Detracking and Tracking Up: Mathematics Course Placements in California Middle Schools, 2003–2013

Between 2003 and 2013, the proportion of California eighth graders enrolled in algebra or a more advanced course nearly doubled to 65%. In this article, we consider the organizational processes that accompanied this curricular intensification. Facing a complex set of accountability, institutional, technical/functional, and internal political pressures, California schools responded to the algebra-for-all effort in diverse ways. While some schools detracked by enrolling all eighth graders in algebra, others "tracked up," creating more advanced geometry opportunities while increasing algebra enrollments. These responses created a new differentiated course structure that is likely to benefit advantaged students. Consistent with the effectively maintained inequality hypothesis, we find that detracking occurred primarily in disadvantaged schools while "tracking up" occurred primarily in advantaged schools

Capturing more than poverty: School free and reduced-price lunch data and household income

Linking K-12 data on students and teachers to Internal Revenue Service (IRS) information allows us to answer questions that are difficult to answer using survey data or educational administrative data alone. We describe two research projects that demonstrate the importance of using linked administrative data to further research on education and inform policy discussions. In the first research project, using linked IRS income tax data to school administrative records for all 8th graders in one California public school district and all K-12th graders in Oregon public schools, we examine how well free and reduced price lunch (FRPL) enrollment captures student disadvantage. We find that FRPL categories capture relatively little variation in household income. However, FRPL captures elements of educational disadvantage that IRS-reported household income data do not. In the second research project, using data on teachers from a large California school district linked to IRS records and the Business Register, we examine what teachers do after they leave teaching. Preliminary findings suggest that many teachers leave the workforce after they leave teaching. Teachers that continue to work after leaving our school district often do so in a nearby school district, and often see a modest increase in their earnings in their new positions

Fadeout in an early mathematics intervention: Constraining content or preexisting differences?

A robust finding across research on early childhood educational interventions is that the treatment effect diminishes over time, with children not receiving the intervention eventually catching up to children who did. One popular explanation for fadeout of early mathematics interventions is that elementary school teachers may not teach the kind of advanced content that children are prepared for after receiving the intervention, so lower-achieving children in the control groups of early mathematics interventions catch up to the higher-achieving children in the treatment groups. An alternative explanation is that persistent individual differences in children’s long-term mathematical development result more from relatively stable pre-existing differences in their skills and environments than from the direct effects of previous knowledge on later knowledge. We tested these two hypotheses using data from an effective preschool mathematics intervention previously known to show a diminishing treatment effect over time. We compared the intervention group to a matched subset of the control group with a similar mean and variance of scores at the end of treatment. We then tested the relative contributions of factors that similarly constrain learning in children from treatment and control groups with the same level of post-treatment achievement and pre-existing differences between these two groups to the fadeout of the treatment effect over time. We found approximately 72% of the fadeout effect to be attributable to pre-existing differences between children in treatment and control groups with the same level of achievement at post-test. These differences were fully statistically attenuated by children’s prior academic achievement

Validating the SEDA Measures of District Educational Opportunities via a Common Assessment

The Stanford Educational Data Archive (SEDA) is the first data set to allow comparisons of district academic achievement and growth from Grades 3 to 8 across the United States, shining a light on the distribution of educational opportunities. This study describes a convergent validity analysis of the SEDA growth estimates in mathematics and English Language Arts (ELA) by comparing the SEDA estimates against estimates derived from NWEA's MAP Growth assessments. We find strong precision-adjusted correlations between growth estimates from SEDA and MAP Growth in math (.90) and ELA (.82). We also find that the discrepancy between the growth estimates in ELA is slightly more pronounced in high socioeconomic districts. Our analyses indicate a high degree of congruence between the SEDA estimates and estimates derived from the vertically scaled MAP Growth assessment. However, small systematic discrepancies imply that the SEDA growth estimates are less likely to generalize to estimates obtained through MAP Growth in some states

Stymied Mobility or Temporary Lull? The Puzzle of Lagging Hispanic College Degree Attainment

We assess the intergenerational educational mobility of recent cohorts of high school graduates to consider whether Hispanics’ lagging postsecondary attainment reflects a temporary lull due to immigration of low education parents or a more enduring pattern of unequal transmission of social status relative to whites. Using data from three national longitudinal studies, a recent longitudinal study of Texas high school seniors and a sample of students attending elite institutions, we track post-secondary enrollment and degree attainment patterns at institutions of differing selectivity. We find that group differences in parental education and nativity only partly explain the Hispanicwhite gap in college enrollment, and not evenly over time. Both foreign- and native-born collegeeducated Hispanic parents are handicapped in their ability to transmit their educational advantages to their children compared with white parents. We conclude that both changing population composition and unequal ability to confer status advantages to offspring are responsible for the growing Hispanic-white degree attainment gap

Educational Inequality Regimes amid Algebra-for-All: The Provision and Allocation of Expanding Educational Opportunities.

Schools can approach the task of sorting students to privileged learning opportunities in different ways, potentially creating distinct and durable educational inequality regimes. We test this idea by exploring variation in socioeconomic inequalities in advanced mathematics course-taking across California middle schools during a statewide algebra-for-all initiative. This case provides unique insight into local stratification processes since the state pressured schools to boost advanced course enrollments but provided little guidance about how to do so. We distinguish two critical organizational processes: the provision of different types of opportunities and the allocation of students to opportunities. The former, we argue, creates the potential for inequality; the latter determines what level of inequality is realized. Using panel data for all public middle schools in the state over a decade, we demonstrate a curvilinear association between opportunities and inequality, with disparities highest when opportunities are most differentiated. However, allocations at most schools were less unequal than would be expected under a test-based meritocratic allocation regime. Further, we find substantial school-level variation which is systematically related to organizational characteristics and consistent over time. These patterns provide evidence for local educational inequality regimes

Eighth-Grade Algebra Course Placement and Student Motivation for Mathematics

This study uses student panel data to examine the association between algebra placement and student motivation for mathematics. Changes in achievement goals, expectancy, and task value for students in eighth-grade algebra are compared with those of peers placed in lower-level mathematics courses (N = 3,306). In our sample, students placed in algebra reported an increase in performance-avoidance goals as well as decreases in academic self-efficacy and task value. These relations were attenuated for students who had high mathematics achievement prior to algebra placement. Whereas all students reported an overall decline in performance-approach goals over the course of eighth grade, previously high-achieving students reported an increase in these goals. Lastly, previously high-achieving students reported an increase in mastery goals. These findings suggest that while previously high-achieving students may benefit motivationally from eighth-grade algebra placement, placing previously average- and low-performing students in algebra can potentially undermine their motivation for mathematics

Students Left Behind: Measuring 10th to 12th Grade Student Persistence Rates in Texas High Schools

The No Child Left Behind Act requires states to publish high school graduation rates for public schools and the U.S. Department of Education is currently considering a mandate to standardize high school graduation rate reporting. However, no consensus exists among researchers or policymakers about how to measure high school graduation rates. In this paper, we use longitudinal data tracking a cohort of students at 82 Texas public high schools to assess the accuracy and precision of three widely-used high school graduation rate measures: Texas’s official graduation rates, and two competing estimates based on publicly available enrollment data from the Common Core of Data. Our analyses show that these widely-used approaches yield inaccurate and highly imprecise estimates of high school graduation and persistence rates. We propose several guidelines for using existing graduation and persistence rate data and argue that a national effort to track students as they progress through high school is essential to reconcile conflicting estimates