Bush Touts Gains In Student Test Scores
President Bush is touting new national test scores as evidence that the No Child Left Behind Act, his signature education law, is working and deserving of renewal by Congress.
"My call to the Congress is, don't water down this good law," Mr. Bush said Wednesday. "Don't go backward when it comes to educational excellence."
The new national test results, released Tuesday, show elementary and middle schoolers posted solid gains in math. The students made more modest improvements in reading, however.
Mr. Bush met with Joel Klein, chancellor of New York City's school system, which has won the nation's top prize for urban districts. The district garnered the honor chiefly for reducing achievements gaps among poor and minority kids, a key educational goal for Mr. Bush.
The president intends to miss no chance to talk up the No Child Left Behind law, which is up for renewal in Congress. Many lawmakers say it is too narrow and punitive.
Mr. Bush, accompanied Klein and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, surrounded himself with about two dozen public school children from P.S. 76 in the Bronx. Several of them seemed stunned by the attention.
The test scores landed in the midst of a raging debate in Congress over renewal of the No Child law and provided ammunition for those who want to see it extended with minimal changes.
"If we hadn't seen progress today, I think it might have been the death knell for renewing the law," said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. "It's definitely going to give the proponents some evidence that five years into the experiment, we're seeing some uptick in some parts of the country."
The 2002 law requires schools to test students annually in math and reading. Schools that miss benchmarks face increasingly tough consequences, such as having to replace their curriculum, teachers or principals.
The national assessments, sometimes referred to as the nation's report card, provide the only uniform way to compare student progress in a variety of grades and subjects across the country.
The tests were administered nationwide last winter.
Overall, math scores were up for fourth- and eighth-graders at every step on the achievement ladder:
The math scores have generally been on a steady upward trajectory since the early 1990s, well before the No Child Left Behind law was enacted.
"In many cases, the cumulative gain has been extraordinary," said Kathi King, a math teacher in Oakland, Maine who serves on the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the tests. "It's pretty clear that we must be doing something right."
Jim Rubillo, executive director of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, says math teachers are getting more on-the-job training than they used to.
"Teachers know more about mathematics," he said. "They know more about how students learn mathematics."
There also is a widespread belief that it's easier for teachers to affect math scores than reading scores, because math is almost entirely a school-based subject while children get varying degrees of exposure to reading at home.
In reading, fourth-grade scores were higher than they were two years ago. But eighth-grade reading scores only moved up a little.
Darvin Winick, chair of the National Assessment Governing Board, said it was discouraging that there wasn't more progress in eighth-grade reading. He said boosting the reading skills of older children "should be the next national imperative."
David Gordon, a member of the testing board and the school superintendent in Sacramento, Calif., said educators and policymakers must focus on bringing up the scores of minority students. "We owe it to those kids to make them competitive," he said.
One goal of No Child Left Behind is to shrink the gap in math and reading scores between minority and white students.
The test results showed the reading achievement gap between black and white fourth-graders narrowed this year, as did the gap between black and white eighth-graders in math. But the gaps in other grades, as well as those between whites and Hispanics, held steady.
Students in the District of Columbia and the following states posted gains in math in both grades: Delaware, Hawaii, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Virginia.
In reading, students in the District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii and Maryland saw their scores go up in both the fourth and eighth grades.
The states set their own policies regarding the percentage of special education and limited English speakers who take the tests.
Overall nationally, however, more kids with disabilities and limited English skills have been taking the tests in recent years.