FairTest comments on today’s release of 12th grade NAEP scores. Their conclusion: a dozen years of test-based accountability has had no discernible effect on the test scores of seniors.
This accords with the 2010 report of the National Research Council, which released a report saying that incentives and test-based accountability are ineffective.
Although I have never put much stock in 12th grade NAEP results, due to lack of student motivation on a test that doesn’t count, there ought to be some residual effects of 12 years of testing, testing, testing.
FairTest
National Center for Fair & Open Testing
for further information:
Bob Schaeffer: (239) 395-6773
mobile: (239) 699-0468
for immediate release May 7, 2014
STAGNANT GRADE 12 NAEP RESULTS UNDERSCORE
FAILURE OF TEST-DRIVEN PUBLIC EDUCATION;
“NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND” AND STATE HIGH-STAKES EXAMS
DID NOT LEAD TO IMPROVED PERFORMANCE
Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for twelfth graders “underscore the failure of federal and state test-driven school policies,” according to the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest). Today’s report shows no NAEP score improvement for high school seniors in reading or math since 2009 and little progress over the past decade. Over the same period, performance gaps between racial groups have not narrowed significantly.
The NAEP trend is consistent with results from the ACT and SAT college admissions tests, where average scores continue to stagnate and racial gaps persist.
“How much more evidence do federal and state policy-makers need that driving schooling through standardized exams does not increase educational quality?” asked FairTest Public Education Director Bob Schaeffer. “It is time to abandon failed test-and-punish policies and adopt assessments that have been shown to improve teaching and learning.”
Schaeffer continued, “Across the country parents, teachers, students, and community activists are saying ‘enough is enough’ to testing misuse and overuse. They are opting out of tests, organizing protests against high-stakes exam overkill, and successfully pressing politicians to overhaul assessment policies. More elected officials must start listening to their constituents, who know what is going on in public school classrooms.” FairTest is a founder of the national Testing Resistance & Reform Spring campaign.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This would seem to be the evidence that the test driven accountability program is not working. Did they break down the results by state to see if any faired better over time and then link that to an analysis of the state testing and accountability systems? On the other hand, just repeating the jargon about data driven, drilling down, career ready, 21st century skills, etc as most of these policy and education reform leaders, as well as many school based educators, have done perhaps overshadows the lack of ability and skills to actually analyze data so that it can drive instruction. Create a test to identify weaknesses specific to specific standards/skills, then provide real remedial instruction for those skills, then test again to see if the student has mastered those specific skills. But this requires better tests than NAEP or any of the criterion referenced expensive state tests and it requires people who can use the data in a timely matter to alter instruction to meet the needs of that student. Not a once a year exam whose results are returned months later to teachers who have no time alloted for pd in order to learn to analyze scores nor any time alloted in which to do the analysis.
FYI Indiana did not pass a law exiting common core, it passed a law saying standards must be written by Hoosiers, and then pence had his people just adopt the common core with minor revisions which seemed to have made them worse than the actual common core and probably worse than our previously highly regarded high not common core standards. Changed the name, bloviated a bunch, posed as a leader would, and now we have a new rose.
Do teachers give exams/quizzes in class each week anymore? Those spelling tests on vocabulary and math tests to see if we had mastered the material of the past week were always very instructive to both student and teacher. Have we abandoned these?
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And the emphasis on testing is driving out good teachers. The newspaper in my hometown of Nashville, TN reported today that the city is losing a teacher, widely believed throughout the city to be one of the district’s best public school teachers, to a fancy-schmancy private school most can’t afford, because the emphasis on testing has made it so that she can’t do her job anymore. I have a number of affluent friends, and I know that expensive private schools still often use old-fashioned teaching methods that effectively educate students. Compared to them, middle-class and working class kids in the public schools will increasingly be at a disadvantage (as if they weren’t already).
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NAEP scores were the gold standard and I trusted that children did their best. They produced a real score (criterion referenced), not the Bell Curve (norm referenced) categories of 1,2,3,4 with artificial cut scores. I suspect that “all children” are doing worse than before “No Child Left Behind” (2000) This is why tests and scores remain secret. There is a dumbing down going on right through the colleges, “I suspect”, creating an indifference by many young people on campus. We will need to replace the College Boards to hide it, which is happening.
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Poor validity in absolute terms is one thing, as you note. But as a comparison between-years it should be fine, kids’ interest notwithstanding.
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You can expect the Reformy types to say that our students are “still” unprepared, evidence being these “flat” scores, and this just proves that here has not yet been enough “reform.” Double down.
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Peter Greene, aka Curmudgucation, has an excellent blog post about this, http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2014/05/oh-nos-naep-sadness.html. He argues, as Diane does above, that lack of motivation is likely a key determinant of the NAEP scores of high school seniors. But the most important point continues to be that standardized test scores are a poor measure of achievement and future academic potential!
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Unrelated (well partly anyway), but I’m looking to opt my child out of PAARC tests here in massachusetts in a couple of weeks and am looking for a sample letter……that you know, spells out the valid reasons to do so. So fed up!! Two days this week for MCAS tests and then in two more weeks two days for PAARC. I know I am the only one in her school seeking to do this not so sure about the rest of the district. I apologize if this doesn’t make sense but I think regular commenters will get the idea of what I’m looking for thanks!
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Kay in Mass., contact United Opt out to learn how to opt out of testing.
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Thanks so much Diane. I’ll let you know how it goes.
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Is United Opt Out funded by a very conservative think tank in Pa. going back to Rockefeller and Carnegie (1914)?
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Good luck, Kay.
We are pulling for you.
Endless standardized testing waste time and much money and helps your child not at all.
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Or PARCC. 😉
Opting out no matter the proper acronym!
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Diane, today’s report on NPR had me fuming. I hope you’ll respond.
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Ann, I did not hear it. Send it to me.
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Sorry. See comment below.
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This is the one!
http://www.npr.org/2014/05/07/310476515/department-of-education-brings-home-a-disappointing-report-card
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http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/05/06/310181788/nations-report-card-shows-stagnant-scores-for-reading-math
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You might be interested in today’s blog on testing at http://www.scattershot.typepad.com.
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Jere Brophy and Carol Ames, two highly respected researchers, wrote this for the National Assessment Governing Board (NAEP’s “daddy,” so to speak) in 2005:
“Neither students nor school personnel are likely to perceive value in NAEP participation. Tests are not intrinsically interesting to most students, and although some may value rewards that successful test performance might bring, they usually do not value the process of test taking itself. This is especially true of high school seniors in their spring term, who are disengaging from the series of evaluation hurdles that is built into our high school culture.”
Brophy and Ames added this: “NAEP does not align with their school’s curriculum and does not lead to feedback that would allow students to improve their school performance levels…”
And they concluded that “NAEP assessments, as conducted in the past, offers nothing of objective value to participating students, their schools, or their communities, so that twelfth-grade NAEP probably should be dropped.”
By the way, the NAGB is one of those that maintains (falsely) that test scores are critical to the ability of the U.S. to “compete in a global economy.”
However, the U.S. already is internationally competitive. The World Economic Forum provides an index of competitive nations.
When the U.S. dropped from 2nd to 4th place in 2010-11, four factors were cited by the WEF for the decline: (1) weak corporate auditing and reporting standards, (2) suspect corporate ethics, (3) big deficits (caused on by Wall Street’s financial shenanigans and implosion) and (4) unsustainable levels of debt.
Last year (2011-12), major factors cited by the WEF were a “business community” and business leaders who are “critical toward public and private institutions,” a lack of trust in politicians and the political process with a lack of transparency in policy-making, and “a lack of macroeconomic stability” caused by decades of fiscal deficits and debt that “are likely to weigh heavily on the country’s future growth.”
Last year (2012-13) the U.S.dropped to 7th place. Problems cited were “increasing [income] inequality and youth unemployment” and “the United States is among the countries that have ratified the fewest environmental treaties.“ The WEF noted that in the U.S.,”the business community continues to be critical toward public and private institutions” and “trust in politicians is not strong.” Political dysfunction has led to “a lack of macroeconomic stability” that “continues to be the country’s greatest area of weakness.”
And this year (2013-14) the U.S. returned to 5th place, precisely because it’s getting a handle on its deficit problem (and interestingly, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the corporate education “reformers” were all in opposition to the policies enacted to achieve this).
So, 12th grade NAEP is meaningless. And the corporate “reformers” are clueless. But so are the educators who keep supporting goofy “reform,” and who endorse the tests (ACT, PSAT, SAT) and the programs (AP) that are essential elements of that “reform.”
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Though there is little reason to put great weight on the 12th-grade NAEP, it is also true that there is absolutely no evidence that over ten years of accountability based upon standardized summative testing to bullet lists of standards has had any effect on student writing, reading, mathematical, or thinking ability. And yet, despite this, the defomers have doubled down on their failed prescription.
Any tiny improvement at any particular grade level is well within the statistical margin of error of the measurements employed.
Simply from the Hawthorne Effect, one would expect that there would be some improvement. But there has been none that has been validly demonstrated. None. What this suggests is that standardized summative testing to bullet lists of standards has actually negatively impacted student achievement, and there are many, many reasons to think that that is, indeed, the case. Much of the momentum of positive innovation in curricula and pedagogy was stopped cold by NCLB and continues to be impossible under Son of NCLB, NCLB Fright Night II: The Nightmare Is Nationalized.
Those who think otherwise, with no evidence, thereby evince cultlike, magical, faith-based thinking, and it is not on the basis of such thinking that we should be making national and state education policy.
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And the slowest of the slow learners regarding this happens to be the guy in charge, our Secretary of the Department for the Centralization and Regimentation of Education, formerly the USDE, Arne Duncan.
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Much of the momentum of positive innovation in curricula and pedagogy
For example, when I started working in K-12 education thirty years ago, there were lots of studies showing that students were doing very, very little writing, and there was a reason for this. English teachers at the time thought that they had to edit every scrap of writing produced by students. So, if they assigned six classes of students a five-paragraph essay to write, they would have a 840 paragraphs to line edit–basically the equivalent of a long novella or short novel.
All that changed thanks to the work of Donald Graves and others to introduce the writing process. I myself edited what I think was the first assessment program in a major U.S. grammar and composition basal that took the rubrics-and-anchor-papers approach to grading of writing, and I contributed to several such texts that put forward a portfolio review model that involved students writing regularly and accumulating that writing in portfolios that would be assessed by various doable means. Suddenly, a kind of renaissance in writing instruction was happening all around the country, and that was very exciting. Students were writing a LOT more, and writing is one of those activities like tennis that becomes better only with practice.
But with NCLB, the momentum there was lost. Instead of doing a lot of extended writing in authentic formats, people started teaching InstaWriting to the test–creating the five-paragraph theme or the short constructed response in answer to the essay prompt. Teaching InstaWriting replaced teaching writing. In many states, teaching InstaWriting (they didn’t call it that, of course) was MANDATED by state education departments.
This is just one of many, many, many ways in which NCLB and Son of NCLB have dramatically distorted and narrowed curricula and pedagogy in the United States and stopped positive innovation in those areas cold.
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cx: Instead of having students do a lot of extended writing in authentic formats, people started teaching InstaWriting to the test–creating the five-paragraph theme or the short constructed response in answer to the essay prompt. And they used the rubrics-and-anchor papers approach to avoid having to look at that writing much at all. Oh, yeah. This is a 4. That’s a 3.
As if such responses actually meant anything to students.
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The essays for the NYS Regents ELA exam are essentially a formula. I was tutoring a student in her home for 3 Regents Exams and at the last minute they decided she should take the ELA exam as well. We had just studied two pieces of literature. I told her what to write and how to write it. Just before the exam, I called her on the phone to remind her of what to do. She failed the Algebra. She failed the Living Environment. She failed the Global.
She passed the ELA.
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Meanwhile, atomizing and operationalizing instruction in the large number of specific techniques used by accomplished writers so that students can develop a toolkit of such techniques for use in their own writing has almost entirely disappeared AND IS NOT REFLECTED AT ALL in the puerile new writing “standards,” which, instead, encourage the writing of more five-paragraph themes. Yes, those “standards” give lip service to doing research and writing reports, but the standards serve as lists of supposedly measurable outcomes for testing, and everyone knows that the tests will be tests of InstaWriting to the prompt, and so that’s what they are teaching.
If I suggested to a publisher, today, that it would be quite easy to come up with a list of many hundreds of specific concrete techniques used by accomplished writers that could be taught and that we should do that as part of our writing instruction across the grade levels, that publisher would have this response:
Sorry, that’s not in the “standards.”
This is what happens when amateurs write “standards.” Curricula and pedagogy are warped and narrowed, and innovation in both dies.
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The NAEP scores are meaningless. There are so many other aspects of education that need our attention.
The US is a rebel in so many ways. Why do we need to focus on this one test, when we ignore problems such as immigration and climate change?
Let’s get our priorities straight. NAEP is an interesting, but irrelevant statistic. Leave it at that.
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NAEP is all that we have. We have crushed everything else. Sorry Diane, kids are not doing well and getting worse. We are changing the College Boards testing to hide it. In the 70’s students understood what was happening and were very involved. That had to be done away with. When is the next IPod due out?
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Is it that test scores don’t provide useful information, or that they do? Is it that seniors blow off tests that don’t matter, so we should not pay attention? Or that seniors scores do matter? It appears that each position has been advocated here.
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Interpretations may be pointless, but here we have standardized testing of an entire population with real scores. If the test can be proved valid, so be it. It is given randomly to different sub groups without an analysis that “it matters”. With those in charge of testing today and the College Boards, and no accountability or transparency, this test needs to prove its independence. It had been a great tool, but may be no longer with the current testing schedule on steroids.
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