No abstract

The increasing use of state-mandated public high school exit exams is one manifestation of the current movement in U.S. public schooling toward more explicit standards of instruction and accountability. Exit exam requirements implicitly argue that raising the bar for graduation creates incentives both for students to work harder in school and for schools to increase their efforts for low-achieving students. Such incentives should most strongly affect the motivation of students who fail an exit exam the first time they take the test because failing provides a clear signal of students' need to improve their academic skills. Others argue that failing an exit exam discourages low-achieving students from staying in school. In this article, the authors use a regression discontinuity design and studentlevel longitudinal data from four large California public school districts to estimate the effect of failing a high school exit exam in 10th grade on subsequent student achievement, course taking, persistence in high school, and graduation. The analyses show no evidence of any significant or sizeable effect of failing the exam on high school course-taking, achievement, persistence, or graduation for students with test scores near the exit exam passing score. In each case, the estimates are precise enough to rule out modest to large effects. This implies that the negative impacts of high school exit exam policies on graduation rates found in other studies are more likely a result of reduced graduation rates of very low-achieving students than of discouragement of marginally lowachieving students.

Summer learning loss (SLL) is a familiar and much-studied phenomenon, yet new concerns that measurement artifacts may have distorted canonical SLL findings create a need to revisit basic research on SLL. Though race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status only account for about 4% of the variance in SLL, nearly all prior work focuses on these factors. We zoom out to the full spread of differential SLL and its contribution to students’ positions in the eighth-grade achievement distribution. Using a large, longitudinal NWEA data set, we document dramatic variability in SLL. While some students actually maintain their school-year learning rate, others lose nearly all their school-year progress. Moreover, decrements are not randomly distributed—52% of students lose ground in all 5 consecutive years (English language arts).

As educational policy makers seek strategies to improve the teacher workforce, the early career period represents a unique opportunity to identify struggling teachers, examine the likelihood of future improvement, and make strategic pretenure investments in development or dismissals. It is also a useful time to identify particularly promising teachers for development and focus on high-needs areas. This article asks how much teachers vary in performance improvement during their first 5 years of teaching and to what extent initial job performance predicts later performance. We find that, on average, initial performance is quite predictive of future performance, far more so than typically measured teacher characteristics. This is particularly the case in math, while predictions about future English language arts (ELA) performance based on initial ELA value added are less precise. Predictions are most powerful at the extremes. We use these predictions to explore the likelihood that personnel actions based on initial performance would lead to inappropriate distinctions between teachers who would be high or low performing in future years. We also examine the much less discussed costs of failure to distinguish performance when meaningful differences exist. The results point to the potential of policies that make use of teachers' initial performance to inform personnel decisions.