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[Assessment 962] The Literacy Testing Debacletsticht at znet.com tsticht at znet.comFri Oct 12 21:38:38 EDT 2007
12 October 2007 The Great Literacy Testing Debacle in the United States Tom Sticht International Consultant in Adult Education Definition: 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. Education Department has developed adult literacy tests, and Title 2: The Adult Education and Family Literacy Act of the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 calls for accountability measures which the U. S. Education Department has implemented in a National Reporting System that makes extensive use of adult literacy tests. But in all these cases, 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, and hence interpretations of the data produced by comparing the findings of the various tests are essentially meaningless. Testing Children's Learning of Reading 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 are standardized tests given in all states in the nation. There are some very large differences between the state and national test results. For instance, Mississippi reports that close to 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 in the numbers of fourth graders in Mississippi who are considered proficient in reading. The Time article provides data indicating that using state test data the average percentage of fourth graders considered proficient is 70 percent. Using the national NAEP tests only 30 percent 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, and are hence incommensurate. This raises the question of which tests should be considered as the valid indicators of the reading abilities of the nation's fourth grade children, the state or the federal tests. or perhaps neither. Testing Adult's Literacy Ability Jumping ahead to when fourth graders have grown up, the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) presents data for Prose and Document literacy which indicate that in 1992 15 percent of adults over the age of 16 scored as proficient on these tests while in 2003 13 percent of adults scored as proficient, a drop of 2 percent during the decade. Surprisingly, only 30 percent of adult college graduates scored as proficient in literacy. Although there are clearly differences between the NAEP reading tests for fourth graders and the adult literacy tests, again rendering them incommensurate, nonetheless 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 percent) who are proficient in literacy as there are fourth-graders (30 percent) who are proficient using the federal-made NAEP, and there are only a fifth as many proficient adults as there are proficient fourth graders (70 percent), 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 in Adult Literacy Education The problems of assessing literacy also show up in the accountability system of the nation's Adult Education and Literacy System (AELS), which is made up of the some 3,000 programs that are 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 literacy in the AELS has acknowledged that different states use different standardized tests, with differing amounts of time between pre- and post-tests to assess growth in literacy learning. The NRS has also indicated that the comparison of educational functioning levels and level gains across states is complicated by this lack of comparability. But despite the acknowledged lack of comparability in the tests and procedures used in various states the NRS goes ahead and computes averages of the percentage of adults making learning gains across the fifty 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 all these 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 fifty states, thirty- year trend data with the NAEP show that reading has not improved 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 nor its international competitiveness in the global economy. Even if we could get the testing of literacy 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 International Consultant in Adult Education 2062 Valley View Blvd. El Cajon, CA 92019-2059 Tel/fax: (619) 444-9133 Email: tsticht at aznet.net
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