Amanda Paulson, Christian Science Monitor, October 1, 2009
The news from a major new education study is encouraging: Student achievement is going up, and the gaps in test scores between subgroups—such as between African-Americans and whites—are closing across all grade levels and subjects.
The study, released Thursday by the Center on Education Policy (CEP), examines student performance in all 50 states since 2002, when the No Child Left Behind Act took effect. It paid particular attention to the achievement gaps for minority and low-income students.
The report focused on “trend lines”—for Latino students in fourth-grade reading, for instance, or for low-income students in high school math—and examined the gaps between lines. The gaps narrowed in 74 percent of all trend lines the researchers examined, most often because the gains made by lower-performing groups outpaced those made by the top-performing group.
{snip}
Despite this, the news isn’t all positive. In 23 percent of the cases the report analyzed, the gap grew (although in some of those instances, both groups still made gains). And in a few cases, the gap narrowed, but only because the achievement of higher-performing subgroups went down.
“The gaps are still large, even with the gaps narrowing,” says Nancy Kober, a consultant with CEP. In many cases, she notes, more than 20 points still separate the scores of white and non-low-income students from those of African-American, Latino, and low-income students. “We’re still talking about a lot of ground that needs to be made up before the gaps can be said to have closed,” she says.
Also, Ms. Kober points out, different methodology can change the results. The study focuses on the percentage of students who have reached the “proficient” level, since that’s the level that the No Child Left Behind Act emphasizes. But when the researchers looked at the gaps between average test scores for all groups, the results were “still positive, but a little less rosy,” she says.
{snip}
[Editor’s Note: “State Test Score Trends Through 2007-08: Are Achievement Gaps Closing and Is Achievement Rising for All?” together with tables and state profiles, can be downloaded as a PDF file here.
Original article
(Posted on October 7, 2009)
Comments
The gap and the achievement all depend on tests that are essentially moronic compared with Asian and European exams. US expectations for its students are pathetically low. Blacks remain at the bottom of tests that in high school measure upper grammar school standards. White kids except for the gifted few don’t do much better. We need tougher tests and an end to public education for all. By ninth grade, if students can’t do algebra and literary interpretation fluently, they should be put in vocational or military school, as they are in England, Japan and many other nations that have surged beyond the incompent competitors of the USA. Kids who misbehave in vocational school should find work camps in Northern Alaska a soothing alternative.
Cut out the no child left behind nonsense. Get rid of special ed. To hell with “equal” education for blacks, whites, Natives and Latinos. Whites, some that is, are superior to the rest, and education is a joke unless we acknowledge the obvious inequalities between races.
What does income have to do with anything? Either you are a moron or you are not, money can’t fix stupid.
It will eventually come out that schools where the “gap is narrowing” is doing two things: (1) Encouraging or forcing dumber blacks and Hispanics in not taking the standardized tests, AND (2) Encouraging or forcing smarter whites not to take the tests. That leaves them with smarter blacks and dumber whites, and surprise, the achievement gaps narrow apparently.
We do know that some schools have tried (1) to the point of breaking the rules of NCLB.
NCLB is stupid anyway, it’s based on Bush neo-con racial equality nonsense. Repeal it.
Why the comparison to whites when whites are not the top scoring group? Could it be because closing the ‘achievement gap’ and indeed the ‘report’ here, have little to do with being about increasing achievement?
No Child left behind is nothing more than a way to punish those who can achieve. God forbid that the gifted & talented be allowed to exercise their talents (unless it is athletic).
Head out to Google or Yahoo and look up “1895 Salina Test”. This was a test one had to pass to graduate from the 8th grade. Most college graduates today couldn’t pass this test. It would need to be modified a bit for today, but is still a valid test.
A test like this would be something to parse off those who are not qualified to move continue with school. An apprenticeship program would be really appropriate for a lot of people. Until the economy totally collapses or people are pushed against a wall, we will never admit that not everyone is created equally.
It would not be a bad idea for Amren readers to check out a copy of “The Fountainhead” or “Atlas Shrugged” so that they can see the insanity of trying to make unequal situations/things/people equal.
It’s not an achievement gap; it is an ability gap and the only way to close it is on paper through nefarious manipulation of tests and/or scores.
“Achievement Gaps Narrowing in US Schools Since No Child Left Behind…..”
LOL! Yeah, sure.
Since it’s impossible to raise black intelligence any further than it is right now, they just manipulate the figures or cheat on the testing somehow.
Also, isn’t this report a little suspect for other reasons? Why?
This is most likely a group who believes telling a lie enough times will eventually create the situation they’re lying about.
The MSM does it all the time, lying about one thing or another, expecting repetition to somehow make a lie come true.
Thankfully, this empire is degenerating quickly and is on the way out.
To Bandmo…
My thoughts exactly. What DOES income have to do with it? Last I heard, the library is FREE. I went to school with a white girl who was dirt poor, but she was by far the smartest kid in the class. Today she is a Dr. She had parents who understood the need for a great education so she could be better than them.
Money is raised as an issue since they don’t want you to focus on how inner city schools actually receive more funding than suburban schools. It doesn’t look right that increased spending does not result in increased achievement. It also plays into the hands of the teacher unions that tell you that if the teacher to pupil ratio is lowered that the kids will benefit.
The net effect of introducing blacks into White schools was to degrade education. No one can learn with a population that can’t help being disruptive.
“Low-income” my rear-end! I grew up in a single-mom home(way before it was fashionable, I might add)and we were nothing if not a low-income household. I, however, basically breezed through school, and admittedly didn’t apply myself nearly as I could or should have. In my school experience, income had very little, if anything to do with one’s academic performance. Race, however, had a great deal to do with it!!
I don’t doubt that under the right circumstances the lower IQ groups will score a few points higher when sitting next to their white and Asian counterparts watching how the higher IQ’s learn.
However, to keep spending good money after bad, and to try and make equality a reality is foolish. It isn’t going to happen. I’m starting to believe that the educator’s who keep trying these experiments have lower IQ’s than the groups they’re trying to improve.
I would really like to see and take the exams these people are judged with. Most of the younger people seem so ill informed about math and history, much less grammar and diction, it’s shocking.
The current president exhibits that being glib will get you over, but the true knowledge and reason is absent. Because Amerika is satisfied with getting over, we are in a downward spiral. Dumbing down all things and all major institutions.
Running an ipod, playing vid games makes you quick, not smart.
Somehow I think that as we get more and more mixed, the achievement gaps will become smaller and smaller and equalize around a grand average of…. mediocrity.
Mission accomplished, right? A horde of tan people will all perform the same and won’t bicker among themselves and pose a threat to the elites, right?
Make sure you are 100% sure what the ethnic makeup of your mate or child’s mate is. These things are so vastly important and palpable, despite what decades of brainwashing will tell you.
2 — Bandmo wrote at 6:46 PM on October 7:
“What does income have to do with anything? Either you are a moron or you are not, money can’t fix stupid.”
Wealthy people score higher than poor people, when adjusted for everything else (i.e. wealthy white people outscore poor white people).
No, money can’t fix stupid, but in a truly meritocratic society (as we are becoming now), wealth will tend to be strongly correlated with intelligence; this isn’t always the case when other things besides merit are potential means for getting ahead, like ‘status’ and ‘title’ and ‘names’. The correlation will become stronger as ability becomes the only real means for getting ahead. Haven’t you read the Bell Curve, for goodness sake! ;)
Someone like George Bush could get ahead in his generation, since he was part of the ‘Bush family’, with all of the inherited prestige, status, etc. This might not be completely gone, but it’s rapidly eroding, for sure.
These “findings” are the result of several factors: (1)Academic standards for American public schools are laughable and positively “third-world” when compared to Europe and Asia, thus, almost everyone excels; and (2) The reported numbers are simply falsified.
Just last week in Dekalb County (Atlanta), Georgia, several school administrators were fired or suffered other discipline as a result of a scheme to inflate standardized test scores. I suspect that such cheating is near-universal but these folks simply had the whistle blown on them.
No Child Left Behind simply means No Child Out in Front. Under NCLB, all students are well-above average and improving all the time!
Dumbing down the tests is a great way to narrow the achievement gaps for sure. The stupid kids score higher and the smart kids score the same.
5)Howard: I certainly couldn’t pass that test, and I’m a college student.
8 NBJ:
Years before it was presented to me formally in math class, I learned advanced arithmetic from two older (late 50s and early 60s) what would now be called “middle school” textbooks she found thrown away in a back alley near a dumpster, still clean. Didn’t cost her or me anything, and they were these supposedly deficient “older” textbooks that people complain are so bad and need to be replaced. Especially in the social sciences, older textbooks, pre-1970, seem to have the least PC propaganda/garbage.
My sister-in-law teaches fourth graders in a white school district in Ohio with some foreign students. She is the only teacher that does not use “social promotion”. The other teachers do in order to receive federal funds.
These students do not learn the concepts. They learn how to pass the test, and my sister-in-law is an expert at teaching the test. She is retiring at the end of this year after teaching for 30 years. She has been asked to stay since she is an expert at teaching the test, and gets the highest scores in the district.
The foreign parents give her the hardest time, because they refuse to believe their child is not a genius and should be.
“…The correlation will become stronger as ability becomes the only real means for getting ahead. Haven’t you read the Bell Curve, for goodness sake! ;)…”
I disagree.
The government overrides ability (and the Free Market) by mandating onerous AA requirements on the public and private sectors, forcing employers to hire and promote those who are unqualified over those more qualified—the unqualified get ahead by government fiat.
The government, msm, intelligentsia and academia continue to deny that IQ differences exist between the races—if non-qualified NAMs are not hired, for whatever position, in numbers that satisfy the EEOC and other government bureaucracies, it is axiomatically blamed on racism and opens any business, especially large corporations, to massive litigation.
Ask Boeing (20 million paid out for discrimination, five million of which went to jack$on), Coca-Cola (193 million paid out plus one billion to promote business opportunities for preferred non-Whites) or Texaco (3.1 million for ‘disparate pay’, even though the government did not find any instance of discrimination) for their take on AA enforcement.
This is one of the reasons companies prefer to hire illegal immigrants while the government looks the other way—they are less likely to file discrimination suits, can be paid less and gotten rid of easily.
It is indeed too bad that government ignores the tenants put forth in the Bell Curve and instead, at enormous taxpayer cost, demands those without qualifications be favored instead of those more qualified.
http://tinyurl.com/yl2tf57
Bon
jdavis writes:
“…I would really like to see and take the exams these people are judged with. Most of the younger people seem so ill informed about math and history, much less grammar and diction, it’s shocking…”
The NAEP tests have been shockingly dumbed down over the years. I know this because I have been giving these tests for over 20 years. The contents of the tests are hidden from the public—but every year the government educational-industrial complex loudly announces that test scores are rising and the achievement gap is closing (but they need a lot more money anyway).
Charles Murray reports:
“…The tests do not measure the ability to do actual mathematics; they just measure the familiarity with concepts…The required math has usually been taught by the middle of the third grade—in the test for eighth-graders.
For eight-graders and twelfth-graders, reading scores in 1980 and 2004 were within a point of each other…since the 1970s, there has been no improvement in reading…”
But as long as fools such as California’s Superintendent of Public Education, Jack O’Connell, state, “The achievement gap is absolutely, positively not genetic!” the government will continue to pour billions upon billions of fiat dollars into an impossible goal: raising NAM abilities to those of Whites and Asians.
Bon
