I posted all of these earlier in the year. I’m just going to leave them here.
Pursuant to the preceding:
(source: NCELA)
(source: National Center for Education Statistics)
by Freddie deBoer| 27 Comments
This post is in: Education
I posted all of these earlier in the year. I’m just going to leave them here.
Pursuant to the preceding:
(source: NCELA)
(source: National Center for Education Statistics)
Comments are closed.
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[…] is being done in the name of “saving their children.” It’s about recognizing that there is no crisis in public education that cannot be solved by teachers and administrators working together rather than one trying to […]
Villago Delenda Est
I like the colors. They’re pretty!
What’s this shit about the dropout rate trending down for everyone? How can that possibly be? The teachers’ unions still exist!
Soonergrunt
I presume that all of that means something. I’m just a dumb grunt though, so could somebody enlighten me briefly?
Thanks!
Gin & Tonic
@Soonergrunt: More people are finishing more school, and kids are doing better (although not so much in reading.)
Dennis SGMM
@Soonergrunt:
Thank you for asking the question. I humped an M60A1 when I could have gone to OCS. That makes me a White Hat in the Navy of life, Some of this stuff goes right over my head.
Villago Delenda Est
The first two sets of graphs seem to indicate that some basic scores of learning are going up over time, but what you can’t see is how the tests themselves have been altered over that period.
So, while the graphs indicate improvement, they could also indicate grade inflation. If the scores are measured in “baseline” tests (the way you measure things in say 1970 dollars, to adjust for inflation) then you’ve got a good trend going, for sure.
Brachiator
No, most people like their arguments in coherent form.
Are the first graphs using moving averages? What are “accommodations”? Why not use a log scale for the x axis to show variance more clearly? Average scores are rising in relation to what? What is considered a good score, or one that represents clear mastery or some reasonable standard of achievement?
Nationally, in the aggregate, students appear to be doing well. Now what? How does this relate to any particular city or local school district?
Teachers complain that they are forced to change their methods to teach to standardized tests, and that this blunts efforts to provide real education. So, we learn here that test scores are looking good. But, Iz ar childrunds lerning?
The dropout rates chart is interesting, but absolutely meaningless with respect to, for example, the Los Angeles Unified School District and surrounding cities with large Latino populations.
The graphs are a start, not an argument.
Monala
I assume “accommodations” means things they allow students with disabilities to do to enable them to demonstrate their learning: for example, taking the test orally, or having more time to complete it.
Mandalay
@Soonergrunt:
The graphs are answering the question: is our children learning?
And the answer is that they are getting good at sums, but reading not so much. Dog whistle interpolation of the data points shows that the browns are a major cause of the problem, and voluntary deportation should solve the problem. Mitt is addressing that, and Newt also working on the forced repatriation of the blacks. Finally Rahm is abolishing teachers unions.
Collectively these actions will give us much fewer lines on the graphs, and they will become much easier to read.
Glad to help.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mandalay:
WIN!
Soonergrunt
Thank you all.
Or something like that.Suffern Ace
@Villago Delenda Est: Nope. The scandals have been on the state tests. The Naep is fine.
The reason these graphs are important is that they make the common assertion that our school are failing questionable. That assertion is central to the current school reform (union busting) scam. You will never see these graphs published in our major newspapers or cited by our major columnists when discussing education reform.
This is similar to the charts showing how much more per capita that the us spends on healthcare. You won’t see those until after the debate is over.
Anyway I’m probably the only one who still reads somerby on a regular basis. But if liberals would just fucking read somerby on education, social security and healthcare, they would not be so inarticulate when discussing these issues. We should as liberals put pressure on our own side to take these discussions seriously since the debates are being driven by phony controversys and not facts.
Whatever. It’s not like these things matter.
binkwithoutgolly
I prefer mine in graf form.
Joel
I assume the english learners graph is there to explain why the reading scores haven’t improved?
Villago Delenda Est
@Or something like that.Suffern Ace:
Well, you see, you have no way to know any of that from just looking at the graphs.
To accept them as they are, without that underlying knowledge, is not really helpful.
However, you just provided information that we didn’t have before that assists in understanding.
So there you go.
Or something like that.Suffern Ace
@Villago Delenda Est: To interpret the graphs – And 8th graders are doing about two grade levels better in math than they were in 1990. That is a tremendous improvement actually. Reading has been flat, but does that mean it is failing?
NA
Lovely!
aldisney
@Brachiator: Actually, the graphs are a prop, not an argument. And given that the poster can’t seem to fix the formatting, they’re a pretty amateur attempt.
goblue72
@aldisney: love the website – you do it yourself? was it your graduation project from your correspondence school?
Some Loser
I honestly do not know the purpose of this post. Kids today are less dumb than kids yesterday? You like to make graphs?
It’d be nice if you put a bit more context to these things, deBoer.
greennotGreen
My comment is based on an anecdote. Several years ago, a friend’s son was doing his math homework. He was in the ninth grade at a public magnet school. I asked him about his problems, and it turned out he was doing math that I had learned in the seventh grade at a public school twenty years earlier. These NAEP graphs don’t start till 1990, so I still don’t know what they mean over the long haul.
lou
@Villago Delenda Est:
National Assessment of Educational Progress is pretty rigorous in its methodology. It randomly samples U.S. students. It’s not a high-stakes test. So grade inflation is unlikely.
I think it would be telling to also include the breakdown by race. Yeah, correlation is not causation, yadayada, but it’s pretty striking that the racial achievement gap was rapidly closing until the mid-1980s. Let’s see, what social policies met the wrecking ball about that time? hmmmm. So many.
Here’s one: BEOG and grants that helped black mothers get college educations (the number of black women achieving college degrees was rapidly climbing in the 60s and 70s too. That stopped in the 80s). And anyone can tell you the strongest correlation to achievement in school is a mother’s education.
dave
@Villago Delenda Est:
What Lou said. Also, the whole purpose of the NAEP is to measure student achievement over time so the test is designed to remain stable regarding difficulty.
That is why this test is called “the Gold standard” by everyone on all sides of the education issue. Funny enough, the data within the NAEP never gets cited in the MSM the way it has been done here (which shows that achievement has gone up despite an influx of non-english speaking students.) It is usually only cited to complain about the racial achievement gap (which still persists because BOTH black and white students have made substantial gains).
In fact, black forth graders today score better than white forth graders did in 1992. This means that if you are over thirty, current black forth graders know more than you did when you were in fourth grade.
dave
@greennotGreen:
Why don’t you go to the NAEP website (its very interactive) and look it up for yourself. You will see that student achievement has been improving since as far back as the 1970s.
Its funny how people who feel perfectly comfortable claiming, without any evidence, that public schools are getting worse feel the need to nitpick any data presented which shows the opposite and are unwilling to do the (very minimal) work to inform themselves.
Neldob
how do we read Somerby?
stinger
Although Mandalay has nailed the “popular” interpretation, my takeaway is that math scores have improved substantially and, despite increasing numbers of learners for whom English is not their first language, even reading scores have improved slightly. Therefore, education and public schools are not in crisis as is so often claimed by people who want to
extinguishmake a buck off them.