Perhaps you saw the story in the New York Times a few days ago, lamenting that American students were not making up the ground they lost academically during the pandemic. This was presented as a full-blown crisis. The period from March 2020 to the fall of 2022 included many disruptions: family members died or were very sick, teachers and other school staff died or were very sick, many schools closed, many adopted online classes, normal life came to an end for more than two years, affecting family life and mental health.
When I read the panicked discussion in the New York Times, based on a study by NWEA, a major standardized testing company, I reached out to one of the wisest people I know and asked him to discuss the issues. That’s Gene V. Glass, one of the nation’s eminent education researchers. He wrote the following commentary for the blog.
He wrote:
The New York Times is worried — no, it’s panic-stricken.
Jeremiah — the weeping prophet of the Torah — was a veritable Pollyanna compared to today’s policy wonks and political animals when it comes to delivering bad news.
Journalists — like the New York Times education reporter Sarah Mervosh — envision the half-dozen NAEP score point loss from 2019 to 2022 to result in fewer students accepted to college with a resulting lifetime loss of $70,000 income. Does anyone seriously entertain the possibility that colleges will forego the tuition & fees payments of students who scored 5 points lower in the eighth grade on the NAEP test? Nor did anyone weep in 1990 when the scores were 30 points lower and lifetime incomes were doing just fine, thank you?
Three weeks ago, Dana Goldstein reported, again in the New York Times, that on the October 2022 administration of the NAEP test, the 13-year-olds scored an average of 256 in reading – down 4 pints — and 271 in math — down 9 points — from the averages in 2019. What happened between 2019 and 2022? The COVID pandemic, of course.
Conjuring up the causes of NAEP fluctuations has grown into a widespread academic game since the NAEP Governing Board decided to call some scores “Advanced” and other scores “Basic” — euphemisms for “Excellent!” and “My, my; we have a problem here.” When the U.S. History NAEP scores dropped 9 points from 2014 to 2022, no one panicked, or even cared apparently. The Civics NAEP score never wavered more than 1 or 2 points between 1998 and 2022; the average was 150 in 1998 and 150 again in 2022, never rising above 153. Again, a big nothing, though arguably the nation needs better citizens than it needs better calculators.
NAEP scores jump around for all sorts of reasons, mostly a host of very small reasons that are impossible to unravel. Readers can exercise their own analytic muscles puzzling over NAEP scores. Reading scores were already declining from 2017 to 2019 before the pandemic. In 2019, NAEP Mathematics scores increased at grade 4, but decreased at grade 8 compared to 2017. Moreover, the percent of 13-year-olds taking algebra declined from 34 percent in 2012 to 24 percent today. I don’t disapprove of such a decline; I merely advance it as one of a number of reasons why NAEP scores might be wiggling from time to time. And even bigger forces are afoot.
A couple dozen Red states are experiencing a mass migration of middle-class and upper-class white students to private and charter schools, all driven with barely a whimper by crypto-privatization backers. It would be remarkable for NAEP scores to hold steady under these circumstances alone. Arizona’s universal school voucher program is expected to cost the taxpayers $900 million for the 2023-24 year, more than ten times initial estimates. Three-quarters of the initial voucher applicants are students already in charter, private, and parochial schools. The U.S. percentage of white K-12 students in public schools is projected to decline by 20% between 2010 and 2030.
But the occasion of the COVID pandemic has become a good excuse for policy analysts to propose their favorite solution to the crisis, indeed a “manufactured crisis” in the words of my friend and colleague David Berliner who introduced the term in 1995. Experts have offered no fewer than a dozen emergency measures needed for the nation’s recovery. Nine of these follow: 1. Smaller classes; 2. Tutoring; 3. Extending the school year; 4. Adding a fifth year of high school; 5. Focused funding on minority students; 6. Focusing on math, not reading; 7. Full-time summer school; 8. Increased teacher pay; 9. Focusing on students’ mental health. A fifth year of high school?! Seriously? Now I’m in favor of most of these things, except focusing on math. How about Civics?
Some seem to favor no solution at all. A leitmotif of the NYT article is that the federal government’s billions of dollars in pandemic emergency aid to schools were misspent. The trouble is, less will be heard of any of these “solutions” after NAEP scores wiggle up a couple of points in the next testing.
The ravages of the pandemic were caused by a White House of Dunces. Incompetence cost the nation 1.1 million lives, two or three times more than the irreducible number. It will never happen again — at least not with COVID. The stewardship of all children’s education is a responsibility of every citizen, regardless of the next year’s tweak in NAEP scores. Put that on NAEP’s next Civics test.
Gene V Glass
Emeritus Regents’ Professor
Arizona State University
The New York Times is worried — no, it’s panic-stricken. https://shorturl.at/mtI15
Jeremiah — the weeping prophet of the Torah — was a veritable Pollyanna compared to today’s policy wonks and political animals when it comes to delivering bad news.
Journalists — like the New York Times education reporter Sarah Mervosh — envision the half-dozen NAEP score point loss from 2019 to 2022 to result in fewer students accepted to college with a resulting lifetime loss of $70,000 income. Does anyone seriously entertain the possibility that colleges will forego the tuition & fees payments of students who scored 5 points lower in the eighth grade on the NAEP test? Nor did anyone weep in 1990 when the scores were 30 points lower and lifetime incomes were doing just fine, thank you?
Three weeks ago, Dana Goldstein reported, again in the New York Times, that on the October 2022 administration of the NAEP test, the 13-year-olds scored an average of 256 in reading – down 4 pints — and 271 in math — down 9 points — from the averages in 2019. https://shorturl.at/DFHZ5 What happened between 2019 and 2022? The COVID pandemic, of course.
Conjuring up the causes of NAEP fluctuations has grown into a widespread academic game since the NAEP Governing Board decided to call some scores “Advanced” and other scores “Basic” — euphemisms for “Excellent!” and “My, my; we have a problem here.” When the U.S. History NAEP scores dropped 9 points from 2014 to 2022, no one panicked, or even cared apparently. And the Civics NAEP score never wavered more than 1 or 2 points between 1998 and 2022; the average was 150 in 1998 and 150 again in 2022, never rising above 153. Again, a big nothing, though arguably the nation needs better citizens than it needs better calculators.
NAEP scores jump around for all sorts of reasons, mostly a host of very small reasons that are impossible to unravel. Readers can exercise their own analytic muscles puzzling over NAEP scores at www.nationsreportcard.gov. Reading scores were already declining from 2017 to 2019 before the pandemic. In 2019, NAEP Mathematics scores increased at grade 4, but decreased at grade 8 compared to 2017. Moreover, the percent of 13-year-olds taking algebra declined from 34 percent in 2012 to 24 percent today. I don’t disapprove of such a decline; I merely advance it as one of a number of reasons why NAEP scores might be wiggling from time to time. And even bigger forces are afoot.
A couple dozen Red states are experiencing a mass migration of middle-class and upper-class white students to private and charter schools, all driven with barely a whimper by crypto-privatization backers. It would be remarkable for NAEP scores to hold steady under these circumstances alone. Arizona’s universal school voucher program is expected to cost the taxpayers $900 million for the 2023-24 year, more than ten times initial estimates. Three-quarters of the initial voucher applicants are students already in charter, private, and parochial schools. The U.S. percentage of white K-12 students in public schools is projected to decline by 20% between 2010 and 2030.
But the occasion of the COVID pandemic has become a good excuse for policy analysts to propose their favorite solution to the crisis, indeed a “manufactured crisis” in the words of my friend and colleague David Berliner who introduced the term in 1995. Experts have offered no fewer than a dozen emergency measures needed for the nation’s recovery. Nine of these follow: 1. Smaller classes; 2. Tutoring; 3. Extending the school year; 4. Adding a fifth year of high school; 5. Focused funding on minority students; 6. Focusing on math, not reading; 7. Full-time summer school; 8. Increased teacher pay; 9. Focusing on students’ mental health. A fifth year of high school?! Seriously? Now I’m in favor of most of these things, except focusing on math. How about Civics?
Some seem to favor no solution at all. A leitmotif of the NYT article is that the federal government’s billions of dollars in pandemic emergency aid to schools were misspent. The trouble is, less will be heard of any of these “solutioins” after NAEP scores wiggle up a couple of points in the next testing.
The ravages of the pandemic were caused by a White House of Dunces. Incompetence cost the nation 1.1 million lives, two or three times more than the irreducible number. It will never happen again — at least not with COVID. The stewardship of all children’s education is a responsibility of every citizen, regardless of the next year’s tweak in NAEP scores. Put that on NAEP’s next Civics test.
Gene V Glass
Emeritus Regents’ Professor
Arizona State University
Thanks for posting this. great article. barbara
Thank you, Professor Glass!
Does anyone seriously entertain
the possibility, that the balance
of economic, political, or social
power, as it stands today, is the
result of what the PTB fails to
discern?
What is PTB? Pacific Testing Board? I could not find it as I skimmed the post.
PTB is an abbreviation for
“Powers That Be”. In idiomatic
English, “the powers that be” is
a phrase used to refer to those
individuals or groups who
collectively hold authority over
a particular domain. Within this
phrase, the word “be” is an archaic
variant of “are” rather than a
subjunctive “be”…
Thank you. However, it was not “idiomatic” to use such abbreviations when I was learning to read and write in the 1950s and 60s.
If an acronym can be created, it will be. GMAB! (Give me a break!)
NoBrick asks: “Does anyone seriously entertain the possibility, that the balance of economic, political, or social power, as it stands today, is the result of what the PTB fails to discern?” (PTB: powers that be)
NoBrick: Unless you think there is always only ONE reason why things are “the way they are,” the answer is “yes and no.” (It’s a breakthrough most progressives have to undergo.)
YES . . . unless you haven’t noticed the abundance of mental morons in politics today (not to mention on blogs).
NO . . . there are also plenty who know exactly what they are doing and who apparently either don’t give a hoot about its short- or long-term implications; OR they are arrogant do-gooders forcing their way into others’ lives by any means whatsoever and who are willing to betray democracy to get their way; OR who are pseudo-victims, OR who are also arrogant borderline nihilists who go “eeewwwww” about everyone on the planet and who are followed around by those who are so full of hate they “just want to hit someone in the face.”
But don’t forget those many who don’t fit in anywhere above and who keep going to try to understand and to make things truly better.
Welcome to America, or perhaps we should say “democracy.” CBK
Please clarify what NWEA stands for. I looked up the organization online, and the first answer was “NWEA is now part of HAH” Or maybe it was “AHA.” Whatever. I clicked on that and up came the HAH/AHA website with a headline declaring that NWXYZ and HAwhatever are now one.
https://www.nwea.org
Thank you, but like I said, I already googled it, got the website, and that NWEA website did not spell it out on the first page, and I wasn’t going to–and shouldn’t have to–read on and on trying to find what those letters stand for.
NWEA personnel need to find a good remedial writing program somewhere and learn the basics of clear writing.
NWEA used to be Northwest Evaluatuon Association. As I said in the post, it’s a standardized testing company. Its product, the MAP test, is given three times a year to mrasure “progress.”
https://www.nwea.org/about/
Also, NWEA was acquired by HMH, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt with the goal of linking testing and instruction with online intervention software using the HMH platform. The company calls it personalized learning, but it’s anything but. They’re just hustlers selling worthless online test prep school. Their sales pitch, based on a UFO sighting of NAEP apocalypse-Sasquatch, does not belong in the New York Times or on the PBS Newshour.
The NWEA marketing campaign (the sky is still falling) has been picked up by the AP news wire. Many dumb politicians believe that tests increase test scores.
It’s irresponsible if the news organization didn’t find out what NWEA was and even more irresponsible if they knew and published anyway. It’s as though AP reported as news a marketing pitch from a company owned by Michael Lindell that said Americans are losing $70,000 a year because they don’t sleep on a My Pillow. As news. And if My Pillow was as harmful as testing or Pearsonalized learning.
“…was acquired by HMH, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt with…” Thank you. This is an example of proper use of abbreviations, which produces clarity in writing.
Thanks for posting this comment, Diane.
In skimming the post, I see that Mr. Glass is criticizing “test and punish.” Bravo! Kids are where they are (as they always are!) and our job is to move them forward.
M I thought a real keeper was ” . . . though arguably the nation needs better citizens than it needs better calculators.” CBK
“NAEP scores jump around for all sorts of reasons, mostly a host of very small reasons that are impossible to unravel.”
No, the reasons are not “impossible to unravel.” It’s been known, as cogently pointed out by Noel Wilson that the whole standards and testing malpractice process is fraught with invalidities. Any one of those myriad invalidities invalidates, makes moot not only the bases of the standards and testing malpractice regime but, even more so, makes any discussion of the results, as Wilson puts it, “vain and illusory.” Or as Swacker puts it a bunch of mental masturbation-totally worthless and not worth the effort, resources and time.
Not to mention the harms inflicted upon the students through a bastardized teaching and learning process that is guaranteed to hinder all students from learning as much as they would choose and like.
When will we learn?
Glass for Ed Secretary
I would refer back to Bob “The Legend” Shepherd’s post a few weeks back where he clearly spelled out the tiny percentage of “loss of learning.” And as so many of us have discussed in the past, kids are yearning for something other than tests. In my neck of the woods, silly me, I found out kids don’t have to pass middle school. I was told more often than not, “they can fail if they want” as long as they don’t bother others. Wow, great mantra Mr. Principal. And kids are TIRED of the same ol’ “This will be on the test.” Uh, I thought you said no four-letter words Mr. Teacher Man. I was there watching students who could not even understand the directions take a PSAT in middle school. The test was difficult. Many tuned out in minutes. Timers on tests irritated them. You have to do this! Try guessing! And knowing “they can fail if they want” geez, I don’t know why they should care about a passage that makes no sense to them (and mostly culturally) if they are moving on regardless. And, if I am a kid who goes to school “…otherwise I just get in trouble…” why should I care? They yearned for REAL LEARNING. And those of my kids who couldn’t pass a test no matter if the school year was all year, longer, tutored, their minds were elsewhere. Where I saw REAL LEARNING is when the trouble kid told me all about BMX bikes, gear ratios, speeds (and created a PPT about it all). The other kid was a martial arts gold-medal winner, but an academic failure. Gee, that “learning” wasn’t on the test. The artists, poets, story tellers, interior designers (yes, one student I found out loved to move furniture around) so I let him design the classroom. I had students tell me about their farm animals, construction, plumbing, animal abatement, horses, plants, and you name it even childcare.Uh, I kinda liked that “freedom to learn” but what did I know? As Alfie Kohn wrote, “What does it mean to be educated?” And no four-letter words, please.
And…I was looking for an old book called “Fear” about the “sky is falling” viral nonsense that more people tend to believe. But, I found this book that might be worth checking out, “Fear is the Mind Killer.” For the last eight years, James and Kate have been working together to design, implement and evaluate a whole-school, evidence-informed approach to teaching and learning known as Learning Skills. An eight-year study with the University of Cambridge revealed that Learning Skills led to significant gains in subject learning, with rapid gains among students from disadvantaged backgrounds. In this practical guide for teachers and school leaders, James and Kate reveal a recipe for success rooted in three key concepts: metacognition (reflecting on learning); self-regulation (taking ownership over the learning process); and oracy (developing high-quality speaking and listening skills). This is a book about what happened when a small team of teachers seized an opportunity to provide their students with the knowledge, the skills and the confidence to take control of their own learning. This journey began with a question: how and what would we teach, if there was no one watching? On the other side of fear is the teacher you want to be, and the children you’d like to teach… What a concept.
I was afraid that Gene v. Glass was going to be another whacko SCOTUS decision I somehow missed. Whew!
That’s what I thought!
It probably is. They’re cranking them out like there’s no tomorrow.
leftcoastteacher OMG! There’s no tomorrow?! CBK
“When the U.S. History NAEP scores dropped 9 points from 2014 to 2022, no one panicked, or even cared apparently. The Civics NAEP score never wavered more than 1 or 2 points between 1998 and 2022; the average was 150 in 1998 and 150 again in 2022, never rising above 153. Again, a big nothing, though arguably the nation needs better citizens than it needs better calculators.”
What the nation needs is better citizens who can critically evaluate EVERYTHING they read. I like the way Natalie Wexler, author of The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System–and How to Fix It, phrased it in a piece she wrote today, “More Time in School Isn’t Enough to Counter Pandemic Learning Loss: Unless we also change our approach to reading instruction, we’ll just be spinning our wheels.”
https://nataliewexler.substack.com/p/more-time-in-school-isnt-enough-to?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=443300&post_id=134725303&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email
She writes:
“If we really want to narrow gaps and make up for pandemic-related learning loss, we need to change what and how we teach—especially in the area of reading. Part of what needs to change is our approach to teaching kids how to decipher individual words, which doesn’t work for many of them, especially those at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum.
We also need to change our approach to reading comprehension, which takes up the lion’s share of instructional time in elementary school—and presumably would continue to do so with an extended school year. Under the mistaken belief that comprehension should be taught as a set of abstract skills—like “finding the main idea” of a passage—schools have failed to give children access to the knowledge and vocabulary that would actually enable them to understand the complex text they’re expected to read at higher grade levels.”
Using any drop from standardized test scores as an excuse to claim we are having a full-blown crisis is using a well-known propaganda method known as the BIG LIE — once fascists everywhere launch a BIG LIE like this one, then they repeat it as many times as possible in one form or another with only one goal that has nothing to do with educating children to become mature adults that are lifelong learners, avid readers, critical thinkers, and problem solvers.
Since the real meaning of WOKE means people that are lifelong learners, avid readers, critical thinkers and problem solvers, who do you think is behind this BIG LIE propaganda campaign? Hint: they are not WOKE.
I liked a recent comment I saw on this blog that asked the question, ” What is the opposite of woke?” I believe the answer was ,”Asleep at the wheel?”
A company that sells empty, plodding “intervention” test prep apps says schools need to spend more time using empty, plodding “intervention” test prep apps. NWEA, thank you for your presentation. Don’t call us; we’ll call you.
I just pulled down eighth grade NAEP Math, Reading, Civics, and U.S. History average scale scores (“scores”) for all available years and put each subject’s scores on a Deming control chart. Following are readings from the control charts at the scale of the charts rather than at the NAEP 0-500 scale. At the NAEP 0-500 scale, scores would like a flat line and “nothing to see, here.” It’s a difference like looking through a microscope rather than a telescope.
Math increased continually from 1990 through 2013 from 262.6 to 284.6. There were only two interruptions: a 1.5 dip in 1996 and a 2.4 dip in 2000. In 2013, there was a 0.8 spike up to 284.6 that went very slightly beyond the upper natural limit of the range of “wiggling” the scores naturally did. The spike was then followed by 2015, 2017, and 2019 that saw scores wiggle tightly around 282.4 before nosediving to 274.3 in 2022.
Reading began in 1992 and 1994 with scores wiggling tightly around 259.8. Then beginning in 1998 with a sudden shift up, the scores wriggled stably around 263.4 until 2009. Then beginning in 2011 with another sudden shift up, the scores wiggled stably around 266.2 until 2017 before nosediving through 2019 to 2022 and a score of 260.5.
Civics scores have wiggled stably around 151.3 since the beginning, in 1998. However, it is worth noting that scores increased continuously from 150.0 in 1998 through 2006 and 2010 to peak at 153.6 in 2014, only to then nosedive from 2014 through 2018 to 150.3 in 2022.
Like the Civics scores, U.S. History scores have wiggled stably around 262.4 since the beginning, in 1994. However, here too, it is worth noting that scores increased continually from 259.3 in 1994 to 267.5 in 2014, with one dip to 260.2 in 2001, only to then nosedive continuously from 2014 through 2018 to 258.4 in 2022.
Observation: Taking all subjects’ scores together as a bigger context rather than just one subject’s scores as context, something triggered scores to nosedive pre-COVID. While COVID may have been a factor causing scores to wiggle unnaturally for the worse, the story all the scores tell viewed through control charts suggest it is a mistake to pursue learning recovery based on COVID. Something before COVID started happening.
The control charts beg the question: What starting happening around 2013 and 2014 for the worse?
Maybe the trail has gone too cold by now. In any case, fingering COVID exclusively is very likely a mistake.
Ed, you are right. The NAEP scores flatlined for the decade that preceded COVID. That was the decade in which the Common Core was introduced, along with the aggressive tactics of Race to the Top. Bold promises were made on behalf of these innovations. They had no effect —or a negative one, due to their wacky promotion of disruption.
I thought we already had this established. Any positive results on standardized testing is because of Ed Reform. Any negative results on standardized testing is because of failing public schools.
Btw, Arne Duncan has declared the NAEP scores to be a national tragedy (or something like that)….
Some liberal rag that New York Times, huh…