FAPPAF Bucket

What percentage of Georgia’s fourth-graders are good readers? It seems to depend on whom you ask. The state will tell you that 85 percent of them met or exceeded the proficiency benchmark on its 2007 test. Not too shabby. On the other hand, only 28 percent of fourth-graders in Georgia scored high enough to be considered proficient on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), an exam administered by the U.S. Department of Education that is usually regarded as the gold standard in education testing. The big difference results from where the two tests set their proficiency bars. Georgia sets its bar pretty low—so low that barely literate students can score high enough to be deemed proficient. The NAEP has a much higher standard; in fact, a student labeled “proficient” by Georgia could fail to score above “basic” on the federal test.

Unfortunately, Georgia’s low standard is not anomalous. Three states have even bigger gaps in fourth-grade reading. Worse, standards are declining, even as graduates need more and more knowledge and skills to get ahead in the global economy. A recent federal study noted that 15 states lowered at least one of their proficiency standards in math and reading between 2005 and 2007.

States’ low standards have spurred a bipartisan campaign to create worthwhile national ones. Conservative groups like the Fordham Foundation have pushed for national standards for years; more recently, President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, as well as local leaders like New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, have embraced the idea. But the road to national standards would be extremely tough to navigate politically. A more feasible approach would give all states an incentive to set objectively high standards themselves, and the looming reauthorization of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act gives us a perfect opportunity to do it.

The perverse incentives of NCLB clearly have something to do with the downward movement of state standards. NCLB punishes a school when too few of its students make progress toward math and reading proficiency—beginning with extending to students the choice of other public schools to attend and culminating with completely restructuring the school. But the law has a gaping loophole: states get to define proficiency however they want. A state can thus meet NCLB targets by defining proficiency down; toughening its standards, by contrast, handicaps its ability to meet the federal requirements.

Given such confusion, the case for high, uniform, enforceable national standards seems strong. States with unchallenging standards do a disservice to their students, who wind up thinking that they have mastered the skills to succeed when they may in fact be way, way behind peers in more demanding states.