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Measurement Of Gap Complicated By Myriad Of Tests
By Anika Myers Palm
Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies
ORLANDO, Fla. - Every Saturday during the school year, about 30 college students, engineers, lawyers and other professionals gather at 8:30 a.m. in a downtown church building here.
By 8:45 a.m., their purpose becomes clear as dozens of elementary school-age children run into the room. The program is called Outreach Love. The adults in the room provide academic support to the students, who all are black or Hispanic. The students come from Parramore, one of Orlando’s toughest and poorest neighborhoods.
Some have parents in jail, some live in homeless shelters - and all have been recommended by their teachers as students who need “a little extra push.”
The tutors back up what the teachers tell them in school and reinforce the lessons with fun, games and extra work, said Don Madden, the director of the program.
In one corner of the room, a tutor uses flash cards to drill a recalcitrant fourth-grader on her multiplication tables, while in another a tutor and student rotate a globe, naming continents. Throughout the room, tutors are giving individualized attention to students in similar scenarios.
Absenteeism is rare, Madden said. The kids love the program – although it effectively amounts to a sixth day of schooling for them each week.
Madden and others hope the children’s dedication will soon show up on paper.
Part of the reason Outreach Love exists is to make sure the students have a leg up when it comes to standardized tests such as the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, which is given to students in grades 3 to 11 annually to track their performance in mathematics, reading, science and writing.
“It is the first real-world consequence for poor academic habits they experience, but it certainly wouldn’t be the last if they don’t correct the bad habits,” Madden said. “Better to learn in the fourth grade that you aren’t working up to grade, than to discover only after high school when there are real-world consequences.”
But even with loads of attention to the test and the work of groups like Outreach Love, educators and policymakers in Florida wrangle over why black and Hispanic students continue to score poorly on the FCAT.
Just 34 percent of black 10th-graders earned passing scores on the FCAT reading exam on the first try this past year, according to data from the Florida Department of Education.
And black boys, particularly in elementary school, actually fail the FCAT more than any other demographic. In some Florida counties, as many as two of three black boys fail the test in third grade.
Florida isn’t the only place where this happens.
Federal statistics indicate that black and Latino students, irrespective of income, score lower on standardized tests than white and Asian students. By kindergarten, black students nationally already perform at lower rates than their white counterparts.
The achievement gap can be measured in a number of ways: grades, scores on standardized tests, ability tracking and high school- and college-completion rates.
Most often, though, it is quantified in terms of how students score on standardized tests, which, perhaps, is part of the problem.
Most states have their own versions of the tests. In Florida, it’s the FCAT. Across the country in California, it’s the California High School Exit Exam.
However, because each state has different metrics, it’s often difficult to make comparisons. And while the public debate rages about improving the way black students score on the tests, little research and attention go to recalibrating the tests themselves.
“It depends on why you’re comparing and for what purpose,” said Kathy Williams, a retired Wisconsin teacher and editor of the book, Failing Our Kids: Why the Testing Phase Won’t Fix Schools.
“If you want to know so you can direct resources to assist or alleviate discrepancies, that’s one thing. But if you want to know so you can sort students or group them, that gets more complicated,” she said.
Education consultant James E. Ray, a former Michigan school district superintendent, agreed.
“No ‘one’ assessment tool can provide us with all we need to know about a child’s performance or ability to learn,” he said. “High-stakes testing has altered the way schools now assess and look at outcomes. What gets lost in this, as a result of No Child Left Behind legislation, is that you find schools not engaging students in the deeper learning, more cognitive aspects of learning.”
Still, many jurisdictions continue to shape their own versions of the scholastic tests. States and school districts, for instance, contract with companies such as Harcourt Assessment to design the tests according to the buyers’ specifications. Committees comprising teachers, educational consultants and government officials review the tests to determine whether the material is grade- and age-appropriate, according to the Department of Education.
Once completed, schools send the exams away to testing companies such as CTB/McGraw Hill, which are responsible for scoring the tests and sending the data back to school districts, schools and parents.
Some testing shows that black students are on average three years behind white students by eighth grade, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
Further, NAEP reading tests show that black 17-year-olds read only as well as white 13-year-olds. In math, just 13 percent of black fourth-graders were proficient at NAEP math tests, compared with 47 percent of their white counterparts.
Graduation rates also reflect what academics and policymakers have come to call the “achievement gap”: Just more than 80 percent of blacks graduate from high school, compared with more than 90 percent of whites.
And it’s getting worse. Federal Department of Education figures show that the achievement gap did not shrink during the 1990s. The problem has grown so glaring that federal officials are advancing their own techniques and proposals for measuring and reducing the gap, even though their plans must be implemented at state and local levels.
Officials and educators alike, in an attempt to find ways to improve minority students’ scores, have indeed turned to questioning the tests themselves.
Through the late 1960s, researchers were unable to come to a conclusion about whether standardized and intelligence tests were biased against minority students. The opposition to those tests then turned social. By 1969, the Association of Black Psychologists said it supported parents who declined to allow their children to submit to the tests.
That resistance to testing and labeling would continue to grow. In 1998, a Journal of Higher Education article frequently referenced by researchers summarized decades of research to conclude that standardized tests are poor indicators of black students’ academic performance.
Governmental officials still didn’t buy it.
In 2001, as President George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind program - his own solution to the achievement gap and other perceived problems in American education – he lamented what he called the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” suggesting that holding all students to high standards would lift test scores.
It was then that pundits - conservative and liberal alike - began to suggest that in taking on this problem, Bush might cement his legacy as a president who put the education of the nation’s children first.
In October of that year, he told a Florida audience in Fort Myers, “We passed the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, meaningful education reforms to bring high standards to our classrooms and to make schools more accountable to our parents. We’re making progress. Math and reading scores are rising.
“We’re closing an achievement gap by helping all students,” he said. “We will build on these reforms. We will extend them to our high school so that no child is left behind in America.”
Bush’s brother, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, said at that time that his state’s testing program, FCAT, was more efficient than NCLB. Both programs continue to show a large achievement gap between minorities and students of other ethnicities.
Four years later, in the same county where the president gave his speech, Florida Department of Education figures showed that just 21 percent of 11th-grade minority students met or exceeded grade-level expectations in science, 61 percent of 10th-graders met or exceeded expectations in math and 29 percent of 10th-graders met or exceeded in reading. In comparison, the numbers for non-minority students were 40 percent, 81 percent and 51 percent, respectively.
By every metric, minority students continue to lag behind their white counterparts.
Bush wasn’t the first president to think he had a solution to the problem. Former President Bill Clinton lauded the Teach for America program, which started as the thesis of Princeton student Wendy Koop, who proposed that an army of recent college graduates be sent into the nation’s schools with the aim of throwing so many bodies at the nation’s troubled schools that the achievement gap would drop by means of sheer effort.
The program started with 500 teachers. Today it has more than 3,000.
And yet, despite programs such as Teach for America and Outreach Love, and attempts to obliterate it by requiring high standards of all students, the achievement gap still exists.
So now, the questions remain: Why do black students’ test scores consistently place them at the bottom of the class? And how can they get closer to the top?
Again, some experts suggest scrutinizing the testing system.
“All tests should be valid and reliable and based on rigorous standards,” said education consultant Ray. “The current variation of state exams - when compared to one another and collectively juxtaposed against the National Assessment education test - leaves a lot to be desired.
“A state can’t say it is doing well and achieving (adequate yearly progress) goals when wide variations exist between the tests they respectively administer and the NAEP exam,” Ray said.
Anika Myers Palm is a reporter for The Orlando Sentinel
Index of Black-White Achievement Gap Stories |
