The Education Gadfly Weekly

What does the Common Core portend for America’s high-achieving and gifted students? Quite a kerfuffle has erupted in many parts of the country, with boosters of these rigorous new standards declaring that they’re plenty sufficient to challenge the ablest pupils and boosters of gifted education fretting that this will be used as the latest excuse to do away with already-dwindling opportunities for such children.

Previous research by Fordham and others has made clear that the pre-Common Core era has not done well by high achievers in the United States. Almost all the policy attention has been on low achievers, and, in fact, they’ve made faster gains on measures such as NAEP than have their high-achieving classmates. Gifted children, in our view, have generally been short-changed in recent years by American public education, even as the country has awakened to their potential contributions to our economic competitiveness and technological edge. It would therefore be a terrible mistake for the new Common Core standards, praiseworthy as we believe they are, to become a justification for even greater neglect.

We asked gifted education expert Jonathan Plucker of the University of Connecticut to help us and others understand what lies ahead, particularly with regard to how the opportunities presented by the Common Core can benefit high-ability students as well as others. In a new brief, Common Core and America’s High-Achieving Students, he addresses these challenges and provides guidance for CCSS-implementing districts and schools as they seek to help these youngsters to reach their learning potential. Four key points emerge:

1. Common Core is no excuse to ditch gifted services. One key challenge for the gifted education community is that the CCSS are indeed being used in some places to justify reducing or even scrapping gifted education services on the grounds that the new universal standards are more challenging than what came before them. No doubt the level of rigor will rise in many states for standards, curriculum, and tests alike. But that doesn’t mean they’ll adequately challenge the most advanced students, girls and boys working well above their grade level. Since the standards represent grade-level learning, curricula and assessments based on them will, by definition, not challenge students who are already surpassing these expectations. It stands to reason, as Plucker makes clear, that schools must still go the extra mile if they are properly to serve those children, some of whom may already be quite a considerable distance down the road to career and college readiness.
2. State and local officials should get rid of policies that hurt gifted students and strengthen practices that help them. Many districts and schools have formal or informal policies that limit the learning of advanced pupils. For instance, some states cap how far students can progress within the curriculum in one school year or base kindergarten entrance on age rather than readiness. Some districts have added prohibitions on within-class ability grouping. Many discourage grade-skipping and other forms of acceleration. Such “anti-excellence” policies, often inscribed in state laws and regulations, are nearly always bad for high-ability children and must be excised if the Common Core standards are to be successfully implemented for them, too. On the other hand, the CCSS can facilitate policies that are good for gifted learners, such as academic acceleration, which depends on clear expectations of what students should know and be able to do at specific grade levels. If a ten-year-old has already mastered the expectations of fourth grade, why not move her into fifth or sixth, whether completely or just in selected subjects?
3. Schools must work harder to make differentiation “real.” Differentiating instruction by students’ ability and/or achievement levels is a skill set that few teachers have mastered. But it won’t get any better if we throw our hands up. The few hours (at most) of annual professional development spent on training teachers to educate gifted students are clearly not sufficient; we need more time and higher-quality training devoted to curricular and instructional differentiation by ability level. Initial teacher preparation programs need to take this challenge seriously in ways that most today do not. Once on the job, teachers also need ample opportunities to plan together to meet the educational needs of their high-ability learners. And principals ought to build this into their schools’ priorities.
4. Schools should make use of existing high-quality materials that help teachers adapt the Common Core for gifted students. There are plenty out there! A number of organizations and gifted education experts, including the National Association for Gifted Children, have published units, lessons, tips, and guidelines to help educators build on and extend the Core for high-ability children. Let’s get them into the hands of teachers. Likewise, educators of the gifted can serve as key resources for their districts.

The advent of the Common Core standards can and should boost the learning of America’s ablest young learners, not serve as a rationale for denying them opportunities to fulfill their potential. Getting this right calls for re-evaluating and strengthening policies for the gifted, providing more robust programs and services for them, doing what it takes to make differentiation more than a pipe dream, and tapping into resources and educators who can amplify both the standards and their students’ chances of success. It’s a great opportunity to right one of the wrongs perpetrated on U.S. K–12 education during the NCLB era. In so doing, we can brighten the prospects of millions of kids—as well as the entire country’s future.

The late Don Meredith, beloved color commentator from the glory days of Monday Night Football, liked to break into song when a game hit garbage time, or a big play put the game out of reach. “Turn out the lights!” he would sing in his folksy Texas twang, channeling Willie Nelson. “The party’s over!” Dandy Don’s voice was ringing in my ears as I read a new report from the Educational Testing Service (ETS), America’s Skills Challenge: Millennials and the Future. The publication dares to ask out loud how much longer we can thrive as a nation when a vast segment of our society—Americans between sixteen and thirty-four who will be in the workforce for up to fifty more years—“lack the skills required for higher-level employment and meaningful engagement in our democracy.” Seldom have I read a more depressing report.

“Despite having the highest levels of educational attainment of any previous American generation,” writes ETS’s Center for Global Assessment Director Irwin S. Kirch in the report’s preface, “these young adults on average demonstrate relatively weak skills in literacy, numeracy, and problem solving in technology rich environments compared to their international peers.”

In literacy, U.S. millennials outscore only their peers in Italy and Spain among the twenty-two countries in the report. In numeracy, they rank last. Our best-educated millennials—those with a master’s or research degree—are outperformed by the same cohort in every nation other than Ireland, Poland, and Spain. And it’s true no matter how you slice it: Our best-performing compared to their best-performing; our wealthiest vs. their wealthiest; our native-born next to their native-born; our immigrants against theirs. The gap between our own best and worst educated, just for bad measure, is the widest it’s ever been and among the most imbalanced of the countries surveyed.

Most troubling is that our faith in more years of schooling, degrees, credentials, and certificates to produce better outcomes is vividly shown to be misplaced. More time in school is not producing Americans with more or better skills. The people who will work, earn, support families, create jobs, make policy, take leadership positions, and be entrusted generally with protecting, defending, and continuing our democracy are less prepared to do so than any generation in American history.

One of the comforting lies we have told ourselves in recent years is that, while we might have problems, our top performers are still the equal of the best in the world. Alas, the score for U.S. millennials at our ninetieth percentile was statistically higher than the best in just a single country: Spain.

So much for that.

“The comparatively low skill level of U.S. millennials,” write report authors Madeline J. Goodman, Anita M. Sands, and Richard J. Coley, “is likely to test our international competitiveness over the coming decades. If our future rests in part on the skills of this cohort—as these individuals represent the workforce, parents, educators, and our political bedrock—then that future looks bleak.” Uh huh.

I was sitting in a coffee shop as I read and reviewed this report on a snowy New York City afternoon. Overwhelmed, dispirited, eager for distraction, I allowed myself to be dragged briefly into a Twitter “debate” about education reform that instantly devolved into familiar rants about who is or is not qualified to set standards or policy, who’s funding whom, and who stands to make a buck. It was impotent rage: tired, bitter, and utterly pointless. A little like players pushing and shoving during garbage time in a meaningless late-season game. Meanwhile the ETS report at my elbow pitilessly reported what looks more and more like it might stand as the final score.

Somewhere, Dandy Don shakes his head and clears his throat.

photo credit: Merlijn Hoek via Flickr

The Club for Growth is right about a bunch of issues, but they’re wrong about the pending House bill to replace No Child Left Behind with something far better. H.R. 5 (the “Student Success Act”), slated for floor action a few days hence, would, if enacted, be the most conservative federal education move in a quarter century. It has the potential to undo nearly all of the mischievous, dysfunctional, intrusive, big-government features of NCLB and return most education responsibility and authority to states, just as the Tenth Amendment prescribes. Which is, of course, precisely why the bill has come under sustained attack from the left! If right and left team up to kill it, we’ll be left with No Child Left Behind circa 2002, as modified (and made even more mischievous) by the Education Department’s unilateral “waivers.” 

Moreover, states have always had the option—urged yesterday by the Club for Growth as if it were a fresh idea—to “opt completely out of the program.” Any state willing to forego its share of federal education dollars is free to do so—and to exempt itself from all the rules and constraints that accompany those dollars.

States have flirted with this option, and perhaps one will someday actually make such a move, but so far—that means for the last fifty years, inasmuch as NCLB was only the most recent iteration of a 1965 program—none has wanted to decline the money.

Because it’s unlikely that many states ever will, and even less likely that the money will vanish entirely (though H.R. 5 caps and redirects it in ways that the Obama administration is railing against), conservatives should cheer the flexibility and empowerment given back to state leaders by this bill. Then they should focus on the Senate, where Senators Alexander and Murray are trying to craft a bipartisan measure to take to markup in the weeks ahead.

• In case there was any doubt that you can fool some of the people all of the time: A new Fairleigh Dickinson poll reveals that a great many Americans have no earthly idea what’s actually in the Common Core State Standards—but they hate ‘em anyway. Over half the respondents believed global warming, evolution, and sexual education are included in the standards (they’re not). Almost comically, those who say they are most informed about Common Core are precisely those most likely to be wrong about what the standards actually contain. Thankfully, about four in ten have the honesty to tell pollsters they know nothing about Common Core.
• Of course, standards are just part of the solution to a big national problem: Way too many high school seniors are graduating without being fully prepared for college or career. Tennessee State Senator Todd Gardenhire has proposed a novel response: legislation that would require the state’s school districts to reimburse recent high school graduates who need remedial classes at the college level. Innovative, but terrible. It’s unrealistic to expect every graduating senior to be ready for college. Students would be better served by college entrance requirements—even for community colleges.
• What do small rural universities, big Catholic orphanages, and sylvan nature sanctuaries have in common? According to a new ProPublica report, they all somehow authorize charter schools—and not all of them do so competently. The disparate institutions charged with regulating charters are bound by varying rules in different states, and some are riven with abuses and conflicts of interest. Particularly troubled is Fordham’s home state of Ohio, deemed the “Wild West” of authorization for its lax rules. That’s why we recommended a significant rewrite of Ohio's charter school law last year. Thankfully, our call for urgency seems to be resonating.
• In other school-choice news, Education Next has posted a great debate on whether New Orleans or the District of Columbia should be seen as the model for education reform. New Orleans has gone 100 percent charter—a thrilling development for NOLA’s Neerav Kingsland. But that comes with some downsides, including pressure for charters to surrender their autonomy and act more like neighborhood schools. So argues D.C’s Scott Pearson, who makes the case for the District’s fifty-fifty approach (half charter, half district) instead. 

Mike:            Hello, this is your host Mike Petrilli at The Thomas B. Fordham Institute here at The Education Gadfly Show and online at edexcellence.net. Now, please join me in welcoming my co-host, the Lady Gaga of education reform, Rebecca Sibilia.

Rebecca:            Thank you for having me here. Great to be on podcast, first time ever.

Mike:            I'm so excited to have you here. Lady Gaga, wow. She always knows how to surprise. This time it's by going totally classy.

Rebecca:            Totally classy. She was fantastic.

Mike:            That's how I think of you, Rebecca. Totally classy. Rebecca is the founder of EdBuild. Tell us a little bit about Ed Build. What are you guys up to?

Rebecca:            EdBuild is a new non-profit, non-partisan focused on school finance reform. The way that we're funding schools is actually getting in the way of innovation, and we want to help states and municipalities figure out how to do it better.

Mike:            Nice. EdBuild has nothing to do with anybody named Ed or buildings.

Rebecca:            It does not. It refers to the way that we're using the resources in the education system to actually help kids.

Mike:            Yes, excellent. Including kids name Ed.

Rebecca:            That's right.

Mike:            Okay, we're going to get going here. We're going to start by playing "Pardon the Gadfly." You will notice that we're going to have some school finance questions in here, just because you're on the show, Rebecca.

Rebecca:            You're going easy on me.

Mike:            Yeah, baby. Okay, Ellen, let's play "Pardon the Gadfly."

Ellen:            The Republican ESEA bill that is coming to the House floor for the vote this week would make some major changes to federal policy on school finance, allowing Title I dollars to be portable and scrapping maintenance of effort requirements. Are these good ideas?

Rebecca:            If the question is should students be funded based on their characteristics and should all funds, local, state, and federal, move with them to their school of choice, the answer is absolutely yes.

Mike:            So you like portability?

Rebecca:            We absolutely love portability. I think that it's important to understand the kerfluffle here. The kerfluffle relates to the fact that Title I funds as they currently exist are heavily weighted toward areas, particularly public schools, that have dense poverty enrollments. The potential of the way that the portability provision is structured, there's a potential for that amount of money to be diluted.

The way that the portability would work is that if a student is moving to a more affluent school, which you would hope we are giving students from dense poverty areas the option to do, they would not be bringing the full amount. Therefore, Detroit Public Schools, Chicago Public Schools, et cetera would be actually losing money.

If it goes through based on what's been proposed, you're talking about losses potentially to Detroit, Philadelphia, $50 million to $25 million respectively. That's something that we want to try to avoid. These school districts that have high concentrations of high-poverty students have additional costs burdens, and we need to be focused on that.

Mike:            In a weighted student funding system, which I think you support, right, there should be some weights for the poverty level of the school as well?

Rebecca:            Absolutely.

Mike:            In other words, yes the money should follow the kids, but particularly if it's following them into high-poverty schools those schools do deserve more money.

Rebecca:            Absolutely, and there's nothing that would prohibit states from still keeping the weighting for concentrated poverty and considering where a student is living rather than where they're enrolled in school.

Mike:            And maintenance of effort, this is basically the rule that says, "You can't spend less this year than you did last year." Now, in ESEA you can spend a little bit less, but that just seems like that is the "please continue to be inefficient" provision.

Rebecca:            I think that's right. As the former CFO for the state education system in DC, maintenance of effort was probably one of the hardest things to track and probably the most bureaucratic element of Title I. If we could just spend some time focused on efficiency rather than tracking maintenance of effort, I think that you would actually end up seeing better results.

Mike:            I love it! Okay, topic number two, Ellen.

Ellen:            Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner is proposing big changes to the state pension system. What's this all about and is it going to happen?

Mike:            We need to gear up over the next 10 years to see major changes to the pension system in pretty much every state, hopefully. Let me kind of set the context. Currently, Illinois' pension system is about 40% funded, which means it's 60% under-funded. Right now, about 20 cents on the taxpayer dollar is going just towards this pension debt. In about 10 years, that will be 40%.

Let me put that into perspective. That would mean that the entire K-12 system and the entire higher education system in Illinois would become defunded if pensions continue to move forward in this unfunded liability. We have to really think about the trade-offs that are associated with the pension debt that we're dealing with.

                        What the Illinois governor put forward is a proposal that takes serious cuts to the state funding and also moves most of the state employees into a 401k. 401k is actually what everyone else is in. It offers full portability for people who want to change jobs, and that's what we're seeing currently in our new workforce. It's just a modernized way of saving for retirement benefits.

We're going to see this across all states. Illinois is certainly the worse. What we're going to end up seeing is probably a grand bargain similar to what happened in Detroit, where unfortunately some of the pending retirees have to take some small cuts, states have to significantly trim their budgets, and in some cases taxpayers are going to have to pay in. There's just no other way to keep the state funding where it is.

Mike:            It's tough, because of course Illinois already has a very high tax rate, higher than many of its neighbors in the Midwest. This is what happens when politicians give sweetheart deals to the unions year after year when they also raid the pension funds. This is about politicians behaving badly on both sides of this equation.

Rebecca:            It is, absolutely. I think that it's unfortunate that it ends up being the retirees or near retirees that do end up taking some of the hit. Politicians not funding the pension fund has been the biggest issue associated with pension reform. Moving to a 401(k) plan takes that issue out of the equation, because we're forcing politicians to pay in real time what the promise is rather than allowing them to kick the can down the road.

Mike:            All right, topic number three.

Ellen:            Last week, Mike argued in the National Review Online…

Mike:            Argued effectively, I would add (laughs).

Ellen:            Mike argued effectively in the National Review Online that Scott Walker's lack of a college degree shouldn't disqualify him from becoming president. Rebecca, do you agree?

Rebecca:            Wow.

Mike:            Now, you do not have to endorse Scott Walker. Neither did I. I'm not sure he's my favorite. What I said in the piece was the fact that he left college a semester early, who cares? That was 30 years ago now. We have plenty of his record to look at in terms of how he behaves as an executive, what he knows, if he has the knowledge and skills and experience to do a good job as president. That's what matters.

My point in the article was that unfortunately a lot of employers are not treating their potential employees the same way. There's a lot of people that when they hire for jobs they require a college degree as a shortcut, because that indicates a bunch of things to them, rather than examining the actual record of applicants. There are some jobs out there that require college degrees that do not need college degrees.

Rebecca:            I completely agree. I think that Scott Walker, like any other presidential candidate, should be judged based on their most recent successes or failures.

Mike:            Yes.

Rebecca:            That's the first thing. The second thing is that I think it's important to note that your argument, you said that college isn't for everybody, it wasn't saying that everybody isn't for college. I think that that's an important distinction that we need to hold to in the education reform community.

If we start thinking that there are alternative routes into a successful life and career without taking the time to make sure that those alternative routes actually prepare students for that success, then what we end up with is a subtle bigotry. I don't want us to start moving in that direction just by kind of putting out the logical…

Mike:            Sure, I totally agree, but you're pretending that our routes into college right now are in any way effective. They're terrible! What do we do? We tell kids to shuffle through these so-called college prep high schools, these big, large, comprehensive high schools where half the kids are bored.

A lot of the kids come in way behind, they barely graduate, then we say, "We want you to go to college." They do it, and they go, and end up in remedial education and they never get out. That is today's route. That is the route that almost half of the kids are now taking, including most of the poor kids. It is a total dead end.

Rebecca:            Completely agree. I think that college prep standards, even in our dense poverty communities, are a joke. I think that one of the ways that we should start to look to address this is competency based learning and some of the other things that we've been putting forward as an education reform community that focuses on how well we're preparing students, rather than how many years they've been in school. Keeping with that same theme, I absolutely believe that it is okay in our current society to judge someone based on what they've done rather than what they've earned.

Mike:            She's good, isn't she? I'll tell you. Just like Lady Gaga. Are you all tatted up like Lady Gaga is too?

Rebecca:            No, I only have one and most people don't know that. Now the truth comes out.

Mike:            Now about 500 people out there in the education policy world now do. Thank you, Rebecca. That is all the time we've got for "Pardon the Gadfly." Now it's time for everyone's favorite, Amber's research minute. (music plays) Amber, welcome back to the show.

Amber:            Thank you, Mike.

Mike:            Amber, what did you think about Lady Gaga?

Amber:            Wow, she was impressive, wasn't she? I'm no Lady Gaga fan, but come on. She knocked it out of the park. She took it seriously, I think.

Mike:            It was really cool. I really did like that.

Amber:            Yeah. You know what gave her street cred for me was when Tony Bennett start doing duets with her. He's a big name right and he really thinks…

Mike:            Clearly, she's got a voice.

Amber:            Yeah, and she's got talent. She went up a few notches in my book.

Mike:            Nice. Okay, what you got for us this week?

Amber:            This week we've got a new study out in the American Education Research Journal that asks what works in gifted ed? We all want to know that, right? Five gifted ed researchers out of Virginia, my alma mater by the way, assessed the impact of differentiated ELA units on gifted 3rd graders. Two units, one in poetry and one in research.

They randomly assigned, that's the important part, gifted classrooms to treatment and comparison conditions, w hereby a total of roughly 1200 students from 85 gifted classrooms in 11 states participated in year one of the study, then it went down to about 1,000 kids in year two and 700 in year three, but the number of classrooms in states kind of changed every year. Still, you've got three years of data, three cohorts of kids.

                        All classes were pre-assessed using the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, so they could control for prior achievement, because schools use different ways to identify gifted kids. We can't all think they're going to be on the same sort of level. Authors also measured fidelity of implementation, so that was kind of important. They found moderate to high fidelity to the units. Teachers also had access to webinars to explain how to teach the units.

                        Bottom line, results showed significant increases favoring the treatment group for every cohort and year, across years, explaining from roughly 11 to 23% of the variance in student achievement scores, which is something. Yet, this is the part that worried me. The outcome assessment was designed by the researchers, since the data showed the students had topped out in the standardized ELA test prior to the study. They spent like four pages saying, "We took great care not to refer specifically to the content in the units, we based the items on third grade standards across different states," but it's still likely that the treatment group benefited from that customized assessment, because you're presuming they're going to take that assessment and make it more aligned to the differentiated units that they implemented.

                        I'm like, "Kudos to these researchers," because I really think they're trying hard to design a differential unit. Which is important, because we still don't know how to do that well, figure out how we can get teachers to teach it with fidelity, and then measure that it makes a difference for talented kids. I think that when you have these tests that we just don't have to measure this stuff, it makes the whole thing really hard to do. 

Mike:            I'm still confused, though. What is the treatment?

Amber:            The treatment is implementing these two differentiated units.

Mike:            Meaning what?

Amber:            Meaning they base these units on poetry, and one on research, and they did all these different ways that you can make the content more aggressive for gifted kids. There's like three pages on exactly what the units did, but they're differentiated ELA units in poetry and research.

Mike:            Were all the kids … All the courses were gifted kids? They were all pullout gifted programs of some sort?

Amber:            Right. Both pullout and self-contained.

Mike:            Some got something sort of special…

Amber:            Different, and everybody else got business as usual.

Mike:            For whatever the business as usual gifted is?

Amber:            Right. That's right. It's not like a dosage study where you get different elements of whatever it is, but I think we've been ... First of all, it's so many different things. First, we're worried that differentiation is not done well. We worry that teachers don't know how to develop differentiating units. Then we worried that if we do that, which is what they did, that we can't really measure it well because we don't have the tests, so they had to create the tests.

Mike:            Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Amber:            It was such a morass.

Mike:            What's interesting to me is the way that word differentiation is used in so many different ways now. A lot of people use it as saying, "We're not going to have  ability groups. We're going to have heterogeneous groupings of kids, so the gifted kids are going to be in with everybody else, but within that mixed classroom we will create differentiated instruction and somehow teach the gifted kids differently than the other kids." Here you're saying they actually did pull the gifted kids out, but did they do something significantly different?

Amber:            They differentiate, because you're supposed to differentiate even among gifted kids, right? If you listen to some of the research of Carolyn Callahan and Tomlinson, they say all kids need differentiation no matter what their level.

Mike:            Is differentiation just total BS, Rebecca? What do you think?

Rebecca:            This is way out of my league. Way out of my league. Here's what I will say, I think that it's important to ensure that we are consistently innovating around gifted students. I think that what we've seen in a lot of high-poverty areas is that just as many students dropping out because they're gifted and not engaged in their learning as those that are significantly deficient. I think that whether we pull students out or keep them in a classroom, clearly you will need differentiation either way. But it's important to figure out what's working.

Mike:            Rebecca, you do a lot of focus on school finance. I feel sometimes that some of our friends on the left who are focused on school finance feel like we shouldn't be spending very much money on gifted kids. That they're going to do fine anyways, that equity demands us to spend money on the low performing kids. How do you think about that when you think about equity and gifted?

Rebecca:            I absolutely believe that we should be funding for gifted students if we find that gifted students are in areas that traditionally are under-funded either by local or state funds. We are completely supportive of a 100% weighted student formula that follows a student based on their characteristics. If the state thinks that a weighted student formula for gifted students is important and should earn more money, then we absolutely support it. We do believe that there are additional costs associated with keeping gifted students engaged in the classroom, and the state should be considering that.

Mike:            Boom. Love it. Music to our ears. (laughs) That was a good answer. Well, good stuff. It is great to see people out there trying to do good research on gifted education.

Rebecca:            It is.

Mike:            We love it.

Rebecca:            We love it.

Mike:            That is all the time we've got for this week. I appreciate you joining us on the show, Rebecca. Thank you, Amber. Until next week...

Rebecca:            I'm Rebecca Sibilia.

Mike:            And I'm Mike Petrilli. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, signing off. 

As Common Core gathers speed in forty-three states and DC, what does it mean for high-ability students and gifted-and-talented education?  Some contend that higher standards for all mean gifted education is no longer necessary for some. Others insist that increasing the rigor of classes will automatically serve high achievers well. Some claim that differentiated instruction does the trick, while others worry that the country’s ablest students will lose what little claim they presently have on curriculum and instruction suited to their needs.

Who’s right?

Watch this discussion on what the Common Core portends for gifted students and their teachers, moderated by Fordham’s own Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Report Release: Common Core and Gifted Education: Myths, Opportunities, and Strategies for Success By Jonathan Plucker

PANELISTS
	Tricia Ebner Gifted Intervention Specialist and ELA teacher, Lake Middle School NBCT, PARCC ELC  @TebnerEbner
	Jonathan Plucker Raymond Neag Endowed Professor of Education, University of Connecticut   @JonathanPlucker
	Rena Subotnik Director, Center for Psychology in Schools and Education, American Psychological Association

MODERATOR
	Chester E. Finn, Jr. Distinguished Senior Fellow and President Emeritus, Fordham Institute

A new study published in the latest issue of Gifted Education Quarterly examines the long-term impact on young students of skipping a grade (also known as acceleration) on subsequent academic outcomes. Analysts used the National Education Longitudinal Study database (NELS) to begin tracking a representative cohort of eighth-grade students in 1988, then follow them through high school and again two and eight years post-high school (i.e., through 2000). A variety of outcome data were collected, including PSAT, SAT, and ACT scores, students’ GPAs, and college aspirations—as well as college measures, such as the selectivity of the institution, GPA for each college year, and degree attainment. All students who had ever skipped at least one grade prior to eighth grade comprised the acceleration group. Thus, the sample included kids who ranged from age nine to age thirteen while in eighth grade (the mean age was 12.7). Those students were then matched with a set of older, non-accelerated, same-grade peers from NELS based on gender, race, SES, and eighth-grade achievement. The accelerated and non-accelerated groups were nearly identical on these variables.

The study found that accelerated students scored significantly higher on the math sections of the PSAT, SAT, and most of the ACT and earned higher grades in high school. They also took more advanced courses and more often participated in additional educational opportunities. Once in college, they earned higher grades during their second year and overall. (Among the few similarities was that both groups were admitted to similarly selective colleges, and both had similar rates of graduate degree completion, although accelerated kids were slightly more likely to attain a bachelor’s degree.) More advanced students, of course, are also likelier to be more self-motivated in general, which may explain their better performance on most measures. Nevertheless, accelerated kids keep doing things to help them accelerate. We should applaud and encourage that.

SOURCE: Katie Larsen McClarty, "Life in the Fast Lane: Effects of Early Grade Acceleration on High School and College Outcomes," Gifted Child Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 1 (January 2015).

Faced with enormous budgetary shortfalls, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) opted in May 2013 to close forty-seven schools, one of the largest instances of school closures in U.S. history. CPS then set about relocating more than ten thousand displaced students into higher-performing schools for the 2013–14 year. The district called the schools that absorbed the transplanted pupils “welcoming schools.” The policy was supported by research showing that students affected by closure benefit academically if they land in a better school. The welcoming schools were all higher-performing on CPS’s internal measures of performance; they also received additional resources to ease the influx of new students (e.g., pupil safety and instructional supports). So how did the policy play out? According to University of Chicago analysts, 66 percent of displaced students enrolled in their designated “welcoming school” in fall 2013, while 25 percent attended other neighborhood-based CPS schools, 4 percent enrolled in charters and a similar number in magnets. An analysis of student records indicates that distance from home, building safety concerns, and residential mobility were all significant reasons why one-third of the total went somewhere other than their welcoming school. Interesting, to be sure, but the study does not report anything about the academic results for CPS students in their new schools. (Stay tuned for a new Fordham study of how Ohio students fare after closure.) Overall, CPS crafted a reasonable though not perfectly implemented policy for reassigning students to better schools. While few places are apt to shutter schools on the scale of CPS, they could learn from Chicago’s experience—and perhaps improve upon it.

SOURCE: Marisa de la Torre, et al., “School Closings in Chicago: Understanding Families’ Choices and Constraints for New School Enrollment,” University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research (January 2015).

According to this Education Resource Strategies report, State Education Agencies (SEAs) possess “a gold mine of untapped material”—vast amounts of school and district data collected annually. This information is currently used for accountability purposes or to inform research and policy, but the report calls for what may be an even more important data deployment to inform local decisions that could potentially help schools make the most of limited resources. For example, Maryville Middle School in Tennessee used value-added performance data on teacher effectiveness to match educator strengths with student needs. The result? Maryville has repeatedly outperformed all other schools in the state on student growth measures

A good example, yet it’s also a fact that raw data alone are not too useful. Helpfully, the report offers several ways in which SEAs can make this information more actionable for local education agencies. They can, for example, create their own analyses providing feedback on allocations of people, time, and money. Such analyses should examine the connection between resources and student achievement so schools and districts can deploy the most effective or relevant resources to the students who need them most.

Besides such sensible (if obvious) recommendations, this report serves to highlight what well-designed data systems can do. If we want to make the most of the resources within our current K–12 systems, data may be the most powerful tool we have.

SOURCE: Stephen Frank and Joseph Trawick-Smith, “Spinning Straw into Gold: How state education agencies can transform their data to improve critical school resource decisions,” Education Resource Strategies (December 2014).