[AAACE-NLA] Reading Today article

[Andrea Wilder]

Tom,

Thanks for the informative email!  Given the "debacle" you describe, 
what are your suggestions  for accountability?

Thanks!

On Feb 13, 2008, at 12:17 PM, tsticht at znet.com wrote:

> Colleagues: I am pleased to report that the following article appears 
> in the
> Vol. 25, No. 4, February/March 2008 issue of Reading Today, the 
> official
> newspaper of the International Reading Association (IRA). Reading 
> Today is
> read by over a 100,000 people in more than 30 nations. Tom Sticht
>
> The great literacy testing debacle in the United States
>
> By Thomas G. Sticht
>
> Debacle: n. A total, often ludicrous failure. Online dictionary
> at www.answers.com/topic/debacle
>
> The United States seems to be caught up in measurement mania when it 
> comes
> to literacy. The No Child Left Behind law calls for extensive testing 
> of
> children's reading abilities in different grade levels. For adults, the
> U.S. Department of Education (DOE) has developed adult literacy tests,
> while Title 2: The Adult Education and Family Literacy Act of the 
> Workforce
> Investment Act of 1998 calls for accountability measures that the DOE 
> has
> implemented in a national reporting system that makes extensive use of
> adult literacy tests.
>
> The actual measurement instruments and procedures for measuring
> reading/literacy and
> comparing states suffer from major flaws. They all follow different
> procedures in their development, which renders them incomparable, hence
> interpretations of data produced by comparing the various tests are
> essentially meaningless.
>
> Testing children's reading achievement
>
> On page 39 of the June 4, 2007 issue of Time magazine a graph is 
> presented
> showing differences between the percentage of fourth graders in each 
> state
> who are deemed "proficient" in reading based on each state's different
> standardized test. The graph also shows the percentage deemed 
> "proficient"
> on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is a
> standardized test given in all states. There are some very significant
> differences between the state and national test results. For instance,
> Mississippi reports that nearly 90 percent of fourth graders are 
> proficient
> in reading on the state-developed test, while on the NAEP only about 19
> percent score as proficient. This is a whopping 71 percentage points
> difference.
>
> The Time article reported that when using state test data the average
> percentage of fourth graders considered proficient is 70%. On the 
> national
> NAEP tests only 30% of U.S. fourth graders score as proficient. This 
> is a
> 40-point average gap between state and national estimates of 
> fourth-grade
> reading proficiency. The state and national tests
> use different procedures to determine if children are proficient 
> readers;
> hence they are not commensurate. This raises these questions.  Which 
> tests
> should be considered valid indicators of the reading achievement level 
> of
> the nation's fourth-graders? Should it be, the state or the federal 
> tests -
> or perhaps neither?
>
> Testing adult's literacy levels
>
> Jumping ahead to when fourth graders have grown up, the 2003 National
> Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) presents data for prose and 
> document
> literacy that indicate that in 1992 15% of adults over the age of 16 
> scored
> as proficient on these tests. In 2003, 13% of adults scored as 
> proficient, a
> drop of 2%. Surprisingly, only 30% of adult college graduates scored as
> proficient in literacy.
>
> Although there are clearly differences between the NAEP reading tests 
> for
> fourth graders and adult literacy tests, again rendering them
> incommensurate, they both attempt to portray how many of their target
> groups are "proficient" in literacy. The data indicate that there are 
> fewer
> than half as many adults (13%) who are proficient in literacy as there 
> are
> fourth graders (30%) who are proficient using the federal NAEP, and 
> there
> are only a fifth as many proficient adults as there are proficient 
> fourth
> graders (70%), if the average of the state-made tests are used. This
> suggests a tremendous loss of proficiency as children grow into 
> adulthood!
>
> Measuring literacy for accountability
>
> The problem of assessing literacy also shows up in the accountability 
> system
> of the nation's Adult Education and Literacy System (AELS), which is 
> made up
> of some 3,000 programs funded jointly by federal money from Title 2 of 
> the
> Workforce Investment Act of 1998 and state and local funds.
>
> The National Reporting System (NRS) which prepares reports on how well
> adults are learning to read in the AELS, has acknowledged that 
> different
> states use different standardized tests, with differing amounts of time
> between pre- and posttests to assess growth in literacy learning. But
> despite the acknowledged lack of comparability in the tests and 
> procedures
> used in various states, the NRS computes averages of the percentage of
> adults making learning gains throughout the 50 states. Of course, the 
> lack
> of comparability in measurement tools and their administration renders
> these data totally meaningless and useless to Congress (or anyone else 
> for
> that matter) in deciding whether or not states are using their federal
> funds responsibly and productively.
>
> The debacle of testing literacy ability
>
> Despite the faults of testing for literacy skills, there is apparently 
> no
> hesitancy in using the test results to reward some educators and punish
> others for what they are doing to teach literacy, whether to children 
> or
> adults. Despite extensive use of standardized tests of various sorts 
> by the
> 50 states, 30-year reading trend data with the NAEP show minimal if any
> improvement  for 9-, 13-, or 17-year-old children since the early 
> 1970s.
> Further, the testing of adult literacy in 1992 and again in 2003 shows
> little or no improvement in literacy at the lowest levels and a 
> decline at
> the highest levels.
>
> To date, then, the great literacy testing debacle has cost hundreds of
> millions of dollars, threatened teachers and administrators, subjected
> children to hours of drill and practice in test taking rather than 
> engaging
> in learning important content and skills, and cast aspersions on the
> literacy skills of America's workforce, thus advertising to the world 
> that
> the U. S. workforce is incompetent. This cannot be good for the health 
> and
> welfare of the nation or its international competitiveness in the 
> global
> economy.
>
> Even if we could get literacy testing right - which we have not done 
> up to
> now - there is no way we can test ourselves out of the serious 
> educational
> problems that afflict our K-12 and adult literacy education systems. 
> There
> is a word for the obsessive repetition of utterly foolish, 
> unreasonable,
> and failed practices: insanity.
>
> Thomas G. Sticht is an international consultant in adult education and 
> lives
> in
> El Cajon, California
>
>
>
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