‘No Child,’ No Problem, No Standards
On the front page of today’s Washington Post is a feel-good story about Ocean City Elementary, a Maryland school in which 100 percent of the students passed the state’s math and reading tests. I don’t want to rain on the school’s parade (or give the Post reporter, Dan de Vise, a hard time for finding an excuse to mix business with pleasure (hmm... this school is at the beach... the article appeared just after Memorial Day Weekend...)) but isn’t it worth pointing out (again) that when everyone can meet a standard, it means it’s not really a “standard”? Perhaps this is a sign that Maryland should raise the passing scores on its tests? Can you imagine a front-page Washington Post story reporting that an entire high school student body got a perfect score on the SAT? Surely someone would question whether standards had slipped.
Still, I’m sure we’re only days away from hearing Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings declare that “this school proves that 100 percent proficiency is an achievable goal.” And with low enough standards, yes it is.
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May 28th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
I don’t know. Is a “standard” what the average student should be able to do, or is it what every student should be able to do?
May 28th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
If every elementary school in the state were demonstrating 100% proficiency in reading, then I would say you are absolutely right. But when one school or a handful of schools manage to get their ship pointed in the right direction and get every child achieving, it means they are doing something right. And it means they are doing something that most other schools in Maryland are failing to do.
Given the choice, let’s have the other elementary schools in Maryland try to duplicate these reading proficiency results. Then we can get the state to raise the bar and strengthen the standards.
May 28th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
Your logic would seem to suggest that if anyone can meet a standard then it’s not a standard. I’m hard-pressed to see how the existence of a single school with 100% proficiency suggests that standards are too low. Is it possible that the source of your concern lies in the fact that there are many other schools that have 90+% of their students proficient on the Maryland tests? That seems like better evidence for the argument that standards are too low than this one idiosyncratic school.
May 28th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
still hung over from the weekend, mike?
that’s a pretty crabby interpretation of events.
and not necessarily correct, as others have already pointed out.
May 28th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
Read about the 1995 “re-centering” of SATs here:
http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2008/05/one-that-got-away.html