Posted on 02/27/2007 8:30:38 AM PST by Reagan Fellow
The U.S. Department of Education released 12th grade NAEP scores last week and the results are discouraging.
Reading scores of 12th grade students have declined significantly since 1992. The percentage of high school seniors scoring “below basic” in reading increased from 20 to 27 percent between 1992 and 2005. During the same period, high school seniors scoring “proficient” in reading dropped 14 percent.
Separately, the Department released a study showing that since 1990, high school grade point averages are up across the country. Also, the percentage of students taking “college-prep” classes climbed from 40 to 68 percent. In addition, 12th graders in 2005 averaged 360 more hours of classroom instruction than their 1990 counterparts.
Despite all of that, the Class of 2005 performed worse on the NAEP than students in the early ‘90s. I’d like to remind you that Bill and Ted were students during that time…
Although the Department of Education did not mention it, inflation adjusted per pupil spending increased more than 20 percent between 1990 and 2002. It has increased even further since then.
As another famous Bill once said, it’s time for a change.
MORE Money....equals....LESS results.....DUH.
"If we don't raise our test scores, we lose money!"
"OK, let's ask easier questions - more people will pass - we'll keep our money!"
Of course, the excrement collides with the rotary air-mover when the kids reach the NAEP (or the real world), but the schools don't have a dog in that fight.
Just a theory.
No wonder educators don't like tests.
MONEY
Because money makes no difference and the grades are fraudulent.
Scores are down due to less teaching of basic skills! This youtube describes the deplorable condition of many math classes. http://youtube.com/watch?v=Tr1qee-bTZI&mode=related&search= Reading is no better. Where is the science?????
Extra money in my local school system goes toward hiring additional administrators or building a new school board building (beauracracy) - rather than directly benefiting the students or hiring additional/skilled teachers.
Educrats are the problem!
The kids don't have to read much anymore. Even in college courses little reading is required, not even in phlilosophy.
WOW....I watched about 3 minutes.....I always wondered what the grandkids were doing when they were multiplying with some weird process!!! This is WA State where I am.....
ping to WA STATE Freepers
College courses don't require much reading???Which colleges. Source? I have a whole bookshelf of college books that have been read cover to cover, that will argue with that statement. I think you are making that up.
I am in Georgia. California backpedaled on "reform math" a few years ago and the Texas Public Policy Foundation wrote a poor review in the late 90's, but many other states use "reform math." We "afterschool" in the afternoons after public school. The kids love it - hah!
Hm. Test scores in the City of Chicago are up. I'd love to see a breakdown of where scores have gone up and where they've gone down. Correlations to race, ethnicity, family income, urban/rural, state, school district spending/pupil, etc. would be illuminating.
Most of my students sell their books back to the bookstore as soon as the semester is over.
Probably not a causative connection, though.
Educational fads such as the "whole language" approach and (sigh, again....) a lack of emphasis on phonics is probably more to blame for the decline in reading scores.
My last university teaching assignment was in the College of Education, or "Center for Excellence" as it preferred to call itself, in the mid '90s. I was "disenfranchised" (not asked back) after too many students found my syllabus to be too difficult. Proudest moment of my life actually.
During the 1970s I was a young English teacher on the Navajo Reservation. Many of my students lived, literally, in mud huts. They did not speak English as a first language. Almost all lived in circumstances of real poverty.
Those kids, bless their hearts, had higher levels of literacy and writing skills than my spoiled, lazy white university students twenty years later.
I'm so glad to be out of educationalism.
I don't like tests, either. Kids in my school district spend at least 20 days every year taking various mandatory tests.
And since there's monetary impact to the test scores, -- big, gasping surprise -- the schools have taken to teaching to the tests.
The current emphasis on "testing" is a crock, foisted on us by idiots who want to pretend they're doing something about education.
My son graduated from high school in 2006. He's about the last group of the "whole language" nonsense. Second son will graduate in 2008, and everything had changed for him in first grade--back to phonics, for the most part.
I bet the test scores will start going back up.
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