Tag Archives: NAEP

Weep Not For NAEP – Rely On Local Data

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Data about how children are doing in school is a lot like the price of gasoline. The only meaningful data is the cost of gas at your local gas pump. Likewise, the only meaningful data about student learning are assessments at your local schools. National report cards are irrelevant and misleading. If we are to be data-based, we need to consider and use the right data. Stay local!

What do we know?

Everyday the media posts the average price of a gallon of gas on national and state and regional averages. For example, today AAA posted that the national retail price of a gallon of regular gas is $3.319. AAA says that the retail average for Wisconsin is $2.924 per gallon. I disregard these data because the gas prices are always higher in rural, northeastern Wisconsin. Today’s price in northern Door County is $3.37 per gallon. The price of gas depends on location.

The quality of education also depends on location. And the only location that matters is the quality of education in the school teaching your children. I always read educational data in this order – national, state, local school district. Then I consider the data in reverse order – district, state, nation. I do this because the only data that is meaningful and classroom-related is that of my local school district. National education policies and commitments are political not educational. While federal politicians lament the United States’ falling status internationally and the annual negative slope of reading and math scores nationally, their commitment to education is always partisan. Even though the US Constitution assigns responsibility for public education to state governments, national politicians consistently try to implement policies and programs to “ram” change into the 16,200+ school districts in our country. Their “carrot or stick” efforts are guided by political hubris and constantly prove futile.

Last week the 2024 NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) data were published. The latest NAEP assessment always reports data from the prior school year. NAEP assessments tell us that national student achievements in reading and math continue to decline. The data displays current scores compared to a decade of pre-pandemic scores and most recent post-pandemic scores. The graphs show a consistent decline in reading and math scores with a sharper tick downward after the COVID pandemic.

As expected, commentary about this week’s NAEP report once again asked what can be done to reverse the national data trend and strengthen student achievement in reading and mathematics.  “We need to fix this problem,” our politicians said. However, the current administration’s work in dismantling the US Department of Education shows that all we will hear from Washington DC is an exaggeration of the “economic effects” of the reading/math score decline who to blame for it.

Policy and commitment to public education at the state level resembles national futility only at a smaller scale. Conservative statehouses are more willing to engage in legislating cellphone policy, book banning, and LGBTQ issues than discussing educational outcomes in their state’s schools. The ultimate truth about state responsibility for public education lies in the language of the state constitution. The Wisconsin State Constitution tells us there will be schools, schools will be mandated to teach core subjects to prepare graduates to become productive citizens, and responsibility for funding schools will be shared by the state and local school boards. There are many chapters and verses, but this is the gist of our state’s responsibility.

The policies of local school boards and their schools are where public education lives best and thrives.

Treat local educational data with care and commitment for improvement.

There is an interesting tipping point in school districts about their understanding of educational achievement data. If the school district is a large, urban district, the data becomes disoriented by the tens of thousands of students and the hundreds of teachers. Yet if the school district is a small, one building rural district, the data can be isolated to a classroom of students and an individual teacher. It is dangerous to draw conclusions about all schools in a large district and equally dangerous to drill too deeply in a small district.

However, conclusions want to be drawn. Always consider educational data clinically and from a respectable distance. The positive care and humaneness schools show about their data aids their future improvement; negativity gets in the way of improvement.

A healthy school board and district administration look at local educational data as indicators of school success not failure. Their assets-based approach says, “80 percent of third graders are reading at grade level and what can we do to raise that percentage?” An unhealthy approach focuses on the 20 percent reading below grade level and deficits that must be contributing to their lower achievement. A healthy approach assures and reassures that the reading program includes strong instruction and then extra instructional time for positive aid for below grade level readers. That approach does not ignore the learning needs of students who need more instruction in reading, nor does it trash can a reading program that causes 80% of the students to be successful readers. An unhealthy approach is sum-zero and takes time and resources from other curriculum just to bolster time and resources where deficits appear. To be Gump-like, positive, and healthy school leadership is as positive and healthy school leadership does. We want local school leadership to be healthy and positive in their data consideration while constructively working to improve educational programs for all children.

If annual data says that the annual achievement of students in reading is declining, constructive school leadership looks at all the data and considers it without knee jerking a response. Leaders disaggregate the data. They want to know for whom the program is and is not causing success and where and how separation between students who are successful and unsuccessful takes place. Knowing about that separation is essential for closing gaps in student learning performances. A decline in some students’ reading and math achievement does not happen overnight but over time, yet it always has a beginning and characteristics that begin a definition of successful and unsuccessful performances. This is how data can and should be used to improve education for all students and this careful and considered use of data only takes place at the local school level.

The consideration of local school performance data must be macroscopic as well as microscopic. Educational data about students in our community is not impersonal; these are our children. As we consider microscopic annual reading and math data, we also must consider the full profile of the educational programs for these children. Are they equally engaged in the school’s academic, activity, arts, and athletic programs? Are they growing in creative ways as well as performative ways? Are they well-adjusted and integrated as a student body without outliers? Are the school’s programs preparing all students for post-secondary college and career entry? Is the school creating an informed and prepared pathway into local citizenry? A macroscopic perspective allows school leaders better adjust reading and math programs, or any program that is not microscopically creating success for all students. Too often a look at data causes knee jerk responses that cause more harm to students than help.

The Big Duh!

The data about student reading and math achievement on a national level is an ongoing story that is always historical. The data tell us about what happened last year and in years past. Federal and state attempts to affect that data through line over all students and over time consistently have proven politically and educationally futile. As readers of national educational news, we should remember that the only data that matters is local data. Change in national trends will not be the result of action by federal or state governments, but only by careful and healthy consideration and use of data at the local school district level. Know your local data and help your local leaders to use it effectively.

Don’t Sweat NAEP Scores.  What Did We Expect?

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Life has recently given educators many things to worry over.  Pandemic!  School shootings!  Teacher shortages!  Low pay!  Chaotic school board meetings!  Book banning!  NAEP score decline!

I take the last one back.  As we indeed should worry about disease, bullets, teacherless classrooms, and surging radicalism, we should not sweat the reported decline in the National Assessment of Educational Performance scores.  The reason we should not sweat this is – what did we expect assessment scores to be after three semesters of emergency teaching and learning?  Improved? 

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported scores for 4th grade students declined 5 points in reading and 7 points in mathematics.  In terms of trend lines, NCES says these were the largest score declines since 1990 and the first ever score decline in mathematics.

I return to the question – what did we expect?  Actually, the scores represent what we expected, and these are not a calamity.

The decline in reading scores was expressed broadly across all demographics or within a point or two for differentiated groups.  Pick your target population – urban, suburban, rural; ethnicity; gender; wealthy or impoverished; English or non-English speaking – reading and math scores declined.  When schools went into emergency mode due to the pandemic, reading and math achievement amongst all children suffered.  What did we expect?

Interestingly, among higher performing students, those with constant access to computer or tablet, reliable Internet, consistent access to a quiet place to do school work, and consistency of an on-line teacher available top help them with assignments demonstrated less decline in reading and math.  Exactly what we would expect.

Correspondingly and without great surprise, students with low performance in reading and math prior to emergency education, especially children of color, demonstrated greater decline in reading and math.  Many of these children were at the opposite end of educational supports during the pandemic.  They had little to access to computers or tablets, unreliable or no Internet access, no quiet places, and were not connected with on-line teachers.  Exactly what we would expect.

NAEP measures only reading and math.  What of student learning in science and social studies?  What of achievements in art, music, and second language?  As a result of the pandemic, all areas of student learning suffered and expected overall achievement diminished.  Another expectation.  It sounds like educational disaster, but it is not.

What do we know?  First, these diminished student achievements are associated with emergency education and not with usual education.  I recall smashing my leg and spending 16 weeks in a cast and walking with crutches when I was fourteen.  Life, for a while, changed due to that emergency.  Once the cast came off, it took months before I regained strength and flexibility in my right leg.  I had to unlearn living with the emergency as well as living anew without it.  In emergencies, we compensate by doing things differently when we cannot do what we usually do.  Compensatory life is not the same.  When the emergency is over, we typically stop compensating and life returns to normal, although I am more duck-footed.

2019-20 through 2021-22 data were emergency-based data.  The casts we wore during that emergency are off.  We need to look at that data for what it is – emergency data – and not consider it as normal data.

Second, over time, all data resettles around its historic mean.  It will take renewed implicit teaching to cause children who limped through pandemic education to have the knowledge, skills, and dispositions they need; this learning will not happen without focused education.  But it will happen.  Students who in 21-22 were not solid in their reading and math will achieve improvements in 22-23 and 23-24 and their data will move back toward usual norms.  School bands that suffered developing instrumentation will find new players and students not ready for Spanish 3 will find growth in blended Spanish 2-3.  We know how to teach these children.

Third, our world is too attuned to reports of calamity, and what may not be calamitous gets reported as “disaster”.  Across the 14 years of 4K-12 public education, emergencies will rise, be faced, and we will trend toward normalcy.  The real calamity and disaster of the pandemic was the number of lives lost to death.  Those we cannot recover.  Everything else can be recouped.

Lessons learned.  Don’t sweat what you cannot affect.  The NAEP data is already in the books, and it reported the kind of data we were expecting.  We were in an emergency and now we are not.  Today, we pull up our socks and get at the 22-23 data.

Certified Reading Teachers in Every K-3 Classroom = A Good Decision

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Put strong instructional resources where they can maximize later school success. School leaders in fourteen states are doing this by ensuring that all K-3 classroom teachers not only are highly qualified in elementary instruction but also are certified to teach reading.

When teachers of my generation were hired to their first classroom positions, it was accurate to say that elementary teachers were generalists and secondary teachers were specialists. Teachers in grades K-5 majored in general education and teachers in grades 6 – 12 majored in a subject area, like math or English/language arts. This statement remained accurate for the vast majority of regular education teachers in K-12 public ed through the first decade of the 21st century. Generalists were responsible for teaching reading to all children during their formative years, K – 3. For most of the adults who attended public school in the 20th century, the level of reading required for an industrial-age career was adequately met by an elementary reading instruction taught by generalists. However, the demands of the information-age require adults to have better developed reading comprehension, analysis and application skills.

A growing number of state departments of public education are recognizing the need for all elementary classroom teachers to be specifically certified in reading instruction. “Reading proficiently by the end of third grade (as measured by NAEP at the beginning of fourth grade) can be a make-or-break benchmark in a child’s educational development. Up until the end of third grade, most children are learning to read. Beginning in fourth grade, however, they are reading to learn, using their skills to gain information in subjects such as math and science, to solve problems, to think critically about what they are learning, and to act upon and share that knowledge in the world around them. Up to half of the printed fourth-grade curriculum is incomprehensible to students who read below that grade level, according to the Children’s Reading Foundation. And, three quarters of students who are poor readers in third grade will remain poor readers in high school, according to researchers at Yale University.”

http://www.aecf.org/m/resourcedoc/AECF-Early_Warning_Full_Report-2010.pdf

These states are making the right move to strengthen K-3 reading, and several are going beyond to ensure reading expertise in K-5 instruction.

State-Developed or Unspecified Test of Reading Instruction Foundations of Reading Test Praxis Teaching Reading Test

  • California (EC, EM, SE)
  • Mississippi (EM)
  • New Mexico (EM)
  • Ohio (EC, EM)
  • Oklahoma (EC, EM, SE)
  • Virginia (EC, EM, SE)

 Foundations of Reading Test

  • Connecticut (EC, EM, SE)
  • Massachusetts (EC, EM)
  • New Hampshire (EC, EM)
  • North Carolina (EC, EM, SE)
  • Wisconsin (EC, EM, SE)

Praxis Teaching Reading Test

  • Alabama (EC, EM)
  • Tennessee (EC, EM, SE)
  • West Virginia (EC, EM)

The following shows how Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin have added reading requirements to their statutory language for teacher licensure.

Indiana: IND. CODE § 20-28-5-12(b)

“The department may not grant an initial practitioner license to an individual unless the individual has demonstrated proficiency in the following areas on a written examination or through other procedures prescribed by the department:

(1) Basic reading, writing, and mathematics.

(2) Pedagogy.

(3) Knowledge of the areas in which the individual is required to have a license to teach.

(4) If the individual is seeking to be licensed as an elementary school teacher, comprehensive scientifically based reading instruction skills, including:

(A) phonemic awareness

(B) phonics instruction

(C) fluency

(D) vocabulary

(E) comprehension.”

Ohio: OHIO REV. CODE ANN. § 3319.233(A)

“Beginning July 1, 2017, all new educator licenses issued for grades pre-kindergarten through three or four through nine shall require the applicant to attain a passing score on a rigorous examination of principles of scientifically research-based reading instruction that is aligned with the reading competencies adopted by the state board of education.”

Wisconsin: WIS. STAT. ANN. 118.19(14)(a)

“The department may not issue an initial teaching license that authorizes the holder to teach in grades kindergarten to 5 or in special education, an initial license as a reading teacher, or an initial license as a reading specialist, unless the applicant has passed an examination identical to the Foundations of Reading test administered in 2012 as part of the Massachusetts Tests for Educator Licensure. The department shall set the passing cut score on the examination at a level no lower than the level recommended by the developer of the test, based on this state’s standards.”

http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/01/16/81/11681.pdf

Prior to 2014, a reading specialist was a unique assignment in a school. Students with significant reading deficits were assigned time with the specialist, but for most, this time was small and sporadic. Specialists were itinerants in the schools and could not spend enough time with the most reading-needy children. Wisconsin’s DPI has taken significant steps to ensure that all children, especially those with special needs, get consistent instructional attention to their reading needs from teachers who are trained in reading.

“Beginning on January 31, 2014, candidates in Wisconsin applying for an initial teaching license in grades Kindergarten through 5 or special education, or for a license as a reading teacher or reading specialist, as listed below, will be required to take and pass the Foundations of Reading test:

• Early Childhood – Regular Education (70–777)

• Early Childhood – Special Education (70–809)

• Early Childhood – Middle Childhood (71–777)

• Middle Childhood – Early Adolescence (72–777)

• Middle Childhood – Early Adolescence Cross Categorical (72–801)

• Middle Childhood – Early Adolescence Specific Learning Disabilities (72–811)

• Middle Childhood – Early Adolescence Emotional Behavioral Disabilities (72–830)

• Middle Childhood – Early Adolescence Cognitive Disabilities (72–810)

• Early Adolescence – Adolescence Cross Categorical (73–801)

• Early Adolescence – Adolescence Specific Learning Disabilities (73–811)

• Early Adolescence – Adolescence Emotional Behavioral Disabilities (73–830)

• Early Adolescence – Adolescence Cognitive Disabilities (73–810)

• Early Childhood – Adolescence Visual Impairments (74–825)

• Reading Teacher (316)

• Reading Specialist (17)

http://www.wi.nesinc.com/PageView.aspx?f=GEN_FOR.html

These are the academic objectives of the Foundations of Reading test.

Foundations of Reading Development

1 Understand phonological and phonemic awareness

2 Understand concepts of print and alphabetic principle

3 Understand the role of phonics in promoting reading development

4 Understand word analysis and strategies

Development of Reading Comprehension

5 Understand vocabulary development

6 Understand how to apply reading comprehension skills and strategies to imaginative/literary tests

7 Understand how to apply reading comprehension skills and strategies to informational/expository texts

Reading Assessment and Instruction

8 Understand formal and informal methods for assessing reading development

9 Understand multiple approaches to reading instruction

Integration of Knowledge and Understanding

10 Prepare an organized, developed analysis on a topic related to one or more of the following: foundations of reading development, development of reading comprehension; reading assessment and instruction

http://docs.nesinc.com/SA/SA_090_FW.pdf

Given these new credentials, a new hire to an elementary classroom will have the instructional tools to cause all children to be better readers by the completion of third grade.