Sue Legg of the Florida League of Voters wonders whether Florida’s policy of holding back third grade students who don’t pass the reading test is working.
It certainly boosts fourth grade reading scores.
But she notes a strange anomaly: Why does the number of high-scoring students decline from fourth grade to eighth grade?
She also notes that the biggest improvement in fourth grade reading scores occurred before the “reforms” were implemented.
She welcomes your thoughts in explaining why the number of high scoring students drops from fourth to eighth grades.
She writes:
“Do Florida students’ reading skills get worse over time? This seems unlikely. There was a relatively large increase in reading scores for eighth grade in 2009, and scores have only fluctuated slightly since then.
“Other possible explanations. Perhaps eighth grade student characteristics are now different than in fourth grade? How could this be? There are several ways to explore this possibility:
“Florida’s retention policy is more extreme than most other states’ policies.
“Thus, Florida has more students who have been in school longer by fourth grade than do other states. One would expect their reading and math levels to be higher. This advantage may be lost by eighth grade when these skills are more complex.
“Does Florida’s school choice policy pull out more low scoring students in elementary grades, thereby elevating its fourth grade scores compared to other states?
“Do many of these students return to public schools in middle school and lower the state achievement scores?
“We know from Florida DOE data that the Florida tax credit program enrollment drops more than one half between kindergarten and eighth grade.
“Which students leave the private schools and which remain? If the struggling students leave, as the DOE evaluations suggest, eighth grade scores in public schools would decline.
“A similar examination of the achievement levels of students who return to public schools from charter schools between fourth and eighth grade may also shed some light on the changing student achievement
“I welcome an evaluation of Florida’s school accountability approach to improving student learning.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Shows the counterintuitive and unreliable features of standardized tests. Many other factors impact learning than just hammering students over the head with academics.
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Explanations for the drop in test scores might begin with explaining this:
“The Florida tax credit program enrollment drops more than one half between kindergarten and eighth grade.”
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Going by only what was provided above, it seems like the problem is what they are learning (or not learning) while in voucher schools. Therein lies the problem. Why are we spending so much money on these often unregulated schools?
As a Middle and high school teacher, I’ve often wondered why we don’t look at alternatives to traditional programs for struggling students. In my classes, I have students who have been in double blocks of reading for years; obviously, that avenue is not working. Why not take the money being wasted on unsuccessful charter and voucher programs and dedicate it to more centralized and specific programs to address these real issues.
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I was only able to see Laura Chapman’s comment after I posted mine. The first part of my comment is referencing the same thing.
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I don’t know. Ohio has the same program (because Ohio adopts every ed reform policy, just by rote at this point) and what actually happened was they put in a lot of supports for lower scoring students.
I guess I’m not clear why they couldn’t just put in supports for lower scoring students without those piggy-backing on another ed reform scheme.
There’s a weird assumption of bad faith that seems to operate in ed reform re: public schools. They seem to start with the premise that no one but them wants people to learn to read, so we all have to be “dragged, kicking and screaming” (as Obama put it).
We had a series of community meetings when the 3rd grade retention policy went in and our superintendent presented it as another ed reform that had been imposed from on high that she would try to retrofit to make it helpful. She seems to have done that but why is this always so adversarial? Why the assumption she would somehow slack off unless she was threatened and scolded? Reading scores were NOT her singular focus. She had actually identified attendance as a focus area- her thinking was their reading scores would improve if they were IN SCHOOL. Genius, right? 🙂
This is a WAY OF THINKING about public schools that positions them as an enemy to be conquered, brought to heel, “dragged, kicking and screaming”. It’s bizarre.
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This attitude may reflect sexism and anti-union sentiment. Maybe white males feel entitled to try to demean a profession that is over 75
% female. They also harbor a lot of anti-union acrimony. Anything that members of a labor union back is assumed to be to “feather their nests.” While unions do look out for the rights of members, they are hardly the teamsters union that will slash your tires or lay in wait in a dark alley. Unions usually support progressive social justice causes like immigration reform. These type of causes have nothing to do with any benefit to the union membership. Many “reformers” have biased perceptions about public teachers.
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And what I have been frustrated by year after year with our inner-city district’s union is that no matter what new “save public schools” idea is put on the table, the endlessly touted “we must rid ourselves of bad teachers” propaganda still runs alongside.
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First: Are you comparing the same students as they move up the grades? Follow last year’s fourth grade to this year’s fifth grade. Have the reading scores continue to stay high? If not, then look for the reasons. Public schools must take all students who transfer in, even in the middle of the school year.
Second: Check out the curriculum. What are the students reading in the upper grades? Boring reading tends to make the students blow it off. Dumb passages or passages/novels that are way above the students’ level of reading will give reason to lower scores. The vertical alignment of the curriculum is important as well, but follow it from third grade up.
Third: The attitude of the students by the time they get to eighth grade has changed dramatically. Once they are in eighth grade and by the time they take the BS test, they are done with school. They are graduating and they don’t have to do any work.
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Try this. How many students read for pleasure. High correlation. Obviously if one has high vocabulary and highly developed sense of grammatical structure (often gained from parents vocabulary and oral syntax as well as from reading habits) one will read for pleasure.
Just as with football skill, you have to practice. How many kids do?
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Since the retention malpractice is based on standardized test scores it can never be just, rational, or logical* and can only cause harm to many, many students. It is state discrimination that countermands constitutional issues of liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Just as state discrimination based on inherent student characteristics like skin pigmentation, gender, age, sexual orientation, etc. . . has been ruled to be unconstitutional, so should discrimination based on the inherent characteristics of the students of mental capabilities.
*See: “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional 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 the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
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).
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.
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 words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
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. And 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.
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.
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 attempts to measure “’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.”
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Can’t get the paragraph breaks to come through when I post. Have no clue why, as they used to.
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Duane,
I have that problem too. At least you haven’t been kicked off, as some other readers have been, by WordPress.
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Very concisely Duane E. Swacker stated the answer in his opening statement.
The evaluation tool used is the standardized test. Marion Brady already posted 34 reasons why standardized tests are useless- unreliable.
Florida’s policy of retention can only cause regression. Retention destroys students’ self-image. Logically speaking some students must get tired of this constant high stressed test – wasting valuable time. It would appear perfectly logical that the brighter students are tired of wasting their time and don’t labor over it as the years go on because they know they are good, competent readers. Mark anything- just get finished with the beast.
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Like 🙂
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