Re: Study comparing NCLB standards and tests

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NCLB Chatboard

Study comparing NCLB standards and tests

by requested web site

Jul 15, 2008

Not long ago there was a serious discussion on this site concerning a study that compared the NCLB standards and tests in all 50 states to each other.

There were several people who wanted to read the study. I came across the actually study when I was working on my master's thesis this morning. I do not know how to put a link in, but here is the web site. The study is called THE PROFICIENCY ILLUSION

Here is the first page of the study:

No Child Left Behind made many promises, one of the most important of them being a pledge to Mr. and Mrs. Smith that they would get an annual snapshot of how their little Susie is doing in school. Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer would get an honest appraisal of how their local schools and school system are faring. Ms. Brown, Susie’s teacher, would get helpful feedback from her pupils’ annual testing data. And the children themselves would benefit, too. As President Bush explained last year during a school visit, “One of the things t...See MoreNot long ago there was a serious discussion on this site concerning a study that compared the NCLB standards and tests in all 50 states to each other.

There were several people who wanted to read the study. I came across the actually study when I was working on my master's thesis this morning. I do not know how to put a link in, but here is the web site. The study is called THE PROFICIENCY ILLUSION

Here is the first page of the study:

No Child Left Behind made many promises, one of the most important of them being a pledge to Mr. and Mrs. Smith that they would get an annual snapshot of how their little Susie is doing in school. Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer would get an honest appraisal of how their local schools and school system are faring. Ms. Brown, Susie’s teacher, would get helpful feedback from her pupils’ annual testing data. And the children themselves would benefit, too. As President Bush explained last year during a school visit, “One of the things that I think is most important about the No Child Left Behind Act is that when you measure, particularly in the early grades, it enables you to address an individual’s problem today, rather than try to wait until tomorrow. My attitude is, is that measuring early enables a school to correct problems early…measuring is the gateway to success.” So far so good; these are the ideas that underpin twenty years of sensible education reform. But let’s return to little Susie Smith and whether the information coming to her parents and teachers is truly reliable and trustworthy. This fourth- grader lives in suburban Detroit, and her parents get word that she has passed Michigan’s state test. She’s “proficient” in reading and math. Mr. and Mrs. Smith understandably take this as good news; their daughter must be “on grade level” and on track to do well in later grades of school, maybe even go to college. Would that it were so. Unfortunately, there’s a lot that Mr. and Mrs. Smith don’t know. They don’t know that Michigan set its “proficiency passing score”—the score a student must attain in order to pass the test—among the lowest in the land. So Susie may be “proficient” in math in the eyes of Michigan education bureaucrats but she still could have scored worse than five-sixths of the other fourth-graders in the country. Susie’s parents and teachers also don’t know that Michigan has set the bar particularly low for younger students, such that Susie is likely to fail the state test by the time she gets to sixth grade—and certainly when she reaches eighth grade—even if she makes regular progress every year. And they also don’t know that “proficiency” on Michigan’s state tests has little meaning outside the Wolverine State’s borders; if Susie lived in California or Massachusetts or South Carolina, she would have missed the “proficiency” cut-off by a mile. Mr. and Mrs. Smith know that little Susie is “proficient.” What they don’t know is that “proficient” doesn’t mean much. This is the proficiency illusion. Standards-based education reform is in deeper trouble than we knew, both the Washington-driven, No Child Left Behind version and the older versions that most states undertook for themselves in the years since A Nation at Risk (1983) and the Charlottesville education summit (1989). It’s in trouble for multiple reasons. Foremost among these: on the whole, states do a bad job of setting (and maintaining) the standards that matter most—those that define student proficiency for purposes of NCLB and states’ own results-based accountability systems. We’ve known for years that there’s a problem with many states’ academic standards—the aspirational statements, widely available on state websites, of what students at various grade levels should know and be able to do in particular subjects. Fordham has been appraising state standards since 1997. A few states do a super job, yet our most recent comprehensive review (2006) found that “two-thirds of schoolchildren in America attend class in states with mediocre (or worse) expectations for what their students should learn.” Instead of setting forth a coherent sequence of skills and content that comprise the essential learnings of a given subject—and doing so in concrete, cumulative terms that send clear signals to educators, parents and policymakers—many states settle for nebulous, content-lite standards of scant value to those who are supposed to benefit from them. That’s a serious problem, striking at the very heart of resultsbased educational accountability. If the desired outcomes of schooling aren’t well stated, what is the likelihood that they will be produced? Yet that problem turns out to be just the opening chapter of an alarming tale. For we also understood that, when it comes to the real traction of standards-based education reform, a state’s posted academic standards aren’t the most important element. What really drives behavior, determines results, and shapes how performance is reported and understood, is the passing level—also known as the “cut score”—on the state’s actual tests. At day’s end, most people define educational success by how many kids pass the state test and how many fail. No matter what the aspirational statements set forth as goals, the rubber meets the road when the testing program

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