“School Reforms Fail to Lift U.S. On Global Test,” New York Times, December 3, 2019: A1
Common Core and its high-stakes testing regime keep failing American students. Last month we learned that on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), average reading scores declined, while average math performance remained flat, 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.
This month we learn that the performance of American teenagers on the international Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) exams in reading and math are stagnant since 2000. This is despite federal programs like No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and Every Student Succeeds and Common Core and a heavy national investment in charter schools.
Over 500,000 fifteen-year-old students in nearly eighty countries took the two-hour computer-based PISA test in 2018. American students were significantly outperformed in reading by students from ten other countries including China, Singapore, Estonia, Finland, Canada, New Zealand, and Ireland, and in math students from thirty-four countries including China, Japan, France, Portugal, Italy, and Russia.
The latest results are especially disturbing because the achievement gap in reading between high and low performers widened. The top quarter of American students actually improved their performance on the PISA exam, while the bottom ten percent did worse. Twenty percent of American 10th grade fifteen-year-olds barely mastered reading skills expected of a ten-year-old in fifth grade.
Gross national score reports on tests like PISA and NAEP actually hide more than they reveal. While aggregate results for United States students on the 2014 PISA exams were below expectations when measured against their peers in other countries, students in Massachusetts did just fine. American fifteen-year-olds ranked 31st out of 65 countries on math tests, 24th in science, and 21st in reading. But if Massachusetts was considered a separate country, its fifteen-year-olds would rank 9th in the world in math and 4th in reading.
Poor performance on these tests, especially by students in the lower rankings, is evidence that the United States continues to fail to provide a quality education for many of its minority and immigrant students and for children in states like Alabama and Mississippi where public education is poorly funded, a remnant of their history of deep-seated racism and segregation.
Another thing we learn from dismal test scores on PISA and NAEP is that test prep for one type of test, Common Core aligned assessments, does not translate to improved performance on other test formats. Essentially all students did was learn to pass Common Core tests. You can blame teachers and schools, but when they are assessed based on Common Core aligned tests, you ensure that type of instruction.
I tutor high school students and this is what I find. In ELA, they no longer read stories, novels, or plays. Instead they “close read” and “annotate” fiction and non-fiction excerpts, including excerpts from Shakespeare. One mother complained to me that instead of learning to love reading and literature the way she and her siblings did, reading has become another homework chore. In math, students drill on sample Common Core test questions so they learn to recognize them for the test and then apply an appropriate step-by-step formula without any conceptual understanding of the problem or the solution. Science becomes memorization of formulas instead of an exploration of major crises like climate change or of breakthroughs that have improved human life. In social studies, history has become close reading and annotation of documents in preparation for the ELA assessment so students learn nothing about the arc of history and issues that will concern them as citizens. New York State even changed its world and U.S. history exams to more closely resemble Common Core reading tests.
The New York Times article on the PISA scores included a quote by Daniel Koretz, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who is a major critic of high-stakes testing. Koretz is quoted as saying, “it’s really time to rethink the entire drift of policy reform because it just isn’t working.” The Times article also attributed another statement to Koretz, this time without quotation marks, that he was concerned “because the United States lacks a centralized system for teacher training or distributing quality instructional materials to schools” and “states and districts did not always effectively carry out the Common Core or other reforms.”
The reality is that Koretz has repeatedly attacked the high-stakes testing educational reform movement initiated by and aligned with Common Core. According to his 2017 book The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better, “Pressure to raise scores on achievement tests dominates American education today. It shapes what is taught and how it is taught. It influences the problems students are given in math class (often questions from earlier tests), the materials they are given to read, the essays and other work they are required to produce, and often the manner in which teachers grade this work. It can determine which educators are rewarded, punished, and even fired. In many cases, it determines which students are promoted or graduate.”
In other places Koretz argues that the high-stakes testing regime left many educators with “only three options: cheat, find other ways to cut corners, or fail. As successive waves of “reform” ratcheted up the pressure to raise scores, the risks only became worse.” He has called Common Core “another iteration of that same cycle.” Koretz charged that “People have lost track of the fact that tests are just tests . . . There is a great deal that I value walking into a school that can’t be measured in tests.” He added that reform policies that “lead with the test” need to be fundamentally reconsidered.
The New York Times owes Daniel Koretz an apology for misrepresenting him and a chance to respond.
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