I'm reminded again and again of America's need for an independent education-achievement "audit agency" to sort out the claims and counterclaims about student performance and school achievement and when it has risen and when it has flat-lined or fallen--and why.
In today's Washington Post, former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, relentlessly defending the No Child Left Behind act over the implementation of which she long presided, tries to attribute NAEP gains since 1999 to the impact of NCLB. She doesn't exactly remind us that NCLB was proposed in January 2001, signed into law in January 2002, and the first school year on which it could conceivably have had an influence would be 2002-3. The most recent (long-term)??NAEP results come from spring 2008, meaning that five years is the longest period for which any student gains could even be ASSOCIATED with NCLB, much less attributed to NCLB. (Because this was no random experiment, any gains could equally have been caused by global warming or whatever.) Unfortunately, the long-term-trend??NAEP wasn't administered in 2003, however (or 2002 for that matter), so one faces a challenge in deciding what to use as the baseline. The assessment was given in 1999, then again in 2004, and again in 2008. Of the gains recorded (for 9 and 13 year olds)--and there were indeed modest gains in math and reading--between 1999 and 2008, the lion's share occurred between 1999 and 2004, not between 2004 and 2008. One COULD even claim that NCLB slowed the rate of gain. I wouldn't claim that. But Spellings shouldn't suggest that NCLB caused the gains, either, since most of them occurred prior to its enactment.
As Diane Ravitch has repeatedly shown (as in this New York Times op-ed and in this response to Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger, an official in the New York city Department of Education), Joel Klein's team in New York has similarly chosen a convenient baseline against which to claim credit for their reforms' achievement gains even though those reforms hadn't kicked in at the time when the greatest gains were recorded (in this case, on New York State tests).
Advocates always do this sort of thing--reaching for whichever data they think make the most convincing case for their??accomplishments, exertions??and assertions (and, of course, making or implying causations that no reputable scientist would accept). This will continue. And usually the advocates get away with it because anybody who disputes??their claims is also seen as having his/her own ax to??grind. That's why America would be so much better off with an independent??education-performance audit bureau.
