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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2005 > October > 20 > Entry
Report: Ohio kids getting smarter
If it ticked a few people off last week when I blogged about a report that said Ohio was getting dumber, well I’ve got good news.
Results yesterday of an important national test showed Ohio kids are doing much better in math. The results also have me wondering, are Ohio’s state math tests too hard?
These new scores are for fourth and eighth graders who took the NAEP, sometimes called the “Nation’s Report Card.” It’s a national test given every two years in all 50 states to gague academic growth. NAEP is a very valuable test because it has been given for more than 30 years in essentially the same format so the results over time are comparable. And it allows us to compare states to each other. NAEP is also a pretty hard test.
Ohio ranked among the top 20 states on all four tests — reading and math in fourth and eighth grade. Fourth grade reading made a dramatic jump — up 11 points since 2002. And if you go back to 1992, Ohio made a huge gain of 27 points in math, and milder gains of six points over those 13 years in reading at both grade levels.
Unlike the more flighty report I cited last week, the NAEP is a serious measure of how Ohio compares, and the kids did well.
The other great thing about the NAEP, is you can lay the results down against a state’s own tests and see how they measure up. Both Ohio’s state tests and NAEP use the same passing standard — you must score “profiicient” or better.
Well, on the NAEP, 84 percent of fourth graders scored proficient in math while 65.5 percent did so on Ohio’s test. At eighth grade, 74 percent were proficient on NAEP, but just 60 percent on the state test.
Remember, the NAEP is widely considered to be a pretty hard test. So if our kids are doing that well on it, but scoring poorly on our own tests, perhaps our own tests are a bit too hard.
This was clear last year when Mark Fisher and I wrote about how 76 percent of Ohio 10th graders failed the first offering of the Ohio Graduation Test’s math section. The state later lowered the passing score significantly to be sure enough kids passed, and avoided a statewide revolt against the test.
Setting passing scores on state tests is a very inexact science. But the NAEP offers a good guideline to judge test rigor. The question now is, should Ohio lower the passing score on more math tests?
