National Test Scores - Math and Reading

[rr]

hmmm...

I'm still not saying it's perfect but here's some more evidence that we're starting to see a change as part of Common Core and creating more accountability. I'm sure some people will find faults with these tests or any testing but in order to understand trends we need benchmarks to understand the impact of change. Are these increases directly related to Common Core implementation, probably not, but I would think it's becoming harder to argue that it's detrimental to students ability to learn and as time goes on it will should get progressively better.

A quote from the NYT article:
"Experts concerned that American students are falling behind their international peers said that despite these improvements, the United States still had a long way to go. Paul E. Peterson, director of Harvard University’s program on education policy and governance, said he worried that recent policy changes were not putting enough pressure on states and school districts."

www.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/education/us-reading-and-math-scores-show-incremental-gains.html?_r=0

www.newsday.com/long-island/education/national-reading-math-scores-shoot-up-1.6396108

www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/07/national-test-scores_n_4229264.html?utm_hp_ref=politics

www.pressherald.com/news/Maine_students_score_high_on_national_reading__math_tests_.html

[Chris_Wendt]

I want to handle this response gingerly. Four concurrent accounts of the NAEP results in the main stream media deserve some recognition. and rr's commentary, above, is worth consideration. It is important that dialogue continues on this topic, one that will not be going away or even quieting down any time soon. It was my own due consideration and reading of these articles which delayed my replying.

Here is the latest available (2011-12) Wantagh Report Card (NYSED Website). Part of the Wantagh Report Card is the Statewide (NOT Wantagh) results for the most recently published (2010-11) NAEP results.


Here is the disclaimer from the bottom of that Report Card page:

NOTE
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), developed in 1969, is a nationally representative assessment of the performance of United States’ students in mathematics, reading, science, writing, the arts, civics, economics, geography, and U.S. history.

The NAEP assessment is administered to a sampling of schools across New York State. Teachers, principals, parents, policymakers,
and researchers use NAEP results to assess progress and develop ways to improve education in the United States. As part of a federal requirement, NYSED is publishing these statewide results on NAEP. There are no consequences for schools, teachers, or students based on NAEP results.

Frustratingly, NYSED expresses the NAEP results in terms of percentages instead of hard data, namely actual scores. The percentages are not accompanied by their base numbers, and as such are even less meaningful to anyone actually interested in understanding what those results indicate.

To help everyone understand a little better, these results may not have included ANY Wantagh students; they are a "representative sampling" of New York's student body, which numbered 385,000 for 4th and 8th Grade in 2012-13. So how many NY students were included in the 2013 NAEP testing?

• Reading 4th Grade...4,200
  
• Reading 8th Grade...3,900
  
• Math.... 4th Grade...4,100
  
• Math.... 8th Grade...3,900

That makes 8,100 out of 385,000, or 2.1% tested in Reading, and 8,000, or 2.0% tested in Math from NY State in 2013. The total number of schools participating in the NAEP 2013 tests were only 150 from across 700 school districts.

To me, it defies logic that truly "representative" data can be gleaned from only 2% of a student population that covers the gamut from Syosset to Buffalo to Brooklyn, to Newburg to Salamanca, and every other hamlet and 'burb in the state.

But assuming arguendo that the published results have some validity, then let's look at the numbers on that report card.

Percentages Scoring Proficient or Advanced:

• 4th Grade Reading...35%
  
• 8th Grade Reading...35%
  
• 4th Grade Math........36%
  
• 8th Grade Math........30%

It is indeed a good thing that New York's fourth and eighth graders are not out in the world competing for jobs, or even admissions to colleges at this point in their lives. No, our NY State fourth graders are simply not ready for fifth grade, and our NY State 8th Graders are not quite ready for the rigors of high school.

So, let's put more pressure on them, and watch them do better? Really?

Are they kidding us?

No fooling!

Chris Wendt

[rr]

I'm curious - where is this "pressure" you speak of and who is it coming from? I've written about making the whole system more accountable and challenge the status quo...I don't believe I, nor anyone else in the discussion, has said we need to "pressure them", the students. So where is the "pressure" coming from?

But let's put that aside for now...are the students that have been taking these NAEP tests for the past few decades feeling the same pressure as so many people perceive we're putting on kids? Probably not - I wonder why? Could it be that the teachers and administrations of these kids haven't been held accountable for the results? Could it be that they have no proverbial skin in the game?

Why are the tests that have been administered for decades been OK, spelling tests, math tests, all the various tests that have been given for years - why aren't those considered "high stakes"? Why is it that only once teacher evaluations are attached to a test does that test become "high stakes" and are the students feeling "more pressure"?

[Chris_Wendt]

rr posited:

"Why is it that only once teacher evaluations are attached to a test does that test become "high stakes" and are the students feeling "more pressure"?"

Sorry, but you are behind the curve on this discourse. The NCLB Assessments, predating the Common Core and having nothing at all to do with CC or APPR (teacher assessments) were high stakes tests, became high stakes due to the AYP requirement, meaning Acceptable Yearly Progress.

It was AYP that first turned me off to the whole central government testing milieu. It caused me, personally, to develop grave doubts as to the sanity of the governmental organizations and leaders at all levels of public education, starting in Washington. You cannot operate any system of anything on a concept of infinitely increasing performance by simply adopting infinitely increasing performance as a goal and saying, "Go get it, people!" But you especially cannot attempt to do this AND reduce your financial support for the system, public education in this instance.

There was never a performance plateau, never any reward or respite granted, to school boards, school administrators, teachers, or students. Just more, better, every year. And what was more and better? Was it real performance, read, high school graduation rates, or, was it just numbers on spreadsheets, scores on tests?

NCLB has become a dismal and costly failure, with 23% of our nation's high school seniors perennially not graduating with their class after 4 years of public high school. We leave about 50,000 students behind, year after year after year, despite the high stakes tests and the costly remedial and supportive services mandated by NCLB, which stands for NO CHILD Left Behind.

You may now toss NCLB on the same scrap heap with The New Math, the Metric System Conversion, and a host of other long forgotten, failed, expensive federal and state educational panaceas. Bring on the Common Core!

Wantagh kids, Wantagh teachers, Wantagh principals, Wantagh Administrators, the Trustees of the Wantagh Board of Education should NOT be worrying about passing (or failing) some meaningless central government tests every single year.

Instead, we here in Wantagh should be striving (away from this common core conformity) toward making available a wider selection of languages, like Hebrew, Latin, Mandarin Chinese, Russian or Greek, finding partners in this and deploying the right kind of technology solutions to make it happen.

Wantagh should be in a consortium of districts and universities innovating for meaningful STEM programs, not the ridiculously stupid BOCES half-day program on the other side of the island where students spend as much time riding school buses as they do sitting in science, technology, engineering, or math classes.

But what is Wantagh focused on? The Assessments. Our own program is stagnating while we march in lockstep to the central government's drumbeat, on a march that has no end point. Test. Test. Test. Test. Test. Test. YOUR KIDS DESERVE BETTER!!!

But wait! Listen...can you hear it? A new and different drumbeat? Anarchy in the suburbs, with parents and teachers and principals now mad as hell and not about to just keep on taking this crap with the teaching to the tests, and sweating out the tests, over and over and over again. And now they get to watch their hard-fought and precious 2013 Assessment scores just flowing down the toilet like it was no big deal.

No big deal or colossal mistake by the Commissioner of Education?

They, the parents, the teachers, the principals are now on their own march, in the streets and in the auditoriums, on the blogs and in the newspapers. This is not over yet. in fact, a new beginning can be witnessed this very week as the Commissioner steps back into the lions' den. Mineola on Wednesday, INVITATION ONLY! I am no longer chuckling over the missteps of Commissioner King...I am laughing out loud at this point.

What a sorry state of affairs for our public schools.

Chris Wendt

[Chris_Wendt]

rr also queried:

"...where is this "pressure" you speak of and who is it coming from? I've written about making the whole system more accountable and challenge the status quo...I don't believe I, nor anyone else in the discussion, has said we need to "pressure them", the students. So where is the "pressure" coming from?"

Two places.

• the concept of "academic rigor" carries an implication of more stress (or pressure) than the supposedly extant (or perceived) lack of academic rigor which the new rigor, the new rigorous testing regime, as a prime example, is designed to correct or to cure (or to fix).
  
  
• but the real pressure, the kind of pressure against which I and probably most other detractors of testing for its own sake are bridling, is PRESSURE TO CONFORM, and not just to help students become all they can be, but to conform to a generic curriculum under the aegis of making all students "college and career ready".

Chanting that mantra, "all students...college and career ready" is as easy as it is catchy. It seems to sound like a worthwhile call to action behind which everyone could fall in-line, smiling. "Oh-Wee-Oh! Oh-Wee-Oh!" But when you consider the data, the numbers, the gross number of students in America's public schools, and the huge number that do not graduate with their classmates (cohort) after 4 years of high school, you should soon realize that the goal of having tens of millions of students ever all be "college ready" or "career ready" is more blue sky than even pie in the sky. Because, if it were pie in that sky, then all the kids would WANT IT, and eagerly pursue it, and ultimately GET IT.

But for many kids, going to college, succeeding in College even if their parents MAKE THEM GO TO COLLEGE, will not be in the cards.

Becoming "career ready" is a horse of an entirely different color. One of the big misses, a huge disconnect between the Common Core Concept (not the curriculum and not the assessments, but the raison d'etre, the core concept) and our nation's student body is that nobody has bothered to articulate properly what a "career" is, or at least what are some of those careers to which each of these kids could aspire, if any. You could conceivably connect bookkeeping (a/k/a accounting) as a career that results from getting a college degree. And there are numerous other typical jobs, I mean careers, that want or require college degrees. And then there are that majority of college degrees for and into which so many students matriculate because they are cool, or fun, or easy...but which degrees actually lead nowhere, career-wise. So the dilemma takes shape: boring courses for a boring degree for a boring job that winds up being a boring career because you cannot escape your fate, or, interesting coursework for a cool degree, that will disappoint by its ultimate irrelevance to real life, but now you have college loans to pay-off, and so what do you do?

We send kids off to college just because college is de rigeur, and, because there are old people like me still working in the jobs your kids could have, except we cannot afford to retire and pay our taxes, with the hope that those people like me will eventually retire due to ill health or die,, and free-up some jobs in a few years (right after the kids finish college with their boring degrees or their useless degrees). Too many students in the pipeline, too few jobs at the end of that pipeline. Disconnect.

But having drifted off course I need to return to the conformity angle, and the specter of the enforced death of the arts and art education and of related and purely creative life pursuits (music, writing, acting, dance, athletics), as a direct result of the common core concept, its curriculum, and those voracious assessments...all being biased toward college and "careers" at the expense of developing talent and nurturing and encouraging creativity among our kids.

(Here, I like to call to mind the fact that Wantagh's highest achieving young person won an Emmy for his performance in a Broadway Play.)

To me, even to this day, one of Wantagh's best events is the annual high school arts show. I go there every year purely for the love of art, and I do take some small amount of pride at my small role particularly in having promoted (and passed) Wantagh's very robust Photography curriculum when I was on the Board. But I think Common Core threatens all of that, by too narrowly focusing learning objectives, and by demanding and consuming a disproportionately large share of our human and financial resources, such that the arts and related endeavors will be starved out of existence. This has already started to happen.

Those are the pressures, as I see them.

Sincerely,

Chris Wendt