You can view here the results for the NAEP for urban districts, known as TUDA, or Trial Urban District Assessments.
Five districts volunteered to take the NAEP in 2002.
Since then, the number has grown to 21 districts.
Test scores have generally risen, though not in all districts and not at the same rate.
Demographics affects the scores, not surprisingly.
Watch for changes over time in the proportion of high-poverty students.
As a New Yorker, I was very interested in the progress of what was once known as the “New York City miracle.” It disappeared.
On NAEP TUDA 2013, there was no “New York City miracle.” For almost every group and grade, scores have been stagnant since 2007. This year, the only group that saw a gain was white students in eighth grade. Black students and Hispanic students in fourth and eighth grades saw no gains at all. Black and Hispanic scores have been flat since 2005.
Knowing of Mayor Bloomberg’s large public relations staff and his pride in having “transformed” New York City’s public schools, I was curious to see how they would spin these flat results.
Here it is, in the Wall Street Journal:
“NYC Student Test Scores Rise Slower Than Other Cities”
“City Says Its Already High Scores Are Tougher to Improve”
But New York City is not number 1; it is not even number 2.
It is in sixth, or seventh, or eighth place in reading and mathematics, as compared to cities like Charlotte, Austin, Hillsborough County, Boston, and San Diego, yet its officials feel compelled to claim that they are just too darn accomplished to make improvements.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
Reblogged this on Roy F. McCampbell's Blog.
Again considering the complete invalidities involved in the processes involved in any standardized test and educational standards why we continue to discuss these invalidities is beyond me.
Get at the heart of the problem folks, every time someone brings this up it should be strongly emphasized just how absurd and harming these practices are. To quote Wilson:
“It requires an enormous suspension of rational thinking to believe that the best way to describe the complexity of any human achievement, any person’s skill in a complex field of human endeavour, is with a number that is determined by the number of test items they got correct. Yet so conditioned are we that it takes a few moments of strict logical reflection to appreciate the absurdity of this.”
Or look at the absurdity of these educational malpractices this way:
The proliferation of educational assessments, evaluations and canned programs belongs in the category of what systems theorist Russ Ackoff describes as “doing the wrong thing righter. The righter we do the wrong thing,” he explains, “the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.”
Our current neglect of instructional issues are the result of assessment policies that waste resources to do the wrong things, e.g., canned curriculum and standardized testing, right. Instructional central planning and student control doesn’t – can’t – work. But, that never stops people trying.
The result is that each effort to control the uncontrollable does further damage, provoking more efforts to get things in order. So the function of administration becomes control rather than creation of resources. When Peter Drucker lamented that so much of management consists in making it difficult for people to work, he meant it literally. Inherent in obsessive command and control is the assumption that human beings can’t be trusted on their own to do what’s needed. Hierarchy and tight supervision are required to tell them what to do. So, fear-driven, hierarchical organizations turn people into untrustworthy opportunists. Doing the right thing instructionally requires less centralized assessment, less emphasis on evaluation and less fussy interference, not more. The way to improve controls is to eliminate most and reduce all.
Duane Swacker: most excellent!
I am appreciative of the above posting by the owner of this blog and also agree with her remarks. However, I would add this brief comment from Gerald Bracey’s EDUCATION HELL: RHETORIC VERSUS REALITY — TRANSFORMING THE FIRE CONSUMING AMERICA’S SCHOOLS (2006, p. 3):
“Perusing an article…I was stunned on encountering the phrase ‘love of learning[.] … Wait! I’ve heard that before! Just not lately. Lately it’s all dreariness and fearmongering about ‘achievement,’ achievement narrowly defined by test scores. Get it through your head now: In the long run, test scores don’t count.” [brackets mine]
😎
You can rest assured that no other school in the country would ever get away with saying something like that. Too darned good to make improvements? Could be a lot of us.
Detroit did the worst of the 21 urban cities that participate in the TUBA. It was interesting though that even the big-money paper put, in its headline and in the article, that poverty is the main correlating factor. Students qualifying for free- or reduced-price lunch grew from 76% to 87% in 2013. http://www.freep.com/article/20131218/NEWS01/312180105/Detroit-Public-Schools-Nation-s-Report-Card
Detroit has more going against it than poverty. The district has been whipsawed by reform after reform, by budget cuts, by failed policies, by constant bashing. It is amazing that teachers manage to teach, and students still come to school every day.
Cleveland, by the way, has 100% poverty, and Ohio leaders think the way to “fix” Cleveland is with charters and vouchers.
Diane, I teach in a middle / working class Detroit suburb. We have many Detroit kids attending our district. During P-T Conferences, a parent of an awesome student, talked schools with me briefly. She has been a DPS elementary teacher for 19 years. She said Detroit schools were “a hot mess.” The endless types of schools. The constant transiency. Her phrase has stuck with me.
Also, I’d like to point out that Detroit’s last place finish should be a lesson for reformers but it isn’t. Detroit is the second city to see a majority of its students attend charter schools. We’ve had charters in the city for 20 years now. I guess competition and market forces don’t necessarily lead to better outcomes. Yet our legislature keeps rolling out the red carpet for those for-profit geniuses.
THERE ARE NO SURPRISES in the new NAEP studies. For those of us who have worked “boots on the ground” in learning for the all of America’s children and youth, the propositions of the last decade of the 1990’s and the first decade of the 2+oughts of the 21st Century have all been documented by investigated journalists as well as formal research as “Failed Initiatives.” These failed initiatives include Big City Mayors and Superintendents leadership, Federal Court designated Education Spending, Private Corporate Management, School Choice, School Vouchers to Private and Private Religious Schools , Merit Pay to Teachers, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Teach for America, National Ranking of Highs Schools, Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, Transfer of “Successful” Technology, and Reorganization of School Districts. Not one of these initiatives has had a significant impact on important issues of learning in the American schools. But it is useful to remember the words of the late great AFT leader Al Shanker. In discussing the failure to heed the 1983 warnings of THE NATION AT RISK, he said, “If leaders of government and industry, after having vested time, effort and prestige on programs to rebuild American education find their efforts frustrated, there is no question about where the tilt of the public will go. There will be a massive move to try something else, and it will be all over.” And so it has been.
In further edit, I failed to include the worst of the failed initiatives, CHARTER SCHOOLS.
There won’t be enough teachers when the boomers begin. Who will our betters blame then ?
There won’t be enough teachers when the boomers begin to retire…
Look for the next After School Special:
When “No Excuses” Schools Start Making Excuses
The Bloomberg administration fails miserably by its own metric. VAM is based on student GROWTH, not existing test results. Guess growth doesn’t matter when you already “have enough of it.”
Duane, What is the citation for the Wilson quote? Love it.
To quote Wilson:
“It requires an enormous suspension of rational thinking to believe that the best way to describe the complexity of any human achievement, any person’s skill in a complex field of human endeavour, is with a number that is determined by the number of test items they got correct. Yet so conditioned are we that it takes a few moments of strict logical reflection to appreciate the absurdity of this.”
Chapter 15 page 4, “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Read the whole study and you’ll find many more pearls of wisdom, not to mention a complete destruction of the supposed validity of using educational standards and standardized testing. I know of no rebuttal/refutation of his work. See below for a brief summary:
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
Thanks. I look forward to digging into the article. This further validates our decision to have our daughter go to school during the week of state testing and refuse to answer any questions. The only sane response to the madness is civil disobedience. As the last sentence of your post indicates, our democracy is at stake.
Is there a category of reporting for suburban schools v. urban schools v. rural schools??