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RECOMMENDATIONS AND CONCLUSTIONS 6 Recommendations and Conclusions Discussion The results of this exploratory study are encouraging because they indicate that urban schools are making significant academic progress in reading and mathematics. Moreover, our analysis indicated that gains among students in large-city schools were significantly larger than gains in the national sample, suggesting that urban schools may be catching up with national averages. Otherwise, we have shied away from characterizing the size of urban gains except to note that two of the study districts—Atlanta and Boston—had effect sizes between 2003 and 2007 in reading and math, respectively, that were several times larger than either the large-city school or national samples. The findings in this report have special import because they suggest some reasons for these gains, although the reader is cautioned against assuming causal links in the results because of the limited number of study districts. The analysis also suggests steps that might be required to accelerate this progress, particularly as the new common core standards are being implemented. This section synthesizes our findings and observations around broad themes that we think warrant additional discussion and research as the nation’s urban schools move forward. Debate continues, of course, about what separates urban school systems that make major progress from those making more incremental gains or no gains. And sometimes that debate confuses what are perceived to be bold reforms with what actually improves student achievement. This chapter draws on the findings of our study to sort through some of the main issues. Alignment of Standards and Programming The research team working on this study hypothesized that we would find a close relationship between the alignment of NAEP reading and math specifications and state standards, on the one hand, and the ability to make significant gains on NAEP on the other. The reader should keep in mind the limitations to the alignment analysis that we pointed out in chapter 4, but what we found was far more complex than what we had originally anticipated. Essentially, the analysis found that the content alignment or match in reading and math between the NAEP frameworks and state standards in the four study districts was low or moderate. (We did not define what good alignment was other than to designate a content match above 80 percent as high.) In general, North Carolina appeared to have the most consistently aligned standards in reading and grade four math, and it also had the highest overall performance, but it is difficult to draw a causal relationship between alignment and performance. In addition, there was no apparent relationship between the degree of content match and the likelihood that a district would see gains or losses on NAEP in either reading or math. It is possible, however, that the intersection of content and rigor may have greater import than either one alone. In all, it appeared that content alignment on its own was insufficient in the small sample we studied to affect movement on student NAEP scale scores in the four city school systems.
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Council of the Great City Schools and the American Institutes for Research
PIECES OF THE PUZZLE: FACTORS IN THE IMPROVEMENT OF URBAN SCHOOL DISTRICTS ON THE NATIONAL ASSESSMENT OF EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS