Adding Ignorance to Injury
Contributing another sad chapter to an already bleak story, on Friday we learned that students displaced by Hurricane Katrina and now living in Texas scored considerably worse than their Texan-student counterparts on the Texas Assessment of Skills and Knowledge (TASK) test. Putting aside whether the TASK test is a robust measure of student achievement or even whether the "bar has been lowered" by decreasing the test's cut scores, a depressingly small 58% of displaced third graders passed the reading portion of the exam (compared with 89% of all students). Evacuees in the fifth grade fared even worse, with only 46% of them able to pass the reading portion of the exam (compared to 80% of all students). These numbers represent 2,000 evacuee students who are in danger of being held back because a passing score on the TASK exam is required of all third and fifth grade students in order to advance to the next grade.
This is a sad story, no question, but you didn't have to be Miss Cleo to see this coming. That's because this story has little to do with weather systems and the Coriolis effect and everything to do with disparities between state education systems (the even more frightening subplot is that Texas' education system is not exactly top flight to begin with). If you look at these charts (1, 2, 3, 4), you can see that there was already a very large disparity between the performance of Texas children on the NAEP test and the performance of Louisiana students even before Hurricane Katrina. In each of the four tests, students in Texas out-performed students in Louisiana.
But the real story is that if all the students in America were to participate in one massive game of musical chairs (say... to Wagner's Ring Cycle or just an extended version of Stairway to Heaven), by the time the fat-lady had sung, so to speak, and the music had stopped, many students would find themselves in a state where they would suddenly be weeks, months, years(!) behind. Think I'm making this up? Check out this quote from Texas Education Agency spokeswoman Debbie Graves about the displaced Katrina students: "Unfortunately a lot of the children came to us two and three years behind." Two and three years behind after only four to six years of schooling?! Yikes!
I don't know about you, but I can't think of any (good) reason why a child in Louisiana or California would, as a matter of state policy, need to be less educated than say someone in Utah or Vermont. Likewise, I can't imagine a good reason why as a country we would think this was a tolerable idea either. Maybe a high quality education should be the right of all American children, regardless of where they live (hint, hint, nudge, nudge)....
Comments
Just to this point, there is a teacher at my school in Connecticut who was a math departement chair in a San Antonio high school. His says that the difference between the education in Texas and the one here, in CT, the state with the highest per capita income in the country, is astounding.
And the difference, he says, is in the curriculum. If you look on the Connecticut Board of Education website, you can see, published, a detailed curriculum for every subject in every grade, and every student is accountable (and every teacher) for every line of that curriculum.
Maybe something that draconian is a little drastic, but at least it seems to be working.
-Sam Ritter
Posted by: Sam | March 28, 2006 06:14 PM