The Owl: Accounting for Progress the Wrong Way

ISSUE 44 | FEBRUARY 21, 2002

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Most educators, legislators, and parents still live in the dark ages of education statistics. They continue to compare this year's fourth-graders' scores in reading, with last year's fourth-graders' scores, thinking they're measuring progress.

You might as well measure the combined weight of the students in those two fourth-grade classes. The results are equally unimportant.

Yet some civilized souls have emerged from the dark ages into the light of the Renaissance. They are led by a man from Tennessee who is, like Leonardo da Vinci, a man of his time, a brilliant generalist. His name is William Sanders.

His work was the impetus for Tennessee to leap ahead of other states and start measuring academic progress intelligently and fairly. Their system, established in 1990, enables their citizens to understand which districts, schools, and (yes) teachers are most successful in advancing their students each year.

Other states, including our own, continue to compare apples and oranges. Richard Rothstein's New York Times column asks why educators persist in making this error, when Sanders' methods offer a viable alternative. (NOTE: the New York Times website requires registration of new users before they allow access to articles.)

Here is the heart of his argument:

"Most states ask schools to report whether this year's eighth grade did better than last year's. But this method cannot truly identify effective schools because it compares different groups of students. Last year's eighth graders are in ninth grade this year.

Eighth-grade scores could now be higher than last year's, even if eighth-grade teaching did not improve, if this year's eighth graders started in the fall with more ability than last year's, if they learned more at home or if their seventh-grade teacher was better than the previous class's seventh-grade teacher."

This is the way most districts now mark year-to-year progress, even in California. And it is wrong, wrong, wrong. We are long overdue for a public debate on the meaning of academic progress. When it comes time to review the Cohort 1 II/USP "underperforming" schools later this year, the debate over academic progress will get even hotter.

THE FUTURE DEBATE WILL CENTER ON ADEQUATE YEARLY PROGRESS

The reauthorization of the Elementary Secondary Education Act surprisingly directs educators to define "adequate yearly progress" in the old wrong-headed manner: comparing this year's fourth-graders to last year's fourth-graders. This is a serious flaw in the law. Sanders' smarter value-added methods are now fated to compete on unfavorable terms against a host of method mongers stuck in the dark-ages.

But don't take this owl's word for it. Read up on Sanders' work yourself, and make your own conclusions.

Links to other top stories on value-added and William Sanders await you. No need to wade into the statistical swamp. These article abstracts avoid the dense monographs, and favor the policy stories, the feature articles, and the opinion columns that make this debate more lively.

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