College Readiness in the United Way Service Area

Year 2 Update - 2012

The Institute for Urban Policy Research At The University of Texas at Dallas

College Readiness in the United Way Service Area

Year 2 Update - 2012

This report conveys the key findings of the Institute for Urban Policy Research analyses related to the community-wide Education goal – to increase the percent of students graduating college or career ready from 40 percent to 60 percent by 2020. In addition to college readiness, this report provides baseline numbers for overall graduation rates, as well as a more specific college readiness measure based on ACT and SAT scores. A brief overview of the methodology used to produce the estimates is included at the end.

Figure 1. Education outcomes indicators, 2010 - 2012, United Way of Metropolitan Dallas Service Area Approximation

College Readiness The Texas Education Agency (TEA) defines a high school graduate as college ready in math, english / language arts, or both if he or she scores at or above a criterion score on the ACT, SAT, or the Exit Level TAKS.1 For the State of Texas standardized test, the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS), the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) established a scale score of 2,200 or higher in either the mathematics or English / language arts tests as evidence of college readiness. For English / language arts, students must also score a 3 or higher on the essay.

Students who take the SAT are qualified as college ready in math or english / language arts by scoring at least a 500 on the critical reading or math section and a 1070 combined; students who meet the criteria in both subject areas are considered college ready in both subjects. Students who take the ACT are qualified as college ready in math or English / language arts by scoring a 19 or higher on the English or math sections and a 23 composite score. Again, students who meet both criteria are considered college ready in both subjects. A student is considered college ready as long as he or she meets the aforementioned criteria for at least one of the three exams. Analysis of data from TEA’s Academic

1 2011 is the final year in which the TEA will release TAKS-based accountability standards. Standards based on the newer State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR) are currently under development.

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Excellence Indicator System (AEIS) and Texas Academic Performance Reports (TAPR) for campuses in the UWMD service area indicates that 61 percent of graduates in the class of 2012 graduated college ready by TEA standards, up from 55 percent of graduates in the class of 2011 and 54.1 percent of graduates in the class of 2010.

Figure 2. College ready graduates, 2010 - 2012, by county, United Way of Metropolitan Dallas service area approximation

College readiness rates are increasing or maintaining across the service area with fairly substantial increases in all counties except Denton County. Despite the differences across counties, some parity exists among the suburban counties, in which college ready rates range from about 69 percent to 75 percent for the class of 2012. The suburban numbers, however, contrast sharply with Dallas County, where – despite increases – just under 54 percent of high school graduates in the class of 2012 were considered college ready.

Figure 3. College ready graduates, 2010 - 2012, by race and ethnicity, United Way of Metropolitan Dallas service area approximation

Across the service area, college-readiness rates are up for Whites, Hispanics, and African-Americans alike; however, substantial disparities continue to exist among racial and ethnic groups. Moreover, while college ready rates vary across counties, these racial and ethnic disparities are distributed uniformly across all counties. That is to say, the service area as a whole, as well as each individual county, experiences racial and ethnic disparities in basically the same way, even if the actual rates differ across counties.

Figure 4. College ready graduates, 2012, by county by race and ethnicity, United Way of Metropolitan Dallas service area approximation

ACT and SAT Scores The TEA reported college readiness indicator can be an unstable measure of student success due to the frequent changes that occur to both the state standardized test and the achievement requirements of that test. Consequently, one way to find a more stable measure is to exclude the TAKS test from the indicator and simply measure student achievement on the nationally normed ACT and SAT exams.

TEA reports the percentage of students who meet a criterion score for the SAT and ACT exams, but uses a slightly different standard than that used in their reporting of overall college readiness. The criterion scores are at least 1110 for the SAT (critical reading and mathematics combined, 10 points higher than the criterion score used in the definition of college readiness) or a minimum 24 composite score on the ACT. IUPR analysis of TEA’s AEIS and TAPR data for campuses in the UWMD service area indicates that 31.9 percent of graduates in the class of 2012 who took the ACT, SAT, or both scored at or above criterion on at least one of the two tests, up from 31.1 for the class of 2011, but still trailing the performance of the class of 2010, in which 32.9 percent of test takers scored at criterion. Despite these slight changes, performance, as measured by the SAT and ACT, has remained fairly stable over the past three years.

Figure 5. ACT / SAT test-taking graduates scoring at or above criterion, 2010 - 2012, by county, United Way of Metropolitan Dallas service area approximation

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The coincidence of rising college ready rates along with the slight up and down changes in the percent of graduates scoring at or above criterion suggests that the growing college ready rate is largely made up of students who qualify as “college-ready” on the TAKS test; in other words, TAKS scores are rising while SAT and ACT scores are falling. This phenomenon highlights both unreliability and instability of the TAKS as an evaluative instrument.

Figure 6. Percent of high schools graduates taking SAT or ACT, 2010 - 2012, by , United Way of Metropolitan Dallas sevice area approximation

Interestingly, the slight fluctuations in the percentage of test-takers scoring at or above criterion over the last three years, follows a similar – if inverse – pattern to the percentage of graduates who take one of the tests at all. While not necessarily surprising – and certainly not conclusive – this relationship reinforces the possibility that increasing access to the SAT and ACT tests could negatively impact the proportion of test-takers who score at criterion because any addition of new test takers would likely include students at lower performance levels than those already taking the exams.

Compared to the TAKS-driven college readiness indicator, criterion scores on the SAT and ACT provide a much more stable measurement of achievement and readiness for rising college students. That said, one in three high school graduates in the United Way service area takes neither of these two tests. Absent the inclusion of a mandatory test – like TAKS or STAAR – these students are left out of the readiness conversation simply by virtue of not having taken one of the college entrance exams.

This is a key disadvantage of measuring readiness through these college entrance exams. Specifically, relying on these particular test results excludes any notion of career readiness, since a student entering the workforce, instead of a college or university, has little incentive to take one of these exams. Moreover, students who attend two-year institutions that do not require either of these entrance exams may also be excluded from these results, even though they might transfer to a four year institution without having ever taken the SAT or ACT.

Figure 7. ACT / SAT test-taking graduates scoring at or above criterion, 2010 - 2012, by race and ethnicity, United Way of Metropolitan Dallas service area approximation

When evaluating ACT and SAT performance by race and ethnicity, extraordinary disparities are evident across the region as a whole, and the gap has remained constant over time. In terms of criterion-level testing, Whites outperform Hispanics by 38 percent and African-Americans by nearly 42 percent. When compared to figure 3, it is clear that when TAKS testing is removed from the equation, racial and ethnic disparities only appear more pervasive.

Graduation Rate One of the more basic measures of academic performance remains the graduation rate. For the purpose of this report, the graduation rate is calculated based on the completion rate reported by TEA. TEA reports for each campus a “graduates” component of the completion rate that indicates the percentage of the members of a cohort who successfully graduated (completed the requisite number of credits, etc.) by August 31 of the preceding year. A cohort is defined as those students who first attended the ninth grade 4 years prior. For example, the Class of 2010 graduation rate is reported for the cohort of students who first attended the ninth grade in the 2006-2007 school year, and were reported to have graduated by August 31, 2010. IUPR analysis of TEA’s AEIS and TAPR data for campuses in the UWMD service area indicates a graduation rate of 87.3 percent for the class of 2012; this is up from 85.6 percent for the class of 2011 and 81.1 percent for the class of 2010.

Figure 8. Graduation rate, 2010 - 2012, by county, United Way of Metropolitan Dallas service area approximation

Graduation rates increased across the service area by 6.2 percent since 2010; across counties the gains are greatest in Dallas and Collin where rates increased by 7.4 and 3.4 percent, respectively. At the same

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time, Denton County has remained relatively constant and Rockwall County has rebounded from a decrease from 2010 to 2011

Unlike the college ready indicators, there is considerably less racial and ethnic disparity among graduation rates. The gap among racial and ethnic groups is less than 12 percentage points in every county; moreover, African-American students in Rockwall County graduate at the higher rate than Whites or Hispanics in that county. Graduation rates from 2012 suggest that minority students graduate at reasonably comparable levels to White students across the service area.

Figure 9. Graduation rate, 2010 - 2012, by county and race or ethnicity, United Way of Metropolitan Dallas service area approximation

The relatively high graduation rates and low-levels of disparity when compared to college ready indicators suggests that high school graduation is not sufficient for college readiness and parity among graduation rates belies considerable disparity in actual college-readiness.

Brief Overview of Methodology To aggregate the percentages for each indicator reported for the campuses in the United Way service area, the number of graduates reported for the cohort year was used to derive an estimate of the initial cohort size. The aggregated number of graduates and cohort members are then used to produce aggregate estimates for the college ready graduation rate and overall graduation rate. While, following TEA’s methodology, special education graduates are removed from the denominator when computing estimates for ACT / SAT test-takers scoring at or above criterion, this was not possible for the racial / ethnic breakdowns of the ACT / SAT criterion analysis. The impact of the omission should be within tolerance for each racial and ethnic group, rendering group comparisons reliable.

Conclusion From 2011 to 2012, the UWMD service area has seen a continued and noticeable increase in college ready rates, as well as more modest increases in both graduation rates and the percentage of test-takers scoring at criterion on the SAT and ACT. Improvement across all three indicators demonstrated need progress toward the community wide goals for education. Still, with college readiness and graduation rates closely tied to TAKS performance, gains should be interpreted with caution. The impending transition to the STAAR end of course exams and the changing standards for both college-readiness and high school graduation portend significant changes in college ready and graduation rates; if new standards are more rigorous than the previous ones, gains could prove fleeting.

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