August 2009
Associated Press
SAT scores dip for high school class of 2009
By JUSTIN POPE
Education Writer
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Average scores on the SAT college entrance exam dipped slightly for the high school class of 2009, while gender, race and income gaps widened, according to figures released Tuesday by the College Board.
The average SAT score dipped from 502 last year to 501 on the critical reading section of the test. Math scores held steady at 515, and writing fell from 494 to 493. Each section has a maximum score of 800.
More than 1.5 million members of the class of 2009 took the exam, which remains the most widely used college entrance exam despite recent gains by another test, the ACT. The SAT tries to measure basic college-readiness skills, while the ACT is more focused on what students have learned in the classroom. Average SAT scores were stable or rising most years from 1994 to 2004, but have been trending downward since. That's likely due in part to the widening pool of test-takers. That's a positive sign more students are aspiring to college, but it also tends to weigh down average scores.
Forty percent of students in this year's pool were minorities and more than one-third reported their parents had never attended college. More than a quarter reported English was not their first language at home.
However, the scores also indicate a widening of the gaps that have made the test a target for critics of standardized testing. On the three combined sections, men scored 27 points higher on average than women, compared to 24 points higher last year. That gap is mostly attributable to men's higher math scores. Average combined scores for white students declined two points, but scores for black students fell four points, widening the racial gap. Average scores for two of the three categories the College Board uses for identifying Hispanics also declined.
Meanwhile, average combined scores by students reporting their families earned over $200,000 surged 26 points to 1702, an increase that could fuel further criticism the test is too coachable and favors students who can afford expensive test-prep tutoring.
The College Board, the not-for-profit organization that administers the exam, strongly discourages comparing and ranking states and districts based on SAT results. The test-taking population can vary considerably, and the College Board argues rankings may discourage schools from pushing students to apply for college. SAT.doc
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Time MagazineMonday, April 27, 2009
By Walter Isaacson
How to Raise The Standard In America’s Schools
Raising American School Standards.pdf
Wall Street Journal
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
By ROBERT TOMSHO
Few Gains Are Seen in High School Test
U.S. high-school students haven't achieved any significant gains in reading or math for nearly four decades, according to a new federal report that underscores the challenges the Obama administration faces as it pressures schools to raise standards to produce a more competitive work force.
The report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress -- a highly respected federal test also known as the "Nation's Report Card" -- looked at NAEP results for 9-, 13- and 17-year-olds since the early 1970s, when the tests in math and reading were first given.
Although the two younger groups have made progress in those subjects over that period, scores for 17-year-olds were virtually unchanged.
On a zero-to-500-point scale, 17-year-olds scored an average of 286 points in reading in 2008, up one point from 1971. The NAEP report said students with such scores have "intermediate skills" and are able to make generalizations about what they read.
In math, the same group's average scores rose two points to 306 since 1973. The report said students scoring in that range are able to perform moderately complex procedures such as computing with decimals and simple fractions.
The results suggest gains made by younger students are "washing out" as they get older, said Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, which advocates for increasing high-school-graduation rates. "What we are learning is that they need help all the way through," said Mr. Wise, a former West Virginia governor.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called the long-term trends for high-school students "especially troubling," adding that the challenge is to identify "pockets of success" in school districts around the country and determine how to replicate them on a broader scale.
President Barack Obama has said boosting high-school-graduation rates is a key element of his education agenda, but he has yet to detail his battle plan. Mr. Duncan wants to press states to adopt tougher common standards for teaching and testing, and believes that having 50 separate state benchmarks has led to widespread confusion over how much students in each are actually learning.
The new NAEP report was based on "long-term trend" tests given to a sampling of about 52,000 public- and private-school students in early 2008. Such trend tests involve relatively short questions and have changed little since the 1970s. The main NAEP assessment, a separate kind of test, involves more-complex questions that are periodically revised to account for changes in curricula and teaching methods.
The new report comes as colleges and employers are complaining that too many students earn diplomas without learning the skills needed for college or the workplace. Susan Traiman, director of public policy at the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executives, called the high-school NAEP scores "unacceptable" and said they signal that recent efforts by some states to boost learning standards haven't trickled down to the classroom level. "The report really reinforces the fact that high-school reform is long overdue," she added.
Some observers said the findings are also likely to put pressure on Congress and the Obama administration to increase emphasis on changing high schools when the No Child Left Behind law comes up for reauthorization, perhaps as early as this year.
Younger students fared better in the new report. Since 1971, average reading scores for 9-year-olds have risen 12 points to 220; reading scores for 13-year-olds rose five points. Gains for younger students since the advent of the No Child have been more modest, in the two-to-four-point range.
The report also shows that while achievement gaps between white and minority students have declined drastically over the long term, whites still outscore black and Hispanic students by more than 20 points in most categories.
Write to Robert Tomsho at rob.tomsho@wsj.com
In March, the New York Times published an article reporting the National Mathematics Advisory Panel’s call for schools to focus on several "critical foundations" or benchmarks for U.S. students.
Report Urges Changes in Teaching Math
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: March 14, 2008
American students’ math achievement is “at a mediocre level” compared with that of their peers worldwide, according to a new report by a federal panel, which recommended that schools focus on key skills that prepare students to learn algebra.
“The sharp falloff in mathematics achievement in the U.S. begins as students reach late middle school, where, for more and more students, algebra course work begins,” said the report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, appointed two years ago by President Bush. “Students who complete Algebra II are more than twice as likely to graduate from college compared to students with less mathematical preparation.”
The report, adopted unanimously by the panel on Thursday and presented to Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, said that prekindergarten-to-eighth-grade math curriculums should be streamlined and put focused attention on skills like the handling of whole numbers and fractions and certain aspects of geometry and measurement.
It offers specific goals for students in different grades. For example, it said that by the end of the third grade, students should be proficient in adding and subtracting whole numbers. Two years later, they should be proficient in multiplying and dividing them. By the end of the sixth grade, the report said, students should have mastered the multiplication and division of fractions and decimals.
The report tries to put to rest the long, heated debate over math teaching methods. Parents and teachers have fought passionately in school districts around the country over the relative merits of traditional, or teacher-directed, instruction, in which students are told how to do problems and then drilled on them, versus reform or child-centered instruction, emphasizing student exploration and conceptual understanding. It said both methods had a role.
“There is no basis in research for favoring teacher-based or student-centered instruction,” Dr. Larry R. Faulkner, the chairman of the panel, said at a briefing on Wednesday. “People may retain their strongly held philosophical inclinations, but the research does not show that either is better than the other.”
The report found that “to prepare students for algebra, the curriculum must simultaneously develop conceptual understanding, computational fluency and problem-solving skills.” Further, it said: “Debates regarding the relative importance of these aspects of mathematical knowledge are misguided. These capabilities are mutually supportive.”
The president convened the panel to advise on how to improve math education. Its members include math and psychology professors from leading universities, a middle-school math teacher and the president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Closely tracking an influential 2006 report by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the panel recommended that math curriculum should include fewer topics, spending enough time to make sure each is learned in enough depth that it need not be revisited in later grades. That is the approach used in most top-performing nations, and since the 2006 report, many states have been revising their standards to cover fewer topics in greater depth.
The report calls for more research on successful math teaching, and recommends that the secretary of education convene an annual forum of leaders of the national associations concerned with math to develop an agenda for improving math instruction.
Ms. Spellings said Thursday that she would convene such a meeting. She emphasized the importance of math education for all children and said the report underlined the need for parents to teach even young children about numbers and measurements.
Ms. Spellings said she hoped the report would help persuade Congress to approve the president’s fiscal 2009 budget request for almost $100 million for Math Now, an instructional program proposed last year and not financed.
The report cited a number of troubling international comparisons, including a 2007 assessment finding that 15-year-olds in the United States ranked 25th among their peers in 30 developed nations in math literacy and problem solving.
Fractions are especially troublesome for Americans, the report found. It pointed to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, standardized exams known as the nation’s report card, which found that almost half the eighth graders tested could not solve a word problem that required dividing fractions. Panel members said the failure to master fractions was for American students the greatest obstacle to learning algebra. Just as “plastics” was the catchword in the 1967 movie “The Graduate,” the catchword for math teachers today should be “fractions,” said Francis Fennell, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
After hearing testimony and comments from hundreds of organizations and individuals, and sifting through a broad array of 16,000 research publications, the panelists shaped their report around recent research on how children learn.
For example, the report found it is important for students to master their basic math facts well enough that their recall becomes automatic, stored in their long-term memory, leaving room in their working memory to take in new math processes.
“For all content areas, practice allows students to achieve automaticity of basic skills — the fast, accurate and effortless processing of content information — which frees up working memory for more complex aspects of problem solving,” the report said.
Dr. Faulkner, a former president of the University of Texas at Austin, said the panel “buys the notion from cognitive science that kids have to know the facts.”
The report also cited findings that students who depended on their native intelligence learned less than those who believed that success depended on how hard they worked.
Dr. Faulkner said the current “talent-driven approach to math, that either you can do it or you can’t, like playing the violin,” needed to be changed.
Testing and Learning
To get the well-educated, highly skilled workers that the country needs, states must strengthen public school curriculums, especially in math and science. States also need to adopt high-quality tests that show how students are performing from year to year.
Still there is a danger when schools focus too much attention on test preparation at the expense of high-quality classroom instruction. A disturbing new study from an influential research institute at the University of Chicago shows that that is happening far too often in Chicago schools — and likely in many others across the country.
The study, conducted by the Consortium on Chicago School Research, looked at how Chicago high schools dealt with the ACT, the well-known college-entry examination that Illinois students are required to take as a part of the state’s testing regime.
The ACT is a curriculum-based achievement test that measures what students learn at school and how well they are prepared for the first year of college. This is not a test that is easy to game. Performance depends on what students have been taught and the strength of their skills.
Some test preparation can still be helpful if kept in perspective. Indeed, students can benefit from learning general test-taking skills or becoming familiar with a specific test that they are about to take. But some schools and teachers in the consortium study went way overboard.
They required their students to spend enormous amounts of valuable class time practicing on a preliminary version of the test. By cutting instructional time, they were actually making it less and less likely that students would perform well on the test. Thinking that test preparation matters more, some students also blew off the actual course work.
The obvious cure in Illinois, and in other states, is to carefully limit or dispense with test preparation in class. Teachers should instead be working on the high-level academic skills that students need to perform well, not just on tests, but in college and long afterward.
Testing is the only real way to measure student progress and teacher effectiveness. But as the Chicago case shows, teaching to the test can be self-defeating.