Shaun M. Dougherty

Middle School Math Acceleration and Equitable Access to 8th Grade Algebra: Evidence from the Wake County Public School System

Taking algebra by eighth grade is considered an important milestone on the pathway to college readiness. We highlight a collaboration to investigate one district’s effort to increase middle school algebra course-taking. In 2010, the Wake County Public Schools began assigning middle school students to accelerated math and eighth-grade algebra based on a defined prior achievement metric. This policy reduced the relationship between course assignment and student characteristics such as income and race/ethnicity, while increasing its relationship to academic skill. The policy increased the share of students on track for algebra by eighth grade. Students placed in accelerated math were exposed to higher-skilled peers but larger classes. Future work will assess impacts on subsequent achievement and course-taking outcomes.School districts across the country have struggled to increase the proportion of students taking algebra by 8th grade, thought to be an important milestone on the pathway to college preparedness. We highlight key features of a research collaboration between the Wake County Public School System and Harvard University that have enabled investigation of one such effort to solve this problem. In 2010, the district began assigning middle school students to accelerated math coursework leading to 8th grade algebra on the basis of a clearly defined measured of prior academic skill. We document two important facts. First, use of this new rule greatly reduced the relationship between course assignment and student factors such as income and race while increasing the relationship between course assignment and academic skill. Second, using a regression discontinuity analytic strategy, we show that the assignment rule had strong impacts on the fraction of students on track to complete algebra by 8th grade. Students placed in accelerated math were exposed to higher-skilled peers but larger class sizes. We describe future plans for assessing impacts on achievement and high school course-taking outcomes.

From Vocational Education to Career Readiness: The Ongoing Work of Linking Education and the Labor Market

A long-standing debate has been waged over the past century or more about the purpose of education. Is the primary purpose to provide for the general edification of the individual, or must education have a pragmatic application that relates to one’s intended role in the workforce? Public education’s focus on these ends has evolved over time, often in relation to changing economic demands. Using a broad historical lens to examine recent developments, incorporating salient historical debates and social forces, the authors attempt to better understand how the relationship between education and preparation for the workforce has changed over time. They focus on the proliferation of federal innovations in this area over the past 100 years and consider persistent themes in philosophical and policy debates. They supplement this broad history and context with the results of a more focused survey of the literature in career and technical education, with search terms that yielded scholarship from the past 50 years. Drawing themes from this more recent literature, and in light of historical foci, the authors make recommendations for future directions of scholarship.

BRIDGING THE DISCONTINUITY IN ADOLESCENT LITERACY? MIXED EVIDENCE FROM A MIDDLE GRADES INTERVENTION

Strong literacy skills are crucial to ensuring an individuals future educational and economic success. Existing evidence suggests the transition from elementary to middle school is a decisive period for literacy development. In this paper I investigate the impact of extended learning time in literacy instruction on subsequent cognitive outcomes. I capitalize on the existence of a natural experiment born out of a districts use of an exogenously- determined cutoff in Iowa Test scores in fifth grade to assign students to an additional literacy course in middle school. My findings suggest that exposure to this intervention generates strong negative impacts for black students, and noisy positive impacts for white, Latino, and Asian students. My findings suggest that additional literacy instruction in middle school can have markedly different effects on students, and program differentiation or augmentation may be necessary to prevent harm for students of average literacy ability in fifth grade.

Objective course placement and college readiness: Evidence from targeted middle school math acceleration

Advanced math coursework can affect college and labor market outcomes, yet discretionary placement policies can lead to differential access at key points in the college preparatory pipeline. We examine a targeted approach to course assignment that uses prior test scores to identify middle school students deemed qualified for a college preparatory math sequence. Accelerated math placement of relatively low-skilled middle schoolers increases the fraction later enrolling in Precalculus by one-seventh, and by over one-third for female and non-low income students. Acceleration increases college readiness and intentions to pursue a bachelor’s degree. Course placement rules based on objective measures can identify students capable of completing rigorous coursework but whom discretionary systems might overlook.

The Effect of Career and Technical Education on Human Capital Accumulation: Causal Evidence from Massachusetts

Earlier work demonstrates that career and technical education (CTE) can provide long-term financial benefits to participants, yet few have explored potential academic impacts, with none in the era of high-stakes accountability. This paper investigates the causal impact of participating in a specialized high school-based CTE delivery system on high school persistence, completion, earning professional certifications, and standardized test scores, with a focus on individuals from low-income families, a group that is overrepresented in CTE and high school noncompleters. Using administrative data from Massachusetts, I combine ordinary least squares with a regression discontinuity design that capitalizes on admissions data at three schools that are oversubscribed. All estimates suggest that participation in a high-quality CTE program boosts the probability of on-time graduation from high school by 7 to 10 percentage points for higher income students, and suggestively larger effects for their lower-income peers and students on the margin of being admitted to oversubscribed schools. This work informs an understanding of the potential impact of specific CTE program participation on the accumulation of human capital even in a high-stakes policy environment. This evidence of a productive CTE model in Massachusetts may inform the current policy dialog related to improving career pathways and readiness.

How Measurement and Modeling of Attendance Matter to Assessing Dimensions of Inequality

ABSTRACT Each iteration of high stakes accountability has included requirements to include measures of attendance in their accountability programs, thereby increasing the salience of this measure. Researchers too have turned to attendance and chronic absence as important outcomes in evaluations and policy studies. Often, too little attention is paid to the implications of measurement or statistical modeling decisions employed in these studies. Such lack of attention to measurement and modeling can obscure important differences in these measures across the educational life cycle, as well as between the outcomes of higher income students and their lower-income peers. Using longitudinal data from a representative state, this paper demonstrates how measurement and modeling choices can influence model estimates and undermine the quality of inferences. These considerations have important implications for researchers and practitioners who wish to use attendance data to understand policy impacts and guide practice, particularly when focused on chronic absence.

The Impact of Career and Technical Education on Students With Disabilities

Evidence suggests that participating in career and technical education (CTE) in high school, on average, positively affects general education students when transitioning from education to the workforce. Yet, almost no large-scale causal research has explored whether academic benefits also accrue to students with disabilities in CTE. This omission is glaring given that students with disabilities participate in high school CTE programs at high rates. We use multiple years of administrative data from Massachusetts to estimate the effect of participating in CTE on the academic outcomes of students with disabilities. Compared with peers with similar disabilities who do not participate in CTE, students with disabilities in CTE programs perform comparably on standardized measures of student achievement but have higher probabilities of graduating from high school on time or earning industry-recognized certificates. Implications for policy and practice, particularly with regard to scaling access to similar programs, are discussed.

Students With Intellectual Disabilities and Career and Technical Education Opportunities: A Systematic Literature Review:

Career and Technical Education (CTE) offers the potential for disadvantaged student subpopulations to utilize high school toward preparation for the workforce by encouraging specific career pathways. Yet, to date, very little is known about the intersection of CTE programs and disability. In this study, we conducted a systematic literature review of the vocational education and career readiness literatures, with a particular focus on students with disabilities and, specifically, intellectual disabilities, to identify best practices. Results show that few studies differentiate programs on the basis of disability type, and of those that do, intellectual disability was one of multiple disability types represented in studies. Moreover, the majority of studies focused on preparation of students with disabilities for low wage work, and very few focused on a more sophisticated career pathway and/or postsecondary education and training. Given the current policy climate that focuses on college and career readiness, the paucity of CTE and disability-focused studies in the literature is troublesome, and calls for more targeted research studies to be conducted to inform policy and practice.

Evaluating the Effects of Supplemental Reading Intervention Within an MTSS or RTI Reading Reform Initiative Using a Regression Discontinuity Design

A large body of research supports the efficacy of small group reading interventions for students in Grades K through 3. However, there are few studies evaluating the effects of supplemental Tier-2 intervention implemented within a response to intervention (RTI) or multitiered systems of support (MTSS) framework. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of providing Tier-2 supplemental intervention to students in Grades 1 through 3 identified as experiencing reading difficulties (n = 318) in four elementary schools across four different school districts that were selected to participate in a state MTSS initiative. The supplemental intervention was evaluated using a regression discontinuity design, and results indicated statistically significant overall effects on measures of phonemic awareness and word decoding and no discernable effects on reading fluency and comprehension. Results suggest that supplemental reading intervention implemented within MTSS frameworks can impact key reading outcomes when intervention significantly increases instructional intensity.

Missing the Boat–Impact of Just Missing Identification as a High-Performing School

ABSTRACT This study capitalizes on the performance identification system under the No Child Left Behind waivers to estimate the school-level impact of just missing formal state recognition as a high-performing school. Using a fuzzy regression-discontinuity design and data from the early years of waiver implementation in Rhode Island, we find that, when schools that just missed achieving status as a high-performing school (i.e., leading) were located in districts with a large proportion of schools achieving this status, they performed better in subsequent years. Alternatively, when similar schools were in districts with few leading schools, we find no effects.