Issues in Education: Statistics
Skills Gap on State, Federal
Tests Grows, Study Finds
Article by Lynn Olson, Education Week, April 11, 2007
Far greater shares of students are proficient on state reading and mathematics tests than on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and those gaps have grown to unprecedented levels since the No Child Left Behind Act became law in 2002, concludes a study released today.
The study by Policy Analysis for California Education, a nonprofit research group based at the University of California, Berkeley, was released here during the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. The researchers compiled state and federal testing results for the period 1992 to 2006 from 12 states: Arkansas, California, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, and Washington.
In all but two states—Arkansas and Massachusetts—the disparity between the share of students proficient on state reading tests and on NAEP, a congressionally mandated program that tests a representative sample of students in every state, grew or remained the same from 2002 to 2006. A similar widening occurred between state and federal gauges of math performance in eight of 12 states.
Those findings call into question whether
the state-reported gains are real or illusory, according to the researchers.
Differences slither between
schoolteachers, professors on what students should know
Article by Mary Beth Marklein, USA Today, April 9, 2007
"States tend to
have too many standards attempting to tackle too many content topics," the
report says. The report examines science, math, reading and English.
Aligning Postsecondary
Expectations and High School Practice: The Gap Defined
Policy Implications of the ACT National Curriculum Survey Results 2005-2006
High school teachers believe
state standards are preparing student well for college-level work; however,
roughly 65 percent of postsecondary instructors responded that their state's
standards prepared students poorly or very poorly for college-level work in
English/writing, reading, and science. This finding strongly suggests that a gap
still exists between what colleges believe is important for college readiness
and what state standards are requiring teachers to teach.
Children's Chances for
Success Vary Dramatically by State, Report Warns
Released online by Education Week/Editorial Projects in Education Research
Center
January 3, 2007
"A child born in Virginia is significantly more likely to experience success throughout life than the average child born in the United States, while a child born in New Mexico is likely to face an accumulating series of hurdles both educationally and economically, according to an analysis published in Education Week..."
Source: Education Week
Please notice the pattern in
the 2 charts above: higher "life prospects" and higher graduation
rates
across the northern half of the United States; lower "life prospects"
and lower graduation rates in some western states and across the southern half
of the United States....and boys, on average, have an 8% lower graduation rate
than girls.
The "life prospects" charts available in the Education Week study are based on 13 variables: family income, parent's education, parental employment, linguistic integration, preschool enrollment, kindergarten enrollment, elementary reading, middle school math, high school graduation, postsecondary participation, adult educational attainment, annual income and steady employment.
On the Education Week website, be sure to check the links available under "web extras" on the left side of the page. The state links have statistics for each state.
Tom Mortenson of the Boys
Project has compiled a significant list of reports comparing boys to girls.
Report from the National Center for Education Statistics
This report presents the national results from the 1992, 1994, 1998, 2002 and 2005 reading assessments and from the 2005 mathematics assessment.
Report from the Program for International Student Assessment
Learning for Tomorrow's World – First Results
from PISA 2003 presents initial results from the PISA 2003 assessment. The
report goes well beyond an examination of the relative standing of countries in mathematics, science and reading. It also looks at a wider range
of educational outcomes that include students’ motivation to learn, their
beliefs about themselves and their learning strategies.
