John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, writes here about the use and misuse of NAEP scores to advance disruption in the schools.
A new wave of “misnaepery” is heading towards Oklahoma and other states. After most or all of the corporate reform agenda became law in about 90 percent of states, reading scores dropped so much that even a reform true believer dubbed NAEP as “National Assessment of Educational Stagnation and/or Decline.”
https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/07/24/37naep.h32.html
https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cDovL2VkdWNhdGlvbmdhZGZseXNob3cubGlic3luLmNvbS9yc3M%3D&episode=NzEzNTA2MzJjMDI0NDA0YmJmMjM4NjVhNzAwODE4NzE%3D&hl=en
After test-driven, market-driven reform was implemented, from 2013 to 2019, the nation’s 8th grade math scores for African-Americans dropped by five points. But I would argue that 8th grade NAEP reading scores are the most important and reliable metric, and they dropped seven points in six years for African-American 8th graders.
Today, Oklahoma’s 4th grade NAEP reading scores have dropped to four points below the 1990s pre-HB1017 tax increase level. And since accountability-driven, competition-driven reforms were supposed to improve outcomes for our poorest children of color, it is shocking that from 2013 to 2019 black student 8th grade scores dropped 15 points!
https://www.educationnext.org/make-2019-results-nations-report-card/
Rather than admit their mistakes, reformers have retained their original meme that was used to justify hurried and risky reforms to blow up the education “status quo,” so that “disruptive innovation” can spark “transformative change.”
Two contradictory misnaepery themes are being rushed into the breach by the Fordham Institute. The smiley-faced meme is that teachers and students will naturally rise to meet far more “rigorous” standards. On the other hand, the conservative Fordham Institute has been blaming states like Oklahoma for supposedly hurting student performance by ending high school graduation exams. It is also arguing that we should return to the punitive policies of the former Chief for Change State Superintendent Janet Baressi and retain even more 3rd graders based on reading tests.
First, ignoring the damage done by their experiments, accountability-driven, competition-driven reformers argue that radically higher testing standards will produce transformative improvements. State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister was a leader in the reaction against Baressi’s privatization agenda, so I can’t be too critical when she has to adopt some policies pushed by Education Next and other “astroturf” think tanks. Rightly or wrongly, she revised the state’s standards and assessments. There are no stakes attached to these metrics, and they allow the State Department of Education to say, “Oklahoma’s new standards [are] one of only 17 ‘A’ grades in the nation, up from the previous rank of 47th and a grade of ‘D.’”
So, for instance, Oklahoma’s 2017 8th grade math tests set a proficiency level which is at the NAEP proficiency level, basically comparable to around a 300 on that rigorous standard. The only groups in the United States were average scores reach that level are white and economically advantaged students in Massachusetts, a state where per capita income is nearly 50 percent greater. Oklahoma’s NAEP scores currently correlate with a level just above Kazakhstan. Advantaged students in Massachusetts perform at the level of the counterparts on PISA and TMMS in the top performing states and nations, except for South Korea.
https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/studies/naep_timss/profiles.aspx
https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-2015-United-States-MA.pdf
https://www.epi.org/publication/bringing-it-back-home-why-state-comparisons-are-more-useful-than-international-comparisons-for-improving-u-s-education-policy/#_note11
Of course, now that we listened to conservative reformers at the Fordham Institute and raised our expectations, Oklahoma students will soon join students at the top of the world’s education systems …
Fordham and other national reformers are also launching a second round misnaepery memes. The 2015 NAEP was its first test of 4th graders after Oklahoma’s Reading Sufficiency Act required the retention of 3rd graders who don’t pass a reading test. Once Chief for Change Baressi was defeated by a pragmatic Republican, Hofmeister, educators were allowed more judgment in deciding whether to retain students. Until last year, however, little funding was available for interventions to assist struggling readers, much less adequate training and supports for inexperienced and emergency teachers in early elementary grades. (Oklahoma has hired more than 3,000 emergency certified teachers in a year.)
The 2015, 4th grade test scores increased by 2-1/2 percent. A conservative Republican reformer claimed they “were attributed to the 2014 implementation of a law that barred students from being promoted to the fourth grade if they read at lower than a second-grade level.” Those gains disappeared during the next two NAEPs. So, it is argued that more teeth needs to be restored to the retention policy.
But we also need to ask what really prompted the one-year jump in test scores. As in other states, the retention of low-performing readers can provide a temporary boost in NAEP scores. If you add up the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders who would have been in 4th grade during 2015, but who were retained, the total comes to about 9,000. Before the RSA, the more typical number of retentions was about 4,000. That means that about 5,000 more of the lowest performing students were missing from the 2015 4th grade class of about 47,000. The retention of more than 10 percent of the tested class could explain the one-time test score boost. As those students subsequently entered 4th grade, test scores dropped back to normative levels.
https://ocrdata.ed.gov/DistrictSchoolSearch#
https://oklahomawatch.org/2018/12/14/oklahoma-nearly-tops-nation-in-holding-back-early-grade-students/
https://journalrecord.com/2019/11/07/free-market-friday-student-results-continue-to-decline/
And what happened to that year’s economically disadvantaged students when they took 8th grade tests in 2019? Their scores were down by 2-½ percent in comparison to their 2015 8th grade peers.
Who knows what will be Fordham’s next misnaepery-driven attack on public education. After all, they were one of the think tanks who argued that the No Child Left Behind Act, which was enacted in 2002 deserved credit for the NAEP gains of the late-1990s! And now it is proclaiming an “Agincourt-level disaster” is the result of weakening NCLB accountability. The thing we know is that the Fordham spin will be picked up, amplified, and used by rightwing lobbyists throughout the nation to slander public schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So-called reform has offered nothing of value to public education. High stakes testing does nothing to improve education. The public schools in Oklahoma suffer from extreme disinvestment. This disinvestment has resulted in teacher walk-outs. Improvement takes investment and hard work. There are no magic bullets, and it is naive to believe that privatization or more challenging testing offer any solutions.
It’s the get rich quick gold rush mentality peddled by the people selling the picks, spades and other mining supplies.
“The (Fool’s) Gold Rush”
Deform is sure a gold mine
A techie schemer’s trick
Like golden rush of forty-nine
It’s offer: “Get rich quick!”
But gold of fools is our return
For buying into plot
And picks and spades and “lessons learned”
Are all we ever got
“The smiley-faced meme is that teachers and students will naturally rise to meet far more “rigorous” standards. ”
Indeed we have recently been fed this garbage recently. The way it is used by reformers, it is a backhanded way to hold teachers responsible when students do not learn. Anyone who believes in the idea of high standards who does not consider the result, massive failure to reach these standards, and plan to approach this problem reasonably.
This is not the first time we have had this problem. Political leadership in education often thinks that some societal problem can be solved by placing the students in a proper environment. While this may be advantageous, those who do not grow up learning cannot learn at the same rate as those who do grow up in families that recreate by learning. To think that all we have to do is expect more of kids is to assure their falure. What is needed is a massive expenditure of money to buy competent people to teach people who do not grow up in rich learning environments.
This is hard to sell the idea of a lot of taxes to a public used to blaming others for problems that exist in society due to economics, attitudes, and social structures.
succinctly said: ” To think that all we have to do is expect more of kids is to assure their failure.”
Seen that attitude fail many times in the business sector.
One road to the downfall of a civilization is when its leaders keep making the same mistakes and refuse to stop.
Diane,
Related to the NAEP and PISA scores: I would love to see you post about this:
“A horse holds the alltime record for running a 2kilometer race in 1 minute and 59.4 seconds. Which conversions are necessary to find the horse’s average speed for the race in miles per hour? Select all that apply.” From the tnready test given to Algebra students in Tennessee in 2016. This group is comprised of all the ninth graders in the state except those whose IEP placed them in another math program.
This question was followed by several answers containing the fractions and factor labels that are required to change k/min:sec to mph. The students are to select all the needed fractions for the operation.
How many protests are there to this question? Some answers:
-There are a significant number of 9th graders for whom this process is abstruse, so giving it to all the ninth graders is a ruse to obtain false data, inflating the numbers of the “not proficient” for political reasons
-for complex, multi step processes there are always many roads to the same place. Asking this question does not even begin to discover the students that can complete this process. My prediction is that the small group that might be able to answer this question directly would be reduced considerably by the process required to understand the question.
-this process is essential for application in science, but for advancement in algebra, it is not. A person who does not understand conversion of measurements may be taught many of the concepts in the next year of Algebra without knowing this. Moreover, taking the time to explain the math process simultaneously with using it in a science class would be the best pedagogical approach. Due to huge class size and the inappropriate placement of students who are not ready developmentally for this idea, team planning for such a coincidence of class treatment can never occur due to time constraints. Added to this problem is the fact that what fits as a good time to teach this in Algebra probably will not coincide with a good time to teach this in science.
I bet I could go on forever, but the point is that the answers to so many of the questions we talk about here are in the details of the teacher’s everyday confrontation with the testing that is required of their students. The devil is so lodged in the details that the truth is too complex for a public not involved in the details. Thus the public will never be informed. This may be fine with some people, but not with this voter.