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Army rejects 23% of high school grads

December 22, 2010 by

Today’s Army won’t take all high school graduates: 23 percent of would-be enlistees flunk the academic test, reports Education Trust in “Shut Out of the Military.”

. . . 29 percent of Hispanic Army applicants and 39 percent of African Americans were found ineligible. Furthermore, when minority candidates did gain entry into the armed services, they achieved lower scores on average than their white peers. These ratings exclude them from higher level educational, training, and advancement opportunities provided by the Army.

Qualifying rates varied widely for white applicants with 27 percent of Maryland’s white high school graduates failing the test compared to 10 percent in Indiana.

Questions cover basic skills and knowledge, such as:

“If 2 plus x equals 4, what is the value of x?”

Seventy-five percent of 17- to 24-year-olds don’t qualify to take the test because they did not complete high school, are physically unfit or have a criminal record, the Pentagon reports. Ninety percent of Army enlistees are high school graduates or non-graduates who’ve earned at least 15 college credits; the other 10 percent include GED holders who score 50 or better on the Armed Forces Qualifying Test. The Army is exceeding its recruiting goal (slightly), the Pentagon reports.

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U.S. is average — except in inequality

December 11, 2010 by

The U.S. education system is ahead of the pack in one category — inequality — notes Education Trust in its analysis of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results.

Compared to other developed countries, the United States has the fifth largest gap between low-income students and their more affluent classmates. In reading, for example, students attending our high-poverty high schools performed 24 percent below those from higher income schools.

. . . Many of the countries at the top of the performance rankings – Canada, Finland, and Korea, for example – rank noticeably at the bottom of the list measuring the size of socioeconomic-status (SES) gaps.

Low-SES students in the U.S. don’t do as well as similar students in other countries, such as New Zealand.

U.S. students who are white and Asian students perform about as well in reading, math, and science as the average student in high-performing countries like Canada and Japan, Education Trust reports. But our Latino students are at the same level as Turkey and Dubai, while black students are on a par with students in Serbia and Bulgaria.

The recent ACT report, which looked at whether students can meet the new Common Core Standards, also found massive achievement gaps. In reading, 47 percent of white eleventh-graders reach the standard, compared with 19 percent of Hispanic and 11 percent of blacks. In algebra, 41 percent of white high school juniors, 21 percent of Hispanics and 11 percent of blacks are meet the standard.

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Mind the gaps

January 7, 2010 by

Gauging the Gaps, a new Education Trust report, warns that looking at achievement gaps is misleading.

For example, one might want to congratulate Oklahoma for having a small black-white gap in eighth-grade mathematics on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). But a closer look shows that the gap is among the smallest in the country because Oklahoma’s white eighth-graders — the students at the top of this gap — are among the lowest performing white students in the country.

Delaware, Florida, Massachusetts and Texas have done the best at closing gaps and improving achievement, EdTrust reports. Vermont, which has little racial diversity, does well with low-income students.

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College success gap

December 3, 2009 by

Low-income and minority students lag in college enrollment and graduation at two- and four-year public colleges, concludes Charting a Necessary Path, an Education Trust report.

Two years ago, 24 public higher education systems educating 40 percent of four-year students pledged to halve the achievement gap in college access and completion by 2015. The report provides a baseline for the Access to Success Initiative.

The research found that about 45 percent of low-income and underrepresented minority students entering as freshmen in 1999 had earned bachelor’s degrees six years later at the colleges studied, compared with 57 percent of other students.

. . . The study found that fewer than one-third of all freshmen entering two-year institutions nationwide attained completion — either through a certificate, an associate’s degree or transfer to a four-year college — within four years. The success rate was lower, 24 percent, for underrepresented minorities and higher, 38 percent, for other students.

Only 7 percent of minority students who entered community colleges earned bachelor’s degrees within 10 years.

Measuring Success, Making Progress, a spiffy new California site, focuses on high school graduation, college readiness and college success. Despite the title, I saw little progress. Most students don’t take the college-prep sequence, don’t do well on the state’s optional college readiness exam and struggle to complete a degree.

The four-year graduation rate was 70.9 percent in 2008 with Asians the highest, whites next and black (58 percent) and Hispanic students (62 percent) far behind. Only 55 percent of seventh graders in five school districts received regular high school diplomas six years later.

Only 16 percent of 11th graders who took the college readiness exam were judged ready for college English; 13 percent were ready for college math. More will be ready after 12th grade, but most have a long way to go and presumably only kids with college aspirations take the exam. In math, the racial/ethnic disparities were huge: Almost one in five Asian/Pacific Islander students scored at a college-ready level, compared to one in 20 white students and about 1 percent of Hispanic and African American students.

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Bold ideas for teacher effectiveness

November 12, 2009 by

The Education Trust and The New Teacher Project (TNTP) have issued reports calling for states to commit to “bold reforms” to increase teacher effectiveness in applications for federal “Race to the Top” funding.

Fighting for Quality and Equality, Too, by The Education Trust, and How Bold is “Bold”?, by TNTP, “include practical strategies for measuring teacher effectiveness, providing all teachers with the support they need to improve, increasing the number of effective teachers for low-income and minority children, retaining effective teachers, and removing those who are persistently ineffective.”

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One standard shall rule them all

July 17, 2009 by

Though 46 states and Washington, D.C. are backing the creation of common math and English standards, figuring out what all high school graduates should know is a challenge, reports Politics Daily. Experts are trying to meet an end-of-July deadline.

The goal is for students to be career and college ready, meaning that they could make a C or better in first-year college classes without having to take remedial courses. Expanded groups of experts will set standards for grades K-12 by the end of December.

Federal standards efforts went awry in the past.  This campaign was started by governors.

“What’s really changed is that it’s almost always now teachers who say, ‘When are we going to get over this nonsense that math in Mississippi is different?’ “from math in another state, says Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has “pledged up to $350 million to help develop tests that would measure whether students are meeting the new standards.”

ACT and College Board experts are trying to develop fewer, clearer and higher standards than in most states. They’re looking at freshman course syllabi and exit surveys to determine what students need.

“They’re really looking for what students should be able to do to truly be ready for college,” says (Chris) Minnich of the Council of Chief State School Officers, one of the groups overseeing the process along with the National Governors’ Association and a Washington-based group called Achieve. “It means taking out some of the things that aren’t really important, including, he says, “whether or not kids should read Shakespeare. Most of the studies say Shakespeare is not critical.”

We’re going to dump Shakespeare? Lynne Munson of Common Core at the eagerness to “throw out possibly the brightest star of our literary heritage and replace it with … well, we don’t yet know.”

Of course, in a few years the loss will hardly be noticed, as someone wise once pointed out: “He that is robb’d, not wanting what is stolen, / Let him not know ‘t, and he’s not robb’d at all.” (Othello, Act III, scene 3)

Massachusetts’ standards are the best we’ve got, Munson argues. If common standards aren’t that rigorous, why bother?

Gadfly’s Mike Petrilli wants a broad liberal arts curriculum that goes beyond “the utilitarian and narrow drive toward college and work readiness,” which has been embraced by Democrats and Republicans.

While the right celebrates anti-intellectualism, “the left remains uncomfortable saying that there is a body of knowledge that all young people need to master in order to be prepared for life in our democracy.”

Before you know it, Shakespeare’s as dead as a royal Dane in the last act of Hamlet. History, being unessential for college or work, is history.

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Racial gap narrows for young students

July 14, 2009 by

Black and white students are improving in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).  In math and fourth-grade reading, blacks narrowed achievement gaps. But the gap remains large, reports USA Today.  Progress for younger students often is lost in middle and high school.

It’s a start, responds Education Trust.  “In fourth-grade math, for example, average performance for African-American students on the 2007 main NAEP assessment is higher than the average for white students in 1990,” said president Kati Haycock.

Among 9-year-olds:

Compared to 1973, math gains for African-American students (34 points) and Latino students (32 points) have outpaced gains for white students (25 points). However, math scores for African-American and Latino students have not significantly improved since 2004.

Similarly, reading gains for African-American students (34 points) and Latino students (24 points) have outpaced gains for white students (14 points) since the beginning of the trend. Since 2004, scores for all groups of students have increased significantly.

However, the news is less rosy for 13-year-olds, Education Trust notes. And high school reading and math skills have “stagnated” for 35 years. As a result, “the skills of African-American and Latino 17-year-olds still lag about four years behind those of their white peers.”

Defense Department schools in the U.S. and overseas show the smallest gaps between black and white students.

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Texas schools get credit for kids who fail

July 9, 2009 by

Texas schools are expected to get higher ratings under a new state rule that counts students who fail the state exam as passing if they’re expected to pass in the future. School accountability ratings have changed so much, it’s “a test in itself to figure out if a school is doing better, doing worse or holding even,” writes the Dallas Morning News.

Say a seventh-grader failed the math TAKS. The Texas Education Agency developed a statistical formula that predicts whether that student will pass the math test in eighth grade. The formula considers the student’s math and reading TAKS scores, plus the average math TAKS score at his school.

If the student is predicted to pass, the school gets to count him as actually passing – even though he really failed.

If the student fails in the future, nothing happens to the school’s rating, says Education Gadfly.

Say a sixth grader fails TAKS but is projected to pass in eighth grade; if that same student actually fails in eighth grade, the school is not penalized. Instead, projections readjust, and our former-sixth-now-eighth-grader’s scores are now calibrated to predictions for passing the eleventh grade test. As Education Trust’s Daria Hall explains, “From a school perspective, a student never has to actually be proficient. It’s always projected into future grades.”

Some day, my proficiency will come.

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