Vaughan Byrnes

Closing the Mathematics Achievement Gap in High-Poverty Middle Schools: Enablers and Constraints.

The mathematics achievement levels of U.S. students fall far behind those of other developed nations; within the United States itself, the students who are falling behind come predominantly from high-poverty and high-minority areas. This article reports on a series of analyses that followed 4 cohorts of students from 3 such schools through the 5th to 8th grades, where studies have found the mathematics achievement gap to develop most rapidly. The cohorts followed in these analyses attended schools implementing whole-school reform models that incorporated research-based, proven curricula, subject-specific teacher training and professional development, multiple layers of teacher and classroom support, and school climate reforms. The research found that students at schools implementing the whole-school reform (WSR) models made greater progress in closing the mathematics achievement gap than at the other 23 high-poverty, high-minority schools in their district. Using the results from a Binary Logistic Regression model, we show which factors were key in enabling or constraining a students ability to close the achievement gap during the middle school years. We conclude that various student-, classroom-, and school-level factors are all key in helping students to close the gap. WSR models, while often time- and cost-intensive, address issues at all of these levels and may be more able to affect the achievement gap than other, more simply implemented reforms.

Comparing Achievement between K-8 and Middle Schools: A Large-Scale Empirical Study.

This study compares middle schools to K–8 schools, as well as to newly formed K–8 schools that are part of a K–8 conversion policy. The outcome is student achievement, and our sample includes 40,883 eighth‐grade students from 95 schools across five cohorts. The analysis uses multilevel modeling to account for student, cohort, and school‐level variation, and it includes statistical controls for both population demographics and school characteristics. The results find that older K–8 schools perform significantly better than middle schools, and this advantage is explained by differing student and teacher populations, average grade size, and school transition. Newer K–8 schools did not enjoy the same advantage despite having smaller grades and lower transition rates, due to their more disadvantaged populations.

The Effect of Teacher Certification on Middle Grades Achievement in an Urban District.

Fewer than 20 states require middle grades certification; in most states, credentials overlap so that both elementary and secondary certified teachers may teach in the middle grades. Moreover, in many urban districts, getting teachers for the middle grades is a challenge. Despite this crazy-quilt of certifications and a growing body of work on teacher qualifications, there have been few studies that examine the teachers’ impact on learning in the middle grades. This paper uses a data set from an urban district to estimate the impact of different certifications (and lack of certification) on middle-grades students’ learning gains in mathematics and science. In mathematics, we find that students with elementary- and secondary-certified teachers outscore those with uncertified teachers and those who are certified in special education. Especially strong effects are seen in science, where students with secondary science-certified teachers substantially outscore those with any other kind of teacher.

Getting a Feel for the Market: The Use of Privatized School Management in Philadelphia.

This study evaluates the impact of the privatization of education services in the Philadelphia School District, using an interrupted time series design. The sample observes 88 middle‐grades schools, beginning with the 1996–97 school year, and finds that, by 2006, four years postintervention, the achievement growth rate of schools run by educational management organizations (EMOs) had fallen significantly below the growth rate of district‐run schools in both reading and mathematics, whereas, in 2002, immediately prior to privatization, those schools later run by EMOs had achieved growth rates significantly higher than the rest of the district in reading and statistically equivalent in mathematics.

DEVELOPING ADOLESCENT LITERACY IN HIGH POVERTY MIDDLE SCHOOLS: THE IMPACT OF TALENT DEVELOPMENT’S REFORMS ACROSS MULTIPLE YEARS AND SITES

In calling for Congress and the President to start a national Adolescent Literacy Initiative, the Alliance for Excellent Education noted that approximately six million middle school and high school students have very low literacy levels that not only affect their achievement in English and language arts classes, but that also make it very difficult for them to master content in other subjects ( Joftus, 2002). These students typically have mastered word attack skills (and some can even read aloud smoothly and with expression) but have very low comprehension (Balfanz, McPartland & Shaw, 2002a ; Buly & Valencia, 2002; Snow, 2002 ). The adolescent literacy crisis is not one that affects all schools equally. Young adults who are poor comprehenders are much more likely to be found in high poverty, high minority schools than in other schools. It is not unusual for over 70% of the eighth-graders in high poverty, high-minority middle schools to