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The Washington Post has a piece out about national test scores dipping for the first time since the federal government began this test in 1990.
Fourth-graders and eighth-graders across the United States lost ground on national mathematics tests this year, the first declines in scores since the federal government began administering the exams in 1990.
Reading performance also was sobering: Eighth-grade scores dropped, according to results released Wednesday, while fourth-grade performance was stagnant compared with 2013, the last time students took the test.
And the tests again show large achievement gaps between the nation’s white and minority students as well as between poor and affluent children, an indication that the nation’s disadvantaged students are not gaining ground despite more than a decade of federal law designed to boost their achievement.
There are several data points mentioned within the story:
Those ten data points by themselves tell us little. However, when presented together, we see a trend: the comprehensive reform has set things back.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan defended those policies in a call with reporters Tuesday, saying that massive changes in schools often lead to a temporary drop in test scores while teachers and students adjust. But the new standards and other policies, Duncan said, are poised to improve student achievement — and students’ lives — in the long terdatam.
“Big change never happens overnight,” Duncan said. “I’m confident that over the next decade, if we stay committed to this change, we will see historic improvements.”
Arne, if you’ll recall, is on his way out, and is the near villainous character within the education department that tried to force Common Core on the states by tying implementation to federal dollars. We would expect Arne to defend those policies, because it would be irresponsible to take something so new to the school systems around the county (Common Core) and say that it’s the reason scores are dropping. We don’t have enough data to say there is a trend of scores dropping.
But, we have enough data to say definitively that something about the new standards or curricula or whatever the case may be caused a hiccup in the data. If I had to guess:
Now, if you want to measure national trends, don’t do it by giving everyone the same thing to study. States should be free to choose their education style. When it fails, then studying the testing data would let us see what state is doing something right, and find out what that something is. From there, another state can choose to adopt similar policies in order to improve their student growth.
It is important to not panic when we see “SCORES ARE DROPPING”, but we do need to find out quickly where the issues are and what we can do to fix them.
Without the federal government forcing states to do it, I might add.
*I teach and therefore see the merit in the Common Core State Standards for English. However, Louisiana is a prime example of failure to properly train teachers on how to implement, and a lot of frustration not only stems from rather bad curricula, but also just utter confusion as to what the hell they’re supposed to do.
The post What’s Causing National Test Scores To Drop? appeared first on RedState.