The main mechanism under federal law to support school improvement often fails to do its job, according to a new report from EdTrust, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on equity in education.
The report examines how state accountability systems have evolved in the near decade since Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act. The law provided more flexibility than its predecessor, the No Child Left Behind Act, in how states could design their accountability systems and help low-performing schools improve.
No Child Left Behind required states to identify schools for improvement with the goal of getting every student to proficiency for their grade level by 2014. The law imposed increasingly serious sanctions on schools that continually failed to make “adequate yearly progress” in test scores.
ESSA, passed in 2015, allowed states to expand the definition of school quality to include academic growth rather than just standardized test scores. It also allowed states to give schools more credit for the strategies they used to help students improve.
But while most states have adapted their accountability systems under ESSA, they’re still far from being truly equitable, the report found.
About half of states use ESSA’s school identification process, which determines which schools need to improve, to ensure schools with performance disparities among students of color can access state and federal resources to fix those disparities, the report said. Only 11 states include information on the performance of individual student groups, like students with disabilities and low-income students, in their overall school performance rating.
And no states have set rigorous exit criteria to ensure schools identified as needing improvement “are effectively making meaningful and sustainable progress toward improved student outcomes,” the report said.
“Unfortunately, states have a long way to go in terms of centering equity in their accountability systems, particularly thinking about how they’re rating schools and identifying schools for support,” said Nicholas Munyan-Penney, assistant director of P-12 policy at EdTrust and one of the authors of the report.
EdTrust’s analysis is the latest report this year to point out the shortcomings of state accountability systems under ESSA. In January, the Government Accountability Office examined a sample of district plans for improving their lowest-performing schools, and found that fewer than half met federal requirements even though states had approved them. As a result, schools in need of improvement—the bottom 5 percent in a state—were left without clear improvement strategies and didn’t receive dedicated resources to execute turnarounds, Congress’ nonpartisan watchdog found.
Not all measures of academic growth work the same
Most states now measure student academic growth, in addition to raw student performance, in their accountability systems, according to the report. Academic growth allows schools to show that they are helping students develop their knowledge and skills, even if they fall short of the annual testing benchmark for proficiency, making accountability systems “more reflective of what a student has actually learned,” the report said.
One thing the report highlights is that the different ways of measuring growth have tradeoffs. States use a variety of ways to measure academic growth, some more technically sophisticated than others. Twenty-four use what’s called a student growth percentile model, which assesses students’ progress compared to peers with similar scores on state assessments.
EdTrust argues the student growth percentile can give “a misleading impression of the progress schools are making” because a student who made little to no progress toward grade level proficiency can still have a positive student growth percentile score as long as other students around the state performed worse.
“That’s particularly impactful in the wake of the pandemic, when lots of students were falling behind,” Munyan-Penney said.
Instead, EdTrust recommends states use a value-table measure of growth, which 13 states use, according to the report. Value-table systems measure students’ performance year to year, crediting schools when students move up within a performance level, or from one performance level to the next.
Eight states use a value-added growth model to measure student performance gains. The model uses a formula to measure how attending a specific school improves a student’s test score compared to a typical school in the state. These growth measures often control for student demographics like race and ethnicity, but EdTrust argues this can lead to different targets for different student groups.
Many states fail to account for the performance of specific student populations in their accountability systems, the report said. One of the original objectives of No Child Left Behind was to spotlight performance differences among various student subgroups.
States set an “n-size,” or a minimum number of students required for a student group to be included in a school’s ratings calculations. The law does not specify a number.
Seventeen states use an n-size of 20, and 13 have even higher n-sizes, according to the report. In practice, what that means is that if a school in a state with an n-size of 20 for Black students only has 19 Black students, those students’ growth isn’t reflected in the accountability system.
EdTrust recommends that states set their n-size to 10 students. Currently, 13 states meet that threshold, according to the report.
States can do more to help struggling schools improve
One of the core goals of accountability systems is to help schools improve.
The EdTrust report found that 30 states require schools to show growth to exit from their improvement status, and 11 of those states also require schools to participate in improvement activities, which can include strategies such as conducting a strengths and needs assessment of the school or developing ways to help English learners improve, to exit their improvement status.
EdTrust recommends that states set exit criteria that require schools to show substantial improvement that can be sustained, and participate meaningfully in school improvement measures. No states meet those recommendations, according to the report.
“States have large latitude in the way they fund school improvement,” Munyan-Penney said. “They get to set aside 7 percent of their Title I dollars to fund school improvement, but there just isn’t a lot of information out there about how that’s being done.”
The report recommended that states and the federal government set more rigorous exit criteria for schools identified as needing improvement to move beyond that status. The federal government should also increase its monitoring of state’s school improvement measures, the report said.
States should be “really thinking about how [they] can be leveraging the school improvement provision of ESSA that exists already and supplementing those with additional state resources to make sure that schools that are low-performing, not serving students as well as they could be, are getting access to the support they need,” Munyan-Penney said.
