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

December 26, 2007

'Accommodations Do Not Benefit the Student'

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

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

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

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

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

Diane Ravitch

Research Professor

of education

new York University

Freakonomics Blog: What Should be Done About Standardized Testing?

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

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

Why State Standards Trouble me

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

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

NCLB in waiting

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

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

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

WaPo: Calls Grow for a Broader Yardstick for Schools

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

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

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

Rothstein: Leaving "No Child Left Behind" Behind

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

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

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

WaPo: Hoping to Turn the Beat Around

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

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

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

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

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

Finn: NAEP Math Framework Too Thin, Proficieny Level OK

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

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

Losing the race

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

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

Bridging Differences: The Value of Standards

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

-Diane

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

HuffPo: Diane Does Rush (Gerry Bracey!!)

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

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

Bridging Differences: The Fallout from Testing

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

Deborah Meier

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading

The Grand Illusion of Proficiency

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

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

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

Continue reading article.

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

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

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

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

Schools for Tomorrow: False, cheery optimism from the feds

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

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

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

EdWeek: National Math Panel Unveils Draft Report

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

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