Thursday
September 27, 2007
Is there really a single true interpretation of a set of education statistics? This week’s release of 4th and 8th grade NAEP scores certainly doesn’t make me think so. Here are the basics from the actual NAEP report, the Nation’s Report Card.
- At grade 4 the average mathematics and reading scores were higher in 2007 than in all previous assessment years. At grade 8, this was true for math.
- At both grades 4 and 8, the percentages of students performing at or above Basic and Proficient were higher in 2007 than in all previous assessment years in math, and higher than in 1992 and 2005 in reading.
- White, Black, and Hispanic students at both grades 4 and 8 scored higher in 2007 than in all previous assessment years in math, and higher in reading than in 1992.
See how those statistics have some interesting twists? Like, what happened to reading scores between 1992 and 2005?.
And while NCLB proponents count any increases in scores since 2003 as a success for NCLB, opponents, like anti-testing group FairTest point out that “Gains from 2000 to 2003, before NCLB went into effect, were significantly greater than they were from 2003 to 2007, when NCLB was the law.”
The report touts the narrowing achievement gap between minority and white students, but in Illinois, “while...minority and poor pupils made important gains on the tests, the gap also narrowed because the progress of white and more affluent pupils was minimal,” according to the Chicago Tribune.
Muddying the Illinois analysis even more is the stark difference between our extremely minimal upward progress in NAEP scores ("Illinois pupils showed slight improvements in math and reading last spring but did not keep pace with the rest of the nation,” says the Trib) and our rapidly increasing ISAT pass rates. The same Trib article points out:
On the national reading exam, for example, only 30 percent of the state’s 8th-graders scored at or above the proficient level, a drop from 35 percent in 2003.
But there has been an 18 percentage-point gain—from 64 percent to 82 percent passing—on the state 8th-grade reading exam in the same period.
It’s not the NAEP that determines AYP. It’s the ISAT. Which state officials tinkered with quite a bit in the last few years. See where we’re going with this?
So, as usual, a ton of statistics, but few clear answers to the question of how well students are learning.
Interested in reading more?
Alexander Russo rounds up a few of the main national stories here.
The actual statistics are here. There are one-page pdfs for each grade level by state, like this.
