http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/education/15educ.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print
from the NY Times
July 15, 2005
Young Students Post Solid Gains in Federal Tests
By SAM DILLON
WASHINGTON, July 14 - America’s elementary school students made solid gains in both reading and mathematics in the first years of this decade, while middle school students made less progress and older teenagers hardly any, according to federal test results released on Thursday.
The results, considered the best measure of the nation’s long-term education trends, show that 9-year-old minority students made the most gains. In particular, young black students significantly narrowed the longtime gap between their math and reading scores and those of higher-achieving white students, who also made strong gains.
Older minority teenagers, however, scored about as far behind whites as in previous decades, and scores for all groups pointed to a deepening crisis in the nation’s high schools.
The math and reading test, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Long-Term Trends, has been given to a representative national sample of students ages 9, 13 and 17, every few years since the early 1970’s, virtually without modification, and social scientists study it carefully.
The results were from a test given to 28,000 public and private school students in all 50 states during fall 2003 and spring 2004. It was the first time the federal Department of Education had administered the test since 1999.
Nine-year-old students, on average, earned the highest scores in three decades, in both reading and math.
In the reading test, the average score of 9-year-old black students increased 14 points on a 500-point scale, from 186 in 1999 to 200 in 2004. Reading scores of 9-year-old white students rose 5 points, to 226 in 2004 from 221 in 1999. As a result the “achievement gap” between black and white 9-year-old students narrowed to 26 points over those five years from 35. The gap was 44 points in 1971.
The test measures students’ skills, but does not include a passing grade or indicate whether they are performing at grade level. Over all, the 30-year trend in reading for 9-year-old students has been one of steady, modest increases, with the sharpest gains in the last five years.
Bush administration officials credited the president’s signature education law, No Child Left Behind, with raising the scores.
But groups that have criticized the law, including both national teachers unions, noted that it had only been in effect a year or so when the test was administered. They said that state efforts to increase testing, bolster teacher training and reduce class sizes, as well as an increase in early childhood and kindergarten programs should also be credited.
President Bush celebrated the results Thursday before a largely black audience in Indianapolis, arguing that the federal law’s emphasis on standardized testing should be extended to the upper grades.
“I’m proud to come here to talk about the new results,” Mr. Bush said. “They’re from the first long-term test, by the way, since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act. Over the last five years, American children have made significant gains.”
“No Child Left Behind is making a difference in the elementary and middle schools, and I believe we need to expand this process to our high schools,” he added.
Darvin M. Winick, the chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the test, agreed that there was “considerable good news to report.”
But Mr. Winick, who was appointed by the former secretary of education Rod Paige, urged caution in attributing the gains narrowly to the federal law. Increased testing and reporting of student data and other reform efforts that got under way in many states during the Clinton administration probably also contributed, he said.
No Child Left Behind, which requires states to test students in third through eighth grades in English and math every year, and to break out scores of minority students, first took effect in fall 2002.
In math, 9-year-old blacks narrowed the 28-point gap separating them from white classmates in 1999, to 23 points in 2004.
Hispanic children also gained ground. The average reading score for 9-year-old Hispanics, for instance, rose to 205 in 2004 from 193 in 1999. In math, the average score rose 17 points, to 230 in 2004 from 213 in 1999. The math gap between 9-year-old Hispanic and white students narrowed to 18 points from 26.
“These results show that as a country we’re headed in the right direction,” Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said in an interview.
Regardless of race, the scores of older students were less impressive, with a few exceptions.
Thirteen-year-old students, for instance, achieved math scores that on average were the highest in the history of the test. But their reading scores were no better than in 1980.
Seventeen-year-old students performed the worst. Average reading and math scores for that group were unchanged from the early 1970’s.
Those low scores appeared likely to fuel a debate about how to improve the high schools.
No Child Left Behind requires states to test teenagers in one of their high school years, and Mr. Bush has proposed expanding the testing to include Grades 9, 10 and 11.
But Robert Schaeffer, the public education director of Fairtest, an advocacy group critical of standardized testing, said that more than 20 states have already introduced new high school tests in the form of exit examinations required for graduation. Many of those states have reported sharp score increases on those exams, and the National Assessment results released on Thursday seemed to call the validity of those state scores into question, Mr. Schaeffer said.
“Stagnant results for 17-year-olds indicate that soaring exit exam passing percentages reported by many states, such as Texas and Florida, reflect test score pollution, not real learning gains,” Mr. Schaeffer said.
Freeman Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who has written on raising successful African-American children, said that among the tests’ more discouraging findings were those concerning homework and reading trends.
Students who took the reading test were asked how many hours they had spent on homework the previous day, and the results showed that many were spending less time. The percentage of 13-year-old students devoting less than an hour on their homework, for instance, increased to 40 percent in 2004 from 36 percent in 1984. And the percentage of 17-year-old students who said they were not assigned any homework at all rose to 26 percent in 2004 from 22 percent in 1984.
For teenage students, the results showed a direct relation between higher scores and more time spent on homework.
The group of 17-year-old students who said they “never or hardly ever” read for fun increased to 19 percent in 2004 from 16 percent in 1999.
“Clearly, you learn by reading and studying, and not enough kids are spending that time,” Dr. Hrabowski said.
Outcomes
Right. So we are drilling the kids to learn earlier the things that they used to learn later (like teaching reading in 1st grade instead of second and third), but the overall effect is, they learn the same things, only a little earlier, so the long-term benefits are nothing. Except that we feel better about our wonderful testing programs.
We should be looking at improving long-term outcomes, not short-term test scores.
Re: Young Students Post Solid Gains in Federal Tests
While I am certainly not going to defend this article, I would like to point out that the serious push of NCLB has only just started very recently, certainly too short a time period for any improvements made in the younger children to show up in the older groups. It really should not be a surprise even to those who firmly defend NCLB that the older kids have not yet shown any improvement (recalling that younger students respond far easier to learning that older ones).
I also believe that rote is sorely underappreciated in today’s America. Most areas of study begin with rote learning to establish a basic framework of facts. When you get a bit older and/or moire deeply into a particular subject you begin to apply critical thinking skills to tie facts into information and knowledge, something too many educrats turned their backs on at some point in the 70’s and 80’s. [DISCLAIMER: I am in no way saying that rote learning is all that is needed, just that it has its place in the big picture process.]
Time will be the teller. What we need to do is to follow several of these birth cohorts and see if a few years from now they continue to show improvement over their comparative age from years past
I also am leery of the “teaching the test” philosophy, which may give artificially higher test scores without the actuial impartation of true knowledge. However, we have to have SOME instrument to determine what kids know and how they compare to others, and at this point in time standardized testing is about all we have.
I also believe that the concept of standardized testing has taken more than a few lumps from critics who refuse to acknowledge that there is indeed more than a little appropriateness in using this instrument. After all, either you know and can regurgitate basic math, reading, history and science facts or you don’t and can’t.
If the criticism is about using standardized tests at all, we had better abandon the ACT and SAT as well. It is going to make college entry a bit more challenging, not to mention the process of obtaining a job that requires an educated person. Personally, I hated having to get my liberal arts distribution when I was in college (I would have much prefered to skip my English 1 & 2, my bio and chem, my art and music apprec classes and instead focused more on my major and the minor I qualified but did not get credit for, as these classes had greater interest to me and were more in line with my anticipated career track. That was not an option I was granted, and I did what was required to get my sheepskin.
All in all I took this article to be a small indication that perhaps we are finally turning the corner and just maybe beginning to head in the right direction. It is a shame that more parents do not value education and encourage their kids to get one. I am really not sure how much good the schools can do with or without NCLB without the parents giving their kids a little more push.
Re: Young Students Post Solid Gains in Federal Tests
Well, Dad, I am in agreement with you about almost everything. Yes, the goals of NCLB are excellent — always a fight for implementation in line with the goals, but that is to be expected. Yes, rote learning of the basics is a necessary first step, I’m all for it, and I even teach people how. Yes, NCLB hasn’t had time to show up in the high school yet.
My point however is that **ten years ago, the story was the exactly the same**. There were headlines “US students soar on tests” On reading the article and finding that only the Grade 4 did slightly above average and the older groups did very badly, I noted that this was a pretty odd definition of “soar”. Now that cohort *has* passed through the schools, and they did not live up to their earlier promise, not even average.
Of course we live in hope, but having seen this cohort I am not holding my breath.
Re: Young Students Post Solid Gains in Federal Tests
I agree that the use of descriptors may have been a bit, um… “superlatively exxagerative”; I believe that is due to the philosophical spin the users placed into their comment (in the case of “soaring” exit exams, that would have been the State level officials.
Assuming that the sampling of test scores is reasonably accurate for the whole, the gains made by minorities in the younger grade would indeed be cause to celebrate. I retain a small touch of Missourian in this (as I do not see how the Feds will refrain from spinning numbers any more than the States have been doing for years), so put me in the “guarded optimistic’ category, with one foot still over the line into the “I-still-think-they-are-cheating-somehow” camp.
I am not sure where plateau will hit; after all, how much can mandates from DC (or whereever) achieve in this as long as the societal hinderances and inherrant shortcomings of the system itself remain doggedly entrenched? Also, every report I have read this year indicates that the gains made are almost exclusively in the typical population; those with LD’s and DD’s are still being left behind by and large. It is my opinion that these children are no less worthy of the attention they require to achieve, nor is society going to benefit if we fail this 1/6th of our students. {Anyone who can post a credible estimate of the cost to society for unremediated dyslexia is asked to please do so.}
Still, all in all I took this article to be good news, and a first step in turning the behemouth we know as public education in the right direction. As I said, time will tell.
You know, it is funny… We get bad news and we deconstruct it to find some good, we get good news and we work even harder to disprove it. Were the stakes not so high I might wax poetic and wish to return to a simpler age when we believed in our schools and accepted that they were doing their job well. C’est la’guerre!
Dad — this classes as good news and bad news, with more bad than good.
Around ten years ago when I was teaching a math education class, there was a previous report about test scores — and it was almost word-for-word the same as the above. I still have the news article saved, and happened to see it last month while excavating files. Higher scores in Grade 4, not so good in Grade 8, and very low and staying low in high school.
If the education system is actually improving, we would see better Grade 4 scores in 1995, better Grade 8 scores for the same cohort in 1999, and better Grade 12 scores for the same cohort in 2003. This is, unfortunately, definitely not the case.
This question came up on another board where someone was vaunting the high US Grade 4 scores. My answer was and is: to put it bluntly, who cares? How many people leave school after Grade 4 any more? (My seventy-year-old neighbours did leave school after Grade 4, but that was a long long time ago and a different economy.)
What matters is what skills students take away at school leaving, and as your article says clearly, this has not changed since the low point in 1970.
Improving Grade 4 and then teaching very little after that is not helping either the individuals involved or the economy and the country in general.
It has been suggested that the problem is that US schools are doing a fairly good job on rote learning which is what takes up much of the early grades, but are failing badly at higher-level thinking and concept development and problem-solving, whch are the skills needed to go past Grade 4