High-stakes testing may push struggling teachers to younger grades, hurting students

July 14, 2017
Chalkbeat

BY Matt Barnum

Kindergarten, first grade, and second grade are often free of the high-stakes testing common in later grades — but those years are still high-stakes for students’ learning and development.

That means it’s a big problem when schools encourage their least effective teachers to work with their youngest students. And a new study says that the pressure of school accountability systems may be encouraging exactly that.

“Evidence on the importance of early-grades learning for later life outcomes suggests that a system that pushes schools to concentrate ineffective teachers in the earliest grades could have serious unintended consequences,” write study authors Jason Grissom of Vanderbilt and Demetra Kalogrides and Susanna Loeb of Stanford.

The research comes at an opportune time. All 50 states are in the middle of crafting new systems designed to hold schools accountable for student learning. And this is just the latest study to point out just how much those systems matter — for good and for ill.

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Mentioned Publications

School performance pressures apply disproportionately to tested grades and subjects. Using longitudinal administrative data—including achievement data from untested grades—and teacher survey data from a large urban district, we examine schools’ responses to those pressures in assigning teachers to high-stakes and low-stakes classrooms. We find that teachers with more positive performance measures in both tested and untested classrooms are more likely to be placed in a tested classroom in the following year. Performance measures even more strongly predict a high-stakes teaching assignment in schools with low state accountability grades and where principals exercise more assignment influence. In elementary schools, we show that such “strategic” teacher assignment disadvantages early grades, concentrating less effective teachers in K–2 classrooms. Reassignment of ineffective upper-grades teachers to early grades systematically results in lower K–2 math and reading achievement gains. Moreover, evidence suggests that students’ lower early-grades achievement persists into subsequent tested grades.

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