Have We Reached a Tipping Point?

An Idea Whose Time May Have (Finally) Come

By Linda Bevilacqua, President

With the halcyon days of summer now but a memory, not only are classroom hallways once again bustling, but Congressional hallways as well. With the release, just before Labor Day, of a draft bill for the reauthorization of The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) by the House Education and Labor Committee, led by representative George Miller (D-California), it feels as if not a day goes by without a “new” analysis of this draft, accompanied by a staggering number of counterproposals by politicians, teacher groups, and assorted think tanks. It sometimes feels like you need a score card to keep track of who is in favor (or against) the latest pitch. One idea, though, has recently caught and held our attention here at the Foundation: it is an idea that will resonate with Core Knowledge supporters and, whether coincidental or evidence of a shift in the winds, it is an idea that has shown up in one form or another quite recently, including in this Washington Post article by Jay Mathews, in a New York Times op-ed by Core Knowledge board member Diane Ravitch, and in a hefty new report entitled The Proficiency Illusion, just released by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

It is an idea that the founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., addressed in his chapter on “Using Tests Productively” in The Knowledge Deficit (2006). Dr. Hirsch succinctly chronicled the hue and cry throughout the education world in recent years denouncing the horrors of testing and the overemphasis on accountability as a result of NCLB. But, as he deftly points outs, the real villain is not accountability or even the idea of testing, but rather two other, underlying issues. One is the time, money, and energy spent in classrooms throughout the United States on intensive test preparation that wastefully focuses on teaching comprehension strategies that, by the very nature of reading comprehension, are doomed to have, at best, only a small effect on improving children’s reading comprehension or test scores. As those who believe in the principles and rationale underlying Core Knowledge understand, it is impossible to prepare directly for such tests; the best preparation is indirect and is achieved by ensuring that students are offered a coherent, sequenced, content-rich curriculum that builds broad general knowledge.

The other cause for concern raised by Dr. Hirsch in this same chapter is that the testing associated with NCLB uses the wrong yardstick, or perhaps stated more accurately, allows for the use of too many yardsticks. Under the current law, every state is tasked with developing its own tests of reading and math achievement. Furthermore, each state is then responsible for establishing a “cutoff” score on these tests that defines what constitutes proficiency. Attention to this issue appears to be gathering momentum among educators, politicians, and the media.

Among the many interesting points highlighted in The Proficiency Illusion, the Fordham report points out mind-boggling discrepancies between the levels of difficulty on state tests: Colorado, Wisconsin, and Michigan are said to have the lowest proficiency standards in reading, with proficiency cutoff scores falling about the 16th percentile, while South Carolina, California, Maine, and Massachusetts have the highest; Massachusetts’ cutoff score falls at the 65th percentile. Sample questions from tests of two of these states are revealing:

Source: In a Nutshell: The Proficiency Illusion (Thomas B. Fordham Institute)

Not All Tests Are Equal: Cats & Dogs vs. Tolstoy
Wisconsin's Definition of 'Proficient'	Massachusetts' Definition of 'Proficient'
Grade 4 item with difficulty equivalent to Wisconsin's proficiency cut score (scale score 191 – 16th percentile) Which sentence tells a fact, not an opinion? Cats are better than dogs. Cats climb trees better than dogs. Cats are prettier than dogs. Cats have nicer fur than dogs. This item is quite easy for most fourth-graders and does not require reading a passage. It does introduce the concepts of fact and opinion, however, and some of the distinctions between fact and opinion are subtle. For example, some children may believe that the differences in cat and dog fur are fact.	Grade 4 item with difficulty equivalent to Massachusetts's proficiency cut score (scale score 211 – 65th percentile) Read the excerpt from "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" by Leo Tolstoy. So Pahom was well contented, and everything would have been right if the neighboring peasants would only not have trespassed on his wheatfields and meadows. He appealed to them most civilly, but they still went on: now the herdsmen would let the village cows stray into his meadows, then horses from the night pasture would get among his corn. Pahom turned them out again and again, and forgave their owners, and for a long time he forbore to prosecute anyone. But at last he lost patience and complained to the District Court. What is a fact from this passage? Pahom owns a vast amount of land. The peasant's intentions are evil. Pahom is a wealthy man. Pahom complained to the District Court. This item is clearly the most challenging to read (it is Tolstoy after all, and the majority of fourth-graders in the NWEA norm group got it wrong. The passage is long relative to the others and contains very sophisticated vocabulary. At least three of the options identify potential facts in the passage that have to be evaluated.

Clearly, being proficient in Wisconsin means something very different from being proficient in Massachusetts. Furthermore, the Fordham study reports that the states consistently set lower standards of proficiency at the early grade levels as compared to the middle-school levels. The eighth- and twelfth-grade state tests are relatively more difficult to pass than the tests in fourth grade, even when differences in subject matter complexity and so forth are taken into consideration.

There have been hints of this problem during recent years as reports and newspaper articles have noted the wide discrepancies between test performance on state tests as compared to performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Some states claim that the large majority of their students are proficient—and they are, according to their state tests—while student performance in those same states on the NAEP tells another story.

As these findings become more widely disseminated, it is hard to imagine a parent, educator, politician, or citizen anywhere in this country who will not be outraged by the hoax that has been perpetrated by the use of these varying yardsticks. Certainly, it is not an exaggeration to say that our national welfare depends upon finding a solution that will expose and remedy this deception. Let us be clear, however—the problem is not accountability, but rather, what we have been measuring and how we have been measuring it.

It will come as no surprise to supporters of the Core Knowledge movement that what is increasingly being proposed to address this problem is the adoption of national standards and national testing; some suggest this course of action should proceed initially on a voluntary basis.

Diane Ravitch and others are now increasingly declaring that NCLB got it exactly backwards. The federal government deferred exactly when it should have stepped up to the plate: instead of leaving it to individual states to develop their own standards and tests and then set definitions of proficiency, the federal government should assume responsibility for these critical tasks. Indeed, as Montgomery County, Maryland, Superintendent Jerry D. Weast said bluntly in the recent Washington Post article, “I’ve never figured out why in the world we wouldn’t have a national education standard. We have standards for toys and everything else.” Why, indeed, Superintendent Weast. We at the Core Knowledge Foundation couldn’t agree more.