Achievement gap - evidence

[Anonymous]

All the evidence suggests that dispersing highly-concentrated poverty to middle-class schools will help more kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Look there is no easy answer to closing the achievement gap and I don't really believe that is what this is about. This is more of an equity issue. Shouldn't all kids have access to decent schools?

I don't either. "Normal Parent" has misstated the premise.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:All the evidence suggests that dispersing highly-concentrated poverty to middle-class schools will help more kids.

Can you cite any of that evidence? Thank you.

[Anonymous]

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Recent integration / achievement gap experiment in Missouri.

In 2013, a failing school district in St Louis called Normandy lost accreditation with the state because it was failing. The students received a state-mandated right to bus to a school district 30 miles away, called Frances Howell. Of note, Frances Howell had a negligible number of URM students prior to the integration.

The story of the initial integration was covered in depth by a journalist called Nikole Hannah-Jones, with the summary available on This American Life. The previous thread had suggested listening to Part 1 starting at minute 23 to see how the parents felt about the integration:

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with-part-one

So I decided to follow-up on this experiment, to see what happened to the achievement gap. The state-mandated busing persisted through 2018, when the Normandy district reclaimed its accreditation. I decided to look at all 4 middle schools in Frances Howell since that is what Nikole Hannah-Jones focused on. By this time, all URM's in the 4 middle schools will have come from Normandy, and gone there for the entire time.

So let's look at the achievement gap results in 4 schools:

Frances - Howell Middle School
GS rating 8/10
https://www.greatschools.org/missouri/st-charles/1938-Francis-Howell-Middle-School/
All students: 10/10
White (86% of students): 10/10
Black (6% of students ): 4/10
Hispanic (3% of students ): 9/10

Saeger Middle School
GS rating 8/10
https://www.greatschools.org/missouri/st-charles/1947-Saeger-Middle-School/
All students: 9/10
White (84% of students): 9/10
Black (7% of students): 6/10

Hollenbeck Middle school
GS rating 7/10
https://www.greatschools.org/missouri/st-charles/1941-Hollenbeck-Middle-School/
All students: 9/10
White (83% of students): 9/10
Black (8% of students ): 3/10
Hispanic (4% of students ): 4/10

Bryan Middle School
GS rating 7/10
https://www.greatschools.org/missouri/st-charles/1957-Bryan-Middle-School/
All students 9/10
White (83% of students): 9/10
Black (9% of students): 4/10
Asian or Pacific Islander (3% of students): 9/10

Can we say that moving the students to Frances Howell district had no impact on them? I think that would be wrong. Not everything is measured in test scores; in fact, most things are not. Also, I looked up Normandy Middle School. Its GS rating is 1/10, so 4/10 is an improvement. On the other hand, the students who chose to commute 30 miles on the highway self-selected. There was also a much better funding structure in the Frances Howell schools, so several variables in play.

However, can you say that integration fixed the achievement gap in Missouri? You find, at best, marginal improvement, maybe a difference between HS drop-out and graduation, but not much more than that. There are probably a few select students that really benefited.

Also, with all the schools hitting the sweet spot of 15%-20% FARMS students, the achievement of the original student body, at least as measured through standardized testing, did not suffer.

A couple of comments:

I wouldn't expect kids who have a horrible elementary school experience to make a 180 after moving to a "better" middle school. Do we know what happens with kids who never went to Normandy or did I miss something?

Why are "Hispanic" kids doing so well at the one school (9/10)?

Do they have the results broken down by income level?

[Anonymous]

Let's remove the URM vs non-URM factor from the equation. Can anyone find achievement gap studies comparing white upper income and white lower income students?

[Anonymous]

The achievement gap hasn't been closed anywhere. It is a parental gap and shouldn't fall on schools to fix.

Schools should be judged on ensuring that all students are learning not on whether or not gaps are closing between students

[Anonymous]

https://www.brookings.edu/research/some-schools-much-better-than-others-at-closing-achievement-gaps-between-their-advantaged-and-disadvantaged-students/

[Anonymous]

https://www.nber.org/digest/may11/w16664.html

"The average high school graduation rates for blacks and whites in Rucker's sample were 0.73 and 0.88, respectively. On average, children were in desegregated schools for five years, and each additional year that a black child was exposed to education in a desegregated school increased the probability of graduating by between 1.3 and 2.9 percent. For black men, spending time in desegregated schools as a child also reduced by 14.7 percent the probability of spending time in jail by age thirty.

Rucker estimates that each additional year of exposure to desegregated schools increased black men?s annual earnings by roughly 5 percent, increased their wages by 2.9 percent, and led to an annual work effort that was 39 hours higher. At the same time, for these black male adults the probability of poverty decreased by between 1.6 and 1.9 percentage points. Overall, five years spent in desegregated schools yielded an estimated 25 percent increase in annual earnings and increased annual work effort of 195 hours. Desegregation also resulted in significant long-run improvements in blacks' adult health, as measured by self-assessed general health status; the effect of a five-year exposure to school desegregation is equivalent to being seven years younger."

[Anonymous]

https://tcf.org/content/facts/the-benefits-of-socioeconomically-and-racially-integrated-schools-and-classrooms/?session=1

"Integrated schools help to reduce racial achievement gaps. In fact, the racial achievement gap in K–12 education closed more rapidly during the peak years of school desegregation in the 1970s and 1980s than it has overall in the decades that followed—when many desegregation policies were dismantled. More recently, black and Latino students had smaller achievement gaps with white students on the 2007 and 2009 NAEP when they were less likely to be stuck in high-poverty school environments. The gap in SAT scores between black and white students continues to be larger in segregated districts, and one study showed that change from complete segregation to complete integration in a district could reduce as much as one quarter of the current SAT score disparity."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All the evidence suggests that dispersing highly-concentrated poverty to middle-class schools will help more kids.

Can you cite any of that evidence? Thank you.

Several studies already cited in this thread. There isn't even a debate at this point. It's been known for decades.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All the evidence suggests that dispersing highly-concentrated poverty to middle-class schools will help more kids.

Can you cite any of that evidence? Thank you.

Several studies already cited in this thread. There isn't even a debate at this point. It's been known for decades.

Any of the studies cited in this thread showing that it will help "more kids"? I don't really see that.
This is a thread about evidence, let's be specific about things.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All the evidence suggests that dispersing highly-concentrated poverty to middle-class schools will help more kids.

Can you cite any of that evidence? Thank you.

Several studies already cited in this thread. There isn't even a debate at this point. It's been known for decades.

Any of the studies cited in this thread showing that it will help "more kids"? I don't really see that.
This is a thread about evidence, let's be specific about things.

Lower performing kids are helped some of us want evidence that higher performing kids aren't harmed. To do this you need a control group and a test group. Commonsense tells me that higher performing kids without lower performing kids do better but I am willing to change my mind if their is evidence that shows otherwise

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There seems to be a lot of achievement gap in sports. Asian-Americans are never represented. What can be done about it?

Apparently we don't have a Board of Sports in addition to BoE, so, sorry, nothing can be done on that.

Sports is a part of the curriculum. PE is one period, just like Mathematics is. URMs are doing very well in this subject, just lagging behind in Maths. I think that every group has their own strengths and weaknesses in different subjects. It all averages out. Hence in reality, there is no achievement gap overall.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Lower performing kids are helped some of us want evidence that higher performing kids aren't harmed. To do this you need a control group and a test group. Commonsense tells me that higher performing kids without lower performing kids do better but I am willing to change my mind if their is evidence that shows otherwise

It's not a zero sum issue, as though there's only so much good education to go around, and if those other kids get more of it, then my kid necessarily gets less.