Colorado Department of Education Significant Disproportionality Policy Review
Personnel: Jessica Alzen & Elena Diaz-Bilello
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) requires states to examine data from each district annually to determine if there is significant disproportionality based on race and ethnicity in multiple special education contexts. The Colorado Department of Education (CDE) contracted CADRE to serve as an external reviewer for CDEs implementation of this regulation. This work includes a review of the relevant research literature, review of the methodologies and accompanying accountability system in place at CDE, and recommendations regarding potential ways to supplement the current approach. In addition to secondary data analysis, CADRE will also conduct two small case studies in the spring to understand more about contextual factors that may influence the conditions under which a district gets flagged for significant disproportionality. This work not only assists CDE in due diligence in implementation of the policy but also provides information relevant to the Federal policy context as little is known about how variability in methodology influences significant disproportionality rates or how context may be related to those rates.
Student Growth Study with Curriculum Associates
A core principle behind diagnostic assessment is that results are intended to provide teachers (and for that matter, students) with timely and actionable information that can be used to inform subsequent instruction. For this to be possible, it is important to be able to support valid inferences about both student understanding (i.e., status of achievement or attainment) and changes in understanding (i.e., progress in achievement, growth). While neither of these inferences are easy to make, inferences about growth are especially challenging. With this in mind, CADRE is excited to be partnering with Curriculum Associates in the coming year to investigate innovative ways to convey trustworthy and actionable information about student progress. This work will be spearheaded by CADRE’s Director, Derek Briggs, with assistance from Sarah Wellberg, a graduate student researcher. In addition to new ideas for modeling normative information about student growth, the team is especially excited to explore some ideas for the use of item mapping to convey information about criterion-referenced growth.
The Educational Opportunity Project
The Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), an initiative lead by Sean Reardon of Stanford University, is a publicly available database aimed at providing researchers, policymakers, educators, and parents with data about educational opportunity in the United States. In September 2019 The Educational Opportunity Project website launched, providing an interactive tool for exploring and learning from the data. CADRE Faculty Partner Benjamin Shear, a member of the SEDA Development Team, and graduate student researcher Kaitlin Mork helped to develop statistical methods and prepare raw data used to construct SEDA and summarize the large amounts of data in meaningful ways. The new website explorer provides three measures of educational opportunity in US schools: average test scores, learning rates, and trends in average scores across years. The tool allows users to explore these measures of opportunity at different geographic scales, ranging from schools to districts to counties, and to explore the associations between educational opportunity and community demographics. Benjamin Shear will be co-facilitating training sessions about the explorer and database at upcoming conferences including the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE), the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME), and the American Educational Research Association (AERA). The new website can be viewed at edopportunity.org. A recent summary of the work also appeared in a CU Boulder Today news article.
School of Education Place-Based Research in Northeast Colorado
Benjamin Shear and Kaitlin Mork collaborated with School of Education colleagues Terri Wilson (Assistant Professor, EFPP), Michele Moses (Professor, EFPP), and Maravene Taylor-Heine (PhD Student, LSHD) on a School of Education place-based partnership research project exploring the impacts of state accountability systems on small, rural school districts. Through collaboration with district leaders and a teacher leadership team, we sought to better understand how one rural district navigated the rapidly shifting context of state and federal legislation regarding student testing and accountability. The case study focused on how education leaders navigated issues such as student opt-outs of state testing, and sought to provide support regarding the use of student assessment data moving forward. This work is on-going as part of the School of Education's Northeast Colorado Education Place-Based Partnership initiative.