Federal Accountability Under ESSA: Value-Added Measures of School Effectiveness Are Related to Student Enrollment and Success in College

-ACT Research & Policy ISSUE BRIEF MAY 2017 Dina Bassiri is a senior research scientist in the Statistical and Applied Research Department, specializing in educational outcomes research and student growth models. Dan Vitale is a policy analyst in Public Affairs. Federal Accountability Under ESSA: Value-Added Measure of School Effectiveness Are Related to Student Enrollment and Success in College Dina Bassiri, PhD, and Dan Vitale Educational accountability in the nation’s public schools—that is, measurement of schools’ effectiveness—has gained considerable attention over the last decade, primarily because it has become the basis for sanctioning schools. This is in large part due to the 2001 reauthorization of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) known as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which prescribed how states must develop their educational accountability systems. Both the Obama administration’s Race to the Top grant program and the ESEA Flexibility Waivers enabled a transition from a fairly prescriptive and limited state accountability system to one that offered a new degree of flexibility but required the inclusion of new measures. Now, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)—the 2015 reauthorization of ESEA to be implemented in the 2017–18 school year—offers even greater flexibility. ESSA, like NCLB, requires schools to adopt “challenging academic standards,” and preserves NCLB’s notion of an accountability framework; however, under ESSA, states have more flexibility in identifying schools for improvement and gives states more latitude to choose certain indicators within it. States are currently in the process of developing plans under ESSA that include establishing a set of accountability indicators. The law mandates five types of indicators that must be included, one of which is academic achievement based on annual assessments in reading and mathematics in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school. Under ESSA, states must include a measure of student proficiency on the assessments. They also have the option of including a growth measure showing how student performance on the assessments changes from one year to another. Examples of growth measures include student growth percentiles and value-added measures.1 Acknowledgement The authors thank Jeff Allen and Krista Mattern for their reviews, helpful comments, and suggestions on an earlier draft of this report. www.act.org/research policy © 2017 by ACT, Inc. All rights reserved. R1639 ACT Research & Policy Federal Accountability Under ESSA The value of a school accountability indicator depends, in part, on whether the indicator measures an attribute that is under a school’s control. With respect to performance on assessments, simply reporting, for example, the average proficiency rate of the students in a school—that is, the percentage of a school’s students meeting a certain benchmark score on the assessment—is an incomplete measure of school effectiveness.2 In an earlier brief, ACT identified similar drawbacks to other potential accountability measures involving assessment results and found that value-added measures could provide valuable information about growth.3 A value-added measure for a school is based on two or more years of assessment results at the same school for the same students. It is an estimate of the number of score points by which attending that particular school increases students’ test scores in a given subject beyond the average expected increase associated with attending a “typical” school. Because the fundamental purpose of value-added measures is to estimate the influence of schools by controlling for contextual factors such as student socioeconomic status and initial achievement level, such measures provide additional data to help give a more complete picture of the school. As such, one could reasonably expect that a high school’s contribution to student learning would extend beyond their high school test scores and would be related to performance after high school.4 Therefore, a way of gauging the usefulness of a value-added measure of high school effectiveness is to see how it relates to the college enrollment rate of the school’s graduates and their success in college. If the value-added measure is related statistically to college enrollment, persistence to a second year of college, and first-year college course grades, for example, then it can be a useful component of an accountability system designed to measure schools’ effectiveness at holding students to challenging academic standards of the sort required for entry into college. To test whether value-added measures are related to indicators of college success, ACT analyzed the assessment scores, college enrollment history,