Do students today know more than in past?

I don’t know about you, but I tire of hearing how terrible public schools are and how charter schools will solve all public-sector educational problems.

Recently, I attended a celebration with family and friends. One of my friends asked if students know less now than in the past, because he had been told by several college professors that this was the case – “Students don’t know anything anymore.” I assured him that was not the case. I had read enough Gerald Bracey to know that the basic trend nationally was upward and had seen OSPI (Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction) reports to support this in the state.

Washington state students do know more now than they did in the past. A look at the NAEP (National Assessment of Education Progress) results for Washington bears this out. For both fourth- and eighth-graders, reading and mathematics scores have been going up between 2003 and 2011, and the state average has been higher than the national average for both grades in both tested subjects.

Remember, No Child Left Behind was passed by Congress in 2001, and NAEP testing for this state began in 2003. So, if test scores are any indication of students’ learning, then, yes, Washington students are learning despite increases in poverty and numbers of non-English speaking students in the schools.

But I was not satisfied with the state NAEP results alone. Diane Ravitch advises readers to Google the NAEP national results for reading and mathematics. I did. I learned that the national trends in reading and math have also been on the upward swing since 1990. I have not heard this touted anywhere in educational circles that count.

Fourth- and eighth-grade mathematics national NAEP scores have been on the upward trend between 1990 and 2011, each round of test scores higher than the time before and at a statisically significant level. For reading, the same trend has been noted where test scores have been the same or higher than the time before. All of the fourth-grade reading assessments were statistically significant over the previous test results; this also held mostly true for eighth-grade reading, except for the last three testing rounds where the scores were the same or slightly higher, but not statistically significant.

The end result of the state and national tests is this: Students know more than they did in the past. You don’t hear that on national or local news or in our state legislature.

And then there is the concern of how charter schools compare to traditional public schools in student performance. According to the Center for Public Education, nationally 17% of charter schools peform better than, 37% worse than, and 46% the same as traditional public schools. Overall, the study reports that “charter schools do no better than traditional public schools.” Why then do we want to gamble on charter schools taking over public education and doing better if 37% of schools will do worse than they do now?

Washington’s public schools are doing their job well, thank you very much.

Dr. Duane Pitts is the English teacher at Odessa High School.