Overall Research Project Description The United States has long been requiring states to classify schools as underperforming based on student achievement, but federal policies underlying this mandate have changed. Among the most important changes is how schools are identified as underperforming. Under No Child Left Behind, schools were labeled low performing for failure to meet proficiency targets, which are widely understood to reflect a student body’s socioeconomic advantage rather than a school’s quality. The most recent federal policy expands the definition of low performance and takes a more nuanced view of school quality.
In this project, we are working to build an understanding of whether and to what extent these new approaches to identifying low-performing schools yield schools a different set of schools than older proficiency-based policies. In particular, we are interested in whether the way states rate school performance under federal law affects the composition of schools that are ultimately designated as low performing. This matters because being identified as low performing is a double-edged sword for schools. On one hand, the low-performing label is demoralizing for communities, educators, and students in those schools. There is a large evidence base showing that schools with more students of color and economically disadvantaged students are labeled as low performing, raising important implications for equity. On the other hand, some policies allocate considerable additional funding for schools that are identified as low performing.

We are looking for an undergraduate research assistant to support, and ultimately lead portions of a document review and analysis of all state plans and revisions submitted to the U.S. Department of Education under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). What measures are states using to rate schools? How are they weighting each of those measures? How can schools exit improvement status in different states? The research assistant will play a central role in developing a coding scheme for these plans, conducting the coding, and potentially helping to analyze plans for academic publication moving forward.

One outcome for the project will be to disseminate the data that we collect to support additional projects. To that end, we would encourage and support the research assistant to use the expertise they develop on the project to advance their own research.

This is a joint project with a faculty member at University of Pittsburgh. The research assistant will have the opportunity to participate in the project from relatively early stages and follow it through to build a novel dataset that we expect will result in academic publications. This would be a nice opportunity for a student interested in pursuing (or learning about) a master's or Ph.D. in educational policy.