One Response to “2005 NAEP and New York Scores Compared”

1. best of myshortpencil » Urgency. And candor says:

   November 9, 2005 at 2:24 am

   [...] With some insight and stupidity Westchester (NY) Journal News November 6, 2005 Soul-searching of any kind, for individuals as well as entire systems, is by its nature important. But close examination of "what it means to be us’’ proves valuable only when it is painfully honest, and results in clarified values and commitment to change. Otherwise it is navel-gazing. More than 800 people attended a major education summit in Albany Wednesday, gathering to confront the question of whether New York state truly is delivering to all its students the education it says it is. Or says it wants to. It was an informational and inspiring day, ended with "commitments’’ from educational leaders to do something specific about "the achievement gap.’’ But our fear is that, unless leaders and individuals summon the courage to take on, and speak out against, the hypocrisy that permeates the state’s educational system, particularly in the areas of funding and resource allocation, New Yorkers’ collective gaze will remain downward. Resource allocation–as in what schools spend their money on–is the big problem. Educators simply aren’t using technology effectively to increase flexibility, the quality of instruction or the individualization of instruction. A labored pace Wednesday’s all-day conference on educational challenges was convened by the University of the State of New York and its top educational policy-making body, the Board of Regents. It actually focused on two overarching achievement gaps in public education: one separating students and resources along income, race and ethnicity, language and disability lines. The other: an alarmingly widening gap between U.S. student achievement and several foreign competitors. Ironically, the second one — the threat that nations like China and India will soon eclipse the United States in fully educating their citizenry — may finally be the propellant to force New York and the rest of this nation to address the first — the fact that privilege, not equity, still defines American academics generations after it was acknowledged. "We’ve got to move from evolution to revolution in public education," said summit moderator David Gergen, former four-time White House adviser now at Harvard University. "I think the critical point is for the leading educators of New York to come out with a sense of urgency about change.’’ Yet how much more urgency is needed? Four major national summits on education have been held since 1989. New York has been raising its academic standards since 1998. Raising them from where to where? Educators let academic excellence deteriorate to the point where it became politically intolerable. That standards have been raised does not mean they’re at or even near the level of excellence of past generations. In fact, gains in student achievement by all races and income levels are being documented. The gains are mostly illusory. A consequence of jiggering with exam content and scoring. See 2005 NAEP and New York Scores Compared and Nine Commentaries on NY K-12 Exams: Testing to the Results. It was announced at the summit, for example, that between 1998 and 2005, New York was third among the 50 states in reading growth among African-American fourth-graders and second in growth among Latino fourth-graders. Yet the frightening fact is, the pace of improvement isn’t fast enough — not for individuals and not for the nation’s future. Gaps remain embedded in elitism, racism and classism, "isms’’ we accept and, indeed, are comfortable with. The first gap targeted by the summit — shorthanded to the "achievement gap’’ between white and nonwhite students — is as familiar as the smell of old wooden lab tables: By virtually every measure, despite huge efforts and even some successes, students who are not white, students who are not in higher-income brackets simply do not reach the level of success in school, college and the work world that their peers do. And the fault, keynote speaker Kati Haycock told the attendees, is not solely that of distant lawmakers doing something with our money. It is, she said, the "function of choices that we educators make.’’ Haycock, president of the Washington-based Education Trust, a nonpartisan group that advocates for the disadvantaged, said that "every year, thousands of children head toward school already behind.’’ "Sadly,’’ she insisted, "rather than organizing our educational system to ameliorate this problem, we organize it to exacerbate the problem.’’ We refuse, for example, to fully fund pre-kindergarten and kindergarten. We allow poorly credentialed or "mis-assigned" teachers to be directed to the neediest students. Targeting a "perverse’’ facet of the teaching profession, she said that "status flows not from how good a teacher we are, but to the status of the kids.’’ To say that "organizing," or rather "re-organizing" the educational system is required to correct our problems is a recognition of the principle that the system produces precisely the results it’s designed to produce. It’s exactly right. But to continue to insist on 19th century "solutions" is beyond stupidity. We need schools for The 21st Century Student, not more of the same structures that even when politically pushed produce mediocrity. Every student should–and can–have an exceptional teacher every day in every subject when research-verified, high quality lessons are made available on-demand over the Internet all year long. It is simply impossible to attain this level of quality by having 3.1 million teachers attempting to replicate excellence. For students who thrive in classrooms, they can have them. But the rest need to be freed from these one-sized, single-paced, distraction-filled "learning environments" to the greatest extent possible. And it should have happened yesterday! By the end of high school, Haycock said, "African-American and Latino 17-year-olds read at the same levels as white 13-year-olds.’’ The patterns are reflected in high school completion, college entry and college graduation rates. Foreign competition The second achievement gap has become particularly worrisome to the business community trying to operate in a global economy. "America is being challenged in a way that we have never — underscore never — been before,’’ Nicholas Donofrio, executive vice president for innovation and technology at IBM, said at the summit. Countries to which we paid little attention 10 years ago, he and state Education Commissioner Richard Mills said, are expected to overtake the United States educationally. China, Mills noted, is providing an elite secondary education in math and science, and is on a path to provide a sound, basic education to all its students by 2020. It is that "sound, basic education’’ phrase that should shine the unflattering light back on this state. Virtually every elected leader will insist they support an education for all children — as long as they don’t have to make the hard choices about how to fund it equitably. As long as they don’t have to explain, for example, why it is perfectly fine for some cities in Westchester County to spend less than half per student what suburban districts a drive away spend. As long as student athletes routinely get more opportunities, and supports, than disabled students. Equitable spending is nice. What’s equitable? No one knows. There are numerous ways to define it. A "sound, basic education,’’ of course, is at the heart of a lawsuit that has preoccupied New York’s education system for more than a decade — with little impact. An advocacy coalition brought the equity suit on behalf of New York City school children, and a court finally ordered an additional $5.6 billion over four years in aid to them. Like investing $5.6 billion in plow-horses to feed a starving population rather than investing in tractors, fertilizer and genetically enhanced seeds. It’s not just a waste, it’s an utter disgrace and tragedy. Yet Gov. George Pataki and other state leaders have fought the order, with political impunity. Rest assured, no state incumbent has lost an office on this issue. And as Haycock of the Education Trust pointed out last week, today there is a larger gap in spending between poor and rich school districts in New York than in any other state. But even the "rich school districts" aren’t producing the academic excellence that’s possible and needed. That’s because they’re using the highly inefficient and somewhat ineffective model of classroom-delivered, mass instruction. Every other industry in the U.S. has been significantly transformed by technology except education. It’s pathetic. What we need far more than pre-K, equitable funding, teacher training and all the rest is parents with the guts to tell the government to spend more on research and development and, within 5 years, create schools for The 21st Century Student. See S.O.S. (Save Our Schools). It is such hypocrisy and political inertia that education leaders and others who say they are committed to closing identified achievement gaps must find the courage to revolt against, loudly. Otherwise, academic achievement in New York is about small gains, and navel-gazing. Hypocrisy is not the problem. Attitude is not the problem. Caring is not the solution. Commitment is not the solution. The system of classroom-delivered instruction is the problem. If educators were doctors, they’d still perform surgeries without endoscopes. Just like surgery, improving education requires a new approach. What passes for education leadership today is deplorably unimaginative, anachronistic and the living embodiment of absurdity. The elixirs and potions offered as cures appeal only to the ignorant and the desperate. They ought to be banned by the FDA. [...]