focused on addressing the specific challenges that students with disabilities face by providing training for teachers on how to establish support systems that aid these children as they enroll and move through their career pathways of choice. The state also began working with the National Alliance for Partnerships in Equity to create a school-based support model that would combine resources from the Department of Education, the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, and the Department of Health and Social Services. By breaking down barriers between these three departments, Delaware will be able to ensure that all students have the access and support they need to succeed. So far, their efforts seem to be working: Enrollment in Delaware Pathways programs is on track to reflect the population of the state.
Data
As CTE grows in popularity and prominence, it’s important for states to gather quality and meaningful data. Kentucky is leading the way on this front by improving its cross-sector use of labor market data. The Blue Grass State has one of the strongest longitudinal data systems in the country, which is run by an independent agency known as the Kentucky Center for Education and Workforce Statistics (KCEWS). In August 2017, the state legislature identified KCEWS as the primary source for labor market information. Since then, a variety of groups—including the Department of Education, the Workforce Innovation Board, the Cabinet for Economic Development, and the Chamber of Commerce—have been working in tandem and using KWECS data to match the state’s most highly valued industry certifications with existing career pathways. As a result, the Department of Education is in the process of phasing out or transforming CTE programs that aren’t aligned with high-demand, high-wage industries.
Employer engagement
One of the most difficult aspects of cultivating a high-functioning CTE sector is bridging the gap between schools and employers. Louisiana accomplished this by creating education subcommittees within the state’s sixteen regional Workforce Development Boards (WDBs). These subcommittees are responsible for helping to craft goals for K–12 career-pathway participation and credential attainment in high-demand industries. By leveraging already-existing WDBs, the state has been able to ensure local buy-in and align K–12 goals to regional economic and workforce development needs.
States have also started leveraging technology to bridge the gap between schools and employers. Louisiana, for example, utilizes a virtual video conferencing platform called Nepris that allows teachers to bring industry experts straight into their classrooms as guest speakers, mentors, and competition judges. Wisconsin uses the Inspire platform, an online portal that allows employers to connect with students for work-based learning experiences, job shadowing, and interviews.
Program quality
As states grow their CTE sectors, it’s important that they don’t sacrifice quality for quantity. Massachusetts—one of the highest performing CTE sectors in the nation—offers an excellent example of how to maintain quality and rigor. A 2016 report on the Bay State’s early-college landscape identified five high-quality design principles, such as providing equitable access, establishing guided academic pathways, and leveraging effective partnerships between schools and local businesses. These design principles were used as the basis of the state’s work to identify high-quality college and career pathways (HQCCPs) via a two-step application process. Programs that are formally designated by the state as HQCCPs receive ongoing support and technical assistance, are held accountable for student performance, and are eligible to receive grants to support their implementation efforts. As the state continues to identify and scale up HQCCPs, the Massachusetts NSFY team plans to establish a priority list of industry-recognized credentials that have labor market value.
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The programs and solutions outlined above reflect only a small portion of the progress made by New Skills for Youth sites. The individual snapshot profiles provided for each of the phase-two states are treasure troves of innovative ideas and solutions, and other states would be wise to carefully consider them.
Disclaimer: The Fordham Institute recently received a research grant from the JPMorgan Chase Foundation for a study that is currently in the field, looking at the alignment (or lack thereof) between CTE course offerings and regional labor market demand.
In a recent blog, I described an initiative called New Skills for Youth (NSFY) that aims to help states transform their career-readiness sectors. The multi-year grant competition awarded $2 million grants to ten states—including Ohio—to expand and improve career pathways for high school students over the course of three years.
With the first year of the grant finished, NSFY released a snapshot highlighting the work of all ten participating states. The concluding page provides an index of eleven focus areas of improvement and identifies the states that made significant progress in those areas. Ohio is identified in six sections: communications, dual credit, employer engagement, graduation requirements, program quality, and work-based learning.
Based on the information included in Ohio’s individual snapshot, here’s a brief overview of the state’s work in each focus area.
Communications
During phase one of Ohio’s work with NSFY, the project team conducted a statewide survey tailored to a variety of stakeholders, including business leaders, parents, students, teachers, and secondary-school and higher-education administrators. The survey, along with supplemental information from focus groups and data analyses that were part of a broader needs assessment, revealed that, although 71 percent of students expressed interest in career-focused options, most were unaware of the opportunities available to them. To combat this lack of knowledge, Ohio’s NSFY project team created SuccessBound, a communications strategy aimed at increasing student enrollment in career readiness programs that align with employer needs. So far, the initiative has produced videos and student profiles of success stories, informational and social media resources, and a toolkit for families (toolkits for businesses and schools are forthcoming). Six regional conferences were also convened that provided attendees with the opportunity to learn more about the initiative and network.
Dual credit
When folks in Ohio talk about dual credit, they’re usually talking about College Credit Plus, a statewide program that offers college-ready students the opportunity to earn high school and college credit simultaneously. But there are also additional pathways toward college credit available to students enrolled in career and technical education (CTE) courses. For example, Ohio has developed statewide articulation agreements that allow high school students to count certain CTE classes toward postsecondary degrees. These agreements are known as Career Technical Assurance Guides, or CTAGs. The Ohio Department of Higher Education maintains a list of all the available CTAG courses (in areas like virtual design and imaging and electrical engineering technology) online, and offers a search tool that helps students identify which of their CTE credits can transfer to the next level.
Employer engagement
Ohio’s efforts to bridge the gap between education and industry started long before the NSFY grant. For instance, towards the beginning of Governor Kasich’s administration, he created the Office of Workforce Transformation (OWT) to improve the state’s workforce development efforts. From its inception, OWT has prioritized making connections between K–12 and postsecondary education and employers. The Executive Workforce Board, which guides all of OWT’s work, has members from the business, government, and education sectors. In the most recent state budget, the legislature tasked OWT with developing a regional workforce collaboration model that would provide businesses and stakeholder groups (like postsecondary institutions and the College Tech Prep Regional Centers) with guidance on how to partner to provide career services to students. The final guidelines highlight the work of some truly innovative partnerships, like the Central Ohio Compact.
Graduation requirements
Similar to its efforts in employer engagement, Ohio had already incorporated career education into its graduation requirements prior to the NSFY grant. Back in 2014, the legislature created three pathways students could take to earn a diploma; one of these pathways requires students to earn a specific score on the WorkKeys exam and an industry-recognized credential. WorkKeys is a job-skills test that measures how well prepared students are for the workforce, and students who receive a certain score can earn a National Career Readiness Certificate in addition to their Ohio diploma. As for credentials, Ohio offers a vast array of them in thirteen different career fields, including engineering and information technology. And students can now earn a job readiness seal that’s garnered support from a variety of Ohio businesses and schools.
Program quality
The federal government defines “career pathways” as combinations of rigorous, high-quality education with training and other services. Ohio has a variety of career pathways, but it previously lacked a way to determine whether programs were high quality. That’s why the Ohio NSFY team developed criteria to evaluate programs and help local decision makers ascertain which ones to expand or phase out. The criteria identify four aspects of successful, high-quality, and in-demand pathways: 1) business and community engagement, 2) career-pathway design, 3) educator collaboration, and 4) learning environment and culture. Ohio’s NSFY team is working to scale career readiness models that fulfill these criteria.
Work-based learning
Work-based learning (WBL) is designed to help students master a combination of academic, technical, and professional skills. In Ohio, students are jointly supervised for the duration of their WBL by their employer and a representative from their school. Supervision is based on a learning agreement that all three parties must agree on. In an effort to increase student engagement, the recent budget bill required the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) to develop a framework for schools to use to grant high school credit to students who demonstrate subject competency through WBL. Traditional districts and charter schools will be required to follow ODE’s framework during the upcoming school year. Schools have two options for issuing credit to students: They can enhance a course by offering work-based learning as part of course requirements, or they can replace a course with WBL via their credit flexibility policy. According to the NSFY snapshot, Ohio is still working on how to reliably measure work-based learning participation and evaluate performance—including the possibility that WBL indicators could be added to the state’s accountability system.
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Ohio still has plenty of room for improvement. But the work outlined above is both significant and encouraging. As career and technical education continues to grow in prominence and scope at the national level, Ohioans should feel fortunate to have access to CTE programs that are already so far ahead.
If a little treatment goes a long way, does it stand to reason that more treatment will go even further? A research team led by Karen Bierman of Penn State University tested this idea, and their results were recently published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics. The treatment in question is the Research-Based and Developmentally Informed preschool classroom program (REDI-C), which researchers extended via a home-visiting program designed to train parents as surrogate teachers (REDI-P).
To carry out the study, researchers recruited the families of 200 four-year-olds participating in Head Start programs across three counties in Pennsylvania. Fifty-five percent of the children were white, 26 percent were black, and 19 percent were Latino. Most primary caregivers were mothers (89 percent), roughly one in three were single parents, and slightly more than half were unemployed. Almost all participating families were living in poverty with a median income of $18,000 per year.
Students were randomly assigned to the treatment group—those whose families would receive the in-home intervention—or the control group. Control families received only a packet of math learning games in the mail, while the other parents were visited ten times during their child’s last preschool year and six times during kindergarten. These home visits included extensive in-person coaching to enhance parent-child relationships and demonstrations of home learning activities to support child development and school readiness, especially language, literacy, and social emotional skills. Sample activities included storybooks, conversation games, and pretend play like “restaurant” in which children practiced their letters and language skills as they took their parent’s orders and mixed up alphabet soup.
Researchers first evaluated children’s outcomes at the end of kindergarten. Academic achievement was gauged in two ways: performance on a sight word fluency test and a teacher completed assessment of student competence in math and reading. Social-emotional adjustment was measured using a test of students’ pragmatic judgment skills administered by research assistants. Those research assistants then provided their own assessments of students’ attention, impulse control, and mastery motivation based on their experience administering the pragmatic judgment test. Home problems were measured using three parental survey instruments (with names like “Parenting Daily Hassles Scale” and “Parent Stress Index”) reflecting emotional symptoms, peer problems, conduct problems, and hyperactivity among other areas of potential difficulty. Finally, teachers rated students’ need for and use of services at school—such as IEP use, speech-language services, taking medication for attention or behavior, mental health counseling, and behavioral support use.
Researchers found that, consistent with their previous studies, students who received the REDI-P treatment at home scored significantly better on all measures at the end of kindergarten than did students receiving only REDI-C and the math-games packet. To further their research and to test the longer-term effects of the home-visiting intervention, Bierman and team followed up with students at the end of their third grade year, administering assessments again at that time. They found strong evidence of a lasting benefit of the treatment in all assessed areas, including indicators of both academic and social-emotional well-being.
Is this proof that home visits can lead to sustained positive effects? Up to a point, perhaps. But a couple caveats should be kept in mind. First, the academic test used for kindergartners and third graders here is the same. While this may be helpful for researchers to compare data more easily, sight word identification is not the standard for third grade reading proficiency. It seems odd that the state’s third grade test data were not available to the researchers. But if there are third graders performing poorly on kindergarten-level tests, it is likely that their third grade performance was poor as well. However, it does not seem likely that lack of pre-K programing exposure would be the cause. Second, the adult-reported assessments of both academics and social-emotional adjustment in class and at home lean heavily toward compliance and rule following. It stands to reason that obedient children would be less likely to raise hackles for teachers or parents, but what bearing does obedience have on academic achievement? The extent to which the social-emotional assessments are measuring self-motivation and executive function versus rule following and lack of defiance is an open question. The evidence here seems to suggest mainly that extending Head Start programing into the home goes a long way to benefiting adults. That also seems to be the point.
SOURCE: Karen L. Bierman, et al, “Effect of Preschool Home Visiting on School Readiness and Need for Services in Elementary School: A Randomized Clinical Trial,” JAMA Pediatrics (June 2018).
