New legislation gives Hawaii more flexibility with testing in our schools

In December, President Obama announced “the Christmas Miracle”—that Congress had managed to pass the new “Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)” to replace the unpopular “No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).” This major change shifts authority from the federal DOE to state departments of education. Testing mandates may now be replaced by states with alternative programs and other flexibility will now enable states to customize testing and other solutions for their schools.

Local Support for Changes

When Governor Ige attended the National Governor’s Association meeting in the end of February, he arranged for the legislative director, Steven Parker, to come to Hawaii to provide important briefings on ESSA for the BOE, DOE, state legislators, and the public. The goal of the community presentations was to explain the purpose and potential in the ESSA, and several PPS-HI board members were able to attend one of these meetings.

Here is an excerpt and a chart summarizing changes from Steven Parker’s presentation to the Hawaii State Legislators, March 16, 2016.

“Under ESSA, we have a new vision: one that allows a more flexible approach to testing. Efforts to improve testing are under way across the country and ESSA provides additional flexibility and federal resources to support this work.

We can now have accountability systems based on multiple measures. We can now have state determined goals not federal ones.  States determine a school’s rating not the federal government. We have a mixed delivery system that allows for states to really have multiple assessments during a school year using portfolio based or observational assessments from teachers or educators who know the students and can tell what that student needs to succeed.  A state also has the option of allowing a substitution of a nationally recognized high school exam in place of the state exam.”

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EDUCATION WEEK.  MAY 14, 2014, VOL. 33, ISSUE 31, PAGES 1, 22

By Holly Yettick

The recent publication of a scholarly book has reopened the debate surrounding the academic achievement of public vs. private schools.

Public schools achieve the same or better mathematics results as private schools with demographically similar students, concludes The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools, published in November by the University of Chicago Press. The authors are Christopher and Sarah Lubienski, a husband-and-wife team of education professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Central to the controversy is their suggestion that vouchers, which provide public funding for private school tuition, are based on the premise that private schools do better—an assumption that is undercut by the book’s overall findings.

The Lubienskis’ analysis draws on data from the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, as well as the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99.

After accounting for socioeconomic status, race, and other demographic differences among students, the researchers found that public school math achievement equaled or outstripped math achievement at every type of private school in grades 4 and 8 on NAEP. The advantage was as large as 12 score points on a scale of 0 to 500 (or more than one full grade level) when the authors compared public school students with demographically similar 4th graders in conservative Christian schools.

The Lubienskis also used NAEP data to conclude that regular public schools outperformed independently operated, publicly funded charter schools in 4th grade math and equaled them in 8th grade math.

Finally, the Lubienskis used their longitudinal data to find that public school students started kindergarten with lower math achievement than demographically similar private school peers. By the time they reached the 5th grade, however, they were outperforming those same peers in the subject.

On the basis of the data they analyzed, the Lubienskis offer two possible explanations for their findings.

First, public school teachers are more likely to be certified, meaning they are required to continue to take professional-development courses that expose them to the latest research on teaching math.

Second, perhaps as a result of that professional development, their instructional approaches more closely align with recent studies suggesting that test results improve when students know how to reason and communicate mathematical concepts rather than merely learning to add, subtract, multiply, and divide.

The Lubienskis conclude that “private, autonomous, choice-based schools are not necessarily more innovative or academically effective but instead often perform at lower levels even as they attract more able students.”

Their book adds to a growing and controversial body of research questioning the conventional wisdom that private schools are superior to their public counterparts.

One source of contention is that private schools serve a different and often socially and economically more privileged set of students. So efforts to compare the two sectors necessarily require researchers to account for demographic differences between the groups.

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