| What do MEAPs really measure? Which kids are rich, which
are poor Sunday, February 23, 2003 BY PERI STONE-PALMQUIST News Staff Reporter Increasingly, politicians are turning to standardized test scores to gauge how well a school or district performs or to award scholarship money. But not everyone is convinced these tests tell us what we want them to. Nelson Maylone has taught in West Bloomfield and served in administrative positions in the Brighton and Grosse Pointe school districts. Now, he's an Eastern Michigan University assistant professor of educational psychology who focuses on evaluation, assessment and research. His formula predicts the percentage of district high school students qualifying for the MEAP Merit Scholarship based on the socioeconomic makeup of the school district. Q: We understand you can predict MEAP scores. Could you explain that? A: What any test really is measuring is what it correlates with. By that I mean a test may look like a math test, but if you give a math test that's written in English to a group of American students and the same test written in English to a group of French students, the results really aren't telling you a lot about anybody's math ability. What the results, of course, will tell you is who speaks English. That's a bit of a facetious example. But anytime you give a test, especially a standardized test that's given to thousands of people ... you need to look at what it lines up with. ... Well, we've known for a long time ... that most standardized tests seem to line up ... with students' socioeconomic status, meaning kids in poverty tend to do poorly on standardized tests. As it turns out, that what MEAP is really measuring ... is who the rich kids are and who the poor kids are. ... For my dissertation, I took on the task of examining all 522 K-12 unified districts in the state, looking at their high school MEAP scores and comparing that to the district's socioeconomic status factors, such as mean annual income, average household income, percent of lone parent households - which you can probably guess are typically female - and so on. And then using some pretty powerful statistical programs. I claim that what you'll get, using only socioeconomic information, is a district's high school MEAP score ... in one sense that's kind of cool, and in another sense it's really disturbing. Q: Tell us about some of the districts who are beating the odds. A: Further study is needed in this area. ... But I do happen to know of a few who do outperform - Oak Park being one in particular that has beat the odds. And that's the result of intensive, hard, smart work and focus with lots of outside resources, by the way, for years and years. And they've pulled off a few minor miracles. ... We know a little bit already from other research from what's happening in those outliers: Strong administrative leadership, strong positive parental involvement, well-trained teachers, teaching in their specialty areas. Q: Can you speak as to why these factors of socioeconomic class factor into test scores so much? A: Although this particular study didn't look at that, the literature is pretty clear that when kids are disadvantaged, well, they're disadvantaged, which typically means less access to culture as kids, probably most significantly less reading in the home, less modeling of reading and learning from parents, frequently one-parent households and often that parent is working two jobs and so kids to some extent fending for themselves. And they're just not as ready for school. Q: What do your findings mean for how much we should value MEAP scores? A: MEAP is not a quality indicator of student achievement in the first place. You have the socioeconomic-MEAP score correlation issue, which in and of itself is pretty important, but then it segues into a discussion of whether we ought to be using MEAP anyway. And the answer is clearly no. It's a flawed test. The high stakes that are attached to it are incredibly inappropriate. There is plenty of room in education for traditional paper-and-pencil testing in the hands of educators and parents. But the politicians have just run amok with MEAP. Q: What can the state do? A: The entire MEAP program has been getting worse and worse for several years, but now with the No Child Left Behind federal legislation, the badness of the MEAP program has been locked in. And to a great extent, now it's out of local hands. MEAP is expanding shortly. The No Child Left Behind legislation mandates annual standardized testing for all American public school kids in reading and math in grades 3-8. In Michigan, what we're doing, since we already have the MEAP up and running, is simply expanding that program. ... I'm not advocating any civil disobedience, but I would like to see more brave superintendents and principals and parents stand up to MEAP and the federal legislation. It's bad stuff. Peri Stone-Palmquist can be reached at (734) 994-6835 or pstonepalm@annarbornews.com. © 2003 Ann Arbor News. Used with permission Copyright 2003 Michigan Live. All Rights Reserved.
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