Classroom churn, school funding and more impact student success, study finds
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The full report is available here.
The recipe for college success starts a decade before a student ever steps foot on campus.
“There’s a lot of research out there that shows that if young students aren’t reading at the proper level by third grade, they’re at an increased risk of learning and professional setbacks later in life,” said Phyllis Resnick, the executive director and lead economist for the Colorado Futures Center, an independent think tank based out of the Colorado State University System. “Students may be at increased risk of beginning their first year of college in need of support and remediation.”
This is why the CSU System commissioned a study led by Resnick aimed at analyzing how social factors encompassing everything from income to employment opportunity to housing impact student success. The research is unique in that rather than following a cohort of students like many other studies of educational achievement, it uses local geography as a unit of analysis. In addition, this is the first-known study to apply a full set of social factors – an approach regularly used in health-related studies – to learning.
The hope is it will provide school districts with community-level data that will help them formulate policy responses and recommendations designed to combat potential barriers to learning as early in a student’s academic career as possible.
“While this report outlines tangible barriers to student success, it provides a roadmap for the most important ways we can support students and ensure higher education is accessible to anyone who has the talent and desire to go to college,” CSU System Chancellor Tony Frank said. “Data has long shown that people with a higher education are healthier, happier, more financially stable, and more civically engaged in their communities. This matters to the lives of those individuals, but it also creates positive, systemic change in our society.”
Reducing classroom churn helps everyone
Resnick said that one of the study’s key findings was that students who frequently switch schools and miss important lessons aren’t just at a disadvantage themselves – this state of what’s known as “classroom churn” can affect everyone around them.
“The higher the churn is, the poorer the scores are for everyone in the classroom, not just the students who are churning,” Resnick said. “Imagine if you’re a teacher and you’re trying to keep students at a certain learning level and they cycle in and out – it makes your already difficult job that much harder.”
The Colorado Futures Center analysis focused on data gathered in 2019 – before the pandemic skewed the numbers – but Resnick says the problem of classroom churn has only gotten worse since COVID-19.
Luckily, she said this problem may also be one of the most actionable, be it through outreach to families experiencing some form of instability, better support for churning classrooms and schools, or doing a better job of transferring student records between institutions.
“One thing I’ve heard from school districts is that when they receive these student enrollments mid-year, they don’t know what their test scores or other competencies are, and that leaves teachers playing catch-up in determining how to help this student, often at the cost of attention to the remaining students in the classroom,” Resnick said.
How people perceive their community’s health impacts academic success
Another distinct finding of the report was that third-grade student reading levels were associated with how the surrounding communities rate their health in comparison to the surrounding community’s life expectancy, a phenomenon the study referred to as health perception. Resnick found that in communities that considered their health to be worse than what the actual life expectancy indicated, student success often suffered.
“The bigger that negative gap is, the poorer students are doing in the elementary schools,” she said. “There may be something about intergenerational trauma that impacts outcomes, and it got us thinking about the role of perception and how it can permeate a culture and a household.”
The research recommended that communities and schools recognize and consider the impact of intergenerational trauma when providing mental health programs at schools, as well as provide outreach to the families in the community to highlight available resources and community assets.
School funding matters
Another key aspect of the Colorado Futures Center study demonstrated that school funding matters, and how it’s allocated has the potential to alleviate other challenges.
“The findings found an association between funding levels and academic outcomes, even when funding levels were assessed in light of household income in the community,” Resnick said. “Further, there may be opportunities to dedicate incremental funding to support schools and classrooms experiencing high churn.
“That could mean paying for additional paraprofessionals or other support in schools challenged by churn.”
The next steps
For the second phase of this project, Resnick hopes to reach out to educators, school officials and other education leaders and policymakers to share the findings and address potential interventions.
This is slated to occur sometime during the fall, and could result in additional pieces of research and policy recommendations.
“We hope policymakers and education leaders find this research not just interesting, but actionable,” said Henry Sobanet, the chief financial officer for the CSU System. “As a society, our investments in human capital are the most important we can make. I am grateful to the Colorado Futures Center for this impressive work.”
Resnick said identifying the factors that help students succeed long before college is an integral part of CSU’s land-grant mission, which was built on a belief that anyone who wants a higher education should have an opportunity to obtain it.
“If there are things that we can do as a society to lower these barriers to learning, we’re giving a gift that will serve students for the rest of their lives,” she said. “At the end of the day, we want all kids to thrive and have the ability to do whatever they want in life.”
Read the full report and see the full list of recommendations here.