There is good news, bad news, and troubling nonsense associated with the 2003 big-city NAEP results (for 4th and 8th grade reading and math) released yesterday by the Department of Education. The good news is that ten major urban school systems are willingly participating in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, allowing their results to be held up for public inspection, and submitting to comparisons of results that can be harsh as well as revealing. Kudos to the Council of the Great City Schools for brokering this development, and to NAEP and the Education Department (and Congress) for - finally - enabling these important assessments to report student achievement for units smaller than whole states. It's called the "trial urban district assessment" but let's hope it lasts and spreads. It would make infinitely more sense for everybody's school system to do this, or at least have the option of doing this, rather than tolerating the motley array of non-comparable state and local tests that are the norm today.
The bad, albeit unsurprising, news is that most students in most of these districts did poorly. In fourth grade math, for example, only in three of the ten jurisdictions did the percentage of kids scoring in NAEP's "proficient" range rise above the teens - and only in Charlotte did it surpass the national average. In 8th grade reading, at least two-fifths of students were "below basic" in seven cities and - again - only Charlotte equaled the national average. In the six lowest-scoring cities, the percentages of 8th graders reading at/above proficient were as follows: Chicago 15, Houston 14, Atlanta 11, Los Angeles 11, District of Columbia 10, Cleveland 10.
What this shows is that attaining the goals of NCLB in these districts is akin to crossing the Grand Canyon. Daunting though that is, for most education observers and policy makers it's hardly unexpected. Everybody knows that America faces a huge challenge in getting all its children to proficiency and that big-city school systems face an unusually tough version of this challenge. (It may be worth looking into how Charlotte produced its relatively strong results.)
Meeting that challenge in U.S. metropolises calls for heroic action on many fronts. Why, then, is the chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board saying something different? As an architect of the Texas education reforms that are the prototype for NCLB itself, NAGB head Darvin M. Winick is a veteran test-score analyst and widely respected for his sagacity. But his statement accompanying the release of these data was worse than spin; it's a (modest) setback for education reform in urban America. And its determinism smacks of unfortunate double standards for kids.
Winick asserted, first, that "The perception that students in urban schools do less well than others and have poor academic performance is not supported by the 2003 NAEP results." Wrong. Their academic performance, by and large, is horrendous. And (except in Charlotte) they do markedly less well than other students, if the national average is a reasonable proxy for "others." Why would anyone, much less a key education ally of the Bush administration, want to encourage complacency in America's big-city school districts at the very moment they need to try harder than ever to make painful reforms? (Education Secretary Rod Paige, by contrast, spoke of the "truly worrisome" achievement gap revealed by these data and an "abysmal" problem in some of these cities.)
Winick turned next to the disaggregation of test results by race, noting that, in several cities, white, black, and Hispanic youngsters "meet or exceed national averages" for students of the same race. True - and instructive to know that urban school kids do not do worse than same-race children elsewhere. That means their situation is not hopeless, merely bleak. But then he made this misguided (if technically accurate) assertion: "When demographics and family economics are considered, students in the participating urban districts, on the average, are not too different from other students across the nation. The common perception that students in urban public schools do not achieve is not supported by the NAEP results."
The fact is that huge numbers of urban (as well as non-urban!) students in America today are NOT achieving anywhere near satisfactorily, and THAT ought to be the main point made by the chairman of NAGB - as by Rod Paige and almost every other analyst of these data. Moreover, at a time when the foremost policy goal of NCLB and most states and districts is to close race-related achievement gaps, it is bizarre to settle for academic outcomes adjusted for "demographics and family economics." Such a statement implies that poor and minority kids mustn't be expected to attain proficiency and we should somehow be content if the poor and minority kids in our big cities do as well (i.e. as poorly) as similar kids elsewhere in the land.
Troubling indeed.
"2003 Trial Urban District Assessment," http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/reading/results2003/districtresults.asp (Reading)
http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/mathematics/results2003/districtresults.asp (Math)
"Statement by board chairman Darvin Winick" (click on "NAEP 2003 Trial Urban District Results," then on Winick's statement)
"Reading, math scores poor," by Ben Feller, Washington Times, December 17, 2003
"Student performance not tied to urban setting, study suggests," by Michael Dobbs, Washington Post, December 18, 2003
