NAEP Tracking

Problem: Boys Don't Like to Read. Solution: Books That Are Really Gross

2008-08-08T07:56:00.001-05:00

Front page WSJ article on getting boys to read, which mentions the reading gap on NAEP. Also, lots of great ideas for any reticent boy readers you know.

NAEP Heresy

2008-07-16T13:13:00.002-05:00

Eduwonk says that NAEP isn't the end-all-be-all of tests, and that there may be legitimate reasons why NAEP and state scores may be divergent (beyond making state tests easier).

Testing Officials Again Tackle Accommodations And Exclusions for Special Student Populations

2008-07-11T15:45:00.001-05:00

Long Sean Cavanagh article on the challenges facing exclusion and accommodations on NAEP

Psychometrics 101 from Eduwonkette's blog

2008-07-02T13:28:00.001-05:00

A glossary of basic psychometric testing terms. Great resource for folks unfamiliar with testing.

Skoolboy: An Immodest Proposal

2008-07-01T08:36:00.002-05:00

Talks about why NAEP is called the "gold standard," and why people use it to claim score inflation on some state-mandated tests.

Ladner on Arizona's performance on NAEP and international comparisons

2008-06-26T09:04:00.003-05:00

Interesting insight into how NAEP is used vs. internal Terra Nova scores by the AZ school chief. Ladner also uses the AIR NAEP/PISA study to compare Arizona to other countries.

More Blogging on TUDA

2008-06-25T09:55:00.002-05:00

Ezra Klein discusses comparisons using Free and Reduced Price Lunch:

Cavanagh likes State Mapping Study

2008-06-25T09:11:00.002-05:00

From the new blog "Curriculum Matters" by Sean Cavanagh and Kathleen Kennedy Manzo - Cavanagh brings up the "good... and largely overlooked" state mapping studies.

Report: Racial gap narrows, but what did No Child law do?

2008-06-25T08:29:00.004-05:00

Gannett and other sources cover the CEP report on student achievement released yesterday, which found that student achievement is basically on the rise in the last five years (i.e. since the enactment of NCLB). They found that gains on state tests are generally in the same direction as gains on state NAEP, but are usually greater than what's found on NAEP. While CEP is careful to say that you can't credit NCLB directly for this, surely some readers of the report will leap to make the causal link between NCLB and rising achievement.

At the briefing someone from AFT asked if the compared trend lines from before NCLB to after NCLB, which they weren't able to do because of the dearth of data pre-2002.

Maria Glod's story ran A2 in the Post.

Matthew Yglesias on TUDA

2008-06-24T09:03:00.002-05:00

Matthew Yglesias writes for the Atlantic. I believe he is dating Sara Mead, formerly of Ed Sector (lots of research on performance gaps), and is pretty well versed on urban education. Click through for the full post:

The Truth About Urban Schools

23 Jun 2008 11:41 am

Conversations about urbanism always eventually end up going in the direction of education policy. After all, absent better schools, the city will always be a place for poor people, very rich people, and young people rather than for the mainstream of American life. To that end, it's worth noting that a lot of people's ideas about the quality of urban schools are mistaken, as you can see from a look inside the results of the NAEP mathematics test as revealed in the Trial Urban District Assessment from 2005. First off, consider the number of eighth grader who rate as "below basic" (this is bad):

Mayor Sees a Test Scores Triumph

2008-06-23T09:37:00.002-05:00

No NAEP mention, but relevant to the discussion of state tests vs. NAEP. Scores are going up like mad in NY.

Mayor Sees a Test Scores Triumph

Or is it a case Of inflation of results?

By ELIZABETH GREEN, Staff Reporter of the Sun
June 23, 2008
http://www.nysun.com/new-york/mayor-sees-a-test-scores-triumph/80476/

Mayor Bloomberg will announce an education victory today: Test scores are up across the city, by double digits at some schools. But a cloud is already gathering, as education experts are raising the possibility that these gains and others across the country could suggest score inflation and not real learning gains.

The scores being released today show a nine-percentage-point gain in math citywide versus last year, and a seven-point gain on the reading test. The gains are even more remarkable when viewed over the six-year timeline since Mr. Bloomberg took office: Three-quarters of city students now score proficient at math, up from 37% in 2002.

if you read this please email me

2008-06-10T11:27:00.001-05:00

NAEP team - if you are reading this, please email me to let me know. I'm trying to see how useful keeping this blog is.

Report on Asian-American Achievement

2008-06-10T11:25:00.001-05:00

Report arguing that the Asian-American and Pacific Islander category is too broad, hides low achievement of some Asian groups.

Ideas on Creative and Practical IQ Underlie New Tests of Giftedness

2008-05-21T08:20:00.001-05:00

Interesting Ed Week article on a test called the Aurora Battery used to identify gifted and talented students. Attempts to assess things like creativity.

No Child Left Behind Lacks Bite

2008-05-13T15:13:00.001-05:00

Lisa caught this article in the WSJ. The article is on how NCLB hasn't really resulted in a lot of restructuring for the most persistently-troubled schools.

The troubles in the restructuring arena reflect broader questions about whether NCLB is a strong enough tool to bring about the overhaul of American education. In many ways, the law was an outgrowth of "A Nation at Risk," a pivotal 1983 federal report that warned that a "rising tide of mediocrity" in education could undermine the nation's competitiveness. That report ushered in the era of accountability and testing, which eventually spawned NCLB.

Supporters maintain the law is helping to fuel learning gains. In the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, reading and math scores for fourth and eighth graders rose compared to 2005, albeit only by a few points.

But NCLB gave states -- not the federal government -- authority to set the academic standards for local schools. And so, while NCLB requires all students to be proficient in reading and math by 2014, states determine what proficiency is and how they will test for it. A 2007 federal study found states don't exactly agree on proficiency.

Asian-American Students Struggling Under NCLB, Group Says

2008-05-08T13:23:00.004-05:00

A group is arguing that data for Asian Americans needs to be further disaggregated, because the wide-ranging cultures and languages of Asian Americans makes that designation fairly meaningless, and can hide low-performing Asian groups. If I remember correctly, several Southeast Asian-American groups do have much lower performance than the Asian American Average when data are disaggregated to that level.

Schools are failing to identify struggling Asian-American students under the No Child Left Behind Act and to get them the academic interventions they need, a report says .

“Contrary to stereotypes that cast Asian-Americans as model students of academic achievement, many Asian-American students are struggling, failing, and dropping out of schools that ignore their needs,” says the report, released last week by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

What Do Children Read? Hint: Harry Potter's Not No. 1

2008-05-05T08:06:00.002-05:00

Traditional children's books (e.g. books by E.B. White, Judy Blume, etc.) still popular among kids. Founder of Accelerated Reader software is a former ED of NAGB, apparently.

Ed Daily:

2008-04-30T09:37:00.002-05:00

Interesting-sounding AFT report finds that standards are often not that great. Only Virginia has strong standards in all subjects assessed. Side note about Virginia - look at NAEP scores broken down by race and you'll see some great Simpson's Paradox.

AFT report finds vague, repetitive content standards across states

Union: Federal government should underwrite consortia on standards, curriculum, assessment

By Stephen Sawchuk

With evidence in hand that states' academic content standards lack specificity and depth, the American Federation of Teachers is renewing its call on the federal government to fund efforts by state consortia to develop model standards, curricula and assessments.

Such funding, AFT officials say, would not only improve instruction in low-income schools but also rejuvenate the standards-based reform movement by putting better curricula in the hands of teachers. The funding would also improve test quality, therefore decreasing the pressure on teachers to resort to "drill and kill" multiple-choice test preparation.

"A federal funding stream would be a very helpful way of avoiding the political controversy over national standards," AFT Executive Vice President Antonia Cortese said. "For our poorer students in urban areas, we believe strongly that good state standards would help them get the same kind of education that a suburban child would get."

AFT's position reflects that of several national groups, notably The Education Trust, which has lobbied Congress to put $750 million annually into curricula -- suggesting that the issue could receive more attention when Congress resumes NCLB reauthorization.

Findings

AFT's Sizing Up State Standards 2008 examines whether states have strong standards in place in elementary school through high school in the core subjects of English, math, science and social studies. Strong standards, the report says, are grade- and course-specific and define content and skills so that the standards can be used to underpin a common curriculum. Standards that failed to meet AFT's criteria were repeated from grade to grade, articulated for grade spans rather than for each grade, or were vague and missing content.

States lack tools to meet federal reporting mandate

2008-04-29T08:08:00.000-05:00

Since 2002, states have been required under NCLB to ensure that all students become technologically literate by eighth grade. However, this is the first year the Education Department is requiring states to report students' proficiencies -- a task most states are not yet equipped to execute, experts say.

In fact, most states do not have a formal assessment in place, experts say, adding that the resource is costly and complicated to construct. Further, education stakeholders question how much weight the new provision will have, given that technology literacy is not a component of schools' adequate yearly progress requirements.

USA Today: SAT writing portion good predictor of grades

2008-04-25T14:55:00.001-05:00

The controversial new writing portion of the SAT is actually a better predictor of grades for freshmen college students than the older, more-established, critical reading and mathematics portions, according to preliminary results of two new studies.

If I recall correctly, the "older" SAT was never a great predictor of college GPA (and that it over-predicted the GPA of white males and under-predicted that of everybody else).

Ed Week: Spellings Proposes New Rules For Graduation Rates

2008-04-23T13:01:00.001-05:00

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings issued proposed federal regulations today that touch on core aspects of the No Child Left Behind Act, requiring states to provide more and better information about high school graduation rates, student test performance, and the availability and quality of tutoring under the federal law.

In a speech before the Detroit Economic Club, Ms. Spellings described the new policy tools as “bulldozers” designed to “tear down barriers to reform.”

She said that many of the proposed actions “have gained broad support” in conversations about how to strengthen the federal law, whose reauthorization is stalled on Capitol Hill.

Bob Herbert: Clueless in America

2008-04-22T09:14:00.001-05:00

No NAEP mention (boo!), but lots of ed-stuff and a mention of the Common Core report.

We don’t hear a great deal about education in the presidential campaign. It’s much too serious a topic to compete with such fun stuff as Hillary tossing back a shot of whiskey, or Barack rolling a gutter ball.
The nation’s future may depend on how well we educate the current and future generations, but (like the renovation of the nation’s infrastructure, or a serious search for better sources of energy) that can wait. At the moment, no one seems to have the will to engage any of the most serious challenges facing the U.S.
An American kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. That’s more than a million every year, a sign of big trouble for these largely clueless youngsters in an era in which a college education is crucial to maintaining a middle-class quality of life — and for the country as a whole in a world that is becoming more hotly competitive every day.
Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.

AP - "No Child Left Behind faces changes"

2008-04-22T09:12:00.001-05:00

No Child Left Behind faces changes
By NANCY ZUCKERBROD, AP Education Writer

WASHINGTON - Unable to push education fixes through Congress, the Bush administration is taking its own pen to the No Child Left Behind law.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings says she plans to make a host of changes to the education law through regulations being unveiled Tuesday.

Among the biggest changes will be a requirement that by the 2012-13 school year, all states must calculate their high school graduation rates in a uniform way.

States currently use all kinds of methods to determine their graduation rates, many of which are based on unreliable information about school dropouts, leading to overestimates.

States will be told to count graduates, in most cases, as students who leave on time and with a regular degree. Research indicates students who take extra time or get alternatives to diplomas, such as a GED, generally don't do as well in college or the work force.

While states will no longer be able to use their own methods for calculating grad rates, they will still be able set their own goals for getting more students to graduate. Critics say that allows states to set weak improvement goals.

The six-year-old education law is President Bush's signature domestic policy initiative. The law requires testing in reading and math in grades three through eight and once in high school. The stated goal is to get all kids working at grade level by 2013-14.

Lawmakers recently tried but were unable to pass an updated version of the law due to disagreements over how to judge schools and teachers, among other things. Without a renewal, the existing law stands.

Spellings has been taking steps in recent months to make changes from her perch. However, the proposed regulations amount to the most comprehensive set of administrative changes she has sought so far.

"The Congress, I guess because of the political and legislative climate, has not been able to get a reauthorization under way this year," Spellings said in an interview. "I know that schools and students need help now, and we are prepared to act administratively."

The regulations call for a federal review of every state policy regarding the exclusion of test scores of students in racial groups deemed too small to be statistically significant or so small that student privacy could be jeopardized. Critics say too many kids' scores are being left aside under these policies.

The regulations also call for school districts to demonstrate that they are doing all they can to notify parents of low-income students in struggling schools that free tutoring is available. If the districts fail to do that, their ability to spend federal funds could be limited under the proposal. The department estimates only 14 percent of eligible students receive tutoring available to them.

An even smaller percentage of kids who are allowed to transfer to higher-performing schools make that switch, in part because they aren't always informed of vacancies on time. The regulations require schools to publicize open spots at least 14 days before school starts.

The administration's proposal also would tighten the rules around the corrective steps schools must take once they've failed to hit progress goals for many consecutive years.

The administration is seeking public comments before finalizing the regulations in the fall.
Regulations can be overturned by a new administration. Spellings said that's unlikely in this case, because the rules she is proposing have widespread support. She said she hoped the ideas would help shape the legislative debate on Capitol Hill whenever the law is revisited there.

"I think these things will help the law work better in the field ... and I think they are ways for the Congress to have a good jumping-off place when they start on their work," she said.

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who chairs the Senate education committee, said the regulations "include important improvements for implementing No Child Left Behind."
___
On the Net:
Education Department: http://www.ed.gov/

Ed Daily: Students with Disabilities make little progress on NAEP

2008-04-17T08:24:00.002-05:00

(login required)

SDS gained some on NAEP Writing 2007, but didn't close the gap between students w/o disabilities.

EdWeek: Make a Science Generation

2008-04-11T12:12:00.002-05:00

When even Newt Gingrich wants to triple the funding of something, it must be important.

High School Seniors Get an "F" in Finance

2008-04-10T16:06:00.002-05:00

The Fed released a survey saying that high school seniors got less than half of questions about personal finance and economics right, the lowest percentage in the six surveys they've administered. No NAEP Economics mention, unfortunately, but worth noting in case we ever do Econ again.

AP Language, Computer Courses Cut

2008-04-04T08:45:00.001-05:00

AP Italian, Latin and French literature are being cut from the list of AP courses, as is Computer Science. These courses have been underenrolled by a lot, says College Board.

NAEP Writing Report coverage round-up

2008-04-03T11:12:00.002-05:00

Only the big ones:

AP - http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5guahnmZPHr8GssFKtPhlkhccpkqgD8VQEA7O2

WaPo -

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/03/AR2008040301655.html?hpid=topnews

Ed Week - http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/04/09/32naep.h27.html?tmp=1563593171

NYT -

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/education/03cnd-writing.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

Teachers in US paid less than other countries

2008-04-03T11:10:00.002-05:00

Interesting report from EPI via McKinsey. Teachers in South Korea and Germany make 141% of per capita GDP, vs. 81% in the US.

ED to require states to use a uniform dropout formula

2008-04-01T07:59:00.002-05:00

A lot of talk about the crazy ways of counting dropout rates has resulted in ED requiring all states to use the federal formula. This is "one of the most far-reaching regulatory actions taken by any education secretary," according to the article. NGA signed on to this in 2005, but haven't gotten there yet. Spellings is announcing this today at the start of a campaign by a new group called America's Promise Alliance, which seems to be headed by Colin Powell and his wife.

Ed Week releases Technology Counts report

2008-03-26T09:28:00.002-05:00

Technology Counts report finds that STEM expectations are increasing in response to loud calls from basically everybody. Most states require at least three years of math and science (or at least have imminent plans to do so). Mentions that 12th grade NAEP scores aren't great, and that the US is middling on TIMSS. Will read more when I have time.

Ed week: Poor Math Scores Posted on Unusual 3-State Exams

2008-03-21T10:42:00.003-05:00

Apparently NH, RI, and VT teamed up to write a common assessment called the New England Common Assessment Program, on which their students' didn't do great. Just an interesting thing to know is on the radar; Ed Week has more. I know Achieve and NGA have been recommending things like this, but this is the first time I've heard of states creating and using assessments together.

Ed Week - "NCLB Act III: Given Choice, Virginia Board Unlikely to Pull Out of NCLB"

2008-03-12T15:21:00.001-05:00

Given Choice, Virginia Board Unlikely to Pull Out of NCLB
David Hoff

The Virginia General Assembly has passed a bill that would give the state's board of education the option of leaving NCLB behind.

Virginia's been down this road before. In 2004, it passed a Republican-backed resolution saying it didn't have the money to comply with the law, prompting this statement from then-Secretary of Education Rod Paige. Virginia stuck with the law.

This year, Republicans raised the issue again. Throughout the legislative session, the House pushed a bill that would have required the state board to create a plan to withdraw from NCLB by 2009. Gov. Tim Kaine, a Democrat, opposed it, according to this news story, and the Senate never went along.

The compromise was to let the board of education members decide. They have 416 million reasons to stick with NCLB. That's the number of dollars the state would receive from NCLB programs under President Bush's proposed fiscal 2009 budget proposal. Gov. Kaine probably wouldn't want to forfeit that money because he has plans for universal preK and other programs, as eduflak points out. Board members know that—and that the legislature wouldn't replace lost federal money with state funds.

All Virginia lawmakers are doing is making a political statement that reinforces the assertion by Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., that NCLB is "the most negative brand in America."

Ed Week - "11 States Poised to Pilot National Test for Seniors"

2008-03-12T15:12:00.001-05:00

11 States Poised to Pilot National Test for Seniors
By Sean Cavanagh

For the first time, a select group of states is expected to take part in a 12th grade version of the National Assessment of Educational Progress in reading and mathematics, a move that could lay the foundation for even greater state participation at that grade level on the heavily scrutinized test.

The board that sets policy for NAEP, known as “the nation’s report card,” has approved tentative plans to have 11 states voluntarily participate in the exam.

Each of those states would have a representative sample of its high school seniors take part in a reading and math NAEP beginning in 2009, a process that would eventually allow for state-by-state comparisons of high school seniors’ scores.

The National Assessment Governing Board approved the 12th grade proposal at its quarterly meeting, held March 6-8 in Albuquerque, N.M.

The board also set in motion plans to add seven big-city districts to the special NAEP edition for urban school systems. Eleven districts took part in the most recent version of the Trial Urban District Assessment, which was given in reading and math in grades 4 and 8.

Currently, states are required to participate in NAEP reading and math every two years at the 4th and 8th grade levels in order to remain eligible for federal funding under the No Child Left Behind Act.

Those 4th and 8th grade scores, called state NAEP, typically receive widespread attention because they allow the public to judge individual states’ academic progress over time—and compare states against one another. There is no such mandate for 12th grade, though some elected officials, including President Bush, have advocated expanding the state-by-state tests to high school seniors.

Federal officials will not release the names of the states and urban districts that have voiced an interest in joining in the expanded NAEP until they go back to policymakers from those jurisdictions and make certain they want to go forward, said Charles E. Smith, the executive director of the governing board. Those agreements could become final in the next few weeks, he said.

‘The Real Meaning’
While federal officials believe the first 12th grade state NAEP will occur next year, it has yet to be determined whether those exams will take place every two years or less regularly, Mr. Smith said.

A separate NAEP, the long-term trend, is given to 17-year-old students, as well as children ages 9 and 13. It provides a nationwide snapshot of trends in reading and math performance. But policymakers in the 11 volunteer states have told federal officials they want more detailed, state-specific information about high school students’ performance than the national trend tests can provide, Mr. Smith said.

State officials have said “the real meaning comes from the state-level [exam], and what it can tell them,” said Mr. Smith, who noted that he was “very encouraged” by the state interest in 12th grade NAEP so far.

The expansion of the urban-district NAEP and the creation of new 12th grade state reading and math tests became possible with President Bush’s approval of the fiscal 2008 federal budget in December. It provides an $11 million increase for NAEP and the governing board, to $104 million, from the previous year.

In a statement explaining the 2008 budget for NAEP, members of Congress said the new money should be devoted in part to an expansion of the urban test and the addition of reading and math exams for seniors.

And if the Bush administration has its way, more 12th graders will be taking part in NAEP in the future. In his fiscal 2009 budget proposal, the president called for a 33 percent increase in spending for the assessment and the governing board, to $139 million. That spending boost would allow the “12th grade state NAEP to include all states in 2011,” according to the administration’s budget summary.

Vol. 27

VA Assembly passes NCLB opt-out, goes to Gov. Kaine

2008-03-11T10:19:00.003-05:00

The VA General Assembly passed the NCLB opt-out bill. At first I was surprised that this didn't get more coverage, but if passed, the Board of Education has a year to create the plan, so there won't be an immediate effect. By then we may have serious talks about a reiteration of 2.0 under whoever the new president will be.

EdWeek: Study Finds Lower Math Scores in Catholic Schools

2008-03-07T12:16:00.000-05:00

Children in Roman Catholic schools make no more progress in reading in the early grades than similar students in public schools, and make even less progress in math, a new study finds.

“I was actually surprised to find the results that Catholic schools are worse in mathematics,” said Sean F. Reardon, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of education and sociology at Stanford University. “But, if Catholic schools aren’t subject to the same accountability requirements as public schools are, then they may not spend as much time on mathematics and literacy.”

He presented the study findings March 3 during the annual conference of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, a professional society that focuses on “cause and effect” research and other kinds of rigorous studies. The March 2-4 event in Arlington, Va., attracted more than 250 conference-goers and featured presentations by more than 80 researchers.

Full story: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/03/12/27sree.h27.html?print=1

Report urges greater federal role in education

2008-03-05T09:24:00.000-05:00

Local control of education has produced financial inequality in schools, inconsistent standards, no way of knowing how children are truly doing and an atmosphere dominated by unions, according to a new report yesterday that calls for national standards and a greater federal role in schools.

"It is only by transcending traditional local control, and by getting serious about a new national role in standards and finance, that we can at last create genuine autonomy for local schools," Matt Miller, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, wrote in his report, "Nationalize The Schools ( ... A Little)."

NYT: Next Question: Can Students Be Paid to Excel?

2008-03-05T09:03:00.002-05:00

Front page NYT story on paying students for test scores. Focuses on the Bloomberg initiative thought up by Chief Equality Officer and Harvard economist Roland Fryer of paying students $50 for good test scores.

The fourth graders squirmed in their seats, waiting for their prizes. In a few minutes, they would learn how much money they had earned for their scores on recent reading and math exams. Some would receive nearly $50 for acing the standardized tests, a small fortune for many at this school, P.S. 188 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

When the rewards were handed out, Jazmin Roman was eager to celebrate her $39.72. She whispered to her friend Abigail Ortega, “How much did you get?” Abigail mouthed a barely audible answer: $36.87. Edgar Berlanga pumped his fist in the air to celebrate his $34.50.

Catholic leaders assured of help on schools

2008-03-04T14:20:00.000-05:00

A Department of Education official yesterday said the Bush administration is working to help Catholic schools by pushing for renewal of the D.C. voucher program and holding a summit to discuss ways to retain religiously affiliated schools in inner cities.

"We in the administration are proud of a lot of initiatives we've been working on ... but we know there's a lot of more work to do," Holly Kuzmich, deputy chief of staff at the Department of Education, told members of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).

The White House Summit on Inner-City Children and Faith-Based Schools, announced by President Bush in his State of the Union address and scheduled for later this spring, will bring together private-school leaders, educators and researchers to "discuss creative solutions to this problem" of losing faith-based inner-city schools, she said.

Common Core off to a Dubious Start

2008-02-27T13:14:00.002-05:00

Kevin De Rosa at D-Ed Reckoning calls out the new Common Core report for not using existing NAEP data in their report, instead relying on a telephone survey. He says they didn't do this because NAEP data undermines their conclusions. Lots of NAEP data and some charts.

NYT: History Survey Stumps US Teens

2008-02-26T15:35:00.002-05:00

Following up on the report emailed around, via Sam Dillon at the Times:

Fewer than half of American teenagers who were asked basic questions about history and literature during a recent telephone survey knew when the Civil War was fought, and one-quarter thought that Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World sometime after 1750, not in 1492.

The results of the survey, released Tuesday, demonstrate that a significant proportion of American teenagers live in “stunning ignorance” of history and literature, according to the group that commissioned it. Known as Common Core, the organization describes itself as a new, nonpartisan research and advocacy organization that will press for more teaching of the liberal arts in American public schools.

'Best and brightest' dim on history

2008-02-18T10:39:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow is President's Day, so it's an appropriate time to see who has a good handle on national history or government. If you think, however, the nation's college students have the most knowledge about the subjects, think again.

College freshmen earned an average grade of 'F' — or just 53.7 percent — when asked a series of questions about U.S. presidents and key historical events from their times in office. After four years of college, their knowledge didn't improve.

College seniors got just 55.4 percent on the 60-question quiz given to 14,000 students at 50 colleges and universities around the country as part of a study designed to test their knowledge of America's history, government, international relations and market economy.

"In this election, we are focusing on the youth vote, and it's great that more kids are coming out to vote. But we worry that it's become a kind of cult of personality," says Richard Brake, director of the Lehrman American Studies Center at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Wilmington, Del., which commissioned the civic learning study, conducted by researchers at the University of Connecticut's Department of Public Policy...

WaPo: The Knowledge Connection (E.D. Hirsch)

2008-02-17T12:33:00.001-05:00

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 2001...

EdWeek: U.S. ‘Dashboards’ Offer Data on State Achievement

2008-02-12T14:57:00.000-05:00

U.S. ‘Dashboards’ Offer Data on State Achievement

By David J. Hoff

More than 20 years ago, when federal officials sought to publicize data portraying the relative quality of the states’ school systems, the best statistics they could find were scores on college-admissions tests and state-reported graduation rates.

Now that states have results from their own tests and state-level results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress—as well as a wealth of other data—the Department of Education is publishing a two-page report on each state that gives a glimpse of the quality of its K-12 schools.

The reports also should answer the public’s questions about the success of the No Child Left Behind Act in promoting increased student achievement, said Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.

The data reports show that gaps in achievement between minority and white students are narrowing, the secretary said. And they show the proportion of schools making their achievement targets under the NCLB law; nationally, the rate is about 70 percent.

“When they see in black and white what [NCLB] means in their own backyard, … I think it’s very useful for parents and policymakers,” Ms. Spellings said in an interview last week.

Data Quality Improves

The amount and quality of data available today represent a dramatic improvement over what was available in the so-called “wall chart,” a state-by-state compilation of resource inputs, performance outcomes, and population characteristics that the Education Department published for six years, starting in 1984 under Secretary Terrel H. Bell. ("E.D. Issues Study Ranking States On Education," Jan. 11, 1984.)

The Department of Education’s Web site offers data on achievement and other factors for each state, such as Minnesota, in a form it calls “dashboards.” Secretary Margaret Spellings likens the setup to a car dashboard’s usability.

Educators challenged the validity of those comparisons, and Mr. Bell at the time acknowledged the limitations of the data. But he defended such a “scoreboard” as a way of raising awareness of the need for school improvement.

Since 1990, NAEP has published state-by-state results for 4th graders and 8th graders from its reading, mathematics, science, and writing tests based on a sampling of student achievement. States voluntarily participated in the NAEP tests until 2003, when the NCLB law required them to join the assessment for the reading and math exams.

In addition, the NCLB law requires states to create their own tests to measure the reading skills and mathematical abilities of students in grades 3-8 and once in high school.

Those data are the heart of the new Education Department reports, which the agency is calling “dashboards.” Like the dashboard of a car, the reports give people “pieces of information … in a way that are quickly consumable and usable,” said Secretary Spellings, who unveiled the reports last month in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington.

A chart in each state’s report compares how its students are doing on the NAEP tests and the state’s own exams. The chart also disaggregates the data by the performance of white, African-American, Hispanic, and low-income students.

Each state’s report lists the high school graduation rate as reported by the state. It compares that rate with the so-called average freshman graduation rate, which estimates the percentage of 9th graders who earn their diplomas within four years in that state.

While the data aren’t exhaustive, they are far more extensive than what the federal government was able to publish shortly after the 1983 report helped set off a wave of school reforms, said Chester E. Finn Jr. Mr. Finn was an assistant secretary of education under Mr. Bell’s successor, William J. Bennett. Lamar Alexander ceased publishing the “wall chart” shortly after he became secretary of education in 1991.

“We have had approximately two decades of movement toward state-level results data that can be compared,” said Mr. Finn, who is the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington-based think tank that supports accountability measures and school choice. “I expect we’ll see . . . the data will continue to get better, faster, more precise, more fine grained, better able to be analyzed in various useful ways by various constituencies.”

Long before the department first published its dashboards, Mr. Finn said, states, nonprofits, and companies published a variety of Web sites that allow users to find data and, often, compare schools, districts, and states on measures such as student achievement, spending, and other data.

Giving NCLB Credit

The increase in the amount and quality of data is mostly the outgrowth of the NCLB law, said Chrys Dougherty, the research director of the National Center on Educational Accountability, an Austin, Texas-based nonprofit group that supports data-based efforts to improve schools.

“It’s something people need to look at,” Mr. Dougherty said. “It gives you an idea how tough their state test is or how high the standards are.”

But Mr. Dougherty and other advocates of such use of data are laying the groundwork to help states measure whether their students are graduating prepared for college or the workforce.

ACT Inc. has developed a method for reporting such percentages based on students’ scores on the ACT college-admissions exam, which the Iowa City, Iowa-based nonprofit produces. Other states can calculate similar percentages if they benchmark their high school exams to the ACT’s standards.

“That’s an indicator that’s coming down the pike,” Mr. Dougherty said. “But somebody has to do the data analysis.”

'Troublemaker' Finn Recalls Setting 'Proficiency' Standard

2008-02-12T13:47:00.000-05:00

David Hoff has info on Checker Finn's new book Troublemaker, copies of which Lindsy and I picked up at the Fordham Open House last week. Seems like Hoff's gotten through the book quicker than we have:

In the NCLB world, Finn may be the reason why we're so concerned about "proficiency." Back in the 1980s, when he was an assistant secretary at the Department of Education, Finn complained that the National Assessment of Educational Progress didn't deliver meaningful results. The public couldn't understand, he said, the meaning of an obtuse scale score for the nation. He led the lobbying effort to persuade Congress to create a version of NAEP that delivered results for every state. Once it passed, Finn became the first chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board and served on it for eight years. He was the architect of NAEP's performance levels ("advanced," "proficient," and "basic"). When Congress was looking to set a goal for student achievement, it chose proficiency. To hold states up to a national standard, it required states to participate in NAEP's reading and math tests and increased the frequency of those tests to every other year. Today, NAEP is the most cited source for declaring states' definition of proficiency to be too easy.

Finn covers all of this in "Troublemaker," and he acknowledges that the achievement levels have been controversial. But he leaves out that their validity has been questioned by the research community. In 1991, NAGB's own consultants said it "must be viewed as insufficiently tested and validated, politically dominated, and of questionable credibility." NAGB fired the consultant, according to this Education Week story. In 1999, a National Academy of Sciences report called the process of setting them "fundamentally flawed." To this day, every NAEP report includes a footnote saying that the achievement levels are "developmental."

Economy brakes school spending

2008-02-12T09:27:00.000-05:00

School budgets have seemed to defy gravity in recent years — going up steadily without ever coming down. But school board members from across the country say that's likely to change soon, and they're bracing for leaner times forced by the nation's economic downturn.

Board members in the District last week for an annual conference said shortfalls in state budgets, coupled with pessimistic predictions about local revenues, are forcing them to consider ways to trim next year's budgets, which they are working on now.

About half of the states are facing projected budget shortfalls, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a District-based liberal research group.

The downturn in the housing market has precipitated a drop in state revenue from sales taxes associated with construction materials, furniture and other goods, said Liz McNichol, senior fellow at the center. She said recent job losses around the country also could catalyze a reduction in income taxes collected by states...

Ed Week: Tests of Tech Literacy Not Widespread Despite NCLB Goals

2008-01-29T13:14:00.000-05:00

Only four states have adopted statewide testing for students on technology. A number of companies have services available to provide such tests, but the market is still small. This seems relevant as I believe there is (was?) a proposed NAEP pilot test sometime in the next few years.

Students with Disabilities Said to Benefit from NCLB

2008-01-29T09:29:00.001-05:00

According to a report released by the National Council on Disability, NCLB seems to have led to academic gains for students with disabilities, though it is too soon to definitively link the two.

In the 10 states that were examined closely, students with disabilities appear to be performing better on the National Assessment of Educational Progress when they are in elementary school, but those gains seem to dissipate by the time the students reach middle school.

This seems to make intuitive sense, as one of the only things even the most ardent critics of the law (e.g. Jon Kozol) and its supporters can agree on is that NCLB raised the issue of not letting marginalized groups fall by the wayside.

Study finds merit in teacher performance pay

2008-01-29T09:18:00.000-05:00

Paying teachers based on their performance in the classroom has resulted in better student test scores, a recent study has found.

The study, released Jan. 22 by researchers at the University of Arkansas, examined a merit pay program called the Achievement Challenge Pilot Project that was implemented in five schools in Little Rock. Under the ACPP, teachers could earn as much as an $11,000 bonus based on how much their students' test scores improved.

"Our two years of analysis of test data in ACPP schools in Little Rock reveal consistent findings: Students of teachers who are eligible for performance bonuses enjoy academic benefits. Further, many of the criticisms of merit pay programs simply have not proven true in Little Rock," said Gary W. Ritter, lead researcher and professor of education at the University of Arkansas.

The schools participating in ACPP are composed predominantly of black students from low-income homes.

The study comes as lawmakers are crafting a bill to renew the No Child Left Behind Act, and Republicans and Democrats are considering including performance pay systems for teachers...

Rhee: DC last on NAEP

2008-01-24T13:03:00.001-05:00

Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee writes in Forbes that DC is last by far on NAEP, with only MS anywhere close.

Update: This is a part of a larger Forbes series asking people to weigh in on education. Worth checking out: http://www.forbes.com/home/opinions/2008/01/23/solutions-education-teaching-oped-cx_hpm_0123solutionsland.html

USA Today: Employers want ways to judge grads beyond tests, grades

2008-01-23T09:20:00.000-05:00

A survey of business leaders finds that most would prefer finding ways to assess "a student's ability to apply college learning to real-world settings." Most don't seem to be interested in the kinds of recommendations Sec. Spellings made in 2006.

"Too many policymakers and educational leaders are focused on the tests rather than on what is really important: whether students are learning what they need to know," says Roberts Jones, president of Education & Workforce Policy, a consulting firm based in Alexandria, Va.

Weekly Clips 1.18.08

2008-01-18T14:21:00.001-05:00

The relatively light amount of coverage this week included continued discussion of the Quality Counts report, a long article in City Journal by prominent school-choice advocate Sol Stern, and an article discussing the possible mandating of summer school in Albuquerque, with low NAEP scores being used as justification.

While most of the coverage of the Quality Counts report immediately followed the release, several articles were published this week. The Messenger-Inquirer (KY) and the Daily Comet (LA) published news stories of the report, while the Honolulu Star Bulletin used NAEP data in an article comparing the roughly equal achievement in private and public schools. The Orlando Sentinel and the Opelkia-Auburn News (AL) published editorials, the first arguing that Florida needs to adopt excellent science standards as it has done for reading and math, while the second exhorts Alabamans not to accept the low grade their states received on the Quality Counts report.

The Manhattan Institute scholar Sol Stern published a long article in City Journal that repudiates his past beliefs of school choice as a panacea for educational problems in the US. While maintaining his faith in the importance of school choice, Stern writes that he has seen the importance of excellent curriculum and strong standards; the “education miracle” of Massachusetts’ growth on NAEP illustrates this for him. Stern also highlights two TUDA districts:

This may explain why, on the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests—widely regarded as a gold standard for educational assessment—Gotham students showed no improvement in fourth- and eighth-grade reading from 2003 to 2007, while the city of Atlanta, which hasn’t staked everything on market incentives, has shown significant reading improvement.

Stern’s article generated commentary among the blogs, as well as a great deal of criticism from the Cato Institute bloggers.

The acting superintendent of Albuquerque Public Schools wants to introduce mandatory summer school for underperforming second and third graders, reports the Albuquerque Journal. New Mexico’s low scores on NAEP are cited as evidence of the state’s overall educational problems, and implicitly included as evidence for her proposal.

There were approximately 7.7 million media impressions this week, bringing the total for the year to just under 53 million. There were 29 stories this week, bringing the yearly total to 107.

Spellings Statement in Oregon

2008-01-18T09:26:00.000-05:00

See bolded comments on Hispanic performance. Nationally, the statement isn't really true for Hispanic 8th graders. I tried to find out if it is true for OR, but trends for r/e by state are not easily accessible on the release website , nor in the report (which I think is a big shortcoming. Unless I missed it... anyone else want to take a look?).

Also, check out the link to the Mapping Oregon's Educational Progress -- it puts the % Proficient on state test in a table next to %Basic and Proficient on NAEP.

U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings Discusses No Child Left Behind with Oregon State Board of Education, Visits Auburn Elementary School and Hosts Roundtable With Hispanic Leaders
Highlights six years of improvement and calls for continued support from states

FOR RELEASE:
January 17, 2008 Contact: Elaine Quesinberry
Casey Ruberg
(202) 401-1576

U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings today met with the Oregon State Board of Education and Oregon Superintendent of Public Instruction Susan Castillo in Salem, Ore. to discuss No Child Left Behind and the gains made by students in Oregon and across the country. Secretary Spellings and Superintendent Castillo also visited Auburn Elementary School, where they toured classrooms and addressed an all-school assembly. In the afternoon, Secretary Spellings and Superintendent Castillo hosted a roundtable discussion with local Hispanic leaders at the Hispanic Metropolitan Chamber in Portland, Ore.

"Six years after No Child Left Behind changed the education game in this nation, we can be proud of where it has brought us," said Secretary Spellings. "Oregon is an innovator and leader in developing assessments that help teachers get immediate results and tailor instruction. Now all 50 states and the District of Columbia have assessment systems, report disaggregated data and target federal resources to serve their neediest students. It's time to build on the momentum that No Child Left Behind helped to generate."

During her visit to Auburn Elementary School, Secretary Spellings commended students and teachers for their achievement gains. Like many schools across the country, Auburn Elementary is an excellent example of a school making strong progress under No Child Left Behind. Some 75 percent of Auburn's students are now proficient in math, up from 65 percent in 2003, and 81 percent of students are proficient in reading, up from 65 percent in 2003. Eighty percent of schools in the Auburn School District made Adequate Yearly Progress last year-up from 60 percent in 2005.

In the afternoon, Secretary Spellings and Superintendent Castillo met with leaders of Portland's growing Hispanic community during a roundtable at the Hispanic Metropolitan Chamber in Portland, Ore. Secretary Spellings and more than a dozen Hispanic representatives from Portland's education, government and business communities discussed No Child Left Behind and how to help close the achievement gap, increase access to higher education and improve workforce preparation for Hispanics.

The 2007 Nation's Report Card from the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that Hispanic students posted all-time highs in a number of categories. Hispanic fourth- and eighth-graders achieved their highest mathematics and reading scores in the history of the test.

To view Mapping Oregon's Educational Progress 2008, please visit http://www.ed.gov/nclb/accountability/results/progress/or.html.

For Mapping America's Educational Progress 2008, visit http://www.ed.gov/nclb/accountability/results/progress/nation.html.

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Sol Stern: School Choice Isn't Enough

2008-01-17T10:48:00.000-05:00

Manhattan Institute scholar Sol Stern, a longtime school choice advocate, writes a long article in City Journal saying that school choice isn't the cure-all he once hoped, thinking now that strong pedagogy, curricula, and standards are more vital.

But the new reliance on markets hasn’t prevented special interests from hijacking the curriculum. One such interest is the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project—led by Lucy Calkins, the doyenne of the whole-language reading approach, which postulates that all children can learn to read and write naturally, with just some guidance from teachers, and that direct phonics instruction is a form of child abuse. Calkins’s enterprise has more than $10 million in Department of Education contracts to guide reading and writing instruction in most of the city’s elementary schools, even though no solid evidence supports her methodology. This may explain why, on the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests—widely regarded as a gold standard for educational assessment—Gotham students showed no improvement in fourth- and eighth-grade reading from 2003 to 2007, while the city of Atlanta, which hasn’t staked everything on market incentives, has shown significant reading improvement.

Editorial: Reforming Education

2008-01-17T09:50:00.000-05:00

Congressional Democrats may put an extension of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) on their legislative agenda for this year, but it seems more likely that nothing will happen before 2009 in order to keep options open for the incoming president. But even without an NCLB extension, President Bush's achievements in education are striking. Student scores on some standardized tests have started rising with the administration's back-to-basics focus, and Republican candidates no longer face an insurmountable credibility deficit on the education issue.

In 2008, Democrats will undoubtedly promise parents with school-age children that another round of new programs and much more federal spending will produce better local schools. Thanks to Mr. Bush, Republicans need not say "me too," as most voters can now see from NCLB's early success that more federal funding was not, and is not, the answer...

Round up of comments from Spellings' speech

2008-01-11T11:21:00.000-05:00

UPI story

Eduwonk

The Quick and The Ed

This Week in Education

Spellings says No Child law is 'getting results'

2008-01-11T08:56:00.000-05:00

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings yesterday said America has reached a "tipping point" on education and must decide whether to keep the No Child Left Behind law's accountability for public schools, which she said has forced "an honest look at our schools."

Her comments come as administration leaders are trying to improve and solidify the much-debated 2002 law this year before President Bush's term ends.

As Mr. Bush did earlier this week, Mrs. Spellings defended the law and urged Congress to renew it soon, with some changes. But, she said if Congress fails to act, "I will move forward" and try to improve it through pilot programs and other administrative tools at her disposal. She noted the new president probably won't focus immediately on NCLB.

"Agree or disagree with this law, without NCLB, we wouldn't even be talking about how to get every student on grade level," she said. "After decades of doling out federal dollars and hoping for the best we're now expecting and getting results."

WS: Informed Reader

2008-01-10T10:06:00.000-05:00

Informed Reader
January 10, 2008; Page B6
EDUCATION
What Ails Schools? No National Standard

• THE ATLANTIC -- JAN./FEB.

Local control of schools is crippling education in America, says Matt Miller.

U.S. students for years have lagged far behind their international peers in reading, math and science; dropout rates are alarmingly high. The best way to fix these problems is to nationalize achievement targets, says Mr. Miller. A frequent voice on policy matters, he served in the Clinton administration and is a fellow at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.

Local control has roots in the Colonial era, when people developed a deep distrust of distant, centralized authority. That ethos has served the country politically, but it is failing the schools, says Mr. Miller. For one, widely varying standards make it difficult to know how well students are doing. President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program has failed to address disparities, since states can establish their own definitions of proficiency.

The fragmented nature of the education system impedes innovation. School districts typically can't afford to invest in new approaches on their own, yet they remain suspicious of federal efforts. Mr. Miller also faults what he says is widespread incompetence on school boards. Recalcitrant teachers' unions, meanwhile, block changes.

In an ideal world, school boards would be jettisoned. Since that isn't likely, Mr. Miller advocates limiting the boards' role, starting by sharply increasing the federal government's share of education spending.

Schools need national expectations, says Mr. Miller. Start by establishing national objectives, he says, while allowing schools discretion in how they meet the objectives.

Bush to veto any softer No Child law

2008-01-08T09:22:00.000-05:00

President Bush yesterday said schools are improving under his much-debated No Child Left Behind Act, which turns six years old today, and he urged Congress to renew it, pledging to veto any bill that weakens the law's accountability for schools.

"I believe this country needs to build upon the successes," Mr. Bush told an assembly at the Horace Greeley Elementary School in Chicago, which he touted as a school that embraced the law's accountability and raised its test scores over the past several years.

"Now is the time for Congress to reauthorize it," he said of the 2002 law, adding, however: "If Congress passes a bill that weakens the accountability system in the No Child Left Behind Act, I will strongly oppose it and veto it."

NY Sun: Letter to Editor 'Accommodations Do Not Benefit the Student'

2007-12-27T08:09:00.000-05:00

December 26, 2007

'Accommodations Do Not Benefit the Student'

There was an error in Andrew Wolf 's otherwise thoughtful column OpEd, "Did the Dog Eat Mills's Homework?" December 21-23,2007. Mr. Wolf described how the State Education Commissioner, Richard Mills, has tried to downplay the bad news from the federal government's tests of mathematics and reading.

Mr. Wolf correctly noted that the state's own tests produce far rosier results than the national tests The latest federal test results showed that there were no academic gains for students in New York City or New York State from 2003 to 2007, except in fourth grade math. Wolf erred in saying that 21% of students in New York City were "assessed with accommodations," which means that they got extra time or other advantages when they took the tests. Actually, 25% of New York City fourth grade students got accommodations when they took the math test, as did 22% of fourth graders who took the reading test.

Far more New York City students were given accommodations than in other cities that were tested. The figure for New York City students doubled between 2003 and 2007. This is not because we have more students who are English language learners. In Los Angeles, for example, nearly half the students are English language learners, but only 5% of them were assessed with accommodations.

Accommodations do not benefit the student because no individual scores are reported. They do benefit the district, however, by giving extra help to students who might get lower scores. This explains why federal officials (as your Elizabeth Green reported) are now trying to set a national standard to define which students should be given accommodations or excluded from taking the national tests.

The unusually large number of accommodations granted in New York City supports Mr. Wolf's assertion that the NAEP is taken seriously by school officials, and that Commissioner Mills is wrong to belittle the poor results on the NAEP as contrasted with what appear to be inflated results on the state tests.

Diane Ravitch

Research Professor

of education

new York University

Freakonomics Blog: What Should be Done About Standardized Testing?

2007-12-20T15:15:00.001-05:00

The Freakonomics blog at NYT has occasional 'quoroms' where they get a few experts in a field to opine on a subject. For the recent post about standardized testing, they had several, including FairTest's Monty Neill, who invoked NAEP:

NCLB’s testing mandates have flooded American classrooms with millions of additional tests. At the same time, the rate of learning improvement has actually slowed, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Why State Standards Trouble me

2007-12-20T09:33:00.001-05:00

Deborah Meier says NAEP might "even offer another source for teacherly curiosity"! Says other stuff about national standards too.

The old NAEP—with its information-gathering core—doesn't kill that. It may even offer another source for teacherly curiosity: "I wonder how my students would answer that?" "Hmm, if I'd worded it differently…." But it is clearly a hard battle to keep such "standards" from turning into efforts to decide what everyone "ought to" think (know?), and then into tools for "making them" do so.

NCLB in waiting

2007-12-19T11:06:00.000-05:00

commentary from the co-chairs of the Aspen Institutes's Commission on NCLB...

Yesterday, across the United States, more than 7,000 students dropped out of school. And the same number will drop out tomorrow, and the next day.

This statistic is staggering, to be sure, but it's not the only worrisome one. Every day we see evidence we are also letting down far too many of those students who remain in school. Far too few of our students are even minimally proficient in reading and math. Even our best and brightest students have difficulty competing with their peers internationally. And the achievement gap between our most and least advantaged students is still far too wide...

WaPo: Calls Grow for a Broader Yardstick for Schools

2007-12-18T16:42:00.000-05:00

For nearly six years, the federal government has defined school success mainly by how many students pass state reading and math tests. But a growing number of educators and lawmakers are pushing to give more weight to graduation rates, achievement in science and history and even physical education.

The debate over the formula for rating the nation's public schools has stalled efforts in Congress to revise the No Child Left Behind law. At issue: What's the best way to measure whether schools are doing their job?

Full story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/15/AR2007121501747.html?nav=rss_education

Rothstein: Leaving "No Child Left Behind" Behind

2007-12-18T09:55:00.000-05:00

Richard Rothstein wrote a long article in Prospect about arguments against NCLB that is full of background and detail and that mentions NAEP prominently throughout, and calls for a vast expansion of NAEP. It's getting a decent amount of play already, and is definitely worth a read.

The next president has a unique opportunity to start from scratch in education policy, without the deadweight of a failed, inherited No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law. The new president and Congress can recapture the "small d" democratic mantle by restoring local control of education, while initiating policies for which the federal government is uniquely suited -- providing better achievement data and equalizing the states' fiscal capacity to provide for all children.

This opportunity exists because NCLB is dead. It will not be reauthorized -- not this year, not ever. The coalition that promoted the 2001 bipartisan law has hopelessly splintered, although NCLB's advocates in the administration and the Congress continue to imagine (at least publicly) that tinkering can put it back together.

WaPo: Hoping to Turn the Beat Around

2007-12-17T10:27:00.000-05:00

Arts being squeezed out... lobbying for more attention to Arts in NCLB reauth... relevant as we are assessing Arts in 2008...

Hoping to Turn The Beat Around
Even as Attention to 'No Child' Law Squeezes Class Time, Teachers in Manassas Champion the Value of Music

By Valerie Strauss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 17, 2007; Page B01

(...)
Music and the arts are listed in No Child Left Behind guidelines as "core" subjects, but there is no money in the law to support such programs nor any mandate requiring schools to provide them. As instructional time in math, language arts and other subjects students must achieve proficiency in has risen, time devoted to other subjects has declined. Time spent on arts and music in 2007 is about half what it was before No Child Left Behind became law in 2002, according to a report recently released by the nonprofit Center on Education Policy.

Educators are lobbying legislators to raise the profile of music education when No Child Left Behind is reauthorized, action that had been expected this year but has been delayed until next year. They are pushing for more money for arts programs and seeking a requirement that school systems report to the federal government on the status of their music education programs.

Finn: NAEP Math Framework Too Thin, Proficieny Level OK

2007-12-17T09:29:00.000-05:00

Chester Finn comments on the Tim Loveless (Brookings) report on NAEP, agreeing that Loveless has it right on "the thinness of mathematical content in NAEP's math frameworks and exams, and how NAEP's governing board and bevies of experts have seemingly compensated by setting lofty targets that students must hit on those exams to be deemed "proficient,"" but that Loveless is incorrect on the idea that "NAEP's proficient level is too high."

If you haven't read the report yet and would like to, it is available here.

Losing the race

2007-12-13T09:10:00.000-05:00

It's report-card time again for America's education system, and, unfortunately, our schools have once again brought home a failing grade. The latest round of international test scores paints a grim picture for the United States.

The new results were released from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which tested hundreds of thousands of 15-year-old students from 30 industrialized countries. The results, which were released last week, show that American students are below average in math and science. Out of 30 industrialized nations, American students rank 25th in math and 21st in science, and our average scores on both tests are below the U.S. averages from the 2003 test. America is falling behind its global competitors and the economic security of our children is at risk.

Bridging Differences: The Value of Standards

2007-12-11T10:53:00.001-05:00

..."Mathematics and science should be the easiest fields to reach a consensus, because—while there are certainly many controversies in both fields—it is also quite possible to identify important knowledge and skills that can fairly be tested. I just looked at the NAEP test. A typical fourth-grade question: “The Ben Franklin Bridge was 75 years old in 2001. In what year was the bridge 50 years old?” The student is given a choice of 1951, 1976, 1984, or 1986. There is a single correct answer. The student who answers this question correctly knows that she must deduct 25 from 2001 to get the answer of 1976."...

-Diane

Full post: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2007/12/dear_deb_i_dont_understand.html

HuffPo: Diane Does Rush (Gerry Bracey!!)

2007-12-07T09:56:00.000-05:00

The report showed (page 273) that NAEP math scores had been steady for whites and rising for blacks and Hispanics although both groups trailed whites substantially. An analysis by community type (rural, advantaged metro, disadvantaged metro) showed NAEP performance steady or rising. We're talking NAEP here, not some dinky test the Sandia engineers made up.

Full post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gerald-bracey/diane-does-rush_b_75696.html

Bridging Differences: The Fallout from Testing

2007-12-06T11:24:00.000-05:00

I see national testing as another nail in the coffin of a nation prized for being creative and innovative. I know, Diane, that textbooks often establish dumb standards, too. But whatever leads you to believe that these tests won't repeat what's already in (and not in) those textbooks??? At least now some schools—and not just private ones—can ignore them or use them as mere back-up. There remains another way to get good information without dumbing education down; sampled in-depth testing (which NAEP started out doing) could be invaluable, based on interviews, performance tasks, writing samples, etc.

Deborah Meier

Full Post: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2007/12/dear_diane_theres_a_streak.html

NY Daily News: Gifted test to be used to identify slow learners, too

2007-12-06T10:05:00.000-05:00

New York plans to give an assessment to kindergartners to assess who gets into gifted programs and who might need special education services too. No mention of NAEP, but has general implications for testing.

A test school officials plan to give kindergartners to make gifted programs more accessible will also be used to assess academic ability, the Daily News has learned.

Starting next fall, schools will give the Bracken School Readiness Assessment in all kindergarten classes to identify which children should be further tested for coveted spots in gifted programs.

But the standardized test, which gauges understanding of letters, numbers, colors and shapes, is also designed to identify learning disabilities and find out where kids stand when they enter school.

The Grand Illusion of Proficiency

2007-12-04T12:01:00.000-05:00

More talk on national standards/testing from Diane Ravitch, once again highlighting that NAEP "is the only measure that is maintaining a consistent standard across the fifty states."

As usual, you raise lots of interesting questions and you sharpen our clear differences. Yes, I do think we should have national testing. This idea that fifty states should each have their own standards and their own tests is nutty. We are not getting higher standards; we may even be getting lower ones.

How did we get to this point? President Clinton's Goals 2000 pushed the states to create their own standards and tests (Clinton, to his credit, actually preferred national tests, but he couldn't persuade the Republican Congress to go along with his proposal for such tests). Then along came NCLB, and President Bush wanted a bigger emphasis on standards and testing, but knew that his own party would never accept national testing. So he built on the idea that each state should set its own standards, develop its own tests, grade its own progress towards the goal of having every student "proficient" in reading and mathematics by the year 2013-2014. Since the bill passed Congress in the fall of 2001, I assume that the goal of 2013-14 was based on the idea that this was the amount of time (12 years, starting in 2002) necessary to raise the achievement of children who were then in kindergarten.

Continue reading article.

CAP: What is the Urban National Assessment Data Telling Us?

2007-12-01T19:21:00.000-05:00

The National Assessment of Educational Progress released its latest Trial Urban District Assessment on November 15th. The TUDA assesses the performance of fourth and eighth grade students in reading and mathematics from 11 participating districts: Atlanta, Chicago, the District of Columbia, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, Charlotte, Cleveland, San Diego, and Austin.

The development of TUDA came from a belief that urban districts should be assessed independently from the national report card. Yet as the recent TUDA reports show, not all urban districts are alike.

Full post: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/11/naep_data.html

Schools for Tomorrow: False, cheery optimism from the feds

2007-12-01T19:11:00.000-05:00

Adam Honeysett over at the US Department of Education sends me an email now and then. I don’t know who he is, but I like him. He always makes me feel that our country is making great strides in education. Which, of course, it probably isn’t. The most recent newsletter cheered that,

“the percentage of students achieving at or above the state’s proficient level rose for most student subgroups in a majority of states. Also, both National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and state assessments results indicate that the achievement gaps between disadvantaged students and other students may be narrowing.”

Full post: http://www.headfirstcolorado.org/blog/index.php/2007-11-29/false-cheery-optimism-from-the-feds/

EdWeek: National Math Panel Unveils Draft Report

2007-12-01T19:10:00.000-05:00

Students’ success in mathematics, and algebra specifically, hinges largely on their mastering a focused, clearly defined set of topics in that subject in early grades, the draft report of a federal panel concludes.

Full Story: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/12/05/14math.h27.html

Hey, Young Americans, Here's a Text for You

2007-11-28T16:44:00.000-05:00

Naomi Wolf wrote an op/ed for WaPo, lamenting young people's disengagement with and ignorance of democracy. Cites NAEP history results, but not by name.

"Is America still America if millions of us no longer know how democracy works?

When I speak on college campuses, I find that students are either baffled by democracy's workings or that they don't see any point in engaging in the democratic process. Sometimes both.

Not long ago, I gave a talk at a major university in the Midwest. "They're going to raze our meadows and put in a shopping mall!" a young woman in the audience wailed. "And there's nothing we can do!" she said, to the nods of young and old alike."

Bridging Differences: National Tests Keep the Districts Hones

2007-11-28T08:53:00.000-05:00

National Tests Keep the Districts Honest

Dear Deborah,

I note with pleasure that The New York Times endorsed (again) the principle of national testing. My guess is that the latest NAEP results for New York City prompted them to do so....

...When NAEP's urban district scores were released on November 14, it contained a heap of bad news for New York City. The reports compared progress in 11 cities and showed that NYC's public schools had made "no significant gains" from 2003-2007 in 4th grade reading, 8th grade reading, or 8th grade math. The only subject and grade where there was a significant improvement during these years was in 4th grade math. However, doubt has been cast even on that gain because (as an article in the New York Sun pointed out), 25 percent of the city students received accommodations (e.g., extra time), a rate far higher than in any other urban district and double the rate for the city's students only four years ago. Los Angeles, which has a far higher proportion of English-Language Learners than NYC, assessed with accommodations only 8 percent of its 4th graders on the math test, compared with NYC's 25 percent. Giving such a large number of accommodations presumably would give the city an extra boost in scores in 4th grade math...

...If one sees significance in the national tests, which have similar standards for all states and cities that take it, then the clear winner among the cities over the past five years is Atlanta. Atlanta has an enrollment that is more than 90 percent African-American; it has a superintendent, Beverly Hall, who has been on the job for eight years. Its NAEP scores in math and reading at both 4th and 8th grades have trended steadily upward over the past five years. Something is happening in Atlanta that the nation should pay attention to. Too bad the Broad Foundation didn't notice.

Full post: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2007/11/national_tests_keep_the_distri.html

NYT: Test and Switch

2007-11-27T15:12:00.000-05:00

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

November 26, 2007
Editorial
Test and Switch

Congress hoped that if it required the states to give annual tests in return for federal education aid, state politicians would be encouraged — or at least embarrassed — into improving dismal schools and closing the achievement gap between rich and poor children.

That’s not how things have worked out. Many states have gamed the system — and misled voters — devising weak tests, setting low passing scores or changing tests from year to year to prevent accurate comparisons over time. The charade will continue, and children will continue to be shortchanged, until the country develops a rigorous national test keyed to national standards.

This problem is highlighted in a recent study by Policy Analysis for California Education, a research center run by Stanford University and the University of California, that analyzed the testing practices of a dozen states between 1992 and 2006. States that performed swimmingly on their own weak math and reading tests tended to score dismally on the more rigorous federal National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as NAEP.

In nearly all of the states studied, students did noticeably worse on federal tests than on state tests. In Oklahoma, the gap in scores was a shocking 60 percentage points in math and 51 percentage points in reading. In Texas, that gap was 52 percentage points in math and 56 points in reading. The state that came closest to the federal standard was Massachusetts, where there was a modest 1 percent gap in math and 10 percent gap in reading.

New York was not included in this study. But the same issue emerged here earlier this month when NAEP scores for the state’s students turned out to be strikingly lower than scores achieved on the state-level test.

Advocates of the mediocre status quo will oppose any requirement for a national test. Congress could get the process started by instructing the NAEP board, an independent body created by the federal government, to create a rigorous, high-quality test and offer it to the states free — if they use federal scoring standards. Congress might push things further if it published a list of states that still insisted on using their own weaker tests. Americans need an accurate picture of how this country’s students are doing.

EdWeek: Students in Urban Districts Inching Forward on NAEP

2007-11-27T13:43:00.000-05:00

Atlanta’s middle school students were just starting their academic careers when the district began rolling out efforts to improve reading and mathematics instruction. Now, the district’s 8th graders are gaining faster than much of the nation and many other cities in raising achievement in those subjects, according to the urban district results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Full story: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/11/28/13naep.h27.html

WaPo: 'No Child' Law May Slight The Gifted, Experts Say

2007-11-27T09:01:00.000-05:00

Some scholars are joining parent advocates in questioning whether the education law No Child Left Behind, with its goal of universal academic proficiency, has had the unintended consequence of diverting resources and attention from the gifted.

Full story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/24/AR2007112401420.html?nav=rss_education

N.Y. Gave the Most Breaks for School Exam

2007-11-21T09:05:00.000-05:00

Yet another potential salvo in the New York testing wars. New York state gave the most students accommodations, and NYC did the most for the TUDA districts. One analyst is quoted as saying so many students got accommodations because they had been excluded previously.

So many New York City students received extra time and other accommodations on a respected national test this year that several testing experts are saying the results should be considered invalid.

On the test known as the nation's report card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, New York state gave accommodations to more fourth-graders than any other state in the nation, and New York City gave more help than any of the ten other major cities that participate in a separate city-by-city comparison. On three of four tests the accommodation rate hovered around 20%. On the last — a fourth-grade math exam city officials are trumpeting as evidence the Bloomberg administration's schools program is working — the rate was 25%.

The math test this year showed the city's fourth-graders making record gains, with 79% of students reaching the basic level, up from 73% in 2005 and 67% in 2003. At the same time, the number of students receiving legally allowed accommodations, such as extra time to take the test, having the test read out loud, and receiving a translation into the student's native language, more than doubled, to 25% this year from 12% in 2003.

LAT: California schools are failing all our kids

2007-11-20T10:54:00.000-05:00

LAT Opinion article on how NAEP scores reveal problems with California students compared to the nation as a whole.

State schools Supt. Jack O'Connell hosted a summit in Sacramento last week of 4,000 educators, policymakers and experts. He asked them to confront California's "racial achievement gap" -- the persistently lower test scores of California's African American and Latino public school students compared with their white and Asian peers. In 125 packed sessions, participants probed causes of the gap and offered strategies to close it. O'Connell asked them to "honestly and courageously face this pernicious problem," and for two days, the capital was abuzz with ideas, energy and even some hope.

Strikingly, the state's other "achievement gap" was barely mentioned at the summit; this is the gap between California and the rest of the nation.

The most recent results from the National Assessment of Education Progress test (popularly known as "the nation's report card") place California's fourth- and eighth-graders below those in nearly every other state in math and reading achievement. (Although California's math scores have improved over the last decade, so have the scores in the rest of the country.)

Ed Week: Core Subjects in Danger of Being Axed From National Assessment

2007-11-20T09:27:00.001-05:00

Lindsy sent this out to NCES already, but at last week's NAGB meeting, there was discussion about cutting many future assessments due to budget constraints.

National tests in several core subjects could be eliminated or scaled back over the next five years without more federal funding, the officials who set policy for the National Assessment of Educational Progress said last week.

Scheduled exams in economics, foreign language, geography, and world history could be canceled if funding remains flat, as is projected.

Moreover, some grade levels would not be tested in civics, U.S. history, and writing, and the next administration of the NAEP long-term trend tests in mathematics and reading, which have been conducted regularly over the past 40 years, would be given in 2008, but not in 2012.

Impression Management, or: How I Learned to Stop Hating Press Releases on Test Scores

2007-11-20T09:23:00.000-05:00

Eduwonkette posts on the divergent takes on the TUDA results by different cities.

Once upon a time in a land far, far away, district leaders did not live and die by their students' test scores. When I peered back into the educational debates of the 1980s and even the early 1990s, I found that the release of state and federal test scores was not an occasion for carefully orchestrated media stunts.

Sure, there was spin then, too - but district leaders were just as likely to decry poor test results to build political momentum to infuse additional resources or make needed changes.

Not so last week, where almost every district publicly releasing scores from the Trial Urban District Assessment spun a fabulous yarn around the NAEP results. Indeed, some of the results were promising. But many of the results that district leaders swaggered about were not. Instead, district leaders cherry-picked the results, up-playing positive news while ignoring or discounting negative news.

TUDA and the DOE Response

2007-11-20T09:19:00.000-05:00

More coming from the war between the NYC DOE and the UFT/people like Diane Ravitch/everyone else. This time about TUDA.

The DOE’s press release on NAEP is among the most misleading I have seen from them in the past five years. Touting “impressive gains” – especially for Black, Hispanic and low income students – Klein bragged that the NAEP results “confirm that our reforms have helped raise performance to an historically high level.” But, again, there has been no progress in three out of four categories during the Klein years.

WaPo: A Troubling Case of Readers' Block

2007-11-19T15:20:00.001-05:00

Americans are reading less and their reading proficiency is declining at troubling rates, according to a report that the National Endowment for the Arts will issue today. The trend is particularly strong among older teens and young adults, and if it is not reversed, the NEA report suggests, it will have a profound negative effect on the nation's economic and civic future.

"This is really alarming data," said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. "Luckily, we still have an opportunity to address it, but if we wait 10, 20 years, I think it may be too late."

Full story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/18/AR2007111801415.html?sid=ST2007111900059

More on the AIR study

2007-11-14T11:26:00.000-05:00

USA TODAY U.S. students 'middle of the pack' compared with world
Educators and politicians these days make a point of saying that U.S. schoolchildren aren't just competing locally for good, high-paying jobs — they're competing globally."

"Crunching the most recent data from a pair of U.S. and international math and science exams for middle-schoolers, Gary Phillips, a researcher at the non-profit American Institutes for Research (AIR), a non-partisan Washington think tank, finds a decidedly mixed picture: Students in most states perform as well as — or better than — peers in most foreign countries.

But he also finds that even those in the highest-scoring states, such as Massachusetts and Minnesota, are significantly below a handful of top-scoring nations such as Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan."

"He should know. Before joining AIR, he headed the National Center for Education Statistics at the U.S. Education Department, overseeing large-scale testing programs that included the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS ), the two tests he compares in the new analysis."

EdWeek: Top-Achieving Nations Beat U.S. States in Math and ScienceStudents in the highest-performing U.S. states rank well below their peers in the world’s top-achieving countries in mathematics and science skill, according to a new study that judges American youths on an international scale.

CSM: World's schools teach U.S. a lesson
For states interested in international benchmarking, a new report just added a piece to the puzzle. It takes data from each state's 8th-grade scores in math and science on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and links it to the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). The two tests were designed to be compatible, says Gary Phillips, chief scientist at American Institutes for Research (AIR, www.air.org), a nonprofit in Washington that released the data Nov. 13. Each state can see where it ranks on a scale with 45 industrialized and developing countries.

"Most [states] are doing as well as or better than most countries," Mr. Phillips says. But he's concerned because "our best states are ... lower than the best countries – so even though we're in the race, we're not winning the race."

EdWeek: Dropout Prevention

2007-11-14T11:20:00.000-05:00

Students who are at risk for dropping out of high school can be identified as early as 6th grade by key warning signs such as low attendance, little classroom participation, and poor grades in core subjects, says a report Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader by the National High School Center, a division of the Washington-based American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit organization that conducts research on social and behavioral sciences.

Full story: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/11/14/12report-5.h27.html

Study Compares States’ Math and Science Scores With Other Countries’

2007-11-14T08:59:00.000-05:00

NYT article on TIMSS, by Sam Dillon

American students even in low-performing states like Alabama do better on math and science tests than students in most foreign countries, including Italy and Norway, according to a new study released yesterday. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that students in Singapore and several other Asian countries significantly outperform American students, even those in high-achieving states like Massachusetts, the study found.

Union gain is pupils' loss

2007-11-13T10:10:00.000-05:00

Education is not ordinarily thought to be in the purview of a Federal Reserve chairman. So it's striking when Alan Greenspan in his memoir, "The Age of Turbulence," raises the subject.

"Our primary and secondary education system," he writes, "is deeply deficient in providing homegrown talent to operate our increasingly complex infrastructure." The result: "Too many of our students languish at too low a level of skill upon graduation, adding to the supply of lesser-skilled labor in the face of an apparently declining demand."

So if you're concerned about widening disparities in income, Mr. Greenspan tells readers attracted to his book by its publicists' promise of criticism of George W. Bush, you need to "harness better the forces of competition" in educating kids.

AP: Calculation of graduation rates differ

2007-11-12T11:21:00.000-05:00

WASHINGTON --If Congress doesn't get the job done, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings says she'll consider using her authority to require states to report high school graduation rates in a more uniform and accurate way.

Full story: http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2007/11/09/calculation_of_graduation_rates_differ/

Chicago Tribune: Illinois looking into record-low test scores

2007-11-12T11:17:00.000-05:00

A few months after Illinois high school students posted the lowest scores ever on the state achievement exam, state education officials are investigating whether the test, or the scoring process, was flawed.

Illinois State Board of Education officials confirmed Friday that they plan to hire an independent auditor to delve into the drop in 2007 Prairie State Achievement Exam (PSAE) results, especially in reading, where scores plunged more than 4 percentage points.

Full article: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-test_webnov10,0,3603393.story?coll=chi_tab01_layout

EdWeek: Alexander NCLB Bill Offers Pilot Project on Flexibility

2007-11-09T17:49:00.001-05:00

Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee proposed giving 12 states wide latitude in devising accountability systems and intervening in schools that fail to meet their NCLB achievement goals. In exchange, the states would agree to increase the rigor of their subject-matter standards

Full story: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/11/14/12nclb.h27.html?levelId=2300&rale2=KQE5d7nM%2FXAYPsVRXwnFWYRqIIX2bhy1%2BKNA5buLAWGoKt77XHI2terRpWBSgktLCXMT9GhM0FfQ%0ABpNWoD3y7MIQ%2B3918Izn1nuI1h1nm00bG8UMgOitEFboRy8zQyHPASRokBka0THyWRxs8ye%2BhbTm%0AyVnXWNGh%2Fm9iR4xl6zBMgLA2PjVDb2hyGBZVwDtjbjvztAlTWWDbks%2BEZAIgwKAIYKXnYYYbhKtU%0A06lB14ESY2IVsPuO5BthXwq%2BKkIqpGr68LOxgV9UjbMEZlYFY1boRy8zQyHPJmSpEnBfkxv%2FBe4D%0AfdeFdgLCT6b3N3uwAEm2gFZ2d51PBydnukLovP%2BE0K4TmuU9J324dLakEPP5iUTNaj1hxWfgbb3m%0Ayc%2F0CJofU4EKdvaEq1TTqUHXgdSVBzUTqwxn5NNbFJzJ0iHPK0nKI2yCTQFDXmI%2FlcT0V1vepDzk%0A1M2XIeKdsN0SOaYgWJMqY70ZAUNeYj%2BVxPTxQmVzP7FIsAEviOk0d2S8mBL90J1C2wfmdaVhIZiP%0AXEu8O3lLANBM0XuZ0OGdMSYqjlHGrKAroYOkZUa0Aom1%2FRsk4tLIgega9dPXjDLnIqr4fnU6%2BjHZ%0APQEY14GHljZOx%2BOaK1TL2aausTGg%2B1BYrwwi0i2X73Vu1wG2qxx9YBrOrpRYC%2Fyc6BMNjiOqZx0%3D

LA Times: State schools bad, L.A. worse

2007-11-09T17:04:00.000-05:00

Thought this was relevant due to upcoming TUDA release. Also, there's a NAEP mention further down in the story

"California students are among the nation's worst academic achievers, and those in the Los Angeles Unified School District are faring even worse than the statewide average, according to a UCLA study released Thursday."

"The study also incorporated results of the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which showed that California's fourth-graders rank 48th in reading and 46th in math. Meanwhile, eighth-graders ranked 47th in reading and 45th in math."

Full story: http://www.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_7411327

WaPo: An Unlikely Partnership Left Behind

2007-11-09T16:52:00.000-05:00

"Ten months later, the optimism has vanished and the campaign to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind education law has bogged down. Not only has it not passed, but no formal legislation has even been introduced. In an interview last week, Kennedy said it will not happen this year after all. "It's going to tip over to next year," he said -- right into the teeth of a presidential campaign with candidates on both sides denouncing the program."

"The back-and-forth came as new test results bolstered Bush's case. The National Assessment of Educational Progress showed math and reading scores rising and the gap between white children and black and Hispanic students shrinking. Bush aides saw vindication. "Obviously there have been complaints and there have been growing pains, but the proof is in the pudding," Kaplan said."

Full story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/04/AR2007110401450.html?nav=rss_education

U.S. News & World Report - Room to Improve

2007-11-08T16:01:00.000-05:00

Room to Improve
The No Child Left Behind law is scheduled for reauthorization by the end of this year, but Congress has been slow to make that happen
By Eddy Ramírez
Posted November 2, 2007
It was expected to be one of the most contentious debates of the political year. President Bush's landmark No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is due for reauthorization by the end of 2007. But as the calendar ticks into November, little has been heard since early summer, when U.S. House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller began circulating his proposed changes to the education law designed to combat the "soft bigotry of low expectations." The Democrat's proposal—which included allowing schools to measure how much students learn using methods other than the policy's signature standardized tests—was simultaneously criticized for potentially weakening the law and potentially making it more stringent. By both Democrats and Republicans.

Miller and Education Secretary Margaret Spellings say they are committed to getting the bill renewed this year. And even without a reauthorized version, the original NCLB law and its mandate that all students be proficient in math and reading by 2014 remain in effect. That means students, parents, and educators will grapple with its requirements for years to come.

Full article: http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/2007/11/02/room-to-improve.html

Ohio Goes After Charter Schools That Are Failing

2007-11-08T08:58:00.000-05:00

Below-the-Fold Front Page Story on failing charters in Ohio. Over half of charters are getting a grade of D or F; apparently Ohio had a "wide-open" policy for opening charters, where lots of agencies were given authority to open schools, many of which had little educational credentials. The Attorney General of Ohio is suing to close three schools, and is investigating "dozens" of others.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio became a test tube for the nation’s charter school movement during a decade of Republican rule here, when a wide-open authorization system and plenty of government seed money led to the schools’ explosive proliferation.

But their record has been spotty. This year, the state’s school report card gave more than half of Ohio’s 328 charter schools a D or an F.

Politico: Arts educators battle No Child Left Behind

2007-11-06T13:40:00.000-05:00

No NAEP mention, but relevant given the 2008 Arts assessment

Arts educators battle No Child Left Behind
By: Erika Lovley
November 5, 2007 06:27 PM EST

Raising school test scores in reading and math remains the biggest hurdle for No Child Left Behind, with many schools nationwide performing at less-than-acceptable levels, according to government proficiency tests.

But while districts scramble to improve on core subjects, educators say the latest subject to be left behind is arts education.

. . .

A recent study by the Center on Education Policy indicates that school time spent in art classes has decreased by nearly half since NCLB was passed in 2001. Some educators say the focus on testing is so intense that it is forcing schools to siphon time away from other nontest subjects such as music and dance.

The shift has alarmed and energized some of the nation’s largest arts groups, like Americans for the Arts, the nation’s largest arts advocacy nonprofit; American Arts Alliance, a group of 4,100 performance artists; and NAMM, a trade association representing musical instruments. NAMM spent $320,000 on lobbying last year, the most out of the three groups.

With the reauthorization of NCLB stalled on Capitol Hill, the community has time to plan its attack. In March, on Arts Advocacy Day, it plans to saturate Capitol Hill; some activists will be toting samples of professional and student artwork to show lawmakers.

. . .

Kress points to studies that show arts education hasn’t suffered dramatically under NCLB. The Digest of Education Statistics shows that 2005 high school graduates took more courses in noncore subjects like history, science and arts than 2000 graduates did. [this is HSTS data]

full story: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1107/6715.html

Baltimore Sun, Inside Ed: Glossary

2007-11-06T12:16:00.000-05:00

"NAEP: National Assessment of Educational Progress. Also referred to as “The Nation’s Report Card.” The only standardized test administered to schools around the nation. The standardized tests administered under No Child Left Behind vary from state to state, and therefore it’s difficult to make comparisons. NAEP is considered to be a harder test than many of the statewide assessments. But NAEP does not provide scores for individual students or schools as the statewide assessments do."

Full glossary: http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/education/blog/2007/11/our_glossary_of_education_jarg.html