Test results N.J. eighth-graders do it "write"

[fiberisgoodforyou]

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New Jersey's public school eighth-graders are tops in the nation when it comes to a national writing test.

The state's students had the highest scores of the 46 states that administered the National Assessment of Educational Progress test last year. Only students in Connecticut came close.

The bipartisan group announced the results Thursday.

Every subcategory of New Jersey students also scored top in the nation, including lower-income, white, black, Latino and Asian students.

New Jersey's average scale score was 175, which is greater than the national average of 154.

However, a gap still existed between results from white and black students. In New Jersey, there was a 32-point gap between those demographic groups, as compared to the national average of 22 points.

"It's bad news that there is a gap," said Education Commissioner Lucille E. Davy in a conference call with reporters on Thursday. "The good news is that our children of color are performing as well as all kids around the rest of the country."

The test is the only one that education officials say can be used to compare states directly.

Last year in January and February, 111 New Jersey schools — a mix of urban and suburban schools — were given the exam. The schools were selected at random by a computer to participate. Statewide, 3,000 students took the test, and not all eighth-grade students at each school participated.

The 13 schools in Monmouth and Ocean selected to participate were: Asbury Park Middle School, Veterans Memorial Middle School in Brick, Central Regional Middle School in Berkeley, Clifton T. Barkalow School in Freehold, Howell Township Middle School North, Lacey Township Middle School, Long Branch Middle School, Manalapan-Englishtown Middle School, Pinelands Regional Junior High School in Little Egg Harbor, G. Harold Antrim School in Point Pleasant Beach, Memorial Middle School in Point Pleasant, Toms River Intermediate East School and Frank Antonides School in West Long Branch.

The NAEP does not provide scores for individual students or schools, but gives results for different demographic groups and subgroups, such as gender, or students with disabilities.

A sample test question provided on the NAEP Writing Report Card's Web site provided a letter from a student coming to America from another country. The instructions tell the test-taker to reply to the letter and "include a clear description of a backpack and explain in detail what she should keep in it."

On NAEP tests, New Jersey regularly does very well. Nonetheless, Thursday's results were impressive, education officials said.

Black students in New Jersey scored comparably to the national average on the test and better than the national average for the demographic. Latino students scored slightly higher than all other states except Wyoming.

"We think this is a validation of the investment we made in the Abbott districts," said Steve Wollmer, spokesman for the New Jersey Education Association, referring to the extra aid that New Jersey's poorest and most ethnically diverse districts received continuously following a state Supreme Court decision in 1999.

"We always said that when those kids reached eighth-grade . . . they would do well on the eighth-grade assessment," he said. "And here we are, because these are the first kids who have the full benefit of the Abbott investment."

[admin]

Now that we read some nonsense from an educrat and a self absorbed union person, here is a much better read about public education....

By George Will


Education lessons we left behind


By George Will









If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.
— "A Nation at Risk" (1983)


Let us limp down memory lane to mark this week's melancholy 25th anniversary of a national commission's report that galvanized Americans to vow to do better. Today the nation still ignores what had been learned years before 1983.


Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once puckishly said that data indicated that the leading determinant of the quality of public schools, measured by standardized tests, was the schools' proximity to Canada. He meant that the geographic correlation was stronger than the correlation between high test scores and high per-pupil expenditures.


Moynihan also knew that schools cannot compensate for the disintegration of families and hence communities — the primary transmitters of social capital. No reform can enable schools to cope with the 36.9 percent of all children and 69.9 percent of black children today born out of wedlock, which means, among many other things, a continually renewed cohort of unruly adolescent males.



Chester Finn, a former Moynihan aide, notes in his splendid new memoir ("Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik") that during the Depression-era job scarcity, high schools were used to keep students out of the job market, shunting many into nonacademic classes. By 1961, those classes had risen to 43 percent of all those taken by students. After 1962, when New York City signed the nation's first collective bargaining contract with teachers, teachers began changing from members of a respected profession into just another muscular faction fighting for more government money. Between 1975 and 1980 there were a thousand strikes involving a million teachers whose salaries rose as students' scores on standardized tests declined.


In 1964, SAT scores among college-bound students peaked. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) codified confidence in the correlation between financial inputs and cognitive outputs in education. But in 1966, the Coleman report, the result of the largest social science project in history, reached a conclusion so "seismic" — Moynihan's description — that the government almost refused to publish it.


Released quietly on the Fourth of July weekend, the report concluded that the qualities of the families from which children come to school matter much more than money as predictors of schools' effectiveness. The crucial common denominator of problems of race and class — fractured families — would have to be faced.


But it wasn't. Instead, shopworn panaceas — larger teacher salaries, smaller class sizes — were pursued as colleges were reduced to offering remediation to freshmen.


In 1976, for the first time in its 119-year history, the National Education Association, the teachers union, endorsed a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter, who repaid it by creating the Education Department, a monument to the premise that money and government programs matter most. At the NEA's behest, the nation has expanded the number of teachers much faster than the number of students has grown. Hiring more, rather than more competent, teachers meant more dues-paying union members. For decades, schools have been treated as laboratories for various equity experiments. Fads incubated in education schools gave us "open" classrooms, teachers as "facilitators of learning" rather than transmitters of knowledge, abandonment of a literary canon in the name of "multiculturalism," and so on, producing a majority of high school juniors who could not locate the Civil War in the proper half-century.


In 1994, Congress grandly decreed that by 2000 the high school graduation rate would be "at least" 90 percent and that American students would be "first in the world in mathematics and science achievement." Moynihan, likening such goals to Soviet grain quotas — solemnly avowed, never fulfilled — said: "That will not happen." It did not.


Moynihan was a neoconservative before neoconservatism became a doctrine of foreign policy hubris. Originally, it taught domestic policy humility. Moynihan, a social scientist, understood that social science tells us not what to do but what is not working, which today includes No Child Left Behind. Finn thinks NCLB got things backward: "The law should have set uniform standards and measures for the nation, then freed states, districts and schools to produce those results as they think best." Instead, it left standards up to the states, which have an incentive to dumb them down to make compliance easier.


A nation at risk? Now more than ever.