"(Common Core) standards alone don’t make for better education. (California, for example, has had impressive academic standards for years, and yet its student performance remains weak.) Standards just describe a desirable destination. Getting there demands good schools, too, with competent teachers, hard-working students, attentive parents, and a solid curriculum."
Checker Finn
President, Thomas Fordham Institute
California's current academic standards long have been admired; they have influenced many other states, and Achieve used California's standards to establish its own when developing its academic benchmarks for the American Diploma Project.
Yet, as Checker Finn so aptly point out, strong standards do not (automatically) produce strong academic results. It's an important point and question as the state deliberates of the Common Core standards. One hopes that policymakers consider carefully the strengths of California's current standards-based system as well as areas in need of improvement. Today, we focus on a specific area of communications and transparency.
One specific area worthy of consideration is the relationship between California's standards-based assessment system and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The federal No Child Left Behind (the 2002 version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act) legislation called for more transparency in reporting student, school, district, and state academic achievement. That's good. But the execution left much to be desired.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has succinctly explained the problem: NCLB had things backward; it provided a narrow approach to learning and achievement for states that could then measure their progress against their self-defined target. There was no comparability. Conversely, what schools need is flexibility in working towards a commonly understood academic target.
Against this backdrop, researchers have increasingly looked at NAEP as the most useable measuring stick to tie together performance across states. Of course, there are many caveats to doing so; California long has tested a more diverse population than other states, especially with its English learners. But there is also no denying that California's overall achievement on NAEP---particularly in 4th grade Reading and Math and 4th grade Math (California does not have a uniform 8th grade math curriculum so the state's students do not take the NAEP 8th grade Math test)--is low.
Let's focus on the 2009 Reading test as an example. Here's how California measured up against the national average and against Massachusetts, the highest performing state:
California National Average Massachusetts
4th 210 220 232
8th 253 262 274
To provide some context, the scale scores indicate that California's students are performing somewhere between one and two grade levels below students in Massachusetts. That's not okay.
But the situation in comparing our state's efforts to NAEP is, in practice, far more complex. So let's now turn for a moment to comparing California's stated learning objective all students--Proficiency as measured by the student's performance on the California Standards Test--against NAEP.
To return to the shortcomings of NCLB, strong evidence that states were truly establishing 50 different performance targets is revealed by comparing each state's proficiency target (as translated into a NAEP scale score) to the NAEP proficiency target. Ideally, one would see a strong correlation between the two so that each state's internal dialog on student learning and achievement matches that of the Nation's Report Card.
Here's what recent NAEP studies reveal. Now, recall this is a reflection not of student performance but rather:
When states’ standards are placed onto the NAEP reading or mathematics scales, the
level of achievement required for proficient performance in one state can then be compared with
the level of achievement required in another state. This allows one to compare the standards for
proficiency across states.
Check out this link (see pages 17 and 20) to see how California ranks under these conditions:
http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pdf/studies/2010456.pdf
Now, the rigor of California's system puts the state in the top ten, and even higher in mathematics.
The point is this: there is a lot that's wrong in California public schools, and adopting the Common Core is a fresh start and commitment to ensuring that each student is afforded a chance for success in higher education and careers. But thought must go into preserving what's been successful as well. Thanks to the work of many in this state--the Public School Accountability Act Committee, California Department of Education leadership and staff, the State Board of Education, and governors and the Legislature--institutionalizing rigorous performance expectations has, and will continue to, serve the state well.
This is truly a transparency and communications issue. NAEP performance does not lie; but it's not a complete picture. The missing link is that California has established some important benchmarks for student learning and achievement that are reasonably aligned to those in NAEP. Consequently, unlike some states that report dramatically high levels of proficiency on their state assessments and dramatically low performance on NAEP, California's is far more consistent (but unfortunately, consistently low). It is highly likely that an assessment system built from the Common Core can continue this strong statement by the state.
Tomorrow, and leading up to next week's meeting of the Academic Standards Commission, we begin in-depth explorations of the Common Core English/Language Arts and Mathematics standards.
