Getting Students on Track to College and Career Readiness: How Many Catch Up from Far Behind?

*050209120* Rev 1Getting Students on Track to College and Career Readiness: How Many Catch Up from Far Behind? Chrys Dougherty Steve Fleming November 2012ACT Research Report Series2012 (9) For additional copies, write: ACT Research Report Series P.O. Box 168 Iowa City, IA 52243-0168© 2012 by ACT, Inc. All rights reserved. Getting Students on Track to College and Career Readiness: How Many Catch Up from Far Behind? Chrys Dougherty Steve Fleming ii Abstract This report focused on the extent to which students who are academically far off track in preparing for college can catch up in four years. We studied multiple cohorts of students in eighth grade whose EXPLORE® scores were more than one standard deviation below the EXPLORE benchmark scores associated with being on track. We found that 10 percent or fewer of the students who were far off track in eighth grade attained the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks® by twelfth grade. We did a similar analysis for two cohorts of students beginning in fourth grade, using scores on state-developed tests in grade four and EXPLORE scores in grade eight, and obtained similar results. For both the fourth grade and the eighth grade cohorts, the overall percentage of students catching up was lower in higher poverty schools. At some higher poverty schools, however, the percentage of students catching up exceeded the average for lower poverty schools. These findings will help inform policymakers who set accountability expectations for schools. For example, reasonable growth goals might be set based on student performance in the more successful schools. Furthermore, goals for percentages of students reaching college and career readiness achievement targets should take into account the students’ starting points and the number of years that schools have available to catch them up. In addition, research can be conducted to identify educational practices that distinguish schools and school systems that are more successful at working with off-track students and getting students on track starting in preschool and the early grades. iii Getting Students on Track to College and Career Readiness: How Many Catch Up from Far Behind?1 Introduction In recent years, educators and policymakers have emphasized the goal that all students graduate from high school ready for college and careers (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, National Conference of State Legislatures, National Association of State Boards of Education, and Council of Chief State School Officers, 2008). The Common Core State Standards were written with that goal explicitly in mind (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010). Evidence from the ACT®, however, indicates that the majority of students who finish high school do not graduate college and career ready, and the situation is worse for low-income and minority students (ACT, 2010a). For example, in states where all eleventh graders took the ACT in 2010, only 27% of low-income students met college readiness benchmarks in reading, 16% in mathematics, and 11% in science.2 Many efforts to address the problem of preparing American students for college and careers have focused on high school. The famed Nation at Risk report placed nearly all of its emphasis on strengthening the high school curriculum (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). However, academic preparation gaps appear long before high school. For example, gaps in vocabulary development between disadvantaged students and their more advantaged counterparts emerge in early childhood (Hart & Risley, 1995), and students entering kindergarten from disadvantaged backgrounds tend to lag behind their more advantaged peers not only in vocabulary and overall oral language development (Farkas & Beron, 2004; Dunham, Farkas, Hammer, Tomblin, & Catts, 2007) but also in early reading and mathematics skills and 1 This study uses data maintained by the Arkansas Department of Education and is published with its permission. 2 For African American and Hispanic students respectively, the corresponding statistics were 17 and 28 percent in reading, 9 and 19 percent in mathematics, and 5 and 10 percent in science. If the college readiness of dropouts were measured and inclu