{"id":3235,"date":"2008-12-18T10:19:49","date_gmt":"2008-12-18T10:19:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/12\/18\/standards-are-the-enemy-of-ach\/"},"modified":"2008-12-18T10:19:49","modified_gmt":"2008-12-18T10:19:49","slug":"standards-are-the-enemy-of-ach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/12\/18\/standards-are-the-enemy-of-ach\/","title":{"rendered":"Standards Are the Enemy of Achievement"},"content":{"rendered":"

The US Chamber of Commerce has a education website<\/a>, which provides “grades” for states based on various measures of their educational performance. One category is “Academic Achievement,” based on the percentages of students scoring at or above grade level on the NAEP<\/a> test. Another is “Rigor of Standards,” which is a little fuzzier, but is based on official standards for graduation in that state– state curricula, exit exams, and that sort of thing.<\/p>\n

What’s interesting about this is their correlation: if you click back and forth between the two, looking at their spiffy map, you can watch the colors change, and it jumps out (at least to me) that states with a lousy grade in one, tend to have a good grade in the other. That is, “Academic Achievement” seems to be negatively correlated with “Rigor of Standards.”<\/p>\n

This mostly holds up if you look at the numbers, too (you can download the data sets as Excel files if you click on the little question mark). Out of the 48 states with a grade reported for both categories, there were 17 states that got a D or F grade for “Rigor of Standards.” 12 of those states (70%) had either an A or B in “Academic Achievement.” Six of the eleven (55%) states with an A or B grade for “Rigor of Standards” got a D or F in “Academic Achievement.”<\/p>\n

Only one state (Massachusetts) managed an “A” in both, and only one state (Virginia) got a “B” in both. There were two double D’s (Missouri and Rhode Island), and one D-F (Hawaii).<\/p>\n

So, what the hell is going on here? Why is it that rigorous standards lead to lousy achievement, and vice versa? I can come up with some possible explanations, but I’d like to hear other people’s opinions, first.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, the data at least give you a quick way of knowing where you want your kids to go to school. And, more importantly, where you want them not<\/strong> to go…<\/p>\n

(The original link was from Ezra Klein<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The US Chamber of Commerce has a education website, which provides “grades” for states based on various measures of their educational performance. One category is “Academic Achievement,” based on the percentages of students scoring at or above grade level on the NAEP test. Another is “Rigor of Standards,” which is a little fuzzier, but is… Continue reading Standards Are the Enemy of Achievement<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3235\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}