In a study of California schools, David P. Sims, an economics professor at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, examined the effect that having enough students to constitute a “subgroup” under the federal No Child Left Behind Act had on a school’s ability to make adequate yearly progress and the resulting impact on teacher turnover.
Mr. Sims found that schools with enough Hispanic or black students to be counted as a separate subgroup were less likely to meet AYP under the NCLB law and to lose experienced teachers after failure is made public.
His study was among those recently released at a conference hosted by the Washington-based Urban Institute’s National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research and the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University.
