Be cautious about buying the headlines

 You've quite possibly seen headlines touting particular states' "miracles" or otherwise having all the answers, suddenly, in student achievement. 

In addition to the caution that Bruce Baker (as so often) offers around how we support schools, I want to also point you to Linda Darling-Hammond's recent piece in Forbes, which cautions about hyping up only fourth grade NAEP, particularly in light of another affirmation of the long-term bad impacts of retaining students in early grades. As Darling-Hammond writes: 

In this article, I look primarily at 8th-grade NAEP scores, because there are two substantial sources of potential distortion in the comparability of 4th-grade NAEP scores across states: the outcomes of grade retention policies and the size of English learner (EL) populations.

About 20 states now have policies that require holding students back in 3rd grade if they score low on a reading test. The rigor of the tests and cut points varies across states. Some states allow for exemptions; others do not, so the results also vary. Some states (like Mississippi) provide extensive interventions to students that prevent many from ultimately being retained; others do not. These differences make the impacts of such policies difficult to generalize. In some cases, states with mandatory 3rd-grade retention policies will appear stronger on 4th-grade NAEP scores because large numbers of their lowest-performing students are excluded from the tested cohort in 4th grade.

What happens to those students after this point as they move through school is an important question. Most studies have found that students retained based on test scores do score higher when they get to the following grade, but their achievement is not always maintained thereafter. Many studies find that these students have higher dropout rates in secondary school. (This can also increase scores when low-performers leave the school population.)

States with fewer English learners also appear more advantaged on 4th-grade tests than those with many ELs, because it takes 5 to 7 years to acquire a new language. Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi have fast-growing populations of ELs, but they are still far lower than states like California and Texas, which serve about four times as many ELs as a share of their populations. For example, half of California’s kindergartners speak a language other than English at home, and most are not fluent in English when they first start school. However, the large majority become fluent within 7 years and, on average, outscore their monolingual English counterparts thereafter in both English language arts and math.

At 8th grade, where the impact of schools over time on a student’s learning is clearer, five of the top 10 states in 8th-grade reading on NAEP in 2024 appear on both the unadjusted and demographically adjusted state rankings: Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. That means that these demographically diverse states (all blue) are doing relatively better than other states for their population as a whole and for their students from low-income backgrounds and English learners. The other states on the list that are high achieving overall (Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Utah) are not as demographically diverse and do not score at the top of the adjusted rankings. Those that are more racially and economically diverse and thus given bigger statistical adjustments—including Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi—are not yet high achieving overall, even though progress is being made.

So what works? School funding reform (no escaping money!), and investment in educational quality (note the Massachusetts state standards get mentioned here),  

Read beyond the headlines and the grabber columns.