Peter Greene retired as a teacher but, happily, not as a blogger. He continues to eviscerate hot air balloons and pretensions.

In this post, he examines the questions raised by the conservative journal Education Next: Have states maintained high expectations and does it matter?

Daniel Hamlin and Paul Peterson “note that ESSA gave states license to dump the Common Core, either in its actual form or under whatever assumed name they hid it behind. For accountability hawks, this raises the concern that we’ll have a Race to the Bottom, as states make it easier for schools to clear the performance bar (yes, for the six millionth time, this blurs the barely-existing line between the standards and the tests used to account for them). Will the political expediency of being able to say, ‘All our kids are Proficient (as we currently define it)!’ be too much for politicians to resist?”

They write:

So, has the starting gun been fired on a race to the bottom? Have the bars for reaching academic proficiency fallen as many states have loosened their commitment to Common Core? And, is there any evidence that the states that have raised their proficiency bars since 2009 have seen greater growth in student learning?

In a nutshell, the answers to these three questions are no, no, and, so far, none.

Peter responds: “So nobody has loosened up requirements to– hey, wait a minute. Did they just say that raising proficiency bars hasn’t actually increased student learning?”

Yep. States still have high standards, but the states with those high standards did not see “greater growth in student learning.”

Peter observes: “We are now only one third of the way through the article, and yet the next sentence is not “Therefore, there really is no purpose in continuing to fret about how high state standards are, because they have nothing to do with student achievement.” But instead, the next sentence is “While higher proficiency standards may still serve to boost academic performance, our evidence suggests that day has not yet arrived.” And sure, I understand the reluctance to abandon a favorite theory, but at some point you have to stop saying, “Well, we’ve now planted 267 magic beans in the yard and nothing has happened– yet. But tomorrow could be the day; keep that beanstalk ladder ready.”

Peter thinks those magic beans will never grow into a giant beanstalk.

You would think that after almost 20 years of pursuing high standards and rigorous tests, there might be more discussion of the meager results of these policies.

I have to use this discussion as an opportunity to say a few words about the subjectiveness of the term “proficiency.” Setting the dividing line between “basic” and “proficient” is an arbitrary process. A group of people, some educators and non-educators, meet together to decide what children of a certain grade should know and be able to do. On different days, the same panel might draw a different line. A different panel might choose a different cut score. The decision about where the cut score falls is not objective. “Proficient” is not an objective term.

When I served on the NAEP board, it was understood that “Proficient” was a high bar that most students were unlikely to reach. I thought of it as equivalent to an A. Somehow it has been transformed into a goal that all students should reach. On NAEP, Massachusetts is the only state where as many as 50% of students have reached Proficient.

It is not reasonable to complain when students don’t reach an arbitrary goal that is out of reach, like the NCLB goal that 100% of students would be Proficient by the year 2014. Making tests harder doesn’t make students smarter.