The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) just released the results of its Economics test for high school seniors.
Only 18% of students ranked “below basic,” which surely included high numbers of students who are English language learners and have serious disabilities.
82% are basic or above.
A remarkable 43% of students ranked “proficient” or above.
Proficient is excellent performance. Having served on the NAEP Board for seven years, I believe that a student who is proficient demonstrates A level performance.
3% of students rank “advanced.” This is A++ performance.
In any classroom where 43% of the students earn a solid A, great things are happening.
Congratulations to our high school social studies teachers!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
At our district “Proficient” was considered a “C” and “Advanced” was an “A” …
NAEP has very high standards,higher than state standards
Thanks for the clarification regarding the meaning of Proficient on NAEP. Here’s David Coleman decrying the NAEP reading results for 8th graders.
http://www.hunt-institute.org/knowledge-library/articles/2011-9-1/the-english-language-arts-standards-key-changes-and-their-evidence/
Made even more remarkable by lack of finance, financial literacy, and economic courses offered in these days of NCLB and RttT.
Ravitch: “Only 18% of students ranked “below basic,” which surely included high numbers of students who are English language learners and have serious disabilities.”
How is that “good news”? What high-brow elitism. Is it any wonder how difficult it is for public school educators to receive a stronger hearing and how much easier it is for demagogues like Rhee even to be heard?
I wonder, Diane, if you consider it a point of congratulations that out of the 57% who don’t get a “solid A” a large proportion include students historically never having benefited from public education? Yes, you go all you social studies teachers, Diane Ravitch thinks it’s just fine that all the victims of history and economics in America are not doing so well in social studies because, you know, all the “good kids” are getting “solid A”s.
I am certain Dr. Ravitch did not mean to condescend. It is rather obvious that the populations mentioned do not always do well on tests, through no fault of their own. In my opininon, they should not have to take those tests, but that is for another column.
What is your basis for saying that those students have never benefitted from public education? I am an ELL teacher, my students learn a lot from their public education. I don’t often hear what former students do once they finish school, but I know at least a few of mine went on to college, one is a pilot, and another works on computers. These are students who came to the US with little or no knowledge of English. Tell me that they did not benefit from their education.
Children who can’t read a test that requires reading skills will not pass it. Axiom.
As a long time teacher of special needs students, It has always amazed me that they here in my state they are required to take the same test as their non-identified peers. The quotas set by our state limit the number who may not take the test. These students are diagnosed with learning disabilities and many are, by definition, developmentally delayed compared to their age peers. I have been a long time advocate for my students and their parents, but it is frustrating to watch them take a test that is worded beyond their comprehension. It is frustrating to know that many will have to repeat 4th grade because they fail the high stakes test. even though the research shows that repeating a grade does not benefit most students academically. These mandates are punitive to our special needs students. The very accommodations that we know are critical to their academic success, are withheld from them for much of the standardized state test. If we truly cared about assessing what our special needs and ELL students actually know, we would do a better job with the assessments by which we judge them. But then again, these state assessments don’t really do a great job of assessing most students, do they? Computers counting bubbles and test scorers in basements across our nation decide the fate of our students. Pearson makes sure that their profits come first and state departments of Ed have allowed it. So goes Ed Deform in America.
MTomas,
You thought I was being “elitist” when I said that the “below basic” category on the 12th grade NAEP Economics test had disproportionate numbers of students who are ELL and special education. That was not a judgment by me, it is a fact.
Consider this:
The average score of ELL students was 101; the average score of “Not ELL” was 153.
The average score of students with disabilities was 121; the average score of “Not SD” was 155.
Know the facts before you get outraged.
Diane,
how disappointing that you would rather reply with a debater’s trick to my criticism of your remarks about how the NAEP economics test scores somehow argue against the privatizers of education and make social studies teachers look good. You claim that my “outrage” is born of not knowing “the facts” and point to those “facts” as evidence, for what, that I’m wrong to call you elitist?
It’s not the facts that make your comments elitist, it is the flippancy with which you and too many other educators dismiss those “facts” of “disproportionate numbers of students who are [sic] ELL and special education [again, sic]” being below basic as not quite important enough to counter the otherwise “successful” results. It reminds me how so many state officials speak about improvements in test results based on the “fact” the majority of students–primarily and usually White students–show increased test scores. And, the test scores often do change because states quite often change the tests they use and then observed results follow a pattern of first, lowered scores overall (with chronic demographic disparities intact, of course) then increases over years until yet another set of tests are initiated and the pattern starting over again. No one likes to delve into these patterns because, you know, “different kids, different results”, but those patterns hold nonetheless.
In “fact”, your report of the NAEP test scores are only an extension of the pattern of results you will find in all the test results by states regarding the chronically and historically under-performing students, especially students with disabilities and English language learners. Those “facts” are also evident in my examinations of earlier NAEP results on other subjects, including the ones tested by the states, reading and mathematics; you see, I actually have had experience and education in analyzing NAEP results among other knowledge in assessment and measurement. I deal with this issue daily as a researcher of state accountability testing and the more useful form of classroom and curriculum-based assessment–I resent having to “prove” my credentials just because you think anyone who has a contrary idea to your more mundane observations of testing “success” is simply not knowledgeable about “facts”. For example, it is a common result that students with disabilities will often “test” better on state assessments than English language learners; a clear indication that the tests are greatly influenced by, of all things, English proficiency. Unless, of course, you might believe that the tests actually reveal real evidence about what students have actually learned. I hope you don’t because you would, of course, be sadly mistaken.
The fundamental mistake is to believe that standardized test will do anything to provide teachers with guidance of any sort. By their nature, standardized tests are NOT pedagogically useful, but only when they have strong validity and reliability measures can they be diagnostically useful for determining relative standing and only for very limited clinical support for examining levels of attainment for individual students. That utility is not designed for pedagogy; that is, to aid in determining how best to teach and promote actual learning based in a sound–and equitable–curriculum as well sound and equitable educational intentions to promote critical reasoning and inquiry-based learning skills. There is a difference between testing and assessment. Standardized testing is only “assessment” in the more Latinate notion more akin to determining worth (you know, like tax assessment). Educational assessment, to be pedagogically relevant, must be about determining what to do next in context about what someone already knows and to what someone has already been exposed as determined by direct knowledge based in some form of direct measurement of those variables. In other words, are “testing” what has been taught and/or previous learned so that we know what next to teach and how best to promote what next has to be learned?
The NAEP scores don’t help to do that any more than state accountability tests do. To give them any kind of credence is to cede the principle of educational assessment to its enemy, educational accountability. This problem would be a nuisance if it were not for the “fact” that we spend $billions on the latter and sometimes don’t actually teach teachers how to do the former never mind provide them with the time, opportunity, or resources to do it. It is about time that some teachers, students, and their parents are beginning to question this great and expensive disparity between proving “worth” and determining how best to learn. Flippantly dismissing the “disproportionate numbers of students who are ELL and special education” who are “below basic” as beside the point of an otherwise “successful” result of what you consider a “better” form of testing undermines rather than strengthens that resolve.
Mtomas, my response to you was not flippant. Your comment makes no sense. Sorry.
But that can’t be! In order to justify their existence, Rhee, Duncan, et al. need to be in crisis mode all the time everywhere. The one thing they should find threatening is students who are actually learning. It’s like we don’t need these corporate takeover artists!
Read a report yesterday, decrying the poor performance of American kids on this test and saying less than half were proficient. They are selling the line that proficient is normal.
Ken, they are spinning.
Proficient is excellent on NAEP
Advanced is beyond excellent to amazing
Don’t believe lies about our kids and our schools
Yes, I expected as much. I don’t recall the source and am off to attend the Washington Education Association RA. Will research me messages and Facebook postings there, to see if I can identify the source.
None of those scores count until a VAM is applied. Then we’ll really see who can teach. (insert sarcasm here)
Last night I left a comment at EdWeek where the results were characterized as “proficiency woes” in the headline.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2013/04/naep_economics_results_reveal_proficiency_woes.html
Diane, thank you for all that you do. You are the best advocate for the hope and promise of public education that we could possibly have.
Proficient on NAEP is a very high standard of student performance
Advanced is for the tiny percentage of superstars
I told the reporters who wrote the EdWeek “proficiency woes” piece that if a very high percentage of students scored at the advanced level, then advanced wouldn’t be advanced. Duh.
Isn’t it remarkable? Comical yet so sad. You’d think they’d be embarrassed.
We sure need an evaluation system and perhaps merit pay for our nation’s ed reporters and pundits.
Personally, the one I’d love to skewer most is Jonathan We-Know-What-Works Alter. I know, shame on me. But thanks for letting me rant a little.
Alter skewers himself so often that you don’t need to.
He is good on national politics.
Yes, Jonathan Alter has been a good reporter on American politics; at least thus far he has been.
He’s abysmal and seemingly delusional when it comes to public education, however, and when directly confronted with his inaccurate data, or exaggerated praise or unfounded criticism, he gets hostile almost to the point of unhinged hysteria.
After all. Why should we mere mortals question the absolute wisdom of Jonathan Alter, scion of an upper-middle class family who graduated from Exeter and Harvard and thus “knows everything” about public education, despite the fact that—like most of the billionaire privatizers he so admires—he’s never spent one single day in a public school.
Right now, Jeb Bush is on his cell phone, asking one of his high-priced Privatization Consultants how they can make the NAEP scores look “really bad”.
Arne Duncan heard the news and reportedly threw his coffee cup across the room, screaming something about “those (expletive deleted) idiots at NAEP “biting the hand that feeds them!”.
Rupert Murdoch, Joel Klein and Roger Ailes just completed a conference call. They agreed on the “Talking Points Takeaway” for this item, which they’ve decided to frame as “not even HALF of public school students know the very basics of money and counting, due to the unions who make it impossible to fire teachers who can’t count past 100.”
Michelle Rhee, sources say, went into a full-scale panic attack, demanding to know “Who dropped the (expletive deleted) ball on this!” Aides said she’s requested a Video Chat—ASAP—with her main contacts at Broad, Gates and Walmart…woops, I mean Walton, and that her husband, former NBA star, Sacramento mayor—and “Teen Chaser” Kevin Johnson, was able to coax a text message out of Eli Broad himself that “we’ll get though this and that they’re still good for that additional $45 million they promised last weekend at the Elite Retreat.”
President Obama, traveling today, and facing a “packed schedule” of meetings and public appearances, has issued no formal statement at this time. However, his White House spokesperson said he sought to “clarify that the president is pleased with the performance of those children who performed well on this test, but however also recognized that economic and educational disparities in different households will inevitably produce different results on such scientifically-based assessments, that while essential for understanding and categorizing both aggregate and individual progress within our schools, should not imply an open-ended commitment on his part to the idea of ‘teaching to the test’—which, as you know, he strongly opposes—and that he also strongly supports our teachers and their need for independence, judgment and pedagogical autonomy, while strongly underscoring his unqualified adoration of Education Secretary Duncan for his insistence on rigorous assessment of education benchmarks, that will help lay the foundation for our children to be prepared for the jobs of this century, and that he has no position on any of this at this time or in the future.”
I thought NAEP results reflected the level of difficulty typical for the course. So economics (less commonly taught) would show higher NAEP scores than American history, where more rigor is expected. The value of NAEP would be with trends, state scores, and disaggregation.
A very interesting report. I am not sure that I would say that explaining why demand curves have a negative slope (except, of course, for Giffen goods) or having the ability to subtract the inflation rate from the nominal interest rate is something I could expect of only the very best of my students, but I am teaching 13th grade, not 12th.
Reblogged this on Restore Reason and commented:
Good news from our high schools!