Natalie Wexler: Dire high school test scores show need for knowledge-based instructional approaches

While test scores in DC are inching up at lower grade levels, high-poverty high schools continue to post abysmal results despite a decade of education reform. Some are pinning the blame on poverty and racism. But many DC schools have yet to try instructional approaches that could not only raise test scores but also improve the chances of long-term success for low-income students.

Of the District’s nine neighborhood high schools, only one had over 50 percent of its test-takers score at the “college and career ready” level on the state-mandated literacy test this year — and that school, Woodrow Wilson, is the only one with a significant population of middle-class and affluent students. The next highest scorer was Eastern, with 17.5 percent, followed by H.D. Woodson with 10.7 percent. At the other six, the proficiency rate ranged from 9.4 percent to 2.8 percent.

Significant gaps between demographic groups have barely budged. The black-white gap narrowed a bit, from about 62 percentage points to 60 — but that was largely because the scores for white students dropped about four points.

Perhaps scores will improve as today’s younger students reach high school. Elementary-level scores have been rising for years, and this year middle school scores at last began to show growth.

But perhaps not. The fact is, questions on high school-level tests are significantly more difficult than those at lower grade levels. Some charter networks that have boasted high scores at lower grade levels have struggled to sustain that success with older students.

For years, the rallying cry of reformers has been that a student’s ZIP code shouldn’t determine her destiny; poverty, they’ve said, is no excuse for low academic achievement, usually measured by test scores. Now, after a decade of education reform in DC, some are questioning that belief — and the very idea that tests measure anything meaningful.

People shouldn’t read too much into test scores, one education policy expert told The Washington Post, because they tend to favor students from wealthier families. The scores, said National Education Policy Center director Kevin Welner, “depend a great deal on students’ opportunities to learn outside of school. If we address the poverty and racism, then we will see these test scores increase.”

And yet the same article notes that some DC charter high schools serving low-income populations recorded large increases in scores this year. Did their students suddenly acquire more opportunities to learn outside school? Did those schools somehow figure out a way to insulate students from poverty and racism? I doubt it.

Yes, test scores are linked to family income. And high scores often reflect knowledge students have acquired outside school. But that doesn’t mean schools serving low-income students have reached the limit of what they can do to narrow the test-score gap.

It’s also true that we shouldn’t put too much weight on tests — and they certainly shouldn’t be used to guide instruction, something that has happened all too often in recent years. But standardized reading tests do measure something important: general knowledge and vocabulary.

The tests don’t purport to assess the specific knowledge students have acquired in school, because different schools are all teaching different things. Instead, they present students with passages on a variety of topics and attempt to evaluate students’ general comprehension ability. But a reader’s ability to comprehend any text is largely dependent on his relevant background knowledge and vocabulary. That means that the more general knowledge a student has, the better he or she is likely to do on a reading test.

Rather than dismissing reading tests as biased or irrelevant, we should see them as general barometers of how much knowledge students in different demographic groups have been able to acquire. That’s important because people with more knowledge have greater chances of success in life. They’re better able to understand any text: college-level texts, newspapers, and on-the-job instruction manuals.

And rather than throwing up our hands at the fact that wealthier students generally acquire more knowledge outside of school, we should be aiming our efforts at providing lower-income students with more access to knowledge inside school. Most elementary and some middle schools — including many in DC — waste precious time drilling students in so-called “reading comprehension skills,” failing to provide them with the content knowledge that would actually boost comprehension. The result is that many students arrive at high school with huge gaps in their knowledge.

It’s difficult to address those gaps at higher grade levels, but not impossible. Tutoring can help, as can providing students with strategies that enable them to write coherently about the content they’re learning. (Disclosure: I’m the co-author of a book on such a method of writing instruction and the board chair of an organization that disseminates it.)

To be sure, we need to do all we can to combat poverty and racism. But those problems are deeply rooted and unlikely to disappear anytime soon. To tell students their test scores — and their chances of success in life — won’t improve until we’ve “addressed” those systemic ills is likely to provide little comfort. And to the extent that it represents a retreat from efforts to improve the quality of education for low-income students, it’s a dangerous and premature admission of defeat.

Education writer Natalie Wexler, a DC resident, is a contributor to the education channel at Forbes.com and occasionally blogs about DC-specific education issues at DC Eduphile.