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Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2007 > March > 10
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Maybe school reform isn’t working
Ohio has been through a huge upheaval of its statewide education system over the past 15 years with the high goal better student learning and with a bedrock belief that such improvement can be best demonstrated on tests.
Since 1992, Ohio has implemented statewide content standards, high stakes testing for all kids, ratings for schools and school districts based on those test scores and a huge school choice program.
So is it all working? Well in the course of gathering data for a project I’ve been working on I thought Ohio’s results on national tests during the past 10 to 15 years and its rank compared to other states might raise some concerns.
In that period, Ohio schoolchildren have seen their test scores improve, both on state tests and and national tests, but its standing compared to other states has not changed very much.
Let’s start with the National Assessment of Education Progress, a national test called NAEP for short and also known as the Nation’s Report Card. It’s given to a sample of fourth and eighth grade students nationwide every two years as a means of judging our national standing compared to the decades of data from the past that NAEP has compiled.
States can also participate individually by asking NAEP (at a price) to test a larger sample of its kids to get useable state results. Ohio has recently began participating in this way after several years without state specific scores.
Today, NAEP is the test state leaders like to point to as evidence of Ohio’s big gains in student achievement. And indeed, there’s no arguing that at fourth grade math, our state has made a very significant gain.
In 1992, Ohio ranked 21st in the nation on fourth grade math, but by 2005, Ohio ranked 10th on fourth grade math. That’s a very impressive gain.
The gains elsewhere are more modest. On eighth grade math, Ohio’s ranking was 18th in the U.S. in 1992 and in 2005 it jumped to 16th. Reading gains were even more marginal, going from 19th on fourth grade reading in 1992 to 18th in 2005. Ohio ranked 17th in eighth grade reading in 2005 but the state sample on the same test in 1992 was too small for results to be reported.
Now lets look at the college entrance exams.
In 1996, college bound Ohio seniors’ average score ranked 23rd in the U.S. on the verbal portion of the SAT (536 average score) and 24th on the math portion (535 average score).
In 2006 there were only small changes, again with more improvement in math. The state’s college bound seniors ranked 24th in the U.S. on the verbal portion (535 average score) and 23rd on math (544 average score).
On the ACT, Ohio seniors had a composite score of 21.3 in 1996, which ranked 18th in the U.S. Ohio’s composite ACT score of 21.5 in 2006, ranking 25th among the states.
Given this data it seems that some dramatic improvement has been made in elementary school math. Perhaps this is because the state standards and tests forced elementary schools to pay more attention to math. A frequent knock on public elementary schools is that teachers of young children tend most often to be reading experts who may not place equal emphaisis on math.
It will be interesting to see if those good fourth grade math scores start translating into bigger gains in math at eighth grade and on the college tests as those good scoring younger children grow up.
But overall, given all the state’s efforts at improving student test performance, I wonder if the results are less than might be expected. That’s what I’d like to hear your thoughts on. Do you think these scores should be better than they are?
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