You've been seeing plenty of headlines about the dismal scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test scores.
Despite the panic, the NAEP results have provided no clear answers about any of the things people want answers about. As we saw with the "little" NAEP results, there's no clear connection between school closings and dropped scores— staying open when other schools were closed did not produce any clear advantages. And in fact some score declines mirrored other pre-pandemic declines.
Add this on top of the usual caveats about the test. NAEP’s “proficient” is set considerably higher than grade level, as noted on the NAEP site. (This is a lesson that has to be relearned as often as NAEP scores are released.) Students who don’t achieve “proficient” are not “below grade level.” And when interpreting scores, NAEP is extraordinarily clear that folks should not try to suggest a causal relationship between scores and anything else. There are too many factors in play to point to any single factor as a clear cause.
But with all that said, folks are settling on the new scores as confirmation that U.S. students fell behind the levels they would have achieved had the pandemic not occurred. There is always danger in comparing real students in this world to imaginary students in some imaginary parallel universe, but we’ve been through a couple of years now ringing alarms on Learning Loss and a wide variety of solutions that folks would like to sell, and now many folks are worried about “recovery.”
We don’t truly know why scores are dipping, nor do we know for certain that dipped scores represent a real problem. But behind all the bluster and pearl clutching and red flag waving, we find real concern about how to help students make up lost time.
Some, like Dr. Martin West of Harvard Graduate School of Education, offer a simple solution—just make students spend more time in school. Longer days, longer school years, additional tutoring—these are fine solutions with just two shortcomings. One is that students can only sit in school so long before the law of diminishing returns kicks in. The other is that all of these extra hours, all these tutoring sessions, require competent staffing, and that staffing has to be found, recruited, and, perhaps most daunting of all, paid.
What could schools do to aid students that did not involve “extra”—extra expense, extra staff, extra time?
“Accelerated learning” has been mentioned, as if teachers have known all along the secret of teaching more stuff faster, but have for some reason chosen not to use that secret. This is not a serious solution.
The best solution is to make better use of the time schools already have.
Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute offered some ideas for how schools can “reclaim lost learning time.” Hess points to structural, operational and behavioral areas where instructional time is lost. This includes time lost to interruptions like early dismissals, time-consuming administrivia tasks, and working through behavioral disruption by students.
Hess’s ideas are good. In many U.S. schools, teachers spend large chunks of time on duties that are not directly related to their work, but at the same time keep them from getting more work done. Covering lunch periods, monitoring study halls, and completing paperwork (that nobody will ever look at) all eat into a teacher’s workday.
Teachers are given many balls to juggle; only some of them are actually related to teaching.
However, arguably no single factor is stealing more instructional time than high stakes testing. While many states have passed laws limiting the amount of time that may be spent on the annual Big Standardized Test, the actual test taking in the spring is only the tip of the iceberg. Many districts employ pre-testing multiple times in the year, as well as extensive test prep (particularly for those students identified as at risk for low scores).
The test prep itself drains much instructional time because it is aimed not so much at content and skills areas as it is aimed at “how to handle these forms of test questions,” a focus not on what the test will be about (which is typically unknowable) but on how to take this sort of test.
The spring positioning of the test also adds to a loss of instructional time. Scheduled for the spring and given a great deal of attention and emphasis, the Big Standardized Test feels to students like the end of the real school year. It interrupts what should be a final, climactic finish to a year’s worth of learning, sapping all momentum going into the last weeks of the year. Imagine you’re watching a movie, and twenty minutes from the end, you’re required to spend two hours watching advertisement before watching the final portion.
There is no single move that would better increase school instructional time than putting an end to high stakes testing requirements. Not only would it effectively and dramatically increase instructional time, but it would do so at zero additional cost. In fact, cutting testing expenses would save most districts money.
So if policy makers are concerned about increasing instruction and helping students “catch up” (without spending more money to do it), freeing up teacher hours so they can be spent on teaching is a viable solution, and nothing would help achieve that solution like taking high stakes testing out of the juggling routine.
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October 26, 2022 at 11:34PM
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Worried About Helping Students “Catch Up”? Here's How To Do It. - Forbes
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