Blame the economy for that bad grade on your math test.
According to a recent study by the Sanford School of Public Policy called “Children Left Behind: The Effects of Statewide Job Loss on Student Achievement,” higher unemployment rates cause significantly lower test scores across the state, regardless of whether or not a child’s own parents are unemployed.“We found pretty big effects for eighth grade math test scores, and we believe they are large enough that they can’t just be coming from the kids with parents who lost jobs,” said Elizabeth Ananat, assistant professor of public policy and economics at Sanford. “An entire community of children is affected when there’s a serious job loss.”
The results of this analysis show that high unemployment rates affect not only students in individual families where the parents are unemployed, but also entire communities.
The economy’s impact on test scores can have severe effects on schools—especially under the No Child Left Behind Act, which requires schools to set goals for students to be proficient in reading and math—said Anna Gassman-Pines, assistant professor of public policy, psychology and neuroscience at Sanford. There can be serious consequences for schools that fail to reach these goals or show yearly progress.
Most states with 2% change in unemployment over the course of one year have shown to have a 16% of their schools fail to meet the guidelines for Adequate Yearly Progress under the No Child Left Behind Act, Gassman-Pines said.
“It struck us that there was a lot of attention being paid to the workers themselves…but we realized that no one was really asking what the consequences were for children both in these families and also in communities where there have been serious job losses,” Gassman-Pines said.
The 1996 through 2009 national data from reading and math standardized tests for fourth and eighth graders consistently showed lower test scores in states with higher unemployment rates. Only the effects on eighth grade math test scores, however, were statistically significant. Ananat speculated that, while a student’s reading success is very much cumulative, the math scores can fluctuate from year to year, depending on the student’s grasp of the math topic that is taught and then tested at the end of the year.
What about the effects of aggregate changes in the economy and unemployment rates like in the current recession—would higher unemployment across the board hurt everyone’s scores? Although test scores generally improve from year to year, Ananat speculated that schools in the recession might be improving less than they would have had it not been for the suffering economy.
As a college student, I also wonder if high unemployment rates in students’ hometowns would carry with them when they move to college or into the real world. And what about tests for getting into college in the first place, like the ACT or SAT? Are students in states with high unemployment at a disadvantage?
Future research by these authors might answer these types of questions.
“On the one hand, you can imagine that…as things improve, [students’] test scores kind of go back up—that’s certainly one scenario that seems plausible,” Gassman-Pines said. “[Or it] could also create a snowball effect where test scores go down and cascade—we just don’t know about longer-term.”
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