As a part of the recent Wisconsin government/ public employee union brouhaha taking place in Madison…and for that matter, all around the country, I’ve seen a few interesting bit of statistics being bandied about as a club to beat the opposing side in this great debate, It seems that the Wisconsin 8th grade students have been doing poorly in a reading assessment test covering all schools in the state. The statistics themselves relate the facts that only 23% of students are deemed to be proficient and only 2% deserve an advanced rating as readers…
Of course this sounds terrible (and it very well may be!). But there are too many other related points which need to be addressed to encompass this topic to make any headway. Of course the overriding concern here is that this whole topic has only been used for blunt force trauma to political opponents (both sides…),and the fact is that sadly, this whole topic will subside into the swamp of last week’s news soon…
No reporter or political operative ever looked past this red meat to consider exactly what this even represents… What exactly is being tested, and what do the results really mean (in context). What has been covered in the test, what is the technical validity of this test, are there any trends…over time, in relation to nearby states, and for that matter how does this look across the entire country…
None of this took place in any news organ or political opinion website which I found…
It is a shame in that this newfound level of scrutiny may be well deserved.
For instance, is there really a mechanism with would allow us to directly correlate these results with the amount of spending per student in this state…or any other for that matter. If it doesn’t, what value has there been in increasing all of these ‘education’ funds over the years?
We seem to be in the process of trying to weather an economic malaise, and I would suggest that this may be an ideal time to evaluate what our education system actually does, versus what we want it to do.
How can we fix this? I think that history shows us that the notion of merely throwing more and more money at these issues is a fool’s errand; I also think that it circumscribes several important issues. One: it may be that the whole education system is woefully out of date, and is being led by bureaucrats who are, in effect, fighting the last war (at best). Two, Even very good teachers can’t fix everything, there is an obvious need to get families, parents, and the whole society more involved in student performance. The fact of the matter is that you only need to check out the media that most students watch to see how low academic success rates to them… Three, we need to see this problem in an international context, in that our children are in direct competition with millions of harder working students in many developing countries.
This doesn’t even get into the reading problem. This is only a means to start to objectify the real problems, since without this effort to see the reality, ‘warts and all’, there is no real hope to solve anything.
Two-Thirds of Wisconsin Public-School 8th Graders Can’t Read Proficiently—Despite Highest per Pupil Spending in Midwest
http://www.cnsnews.com/node/81728
Limbaugh, Beck Leave out Context on Test Scores to Smear Wisconsin Teachers
http://mediamatters.org/research/201102230050
Middle School Reading Levels
http://school.familyeducation.com/standards/middle-school/41940.html
Reading proficiency among Wisconsin’s elementary students is cause for concern
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/72258361/Reading-proficiency-among-Wisconsins-elementary-students-is
2004 Wisconsin Reading Comprehension Test:
http://dpi.state.wi.us/oea/pdf/3intrp04.pdf
