Altering Policies Regarding Reclassification Criteria Affects Achievement and Graduation Outcomes for English Learners

• In Event: 26.048 - Which Policies and Practices Promote Improved Outcomes for English Learners? Evidence From Large-Scale Quantitative Studies

Abstract

Language-minority students who enter the school system as English Learners (ELs) are expected, during their time as students, to be reclassified as Fluent English Proficient (R-FEP). To reach R-FEP status, ELs often must attain test-based thresholds set by policymakers. Because reclassification can affect student achievement through altering instructional settings or services, recent studies have used regression discontinuity designs (RDD) to investigate threshold-based reclassification effects (e.g., Matsudaira, 2005; Robinson, 2011). In this paper, we extend this work to examine the effects of policy changes in reclassification thresholds. We implement a series of “difference in regression discontinuity” designs to estimate the effects of a policy changing reclassification criteria.

We use eight years of student-level administrative data from the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) spanning a period of two different reclassification test policies: In the fall of the 2006-07 school year, the California Department of Education rescaled the California English Language Development Test (CELDT), effectively making the criteria for reclassification harder to attain (which we demonstrate empirically). In addition to the CELDT, LAUSD required ELs to also attain a pre-specified level on the California Standards Test of English Language Arts (CST-ELA) in order to be eligible for reclassification; unlike the CELDT, the CST-ELA thresholds remained unchanged throughout the duration of our study. Thus, both before and after 2007, ELs needed to meet multiple thresholds—one which shifted in 2007, and the other which remained constant across the periods. The implicit shift in the CELDT threshold allows us to explore changes in the effects of reclassification at the CST-ELA threshold between a lower CELDT standard and a higher CELDT standard.

We find that, prior to the 2007 policy change, reclassification associated with attaining the CST-ELA threshold resulted in negative effects on subsequent CST-ELA scores and on graduation rates in high school. These negative effects suggest that the reclassification criteria were not stringent enough and that ELs were being reclassified as R-FEPs when they were still benefitting more from the EL instructional settings and services than the reclassified settings and services. Following the 2007 CELDT policy change, we find no evidence of a reclassification effect on achievement or graduation. Importantly, there are significant differences between the pre-2007 and post-2007 effects, suggesting that the test-policy change itself had an effect. In this case, the test-policy change was fortuitous because it replaced the negative (i.e., disruptive) academic effects with null (i.e., non-disruptive) academic effects for students on the cusp of threshold-based reclassification, suggesting that (in consort with the CST-ELA) the threshold on the rescaled English language development test more accurately assessed students’ readiness for reclassification than did the lower threshold.

Our analyses provide robust evidence that test-based requirements for EL reclassification can lead to subsequently negative effects on tests of ELA and graduation rates, and that changes in test-based criteria can shift the consequences of reclassification on subsequent student achievement and graduation. We demonstrate that policymakers can alter reclassification criteria in ways that ultimately lead to more efficient and accurate identification of ELs ready for reclassification.

Authors

• Joseph P. Robinson-Cimpian, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Karen D. Thompson, Oregon State University