The Role of School Boards in Guiding Student Achievement, Equity, and Trust

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]  

The cyclical nature of the school year, coupled with the consistent influx of students embodying a diverse array of backgrounds and abilities makes the educational goals of enhancing student achievement, fostering equity, and reinforcing public confidence in the educational system ones that endure over time. Each incoming cohort of students brings with it a unique blend of strengths, challenges, and needs. The variety of these needs - cognitive, socio-emotional, cultural, linguistic, physical, among others - reinforces the persistent nature of improving student achievement and success, ensuring equity among different groups of students, and instilling confidence in the school system.  

Improving student achievement and success is a constant because, with each new group of students, there is a renewed need to ensure they acquire the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary for their success in school and beyond. Every year, schools welcome students with diverse abilities, ethnicities, socio-economic statuses, and more. Equity in education means ensuring that all students achieve outcomes unimpeded by their backgrounds or circumstances. Given the diversity in any school population, the pursuit of equity is an ongoing task that must be addressed anew with each incoming cohort.  

The credibility of the school system is dependent on its ability to adapt to the changing needs of the student population and the broader community. It must strive to improve, to foster an environment of trust and respect, and to deliver on its commitments to the citizens who rely on the school system to prepare the young to take their role as citizens. As societal expectations and contexts evolve, so too does the need for the school system to demonstrate its relevance, effectiveness, and reliability.  

The rapid pace of technological change requires schools to modify teaching strategies to prepare students for a world increasingly dependent on technology. This constant need for adaptation underscores the enduring nature of the goal of improving student achievement and success. As societal values and norms shift, so too do the expectations placed on schools. Schools are places where students are prepared for their participation in a democratic society that values respect for diversity, civic responsibility, and social justice. Schools have a responsibility to prepare students to engage with diverse cultures and perspectives. The goal of promoting equity must therefore extend to include intercultural understanding and competence.  

The persistence of these goals — enhancing student achievement, fostering equity, and building public confidence in the education system — highlights their importance, and there is an argument to be made that they should be at the core of a school board's strategic focus. The essential role these goals play in shaping an effective and inclusive educational environment is undeniable, and their achievement can be seen as a critical indicator of the success of an educational institution.  

Reducing the strategic goals of a school board exclusively to these objectives may not encapsulate the multifaceted nature of education, nor address the complexity and variety of students' needs. Education isn't merely about academic achievement, but also about holistic development, including social, emotional, and physical wellbeing. Similarly, equity extends beyond academic equity to include providing a safe, inclusive, and supportive environment for all students, regardless of their background, abilities, or identity. These important dimensions of schooling should be reflected in board policies and, if they are not expressed in policy, school boards should have as a strategic objective for their development.  

Matters such as teacher recruitment and retention, budgeting, and facilities management are operational matters that are necessary to achieve the broader goals of education. How these operational tasks are managed and executed to effectively support these broader goals depends on the Superintendent that the Board hires.  

The Superintendent sets priorities for hiring teachers with specific skill sets or experiences, establishes and implements programs to support teacher development and job satisfaction, and allocates resources towards competitive compensation packages. The superintendent’s budgeting decisions should prioritize programs and resources that have been shown to be effective, efficient, and economical.  

While these areas are indeed operational in nature, they require planning and decision-making to ensure they align with and support the broader educational goals. School board oversight can ensure their operations not only address the day-to-day functions of the schools but also contribute to the long-term vision and goals of the education system.  

The role of the school board extends beyond just hiring a superintendent to manage operations. School boards are responsible for setting the strategic direction of the district, establishing policies, and holding the superintendent accountable for implementing these policies and achieving the set goals.  

While the superintendent handles the day-to-day operational aspects of running the school district, the school board is responsible for ensuring that these operations align with the larger strategic goals. So, even though operational tasks like teacher recruitment, budgeting, and facilities management might be handled primarily by the superintendent, the school board still has a crucial role in overseeing the performance of the superintendent.  

While the tactics and methods employed by the school board’s leadership may change over time, the underlying goals of improving student achievement, ensuring equity, and instilling confidence in the school system are constant because of the changing nature of the student population and the broader social, economic, and technological context in which schools operate. 

Hunger, poverty, and teen pregnancy

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]  

Throughout my career I’ve heard many say that you cannot increase student achievement without addressing child poverty, hunger, and related factors such as teen pregnancy. I think addressing hunger, poverty, and teen pregnancy are essential, but I do not think addressing them is a precondition for increasing student achievement.  

It appears that substantial improvement in student achievement and outcomes is possible on a system-wide basis. Nicholas Kristof, in his May, New York Times opinion piece, discussed the transformation of Mississippi's education system, which has significantly improved from being at the lowest level to reaching the middle and then the top position when adjusted for demographics. The achievement was realized through a strong emphasis on reading proficiency by the third grade, using research-based methods and metrics to improve outcomes.  

Despite being ranked last in child poverty and hunger and second in teen births, Mississippi has successfully improved reading and math scores, and high school graduation rates. The improvements have been achieved in collaboration with teachers and their unions.  

The achievement is linked to several key factors, including a $100 million donation from former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale and his wife to establish a reading institute in Jackson. The institute helped implement a focus on measurable outcomes and cost-effective strategies. Other strategies involved an emphasis on phonics and literacy, teacher professional development, investment in pre-K programs, and a "third-grade gate" policy that requires students to pass a reading test at the end of third grade or repeat the year. To keep students in school, officials visited students who had dropped out due to economic hardships and helped them to arrange flexible work schedules with their employers.  

Mississippi's public school system has made noticeable improvements despite substantial socio-economic challenges and a history of school segregation. If Mississippi can make such remarkable system-wide improvement, systems elsewhere should also be able to do so. The central elements in Mississippi are ones that can be implemented in other state and provincial systems: measurable goals and metrics; cost-effective, research-based methods such as phonics instruction; productive collaboration with teacher unions; and focused professional learning for teachers.  

Careful readers will note that I did not mention the "third-grade gate" policy that requires students to pass a reading test at the end of third grade or repeat the year. My reason for omitting it as a central element is that grade repetition is not supported by evidence.[1] I am, nevertheless, open to changing my perspective based on an examination of the evidence from Mississippi.  

Mississippi’s success shows that it is possible to increase student achievement without addressing child poverty, hunger, and teen pregnancy. Of course, that doesn’t mean we should not also be making efforts to reduce – if not eliminate them. 

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[1] Jimerson, S. R. (2001). Meta-analysis of grade retention research: Implications for practice in the 21st century. School Psychology Review, 30, 420–437.

Should we care about the decline in PISA scores?

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

There is little doubt that results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) get attention. If you enter the search term “PISA results” in your browser under the heading news as I just did, it will return more than 67,000 references in about a quarter of a second. Every three years the results are celebrated by politicians in jurisdictions that are ‘winners,’ like Canada, and loathed by those presiding over education in jurisdictions that are ‘losers.’  

PISA is the name given to the assessments administered to 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics, and science. The assessments are administered in more than 35 countries (which PISA often calls “economies”) and more than a dozen partners that include countries, such as Brazil, and economic regions such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Macau. It is convenient for PISA to use the term ‘economies’ to speak of all participating entities. 

Each administration of PISA assesses all three domains (reading, mathematics, and science), but gives prominence to one of the three domains in each cycle. In 2000, 2009 and 2018, the principal assessment domain was reading. In 2003 and 2012, it was mathematics. In 2006 and 2015, science was the focal domain. In 2021, the focus will be on mathematics again with an additional test in creative thinking. And, in 2024, PISA will measure “Learning in the Digital World,” the ability of students to use self-regulated learning while they employ digital tools.

PISA derives its support from the countries and economies that participate in the assessments. To sustain itself PISA must maintain the continuing support of previous participants, but it also tries to encourage new participation. PISA combines the assessment of the three domains with the assessment of abilities in other areas: financial literacy, creativity, and digital learning, for example.  

It is doubtful whether PISA would earn repeat business if there were significant differences from round to round in the major domains. “If you want to measure change, do not change the measures” – at least not too much.  Thus, while the assessments do change from one round to the next, the folks who analyze the results perform a variety of statistical operations to assure participating jurisdictions of the equivalence of the assessments. They also adjust the results so that they are related to the same scale. Thus, adjustments are made so that the score is centered at 500 with a standard deviation of 100 score points.

Large-scale assessments are helpful in determining if school systems are producing better student outcomes and reducing educational inequalities among groups of students over time. The jurisdictions that have such mechanisms are advantaged. Ontario, for example, has an Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO). A body that has some independence from the provincial Ministry of Education , EQAO conducts province-wide, census-type, large-scale assessments in reading, writing and mathematics at the primary and junior divisions; applied and academic mathematics at Grade 9; and the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) administered at grade 10. But education systems that do not have their own census-type large-scale assessments are at a disadvantage and thus must rely on external benchmarks against which they can measure their progress over time.

Because of my interest in improving student outcomes and reducing educational inequalities, I have been an observer of PISA since it began at the turn of this century. I am primarily interested in how jurisdictions interpret the results and what use, if any, they make of them to improve outcomes.

Earlier in this blog I used the terms ‘winners’ and ‘losers.’ I did that because the leadership in most jurisdictions treats PISA like a horse race. “Who won?” Who lost?” “How well or badly did we do?” There are some significant challenges to making use of the results.

Those who are responsible for PISA want PISA to attract attention and earn support. But they caution that PISA results are not a measure of the impact of schooling per se, but a cumulative measure of the prior experiences that the 15-year-olds have had and the many factors that influence those experiences such as poverty, parental education, etc. They also caution that PISA is not aligned with curriculum in the many countries and economies that participate.

Notwithstanding these significant limitations, I have spent quite a bit of time reading and consulting with colleagues about the decline in PISA scores over time. The decline has occurred in all three major domains (reading, mathematics, and science) on an international level and within Canada. I have represented that decline in the chart below devoted to mathematics. I chose mathematics because it is an area about which there has been much hand wringing. It includes the data for all the Canadian provinces, Canada, and the OECD average (excluding the partner economies since because they are not countries).

 

 This chart produced from data extracted using the PISA International Data Explorer.

I and my colleagues, many of whom have international reputations in measurement, statistics, and education are baffled. We are not certain to what the decline should be attributed or  its significance. There is no shortage of hypotheses.

With repeated measurements of the same phenomenon, there is a tendency for scores at the extreme ends (high or low) of the distribution to be followed by ones that are closer to the mean. The trend in the PISA data may reflect such a tendency. Another hypothesis is that over the nearly 20 years of PISA assessments, students spend more time on computers and less time reading print material, and the kind of reading they do has changed - if not in kind in degree. According to this hypothesis, students devote less mental effort to reading and the loss of mental effort is reflected in all subjects. Still another hypothesis is that the effort to retain students who would have dropped out of school has paid off, but that the students retained are less able and, thus, ‘diluting’ performance over time. Yet another hypothesis is that successive generations of students have become desensitized to large-scale assessments, attributing less importance to them, and expending less effort on them than in the past. I could go on, but I won’t.

Do these tentative explanations deserve examination? These hypotheses are worthy topics for a dissertation. But, if a jurisdiction has a robust system of large-scale assessments upon which it can rely for examining change over time, it would be more productive to focus on the data produced by those systems than to depend upon PISA. This is particularly true if the large-scale assessments are closely linked with the jurisdiction’s educational goals and curricula; allow for assessment at regular intervals throughout students’ educational careers; and are amenable to close analysis of the relationship between factors over which schools have control and the outcomes measured. 

Jurisdictions that do not have robust systems for large-scale assessment and do not have the resources to develop them will be dependent upon assessments such as PISA. For them, understanding why PISA scores are declining is a necessary prelude to understanding the results their students obtain.  Jurisdictions that depend on PISA alone for an external measure of system performance would also be wise to invest in some oversampling so they can track performance of subpopulations.