January 12, 2015
GOOD SCHOOLS, GETTING BETTER:
Black And Hispanic Students Are Making Meaningful Gains, But It's Hard To Tell (MIKHAIL ZINSHTEYN, 1/12/15, 538)
While the overall math averages for 9-year-olds grew by 25 points between 1978 and 2012, average scores among black and Hispanic students increased by 34 and 31 points, respectively.Among 13-year-olds, math scores for white students increased by 21 points, while results for blacks and Hispanics increased by 34 points and 33 points, respectively. Overall, 13-year-olds improved by 26 points in math.Seventeen-year-olds, many of whom are one year away from enrolling in college, nudged upward by six points overall between 1978 and 2012 on the math portion of NAEP, but scores for black and Hispanic students increased by 20 and 18 points, respectively.Overall, scores for 9-year-olds taking the reading assessment grew by 11 points between 1975 and 2012; the scores for black and Hispanic students each rose by 25 points in that same period.While scores for all 13-year-olds and white students increased by less than 10 points in reading, scores for blacks and Hispanics grew by 21 and 17 points, respectively.Among 17-year-olds, reading scores for the overall tested population and white students grew by no more than two points between 1975 and 2012; scores for both black and Hispanic students grew by more than 20 points.So, why haven't minority students' numbers boosted the overall average? There are two main reasons: Black and Hispanic students have grown as a share of all students in the U.S., yet despite the improvements of these groups, their scores still are lower than those of white students. That means the average doesn't represent the considerable student growth at play.In statistics, this phenomenon is called Simpson's paradox."The minority students tend to do worse on the NAEP test, and they're growing as a proportion of the population," said Goldhaber, who also studies education issues at the University of Washington Bothell. "So, the fact that they are growing and have test scores that are below the average of white students, they're going to drag the overall average down, even if their average is rising over time."
There's never a bad time to use hysteria about American education to gain further reforms, but the next one is particularly difficult, the use of vouchers (housing and education) to get these inner city kids into white suburban schools.
Posted by Orrin Judd at January 12, 2015 3:35 PM
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