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High-Flying Schools, Student Disadvantage, and the Logic of NCLB


File number :
CS-ISC-34e

Bibliographic reference :

Harris, D.H. (2007). High-Flying Schools, Student Disadvantage, and the Logic of NCLB. American Journal of Education, 113(3), 367-394.



Abstract :

In spite of efforts deployed to reduce educational inequalities, they continue to persist for ethnic minority and disadvantaged students. These inequalities account for the most important problems faced by educational systems.

The author of this article reacted to reports published in the United States by the Education Trust (ET) and the Heritage Foundation, identifying some schools as high flying despite serving a disadvantaged clientele. As a result, schools unable to rank among high flyers become responsible for their students not succeeding in school as expected, because schools neglect the influence of the student environment. The logic underlying these reports is likewise applied as part of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy introduced in 2001 by the American government. The levels of achievement reached by students, not their school progress, are considered within this policy. Schools are penalized if their students do not reach the expected achievement level, even though they succeeded in making their students progress in school.

Shedding New Light on Results from the Education Trust (ET) Study
In this article, the author discusses methodological considerations involved in the ET study that lead, in his opinion, to results being misinterpreted.

In the ET study, schools identified as high flyers must meet two criteria: (1) a high achievement rate and (2) a high poverty rate. The ET study identified 3592 schools with these criteria. However, because the achievement criterion is based on a single academic subject, a single year and a single grade level, it provides a limited picture of the situation and increases the number of schools ranked as high flyers. The author also emphasized that even if this number was right, it nonetheless represented a very small number of disadvantaged schools when considering all these schools across the entire country.

The author conducted a second analysis of the data used by the ET and drawn from the School Level Achievement Database (SLAD), which involved data on 62,000 schools across 47 American states.

In particular, the author found that by basing his analyses on a more consistent definition of the criteria (by considering two academic subjects over two years and for two grade levels), only 1% of high-poverty schools met the criteria required to rank as high flyers, as opposed to 15.6% of schools in the ET study, representing a 93% decrease. Based on these results, low-poverty schools are 22 times as likely to be high performers.

In line with the same definition, the proportion of low-poverty schools achieving high performance was also lower, but significantly less so (54.2% versus 24.2%, representing a 55% decrease).

With the poverty level of schools considered along with their proportion of ethnic minority students, it was found that schools serving student populations that are both low-poverty and low-ethnic minority are 89% more likely to reach expected levels of performance compared with high-poverty, high-ethnic minority schools.

The author also criticized practices used by certain schools to increase their chances to be ranked among the best, such as using admission policies that restrict the access of under-performing students or integrating these students into groups whose performances are not considered during assessments.

Addressing only the effectiveness of school systems, although necessary, is therefore insufficient. By making schools responsible for educational inequalities and emphasizing the levels of achievement students reach instead of their school progress, inequalities are more likely to be reinforced than countered.



Links :
This journal is also available in electronic format. Publisher’s Website Address: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJE/home.html"

Key Words :
Socio-economic Status, Ethnic Minority, Role of the School, Inequality of Opportunities, Accountability, Methodological Issues, Quantitative Analysis, Newsletter9

Monitored Countries :
United States