Making Standards Stick
April 2000
Robin Lake, Paul Hill, Sara Taggart, Maria McCarthy
Download Full Report (PDF: 242 K)
In 1993, the Washington legislature enacted EHB 1209, the Washington State Education Reform Act, which set in motion the creation of new K-12 educational standards and assessments to measure student performance in several areas. The first testing began in the spring of 1997 when Washington's 4th grade students took the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) in reading, writing, math and listening.
Each year since, the new state standards system has expanded. In 1998, middle schools administered the first round of assessments in reading, writing, math and listening to 7th graders. In 1999, the first 10th grade assessments were piloted.
As the system grows, so does the pressure to improve. Now that they have had more time to get used to the new standards and adjust their practice, schools are expected to make gains in student achievement. They are seeing their successes and failures broadcast on the front page of local newspapers. The Legislature has required elementary schools to set four-year reading targets, and the new state commission A+ Commission is defining how schools will be held accountable for ensuring that their students meet the new standards.
The purpose of the educational standards system is not to create pressure for its own sake. The system is, instead, meant to focus the efforts of individual schools toward common learning expectations as defined by the state Essential Academic Learning Requirements (EALRs). Seven years into the process, the state is now faced with two challenges: First, ensuring that all students meet the new higher standards for student learning; and second, making certain that improvements in school and student performance are sustained over time.
The Center on Reinventing Public Education is attempting to answer these questions by studying how principals and teachers respond to the new state standards and documenting effective strategies for improving school performance on the new state exams.
Research Strategy
The purpose of this study was to understand how schools can raise student performance. We were particularly interested in schools serving low-income students and schools with low baseline performance levels. In addition, the study sought to know whether schools could sustain gains in performance, and what it takes to do so.
Our research focused on a limited group of rapidly-improving schools and a small number of matched non-improving schools studied for purposes of comparison. We did not study a representative sample of all Washington schools. In fact our schools were non-representative; we studied them because they were dramatically improving. Our results show what can be done, not what is being done in the average Washington State school.
1998-99 study: Making Standards Work
This year's study is our second. Last year, results from the 1998 WASL offered the first opportunity for us to look at changes in test scores over a two-year period. In our 1998-99 study, we interviewed improving elementary schools, defined as those whose scores had increased at more than twice the statewide average, and compared their improvement strategies to schools that served similar groups of students, as measured by race and income, but were not making progress.
We were especially interested in studying rapidly-improving schools with high poverty rates, on the belief that their success stories would help those struggling with similar challenges. Although not all of the schools we studied were high poverty schools, most of our sample schools had poverty rates above the state average. Our goal was to find common threads in these schools' strategies and to share those insights broadly to help other schools improve.
We found striking differences between the two groups. Improving schools had the following common attributes. They:
- Focused on a few key schoolwide goals;
- Pulled staff together to work as a team;
- Based improvement strategies on the unique needs of their school;
- Targeted resources and energy toward their key goals;
- Understood that attitude matters.
Schools making strong test score gains were able to do so regardless of the students' poverty levels, mobility rates and other challenging factors. These results prove that school actions do influence student achievement. Though, on average, low-income schools are relatively low-performing, these findings show that at least some schools are able to overcome the poverty-achievement connection.
This Year's Study: Making Standards Stick
This year we deepened our inquiry by expanding the study to include middle schools and continuing to interview elementary schools in their third year of testing.
In an attempt to understand whether our 1998-99 findings would hold true for middle schools, we interviewed principals at 32 middle and junior high schools across Washington State. Twenty-two of those schools made strong gains on the 7th grade WASL. As a basis for comparison we also interviewed 10 principals from middle and junior high schools with similar characteristics that made little or no gains from 1998 to 1999. We selected a range of schools from rural, urban, and suburban districts.
In addition, in an attempt to better understand what it takes to sustain such improvements and to identify barriers that might get in the way of making such improvements, we again interviewed elementary school principals across Washington State. We completed interviews with principals in 24 of the 26 improving elementary schools we studied last year, hoping to learn how they fared in the 3rd year of testing and to discover how schools that sustained improvement were able to do so. We also interviewed principals in a small group of elementary schools that failed to make any gains during the first 2 years of testing, but brought their scores up in the 3rd year. The interviews focused both on the strategies employed by schools and on the challenges they faced in sustaining their improvements.
The confidential interviews, typically 45 minutes each, were conducted from October through December of 1999. The interviews sought principals' perspectives on why students in their schools performed as they did. We also attempted to identify other factors that may have influenced student performance in the school, such as student population, staffing levels and quality, funding amounts and flexibility, instructional goals and methods, school environment and culture, and school relationships with parents. Principals were also asked about sources of pressure to improve WASL scores, and the sources and usefulness of help, advice, and teacher training their school received.
In addition to our interviews with principals, we conducted case studies of four schools - two middle schools and two elementary schools - to gain greater insight from the perspectives of teachers, parents and students. What we heard during these visits supported what principals had told us and increased our confidence in our findings, particularly in our understanding of the challenges schools face in responding to the new state expectations.
In this report, we present an overview of the strategies elementary schools and middle schools are using to make gains. We detail how middle schools are applying these common strategies and how some elementary schools are sustaining their gains and possible reasons that some are not. Finally, we discuss challenges all schools are facing and present recommendations for how policymakers, philanthropists and others who support schools can help address some of these challenges.
