Can a funding surge close the charter school gap? | Episode 1030 of The Education Gadfly Show

We are looking at students who were held back.

You know, all these states are trying to figure out, do we want to do this, you know, third grade reading guarantee? Do we not? And we've got some new evidence this time out of, again, our home state of Ohio.

They're not just looking at kids who were retained.

They're looking at the threat of retention.

And I've covered some sort of earlier studies on this, but this one's a more rigorous study and it's further along.

So it's an important one.

Looks at the Ohio's Read to Succeed Law, which was, again, had the third grade reading guarantee in it.

Required students below a state set proficiency threshold.

Well, that's a tongue twister.

On their grade three ELA exam to basically risk being held back.

When we look at the data, we'll find that only 1% of at-risk kids were actually retained during 2014 through 2017.

So this study says, okay, we had 1% retained, but there is probably a much larger group that was exposed to the threat.

And did that make a difference? And so they've got a neat design here where they're able to separate out the threat effect from the consequences of actually being retained.

They take advantage of this natural experiment that's built into Ohio's testing schedule.

And basically third graders who took this ELA state test at least twice, so once in the fall, once again in the spring, their highest score determines whether they are ultimately retained, at least on paper.

So they focus on what happened after that fall test.

They compare students who score just enough to be safe from retention, regardless of how much they might learn later in the year with students who fell just short of that bar.

And they hence continue to face the threat of retention.

They have 500,000 over that first time grade three students across these four cohorts, 2014 through 2017.

Again, this is a regression discontinuity design, examining kids above and below that threshold so it doesn't generalize to kids outside that range.

All that key finding, the threat works.

I think that's basically the bottom line.

Students who remained exposed to the possible retention after the fall test score, they significantly did better by the end of third grade than students who had scored just high enough in the fall to avoid that threat.

Not only in language arts, which was the interesting part, but it was also in math.

And so they say, you know, this math effect is kind of important because it shows that these gains aren't merely test prep for the ELA test.