RALEIGH — A few weeks ago, my colleagues and I at the John Locke Foundation reacted to the celebrated release of the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) reading scores for 2002. We noted that while North Carolina was probably at or slightly above the national average, the huge gains that state students appeared to make from 1998 to 2002 had likely been exaggerated by North Carolina’s propensity to exclude low-performing students from taking the test that, in other words, would have been tested.
I stand by that analysis. It’s a point we’ve been making since the mid-1990s. North Carolina politicians have consistently played up good news, played down bad news, and paid little attention to the details and complexities of sound educational measurement. The most famous example of this tendency was a 1998 press conference at which Gov. Jim Hunt claimed that his Smart Start preschool program, in place in most jurisdictions for only a couple of years, had played a significant role in boosting the scores of the state’s fourth- and eighth-graders.
Unfortunately, critics of North Carolina’s education reforms over the past decade have also been prone, on occasion, to play up the bad news, play down the good news, and pay little attention to what the state might be doing right. The most famous example of this mirror-image tendency has been the consistent — and ridiculous — suggestion by some that North Carolina ranked “48th in education,” all based on state-by-state rankings in SAT scores that are dated and flawed as a useful comparison.
In the spirit of uplifting rational discourse above the political ax-grinding that can pervade education policy, let me take this opportunity to note that last week’s release of NAEP writing scores for North Carolina provided some unadulterated good news for our students. Average scores for both fourth-graders and eighth-graders put North Carolina above its neighbors and a bit above the national average. Moreover, the percentage of eighth-graders demonstrating proficiency in writing increased markedly from 1998 (the last time the test was given) to 2002.
As far as I can tell, differences in exclusion rates could not have played a significant role in shaping the average scores. North Carolina excluded about as many students as the average state did. Our schools did tend to test disabled students “with accommodations” — that is, with special assistance or extra time — more often the most states, but there is no evidence that withholding the accommodations would have impacted the scores enough to change the average much. Indeed, while the federal officials that oversee NAEP have expressed many reservations about the impact of exclusions and accommodations on state comparisons for reading, they have apparently concluded that, so far, the evidence on writing suggests a “minimal” impact on scores and ranks.
Why has North Carolina outperformed so many other states on the writing exam? I suspect that part of the answer lies in the fact that our public schools have administered annual writing tests for a number of years, while other states focused on reading or math alone. Writing tests, as we have seen in North Carolina, can be tricky tools to employ well. Learning how to read and respond to the “prompt” probably doesn’t come as easily to the average student as learning how to take a multiple-choice test. If our students are getting more practice on annual tests, then it stands to reason they would perform better in the occasional NAEP exams.
Whatever the reason, North Carolina’s solid performance on the NAEP writing test deserves recognition. It should not, of course, be interpreted to mean more than it does. The nation’s public schools are so mediocre that “beating the average” isn’t exactly a high hurdle to surmount. Moreover, both state and national data suggest that whatever gains our public schools are making in the elementary and middle grades tend to fade once our students reach high school. Keep in mind that the final “product” of the educational process isn’t an eighth-grader. It is a high-school graduate. So far, we have yet to see the kind of gains in high-school achievement that we have seen in the lower grades. Is it a measurement problem? A collapse of academic rigor? Lax discipline? Drugs and safety concerns?
Real answers will come from rational discourse. Neither puffery nor obloquy will suffice.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.