Education Week reports that NAEP results are flat, with few exceptions. The billions squandered on annual testing and Common Core Gabe produced meager change, especially for those already at the bottom. Achievement gaps widened.
With so little change, it is time—past time—to give serious attention to rethinking the federal testing juggernaut that began with No Child Left Behind, intensified with Race to the Top, and continues with the so-called Every Student Succeeds Act. The latest national results show that many children have been left behind, we are nowhere near “the top,” and every student is not succeeding.
In short, the federal policy of standards, testing, and accountability is a train wreck.
It is past time to stop blaming students, teachers, and schools, and place the blame for stagnation where it belongs: On nearly 20 years of failed federal policy based on failed assumptions.
Education Werk reports:
“Across the board, struggling American students are falling behind, while top performers are rising higher on the test dubbed the “Nation’s Report Card.”
“A nationally representative group of nearlyt Behind, 585,000 4th- and 8th-graders took the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2017, the first time the tests were administered digitally. The results, released Tuesday, show no change at all for 4th grade in either subject or for 8th graders in math since the tests were last given in 2015. Eighth graders on average made only a 1-point gain in reading, to 267 on the NAEP’s 500-point scale.
“That meager gain in reading was driven entirely by the top 25 percent of students. During the last decade, 8th grade reading was the only test in which the average score for both high and low performers rose. By contrast, in math, the percentage of students performing below basic (30 percent) and those performing at the advanced level (10 percent) both increased significantly since 2007. The same pattern emerged in 4th grade math and reading.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Add the challenge of taking the test on computers rather than with paper and pencil, but just as important is what students were not learning about ideas, concepts, the content so essential in grasping the meanings in what you read.
My 11th graders were telling me today that they HATE to take tests on computers. They like reading on paper. They like the feel of a book. They like to look back at what they’ve written or read previously. These are smart kids. I agree with them. In every book I own, I have post its, annotations, highlights, underlining, papers with notes falling out. It’s the only way to read and ask questions and find meaning. The kids know they’re getting screwed.
My editor at Knopf tells me that real books are making a comeback. Personally, I hate reading books online.
Me too. It’s funny because my husband is an English teacher and he tells me that “they” want kids to learn how to annotate and mark the text which was hard enough when they had books! So kids are learning to annotate in class and then have to take tests on computers where they can’t annotate. It’s a well thought out system, really.
FYI:
I am flying to Santa Fe today and will be offline except for changing flights in Dallas.
I PREFER reading books on real paper I can hold in my hand. I like to flip pages, write in the margins, highlight if needed, dog ear pages, and HOLD the BOOK, a more satisfying experience.
Glad “real” books are making a comeback, Diane.
I can’t imagine reading your book, Reign of Error, online, Diane.
Me neither.
That won’t happen though. There’s some sunk-cost thinking going on here. A lot of very influential and powerful people have bet a lot on “market-based ed reform” and they aren’t going to reverse course now.
That’s one of the problems with “bipartisanship”. There’s no opposition. They ALL bought this and thus they will be very reluctant to backtrack now.
Ed reform would have been better had it NOT been bipartisan. It would have benefitted from dissenters.
I saw the same thing happen with deregulation of financial markets. The damage would have been contained had Democrats not clambored onboard – they would have been a check on excess. Once they joined the deregulation chorus it was over – all checks were gone.
“Bipartisan” just means agreement. It doesn’t mean “right” or “correct” or “smart”. Lawmakers have all happily agreed on a LOT of terrible ideas.
You could set it up like a math problem. The more influential/powerful/rich people endorse an idea the less likely we reverse course when idea isn’t working. That has played out over and over in the US.
All of these super-smart people can’t be wrong, can they? That’s the scenario that happens again and again.
Public school teachers and principals and students deserve some credit for holding steady while ed reformers in 30 states slashed their budgets.
They’re doing the same with less. Less support from politicians and elites, less funding, a federal government that openly hostile to the continued existence of their schools.
Can you imagine if we took all the money that is used for test prep and testing, was reallocated to classrooms, internships etc…..what the world of education might look like?
But Arne Duncan says Ed Reform is working.
Arne is panicked. Will we live long enough to see him admit error? Not me.
Doesn’t make any difference anyway. Robert McNamara’s later contrition didn’t replace the lives and treasure he wasted. It was, in fact, sickening to see him weeping about this. I doubt seriously that Arne will prove to be smart enough to see, ever, the damage that he did to millions of kids.
It is past time to stop blaming …
The devil made me do it. The primary flaw lay in the short-sightedness of
the: appointed, the elected, the voters. It’s the damn roooskies, I tell ya.
It’s fake news. It’s Ed-reformers.
Blame seems to function as the “mother” of all situations, rationalizing
complicity. The devil made me “test”…
The scores have been flat (have shown no statistically significant improvement) for the entire period of the standards-and-testing “reforms,” which means that even by their own pseudoscientific measures, the deformers’ magic formula for improving schools has been an utter failure. This failure is no so clear that even the meretricious mouthpieces at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute are acknowledging the fact and are revising their message to read that standards and testing were necessary but not sufficient.
The truth, of course, is that the ludicrous standards purchased by Bill Gates so that there would be a single national set of standards to correlate computer instruction to and the question types used on the tests on those standards [sic] have BECOME THE CURRICULUM in English classes in the US, with the result that an entire generation of US students has now had almost no instruction in English but endless hours, year after year, of test prep that HASN’T EVEN IMPROVED THE TEST SCORES.
It’s time to stop this scam. The test makers are raking in billions on it. The English language arts have been supplanted by test prep. What a disgrace.
Opt out.
CX: that HAVEN’T EVEN IMPROVED THE TEST SCORES.
Not only has ELA test prep become the ELA curriculum, but ELA has taken over much of the school day at the K-5 level. So this bankrupt approach to education dominates the school day. This is a national scandal. Schools are giving kids next to nothing. Unfortunately, few teachers understand this. They have faith that even though kids know very little, they are somehow benefiting from these exercises. Most are true believers in Common Core and its underlying approach: practicing skills, not learning content.