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