Re: LEAP to the Failure Abyss

[aburke5054@aol.com]

If poor children had better schools, perhaps family income would be 
less
predictive of their achievement.  In any event, working to improve 
schools is far more
constructive than the endless wringing of the hands about how poor 
children score
lower on achievement tests or running around saying why bother to 
improve
schools because it's all demographics anyway.  Get on Louisiana's case 
to make
changes that need to be made in schools.  Nobody could be against that, 
right?

Art

-----Original Message-----
From: Horn, James <jhorn@monmouth.edu>
To: arn-l@interversity.org
Sent: Wed, 8 Aug 2007 7:51 am
Subject: [arn-l] LEAP to the Failure Abyss


The Louisiana Department of Education is more practiced at bad new than 
the
"folks" in the White House. Of course, they have been at it longer. 
Louisiana's
war against the poor and the dark-skinned began in 1999 with the LEAP 
(Louisiana
Education Assessment Program). Yesterday the State put out a press 
release
puffing themselves up for the results on the big Summer of testing that 
followed
the big Spring of testing which followed the big Year of preparing for 
testing,
etc. Here's the opening to the Press Release:

    BATON ROUGE, La. – More than 9,000 Louisiana 4th and 8th grade 
students
succeeded in passing the LEAP test after taking summer school courses 
and
retaking at least a portion of the test, according to results released 
Monday.
About 25,000 4th and 8th graders participated in the summer retest.

And here is the way the Daily Iberian reported it yesterday:

    Statewide numbers released Monday show about 9,000 students will 
move on to
fifth or ninth grades after passing the LEAP test this summer.

Sounds great, doesn't it? What the LDE doesn't brag about is down in 
the pdf
files made available on Monday. The facst are that 10, 762 8th graders 
will
repeat the eighth grade this coming year (if they don't drop out), and 
8,177 4th
graders will repeat the fourth grade this coming year. So while 9,000 
passed the
LEAP re-test this summer, 18,939 did not:

   * 10,762 Eighth Grade repeaters

   * 8,177 Fourth Grade repeaters

The Graduate Exit Exam (GEE) goes unmentioned in the text of Monday's 
glowing
Press Release. Good reason from a PR perspective. The results were even 
more
devastating. The GEE is given the first time in 10th grade, and 
students must
pass (Approacing Basic) math, reading, and either science or social 
studies to
earn a diploma.

In Spring 2007 41,346 high schoolers took the Math part of GEE and 
8,075 failed
it.

Of the 8,075 failures, 5,303 took the Summer retest, and 3,524 
youngsters failed
that. With the 2,772 who did not retake the Math part and the 3,524 who 
failed
the retest, there will be at least 6,296 students who failed the 
mandatory Math
section of the GEE. Those 6,296 failures represents a 15% failure rate 
among
10th and 11th graders, and that does not take into account the 
thousands who
dropped out between 8th grade and now.

Bottom line: Louisiana has a total of 25,235 failures this year in 
grades 4, 8,
and 10-11 as a result of a single test that is oh-so-predictably 
correlated to
family income levels. This is how Louisiana is getting entirely 
color-blind in
the 21st Century.
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