by Tamar Lewin
The New York Times
Friday, June 8, 2007
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.
Critics have argued 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 around the country, with no common yardstick to determine whether schoolchildren 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. The results illustrated starkly that some states’ standard for proficiency are much lower than others’.
For example, an eighth-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 eighthgrader would need the equivalent of a 311.
And while a Mississippi fourthgrader can meet the state’s reading proficiency standard with a state score that corresponds to a 161 on the national test, a Massachusetts fourth-grader would need the equivalent of a 234. Such score differences represent a gap of several grade levels.
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 J. Whitehurst. Whitehurst is the director of the education department’s Institute of Education Sciences ; he and the secretary of education, 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 its 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.
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. Noting that some states waited until the 2005-06 school year to begin annual assessments, and are only beginning to examine their results and standards, she said, “I’m confident they will ratchet them up over time, and that will be good for kids.”
The new report, she said, will make it possible for parents and legislators to compare national and state test results meaningfully, and to improve school performance as they think best.
“For us to dictate one curriculum and one level of rigor would be very imprudent,” she said.
Others, though, say that 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 J. 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.”
On Tuesday, a survey of state scores in reading and math, released by the Center on Education Policy, an independent Washington group, found that since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2002, student achievement had increased and the racial achievement gap narrowed in many states
