EducationNews.org

Tom Sticht
Columnist EducationNews.org
International Consultant in Adult Education

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 WorkforceInvestment 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

Last year, on page 39 of the June 4, 2007 issue of Time magazine a graph was 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.

Published May 10, 2008