Academic expectations around the country, in two maps - The Hechinger Report

Academic expectations around the country, in two maps - The Hechinger Report:

Academic expectations around the country, in two maps

Many education experts, and lay people alike, argue that you must set high academic standards in order for students to excel at school. All too often you hear the lament that low-income minority students often perform poorly because schools don’t expect much of them. Naturally, data geeks want to quantify abstract notions like “expectations,” and see exactly what they are. One way to do this is to look at where each state sets the passing score, or proficiency mark, on the exams it gives each year.

A branch of the U.S. federal government has actually gone through this exercise five times since 2003, and consistently finds that both math and reading expectations vary wildly throughout the country. As one analyst said recently, the eighth-grade proficiency level in one state might be equivalent to the fourth- or fifth-grade proficiency level in another state.

But these federal analyses are almost impenetrable to non-statisticians. The differences are measured in “NAEP points” and “standard deviations.” And you’re left wondering if these differences are significant, or merely interesting to academics who analyze measurement errors.

So I thought I would take the most recent report from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), called “Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto NAEP Scales: Results from the 2013 NAEP Reading and Mathematics Assessments,” and released July 9, 2015, and convert it into something both my mother and my daughter can understand: grade levels, as in the difference between sixth and seventh grade. I found that 26 states set expectations that were three or more grade levels behind the eighth-grade standards of New York State, the state that had set the highest expectations back in 2013, as an early adopter of Common Core.

Eighth-grade reading expectations, as set by each state’s annual test, can be several grade levels apart.

Zoom in and click on any state to see what each state’s proficiency mark on its 8th-grade reading test is equivalent to on the national NAEP exam, and how many grade levels that is below New York, the top state. (Interactive map created by Jill Barshay of The Hechinger Report. Source data: NAEP mapping report, 2013 NAEP scores, Jill Barshay’s calculations.)

Eighth-grade math expectations, as set by each state, also vary wildly.

Zoom in and click on any state to see what each state’s proficiency mark on its 8th-grade math test is equivalent to on the national NAEP exam, and how many grade levels that is below New York, the top state. California and Virginia didn’t assess general mathematics in 8th grade in 2013. (Interactive map created by Jill Barshay of The Hechinger Report. Source data: NAEP mapping report, 2013 NAEP scores, Jill Barshay’s calculations.)

This number-crunching exercise was inspired by comments fromGary Phillips, a former NCES acting commissioner, and now a vice president at the American Institutes for Research. In an online press briefing just prior to the release of the July report, Phillips said that “states are setting wildly different standards and most states are setting very low standards.” To make it more vivid, Phillips explained that differences between the states with highest expectations and those with the lowest were equivalent to “three or four grade levels.”

It’s worth emphasizing that these are not measurements of how kids Academic expectations around the country, in two maps - The Hechinger Report: