A new study from the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings finds that the benchmarks used in scoring the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are set too high, causing inordinately large numbers of students to be classified as less than proficient in math and reading, and making it unrealistic to expect that schools will make rapid progress in bringing students to so-called “proficient” levels, as required under No Child Left Behind (NCLB).
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Transcript
"If you take this combination of the fact that fourth graders really have made gains since 2000 and eighth graders have not, you see a slippage, if you create these sorts of pseudo-cohorts. Let me explain what I mean by that. If you take the fourth graders' score in a baseline year (and this first one that I did was fourth graders in 1994 and then four years later in 1998), you ask the question, 'Well, how are 8th graders doing now?' So, they were 4th graders in ’94 and then in ’98 you have an 8th grade class. And you can roughly situate these on a common scale on NAEP. So, they gained about 49 NAEP points…the '94-to-'98 cohort. The next cohort you can do the same examination with is the ‘98-to-2002 cohort. They gained about 49 NAEP score points. But the latest cohorts, you see some slippage. They only gained 45 points. So, this is kind of a cautionary signal that we might be seeing deterioration between 4th and 8th grade in terms of reading, most recently."
"And, of course, one key aspect of this, these are the key No Child Left Behind years. Right, 4th through 8th grade are all NCLB years."
"And yet this latest cohort—the 2003-to-2007 cohort—spent those years under No Child Left Behind, it was being implemented, and yet we’re seeing this slippage in reading. Now, I’m not going to attribute this slippage to No Child Left Behind, just as if they went up four points, I wouldn’t be saying, “Oh, that’s because of No Child Left Behind.” But, I do think a good explanation has to do with the status with the research on reading. And that is that we know much more about how to teach kids how to read before 4th grade than we do after 4th grade."
"If private schools are so good, and the public thinks they’re so good, then why aren’t they staying in them in high school? Now, there are three main explanations—all of them are speculative but they’re all reasonable. One is simple costs. The cost of sending a child to high school in the private sector is around $8,500; in elementary it’s only $5,000. So there’s a huge financial burden that one incurs. You can have your kid in private school all the way to 8th grade but once you decide to go to high school your bill just simply jumps significantly. So that’s one aspect of this. And maybe there’s a cost to achievement. Maybe parents undergo some sort of calculation where they say, 'Ok, we recognize that high schools are better, but they’re not $3,500 better.' I don’t know, but there is a jump in cost."
"The second explanation is demographic and has to do with Catholic schools. Catholic schools dominate the private school sector, they’re closing Catholic schools left and right. It costs a lot more money to keep a Catholic school open than it did in 1960 when Catholic school enrollment peaked, mainly because of the loss of nuns. Nuns were a cheap source of labor for Catholic schools in 1960. And today, not only are there almost no nuns teaching anymore, there are very few teaching anymore. But the Catholic schools have to compete with public schools in terms of teachers’ salaries. The schools are just much more expensive. So, the Catholic schools just haven’t been able to stay open and lots of them are closing. And they’re still not attracting kids though, so not completely a fact of expenses."
"We did a two factor regression where we asked the following question: Essentially, there appears to be this positive relationship between instruction and achievement. Is it calendar time or clock time? Is it adding days to the year or is it adding minutes to the day? I mean there are two different ways of extending instructional time. So what we did is we took a base of 1800 minutes of math instruction. If you were going to increase math instruction in the U.S. by 1800 minutes, at 45 minutes per day, that would be 40 days. We have a 180 day calendar year; it would be ten minutes per day. So we asked the question, 'Where do you get more bang for your buck?' and it turns our, both of them are positive, but you get more bang for you buck by increasing your instructional day by ten minutes."