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\nWhen parents look for information to help them choose a good elementary or secondary school for their child, they often turn to a variety of sources online.<\/p>\n
\nWhen parents look for information to help them choose a good elementary or secondary school for their child, they often turn to a variety of sources online.<\/p>\n
For instance, they may check out state government websites that provide \u201creport cards<\/a>\u201d on local schools. Examples include Virginia\u2019s\u00a0School Quality Profiles<\/a>\u00a0or Ohio\u2019s\u00a0School Report Cards<\/a>.<\/p>\n Parents might also rely on popular school rating websites like\u00a0GreatSchools.org<\/a>,\u00a0Niche.com<\/a>\u00a0or U.S. News & World Report\u2019s\u00a0K-12 schools directory<\/a>, which claims to help parents find the \u201cbest\u201d schools for their child.<\/p>\n As a researcher who specializes in\u00a0education policy<\/a>, I see some shortcomings with how many of these websites portray school quality to the public. I\u2019m interested in the kinds of information that parents use to make school-related decisions. I also study how parental decisions about which school to select for their child might influence student diversity within schools.<\/p>\n Along with fellow\u00a0education researcher Jeffrey Henig<\/a>, I conducted a survey with a nationally representative sample of 2,800 parents or caretakers of children under age 12. With financial support from the\u00a0Spencer Foundation<\/a>\u00a0and technical assistance from\u00a0YouGov<\/a>,\u00a0we embedded an experiment<\/a>\u00a0in the survey to see how enrollment decisions might vary if parents chose schools based on different kinds of academic performance data.<\/p>\n More specifically, we enabled parents to look at a school\u2019s academic performance in\u00a0two different ways<\/a>: achievement status and achievement growth. Achievement status is based on students\u2019 current levels of academic performance, whereas achievement growth considers students\u2019 academic performance over time.<\/p>\n We found<\/a>\u00a0that when parents are given information about achievement growth, they tend to choose schools that are not only more effective at teaching their students but also more demographically diverse.<\/p>\n To make more informed choices for their children, parents need a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of these two ways to measure schools\u2019 academic performance. But many websites meant to help parents choose schools \u2013 whether government or commercial sites \u2013 offer information about only achievement status.<\/p>\n Achievement status refers to individual students\u2019 academic performance at a single point in time. For example, 50% of a hypothetical school\u2019s fifth graders might be proficient in reading as measured by the state\u2019s annual reading test. Measures of achievement status like this provide a rough understanding of how students are doing in the tested subjects.<\/p>\n However, achievement status does not tell the public much about how schools contribute to student learning. Students face different obstacles both inside and outside of school, such as the\u00a0challenges of poverty<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0racial discrimination<\/a>, and they enter school with different levels of preparation. As a result, schools with relatively high achievement status tend to be\u00a0disproportionately white and wealthy<\/a>.<\/p>\n Achievement growth, on the other hand, refers to the rate of change in individual students\u2019 academic performance from one year to the next. Consider the same hypothetical school where 50% of the fifth graders are proficient in reading. But the year before, when those same students were fourth graders, only 40% were proficient in reading. Something very positive is happening in this school, but people would miss it if they focused exclusively on the 50% proficiency rate. Rather than looking at the results from a single year, achievement growth measures changes like this over time.<\/p>\n Some researchers argue that growth is a better measure of school effectiveness than status. For instance, education researcher\u00a0Morgan Polikoff<\/a>\u00a0has noted<\/a>\u00a0how indicators of achievement status, like proficiency rates, \u201cessentially measure who is enrolled in a school, rather than how well the school is doing at educating them.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBecause such status measures merely capture the current performance levels of students, proficiency rates are highly correlated with student socioeconomic status and other demographics,\u201d Polikoff has written. \u201cGrowth-based measures, on the other hand, can show students\u2019 year-to-year changes and better demonstrate the school\u2019s effectiveness or contribution to student learning.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, a school\u2019s academic\u00a0growth has much<\/a>\u00a0less<\/a>\u00a0to do with who\u2019s enrolled at the school and more to do with what the school is doing to educate those students.<\/p>\n Some people might wonder whether a school\u2019s rate of achievement growth merely reflects the fact that, for many schools serving disadvantaged students, those students may just have more room to grow.\u00a0In fact<\/a>, there are roughly as many high-growth schools that serve disproportionately affluent students as there are high-growth schools that serve disproportionately low-income students. As it turns out, all students \u2013 no matter their backgrounds \u2013 have a similar capacity to learn and grow.<\/p>\n For my study, I asked participants to choose between three randomly selected schools drawn from the same randomly selected school district somewhere in the United States. To guide this choice, participants received a range of demographic information about each school, such as the percentages of white, Black, and Hispanic students and the percentage of students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch \u2013 a common measure of economic disadvantage. In addition, some participants were\u00a0randomly assigned to receive information<\/a>\u00a0about each school\u2019s average status, average growth, or both.<\/p>\n What I found is that when parents are provided with information about a school\u2019s current academic performance, they tend to choose higher-status schools, which, on average, have more students who are white and from families with higher income. However, when parents are provided with student growth data, they tend to choose higher-growth schools, many of which serve larger proportions of low-income students and students of color.<\/p>\n For this reason, school rating websites that provide only achievement status information are essentially nudging families toward the whitest and most affluent schools in a community. This exacerbates school segregation, especially if white and affluent families are more likely to have the economic means to decide where they want to live and where to send their kids to school.<\/p>\n Increasingly, school districts and states have included growth data in their reports on local schools. As of 2020,\u00a043 states<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0District of Columbia<\/a>\u00a0reported achievement growth info in their annual school report cards.<\/p>\n However, with the exception of\u00a0GreatSchools.org<\/a>, most school rating websites have yet to incorporate student achievement growth data into the range of information that they provide.<\/p>\n Measuring growth has also been made more difficult by the COVID-19 pandemic. Notably, annual standardized tests were canceled in\u00a02020<\/a>\u00a0and frequently administered in modified formats in\u00a02021<\/a>. It will be more challenging \u2013 but not\u00a0impossible<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 for states to calculate growth accurately for the next few years because of the missing and modified tests during the pandemic.<\/p>\n Calculating students\u2019 rates of growth on tests is a technical and\u00a0complicated process<\/a>. The results are often difficult for many people to understand. The next step in my research is to identify more effective and intuitive ways of communicating growth data to the public.<\/p>\nStatus vs. growth<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Toward more diverse schools<\/strong><\/h4>\n
The future of growth data<\/strong><\/h4>\n