Updated at 7:39 p.m., Thursday, February 22, 2007
School survey may not be indicative, expert says
Advertiser Staff
A top Hawai'i education official says that while the results of a new national study are perplexing, he thinks low participation by 12th-graders may be part of the reason for some of the results, including slippage in scores over the last 15 years.According to two new national studies of reading and math scores for 12th-graders tested in 2005 that were released today, U.S. high school students are taking harder classes and getting better grades, but their scores seem to indicate they're learning less than their counterparts did 15 years ago.
Robert Hillier, Hawai'i Department of Education coordinator for what's known as the Nation's Report Card testing, said while the results are somewhat of a surprise, his sense is students may actually be challenging themselves to a higher level than in the past and that could be another reason for lower scores.
Indicators of that include an increase of three in the average number of credits earned by graduates in 2005 compared to what was earned by graduates in 1992.
Hillier also questioned the sampling, saying that participation in the 2005 test was fairly low because taking the test is voluntary among 12th-graders, and many of the top students skip it because they don't want to miss classroom work.
None of that stopped educators across the country calling the results dismal, and saying there had been little change in more than a decade in the state of education nationwide.
Nationally the reading and math test was given to 21,000 high school seniors at 900 U.S. schools, including 200 private schools.
Only about 200 Hawai'i 12th-graders from two public high schools participated in the 2005 testing.
The reports summarized two major government efforts to measure the performance of high school seniors as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress — NAEP — but better known as the Nation's Report Card. One was a standardized test of 12th-graders conducted in 2005. The other was an analysis of the transcripts of students who graduated from high school that year. The transcript study was based on 26,000 transcripts from 720 schools, 80 of them private.
The reports did not give separate results for public vs. private schools.
The transcript study showed that, compared to students in similar studies going back to 1990, the 2005 graduates had racked up more high school credits, had taken more college preparatory classes and had strikingly higher grade point averages. The average GPA rose from 2.68 in 1990 to 2.98 — close to a solid B — in 2005.
But the standardized test results also showed that 12th-grade reading scores have generally been dropping since 1992, casting doubt on what students are learning in those college prep classes.
