Race to the Top’s Bart Simpson Standard

Alex Adrianson / May 21, 2010

It’s not exactly news that the federal No Child Left Behind program has encouraged the states to define proficiency downward in order to avoid triggering various federal sanctions. But judging from Education Next’s recent grading of state proficiency standards, the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program is no fix. Here’s the journal’s overall finding: “Every state, for both reading and math (with the exception of Massachusetts for math), deems more students ‘proficient’ on its own assessments than NAEP [the National Assessment of Educational Progress] does. The average difference is a startling 37 percentage points.”

But perhaps even more startling is that “Tennessee received an F and had the lowest standards of all states” yet was also one of the two winners in the first phase of the Race to the Top (RttT) competition. Education Next reports:

Based on its own tests and standards, the state claimed in 2009 that over 90 percent of its 4th-grade students were proficient in math, whereas NAEP tests revealed that only 28 percent were performing at a proficient level. Results in 4th-grade reading and at the 8th-grade level are much the same. … (more…)