Achievement Gaps Are Growing
And they're growing in all grades and subjects
I have a new piece over at The 74 this week looking at America’s growing achievement gaps. I worked with Eamonn Fitzmaurice, The 74’s art and technology director, to show how 8th grade math scores are changing across states and cities. Eamonn created some pretty cool graphics plus an interactive tool, so I hope you’ll go check it out.
We used 8th grade math scores to tell “a tale of two eras.” Namely: Achievement scores rose during the No Child Left Behind Era from roughly 2003 to 2013. Those gains were broadly shared.
But scores started falling about a decade ago. Not only that, but the declines have been uneven, with lower-performing students suffering the biggest losses. Here are the changes over time for higher-performing students (in yellow) versus lower-performing students (in red):
For simplicity’s sake, we chose to focus on 8th grade math scores, but the patterns are similar in other grades and subjects. Here’s a similar graph for 4th grade math:
And 4th grade reading:
And 8th grade reading:
Nat Malkus from the American Enterprise Institute’s has documented the same patterns of growing achievement gaps in history and civics as well.
What’s causing these trends?
There are a lot of potential explanations, from the rise of smart phones and social media to school funding or the Common Core. It’s possible all of these factors are at work, but for reasons that I explain in the piece, I do not think they fully explain the timing, magnitude, or distribution of the declines, or why the achievement gap problem is so much worse in the U.S. than in other developed countries.
Instead, my top theory is the easing of accountability pressures, specifically the end of No Child Left Behind policies requiring states and districts to pay close attention to low-performing students and schools. There are solid research studies showing that accountability improves student outcomes, especially in math and for the lowest-performing students. The timing of the weakening of accountability systems also lines up perfectly with the broader achievement declines.
Whether I convince you of accountability argument or not, I’d welcome any counter theories or feedback. Regardless, the data suggest that achievement scores have been falling for the last decade, those declines are widespread across grades and subjects, and they are affecting our lowest-performing students the most.
Chad, thank you for drawing attention to this. First, props for calling attention to a potential root cause that involved a policy that you helped put together. Not everyone would do that.
You make a pretty strong case for the loosening of standards being a predominant root cause. I found myself trying to compare charts between Race to the Top and non-Race to the Top neighboring states, among other theories, to no avail. The sheer similarity of charts between states is striking.
The one wondering I have as someone who was working on the state side of things at the time is the extent to which shifts in the prevailing culture around standardized testing, accountability, and common academic standards could be part of the explanation. The policy shift was in response to public outcry against testing and NCLB AYP targets that felt increasingly unattainable. The waiver requirements escalated efforts to tie teacher evaluations to test scores, which contributed to backlash and a further undercutting of public confidence in testing. The opt-out movement soon grew on the left and right, and progressive support for ed reform waned as views of testing and the achievement gap as racist grew in salience.
This possibility doesn’t diminish the point you’re making. Rather, it’s that both the policy itself and decreased public and educator confidence in testing/accountability/standards--some of which led to the policy shift and some of which was unleashed afterward--may be conspiring to reduce scores and widen gaps.
Thanks again for your thoughtful work!
This is, sadly, not shocking at all. I wonder how much is due to grade inflation and the “everyone gets a 50% for doing nothing” policies that are crashing through education. Now that kids can pass after doing 10% of there work, it seems less learning is happening.