NAEP shows Kentucky’s eighth graders aren’t making ANY!
Quite frankly, I was shocked.
With all the hype this week about Kentucky being the only state to show reading progress in both fourth and eighth grade in the new National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Reading Assessment results, I thought I could show you a graph that would project when we could expect to reach a 90 percent rate of reading proficiency for our eighth grade students.
Well, forget that.
You don’t have enough paper, or computer screen area, to print that out. What I found is that our rate of progress in teaching reading at the eighth grade level is so slow that at our current rate:
That’s right, several thousand years from now (Note: this is corrected from an earlier estimate)!
How can this be? Read on.
Look at this graph. It plots the percentage of Kentucky’s eighth grade students that scored at or above the NAEP “Proficient” level by year since the NAEP started reporting that information in 1998. The data comes straight from Table A-19 in the new 2009 NAEP Reading Report Card.
I used a standard statistical process called linear regression analysis to determine the formula for the best fit straight line that matches this data. The slope of that line rounded to three significant digits is only 0.0263. This is almost a perfectly flat line (This updated number adjusts a number in an earlier post to reflect use with a percentage point scale instead of a straight decimal proportion scale).
So, the NAEP data implies Kentucky averaged only a tiny, 0.0263 percentage point improvement in its proficiency rate each year between 1998 and 2009. It will take several thousand years at this miniscule rate of progress for us to get anywhere close to the kind of reading performance our eighth grade students need.
It gets worse.
Table A-19 in the NAEP report card also identifies proficiency rates for earlier years that are significantly different from the new, 2009 proficiency rate of 33 percent.
For Kentucky, only the 2007 rate is listed as statistically significantly different from the 2009 rate.
Most specifically: 
You haven’t been reading about that elsewhere, either. But, the truth is right there in the NAEP report, buried where even the US Secretary of Education apparently missed it.
So, here’s the bottom line for Kentucky:
All that progress we supposedly made in NAEP reading - it didn’t happen in eighth grade. Since 1998 we have made NO statistically significant improvement in our NAEP eighth grade reading performance.
By the way, this further supports my earlier post about the eighth grade scores where I looked at the results from Kentucky’s performance on the EXPLORE test for reading.
EXPLORE also showed flat performance even when the NAEP showed a five point jump up from 2007 to 2009.
Here’s another thought. Could it be that the statistical sampling errors in the NAEP are actually much larger than officially reported? That is a national issue I will be asking about.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
What Reading Progress????
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2 comments:
Projecting that 90% of students in any state will reach NAEP Proficiency by 4235 is an unrealistic projection.
NAEP’s policy definition of its "Proficient" achievement level is "competency over challenging subject matter" and is implicitly intended to be higher than grade-level performance (says Andrew Kolstad, Senior Technical Advisor, Assessment Division, National Center for Education Statistics, 2009).
Long before 90% of the students can perform at the B+ or higher level in the classroom and on standardized tests, grade-level expecations will be raised so what now earns a student a B+/A- grade will then earn only a C-/C+.
Anonymous March 28 at 5:50PM raises an issue that has been debated across the nation -- are the NAEP Achievement Level standards simply too high?
I don't think so, and one of my previous blogs about the new NAEP reading results provides some evidence to support that.
Go back and look at "Kentucky’s 2009 NAEP reading performance – is it credible?" at http://bluegrasspolicy-blog.blogspot.com/2010/03/kentuckys-2009-naep-reading-performance.html.
There I compare Kentucky's recent eighth grade reading proficiency rates from the NAEP to the percentage of students reaching the EXPLORE test's reading Benchmark score. EXPLORE Benchmarks are designed to tell us if kids are on track for postsecondary education studies.
Notice in the graph in the referenced blog that the percentages are generally about equal. In other words, NAEP eighth grade reading "Proficient" performance corresponds pretty well to what it takes to get an EXPLORE score at or above the reading Benchmark.
Currently, there is growing consensus that our schools need to get kids ready for postsecondary education. We hear that from Kentucky's education and governmental leaders and even the President of the United States. I think they are right, given the direction of the global economy. So, we need test results that tell us if that goal is being achieved. I think both the EXPLORE and NAEP probably are doing at least a fair job in that area.
So, despite what school appologists like Anonymous try to claim, it looks like NAEP's Proficient score for reading is not badly set.
And, the fact that both EXPLORE and NAEP tell us about the same thing, that only about one out of three eighth graders has adequate reading skills, says we need to stop with the denials and excuses and buckle down to help the other two thirds of our kids achieve what one third of our students shows is not an impossible accomplishment.
One more point: Anonymous' grade level discussion is just a red herring. Of course NAEP Proficient is set higher than current grade-level performance. Current performance in our schools isn't adequate -- Kentucky's astonishingly high college remediation rates settles that argument. And, I am glad that the NAEP Proficient score is more demanding than our average performance today. It definitely needs to be that way.
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