South Carolina, Maine, Massachusetts get best marks in setting higher expectations
South Carolina and Maine, praised last year by the national research journal “Education Next” for setting the country’s highest academic standards, now have company at the head of the class. In its Summer 2006 issue, “Education Next” adds Massachusetts as the third state to earn all A’s for the level of expectations set for students.
The new issue of the research journal, which previously had used 2003 student testing data to illustrate how the federal No Child Left Behind Act produces misleading information on school performance across the nation, updates its rankings with 2005 data.
Because NCLB allows individual states to set their own standards for whether schools meet annual progress targets, the academic rigor of those standards plays a key role in determining each state’s results. When “Education Next” Editor-In-Chief Paul E. Peterson and co-author Frederick Hess analyzed individual state standards and test scores, only South Carolina, Maine and Massachusetts received A’s in every rating category.
“It’s an odd discordance at best,” Peterson and Hess write. “It has led to the bizarre situation in which some states achieve handsome proficiency results by grading their students against low standards, while other states suffer poor proficiency ratings only because they have high standards.”
The “Education Next” report is the seventh research study to confirm that South Carolina’s proficiency standards lead the nation. Last year U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings commended South Carolina’s efforts to implement the federal No Child Left Behind Act in a highly publicized speech to state education chiefs and other education leaders. Spellings specifically praised South Carolina for setting proficiency standards at high levels.
“Education Next” has argued that the federal government should develop “a common benchmark that allows for objective comparisons among the states.” South Carolina State Superintendent of Education Inez Tenenbaum has long urged Congress to develop a common benchmark that correlates states’ proficiency standards with their students’ scores on National Assessment of Education Progress tests required by NCLB.
“South Carolina’s standards are demanding, but they are exactly where they should be,” Tenenbaum said today. “We believe our schools can compete with any schools in the country, but there continues to be a problem with a federal system that allows other states to get praise for lower performance.”
“Education Next” is an independent, nonpartisan journal that publishes peer-reviewed research papers on American K-12 education. The group’s web site says it “partakes of no program, campaign or ideology,” and “goes where the evidence points.”
Peterson and Hess compare the percentage of students rated proficient on state tests (PACT, in South Carolina’s case) with the percentage rated proficient on NAEP. They have previously said that if only 50 percent of a state's 4th-graders are proficient on the federally administered NAEP tests, but the state claims that 80 percent scored “proficient” on its state-administered tests, that state should be given an F for failing to establish high expectations for students. But a state would receive an A if scores were equivalent on both state and federal assessments. In the new report, fourth-fifths of the states received C’s, D’s or F’s.
South Carolina’s NAEP results place the state at the national average in terms of student performance, and recent news stories have reported that the Palmetto State’s gains on NAEP frequently lead the nation. But Tenenbaum emphasized that while the continuing improvements are encouraging, much work remains to be done.
“Average is not where we want to be,” she said. “Our teachers and students have done a wonderful job in making these improvements, but we won’t be satisfied until we’re No. 1.”
The new “Education Next” article on proficiency standards follows two recent research studies by the Fordham Foundation that praised South Carolina’s curriculum standards in world history and science.
Here is an excerpt from the Peterson/Hess article that explains their method of computing state grades and rankings:
“The standard we again use is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the nation's ‘report card,’ and still the only metric that allows strict comparisons between states. For each state where both NAEP and state accountability measures were available, we computed a score based on the difference between the percentage of students said to be proficient by the state and the percentage identified as proficient on the NAEP in years 2003 and 2005.
“We are not evaluating state tests, nor are we grading states on the performance of their students. Instead, we are checking for ‘truth in advertising,’ investigating whether the proficiency levels mean what they say. We are thus able to ascertain whether states lowered the bar for student proficiency as the full panoply of NCLB provisions took effect.”