Testing, accountability, NAEP, and reading
For those of us who still believe that results-based school accountability is an essential part of the education renewal that America sorely needs, not many things are looking great this week.
For those of us who still believe that results-based school accountability is an essential part of the education renewal that America sorely needs, not many things are looking great this week.
Two years ago, Seth Gershenson and Fordham published Grade Inflation in High Schools, groundbreaking research examining the relationship between students’ Algebra I course grades and end-of-course (EOC) test results in North Carolina.
A perennial complaint about holding students accountable through grades and test scores is that these mechanisms are biased against already disadva
Education wasn’t explicitly on the national ballot in 2020, but education is always on the ballot, even when you don’t see it. Now that the election is behind us, education reformers can focus again on states and communities, where most of the important decisions about K–12 education get made.
As we previously saw at the 4th grade and 8th grade levels, the just-released 2019 12 grade NAEP results were mostly flat or down. But we already knew from the 2015 results that this cohort of students entered high school performing below their older peers.
On Wednesday, the government will release the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress scores for twelfth grade students.
Contrary to much public rhetoric, the evidence for expanding charter schools in urban areas is stronger than ever. To be sure, the research is less positive for charters operating outside of the nation’s urban centers. And multiple studies suggest that internet-based schools and charters that serve mostly middle-class students, perform worse than their district counterparts, at least on traditional test-score-based measures. But charters needn’t work everywhere to be of service to society.
Two big public-school systems in the D.C. area are on the verge of letting their zeal for equity and racial justice lead to consequences they may end up regretting. Fairfax County, which operates one of America’s best known and most esteemed “exam schools,” is may use a lottery, rather than test scores and other quality measures, for admissions. And Loudoun County is considering revising its rules for “professional conduct” by school staff to punish employees—teachers included—in truly Orwellian ways.
Proponents of test-based accountability generally believe that robust systems—those that set high bars for achieving success, generate copious and transparent data, and impose substantive awards or consequences based on progress (or lack thereof)—are enough to boost student achievement. Another school of thought posits that more funding to schools does likewise.
There are two aspects of standardized testing to which opponents tend to object: The testing itself and how the results are used.
Ohio legislators recently introduced Senate Bill 358, which proposes to cancel all state testing scheduled for spring 2021. The provision calling for the cancellation of state exams would only go into effect if the state receives an assessment waiver from the U.S.
In the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, a group of researchers at Arizona State University (ASU) surveyed students at that school to determine the impact of Covid-19 on their current and future plans—including their enrollment decisions, study habits, remote learning experiences, labor market participation, and more.
Remote learning did not go well in the spring. What we need, then, are concrete recommendations for how to significantly improve the remote learning experience for students, teachers, and families. Fordham’s new report, Schooling Covid-19, provides just that, with ideas culled from educators who achieved striking success in the face of the viral challenge this spring—educators from some of the nation’s leading charter school networks
Eventually we’ll learn whether our mass experiment in “remote learning” leads to durable changes in the U.S. education system, such as more students taking some of their courses online or opting out altogether from school as we know it. In the meantime, the massive digital footprint this experiment is creating can provide fresh insights into how students spend their days.
Following numerous Covid-19-related testing cancellations, over 50 percent of four-year colleges and universities have, for fall 2021, gone “test-optional,” an admission policy providing the choice to applicants of whether to submit their ACT and SAT scores.
For more than sixty years, Advanced Placement exams have been an “in person” affair. AP exams have always been administered in schools with paper test booklets, then hand-graded at massive gatherings of teachers and college professors.
Five years ago, Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) launched an initiative called “Connected Education” in an effort to boost the number of students able to partake of Advanced Placement (AP) courses. More students meant more courses could be offered, but fiscal and personnel constraints prohibited them being offered in the traditional manner.
Discussions about the power of literacy are ceaseless.
The National Assessment Governing Board is in the middle of an enormous effort to revamp its framework for assessing reading, a central element of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Frameworks set forth what is to be assessed and how that’s to be done. Changing them is harder than moving a cemetery, requiring years of lead time, costing much money, and entailing endless palaver among people with divergent views of the subject. Unfortunately, in the proposed set of revisions, the bad outweighs the good by a considerable margin
Last month, Fordham released a detailed review of Florida’s latest K–12 academic standards for English language arts (ELA) and mathematics.
Today, Michigan became the first state to formally seek federal permission to suspend standardized testing in 2021 because of learning disruptions caused by the coronavirus.
The start of a new school year is always filled with challenges. New teachers, new classes, and new expectations can be difficult for both teachers and students. But what if teachers and students haven’t been in school for six months or more? How can schools try and prepare to get back to a sense of normalcy after all of this?
Michael J. Petrilli’s recent article “Half-Time High School may be just what students need” is compelling. Yet proposals to cut school time in half in grades nine through twelve may be only half right.
Most people agree that a college education is a worthwhile investment for a young person. For example, across the U.S., bachelor’s degree holders earn on average 55 percent higher salaries than those with no education beyond high school. However, it is less well understood that there are stark geographical differences in how much return one gets on their educational investment.
The COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout has yielded yet another cautionary tale about the perils of entering the workforce with nothing but a high school diploma. But that doesn’t mean that everyone needs a four-year college degree, or that we should build our high schools around that singular mission. In many American cities, workers with associate degrees earn middle-class wages.
A skills gap occurs when the demand for a skilled workforce increases faster than the supply of workers with those skills. As the U.S. economy recovered from the 2008 Great Recession, that gap was evident in many economic sectors.
Denver Public Schools (DPS) has long prided itself on being ahead of the curve when it comes to education reform. It was one of the first major urban districts in the country to negotiate a pay-for-performance system for its teachers in 2005.
This year’s holiday from federally-mandated end-of-year assessments in math and English language arts will undoubtedly embolden test haters to declare once again—and louder than ever—that we never needed those damned exams in the first place and that our schools and students are far better off without them.
With schools shuttered nationwide by the COVID-19 pandemic, states had no choice but to cancel standardized testing for the 2019–20 school year. Although certainly less pressing than many other COVID-related issues, the test stoppage is a long-run concern for states and school districts that monitor student performance using annual tests.