Ask me no questions

Under NCLB, many of the states have been lying about their drop-out rates. Big surprise - the law left them the unchecked latitude to fudge their "mandatory" statistics.

It's very easy to find out the percentage in an age cohort who have diplomas. Count 'em, which you can do well enough without a census using births and life expectancies. Divide that number by the total number of diplomas issued. If these numbers are far off from graduation rates, someone's reporting bullshit.

This has been a lie that everyone was happy to leave hidden in plain sight. Fortunately, no more.

The number one education crisis in this country is not what schools teach the kids who stay. It's what schools don't teach the kids who leave. Our high school graduation rates are poor, and our college graduation rates - once the world's highest - are slipping well back into the pack.

This is why we're not prepared for the 21st century. The old saw says that a job is the best social welfare program, but the jobs you can get without an education often don't qualify.

When something unfair succeeds

The statistical targets in No Child Left Behind are absurd on their face. Steady improvement forever cannot happen, and expecting it is unfair.

However, I have to admit that the federal threat to sanction school systems for poor performance has stimulated significant progress and creativity. The very act of paying attention socially and politically has paid dividends that previous testing regimes (NAEP, for example) did not provide.

So, maybe I need to eat a little crow and reconsider some of my opinions. Maybe fairness is not a vital aspect of the shared goal of bringing everyone forward educationally. On the other hand, the Massachusetts Ed Reform Act of 1993 brought not just the MCAS but also new state funding to local districts, where NCLB did not, and that's one reason that Massachusetts scores first or second of all states on the NAEP.

It is still true that standardized testing is more limiting than a mythical true measure of educational success. But it works at the low end as a gross measure of progress, and that's where America has its greatest educational challenges.

This reminds me a bit of the basic skills movement in the 1970s. Even though the thinking behind that movement was simplistic and tended to dumb down the curriculum, it provoked public school systems to try at least to give their students those foundational abilities. And it did raise minority achievement.

Perhaps the best way to improve our urban public schools is to focus new programs on them periodically, and maybe the focus matters more than what exactly the ideology is. Of course, do this too often and someone's bound to resort to marketing to respond to a real problem. Oh, yeah, already happened - vouchers.

Update: It's statistically astute to start with the lowest achievers. Helping them can do the most to your average scores. But you'd better start young, and Boston has.

Looking for the cloud

Stories on testing of school children hardly ever give a full and fair picture. In this case, the reporter James Vaznis finds something wrong with the increase in MCAS scores in 2007.

The something is racial and ethnic disparities, and that is indeed a persistent problem. What Vaznis doesn't tell us until after the jump is that the long-standing disparity also improved. So I guess the bad news that every test score story must by journalistic convention include is that we don't live in heaven on earth.

Vaznis doesn't provide a socioeconomic breakdown of the MCAS data, but then the state doesn't provide it. There are privacy concerns of course. However, Vaznis could have looked at income averages and correlated them with average test scores. That might not be good enough for a peer-reviewed journal, but it would be good enough for a newspaper. In fact, I did it almost ten years ago for a local weekly.

There's a strong correlation between wealth and test scores, and it explains part of the ethnic and racial disparities. Of course, that explanation is only an explanation, not an excuse to do nothing. If we really want to be a classless society, we've got to educate our poor people well, or we doom social mobility. No real 'if' - the middle class nation we had forty years ago has been under persistent and successful attack from the right with little defense from the left.

Another bit of context missing from this story, as from most Boston Globe stories on test scores, is the fact that Massachusetts and Connecticut students are duking out for number one in the nation on nationally normed tests. The only fair conclusion is that our NCLB-mandated testing is much harder than, say, the similar testing done in Florida and Texas and put in place by two of the worst Bushist governors, Duhbya and Jeb.

One last point (and then pencils down!): The summaries shown here indicate that the 10th grade math test is too easy to tell the difference between really good math students and merely mediocre ones. This is the real standard that NCLB has set, and it encourages dumbing down the test. All the other distributions look reasonably normal, so far as I can tell from such coarse data.