Racine Unified Takes Proactive Steps to Close Achievement Gaps, Enhance Accountability

Across the state, school accountability has been a hot topic in recent weeks, including the first release of individual school report cards in late October, which sparked lively public discussion about how to effectively measure and improve school quality, student achievement, and teacher effectiveness.

In Southeast Wisconsin, Racine Unified School District (RUSD) is actively engaged in addressing these questions. The district has been working since 2009 to reach its North Star Vision, a community-wide effort to hold the district accountable for grade level performance targets. The intent is to improve student achievement and close achievement gaps so that every student can graduate from high school ready for success in college or careers.

In the Forum’s 15^th annual report comparing RUSD with nine peer districts across Wisconsin, we analyze the district’s performance not only as compared to the peers and North Star targets, but against the overall context of community and student demographics, district finances, student engagement, and state-level policy changes. This year’s report also contains an analysis of school- and district-level value-added student growth, which measures the impact of schools and teachers on student learning.

Among our key findings:

• North Star scorecard: Consistent with last year’s findings, the district generally did not meet its North Star grade level targets. This suggests the targets are in need of revisiting, especially as student growth takes on increased relevance in the statewide accountability system and the WKCE is phased out in favor of a new state assessment. It is anticipated that a new superintendent will investigate the need for revisions to the North Star framework in light of past performance and new state objectives and measures.
• High school completion: The state’s focus on college and career readiness sharpens attention on the district’s high school completion rate, which showed a modest gain in 2010-11 to 73.2%. All student subgroups except white students increased their graduation rate over 2009-10, with African American students showing the most dramatic rise—7.4 percentage points to 60.6%.
• WKCE proficiency rates: The 2011-12 school year brought mixed results in overall district reading and math proficiency. Historically, reading proficiency rates in the district have been among the lowest relative to peer districts and have tended to be higher in 8^th grade than in 4^th grade, only be precipitously lower in 10^th grade. In 2011-12, however, the reading proficiency of Racine 10^th graders jumped seven percentage points to 59%. As with reading, Racine’s math performance is lower than its peer districts and the state average. Unlike last year, however, when the district showed no progress over the prior year, 2011-12 saw Racine’s math proficiency improve slightly in all three grades.
• Value-added growth: RUSD’s average value-added growth in reading over the past three years is equivalent to average growth statewide and outpaces growth in four peer districts. In math, RUSD lagged the state average and was the lowest of the peer districts. At the school level, all but two of RUSD’s 21 elementary schools met or exceeded the state average growth in reading, while all but six did so in math. Notably, the majority of these schools started below the state average in WKCE achievement. These results show how value-added growth analysis paints the picture of achievement with a different brush and highlights the progress of all students, not only those who meet proficiency standards in a given year.

Although it is too soon to tell precisely how the current education reforms will affect the district as a whole, it is clear that RUSD will be feeling their impacts for years to come. Despite the economic challenges RUSD continually faces, this year’s report shows RUSD entering the new policy environment with the momentum of community support of the North Star vision, vital initiatives to strengthen student engagement and early childhood education, and a firm commitment to narrowing achievement gaps related to race, income, language, and disability. For a copy of the 15^th Annual Comparative Analysis of Racine Unified School District, click here. The report was sponsored by Education Racine Inc. and The Johnson Foundation.

New standards and tough goals for region's school districts.

Public school districts in southeast Wisconsin are likely to be hard-pressed to meet new annual performance objectives adopted by the state in connection with its No Child Left Behind Act waiver.  The new objectives are quite ambitious, requiring significant annual improvement by all demographic subgroups of students.  In the latest edition of our annual report, "Public Schooling in Southeast Wisconsin," we find that of all the subgroups and across all subjects, in only one instance – white students in math – does past performance indicate the six-year goal is readily achievable.  All other subgroups in all other subjects would need to dramatically improve proficiency if the goals are to be met.  

This year’s report highlights the host of other new state and federal education policies that will greatly impact local schools, as well, such as the adoption of the Common Core State Standards, new school report cards, changes in state standardized testing, and implementation of teacher effectiveness measures.

Major findings include:

• A continued five-year gap between southeast Wisconsin students and students in the rest of the state in reading, math, and science proficiency, as measured by the state’s standardized assessment, the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam.
• Overall declines in state aid, federal aid, and local property taxes when comparing 2010-11 actual amounts to  2011-12 budgets, coupled with cuts in expenditures.  The 2011-12 budgets for the region’s school districts averaged $665 less per pupil in total expenses and $525 less per pupil in instructional expenses than the previous year.
• Mostly positive trends in college readiness.  The percentage of students in the region taking the ACT increased 1.1 percentage points, while the region’s composite score declined slightly from 22.8 in 2010 to 22.7 in 2011.  The percentage of AP exams passed by southeast Wisconsin students increased by 1.3 points, and the region’s high school completion rate increased by 0.8 percentage points over the past year.
• Improved student engagement.  Southeast Wisconsin attendance rates rose slightly over the last year, outpacing a statewide increase. Truancy rates in the region dropped, but remain higher than the statewide average. Dropout rates in the region fell more in the region than across the state as a whole.
• A 0.8% decline in enrollment in southeast Wisconsin during the past year, representing the largest one-year decline in enrollment in the region in the past five years.  
• Another year of growing poverty rates.  Almost half of all students in southeast Wisconsin (46%) received free or reduced-price lunch during the 2011-2012 school year, up 11.6  percentage points from 2005-06.

The report is sponsored by Alverno College, Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, Multiple Listing Service, Northwestern Mutual Foundation, Southeastern Wisconsin Schools Alliance, and Waukesha County Technical College.   

A spreadsheet of schooling data for all districts in the 7-county region is also available.      

Fighting an uphill battle

It always feels a bit discomforting to say, "Race and economic status are highly correlated to academic achievement." Children can change neither their race nor their income; a statement like the one above can feel like saying these children also cannot improve their academic achievement. But when confronted with the lackluster-to-dismal achievement data of many Milwaukee schools, where the race and income patterns are so stark, its hard to avoid making that statement.

As the Forum's recent report on the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program found, these patterns appear among private school students as well as public school students. In both the public and private sectors in Milwaukee, there are very few schools enrolling predominantly minority and low-income students producing high test scores. (Even among the suburban public schools with fewer minority or low-income children, we've found that as those populations have grown, aggregate test scores have declined.) And while the private school data are new, are they really news, considering how entrenched the pattern has been in the public schools?

What is news is the fact that, while the nation's schools have made some progress in closing the racial achievement gap, the income achievement gap has grown significantly. A recent New York Times story highlights the research of Sean F. Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist, who analyzed data from 12 national studies starting in 1960 and ending in 2007 and found that while the average black-white racial achievement gap has shrunk in half since the 1960s, the gap between children from the wealthiest and poorest families has grown 40% in that time, and is now twice the size of the racial achievement gap.

Schools with low-income students in their charge, whether public or private, are fighting against a nationwide, decades-long trend. While several of these schools, on an individual level, have stellar outcomes, educators are still hunting for the best strategy to improve outcomes system-wide. The hunt requires even more urgency now--the recession is creating more, not fewer, poor families.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applied to schools

Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle states that one cannot simultaneously measure the location of a particle while also measuring the momentum of that particle. When you apply this principle to schools, it's a little disheartening--if we attempt to measure where we are now, we are no longer certain how fast we're improving. If the environment in which the measurement is taking place is also moving (think of the vast legal and budgetary changes at the state level), the uncertainty is all but overwhelming.

Thus, this year's analysis of public school data in southeast Wisconsin heeds Heisenberg and emphasizes the use of the 2010-11 data as a baseline. Knowing that all Wisconsin school districts will be in a state of flux over the next few years due to changes in contractual bargaining legislation, the state budget, a slow economic recovery, a new standardized testing system, and new standards for curriculum, in the future we hope to measure their improvements over time as these various "new normals" kick in. For now, we emphasize where they've been and where they are currently.

By analyzing trends in performance indicators such as WKCE reading and math scores, ACT scores, and graduation rates – and breaking down the numbers by minority group and gender – this year’s report provides a basic understanding of the strengths, weaknesses, and challenges of individual districts. Comparing these data with those from future years will provide insight into the impacts of the historic changes recently adopted at the state level.

This year's major findings include:
• The region trails the rest of the state in several grade levels and subjects when it comes to proficiency on state standardized tests. In addition, the data show a progressively wider disparity between the region and the state in all subjects at the higher grades, raising a red flag in the context of current efforts to drive educational reform toward college and career readiness.

• Measures of college preparation show mostly good news. For the third straight year, the most recent data show the average ACT score in the region held steady at 22.8 (even as the number of students tested rose by 6.3%), while the statewide average score dropped slightly. The region’s percentage of students passing Advanced Placement exams (13.6%) also is well above that of the rest of the state (10.7%). The region’s high school completion rate of 86.1% is below that of the state (89.9%), but increased more over the previous year than the statewide rate.

• Individual districts in southeast Wisconsin continue to compare favorably with state averages for attendance, truancy, and dropout rates, with 41 of the 50 districts achieving an attendance rate of 95% or better, and 36 posting truancy rates below 3% and high school dropout rates at 1% or lower. The region’s three largest districts – MPS, Kenosha and Racine Unified – lag well behind the rest of the region in all three indicators, however.

• Southeast Wisconsin school districts continue to rely more on property taxes and federal aid than those in the rest of the state. Meanwhile, regional spending allocations among categories such as instruction and administration mirror the rest of the state, but the region’s per-pupil spending of $12,422 exceeds the statewide average by nearly $1,000. Overall, per-pupil spending in the region rose slightly compared to the 2009-10 academic year.

• Enrollment in the region’s public schools tilted slightly upward for the first time in more than five years, which is primarily attributable to growth in 10 moderately-sized districts of between 2% and 7%. Amid this relatively steady overall enrollment, minority enrollment is accelerating. Minority enrollment in the region exceeded 40% in 2010-11 and grew 1.3%, whereas the last several years saw growth levels of below 1%.

In total, the data from 2010-11 continue to show a region whose largest and poorest school districts continue to struggle, and one in which the racial achievement gap remains large and static. While there is plenty of uncertainty about the direction and speed in which the schools will change over the next several years, it is certain that staying put is not an option for many districts.

The full report, as well as a poster-sized summary detailing data from individual districts, can be found here.

Underwriters of this year's edition include: Alverno College, Multiple Listing Service, Northwestern Mutual Foundation, Southeastern Wisconsin Schools Alliance, Stifel Nicolaus, and Waukesha County Technical College.

PPF annual analysis of school district performance: How's your district doing?

The Forum's annual analysis of public school districts in southeast Wisconsin is released today, and finds the regional academic achievement scores continue to come more in line with the statewide scores. Unfortunately, lower scores in the rest of the state contribute to the smaller difference as much as improved scores in the seven-county region.

The report also finds that while the region does well on ACT and AP exams, as compared to the rest of the state, it is lagging more and more in graduation rates, mostly due to the low graduation rates in MPS.

The region's large racial achievement gap has been highlighted in several previous editions of the report. This year's analysis shows little progress has been made toward closing the gap in scores between white and African-American students--it is nearly as large now as it was five years ago and is persistent across all districts. All districts also show a significant gender achievement gap in reading, with girls outperforming boys at every grade level.

Other findings:

• This year's 8th graders' reading proficiency rate slipped down as compared to the rate for last year's 7th graders, a trend that has been true statewide in previous years but has occured in the region for the first time this year.


• Total enrollment in the region remained virtually static, but the number of minority students attending public schools in the region grew by 39%.


• The number of students participating in the free or reduced-price lunch program grew significantly this year for both the region and the state as a whole. Almost all districts in southeast Wisconsin had more students qualify for the program serving low-income children.

The full report, as well as a poster-sized summary detailing data from individual districts, can be found here.

Underwriters of this year's edition include: Alverno College, Multiple Listing Service, Northwestern Mutual Foundation, Southeastern Wisconsin Schools Alliance, Stifel Nicolaus, and Waukesha County Technical College.

Fiscal estimates suggest quality early childhood education is costly yet beneficial

The annual cost of operating a high-quality child care or early education center in southeast Wisconsin is an estimated $11,000 per child, more than double the cost of a typical program in the region today, according to the Public Policy Forum’s latest report from its three-year research initiative on early childhood care and education.

The report, “The Price of Quality: Estimating the Cost of a Higher-Quality Early Childhood Care and Education System for Southeast Wisconsin" stresses that only high-quality programs reap the long-term benefits our region needs most, such as better student achievement and improved graduation rates.

Noting that many other states have invested in child care quality improvement policies in order to capture those long-term benefits, the report intends to help policymakers cost out their options for improving child care quality in Wisconsin. The report provides fiscal estimates on a status quo scenario, a mid-level option and a high quality scenario for state policymakers to consider. While the report’s estimates include only the seven-county southeast Wisconsin region, the policy decisions likely will be made at the state level.

Main findings include:

· The direct costs of operating the region’s current system of early childhood care and education is an estimated $370.5 million annually to serve over 66,700 children. To operate the same sized system at a high-quality level would cost an estimated $671 million annually;

· Policies aimed at maximizing quality would be the most expensive, while a more modest improvement in quality in the region would result in total direct costs of $506.2 million;

· While taxpayers pay for direct costs only to the extent that they subsidize costs for low-income families, certain indirect costs are paid for by taxpayers, including regulation and monitoring of child care providers. These indirect costs would increase if policies were put in place to improve quality in the region and are estimated to total almost $7.5 million during the initial phases of any quality improvement initiative;

· The long-term economic and social benefits that can result from improved quality care and education are maximized when the care is of the highest quality. In addition, the benefits for at-risk and low-income children are larger than for other children.

The report presents several policy options for policymakers, ranging from low-cost and low-return on investment to high-cost and high-return. The least costly option is to maintain the current regulatory system and the focus on fraud prevention. The most costly option is to reform the system as a whole, requiring smaller caregiver-child ratios and requiring caregivers to have four-year degrees, for example. Other options include incremental improvements in quality over a period of time, focusing on improving quality for the neediest children, or a Quality Rating and Improvement System that gives parents information about the relative quality of programs. The report also analyzes five different models for financing quality improvement initiatives.

The Governor and the Legislature have child care on their radar screens right now in light of the serious fraud problems that have arisen in the Wisconsin Shares program. For the sake of children and our regional economy, stamping out fraud in Wisconsin Shares must also involve consideration of how to improve quality. This report’s overview of costs and policy options aim to provide context for upcoming legislative deliberations.

Who's responsible for the achievement gap?

A new federal study of standardized test scores finds Wisconsin has the most persistent achievement gap in the nation between African-American and white students. This story received prominent play in the New York Times on Tuesday, but was covered with a just short article inside the local section of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Wednesday.

The Times coverage quotes the head of the Education Trust, a national education advocacy group, as saying principals in Wisconsin were "stunned" to find out the results.

It sounds incredulous that Wisconsin principals weren't truly aware of the extent of the problem. But it is important to note that the findings are based on a national standardized test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and not on the state standardized test, the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam (WKCE). NAEP scores are always presented at the state level because the test is actually taken by a sample of students across the state, and not by every student in every district, as is the WKCE. So principals are probably less likely to feel the statewide NAEP results truly reflect the status of their school or district. In addition, some studies have shown that the NAEP is more rigorous than the WKCE; a score earning a grade of "proficient" on the WKCE is much lower than a proficient score on the NAEP. So principals whose students do well as defined by the WKCE might be "stunned" by lower performance on the NAEP.

At any rate, the federal study shows that Wisconsin schools are losing ground in comparison with schools in other states when it comes to narrowing the racial achievement gap. The study doesn't note which states have open enrollment programs, which allow students to choose to attend schools outside their resident districts. Might the presence of this program in Wisconsin help explain our "stunning" results?

Most of the state's African-American students attend school in districts in southeast Wisconsin, which is also where most of the students participating in open enrollment (and the smaller Chapter 220 interdistrict integration program) attend school. Consequently, in many of the region's school districts, non-resident students make up a significant portion, if not nearly all, of their minority student population. In addition, the region's scores on the WKCE, on the whole, lag behind the rest of the state's.

Open enrollment and Chapter 220 may thus have a relationship to the achievement gap if the performance of the students opting for these programs differs from that of other students. This kind of gap might not get addressed if there is a perception within a district that performance should be measured mostly by the test scores of the district's "own" students, meaning resident students, because these students are more likely to stay in the school or district throughout their schooling career and are truly products of that district. While non-resident students may in fact be less likely to spend their entire schooling career in one district, if much of a district's diversity comes from its non-resident students, how can this attitude result in anything but a racial achievement gap?

If a district is only responsible for resident students, then no one should be stunned by the pursuant gap. But it's harder to sustain this argument when it is a statewide result being analyzed. These children are all Wisconsinites. They all count when it comes time to measure up to the rest of the country.

If the scores of resident students could be compared to those of non-resident students, we could analyze the extent to which the achievement gap may or may not be due to a lack of concern about non-resident performance. But state law does not instruct districts to disaggregate the scores of open enrollment or Chapter 220 students. Some districts, of course, likely do so anyway, at least internally, which may be the basis for the perception of success with their "own" students. But there is no way of knowing, on a statewide basis, whether the children who have exercised a choice to attend a school outside their resident district are being left behind, causing Wisconsin's achievement gap to grow ever larger.

Clarke Street School program targets achievement gap

A new program at Milwaukee’s Clarke Street School, announced last week, will provide 80 first- and second-graders with extra help through elementary, middle and high school and a guarantee that they will be able to afford college. The I Have a Dream Foundation effort builds on a quarter-century of the foundation’s experience in similar programming in 29 cities. Early intervention tuition assistance programs are unique among education interventions for their combination of early, long-term support and the promise of eventual tuition funding. In some cases, programs similar to the I Have a Dream model have not been successful, revealing some lessons learned along the way. For example:

1. Start early, stay invested

After Minneapolis/St. Paul's Destination 2010 program's disappointing evaluation results, St. Paul’s then-superintendant commented, “You can’t ever start too early. Third grade – what if we had started even earlier?” (2/19/07 Pioneer Press article via LexisNexis).

Starting interventions early makes sense if the goal is to close or prevent the achievement gap; however, maintaining such an investment over the long-term is costly and can be difficult given changing politics and funding. For instance, in 1988 the New York Scholarship and Partnership Program experienced severe cuts and the program's students who had enrolled with promises of tuition help were suddenly out of luck (Coons and Petrick, 1992).

2. Emphasize the right incentive for success

The Twin Cities’ Destination 2010 program shows that it takes much more than some afterschool tutoring and a promise of tuition assistance to bolster struggling students. Five years into the program, tests scores showed that long-term monetary incentives were doing little to change students’ lives in the short-term, with program students performing worse in some testing areas than the comparison group.

The I Have a Dream model to be used by Milwaukee’s Clarke Street School program emphasizes relationships over tuition funding. The program will place a family outreach coordinator in the school to address poverty-related problems and family stability issues, ensuring that students and families receive extensive support. The intent is to make the program more than just a promise of eventual funding at the finish line.

3. Understand student barriers to success

The Twin Cities’ Destination 2010 program’s administrators thought they had a handle on the roots of the achievement gap, until their program enrollment was decimated by high student mobility.

Of the original 450 students who could have joined Destination 2010, 368 signed up. Five years later, only 215 students remained – fewer than half of the initial group. According to the program manager, 80% of those who left the program went "off the radar" (6/3/06 Pioneer Press article via LexisNexis). In addition, students who were initially from seven schools in 2000-01 had fanned out to 71 schools by 2002-03. It was common for many students to attend up to three schools in a single year, an obvious problem when trying to keep up with homework and learning. The program concluded, “We believe that lack of safe and affordable housing is at the heart of the mobility issue.”

The I Have a Dream Foundation model considers the impacts of mobility. The foundation’s website explains that often, students who are sponsored together at the same elementary school will attend different middle and high schools but will gather together for I Have a Dream programming at a local organization. This is important, as Milwaukee is no different from any other low-income, urban district with regard to mobility.

In 2006-07, Clarke Street School had a 13% mobility rate within the school year, with a 61% stability rate. This predicts that, of the 80 first- and second-graders in the new I Have a Dream program, 13% will be at a different school before the year’s end, and 39% will switch schools at the year’s end.

4. Protect program sustainability

As much as possible, it is important to insulate early intervention tuition assistance programs from the ebb and flow of budget politics. The worst case scenario would be to promise tuition to young students who later find no money available. A more common danger is that tight budgets serve to undercut program effectiveness. For instance, in the Twin Cities, school budget cuts resulted in higher teacher turnover, effecting continuity of teachers fluent in the program philosophy. State budgets cuts then reduced the availability of area after-school and tutoring programs – programs that were a key Destination 2010 intervention element to help kids stay on track (9/27/04 Pioneer Press article via LexisNexis). For long-term intervention programs, it is especially important to design a program that can make accomodations when faced with inevitable cuts in other areas.

Conclusion

Among early intervention tuition assistance programs, the I Had a Dream Foundation model has significant merit. However, when examining all types of interventions that target the achievement gap, many studies have suggested that investments in high-quality early childhood education interventions for children under age 5 have the highest long-term payoffs.

For the 80 first and second-grade children at Clarke Street School, this privately-funded program may have a huge impact if the lessons above are heeded. For the rest of the children in the district, and the infants and toddlers who will eventually be MPS students, large scale early intervention will need to take other forms.