The 2009 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning?

Notes

32 The Brown Center Report on American Education NOTES 1 Richard F . Elmore and Milbrey Wallin McLaughlin, Steady Work: Policy, Practice, and the Reform of American Education (Washington, DC: The RAND Corporation, 1988). 2 Arne Duncan and David Driscoll quoted in Libby Quaid, “Math Tests: Fourth-Grader Progress Stalls,” Associated Press Online, October 14, 2009. Mark Schneider, NAEP Math Results Hold Bad News for NCLB, American Enterprise Institute Blog, October 14, 2009. Available at http://blog.american.com/author=50. Diane Ravitch, “Time To Kill ‘No Child Left Behind,’” Education Week, June 10, 2009. Robert Tomsho, “U.S. Math Scores Hit a Wall,” Wall Street Journal, October 15, 2009, p. A3. Sean Cavanagh, “NAEP Scores Put Spotlight on Standards,” Education Week, October 19, 2009. 3 The extrapolation is imprecise. It is also theoretical. Projecting gains several years above grade level is dicey on a test that contains few, if any, above-grade-level items. 4 Fordham Institute’s review of math tests ranked TIMSS ahead of NAEP in mathematics content. W. Stephen Wilson’s math review in Stars by Which to Navigate, (Washington, DC: Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 2009). Available at http://edexcellence.net/doc/20091008_ NationalStandards.pdf 5 The projections for 2022 and 2053 are based on fourth- and eighth-grade scores in 1990 and the rates of gains for fourth graders from 1990 to 2007. 6 National Mathematics Advisory Panel, Report of the Task Group on Assessment, 2008. Available at www.ed.gov/ MathPanel 7 Using a discontinuity design bolsters the ability to uncover meaningful correlations from cross-sectional data. See Thomas Dee and Brian Jacob, The Impact of No Child Left Behind on Student Achievement. NBER Working Paper # 15531 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2009). 8 Tom Loveless, Part I of High-Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind (Washington, DC: Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 2008). 9 Sam Dillon, “‘No Child’ Law Is Not Closing a Racial Gap,” New York Times, April 28, 2009, p. A1. 10 Education Week, Quality Counts: Rewarding Results, Punishing Failure (January 11, 1999); Education Week, Quality Counts: If I Can’t Learn from You (2003). 11 Martin Carnoy and Susanna Loeb, “Does External Accountability Affect Student Outcomes? A Cross-State Analysis,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 24, no. 4 (2002), pp. 305–331; Eric A. Hanushek and Margaret E. Raymond, “Does School Accountability Lead to Improved Student Performance?” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 24 (2005), pp. 297–327. 12 Larry Cuban, “Reforming Again and Again and Again,” Educational Researcher, 19(1), (1990), pp. 3–13. 13 A 1985 headline read, “S.D. 8th graders Follow State Slide in Test Scores,” referring to students in San Diego. David G. Savage, Los Angeles Times (San Diego County edition), November 9, 1985, Metro p. 1. 14 California State Department of Education, California Assessment Program Annual Report, 1985–86. For example of the PQR, see David D. Marsh and Patricia S. Crocker, “School Restructuring: Implementing Middle School Reform,” in Education Policy Implementation, edited by Allan R. Odden (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991). 15 For 2009 mathematics scores, we used seventh-grade scores because all students take the same test. Multiple tests are offered in mathematics at eighth grade (algebra, geometry, general math, and integrated math). 16 The 10th percentile is the upper limit of the bottom tenth of schools. The mean percentile of the bottom 10 percent is about 5.0, so the actual gain needed to get to the 50th percentile is more than 40 points. 17 James S. Coleman, Equality of Educational Opportunity (Washington, DC: U.S. Printing Office, 1966). 18 NAPCS Dashboard, 2009 (www.publiccharters.org/ dashboard/) 19 Caitlin Scott, Improving Low-Performing Schools: Lessons from Five Years of Studying School Restructuring Under No Child Left Behind (Washington, DC: Center on Education Policy, 2009). 20 Julian R. Betts and Y. Emily Tang, Value-Added and Experimental Studies of the Effect of Charter Schools on Student Achievement: A Literature Review, National Charter School Research Project (Seattle, WA: Center on Reinventing Public Education, 2008; Tom Loveless and Katharyn Field, “Perspectives on Charter Schools,” in Handbook of Research on School Choice, edited by Mark Berends, et al. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2009), pp. 99–114. Also see NAPCS (2009). An exception to the modest effect sizes typical in the literature was found by Caroline M. Hoxby, Sonali Murarka, and Jenny Kang, How New York City’s Charter Schools Affect Achievement, August 2009 Report (Cambridge, MA: New...