Archives for category: NAEP
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G.F. Brandenburg: Reform Has Failed, in the U.SA. and D.C.

By dianeravitch
April 10, 2018 //
7

Retired teacher Guy Brandenburg went to the National Press Club to observe the official release of the NAEP scores for 2017, released one year after the tests were offered in every state to samples of students.

His judgment: NAEP 2017 demonstrates the failure of what has been called “Reform” since the signing of NCLB in 2002 and the hiring of Michelle Rhee as autocratic chancellor of D.C.

”In the morning session, presenters acknowledged that for the nation as a whole, reading scores are flat – essentially unchanged — after 25 years of various types of ‘reforms’. Panelists tried to explain why, and seemed to me to give just about diametrically-opposed solutions to the problem. The introductory presenter (whom we saw on tape), essentially blamed us adults for not letting kids see us read often and deeply enough, and said that if we just wish harder, the results will come. (not quite a direct quote, but close)

“I did a quick appraisal of how Washington DC’s scores have improved (or not) before and after mayoral control, which was imposed shortly after students took the 2007 NAEP. You may recall that Michelle Rhee was imposed as DC’s first education Chancellor. She and her henchwoman, Kaya Henderson (who succeeded Rhee) predicted, in writing, all sorts of miraculous gains that would come if they were free to fire teachers en masse and subject them to rigorous numerical control via IMPACT and VAM.

“None of it came to pass.

“With today’s data it is even clearer than ever. I found 16 separate subcategories of students for which I could easily find data. Of them, improvements were better BEFORE mayoral control for 12 of them, and in only 4 was the improvement slightly better AFTER mayoral control.

“That’s a three-to-one vote against mayoral control and the whole educational Reformster movement.

“In other cities and jurisdictions, it’s more of the same. The imposition of Common Core curriculum, along with SBAC and PARCC testing and the like, has in fact made the gaps between high-achievers and low-achievers wider than ever.”

This is what failure looks like. Watch the excuses come pouring out.

Categories District of Columbia, Education Reform, Failure, NAEP

James Harvey: Don’t Be Fooled By NAEP “Proficient”

By dianeravitch
April 10, 2018 //
12

 

James Harvey, executive director of the National Superintendents Roundtable, warns parents and the public not to be fooled by the “proficiency” standard of NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The NAEP scores for 2017 will be released today, and you will hear loud lamenting about how many students are “not proficient.”

Under the leadership of Chester (Checker) E. Finn, Jr., the National Assessment Governing Board adopted “achievement levels” in 1992. The levels are: Advanced, Proficient, Basic, and Below Basic. They have been “provisional” since that time. They are determined by the subjective guesswork of adult panels who decide what students in fourth and eighth grade “should know and be able to do.” Sometimes these panels include teachers, but not always.

Before 1992, NAEP results were reported only as “scale scores” on a scale of 500 (they still are). One could see if the scores went up or down but not deplore their rise or fall because the scale scores tell you what is, not what ought to be. Checker has long been a critic of American schools, and he pushed for an easily understandable way to gauge the slow progress of the schools. Progress on a mass test is always incremental. When it is not, the measure is suspect.

Achievement levels provided a way to make simple (and simplistic) judgment calls. Most often, in this time of lamentations and chest-pounding about the younger generation, the achievement levels have turned into a cudgel with which to beat teachers, students, and public schools, usually by ignorant politicians who want to pass laws to ensure that “no child will be left behind” and that “every student succeeds.” Laws don’t teach children, nor do bluffs and fake threats.

My term on NAGB, the NAEP governing board, did not overlap Checker’s. I served later, from 1998-2004. I came to believe that the Advanced level represented A+ performance; Proficiency was a solid A, A-, even a B+; Basic was a B to C- level, where the plurality of students scored, and Below Basic was D and F. That was my judgment, not the policy of the board. When anyone asserts that all or almost all students should score in the Proficient range, I think of this as massive grade inflation. Reaching Proficient is a very high bar. It is entirely unrealistic to use NAEP Proficient as a passing standard, as the Common Core Tests do. Any school in which every student scores an A or A- or B+ must be a school for gifted students.

James Harvey writes:

NAEP TERM “PROFICIENT” IS MISLEADING

STATEMENT OF JAMES HARVEY

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

NATIONAL SUPERINTENDENTS ROUNDTABLE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SEATTLE, April 9, 2018 – As the U.S Department of Education prepares to release the latest findings from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the American people should understand that the misleading term “proficient” sets a performance benchmark beyond the reach of most students in the world.

A detailed analysis released in January concluded that the vast majority of students in most countries could not demonstrate proficiency as NAEP defines the term.

The authors of the analysis, the National Superintendents Roundtable and the Horace Mann League, linked NAEP’s proficiency benchmark to the performance of students around the world on international assessments such as TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study).

The report on this work (How High the Bar?) concluded that:

In no nation do even 40 percent of students meet the NAEP Proficient benchmark in Grade 4 reading.

Only one nation has 50 percent or more of its students meeting the Proficient benchmark in Grade 8 science (Singapore).

Just three nations have 50 percent or more of their students meeting the Proficient benchmark in Grade 8 math (Singapore, Republic of Korea, and Japan).

Citing U.S. Department of Education documents, the report criticized the Department for misusing the term “Proficient.” The term, as the Department acknowledges, does not mean performing at grade level. Surprisingly, according to the Department’s statements, it does not even mean proficient, as most people understand the term.

Roundtable and Horace Mann League officials have insisted that the problem can be addressed without lowering standards by changing the term “proficient” to “high.” Without such a change, they maintain, the misuse of the term will continue to confuse both the public and educators, as in the past it has confused U.S. Secretaries of Education.

CONTACT: JAMES HARVEY: Office (206) 526-5336
Cell (206) 579-9272

******************************************

National Superintendents Roundtable
9425 35th Avenue, NE, Suite E
Seattle, WA 98115
*****************************************
National Superintendents Roundtable
9425 35th Avenue, NE
Suite E
Seattle, WA 98115
206-526-5336

Web: superintendentsforum.org
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ntsupsrt
Twitter: @natsupers

 

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, NAEP, Testing

Mercedes Schneider: John White Is Nervous about NAEP Scores

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2018 //
14

 

NAEP scores will be released April 18. They have already been released to state Superintendents so they can study their state’s scores and get their press release ready.

The 2015 scores were flat. Some states saw declines. This was widely viewed as a rebuke of the test-obsessed federal policies of the previous 15 years. Intensive test prep produced gains, but they had come to a halt.

Mercedes Schneider writes that Louisiana John White is already worried and has sent out a pre-emptive letter complaining that the scores may have been pushed down by NAEP’s switch to online testing.  This is not a statement by a man who is looking forward to the score release. He is already making excuses.

White, a Broadie who got his start in TFA, has promised dramatic improvements. He has promoted charters and vouchers. He has hailed the New Orleans “miracle.”

We watch for the NAEP release.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Louisiana, NAEP, Testing

The Absurdity of Expecting All Students to Reach NAEP Proficiency

By dianeravitch
March 28, 2018 //
21

 

James Harvey here explores “the problem with proficiency.”

Common Core tests arbitrarily decided that the NAEP proficiency level should be the “passing” mark for all. Test results are routinely reported as if those who did not meet this standard were “failing.”

I have routinely argued on this blog that NAEP proficiency is equivalent to earning an A, and that it was nuts to expect all students to earn an A. Only in one state (Massachusetts) have as many as 50% reached the standard.

Harvey demonstrates the reality.

He writes:

“In 1996, the International Education Assessment (IEA) released one of the earliest examinations of how well 4th grade students all over the world could read. IEA is a highly credible international institution that monitors comparative school performance; it also administers the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), a global assessment of 4th and 8th grade mathematics and science achievement. Its 1996 assessment (The IEA Reading Literacy Study, a predecessor to the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, or PIRLS) demonstrated that out of 27 participating nations, U.S. 4th graders ranked number two in reading (National Center for Education Statistics, 1996). Only Finland ranked higher. To the extent these rankings mean very much, this second-place finish for the United States was an impressive accomplishment.

”But around the same time, the National Assessment Governing Board of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reported that just one-third of American 4th graders were “proficient” in reading. To this day, the board of NAEP continues to release similarly bleak findings about American 4th graders’ reading performance (National Center for Education Statistics, 2011). And IEA continues to release global findings indicating that the performance of U.S. 4th graders in reading remains world class (Mullis et al., 2012).

“How could both these findings be accurate? Was it true, as NAEP results indicated, that U.S. 4th graders couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time? Or was IEA’s conclusion—that the performance of American 4th graders in an international context was first class—more valid? A broader question arises here, one that has intrigued researchers for years: How would other nations perform if their students were held to the NAEP achievement-level benchmark for “proficient”? How might they perform on Common Core-aligned assess-ments with benchmarks that reflect those of NAEP?

”How Would Other Nations Score on NAEP?

“In 2015, statistician Emre Gönülates and I set out to explore these questions on behalf of the National Superintendents Roundtable (of which I am executive director) and the Horace Mann League (on whose board I serve). The results of our examination, recently released in a report titled How High the Bar? (Harvey & Gönülates, 2017), are eye-opening. In short, the vast majority of students in the vast majority of nations would not clear the NAEP bar for proficiency in reading, mathematics, or science. And the same is true of the “career and college-readiness” benchmarks in mathematics and English language arts that are used by the major Common Core-aligned assessments.

“This finding matters because in recent years, communities all over the United States have seen bleak headlines about the performance of their students and schools. Many of these headlines rely on reports about student achievement from NAEP or the Common Core assessments. One particular concern is that only a minority of students in the United States meet the NAEP Proficient benchmark. Frequently, arguments in favor of maintaining this particular benchmark as the desired goal for American students and education institutions are couched in terms of establishing demanding standards so the United States becomes more competitive internationally.

“But the reality is that communities around the world would face identical bleak headlines if their students sat down to take the NAEP assessments. So, when U.S. citizens read that “only one-third” or “less than half” of the students in their local schools are proficient in mathematics, science, or reading (or other subjects), they can rest assured that the same judgments could be applied to national education systems throughout the world if students in those nations participated in NAEP or Common Core-related assessments. (This is true despite the widespread perception that average student performance in some other nations exceeds average student performance in the United States. The metric applied in our study is not a rank ordering of mean scores by nation but the percentage of students in each nation likely to exceed the NAEP Proficient benchmark.)

“Our findings may not even be surprising when we consider questions that have arisen from previous research on NAEP.”

Harvey goes on to explain why it is absurd to use NAEP proficiency as a passing mark.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Common Core, International, NAEP, Testing

Thomas Cox: In Praise of Our Public Schools

By dianeravitch
January 11, 2018 //
32

 

 

Thomas A. Cox practiced law in Georgia for many years and taught Education Policy and the Law at Emory University. Recently he moved to Virginia and discovered that the state’s leading newspaper, the Richmond Times Dispatch, was habitually hostile to the principle of public education and cheerleading for privatization. Cox submitted this opinion article to set the record straight, which the newspaper published.

I hope the editorial writers read his article.

He wrote about the falsity of the “failing schools narrative” and demonstrated that it is just plain wrong.

“Not often heard over the noise of this failure narrative is some compelling evidence that America’s public schools, far from being awash in failure, have overall been performing remarkably well, particularly in the face of new challenges and changing demographics. This counter-narrative is shared by a number of education researchers, historians, and educators, although they seldom receive the same fanfare (or financial impetus) as the nay-saying privatization advocates.”

Privatization is no answer to the challenges faced by our students today.

“A blind reliance on profit-driven markets to address and solve the challenges in educating America’s children would constitute a non-evidence-based leap of faith. Even worse, it would drive us toward abandoning our long-shared concept of education as a “common good” that we as a democratic polity have a collective responsibility to provide to all children. For almost two centuries, our country has served as a model to the world by striving to achieve that ideal through a shared societal commitment to publicly funded and locally operated schools.

“Although far from perfect and in need of constant re-evaluation and improvement, public schools and their legions of dedicated teachers continue to serve as critically important institutional forces in our nation’s ongoing struggle to provide equal opportunities for all citizens. In an age when so many economic and societal forces serve instead to increase inequality, now is no time for us to abandon that common commitment.”

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, For-Profit, NAEP, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Supporting public schools

No, Patricia Levesque, Florida is Not A Model for the Nation

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2017 //
17

Patricia Levesque has worked for Jeb Bush for many years. She is his henchperson in promoting Florida as a miraculous story of educational improvement, based on Bush’s beliefs in high-stakes testing, test-based accountability, school report cards, and choice via charters, cybercharters, for-profit charters, and vouchers. The one belief he does not have is that public schools are important and valuable community institutions.

Here she is today, touting Florida as a “national model.” She says that Florida’s accountability system has “paid off” and is a roaring success.

The Bush approach may be briefly summarized as test-test-test, then close or privatize the schools that can’t produce the scores.

Let’s go to the videotape, or in this case, the NAEP scores for 2015.

In 2015, Florida scored at about the national average in 4th grade math but below the national average in 8th grade math.

Nineteen states had higher NAEP scores in 4th grade math than Florida.

Florida students in 8th grade math scored below the national average and were tied with their peers in South Carolina and Nevada.

Forty states had higher scores in 8th grade math than Florida in 2015.

In 4th grade reading in 2015, Florida was just above the national average.

Fifteen states recorded higher scores than Florida in 4th grade reading.

In 8th grade reading in 2015, Florida students were at the national average, tied with North Carolina and Georgia.

Thirty five states had higher reading scores on the NAEP in 2015 than students in Florida.

Why would anyone consider Florida to be a national model?

Why not choose a state like Massachusetts, which is #1 on all of these measures?

Who would choose to follow the practices of a state that scored at about the national average, rather than one of those states that consistently has greater success on the NAEP than Florida?

What Levesque fails to mention is that many states produced higher test scores over the past 20 years, and Florida’s relative position remained about the same. Florida has a policy of holding back third-graders based on test scores, so that probably inflates their 4th grade reading and math scores. The gains of Florida and other states may reflect that unrelenting emphasis on testing, pre-testing, interim testing, etc., which, as Daniel Koretz points out in his recent book “The Testing Charade” produces inflated scores.

If you live in Florida, check the facts before you follow the lead of Jeb Bush, who is trying to protect his “legacy” of high-stakes testing and privatization.

Bottom line: Florida is no national model, unless your goal is mediocrity.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Education Reform, Lies, NAEP

Trump and Common Core: He Makes No Effort to Get Rid of It

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2017 //
41

It is not unusual to say that Trump lied about something. It happens every day.

But he does try to keep his campaign promises. He has tried and failed to build the Wall, and Mexico won’t pay for it. He has tried and failed to get rid of Obamacare.

But he hasn’t even tried to get rid of Common Core, which he promised to do. Everyone he interviewed for Education Secretary–including Eva Moskowitz and Michelle Rhee–supports Common Core.

Betsy DeVos was a supporter of Common Core before she became Secretary of Education, like her mentor Jeb Bush. She recently nominated at least three strong supporters of Common Core–former Michigan Governor John Engler, former North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue, and test expert Greg Cizek, who helped develop one of the Common Core tests (Smarter Balanced Assessment)–to the governing board of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

DeVos has not made any effort to discourage use of the Common Core.

Opponents of the CCSS: you were hoaxed! Trump will not get rid of it, nor will Betsy DeVos.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bush, Jeb, Common Core, Lies, NAEP

DeVos Appoints Former Governor Engler as Chair of NAEP Governing Board

By dianeravitch
September 29, 2017 //
11

Betsy DeVos apointed her friend and ally in the school choice movement, former Governor of Michigan John Engler, as chair of the National Assessment Governing Board, which administers the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Engler is a charter member of the “schools-are-failing” club. He recently retired as president of the Business Roundtable, an association representing some of the nation’s leading businesses, and before that was head of the National Association of Manufacturers.

Expect every release of NAEP scores to be a dire warning about how terrible our public schools are, how we are no longer globally competitive, and why we need drastic steps (school choice?) to close the achievement gaps.

Maybe some enterprising journalist will ask Engler about the failure of his reforms in Michigan, as reflected in NAEP scores. Since Michigan became a laboratory for choice, its NAEP scores plummeted.

As a seven-year member of that board, I can tell you we zealously protected the scores from politicization. Don’t expect Engler to maintain that tradition.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Fraud, Michigan, NAEP

Study: NAEP Does Not Assess Critical Thinking Skills: No Standardized Test Can Do That

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2017 //
40

The link was left off. It is here.

Valerie Strauss reports on an important new study by a group at Stanford University led by historian Sam Wineburg.

NAEP supporters say that the tests are able to measure skills that other standardized tests can’t: problem solving, critical thinking, etc. But this post takes issue with that notion. It was written by three Stanford University academics who are part of the Stanford History Education Group: Sam Wineburg, Mark Smith and Joel Breakstone.

Wineburg, an education and history professor in the Graduate School of Education, is the founder and executive director of the Stanford History Education Group and Stanford’s PhD program in education history. His research interests include assessment, civic education and literacy. Smith, a former high school social studies in Iowa, Texas and California, is the group’s director of assessment; his research is focused on K-12 history assessment, particularly on issues of validity and generalizability. And Breakstone, a former high school history teacher in Vermont, directs the Stanford History Education Group. His research focuses on how teachers use assessment data to form instruction.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress is considered the “gold standard” of education testing because it is the only national longitudinal measure that goes back to 1970; no one can practice for it; no one knows which students will take the test; no single student takes the entire test; samples of students in every state take portions of the tests.

But when it comes to standardized testing, there is no gold standard. It is all dross, especially now that almost all standardized tests are delivered online. Online testing is popular because it is cheap and supposedly fast. But online testing by its nature allows no room for demonstrating thoughtfulness or for divergent thinking or for creative responses. It is the enemy of critical thinking.

Wineburg’s group tried to determine whether NAEP actually tested critical thinking, and they found that it did not.

But what would happen [they asked] if instead of grading the kids, we graded the test makers? How? By evaluating the claims they make about what their tests actually measure.

For example, in history, NAEP claims to test not only names and dates, but critical thinking — what it calls “Historical Analysis and Interpretation.” Such questions require students to “explain points of view,” “weigh and judge different views of the past,” and “develop sound generalizations and defend these generalizations with persuasive arguments.” In college, students demonstrate these skills by writing analytical essays in which they have to put facts into context. NAEP, however, claims it can measure such skills using traditional multiple-choice questions.

We wanted to test this claim. We administered a set of Historical Analysis and Interpretation questions from NAEP’s 2010 12th-grade exam to high school students who had passed the Advanced Placement (AP) exam in U.S. History (with a score of 3 or above). We tracked students’ thinking by having them verbalize their thoughts as they solved the questions.

What we learned shocked us.

In a study that appears in the forthcoming American Educational Research Journal, we show that in 108 cases (27 students answering four different items), there was not a single instance in which students’ thinking resembled anything close to “Historical Analysis and Interpretation.” Instead, drawing on canny test-taking strategies, students typically did an end run around historical content to arrive at their answers.

Their analysis is fascinating.

It is past time that we relinquished our obsession with standardized testing.

Categories History, NAEP, Standardized Testing

Cloaking Inequity: What NAEP Reveals About Charter Schools Vs. Public schools

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2017 //
40

Julian Vasquez Heilig, a scholar at California State University in Sacramento, reports on a research project comparing the performance of charter schools to public schools, using state scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAEP is administered by the U.S. Department of Education and governed by a nonpartisan board appointed by the Secretary of Education. Since members serve for four-year terms, most were appointed by Arne Duncan or John King.

Heilig, with the assistance of Blake zclark, Jr., reviewed NAEP data and reached the following conclusions:

“One would most likely suspect from the current positive public discourse about charter schools that they would display higher national and large city NAEP performance when compared non-charter neighborhood schools, however, this is not actually the case when examining achievement data at the school level. Out of the 28 total comparison tests run, only 4 times did charters produce higher composite score averages than non-charter neighborhood public schools— 8th grade reading and math in the years 2013 and 2015. There was a tie in the large city comparison for 4th grade reading in the year 2013 as charter schools and non-charter neighborhood public schools displayed the same average composite scale scores. In the other 23 cases charter schools produced lower average composite scores on the NAEP (math, reading, science) than non-charter neighborhood public schools.”

The difference favoring public schools in 12th grade was very large.

In light of this disparity, why do so many federal and state policy makers consider charters a remedy for low-scoring public schools? What is the remedy for low-performing charter schools?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, NAEP, Privatization
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