The American people have been sold a bill of goods by testing and publishing companies and politicians with little understanding of how children learn. Incessant and deadening test prep aligned with the high-stakes Common Core tests were supposed to super-charge student academic performance. But the results are now in. Teaching for the test is a dismal failure when students take a different test.
On the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), average reading scores have declined since 2017, while average math scores stayed the same, up a little here, down a little there. Reading scores dropped for 4th graders in seventeen states and for 8th graders in thirty-one states.
Overall there are few gains in performance since 2009 when the big push for Common Core and the testing regime were taking off. According to Peggy Carr, the associate commissioner of the assessment division at the National Center for Education Statistics, “students who are struggling the most in reading are where they were almost 30 years ago.” Test scores for New York City school kids have flattened since 2013, despite the de Blasio administrations “Equity and Excellence for All “agenda.
Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos admitted the NAEP results are "devastating" and is pushing for “school choice,” which means more charter schools. But for Black and Latino parents in urban areas who have been heavily recruited by the charter school industry, their failure to deliver on promised results is especially disturbing. Nationally, there has been virtually no change in the score gap on the math and reading scores between white and black students and white and Hispanic students.
The most recent scores on science and social studies exams that date from 2014 and 2015 may explain how Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. We are looking at very high-levels of ignorance, partly caused by a shift in instruction away from content understanding to skills acquisition. Three-quarters of American eighth-graders performed below proficiency level in Civics and Geography and about one in five met the standard in U.S. History or science. We don’t know how Donald Trump, the truly “stable genius” performed on similar exams when he was in school, but we do know that he has no understanding of science, civics, or economics and thinks they are part of a” deep state” conspiracy to make him and his administration look bad. Covfefe!
In New York State public officials are celebrating a decline in the number of families that opt their children out of high-stakes standardized tests. In is time for state officials to admit that Opt-Out parents and teachers are right and that maybe the entire state has to opt-out of the failing high-stakes Common Core testing regime.
Follow Alan Singer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ReecesPieces8