270. Growth vs Proficiency

The Growth vs. Proficiency Debate and Why Al Franken Raised a Boring but Critical Issue Al Franken asked about student growth versus proficiency in the #DeVosHearing. Here’s why that matters By Matt Barnum … Franken’s position in favor of growth (how much students improve) over proficiency (how many students meet a certain score deemed proficient) appears to be on solid ground. A 2008 survey of education researchers found that more than two in three said that value-added metrics — which examine how much students grow from year to year — are a good way to measure school quality. Just 9 percent said that “raw test scores” — proficiency — made sense for evaluating schools Why are researchers, at least in this survey, so in favor of growth measures? Perhaps the most basic reason is that there are many factors that affect what level a student achieves at and whether they hit the bar set at proficiency. Careful research finds that about 20 percent, and perhaps less, of the variation in student achievement is explained by differences in schools. That pales in comparison to out-of-school factors, like poverty, that have a significant effect on learning. Schools matter, but they aren’t the sole or even main driver of student outcomes. What that means for proficiency is that schools that take disadvantaged students — those in poverty, those who come in at low achievement levels — will look much worse. The school could be doing a great job helping kids improve, but if they start out at a very low level, that might not show up on proficiency measures. Put simply, proficiency rewards schools for the students they take in, but not necessarily for how they teach students once they’re there. Proficiency is also problematic not just because it is a score at one point in time — referred to as “status” by researchers — but because it sets an all-or-nothing bar for students to reach. That means it doesn’t matter if a student just missed proficiency or scores way below it. Franken argues, “With proficiency, teachers ignore the kids at the top who are not going to fall below proficiency, and they ignore the kid at the bottom who they know will never get to proficiency.” Indeed, there is research suggesting this phenomenon — sometimes called “educational triage” — is real, though other studies do not find evidence of it. The extent of such triage likely varies from place to place, but the incentives for it inevitably exist when proficiency is used.