CFK reports from: The Brookings Institution
Event: Release of 2004 Brown Center Report on American Education
Organized by: The Brookings Institution
Where/When: Washington, D.C., November 18, 2004

The Brookings Institution has released its annual Brown Center Report on American Education. The 2004 edition focuses on student learning, providing a look at three issues: whether the math portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is demanding enough, the content training of middle school math teachers, and the national Blue Ribbon Schools Program.

At the release of the report, Tom Loveless, Director of the Brown Center on Education Policy, was especially animated when discussing the findings regarding NAEP, a test that American students have been performing significantly better on over the last decade. After reviewing test data released in 2004, his team analyzed a sample of NAEP items and discovered that the mathematics required to solve many of the problems is extraordinarily easy.

“Most of the arithmetic one would need to know to solve the average item on the eighth grade NAEP is taught by the end of third grade,” he said. He added that whole numbers, rather than fractions, dominate the problem sets in the NAEP test. In addition, he explained that some items on the test are “falsely rigorous” – they don’t really test algebraic knowledge, even though they may seem to do so on the surface.

Has NAEP always been simple, or have its designers purposely dumbed it down over the last decade? “I don’t think the test has been degraded over time,” said Loveless. “I think it’s always been what it is.”

Turning to middle school math teachers, Loveless reported more bad news on the arithmetic front. A significant number of these teachers (59 percent) lack formal undergraduate training in mathematics, and the professional development they are receiving appears to be inadequate to remedy the problem. “[There are] too many topics that teachers are being developed on,” he said.

“This is a problem for No Child Left Behind,” added Loveless. “It requires highly qualified teachers by 2006.”

Part 3 of the report, titled “Blue Ribbon Schools Revisited,” expanded on a 2000 study by the Brown Center which found some problems with the “highly successful schools” that were singled out for national recognition in 1999. At least one-fourth of the winning schools did not deserve to win the award, at least based on state test scores in reading and math, according to Loveless.

The federal government made changes to the Blue Ribbon ranking system after that report, changing some of its measurements of achievement and test scores.

After the 2000 report was released, many administrators associated with schools that Brown found to be of questionable Blue Ribbon caliber contacted Loveless to express their dissatisfaction.

In this year’s replicated study, the team found that the Blue Ribbon program today makes fewer errors. “There is still room for improvement, but far fewer failing schools are receiving the awards,” according to the report.