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A new AFT analysis of how states measure student proficiency in reading and math to meet performance goals under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) shows that there is no common understanding among policymakers about what "proficient" means.
President Bush and U.S. Department of Education officials say that proficiency means students are on "grade level," but the AFT issue brief, "What's Proficient? The No Child Left Behind Act and the Many Meanings of Proficiency," points out that the proficiency goals of NCLB and how progress in meeting those goals is measured have nothing to do with grade level.
States measure proficiency by administering different tests with different content standards and different cut scores—all of it much more difficult than simply determining if students are at grade level. In many states, the standard is high; in others, it is less rigorous.
A student who is proficient in California in reading may not be deemed proficient in reading in Colorado, and being proficient in math is not same as being proficient in reading. Nor does proficient mean the same thing in different academic subjects. The meaning of proficient even varies across the grades in the same subject in the same state. "What it doesn't mean, however, is so-called grade-level performance," says Bella Rosenberg, assistant to the AFT president and author of the brief.
For states, "proficient" means hitting at least a particular cut point on tests; it's standards-based, she says. Grade level, on the other hand, reflects a big range and is based on actual student performance.
Yet, the stakes are high for the nation's schools if students do not meet state performance standards for proficiency—regardless of whether or not they are performing on grade level. The NCLB's "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) formula--the law's chief accountability mechanism--requires states to calculate annual achievement targets for schools and districts based on the ultimate goal of 100 percent proficiency by the year 2014; missing those annual targets means failing AYP, which carries increasingly stiff sanctions.
The report is especially timely given that President Bush reiterated his administration's own misunderstanding of "proficiency" in an education speech on May 11. "Some believe that the standards of No Child Left Behind are too high," he told students at a junior high school in Van Buren, Ark. "They say that if you raise expectations, all you're doing is setting up children to fail. Yet this law requires students to perform at grade level, which doesn't seem like it's too high a bar to cross. I mean, we're asking children to read at third-grade level if you're in the third grade. Why is that raising expectations too high?"
It's precisely this reasonable-sounding suggestion that the goals of NCLB and AYP are relatively easy to achieve that engenders support for it—but "it's dead wrong," says Rosenberg. "If AYP was only based on grade level, we wouldn't have the massive district and school failure that's already been seen in the first year of the law."
In fact, the goals are very difficult, and even before the law was signed, "experts warned that they went beyond challenging into the realm of the supernatural," she says.
The news is likely to get worse when this year's results are processed in the summer, warns Rosenberg, because most districts will be on the failing list by then.
"The reason isn't our 'failed public education system,'" she says. "It's because of the statistical and educational deficiencies in the AYP formula itself."
May 13, 2004
