That's my take on the new Marcus Winters/Jay Greene/Julie Trivitt study on the impact of high-stakes testing on low-stakes subjects in Florida. According to its executive summary, the study examined whether labeling schools with an "F" motivated them to increase learning in science, even though it didn't "count" in the Sunshine State's accountability system:
-- The F-grade sanction produced after one year a gain in student science proficiency of about a 0.08 standard deviation. These gains are similar to those in reading and appear smaller than the gains in math that were due to the F sanction.--There is some evidence to suggest that student science proficiency increased primarily because student learning in math and reading enabled that increase. That is, learning in math and reading appear to contribute to learning in science.
That sounds reasonable enough to me, though Eduwonkette wants to see all the technical details to know whether the methodology stands up. (I'm not smart enough to figure that out; that's why we have Amber!)
My beef is with the study's pre-release spin. The Greene Machine directly juxtaposes its paper with statements by our own Checker Finn (who wrote in National Review Online last year that he worried about "a narrowing curriculum that sacrifices history, art, and literature on the altar of reading and math skills") and trustee Diane Ravitch (who co-chairs Common Core, an organization concerned about subjects "neglected" by NCLB).
Both Checker's op-ed and Common Core grew out of Fordham's Beyond the Basics project. Its conference volume include a great paper by Brown University professor Martin West that finds that schools in states that test in science (or history) didn't narrow science (or history) out of the curriculum, even if those tests didn't "count" for accountability purposes. Meanwhile, schools in states without such tests did reduce time spent on those subjects-quite dramatically. Just having a test--even a low-stakes one--seems to be enough of an incentive for schools to keep their focus broad.
Greene et al's findings are consistent with West's. What would be interesting to know is whether Florida's "F" schools also raised achievement in a subject NOT tested by the state. (Of course, doing that study would be much more difficult because state test scores aren't available.)
The new study provides some helpful evidence that improving achievement in reading and math can improve achievement in science. But it certainly doesn't contradict other evidence that American schools are spending less time teaching non-tested subjects such as history. The last word on the "narrowing of the curriculum" this is not.
