The bar keeps lowering...
I wrote an article (a very light version of a regular rant I have) for work that is posted over on linkedin. Julia found the below comic from ADHDinos and it’s a great summary. I’ve added a bit more to my rant below.
For work recently, I’ve been doing a lot of digging into edtech apps and also standardized tests. One of the big things that I keep encountering, is that they all want to talk about how they’ve normalized their data based on all their players. So you can see how well your students are doing versus everyone else from the same grade (and often even the same time of year).
The thing is, we’ve been lowering the standards for success for years (way before COVID) and therefore, the average 3rd grader today is achieving a lot less than the average 3rd grader 10 years ago. And so adjusting the norms to todays students, just make students look like they’re doing okay, when in fact they’re achieving less, and doing worse.
I think norms are generally useless. Mainly because I think the benefit they bring is only about being able to brag about percentiles, and have no connection to actually adjusting learning outcomes. If you care about outcomes, you’d stop caring about what rank a student is, and instead just focus on what they know.
I would like us to be aiming for every kid to be able to master all the standards for grade 3, not just 50%. Now, we can get into a discussion about all “what about” questions. And sure, okay, maybe 100% is unrealistic to ever fully achieve, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t set the bar high.
The the more we continue to be okay because our students are doing “better” than others, and not actually evaluating what they know, all we’re going to do, is 10 years from now, have students that are doing worse, but getting the same percentile ranking.
It’s well past time we start expecting more.