The Impact of Economic Disadvantage on Acaemic Achievement in Hawaii: A Multi-Level Analysis
The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation in the US requires that all students in public schools, whether economically disadvantaged or not, meet the proficiency standards by the year of 2014. The state of Hawaii started the NCLB-mandated assessment by administering standards-based reading and mathmatics tests to 3rd, 5th, 8th and 10th graders in 2002. Using the 2002 state-wide assessment as the baseline, a multi-level analysis was conducted to estimate the achievement gaps between the disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged groups totalling approximately 45,000 students.
At the student level, disadvantage was defined according the US federal government's guidelines of eligibility for free or reduced price school lunch. At the school level, the percentage of eligible students within each school was calculated. A hierarchical linear model (HLM) was developed that allowed the effect of student-level disadvantage to be conditioned on the poverty level of the school. Across the four grade levels and two subject areas, a consistent multi-level model was arrived at, which provided the most accurate estimates so far of the negative effects due to student- as well as school-level disadvantage in Hawaii. Those estimates serve as the baseline against which the state of Hawaii's annual progress is to be measured in compliance with the NCLB mandate.
Further discussions in the paper compared the latest HLM findings against estimates derived from the traditional student- or school-level analysis and explored the policy implications in how to evaluate schools with a high percentage of disadvantaged students.
Keywords: Equity, Large Scale Assessment, No Child Left Behind, Hierarchical Linear Modeling, Multi-Level Analysis
Dr. Shuqiang Zhang
Associate Professor, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Hawaii at Manoa