Dorn, Sherman
Individual repository of Sherman Dorn, Professor, Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. In my scholarship, I trace how society defines school problems and how those definitions shape education policy. In my first major research project, I documented that dropping out became defined as a crisis in the 1960s when the proportion of teens graduating from high school had been rising for years. I have written on various topics on special education, from the fuzzy public-private divide to how the mass culture of test-prep undermines formative assessment. My book on accountability explores how we have come to distrust schoolteachers but trust test scores.
Filtering by
- All Subjects: African Americans -- Education
- All Subjects: Student mobility
In the wake of both the end of court-ordered school desegregation and the growing popularity of accountability as a mechanism to maximize student achievement, the authors explore the association between racial segregation and the percentage of students passing high-stakes tests in Florida's schools. Results suggest that segregation matters in predicting school-level performance on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test after control for other known and purported predictors of standardized test performance. Also, these results suggest that neither recent efforts by the state of Florida to equalize the funding of education nor current efforts involving high-stakes testing will close the Black-White achievement gap without consideration of the racial distribution of students across schools.
The current debate over graduate rate calculations and results has glossed over the relationship between student migration and the accuracy of various graduation rates proposed over the past five years. Three general grade-based graduation rates have been proposed recently, and each has a parallel version that includes an adjustment for migration, whether international, internal to the U.S., or between different school sectors. All of the adjustment factors have a similar form, allowing simulation of estimates from real data, assuming different unmeasured net migration rates. In addition, a new age-based graduation rate, based on mathematical demography, allows the simulation of estimates on a parallel basis using data from Virginia's public schools.
Both the direct analysis and simulation demonstrate that graduation rates can only be useful with accurate information about student migration. A discussion of Florida's experiences with longitudinal cohort graduation rates highlights some of the difficulties with the current status of the oldest state databases and the need for both technical confidence and definitional clarity. Meeting the No Child Left Behind mandates for school-level graduation rates requires confirmation of transfers and an audit of any state system for accuracy, and basing graduation rates on age would be a significant improvement over rates calculated using grade-based data.