This just doesn’t make sense

Last week the Fordham Institute release a new study showing that, “while the nation’s lowest achieving youngsters made rapid gains from 2000 to 2007, the performance of top students was languid.” It suggests that NCLB’s focus on “closing the achievement gap” has forced teachers to pay more attention to their lowest performing students, perhaps as the expense of the highest.

The report expresses grave concern about these findings, calling them “one of [NCLB’s] unintended consequences - and one that’s worrisome for America’s future competitiveness.”

There’s something about this that just doesn’t make any sense to me. Never has. Let me see if I can break it down.

Here’s a set of scores reported in the study: in 8th grade math, the average score of those students in the 10th percentile went up 13 points, from 221 to 234, while the average score of the students in the 90th percentile went up only five points, from 320 to 325.

These scores aren’t measuring the performance of individual kids over time. They’re the 8th grade scores each year, so each year it’s a different set of kids.

I might be worried if we were talking about a single group of kids. If in the past we were able to move high achieving kids along at a certain rate over their years in school, and now we’re not because we’ve stopped paying attention to them, that would be worrisome.

But why does it make sense to expect the top scores of 8th graders to increase dramatically each year? Should each class of 8th graders be significantly more successful than the previous year’s class?

Is what we’re saying that we don’t think that 325 is a good score on the NAEP? That to be internationally competitive, 8th graders should be scoring, what, 400? 500? If they got to that score, would we then be contented if their scores stayed stagnant?

It makes me wonder what we’re really measuring. If we had some really well defined standards for what 8th graders should be able to know and do, and some really valid measuring tools, then I think you would not expect the scores of the top students to rise dramatically every year. They would just be high. Stable and high.

It’s not that I don’t think they have a point about teachers in the current test-obessed climate being pressured to pay more attention to their lowest performing students at the expense of enriching the education of the highest performing students. There’s just something really fishy to me about the expectation that all scores - even the very highest - will rise every year. Maybe there’s something I’m missing.

More on the study from Eduwonk and Eduwonkette.

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