John Merrow of Learning Matters examined ways that education administrators of US states could make their test scores look better than they are. Under the “No Child Left Behind” rules, states can (a) remove the scores of subgroups of students from the overall results, and the scores they remove are often those of subgroups that score lower than the average, so removing those scores makes the average go up (and they can determine how many scores to remove); (c) alter the cut scores for determining who is judged competent, who passes; and (c) use scores that are in the high end of the statistical range around the mean rather than the mean itself, thus essentially raising the score.
The No Child Left Behind “Race”
Despite all the tough talk about the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind, thousands of schools with failing scores pass anyway. They do by using little-known and rarely discussed “loopholes” that are buried in the fine print of the law. Using sports analogies from track and field, our report explains four statistical techniques that allow schools to artificially boost performance and avoid federal penalties for low achievement. By taking advantage of these (perfectly legal) loopholes, states can add points to a school’s score, thereby converting a failing performance into an apparent success. U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, together with education policy analysts Kevin Carey and Chester Finn, discuss the loopholes and their impact on students.
To some extent, of course, the adjustments are legitimate. But the public should be able to see the actual, unadjusted results, too. Show the averages with and without the scores of the students who have limited English profeciency.
Link to “Gaming the System.” The show aired last spring, but I missed it then. I’m glad to get a link to it now, though.
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According to a report entitled “The Proficiency Illusion” from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a nonprofit that is based in Washington (DC) and focuses on K-12 education policy, the tests that are being used in some US states to assess educational outcomes reflect lower (and varied) standards for success. The report authors argue that the results are problemsome: Students may actually be performing worse than the assessments suggest, especially during the elementary years in reading, and their low competence may set the students up for failure as they progress through the grades.
New Fordham Report: The Proficiency Illusion
At the heart of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is a call for all students to be “proficient” in reading and mathematics by 2014. Yet the law expects each state to define proficiency as it sees fit and design its own tests. This study uses a Northwest Evaluation Association exam as a common benchmark to measure proficiency cut scores for assessments in twenty-six states. The findings suggest that the tests states use to measure academic progress and student proficiency under the No Child Left Behind Act are creating a false impression of success, especially in reading and especially in the early grades.
Link to the description of the report.
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In his column under the headline “Our Schools Must Do Better,” Bob Herbert of the New York (US) Times issued a clear and explicit call for greater effectiveness in education. Such calls are common, but Mr. Herbert goes further than many of them. He does not simply lament the situation, but makes some concrete suggestions.
What’s needed is a wholesale transformation of the public school system from the broken-down postwar model of the past 50 or 60 years. The U.S. has not yet faced up to the fact that it needs a school system capable of fulfilling the educational needs of children growing up in an era that will be at least as different from the 20th century as the 20th was from the 19th.
Mr. Herbert presents Professor Thomas Kane’s recommendation about systematically (a) identifying effective teachers during the early stages of their careers and (b) mining the plethora of alternative schools to determine the characteristics of those that have proven effective so that they can be emulated.
We need other important changes (e.g., explicit teacher preparation in the use of evidence-based practices, for example), but these two are worth considering. Thanks to Mr. Herbert’s column, they are now on the table.
Link to Mr. Herbert’s column.
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