Fifty Years of Student Achievement: Agency and Flynn Effects; Ethnic Differences

• In Event: School Policies, COVID, and Student Achievement, Emotional, and Civic Outcomes

Abstract

We use the principal-agent model to interpret the efforts of policy makers to elicit information about the rate of educational progress by U. S. student cohorts since 1971. Principals (policymakers) disagree as to whether U. S. student performance has changed over the past half century. To inform conversations, agents administered seven million psychometrically linked tests in math and reading in 160 survey waves to national probability samples of cohorts born between 1954 and 2007. Estimated change in standard deviations (sd) per decade varies by agent (math: -0.10sd to 0.27sd, reading: -0.02sd to 0.12sd). Consistent with Flynn effects, median trends show larger gains in math (0.19sd) than reading (0.04sd), though rates of progress for cohorts born since 1990 have increased in reading but slowed in math. Greater progress is shown by students tested at younger ages (math: 0.31sd, reading: 0.08sd) than when tested in middle years of schooling (math: 0.17sd, reading: 0.03sd) or toward the end of schooling (math: 0.06sd, reading: 0.02sd). Young white students progress more slowly (math: 0.28sd, reading: 0.09sd) than Asian (math: 46sd, reading: 0.28sd), black (math: 0.36sd, reading: 0.19sd) and Hispanic (math: 0.29sd, reading: 0.13sd) students. These ethnic differences generally attenuate as students age. Young students in the bottom quartile of the SES distribution show greater progress than those in the top quartile (difference in math: 0.08sd, in reading: 0.15sd), but the reverse is true for older students. Moderators likely include not only changes in families and schools but also improvements in nutrition, health care, and protection from contagious diseases and environmental risks. International data suggest that subject and age differentials may be due to moderators more universal than just for the United States.

Authors

• M. Danish Shakeel, University of Buckingham

• Paul E. Peterson, Harvard University