Governors: Education, workplace must change
Refocus needed on science, tech, engineering, math and foreign language
The Associated Press
Updated: 10:24 a.m. ET Feb 27, 2007
WASHINGTON - Governors are facing up to some harsh realities: Their states' school children aren't ready for the 21st century, their workers aren't trained for the new jobs created every day, and their businesses aren't competing as strongly as they must to keep ahead.
The only way to thrive amid globalization is to change, and states are past due for a sweeping transformation of education, worker training and economic development, governors agreed Monday after days of discussions at the annual winter meeting of the National Governors Association.
"The plain fact of the matter is the world has changed," said Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat who sought to convince her fellow state leaders that globalization is their problem. "We must have a sense of urgency as governors. ... What we're doing now does not suffice."
Framework for change
Meetings over four days hammered her point home. School teachers, business leaders, scientists, pollsters all delivered the same message - overhaul school curriculums, retrain workers and revamp economic development so that businesses build upon each other, rather than pit one state against another.
They heard from Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway; Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration; President Bush's top trade negotiator, Susan Schwab, and many more.
"Governors' jobs are no longer to be chasing smokestacks - now it's to build vibrant economies, state by state," said Carl Schramm, president and chief executive of the Kauffman Foundation, which encourages entrepreneurship.
Governors agreed on a framework for change, and are hoping to get federal support through legislation in Congress on workforce training, education, and research and development. Among the ideas:
- Refocus on science, technology, engineering, math and foreign language proficiency. They are seeking programs to encourage students and teachers in those subject matters.
- Make worker training more flexible, coordinate training with regional needs and make progress measurable.
- Create federal "competitive innovation grants" to encourage states to develop regional hubs that build on existing strengths, like computer development in North Carolina's Raleigh-Durham area.
U.S. education a moral issue
Education is the foundation of a 21st century economy, but state systems don't come close to delivering what is needed, said William H. Schmidt, a Michigan State University professor who studies education.
In many other industrial countries, by the end of eighth grade students are two years ahead of American students, he said. "That's why Europeans view the first two years of our university system as basic high school catch-up."
"These children, we're putting them at a disadvantage. This makes it more than an economic issue, it makes it a moral issue," Schmidt said.
One of the speakers was GOP pollster and strategist Frank Luntz, who told governors that they need to engage the public on the need for change but find the right way to talk about it.
"Innovation is about the future," he said. "This is not about us versus them, us versus the Chinese or Utah versus Alaska. ... That's not how the public views innovation. They see it as everyone wins."
But he warned that while many Americans see the country as being powerful, they don't see it as being particularly innovative and many are worried about how the country will manage the challenges of the future.
While many governors said they recognized the need for change, making it happen was much more difficult.
"I'm trying to move the economy of Tennessee from a low-skilled, assembly-line approach to a more high tech approach," said Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat. "We're not going to be successful with trade barriers. It's going to have to be through a very flexible economy and engaging in innovation and change."
© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
February 28, 2007
Washington Post - "Graduation Requirement to Be Delayed for Some"
Graduation Requirement to Be Delayed for Some
Special-Ed Pupils, Others to Get More Time Before Assessment Tests Count for Diploma
By Nelson Hernandez and Daniel De Vise
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 28, 2007; Page B01
Maryland School Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick plans to announce today that graduation requirements tied to the state's high school exit exams will be delayed by two years for students in special education and limited English proficiency programs as well as for students with certain disabilities such as hearing or vision impairments.
The announcement, scheduled for a meeting of the State Board of Education in Baltimore today, will put off the requirement for thousands of students who the state said would have to pass four exams, in algebra, English, government and biology, known as the High School Assessments, to receive their high school diplomas. Students throughout the state school system take the exams, and although schools need to show yearly improvement in scores, passing the tests is not yet required to earn a diploma.
Sen. Paul G. Pinsky (D-Prince George's) confirmed the delay, as did a senior school official in Maryland who spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcement had not been made. A discussion of the HSA exams is on the agenda for today's Board of Education meeting. A spokesman for Grasmick said she would not address the tests until then.
"I think it makes a lot of sense," Pinsky said. "With those subgroups, they obviously have some learning difficulties that truly interfere."
The testing requirement, which is scheduled to go into effect with the Class of 2009, has attracted growing attention in this year's legislative session. State lawmakers have proposed bills to create a task force to examine the tests and to make the exams part of a weighted assessment, reducing their importance in receiving a diploma.
Pinsky, who is sponsoring the task force bill, speculated that Grasmick's move is a response to legislators' concerns.
"It shows a proactive stance on the part of the state board and superintendent, and I applaud it," he said.
Some opponents of the test say that as many as 25,000 students are at risk of failing at least one of the exams, but state officials say programs to improve performance and generally improve scores on tests mean only a handful of students will fail.
Many students having the most difficulty with the tests are in the groups affected by the delay. According to a state education Web site, there are more than 31,000 special-ed students in high schools; almost 6,500 with limited English proficiency; and nearly 5,000 who fall under Code 504, which includes many students with disabilities. However, not all of these students are in the Classes of 2009 and 2010, the groups affected by the change.
Grasmick left open the option of changing the requirement in testimony before the House of Delegates' Ways and Means Committee this month, saying they were not "set in stone." In an interview last week, she emphasized that although she believes in the test, she is open-minded about changing aspects.
"We don't want the message to be 'We're not going to do this.' We just want to find out how we are going to do it," Grasmick said.
Many educators and politicians have mixed feelings about the tests. They want to make high school diplomas more meaningful. But they do not believe in making 13 years of education ride on a set of four exams. Some parents groups strongly oppose the exams.
Sue Allison, director of Marylanders Against High Stakes Testing, said she will continue her opposition despite the delay, saying the requirement is still unfair to all students.
"Now, and in two years, and in four years, it's never going to be fair," Allison said.
Special-Ed Pupils, Others to Get More Time Before Assessment Tests Count for Diploma
By Nelson Hernandez and Daniel De Vise
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 28, 2007; Page B01
Maryland School Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick plans to announce today that graduation requirements tied to the state's high school exit exams will be delayed by two years for students in special education and limited English proficiency programs as well as for students with certain disabilities such as hearing or vision impairments.
The announcement, scheduled for a meeting of the State Board of Education in Baltimore today, will put off the requirement for thousands of students who the state said would have to pass four exams, in algebra, English, government and biology, known as the High School Assessments, to receive their high school diplomas. Students throughout the state school system take the exams, and although schools need to show yearly improvement in scores, passing the tests is not yet required to earn a diploma.
Sen. Paul G. Pinsky (D-Prince George's) confirmed the delay, as did a senior school official in Maryland who spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcement had not been made. A discussion of the HSA exams is on the agenda for today's Board of Education meeting. A spokesman for Grasmick said she would not address the tests until then.
"I think it makes a lot of sense," Pinsky said. "With those subgroups, they obviously have some learning difficulties that truly interfere."
The testing requirement, which is scheduled to go into effect with the Class of 2009, has attracted growing attention in this year's legislative session. State lawmakers have proposed bills to create a task force to examine the tests and to make the exams part of a weighted assessment, reducing their importance in receiving a diploma.
Pinsky, who is sponsoring the task force bill, speculated that Grasmick's move is a response to legislators' concerns.
"It shows a proactive stance on the part of the state board and superintendent, and I applaud it," he said.
Some opponents of the test say that as many as 25,000 students are at risk of failing at least one of the exams, but state officials say programs to improve performance and generally improve scores on tests mean only a handful of students will fail.
Many students having the most difficulty with the tests are in the groups affected by the delay. According to a state education Web site, there are more than 31,000 special-ed students in high schools; almost 6,500 with limited English proficiency; and nearly 5,000 who fall under Code 504, which includes many students with disabilities. However, not all of these students are in the Classes of 2009 and 2010, the groups affected by the change.
Grasmick left open the option of changing the requirement in testimony before the House of Delegates' Ways and Means Committee this month, saying they were not "set in stone." In an interview last week, she emphasized that although she believes in the test, she is open-minded about changing aspects.
"We don't want the message to be 'We're not going to do this.' We just want to find out how we are going to do it," Grasmick said.
Many educators and politicians have mixed feelings about the tests. They want to make high school diplomas more meaningful. But they do not believe in making 13 years of education ride on a set of four exams. Some parents groups strongly oppose the exams.
Sue Allison, director of Marylanders Against High Stakes Testing, said she will continue her opposition despite the delay, saying the requirement is still unfair to all students.
"Now, and in two years, and in four years, it's never going to be fair," Allison said.
Goldwater Institute: Bill and Ted's Excellent Education
Bill and Ted killed on the History Assessment though.
Center for Educational Opportunity
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Education
Spending and grade point averages are up, so why are test scores down?
by Matthew Ladner
Goldwater Institute Today's News
February 27, 2007
The U.S. Department of Education released 12th grade NAEP scores last week and the results are discouraging.
Reading scores of 12th grade students have declined significantly since 1992. The percentage of high school seniors scoring “below basic” in reading increased from 20 to 27 percent between 1992 and 2005. During the same period, high school seniors scoring “proficient” in reading dropped 14 percent.
Separately, the Department released a study showing that since 1990, high school grade point averages are up across the country. Also, the percentage of students taking “college-prep” classes climbed from 40 to 68 percent. In addition, 12th graders in 2005 averaged 360 more hours of classroom instruction than their 1990 counterparts.
Despite all of that, the Class of 2005 performed worse on the NAEP than students in the early ‘90s. I’d like to remind you that Bill and Ted were students during that time…
Although the Department of Education did not mention it, inflation adjusted per pupil spending increased more than 20 percent between 1990 and 2002. It has increased even further since then.
As another famous Bill once said, it’s time for a change.
Matthew Ladner, Ph.D., is vice president for research at the Goldwater Institute.
Center for Educational Opportunity
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Education
Spending and grade point averages are up, so why are test scores down?
by Matthew Ladner
Goldwater Institute Today's News
February 27, 2007
The U.S. Department of Education released 12th grade NAEP scores last week and the results are discouraging.
Reading scores of 12th grade students have declined significantly since 1992. The percentage of high school seniors scoring “below basic” in reading increased from 20 to 27 percent between 1992 and 2005. During the same period, high school seniors scoring “proficient” in reading dropped 14 percent.
Separately, the Department released a study showing that since 1990, high school grade point averages are up across the country. Also, the percentage of students taking “college-prep” classes climbed from 40 to 68 percent. In addition, 12th graders in 2005 averaged 360 more hours of classroom instruction than their 1990 counterparts.
Despite all of that, the Class of 2005 performed worse on the NAEP than students in the early ‘90s. I’d like to remind you that Bill and Ted were students during that time…
Although the Department of Education did not mention it, inflation adjusted per pupil spending increased more than 20 percent between 1990 and 2002. It has increased even further since then.
As another famous Bill once said, it’s time for a change.
Matthew Ladner, Ph.D., is vice president for research at the Goldwater Institute.
February 27, 2007
NY Times: A Bad Report Card
February 27, 2007
Editorial
A Bad Report Card
The news from American high schools is not good. The most recent test results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly known as the national report card, finds that American 12th graders are actually performing worse in reading than 12th graders did in 1992, when a comparable exam was given. In addition, 12th-grade performance in reading has been distressingly flat since 2002, even though the states were supposed to be improving the quality of teaching to comply with the No Child Left Behind education act.
The new scores, based on tests given in 2005, show that only about 35 percent of 12th graders are proficient in reading. Simply put, this means that a majority of the country’s 12th graders have trouble understanding what they read fully enough to make inferences, draw conclusions and see connections between what they read and their own experiences. The math scores were even worse, with only 23 percent of 12th graders performing at or above the proficient level.
Marginal literacy and minimal math skills might have been adequate for the industrial age. But these scores mean that many of today’s high school seniors will be locked out of the information economy, where a college degree is the basic price of admission and the ability to read, write and reason is essential for success.
Congress, which is preparing to reauthorize both the No Child Left Behind Act and the Higher Education Act, needs to take a hard look at these scores and move forcefully to demand far-reaching structural changes.
It should start by getting the board that oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress testing to create rigorous national standards for crucial subjects. It should also require the states to raise the bar for teacher qualifications and end the odious practice of supplying the neediest students with the least qualified teachers. This process would also include requiring teachers colleges, which get federal aid, to turn out higher quality graduates and to supply many more teachers in vital areas like math and science. If there’s any doubt about why these reforms are needed, all Congress has to do is read the latest national report card.
Editorial
A Bad Report Card
The news from American high schools is not good. The most recent test results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly known as the national report card, finds that American 12th graders are actually performing worse in reading than 12th graders did in 1992, when a comparable exam was given. In addition, 12th-grade performance in reading has been distressingly flat since 2002, even though the states were supposed to be improving the quality of teaching to comply with the No Child Left Behind education act.
The new scores, based on tests given in 2005, show that only about 35 percent of 12th graders are proficient in reading. Simply put, this means that a majority of the country’s 12th graders have trouble understanding what they read fully enough to make inferences, draw conclusions and see connections between what they read and their own experiences. The math scores were even worse, with only 23 percent of 12th graders performing at or above the proficient level.
Marginal literacy and minimal math skills might have been adequate for the industrial age. But these scores mean that many of today’s high school seniors will be locked out of the information economy, where a college degree is the basic price of admission and the ability to read, write and reason is essential for success.
Congress, which is preparing to reauthorize both the No Child Left Behind Act and the Higher Education Act, needs to take a hard look at these scores and move forcefully to demand far-reaching structural changes.
It should start by getting the board that oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress testing to create rigorous national standards for crucial subjects. It should also require the states to raise the bar for teacher qualifications and end the odious practice of supplying the neediest students with the least qualified teachers. This process would also include requiring teachers colleges, which get federal aid, to turn out higher quality graduates and to supply many more teachers in vital areas like math and science. If there’s any doubt about why these reforms are needed, all Congress has to do is read the latest national report card.
Huffington Post: The Kids are OK, but Journalists and US Ed Bureaucrats...
 | Gerald Bracey |   |
02.26.2007 
Another found that NAEP reading scores of high school seniors had declined a bit since 1992.
The Kids Are OK, But Journalists and U.S. Department of Education Bureaucrats... (4 comments )
"Study: Despite Hard Courses, High Schoolers Learn Less." That paradoxical headline ran over a story in the Los Angeles Times February 23. Similar headlines appeared in the New York Times and papers all over the country. The stories under the headlines reported two related studies. One study found that high school students were taking more and tougher courses in math and science and getting better grades.
One sign of intelligence is the ability to link disparate pieces of information and make sense of it all. But linking changes in science and math course-taking to reading scores might well be finding a connection that isn't there. Maybe if the reading test contained the vocabulary of the math and science courses the scores might go up but that is most unlikely to happen.
So why did the reading scores dip? Well, when was the last time you heard a Right Honorable and Self-Important School Reform Commission say that the problem with schools is that kids don't read enough Shakespeare? Or Faulkner? An occasional lament is heard that the western canon now includes Steinbeck, Morrison and Angelou, but no reform commission that I know of has ever laid the blame--the blame for whatever the commission is blaming the schools for--at the feet of English teachers. "A Nation At Risk" mentioned what English courses should teach, but its major concerns were science and technology.
The perpetual cry for the last 50 years has been more math, more science, more math, more science. "A Nation at Risk" called for adding computer science because "computers and computer-controlled equipment are penetrating every aspect of our lives" (no doubt the only image in a reform report to evoke simultaneously both a sex act and Invasion of the Body Snatchers).
It is quite possible that reading scores are down because the kids are taking more math and science courses. Sure there are other more familiar villains to charge: television, video games, the strange spelling and syntax of text messaging, even multitasking. But the number of courses the average high school student takes in mathematics, science, and computer science enroute to a diploma have all increased since 1990 (English classes have not). The time for these courses has to come from somewhere. Reading about quarks or taking derivatives jeopardize Jane Austen.
Mostly, though, I think the kids just don't give a damn about NAEP and I bet they give less of a damn now than they did 15 years ago. Nor should they care. I once said to then-NAEP Executive Director, Archie Lapointe, that NAEP systematically underestimates achievement because kids don't take it seriously. Yes, he laughed, the major challenge for NAEP was keeping the kids awake during the test.
Over the last 15 years, much of schooling has been reduced to testing. SATs, ACT's, APs, high school exit examinations, formative assessments (in reality, just little tests). Plus test-obsessed NCLB. These tests all have consequences (although some, like the SAT, have many fewer than commonly believed). And now, in the second semester of the senior year comes NAEP (did the Senior Slump exist in 1992? I don't recall having heard that phrase back then).
Dude, you seriously want me to take this test seriously? It won't tell me or my parents anything. It won't tell the teachers or administrators or district anything (NAEP does not report below the state level). It means doodley squat, nothing, nada, nil for my future and you want me to give it my all? It wouldn't surprise me if teachers and administrators, saturated by tests and test-related anxieties communicate through body language that kids can blow off NAEP with no consequences. In fact, NAEP is having trouble these days getting schools to agree to test.
Motivation bears tremendously on test outcomes. When I directed Virginia's testing programs, my staff developed a computer program to detect what the state superintendent called "inappropriate administrative procedures"--cheating to the rest of us. One year a heretofore middling rural district popped way up. We visited the local superintendent to determine how he'd done it.
He had done it by transferring testing from the academic realm to the sporting world. You should bust your gut, not to show how smart you are or how well your teachers taught you but so that we can beat the adjacent archrival county like we try to in football, basketball and baseball.
If you walked around the school and asked kids "What are you going to do on the SRA's?" The answer was, "Beat Orange County!" The week of testing, teachers dressed as cheerleaders and the schools held pep rallies in the auditorium. Students in grades not tested cheered on those who were under the gun. It worked.
Find me something that makes seniors take NAEP seriously and then maybe I'll take 12th grade NAEP results seriously.
Bloomberg: No Child Left Behind? Well, Maybe Just a Few
He called our job depressing. What a way to start the day.
No Child Left Behind? Well, Maybe Just a Few: Andrew Ferguson
By Andrew Ferguson
Feb. 27 (Bloomberg) -- You think you hate your job? Imagine working for the National Assessment of Educational Progress at the U.S. Department of Education, which releases periodic reports on the state of education in the U.S.
Another day, another statistic -- and not just any statistic but another sad, despair-inducing statistic, the kind that, piled one on top of another, might make you double-check whether you still qualify for that last slot on the road kill detail at the highway department.
Last week the NAEP released a pair of reports that at first blush seemed not nearly as sad and despair-inducing as usual. They suggested that the nationwide mania for higher standards in education, begun in 1983 with the famous blue-ribbon study ``A Nation at Risk,'' might at last be showing positive effects among high school seniors.
Almost 2.7 million people graduated from high school in 2005. During their high school careers, according to NAEP, they received on average 360 more hours of classroom instruction than their counterparts in 1990.
Not only that, but the curricula they completed involved a more challenging course load. In 1990, only 31 percent of seniors took advanced courses in algebra II or physics; by 2005, the percentage was 51 percent.
And best of all, the class of 2005 had a significantly higher cumulative grade-point average than that of the class of 1990 -- 2.98, a solid B, versus 2.68, a wobbly C-plus, where a four is the maximum grade.
Sobering Fact
These findings would be wonderful news -- more studying, tougher coursework and higher grades all at once -- were it not for a more sobering fact that the NAEP draws our attention to: There has been no improvement in the students' ability to read, write or do math.
Scores on standardized reading tests, in fact, show an actual decline since 1992, to 285 from 290 by NAEP's assessment. A similar decline has been evident in knowledge of science. Math achievement of high school students has been harder to compare from year to year, but scores have been little changed at best.
It turns out that ``A Nation at Risk'' did spur a revolution in U.S. high schools. It just wasn't the kind of revolution we might have expected. In place of reform at the high-school level, we got an elaborate confidence game -- an extended period of grade inflation to disguise the failures of schools, parents, teachers and students themselves.
Too Rosy?
There has already been evidence that grades were being artificially pumped up.
Even as GPAs have continued to rise, one out of every four college freshmen has to take remedial courses in basics like reading and math; in two-year colleges, more than 40 percent of first-year students need remedial work. A study last year by ACT, a non-profit testing firm, found that only 51 percent of test- taking high-school seniors were prepared to read at the college level.
In fact, the news is even worse than NAEP's comparison of rising GPAs with declining achievement would suggest.
Kevin Carey, research and policy manager for Education Sector, an independent research organization in Washington, points out that only 75 out of every 100 kids who enter ninth grade graduate four years later.
``The achievement scores at 12th grade would be a lot lower, except that they don't include the 25 percent of kids who drop out and never even get that far,'' he says. ``It actually paints a rosier picture of how well kids are being prepared for 12th grade than it would otherwise.''
NCLB Again
For Carey, the lesson of last week's report is: ``Algebra is not algebra is not algebra'' -- by which he means that simply labeling a course ``advanced'' or ``college prep'' tells us next to nothing about the demands being made on the students.
The NAEP report comes just as Congress is set to consider reauthorizing President George W. Bush's landmark education reform, the No Child Left Behind Act. The law, which ties education funding to testable achievement among grade-school and middle-school students, has left high schools mostly untouched.
Already proposals are being made to rope 12th-graders into the No Child law's elaborate system of federally mandated tests, which means that high schools would finally be held accountable for graduating poorly educated seniors. The most recent of these proposals, by the Aspen Institute, received a favorable response from reformers, including within the administration.
Indeed, the administration has tried before to extend the No Child law to upper grades, with no luck. Stopping it was the usual anti-reform stonewall of teachers' unions and congressional Democrats, along with an astonishingly powerful vocational-school lobby.
Threats and Hectoring
Those voc-ed lobbyists worry that achievement tests required by the No Child law would push high schools to emphasize college preparation at the expense of vocational education. And they're right to worry: Vocational training gets a smaller share of education funding than ever before, and the trend is accelerating.
In the meantime, this unhappy status quo leaves reformers with little to work with other than the power of publicity, hectoring and persuasion. Threats might work, too. Here's one: Tell kids they better study harder or they'll end up with a depressing job -- like working for NAEP, compiling statistics about the next generation of kids like them.
(Andrew Ferguson is a Bloomberg News columnist. In 1992, he wrote speeches for President George H.W. Bush. The opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer of this column: Andrew Ferguson in Washington at aferguson62@yahoo.com .
Last Updated: February 27, 2007 00:01 EST
No Child Left Behind? Well, Maybe Just a Few: Andrew Ferguson
By Andrew Ferguson
Feb. 27 (Bloomberg) -- You think you hate your job? Imagine working for the National Assessment of Educational Progress at the U.S. Department of Education, which releases periodic reports on the state of education in the U.S.
Another day, another statistic -- and not just any statistic but another sad, despair-inducing statistic, the kind that, piled one on top of another, might make you double-check whether you still qualify for that last slot on the road kill detail at the highway department.
Last week the NAEP released a pair of reports that at first blush seemed not nearly as sad and despair-inducing as usual. They suggested that the nationwide mania for higher standards in education, begun in 1983 with the famous blue-ribbon study ``A Nation at Risk,'' might at last be showing positive effects among high school seniors.
Almost 2.7 million people graduated from high school in 2005. During their high school careers, according to NAEP, they received on average 360 more hours of classroom instruction than their counterparts in 1990.
Not only that, but the curricula they completed involved a more challenging course load. In 1990, only 31 percent of seniors took advanced courses in algebra II or physics; by 2005, the percentage was 51 percent.
And best of all, the class of 2005 had a significantly higher cumulative grade-point average than that of the class of 1990 -- 2.98, a solid B, versus 2.68, a wobbly C-plus, where a four is the maximum grade.
Sobering Fact
These findings would be wonderful news -- more studying, tougher coursework and higher grades all at once -- were it not for a more sobering fact that the NAEP draws our attention to: There has been no improvement in the students' ability to read, write or do math.
Scores on standardized reading tests, in fact, show an actual decline since 1992, to 285 from 290 by NAEP's assessment. A similar decline has been evident in knowledge of science. Math achievement of high school students has been harder to compare from year to year, but scores have been little changed at best.
It turns out that ``A Nation at Risk'' did spur a revolution in U.S. high schools. It just wasn't the kind of revolution we might have expected. In place of reform at the high-school level, we got an elaborate confidence game -- an extended period of grade inflation to disguise the failures of schools, parents, teachers and students themselves.
Too Rosy?
There has already been evidence that grades were being artificially pumped up.
Even as GPAs have continued to rise, one out of every four college freshmen has to take remedial courses in basics like reading and math; in two-year colleges, more than 40 percent of first-year students need remedial work. A study last year by ACT, a non-profit testing firm, found that only 51 percent of test- taking high-school seniors were prepared to read at the college level.
In fact, the news is even worse than NAEP's comparison of rising GPAs with declining achievement would suggest.
Kevin Carey, research and policy manager for Education Sector, an independent research organization in Washington, points out that only 75 out of every 100 kids who enter ninth grade graduate four years later.
``The achievement scores at 12th grade would be a lot lower, except that they don't include the 25 percent of kids who drop out and never even get that far,'' he says. ``It actually paints a rosier picture of how well kids are being prepared for 12th grade than it would otherwise.''
NCLB Again
For Carey, the lesson of last week's report is: ``Algebra is not algebra is not algebra'' -- by which he means that simply labeling a course ``advanced'' or ``college prep'' tells us next to nothing about the demands being made on the students.
The NAEP report comes just as Congress is set to consider reauthorizing President George W. Bush's landmark education reform, the No Child Left Behind Act. The law, which ties education funding to testable achievement among grade-school and middle-school students, has left high schools mostly untouched.
Already proposals are being made to rope 12th-graders into the No Child law's elaborate system of federally mandated tests, which means that high schools would finally be held accountable for graduating poorly educated seniors. The most recent of these proposals, by the Aspen Institute, received a favorable response from reformers, including within the administration.
Indeed, the administration has tried before to extend the No Child law to upper grades, with no luck. Stopping it was the usual anti-reform stonewall of teachers' unions and congressional Democrats, along with an astonishingly powerful vocational-school lobby.
Threats and Hectoring
Those voc-ed lobbyists worry that achievement tests required by the No Child law would push high schools to emphasize college preparation at the expense of vocational education. And they're right to worry: Vocational training gets a smaller share of education funding than ever before, and the trend is accelerating.
In the meantime, this unhappy status quo leaves reformers with little to work with other than the power of publicity, hectoring and persuasion. Threats might work, too. Here's one: Tell kids they better study harder or they'll end up with a depressing job -- like working for NAEP, compiling statistics about the next generation of kids like them.
(Andrew Ferguson is a Bloomberg News columnist. In 1992, he wrote speeches for President George H.W. Bush. The opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer of this column: Andrew Ferguson in Washington at aferguson62@yahoo.com .
Last Updated: February 27, 2007 00:01 EST
Washington Post - "Senior Slump"
Senior Slump
High school students are getting better grades, but that doesn't mean they're learning.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007; Page A14
THE TROUBLING condition of America's public high schools has long been recognized. Even so, it was sobering to learn last week that high school seniors, though taking more advanced classes and getting better grades, are performing dismally on national tests.
The data from the U.S. Education Department revealed a disturbing incongruity between how well schools say students are doing and how well students really are doing. Transcripts show more students taking supposedly more rigorous courses, yet raising their grade-point average from 2.68 in 1990 to 2.98 in 2005. But when these same students had to demonstrate what they learned on nationally recognized tests, only 35 percent scored proficient or better in reading. That's the worst performance since the testing began in 1992.
Why? Advanced classes may have highfalutin course descriptions, but the curriculum has been dumbed down. Pressure to pass students has caused grade inflation. The students hurt most are poor and minority. The Post's Amit R. Paley vividly demonstrated this by visiting two classes supposedly teaching the same material. Students at a more affluent high school faced higher expectations and standards than those at a school with more poor and black students. But even students who typically are seen as doing well in school -- suburban, middle-class children -- showed no gains. And the data don't deal at all with the many children who drop out before 12th grade.
Some states are moving to overhaul high schools and stiffen standards. Twenty-nine states, including Maryland and Virginia, are working with Achieve, a nonprofit group, to raise academic standards and accountability so students graduating from high school are able to meet the demands of college or work. So far, the No Child Left Behind Act has focused mainly on the elementary grades. The national debate over the law's reauthorization must include a robust discussion of how to improve high schools and create national standards. If not, any progress made in boosting achievement in elementary grades will be lost.
High school students are getting better grades, but that doesn't mean they're learning.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007; Page A14
THE TROUBLING condition of America's public high schools has long been recognized. Even so, it was sobering to learn last week that high school seniors, though taking more advanced classes and getting better grades, are performing dismally on national tests.
The data from the U.S. Education Department revealed a disturbing incongruity between how well schools say students are doing and how well students really are doing. Transcripts show more students taking supposedly more rigorous courses, yet raising their grade-point average from 2.68 in 1990 to 2.98 in 2005. But when these same students had to demonstrate what they learned on nationally recognized tests, only 35 percent scored proficient or better in reading. That's the worst performance since the testing began in 1992.
Why? Advanced classes may have highfalutin course descriptions, but the curriculum has been dumbed down. Pressure to pass students has caused grade inflation. The students hurt most are poor and minority. The Post's Amit R. Paley vividly demonstrated this by visiting two classes supposedly teaching the same material. Students at a more affluent high school faced higher expectations and standards than those at a school with more poor and black students. But even students who typically are seen as doing well in school -- suburban, middle-class children -- showed no gains. And the data don't deal at all with the many children who drop out before 12th grade.
Some states are moving to overhaul high schools and stiffen standards. Twenty-nine states, including Maryland and Virginia, are working with Achieve, a nonprofit group, to raise academic standards and accountability so students graduating from high school are able to meet the demands of college or work. So far, the No Child Left Behind Act has focused mainly on the elementary grades. The national debate over the law's reauthorization must include a robust discussion of how to improve high schools and create national standards. If not, any progress made in boosting achievement in elementary grades will be lost.
February 26, 2007
What Chance co-operation
Guy next to me on the Metro was reading this. I recognize the LTT graphic anywhere ;-)
The president and Congress
What chance co-operation?
Feb 22nd 2007 WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition
Time is running out for George Bush to leave a positive mark on America. We look at the chances of reform in five key areas, starting with the schools
FOR as long as there have been maths tests, there have been cheats. But whereas a schoolboy caught furtively copying his neighbour's answers can expect a zero and an angry letter home, states that rig exam results are showered with federal cash. This is one reason why the No Child Left Behind Act, a noble attempt to impose discipline on American schools, needs revision before it merits an A grade.
The premise behind the law was sensible enough. Before it was passed in 2002, state education bureaucrats were reluctant to collect and publish the kind of data that would have allowed parents to make comparisons between schools, or to tell if a school was improving over time. Good schools received few rewards; bad ones had little incentive to improve. President George Bush sought to change that.
Under No Child Left Behind, students must be tested on maths and reading every year between the ages of eight and 13, and once in high school. Test results must be published and broken down by race. Schools that fail to show “adequate yearly progress” face penalties. Parents of children at consistently failing schools must be allowed to move them to better ones.
All good stuff. But there are catches. Federal subsidies to the states depend on students meeting standards that the states themselves set. States thus have a multi-billion-dollar incentive to game the system. In Arizona, for example, only one-fifth of eighth-graders were rated “proficient” at maths after taking the state test in 2003. Two years later, that proportion had magically tripled. Does this mean that the test got easier to pass? “Yes,” says Janet Napolitano, Arizona's plain-talking governor.
Joel Klein, the man in charge of public schools in New York City, lists other perverse incentives. States are rewarded for increasing the proportion of students who pass their exams, but not for raising a child's score from abysmal to nearly-good-enough-to-pass, or from just-passed to brilliant. So they are tempted to lavish attention on those on the cusp of passing, while neglecting both the weakest and the strongest students. Mr Klein argues that schools should instead be judged by the progress their pupils show, regardless of whether they cross an arbitrary threshold. He plans to introduce such a system soon in New York.
None of this means that No Child Left Behind is not working. The states may be gaming the system, but the extra data they have been obliged to produce are not meaningless; they can help parents to compare their local schools with others nearby, and allow teachers and principals to make more informed decisions. The act's provisions for rescuing lousy schools have also done some good. For example, when the Isaac Middle School in Phoenix, Arizona, showed consistently terrible results, the authorities sent in a new principal, Armando Chavez. “There was a lot of fighting,” he says, “and one time, the police had to physically take a student away.” Mr Chavez arrived with two new assistant principals and a mandate to “restructure” the school. He imposed clear punishments for misbehaviour and challenged the students academically. The climate is much better now, he says.
Nationally, the best indicators of progress come from federal tests the states cannot tamper with. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), maths scores for nine-year-olds improved by nearly two percentage points between 1999 and 2004, while those for 13-year-olds rose one point. Seventeen-year-olds, who were not affected by No Child Left Behind, showed no improvement. Reading scores for nine-year-olds improved by 1.4 points over the same period; 13- and 17-year-olds got no better.
This suggests—though it does not prove—that No Child Left Behind has been a modest success. Given the challenges, such as a huge annual influx of immigrants' children with shaky English, things are going pretty well, says Margaret Spellings, the education secretary. She says it is a “moral imperative” to make schools more accountable, but she is realistic about the limits of federal power. Schools are largely a state and local responsibility. The federal government can persuade—it provides 8% of a typical state's education budget—but it cannot compel.
The law is up for review this year. Congress is likely to tinker with it, probably soon. On February 13th a bipartisan commission made some useful recommendations. It echoed Mr Klein's call for measuring progress less crudely. It also urged that teachers be individually assessed according to how much their pupils learn. This will be controversial.
America has many excellent public schools, but many awful ones, too. The toughest obstacle to improving the worst is the strident opposition of the teachers' unions to meritocracy. In many states bad teachers are nearly impossible to sack. Pay and promotion are often by seniority. So the worst teachers linger for ever, while many talented people who might otherwise become teachers shun a profession where their talents will be neither recognised nor rewarded.
The unions' dead hand
All this would be technically simple to fix. Tenure could be abolished, principals could be allowed to hire and fire freely and teachers could be paid by results. School funding could also be made dependent on how many parents choose to send their children to a particular school, so that good schools would expand and bad ones would close or be taken over. But all this is politically impossible—especially with the Democrats, who grovel to the teachers' unions, in charge of Congress.
No Child Left Behind originally passed with bipartisan support because Republicans liked the tests and Democrats liked the extra money Mr Bush threw in to sweeten the deal. This year Democrats will push for yet more money, most of which will be unnecessary, and will strive to iron out the worst anomalies in the tests. But will they let bad teachers be sacked? “That's a sticky issue,” says a well-placed Democrat.
Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
The president and Congress
What chance co-operation?
Feb 22nd 2007 WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition
Time is running out for George Bush to leave a positive mark on America. We look at the chances of reform in five key areas, starting with the schools
FOR as long as there have been maths tests, there have been cheats. But whereas a schoolboy caught furtively copying his neighbour's answers can expect a zero and an angry letter home, states that rig exam results are showered with federal cash. This is one reason why the No Child Left Behind Act, a noble attempt to impose discipline on American schools, needs revision before it merits an A grade.
The premise behind the law was sensible enough. Before it was passed in 2002, state education bureaucrats were reluctant to collect and publish the kind of data that would have allowed parents to make comparisons between schools, or to tell if a school was improving over time. Good schools received few rewards; bad ones had little incentive to improve. President George Bush sought to change that.
Under No Child Left Behind, students must be tested on maths and reading every year between the ages of eight and 13, and once in high school. Test results must be published and broken down by race. Schools that fail to show “adequate yearly progress” face penalties. Parents of children at consistently failing schools must be allowed to move them to better ones.
All good stuff. But there are catches. Federal subsidies to the states depend on students meeting standards that the states themselves set. States thus have a multi-billion-dollar incentive to game the system. In Arizona, for example, only one-fifth of eighth-graders were rated “proficient” at maths after taking the state test in 2003. Two years later, that proportion had magically tripled. Does this mean that the test got easier to pass? “Yes,” says Janet Napolitano, Arizona's plain-talking governor.
Joel Klein, the man in charge of public schools in New York City, lists other perverse incentives. States are rewarded for increasing the proportion of students who pass their exams, but not for raising a child's score from abysmal to nearly-good-enough-to-pass, or from just-passed to brilliant. So they are tempted to lavish attention on those on the cusp of passing, while neglecting both the weakest and the strongest students. Mr Klein argues that schools should instead be judged by the progress their pupils show, regardless of whether they cross an arbitrary threshold. He plans to introduce such a system soon in New York.
None of this means that No Child Left Behind is not working. The states may be gaming the system, but the extra data they have been obliged to produce are not meaningless; they can help parents to compare their local schools with others nearby, and allow teachers and principals to make more informed decisions. The act's provisions for rescuing lousy schools have also done some good. For example, when the Isaac Middle School in Phoenix, Arizona, showed consistently terrible results, the authorities sent in a new principal, Armando Chavez. “There was a lot of fighting,” he says, “and one time, the police had to physically take a student away.” Mr Chavez arrived with two new assistant principals and a mandate to “restructure” the school. He imposed clear punishments for misbehaviour and challenged the students academically. The climate is much better now, he says.
Nationally, the best indicators of progress come from federal tests the states cannot tamper with. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), maths scores for nine-year-olds improved by nearly two percentage points between 1999 and 2004, while those for 13-year-olds rose one point. Seventeen-year-olds, who were not affected by No Child Left Behind, showed no improvement. Reading scores for nine-year-olds improved by 1.4 points over the same period; 13- and 17-year-olds got no better.
This suggests—though it does not prove—that No Child Left Behind has been a modest success. Given the challenges, such as a huge annual influx of immigrants' children with shaky English, things are going pretty well, says Margaret Spellings, the education secretary. She says it is a “moral imperative” to make schools more accountable, but she is realistic about the limits of federal power. Schools are largely a state and local responsibility. The federal government can persuade—it provides 8% of a typical state's education budget—but it cannot compel.
The law is up for review this year. Congress is likely to tinker with it, probably soon. On February 13th a bipartisan commission made some useful recommendations. It echoed Mr Klein's call for measuring progress less crudely. It also urged that teachers be individually assessed according to how much their pupils learn. This will be controversial.
America has many excellent public schools, but many awful ones, too. The toughest obstacle to improving the worst is the strident opposition of the teachers' unions to meritocracy. In many states bad teachers are nearly impossible to sack. Pay and promotion are often by seniority. So the worst teachers linger for ever, while many talented people who might otherwise become teachers shun a profession where their talents will be neither recognised nor rewarded.
The unions' dead hand
All this would be technically simple to fix. Tenure could be abolished, principals could be allowed to hire and fire freely and teachers could be paid by results. School funding could also be made dependent on how many parents choose to send their children to a particular school, so that good schools would expand and bad ones would close or be taken over. But all this is politically impossible—especially with the Democrats, who grovel to the teachers' unions, in charge of Congress.
No Child Left Behind originally passed with bipartisan support because Republicans liked the tests and Democrats liked the extra money Mr Bush threw in to sweeten the deal. This year Democrats will push for yet more money, most of which will be unnecessary, and will strive to iron out the worst anomalies in the tests. But will they let bad teachers be sacked? “That's a sticky issue,” says a well-placed Democrat.
Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
NY Times: Real Tests for Real Children
Real Tests for Real Children
The No Child Left Behind Act required the states to raise educational standards and test student performance, in exchange for federal aid. But things have not worked as Congress planned. Instead of moving toward the educational excellence that the country needs to compete in the global economy, many states opted for dumbed-down tests and deliberate sleight of hand to create the fraudulent appearance of progress.
As a result, states that perform well with their own watered-down exams do shockingly poorly when their students take the far more rigorous federal test known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. A report this month by the bipartisan Commission on No Child Left Behind highlights this problem and calls for the development of more rigorous tests and national standards in reading, language arts, math and science.
States would then be offered the options of embracing the national standards and tests, building new ones based on the national model or keeping their existing standards and tests. States that chose not to embrace the national standards would have to submit their tests and standards to federal evaluation — to see how they compare to the national model — and the results would be reported to parents and the general public.
This proposal, which would have been shot down in previous years, is finding a great deal of sympathy in Congress. That is good news, given the work that has to be done to ensure that all of America’s children can compete in the world.
Magna Charters
By NELSON SMITH
February 26, 2007; Page A19
As he prepared to announce the Aspen Commission's recent recommendations for revamping the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), co-chair Tommy Thompson made a telling remark: "We have been much more successful at identifying struggling schools than we have been in actually turning them around." Regrettably, as with other mainstream groups that have weighed in on the NCLB, the commission's report focuses almost exclusively on fixing ailing schools rather than starting healthy new ones. Both tracks are needed.
The NCLB has laid bare the troubling gaps in student achievement among racial and socioeconomic groups, and it has spurred some improvement, particularly in the early grades. Yet its prescriptions for reform have provoked meager change in schools and systems that produce chronically weak results.
The law lets parents move kids to a higher performing public school -- but in many cities there simply aren't any better choices available. Using federal dollars for "supplemental services" can help -- but tutoring often takes place after students have spent the school day in learning-deprived classrooms.
The act's coup de grâce, after years of failure, is to require "restructuring" a dysfunctional school from scratch, through state takeover, contracting-out, or re-opening as a public charter school. But its impact has been stifled by legislative language allowing "any other" step as well. Districts and states have opted to switch principals, give pep talks and hire "turnaround specialists" instead of coming to terms with intractable failure.
Indeed, according to a recent analysis by SRI International for the U.S. Department of Education, only one of 12 states with Title I schools identified for restructuring as of 2004 had reopened a school as a public charter; one turned over operations to the state; two states replaced school staff and eight took no action.
Ironically, the best illustration of the NCLB's mission may be outside this whole "turnaround" apparatus, in the open sector of public education called charter schooling, where parents, teachers and entrepreneurs are creating new schools that are publicly accountable but independent of bureaucratic rules. Reporter Paul Tough recently wrote about three charter-school networks (Achievement First, the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), and Uncommon Schools) for the New York Times magazine. Students attending these institutions made large learning gains despite years of educational neglect elsewhere.
Rather than cobbling together remediation strategies, these schools create an unyielding culture of high expectations, offer significantly longer learning time than traditional public schools, and organize everything (including personnel decisions) around evidence of student achievement. While these are superstars, dozens of independent studies show that public charter schools around the country are closing achievement gaps at a faster pace than their district counterparts.
Despite low participation rates for "official" NCLB-driven choice (less than 1% of those eligible to transfer, according to federal figures), more than a million families, disproportionately poor and minority, have sought out public charter schools on their own. Charters now educate 26% of all public school kids in Washington, D.C.; 28% in Dayton; and 18% in Detroit (and climbing since that city's recent teacher strike). According to our research, charters now account for more than 13% of public school enrollment in 19 jurisdictions.
By all means, the next No Child Left Behind Act should continue pushing to improve existing schools. But the reauthorized NCLB should also be an engine for creating new, high-quality schools in communities where they're most needed. Here's how:
Quality first. The federal Charter Schools Program, authorized in Title V of the NCLB, provides critically important seed funding for startups. It has been an important source of support, especially for small, community-based charters. Created with bipartisan support when only seven states had charter laws (there are 40 today), the program is due for an overhaul, placing more emphasis on funding the strongest startups and replicating top-quality charters.
Grants should be targeted toward places with high numbers of schools "in need of improvement." And states should be expected to promote and monitor quality like the best venture capitalists -- or lose the right to administer the grant program altogether.
The charter program has been flat-lined for four appropriations cycles; it's time to align funding levels with need. Related programs that support charter facilities should be reauthorized and put on a sound financial footing as well, since charter schools do not qualify for state capital programs and only 11 states offer any kind of compensation for facilities needs.
Bust caps. More money will be pointless unless artificial limits on charter growth are lifted in the 26 states that now have them. In some cases these "caps" directly pre-empt the intent of the NCLB. It's actually illegal to create a new charter school in New York State right now -- meaning that a mother desperate to pull her child out of a failing school in the South Bronx may simply have to wait until Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has a change of heart about the state's limit of 100 public charter schools.
U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings recently proposed reauthorization language permitting local officials to reopen a failing school as a charter even if it would exceed a state charter cap. The secretary's idea is on-target, but Congress should go her one better, permitting cap-free chartering wherever students lack suitable public schools. And the local school board should not be the only game in town. In states where universities and state boards can approve charter schools, they too should be able to override restrictive caps.
Add teeth. Persistently failing schools need fundamental change, not cosmetic touch-ups. Re-opening as a charter, with a proven academic model, new team and clear accountability for performance, can provide a fresh start. But to work, such "re-opened" charters must have independent governance with full autonomy over budgets, personnel and working conditions. That independence must be spelled out in the federal law, or else we risk creating a raft of so-called "charters" still tethered to the same central offices that let students down in the first place.
In its first five years, the NCLB has affirmed a national commitment to educational opportunity for all. In the next five years, it should do more to galvanize real change by ratcheting up its support of public charter schools. A vibrant new-schools sector is the best way to challenge the status quo and offer real promise of achievement for every American public-school student.
Mr. Smith is president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
February 26, 2007; Page A19
As he prepared to announce the Aspen Commission's recent recommendations for revamping the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), co-chair Tommy Thompson made a telling remark: "We have been much more successful at identifying struggling schools than we have been in actually turning them around." Regrettably, as with other mainstream groups that have weighed in on the NCLB, the commission's report focuses almost exclusively on fixing ailing schools rather than starting healthy new ones. Both tracks are needed.
The NCLB has laid bare the troubling gaps in student achievement among racial and socioeconomic groups, and it has spurred some improvement, particularly in the early grades. Yet its prescriptions for reform have provoked meager change in schools and systems that produce chronically weak results.
The law lets parents move kids to a higher performing public school -- but in many cities there simply aren't any better choices available. Using federal dollars for "supplemental services" can help -- but tutoring often takes place after students have spent the school day in learning-deprived classrooms.
The act's coup de grâce, after years of failure, is to require "restructuring" a dysfunctional school from scratch, through state takeover, contracting-out, or re-opening as a public charter school. But its impact has been stifled by legislative language allowing "any other" step as well. Districts and states have opted to switch principals, give pep talks and hire "turnaround specialists" instead of coming to terms with intractable failure.
Indeed, according to a recent analysis by SRI International for the U.S. Department of Education, only one of 12 states with Title I schools identified for restructuring as of 2004 had reopened a school as a public charter; one turned over operations to the state; two states replaced school staff and eight took no action.
Ironically, the best illustration of the NCLB's mission may be outside this whole "turnaround" apparatus, in the open sector of public education called charter schooling, where parents, teachers and entrepreneurs are creating new schools that are publicly accountable but independent of bureaucratic rules. Reporter Paul Tough recently wrote about three charter-school networks (Achievement First, the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), and Uncommon Schools) for the New York Times magazine. Students attending these institutions made large learning gains despite years of educational neglect elsewhere.
Rather than cobbling together remediation strategies, these schools create an unyielding culture of high expectations, offer significantly longer learning time than traditional public schools, and organize everything (including personnel decisions) around evidence of student achievement. While these are superstars, dozens of independent studies show that public charter schools around the country are closing achievement gaps at a faster pace than their district counterparts.
Despite low participation rates for "official" NCLB-driven choice (less than 1% of those eligible to transfer, according to federal figures), more than a million families, disproportionately poor and minority, have sought out public charter schools on their own. Charters now educate 26% of all public school kids in Washington, D.C.; 28% in Dayton; and 18% in Detroit (and climbing since that city's recent teacher strike). According to our research, charters now account for more than 13% of public school enrollment in 19 jurisdictions.
By all means, the next No Child Left Behind Act should continue pushing to improve existing schools. But the reauthorized NCLB should also be an engine for creating new, high-quality schools in communities where they're most needed. Here's how:
Quality first. The federal Charter Schools Program, authorized in Title V of the NCLB, provides critically important seed funding for startups. It has been an important source of support, especially for small, community-based charters. Created with bipartisan support when only seven states had charter laws (there are 40 today), the program is due for an overhaul, placing more emphasis on funding the strongest startups and replicating top-quality charters.
Grants should be targeted toward places with high numbers of schools "in need of improvement." And states should be expected to promote and monitor quality like the best venture capitalists -- or lose the right to administer the grant program altogether.
The charter program has been flat-lined for four appropriations cycles; it's time to align funding levels with need. Related programs that support charter facilities should be reauthorized and put on a sound financial footing as well, since charter schools do not qualify for state capital programs and only 11 states offer any kind of compensation for facilities needs.
Bust caps. More money will be pointless unless artificial limits on charter growth are lifted in the 26 states that now have them. In some cases these "caps" directly pre-empt the intent of the NCLB. It's actually illegal to create a new charter school in New York State right now -- meaning that a mother desperate to pull her child out of a failing school in the South Bronx may simply have to wait until Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has a change of heart about the state's limit of 100 public charter schools.
U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings recently proposed reauthorization language permitting local officials to reopen a failing school as a charter even if it would exceed a state charter cap. The secretary's idea is on-target, but Congress should go her one better, permitting cap-free chartering wherever students lack suitable public schools. And the local school board should not be the only game in town. In states where universities and state boards can approve charter schools, they too should be able to override restrictive caps.
Add teeth. Persistently failing schools need fundamental change, not cosmetic touch-ups. Re-opening as a charter, with a proven academic model, new team and clear accountability for performance, can provide a fresh start. But to work, such "re-opened" charters must have independent governance with full autonomy over budgets, personnel and working conditions. That independence must be spelled out in the federal law, or else we risk creating a raft of so-called "charters" still tethered to the same central offices that let students down in the first place.
In its first five years, the NCLB has affirmed a national commitment to educational opportunity for all. In the next five years, it should do more to galvanize real change by ratcheting up its support of public charter schools. A vibrant new-schools sector is the best way to challenge the status quo and offer real promise of achievement for every American public-school student.
Mr. Smith is president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
Progressive U: The NAEP Dilemma
interesting blog post from a recently graduated high school senior responding to the 12th grade HSTS results.
The NAEP (Nation's Report Card) Dilemma
mleliza's picture
Submitted by mleliza on Fri, 02/23/2007 - 4:34pm.
Tags: News and politics | Society | Media | Opinion | Education | Humor | Broad prosperity | Shared responsibility | Better future
This morning I read a report in the newspaper claiming that there's a bit of confusion as to why high school students today possess higher GPA's, but are lacking higher scores in the math and reading portions of the NAEP test they were given. Upon completing the article, my first verbal reaction contained the phrase: "Gee, I think I may know why...."
Last year I was one of several students from my high school chosen to take some type of obscure test that possibly had something to do with a national survey. I, nor any of my classmates apparently, weren't exactly well-informed about the purpose of this seemingly time-consuming test, but the largest aspect of it was that we wouldn't be penalized if we didn't do well. *Key phrase: We wouldn't be penalized if we didn't do well.* Here's a bit of background information about how the whole thing was set up at my high school: most of the students selected for the study were the ones who took a good number of advanced-level courses (one can imagine how some students were extremely irked at having to miss out on a class covering AP material.) We were assigned into cramped classrooms, and the instructions were read by a kind elderly woman speaking with a low drawl that seemed incapable of producing coherent sound-waves. We were given the test packet, and off we started.
I really don't believe enough emphasis was put on the significance of the test we were asked to take. My classmates and I were obviously oblivious as to the importance of it. If we knew that our scores would be calculated for a national statistic I'm pretty sure we would have been less excited about the free pencils, and possibly more motivated to actually completely read each question before carelessly diving into the multiple-choice columns. I don't think people even read the writing on the free pencils (I admit I didn't until the test was over), which actually gives a web address with the line "nationsreportcard" embedded somewhere in there. Anyway, before this post gets extremely verbose, I would like to think that most of the high school students elsewhere were better informed. If they weren't, then perhaps this may have been a factor with the little dilemma I read about in the paper this morning.
On the bright side, I still have my free pencil. I'm glad I made the wise choice of not using it while taking any SATs or ACTs in the past year.
The NAEP (Nation's Report Card) Dilemma
mleliza's picture
Submitted by mleliza on Fri, 02/23/2007 - 4:34pm.
Tags: News and politics | Society | Media | Opinion | Education | Humor | Broad prosperity | Shared responsibility | Better future
This morning I read a report in the newspaper claiming that there's a bit of confusion as to why high school students today possess higher GPA's, but are lacking higher scores in the math and reading portions of the NAEP test they were given. Upon completing the article, my first verbal reaction contained the phrase: "Gee, I think I may know why...."
Last year I was one of several students from my high school chosen to take some type of obscure test that possibly had something to do with a national survey. I, nor any of my classmates apparently, weren't exactly well-informed about the purpose of this seemingly time-consuming test, but the largest aspect of it was that we wouldn't be penalized if we didn't do well. *Key phrase: We wouldn't be penalized if we didn't do well.* Here's a bit of background information about how the whole thing was set up at my high school: most of the students selected for the study were the ones who took a good number of advanced-level courses (one can imagine how some students were extremely irked at having to miss out on a class covering AP material.) We were assigned into cramped classrooms, and the instructions were read by a kind elderly woman speaking with a low drawl that seemed incapable of producing coherent sound-waves. We were given the test packet, and off we started.
I really don't believe enough emphasis was put on the significance of the test we were asked to take. My classmates and I were obviously oblivious as to the importance of it. If we knew that our scores would be calculated for a national statistic I'm pretty sure we would have been less excited about the free pencils, and possibly more motivated to actually completely read each question before carelessly diving into the multiple-choice columns. I don't think people even read the writing on the free pencils (I admit I didn't until the test was over), which actually gives a web address with the line "nationsreportcard" embedded somewhere in there. Anyway, before this post gets extremely verbose, I would like to think that most of the high school students elsewhere were better informed. If they weren't, then perhaps this may have been a factor with the little dilemma I read about in the paper this morning.
On the bright side, I still have my free pencil. I'm glad I made the wise choice of not using it while taking any SATs or ACTs in the past year.
US News and World Report: Local Success, Federal Failure
Nation & World
Local Success, Federal Failure
How do your local public schools measure up? It depends on whom you ask
By Elizabeth Weiss Green
Posted 2/25/07
Since moving from Massachusetts to California, David Gerhard and his wife have made an effort to stay in touch with friends back East. They talk about their homes, their jobs, and another subject: fifth grade. Does your kid have to memorize times tables? Does he have to memorize all the states? What about long division? "We keep a monitor on it," Gerhard says. "Not hard data but to get a feel." Their constant concern: Will their children leave California schools as well educated as their kids' friends in Massachusetts?
The 2002 No Child Left Behind Act was supposed to help families like Gerhard's answer that question with a definitive "Yes." The federal law requires all states to draft standards-minimum expectations for each grade level-and to annually assess how well those standards are being met. But critics of the law argue that all the tests that have followed have not clarified matters at all. Every state administers a different test tied to different standards, and few of the state standards seem to match national ideas about what kids should know.
One size. So why not teach all kids the same things? Or try to make standards uniform? That's what Gerhard and, more important, a growing number of policymakers want to know. With hearings on No Child Left Behind starting in March, two top Senate Democrats have introduced legislation that would require the federal government to define the standards against which all states would be measured. Groups from the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute to the National Education Association, a teachers union, support the idea.
"Isn't it crazy that your child is learning different material and being held to a different standard than, say, your sister's children in another state?" asks Mike Petrilli, Fordham's vice president.
An existing test that should set this all straight-the National Assessment of Educational Progress or the so-called nation's report card-only muddles matters more. NAEP, created in 1964 to provide a snapshot of national academic performance, tests just a sample of students on a sample of questions; as a result, it cannot grade individual students or individual schools.
It can, however, cast doubt on other grades, often contradicting states' rosy reports. In 2003, states like Tennessee, Texas, and Mississippi reported that over 80 percent of their fourth graders were "proficient" or better in reading, yet fewer than 30 percent of their students scored proficient on the NAEP reading test. Thirty-two other states posted gaps of more than 30 percentage points. The latest data-presented last week-are just as dismal. One study, based on 2005 high school transcripts, showed impressive gains in state-reported grade-point averages and course loads. Another, based on 12th-grade NAEP scores in the same year, showed depressing stagnancy in actual test performance; less than one quarter of high school seniors scored proficient in math, and only 35 percent scored proficient in reading-down from 40 percent in 1992.
Critics say No Child Left Behind is the source of the problem. To avoid labeling hundreds of schools "failing," they say states have simply lowered the definition of proficient, or the "cut score," to ensure more schools make the grade. Indeed, a 2004 Missouri law mandated lower cut scores, and Arizona has lowered some of its scores, too.
Of course, grades are less important than the content they measure. But critics say the content is also too weak. A 2006 Fordham report grading the quality of the state standards awarded only three states A's; 26 got D's or F's. A major problem highlighted by Fordham: The "experts" drafted to write the standards were not highly educated in their disciplines.
Qualified standards writers can be hard to find-especially for a state on a tight deadline and trim budget. North Dakota had just 10 permanent staffers on standards and testing; on assessments, Montana's education agency had one. "She's the whole department," says Linda McCulloch, the state superintendent.
By contrast, the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees NAEP, regularly revises standards with the help of dozens of experts. "As a [state] commissioner, you're really pretty much restricted to off-the-shelf tests," says Charles Smith, the former Tennessee education commissioner and now NAGB's executive director. There are not many states ... [that] could attract the kind of experts that we're able to attract." If the federal government were in charge, reformers say, states could design better tests and create more rigorous standards, with no additional funding.
This is not the first time national standards have been proposed. President Bill Clinton tried twice-first to draft standards and later to introduce a voluntary national test-but the ideas failed as opponents warned the test would force schools to teach a liberal national agenda condoning homosexuality and encouraging feminism and as states and municipalities resisted the loss of local control.
The double failure made a deep impression on Michael Cohen, a Clinton adviser. "What is conventionally thought of as national standards-that is, the federal government leads, it picks somebody to write them, and it puts it out there for states to use-I'm increasingly unconvinced that that's the way to get there," he says.
Bottom up. Cohen now believes the states must take the initiative. He is president of Achieve, a nonprofit that helps states improve their standards through a process far more intensive than simply accepting a list from the government. Instead, the states hold summits and solicit outside assistance; the proposed standards are then reviewed by an independent panel. Although each state conducts its own review, they tend to reach similar goals. "The real world is the same wherever you are," Cohen says. "So the states, by virtue of trying to create real-world anchors, are discovering their standards ought to be quite similar to each other."
Letting states write their own plans could produce even better results. Cheri Pierson Yecke, Florida's chancellor of K-12 schools, points to a new reading program that some California schools tested in the 1990s. The resulting lower test scores alarmed policymakers, and the program was scrapped. Because the program wasn't a national one, only some students had to suffer its poor results. "That's the beauty of local control," Yecke explains. "[It] gives us 50 different laboratories, so we'll know what we need to discard and what we need to embrace."
National standards would not necessarily disrupt those laboratories. Neither plan before Congress-one from Sen. Christopher Dodd and the other from Sen. Edward Kennedy-would force the states to adopt the standards the federal government would be required to write. But, if history is any guide, backlashes could result from whatever those standards turn out to be.
This story appears in the March 5, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
Local Success, Federal Failure
How do your local public schools measure up? It depends on whom you ask
By Elizabeth Weiss Green
Posted 2/25/07
Since moving from Massachusetts to California, David Gerhard and his wife have made an effort to stay in touch with friends back East. They talk about their homes, their jobs, and another subject: fifth grade. Does your kid have to memorize times tables? Does he have to memorize all the states? What about long division? "We keep a monitor on it," Gerhard says. "Not hard data but to get a feel." Their constant concern: Will their children leave California schools as well educated as their kids' friends in Massachusetts?
The 2002 No Child Left Behind Act was supposed to help families like Gerhard's answer that question with a definitive "Yes." The federal law requires all states to draft standards-minimum expectations for each grade level-and to annually assess how well those standards are being met. But critics of the law argue that all the tests that have followed have not clarified matters at all. Every state administers a different test tied to different standards, and few of the state standards seem to match national ideas about what kids should know.
One size. So why not teach all kids the same things? Or try to make standards uniform? That's what Gerhard and, more important, a growing number of policymakers want to know. With hearings on No Child Left Behind starting in March, two top Senate Democrats have introduced legislation that would require the federal government to define the standards against which all states would be measured. Groups from the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute to the National Education Association, a teachers union, support the idea.
"Isn't it crazy that your child is learning different material and being held to a different standard than, say, your sister's children in another state?" asks Mike Petrilli, Fordham's vice president.
An existing test that should set this all straight-the National Assessment of Educational Progress or the so-called nation's report card-only muddles matters more. NAEP, created in 1964 to provide a snapshot of national academic performance, tests just a sample of students on a sample of questions; as a result, it cannot grade individual students or individual schools.
It can, however, cast doubt on other grades, often contradicting states' rosy reports. In 2003, states like Tennessee, Texas, and Mississippi reported that over 80 percent of their fourth graders were "proficient" or better in reading, yet fewer than 30 percent of their students scored proficient on the NAEP reading test. Thirty-two other states posted gaps of more than 30 percentage points. The latest data-presented last week-are just as dismal. One study, based on 2005 high school transcripts, showed impressive gains in state-reported grade-point averages and course loads. Another, based on 12th-grade NAEP scores in the same year, showed depressing stagnancy in actual test performance; less than one quarter of high school seniors scored proficient in math, and only 35 percent scored proficient in reading-down from 40 percent in 1992.
Critics say No Child Left Behind is the source of the problem. To avoid labeling hundreds of schools "failing," they say states have simply lowered the definition of proficient, or the "cut score," to ensure more schools make the grade. Indeed, a 2004 Missouri law mandated lower cut scores, and Arizona has lowered some of its scores, too.
Of course, grades are less important than the content they measure. But critics say the content is also too weak. A 2006 Fordham report grading the quality of the state standards awarded only three states A's; 26 got D's or F's. A major problem highlighted by Fordham: The "experts" drafted to write the standards were not highly educated in their disciplines.
Qualified standards writers can be hard to find-especially for a state on a tight deadline and trim budget. North Dakota had just 10 permanent staffers on standards and testing; on assessments, Montana's education agency had one. "She's the whole department," says Linda McCulloch, the state superintendent.
By contrast, the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees NAEP, regularly revises standards with the help of dozens of experts. "As a [state] commissioner, you're really pretty much restricted to off-the-shelf tests," says Charles Smith, the former Tennessee education commissioner and now NAGB's executive director. There are not many states ... [that] could attract the kind of experts that we're able to attract." If the federal government were in charge, reformers say, states could design better tests and create more rigorous standards, with no additional funding.
This is not the first time national standards have been proposed. President Bill Clinton tried twice-first to draft standards and later to introduce a voluntary national test-but the ideas failed as opponents warned the test would force schools to teach a liberal national agenda condoning homosexuality and encouraging feminism and as states and municipalities resisted the loss of local control.
The double failure made a deep impression on Michael Cohen, a Clinton adviser. "What is conventionally thought of as national standards-that is, the federal government leads, it picks somebody to write them, and it puts it out there for states to use-I'm increasingly unconvinced that that's the way to get there," he says.
Bottom up. Cohen now believes the states must take the initiative. He is president of Achieve, a nonprofit that helps states improve their standards through a process far more intensive than simply accepting a list from the government. Instead, the states hold summits and solicit outside assistance; the proposed standards are then reviewed by an independent panel. Although each state conducts its own review, they tend to reach similar goals. "The real world is the same wherever you are," Cohen says. "So the states, by virtue of trying to create real-world anchors, are discovering their standards ought to be quite similar to each other."
Letting states write their own plans could produce even better results. Cheri Pierson Yecke, Florida's chancellor of K-12 schools, points to a new reading program that some California schools tested in the 1990s. The resulting lower test scores alarmed policymakers, and the program was scrapped. Because the program wasn't a national one, only some students had to suffer its poor results. "That's the beauty of local control," Yecke explains. "[It] gives us 50 different laboratories, so we'll know what we need to discard and what we need to embrace."
National standards would not necessarily disrupt those laboratories. Neither plan before Congress-one from Sen. Christopher Dodd and the other from Sen. Edward Kennedy-would force the states to adopt the standards the federal government would be required to write. But, if history is any guide, backlashes could result from whatever those standards turn out to be.
This story appears in the March 5, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
February 23, 2007
LA Times: Grades are rising but learning is lagging, federal reports find
Grades are rising but learning is lagging, federal reports find
High school students today have higher GPAs but lower skill levels, suggesting a failure of education reforms.
By Mitchell Landsberg, Times Staff Writer
February 23, 2007
American high school students are taking tougher classes, getting better grades and, apparently, learning less than their counterparts of 15 years ago.
Those were the discouraging implications of two reports issued Thursday by the federal Department of Education, assessing the performance of students in public and private schools. Together, the reports raised sobering questions about the past two decades of educational reform, including whether the movement to raise school standards has amounted to much more than window dressing.
"I think we're sleeping through a crisis," said David P. Driscoll, the Massachusetts commissioner of education, during a Washington news conference convened by the Department of Education. He called the study results "stunning."
Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at UC Berkeley, said he found the results "dismal." After years of reforms aimed primarily at elementary schools, Fuller said the studies "certainly support shining the spotlight on the high school as a priority for reform efforts."
The reports summarized two major government efforts to measure the performance of high school seniors as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. One was a standardized test of 12th graders conducted in 2005. The other was an analysis of transcripts of students who graduated from high school that year.
The transcript study showed that, compared to students in similar studies going back to 1990, the 2005 graduates had racked up more high school credits, had taken more college preparatory classes and had strikingly higher grade point averages. The average GPA rose from 2.68 in 1990 to 2.98 — close to a solid B — in 2005.
That was the good news — or so it seemed. But the standardized test results showed that 12th-grade reading scores have generally been dropping since 1992, casting doubt on what students are learning in those college prep classes.
Math scores posed a different sort of mystery, because the Department of Education switched to a new test in 2005 that wasn't directly comparable to those used before. Still, the results of the new test didn't inspire confidence: Fewer than one-quarter of the 12th graders tested scored in the "proficient" range.
The reports also showed that the gap separating white students from black and Latino students has barely budged since the early 1990s. And although the results were not broken down by state, a broad regional breakdown showed that the West and Southeast lagged well behind the Midwest and, to a lesser extent, the Northeast.
David Gordon, the Sacramento County superintendent of schools and a participant in the Department of Education news conference Thursday, said he found it especially disturbing that the studies focused on "our best students," those who had made it to 12th grade or who had graduated.
"It's clear to me from these data that for all of our talk of the achievement gap among subgroups of students, a larger problem may be an instructional gap or a rigor gap, which affects not just some but most of our students," Gordon said.
The reading and math test was given to 21,000 high school seniors at 900 schools across the country, including 200 private schools. The transcript study was based on 26,000 transcripts from 720 schools, 80 of them private. The reports did not give separate results for public versus private schools.
Policy analysts nationwide said the studies were gloomy news for the American economy, since the country's educational system already measured poorly in international comparisons.
"What we see out of these results is a very disturbing picture of the knowledge and skills of the young people about to go into college and the workforce," said Daria Hall, assistant director of the Education Trust, a Washington-based nonprofit dedicated to improving education, especially for poor and minority students.
Among other things, Hall said, the transcript study provided clear evidence of grade inflation, as well as "course inflation" — offering high-level courses that have "the right names" but a dumbed-down curriculum.
"What it suggests is that we are telling students that they're being successful in these courses when, in fact, we're not teaching them any more than they were learning in the past," she said. "So we are, in effect, lying to these students."
Although the reports came out five years after passage of President Bush's signature education reform initiative, No Child Left Behind, Hall and others said it would be unfair to blame that program for the students' poor showing. They were already in high school when No Child Left Behind was enacted, and it is primarily aimed at elementary and middle schools.
Driscoll recalled an earlier president's contribution to education reform — the Nation at Risk report that seemed to galvanize the educational establishment when it was issued by President Reagan in 1983.
"That was a shocker," said Driscoll. "But here we are, 25 years later [and] … we've just been ignoring what it's going to take to really change the system."
In a statement issued by her office, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said Thursday that the two reports "show that we have our work cut out for us in providing every child in this nation with a quality education."
mitchell.landsberg @latimes.com
High school students today have higher GPAs but lower skill levels, suggesting a failure of education reforms.
By Mitchell Landsberg, Times Staff Writer
February 23, 2007
American high school students are taking tougher classes, getting better grades and, apparently, learning less than their counterparts of 15 years ago.
Those were the discouraging implications of two reports issued Thursday by the federal Department of Education, assessing the performance of students in public and private schools. Together, the reports raised sobering questions about the past two decades of educational reform, including whether the movement to raise school standards has amounted to much more than window dressing.
"I think we're sleeping through a crisis," said David P. Driscoll, the Massachusetts commissioner of education, during a Washington news conference convened by the Department of Education. He called the study results "stunning."
Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at UC Berkeley, said he found the results "dismal." After years of reforms aimed primarily at elementary schools, Fuller said the studies "certainly support shining the spotlight on the high school as a priority for reform efforts."
The reports summarized two major government efforts to measure the performance of high school seniors as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. One was a standardized test of 12th graders conducted in 2005. The other was an analysis of transcripts of students who graduated from high school that year.
The transcript study showed that, compared to students in similar studies going back to 1990, the 2005 graduates had racked up more high school credits, had taken more college preparatory classes and had strikingly higher grade point averages. The average GPA rose from 2.68 in 1990 to 2.98 — close to a solid B — in 2005.
That was the good news — or so it seemed. But the standardized test results showed that 12th-grade reading scores have generally been dropping since 1992, casting doubt on what students are learning in those college prep classes.
Math scores posed a different sort of mystery, because the Department of Education switched to a new test in 2005 that wasn't directly comparable to those used before. Still, the results of the new test didn't inspire confidence: Fewer than one-quarter of the 12th graders tested scored in the "proficient" range.
The reports also showed that the gap separating white students from black and Latino students has barely budged since the early 1990s. And although the results were not broken down by state, a broad regional breakdown showed that the West and Southeast lagged well behind the Midwest and, to a lesser extent, the Northeast.
David Gordon, the Sacramento County superintendent of schools and a participant in the Department of Education news conference Thursday, said he found it especially disturbing that the studies focused on "our best students," those who had made it to 12th grade or who had graduated.
"It's clear to me from these data that for all of our talk of the achievement gap among subgroups of students, a larger problem may be an instructional gap or a rigor gap, which affects not just some but most of our students," Gordon said.
The reading and math test was given to 21,000 high school seniors at 900 schools across the country, including 200 private schools. The transcript study was based on 26,000 transcripts from 720 schools, 80 of them private. The reports did not give separate results for public versus private schools.
Policy analysts nationwide said the studies were gloomy news for the American economy, since the country's educational system already measured poorly in international comparisons.
"What we see out of these results is a very disturbing picture of the knowledge and skills of the young people about to go into college and the workforce," said Daria Hall, assistant director of the Education Trust, a Washington-based nonprofit dedicated to improving education, especially for poor and minority students.
Among other things, Hall said, the transcript study provided clear evidence of grade inflation, as well as "course inflation" — offering high-level courses that have "the right names" but a dumbed-down curriculum.
"What it suggests is that we are telling students that they're being successful in these courses when, in fact, we're not teaching them any more than they were learning in the past," she said. "So we are, in effect, lying to these students."
Although the reports came out five years after passage of President Bush's signature education reform initiative, No Child Left Behind, Hall and others said it would be unfair to blame that program for the students' poor showing. They were already in high school when No Child Left Behind was enacted, and it is primarily aimed at elementary and middle schools.
Driscoll recalled an earlier president's contribution to education reform — the Nation at Risk report that seemed to galvanize the educational establishment when it was issued by President Reagan in 1983.
"That was a shocker," said Driscoll. "But here we are, 25 years later [and] … we've just been ignoring what it's going to take to really change the system."
In a statement issued by her office, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said Thursday that the two reports "show that we have our work cut out for us in providing every child in this nation with a quality education."
mitchell.landsberg @latimes.com
USAT: Grades rise, but reading skills fall, data suggest
Again -- graphics in the web version
USA TODAY
Grades rise, but reading skills fall, data suggest
Updated 2/22/2007 10:28 PM ET
By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — High school seniors are taking more challenging classes and earning higher grades than ever, but their reading skills have actually worsened since 1992, data released Thursday by the U.S. Education Department suggest.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said the results show that "we must act now to increase rigor in our high schools." The No Child Left Behind law, up for reauthorization this year, currently applies only minimally to high schools.
The report brought mixed — and contradictory — results:
A record 68% of the class of 2005 completed at least a standard curriculum with four years of English and three each of math, science and social studies. That's a huge jump from 1990, when only 40% did the same, according to the study of 26,000 public- and private-school transcripts.
In 2005, 51% of students were doing college-preparatory work, up from 31% in 1990. And 10% were earning college credit, up from 5% in 1990.
•The average high school senior doesn't read as well as those in 1992, the first year the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) was given to 12th-graders. In 2005, 35% of seniors scored "proficient" or "advanced," down from 40% in 1992.
Reading at a "proficient" level means students can make critical judgments — for instance, describing how two editorials argue different viewpoints. "Basic" means students can read and retrieve information from a document and recognize a sequence of plot elements.
The government has no comparable long-term data on math scores since it changed the test in 2005. But the 2005 scores show that, overall, 12th-graders' skills are basic at best.
"Clearly we need to look at some major changes in the way schools are organized and how teaching is delivered," Massachusetts Education Commissioner David Driscoll said.
The Brookings Institution's Tom Loveless, who researches the NAEP and course content, said that the reading results "should really be an area of concern" — and that perhaps even the brightest students don't read as much as they used to.
Critics have long said the NAEP is a poor measure of how well 12th-graders do, and the new data could give them ammunition: Even students whose transcripts show they took calculus score only, on average, "proficient" in math.
Loveless noted that the test includes no calculus, which forces advanced students to do math work they haven't done in three or four years.
Education researcher Gerald Bracey said 12th-graders take the NAEP in the last semester of their high school careers, and they have no real incentive to do well. Poor results are "senior slump writ large," he said.
Find this article at: http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-02-22-math-reading-scores_x.htm
USA TODAY
Grades rise, but reading skills fall, data suggest
Updated 2/22/2007 10:28 PM ET
By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — High school seniors are taking more challenging classes and earning higher grades than ever, but their reading skills have actually worsened since 1992, data released Thursday by the U.S. Education Department suggest.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said the results show that "we must act now to increase rigor in our high schools." The No Child Left Behind law, up for reauthorization this year, currently applies only minimally to high schools.
The report brought mixed — and contradictory — results:
A record 68% of the class of 2005 completed at least a standard curriculum with four years of English and three each of math, science and social studies. That's a huge jump from 1990, when only 40% did the same, according to the study of 26,000 public- and private-school transcripts.
In 2005, 51% of students were doing college-preparatory work, up from 31% in 1990. And 10% were earning college credit, up from 5% in 1990.
•The average high school senior doesn't read as well as those in 1992, the first year the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) was given to 12th-graders. In 2005, 35% of seniors scored "proficient" or "advanced," down from 40% in 1992.
Reading at a "proficient" level means students can make critical judgments — for instance, describing how two editorials argue different viewpoints. "Basic" means students can read and retrieve information from a document and recognize a sequence of plot elements.
The government has no comparable long-term data on math scores since it changed the test in 2005. But the 2005 scores show that, overall, 12th-graders' skills are basic at best.
"Clearly we need to look at some major changes in the way schools are organized and how teaching is delivered," Massachusetts Education Commissioner David Driscoll said.
The Brookings Institution's Tom Loveless, who researches the NAEP and course content, said that the reading results "should really be an area of concern" — and that perhaps even the brightest students don't read as much as they used to.
Critics have long said the NAEP is a poor measure of how well 12th-graders do, and the new data could give them ammunition: Even students whose transcripts show they took calculus score only, on average, "proficient" in math.
Loveless noted that the test includes no calculus, which forces advanced students to do math work they haven't done in three or four years.
Education researcher Gerald Bracey said 12th-graders take the NAEP in the last semester of their high school careers, and they have no real incentive to do well. Poor results are "senior slump writ large," he said.
Find this article at: http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-02-22-math-reading-scores_x.htm
WSJ: Non-Union jobs
WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 23, 2007
Non-Union Jobs
February 23, 2007; Page A10
If Apple CEO Steve Jobs had praised teachers unions as the backbone of public education in the U.S., it would have made the front pages. Instead, at an education conference in Austin, Texas, Mr. Jobs offered some constructive criticism of teachers unions and barely anyone noticed.
Sounds like news to us.
"I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they've become unionized in the worst possible way," said Mr. Jobs during a Q-and-A session on technology in the classroom. "This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."
The real crisis in public education, he noted, has nothing to do with the amount of technology in the classroom. It's the fact that union work rules prevent principals from firing the bad teachers and rewarding the good ones. "Here's the problem," said Mr. Jobs, using a business analogy: "What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them, when they came in, they couldn't get rid of people they thought weren't any good in the first place? Or they couldn't pay people three times as much when they got three times as much work done?"
Regular readers of these columns will find nothing particularly shocking in Mr. Jobs's broadside. Still, it's nice to hear such sentiments coming from a titan of industry, especially his.
The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report was released yesterday. The dismal results are what we've come to expect from an elementary and secondary public education system in the vice-grip of the National Education Association and its political acolytes. According to the NAEP survey, nearly 40% of high-school seniors scored below basic level on the math test, and fewer than a quarter of 12th graders rate proficient.
Except for high-skill immigrants, this would be Apple's future labor pool. Mr. Jobs is right to point the finger at the union stewards of public education. And fellow business leaders, who have as big a stake in this matter, would do well to lend him public support.
URL for this article:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117219910015216918.html
February 23, 2007
Non-Union Jobs
February 23, 2007; Page A10
If Apple CEO Steve Jobs had praised teachers unions as the backbone of public education in the U.S., it would have made the front pages. Instead, at an education conference in Austin, Texas, Mr. Jobs offered some constructive criticism of teachers unions and barely anyone noticed.
Sounds like news to us.
"I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they've become unionized in the worst possible way," said Mr. Jobs during a Q-and-A session on technology in the classroom. "This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."
The real crisis in public education, he noted, has nothing to do with the amount of technology in the classroom. It's the fact that union work rules prevent principals from firing the bad teachers and rewarding the good ones. "Here's the problem," said Mr. Jobs, using a business analogy: "What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them, when they came in, they couldn't get rid of people they thought weren't any good in the first place? Or they couldn't pay people three times as much when they got three times as much work done?"
Regular readers of these columns will find nothing particularly shocking in Mr. Jobs's broadside. Still, it's nice to hear such sentiments coming from a titan of industry, especially his.
The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report was released yesterday. The dismal results are what we've come to expect from an elementary and secondary public education system in the vice-grip of the National Education Association and its political acolytes. According to the NAEP survey, nearly 40% of high-school seniors scored below basic level on the math test, and fewer than a quarter of 12th graders rate proficient.
Except for high-skill immigrants, this would be Apple's future labor pool. Mr. Jobs is right to point the finger at the union stewards of public education. And fellow business leaders, who have as big a stake in this matter, would do well to lend him public support.
URL for this article:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117219910015216918.html
WaPo: Test Scores at Odds With Rising High School Grades
Washington Post
Test Scores at Odds With Rising High School Grades
By Amit R. PaleyWashington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 23, 2007; A01
High school seniors are performing worse overall on some national tests than they did in the previous decade, even though they are receiving significantly higher grades and taking what seem to be more rigorous courses, according to government data released yesterday.
The mismatch between stronger transcripts and weak test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the nation's report card, resonated in the Washington area and elsewhere. Some seized upon the findings as evidence of grade inflation and the dumbing-down of courses. The findings also prompted renewed calls for tough national standards and the expansion of the federal No Child Left Behind law.
"We have our work cut out for us," Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said in a statement. "If, in fact, our high school students are taking more challenging courses and earning higher grades, we should be seeing greater gains in test scores."
About 35 percent of 12th-graders tested in 2005 scored proficient or better in reading -- the lowest percentage since the test was launched in 1992, the new data showed. And less than a quarter of seniors scored at least proficient on a new version of the math test; officials called those results disappointing but said they could not be compared to past scores. In addition, a previous report found that 18 percent of seniors in 2005 scored at least proficient in science, down from 21 percent in 1996.
At the same time, the average high school grade-point average rose from 2.68 in 1990 (about a B-minus) to 2.98 in 2005 (about a B), according to a study of transcripts from graduating seniors. The study also found that the percentage of graduating seniors who completed a standard or mid-level course of study rose from 35 to 58 percent in that time; meanwhile, the percentage who took the highest-level curriculum doubled, to 10 percent.
"The core problem is that course titles don't really signal what is taught in the course and grades don't signal what a kid has learned," said Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a D.C.-based nonprofit group that supports No Child Left Behind. She added hyperbolically, "What we're going to end up with is the high school valedictorian who can't write three paragraphs."
Some experts say these educational mirages, which obscure low student achievement with inflated grades and tough-sounding class titles, disproportionately harm poor and minority students.
A visit to two ninth-grade English classes in Prince George's County this week showed that instruction can vary immensely even in classrooms -- just 15 miles apart -- that share the same champagne-colored textbook, the same course title and the same syllabus.
In Room 101 at Bowie High, a racially diverse school in one of the county's more affluent areas, the assignment was: Compare and contrast the themes of disillusionment, poverty and frustration in George Orwell's "Animal Farm" and the poems of Langston Hughes.
In Room 31 at Suitland High, which has more poor and black students, the assignment was: What are your immediate goals? How would you feel if no one close to you supported you in reaching your goals?
The teacher at Suitland, R'Chelle L. Mullins, walked around the classroom and repeated the assignment several times to the students, some of whose heads were slumped on their desks. "What are your immediate goals?" she asked one boy again.
"To pass the ninth grade," he finally answered.
After class, Mullins said she had "stuck very close to the curriculum" and "was doing exactly what the county wants me to do." But when told of the more complicated questions asked in the Bowie High class, Mullins acknowledged that she sometimes modifies assignments based on the background of her students.
Mullins, 24, who began teaching two years ago because she wanted to help underprivileged children, said she had "a different caliber" of students in her classroom. "Not to dumb my kids down," she added. "I hate the bad reputation that they get, and I don't think it's fair at all. . . . Not to pass the blame, but some of these kids should never have been allowed to graduate middle school."
County Superintendent John E. Deasy said he is working hard to reduce inequities among schools and cited uneven teacher quality as a key issue. He said that the county curriculum has been standardized and that the challenge now is to ensure an equal level of instruction in every classroom by investing in teacher training and increasing the number of Advancement Placement courses.
"This is the civil rights issue of our time," Deasy said.
The potential for grade and course-title inflation is not confined to low-performing schools. Julie Greenberg, a math teacher at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, said she was under such pressure to raise grades that she used to keep two sets of books in her statistics class: one for the grades students deserved and one for the grades that appeared on report cards.
"If a teacher were to really grade students on their true level of mastery, there would be such extraordinary levels of failure that it would not be tolerated, so most teachers don't do that," she said.
At a news conference yesterday near Capitol Hill, education experts expressed concern that white and Asian students continue to score consistently higher than black and Hispanic students in all subjects. They also said the overall discrepancy between the test scores and transcripts deserves close examination. Darvin M. Winick, chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversaw the exams and the transcript study, called the gap "very suspicious."
"For all of our talk of the achievement gap amongst subgroups of students, a larger problem may be an instructional gap or a rigor gap," said David W. Gordon, superintendent of Sacramento County schools in California. "There's a disconnect between what we want and expect our 12th-grade students to know and do and what our schools are actually delivering through instruction in the classroom."
Lawmakers said the low test scores would reinvigorate the debate over high school reform as Congress considers the renewal of No Child Left Behind.
Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said "disappointing" results underscore the need to recruit first-rate teachers to low-performing schools.
Test Scores at Odds With Rising High School Grades
By Amit R. PaleyWashington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 23, 2007; A01
High school seniors are performing worse overall on some national tests than they did in the previous decade, even though they are receiving significantly higher grades and taking what seem to be more rigorous courses, according to government data released yesterday.
The mismatch between stronger transcripts and weak test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the nation's report card, resonated in the Washington area and elsewhere. Some seized upon the findings as evidence of grade inflation and the dumbing-down of courses. The findings also prompted renewed calls for tough national standards and the expansion of the federal No Child Left Behind law.
"We have our work cut out for us," Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said in a statement. "If, in fact, our high school students are taking more challenging courses and earning higher grades, we should be seeing greater gains in test scores."
About 35 percent of 12th-graders tested in 2005 scored proficient or better in reading -- the lowest percentage since the test was launched in 1992, the new data showed. And less than a quarter of seniors scored at least proficient on a new version of the math test; officials called those results disappointing but said they could not be compared to past scores. In addition, a previous report found that 18 percent of seniors in 2005 scored at least proficient in science, down from 21 percent in 1996.
At the same time, the average high school grade-point average rose from 2.68 in 1990 (about a B-minus) to 2.98 in 2005 (about a B), according to a study of transcripts from graduating seniors. The study also found that the percentage of graduating seniors who completed a standard or mid-level course of study rose from 35 to 58 percent in that time; meanwhile, the percentage who took the highest-level curriculum doubled, to 10 percent.
"The core problem is that course titles don't really signal what is taught in the course and grades don't signal what a kid has learned," said Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a D.C.-based nonprofit group that supports No Child Left Behind. She added hyperbolically, "What we're going to end up with is the high school valedictorian who can't write three paragraphs."
Some experts say these educational mirages, which obscure low student achievement with inflated grades and tough-sounding class titles, disproportionately harm poor and minority students.
A visit to two ninth-grade English classes in Prince George's County this week showed that instruction can vary immensely even in classrooms -- just 15 miles apart -- that share the same champagne-colored textbook, the same course title and the same syllabus.
In Room 101 at Bowie High, a racially diverse school in one of the county's more affluent areas, the assignment was: Compare and contrast the themes of disillusionment, poverty and frustration in George Orwell's "Animal Farm" and the poems of Langston Hughes.
In Room 31 at Suitland High, which has more poor and black students, the assignment was: What are your immediate goals? How would you feel if no one close to you supported you in reaching your goals?
The teacher at Suitland, R'Chelle L. Mullins, walked around the classroom and repeated the assignment several times to the students, some of whose heads were slumped on their desks. "What are your immediate goals?" she asked one boy again.
"To pass the ninth grade," he finally answered.
After class, Mullins said she had "stuck very close to the curriculum" and "was doing exactly what the county wants me to do." But when told of the more complicated questions asked in the Bowie High class, Mullins acknowledged that she sometimes modifies assignments based on the background of her students.
Mullins, 24, who began teaching two years ago because she wanted to help underprivileged children, said she had "a different caliber" of students in her classroom. "Not to dumb my kids down," she added. "I hate the bad reputation that they get, and I don't think it's fair at all. . . . Not to pass the blame, but some of these kids should never have been allowed to graduate middle school."
County Superintendent John E. Deasy said he is working hard to reduce inequities among schools and cited uneven teacher quality as a key issue. He said that the county curriculum has been standardized and that the challenge now is to ensure an equal level of instruction in every classroom by investing in teacher training and increasing the number of Advancement Placement courses.
"This is the civil rights issue of our time," Deasy said.
The potential for grade and course-title inflation is not confined to low-performing schools. Julie Greenberg, a math teacher at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, said she was under such pressure to raise grades that she used to keep two sets of books in her statistics class: one for the grades students deserved and one for the grades that appeared on report cards.
"If a teacher were to really grade students on their true level of mastery, there would be such extraordinary levels of failure that it would not be tolerated, so most teachers don't do that," she said.
At a news conference yesterday near Capitol Hill, education experts expressed concern that white and Asian students continue to score consistently higher than black and Hispanic students in all subjects. They also said the overall discrepancy between the test scores and transcripts deserves close examination. Darvin M. Winick, chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversaw the exams and the transcript study, called the gap "very suspicious."
"For all of our talk of the achievement gap amongst subgroups of students, a larger problem may be an instructional gap or a rigor gap," said David W. Gordon, superintendent of Sacramento County schools in California. "There's a disconnect between what we want and expect our 12th-grade students to know and do and what our schools are actually delivering through instruction in the classroom."
Lawmakers said the low test scores would reinvigorate the debate over high school reform as Congress considers the renewal of No Child Left Behind.
Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said "disappointing" results underscore the need to recruit first-rate teachers to low-performing schools.
WSJ: Report Raises QuestionsAbout High-School Courses
note: there was a graphic that didn't show up here. It is in the online version. username hager password 8423600
WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 23, 2007
Report Raises QuestionsAbout High-School Courses
By ROBERT TOMSHOFebruary 23, 2007; Page B1
American educators have complained about grade inflation for years. But new findings suggest that U.S. high schools may also suffer from another type of inflation -- in the labeling of courses.
Under pressure to produce graduates better prepared for college and the workplace, dozens of states have stiffened high-school graduation requirements in recent years, pushing a broader array of students to take more years of core subjects and eliminating less rigorous lower-tier courses altogether.
Reflecting these efforts, a review of high-school transcripts by the staff of the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that high-school students are taking, and receiving higher grades in, more college-prep courses than ever.
Yet just-released test results for 12th graders on the NAEP, a widely respected barometer of educational achievement known as the "nation's report card," indicated that students are graduating with mediocre math skills and reading abilities that have tumbled to their lowest level since the early 1990s. The 12th-grade tests are designed to measure the sorts of high-level thinking demanded in college work.
The findings raise questions about whether college-prep courses are as tough as their titles indicate, and, if so, whether high schools and their instructors are adequately prepared to teach such courses to a rapidly changing mix of students.
U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings expressed disappointment with the findings, saying: "If, in fact, our high-school students are taking more challenging courses and earning higher grades, we should be seeing greater gains in test scores."
Other observers said the results suggest that some school districts are teaching watered-down versions of everything from history to trigonometry. "A course title alone does not make rigor," said David Conley, a University of Oregon professor who studies high-school course content.
The NAEP results are likely to fuel calls for reform measures as the federal No Child Left Behind act approaches a reauthorization debate. The Bush administration has proposed requiring states to conduct additional reading and math achievement tests at the high-school level.
In December, the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a private group that includes former governors and cabinet secretaries from both political parties, called for such radical measures as ending high school after 10th grade for some students and denying entry to public colleges and universities to any who can't pass so-called board exams in core subjects.
The NAEP review of high school transcripts, released yesterday, found that 51% of the graduating class of 2005 completed at least a midlevel college-prep curriculum that included four years of English; three years of math, including geometry and algebra; and three years of science including at least two of biology, chemistry and physics. In 1990, only about 31% of seniors completed a similar curriculum.
The NAEP review also found that the class of 2005 received about 360 more hours of instruction in high school than their 1990 counterparts and earned higher grades. On a zero-to-four point scale, the 2005 seniors had a cumulative grade point average of 2.98 points, or about a B, up from 2.68 points in 1990. But the benefits of such changes weren't evident in the results of NAEP reading and math achievement tests for the class of 2005.
On a zero-to-500 point scale, their average reading score was 286 points. That was down a point from 2002, the last time the test was given, and was the lowest average score since 1992, when the average was 292 points. About 40% of the test takers scored at or above the proficient range, down from 44% in 1992.
On the math side, the average score was 150 on a zero-to-300 point scale and only 23% of the seniors were scored at or above the proficient range. NAEP officials said results of the 2005 math test aren't comparable with those from previous years because of recent changes in the exam's structure and content.
Reflecting demographic changes in society, the sorts of students taking the NAEP test have changed significantly in recent years. Hispanics accounted for 14% of all 12th graders in 2005, up from 7% in 1992. The scoring gap between them and white students has changed little since 1992.
Since 1998, when NAEP began allowing accommodations such as longer testing times, more English-language learners are also taking the NAEP. In 2005, they accounted for about 4% of all seniors taking the NAEP reading test and posted an average score of 247. The effect was to lower the overall average score by two points, to 286, which NAEP officials said was statistically significant.
The decline in reading abilities was not a complete surprise. A recent study by ACT Inc., the nonprofit testing concern based in Iowa City, Iowa, found that only about 51% of high school graduates who took the ACT test in 2005 were prepared to tackle college-level reading, down from 55% in 1999. ACT also found a decline in reading skills through the high-school years, with more eighth- and 10th-graders on track for college reading than seniors. "Reading just drops off the radar in high school," said Jon Erickson, ACT's vice president for educational services.
And the NAEP results aren't the only signs that college-prep courses may not be delivering all that they promise.
The College Board, the New York nonprofit that gives the SAT admissions test, is in the midst of a nationwide audit of its high-school Advanced Placement Program courses, amid concerns that some districts aren't offering college-level content.
Meanwhile, a recent study by the state of Maryland found that 30% of its 2005 high-school graduates who completed a college-prep curriculum needed remedial math in college, up from 26% for the class of 2000.
States may require students to take more upper-level courses, but content is still largely left up to local school boards and varies widely. And few states have instituted mandatory end-of-course tests to measure what is actually being taught in high-school classrooms or taken concrete action to ensure that high-school graduation standards are aligned with what colleges and universities expect incoming freshmen to know.
Hodan Janay, of Boston says she earned B's during four years of high-school English, took a college-prep literature course her senior year and passed the state English exams required to graduate. "But I wasn't as ready as I thought," says the 21-year-old, who is now enrolled in a remedial English course at Boston's Bunker Hill Community College.
Write to Robert Tomsho at rob.tomsho@wsj.com3
WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 23, 2007
Report Raises QuestionsAbout High-School Courses
By ROBERT TOMSHOFebruary 23, 2007; Page B1
American educators have complained about grade inflation for years. But new findings suggest that U.S. high schools may also suffer from another type of inflation -- in the labeling of courses.
Under pressure to produce graduates better prepared for college and the workplace, dozens of states have stiffened high-school graduation requirements in recent years, pushing a broader array of students to take more years of core subjects and eliminating less rigorous lower-tier courses altogether.
Reflecting these efforts, a review of high-school transcripts by the staff of the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that high-school students are taking, and receiving higher grades in, more college-prep courses than ever.
Yet just-released test results for 12th graders on the NAEP, a widely respected barometer of educational achievement known as the "nation's report card," indicated that students are graduating with mediocre math skills and reading abilities that have tumbled to their lowest level since the early 1990s. The 12th-grade tests are designed to measure the sorts of high-level thinking demanded in college work.
The findings raise questions about whether college-prep courses are as tough as their titles indicate, and, if so, whether high schools and their instructors are adequately prepared to teach such courses to a rapidly changing mix of students.
U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings expressed disappointment with the findings, saying: "If, in fact, our high-school students are taking more challenging courses and earning higher grades, we should be seeing greater gains in test scores."
Other observers said the results suggest that some school districts are teaching watered-down versions of everything from history to trigonometry. "A course title alone does not make rigor," said David Conley, a University of Oregon professor who studies high-school course content.
The NAEP results are likely to fuel calls for reform measures as the federal No Child Left Behind act approaches a reauthorization debate. The Bush administration has proposed requiring states to conduct additional reading and math achievement tests at the high-school level.
In December, the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a private group that includes former governors and cabinet secretaries from both political parties, called for such radical measures as ending high school after 10th grade for some students and denying entry to public colleges and universities to any who can't pass so-called board exams in core subjects.
The NAEP review of high school transcripts, released yesterday, found that 51% of the graduating class of 2005 completed at least a midlevel college-prep curriculum that included four years of English; three years of math, including geometry and algebra; and three years of science including at least two of biology, chemistry and physics. In 1990, only about 31% of seniors completed a similar curriculum.
The NAEP review also found that the class of 2005 received about 360 more hours of instruction in high school than their 1990 counterparts and earned higher grades. On a zero-to-four point scale, the 2005 seniors had a cumulative grade point average of 2.98 points, or about a B, up from 2.68 points in 1990. But the benefits of such changes weren't evident in the results of NAEP reading and math achievement tests for the class of 2005.
On a zero-to-500 point scale, their average reading score was 286 points. That was down a point from 2002, the last time the test was given, and was the lowest average score since 1992, when the average was 292 points. About 40% of the test takers scored at or above the proficient range, down from 44% in 1992.
On the math side, the average score was 150 on a zero-to-300 point scale and only 23% of the seniors were scored at or above the proficient range. NAEP officials said results of the 2005 math test aren't comparable with those from previous years because of recent changes in the exam's structure and content.
Reflecting demographic changes in society, the sorts of students taking the NAEP test have changed significantly in recent years. Hispanics accounted for 14% of all 12th graders in 2005, up from 7% in 1992. The scoring gap between them and white students has changed little since 1992.
Since 1998, when NAEP began allowing accommodations such as longer testing times, more English-language learners are also taking the NAEP. In 2005, they accounted for about 4% of all seniors taking the NAEP reading test and posted an average score of 247. The effect was to lower the overall average score by two points, to 286, which NAEP officials said was statistically significant.
The decline in reading abilities was not a complete surprise. A recent study by ACT Inc., the nonprofit testing concern based in Iowa City, Iowa, found that only about 51% of high school graduates who took the ACT test in 2005 were prepared to tackle college-level reading, down from 55% in 1999. ACT also found a decline in reading skills through the high-school years, with more eighth- and 10th-graders on track for college reading than seniors. "Reading just drops off the radar in high school," said Jon Erickson, ACT's vice president for educational services.
And the NAEP results aren't the only signs that college-prep courses may not be delivering all that they promise.
The College Board, the New York nonprofit that gives the SAT admissions test, is in the midst of a nationwide audit of its high-school Advanced Placement Program courses, amid concerns that some districts aren't offering college-level content.
Meanwhile, a recent study by the state of Maryland found that 30% of its 2005 high-school graduates who completed a college-prep curriculum needed remedial math in college, up from 26% for the class of 2000.
States may require students to take more upper-level courses, but content is still largely left up to local school boards and varies widely. And few states have instituted mandatory end-of-course tests to measure what is actually being taught in high-school classrooms or taken concrete action to ensure that high-school graduation standards are aligned with what colleges and universities expect incoming freshmen to know.
Hodan Janay, of Boston says she earned B's during four years of high-school English, took a college-prep literature course her senior year and passed the state English exams required to graduate. "But I wasn't as ready as I thought," says the 21-year-old, who is now enrolled in a remedial English course at Boston's Bunker Hill Community College.
Write to Robert Tomsho at rob.tomsho@wsj.com3
February 22, 2007
Tolerance.org: How Stereotypes Undermine Test Scores
This is a pretty interesting study. If you've read "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell, there is a section where he talks about an experiment conducted relating to racial self-identification and performance on standardized tests (the GRE in this case).
Just by having a control group identify their race on a pretest questionnaire caused a significant swing in correct answers. The following is an interview with the professor who conducted that experiment... keep an eye out for the motivational things he mentions.
February 2007 -- Subtle changes in test environments can improve standardized test scores among students of color and girls.
interview by Jennifer Holladay
For more than 10 years, New York University associate professor Joshua Aronson and his colleagues have examined ways stereotypes interfere with academic performance.
Comparatively low performance among African Americans and Latino students, as well as girls and women in mathematics and science, tends to be attributed to cultural differences that supposedly undermine acquisition of skills or values necessary for academic achievement.
But, Aronson and his colleagues would encourage us to consider the psychology of stigma -- how human beings respond to negative stereotypes about their racial or gender group.
Consistently, their research indicates that being targeted by well-known stereotypes ("blacks are unintelligent," "Latinos perform poorly on tests," "girls can't do math" and so on) can be threatening to students in profound ways, a predicament they call "stereotype threat."
While offsetting stereotype threat isn't a cure-all for the achievement gap, Aronson and his colleagues have demonstrated that even subtle changes to testing situations can improve standardized test scores among students of color, girls and women.
Teaching Tolerance's Jennifer Holladay recently sat down for a virtual chat with Joshua about the implications of this research for educators, during testing season and beyond.
Jennifer: Explain "stereotype threat" to me, in plain terms.
Joshua: Well, take the "absentminded professor" stereotype. I'm a professor, and, like most people, I'm capable of absentmindedness. In my profession though, I'm keenly aware of that stereotype, and I might worry that others -- students in particular -- might see me this way. Let's say I'm late to class, having a hard time finding my lecture notes, stumbling around, just generally flustered. The question crosses my mind: Am I behaving like an absentminded professor? Are my students seeing me that way? I may become even more flustered because my attention is divided by this outside concern.
When a stereotype paints a negative image, whether it's that professors are absentminded or that students of color "don't do well on tests," it can impact those targeted internally, creating a sense of risk about living up -- or down -- to the negative stereotype.
Consider a Latino student called upon in class to answer a complex question. While the student may or may not know the answer, when you add on the stereotype that "Latino intellect" is inferior, the student may perform less well than she otherwise would.
Negative stereotypes about intelligence or aptitude among people of color is particularly dangerous in our society, because the stereotypes are widely known and intelligence is so universally valued. Unfortunately, our research also has shown mere awareness of such stereotypes is enough to manifest the threat in students; one does not have to believe they are true.
Jennifer: So, students of color -- and girls and women in math and sciences -- may internalize social stereotypes and that internalization may impede their performance in academic settings. This time of year, my mind is all about testing. Does stereotype threat manifest in testing?
Joshua: Stereotype threat arises in situations where a negative stereotype relates to evaluating performance. So, absolutely, standardized testing is relevant -- incredibly so after passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).
Jennifer: So how might teachers and schools offset stereotype threat and, at least in relation to it, maximize student performance on standardized tests?
Joshua: How schools position tests is critically important. Ideally, they should be situated as non-evaluative tasks. This may be hard to do in the NCLB era, yet our research has shown time and time again that, if tests are not presented as a measure of students' intelligence, students of color do better. One teacher we worked with told students the test would be used to measure how well the school was doing, rather than how well students were doing. Students performed better.
If this isn't possible, schools should be clear that the tests will measure of students' current knowledge, not their overall ability or potential. Many students believe intelligence and aptitude are unchangeable -- that whatever they were born with is all they're ever going to have. And when students are aware of social stereotypes like "blacks are stupid" or "girls can't do math," it may seem pointless to try to do your best.
A key way to offset the stereotype threat is to stress consistently throughout the year the expandability of academic abilities. When teachers, parents and others let students know that their abilities can improve with hard work, the stereotype threat loses some of its potency, and, research shows, students' test scores and grades will improve.
Jennifer: Is there any value in using the stereotypes as a motivational tool? Like an "us vs. them" -- "we'll prove them wrong!" -- sort of challenge?
Joshua: Not in the context of difficult standardized tests. Stereotype threat can make students try harder, and, when they are charged with a task that can be easily accomplished with a boost of energy, the "us vs. them" mentality might help. In the context of standardized tests, however, what students need is a relaxed kind of concentration. Anything that heightens pressure to perform, including a "we'll show them" mentality, will be counterproductive.
Jennifer: What else can teachers and schools do to offset stereotype threat during testing season?
Joshua: Never, ever ask students to complete questions about their racial, ethnic or gender identities as part of a test. Our research, both in laboratory and actual school settings, show that these seemingly benign questions are enough to introduce stereotype threat and increase anxiety for test takers.
Additionally, one of the most powerful things teachers can do to offset the stereotype threat and bolster student performance is to prompt students to reflect on their talents, beliefs and values. These kinds of "affirmations" remind students of what's important to them and can build a line of defense against stereotype threat. One recent study actually showed affirmation procedures were directly related to a 40% drop in grade disparities between students in different racial groups.
Jennifer: What should schools do throughout the year -- not just during testing season -- to create environments that guard against stereotype threat?
Joshua: Emphasizing the expandability of academic abilities and engaging in affirmation exercises should be done consistently. Two other practices can really help.
First, exposure to role models is important. Ideally, the role models should be older students of shared racial, ethnic or gender identities who overcame difficulties through hard work and ultimately mastered the content.
A famous female engineer isn't the ideal role model for girls in relation to math proficiency, because she can be seen as a "token" of female success in mathematics, someone who possesses an "unusual-for-girls" natural talent. When students serve as role models for each other, the malleability of academic abilities is highlighted, showing students that progress is not only possible, but also normal with persistence.
Second, if I could make just one change to instructional practices in schools, it would be broad-scale adoption of cooperative learning techniques. Stereotypes abound in competitive environments. When students work cooperatively to tackle challenging material, prejudice (and stereotype threat) are reduced and academic achievement among students from stigmatized groups can improve considerably.
Contact us for permission to reprint this interview. Please reference its title in your request and provide the name and location of your school or organization.
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Want to Know More?
Order a copy of Joshua Aronson's Improving Academic Achievement: Impact of Psychological Factors on Education
Stereotype Threat Goes to College
Joshua's mentor, Claude Steele, describes how the threat manifests among black college students.
Additional Resources
Find extra ideas in The ABCs of Testing Season.
Just by having a control group identify their race on a pretest questionnaire caused a significant swing in correct answers. The following is an interview with the professor who conducted that experiment... keep an eye out for the motivational things he mentions.
February 2007 -- Subtle changes in test environments can improve standardized test scores among students of color and girls.
interview by Jennifer Holladay
For more than 10 years, New York University associate professor Joshua Aronson and his colleagues have examined ways stereotypes interfere with academic performance.
Comparatively low performance among African Americans and Latino students, as well as girls and women in mathematics and science, tends to be attributed to cultural differences that supposedly undermine acquisition of skills or values necessary for academic achievement.
But, Aronson and his colleagues would encourage us to consider the psychology of stigma -- how human beings respond to negative stereotypes about their racial or gender group.
Consistently, their research indicates that being targeted by well-known stereotypes ("blacks are unintelligent," "Latinos perform poorly on tests," "girls can't do math" and so on) can be threatening to students in profound ways, a predicament they call "stereotype threat."
While offsetting stereotype threat isn't a cure-all for the achievement gap, Aronson and his colleagues have demonstrated that even subtle changes to testing situations can improve standardized test scores among students of color, girls and women.
Teaching Tolerance's Jennifer Holladay recently sat down for a virtual chat with Joshua about the implications of this research for educators, during testing season and beyond.
Jennifer: Explain "stereotype threat" to me, in plain terms.
Joshua: Well, take the "absentminded professor" stereotype. I'm a professor, and, like most people, I'm capable of absentmindedness. In my profession though, I'm keenly aware of that stereotype, and I might worry that others -- students in particular -- might see me this way. Let's say I'm late to class, having a hard time finding my lecture notes, stumbling around, just generally flustered. The question crosses my mind: Am I behaving like an absentminded professor? Are my students seeing me that way? I may become even more flustered because my attention is divided by this outside concern.
When a stereotype paints a negative image, whether it's that professors are absentminded or that students of color "don't do well on tests," it can impact those targeted internally, creating a sense of risk about living up -- or down -- to the negative stereotype.
Consider a Latino student called upon in class to answer a complex question. While the student may or may not know the answer, when you add on the stereotype that "Latino intellect" is inferior, the student may perform less well than she otherwise would.
Negative stereotypes about intelligence or aptitude among people of color is particularly dangerous in our society, because the stereotypes are widely known and intelligence is so universally valued. Unfortunately, our research also has shown mere awareness of such stereotypes is enough to manifest the threat in students; one does not have to believe they are true.
Jennifer: So, students of color -- and girls and women in math and sciences -- may internalize social stereotypes and that internalization may impede their performance in academic settings. This time of year, my mind is all about testing. Does stereotype threat manifest in testing?
Joshua: Stereotype threat arises in situations where a negative stereotype relates to evaluating performance. So, absolutely, standardized testing is relevant -- incredibly so after passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).
Jennifer: So how might teachers and schools offset stereotype threat and, at least in relation to it, maximize student performance on standardized tests?
Joshua: How schools position tests is critically important. Ideally, they should be situated as non-evaluative tasks. This may be hard to do in the NCLB era, yet our research has shown time and time again that, if tests are not presented as a measure of students' intelligence, students of color do better. One teacher we worked with told students the test would be used to measure how well the school was doing, rather than how well students were doing. Students performed better.
If this isn't possible, schools should be clear that the tests will measure of students' current knowledge, not their overall ability or potential. Many students believe intelligence and aptitude are unchangeable -- that whatever they were born with is all they're ever going to have. And when students are aware of social stereotypes like "blacks are stupid" or "girls can't do math," it may seem pointless to try to do your best.
A key way to offset the stereotype threat is to stress consistently throughout the year the expandability of academic abilities. When teachers, parents and others let students know that their abilities can improve with hard work, the stereotype threat loses some of its potency, and, research shows, students' test scores and grades will improve.
Jennifer: Is there any value in using the stereotypes as a motivational tool? Like an "us vs. them" -- "we'll prove them wrong!" -- sort of challenge?
Joshua: Not in the context of difficult standardized tests. Stereotype threat can make students try harder, and, when they are charged with a task that can be easily accomplished with a boost of energy, the "us vs. them" mentality might help. In the context of standardized tests, however, what students need is a relaxed kind of concentration. Anything that heightens pressure to perform, including a "we'll show them" mentality, will be counterproductive.
Jennifer: What else can teachers and schools do to offset stereotype threat during testing season?
Joshua: Never, ever ask students to complete questions about their racial, ethnic or gender identities as part of a test. Our research, both in laboratory and actual school settings, show that these seemingly benign questions are enough to introduce stereotype threat and increase anxiety for test takers.
Additionally, one of the most powerful things teachers can do to offset the stereotype threat and bolster student performance is to prompt students to reflect on their talents, beliefs and values. These kinds of "affirmations" remind students of what's important to them and can build a line of defense against stereotype threat. One recent study actually showed affirmation procedures were directly related to a 40% drop in grade disparities between students in different racial groups.
Jennifer: What should schools do throughout the year -- not just during testing season -- to create environments that guard against stereotype threat?
Joshua: Emphasizing the expandability of academic abilities and engaging in affirmation exercises should be done consistently. Two other practices can really help.
First, exposure to role models is important. Ideally, the role models should be older students of shared racial, ethnic or gender identities who overcame difficulties through hard work and ultimately mastered the content.
A famous female engineer isn't the ideal role model for girls in relation to math proficiency, because she can be seen as a "token" of female success in mathematics, someone who possesses an "unusual-for-girls" natural talent. When students serve as role models for each other, the malleability of academic abilities is highlighted, showing students that progress is not only possible, but also normal with persistence.
Second, if I could make just one change to instructional practices in schools, it would be broad-scale adoption of cooperative learning techniques. Stereotypes abound in competitive environments. When students work cooperatively to tackle challenging material, prejudice (and stereotype threat) are reduced and academic achievement among students from stigmatized groups can improve considerably.
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Want to Know More?
Order a copy of Joshua Aronson's Improving Academic Achievement: Impact of Psychological Factors on Education
Stereotype Threat Goes to College
Joshua's mentor, Claude Steele, describes how the threat manifests among black college students.
Additional Resources
Find extra ideas in The ABCs of Testing Season.
Christian Science Monitor: Now's the time to test standardized tests
Now's the time to test standardized tests
The Monitor's ViewThu Feb 22, 3:00 AM ET
A five-year federal experiment to boost K-12 schools by standardized testing is still far from its goal: making all students "proficient" in math and reading by 2014. Now Congress will soon weigh whether to renew the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The review itself will be a new test of what the US expects from schools.
Holding public educators accountable for the quality of their work was a noble and necessary aim of the 2002 law. It was designed to produce better workers for an American economy struggling to keep its competitive advantage in a globalized workforce.
But at least 1,800 schools are failing to meet their state's new targets in math and reading. And too many states are using loopholes to lower test standards and make more schools appear to be succeeding - when they clearly aren't, based on the results of separate exams known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The definition of "proficiency" is being dumbed down.
And such weakening of standards helps many states avoid remedies set out by the law to give students an opportunity for tutoring and a choice in transferring to better schools. This neglect of children's basic needs should not go unnoticed.
Many problems have cropped up in implementing the NCLB law, leading to many studies on how to fix them. As House and Senate committees begin hearings in coming weeks to reauthorize the law, they'll need to carefully weigh these diverse recommendations through the same bipartisan lens that created the law, while strengthening its mandates.
President Bush, who sees this act as his signature domestic initiative, proposed his own fixes last month. His ideas lack one of the most needed changes - extending the law to ensure high school seniors meet minimum standards. But his call for lifting state bans on the number of charter schools and for giving federal vouchers to students in underperforming schools shows the kind of solutions that may be necessary.
Mr. Bush also wants the law to require proficiency in science, make it easier for administrators to remove bad teachers, and provide tutoring and the school-transfer option only to those categories of students that are failing.
Other worthwhile ideas have come from a bipartisan panel sponsored by the Aspen Institute. Most of its proposals keep the right emphasis on requiring steady progress in results. Next week, a coalition between the US Chamber of Commerce and the Center for American Progress will offer changes to the law while issuing a "report card" on how each state is implementing it.
Congress needs to renew the law this year to ensure maximum bipartisanship goes into reshaping it before campaigning for the 2008 elections begins in earnest. And with the 2014 deadline for full "proficiency" unlikely to be met, it must rethink this federal deadline. Bush wants to impose sanctions on failing schools in 2020.
The nation remains uneasy about this strong federal hand in local education but also worried about how undereducated workers are affecting its economic future. Whether to impose testing is no longer the issue, but rather how such tests are done, and whether these measurements are used to improve education for all children.
The Monitor's ViewThu Feb 22, 3:00 AM ET
A five-year federal experiment to boost K-12 schools by standardized testing is still far from its goal: making all students "proficient" in math and reading by 2014. Now Congress will soon weigh whether to renew the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The review itself will be a new test of what the US expects from schools.
Holding public educators accountable for the quality of their work was a noble and necessary aim of the 2002 law. It was designed to produce better workers for an American economy struggling to keep its competitive advantage in a globalized workforce.
But at least 1,800 schools are failing to meet their state's new targets in math and reading. And too many states are using loopholes to lower test standards and make more schools appear to be succeeding - when they clearly aren't, based on the results of separate exams known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The definition of "proficiency" is being dumbed down.
And such weakening of standards helps many states avoid remedies set out by the law to give students an opportunity for tutoring and a choice in transferring to better schools. This neglect of children's basic needs should not go unnoticed.
Many problems have cropped up in implementing the NCLB law, leading to many studies on how to fix them. As House and Senate committees begin hearings in coming weeks to reauthorize the law, they'll need to carefully weigh these diverse recommendations through the same bipartisan lens that created the law, while strengthening its mandates.
President Bush, who sees this act as his signature domestic initiative, proposed his own fixes last month. His ideas lack one of the most needed changes - extending the law to ensure high school seniors meet minimum standards. But his call for lifting state bans on the number of charter schools and for giving federal vouchers to students in underperforming schools shows the kind of solutions that may be necessary.
Mr. Bush also wants the law to require proficiency in science, make it easier for administrators to remove bad teachers, and provide tutoring and the school-transfer option only to those categories of students that are failing.
Other worthwhile ideas have come from a bipartisan panel sponsored by the Aspen Institute. Most of its proposals keep the right emphasis on requiring steady progress in results. Next week, a coalition between the US Chamber of Commerce and the Center for American Progress will offer changes to the law while issuing a "report card" on how each state is implementing it.
Congress needs to renew the law this year to ensure maximum bipartisanship goes into reshaping it before campaigning for the 2008 elections begins in earnest. And with the 2014 deadline for full "proficiency" unlikely to be met, it must rethink this federal deadline. Bush wants to impose sanctions on failing schools in 2020.
The nation remains uneasy about this strong federal hand in local education but also worried about how undereducated workers are affecting its economic future. Whether to impose testing is no longer the issue, but rather how such tests are done, and whether these measurements are used to improve education for all children.
Newsday.com: US Schools Suspected of Inflating Reading Test Scores
BY JOHN HILDEBRAND
john.hildebrand@newsday.com
February 22, 2007, 9:31 AM EST
Twelfth-graders show no improvement in reading skills on the latest national tests, but their grades continue to climb, according to federal officials who suspect the nation's schools are inflating grades.
Suspicions that teens' rising grade-point averages are unmerited were fueled by two national reports released Thursday morning at a Washington, D.C., news conference. Both reports are from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a U.S.-sponsored program that tests students in academic subjects.
The latest test results -- in 12th-grade reading -- have hit their lowest point nationwide since assessment in that subject first started. On average, according to a new report on reading achievement, students scored 286 on a scale of 0 to 500 in 2005, down one point from 2002 and six points from 1992.
Meanwhile, grade-point averages have risen steadily nationwide, according to a companion report on high-school transcripts. In 1990, that typical student grade average in English was 2.52 out of a possible 4.0, or the equivalent of a C-plus. By 2005, the typical grade average was 2.82, equivalent to a B-minus.
Federal authorities say they can't be sure whether this reflects a conscious effort by schools to puff students' achievements, or whether other factors such as teacher inexperience in grading also may be responsible.
"What we're saying is that grade inflation is one of a variety of factors that could be at play here," said Stephanie Germeraad, a spokeswoman for the National Assessment of Educational Progress's appointed governing board. "We need to find out what's going on in classrooms."
This marks the first time that National Assessment has drawn such a sharp contrast between declining student achievement and inflated transcripts. However, sponsors of private national testing programs such as the SAT have expressed concern over the same phenomenon for years.
On Long Island, educators say inflated grades are an inevitable result of the pressures felt by students to win admission to selective colleges.
"I think grade inflation has in recent years been endemic to every high school, especially to those that are college-prep institutions," said Jeff Rozran, an English teacher at Syosset High School. "Obviously, the pressure from parents and administrators to keep grades high is very real. But I don't think there's any conscious effort to give higher grades."
Rozran, who is a director of New York State United Teachers, a statewide faculty union, adds that declining reading levels also are inevitable in a world given over to video games.
"When children don't read for recreation, naturally reading scores are going to decline over time," he said. "I don't think there's anything surprising about this, except that none of us know how to address it."
john.hildebrand@newsday.com
February 22, 2007, 9:31 AM EST
Twelfth-graders show no improvement in reading skills on the latest national tests, but their grades continue to climb, according to federal officials who suspect the nation's schools are inflating grades.
Suspicions that teens' rising grade-point averages are unmerited were fueled by two national reports released Thursday morning at a Washington, D.C., news conference. Both reports are from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a U.S.-sponsored program that tests students in academic subjects.
The latest test results -- in 12th-grade reading -- have hit their lowest point nationwide since assessment in that subject first started. On average, according to a new report on reading achievement, students scored 286 on a scale of 0 to 500 in 2005, down one point from 2002 and six points from 1992.
Meanwhile, grade-point averages have risen steadily nationwide, according to a companion report on high-school transcripts. In 1990, that typical student grade average in English was 2.52 out of a possible 4.0, or the equivalent of a C-plus. By 2005, the typical grade average was 2.82, equivalent to a B-minus.
Federal authorities say they can't be sure whether this reflects a conscious effort by schools to puff students' achievements, or whether other factors such as teacher inexperience in grading also may be responsible.
"What we're saying is that grade inflation is one of a variety of factors that could be at play here," said Stephanie Germeraad, a spokeswoman for the National Assessment of Educational Progress's appointed governing board. "We need to find out what's going on in classrooms."
This marks the first time that National Assessment has drawn such a sharp contrast between declining student achievement and inflated transcripts. However, sponsors of private national testing programs such as the SAT have expressed concern over the same phenomenon for years.
On Long Island, educators say inflated grades are an inevitable result of the pressures felt by students to win admission to selective colleges.
"I think grade inflation has in recent years been endemic to every high school, especially to those that are college-prep institutions," said Jeff Rozran, an English teacher at Syosset High School. "Obviously, the pressure from parents and administrators to keep grades high is very real. But I don't think there's any conscious effort to give higher grades."
Rozran, who is a director of New York State United Teachers, a statewide faculty union, adds that declining reading levels also are inevitable in a world given over to video games.
"When children don't read for recreation, naturally reading scores are going to decline over time," he said. "I don't think there's anything surprising about this, except that none of us know how to address it."
Copyright 2007 Newsday Inc.
AP: Test Scores, Grades Don't Jibe
By NANCY ZUCKERBROD
AP Education Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - Large percentages of high school seniors are posting weak scores on national math and reading tests even though more of them are taking challenging courses and getting higher grades in school, two reports released Thursday show.
"The reality is that the results don't square," said Darvin Winick, chair of the independent National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the national tests.
Nearly 40 percent of high school seniors scored below the basic level on the math test. More than a quarter of seniors failed to reach the basic level on the reading test. Most educators think students ought to be able to work at the basic level.
The reading scores show no change since 2002, the last time they were given. "We should be getting better. There's nothing good about a flat score," Winick said.
The government said it could not compare the math results to old scores because the latest test was significantly different.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress _ often called the nation's report card _ is viewed as the best way to compare students across the country because it's the only uniform national yardstick for how well students are learning.
The tests were given in 2005. The government released the scores along with a report examining the high school transcripts of 2005 graduates.
The transcript study shows high school students are earning more credits, taking more challenging courses and getting higher grade-point averages than in the past.
In 2005, high school graduates had an overall grade-point average just shy of 3.0 _ or about a B. That has gone up from a grade-point average of about 2.7 in 1990.
It is unclear whether student performance has improved or whether grade inflation or something else might be responsible, the report said.
More students are completing high school with a standard curriculum, meaning they took at least four credits of English and three credits each of social studies, math and science. More students also are taking the next level of courses, which generally includes college preparatory classes.
But the study showed no increase in the number of high-schoolers who completed the most advanced curriculum, which could include college-level or honors classes.
On the math test, about 60 percent of high school seniors performed at or above the basic level. At that level, a student should be able to convert a decimal to a fraction, for example.
Just one-fourth of 12th-graders were proficient or better in math, meaning they demonstrated solid academic performance. To qualify as "proficient," students might have to determine what type of graph should be used to display particular types of data.
On the reading test, about three-fourths of seniors performed at or above the basic level, while 40 percent hit the proficient mark.
Seniors working at a basic reading level can identify elements of an author's style. At the proficient level, they can make inferences from reading material, draw conclusions from it and make connections to their own experiences.
As in the past, the math and reading scores showed large achievement gaps between white students and minorities.
Forty-three percent of white students scored at or above proficient levels on the reading test, compared with 20 percent of Hispanic students and 16 percent of black students.
On the math test, 29 percent of white students reached the proficient level, compared with 8 percent of Hispanics and 6 percent of blacks.
The gap in reading scores between whites and minorities was relatively unchanged since 2002.
The federal No Child Left Behind law has put added emphasis on math and reading, largely in the elementary- and middle-school grades. It also requires states to separate out their test scores by race so officials can track and try to narrow achievement gaps between groups of students.
AP Education Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - Large percentages of high school seniors are posting weak scores on national math and reading tests even though more of them are taking challenging courses and getting higher grades in school, two reports released Thursday show.
"The reality is that the results don't square," said Darvin Winick, chair of the independent National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the national tests.
Nearly 40 percent of high school seniors scored below the basic level on the math test. More than a quarter of seniors failed to reach the basic level on the reading test. Most educators think students ought to be able to work at the basic level.
The reading scores show no change since 2002, the last time they were given. "We should be getting better. There's nothing good about a flat score," Winick said.
The government said it could not compare the math results to old scores because the latest test was significantly different.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress _ often called the nation's report card _ is viewed as the best way to compare students across the country because it's the only uniform national yardstick for how well students are learning.
The tests were given in 2005. The government released the scores along with a report examining the high school transcripts of 2005 graduates.
The transcript study shows high school students are earning more credits, taking more challenging courses and getting higher grade-point averages than in the past.
In 2005, high school graduates had an overall grade-point average just shy of 3.0 _ or about a B. That has gone up from a grade-point average of about 2.7 in 1990.
It is unclear whether student performance has improved or whether grade inflation or something else might be responsible, the report said.
More students are completing high school with a standard curriculum, meaning they took at least four credits of English and three credits each of social studies, math and science. More students also are taking the next level of courses, which generally includes college preparatory classes.
But the study showed no increase in the number of high-schoolers who completed the most advanced curriculum, which could include college-level or honors classes.
On the math test, about 60 percent of high school seniors performed at or above the basic level. At that level, a student should be able to convert a decimal to a fraction, for example.
Just one-fourth of 12th-graders were proficient or better in math, meaning they demonstrated solid academic performance. To qualify as "proficient," students might have to determine what type of graph should be used to display particular types of data.
On the reading test, about three-fourths of seniors performed at or above the basic level, while 40 percent hit the proficient mark.
Seniors working at a basic reading level can identify elements of an author's style. At the proficient level, they can make inferences from reading material, draw conclusions from it and make connections to their own experiences.
As in the past, the math and reading scores showed large achievement gaps between white students and minorities.
Forty-three percent of white students scored at or above proficient levels on the reading test, compared with 20 percent of Hispanic students and 16 percent of black students.
On the math test, 29 percent of white students reached the proficient level, compared with 8 percent of Hispanics and 6 percent of blacks.
The gap in reading scores between whites and minorities was relatively unchanged since 2002.
The federal No Child Left Behind law has put added emphasis on math and reading, largely in the elementary- and middle-school grades. It also requires states to separate out their test scores by race so officials can track and try to narrow achievement gaps between groups of students.
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