Student segregation and achievement tracking in year-round schools

Teachers College Record

Volumn 107, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 529-562

  Mitchell, Ross E ^a   Mitchell, Douglas E ^b,c  

^a GALLAUDET UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^c UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 27844552430     PISSN: 01614681     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (112)

1. For detailed reviews of year-round schooling in general, see Harris Cooper, Jeffrey C. Valentine, Kelly Charlton, and April Melson, "The Effects of Modified School Calendars on Student Achievement and on School and Community Attitudes," Review of Research in Education, 73 (2003): 1-52;
2. Carolyn M. Shields and Linda J. LaRocque, Literature Review on Year-Round Schooling (with Annotated Bibliography) (Report prepared for the British Columbia Ministry of Education, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 1996 [ED399661]);
3. Jane L. Zykowski, Douglas E. Mitchell, David Hough, and Sandra E. Gavin, A Review of Year-Round Education Research (Riverside: California Education Research Cooperative, School of Education, University of California, Riverside, 1991).
4. For a simpler and less detached review, see Carolyn M. Shields and Steven Lynn Oberg, Year-Round, Schooling: Promises & Pitfalls (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000).
5. For a history of school calendar change since the inception of mass public schooling in the nineteenth century, see Kenneth M. Gold, School's In: The History of Summer Education in American Public Schools (New York: Peter Lang, 2002).
6. See National Association for Year-Round Education, YRE Statistics: Growth of Public Year-Round Education in the United States over a 15-Year Period (San Diego, CA: Author, 2002; retrieved June 13, 2002, from http://www.nayre.org/ statistics.html);
7. Thomas D. Snyder (Proj. Dir.) and Charlene M. Hoffman (Prod. Mgr.), Digest of Education Statistics, 2001 [NCES 2002-130] (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2002);
8. also Ross E. Mitchell, Segregation in California's K-12 Public Schools: Biases in Implementation, Assignment, and Achievement with the Multi-track Year-Round Calendar (Expert report prepared for plaintiffs' counsel, Eliezer Williams, et al. v. State of California, et al., Case No. 312236, Superior Court of the State of California, County of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, October 10, 2002; retrieved from http://www.mofo.com/decentschools/expert_reports/ mitchell_report.pdf).
9. Also see California Department of Education, California Year-Round Education Directory 2000-2001 (Sacramento: California Department of Education, School Facilities Planning Division, 2001; retrieved December 20, 2001, from http://www.cde.ca.gov/facilities/yearround/direct00.htm).
10. Billee A. Bussard, The Politics and Marketing of Year-Round School (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Florida Political Science Association, Gainesville, FL, March 21, 2003);
11. Bethany Prohm and Nancy Baenen, Are WCPSS Multi-track Elementary Schools Effective? [E&R Report No. 96E.03] (Raleigh, NC: Wake County Public School System, Department of Evaluation and Research, January 1996 [ED395983]);
12. Shields and LaRocque, Literature Review on Year-Round Schooling.
13. See, for example, R. Scott Baker, "The Paradoxes of Desegregation: Race, Class, and Education, 1935-1975," American Journal of Education, 109 (2001): 320-343;
14. Tom Loveless, The Tracking Wars: State Reform Meets School Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999);
15. Samuel R. Lucas, Tracking Inequality: Stratification and Mobility in American High Schools (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999);
16. Jeannie Oakes, "Two Cities' Tracking and Within School Segregation," Teachers College Record, 96 (1995): 681-690;
17. Jeannie Oakes, Amy Stuart Wells, Makeba Jones, and Amanda Datnow, "Detracking: The Social Construction of Ability, Cultural Politics, and Resistance to Reform," Teachers College Record, 98 (1997): 482-510;
18. Amy Stuart Wells and Irene Serna, "The Politics of Culture: Understanding Local Political Resistance to Detracking in Racially Mixed Schools," Harvard Education Review, 66 (1996): 93-118;
19. Susan Yonezawa, Amy Stuart Wells, and Irene Serna, "Choosing Tracks: 'Freedom of Choice' in Detracking Schools," American Educational Research Journal, 39 (2002): 37-67;
20. for a comprehensive review chapter, see Jeannie Oakes, Adam Gamoran, and Reba N. Page, "Curriculum Differentiation: Opportunities, Outcomes, and Meanings," in P. W. Jackson, ed., Handbook of Research on Curriculum (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 570-608.
21. Robert Corley, The Condition of California School facilities and Policies Related to Those Conditions (Expert report prepared for plaintiffs' counsel, Eliezer Williams, et al. v. State of California, et al., Case No. 312236, Superior Court of the State of California, County of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, October 10, 2002; retrieved from http://www.mofo.com/decent- schools/expert_reports/corley_report.pdf);
22. Thomas G. Duffy, Educational facilities Issues in California: Williams v. State of California (Expert report prepared for defendants' counsel, Eliezer Williams, et al. v. State of California, et al., Case No. 312236, Superior Court of the State of California, County of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, April 18, 2003; retrieved from http://www.mofo.com/decentschools/expert_reports/ duffy_report.pdf);
23. Legislative Analyst's Office, Year-Round School Incentive Programs: An Evaluation. (Sacramento, CA: Author, April 1990).
24. Multitrack schools are quite different in design (and in their effects) from the much smaller group of single-track year-round education (ST-YRE) schools that also reorganize the school attendance and vacation calendar. In ST-YRE schools, students are all on the same schedule, typically attending classes three out of every four months of the calendar year. In California, one-third of schools using a year-round calendar are ST-YRE schools. Since, by design, these ST-YRE schools have lower enrollments, only one-quarter of the students attending year-round calendar schools are enrolled in ST-YRE schools. (See notes 2 and 3 for data references.) Simply put, single-track year-round schools merely redistribute the traditional "summer vacation" period into shorter break periods spread across the year. This does not increase school enrollment capacity.
25. Joan L. Herman, "Novel Approaches to Relieve Overcrowding: The Effects of Concept 6 Year-Round Schools," Urban Education, 26 (1991): 195-213;
26. Judi McClellan, "K-12 Enrollment Projections," California Demographics (Sacramento, CA: California Department of Finance, Demographic Research Unit, Winter 1997): 10;
27. D. B. Smith, "Finding Room for California's Children," Thrust for Educational Leadership, 21 (1992): 8-11.
28. Also, as noted by Shields and Oberg in Year-Round Schooling
29. and Zykowski et al. in A Review of Year-Round Education. Research, some California school districts sought temporary relief from overcrowding through MT-YRE in the late 1970s because state requirements for school construction created a long, drawn-out process from initial application for to final occupation of a new building.
30. Steve Hymon, "A Lesson in Classroom Size Reduction," School Planning and Management, 36 (1997): 18-23;
31. David C. Illig, Early Implementation of the Class Size Reduction Initiative [CRB-97-008] (Sacramento: California Research Bureau, California State Library, April 1997);
32. Joan McRobbie,Jeremy D. Finn, and Patrick Harman, "Class Size Reduction: Lessons Learned from Experience," WestEd Policy Brief, Number 23 (August 1998).
33. See, for example, Mitchell, Segregation in California's K-12 Public Schools;
34. Claire Quinlan, Cathy George, and Terry Emmett, Year-Round Education: Year-Round Opportunities - A Study of Year-Round Education in California (Sacramento: California State Department of Education, 1987 [ED285272]);
35. Jeffrey A. White and Steven M. Cantrell, Comparison of Student Outcomes in Multitrack Year-Round and Single-Track Traditional School Calendars (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Unified School District, Program Evaluation and Research Branch, Policy Analysis Unit, March 21, 2001).
36. A key requirement for receiving state financial assistance is that "a number of pupils, equal to or greater than 30 percent of the school district's total enrollment in kindergarten and grades 1 to 6, inclusive, are on the multitrack year-round program" (California Education Code §42263.5.b.2);
37. also see Duffy, Educational Facilities Issues in California;
38. Legislative Analyst's Office, Year-Round School Incentive Program.
39. California Department of Education, California Year-Round Education Directory 1997-98 (Sacramento: California Department of Education, School Facilities Planning Division, 1998). However, relaxation of the voter approval rate for local school bond initiatives from the two-thirds level established by the infamous Proposition 13 California ballot measure of 1978 down to 55 percent with the passage of Proposition 39 on California's November 2000 ballot has made it possible for some districts to gain voter approval and thereby completely abandon the MT-YRE schedule. Nonetheless, it remains to be seen exactly how many students and schools will continue on or be added to the MT-YRE list.
40. California Department of Education, California Year-Round Education Directory 2000-2001.
41. Robert B. Burns and Dewayne A. Mason, "Organizational Constraints on the Formation of Elementary School Classes," American Journal of Education, 103 (1995): 185-212;
42. Marjorie F. Orellana and Barrie Thorne, "Year-Round Schools and the Politics of Time," Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 29 (1998): 446-472.
43. Also see Shields and Oberg, Year-Round Schooling.
44. Orellana and Thorne, "Year-Round Schools and the Politics of Time."
45. Burns and Mason, "Organizational Constraints on the Formation of Elementary School Classes";
46. Shields and Oberg, Year-Round Schooling.
47. Single-track-year-round-calendar schools, like traditional-calendar schools, have a common start date and single-track attendance schedule for all students. In ST-YRE schools, there are no opportunities either for parental choice or for student body segmentation among attendance tracks.
48. For a recent review of issues associated with school choice policies, see Jennifer Hochschild and Nathan Scovronick, The American Dream and the Public Schools (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
49. See Shields and Oberg, Year-Round Schooling, esp. 67, 146-149, 165.
50. However, if we were to adopt the definition of "ghettoizadon" offered by Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton in American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 18-19, then a certain set of circumstances would be required to allow only members of one identifiable group to be enrolled on a particular attendance track without any noteworthy representation of another group on the same attendance track. Namely, there would have to be enough students from one particular group enrolled so that the total enrollment of an attendance track could be filled without other groups' being represented to any significant extent. Circumstances that would permit "ghettoization" do exist and have been noted in the literature, but profound isolation of any particular group on one or more attendance tracks is not observed across all school sites in the current study.
51. For example, Maureen T. Hallinan, "Tracking: From 'Theory to Practice," Sociology of Education, 67 (1994): 79-84.
52. Hallinan, "Tracking";
53. Oakes, Gamoran, and Page, "Curriculum Differentiation."
54. See review by Oakes, Gamoran, and Page in "Curriculum Differentiation."
55. Also see Hobson v. Hansen, 1967, 1971
56. cited in Mark G. Yudof, David L. Kirp, Tyll van Geel, and Betsy Levin, Kirp & Yudof's Educational Policy and the Law: Cases and Materials, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: McCutchan, 1982).
57. Pierre Bourdieu, "Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction," in R. Brown, ed., Knowledge, Education, and Cultural Change: Papers in the Sociology of Education (London: Tavistock for British Sociological Association, 1973), 71-112;
58. Elizabeth G. Cohen, "Expectation States and Interracial Interaction in School Settings," Annual Review of Sociology, 8 (1982): 209-235.
59. See Oakes, Gamoran, and Page, "Curriculum Differentiation."
60. Norman R. Brekke, Year-Round Education and Academic Achievement in the Oxnard School District (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Council on Year-Round Education, Anaheim, CA, 1986);
61. Robert Burns, A Study of Combination Class Achievement [SA-006] (Riverside: California Education Research Cooperative, School of Education, University of California, Riverside, 1996);
62. Burns and Mason, "Organizational Constraints on the Formation of Elementary School Classes";
63. Ruth E. Knudson, Year-Round School: Are There Student Differences? (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, 1995 [ED385952]);
64. Douglas E. Mitchell, Assessing the Attainment Risks of Assigning Students to Combination Grade Classes (Unpublished manuscript, California Education Research Cooperative, School of Education, University of California, Riverside, n.d.);
65. Orellana and Thorne, "Year-Round Schools and the Politics of Time";
66. Janet Stimson, The Effects of Multigrade Classes on Student Achievement in Year-Round Schools (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, 1991).
67. Burns, A Study of Combination Class Achievement;
68. Knudson, Year-Round, School;
69. and Stimson, The Effects of Multigrade Classes on Student Achievement in Year-Round Schools.
70. Brekke, Year-Round Education and Academic Achievement in the Oxnard School District;
71. Burns, A Study of Combination Class Achievement;
72. Stimson, The Effects of Multigrade Classes on Student Achievement in Year-Round Schools.
73. Burns and Mason, "Organizational Constraints on the Formation of Elementary School Classes."
74. See Sandra E. Black, "Do Better Schools Matter? Parental Valuation of Elementary Education," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 114 (1999): 577-599;
75. Orellana and Thorne, "Year-Round Schools and the Politics of Time";
76. Joseph G. Weeres and Bruce Cooper, "Public Choice Perspectives on Urban Schools," in James G. Cibulka, Rodney J. Reed, and Kenneth K. Wong, eds., The Politics of Urban Education in the United States: The 1991 Yearbook of the Politics of Education Association (Washington, DC: Falmer Press, 1992), 57-69.
77. Brekke, Year-Round Education and, Academic Achievement in the Oxnard, School District.
78. Burns, A Study of Combination Class Achievement;
79. Knudson, Year-Round, School;
80. Mitchell, Assessing the Attainment Risks of Assigning Students to Combination Grade Classes.
81. A highly detailed description of the district's schools is not provided here in order to preserve the district's anonymity.
82. See note 11 for details.
83. The identity of the superintendent is kept confidential in order to protect the identity of the district.
84. These statistics were calculated from data in the CBEDS School Information File (SIF) for years 1995-96 through 1997-98. All of the district's middle and high schools, as well as the remaining elementary schools, operated on a traditional school calendar.
85. The Stanford Achievement Test, Ninth Edition, Form T, referred to as the California STAR, was the state-mandated achievement test for all schools beginning with the 1997-98 school year. When referring to mathematics and reading achievement on the STAR, we mean the total mathematics battery score and the reading comprehension score, respectively. This choice was made because the prior years' testing data available (1996 and 1997) did not include the full reading battery or any of the language battery. Thus, any references to prior years' scores are consistent with current ones.
86. The NCE score is the normal-curve-equivalent score with a national sample mean adjusted to 50 points (not exactly the median, but very close) and a standard deviation of 21.06 points for all grades. Achievement scores reported on the NCE scale serve as interval-level, normally distributed outcome variables, which meet all assumptions of the statistical methods employed in this study. For extreme scores, floor and ceiling effects may occur, since the minimum score is 1 point and the maximum score is 99 points, corresponding to the 1st and 99th percentile rankings, respectively. This and other test score scales are briefly discussed in Robert L. Linn, "Assessments and Accountability," Educational Researcher, 29 (2000): 4-16. In the sample reported here, there are few extreme scores, and efforts to account for such truncated observations do not change the results.
87. Though it depends a little on the exact level of the test taken, one grade equivalent of achievement is about one-half of a standard deviation, and the largest differences in achievement are about 16 NCE points, which is more than three-quarters of a standard deviation.
88. 3,4471 = 122.52) achievement.
89. Rand R. Wilcox, Introduction to Robust Estimation and Hypothiesis Testing (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1997).
90. As noted in Appendix A, prior years' data were from a qualitatively different standardized achievement test. Particularly for mathematics, using previous test results in combination with scores on the Stanford Achievement Test in the estimation of learning trajectories would be inappropriate.
91. This is most strongly suggested by examination of one of the two schools that changed from traditional to MT-YRE to accommodate class size reduction. This high-performing school (high enough to influence the year 2 bars in Figure 2) had relatively evenly distributed achievement across tracks in its first MT-YRE year, but by the second MT-YRE year, the differentiated achievement pattern had been established there as well.
92. A third type of opportunity segregation, the classroom teacher to which a student is assigned, would be expected to operate relatively independently of any particular attendance calendar - remembering that there are significant differences in teacher placements across tracks. That is, in addition to parental influence in choice of residence and attendance track, a family may attempt to influence determination of the particular classroom and teacher to which its child is assigned.
93. See, for example, Mitchell, Segregation in California's K-12 Public Schools;
94. Quinlan, George, and Emmett, Year-Round Education;
95. White and Cantrell, Comparison of Student Outcomes in Multi-track Year-Round and Single-Track Traditional School Calendars.
96. A two-level hierarchical linear model (students within classrooms, using MT-YRE track as a dummy-coded classroom-level covariate) confirms that classroom differences in teacher experience and proportions of students identified as LEP, GATE, and in poverty (NSLP-eligible) account for the intertrack achievement differences. That is, program, teacher, and socioeconomic-class differences create and reinforce track differences.
97. Orellana and Thorne, "Year-Round Schools and the Politics of Time."
98. Bourdieu, "Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction," 85.
99. Brian Rowan and Andrew W. Miracle, Jr., "Systems of Ability Grouping and the Stratification of Achievement in Elementary Schools," Sociology of Education, 56 (1983): 133-144.
100. Hochschild and Scovronick, The American Dream and the Public Schools.
101. Also see note 42.
102. See, for example, Doris R. Entwisle, Karl L. Alexander, and Linda Steffel Olson, Children, Schools, and Inequality (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997);
103. Douglas E. Mitchell, Tom Destino, and Rita Karam, Evaluation of English Language Development Programs in the Santa Ana Unified School District: A Report on Data System Reliability and Statistical Madeling of Program Impacts [SA-008] (Riverside: University of California, Riverside, School of Education, California Educational Research Cooperative, 1997);
104. Ross E. Mitchell, "Class Size Reduction Policy: Evaluating the Impact, on Student Achievement in California," Dissertation Abstracts International, 62(07): 2305A (September 2001 [UMI No. 3021397]);
105. Alvin S. Rosenthal, Keith Baker, and Alan Ginsburg, "The Effect of Language Background on Achievement Level and Learning among Elementary School Students," Sociology of Education, 56 (1983): 157-169;
106. Russell W. Rumberger, Katherine A. Larson, Robert K. Ream, and Gregory A. Palardy, The Educational Consequences of Mobility for California Students and Schools [Research Series 99-2] (Berkeley, CA: Policy Analysis for California Education, 1999).
107. As reported in John F. Witte, "The Milwaukee Voucher Experiment," Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 20 (1998): 229-252, eligibility for free lunch comes at or below 1.35 times the poverty level; eligibility for reduced price lunch is at or below 1.85 times the poverty level.
108. Students with handicapping conditions severe enough to be assigned to a special day class (SDC) typically take out-of-level tests and thus are eliminated from the study sample.
109. It would be possible to have both a full and an alternative credential if, for example, the holder of a secondary-level credential is teaching at the elementary level on a waiver. It would also be possible if an elementary teacher has an emergency credential to fill a bilingual or ESL teaching position requiring additional authorizations.
110. The Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient is close to one (r = .95) for this pair of teacher experience variables. This and all other analyses were performed using software developed by SPSS, Inc., SPSS for Windows, Version 9.0 (Chicago: Author, 1999).
111. Additional technical details and statistical breakdowns were reported in Ross E. Mitchell and Douglas E. Mitchell, Student Segregation and Achievement Tracking in Year-Round Schools
112. [Originally submitted as Organizational Segregation of Student Achievement in Elementary Schools: The Influence of Multi-track Year-Round Schools] (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Chicago, IL 1999 [ED462756]).