What we have been reading this week

Please Stop Using the Phrase 'Achievement Gap'
Recently, I've been more and more troubled with the phrase "achievement gap." Because of America's racial history and legacy, the cross-racial comparison that holds up white student achievement as the universally standard goal is problematic. Further, the term "achievement gap" is inaccurate because it blames the historically marginalized, under-served victims of poor schooling. And, as with all misnomers, the thinking that undergirds the achievement gap only speaks of academic outcomes, not the conditions that led to those outcomes, nor does it acknowledge that the outcomes are a consequence of those conditions.  full article here
 
Test Scores Suffer When Kids Move
The students aren’t staying put.  Not in Columbus, a district that has long struggled with a student population that often changes schools. Not in many suburban central Ohio schools either. And not among charter schools, according to a first-of-its kind look at kindergarten-through-12th-grade student mobility in Ohio.
The large-scale study followed individual students statewide as they switched schools in recent years, and it paints a picture of instability for many districts that have seemed stable.
The sheer volume of movement — especially in suburban schools — is stunning, the researchers say. It can hurt schools and the children they’re trying to teach, said Roberta Garber, executive director of Columbus-based Community Research Partners, which conducted the study over the past year.
“The big picture is, if children are changing schools frequently, particularly during the school year but even in the summer, the likelihood is that they won’t do as well academically. The other piece of it is ... if it’s a school that has a lot of churn, it makes it harder for teachers to teach and it hurts the stable students,” Garber said.
But “you can’t shake your head and say, ‘Gosh, it’s bad.’ This is powerful data that can be used in a real-time sort of way.”  full article here      study available here
 
Student Turnover: Some Schools Stay Sharp Despite ‘Churning’
The kids keep coming at Groveport Madison High School. They keep leaving, too. In all, there have been about 180 students in and 309 out. A little more than half of the school’s students stay put for at least two years.
“We’ve come to grips that this is the way for us, for better and worse,” Principal AricThomas said. “We have to find ways to make it work for students.”
Groveport Madison and a few other small suburban Columbus school districts — Hamilton, Reynoldsburg and Whitehall — have more students in some grades moving in and out of their schools than Columbus does. But perhaps an even greater takeaway is that those suburban districts, which also serve poor students, are somehow overcoming problems related to student churn. The suburban districts say they’re finding ways to help children who switch schools often, including changing how courses are offered to make it easier to stay in a school even if students move outside the district.
“Reynoldsburg is a good example of, ‘Here’s a district that’s high-mobility, high-poverty, high-minority and high-achieving.’ That’s not a combination we see all the time,” said Mark Real, the president and CEO of KidsOhio, a Columbus nonprofit organization that studies education issues. “I think there’s a lot we can learn from them.”  full article here

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