A Research Focus of the Urban Institute
Even before the No Child Left Behind Act raised the stakes in 2002, Urban Institute's education experts were exploring how schools and teachers would measure up.
About the Research
The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), enacted in 2002, was hailed as a bipartisan success and a promising way to promote student performance and eliminate achievement gaps. Before the law passed, Urban Institute researchers surveyed schools, school districts, and states, gauging the progress of early reforms. Researchers also closely observed Florida's A+ Accountability Plan, which predated NCLB by three years, allowing them to see where nationwide reform was headed.
Achievement testing lies at the heart of the new law, but high schools are also held accountable for their graduation rates. An indicator developed at the Urban Institute offers several significant advantages over other commonly used ways to peg graduation rates. For one, the UI method uses the definition of the high school graduation rate specified by the new law, making it useful for purposes of federal accountability. In addition, UI calculations require only basic information on enrollment and diploma counts, thus avoiding reliance on notoriously unreliable dropout data used by other methods.
NCLB's "highly qualified" teacher mandate is another key provision of the federal initiative. Within two years of the law's passage, some 65,000 teachers had been certified through the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. But does the certification process identify the more effective teachers? This is another critical issue being examined at Urban.
What's New
With education scholars in six states as partners, we founded the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) to mine the longitudinal databases emerging as state education systems face increased accountability pressure.
We are especially interested in who teaches what kinds of students, what determines teacher quality, and the consequences for student outcomes. We expect our research to inform state and local education policies.
Recent Findings
Below are results from our recent studies, reports, articles, and books.
Struggling schools in the nation's capital and in New Orleans require effective education policies and practices.
Giving the mayor and District of Columbia Council more power in a restructure of the city's schools is "no magic bullet" for boosting student achievement, Jane Hannaway, the director of the Education Policy Center testified in January 2007.
What the city might do to improve student performance, Hannaway offered, is to create a better system for collecting data. Such a system can provide feedback on the effects of different policy initiatives and also identify areas and issues where policymakers should focus.
The problems with New Orleans' schools are more complicated, as Hurricane Katrina destroyed most of the public education system there. Yet, at some point, the availability of schools will be what brings residents back.
For more information:
Only 68 percent of those who enter high school will graduate in four years with a diploma, indicating a largely unrecognized crisis in high school completion.
Until recently, graduation rates were not a major focus of educational statistics even though the number of students that complete high school is an important indicator of school system performance. The two most commonly cited sources for dropout and graduation rates—the Center for Education Statistics and the Current Population Survey—produce misleading impressions about public school performance. Further, because states rarely broke down graduation rates by race or socioeconomic status, the extremely low graduation rates now being found for racial and ethnic minorities, students with disabilities, low-income students, and students with limited English proficiency were largely ignored in the past.
The Urban Institute uses the Cumulative Promotion Index, or CPI, to calculate high school graduation rates. Pairing it with the U.S. Department of Education's Common Core of Data, we can now compute graduation rates for the high school class of 2001 in nearly every public school district in the nation. Our findings show that about one-third of all public high school students fail to graduate.
Tremendous racial gaps exist over who graduates and who doesn't. Students from historically disadvantaged minority groups—American Indian, Hispanic, and Black—have little more than a fifty-fifty chance of finishing high school with a diploma. By comparison, graduation rates for Whites and Asians are 75 and 77 percent nationally. The rates for students who attend school in high poverty, racially segregated, and urban school districts lag from 15 to 18 percent behind their peers.
For more information:
Standards-based reform may leave some school districts behind.
The Urban Institute provided some of the first feedback on standards-based reform from the field in the late 1990s. Our findings show that school districts with the least poverty reported the greatest understanding of this reform strategy and also the greatest progress. High-poverty districts, where the need for change is greatest, had the most difficulty establishing standards and aligning the curricula, the early steps of reform.
As part of a team evaluating the Florida A+ Accountability Plan, Urban researchers gained important insights. Both the Florida A+ and NCLB call for annual testing of all students in reading and math in most grades, and both link student performance to consequential actions by the state, including allowing students in "schools in need of improvement" the opportunity to transfer to other schools. We've found that these "choice" provisions are not workable in many urban areas because so many schools fail, leaving few high-performing schools from which to choose.
Putting the NCLB provisions into practice has raised other concerns, especially for students in the lowest-performing schools. One problem is that sanctions might be imposed inequitably across the nation because state standards vary in content and rigor.
For more information:
Based on student-achievement gains, certified teachers appear to be more effective than non-certified teachers.
Having a high-quality teacher can make a big difference in meeting education standards. Thus, National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) began certifying teachers in the mid-1990s. The passage of No Child Left Behind accelerated this push for "highly qualified" teachers, although who meets this definition became one of the most debated provisions of the new law. Recent findings from the Urban Institute indicate that NBPTS is successfully identifying the more effective teachers among the applicants—some 65,000 teachers had been certified by 2003. The importance of NBPTS certification, however, differs significantly by grade level and student type.
Urban Institute research also shows that women are more likely to apply for and gain certification than are men. At the same time, African-American teachers apply at a high rate but are less likely than their white counterparts to get certified. In general, teachers in low-poverty, low-minority, and high-performing schools are much more likely to enter a certification program.
For more information:
The Research Team
Many Urban Institute researchers contribute to research and analyses on the reforms shaping American education:
- Emily Anthony, research associate, an expert in teacher and school performance evaluation;
- Duncan Chaplin, senior research methodologist, an expert in student performance;
- Beatriz Chu Clewell, principal research associate, an expert in school performance evaluation;
- Jane Hannaway, center director, an expert in local education reform and teacher and school performance evaluation; and,
- Kim Rueben, senior research associate, an expert in school finance, teacher labor markets, and teacher recruitment and retention.
Publications
The Urban Institute disseminates many education publications.
