Paul Hanselman

Threat in Context: School Moderation of the Impact of Social Identity Threat on Racial/Ethnic Achievement Gaps

Schools with very few and relatively low-performing marginalized students may be most likely to trigger social identity threats (including stereotype threats) that contribute to racial disparities. We test this hypothesis by assessing variation in the benefits of a self-affirmation intervention designed to counteract social identity threat in a randomized trial in all 11 middle schools in Madison, Wisconsin. We find that school context moderates the benefits of self-affirmation for black and Hispanic students’ grades, with partial support among standardized achievement outcomes. Self-affirmation reduced the very large racial achievement gap in overall grade point average by 12.5 percent in high-threat school contexts and had no effect in low-threat contexts. These self-affirmation activities have the potential to help close some of the largest racial/ethnic achievement gaps, though only in specific school contexts.

An Effort to Close Achievement Gaps at Scale Through Self-Affirmation:

In this districtwide scale-up, we randomly assigned seventh-grade students within 11 schools to receive a series of writing exercises designed to promote values affirmation. Impacts on cumulative seventh-grade grade point average (GPA) for the district’s racial/ethnic minority students who may be subject to stereotype threat are consistent with but smaller than those from prior smaller scale studies. Also, we find some evidence of impact on minority students’ standardized mathematics test scores. These effects address a substantial portion of the achievement gap unexplained by demographics and prior achievement—the portion of the gap potentially attributable to stereotype threat. Our results suggest that persistent achievement gaps, which may be explained by subtle social and psychological phenomena, can be mitigated by brief, yet theoretically precise, social-psychological interventions.

New evidence on self-affirmation effects and theorized sources of heterogeneity from large-scale replications

Brief, targeted self-affirmation writing exercises have recently been offered as a way to reduce racial achievement gaps, but evidence about their effects in educational settings is mixed, leaving ambiguity about the likely benefits of these strategies if implemented broadly. A key limitation in interpreting these mixed results is that they come from studies conducted by different research teams with different procedures in different settings; it is therefore impossible to isolate whether different effects are the result of theorized heterogeneity, unidentified moderators, or idiosyncratic features of the different studies. We addressed this limitation by conducting a well-powered replication of self-affirmation in a setting where a previous large-scale field experiment demonstrated significant positive impacts, using the same procedures. We found no evidence of effects in this replication study and estimates were precise enough to reject benefits larger than an effect size of 0.10. These null effects were significantly different from persistent benefits in the prior study in the same setting, and extensive testing revealed that currently theorized moderators of self-affirmation effects could not explain the difference. These results highlight the potential fragility of self-affirmation in educational settings when implemented widely and the need for new theory, measures, and evidence about the necessary conditions for self-affirmation success.

Professional Sense-Makers Instructional Specialists in Contemporary Schooling

This brief documents the expansion of instructional specialist staffing in U.S. public school districts. We use data from the National Center of Education Statistics’ annual Common Core of Data to chart staffing trends in public school districts between 1997–1998 and 2012–2013. The number of instructional specialists per 1,000 U.S students doubled during that period, and the proportion of districts employing no specialists declined from nearly 20% to 7%. We suggest that specialists are poised to play a pivotal “professional sense-making” role as schools work to implement new instructional standards in the classroom.

The Consequences of Principal and Teacher Turnover for School Social Resources

Abstract Staff turnover may have important consequences for the development of collective social resources based on trust, shared norms, and support among school professionals. We outline the theoretical role-specific consequences of principal and teacher turnover for features of principal leadership and teacher community, and we test these ideas in repeated teacher survey data from a sample of 73 Los Angeles elementary schools. We find evidence that principal turnover fundamentally disrupts but does not systematically decrease relational qualities of principal leadership; negative changes for initially high social resource schools offset positive changes for initially low social resource schools, suggesting that relational instability “resets” the resources that develop in the relationships between leadership and teachers. Greater consistency in measures of teacher community in the face of teacher turnover implies that the social resources inhering in the relationships among teachers are more robust to instability.

Detracking and Tracking Up Mathematics Course Placements in California Middle Schools, 2003–2013

Between 2003 and 2013, the proportion of California eighth graders enrolled in algebra or a more advanced course nearly doubled to 65%. In this article, we consider the organizational processes that accompanied this curricular intensification. Facing a complex set of accountability, institutional, technical/functional, and internal political pressures, California schools responded to the algebra-for-all effort in diverse ways. While some schools detracked by enrolling all eighth graders in algebra, others “tracked up,” creating more advanced geometry opportunities while increasing algebra enrollments. These responses created a new differentiated course structure that is likely to benefit advantaged students. Consistent with the effectively maintained inequality hypothesis, we find that detracking occurred primarily in disadvantaged schools while “tracking up” occurred primarily in advantaged schools.

The Impacts of Success for All on Reading Achievement in Grades 3–5 Does Intervening During the Later Elementary Grades Produce the Same Benefits as Intervening Early?

We evaluate the impact of Success for All literacy instruction in grades 3 through 5 using data from the same cluster randomized trial used to evaluate effects in the earlier grades (K–2). In contrast to the early benefits, there is no effect on reading achievement in the later grades, either overall or for students and schools with high or low baseline reading achievement. This suggests that the impact of Success for All—including established long-term positive effects—may depend on early exposure. As a result, educators may experience difficulty replicating the typical positive achievement impacts of the intervention when children participate in Success for All only during the later elementary grades, as is common for mobile students in program schools.

Do School Learning Opportunities Compound or Compensate for Background Inequalities? Evidence from the Case of Assignment to Effective Teachers.

Are equal educational opportunities sufficient to narrow long-standing economic and racial inequalities in achievement? In this article, I test the hypothesis that poor and minority students benefit less from effective elementary school teachers than do their nonpoor and white peers, thus exacerbating inequalities. I use administrative data from public elementary schools in North Carolina to calculate value-added measures of teachers’ success in promoting learning, and I assess benefits for different students. Results suggest that differential benefits of effective teachers uniquely exacerbate black–white inequalities but do not contribute to economic achievement gaps. Racial differences are small, on average, relative to the benefits for all groups; are not explained by differences in prior achievement; and are largest for low-achieving students. Teacher-related learning opportunities are crucial for all students, but these results point to a disconnect between typical school learning opportunities and low-achieving minority students.

Self-Affirmation Effects Are Produced by School Context, Student Engagement With the Intervention, and Time: Lessons From a District-Wide Implementation:

Self-affirmation shows promise for reducing racial academic-achievement gaps; recently, however, mixed results have raised questions about the circumstances under which the self-affirmation intervention produces lasting benefits at scale. In this follow-up to the first district-wide scale-up of a self-affirmation intervention, we examined whether initial academic benefits in middle school carried over into high school, we tested for differential impacts moderated by school context, and we assessed the causal effects of student engagement with the self-affirming writing prompted by the intervention. Longitudinal results indicate that self-affirmation reduces the growth of the racial achievement gap by 50% across the high school transition (N = 920). Additionally, impacts are greatest within school contexts that cued stronger identity threats for racial minority students, and student engagement is causally associated with benefits. Our results imply the potential for powerful, lasting academic impacts from self-affirmation interventions if implemented broadly; however, these effects will depend on both contextual and individual factors.

Beyond Tracking and Detracking: The Dimensions of Organizational Differentiation in Schools

Schools utilize an array of strategies to match curricula and instruction to students’ heterogeneous skills. While generations of scholars have debated “tracking�? and its consequences, the literature fails to account for diversity of school-level sorting practices. In this paper we draw upon the work of Sorenson (1970) to articulate and develop empirical measures of five distinct dimensions of school cross-classroom tracking systems: (1) the degree of course differentiation, (2) the extent to which sorting practices generate skills-homogeneous classrooms, (3) the rate at which students enroll in advanced courses, (4) the extent to which students move between tracks over time, and (5) the relation between track assignments across subject areas. Analyses of longitudinal administrative data following 24,000 8th graders enrolled in 23 middle schools through the 10th grade indicate that these dimensions of tracking are empirically separable and have divergent effects on student achievement and the production of inequality.