Remembering Test Scores and Learning about Regression toward the Mean | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Remembering Test Scores and Learning about Regression toward the Mean | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

Remembering Test Scores and Learning about Regression toward the Mean

by larrycuban

Here is a story about test scores. I was superintendent of the Arlington (VA) public schools between 1974-1981. In 1979 something happened that both startled me and gave me insight into the public power of test scores. The larger lesson, however, came years after I left the superintendency when I began to understand the powerful drive that we have to explain something, anything, by supplying a cause, any cause, just to make sense of what occurred.
In Arlington then, the school board and I were responsible for a district that had declined in population (from 20,000 students to 15,000) and had become increasingly minority (from 15 percent to 30). The public sense that the district was in free-fall decline, we felt, could be arrested by concentrating on academic achievement, critical thinking, expanding the humanities, and improved teaching. After five years, both the board and I felt we were making progress.
State  test scores–the coin of the realm in Arlington–at the elementary level climbed consistently each year. The