Grading Idaho schools: look beyond the headlines
Commentary by MARILYN HOWARD
One of the lessons we teach children in school is to look beyond the
obvious, to dig deep for information that does not seem evident at first glance. Recent
reports on educational issues gave Idaho citizens, as adults, a chance to practice what we
preach.
The headlines were attention-getters:
· "Study flunks Idaho on teacher quality"
· "Standardized test scores steady"
· "21 states ‘irresponsible' on standards, study says"
Anyone who read the articles in their entirety saw something much
different. Behind each headline is a wealth of detail that tells us much—good and
bad—about the state of public school education in Idaho today.
The irresistible "teachers flunk" headline does, in fact, report
the grade assigned to Idaho in an Education Week review of each state's education
programs.
But the grade had nothing to do with what happens in every classroom every
day. Instead, the finding was based on state-level decisions—decisions over which
teachers have no control—on whether to require written or performance exams for
teachers, on allowing teachers to teach in areas outside of their college majors and on
contributing state funding to local professional development programs.
In that sense, Idaho's grade should have been "I" for
"incomplete," since the state Board of Education and Idaho's teacher education
institutions are now engaged in a major review of how we educate, certify, re-certify, and
retain Idaho's teachers.
A better test of teacher quality comes when Idaho students are measured
against their peers in other states. That occurs each year when we review results of the
Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) and Test of Achievement and Proficiency (TAP), the two
national standardized tests that give us a way to compare our students against all of
those throughout the nation who take the same tests.
The headlines accurately reflected this year's results—that despite a
new and higher national standard for scoring, Idaho's students generally stayed where they
have been for years: above average.
(Ed. note: see the Jan. 19 Idaho Mountain Express, Page A14. On balance
in these high profile tests, Idaho students compared average to favorable with students in
other parts of the country.)
That is something of a comfort. But the details of the test results
identify areas of weakness where more can be done.
We see, for example, that the biggest gap between boys and girls is in
written language: capitalization, punctuation, and grammar. Simply put, boys scored below
national average at every grade level; girls scored above. One conclusion is that this
weakness starts early and does not improve over the years.
Fortunately, Idaho's new reading initiative, now in its first year, offers
promise of changing this situation. The initiative focuses on early intervention and on
how students are developing basic language skills. If we can strengthen these skills early
enough, boys—and girls—will be better readers, and thus better at language,
including spelling, over the long run.
The results also show us that non-English language, migrant, learning
disabled and other disadvantaged students score below the national average. This affirms
our confidence that the additional time, money and energy we have put into these students
is correctly placed, but it also tells us that those dollars and our efforts have to be
focused more than ever on academic improvement.
The third headline is from the national Education Daily publication
and identifies Idaho as one of the 21 states with inferior or no standards for students,
and with weak accountability systems. The director of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation,
which published the report, acknowledged that results focused only on standards and not on
student performance.
Yet the conclusion was misleading. Idaho has worked hard to develop
standards in math, science, social studies, languages, and health for several years, and
the results are now before the Idaho Legislature for review. Those standards set clear and
rigorous expectations for what we expect Idaho's public school students to know and be
able to do.
The fact that Idaho is not in sync with the Fordham schedule is no reason
to characterize us as "irresponsible" stewards of our children's education.
Rather, Idaho’s thoughtful development of its own standards is a testament to the
concern all Idahoans have that our children be challenged to do their best.
All of these issues share one characteristic: each tries to assign a
number or grade to an issue that is more complex than it seems at first reading. All they
really do is confirm that the directions we are headed—in our high achievement
standards for students, in our new reading initiative, and in our focus on the needs of
disadvantaged students—are the correct ones.
Marilyn Howard is Idaho’s superintendent of public instruction.
