A Youngstown State professor's study of testing data suggests Ohio cannot validly claim schools are improving or slipping based on state ratings and says the achievement gap between black and white students is exaggerated.
Randy Hoover's research showed Ohio has a large poverty gap in test performance between poor students and their wealthier classmates, regardless of race or ethnicity.
I'd like to add the caveat that - whether we like it or not - while there are lots of poor people that are not Black, a higher percentage of the Black population meets federal poverty standards. This alone explains the last sentence of the first paragraph. If you read the second paragraph carefully, it makes that distinction. This fits in with some of my thoughts on race as a social status marker. Put another way: Get poor Black people out of poverty, and racial differences become minimal.
All three of the main factors are commonsense elements: Single parent households, the number poor children in a district, and median family income in a district. The first - and I say this as someone who was a single parent for many years - is simply because there's only so much time and energy one person has. The second two - while partially effecting children through poorer home experiences - also plays into lower funds (and therefore, fewer supplies and worse supplies) for schools. It's due to the way we fund Ohio schools through property taxes. That ensures that kids who already have difficulties at home will have more difficulties at school.
I'm not particularly impressed by the state's response that it "doesn't reflect efforts to ensure tests treat students of all wealth and ethnicity evenly". I'm more interested in results. The convoluted last paragraph seems to hold a strong indication that the way we measure results ... well, sucks.
The study's results are "controlled for lived experience". This seems to mean that, all other things being equal, if you've got advantages you should do better. If you've got disadvantages, you should do worse. And what he found was that districts with advantages were not doing better. And they should be. This implies - pretty strongly - that those students are underperforming... and that we're taking thier underachievement as proof that disadvantaged students are doing well. It also means that we need to take long, hard, critical looks at our testing metrics before getting too excited about articles regarding school performance.
A quick analogy: You have two runners. One runs the race with the wind blowing in her face. She runs the race in two minutes. The other runner runs the race in two minutes as well - but with the wind blowing at his back. Are they performing equally? Absolutely not - the conditions they're running under are different.
But the State of Ohio seems to think that it's all the same.
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If academic performance is based on socioeconomic factors, it's beyond the scope of education.
Which has implications for things like school levys. Just spending "more" doesn't address the root causes of poor performance. It almost implies education in disticts with a high percentage of disadvantaged students needs to be rethought.
But I also recognize the politcal agenda in this discussion, too, to discredit profiencieny testing.
There's two things going on here.
1) From my reading, it appears that the "standard" is artificially low because of underachievement by advantaged students. This leads to complacency when disadvantaged students meet that artificially low standard. Or in other words, the tests aren't measuring what they claim to be measuring. That's not an argument against tests, per se, but against these particular ones.
2) If Ohio schools weren't funded based on property taxes, you'd be right in saying that this study reveals the effect of socioeconomic factors in education. But Ohio schools are funded by property tax funds (and levies). This implies that socioeconomic factors not only impact home life, but impact school funds as well. As I made the point elsewhere, more funds does not guarantee better performance, but fewer funds just about guarantees worse performance.
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