Several years ago, public schools in North Carolina abandoned nationally standardized testing in favor of their own state-developed tests. At the same time, however, the state mandated that nonpublic schools — private, parochial, and home schools — must use nationally standardized tests or other nationally standardized equivalent measures selected by the school’s chief administrative officer to show that students are meeting the minimum standards of learning.
Administrators have offered a number of arguments for why they think nationally standardized tests are inadequate measures of student performance. Yet some observers wonder why these same arguments do not apply to nonpublic-school children.
To support their abandonment of nationally standardized testing, state education officials have argued that children are being overly tested, that the tests can be coached, and that nationally norm-referenced tests are unfair and do not measure skills students need in real life.
Contradicting that reasoning is one of the nation’s most renowned standardized achievements tests, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. It is backed by more than 70 years of research. The ITBS provides a comprehensive assessment of student progress in major content areas, many of which assess skills that students need for daily life, such as locating, interpreting, and analyzing maps, diagrams, reference materials, charts, and schematics.
National versus North Carolina
Unlike the Iowa Basic Test of Skills, the California Achievement Test, and the Stanford Achievement Test, which are nationally norm-referenced and mean that students are measured against a national norm group, North Carolina’s state-developed tests are not nationally norm-referenced.
The only qualification to write a test question for North Carolina’s end-of-grade tests is that the question writer be a teacher. Secrecy surrounds how the tests are developed. Students in public schools, including charter schools, are required to take the North Carolina end-of-grade tests in grades three, five, and eight but are not required to take nationally standardized tests.
In contrast, private and home schools are required to administer nationally standardized tests to students every year but are not required to administer North Carolina’s state-developed tests. Most private schools in North Carolina use the ITBS, SAT-9, CAT-5, or other nationally recognized achievement test. If parents of public school children want their children to take a nationally standardized test, they must pay for it themselves.
The state Board of Education says it uses test results to ensure that only those who pass the tests are promoted to the next grade. But Liz Morey, director of Healthy Start Academy, a charter school in Durham, said that too often the parents and teachers “don’t know until it’s too late because the scores come out several months after the students have been promoted to the next grade.”
Angela Cutlip, a home school parent, director of ATC Educational Services, and a former North Carolina public school teacher agrees that there is only a 21 percent chance that students who fail the end-of-grade tests will be held back. “And the students are aware of that fact,” she said.
Cutlip argues that standardized testing, in conjunction with ongoing assessment methods, such as running records and performance-based assessments, is essential for evaluating student performance. Nationally standardized tests provide a “valid and reliable tool for objective measurement of achievement,” according to Cutlip.
Cutlip and Morey both agree that part of the problem arises when test scores are improperly or poorly communicated to parents. But that doesn’t mean nationally recognized tests should be abandoned in favor of lower standards.
Parents are told that public school students in North Carolina are doing better and that their scores are rising. But the scores they refer to are on the state-developed tests. On nationally normed standardized tests, according to NHERI, home school children outscore their public school counterparts by wide margins in all achievements areas (by 30 to 37 percentile points). Similar figures hold true for private school children. North Carolina made such comparisons difficult when it abandoned nationally standardized tests in public schools.
High school graduation and college readiness rates
North Carolinians have more than anecdotal evidence to show that public schools are failing, yet they are told that the answer to the state’s educational woes lies in more money, smaller class sizes, grander school buildings, fewer tests, and so on. But while more money than ever before is being expended on public education, high school graduation rates are lowering and an increasing number of students are finding themselves unready for college. More students are graduating with literacy problems, and North Carolina is now advocating the need for literacy coaches in our schools.
College readiness rates differ for students from public and nonpublic schools. Students from nonpublic schools far outperform their public school counterparts on college-entrance tests. On the SAT, private school students scored from 10 percent to 22 percent higher than public school students, and home school students scored higher than both private and public school students. ACT figures show similar results, according to the College Board.
Nonpublic school students graduate from high school at a significantly higher rate than do public school students. Graduation rates for nonpublic school students range from 94 percent to 99 percent. In contrast, U.S. Department of Education data show that only 70 percent of all students in public high schools graduate, and that only 51 percent of all black students graduate.
North Carolina ranks 45th nationally, with less than 65 percent of all students graduating from high school. The figures are probably worse because schools have been known to use alternate methods to calculate graduation rates so they can artificially inflate the rates. According to Morey, the most reliable method is to start with the students entering the ninth grade.
College readiness data from the U.S. Department of Education show that only 32 percent of all students leave high school qualified to attend a four-year college, and that only 20 percent of all black students are college-ready when they graduate.
Even worse, 38 percent to 42 percent of college freshmen must take remedial math or English courses. According to the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, to be college-ready students must (1) graduate from high school, (2) have taken certain courses in high school to attain necessary skills that colleges require, and (3) demonstrate basic literacy skills. Given that nonpublic school students score higher on college-entrance tests, graduate at significantly higher rates, and that 85 percent or more nonpublic schools offer advanced placement and college prep courses, it can be argued that these students are better prepared to attend college than their public school counterparts.
North Carolina’s double standard in student testing makes it harder to assess public school student performance. However, college readiness and high school graduation rates along with college-entrance test scores provide evidence of vast performance differences between public and nonpublic school-educated students in North Carolina.
Karen McMahan is a contributing editor of Carolina Journal.