Lessons From State Performance on NAEP: Why Some High-Poverty Students Score Better Than Others

Students from low-income backgrounds face a variety of social and economic challenges that make it more difficult for them to achieve their potential. However, it is also clear that some states do a far better job of educating low-income students than others. According to the National Assessment of...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Policy File 2016
Main Authors: Boser, Ulrich, Brown, Catherine
Format: Report
Language:English
Subjects:
Center for American Progress
Education
Government
Online Access:Request full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Students from low-income backgrounds face a variety of social and economic challenges that make it more difficult for them to achieve their potential. However, it is also clear that some states do a far better job of educating low-income students than others. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, there is a massive gap between the states with the highest-performing low-income students and the states with the lowest. The Center for American Progress wanted to better understand the role of standards-based reform in promoting student outcomes, and to that end, we studied the most recent NAEP data. Given previous research, we believed that we might find a strong connection between standards-based reform and student outcomes. Because it can be hard to make clear connections between policy and outcomes, some of our analysis is anecdotal in nature. Since policy takes time to have an effect across a state, we measured the impacts of policy improvements on NAEP outcomes two years after the actual policy change was adopted, taking into account time for policy to be implemented.