Improving Student Achievement: What State NAEP Test Scores Tell Us,Used

Review Recommended for undergraduates, graduate students, researchers, faculty, and professionals. R. C. Morris CHOICE Magazine March 2001Recommended for undergraduates, graduate students, researchers, faculty, and professionals. R. C. Morris, CHOICE Magazine, March 2001 Product Description Fifty states, fifty different educational policies and practices. Which practices are best? The authors find that state test scores differ mainly due to population and family characteristics, not because of different schools or policies. This analysis has been long awaited by the 4.1 million educators in the K12 system nationwide. From the Publisher Great efforts have been made to improve the nation's public K12educational system since the early 1980s. States have been the primaryinitiators of this educational reform. States have leverage toreform education because they provide approximately onehalf ofeducational funding to typical school districts in the nation and setpolicies that influence who teaches and what is taught. Furthermore,state courts also play a key role in deciding whether educationalfunds are adequate and equitably distributed. Even before 1980, thestates had diverse educational systems that varied widely in terms ofperpupil spending, resource allocation, and educational policies.Reforms that have been initiated since then have varied widely bystate in terms of the pace and types of reform, ensuring a continuingwidely diverse set of educational systems across states.Having 50 states taking different approaches to education can providea powerful advantage in the long run if research and evaluationcan identify successful and unsuccessful approaches. Identifyingwhat works, in turn, can help states refine and adapt successful policiesin a continual and ongoing process of improving education.Evaluating the effects of different levels of resources, different uses ofresources, and changing state policies then becomes critical to improvingschools and student outcomes.Perhaps the single most important reason to analyze achievementresults across states is to find out whether public education isamenable to reform and improvement. The crux of the current policydebate about school reform is whether the K12 system of publiceducation is "reformable." Those who argue it is not maintain thatthe present system does not use additional resources effectively becauseof its bureaucratic structure and lack of appropriate internalincentives to change. According to this view, improving educationrequires structural reforms that introduce competition by providingmore choice within the system and more alternatives outside thesystem. Additional resources without this kind of structural reformwould simply be wasted.The alternative position sees resource constraints as the key issueparticularly with respect to disadvantaged students. This view assumesthat additional resources can be used effectively, but only iftargeted to specific programs and types of students. This positionhas been slowly modified to include a different type of structural reform:standardsbased accountability within the public educationsystem through defined criteria and measurements of achievementoutcomes. In this view, a structure of accountability is needed tofocus resources on meeting achievement standards. This type ofreform has been implemented primarily at the state level, beginningin a few states in the mid to late 1980s and, with varying designs,gradually spreading across states. If this type of reform is successful,that success should primarily be reflected in differential score gainsacross states that cannot be accounted for by family characteristicsor changing resources.Another reason to focus on achievement outcomes by state is thatabout twothirds of the variance in perpupil spending is betweenstates, while only onethird is within states. While the state courtscan address withinstate inequalities, federal legislation is the