by Sean Cavanagh
Education Week
Thursday, June 7, 2007
Many of the states that claim to have large shares of their students reaching proficiency in reading and mathematics under the No Child Left Behind Act have set less stringent standards for meeting that threshold than lower-performing states, a federal study released today shows.
The study by the National Center for Education Statistics judges the achievement levels of individual states’ reading and math tests against a common yardstick: the proficiency standards used by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as “the nation’s report card.”
The analysis would appear to back up the suspicions of some researchers and other observers who have cast a skeptical eye on state data showing high percentages of students reaching the “proficient” level in reading and math. The percentage of students reaching proficiency varies enormously among states, and states that fare poorly on NAEP sometimes produce high percentages of students showing a strong command of reading or math on their own exams.
The wide variation in the proportion of students attaining proficiency “can be largely attributed to differences in the stringency of [state] standards” in setting achievement levels, the report says.
See Also
For more stories on this topic see our annual series, NCLB: Taking Root.
The study is an attempt to use a “common ruler” to judge state proficiency standards, said Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, the director of the Institute of Education Sciences , the arm of the U.S. Department of Education that oversees the NCES. Mr. Whitehurst said the study could not determine whether setting high proficiency standards against the NAEP scale resulted in better instruction. But he noted “a very large difference” in how high a bar individual states set in judging students’ mastery of subjects.
Under the NCLB law, states are required to test students annually in reading and math in grades 3-8 and once in high school, and report the percentages of students achieving proficiency on those exams. Schools are required to make adequate yearly progress in those subjects or face increasingly stiff penalties under the 5-year-old law.
Flexibility Justified?
The study, titled “Mapping 2005 State Proficiency Standards Onto the NAEP Scales,” makes no judgment about the difficulty of individual state tests or how they compare with NAEP.
Instead, it compares where states set minimum scores for determining whether students are proficient, under the mandates of the No Child Left Behind Act, against the bar set by NAEP on the 4th and 8th grade reading and math tests. The study used NAEP data from the 2004-05 administration.
In 4th grade reading, for instance, the study found wide variation in states’ standards for proficiency when judged against the NAEP scale. Massachusetts , South Carolina , Wyoming , Arkansas , and Connecticut , in that order, had the five highest “NAEP score equivalents” in 4th grade reading. In other words, Massachusetts ’ proficiency standard matched the NAEP standard for 4th grade reading better than any other state’s. Mississippi had the worst score equivalents in that subject and grade, the study found, with the four next worst being those for Tennessee, Georgia, Alaska, and Oklahoma.
In 8th grade reading, Wyoming , South Carolina , New York , Florida , and California had the top equivalent scores, while North Carolina , Tennessee , Georgia , Texas , and West Virginia had the five worst NAEP-equivalent scores.
U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, in a phone briefing with reporters, noted that states had the right under the federal education law to set different proficiency levels. That flexibility was justified, she said, given the different academic challenges facing different states. “I’m confident that they will ratchet it up over time,” the secretary said of states’ standards.
The NCES study was unveiled two days after the official release of an education policy group’s report showing that student scores on state tests have increased since the enactment of the NCLB legislation, which President Bush signed into law in January 2002, and that gains that began in the 1990s accelerated after the law took effect. Ms. Spellings cited that earlier study, released June 5 by the Washington-based Center on Education Policy, in her discussion with reporters to argue that the law is having a positive effect on student achievement.
Although she said she would not pass judgment on the bars set by individual states, Ms. Spellings suggested that the benefit of the NCES study was that it would bring new public scrutiny to those standards, and she referred to the value of getting such information out in the open.
“Transparency, in my mind,” the secretary said, “is always the first place to go.”
