EdDaily: Voluntary national standards raise technical questions

Voluntary national standards raise technical questions

By Stephen Sawchuk
Staff Writer

Passing a voluntary national educational standards bill represents a monumental political challenge for Congress, but some stakeholders feel that an equally large technical challenge will face the body charged with development of the standards and states that agree to adopt them.

The discourse around national standards has mostly dodged issues of how to align tests to those standards and set uniform proficiency definitions. Yet they are crucial matters: States theoretically could adopt national standards and still not produce comparable data, experts say.

"You could have different tests that align in varying degrees, but if you were serious about it, you would conclude some of them did a better job than others," said Robert Linn, director of the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing. "And there would still be the major issue of what the academic achievement levels are, which at present are just all over the map."

All eyes on NAEP

Several voluntary national standards proposals would use the National Assessment of Educational Progress as a starting point; the Standards to Provide Educational Achievement for Kids Act, S. 224, introduced by Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., would require the National Assessment Governing Board to anchor K-12 voluntary math and science national standards in existing NAEP frameworks.

States have long relied unofficially on the frameworks as one resource for development of their state standards. Yet testing experts are not convinced of their technical appropriateness as a basis for tests aligned to national standards.

Unlike NAEP, states test all students on all test questions. A combination of the number of test items and how well they cover standards governs the value of the instructional information.

"[NAEP] frameworks are pretty broad," Linn said. "And some states like Wyoming that are trying to have a more focused set of content standards might feel pressured to be much broader than desirable from an instructional point of view."

Missouri, whose new fourth and eighth grade-level standards closely align to NAEP frameworks, has had to limit what its test assesses for that reason.

"Our test is a sample of the content; it's not intended to cover every one of the grade-level objectives," said Walt Brown, state curriculum and assessment coordinator. "We'd be testing kids for a week to try to catch all of that."

Stakeholders developing a national standard will have to confront the issue of breadth and depth of the national standards, and also to what extent they should resemble international standards.

NAGB officials could not speculate on the issue but confirmed that if Congress charged the board with development of national standards, it likely would use a process similar to that used to develop NAEP frameworks, which solicits input from officials at all educational tiers.

The cut score challenge

Experts say tests aligned to a common standard also will need to become more similar so states can create a common definition of proficiency and comparable cut scores, the percent of questions a student must answer correctly to be deemed proficient.

Louisiana has learned that lesson firsthand. The state attempted to link its state assessment rigor to NAEP tests in 1999-2000 but found many technical challenges because of the differences in test construction and content.

"We had to use a procedure that was not technically sophisticated because of the lack of our ability to link those two tests together in a psychometric or statistical sense," said Scott Norton, Louisiana's accountability director.

The Dodd bill would authorize grants to states that used NAEP-based national proficiency standards. To date, only Missouri, with its close state-to-NAEP standards, has aligned its proficiency levels to NAEP. Theoretically, the same percent of students score proficient on both state tests and NAEP.

All states signing onto national standards would likely have to agree on a common proficiency definition and a method of comparing cut scores. That, too, could prove challenging, especially as some have questioned the appropriateness of NAEP's proficiency definition.

"My personal view is that NAEP standards are way too stringent," Linn said. "There is no country in the world that has come close to having all students that at level."

A national test?

Some feel a voluntary national test aligned to the standard would produce the most accurate state-to-state comparisons.

"It would be a real waste of potential to have one national standard and 50 state tests," said Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. "If everyone's aligning their assessments to the same standards, they ought to look awfully similar at the end."

That could be a tough sell to states already suspicious of the national standard concept. Not all states will support voluntary national standards. "What I've found over the years is that things start out as voluntary and pretty soon become mandatory," says Montana State Superintendent Linda McCulloch.

Still, many feel the technical conversation is not yet a priority.

"I think it will be pulled into the larger No Child Left Behind debate, and I also don't see any fast action that front," Petrilli said.

March 8, 2007

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