School Scores Too Good to be True, and Likely Are.

The Morning News is reporting that school test scores are way up, in one case even passing the "national average" even though the "national average" itself keeps going up every year. The test is administered to fourth and eighth graders.

Happy lawmakers still had too much sense to believe that their recently enacted teacher pay raise or also-recently enacted pre-K were responsible for Arkansas' accelerated climb. They could only guess as to what the real cause would be.

I might as well throw my "guess" in there, although it is a highly educated one since I taught for 13 years and still have family in the business who tell me what is actually going on.

Legislators should check the number of students labled "special ed" and "504" from 2002 to 2006. If the 2006 number is much higher, the answer is clear- Arkansas' schools are doing a better job than the nation of keeping low-performing students from taking the test by classifying them as some sort of "Special Ed". This would not represent a better effort at educating children, but more akin to "increasing average height" by excluding more short children from the measurements.

In past years, every student, including all Special Ed and 504 students, had to take the test. 2006 was the first year that a percentage of them could be exempted- and suddenly Arkansas' schools found they have a lot more children with "disablities". In my little town we went from maybe having 10% of the children classified like that in 8th grade to having (if my source is correct) an absolute majority of the students in the 8th grade labled as having some "disability".

My guess is that there has been an explosion of labeling children as "special ed" and "504" by many schools in the state so that the schools can exclude more low performers from taking the test. Now you may be asking, "Isn't it kinda sick to decide to tell parents (and child) that their child has a "disability" just so school administrators can keep their test scores up?" Yes. Next question.

I hope I am wrong and that real academic progress has occurred here over and above the fact that the whole nation is learning how to "teach to the test" to the detriment of all other academic content. But like the ledge, I have my doubts. My fear is that Arkansas school administrators are simply more ruthless than their counterparts in other states, both in their willingness to sacrifice non-tested academic content and in slapping a label on a child who doesn't really rate it. This of course waters down the help and attention that the system can give to those children who truly are disabled, but hey, look at our test scores!