What students must learn to be deemed academically proficient varies drastically from state to state, the U.S. Department of Education said Thursday in a report that, for the first time, showed the specific extent of the differences.
The report supports critics who say the political compromise of the federal No Child Left Behind law, President Bush’s signature education initiative, has led to a patchwork of educational inequities across the country, with no common yardstick to determine whether children are learning enough.
The law requires that all students be brought to proficiency by 2014, but lets each state set its own proficiency standards and choose its own tests to measure achievement.
In essence, the report issued Thursday creates a common yardstick of proficiency, by examining the minimum proficiency score on each state’s tests of reading and math and then determining what the equivalent score would be on the math and reading components of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
In some cases, the differences between one state’s proficiency standards and another’s were more than twice as large as the national gap between minority and white students’ reading levels, which averages about 30 points on the national assessment test, according to Grover Whitehurst, the director of the Education Department’s Institute of Education Sciences; he and Education Secretary Margaret Spellings spoke to reporters about the report by telephone on Wednesday.
The national test divides students’ scores into three achievement levels: basic, proficient and advanced. Whitehurst said the achievement level that many states call proficient is closer to what the national test rates as basic.
“This puts NAEP and the state tests on the same scale, and that hasn’t been done before,” Whitehurst said of the report. “One of the interesting findings of this report is that there’s no real correlation between where the state sets proficiency standard and how students perform on NAEP. There’s states that set the bar high and have low NAEP scores, and states that set the bar low and have high NAEP scores.”
In addition to requiring that all states participate in the national assessment test, the federal law also requires that all public school students be tested in reading and math each year from grades 3 through 8.
Many education experts criticize the law, saying it gives states an incentive to set their standards low so as to avoid the federal law’s sanctions on schools that do not increase the percentage of students demonstrating proficiency each year. They argue that uniform national standards are needed.
But Spellings said it is up to the states, not the federal government, to raise standards and improve student achievement.
“It’s way too early to conclude we need to adopt national standards,” she said.
Spellings noted that some states waited until the 2005-06 school year to begin annual assessments, and are only beginning to examine their results and standards.
“For us to dictate one curriculum and one level of rigor would be very imprudent,” she said.
Others, though, say national standards would ensure fairness and a higher level of academic achievement.
“Parents and communities in too many states are being told not to worry, all is well, when their students are far behind,” said Michael Petrilli, a vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation who served in the Education Department during Bush’s first term.
Under the No Child Left Behind law, he said, “folks at the school level give most of their attention to getting kids over the bar of proficiency, so in states with a very low bar, they’re not paying much attention to the majority of kids, who are already over the bar.”
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Varying standards
Standards for proficiency in some states are much lower than those in others:
*An 8th grader in Tennessee can meet that state’s standards for math proficiency with a state test score that is the equivalent of a 230 on the national test. But in Missouri, an 8th grader would need the equivalent of a 311.
*A Mississippi 4th grader can meet the state’s reading proficiency standard with a state score that corresponds to a 161 on the national test while a Massachusetts 4th grader would need the equivalent of a 234.
Such differences represent a gap of several grade levels.
— New York Times
