Thomas B. Fordham Institute - Advancing Educational Excellence

The Fordham Report 2006: How Well Are States Educating Our Neediest Children?

November 1, 2006

The Fordham Report 2006: How Well Are States Educating Our Neediest Children? appraises each state according to thirty indicators across three major categories: student achievement for low-income, African-American, and Hispanic students; achievement trends for these same groups over the last 10-15 years; and the state's track record in implementing bold education reforms. It finds that just eight states can claim even moderate success over the past 15 years at boosting the percentage of their poor or minority students who are at or above proficient in reading, math or science. In addition, most states making significant achievement gains--including California, Delaware, Florida, New York, Massachusetts, and Texas--are national leaders in education reform, indicating that solid standards, tough accountability, and greater school choice can yield better classroom results.

View the press release for this report

Contents

Measuring Education Reform & Results--Achievement

 

The mission of this report is to take the school reform principles described above and apply them to the performance to date of the 50 states. But at the end of the day, what matters most is whether students are learning. And even the latest snapshot of test scores leaves us wondering if a state is making gains, falling behind, or treading water. Thus, we also look at trends over time. So we came up with three grades for each state:

  • Student Achievement
  • Achievement Trends 
  • Education Reform

A crucial decision was to focus primarily on the performances of poor and minority students and on reforms that are most likely to boost their achievement. These are the students who have historically been most likely to fall through the cracks of our education system. Major reform efforts, such as the No Child Left Behind Act, are designed above all to boost their achievement. An examination of their progress over time is the best indicator, we think, of whether education reforms are getting results.

Of course that doesn't mean we're oblivious to the performances of white, Asian, or affluent students. Indeed, we opted not to measure "achievement gaps" because such benchmarks can create perverse incentives. After all, there are two ways to close a gap-by raising the achievement of students at the bottom or holding down the achievement of students at the top. The latter method is insidious and deserves no encouragement.

Some readers will dispute certain indicators. They'll also note that we are not the first group to give "report cards" to the states; Education Week's respected annual Quality Counts series is probably the best known of this genre. Each of them, however, is driven by particular policy preferences and values. We believe that our method is superior for two reasons. First, because two-thirds of our assessment of each state is based on student learning results, the true coin of the education reform realm. Second, because the reforms we examine herein (and describe below) are those most apt to raise the achievement of the kids whose achievement most needs raising.


Student Achievement

Indicators and Calculations

Nine of our 12 student achievement indicators come from NAEP: the percentage of African-American, Hispanic, and low-income students who are proficient in fourth-grade reading, eighth-grade mathematics, and eighth-grade science. These are the three subjects for which state specific data exist. We chose fourth-grade reading because students who aren't reading by then are unlikely ever to catch up. We chose eighth-grade math and science because those are "gateway" subjects to success in high school and higher education. And we chose "at or above proficient" because that is the level which the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) believes all students should reach in order to be prepared for life in our economy and democracy. We understand that it's a high standard but, like President George W. Bush, we reject the "soft bigotry of low expectations."

We also included high school graduation rates as key student outcomes, again focusing on African-American and Hispanic children. Graduation data are notoriously unreliable; most states are struggling to develop a common approach. In the meantime, we chose the best available method that yields data for most states: Education Week's "Swanson" method, which examines graduation outcomes from ninth to twelfth grades, attempting to adjust for mobility and other factors.

Finally, we included an indicator about success in the Advanced Placement (A.P.) program, a measurable reflection of whether states are encouraging a broad swath of their student population to take rigorous coursework and preparing them to succeed in it. We measured the percentage of a state's high school students who had passed at least one A.P. exam by 2005. (We would have preferred to look at pass rates among poor and/or minority students, but the College Board does not provide these data in disaggregated form by state.)

For each indicator, we developed a grading scale to equate raw data to letter grades. These are shown in the appendix. We then averaged these marks (as with a student's grade-point average) to determine states' overall grades for student achievement (see appendix).

States that did not have data for a particular indicator were not penalized. However, in order for a state to be assigned a student achievement grade and included in the national rankings, it must have NAEP data for at least two out of the three subgroups (African-American, Hispanic, and low-income students) and for at least two out of the three subjects (reading, math, and science). This parameter excludes states with tiny minority populations (six in all). But the alternative would have been worse, as it would have presented an inaccurate picture. (Imagine this headline: "Maine leads nation in educating African-American and Hispanic students.")

It's also important to acknowledge that the focus on African-American and Hispanic students ignores other disadvantaged minority groups, which in some states comprise a significant proportion of the student population. For instance, several states have a sizeable Native American population. Unfortunately, they share the same disappointing NAEP scores as their black and Hispanic counterparts in more urbanized regions. (Only 13 percent of Montana's Native American fourth graders are at or above proficient in reading, for example.) However, in order to maintain a nationally comparable look across all states, we could not include these groups in the state grades, though we do highlight their performance in the state reports where appropriate.

 
Results

The grades for student achievement are dismal. The national average is a D; three states flunked, and none earned a grade higher than D+. Still, some states do better by their poor and minority students than others; top performers include such large, diverse states as Virginia, New Jersey, and Maryland. In Virginia, for example, 26 percent of Hispanic fourth graders are at or above proficient in reading and 22 percent of Hispanic eighth graders are at or above proficient in science. Of course, these are still desperately low numbers, hardly worth celebrating.

While southern states dominate the bottom of the list, there are a few surprises there, too. Illinois, Nebraska, Nevada, and Rhode Island all rank among the lowest on the performance of their most disadvantaged students.

In Illinois, for example, only 9 percent of black fourth graders are "at or above proficient" in reading and just 10 percent of low-income eighth graders have reached that level in math. This means that most of the state's poor and minority children are ill-prepared for success in later life. 

Some state officials will surely argue that our grading scale is too difficult, especially when it comes to NAEP results. We concede that NAEP's "proficient" level is a high bar, though one that indicates readiness for college and the workplace. Would a state really deserve an A if less than half of its students failed to reach this level? As it is, a state can earn an "honors" grade with just one-third of its students reaching proficiency-if anything, we are being too generous.

 

Furthermore, were the same scale applied to white students, their national average would be a B. While such marks aren't stellar, they dramatize the real problem: inexcusably low achievement for poor and minority youngsters. The numbers are particularly bleak for African-American students in science, where only seven percent of eighth graders have reached proficiency. Barely half of all black students graduate from high school on time. In other words, the achievement gap is miles wide-and a national shame.

 

 

 

Achievement Trends

Indicators and Calculations

For this rating, we again turned to NAEP and analyzed trends for African-American, Hispanic, and low-income students at the proficient level or above in fourth-grade reading, eighth-grade math, and eighth-grade science.

Trends were examined using NCES's data explorer, which measures "statistically significant progress" between two comparison years. Statistically significant progress indicates that the observed changes in percentages are not likely to be the result of sampling or measurement errors, but arise from dependable population differences. (The National Center for Education Statistics is a useful resource for further information on this topic.)

In general, we looked at whether a state's black, Hispanic, and low-income students made significant progress from 1992 to 2005 in reading; 1992 to 2005 in math; and 1996 to 2005 in science.  Some states did not start participating in NAEP until later, however (it was optional until 2003); for those, we set the starting date whenever their involvement commenced.

We then rated each state on the degree to which its student groups made significant progress in the three subjects.

 
Results

No state made "widespread" progress over the past decade and a half, but 31 states have made some progress and eight-California, Delaware, Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Texas and Washington-showed moderate gains during that time for poor and minority students. Their diversity is striking: big and small, urban and rural, red and blue, and geographically dispersed. Seventeen states made limited progress and another six states made minimal progress. However, thirteen states made no significant progress with these populations. Five of them-Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin-are also found in the bottom half of the achievement rankings, meaning that their lack of progress is all the more disappointing.

As shown in Table 7, more states made gains in math than in reading and science; twenty states demonstrated significant progress for African-American youngsters in math, ten for Hispanic students, and twenty-four for low-income students. This isn't too surprising; the nation as a whole has shown strong progress in math over the past decade or so, while reading and science achievement have been relatively flat.

 

 

 

 


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