Tom Sgouros: Time to Make Adequate Progress on Education
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how the performance of Rhode Island's kids on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) achievement tests provides no support to the claim that our schools are "failing." True, one can always do better, and it's even truer that one must try, since these are our children we're talking about, but the idea that investments in traditional public schools have not paid off is not supported by actual data.
The fourth-grade NAEP data show that Rhode Island schools have made impressive progress in recent years in bringing up their performance of our minority children. Because we don't have enough middle schools in Rhode Island, interstate comparisons are probably not valid for eighth-graders, since our urban and low-income schools are probably overrepresented. My cursory analysis of district level test results say that the likely effect of that overrepresentation is to push our NAEP scores down. Since the scores reported are no cause for shame (even if they could always be better), we are probably not doing badly at all.
So that's what the data say: the performance of our schools has improved over the past decade or so, and in most categories, black and Hispanic kids have improved more, but our urban schools are still holding down the statewide averages.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTOk, there's one clue about the how to improve our performance in interstate NAEP score comparisons: make the urban schools better.
A statistical fast one
Now I'm going to tell you another secret about education data. By state law, as required of all states by "No Child Left Behind", Rhode Island has a set of "annual measurable objectives" in place that require all the students in all the schools to be "proficient" in all subjects by 2014. Now this is a nice goal, but the date was just pulled out of, um, a hat. They were not derived from known progress rates, nor from any kind of theory. Someone just said, "2014 sounds good" and lo, it was done.
Now if a school is improving, but isn't improving as fast as this schedule demands, it is said to be "not making adequate yearly progress", and then people start talking about "turnaround plans" and laying off all the teachers and all the rest.
There are also goals that conflict. For example, high schools are both supposed to improve their test scores and their graduation rates. Keeping more kids in school is a good thing, but the ones who drop out early are the ones who hold down the test scores. You might be doing great things to improve instruction, but if you also decrease the number of kids who drop out, your school's test scores will look like it's standing still. In practice what these arbitrary standards have done is provide reliable evidence that public schools aren't up to the job of teaching our children -- in defiance of the actual data that say things are improving. The traditional schools aren't performing miracles, but I'm pretty skeptical of miracles, and have been since I learned my first card trick.
And what about the teachers?
Then there's all the attention to "teacher quality." Over the past several years, talk of "teacher quality" in education reform circles is largely attributable to a couple of large high-profile studies, in Texas and Tennessee. The findings from those studies are compelling, though not nearly as unequivocal as many reformers would have you believe. There are plenty of more important factors in a child's education, but let the point stand that good teachers make a lot of difference, which I certainly wouldn't debate. But now the question is how do you get good teachers?
Call me crazy, but I'm betting that reducing job security, pensions, and pay in the very schools that need good teachers the most is not the best way to do that. And yet, that's just what we have done. After the mass layoff, the tussling over their contract, the inevitable pay and benefit cuts now that the schools are in the hands of the bankruptcy court, please ask yourself exactly why someone would apply to teach in Central Falls High School?
No one who has other options is going to apply to work there or in any of our urban schools. But no worries: we've also tightened certification standards. Presumably the thought here is we can improve teachers just by insisting?
People complain about teacher salaries, and I've seen a lot of dumb statistics on the subject over the years. There is really only one valid measure of whether salaries are adequate, and that should speak to the free-marketeers among us. If a school district's job ads produce excellent resumes in the mail, and if good teachers stay on, then salaries are adequate. If not, not. If you care about the quality of education, what other requirement is appropriate?
So that's the story of education reform in Rhode Island: a testing strategy that makes progress look like failure, backed up by a strategy to improve teaching by paying teachers less and insisting they be better. Yup, sounds like charter schools are the answer.
Tom Sgouros is the editor of the Rhode Island Policy Reporter, at whatcheer.net and the author of "Ten Things You Don't Know About Rhode Island." Contact him at [email protected].
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