I am not sure that I agree with Steven Singer’s point here, that NAEP scores tell us nothing other than that students from affluent homes have higher test scores than students who live in poverty.
His main point is undeniable. All standardized test scores are highly correlated with family income.
We could use income and poverty data to learn what the test scores tell us, without wasting billions on standardized tests and corrupting instruction.
But I think that NAEP does tell us something we need official confirmation for: the utter failure of Disruptive Corporate Reform.
The Disrupters have promised since No Child Left Behind was proposed in 2001 that they knew how to raise test scores and close achievement gaps: Test every child every year and hold schools accountable for rising or falling scores. That will do it, said George W. Bush, Margaret Spellings, Rod Paige and Sandy Kress. They rode the wave of the “Texas miracle,” which turned out to be non-existent. Texas in 2019 is stuck right in the middle of the distribution of states.
Then came Jeb Bush, with his fantastical claims of a “Florida miracle,” which are now repeated by Betsy DeVos. Look at the NAEP scores: Florida is right in the middle of the states. No miracle there.
Arne Duncan has been promoting Tennessee, which as one of the first Race to the Top states, which is also ensconced in the middle of the distribution.
Two states that were firmly under the control of Reform heroes, Louisiana and New Mexico, are at the tail end of the distribution.
What do the NAEP scores tell us?
Don’t look for miracles.
Don’t believe propaganda spun by snake-oil salesman.
Look to states and districts that are economically developed and that fund their schools adequately and fairly.
The scores in states may go up or down a few points, but the bottom line is that the basics matter most. That is, a state willing and able to support education and families able to support their children.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Great piece, Mr. Singer! Sing me another one!!!
I think he nails it. The test scores increased barely in the first few years because that’s what happens when you do test prep. The kids learn the formats of the questions and how to navigate the interface, and their scores improve a tiny bit. Then the test scores went flat. The tiny variations in them from year to year mean nothing.
I know of a middle school student who in PROTEST “bubbled in” ALL THE D’s. and finished each test within 2 minutes and then she just SAT with nothing to do.
When her test results were sent to her home, she received a PROFICIENT for bubbling all the D’s.
That’s how valid those tests are. I have numerous accounts of this happening.
I also know a woman in her 80’s who hates kids and works for Pearson grading kids high-stakes tests via TEMPORARY work companies like KellyGirl. It’s disgusting.
This woman is also “mean and nasty” to others, and has been barred from restaurants as well as fired from jobs. And she grades our youth. HORRORS!
Love Steve Singer!
Thank you, Steven and to Diane for posting this good article.
When young people commit suicide over test scores, something is definitely wrong.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/middle-school-suicides-double-as-common-core-testing_b_59822d3de4b03d0624b0abb9
The standardized test industry needs to clean up their act:
“Everyone’s personal data is for sale. Including the information hopeful high schoolers give to take standardized tests like the SAT. As reported by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Tuesday, the organization behind the SAT, College Board, is selling test-takers’ personal information to elite universities for a mere 47 cents per name. These universities then use this data to boost their own image of exclusivity.
There are profitable reasons why a college would want to look more exclusive. It makes them appear more selective, like they only take the best of the best. Better yet, it can improve their national ranking, which takes selectivity into consideration when rating each facility. Looking at the top five national universities in U.S. News & World Report’s annual ranking shows just that — the acceptance rate of these schools range from a mere 5-7 percent.”
This is what these adults consider “student centered”? Tricking hopeful 17 year olds?
I mean, come on. They’re using these kids. This in no way benefits these students.
They push these tests, they push student loans, it’s a huge group of adults taking advantage of unsophisticated and less savvy teenagers and blathering all this nonsense about “equity” while they do it. It’s awful. And the poorest kids are the MOST vulnerable because they’re often first generation college students so can’t rely on their parents to understand this ridiculous system. They’re lambs among wolves.
https://www.mic.com/p/college-board-sells-student-data-to-schools-that-use-it-to-boost-exclusivity-new-report-19302423
Instead of “cleaning up their act”, I think we should sweep the entire testing industry into the dust bin of history and bury “them” deep.
Exactly. These people are scam artists.
All standardized test scores do is give politicians ammunition to rail against public education. All they really show is who has resources and money, and who is poor. As Pasi Sahlberg has said, “America does not have a school problem, It has a poverty problem.”
NAEP scores that receive publicity are usually limited to math, reading, and science… an extremely narrow focus that mirrors a narrowing of national attention to studies in the arts and humanities.
I hope that NAEP does not follow a trajectory that leads to national reports on SEL and tests of computer and information literacy and computational thinking and financial literacy and who knows what else, some of this ranking driven by international testing and the blatant use of such tests for marketing research. See, for example, the actual questions asked of eighth graders reported here. https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/icils/icils2018/theme1.asp
Official confirmation…
The ‘scores hamster wheel is nothing more than a bourgeois trap that gets us nowhere.
we in the anti-corporate, anti-common core movement could or should come up with an entirely new set of “scores” based maybe on finnish education? that include creativity, relationship to nature, joy in life, musical education, physical and nutrition education so that we reject the false narrative of the “achievement gap.”
Yes, the scores should be measures of what the district has provided for students and teachers: the arts? a nurse? a library and librarian? small class sizes?
exactly! let’s rate the Districts…and factor in number of administrators and how much they are paid compared to teachers.
“According to the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, today’s public schools employ at least 250,000 fewer people than they did before the recession of 2008–09. Meanwhile enrollment has increased by at least 800,000 students.” from Singer article
This is a remarkable stat. However, there are places where the number of teachers is about what it always was. This would be an even more revealing stat.
Diane, I can’t tell you how much it means to me to see this post. We may disagree on the meaning of NAEP scores, but it shows your great intellectual honesty to still give me space to make my case. I really appreciate it and my opinion of you continues to rise. I won’t relitigate my points in detail. I hope they are clear enough in the article. Over all, I think we can get information from these scores but there are better sources and there is a danger seeing our schools through very limited and flawed standardized assessments. Since you were a member of the National Assessment Governing Board from 1997 to 2004, it makes sense that you would see things differently. Thanks again so much for the respect you show me and my colleagues every day.
BA,
When you stop posting arrogant comments, suggesting that all teachers are ignorant, when you stop making ludicrous and sweeping comments about the stupidity of all students and teachers, I will post what you have to say. Lots of people post comments I don’t agree with. Only you have the rudeness and temerity to insult every teacher in America.
No, I am not saying that all teachers are ignorant. Nevertheless, browsing the media you can find articles like this:
“When I was in elementary school, I was bad at math. … My parents turned to something most parents cannot do. They hired a private tutor. The results were remarkable. Not only did my math grades go up, but my standardized test scores were high enough to put me into consideration for New York’s gifted-and-talented middle school program. Accepted to one, I did not just pass by but excelled at math, getting straight A’s and, eventually, admission to Bronx Science.”
On the face of it, this guy was placed into a gifted-and-talented program because his wealthy parents could pay for a private tutor. But why exactly this boy from a wealthy family became “bad at math” in elementary school? And how him being “bad at math” in elementary school correlates to him excelling at math later in high school and college?
Here is another quote by a professor of mathematics:
“Like most Americans, I found it difficult to believe how poorly prepared mathematically elementary school teachers are. They are well chosen. They are kind, diligent, and smart, qualities that nobody can teach. They have been failed mathematically by our system. They need to be taught. I have found them eager and quick to learn—and appallingly ignorant of the most basic mathematics.”
Click to access fea-kenschaft.pdf
Let me phrase it as polite as I can: you are a historian, not a mathematician. You may have met thousands of teachers but you cannot access their math chops. This professor of mathematics, on the other hand, saw firsthand how elementary teachers — a whole roomful of them, fifty people — answered that an area of a rectangle with sides x and y is x + y. And then in another school when asked where 1/3 on the number line, the teacher said “somewhere around 3”.
BA,
I am offended by your tone. If you substitute the word “Jews” or “blacks or “gays” for your derogatory comments about “teachers,” your bigotry would be obvious, perhaps even to you.
Since you cannot recognize your own bias, I reiterate that I will delete your hateful comments when you slip back into stereotyping teachers or describing Americans kids as stupid (because of their “bad” teachers).
Go post on a Disrupter website, where you would be welcomed.
“They hired a private tutor. The results were remarkable.”
I wonder what the class size was in that math class.
One on one always works great. That tutor only had to deal with one student for every minute he was with that student – 100 percent attention every second.
During the thirty years, I was a public school teacher, my average class size was THIRTY-FOUR for each class. When I started teaching, I taught six periods with seven-minute breaks between classes.
TWO-HUNDRED-THIRTY-EIGHT students a day. And all it takes is one student acting out to destroy the lesson the teacher was teaching for an entire class. ONE student can sabotage a lesson.
And you had the “nonsense” to compare a tutor working with one student at their home or office with a teacher working with a class full of students. A disgusting example of confirmation bias!
Diane, these are not my words, these are quotations. I provided a link to a five-page article that you are welcome to read. It is written by a professor of mathematics who not only visited schools and talked to teachers, but who participated in the classes in several stints for several years, who taught both elementary teachers and their students.
BA, you have attempted on many occasions to post comments smearing all teachers. I have blocked them and will continue to do so. If you have something to add that does not attack teachers en masse, I will post it.
To BA:
Have you ever taught public school? Where?
Public education today is very different from when we were in school. It is not unusual to have a substantial number of first languages other than English represented in one’s classroom. One year, a colleague had 32 different home languages and dialects out of 33 students in her 4th grade class. Most of the students did not speak English and many had never been to school before, as they’d been fleeing war and desperate poverty in their home countries. That’s not the reality of every public school, but it is the reality of some public schools.
However, I would agree that some elementary teachers do not have a strong math background. In the past, many teacher preparation programs did not emphasize math very strongly in their requirements. Some states are promoting a greater math emphasis in undergrad and elementary teacher preparation programs, but this is not consistent across the US. In addition, Common Core has radically changed math across the US, and has made it infinitely more complicated. (Perhaps needlessly so, but I digress).
In my district, we have partnered with a nearby university to have targeted professional development in math, K-12. However, our math scores have remained stagnant over the past three years, despite the increased PD during that time.
Does that mean the PD is not working? Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe it means that student class sizes are too large. Maybe it means the kids are hungry, or ill. A substantial number of children in my district do not have access to preventative medical care. Sometimes this includes glasses.
I would caution you to be very careful in assigning simplistic causality to anything in education because there are so many different factors.
In essence, that is what the “reformers” do: they create a simplistic “fix” which they believe will solve all of the problems in education. Anyone who does not preface their solution for “fixing” education with the statement: “it’s very complicated” and then lists a multiplicity of interconnected issues, many of which are outside the prevue of educators, like preventative medical care, glasses, and the luxury of having a permanent home, does not know what they are taking about.
Funny. I saw Mike Bloomberg at a fancy dinner two weeks ago and I told him he was perhaps the greatest mayor ever except for Education. He said, “What would you have done?” I answered, “It’s complicated.”
“But I think that NAEP does tell us something we need official confirmation for: the utter failure of Disruptive Corporate Reform.”
I agree: high or increasing scores don’t tell us if education is of high quality, but if the goal of a program is to increase test scores and they don’t increase, then the program doesn’t work. Correlation between the goal and education has absolutely nothing to do with whether the goal reached.
It’s like eating pancake. If you promise to eat twenty pancake in 5 minutes, and you don’t eat it, you simply lied. It’s immaterial whether eating pancake is good for your health or not.
Thank you, Mate.
The Disrupters use test scores to close schools, claiming that they can raise them.
When they don’t raise them, they say test scores don’t matter.
But they have to be held accountable for their failure