School may be out, but student achievement is still front and center in the news. Two recently released publications are likely to keep it that way for quite some time.
Mapping 2005 State Proficiency Standards Onto the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) Scales, released June 7th by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), analyzes persistent and widespread discrepancies between state achievement tests and NAEP. It’s no secret that many state tests paint a rosier picture of student proficiency than does the national NAEP exam. Among the states themselves, proficiency scores also vary widely. This report offers one explanation: according to NCES researchers, “Observed heterogeneity in states’ reported percents proficient can be largely attributed to differences in the stringency of their standards.”
Some states seem to have a lock on low standards. Our state’s testing program is no stranger to criticism, accused in the past of misleading both parents and the public with inflated test scores that obscure poor performance. The new NCES report will do little to change this perception. In fact, an Associated Press story citing the NCES study calls out North Carolina as having the most lax reading standards in the entire country for middle-schoolers: “Eighth-graders in North Carolina had to demonstrate the least knowledge to be considered proficient readers, while students in Wyoming had to show the most knowledge.” North Carolina wasn’t dead last in the other categories, but that should come as cold comfort considering how close we still are to the bottom of the heap: our state scored sixth from the bottom on fourth-grade reading, third from the bottom in fourth-grade math, and second to last in eighth-grade math.
If North Carolina’s tests are so darn easy, are kids acing them? Not exactly. On June 8th, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction released preliminary results for the 2006-07 writing assessment. The percentage of proficient fourth and seventh graders has increased slightly since last year, up to 52.7 and 50.8 percent respectively, while tenth-grade proficiency percentages declined to 51.4 percent. State educators may cheer the small uptick in fourth- and seventh-grade scores, but it can’t mask the fact that close to half of students at all three grade levels still don’t exhibit proficient writing skills.
More fundamentally, do state writing tests even give an accurate evaluation of student writing abilities? After all, these tests have been the subject of controversy for years, leading to a revision in 2002-2003. But the newer writing test is also under fire, this time for short-circuiting basic grammar conventions in favor of content. Evaluators grading the tests are instructed to following a scoring formula (pdf., 681KB) that weights content twice as heavily as standard English conventions like grammar, spelling, usage, and sentence structure.
In addition, the newly released report fails to disaggregate content scores from convention scores. So if students are falling down on their grammar, we’ll never know it. Consider too that past trends were far from reassuring. Disaggregated results from 1992 showed that 37.5 percent of tenth graders were proficient in grammar usage; this number fell to only 8 percent in 1999 – a shocking 29.5 percentage point drop in 7 years.
Are educators finally getting the message? Maybe – the State Board of Education recently convened an independent commission to review the state’s accountability system, including student testing. Let’s hope commissioners embrace meaningful reforms to North Carolina’s testing program. After more than 10 years of “accountability,” it’s time we learned how kids are really doing.