The Achievement Gap in California:
Implications for a Statewide Accountability System

Presentation given by Joan McRobbie, WestEd’s California Liaison, on December 3, 1998 at an urban session at the California School Boards Association’s annual conference in San Diego.

In a special session of the California legislature in January, newly-elected Governor Gray Davis will restart the debate over a statewide education accountability system. Central in this debate will be the fact that only some of California’s students are achieving at high levels. Too many at the low-achieving end are minority children, particularly Latino and African American students. At this critical juncture, a look at the achievement gap reveals a picture of educational difference that underscores both the urgent need for an accountability system and the enormous challenges this state faces in creating one.

The major questions I want to address today are: What is the achievement gap? Why do we have it? How does it play out in California? What can we do about it? Then I want to point to some implications in terms of accountability and suggest areas where stakeholders such as yourselves, as urban school board members, may want to join in the Sacramento debate.

What is the Achievement Gap?

Defining the achievement gap is complex. The subject is rife with controversy, tensions, and unknowns. We can begin by saying that across the U.S., poor and minority students tend to achieve at lower levels than other students. And we certainly have plenty of evidence correlating poverty and low achievement. But we also know that besides the enormous socio-economic factor, the gap tends to break down by race and ethnicity. Nationwide, Hispanic, African American, and Native American students tend to achieve at lower levels than their white and Asian peers. This holds true in California. And the differences are often, but not always, related to poverty.

For about 18 years, this gap had been closing, but in the late 1980s that progress stopped, frustrating and puzzling everyone. Now there are some hopeful signs, and I want to talk about some of those. But first, as a jumping off point for our discussion today, I want to address the "why" question by conveying some of the thinking coming from the Education Trust, an agency in Washington, D.C., dedicated to closing the gap.

Why Do We Have an Achievement Gap?

Kati Haycock, executive director of the Education Trust, has researched achievement gap issues for many years, and her work has led her to some provocative conclusions. The basic reason why we have the gap, she says, is not poverty. Rather, the reason is because we give minority and poor children less of the very things they need more of to achieve at high levels.

Haycock points to three essential things that we give these students less of:

1. We teach different children different things. Many Latinos and African American students get a lower-level, less rigorous curriculum;
2. We often assign the least qualified teachers to teach them;
3. We expect less of them, and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Poverty matters. But these things matter more. Moreover, she contends, if we change these things, we can close the gap.

How Does This Play Out in California?

Do we in California teach different students different content? It’s clear that we do. A report prepared last year by the University of California’s Outreach Task Force (which included the state’s newly-named Secretary of Education, Gary Hart) outlined broad structural patterns of difference in educational opportunity in this state. Troubling school-by-school differences exist in types and levels of academic programs offered. Moreover, a pattern of racial/ethnic differences emerges from the data in terms of which students attend low-performing schools. Two facts in particular stand out:

• African American, Latino, and Native American students are concentrated in the bottom tier of K-12 schools (as measured by a variety of academic performance indicators);

• When the Task Force ranked the state’s high schools into five groups by SAT scores, 79% of the enrollment in bottom quintile were African American, Latino and Native American students.

What Is the Educational Difference These Students Experience?

Largely due to poverty, many of these children start out behind. If they simply move forward apace with other children, they remain perpetually behind. To catch up they need a rocket, as San Francisco schools Superintendent Bill Rojas recently pointed out. Instead, we give them something more akin to a buggy. They get lower-level content and a pace that’s stuck in low gear. From the earliest grades, we give them less to chew on, less to get excited about, less to challenge them.

When they reach middle school, they are less likely to be assigned to 8^th grade algebra. Without algebra, they can’t help but do less well (than peers who have taken algebra) on tests like the 8^th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress in math. California’s 8^th graders did poorly overall in 8^th grade NAEP math in 1996. Only 17% scored at or above proficient. But only 5% of Latinos did that well and only 2% of blacks.

As students reach high school, the performance gap continues to widen and the chances for African American and Latino students to be admitted to four-year colleges continue to diminish. Even if these students go to a good high school, they are less prepared for courses like biology and chemistry. Being behind, they can’t fit in as many college-prep courses as faster-track white or Asian students. They run out of time before getting near an offering like AP calculus.

But for many, high school is a place that doesn’t offer AP calculus and where college prep courses are likely to be watered down. As the Task Force report pointed out, it’s hard to overstate how much of an impact attending such schools can have on a student’s academic aspirations and achievement. Many of you no doubt read the Los Angeles Times series on education last May entitled "California’s Perilous Slide." Times reporters spent time in the halls and classrooms of 10 different high schools, and spoke with teachers, administrators, and students at each. The picture of contrasts their stories painted was vivid and distressing.

The SAT and College Admissions

As juniors, students take the SAT. And SAT scores raise a set of questions that include but go beyond differences in preparation. The Task force found that African American and Latino students in every income category have lower average SAT scores than Asians and whites. The differences are so large that average scores for black students in the highest income category are lower than those of poorest white and Asian students.

Unmistakably, something other than poverty is at work here. Issues ranging from test bias to influences of home, schools, and culture all are suspect. In the new book The Black-White Test Score Gap, edited by Harvard’s Christopher Jencks and UCLA’s Meredith Phillips, researchers explore such issues and ways they are being addressed nationwide. Jencks generalizes the test score gap to include Hispanics. Given its economic implications, he believes that closing it would do more than any other action to improve race relations in the U.S.

Not surprisingly, Latinos and African Americans are the groups least represented in higher education in California. These students are at an especially severe disadvantage in competition for places at top-tier schools. According to the Task Force, just 5% of California’s African American students and only 4% of Latinos are fully eligible for admission to UC. Numerous high schools in the state haven’t one UC-eligible student, not even the valedictorian. Admissions show a distinct geographic pattern as well. So, as it stands, one could go into a primary-grade classroom and—based on the location and a student’s race or ethnicity—predict fairly reliably whether that student is likely ever to go to UC.

What does it mean for the future of the state that we are undereducating Hispanic students, who will be our citizen majority in just a few short years? With so few African American and Hispanic students being admitted to UC, what are the implications for the state’s future professional and managerial elite?

What Can We Do About the Gap?

The Task Force proposed a range of actions, including initiation of new kinds of partnerships between the university, K-12 schools, and local community and business leadership. Meanwhile, some UC faculty members are making headway with an admissions policy proposal that would require UC to admit the top 4% of high school graduating classes—with admission based primarily on grades on UC prerequisite courses rather than on SAT scores. Optimistically, such a policy might help spur the kinds of partnerships recommended by the Task Force by creating an incentive for the UC campuses to ensure that the incoming local students are adequately prepared. (N.B. This policy was adopted by UC in early 1999.)

To Kati Haycock, one strong key in addressing these issues is standards—more specifically, setting clear standards and using them as a lever for closing the gap. She points to Texas as a place where some districts are making significant progress in doing just that.

Standards as a Lever: the Texas Example. Texas is California’s cousin in the composition of its students. And in Texas, students from all backgrounds perform better on tests like NAEP than their California counterparts. Though in Texas, as elsewhere, there is still a huge racial chasm, the gap is closing there faster than in any other state.

Here are the key elements of what Texas has done:

• set clear standards that opened some educators’eyes to how low their own schools’ standards had fallen;
• put in place assessments and curricula aligned with the standards;
• freed schools to experiment (in contrast to California’s recent approach of prescriptive, one-size-fits-all initiatives)
• holds schools accountable for results for all groups
• uses a high-stakes, very public ranking system

This approach has created incentives for local school staffs to scour the state to find models and practices that work. Schools are vigorously analyzing their data to determine their particular areas of weakness and use that information make needed changes.

Schools cannot be designated "exemplary" on the basis of overall performance alone. White, Asian, Hispanic, and African American students must all be performing at the exemplary level. Because of this, a wealthy suburban school found itself labeled low- performing because its black students were way behind. By contrast, some schools with largely minority enrollments in the largely minority, poor border town of El Paso have achieved exemplary status.

They’re making remarkable progress by way of the El Paso Collaborative for Academic Excellence, a joint effort of civic, business, and educational leaders from throughout El Paso County (an effort that looks much like what the UC Task Force proposed for California). The collaborative focuses on math and science and on capacity building—lots of professional development that will enable the schools to offer high quality curriculum and instruction. And it’s working. Recent data show dramatic improvements in math and science teaching and learning and in student achievement, particularly in those subject areas.

A word of caution: the Texas accountability system is not universally praised. Some assessment experts, for example, find fault with its being a single-measure system, saying that stakes this high demand multiple measures of performance in order to be fair. Moreover, some question the wisdom of using race and ethnicity as state-level accountability indicators. One risk is that of reinforcing a message of negative expectations for some groups. And in California, a state more ethnically complex than Texas, ethnic breakdown would necessitate getting into—for example—sub-groups of Asian students, since there are performance gaps among those groups. Where would the parsing end? Some suggest a state-level focus on improving low performance, regardless of which students that involves, acknowledging that local schools must disaggregate data to get information needed to guide improvement efforts.

Teaching Matters. Though accountability systems remain imperfect, examples like that of Texas do indeed make a case for using standards as a lever for closing the achievement gap. But within the whole arena of standards and accountability, data from Texas and a number of other places are giving even more weight to something we’ve always known: teaching matters. About this Kati Haycock is emphatic. If we did nothing else but assure that African American, Latino, and low-income youngsters had their fair share of well-educated teachers, she says, we would cut the achievement gap in half.

She points to recent research from Tennessee, Texas, Massachusetts, and Alabama that suggests that teaching quality is even more important than we knew. Studies in these states have ranked teachers as effective or ineffective, based on their ability to produce student learning gains on statewide tests. They’ve looked at what happens to student test scores over time, depending on whether a student is assigned to a good or a bad teacher. And the gains or losses they’re finding are often stunning.

In an example from Dallas, a group of 4^th graders assigned to three highly-effective teachers in a row rose from the 59^th percentile in 4^th grade to the 79^th percentile by end of 6^th grade. A similar but slightly higher-achieving group of students was assigned three consecutive ineffective teachers and fell from the 60^th percentile in 4^th grade to the 42^nd percentile by end of 6^th grade. So a group of students who all started out at roughly the same achievement level ended up three years later with a gap of more than 35 percentile points between them. That kind of outcome, notes Kati Haycock. can mean difference between assignment to remedial or gifted programs. Long term, it can mean acceptance to a top tier college versus a job behind the counter at McDonalds.

Admittedly, this way of measuring teacher effectiveness is limited. But it is one indicator, and it is drawing much attention. Education economist Eric Hanushek has made a career out of saying that money doesn’t matter—that giving schools more resources does not lead to improved performance. He strongly opposes across-the-board class size reduction, for example, as a waste of money. But recently he has made an exception to his view. Based on his own research, he now says resources don’t matter except for one: good teaching.

In resource-starved California, where so many schools are short on basics such as books, even classrooms, we probably need to put that differently. Here we would acknowledge that good teaching alone isn’t enough. But without good teaching, the other things probably won’t make a difference.

The California Teaching Picture

So we come to the distressing status of California’s teaching supply and quality. The picture is marked by two realities, both brought to the crisis point by the state’s class size reduction initiative: 1) an overall shortage, which leads to the hiring of inexperienced and/or unprepared teachers; and 2) the fact that poor and minority children, who need the best teachers, generally get those least prepared. A few facts:

• 11% of teachers lack full credentials (about 31,000, most on emergency permits);

• About half the current teaching force is expected to retire in next 10 years;

• California ranks 50^th in number of high school teachers with even a minor in the subject they teach, which is especially negative for math/science;

• The state needs to hire some 250,000 to 300,000 additional teachers in next decade (the current teaching force is approximately 240,000);

• Urban, especially inner-city, schools have hardest time attracting and keeping qualified teachers;

• Most of the emergency-permit teachers are in the urban districts.

Clearly, the state faces an enormous challenge of supply and severe tensions between supply and quality. The good news is that while class size reduction triggered the crisis, it also launched an array of efforts toward solutions in the four critical areas of recruitment, preparation, support, and professional development. These include:

• Comprehensive recruitment efforts, e.g. a statewide task force on teacher recruitment that’s resulted in such innovations as CalTeach, which involves an 800 number and a web site offering information to prospective teachers;

• A "revolution" in the state university system, which supplies some 60% of California’s teachers. New chancellor Charles Reed is defining his tenure by how he responds to the challenge of recruiting and training an almost an entirely new teaching force. The theme is "faster, better"; one goal is to raise the number of CSU-prepared teachers prepared annually from 10,000 to 15,000 by 2001;

• A number of new K-16 collaborations for teacher preparation and support (some involving County Offices of Education);
• A statewide task force on professional development, which has begun by developing an inventory of current professional development programs and is proceeding to delineate where we need to be (in terms of providing teachers with content knowledge, instructional strategies, and the ability to examine and analyze student work under the new standards) and how to get there;
• A new legislative package that includes creating a new paradigm in how the state prepares its teachers, a huge increase in funding for the successful Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment program, and a one-time, $10,000 stipend for teachers who attain National Board certification.

The Accountability Challenge

As we move toward a new administration and a special legislative session, we’ll be facing the classic tension between the new governor’s political need to show results quickly and the need to be thoughtful and wise in working through the complexities of an accountability system for California. Much input will be needed from the gamut of players, including school board members.

With the difficulties and differences we’ve just looked at in mind, some productive places to put energy include:

• Keeping the focus. As the debate gets underway, focus on the forest can get lost in the density of the trees. Accountability isn’t about blame or punishment. It’s about supporting and enhancing student learning.

• Coherence. For an accountability system to work, the statewide assessment must be aligned with the standards. Right now it isn’t. Alignment will be all the more critical if, like Texas, California decides to hinge high stakes on the results of a single test.

• Fairness. All students need to have access to a high-level curriculum and good teachers. They must have equitable opportunities to learn what they’re expected to know and to do well on the tests designed to measure that learning. Given all we’ve just said, this is a major challenge for California.

• Capacity building. No level of rewards or sanctions will make any difference if people don’t know how to do what they’re being asked to do. That means professional development for teachers. But it also—critically—means a focus on leadership, on development of principals, because site leadership is the linchpin of success.

The key in the success of the system will be reciprocity. States and districts can and should expect schools to function at their best and serve students well. But schools also have the right to expect that they will be given sufficient resources and support to do the job.

Principal Sources

Education Watch 1998: The Education Trust State and National Data Book Vol. II, Education Trust, Washington, DC. (http://www.EdTrust.org)

"Good Teaching Matters: How Well-Qualified Teachers Can Close the Gap," Thinking K-16, a publication of the Education Trust, Summer 1998. (http://www.EdTrust.org)

Christopher Jencks, Meredith Phillips (eds), The Black-White Test Score Gap, Brookings Institution Press, Washington, DC, 1998.

New Directions for Outreach: A Report by the Outreach Task Force for the Board of Regents of the University of California, July 1997.

Public Education: California’s Perilous Slide, special series by the Los Angeles Times, May 1998.

Joan McRobbie, Can State Intervention Spur Academic Turnaround? WestEd, 1998. (http://www.WestEd.org/policy)

Data from California Department of Education, California Department of Finance, California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, CSU Institute for Education Reform