Kansas school standards evaluated

A new edition of an ongoing study shows that Kansas school standards are weak, compared to other states. This is a continuation of a trend.

Last week the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) published a new version of its ongoing study Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto NAEP Scales: Results From the 2013 NAEP Reading and Mathematics Assessments. As was also found in past years, the standards that the state of Kansas uses to evaluate students are low.

This study is important because states set their own standards for evaluating students, as the report explains: “Because each state set its own standards, there was no assurance that students who met the standards of one state would be able to meet the standards of another state, and one could not compare the effectiveness of schools across states in terms of the percentages of students reported to meet the standards.”

There is a national test that is the same in all states, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Again, from the report: “NAEP provided a common scale on which the stringency of the various state criteria for proficiency could be compared.” The purpose of the study is to map each state’s standards to a common standard. By doing this, we can determine whether a state uses a stringent or weak standard to evaluate students. This study does not evaluate the performance — good or bad — of a state’s students. Rather, the study evaluates the state and its standards.

The two-page summary for Kansas is here.

The summary is this:

For reading in grades four and eight, the answer to the question “How do Kansas’ reading standards for proficient performance at grades 4 and 8 in 2013 map onto the NAEP scale?” is “below basic.”

For math in grades four and eight the answer to the same question is “basic.”

This means that the state of Kansas says students are “proficient” when by NAEP standards the students are “basic” or “below basic.”

Especially in reading, Kansas standards are low. For grade four reading, 26 states (including Kansas) are in the “below basic” category. For grade eight reading, only nine other states besides Kansas fall into the “below basic” category.

Following, charts excerpted from the study showing how Kansas measures against the other states. In some cases, there are few states with lower standards than Kansas. In no case is Kansas above the middle. Click charts for larger versions.