High-School Students Are Aiming Higher Without Improving Their Performance, Federal Studies Find
Chronicle of Higher Education 2/23/07
In fact, the performance of high-school seniors on the reading portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress declined from 1992 to 2005, even though high-school students were taking more classes in tougher subjects, and their median grade-point average had risen markedly and steadily -- from 2.68 to 2.98 -- from 1990 to 2005.
Education Department officials declined on Thursday to offer an explanation for why the improvements in students' course-taking habits and grades had not translated into clear improvements in learning. They noted that the studies measure only educational trends, and do not try to pin down the trends' causes.
But Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings issued a statement making clear her frustration with the studies' findings. "The two reports released today show that we have our work cut out for us in providing every child in this nation with a quality education," she said. "If, in fact, our high-school students are taking more challenging courses and earning higher grades, we should be seeing greater gains in test scores."
Outside the Education Department, experts on elementary and secondary schools suggested that the findings of the two studies, taken together, might point to the effects of grade inflation, or a watering down of the curriculum in advanced high-school classes, or the presence of students with a wider range of ability levels in such classrooms, or some combination of those or other factors.
Emerson J. Elliott, a retired commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said the department's analysis of course-taking patterns is based solely on course titles and does not look into the courses' content, so it is possible that the classes many students are taking seem more advanced than actually is the case.
Ross E. Wiener, vice president for program and policy with the Education Trust, a Washington-based nonprofit group, said that there had been "progress in making sure more students take a college-prep curriculum, but there has not been sufficient attention to ensuring consistency in the rigor of those college-prep courses."
Mr. Wiener, whose organization seeks to promote equity in public education, suggested that colleges could help improve the situation "by articulating more clearly the level of knowledge and skills that are 'good enough' to do college-level work."
The reports released Thursday were "The Nation's Report Card: America's High School Graduates" and "The Nation's Report Card: 12th-Grade Reading and Mathematics 2005." Both were based on long-term studies by the Education Department's research-gathering arm, the National Center for Education Statistics, and involved students who were part of the classes graduating from high schools in 2005.
The "High School Graduates" study involved an analysis of the transcripts of a nationally representative sampling of 26,000 students who graduated from 640 public and 80 private high schools in 2005. Along with finding that the overall grade-point average of students had risen by about a third of a letter grade since 1990, the study found that the average 2005 graduate earned about three more credits -- or had 360 more hours of instruction -- in high school than did graduates in 1990.
Over those years, the transcript analysis found, there had been a doubling, from 5 percent to 10 percent, in the share of high-school graduates who had taken a curriculum classified as "rigorous," with at least four credits each of English and mathematics (including precalculus or higher) and at least three credits each of social studies, a foreign language, and science (including biology, chemistry, and physics.) The share of graduates who had taken at least the "standard" curriculum -- three credits each of social studies, mathematics, and science, and four credits of English -- had risen from 40 percent to 68 percent.
The "Reading and Mathematics" report was based on tests administered to students as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which seeks to measure how students perform in various subjects over time. Its data for 2005 were based on a representative sample of 21,000 seniors from 900 public, private, and Department of Defense schools across the nation.
The report said that the percentage of students who had performed at or above a basic level in reading had decreased from 80 percent in 1992 to 73 percent in 2005, while the percentage of students performing at or above a level viewed as proficient had declined from 40 percent to 35 percent.
Although the National Center for Education Statistics has not attempted to correlate various skill levels with college expectations, its report provided examples of the types of tasks students must be able to perform for each level. To be considered as having reached the basic level in reading, for example, students must be able to do things like retrieving information from a highly detailed document or recognizing a sequence of plot elements. The tasks used to measure whether students have reached the advanced level include identifying how an author attempts to appeal to readers and using a theme to explain a character's motivation.
The mathematics test given to high-school seniors in 2005 was changed significantly from the past versions of the test, precluding a direct comparison of the 2005 scores with those of years past. At least as far as the 2005 seniors were concerned, however, the NAEP tests' results were generally not viewed as anything to crow about. Just 61 percent of seniors performed at or above the basic level, and just 23 percent performed at or above levels that could be considered proficient. (Among the tasks assigned at the basic level are converting a decimal to a numerical fraction and finding the length of the sides of a square. At the advanced level, students are asked to perform tasks such as calculating a weighted average for two groups.)
"The NAEP scores, on their own, tell us that kids are not doing well enough by the end of high school, and they are likely to not be well-prepared for college," said Matthew Gandal, executive vice president of Achieve, a Washington-based organization that seeks to align high-school standards with the expectations of colleges and employers.
Both of the "Report Card" studies found substantial gaps between students based on race, ethnicity, and gender, but also some signs of progress in closing them.
Substantially larger shares of students from each of the transcript-based report's four major racial and ethnic classifications -- white, black, Hispanic, and Asian or Pacific Islander -- were completing at least a mid-level curriculum in 2005 than had 15 years earlier, and the gap between the proportions of white and black students taking at least a midlevel curriculum had closed as of about 2000. But sizable gaps remained in the share who had completed a curriculum deemed rigorous -- 22 percent of Asian or Pacific Islander high-school graduates, 11 percent of white graduates, 8 percent of Hispanic graduates, and 6 percent of black graduates had transcripts suggesting they had reached this level.
The math- and reading-test report found no significant closing in either the white-black or white-Hispanic gap in reading-test scores since 1992. In 2005, scores at or above the proficient level were earned by 43 percent of white students, 36 percent of Asian or Pacific Islander students, 26 percent of American Indian or Native Alaskan students, 20 percent of Hispanic students, and 16 percent of black students.
The education level of a students' parents correlated heavily with test performance; scores at or above proficient were earned by 47 percent of those who had at least one parent who graduated from college, but just 17 percent who reported that neither parent finished high school.
The transcript analysis found that the share of all female graduates completing a rigorous curriculum rose from 4 percent in 1990 to 11 percent in 2005, allowing them to overtake male graduates, whose share completing such a curriculum rose to 10 percent from 5 percent. But while girls had higher grade-point averages and outperformed boys on the NAEP tests in science and math, boys fared better on most such tests when their scores were compared to those of girls in equally difficult classes.
On the NAEP reading test, girls substantially outscored boys, and the gap between the genders was wider than it had been in 1992, but had narrowed somewhat since 2002.