Thursday, October 15, 2009

 

The Columbus Dispatch

 

Jennifer Smith Richards

 

 

Ohio’s state tests say more than 78 percent of fourth-graders are proficient in math. A highly regarded national test says it’s more like 45 percent.

 

The disparity also exists in eighth grade where, as in the fourth grade, Ohio students’ performance on the National Assessment of Education Progress in math remains unchanged since 2005. In Ohio, 36 percent of eighth-graders are proficient in math on the national exam, also called the Nation’s Report Card.

 

But by the state yardstick, the Ohio Achievement Test, 70.6 percent are proficient.

 

The new data released yesterday again highlight the difference between Ohio’s version of proficient and what is considered proficient on the national exam. That could be because the exams measure different things.

 

It also could be that state standards aren’t as stringent as those measured by the national exam. Some proponents of more robust state standards say Ohio’s academic requirements are too lax.

“They are different tests with different functions. I understand where it may be confusing to try to look at them and say, ‘The numbers are so different, how can that be?’  ” said Scott Blake, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Education.

 

What’s considered proficient on the NAEP and what Ohio considers proficient are different, he said, although they use the same terminology. The national exam’s “basic” performance level matches Ohio’s “proficient,” he said. Ohio has five performance levels ranging from limited to advanced. The national test has three levels: basic, proficient and advanced.

 

Stuart Kerachsky, acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, agreed that it’s not fair to equate the two proficiency levels.

 

But, he said, when a state has lower passage rates on the NAEP, you “can’t really escape a conclusion that low performance on NAEP is a signal that there is a problem in a state that has to be examined very carefully and has to be addressed.”

 

The national center is the statistical arm of the U.S. Department of Education that administers the NAEP.

 

A representative sample of 330,500 students from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Department of Defense schools took the math exam earlier this year. District-by-district results aren’t released.

 

While Ohio students have a higher average score than students nationwide and those scores are better than they were in the early 1990s, there has been little improvement in the fourth or eighth grades since 2005.

 

Nationally, fourth-graders showed no improvement since the last math test was given in 2007, ending a steady climb since 1990. But eighth-graders improved slightly since the 2007 test, moving from a score of 281 to 283 on a scale of 0 to 500.

 

National and state education officials said yesterday that they were particularly troubled that the gap in scores between white and black students and also between students who receive free and reduced-price lunches and those who don’t had not closed at all, in some cases since the 1990s. Free and reduced-price lunches generally are an indication of poverty.

 

There has been no significant change in the gap between Ohio’s white and black fourth- or eighth-graders for roughly a decade. Nationwide, the white-black gap is smaller than it was in 1990 in the fourth grade, but no smaller than it was in 2007.

 

Education experts gathered in Columbus last week to talk about the need for more-rigorous content standards.

 

“To have 30 percent of the youngsters proficient on the NAEP and 70 percent on a state assessment is a huge disservice to students,” Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, said at the conference. His group of state school superintendents has helped create a set of academic standards in math and language arts so that states can standardize what students should know at each grade level.

 

Ohio is revamping its standards now, and education officials have said they will use those core standards.

 

Higher standards would force better instruction, some experts say, and would result in more-prepared (and more internationally competitive) students.

 

jsmithrichards@dispatch.com