Sunday morning, I met around a large, institutional, brown table to gulp caffeine, nibble coffee cake and discuss my book, “Fighting the White Knight.” We had a diverse group: people with no experience in education, a parapro from a wealthy district, an urban charter teacher’s spouse, a retired teacher from another wealthy district, a university professor, and me.
One problem with discussions on the US educational system is the inherent breadth of the issues. It’s easy to mire down in multiple topics and lose focus. I’d like to share one point from this morning that deserves much more attention than it has received.
Eduhonesty: As educators know, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) explicitly planned to evaluate US schools through expanded testing, designed to gain additional data on student progress. The Common Core set out to create a common national curriculum, and associated national test. That test was intended to homogenize data across the country.
Illinois provides a frightening example of what actually happened when various government entities used power and money to push NCLB and the Core on US students.
In Illinois, we abruptly threw all bilingual and special education students into the state testing pool, mostly dropping tests those subgroups had taken previously, but sometimes adding extra tests and thus subtracting instructional time. Over time, we changed the Illinois State Achievement Test (ISAT) into the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) to match new Core expectations. Then we changed PARCC into the Illinois Assessment of Readiness (IAR), because our PARCC scores pleased almost no one, except maybe a few vindictive psychopaths. Fierce arguments about changes to the IAR are currently underway. Some factions want to break the test into three parts. If this is done, the new IAR definitely will not be the IAR of the recent past.
Here’s the topic that never gets discussed, probably because there is nothing to be done: If we had left that first test, the ISAT, in place instead of playing test roulette, we would know a great deal more about student progress than we do now. When test administration and test content change significantly, the ability to make comparisons over time becomes lost. How does student achievement in 2024 compare to achievement in 2004, 2010 or 2020? Honestly, we don’t know. Answers to that question can be inferred, but the students of today are not taking anything close to the same test given to students in 2004. If 2024 students took the same algebra test as students from 2004, stakeholders could quickly say, “score are down 12%” and reliable, valid data would support that number. But despite burying ourselves in numbers, that reliable, valid data does not exist.
It’s insane how much less we know than we would have known if educational “reformers” and bureaucrats had never created No Child Left Behind or the Common Core and its associated tests.
my own cynical belief: At least some players in this drama intended to destroy or at least obfuscate the data in order to avoid sanctions for failing to make progress. Unfortunately, the data we never got from the similar tests we did not give — THE CHANCE TO GATHER THAT DATA IS GONE. Instead, we have icebergs of test scores floating in a sea of random brainstorms THAT DO NOT ANSWER SIMPLE, useful QUESTIONS SUCH AS, “hOW DO STUDENT SCORES FROM 2010 COMPare to student scores from 2024?”
We would have known so much more if we had left education alone and done
NOTHING AT ALL.
And the money that funded those national curricula, tests, and related professional developments and committee meetings, not to mention the money spent on purchases of test-related classroom materials? That money could probably have funded a permanent base on the moon. I honestly believe we might have spent enough $$$$$ to build a lunar colony — and sadly, if we had spent the money on the moon, and had left education alone, I believe today’s students have come out academically, socially and emotionally ahead.
Recent reforms have provided yet another example of that old quote from the Viet Nam war: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Except the village remains ravished and wrecked in pockets throughout the country, and it’s unclear who — if anyone — we saved.
P.S. Yes, we do have comparable data from a national test. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is a standardized test measuring academic performance given by the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. This test is only for students in grades 4, 8 and 12, however, and students do not receive test results.