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EDITORIALS

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Wednesday, November 30, 2005

IMAGINE you’re the parent of 50 teenagers. (Shrieks of horror!) Now imagine you telling them to clean their rooms. Now imagine telling them they can define “clean.” Each to his own definition. 

Now imagine your house. 

Not very pretty, is it? 

But that’s something like what the federal government agreed to in order to make the No Child Left Behind law more palatable to its critics. The law told the states that more of their students needed to be proficient, but then the feds agreed to let the states give their own tests and determine their own definition of Proficient. Any parent of a teenager could have seen it coming:  Any number of states are showing a dramatic increase in the number of students now considered proficient—on state tests, not national ones. The New York Times has counted a score or more of such states where kids are making “impressive gains”—so long as their performance isn’t compared to how other students are doing around the country. This allows schools in those states to escape penalties under the No Child Left Behind law. And that’s what it’s all about, right? Escaping penalties. (Surely it can’t be about education.)  Educators in Tennessee, for bad example, were overjoyed that 87 percent of their students performed at or above the proficient level on state tests. They threw a big celebration. 

But when it came to another test—the National Assessment of Education Progress test, the federal big-boy test that’s now required for most of the country’s fourth and eighth graders—only 21 percent of Tennessee’s were ranked as high. 

Much the same thing happened in Mississippi. And Oklahoma. And Georgia. And across the fruited plain. How about that? 

Yep, east or west, home tests are best. Or at least they produce more proficient students. 

And why not? The states themselves get to determine what score equals Proficient on their state-only tests. 

Little Joey only got 25 percent of the questions right? No problem. Because 25 percent could be considered proficient in some states! 

When educrats are allowed to determine what the test numbers mean, beware. Just look what happened when they were allowed to devise their own vocabulary. The result has been a nonsense language of their own: educanto. 

IT’S NOT hard to understand how all this happens:     

1) The federal government demands that states improve their schools, and the president wants real accountability, so real penalties are established for schools that can’t show their students are getting more proficient. 

2) But the feds don’t want to seem too harsh (like any well-meaning parent of a teenager) so they let the states decide the meaning of Proficient. (Uh oh. You can already see what’s coming.)     

3) The states, like any bright but messy teenager, set the bar low so too many kids won’t flunk the test. 

4) Everything comes to light when Daddy gets home, administers the federal NAEP test, and finds out what’s really going on. 

End of analogy. And it’s about time. Just thinking about having to raise 50 teenagers makes us a little queasy. Much like having to think about educational statistics and what they signify, or rather don’t. Not really. 

ARKANSAS is in a different, better boat. The Arkansas Benchmark is no gimme test. At least, it isn’t now. A quarter of Arkansas’ 1,100 public schools were tagged as Academically Troubled after the state test was given last year. Evidently this is one state that’s serious about improving education. And it shows on the national test, too:  Only three states improved on three of four NAEP tests last year (the tests that score how well fourth and eighth graders are doing in language and math). Those states were Texas, Massachusetts, and—you guessed it—the Natural State. And by improving we don’t mean going from 1 percent proficient to 3 percent proficient and calling it a 300 percent increase. Students in Arkansas were not only doing much better on those tests, but scoring close to the national average. That average is a moving target from year to year, depending on how the nation’s students do, and that target is usually higher every year and harder to hit.  And that’s not all. The NAEP people said Arkansas was improving significantly in three of these four tests. (No state was improving much on the fourth, the test in eighth-grade reading.)  We wouldn’t want to mislead anybody. (We’re not educators in Tennessee.) Arkansas still has a way to go before anybody can feel our system of public education is top-notch. 

But at least Arkansas isn’t trying to pull a fast one. At least Arkansas isn’t holding press conferences to crow about how 87 percent of its students are proficient—only to have the deficiency of that kind of proficiency revealed soon enough when the national test results come out. 

TESTS, TESTS, TESTS. State bench mark tests. National assessment tests. Why so many tests? That’s a question for another editorial, one we may have written several times by now. The gist of it: Why not combine this state’s Benchmark test with the NAEP so the test-weary kids and teachers would have to deal with just one annual test? And parents and administrators could ponder just one set of test results. 

Right now, because the dual test results are so hard to puzzle out, it sounds as if our kids are over-tested but underassessed. 

Education is a complicated enough process without making it even more complicated than necessary. Let’s do what we can to simplify and clarify the process. Everyone concerned would be grateful. And better informed. 

Arkansas is now considering a better approach to testing: a single new test to replace the two given now. This new test would do more than see how many students are meeting the state’s own definition of Proficient. It would compare every student’s performance with that of other students being asked the same questions around the country. This new, combined test would be scored and returned in weeks, not months, and give Arkansans a better idea of how our students are doing compared to those elsewhere. 

This single, new, improved test would provide both accountability and credibility, two indispensable requisites for a testing system that clarifies how our kids are doing here in Arkansas, rather than just confusing the statistical picture. Who says Arkansas can’t be a leader in education?