Gary Rubinstein, math teacher at Stuyvesant High School, is a skilled myth buster. He frequently unmasks “miracle” stories.
In this post, he demolishes the claim that Louisiana has improved faster in 8th grade math than other states.
This is the last gasp of the Disruption movement, which has controlled federal and state policy for 20 years but has little to show for it.
As Rubinstein shows, Arne Duncan and John White are leading the effort to find the “bright side” of the latest NAEP results, which were stagnant In 2019 and have been stagnant for a decade.
Duncan says the nation should look to Louisiana for inspiration. Louisiana ranked among the bottom states on NAEP, 44th to 49th, depending on the grade and the subject. But how creative to point to one of the lowest performing states as a national model! Do what Louisiana did and your state too can rank among the bottom five states in the nation!
Gary points out that Louisiana has indeed improved, but its 2019 scores on 8th grade math were actually a point lower than its scores were in 2007! In other words, Louisiana hasn’t gained at all for the past dozen years!.
Wouldn’t it be refreshing if the leaders of the Disruption movement admitted that their 20-year-long policy of test-and-punish is both stale and failed?
Wouldn’t it be great if they said, “Whoa! We’re on the wrong track. We’ve inflicted nonstop testing on the nation’s children since 2002. We have spent billions on testing and test-prep. Scores went up for a few years but leveled off in 2007. Enough! Our answers are wrong. Time for fresh thinking.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Just wanted to say that Gary Rubinstein is my daughter’s math teacher, and she thinks he is absolutely wonderful.
Scores went up for a few years, and then they leveled off. There is a reason for that: when you do test prep, you familiarize students with the computer systems and the types of test questions, and so you get initial gains. And then, because you are teaching nothing substantive that is actually tested validly, the scores level off.
The whole thing is a scam. High-stakes standardized testing has NOT improved outcomes, as measured by test scores, and it has not closed achievement gaps. It has cost many billions of dollars, devolved our curricula and pedagogy, and created stressful, micromanaged environments in our schools. The opportunity costs of the standards-and-testing mania have been enormous. Enough. Enough. Enough. We’ve lived with this wasteful nonsense for so long that we now have a whole new generation of teachers who think this normal. It’s not.
Nailed it, Bob. You know well why test prep is deleterious to authentic education. But let’s be more specific: When the NCLB came out, the intensity of NAEP gains was diminished. Scores went up, but not by as much as scores went up during the period of increased integration without high stakes testing. The gains declined with testing. Eventually, testing correlated with the disappearance of gains. And now the scores are in decline.
Two things: One, high stakes testing correlates with lower NAEP scores. And two, and more importantly, the wealth gap caused by neoliberal meritocracy correlates with diminishing NAEP scores so much as to suggest causality. Poverty is the problem — we all know it — and testing/privatization are a big part of the poverty problem. Testing will never be part of the solution.
Do neoliberals care? No, of course not. They’re rolling in the dough.
It makes sense that the NAEP scores remain roughly the same if the SEL of the state has not changed. Test scores are not the ‘Holy Grail’ of learning. Students, schools and teachers are more than the sum of the scores. If there is a punitive system in place that narrows curricula, we should be asking what students are missing or losing. The are missing a rich, varied curricula that teaches social studies, science and the arts. They may be missing the opportunity to read whole novels or books in entirety missing out of hundreds of teachable moments. They may be losing the opportunity to really read, write and reason in order to get a score on a bubble test. Worst of all they may be losing self esteem and gaining a label of failure that may follow them for their whole lives.
It is telling that neither Gary Rubinstein nor the NAEP report card say anything about the ceiling score for a particular grade. The scores cannot grow indefinitely. Eight-graders cannot answer questions regarding integrals or matrices. There is a limit to their knowledge, hence there is a limit to the score. A good result would be a reasonably-high score, pretty much horizontal line year to year with little gap between whatever groups the test proctors decide to define and control: race, gender, wealth, etc. As I said in another thread, the results on the right side of the graphs shown on Brandenburg’s page are nicely grouped together and are reasonably constant year to year.
How close these results to the maximum possible score or even to reasonably acceptable score (this is a matter of opinion) is not known because the ceiling is not provided. Therefore, these results cannot be evaluated, they are pretty much meaningless.
In my local school the tests clearly show min/max/average values of test takers but they also show the maximum score that can be awarded for a particular test, so one can see how close they are to perfection (in test-proctor’s terms, of course).
The entire disruption = progress = in-NO-vation theory needs to be discredited & discarded. They don’t say it will disrupt kids and their lives.
Disruption is the goal of disruption. At that, they succeed.
Here’s an ed reform article about funding for charter schools in Michigan:
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2019/11/04/opinion-charter-school-veto-attack-detroit-students/4113675002/
The headline is “charter school veto attacks Detroit students”
It’s just really interesting how public schools and charter schools are treated differently in the “movement”. Anything negative about a charter school is treated as an attack on charter school STUDENTS, while anything negative about public schools is portrayed as about the SCHOOLS.
They effectively “disappear” public school students. Our students don’t exist. They don’t do this to charter or private school students. Only public school students.
If they were really “agnostic” they would treat the two groups the same- so if a public school budget is cut or not increased they would refer to that in terms of public school students and if a charter school budget was cut or not increased they would refer to charter school students. But they don’t. Only charter and private schools have “students” apparently. Public schools are empty buildings in this world they’ve invented.
It’s just a complete disregard for our students and it’s so much a part of the “movement” none of them even see it.
These people (Duncan, White, Petrilli, etc.) are dishonest and disingenuous. Also incapable of admitting their mistakes. Has Mr. Gates had his 10 years, yet?
Gates resets his 10-year clock continuously. He never admits error. Like Trump.
Like billionaires.