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Improving What State NAEP Test Scores Student Tell Us Achievement DAVID GRISSMER s ANN FLANAGAN JENNIFER KAWATA s STEPHANIE WILLIAMSON Supported by the ExxonMobil Foundation Danforth Foundation NAEP Secondary Analysis Program Center for Research on Educational Diversity and Excellence R EDUCATION The research described in this report was supported by the ExxonMobil Foundation, the Danforth Foundation, the NAEP Secondary Analysis Program, and the Center for Research on Educational Excellence and Diversity. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Improving student achievement : what state NAEP test scores tell us / David Grissmer ... [et al.]. p. cm MR-924-EDU Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN 0-8330-2561-9 1. School improvement programs—Government policy—United States—States. 2. Academic achievement—Government policy—United States—States. 3. Academic achievement—United States—States—Evaluation. 4. Educational tests and measurements—United States—States—Statistics. I. Grissmer, David W. (David Waltz), 1941–. LB2822.82 .I49 2000 371.26`0973—dc21 00-041481 Building on more than 25 years of research and evaluation work, RAND Education has as its mission the improvement of educational policy and practice in formal and informal settings from early childhood on. RAND is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND® is a registered trademark.RAND’s publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of its research sponsors. © Copyright 2000 RAND All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from RAND. Published 2000 by RAND 1700 Main Street, P.O. Box 2138, Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138 1200 South Hayes Street, Arlington, VA 22202-5050 RAND URL: http://www.rand.org/ To order RAND documents or to obtain additional information, contact Distribution Services: Telephone: (310) 451-7002; Fax: (310) 451-6915; E-mail: order@rand.org PREFACE Great efforts have been made to improve the nation’s public K–12 educational system since the early 1980s. States have been the pri-mary initiators of this educational reform. States have leverage to reform education because they provide approximately one-half of educational funding to typical school districts in the nation and set policies that influence who teaches and what is taught. Furthermore, state courts also play a key role in deciding whether educational funds are adequate and equitably distributed. Even before 1980, the states had diverse educational systems that varied widely in terms of per-pupil spending, resource allocation, and educational policies. Reforms that have been initiated since then have varied widely by state in terms of the pace and types of reform, ensuring a continuing widely diverse set of educational systems across states. Having 50 states taking different approaches to education can pro-vide a powerful advantage in the long run if research and evaluation can identify successful and unsuccessful approaches. Identifying what works, in turn, can help states refine and adapt successful poli-cies in a continual and ongoing process of improving education. Evaluating the effects of different levels of resources, different uses of resources, and changing state policies then becomes critical to im-proving schools and student outcomes. Perhaps the single most important reason to analyze achievement results across states is to find out whether public education is amenable to reform and improvement. The crux of the current pol-icy debate about school reform is whether the K–12 system of public education is “reformable.” Those who argue it is not maintain that iii iv Improving Student Achievement: What State NAEP Test Scores Tell Us the present system does not use additional resources effectively be-cause of its bureaucratic structure and lack of appropriate internal incentives to change. According to this view, improving education requires structural reforms that introduce competition by providing more choice within the system and more alternatives outside the system. Additional resources without this kind of structural reform would simply be wasted. The alternative position sees resource constraints as the key issue— particularly with respect to disadvantaged students. This view as-sumes that additional resources can be used effectively, but only if targeted to specific programs and types of students. This position has been slowly modified to include a different type of structural re-form: standards-based accountability within the public education system through defined criteria and measurements of achievement outcomes. In this view, a structure of accountability is needed to focus resources on meeting achievement standards. This type of reform has been implemented primarily at the state level, beginning in a few states in the mid- to late 1980s and, with varying designs, gradually spreading across states. If this type of reform is successful, that success should primarily be reflected in differential score gains across states that cannot be accounted for by family characteristics or changing resources. Another reason to focus on achievement outcomes by state is that about two-thirds of the variance in per-pupil spending is between states, while only one-third is within states. While the state courts can address within-state inequalities, federal legislation is the pri-mary means of addressing between-state differences. Thus, to in-form federal policymaking, it is important to determine whether the significant inequalities between states affect student outcomes— particularly those for disadvantaged students. Empirical nonexperimental research has not definitively answered the question of whether additional educational resources affect edu-cational outcomes. However, experimental research, in combination with new reviews and interpretations of the empirical literature, is pointing to a hypothesis that additional resources primarily affect disadvantaged students but may have little if any effect on more-advantaged students. Since there is a wide variance across states in the proportions of disadvantaged students and per-pupil Preface v expenditures, an analysis of state achievement scores can help test this hypothesis. Finally, resources are spent differently across states, allowing esti-mates of the effectiveness of different uses of resources. Perhaps more important, the different ways that resources are used in states can provide measures of both the marginal cost and marginal achievement benefit of changing resource usage, allowing cost-effectiveness comparisons. Such measures can help answer the questions of what uses of resources are most cost-effective in boosting student achievement and how much resources can affect achievement of disadvantaged students. Until 1990, achievement could not be validly compared across states because no test gave representative samples of students in each state the same tests. In 1990, the Department of Education began to use the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test, which had previously been given to national samples of students, to test representative samples of students in participating states in reading and math at the 4th- and 8th-grade levels. Seven such tests were administered from 1990 to 1996. Successful reform initiatives are ex-pected to take years to be fully reflected in achievement outcomes, so this period is probably too early to serve as a definitive test of whether reforms are successful. However, evidence of no achieve-ment gains would certainly challenge current reform directions. This report uses data from the NAEP to estimate score gains nation-ally and by state. It also uses these data to estimate the effects of varying levels and uses of per-pupil expenditures on student achievement. Finally, the report estimates the cost-effectiveness of the major alternatives for utilizing educational resources. This report should be of interest to national and state executive branch policymakers and the state judiciary, all of whom are in-volved in setting educational policies. District superintendents and school principals, as well as teachers and parents, may also find parts of this analysis useful. This project was conducted under the aus-pices of RAND Education. The mission of RAND Education is to bring accurate data and careful objective analysis to the national de-bate on education policy. ... - tailieumienphi.vn
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