Following the release earlier this week of the Maine Policy Institute's new report on the decline in Maine's K-12 education, the Maine Department of Education has released the report and the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It responded by attempting to discredit both key data on progress. analysis.
The report itself is not an attack on Maine's current DOE. Rather, it tells a story of decades of decline in Maine's classrooms due to mandates that disrupt learning, and the blame lies with prominent politicians at all levels of government (on both sides of the aisle).
NAEP (often referred to as the “National Report Card”) is a Congressionalally mandated test administered by the National Center for Education Statistics. This involves having a representative sample of students in each state tested every two to four years. MPI's report provides evidence that Maine, which consistently ranked first and second in math and reading in the early 1990s, has fallen to an average of 36th in NAEP rankings in 2022. ing.
In public comments this week, the DOE said NAEP is “used to identify national trends and is not designed to measure individual states.” The comments further stated that the test “provides a limited and narrow snapshot of academic performance” for a small group of fourth- and eighth-grade students and “is not a valid or reliable measure of individual state performance.” claims to have been proven.
It is disingenuous for DOE to say that NAEP is not designed to measure student performance in individual states. NAEP itself states that its two primary goals are to compare results across states and time periods.
If the assessment itself is not representative, federal statisticians will not allow it to be used for comparisons between states. In fact, the National Center for Education Statistics works hard to ensure that each state has representative subgroups for analysis, taking into account demographics such as race, gender, and socioeconomic status.
It's also worth noting that while the DOE has criticized its use of NAEP, Maine's NAEP results dating back to 2003 have been published on the DOE's website. Users can compare Maine's results to other states and see its performance over time. The agency does not provide any disclaimers for using the test in the way I did.
NAEP was selected for this report because it is a rigorous and reliable test that provides data dating back to the 1990s. It is used by policy scholars from across the ideological spectrum, from the American Enterprise Institute to the Brookings Institution. As one leading educationist has said, “When it comes to education, there are no more trusted and respected facts than those produced by (NAEP).”
To me it looks like the DOE doesn't care about the data and is trying to obscure the obvious. Test scores in Maine are declining, students aren't learning as much as they should, and teachers and administrators are getting burned out and leaving the profession. I drove. DOE knows the report is correct regarding these important findings, which is why it must resort to attacking the use of this assessment.
Far more important than these test scores is the reality that Maine has experienced a recent exodus of teachers and faces one of the most staggering teacher shortages in the nation.
Experimental top-down mandates imposed on Maine schools by the state and federal governments for decades are forcing teachers to change the way they teach, test, grade, and manage students. . What used to be valuable instructional time is now spent on tasks such as paperwork, data collection, and social-emotional learning. This takes away valuable class time from students, and teachers don't like it either.
If Maine wants to improve test scores and student achievement, local parents, teachers, administrators, and school boards should be empowered to make important decisions about their children's education. Now is not the time to ignore the evidence. Now is the time to learn from past mistakes and provide Maine students with the education they deserve.
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