Low-Income Students

While many education advocates prepare for the looming sequester on March 1, the education policy news in D.C. wasn’t all bad this week. The nation is now on track – for the first time– to reach a 90 percent high school graduation rate by 2020, according to the fourth annual Building a Grad Nation report. Released at the Grad Nation Summit, hosted by America’s Promise Alliance, the report analyzes trends in the national graduation rate, which increased from 71.7 percent in 2001 to 78.2 percent in 2010, and celebrates the significant advances states have made.

States’ progress has accelerated since 2006, thanks in part to an outsized 2.7 percentage point increase in the graduation rate between 2009 and 2010. The recent gains are also largely due to improved graduation rates for Hispanic students (10.4 point gain) and for black students (6.9 point gain). Two states – Wisconsin and Vermont – have already hit the 90 percent mark, and eighteen more are on pace to meet it by 2020.

Notably, these gains come at a time when many states also increased high school requirements and when schools faced heightened accountability measures under No Child Left Behind. In 2012, nine states required students to pass end-of-course exams to graduate, compared to only two in 2002. Six more states required students to take end-of-course exams in 2012, but did not require a passing score. States are also continuing to raise the bar with adoption of the Common Core and other college- and career-ready standards.

Further, Grad Nation reports that over a million students are no longer attending dropout factories, compared to 2002, and the overall number of dropout factories fell by nearly 600 schools. Dropout factories are high schools where twelfth grade enrollment is 60 percent or less then ninth grade enrollment three years earlier. Again, the beneficiaries of this trend were mostly minority students: in 2002, almost half of America’s black students attended a dropout factory, but in 2011, only a quarter did so – a fifty percent decline.

While celebrating the achievements of the last decade, the report also cites the challenges that lie between today’s status quo and the 2020 goal. Over twenty states are not on pace to achieve a 90 percent graduation rate. More troubling, persistent achievement gaps remain. In 30 states, at least one-third of students with disabilities fail to graduate. The same is true for English Language Learners in 33 states, black students in 20 states, and Hispanic students in 16 states. In many cases, the proportion of students failing to graduate in these subgroups is much higher.

Another challenge lies within the data. The 78.2 percent mark was determined using the Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate (AFGR), rather than the 4-year Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate – the uniform methodology states and the federal government agreed to use in 2008. The Cohort Rate will enable a more consistent measure of graduation rates and allow states to more precisely identify schools and strategies that are preventing dropout. But there are technical questions about how to calculate the new rates. After the switch to the Cohort Rate in 2012, the difference between the old and new calculation methods was over five percentage points in nine states. Without a consistent measure, it is unclear how far and how fast states will need to improve to meet the 2020 goal.

Because of these lingering challenges, it is incredibly important for states and the federal government to remain vigilant in reporting accurate data and holding schools accountable for graduation rates, especially for at-risk students. As Ed Money Watch previously reported, many states have backtracked on commitments to graduation rate accountability in their waivers from No Child Left Behind – giving schools equal credit for students that take longer than four years to graduate, or counting GEDs and other non-diplomas. Further, many states are not holding schools accountable for – or even reporting – other measures that are critical early warning indicators of dropout, like chronic absenteeism.

With increased attention on students’ preparedness for college and careers after graduation, schools cannot forget about supporting students who are struggling just to finish their high school degree. To help, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced a new grant competition to place more AmeriCorps volunteers in the nation’s lowest-performing schools. While admirable, this is hardly a comprehensive solution. Federal and state lawmakers must do more and consider both goals – preventing dropout and increasing college and career readiness – equally when creating policies to measure and improve student achievement in our nation’s high schools.

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Obama, Rubio Put Higher Education on Notice, David Wessel
The Wall Street Journal

Senator Marco Rubio and President Barack Obama may not agree on much these days, but they do agree that the way the federal government spends money on student aid needs to change. In this year’s State of the Union, President Obama called for incorporating measures of value and affordability into higher education’s accreditation system or establishing a path to alternative accreditation for nontraditional providers. Senator Rubio, in his response to the State of the Union, said, “We need student aid that does not discriminate against programs that nontraditional students rely on—like online courses or degree programs that give you credit for work experience.” While it is unclear how and when accreditation could be changed, something needs to update the archaic 19^th century practice and bring it to the 21^st century. “The focus by Mr. Obama and Mr. Rubio on accreditation suggests a worry that the old system could stifle innovation,” writes Wessel, “And prevent competition from new, perhaps more efficient forms of teaching.”

On June 9, 1904, Harvard's president, Charles W. Eliot, wrote a letter to Charles Francis Adams Jr. A former railroad executive, Adams was a member of the college's Board of Overseers and, as a grandson of John Quincy Adams, a multigenerational Harvard legacy. The two men were quarreling over the question of raising tuition to ease a financial crisis. Wrote Eliot:

In President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday, he called on Congress to expand high-quality early learning opportunities to low- and moderate-income children. Today, with the release of a White House document and a speech at a Decatur, Ga. pre-K center, Obama sketched more of the plan’s details.

Last week, a district court in Texas ruled in favor of more than 600 Texas school districts, finding that the state’s education finance system is unconstitutional. This is nothing new for Texas – all told, six school finance lawsuits have been tried against the state since 1984, the last in 2005. Each round of lawsuits has prompted the legislature to tinker with the funding formulas. That has added complexity and apparently exacerbated underlying inequities.

Using data and statistics from the New America Foundation’s Federal Education Budget Project (FEBP), we were able to reveal that the inequities across Texas school districts are in fact significant. Worse yet, the inequities have indeed increased over the past several years.

The latest litigation in Texas was brought on by $5.4 billion in cuts that the legislature made to public education in the 2012-13 biennium. The cuts break down into three figures: (1) $2.2 billion from shifting public funds for schools to the 2014-15 biennium; (2) $1.8 billion from assuming no student enrollment growth over the two years; and (3) $1.4 billion from the elimination of programs such as the state pre-kindergarten grant program, as well as reductions in many other public education programs.

While these cuts sparked the latest lawsuit, the districts involved in the suit have indicated that restoring these funds would not be enough to fix the broken system. The court ruled that the state not only provides insufficient funding for education, but that it is unfairly distributed to school districts. In other words, increasing funding through an inequitable formula does not, by definition, make education spending more equitable.

The FEBP data make that abundantly clear. In 2006, per-pupil spending in Texas varied on average 9.3 percent, or $693, from district to district. Three years later in 2009, per-pupil spending varied on average 9.7 percent, or $831, from district to district. And this growing disparity is even more evident at the local level.

Consider Penelope Independent School District. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the Waco-area district is relatively property-poor – it gets only 14 percent of its per-student revenue from local taxes. And overall, it spent just over $9,300 per student in 2009 (slightly above the state average). Meanwhile, Glen Rose Independent School District outside of Dallas received more than 83 percent of its per-pupil revenue from local sources. That district spent more than $11,300 per student in 2009.

But those figures don’t necessarily align with the two districts’ needs. Whereas nearly 75 percent of Penelope ISD’s student body was eligible for free and reduced price lunches (a proxy for student poverty), only about 40 percent of Glen Rose ISD’s students were eligible. Penelope students struggled more in 2009 state achievement tests, too, with only half of fourth-grade students proficient in reading and math, while Glen Rose fourth graders were 88 and 95 percent proficient in reading and math, respectively.

Of course, research has shown that the payoff from spending more money on students is not always improved academic success. But wealthier districts tend to be at an advantage in hiring more experienced teachers and providing extra support services. Fair and equitable funding should be an essential element of state education policies.

The inequalities in Texas’s school finance formulas are mirrored in federal and state funding formulas around the country – and this week’s ruling is just the latest update to a long history of attempts to ensure equal access to quality education.

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In education policy, where so much of the focus is on how much is wrong with today’s schools, it’s refreshing to see examples of something going right. In an op-ed yesterday in the New York Times, David Kirp writes about what he found after spending a year in Union City, N.J., where children are achieving at a very high rate despite coming from poverty and living in families where English is a second language.

Last week was National School Choice Week, a celebration that tends to make strange bedfellows of education policy advocates. The broad appeal of the movement – parents should be able to choose a high-quality school for their children – belies the volatile political reality. However, two recent reports add empirical evidence to the frequently emotional and personal discussions surrounding school choice.

The cleverly-titled School Choice Regulations: Red Tape or Red Herring?, from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, examines the assertion that state-imposed regulations and accountability measures discourage private schools from participating in voucher or tax-credit programs. The report surveyed 241 private schools in five voucher-participating cities: Cleveland, Cincinnati, Dayton, Indianapolis, and Milwaukee. 

Surprisingly, the authors found that regulations don’t act as a strong deterrent for participation. Only 3 percent of non-participating schools listed program regulations as the primary reason for not opting in.

A descriptive analysis of 13 voucher programs and tax credit scholarship programs found a similarly mild effect on participation. Moving from the lowest to highest regulation burden represented only a 9 percent decrease in participation from private schools.

Instead of restrictions and accountability measures, the most-cited reason for not participating was the availability of voucher-eligible families. It seems that these schools believe the area they serve wouldn’t provide enough qualified voucher students to make participation worthwhile. In fact, more than a third of non-voucher schools reported that they would be more likely to participate if the program extended eligibility to all families in the form of a universal voucher.

While voucher regulations had a small deterrent effect, it’s interesting to note that Catholic schools – which make up more than a third of private education options – had high participation even in the most heavily regulated environments. The study’s authors believe that combatting declining enrollments, as well as a foundational mission to serve the poor, drives this participation.

School Choice Week also brought a new report from Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) examining changes in charter school achievement levels over time. Weighing in at two volumes and about 200 pages, Charter School Growth and Replication is a detailed study of the impact of network expansion and the range of performance quality within charter schools.

One of its most notable findings is that charter schools with a rocky first year aren’t likely to improve their achievement results over time. A charter school in the lowest quintile of performance its first year has a 66 percent probability of staying in the lowest two quintiles of schools in math and a 70 percent probability of staying in the lowest two quintiles in reading.

The trajectory of the lowest performing schools becomes more entrenched over time – once a school spends two years in the lowest quintile, the probability of staying in the two lowest quintiles ranges from 82 percent to 91 percent in math and 89 percent to 96 percent in reading.

The study further examines the impact of schools that operate as part of a Charter Management Organization (CMO). They find that CMO schools, on average, tend to post the same achievement results as non-CMO schools, but produce better results for disadvantaged subgroups – students of color and those in poverty – than traditional public or non-CMO schools. 

Another striking finding is the broad range of academic quality of CMO networks. In math, 37 percent of networks produce average achievement results stronger than a traditional public school, while 50 percent posted weaker results. In reading, where the spread of effect sizes is even more pronounced, 43 percent of networks fare better than traditional schools and 37 percent fare worse.

While the two reports occupy different spheres of school choice policy – one focused on the provision of education through the private market, the other on the effectiveness of publicly-authorized charter schools – they both convey a similar theme. Regulations imposed on schools matter, but not always in the ways we’d expect.

Fordham’s report delivers a significant blow to the argument that heavy regulations act as a strong deterrent for participation in voucher programs. For private schools considering voucher participation, it seems that the market  of qualified students, as well as internal factors such as admissions criteria and school culture, may play more of a role than previously thought.     

The CREDO study should act as a wake-up call for charter school authorizers. The study suggests that the length of charter authorization periods should be reconsidered: if a school performs poorly in its first few years, it is not likely to improve before its charter is up for renewal.  

Given the noted difficulties in closing poor-performing charter schools, this report may push authorizers to scrutinize new charter school applications even more closely. In a recent op-ed, the New York Times cited the CREDO study as evidence to push for the closing of poor performing schools and limit the authorization of new charters to the “most credible” candidates. Unfortunately, the study shows that credibility is difficult to measure. Operating under the umbrella of a CMO is not necessarily an indicator of quality. Further, the CREDO study finds that characteristics that might seem to indicate success - network maturity, size, and proximity to other network schools – do not provide significant information about future performance.

One bright spot is the Charter School Growth Fund (CSGF), a non-profit that invests in charter school operators. CREDO found that students in schools selected by CSGF tend to outpace peers in both traditional public schools and other non-CSGF CMOs. The ability of CSGF to “pick winners” from the charter school pool suggests that a high level of due diligence and oversight from authorizers can have impact on school quality.

Yesterday at Higher Ed Watch, I argued that a federal solution is needed to ensure that colleges use their institutional aid resources to keep higher education affordable for low- and moderate-income students. But why should the federal government get involved?

The reason is simple: the government is already involved, way involved. It spends nearly $40 billion on the Pell Grant program each year to try to remove the financial barriers that prevent low-income students from enrolling in and completing college through the Pell Grant program. Yet colleges are increasingly undercutting the government’s mission by using their institutional aid dollars to try to attract the students they desire rather than to meet the financial need of the low income students they enroll. Worse yet, there is compelling evidence to suggest that schools are capturing a significant share of the Pell Grant funds they receive and using them for other purposes, such as providing non-need-based aid to recruit high achieving and wealthier students. This is one reason why even after historic increases in funding, the program’s impact is so limited: students and families are not receiving the full benefits as intended.

The enormous growth in non-need-based, or “merit” aid, at four-year colleges over the last two decades has come lately at the expense of the neediest students. Low-income students who attend these institutions often face high levels of “unmet need,” defined as the difference between the cost of attendance and the amount of financial aid they receive. Unmet need forces students to take on significant amounts of debt, including risky private student loans. Financially strapped students also frequently engage in activities that lessen their likelihood of completing their degrees, such as working full-time while attending college or dropping out until they can afford to return.

Welcome to the Syllabus, a weekly guide that provides insight into what’s happening in higher education.

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This week New America’s Education Policy Program published Rebalancing Resources and Incentives in Federal Student Aid. In this policy paper we make more than 30 recommendations on how to improve our complex federal financial aid system so that it works better for students and taxpayers. With this many proposals, there was something for everyone to be happy about or frustrated over—sometimes simultaneously.

Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and ProPublica offer great summaries of our proposal if you haven’t already read it. We also have this one-page explainer that will help get you up to speed.

Do colleges still provide a gateway to opportunity for low-income and working class students? Or are they perpetuating inequality in this country by limiting opportunity to only those who are rich enough to be able to afford it?

That question, which came up during a podcast conversation between my colleague Kevin Carey and New York Times journalist and New America Foundation Schwartz fellow Jason DeParle [author of this riveting article on the subject] last week, is central to proposals we have offered that aim to ensure that colleges use their institutional aid resources to keep higher education affordable for low- and moderate-income students.

Unfortunately this is often not the case. Colleges are, in fact, increasingly raising the barriers to higher education for low income students by redirecting their institutional financial aid dollars to wealthier students.