Student Testing: Are WI Standards Low???

This is getting a lot of attention after the Fordham report came out indicating the WI state test standards were some of the lowest in the nation. More on this in other posts.

Maria

Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Opinion

Student testing reveals truth

Tuesday, October 9, 2007 9:27 AM CDT
A report on Wisconsin's student standards released last week is like a sliver.

The information gets under your skin, and it sits there and festers,
and eventually you realize how large a problem it actually is.
Unfortunately, nothing as simple as a pair of tweezers will cure the
education problem.

The report by the Fordham Institute looked at 26 states, most of them
wealthy Eastern or Midwestern or Western states with money and a
history of good schools. It found that there is no nationally
consistent means of judging student proficiency, a blow to the federal
No Child Left Behind Act, but it also found that Wisconsin has very
low standards for judging student proficiency. From 2003 to 2005, it
said, the difficulty of fourth-grade reading and math tests remained
about the same while the eighth-grade tests became easier.

The state Department of Public Instruction disagrees. One of its
officials said that while the standards are subjective, Wisconsin's
standards are set using an appropriate process. DPI experts question
the methodology of the Fordham report, and said it is inaccurate to
assert a Wisconsin student is less qualified than a student in one of
the other states studied.

However, the Fordham report notes that its results are consistent with
others from the National Center for Education Statistics. And an
example of what is demanded of students and is evidence in favor of
the Fordham report's conclusion.

In Wisconsin's school proficiency test, a fourth grader is expected to
read four simple sentences (for example, "Cats are better than dogs.")
and decide which states a fact rather than an opinion. In
Massachusetts, fourth graders read a passage from a Leo Tolstoy short
story and then must decide which of four statements presents a fact
about the story.

Take note of how much more difficult the Massachusetts test is.
Students have to master complex sentences written in 19th century
idiom, grasp their ideas, then compare those to the multiple-choice
statements written with 21st century phrasing.

The differences between tests raise questions more fundamental than
those of methodology. If Wisconsin students were truly so proficient,
truly on a par with Massachusetts, the Dick-sees-Jane simplicity of
the state exam means most of our children should qualify as advanced
readers, yet they don't. Why not?

This question stands for all educators, not just the state officials,
because it is down at the local level where the goals are set. If
public school students were being adequately challenged, again, they
should have no trouble with an unsophisticated exam. That raises the
related question of what we're getting for the tens of millions of
dollars flowing into public schools and the millions more in the
still-unborn state budget.

It used to be that even if Wisconsin students didn't score well,
parents and people concerned about education could comfort themselves
with the notion that at least Wisconsin's performance was above the
national average, that even our poorest students were still pretty
good.

That's apparently not the case. Like some twisted version of Garrison
Keillor's mythical Lake Woebegone, we have created a Wisconsin where
the women may be strong and the men good-looking, but all the children
are below average.