For a moment, I kind of felt like Betsy DeVos, the new education secretary.
The moment was when U.S. Sen. Al Franken asked DeVos during her confirmation hearing about her thoughts on using assessments to measure proficiency or growth.
Huh? What’s Franken talking about?
Turns out I wasn’t alone. At a meeting soon after, several colleagues wondered what the issue was all about. Nobody knew.
Turns out, this issue is not just for policy wonks. It is something those Americans who care about public education, and that should be all of us, should know about.
For the past two decades, we’ve been focused on proficiency. If you look at the Illinois School Report Card for any public school in the state, you will see that student achievement is measured by how many of them meet or exceed state standards.
That yardstick became ever more important when the federal government enacted No Child Left Behind in 2002, which required all students to meet state standards for their grade level by 2014.
Each year from the law’s inception, a greater percentage of students had to meet those standards, including students in so-called subgroups, such as racial minorities, limited English speakers, poor children and children with special needs.
A worthy goal, right?
But there was always something odd about the whole business, I thought.
For one, there were no uniform federal education standards of proficiency for students to meet. Instead, each state determined what standards students in each grade level had to meet.
Some states could be more rigorous than others. Each state got to decide.
So when we journalists did stories about how Illinois students compared to students from Indiana or Wisconsin or Iowa or Florida, it was meaningless. The states all used different standards. How could they be compared?
But that’s not all. In measuring these yearly progress statistics, where each year more students had to meet state standards for their grade, students were compared from year to year by grade.
Think about that. The federal mandate required schools to measure student progress every year. But every year, they measured the same grade and therefore different kids. Third-graders’ results from 2002 were measured against third-graders in 2003.
And that’s how we reported it. This year’s third-graders performed better than last year’s third-graders. But that doesn’t mean anything. We weren’t measuring the performance of the same kids from one year to the next. What if this year’s group just had more kid who were smarter or more prepared or whatever.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to measure third-graders one year and then measure their performance as fourth-graders the next? Again, the comparisons we made, it seemed to me, were meaningless. If the goal was to increase the number of students meeting state standards, shouldn’t a student’s yearly progress be measured?
That’s what growth gets at.
You take a student, no matter where they are, and you move them along the scale one full year from September to June.
This makes a lot of sense to me, especially when you consider the number of students who fail to meet state standards in some of our struggling schools. What difference does it make to pass students along from first through eighth grade if they can’t do any of the work.
Forget grades. Take a kid where they are at and help them get better.
So now I know, and I have to say I’m for growth.
Randy Blaser is a freelance columnist for Pioneer Press.
