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Where’s All the Writing Improvement?
By Richard
Innes of the
Bluegrass Institute
Kentucky
Tonight just held a discussion of the pending CATS Task Force that will be
looking at the state’s public school assessment program. It was three educators
against our friend Martin Cothran from the Family Foundation, so the educators
were outnumbered.
One item the educators brought up repeatedly was how much improvement they have
seen in writing. That’s just more evidence our educators see too much in too
little, so I called in to the show to share the latest results on eighth grade
writing from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). I thought
you might like to know about that, too.
The NAEP 2007 Writing Report Card says Kentucky’s eighth graders made no
statistically significant change in writing performance between 2002 and 2007.
That’s half a decade of flat performance.
The 2007 NAEP proficiency rate for our eighth graders was only 26 percent – just
one of four Kentucky kids scored proficient for writing. That was a
statistically insignificant change from the 25 percent proficiency reported in
2002. In fact, since 1998, a decade ago, the NAEP eighth grade writing
proficiency rate in Kentucky has only gone up 5 points – but there is a catch.
While posting its miniscule score improvement between 1998 and 2007, Kentucky’s
exclusion rate for students with learning disabilities shot up faster than
anywhere else in the country, rising from two to six percent of the entire NAEP
raw sample of students. This big increase probably means most, if not all, of
the tiny writing score rise since 1998 is an illusion. Scores look a bit better
if you simply prevent a lot more of your weakest kids from taking the test.
By the way, over that same period, the CATS said our middle school kids
“on-demand” writing sample, which was collected in a manner similar to the sort
of testing conditions the NAEP uses, exploded from just 5.92 percent proficient
to 42 percent proficient. So, CATS went from being graded far too hard to being
graded much easier than the NAEP. That’s just perfect if you are an education
person trying to make yourself look good.
It’s terrible if you are a member of the public searching for the truth about
how schools are really doing.
And, all of this shows how CATS just confuses educators and the public alike.
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