The Education Gadfly Weekly

Helping lots more young Americans get “to and through” four-year college degrees is a major goal of public policy and philanthropy. In 2009, President Obama set the target of leading the world in college completion by 2020. The Lumina Foundation aspires to increase the proportion of Americans with high-quality degrees, certificates, and other credentials to 60 percent by 2025. And the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent over seven years and half a billion dollars on strategies aimed at increasing college completion.

All of this has led to energetic initiatives inside and outside government to reform the higher education system and provide additional supports to first-generation students—the so-called “completion agenda.”

That’s all well and good. But as I’ve argued before, even these heroic efforts are unlikely to add up to much until we dramatically boost the number of young Americans who are ready for college in the first place. The best evidence of this proposition comes from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which set a “college-prepared” level on its twelfth-grade assessments a few years ago (in addition to basic, proficient, and advanced). Chart 1 displays the percentage of twelfth-grade students nationally who have reached NAEP’s “college-prepared” level in reading and math over the past twenty-five years. (The 2015 numbers were released in April.) It also shows the percentage of students who matriculated directly to college, as well as the percentage of those who eventually graduated with bachelor’s degrees.

Chart 1: College preparedness, college matriculation, and college completion

This picture is instructive on several counts. First, it shows that we’ve never gotten more than forty percent of high school graduates to a “college-prepared” level in reading or math. Keep in mind that these are the students who made it to twelfth grade; since about 20 percent of American students drop out, the proportion of all young people in a cohort of eighteen-year-olds who make it to the college-ready level in either subject is more like one in three.

Yet it’s also clear that young people continue to give college, well, the old college try. In 2015, even though just 37 percent of twelfth graders were college-prepared in reading and/or math, a whopping 69 percent enrolled in post-secondary education in the months after graduating from high school. Is it any surprise that remedial (a.k.a. “developmental”) education remains a growth industry on most community college (and some four-year college) campuses?

Finally, note the college completion data, which we now have for the high school class of 2007. About one in three students graduated college-ready, and about one in three students completed four-year degrees. In other words, the proportion of completers is about the same as the proportion of graduates who were college-ready. Interesting.

Now let’s see how these data look by race. Unfortunately, we have to limit our analysis to college preparedness in reading. (The keepers of the NAEP data won’t release “college preparedness” data for math by subgroup. In reading, “college-prepared” is set at the same level as “proficient,” so they have no choice but to make it available.)

Let’s start with white students:

Chart 2: College preparedness, college matriculation, and college completion, white students

The picture looks largely the same as for the national sample, with slightly larger proportions of students graduating from high school at a college-prepared level, matriculating, and completing college. Once again, the proportion of completers is about the same as the proportion of graduates who were college-ready.

Now let’s turn to Hispanic students:

Chart 3: College preparedness, college matriculation, and college completion, Hispanic students

The picture is largely congruent, though the gap between college readiness (and completion) and college matriculation is even bigger than for the national sample. (Especially in recent years, as college entry for Hispanic students has skyrocketed.) There’s also a reasonably big gap between college readiness and college completion.

Now let’s tackle black students.

Chart 4: College preparedness, college matriculation, and college completion, black students

Now some bigger differences start to emerge. For one thing, the college matriculation numbers of late bounce around dramatically. (So dramatically as to make them somewhat suspect.) But also note: The red line in this picture is above the blue line, meaning that a greater proportion of black high school graduates completed college than tested at a college-ready level in twelfth grade. For the class of 2006, the difference was quite large—21 percent of black high school graduates completed college, but just 16 percent left high school at a college-ready level in reading (almost exactly the inverse of the numbers for Hispanic students).

Finally, let’s look at the picture for Asian American students.

Chart 5: College preparedness, college matriculation, and college completion, Asian-American students

** Data from Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) on college matriculation rate for Asian American students are unavailable before 2003.

As you can see, the numbers across the board are much higher than for the other subgroups. A much larger proportion of Asian Americans graduate college-ready and matriculate. But note that, as with African American students, the red line is above the blue line. An astonishing two of three Asian American students who graduated high school in 2007 ended up completing a four-year degree. Yet less than half of Asian American students were reading (English) at a college-ready level in twelfth grade.

***

Can we make sense of these trends? Specifically, why might African American and Asian American students be doing better in terms of college completion than their twelfth-grade NAEP scores would predict?

For African American students, it turns out, this is a well-known phenomenon. (Not well known to me, but my friend and Education Next colleague Marty West brought it to my attention.) As this NBER working paper from 2006 explains, “Blacks get more education than do whites of similar cognitive ability.” The authors, Kevin Lang and Michael Manove, posit that because of discrimination in the labor market, “Education is generally a more valuable signal of productivity for blacks than for whites. As a result, blacks invest more heavily in the signal and get more education for a given level of ability.” In other words, because some employers won’t hire blacks without a college degree, they are even more motivated to get a credential than others.

And what about Asian Americans? Why are they doing so well in terms of college completion? Conventional wisdom would say that their families and cultures prioritize educational attainment and provide the pressure and support to make it likelier. Makes sense to me, though I’d love to see an empirical study on that.

Hispanics, meanwhile, appear to be the group for which the “completion agenda” has the greatest potential. As of the class of 2006, one in four Hispanic students who were ready for college didn’t complete a bachelor’s degree. Higher education reformers might find such students and do all they can to get them across the finish line.

Meanwhile, those of us in the K–12 world have our cut work out for us. If we want to see progress for American students—of all racial groups—we’ve got to get the college readiness rate past the forty percent mark and beyond. Otherwise, we will continue to set up millions of young people to fail.

Sources:

The college enrollment numbers come from the National Center for Education Statistics’s Digest of Education Statistics, Table 302.20, for years up to and including 2013. 2014 and 2015 data come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). NCES defines recent high school completers as “persons sixteen to twenty-four years old who graduated from high school in the preceding twelve months. Includes persons receiving GEDs.” BLS defines "recent high school graduates" as "persons who completed high school in the calendar year of the survey (January through October).”

In reading, the National Assessment Government Board estimates that “college-prepared” is equivalent to “proficient.” So these numbers are the percentage of all twelfth-grade students who were proficient in reading in those given years. In math, numbers are the percentage of all twelfth-grade students who were proficient in math in 2015, 2013, 2009, and 2005 (the first trend year for mathematics because of changes made to the assessment framework).

Bachelor’s degree completion numbers come from the National Center for Education Statistics’s Digest of Education Statistics, Table 104.20: “Percentage of persons twenty-five to twenty-nine years old with selected levels of educational attainment, by race/ethnicity and sex: Selected years, 1920 through 2014.

Special thanks to Andrew Scanlan, a research intern at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, for collecting these data.

Last month, on the heels of the Supreme Court's decision in Fisher v. University of Texas, the hashtag ?#‎BeckyWithTheBadGrades began trending on Twitter. If you're not sure what that phrase means or why it was so hotly discussed on social media, don't despair. You're not poorly educated, misinformed, or illiterate. But you're probably missing a bit of cultural knowledge common among young people, particularly young people of color. The clever hashtag offers a lesson in the value of cultural literacy—often a touchy subject in education—but with a nifty twist: This time, it's our students who got a cultural reference that left many adults scratching their heads.

#BeckyWithTheBadGrades, for the uninitiated, is a reference to a song from Beyoncé's new album Lemonade. Her song "Sorry" ends with the singer telling a faithless lover, "Better call Becky with the good hair." Explains Emma Pettit of the Chronicle of Higher Education: "'Becky' is a term for a stereotypical white woman, and the mention of her "good hair" alludes to society's elevation of whiteness....Thus 'Becky with the good hair' became a succinct phrase on the Internet to call out white privilege." Fisher, who argued that the university denied her admission in favor of less qualified black and Hispanic students, was dubbed "Becky with the bad grades." It stuck and went viral.

An educator friend remarked that he found the hashtag offensive "once hipper people explained the reference to me." Think about that for a second. A gap in a well-educated and deeply informed adult's cultural knowledge prevented him, however briefly, from comprehending and engaging with young African Americans about a landmark Supreme Court decision in a public forum. Usually it's students lacking in cultural knowledge who have trouble with engagement and understanding; they sometimes struggle to clear hurdles because they don’t get some of the countless allusions many of us take for granted.

We don’t always appreciate this as we read, write, speak, or listen, but everyday language is thick with references to literature, art, music, mythology, and theology. From Achilles's heel and Pandora's box to Don Juan, Uncle Tom, and "raising Cain," literate Americans know these references and use them without explanation, assuming that others get the references. And most of us do. Indeed, we cannot be said to fully literate without knowledge of an array of common cultural references that add color and shades of meaning to speech and writing. What makes this a sensitive subject in education is that our most widely used allusions reflect the culture and history of the dominant "speech community." In the case of the U.S., that means—for now, at least—a strong Eurocentric tilt.

This is not a plot to maintain privilege, but the nature of how language is used and evolves—an organic process that we are largely powerless to shape or direct. Your grandparents might have used the phrase "twenty-three skidoo" or the word "skedaddle" when it was time to leave a party. Your children are more likely to "bounce" or "peace out." You might dismiss your kids' terms as non-standard English, but slang plus widespread use over time equals idiomatic language. No one used "friend" as a verb before Facebook. Now the phrase "she friended me" has insinuated itself into the language. The word "phat" has appeared in the New York Times crossword puzzle.

No authority has the power to decide which words, references, and allusions persist or insinuate themselves into the language (a dictionary isn't a rule book; it's a history book). English is a vernacular machine, minting and borrowing useful words and phrases on an as-needed basis from “bodega” and “telenovela” to "down with that" or "sending a text." Activists might insist on "sex-neutral" pronouns like "xe", "xem" and "xyr"; historians might prefer to render dates as "C.E." and "B.C.E." instead of "A.D." and "B.C." But these terms will remain obscure unless they gain traction in everyday use.

The same is true of cultural references. Will "Becky with the good hair" stand the test of time? It might be inscrutable generations from now. But I'd wager "put a ring on it" will still be around. In short, language is a cultural artifact. If we don't account for it as teachers—ensuring that our children's education is broad and rich enough to expose them to the language, history, and art that enliven our language—we risk imposing a kind of illiteracy on our students. This implies the need to make thoughtful judgments about what students read and learn rather than leaving it entirely to chance. If that makes us uncomfortable as teachers—well, don't hate the player, hate the game.

As the "Becky" example shows, youth are the drivers of pop culture; they get plenty of exposure to those references. What they don't know are the references that college professors, employers, elected officials, and others use. We might think of schooling as teaching the prior generation's knowledge so that youth are prepared to communicate on an equal footing with those they are about to join in the economic and civic spheres.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to brush up on my Beyoncé.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared in a slightly different form in U.S. News & World Report.

• Darius Brown’s educational biography, featured last week in the Dallas Morning News, should be encouraging for reformers. It’s the story of a bright young Texan from modest circumstances who, through his own talents and the prodigious advocacy of his single mother, took part in his district’s gifted program and won a Gates Millennium Scholars award and matriculate to Texas A&M. Unfortunately, his story isn’t representative—even though they account for 6.5 percent of the state’s students, black boys like Darius make up less than 3 percent of those enrolled in Texas’s gifted programs. One of the main reasons for the discrepancy is that too many states and districts still rely on referrals from teachers and parents for screening into such programs, rather than spending extra and instituting universal screening. As Jay Mathews argues in the Washington Post, settling for this narrower pool leads to gifted classrooms that are significantly whiter and more affluent. Above-average intelligence is a category of special learning need; the only thing setting it apart from, say, a physical disability or a lack of English fluency is that it doesn’t always make itself known. That’s why we need to do everything we can to identify and serve gifted kids, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
• The old saying goes, “If you love something, set it free.” Louisiana educators seem to have taken that adage to heart, making their carefully crafted and Common Core-aligned Guidebooks 2.0 curriculum available to teachers nationwide at no cost. At least, we think they love it; after all, the state spent a nice chunk of change partnering with the website Learnzillion to develop hundreds of web-based lessons for teachers of grades 3–12. Then again, an official with the state’s department of education voiced this giddy endorsement of the design process: “To be honest, I don’t think other states should create their own curriculum if they don’t have to. It takes a lot of time.” (Well, yeah.) Louisiana is following in the footsteps of New York—which has already released its homebrew EngageNY curriculum to superb reviews—and Learnzillion has won praise as a resource for reformers looking to intervene directly in classrooms. Let’s hope that sound partnerships and precedents augur good tidings for a state that could use them.
• We think of California as the land of sun and waves and far-off geological cataclysm. But if the Big One seems only a distant possibility, the state has already been hit with an educational earthquake in the speedy proliferation of charter schools: Writing in Education Next, Richard Whitmire demonstrates convincingly that charters have devoured much of the district’s market share over the past decade, laying claim to roughly one-fifth of the total student population in Los Angeles. Now the aftershocks are starting to be felt. With the recent revelation of a Broad Foundation plan to vastly expand the city’s charter sector, a full-scale counterrevolution is being led by the schools’ foes. Most notably, the powerful United Teachers Los Angeles has conducted some canny organizing in an effort to unionize the city’s biggest charter network, and perhaps even repeal the state’s charter law entirely. Let’s see if choice advocates have been bracing themselves for another shakeup. 

On this week’s podcast, Mike Petrilli and Robert Pondiscio discuss Beyoncé and cultural literacy, the racial variances in college readiness versus college completion, and Louisiana’s plan for a homegrown Common Core–aligned curriculum. During the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines the effects of interim assessments on student outcomes.

Amber's Research Minute

Like Mom and apple pie, everyone loves and believes in a well-rounded education. Ensuring that every child gets one, however, has proven to be a challenge of Herculean magnitude—despite compelling evidence that it’s precisely what disadvantaged students most desperately need to close persistent achievement gaps and compete academically with their more fortunate peers. Enter the Every Student Succeeds Act. As this report from Scott D. Jones and Emily Workman of the Education Commission of the States (ECS) notes, while concerns about providing children a well-rounded education “have not received the same degree of attention as hot-button issues like equitable funding and accountability indicators, it could be considered a foundational element of the new federal law.”

Foundational, perhaps. But is it enforceable? Education Secretary John King has lately been using the bully pulpit to promote the virtues of a well-rounded education. “States now have the opportunity to broaden their definition of educational excellence, to include providing students strong learning experiences in science, social studies, world languages, and the arts,” King is quoted as saying by the ECS authors. “That’s a huge and welcome change.”

Yes and no. In truth, states have always had the “opportunity” to broaden their definition of educational excellence. The question is why, in the main, they haven’t done so. On the one hand, a case can be made that federal education policy has discouraged states from providing a well-rounded education by tacitly promoting a too-narrow view of reading (I have argued elsewhere that this is precisely what happened under NCLB). Accountability policies that demand fast and measurable gains in reading functionally privilege a skills-and-strategies approach to reading instruction. This discourages the kind of steady investments in knowledge and vocabulary that build mature reading comprehension, which is a slow-growing plant. Merely encouraging a well-rounded education is insufficient. If states don’t use their “opportunity” under ESSA to actively and aggressively incentivize the delivery of a well-rounded education, the phrase will remain a mere platitude.

Jones and Workman offer examples of how ESSA might improve policy and practice. For starters we have the law’s expanded definition of a well-rounded education, which now includes writing, engineering, music, technology, and career and technical education. There’s Title I, which requires that all districts provide a “well-rounded program of instruction that meets the needs of all students,” and Title II, which allows funds to be used to help teachers “integrate comprehensive literacy instruction into a well-rounded education.” And there are “flexible block grants” through which ESSA “creates some accountability around incentives for providing a well-rounded education…particularly for minority groups, including women, English language learners, students with disabilities, and low-income students.” By not limiting states to specific areas in which to apply for funding, local education agencies “are free to emphasize any of the multiple subjects listed in ESSA, select their own, or integrate across subjects,” the authors note: “The possibilities are endless in how states can utilize this [block grant] program to make meaningful investments in their students.”

“With ESSA, districts are asked to conduct a comprehensive needs assessment to identify the needs of their unique populations and to make investments to address those needs,” the authors note. Let me offer districts a leg up on that needs assessment: Every child needs a well-rounded education. And you don’t start that after children learn how to read. You build readers by providing it from the very first days of school. The next Massachusetts will be the state that best understands this truth, adopts curriculum that delivers it, trains teachers to implement it, and uses their newfound flexibility to ensure that kids benefit from it.

Or we can just keep talking about it.

SOURCE: Emily Workman and Scott D. Jones, “ESSA’s Well-Rounded Education,” Education Commission of the States (June 2016).

A new case study by the Center on Reinventing Public Education examines how the cities of Washington, D.C., and New Orleans are approaching discipline so that suspensions or expulsions are “more appropriately and fairly applied while still respecting schools’ autonomy.”

The report describes how D.C.’s sole authorizer, the D.C. Public Charter School Board (PCSB), was interested in reducing charter schools’ out-of-school suspensions and expulsions—likely in the wake of accusations that they were suspending or expelling students unfairly or more often than district schools. (Across the country, schools have also been accused of racial bias when they suspend “disproportionate” numbers of minority students.) So in partnership with DCPS and other city leaders, they decided to release “School Equity Reports” that document school-level data on suspensions, expulsions, student exit, and mid-year enrollment.

The authors found that between 2012–13 and 2014–15, the average suspension rate across all city schools dropped from 12 to 10 percent, and suspensions for students with special needs fell from 23 to 19 percent (they don’t have reliable baseline data from before then). Examining comparable schools from 2012 to 2014, additional analyses show that the citywide declines in short-term suspension rates (meaning less than ten days) were driven mostly by charter schools. Their short-term suspension rates declined by almost three percentage points relative to comparable schools—which is notable since they started with higher average suspension rates than DCPS schools. Charters also showed significant declines in the suspension rate of black students (patterns were similar for expulsions). In addition to the School Equity Reports, PCSB includes discipline data in its oversight of charters even though these data are not included in the performance dashboard to which schools are held accountable.

During the 2012–13 school year, New Orleans’s Recovery School District (RSD) started a centralized expulsion program that all of the city’s schools—either voluntarily or with coercion—joined eventually. It requires schools to use common criteria for expelling students (schools still control how they handle suspensions) and use the same process for student hearings; students must also receive instruction during the time they are expelled, as well as help re-enrolling when the time comes. The RSD is in charge of finding a placement after the hearing, which can include an alternative school or a return to the original school under probationary conditions. (Eventually, the RSD ended up opening three alternative schools.) The number of expulsions has been drastically reduced in NOLA from 2011 to 2014, though it is hard to quantify trends prior to 2011–12 because the data came from the Office of Civil Rights—and NOLA interviewees said OCR did not have accurate numbers. (Still, the rate declined from 3.8 expulsions per thousand students to 2.4 per thousand from 2011 to 2014.)

Although the authors of the report describe the threat to school autonomy and culture through these discipline initiatives, that danger appears minimized presumably because “community leaders rightly feel these schools must assume equal responsibility for serving all students.” Yet if we push too far in this direction, we run the danger of homogenizing charter schools like we did district schools—which is precisely why we created charters in the first place.

SOURCE: Betheny Gross, Sivan Tuchman, and Sarah Yatsko, "Grappling With Discipline in Autonomous Schools: New Approaches From D.C. and New Orleans," CRPE (June 2016).

Despite its age, this 2014 study examining high-achievers’ lack of reading growth during the school year is still relevant today—especially during summer vacation.

Researchers examined differences in reading growth between high-achieving and average-achieving students during the school year and the summer. They used student scores on the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) assessment, which is administered twice during each school year and tests skills such as reading comprehension and word association.

Using national and local norms to identify high-achievers, the analysts used a sample comprising two thousand schools with 171,380 students. They tracked each from the beginning of grade three until the start of grade six, looking at their scores on seven tests from fall 2006 to fall 2009. Students were excluded if they missed a test or changed schools during the observation years. Approximately eight hundred schools and forty-thousand students met the criteria.

The key findings: Reading growth among average-achieving students was rapid from September to June, but it slowed down as the year went on and virtually halted over the summer. High-achievers saw less growth than average students did during the school year, yet that rate remained almost constant during the summer (meaning they didn’t experience the drop-off that average achievers did). And this held for high-achievers attending both moderately high- and low-SES schools.

The limitations of the study are important to note. It does not account, for example, for student-level socioeconomic status—only school-level. Summer and school learning was confounded because testing was not conducted on the first or last day of school. The number of students decreased in the initial screening process. And the sample was not representative of students in the United States. The biggest limitation was that the study could not account for whether students took part in educationally enriching programs during the summer.

The results suggest that classroom instruction and/or attention may be lacking for high-achievers. And as my colleague Robert Pondiscio argues, it might also reinforce the cultural components of language proficiency—including the idea that the smarter you are, the more likely you are to build language proficiency in everyday interactions. The words “high-achievers” and “underserved” do not typically go in the same sentence, but these findings suggest that they ought to.

SOURCE: Karen E. Rambo-Hernandez and D. Betsy McCoach, “High-Achieving and Average Students’ Reading Growth: Contrasting School and Summer Trajectories,” The Journal of Educational Research (2015).