Dimensions: 8.75'' x 5.75'' 138 pages AEI Press  (Washington) Publication Date: May 2003 Paperback ISBN: 0844771651

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May 2003
Closing the Education Achievement Gap: Is Title I Working?
By Marvin H. Kosters and Brent D. Mast

The authors examine the effects on achievement of the largest federal program of financial aid to schools, Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Title I was intended to improve the academic performance of children in low-income schools who have generally failed to attain achievement levels comparable to those in higher-income schools. The program was recently reauthorized as the No Child Left Behind Act. In this book the authors summarize the evolution of policy under Title I, review previous evaluations of its effects on achievement, and present new evidence based on national data on math and reading test scores to assess recent experience under the program. The authors conclude that Title I has failed to produce any significant increase in test scores or to narrow achievement gaps between the scores of low- and high-income students and schools.

This book is another in the AEI Evaluative Studies series, which examines the effectiveness of some of the federal government's most important and costly programs.

Marvin H. Kosters is a resident scholar at AEI. He has written extensively on wage and income inequality, the effects of the minimum wage on employment, regulation, and other topics. Brent D. Mast is a research fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation and a former research associate at AEI. A summary of the book follows.

Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 authorized more than $1 billion to improve the education of children from low-income families. It was the first time Congress authorized a broad distribution of federal money to public schools, which for the most part were--and are--funded by local and state governments. The underlying rationale was that low-income communities were at a disadvantage in educating their children because they could raise less tax money and provide fewer resources for their students than districts that were better off. This disadvantage was reflected by lower achievement for children in low-income schools, a problem that Title I was intended to address by providing additional resources--teachers, material, equipment--to help children overcome educational deficiencies.

Almost four decades and more than $200 billion later, what has been accomplished? Was the money well spent? Are students in low-income schools doing better? Since minorities are disproportionately represented in low-income school districts, has Title I helped to close the achievement gap for minority children?

Children in schools where low-income families or minorities are heavily overrepresented have historically attained lower scores in achievement tests in basic subjects like reading and math than children in schools with few students from low-income or minority families. In the 1970s and early 1980s, a promising reduction in the achievement gap between black and white students was taking place. However, achievement gaps for reading and math showed no further sustained reduction after the mid-1980s.

Over time, skeptics called into question the link between money, educational resources, and achievement. Supplementary resources provided under Title I failed to improve test scores of children who were the beneficiaries, and achievement gaps were no longer shrinking.

In the early years of the program, Congress and federal officials responded chiefly by tightening administration of Title I and renewing efforts to evaluate its effectiveness. More recently the trend has been toward more flexible use of Title I funds in efforts to raise the performance of all students in schools with high concentrations of children from low-income families.

Title I funds are funneled through the states to school districts, mainly to districts with high concentrations of children from poor families, and within these districts toward high poverty schools. The distribution of money has been skewed toward elementary schools, with less going to junior and senior high schools. Funding increased from more than $4 billion (in constant 2001 dollars) in the mid-1960s to nearly $9 billion in 2001. Congress has approved major increases in funding for Title I in recent years, and President Bush is proposing $12.3 billion for Title I in the 2004 budget, a 9 percent increase from the preceding year and a 40 percent increase from 2001.

Evaluations of the Program

Congress and the executive branch showed an early interest in evaluating Title I-was it pulling up achievement scores of low-income students? Was it pulling them up enough to narrow the gap between the scores of the poor and the better-off? In short, was it making a difference?

The enabling legislation called for the states to make annual evaluations, but with the program just getting under way in the late 1960s, early studies to assess its performance were too varied in design and not sufficiently representative to produce reliable evidence about its effectiveness. By the early 1970s, federal officials with policy responsibilities for Title I found the lack of evidence that the program raised achievement disappointing. They concluded that more systematic data collection and analysis were needed to develop convincing evidence of positive effects. These circumstances led to efforts to examine the effects of Title I on achievement in two major congressionally mandated national studies: the Sustaining Effects study initiated in the mid-1970s and the Prospects study in the late 1980s.

The Sustaining Effects study included an ambitious data collection effort involving a representative sample of some 120,000 children in more than 300 schools for three years beginning in 1976-1977. The study used control group methodology to analyze the effects of Title I on achievement. It also examined the effects of different kinds of program activities and the influence of socioeconomic characteristics of families. The evidence from the study on the effects of Title I on achievement was mixed, with some estimates suggesting that the program was raising achievement and others that it was not, but with even the most favorable results showing only a slight contribution to narrowing the achievement gap. The study found no instructional programs that were particularly effective for disadvantaged students, and it confirmed findings in other studies that family background characteristics seemed to be more important determinants of student achievement than additional resources for schools.

In 1988, Congress mandated the Prospects study, a longitudinal study designed to track students over a period of three years beginning in 1991. The study found that achievement levels of participants in Title I were lower than for students not in Title I programs, that the gap remained essentially unchanged as children moved up to higher grades, and that Title I failed to reduce the size of the gap. This study, like earlier studies, indicated that characteristics of individual students and their families made more difference for achievement than what happened in schools. The Prospects study also found that grading standards were much lower in high-poverty schools, where students who received an A for performance might get a C in a low-poverty school.

Analysts who have examined previous evaluations all agree that Title I has not succeeded in closing the achievement gap, but this is perhaps an unrealistic expectation. Although some have suggested the possibility that poor and minority children might have fallen further behind in the absence of Title I, the available evidence does not support this view. The critical issue for evaluation is whether Title I raises test scores of participating students, and thus reduces achievement gaps. The evidence from most studies is that Title I has not made a statistically and substantively significant contribution to raising achievement and reducing the size of achievement gaps.

Evidence from a New Analysis

Studies to evaluate Title I have gradually improved as better data became available and more sophisticated statistical methods were developed. Our analysis takes a new approach to examining the effects of Title I.  We analyze national data on achievement that enables us to compare the achievement scores of individual Title I students with those of similar students (using statistical methods to achieve comparability) who did not get Title I services.

The data we analyzed are scores of individual students in National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) tests, along with information on relevant personal, family, and other characteristics (such as time spent viewing television). The data examined are math and reading scores for fourth and eighth grade students who were tested in 1993-94, 1995-96 and 1997-98. The percentage of students receiving Title I services increased during these years consistent with the trend toward school-wide programs.

If Title I is boosting achievement, that is not apparent from our analysis of the NAEP data. Our finding is consistent with the conclusions reached in earlier evaluations. Nor do we find convincing evidence that Title I conferred disproportionate benefits on minorities or on students from low-income families who receive subsidized lunches.

Many possible reasons may account for the absence of significant positive effects. The data could be inadequate for uncovering such relationships. Or it may be that, contrary to the founding premise of Title I, additional resources do not lead to higher achievement scores. It may also be that family characteristics, especially the education and income of parents, are more influential. Or it may be that the incremental resources delivered by Title I have been insufficient to produce higher scores. Yet another explanation may be that funds received under Title I are offset by reductions from other sources, as local funding is shifted from education to other types of spending or to tax relief.

Conclusions

Consistent with most of the earlier studies, the evidence we examined indicates that no systematic, significant positive effects on achievement can be traced to participation in Title I. The gap in test scores narrowed somewhat in the 1970s and early 1980s, but this trend did not persist after the mid-1980s. Moreover, as other analysts have indicated, the earlier narrowing may have been due to factors other than Title I, such as increased school integration and declining differences between white and black students in parental education and family size.

The problem of disparate achievement is real and important. Reduction of systematic differences between racial and ethnic groups, or between income strata, could contribute to social and economic mobility and reduce the likelihood that low-income status perpetuates itself from one generation to the next. If only for those reasons, the problem of systematic disparity of achievement merits attention.

The plain policy implication of our findings (and those from earlier evaluations) is that Title I should be shut down. However, the political obstacles to doing that are formidable. At the local level, Title I eases fiscal pressures and may permit delivery of more noneducational services. It also supports employment of teachers and aides by the public schools. Although beneficial to a poor community, these are not the goals of Title I.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, which reauthorized Title I, takes some steps toward a conceptually different approach, a testing and information strategy. As the act contemplates, such an approach calls for systematic testing, publication of test results, articulation of performance criteria, and incentives to address unsatisfactory performance. A testing and information strategy would seek not only to foster improved management of public school programs but also to raise parental and community awareness of how schools and students are performing. The act confers on parents a qualified right to transfer children from low-performing schools to other public schools.

Congress could enlarge opportunities for parental choice by dedicating some Title I money to pay for children to attend private schools, secular or-as approved by the Supreme Court in 2002 in the Cleveland voucher case--religious schools. A strong case can be made for such an experiment with Title I funding. To provide sufficient funding to cover the full cost of alternative schools, Congress could require that participating states and localities contribute a partial matching grant. To provide enough time for parents and schools--both private and public--to adjust, such an experiment should be funded for at least five years.

  This summary is available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format.