RAND Education
2004
The Carnegie Corporation of New York paid for this detailed RAND study of adolescent reading and writing achievement in the U.S. (It's part of a big Carnegie adolescent-literacy initiative that you can read more about here.) While basic decoding skills are slowly improving in the early grades, "many children are not moving beyond . . . to fluency and comprehension." The RAND team sought to explicate this by examining how well 4th-12th graders are meeting state literacy goals as measured by state tests; how well they're meeting national goals as evidenced by NAEP; and to what extent are state tests and NAEP results consistent? This inquiry leads, inter alia, to "major concerns about the ability of states to meet the ambitious goal set by NCLB of 100-percent proficiency." In many places, lots of kids are far from proficient judged by the state's own standards. Expectations vary widely from state to state, often set well below NAEP's definition of "proficient." Most troubling to the researchers and (one hopes) to the rest of us, once one gets above the primary grades in most schools, nobody is really responsible for teaching literacy skills as such. That surely helps explain why our kids are not doing very well - and why staying on the present course does not give great grounds for optimism about the prospects of NCLB, at least in the middle and upper grades. The press release can be found here. There's a short "research brief" here. And the 468-page report (the first 70 or so pages are general findings, the rest are state-specific report cards) appears here.
"Teens unlikely to meet reading goal, RAND report warns," by Kathleen Kennedy Manzo, Education Week, January 5, 2005
