Posted on 04/28/2008 11:38:52 AM PDT by GoldwaterInstitute
Non-Alignment of Standards Not Culprit for Low Scores
By Matthew Ladner, Ph.D
Recently I appeared on the Horizon public affairs program together with State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, to discuss the No Child Left Behind law and our state AIMS test.
During the discussion, Superintendent Horne said the main reason Arizona students perform poorly on the national NAEP test, also known as the Nation's Report Card, is due to a non-alignment of standards. If, for example, Arizona does not teach the math concepts in fourth grade that appear on the fourth grade math NAEP, one could expect lower average grades.
The explanation seems quite plausible, and doubtlessly there are some states that have better aligned their standards to NAEP than others. But how big a deal is this, in terms of Arizona's performance? As a study done by the American Institute of Research shows, not much.
The study compared international science scores for eighth graders to eighth grade NAEP science scores. Singapore came in first, with 55 percent of students ranked as "proficient" or above. Massachusetts was the highest-performing U.S. state, with 41 percent proficient. Just 20 percent of Arizona eighth grades ranked proficient.
Alignment error ought to be much greater between nations than between American states. Furthermore, one would be hard pressed to buy into the notion that countries such as Singapore, Korea, Estonia, Hungary, and Slovakia simply have national standards more closely aligned to the American NAEP test than Arizona.
When we get clobbered in science proficiency by countries like Estonia, we have problems that go much deeper than standards alignment.
Nation (or State) 8th Grade Science Scores Percent Scoring "Proficient" or Above Nation (or State) 8th Grade Science Scores Percent Scoring "Proficient" or Above
Singapore 55 Taipei 52 South Korea 45 Hong Kong 44 Japan 42 Estonia 41 Massachusetts 41 England 38 Hungary 38 Netherlands 31 Australia 30 Sweden 28 New Zealand 26 Slovakia 26 Lithuania 25 Slovenia 24 Russia 24 Scotland 24 Belgium 22 Latvia 21 Malaysia 20 Arizona 20 Israel 18 Bulgaria 17 Italy 17 Norway 15 Romania 14 Serbia 12
Dr. Matthew Ladner is vice president of research at the Goldwater Institute.
These people come from universities where they usually had the lowest SAT scores and would not have earned any degree if they had not gone for a teaching degree.
Our entire education establishment is predicated on job retention and deliberately hiring the dumbest people to keep them beholding to the teachers unions and their overpaid hierarchy.
Also, it is easier to lead a bunch of ignorant people (our students and current graduates) around by the nose than to lead people who have been taught to think for themselves and have been given the tools to do so.
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