Showing posts with label USA Today. Show all posts
Showing posts with label USA Today. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Study shows U.S. schools not as bad as the rest of the world

Posted in USA TODAY and can be found at http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2012-02-16/us-schools-global-ranking/53110494/1?csp=34news

By Greg Toppo,

The idea that U.S. public schools are falling behind the rest of the world is widely accepted, but a new analysis of international data suggests that using rankings to sort global winners from losers is often misguided, exaggerating tiny differences between countries that may be producing nearly identical results.

  • U.S. public schools may not be as far behind their international counterparts as previously thought, according to a new study.

    By Rich Pedroncelli,, AP

    U.S. public schools may not be as far behind their international counterparts as previously thought, according to a new study.

By Rich Pedroncelli,, AP

U.S. public schools may not be as far behind their international counterparts as previously thought, according to a new study.


In other words, maybe U.S. schools are not as bad as you might think.

"Sometimes rankings can make small gaps appear big and vice versa," says researcher Tom Loveless of the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution think tank.

Loveless, whose analysis is out today, looked at statistics showing that the United States in 2007 ranked 11th among 36 countries in fourth-grade math.

Re-examining the data, he found that the U.S. results actually placed the nation within a group of nations whose "statistically indistinguishable" scores ranked them, essentially, in fifth place worldwide. Those nations include Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands.

"Nobody ever digs that deep," Loveless says. "They just want the scores and the rankings and they don't ever really look at this part of it."

The sagging performance in the United States, compared with the rest of the industrialized world, has become a key theme among education reformers.

It was front-and-center in the education documentariesWaiting For Superman and Two Million Minutes.

Rick Hess, an education researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, says the data aren't always so conclusive.

For one thing, he says, it's not clear that all nations administer the tests uniformly.

Hess says international comparisons deserve "the good, hard-nosed kind of skepticism and shoe-leather reporting" that Loveless is doing.

"If this were part of a voucher debate, there'd be huge questions about whether the kids in the district schools and the private schools were being given the same assessment in the same way," he says. "But that has somehow just kind of been brushed aside when we're talking about the international context."

Loveless, a former educator who has taught in schools ranging from a Sacramento-area public school to Harvard, is a leading researcher on international education.

He has served since 2004 on the general assembly of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, which administers the top two global skills tests.

His findings, part of Loveless' annual Brown Center Report on Education, also include the first major challenge to the Common Core standards, a proposed set of national academic benchmarks that President Obama and others say will improve schools nationwide.

Loveless says the standards are unlikely to produce improvements, because states have had their own "common" standards for decades, and variability among schools within each state remains wide.

Loveless says the Common Core will likely have little effect on achievement.

"The nation will have to look elsewhere for ways to improve its schools," he says.

How not to respond to a testing scandal

11:39 AM ET, 02/15/2012

How not to respond to a testing scandal

Hosanna Mahaley, state superintendent for education in the District of Columbia, said last week city officials are “committed to restoring and improving confidence” in standardized test security. Yet what they are doing will achieve the opposite.

Since USA Today last year exposed unusual numbers of wrong-to-right erasures on D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System tests in more than 100 schools, many parents and teachers have been waiting for a deep, tough investigation.

Elementary and middle school kids taking an exam don’t suddenly realize that several of their answers are wrong and erase to make them right. What they know or don’t know rarely changes during a test. Yet the USA Today project (conceived and edited by my wife) found that D.C. classrooms sometimes had 10 times as many wrong-to-right erasures per child as was normal. Educators familiar with testing say it is likely that school administrators in at least some cases tampered with answer sheets after children went home.

Many people assumed school officials would question teachers and principals closely and compare their statements to what students remembered. The long-term reputation of the school system was at stake.

When similar erasure data was found in Atlanta, Georgia’s governor ordered state investigators to question educators under penalty of criminal charges. They found wrongdoing in 44 schools. The state forced the removal or resignation of many principals found to have tampered with tests themselves or colluded with teachers.

In D.C., however, Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson last spring handed the investigation of 2009 and 2010 scores over to D.C. Inspector General Charles J. Willoughby. He seems to have devoted few resources to the investigation and has not yet released a report.

Last week, Mahaley’s office said it had reduced from 128 to 35 the number of classrooms it will ask an independent contractor to investigate in connection with 2011 tests. Its criteria for the probe will make identification of tampering by administrators more difficult.

As reported by my colleague Bill Turque, just having an unusual number of wrong-to-right erasures will not guarantee a close look. A classroom will only be investigated if it also has big test score gains by individual students from 2010 to 2011, wide variances or unusual patterns of scores within the classroom, and test results from the prior year that showed inordinate wrong-to-right erasures in that teacher’s classroom.

This approach focuses on possible wrongdoing by individual teachers and narrows the period of time that can be examined. It overlooks the possibility of tampering by principals and test directors over several years. Some erasure outbreaks were found as early as 2008. If a school had a big improvement in test scores in 2008, 2009 or 2010 and stayed at that high level by continued tampering, there would be no suspicious rise in scores from 2010 to 2011 and thus no reason to investigate under these rules.

The city should have investigators interview principals, test directors and teachers under threat of criminal sanctions if they do not tell the truth. Asking students what they remembered would also help: Did they actually check their work and make erasures?

It appears that is not going to happen in the District. Mahaley’s office said it consulted with independent test security experts in deciding on the criteria. I spoke to one of those experts and reviewed the resumes of the others. None appear to have any experience investigating the large-scale cheating that seems likely to have happened here and did occur in Atlanta. The consultants’ experience is in isolated cases of cheating by students and teachers, not relevant to wrong-to-right erasure numbers this numerous and in so many schools. A Mahaley spokesman said erasures alone don’t indicate impropriety.

Will we ever discover what happened after hours to the D.C. answer sheets kept in cabinets to which principals had the keys? Will D.C. parents ever have proof that the people running their neighborhood schools can be trusted? I doubt it. The impact of ignoring the inflated scores will be disastrous. I wonder why the people in charge don’t see that.

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