Tag Archive for 'NAEP'

The Problem With Preschool

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 22, 2008 in Preschool. 3 Comments

Mom, apple pie and universal PreK?  Not so fast argue Shikha Dalmia and Lisa Snell of the libertarian Reason Foundation in today’s Wall Street Journal.  With the exception of “very intense interventions targeted toward severely disadvantaged kids, “there’s little statistical evidence that strapping a backpack on all 4-year-olds and sending them to preschool is good for them.” While U.S. preschool attendance has gone up to nearly 70% from 16% in the last half century, they note, fourth-grade reading, science, and math scores on the NAEP have stayed flat since the early 1970s.

Preschool activists at the Pew Charitable Trust and Pre-K Now — two major organizations pushing universal preschool — refuse to take this evidence seriously. The private preschool market, they insist, is just glorified day care. Not so with quality, government-funded preschools with credentialed teachers and standardized curriculum. But the results from Oklahoma and Georgia — both of which implemented universal preschool a decade or more ago — paint an equally dismal picture.

 Dalmia and Snell maintain that preschool gains don’t stick because the K-12 system “is too dysfunctional to maintain them.”

“Our understanding of the effects of preschool is still very much in its infancy. But one inescapable conclusion from the existing research is that it is not for everyone. Kids with loving and attentive parents — the vast majority — might well be better off spending more time at home than away in their formative years. The last thing that public policy should do is spend vast new sums of taxpayer dollars to incentivize a premature separation between toddlers and parents.”

Update:  Richard Whitmire, guesting over at eduwonk, is having none of this.

Making a Mockery of Accountability

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 12, 2008 in Assessment and Testing and Curriculum. 9 Comments

The drumbeat for national curriculum, standards and assessments gets a little bit louder today with a strongly worded New York Times editorial.

Congress has several concerns as it moves toward reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. Whatever else they do, lawmakers need to strengthen the requirement that states document student performance in yearly tests in exchange for federal aid.  The states have made a mockery of that provision, using weak tests, setting passing scores low or rewriting tests from year to year, making it impossible to compare progress — or its absence — over time.

“The country will have difficulty moving ahead educationally until that changes,” opines the Times, noting that complete lack of a relationship between states that report strong performances on their own tests and performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).  The Times concludes:

Congress needs to take the testing issue head-on. It should instruct the NAEP board, an independent body created by the government, to create a rigorous test that would be given free to states that agreed to use NAEP scoring standards. Then the federal government could actually embarrass the laggard states by naming the ones that cling to weak tests. Without rigorous and consistent testing, there is no way to know whether our children are getting the education they deserve and need.

Sounds an awful lot like what Diane Ravitch was talking about last week.

Sunshine Is Still The Best Disinfectant

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 6, 2008 in Assessment and Testing, Curriculum and Educational Policy. 11 Comments

There are several important threads — the need for national standards and assessments; rethinking the difference between a highly qualified teacher and a highly effective one — at the ongoing NCLB discussion at NewTalk. But one comment raised by CK Board member Diane Ravitch jumps out:

My own preference would be for Congress to authorize national testing (à la NAEP), based on coherent curriculum standards, but without stakes or sanctions. The federal role should be to provide accurate information about student performance. It should be left to states and districts to devise sanctions and reforms. These jurisdictions are closer to the schools and likelier to come up with workable reforms. If states and localities don’t want to improve their schools, then we are in deeper trouble as a nation than any law passed by Congress can fix.

We assume accountability needs teeth to be truly enforceable, but Diane is right — an apples to apples comparison of how schools fare against each other seems likely to pour more sunshine onto what’s really happening than 50 states racing each other to the bottom by lowering proficiency standards. Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest.

A Nation at Risk at 25

Published by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. on April 22, 2008 in Educational Policy. 0 Comments

The following commentary appears in the current issue of Education Week.

In American educational history, A Nation at Risk is significant as a very dramatic official recognition in the 1980s that our schools were declining in effectiveness not only in relation to schools of other nations, but also in relation to our own results in earlier decades. In the 25 years since the report was issued, energetic reform efforts have been put forth, to small overall effect. The best single gauge of overall national school effectiveness—the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test of 12th graders—has remained flat, and has even declined slightly. This persistent lack of significant improvement is owing to the unwavering persistence of the very ideas that caused the decline in the first place—the repudiation of a definite academic curriculum in the early grades by the child-centered movement of the early 20th century. Given the continued content vagueness of state standards in early grades, especially in language arts, that underlying condition has not much changed. There is still no definite, coherent academic curriculum in the early grades. That is the principal source of the low academic achievement of our high school students.

The elementary grades are much more important than is apparently credited by philanthropies like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has recently been giving many millions to high school reform—with negligible results per dollar. For many years, the philanthropic and policy worlds have placed a lot of emphasis on the two ends of precollegiate education—high school and preschool. They are right about preschool—but not about high school. The general knowledge and vocabulary required for effective learning at the high school level are the fruits of a long process. The way to reform high school is to prepare students effectively in the elementary years to thrive there. If, in recent decades, high school has become a place where students are offered a smorgasbord of watered-down subjects, that is because watered-down subjects are all that our ill-educated students are now prepared to understand.

Philanthropies cannot be altogether blamed. In their emphasis on high school, they have followed the lead of A Nation at Risk,which was overwhelmingly concerned with high school. Its assumption was that the elementary years are foundational, and should be spent on the enabling skills of reading, writing, and reckoning. The authors therefore conceived the truly decisive arena for educational improvement to be grades 9-12, where there had been a severe decline in verbal and math scores. Indeed, for most of its length, A Nation at Risk ignored the first eight grades of schooling. Then, in its last pages, the report finally alluded to the early curriculum as follows:

The curriculum in the crucial eight grades leading to the high school years should be specifically designed to provide a sound base for study in those and later years in such areas as English language development and writing, computational and problem-solving skills, science, social studies, foreign language, and the arts. These years should foster an enthusiasm for learning and the development of the individual’s gifts and talents. (Page 72)

Continue reading ‘A Nation at Risk at 25′

Coming Attractions?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 10, 2008 in Education Leadership. 0 Comments

The Weekly StandardIf you want a preview of an Obama presidency look to his friend, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, says the Weekly Standard. The magazine is a conservative organ, so it’s no surprise that authors Charles Chieppo and Jim Stergios of the Pioneer Institute, a Boston think tank, have the long knives out for Obama. Still their take on Patrick’s education moves are noteworthy.

In 2005 the Bay State was the first to place at the top of all four categories of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, attributable to the 1993 Massachusetts Education Reform Act and its hallmark standards, accountability and school choice provisions—and $40 billion dollars of incremental spending on education.

“But the teachers’ unions maintain a deep antipathy to the reforms and to anything that encourages charter schools,” write Chieppo and Stergios. “The unions pumped $3 million into Patrick’s campaign, and the governor called education his ’singular pursuit.’ What he is pursuing is the systematic dismantling of the successful 1993 reforms.” Joe Williams of Democrats for Education Reform said much the same in an op-ed in the Boston Globe in January; he rates an “I told you so” for the piece.

“His first budget eliminated the state’s independent education accountability office,” note the Standard. “Then he used his first two picks for the Board of Education to demolish standards and choice: choosing anti-testing zealot Ruth Kaplan and charter school opponent Paul Reville–whom he also made chairman of the nine-member board.”

The article is downright weak on connecting Obama to Patrick on education, noting merely that similiarities between the two “leave some to wonder” if Patrick is a preview of Obama. But its indictment of Patrick is plenty bad enough.

Get Me Rewrite!

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 9, 2008 in School News. 0 Comments

Milwaukee Journal-SentinelColumnist Eugene Kane is upset by the performance of Wisconsin’s black 8th graders on the recently released NAEP Writing results. He’s just as upset with how his paper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel played the story.

“State black 8th-graders rank worst in nation in writing,” the headline read.

“There’s always plenty of blame to go around when things get this dismal,” Kane writes. “I’m talking teachers, principals, politicians, business leaders, and of course, the parents of all those low-achieving students. But don’t worry about blaming the kids. They already got theirs in that screaming headline.”

“Any story about failing black kids always includes the usual comments from adults embarrassed by the situation who insist things can get better. The problem is too many people are already way too familiar with the below-par performance of black students in Milwaukee to believe anybody cares,” he concludes.

Kane’s kicker delivers a kick in the teeth:

“To be fair, the headline should probably be more inclusive next time, naming Wisconsin as the home of “the worst teachers and parents of black eighth-grade students in the nation. Doesn’t feel too good, does it?”

Bringing Up the Rear

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 4, 2008 in Assessment and Testing. 0 Comments

Improvements shown in the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, the first time eighth- and 12th-graders were tested in the subject since 2002.

The overall percentage of kids rated as “proficient” didn’t change, but both 8th and 12th graders saw upward movement on the percentage scoring at the lower “basic” level.  “Large achievement gaps still persist, though,” notes the Christian Science Monitor “between white and minority students, higher-income and low-income students, and, far more than in other subjects, between girls and boys.”

“The overall improvement in 12th grade is the first good news out of high schools, and that’s great,” Ed Trust’s Amy tells the paper. “But our excitement about that is seriously tempered by the lack of national gap closing.” 

In 2002, the average score for 12th-graders was 148; it’s up to 153 as of 2007.  The percentage of students scoring at the basic level went from 74 percent to 82 percent. “The biggest gains among eighth-graders were also among low performers, with more students reaching the basic level. It’s a trend that has also emerged in NAEP tests on other subjects: the lowest performers are getting better, with little change at the middle or top,” reports the Monitor.

More coverage of the NAEP:

Los Angeles Times

California still lags in student writing skills

Denver Post

Students’ writing skills don’t change

Boston Globe

State’s 8th-graders score well in writing test, despite gender gap

New York Sun

Writing Mastery Eludes Majority In Eighth Grade

Detroit News

Writing scores edge upward

Wall Street Journal

Write Stuff Shown by More in Grades 8, 12

The New York Times

In Test, Few Students Are Proficient Writers

Diane Ravitch on Data, NCLB, Testing and More

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 20, 2008 in Assessment and Testing and Educational Policy. 0 Comments

ednews.org“What now is called ‘data-driven instruction’ seems to be just a euphemism for ‘get those scores up, by any means necessary,” says Diane Ravitch in a thoughtful and wide-ranging intervew on ednews.org this morning. She continues to press the need for “a far more coherent curriculum than we now have in most schools,” and also makes a connection too few have made between a coherent curriculum and teacher training. “If teachers knew what they were expected to teach,” notes Ravitch, “we might also have far better teacher preparation.”

Ravitch confesses to becoming increasingly critical of No Child Left Behind. “Its relentless focus on basic skills in reading and math has not contributed to better education,” she notes. “It seems, in fact, to have led to dumbing down, since it does not challenge students who have leapt over its low bar. When I look at NAEP data, it is clear that national scores are virtually stagnant since the passage of NCLB and that the increases were greater before NCLB

On testing, Ravitch notes, “I have never been a critic of testing, NCLB has turned me into one. Today, many (if not most) districts are obsessed with raising scores on standardized tests, and they seem to confuse means and ends. Indeed, they seem to have lost sight of ends altogether. With the track we are now on, we might see scores go up while levels of knowledge (and education) collapse under the weight of basic skills testing and test-prep.”

NAEP = Not An Entire Picture?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 21, 2008 in Assessment and Testing. 1 Comment

The National Assessment of Educational Progress test of students’ progress in elementary and secondary schools offers “a distorted picture of achievement” and fails to fully examine how well schools prepare students for adult life, according to a paper summarized in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  The report commissioned by the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College of Columbia University argues that the NAEP focuses too narrowly on basic academic and critical thinking skills in measuring how well students are being educated.

“Moreover,” the report says, “the federal benchmarking test fails to gauge the long-term impact of education because it does not look at whether adults who were educated at elementary and secondary schools do things such as vote, read independently, or stay in shape physically.” 

Those expecting disagreement will not be disappointed.  The Chronicle’s report is followed by a reader comment:  “I don’t give a flip whether students in question (or you for that matter) vote, read independently, or stay in shape. However I do care very much whether students can read, write, and do basic math.” 

The Knowledge Connection

Published by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. on February 16, 2008 in Core Knowledge and Educational Policy. 0 Comments

Why has the No Child Left Behind law left so many children behind? According to the latest scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the reading achievement of eighth-graders has declined since the law was passed in 2001, and the large reading gap between advantaged and disadvantaged children — “the achievement gap” — has stayed where it was. Today’s eighth-graders had recorded gains in fourth grade, but these have not led to improvements in later grades — when reading scores actually count for a student’s future.

Those in Congress in charge of crafting revisions should understand that the law’s disappointing results owe less to defects in the law than to the methods and ideas schools use in their attempts to fulfill the “adequate yearly progress” mandate for all groups of students; this causes schools, as many complain, to teach to reading tests rather than educate children. But intensive test preparation by schools has resulted in lower reading test scores in later grades. “Teaching to the test” does not effectively teach to the test after all.

Studies of reading comprehension show that knowing something of the topic you’re reading about is the most important variable in comprehension. After a child learns to sound out words, comprehension is mostly knowledge. Many technical studies support the assertion that after students can fluently sound out words, relevant knowledge is the crucial difference between students who are good or poor readers. In light of the relevant science, an analysis of the textbooks and methods used to teach reading and language arts — for three hours a day in many places — indicates some of the reasons for the disappointing later results. These test-prep materials are constructed on the mistaken view that reading comprehension is a skill that can be perfected by practice, as typing can be. This how-to conception of reading has caused schools to spend a lot of unproductive time on trivial content and on drills such as “finding the main idea” and less time on history, science and the arts.

Continue reading ‘The Knowledge Connection’