Arguing Over the Meaning of the New Fordham Study

The Fordham Institute has released an significant new study on the rigor of state academic standards. Bottom line: they're all over the place, with huge variation between states (which we already knew, but it's good to have further confirmation), and within states between subjects and grades (which we didn't know, and it's important that we do). Many states, for example, have set their "cut scores" (see Andy Rotherham's explanation of how that process works here) higher in middle school than in elementary school, and higher in math than in reading. Test results that seem to indicate a crisis in middle school or mathematics education may actually show a state standard-setting process that isn't as well-calibrated as it needs to be.

So kudos to Fordham for this important, timely analysis. In particular, it shows the danger of giving states unlimited discretion over the process by which they judge their own educational success. Like many people, I'm somewhat ambivalent over the idea of national education standards--depends on the subject, sensible in theory but tricky in practice, worried the U.S. Department of Education will screw it up, etc., etc. But surely there's some threshold level of inter-state variation that's simply intolerable, and if variance from the 14th to the 71st percentile (the difference between the rigor of Wisconsin and South Carolina standards in eighth grade reading) doesn't meet that threshold, I'm not sure what does. Those who want to give the states vast new amounts of "flexibility" under the next version of NCLB should take heed.

The messaging around the report is tricky, however, particularly coming from Fordham. After a brief interlude of non-boringness, Bob Herbert reverted to form today in his Times column , using the Fordham report to argue that NCLB is a crock and the whole testing-based-accountabilty enterprise needs to be scrapped (Fordham's response to Herbert is here).

Herbert's column is pretty useless, but on some level predictable after Checker Finn's piece$ in last Friday's Wall Street Journal, titled "Dumbing Education Down." If, like Herbert, you're not paying attention, it's easy enough to read this as an anti-NCLB indictment. Which it kind of is; it would have been nice to see some of the language from Fordham's response to Herbert (i.e. "The answer is not to throw out testing, but to do testing right, with expectations that are consistent from state to state, grade to grade, subject to subject, and over time, and that prepare students for college and work.") in Finn's op-ed.

Maintaining a consistent line of criticism while conducting new research is tricky; Fordham has been raising alarms about a so-called "race to the bottom" in state standards-setting for some time. Now their report says what's actually happening is a "walk to the middle," with the outliers both low and high regressing to the mean. That's an important finding, but Finn's op-ed emphasizes only one side ("more states have let their tests grow easier to pass than have made them harder). Given that, the previous rhetoric, and headlines like "The Proficiency Illusion" and "Dumbing Education Down" it's not surprising that people like Herbert are confused.