Let's hear it for those eighth-graders
Editorials
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Sunday, April 6, 2008
HELL’S BELLS, hooray and No Child Left Behind! Did you see Cindy Howell’s story in Friday’s paper (Page B1, the Arkansas Page) about the strides being made by the state’s eighth-graders on the National Assessment of Education Progress, aka The Nation’s Report Card?
If not, you might want to take a look at it. It’ll make you proud. In the past decade, Arkansas ’ scores on the writing test have increased 14 points—from 137 in 1998, which was 11 points below the national average, to 151 in 2007, or only 3 points below the national average.
It’s a dramatic, and heartening, improvement as these things are judged. Because the NAEP is the only standardized test that judges all the students in the country by the same standard, rather than letting individual states set their own, often watered-down standards and so inflate their performance. And once again, this time when it came to writing—which as any editorial writer knows, is thinking— Arkansas has got a good report card. No, not just good but superlative.
Arkansas led the country—that’s right, the whole country—in improved test scores among black students and those from poor families. The scores of black eighth-graders jumped 19 points between 1998 and 2007. White students bettered their test scores by 13 points and the scores of low-income students went up 16 points. And they said it couldn’t be done. What a pleasure to see the cynics proven wrong again. Arkansas does not have to settle for mediocrity. In anything.
Let’s note that it isn’t just the kids at the bottom end of the scale who are doing measurably better. While the percentage of test-takers in the below-Basic category was dropping, which is good, the percentage reaching the Proficient and Advanced levels was up from 18 percent in 2002 to 27 percent in 2007. Hooray on that account, too. The object of all these efforts isn’t just to get the poorest students up to speed but make the good ones better.
Let’s celebrate. (Before hitting the books even harder.) And the best way to do that is to read a press release about the latest NAEP scores from the Education Trust. It’s an outfit in Washington that monitors educational trends in hopes of encouraging educational quality for all, particularly for those students who traditionally have tested poorly. One object of exercises like the National Assessment of Education Progress is to get more of those students up to the Basic level of achievement so they can go on to the Proficient, and then the Advanced levels. And we loved every glowing, underlined word of the Education Trust’s statement about Arkansas ’ stellar performance on the latest national assessment:
“Like the results from the 2007 NAEP math assessment, Arkansas ’ improvement on the 2007 NAEP writing assessment was among the biggest in the nation. Since 1998, [ Arkansas ] slashed by nearly one-half the number of African-American and low-income eighth graders that rated below Basic. In recent years, the state has focused on ratcheting up expectations across the board—not just in writing—by emphasizing instruction across subject areas and linking assessments and instruction to state standards.
“State targets are set with high expectations and standards are reviewed regularly to ensure appropriate rigor, beginning as early as kindergarten. And as the expectations bar is raised in Arkansas , so too are the minimum scores required for proficiency on the state’s annual assessments. The result: All groups of students are showing increases in achievement, and gaps are narrowing on both state and NAEP exams.”
Let’s hear it for this state’s eighthgraders, their teachers and principals, and the state Education Department. All had a role in this achievement. Let us now praise both the strict taskmasters and the brazen innovators; the traditional public schools that emphasize quality and concentrate on the classroom, not politics; and the charter schools who are striking out in daring new ways. It takes all kinds of dedication to achieve progress like this.
And let’s not hear any more talk about how some kids just can’t learn and it’s useless to expect them to. We’ve heard all that before from the usual excuse-makers and defenders of the status-low-quo, and these latest test scores show how empty such talk is. No, we’re not going to expect any less of these kids; they’ve just shown what they can do.
Yes, much more needs to be done. To quote the Education Trust: “States like Arkansas are embracing the challenge, but they know that there is still a lot more work that must be done to not just narrow, but eliminate the gaps that have plagued our schools for generations. But by implementing a formula of what we know works for all kids—rich curriculum; high standards; strong, focused instruction; and rigorous assessments—they are proving that change is possible when educators and policymakers work together aggressively to make sure that all students are well prepared for the future, especially the ones who are the farthest behind.”
We have just begun to advance. And reports like these show we can.
