Archive for Assessment

SAT scores were flat for the class of 2008, according to an article by Scott J. Cech published August 26 on the Education Week website. The mean composite score of 1,511 on a scale of 600 to 2,400 remained unchanged from 2007, as did the scores in the reading, mathematics, and writing sections of the exam.

A total of 1.52 million students from this year's graduating high school class took the SAT, a 1.6% increase over 2007. For further information, visit the Education Week website.

Ghoti and tchoghs may not immediately strike readers as staples of the British diet; and even those most enamoured of written English’s idiosyncrasies may wince at this tendentious rendering of “fish and chips.” Yet the spelling, easily derived from other words, highlights the shortcomings of English orthography. This has long bamboozled foreigners and natives alike, and may underlie the national test results released on August 12 which revealed that almost a third of English 14-year-olds cannot read properly.

One solution, suggested recently by Ken Smith of the Buckinghamshire New University, is to accept the most common misspellings as variants rather than correct them. Smith is too tolerant, but he is right that something needs to change. Due partly to its mixed Germanic and Latin origins, English spelling is strikingly inconsistent. Read more of this article in The Economist online.

 Some Texas parents will have to wait until October 8—more than six weeks after the first day of school—to find out whether their children are entitled to transfer to a higher-performing campus under No Child Left Behind. Parent advocates said the delay by theTexas Education Agency is unacceptable and effectively renders No Child Left Behind's toughest sanctions meaningless.

TEA officials said they need more time to figure out how a new Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test for special education students should factor into determining whether schools made the so-called "adequate yearly progress" that No Child Left Behind demands. The U.S. Department of Education signed off on the state's request for more time.

Even though more than 260,000 children statewide are eligible to transfer, only 1,522 students left low-performing schools in the 2006-07 school year. About 1,750 students received supplemental tutoring. Read more in The Houston Chronicle online.

Almost one in three 14-year-olds in England are failing to reach the standards expected of their age group in reading, Sats results have shown. Sats are national tests that assess student achievement. Boys are faring worse than girls when it comes to literacy, according to the tests taken by around 600,000 teenagers in England.

While writing levels improved 3% over last year, more than a quarter (27%) of pupils fell short of Level 5—the standard expected of them in English—with figures down 1% over 2007.

It is a reversal of results at primary school level, where the proportion of schoolchildren reaching the expected standard in reading is higher than in writing. Read more on the Independent Television News website.

Something happens to Anne Arundel County students between elementary and middle school. It was reflected in the Maryland state test scores released last week: Students do well in elementary school, but scores drop off when they hit middle school.

Rivers of ink have been spilled into that achievement gap. Experts offer a slew of explanations: Schools don't prepare students for the upper grades; middle school is viewed as a holding pen between elementary and high school; adolescence is a difficult time for students.

While reports—the most recent one released by the state Department of Education two weeks ago—offer solutions, the real, sweeping reform that many are waiting for still hasn't happened. Read more in The Capital online.

Primary school education in England has been damaged by “prescriptive state nationalization,” which has taken all the fun out of children’s learning, the biggest review of primary education in 40 years has concluded. A mixture of “moral panic,” “policy hysteria,” and “fad theory” has had a devastating effect on primary schools in England, according to the latest reports of the Cambridge University-led Primary Review.

The three reports published today (Friday, April 18, 2008) examining teacher professionalism, training and leadership followed 22 earlier reports that have delivered a damning indictment of the government’s record on primary education.

Children had been reduced to the status of “targets and outputs” in a school system ruled by political “whim,” researchers from Manchester Metropolitan University said. Read the article in The Independent online.

New research into what is commonly called the black-white “achievement gap” suggests that the students who lose the most ground academically in U.S. public schools may be the brightest African-American children.

As black students move through elementary and middle school, these studies show, the test-score gaps that separate them from their better-performing white counterparts grow fastest among the most able students and the most slowly for those who start out with below-average academic skills. Read about the studies in Education Week online.

 Hundreds of schools in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia were judged to have made adequate progress last year under the No Child Left Behind Act even though they failed to meet performance targets for all groups of historically underperforming students, the requirement at the heart of the law.

The schools—153 in Maryland, 100 in Virginia, and 11 in the District—satisfied the law under a “safe harbor” provision. It forgives a school for low test scores from one or more subgroups if those students show yearly improvement and if the school scores well on the whole. The safe harbor provision is a loophole, essentially, in the education law, which sets a national goal of 100% proficiency by 2014 for all students, including seven demographic subgroups defined by race, language, poverty level and disability.

The extent to which schools rely on the provision illustrates the challenge posed by the No Child Left Behind law, which requires that poor and minority students meet the same performance goals as the overall school population, with the target rising by a few points each year. In Maryland, students are being tested this week and testing begins April 22, 2008, in the District and in May for most Northern Virginia schools. Read more in The Washington Post online.

At 2:00 p.m. on April 3, educators can join National Center for Education Statistics Associate Commissioner Peggy G. Carr for an online StatChat about the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment results, which will be available at 10:00 a.m. that day. To view the results and watch a webcast of the release event online, visit the NAEP website at 10:00 a.m. To join the StatChat, visit the StatChat page at 2:00 p.m.

For further information on the writing assessment, visit the section on writing.

NAEP is administered by the National Center for Education Statistics within the Institute of Education Sciences.

Amid mounting national frustration over high school graduation rates, the School District of Palm Beach County in Florida has been thrust onto center stage. In a class-action lawsuit, the American Civil Liberties Union is demanding that the district boost its graduation rates and reduce the gaps in those rates between racial and socioeconomic groups. The lawsuit is the first in the United States to make such demands of a school district, the ACLU and other sources say.

Lawyers from the national ACLU and its Florida chapter filed the suit in state court on March 18. Specifically, the ACLU is asking the court to require the district to improve its graduation rates by a certain percentage each year—overall and for subgroups. It also wants the court to determine a more accurate way of calculating graduation rates—a complex issue nationwide.

For educators and education experts, the case raises some controversial questions: What is an acceptable rate of graduation? And who should be held responsible when schools miss the mark—schools, students, society? Read more in The Christian Science Monitor online.

Ninety-two percent of Texas’ eighth-graders passed the reading portion of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge of Skills (TAKS) on their first attempt earlier this month—the best showing yet in this class’s academic career of high-stakes testing. The 25,644 students statewide who failed the exam can retake it on April 30 and then again on July 2, if needed. Students who don’t pass on their third attempt face being forced to repeat the eighth grade for the first time in state history.

While high-stakes testing is new for middle schoolers, it’s old hat for this bunch of students. The class of 2012 was the first to face high-stakes testing as both third- and fifth-graders. Read more about the testing in The Houston Chronicle and The Dallas Morning News.

The British Columbia Teachers’ Federation in Canada is planning job action to get rid of standardized tests in reading, writing, and math that are used every year by the Fraser Institute to rank schools. In a secret vote Monday, March 17, 2008, delegates to the union’s annual meeting approved a plan for a boycott next year of the tests known as the Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA). The tests are delivered early each year in Grades 4 and 7.

Teachers want the government to stop testing every child and return to the random sampling that was in effect prior to 2000. That would bring an end to the Education Ministry’s practice of releasing school-by-school results and kill the rankings by the Fraser Institute, an independent nonpartisan research and educational organization based in Canada. Read the article in The Times Colonist online.

Following its successful PISA programme for testing the educational attainments of 15-year old high-school-students, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is launching a challenging new project to assess the knowledge and skills of adults.

The OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) will assess the level and distribution of adult skills across countries, focusing on the cognitive and workplace skills needed for successful participation in today’s work environment. PIAAC will also gather data on participants’ educational backgrounds and professional attainments, as well as their ability to use information and communications technology (ICT) and their general levels of literacy and numeracy.

Following development work over the next two years and a field trial planned for 2010, the first tests will take place in 2011. The project will build on the success of OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which recently completed its third round of high-school student evaluations. PIAAC will help governments to go further in evaluating and designing education and training policies by providing comparative information on skills among their adult populations.

For further about OECD's international assessment programs, visit the News and Events section of the OECD website.

New Leaders for New Schools, a national non-profit organization in Washington, D.C., that recruits and trains outstanding urban school principals, today released an analysis on the patterns exhibited by at-risk schools making dramatic academic gains. The findings of this analysis hold important implications for urban principalship and for closing the achievement gap for low-income students in America’s urban schools.

The analysis, “Defining an Urban Principalship to Drive Dramatic Achievement Gains,” identifies practical leadership and management steps that urban school principals take to improve low-achieving schools. Research has shown that a crucial factor in a successful turnaround is principals who are capable of leading significant improvements. New Leaders for New Schools is one major national initiative designed to help transform urban public education at scale by defining a new urban principalship and providing high-quality principals who have the mindsets, knowledge, skills, and support needed to help every student achieve at high levels. Read more about the report’s findings at the New Leaders for New Schools website.

 It might be easy to dismiss the toilet-papering project going on inside Penny Cooper’s fourth-grade classroom late last week as having little to do with standardized tests. However, it’s exactly how Cooper, a teacher at Meadow Lark Elementary in Great Falls, Montana, keeps her students at ease a week before they launch into the testing mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

“This is totally to try and relieve the stress from the test,” Cooper said. “They would be so burned out, but this stuff they look forward to.” Each spring, students across the country participate in week-long testing to determine if students, schools and districts are making adequate yearly progress, as defined by the No Child Left Behind Act. Read more about “stress-busting” in The Great Falls Tribune online.

A public school on Vancouver’s east side regularly scores poorly on standardized tests, but a report released February 11, 2008, by the C.D. Howe Institute says that school serves its students just as well as an elite private west-side school with a pass rate of 90%.

The report, by Professor David Johnson of Ontario’s Wilfrid Laurier University, offers the first comparison of British Columbia elementary schools based not only on scores from standardized tests—being written this month around the province in Grades 4 and 7—but also on the socio-economic characteristics that affect student performance.

Johnson, an economist, says students’ backgrounds are slightly more important than classroom lessons in determining how well they learn. Read more in The Vancouver Sun online.

In Australia, it was the time of the Beatles, the Mavis Bramston Show, the EH Holden and prime minister Robert Menzies. We have seen a lot of changes since 1964, but there are new suggestions that there has been little or no improvement in children’s literacy and numeracy skills since then.

Researchers claim little has changed despite the millions of dollars pumped into the education system. The researchers from the Australian National University (ANU) looked at literacy and numeracy tests between 1964 and 2003 in which successive groups of students were asked the same questions.

One of the study’s authors, Andrew Leigh, says a typical young teenager in 2003 was about a quarter of a grade level behind his or her counterpart in 1964. “The test scores have flat-lined over this period. In fact, there’s even a little bit of evidence suggesting they may have fallen a smidgin,” he said. Read more at ABC News online.

Vermont public school students in grades three to eight improved slightly in reading, dipped slightly in math and continued to struggle with writing, according to standardized test results published February 5, 2008, by the Vermont Education Department.

Worrisome achievement gaps persisted between poor students and those with more money, boys and girls, and special education students compared with those without disabilities. Vermont Education Commissioner Richard Cate said the performance gaps and large numbers of students below standard mean it’s time for bold changes in the way Vermont educates students.

“I just don’t think that we can make significant change to the outcomes for kids without making significant change to how they are educated,” Cate said. Read about the New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) test results and what it means in the Burlington Free Press online.

New York City Mayor Bloomberg has put the city’s middle-schoolers on notice: Remember to study or forget about high school.

In a move that could affect nearly a quarter of all city eighth-graders, Bloomberg used his annual State of the City address Thursday, January 17, 2008, to announce drastic changes to middle school graduation requirements. Starting next year, eighth-graders who bomb standardized math or reading tests or fail one of four courses will not be allowed to advance to high school.

The new eighth-grade policy is the latest by a mayor who vowed to end “social promotion,” the practice of advancing kids because of age, not ability. Read about it in The New York Daily News online.

Tens of thousands of Pennsylvania high school seniors who failed state math and reading tests got “empty diplomas” last year because they had not learned basic skills, Pennsylvania Education Secretary Gerald Zahorchak says. Statewide, 45% of the 127,000 seniors failed the tests, leading Zahorchak to lament that diplomas were awarded to many who “show up and shut up.”

Zahorchak used that statistic to push for rules that would require most of this year’s sixth graders to pass either the PSSA—Pennsylvania’s No Child Left Behind benchmark test—or a new set of state tests before they could graduate in 2014.

The proposed regulations are scheduled for an initial vote today, January 17, 2008, by the state Board of Education. Read more iin The Philadelphia Inquirer online.

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of standardized tests in public schools today. Grade advancement, high school diplomas, teacher bonuses, principals’ jobs and school reputations can all hinge on whether a student picks the right answer. So who creates the tests that carry so much weight?

Much of the work is done by five giants: CTB/McGraw-Hill, Educational Testing Service, Harcourt Assessment, Pearson Educational Measurement, and Riverside Publishing. Together, the companies own about 90% of the state-testing business, which has become a $1.1 billion industry since passage of the federal No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. Working with state educators, the big five—or big four, once Pearson’s planned acquisition of Harcourt takes place— create and score the tests. But the explosion of testing and changes in the types of tests states administer have left the companies scrambling to keep up.

Also, differences in state standards that are used to create the tests and the reluctance of some states to spend money for high-quality, challenging tests have caused a great disparity in testing from state to state. Read more at stateline.org.

The state assessment that will replace the Delaware Student Testing Program should show student growth, require less testing time, and give immediate, diagnostic feedback to help teachers adjust their instruction to meet students’ needs, a new report based on a two-year pilot project recommends. Such a test “allows the educational system to be more responsive to kids,” said Nancy Doorey, coordinator of the Delaware Statewide Academic Growth Assessment Pilot.

The pilot included more than 30,000 students across four districts and charter schools in grades 2 to 10. They were tested three times a year in reading and math using Measures of Academic Progress, a computerized multigrade assessment aligned to Delaware standards that adjusts the difficulty of questions asked according to how accurately a student is answering them.

The pilot compared the improved proficiency, or growth, documented using the computer-adaptive tests to the growth identified using DSTP and found the computer-adaptive assessments documented student progress that the grade-level DSTP assessments missed, particularly among children who began the year well above or below their grade level. The report, released January 8, 2008, suggests Delaware develop a system similar to Oregon’s. Read more at delawareonline.com.

Teachers and principals at schools the state of Louisiana has taken over could earn big bonuses if they bring the schools up to certain standards. The Recovery School District, which is running more than 30 public schools in New Orleans, could dole out bonuses of up to $3,000 to teachers and up to $5,000 to principals under the pay-for-performance plan largely based on test scores, officials said last week. The RSD took over many poorly performing public schools in New Orleans. It has turned some over to charter organizations and is running 34 itself. For more about the performance-based bonuses, read the article in Education Week.

“What should be done about the quality and quantity of standardized testing in U.S. schools?” asks Stephen J. Dubner, one of the authors of Freakonomics. "We touched on the subject in Freakonomics, but only insofar as the introduction of high-stakes testing altered the incentives at play—including the incentives for some teachers, who were found to cheat in order to cover up the poor performance of their students (which, obviously, also indicates the poor performance of the teachers).

“We gathered a group of testing afficionados—W. James Popham, Robert Zemsky, Thomas Toch, Monty Neill, and Gaston Caperton—and put to them the following questions:

•Should there be less standardized testing in the current school system, or more?
•Should all schools, including colleges, institute exit exams?”

Read what these experts have to say in a forum published in The New York Times and moderated by the authors of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.

Principals, teachers and staffers—including custodians—at three Washginton, DC, public schools where students’ test scores rose more than 20% last year received $500,000 in cash awards, delivered by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty on December 18. Fenty and Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee doled out the gifts from a federal program to the first winners of the Together Everyone Achieves More, or TEAM, awards. The schools recognized were Barnard, Noyes and Tyler elementary schools.

As word of the awards spread, several teachers tried to calculate how much each would receive out of a single $8,000 check. They were surprised to learn that each one would get that amount. Principals of the three schools received $10,000 each; assistant principals, $9,000. Librarians and guidance counselors at the schools received $4,000. The schools’ support staff members, including cafeteria workers, each received $2,000. Read more in The Washington Post.

 The federal No Child Left Behind law of 2002 rates schools based on how students perform on state standardized tests, and if too many children score poorly, the school is judged as failing. But how much is really the school’s fault?

A new study by the Educational Testing Service (ETS)—which develops and administers more than 50 million standardized tests annually, including the SAT—concludes that an awful lot of those low scores can be explained by factors that have nothing to do with schools. The study, “The Family: America’s Smallest School,” suggests that a lot of the failure has to do with what takes place in the home, the level of poverty and government’s inadequate support for programs that could make a difference, like high-quality day care and paid maternity leave.

The ETS researchers took four variables that are beyond the control of schools and using just those four variables, were able to predict each state’s results on the federal eighth-grade reading test with impressive accuracy. Learn what those variables are by reading the article in The New York Times.

 Standardized testing for English language learners has improved since the inception of the No Child Left Behind Act, according to report released last month by the University of California Davis School of Education. The 196-page report, edited by education professor Jamal Abedi, found that the new standardized tests better assess academic English rather than exclusively social English, fit individual states’ English language proficiency academic standards and encompass kindergarten through 12th grade, among other improvements. Abedi said the revised tests also measure English proficiency in reading, writing, speaking and listening, as opposed to only reading and writing. Read the article in The California Aggie online or access the report.

Educators across Florida are taking a hard look at how much of a role the FCAT should play in children’s education as public confidence in the state-mandated test erodes. State Senator Don Gaetz, R-Fort Walton Beach, said he plans to sponsor legislation next year that would allow schools to be graded on graduation rates and students’ performance on other exams besides the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. Those tests would include the college entrance exams, the SAT and ACT. If a school performs poorly on the FCAT, it doesn’t receive state bonus money, about $100 per student, given to schools that maintain an A or improve by a letter grade. Read the article in The News-Press.

American teenagers scored lower in science than students in a majority of other industrialized countries participating in a prominent international exam, in results that testing officials said they released early after the scores unexpectedly slipped out abroad. Fifteen-year-old U.S. students ranked lower, on average, than their peers in 16 other countries, including those in Finland, Canada, Japan, the Czech Republic, and Ireland, out of 30 total industrialized nations, on the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA.

At a time when many public officials are decrying American students’ middling performance on the international stage, the latest results seem likely to draw a glum reaction in political and education circles. The United States’ average score of 489 on the PISA science section also fell below the average score among industrialized nations of 500. In 2003, the last time PISA measured science, U.S. students scored an average of 491, also below the international average for industrialized nations of 500. Read the article in Education Week.

Congress hoped that if it required the states to give annual tests in return for federal education aid, state politicians would be encouraged—or at least embarrassed—into improving dismal schools and closing the achievement gap between rich and poor children. That’s not how things have worked out. Many states have gamed the system—and misled voters—devising weak tests, setting low passing scores or changing tests from year to year to prevent accurate comparisons over time. The charade will continue, and children will continue to be shortchanged, until the country develops a rigorous national test keyed to national standards. Read the editorial in The New York Times.

In an episode that has embarrassed the U.S. Department of Education, thousands of flawed testing booklets forced the invalidation of reading scores on an international exam administered without major mishap in 56 other countries. The problem came on a test known as the Program for International Student Assessment that allows students’ proficiency to be compared with that of their international peers. It was administered to 5,600 American 15-year-olds last fall, as well as to students in the 30 member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and in 27 less developed countries. Scores are scheduled for release next month. Read the story in The New York Times.

Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress's (NAEP) 2007 Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) were released on Thursday, November 15. Reading scores for fourth graders and eighth graders were generally the same or higher since 2002, when the TUDA began collecting these statistics from volunteer urban public school districts. However, comparing 2007 scores to 2005, only Atlanta and Washington, DC, posted reading gains among both fourth graders and eighth graders.

For further information, visit the NAEP website.

Math scores continued to rise in the Los Angeles Unified School District, but reading is showing no improvement with fourth-graders ranking among the lowest among urban districts, according to a federal report released Thursday, November 15, 2007. Every two years, 11 urban districts, including Los Angeles, test their fourth- and eighth-grade students in math and reading. The outcome of these tests, known as the Trial Urban District Assessment Results, are part of the National Assessment of Education Progress—commonly called “the nation’s report card.”

The results provide a look into the achievement in the nation’s urban schools and they echoed some of the concerns from the nationwide assessment. Those results released in September showed that while math scores rose, reading progress was mixed and the achievement gap between white and Asian students and their black and Latino counterparts remains wide. Read the article in The Los Angeles Times.

At Oakhill Elementary School in Streamwood, Illinois, teachers stress out annually to reach federal academic bars set by the No Child Left Behind Act. That’s especially true when it comes to those teaching students who have special needs, according to Sue Kellner, a special education resource instructor at Oakhill, who works with about 20 special education students on a weekly basis. The school has anywhere from 60 to 70 special education students per year, according to Kellner. Even though more than 78% of the students at Oakhill met or exceeded math and reading standards set by the act this year, the school failed to make “adequate yearly progress” because of a few special ed students not meeting the standard in reading. Read the article in The Courier News.

Illinois students who have limited English-language skills will have to take the regular state achievement exams beginning next year, under a recent decision by federal officials. In past years, students who were new to the country and spoke little English were allowed to take the Illinois Measure of Annual Growth in English (IMAGE) in math and reading. That exam is written in English, but it has fewer and simpler questions. But the U.S. Department of Education ruled earlier this month that IMAGE was not an appropriate way to determine if non-English speaking students were mastering basic math and reading skills. Read the article in The Chicago Tribune online.

 A teacher in Madison, Wisconsin, who protested the federal No Child Left Behind law by refusing to administer a standardized test learned yesterday (November 1) he will be disciplined for his actions. Middle school teacher David Wasserman said district officials told him he will get a letter of reprimand in his personnel file for insubordination. And they warned he would be fired if he carried out another protest, he said. Wasserman sat in the teacher’s lounge on Tuesday (October 30) rather than give his students the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam. Other teachers gave his students the exam, which is used to measure progress under No Child Left Behind. Schools that fail to meet their goals under the law are considered failing and can face sanctions. Read more at Chippewa.com.

 Under pressure from the right and the left, President Bush said Tuesday, October 9, that he is open to reformulating his signature No Child Left Behind education law but stressed that he remains unwilling to surrender on its core elements of testing and accountability. “As we move forward, we will continue to welcome new ideas,” Bush said in the Rose Garden after meeting with civil rights leaders. “And I appreciate the ideas I heard today. Yet there can be no compromise on the basic principle: Every child must learn to read and do math at, or above, grade level. And there can be no compromise on the need to hold schools accountable to making sure we achieve that goal.” Read the article at washingtonpost.com.

 The controversial idea of paying teachers based on how much their students learn got a boost when a key congressman recently proposed adding pay–for–performance money for teachers in high–poverty schools to the next version of the federal No Child Left Behind education law. Proponents say merit pay would give teachers incentives to raise the quality of students’ work and could help the NCLB program, which requires schools to show yearly improvement on standardized tests or face penalties. Proposed last month by U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-CA), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, the merit plan has support from Republicans and U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. Read more at Stateline.org.

  A new study of state achievement tests offers evidence that the No Child Left Behind law’s core mission—to push all students to score well in reading and math—is undermined by wide variations in how states define a passing score. Read more of this article from The Washington Post.

  The math tests students take under the No Child Left Behind law are harder than the reading exams, a study finds. The findings, in a study released by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington-based education think tank, come a little more than a week after the federal government reported students have been making much more progress in math than in reading in recent years. Read more of this article from MSNBC.com

The number of schools in England deemed to be failing at the end of last term rose by almost a fifth compared with 2006, the official schools inspection agency Ofsted reported today, September 28, 2007. The 18% rise can be partly explained by a sharp increase in the number of inspections, but ministers also said it reflected an “uncompromising approach” toward underperforming schools. the end of the summer term this year, 246 schools were in special measures—the most serious category of concern for Ofsted, up from 208 at the same time last year. Read about the concerns at Guardian Unlimited.

A former senior Labor policy adviser has attacked the vision for school education unveiled by Australian state and territory governments as “dangerous drivel” and a “retrograde step that will dumb down school curriculum across Australia.” Ken Wiltshire, professor of public policy at the University of Queensland, told The Australian that the Future of Schooling report showed Labor education policy was still driven by the teachers’ unions. According to the report released this week, “the judgment of teachers is paramount,” with external state exams and national tests supplementing the teachers’ assessment. “External assessment should be what drives the whole national school curriculum. School-based assessment is subsidiary,” he said. Read about the controversy.

  IRA has entered the world of podcasts. The association’s first podcast, IRA Author Insights: Afflerbach on Reading and Assessment, is now available as a free download on the IRA website. In this podcast, author Peter Afflerbach discusses how classroom assessment, not NCLB accountability testing, influences reading achievement. He highlights the need to support teachers so that they provide excellent instruction to all students. Download the podcast, and look for more in the near future.

An eight–year–old boy has been left as the only pupil at a closure–threatened school near Barnsley. Worsbrough St. Mary’s Church of England school was put in special measures in March after a critical Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) report and the head teacher resigned in May. Ofsted is the official body for inspecting schools in England. Pupil numbers fell from 90 in January to 11 at the end of the school year and only one boy has returned this term. His mother said she felt the school was her son’s best option, but education chiefs fear he will be isolated. An Ofsted report in April said St. Mary’s was “failing to give its pupils an acceptable standard of education.” Read about the lonely pupil at BBC News.

The difficulty of a reading test used to judge students across New York State dropped by as many as six grade levels between 2004 and 2005, according to an internal study by the New York City teachers union.

The study, written in March 2006 by the United Federation of Teachers, found that passages in the 2005 test hovered around third- and fourth-grade reading levels, down from a ninth-grade level in 2004. It also found that the 2004 test was characterized by longer passages, smaller print, crammed text, and more complex questions, such as asking a student to make an inference. Despite this apparent drop in difficulty, however, the number of correct answers needed to pass — known as the “cut score” — was just slightly higher in 2005 than in 2004.

This article appears in The New York Sun.

A new questionnaire designed to assess levels of student engagement at school is being developed to give schools a clearer picture of how their students feel. The survey, designed by the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER), asks students a range of questions such as how safe they feel at school, whether they respect the teachers, and whether they look forward to going to school. Senior researcher Charles Darr said the questionnaire was designed to look more deeply at the reasons students became disaffected at school, rather than focusing on statistics like truancy rates and student attainment. See the article at stuff.com.nz.

 Since the day that the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2005 reading results were released, they have been used in a plethora of flawed attempts to confirm the results of state reading tests required by the No Child Left Behind Act, says Idaho NAEP state coordinator Bert Stoneberg. With that in mind, Stoneberg wrote a short paper about four principles that contribute to a valid use of NAEP scores to confirm state test results. The paper appeared in the electronic journal Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation 12(5). For further information, read the full text of "Using NAEP to Confirm State Test Results in the No Child Left Behind Act."

New teachers are being blamed for the decline in reading scores in Connecticut. Elaine Zimmerman, executive director of the state Commission on Children, says new teachers either don’t know or haven’t followed proven techniques for teaching reading. Doris J. Kurtz, New Britain superintendent of schools, decries new teachers’ lack of preparedness in literacy skills as “disgraceful.” A quick glance at third–grade reading scores, however, shows that higher scores come from wealthy towns and lower ones from poor cities. Poverty has long been associated with low scores across academic disciplines. Leaders ignore greater societal ills as they point their fingers at those who lack the protection of tenure. Read more of this opinion piece at courant.com.

 Since 2002, when No Child Left Behind became law, states have spent millions of dollars giving standardized reading and math tests; one estimate puts the total cost above $5 billion through 2008. Linda Perlstein, a former Washington Post reporter, wanted to see the effects firsthand, so she spent an academic year inside a high-poverty elementary school in Annapolis, Md. The result is Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade. Read an interview with Perstein, and an excerpt from her book, in USA Today.

The new “child-centered ”curriculum for secondary schools in England could give teachers more freedom, but only if exam pressures are tackled, according to Alexandra Frean, education editor at The London Times. No matter how boldly schools reorganize their timetables and tailor teaching to individual requirements, there is no sign that they will be freed from pressures to push up exam scores. The new insistence on making education relevant to young people by focusing on themes may not be relevant tomorrow. Some believe the government will do little to remedy the really serious problem in the state education system: the shortage of good teachers in specialist subjects. Read it in the Timesonline.com.

  Several school districts across the country are moving to an increasingly popular way of analyzing test scores, called a “growth model” because it tracks the progress of students as they move from grade to grade rather than comparing, say, this year’s fourth graders with last year’s, the traditional approach. Concerned that the traditional way amounted to an apples-to-oranges comparison, schools in more than two dozen states have turned to growth models. Now a movement is mounting to amend the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which is up for reauthorization this year, to allow such alternative assessments of student progress. Read more of this article from The New York Times.

 About 82 percent of Georgia’s public schools met federal testing goals this year, according to figures the state released Friday. Roughly 79 percent met the standard last year. The state Department of Education released its annual report Friday on whether Georgia schools met the testing goals required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The law requires all public schools to test students each year in math, reading and language arts in grades 3 through 8. Read more about these results in this article from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

California has ratcheted up the standards for students to be considered fluent in English, causing fewer of them than last year to meet the bar. Twenty-nine percent of the 1.3 million students who are labeled “English learners” scored proficient on the test that measures their acquisition of the language, according to results released recently by the state Department of Education. Last year, 44 percent were considered proficient. Read more of this article from The Sacramento Bee.

What started as a subtle flaw in the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test of 3rd grade reading has widened into a full-scale debate with national implications: Is too much riding on one fallible assessment? Read more of this article from Education Week.

Maryland elementary and middle school students showed continued steady gains in state reading and math tests this year, with both Prince George's and Montgomery counties posting solid improvements from 2006 in many grade levels, according to exam results state educators planned to release June 14. State officials said all 24 school systems earned better scores on the Maryland School Assessments, a set of tests for third- through eighth-graders in reading and math. They also said the results showed a continued closing of the "achievement gap," the imbalance in test scores among students of different races, and students with limited English skills did noticeably better. Read the article at washingtonpost.com.

Girls again outperformed boys in Bahrain's graduation exams, achieving high passing rates and dominating the top students' honor list, final results show. Female students' overall passing rate was 74.36% compared with 53.37% for boys. Lamees Dhaif, a social activist, said the "negative effect of a lad culture" is one of the theories that explains why female students are steadily outperforming boys. "Boys do not spend much time studying because they do not wish to be seen as geeks," Lamees yesterday told Gulf News.

The Georgia Board of Regents voted to require many incoming college freshmen to take a writing and reading test in hopes of catching academic problems more quickly. Traditionally, the test has been taken by sophomores who did not score high enough on the SAT, ACT or Advanced Placement exams or who did not have high grades in basic English courses. Now incoming freshmen who don’t meet those requirements or who score less than a 580 on the English language arts portion of the Georgia High School Graduation Test must take the Regents’ Test either before they begin a state college or in the first few weeks of school. Read more of this article from the accessnorthga.com website.

Across Canada, holding children back has become increasingly rare. Instead, children who do not meet minimum grade standards usually move ahead with their peers—a practice known as social promotion—while also receiving remedial help. As a result, social promotion has largely become the norm for struggling elementary and middle-school pupils. Children who are moved ahead a grade without adequately grasping the curriculum are often given a range of extra support, including tailored instruction from their teachers. But among teachers, there is dissent about the merits of social promotion, with some seeing the practice as ineffective in addressing gaps in learning. Read the commentary at globeandmail.com.

Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary of Great Britain, has rejected calls for scrapping national curriculum tests for two million 7-, 11-, and 14-year-olds. Johnson said he believed ditching the exams would be "profoundly wrong." "Parents don't want to go back to a world where schools were closed institutions, no one knew what was going on in them. Our responsibility is to ensure that our children leave school with a good grounding in English, maths and science," he said. But the General Teaching Council (GTC), which regulates teachers, in a report submitted to the Commons Select Committee on Education, said too many tests were damaging children's education.

We seem to be doing a bit better educating our most disadvantaged students. But many educators think that is not enough. The numbers displayed in the graphic smorgasbord known as "The Condition of Education 2007," from the U.S. Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics, reveal the struggles of a generation to make schools work for all children. Read the article by Jay Matthews on rating gains in our schools at The Washington Post website.

  Almost every fourth-grader in Mississippi knows how to read. In Massachusetts, only half do. So what’s Mississippi doing that Massachusetts, the state with the most college graduates, isn’t? Setting expectations too low, critics say. Read more of this article from USA Today.

Prettygate Junior School near Colchester in Essex, England, has been chosen to take part in a government pilot project aimed at ensuring no child falls behind or gets stuck in an educational rut. Prettygate and the other 483 schools in the project will be challenged to make sure that all children move forward and progress at acceptable rates, said head teacher Barry Hawes. Under the pilot, the Department for Education and Skills will pay for outside tutors to come into the school. The school also has looked at how its teachers assess pupils and is making more use of teacher-based assessments to evaluate children's progress. Read more about England's attempt to leave no child behind at BBC News.

  In a policy shift of interest beyond Nebraska, Republican Gov. Dave Heineman has signed a bill authorizing statewide reading and math exams to coexist with the state’s unique patchwork of district-level assessments. The law, finalized on the last day of Nebraska’s legislative session, made the Cornhusker State the last to move toward uniform statewide assessments to meet the accountability requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Read more of this article from Education Week.

 Under a federal mandate enforced this spring in Virginia for the first time, thousands of beginners in English are taking the same reading tests as peers who are native speakers. Fears that the tests would traumatize some students, even drive them to tears, haven’t been realized. But educators said many have struggled to comprehend some parts of the exam. Read more in this article from The Washington Post.

 The “adequate yearly progress” (A.Y.P.) assessments mandated by the No Child Left Behind legislation, which was enacted in 2002 with high hopes of closing the achievement gap for minorities, don’t kick in until third grade. But when it comes to tests, NCLB is fulfilling its inclusive mission all too well: nobody—not even kids too young to be filling in the bubbles yet—escapes the atmosphere of exam-induced edginess. Read more about the high-stakes atmosphere created by NCLB testing in this article from The New York Times.

Florida students in nearly every grade posted higher scores on the state’s reading, math and science exams this year. State officials released the scores from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test on Wednesday for students in grades 4 to 11. Despite the overall good news, state officials said they were concerned to see the scores of black and Hispanic students fell slightly this year in reading, widening the performance gap with their white classmates. Reading scores for students with disabilities and those still learning English also dropped. Read more of this article from The Orlando Sentinel.

The number of New York state eighth graders reading on grade level climbed impressively this year for the first time since 1999 when the state adopted tougher educational standards and its modern testing system, according to scores released from this year’s statewide English exam. Read more about the improvement in this article from The New York Times.

  The Chicago Public Schools spent $50 million in federal money on after-school tutoring for 56,000 students last year but test scores show it got limited bang for its buck. Tutored elementary students showed only slightly more gains in reading on state tests in 2006 than comparable kids who were eligible for tutoring but didn’t get the extra help. Read more about the tutoring, which is mandated by NCLB, in this article from the Chicago Sun-Times.

Florida students stumbled this year when quizzed about spelling, punctuation and sentence structure, but their essay writing improved, according to 2007 Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test scores released Wednesday. More than half the eighth- and 10th-graders scored below grade level on the new Writing+ test, results show. Fourth-graders did better, with 40 percent below grade level. Read more about these test results in this article from the Orlando Sentinel.

 University of California researchers have released more data on state test results seemingly out of whack with the National Assessment of Educational Progress, as Congress shows some signs of addressing the issue. The California report found test score inflation particularly pronounced in reading, where the gap between state and national test results has grown in 10 of 12 states studied since the 2002 enactment of the federal No Child Left Behind law. Read more of this article from The Washington Post.

  Far greater shares of students are proficient on state reading and mathematics tests than on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and those gaps have grown to unprecedented levels since the No Child Left Behind Act became law in 2002, concludes a study released April 10. In ten of the twelve states included in the study, the disparity between the share of students proficient on state reading tests and on NAEP, a congressionally mandated program that tests a representative sample of students in every state, grew or remained the same from 2002 to 2006. Read more of this article from Education Week.

 The U.S. Department of Education has released final regulations to guide the creation of tests for students in special education who are capable of learning grade-level content, but not as quickly as their peers. The tests may allow some schools to make adequate yearly progress under the No Child Left Behind Act when they had not before. Read more of this article from Education Week.

Five–year–olds are being denied the chance to play with sand and water trays in primary schools because they are under too much pressure to prepare for national tests, teachers warned at a conference in England. The Association of Teachers and Lecturers heard April 5 that too many young children were bored from the moment they started formal schooling because lessons are geared towards assessments for 7– and 11–year–olds. The union’s annual conference in Bournemouth unanimously passed a resolution expressing “grave concern at the continued devaluing and loss of play in the curriculum.” Read more at the Guardian Unlimited website.

Fewer than one in two primary school students in remote indigenous communities of Australia continue on to high school after their primary years, with only one in five continuing their education to the end of 12th grade. A paper to be released April 4 by the Centre for Independent Studies argues the statewide averages used to measure the academic performance and school attendance of indigenous students mask appallingly low levels of literacy, numeracy and absenteeism in remote areas. Read about it at The Australian website.

Surrounded by cheering lawmakers, school administrators and teachers union representatives in Tallahassee, Florida, USA, Gov. Charlie Crist repealed predecessor Jeb Bush’s teacher bonus plan and replaced it with one with less emphasis on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT), given to students in grades 3-11. Bush’s Special Teachers Are Rewarded program would have given a minimum 5% bonus to the top 25% of teachers, based whenever possible on the FCAT scores of their students. The new Merit Award Program will give between 5% and 10% bonuses to as many as half of all teachers, with 60% of a teacher’s assessment based on the FCAT and the rest on other factors. Read the article at PalmBeachPost.com.

The fact that the DIBELS test is used for different purposes in different schools points to a heated debate among testing experts about the validity of the test, which is given annually to about 2 million schoolchildren in the United States—sometimes as often as three times a semester. DIBELS has been championed as “scientifically valid” by Bush administration officials seeking to advance the teaching of reading through an emphasis on phonics. Kenneth S. Goodman, a past president of IRA, calls it “an absurd set of silly little one-minute tests that never get close to measuring what reading is really about—making sense of print.” Read more about the debate in this article from The Washington Post.

 A handful of companies create, print and score most of the tests in the U.S. and they’re struggling with a workload that has exploded since President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002. “The testing industry in the U.S. is buckling under the weight of NCLB demands,” said Thomas Toch, co–director of Education Sector, a Washington–based think tank. When Education Sector surveyed 23 states in 2006, it found that 35 percent of testing offices in those states had experienced “significant”errors with scoring and 20 percent didn’t get results “in a timely fashion.” Read the article on the Boston Herald website.

 U.S. Education Department officials and their contractors appear to have improperly backed certain types of instruction in administering a $1 billion–a–year reading program, congressional investigators found. The Government Accountability Office report supports assertions by the inspector general of the Education Department, who has released several reports in recent months about the Reading First program, a key part of the 2002 No Child Left Behind law. Reading First offers intensive reading help for low-income and struggling schools. Read the article at The Houston Chronicle website. To see the entire report, click here.

 The No Child Left Behind Act puts American public school students in serious jeopardy. That’s the position taken by David C. Berliner, the Regents’ professor of education at Arizona State University, in Tempe, and a past president of the American Educational Research Association, and Sharon L. Nichols, an assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at San Antonio. They state that if Congress does not act in this session to fundamentally transform the law’s accountability provision, young people and their educators will suffer serious and long-term consequences. Read more of their opinions in this commentary from Education Week.

Under a new rating system in Ontario, neighborhood factors, including income, are considered, and only schools whose students come from similar backgrounds are compared. The non–profit C.D. Howe Institute devised the system. Educators are hailing these new socially sensitive ratings for recognizing the role family background plays in learning. “There’s no point comparing apples to bananas—let’s compare apples to apples and see what we can do to improve,” said Michelle Drimmie Miller, principal of St. George’s Junior School in Etobicoke. She says her school is working hard to pinpoint how to boost student learning. Read the special report at TheStar.com.

The Nation’s Report Card was released February 22 by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Some results:
•Except for the highest-performing students (90th percentile), declines were seen at all levels of performance since 1992
•Twelfth-graders in 2005 scored lower than in 1992, but their score was not significantly different compared to 2002
•The percentage of students performing at or above Basic level decreased from 80 percent in 1992 to 73 percent in 2005
•The percentage of students performing at or above the Proficient level decreased from 40 to 35 percent
•At grade 12, students identified as English language learners (ELLs) who could be assessed in 2005 had average scores that were not significantly different than those in 2002 or 1998
•White and black students were the only racial/ethnic groups to show a statistically significant change in reading performance, scoring lower in 2005 than in 1992
•The score gaps between white and black students and white and Hispanic students were relatively unchanged since 1992
•Both male and female students’ scores have declined in comparison to 1992, and the performance gap between the genders widened, with female students outscoring male students.

After learning of the results, IRA president Tim Shanahan commented: “The latest 12th–grade reading scores are troubling. Particularly distressing are the results for boys and language–minority students. They are definitely going in the wrong direction, and reveal why enhanced primary grade reading instruction is insufficient.

“Teachers of all subjects simply must be better prepared to address the literacy demands of their subject matter. An inability to read well harms the individual because of the huge opportunity costs he or she must bear throughout life; and it is harmful to all of us, because it undermines our national productivity and thwarts the dream of a full-participation society.

“We must do better. America needs ambitious efforts to improve reading achievement from birth through high school, and that includes families and schools.”

As nearly 50,000 students sit down this testing season to tackle the Spanish-language version of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge of Skills (TAKS), they'll be answering a record number of questions developed in their native language. Texas’ effort to create questions specifically for the Spanish reading and math tests, rather than translate them from English, signifies an increasing sophistication in the state’s test-development process that experts hope will more accurately capture the academic ability of Spanish-speaking students. Read more of this article from the Houston Chronicle.

For many students today, writing extended essays is a task performed almost exclusively on a computer. It comes as no surprise, then, that a number of states have incorporated computer-based testing into their writing assessments. The movement to assess writing on computers also could grow if the directors of the influential National Assessment of Educational Progress act on a proposal to replace the handwritten test of writing at the 8th and 12th grade levels with a computerized exam. Find details in this Education Week article.

Principals would have the right to hire and fire, and schools would be forced to offer teachers performance pay and publish student test results under an Australian government proposal to make schools more accountable. Education Minister Julie Bishop told reporters February 7 in Canberra she has proposed new performance guidelines for teachers’ pay and refused to rule out withholding funding to states that do not implement the plan. Under her proposal, schools would be forced to publish information about staff qualifications and turnover, the number of suspensions and expulsions, attendance and retention rates, academic results, post–school destinations for students, and feedback on parent, teacher and student satisfaction. Read more at The Australian website.