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Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Texas' annual reading test adjusted its difficulty every year, masking whether students are improving
Texas children's performance on an annual reading test was basically flat from 2012 to 2021, even as the state spent billions of additional dollars on K-12 education. I recently did a peer-reviewed deep dive into the test design documentation to figure out why the reported results weren't showing improvement. I found the flat scores were at least in part by design. According to policies buried in the documentation, the agency administering the tests adjusted their difficulty level every year. As a result, roughly the same share of students failed the test over that decade regardless of how objectively better they performed relative to previous years. From 2008 to 2014, I was a bilingual teacher in Texas. Most of my students' families hailed from Mexico and Central America and were learning English as a new language. I loved seeing my students' progress. Yet, no matter how much they learned, many failed the end-of-year tests in reading, writing and math. My hunch was that these tests were unfair, but I could not explain why. This, among other things, prompted me to pursue a Ph.D. in education to better understand large-scale educational assessment. Ten years later, in 2024, I completed a detailed exploration of Texas's exam, currently known as the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR. I found an unexpected trend: The share of students who correctly answered each test question was extraordinarily steady across years. Where we would expect to see fluctuation from year to year, performance instead appears artificially flat. The STAAR's technical documents reveal that the test is designed much like a norm-referenced test – that is, assessing students relative to their peers, rather than if they meet a fixed standard. In other words, a norm-referenced test cannot tell us if students meet key, fixed criteria or grade-level standards set by the state. In addition, norm-referenced tests are designed so that a certain share of students always fail, because success is gauged by one's position on the 'bell curve' in relation to other students. Following this logic, STAAR developers use practices like omitting easier questions and adjusting scores to cancel out gains due to better teaching. Ultimately, the STAAR tests over this time frame – taken by students every year from grade 3 to grade 8 in language arts and math, and less frequently in science and social studies – were not designed to show improvement. Since the test is designed to keep scores flat, it's impossible to know for sure if a lack of expected learning gains following big increases in per-student spending was because the extra funds failed to improve teaching and learning, or simply because the test hid the improvements. Ever since the federal education policy known as No Child Left Behind went into effect in 2002 and tied students' test performance to rewards and sanctions for schools, achievement testing has been a primary driver of public education in the United States. Texas' educational accountability system has been in place since 1980, and it is well known in the state that the stakes and difficulty of Texas' academic readiness tests increase with each new version, which typically come out every five to 10 years. What the Texas public may not know is that the tests have been adjusted each and every year – at the expense of really knowing who should 'pass' or 'fail.' The test's design affects not just students but also schools and communities. High-stakes test scores determine school resources, the state's takeover of school districts and accreditation of teacher education programs. Home values are even driven by local schools' performance on high-stakes tests. Students who are marginalized by racism, poverty or language have historically tended to underperform on standardized tests. STAAR's design makes this problem worse. I plan to investigate if other states or the federal government use similarly designed tests to evaluate students. My deep dive into Texas' test focused on STAAR before its 2022 redevelopment. The latest iteration has changed the test format and question types, but there appears to be little change to the way the test is scored. Without substantive revisions to the scoring calculations 'under the hood' of the STAAR test, it is likely Texas will continue to see flat performance. The Texas Education Agency, which administers the STAAR tests, didn't respond to a request for comment. The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Jeanne Sinclair, Memorial University of Newfoundland Read more: How going back to the SAT could set back college student diversity Students' test scores tell us more about the community they live in than what they know Is your child taking a test? When is the right time? Jeanne Sinclair receives funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada.
Boston Globe
10-05-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Has America given up on children's learning?
He has begun a bevy of investigations into how schools handle race and transgender issues, and has demanded that the curriculum be 'patriotic' -- a priority he does not have the power to enact, since curriculum is set by states and school districts. None of it adds up to an agenda on learning. Democrats, for their part, often find themselves standing up for a status quo that seems to satisfy no one. Governors and congressional leaders are defending the Department of Education as Trump has threatened to abolish it. Liberal groups are suing to block funding cuts. But none of that amounts to an agenda on learning, either. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up All of this is true despite the fact that reading scores are the lowest they have been in decades, after a pandemic that devastated children by shuttering their schools and sending them deeper into the realm of screens and social media. Advertisement 'Right now, there are no education goals for the country,' said Arne Duncan, who served as President Barack Obama's first secretary of education after running Chicago's public school system. 'There are no metrics to measure goals, there are no strategies to achieve those goals and there is no public transparency.' Advertisement Many Americans will recall that on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush was in a second grade classroom in Florida as children read a story called 'The Pet Goat.' What they may not remember is why Bush was there that morning. The president was promoting No Child Left Behind, which he was struggling to get through Congress. It would eventually pass with bipartisan support, instituting a national program of annual standardized testing in reading and math. While Obama critiqued how No Child Left Behind was carried out, he agreed with its core vision and advanced it. States were prodded to adopt the Common Core, a set of shared curriculum standards, which brought changes like more thesis-driven writing assignments and a greater emphasis on conceptual understanding in math. In those years, Washington sought to hold educators accountable for raising students' scores on tests linked to the new standards. Schools could be labeled 'failing.' Teachers with low evaluation scores could even lose their tenure protections. It worked, at least for a time. Achievement in reading and math increased, especially among the lowest-performing students. But tying punishments to test scores led to a predictable outcome: a curriculum that, in too many schools, centered on test prep. And with principals focused intently on raising scores in reading and math, they whittled away time for social studies and science. All of this contributed to a potent anti-education-reform movement, led by teachers and parents. On the right, there was resistance to any kind of federal mandate over local schools. On the left, a vocal group of parents began to refuse standardized tests. The politics of top-down school accountability had become untenable. In 2015, Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act, largely unraveling his own education agenda. Bipartisan school reform was dead. Advertisement Since then, Republicans have embraced a free market vision of parental rights, in which as many tax dollars as possible are freed to help parents pay for private school tuition, homeschooling and for-profit virtual schooling. That movement accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when conservative parents organized to resist school closures, mask mandates and progressive ideas about race and gender in the curriculum. Meanwhile, Democrats drew closer to their traditional allies, the teachers unions. During the 1990s and early 2000s, the party had engaged in an internal debate on whether to expand the number of public charter schools, an idea that Obama supported. Many charters were built around the conviction that poor children deserve an academically rigorous education -- but they largely were not unionized. President Joe Biden, a staunch labor ally, marginalized the charter school sector, despite the fact that it has created thousands of quality public schools. In one classroom in Louisiana, you can see several ideas that have emerged far from the spotlight of national politics. One recent afternoon at Highland Elementary School, where 70% of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a group of fifth graders sat, rapt, as their teacher, Lauren Cascio, introduced a key insight: that the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the Reformation all occurred during the same period of human history. Cascio reviewed vocabulary words that students would need: heretic, rational, skepticism, heliocentric. Then, over the course of an hour, 10- and 11-year-olds broke into groups to discuss why Leonardo da Vinci was interested in human anatomy. They wrote about how the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo differed from those of the ancient Greeks. Advertisement Unlike in many elementary school classrooms, the students did not have computers or tablets on their desks. They had open books, which they were avidly marking up with highlighters and pencils. The work in Louisiana has been celebrated by the Knowledge Matters Campaign, an effort led by Barbara Davidson, a policy advocate and veteran of the Department of Education under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Davidson has worked to amplify the ideas of a loosely organized network of educators, curriculum-writers, parents and local policymakers who are rejecting ideological approaches to education, and instead, are focused on how to maximize learning. It starts with reading. One positive development of the past decade has been a shift toward a research-backed focus on structured phonics in the early grades -- to successful effect. But now, some of the attention has shifted to additional aspects of literacy instruction that are backed by cognitive science, and crucial for turning beginning readers into proficient ones; namely, the finding that to become a good reader, children need a strong vocabulary and knowledge about the world. The subjects that best build vocabulary and knowledge are social studies and science -- the exact subjects that the Bush-Obama reforms often stripped from the school day. But students face an additional challenge that didn't exist during the education battles of the 2000s: ubiquitous screens. Children cannot learn to focus their attention on books or anything else if they are constantly distracted by addictive technology. The push to ban phones in schools transcends partisanship, and parent activism has helped a dozen states ban or limit cellphones in schools. Still, many educators say that screens remain a problem. Advertisement Some teachers are moving in-class reading and writing back to paper. Among them is Jon Gold, a middle school history teacher in Providence, Rhode Island, who frequently writes on how to enrich the curriculum and use technology in smarter ways. He now requires his students to close their laptops and read on paper. 'Their reading comprehension is stronger,' he said. The country is deeply polarized. But a survey of some of the most exciting work happening in schools shows that educators and parents have the ability to embrace new ideas and come together around the goal of giving the next generation a quality education. It could even be the beginning of a political platform. This article originally appeared in
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Opinion - The DEI era harmed non-white students most, yet some states won't end it
Former President Barack Obama's Department of Education compelled states to adopt Common Core in exchange for waivers from the failed No Child Left Behind Program. State education departments readily complied under pain of losing federal funding. Ever since, they have unquestioningly collected and shared students' private personal information as a condition for keeping the federal dollars flowing, raising significant privacy concerns. However, 16 states have resisted certifying the elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, which the Trump administration has targeted as illegal racial discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Sixteen other states reportedly intend to certify. (The remaining 18 states are either still reviewing the issue or have responded only recently.) The resistance here isn't a Trump-versus-Obama phenomenon. For instance, state education departments embraced Republican George Bush's No Child Left Behind despite its potential to undermine student outcomes. The premise of that law was to have every student be proficient in reading and math by 2014. Everyone knew that to be impossible, so states were allowed to set their own proficiency standards. Predictably, standards plummeted to give a false sense of higher achievement. In Kansas, for example, 8th-grade reading proficiency rates artificially increased from 34 percent to 65 percent in one year due to lowered standards, creating a misleading sense of achievement and reducing the impetus for genuine improvement. However, going along with No Child Left Behind kept the federal money flowing, so states ignored its effect on student achievement and happily complied. In contrast, today, many states seem willing to risk the loss of federal funding rather than stop DEI practices that potentially violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. No one opposes encouraging diversity, including people of all races and backgrounds or giving all students an equal opportunity to attain a good education. However, the DEI concepts that the Education Department will no longer support with taxpayer money are quite different. They often teach students to feel guilt about being white and that the U.S. is founded on racist principles. They exclude differing viewpoints on gender identity. 'Equity' isn't about equal opportunity; it reduces standards and robs students of the education they deserve. DEI was partially sold to school board members as a way of improving student outcomes. The premise was that DEI training would help students feel better about themselves and do better in school. Unfortunately, student outcomes have only grown worse as DEI programs have proliferated, and they have grown particularly worse among non-white student populations. The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress reveals a troubling decline in proficiency among minority students. In eighth grade reading, proficiency for Black students declined from 18 percent in 2017 to 16 percent now, and for Hispanic students from 23 percent to 19 percent. Outcomes are even worse in eighth-grade math, where proficiency rates fell from 13 percent to 10 percent for Black students and from 20 percent to 15 percent for Hispanic students over the same period. Regardless of their personal viewpoints on DEI, state and local school board members should be asking hey they can justify diverting time and resources to a program that isn't improving student outcomes. Ideally, all of educators' efforts should be urgently focused on improving student outcomes, especially for those students who are furthest behind. Every school district and state education department should aim to improve outcomes and academically prepare students to succeed in life. Sadly, there is ample evidence that this is not being done. It seems that some education administrators want students to do better, but not if it means adults must change their behaviors and do better. Declining or hesitating to certify compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, as requested by the Department of Education, is just the latest example of many adults in education putting politics ahead of students. That likely won't change until more student-focused people run for state and local school boards. Dave Trabert is CEO of Kansas Policy Institute and its subsidiary, the Kansas School Board Resource Center, and is author of the book '8 Things to Know about Running for School Board.' David Hoyt is Executive Director of School Boards for Academic Excellence and has written frequently on strategies for achieving academic excellence within the American education system. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
09-05-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
The DEI era harmed non-white students most, yet some states won't end it
Former President Barack Obama's Department of Education compelled states to adopt Common Core in exchange for waivers from the failed No Child Left Behind Program. State education departments readily complied under pain of losing federal funding. Ever since, they have unquestioningly collected and shared students' private personal information as a condition for keeping the federal dollars flowing, raising significant privacy concerns. However, 16 states have resisted certifying the elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, which the Trump administration has targeted as illegal racial discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Sixteen other states reportedly intend to certify. (The remaining 18 states are either still reviewing the issue or have responded only recently.) The resistance here isn't a Trump-versus-Obama phenomenon. For instance, state education departments embraced Republican George Bush's No Child Left Behind despite its potential to undermine student outcomes. The premise of that law was to have every student be proficient in reading and math by 2014. Everyone knew that to be impossible, so states were allowed to set their own proficiency standards. Predictably, standards plummeted to give a false sense of higher achievement. In Kansas, for example, 8th-grade reading proficiency rates artificially increased from 34 percent to 65 percent in one year due to lowered standards, creating a misleading sense of achievement and reducing the impetus for genuine improvement. However, going along with No Child Left Behind kept the federal money flowing, so states ignored its effect on student achievement and happily complied. In contrast, today, many states seem willing to risk the loss of federal funding rather than stop DEI practices that potentially violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. No one opposes encouraging diversity, including people of all races and backgrounds or giving all students an equal opportunity to attain a good education. However, the DEI concepts that the Education Department will no longer support with taxpayer money are quite different. They often teach students to feel guilt about being white and that the U.S. is founded on racist principles. They exclude differing viewpoints on gender identity. 'Equity' isn't about equal opportunity; it reduces standards and robs students of the education they deserve. DEI was partially sold to school board members as a way of improving student outcomes. The premise was that DEI training would help students feel better about themselves and do better in school. Unfortunately, student outcomes have only grown worse as DEI programs have proliferated, and they have grown particularly worse among non-white student populations. The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress reveals a troubling decline in proficiency among minority students. In eighth grade reading, proficiency for Black students declined from 18 percent in 2017 to 16 percent now, and for Hispanic students from 23 percent to 19 percent. Outcomes are even worse in eighth-grade math, where proficiency rates fell from 13 percent to 10 percent for Black students and from 20 percent to 15 percent for Hispanic students over the same period. Regardless of their personal viewpoints on DEI, state and local school board members should be asking hey they can justify diverting time and resources to a program that isn't improving student outcomes. Ideally, all of educators' efforts should be urgently focused on improving student outcomes, especially for those students who are furthest behind. Every school district and state education department should aim to improve outcomes and academically prepare students to succeed in life. Sadly, there is ample evidence that this is not being done. It seems that some education administrators want students to do better, but not if it means adults must change their behaviors and do better. Declining or hesitating to certify compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, as requested by the Department of Education, is just the latest example of many adults in education putting politics ahead of students. That likely won't change until more student-focused people run for state and local school boards. Dave Trabert is CEO of Kansas Policy Institute and its subsidiary, the Kansas School Board Resource Center, and is author of the book '8 Things to Know about Running for School Board.' David Hoyt is Executive Director of School Boards for Academic Excellence and has written frequently on strategies for achieving academic excellence within the American education system.
Forbes
28-04-2025
- Politics
- Forbes
The Fight For Higher Education Will Be Won On Financial Ground
Academic Freedom Is Under Siege getty Although the changes currently shaking American society are being celebrated by some and opposed by others, there is one thing on which we should all be able to agree: the U.S. federal government is not what it was 100 days ago. Over the past few months, we have witnessed two radical trajectories of change, each occurring in opposite directions. On the one hand, the Administration has slashed federal services with a zeal reminiscent of Ronald Reagan. Whole departments have been eliminated or gutted, and major areas of American life, which formerly fell under executive-branch oversight, are now being deregulated. But, at the same time, the Administration has also initiated the most radical expansion of the executive branch since the New Deal, taking major steps to exert control in spaces that previously fell outside the federal government's purview. One such space is the American classroom. Until recently, the federal government respected a basic boundary in its relationship with American schools: it tried to influence policies and programs, but it never tried to interfere with the curriculum itself. Though there have been attempts to standardize performance metrics, as in the case of No Child Left Behind, there has never been a serious attempt by the federal government to control the ideological content of what's actually being taught. States, for their part, were entrusted with full control over public K-12 curricula, while private schools and colleges were considered sacrosanct. Until now, the notion that federal officials might try to dictate what was taught at a private college was simply unthinkable. Then, the unthinkable started happening. First came the infamous "Dear Colleague" letter, which contained the following sentence: The letter focused primarily on policies and programs, but there could be no mistaking the meaning of this line. "Toxic indoctrination" refers to teaching, not policies. "False premise" refers to an argument, not a program. The question of whether the United States was built on 'systemic and structural racism' exemplifies the kind of inquiry worth consideration in a classroom. But all of this was mere rhetoric until the showdown with Columbia University, at which point it became very real. After stripping the school of $400 million in federal grants, the government issued a list of demands, one of which explicitly required changes to the faculty and curriculum of Columbia's Middle Eastern Studies department. In response, Columbia capitulated. To state the obvious, this was the wrong decision. It was wrong from every perspective, and in every sense of that word: In America, free speech is a right, and government control of speech is wrong. Period. Regardless of how harmful or beneficial we may judge the content of that speech to be. This is one of few moral values we've always been united around as a people, perhaps because it was one of the main values that led to the formation of our country to begin with. There is no nuance needed on this particular point, no "both sides" argument to be made. Because this is no longer a battle about any particular issue. It isn't a battle over DEI, or antisemitism, or Title VI compliance, or "wokeness". It is rather a battle over who controls the curriculum in American higher education. And if we lose this battle, we lose the very soul of what makes American colleges and universities a global beacon of free inquiry. Succumbing to government control — even "reasonable" control, even "helpful" control — is simply not an option. So yes, tyranny should be resisted. And yes, Harvard has been making better decisions than Columbia, by fighting instead of caving. But it isn't enough. Fighting back, while necessary, is not sufficient. Resistance alone won't solve the underlying problem. Because thus far, none of us - not Columbia, nor Harvard, nor any other school I can think of - has owned the part that we ourselves played in paving the road to this Orwellian nightmare. The uncomfortable truth is that higher education helped to create the very vulnerability now being exploited. For decades, colleges and universities across the country have relied — increasingly, and in some cases, almost exclusively — on federal dollars to meet their ever-growing budgets. And the dollars to which I'm referring are not those which come in the form of research grants. The explosion in tuition prices over the past 40 years was not market-driven. It was underwritten by federal student loan programs that asked no questions and imposed virtually no limits. Colleges could raise prices endlessly because someone — the federal government — was always willing to foot the bill. Students borrowed sums that would take a lifetime to repay, while schools looked the other way. The reason, of course, was that the schools collected their money upfront, insulating themselves from any long-term risk. It was a tragedy of the commons - a short-term financial arms race whose long-term outcome was always going to be collapse. For most colleges, it is student loan programs and tuition assistance in forms like Pell aid – not research grants – which end up being the primary source of federal revenue. And it is these same aid programs which are providing the government with such tremendous leverage over supposedly independent institutions. The government's interference in the affairs of "private" schools is only half the story; the other half is that all of these schools stopped being "private" quite some time ago. We, America's colleges and universities, made education so expensive that for most of us it isn't possible to operate without government assistance. To move forward, we must therefore tell two truths at once, never sacrificing one for the other. First, it is wrong — deeply wrong — for the government to try to control what schools teach. But second, it's entirely our own fault that the government ever had this leverage to begin with. Recognizing this dual reality will be required if we want to move toward any real solution. Because the real solution isn't just fighting back. The real solution is to rebuild higher education on a more stable foundation. The resources already exist to do this, at least among the wealthiest schools. The Ivy League collectively controls endowments worth hundreds of billions of dollars - enough to provide free tuition to every undergraduate student, forever. Yet those same schools continue to collect billions of dollars each year in tuition and fees, even as they complain about losing federal funding. This is the hypocrisy that has left higher education so vulnerable to political attack. This is why a Nebraska farmer, paying taxes to subsidize Harvard, might become resentful. This is why Trump's attacks, though deeply un-American, have nevertheless found an eager audience. If we want to reclaim the moral high ground, we must do more than just resist government overreach. We must also abandon the broken model that made that overreach possible. We must return to a core value which that same Nebraska farmer would surely celebrate: the value of financial independence. Admittedly, this is easier said than done, especially at schools with smaller endowments. Most of us are facing a significant fundraising challenge, which we must meet head-on. Though the numbers may look daunting, it is doable. Colleges survived without federal funding in the past; we can learn to do it again in the future. At our college, we've been on a path for the last few years to achieve financial independence through a new, pay-it-forward funding model. The idea is simple - students don't pay tuition up front, instead signing a pledge to give to the college after graduation. Right now we only have about 3.5% of our students on this model, but eventually, once we are fully living into it we'll be financially free. Our alumni will be crowd-funding our current students, meaning we won't need government funding in the form of loan programs or tuition is not the only path to financial independence, but it's the one we are attempting. Ultimately, this return to financial independence is about more than just saving the soul of higher ed. It's also about healing our country's wounds – a process which can begin only when colleges themselves own the part that we played in creating this whole mess. It's true that conservatives have been abandoning a number of sacred American values – values that used to be universal, but are now being labeled as "liberal." But it's also true that the same thing has been happening the other way around. Liberals seem increasingly unwilling to live by any value that they now see as "conservative," even if it was previously shared by all. Allow me to suggest one such example: the notion that "freedom isn't free." These days, the only place you'll see that slogan is on a MAGA t-shirt. But that doesn't change the fact that it's still true. If we want to maintain our freedom, it's going to cost us something. The only question is whether we are willing to pay the price and begin the long journey towards financial independence.
