Note to Louisiana Educator readers: Herb
Bassett, an educator in LaSalle Parish, has for the past several years proven
himself to be an excellent independent analyst of data on student testing. His
work has been featured before on this blog.
The 2012 reforms referred to by Mr. Bassett
include primarily the Jindal backed Acts I and 2 of the 2012 legislative
session. Act I drastically reduced teacher tenure protections, did away with
teacher seniority rights, and introduced a merit pay system for teachers based
partially on student test scores. At the same time, the lack of state
funding for the merit pay plan caused many school systems to greatly reduce automatic
pay increases for teachers based on years of teaching experience. Act II
greatly increased the availability of charter schools and vouchers as
alternatives for parents to choose in educating their children.
Enough time has now elapsed to allow us to begin to see how these reforms
have affected student test scores. This analysis relates only to high school
end-of-course testing.
LDOE quietly posted the individual high school
End-Of-Course scores Tuesday, Aug 2. This testing data for various critical
high school courses lets us compare how students in Louisiana performed before
and after the education reforms of 2012.
In a nutshell, the progress Louisiana's students
and teachers were making statewide before the reforms has slowed dramatically
and is beginning to stall completely.
The legislature passed a package of strong
education reforms in the Spring of 2012. The test scores earned in 2012 are the
result of progress being made before the reforms. I use that as a baseline to
then measure progress post-reform. Growth up to 2012 is the product of
Louisiana's teachers and students pre-reform. Statewide growth since 2012 I
credit to the reformers.
High School students take six End-Of-Course tests;
English II, English III, Algebra I, Geometry, Biology, and U. S. History. The
six tests were phased in one per year from 2008 to 2013; we can measure growth
up to 2012 of four that became part of the school accountability system that
year, before the reforms influenced achievement.
All four of those subjects showed robust
proficiency growth prior to the education reforms. Afterward, growth slowed to
a crawl.
The table shows the initial proficiency rate, the 2012 proficiency rate and the current (2016) proficiency rate for each subject (statewide data). While growth has continued since the education reforms, it has slowed dramatically in these subjects.
Before the reforms, overall proficiency growth in
the four subjects averaged 6.71 points per year. After the reforms, the growth
slowed to merely one point per year. This is the difference between a car on a
highway traveling just over the speed limit of 65 m.p.h. and a car slowly
crawling along at ten m.p.h. in a parking lot.
We were cruising down the highway before the
reforms, now we are in the parking lot.
Test score gains over time have been the driving
forces in education since No Child Left Behind.
Test score gains, made rapidly, are the reformers'
preferred measures of success.
The reforms have utterly failed to hasten or even
maintain the rate of progress we were already making.
The reforms of 2012 - and the reformers who pushed
them - have now failed by their own measures.
There always is nuance worth exploring, but I will
save that for another time. Reformers want fast test score gains - we see only
the slowing of progress here.
Herb Bassett
Posts
