Education Week - April 25, 2018 - 22

COMMENTARY
What NAEP Scores Aren't Telling Us

By Ian Rowe
or two decades, as part of repeated research
studies, thousands of participants from diverse backgrounds have watched the same
video of college students playing basketball
in a circle. Participants are told to count
how many times the students wearing
white shirts pass the basketball. Stunningly,
roughly half of the participants become so
distracted trying to count the passes that they completely
miss something extraordinary: a student dressed in gorilla
suit who walks into the middle of the scene and thumps her
chest before walking out of the frame nine seconds later.
In the world of neuroscience, this phenomenon of being
oblivious to the obvious is called "inattentional blindness."
This occurs any time we as human beings fail to notice a
fully visible but unexpected object because our attention
was on another task, event, or activity.
Inattentional blindness is an important concept to keep
in mind now that the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress results for reading and mathematics for 4th
and 8th grades have been released.
As many feared, results were extremely disappointing
across the board. Nevertheless, there are already reams
of analysis of certain subgroups highlighting the stubborn
achievement gaps within the mesmerizing categories of
students' race and family income. For example, despite
the fact that only 37 percent of all 4th graders were at
or above "proficient"-further evidence that poor reading
performance crossed all racial boundaries-the dominant
reaction to the scores continues to focus on the black-white
achievement gap.
What we haven't seen are NAEP analyses of achievement
differences by family structure, even though we know the
stability of the family within which children are raised
matters monumentally to their educational outcomes.

Take a recent study from the Institute for Women's Policy
Research: By 2012, the number of single mothers in college
had doubled in just 12 years to nearly 2.1 million. Despite
their best efforts to create a better future for themselves
and their children, only 28 percent of single mothers who
entered college between 2003 and 2009 earned a degree or
certificate within six years-an outcome that adversely affects both mother and child. For college-going women without children, the completion rate was more than double.
And according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were more than 1 million births to women
aged 24 and younger in 2016. Seventy-one percent of these
births were to unmarried women, and 42 percent were to
women who already had at least one child. There are always
exceptions, but the magnitude in the number of multiple,
non-marital births to typically unprepared young women
and men, and the decades-long rise in the rate of single-parenthood among young mothers, create a much greater risk
of fragile families that correlate with child poverty, chronic
student absenteeism, and the kind of toxic stress that begins in utero and impairs long-term academic advancement.
So what does this mean for NAEP? To be clear, NAEP
data are an invaluable resource. The test remains the largest continuing and nationally representative assessment of
what our nation's students know and can do.
NAEP reports information on student demographics, including race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, disability, and limited English proficiency. But reporting by
these measurement groupings-though critical-has the
unintended effect of fueling the fixation on those categories
as the primary bases for comparison. This is particularly
true with race, where differences in outcomes (e.g., the Hispanic-white achievement gap) are perceived to be caused by
race-related reasons (e.g., racism), which often elicit only
race-related interventions.
It is a classic case of what gets measured gets managed.
And what does not get measured gets ignored.

Enter family structure in a full-body gorilla suit, undetected amid the obsessive counting of other NAEP groupings.
As it turns out, NAEP already includes a question on
many student questionnaires that gets at the issue of family structure by asking students to identify the adults who
live in their home from a range of guardian options.
While self-reported, and thus susceptible to reliability
concerns, this little-known data collection is a promising
start. But given the lack of consensus that family structure
actually matters to academic outcomes-or the fear of retribution of publicly stating that it does-it will take real
courage from the National Center for Education Statistics
to lift this data from obscurity.
Unlike gender or race, family structure is not a static
measure that is easily discernible. Consider the powerful
analysis done by Maria Cancian and Daniel R. Meyer in
their study titled "Implications of Complex Families on
Poverty and Child Support Policy." After monitoring 7,169
first-born children of unmarried mothers in Wisconsin between 1997 and 2007, they found that 10-year-old children
of unmarried parents lived in increasingly complex family
structures, as both the biological father and mother had
more children in and outside of their relationship. Families
change. Nevertheless, I challenge the technical experts at
NCES to incorporate an actual or proxy measure for family
structure into NAEP student groupings.
One suggestion from noted psychologist and researcher
Nicholas Zill is that parents of a representative subsample of
NAEP-tested students be contacted to gather information on
marital status and father or mother presence in the household. Whether by better leveraging the existing data collected
on student questionnaires or by seeking out supplemental information in follow-up interviews, NAEP researchers would
do our nation a great service if they developed a common
metric for family structure and stability that could estimate
the effects of these forces on educational progress.
Virtually 100 percent of the research subjects who failed

In Conversation

John Urschel:
From the NFL to MIT
John Urschel
teaches a STEM
lesson at Dundalk
High School
in Baltimore
last summer.

You've previously described math
education as "an exercise in training to
help students solve the problems they
will face in life." As a vocal champion of
STEM education, what do you think works
when it comes to making math relevant for
students who may not (yet) have a love for
subject?
Math doesn't have to be an exercise in
drudgery, a list of questions that demand
using a formula. It's not about being able to
match the answer in the back of the book.
Math is fundamentally problem-solving.
That can mean doing puzzles or playing
games, or finding ways to connect math to
problems that kids face in everyday life.
That could mean connecting questions to
some larger hands-on project or finding

22 | EDUCATION WEEK | April 25, 2018 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary

Steve Ruark/AP-File

AS FORMER OFFENSIVE LINEMAN
for the NFL's Baltimore Ravens and a
current doctoral candidate in applied
mathematics at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, John Urschel
has managed to find success in two
very different fields. Since retiring
from professional football this past
summer, he has become a visible
proponent for math education
through school visits and public
appearances. In a Q&A with
Education Week Commentary's
Mary Hendrie, Urschel reflects on
his own experiences working to
convince young students that math
can be cool, and discusses the future
of science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics education more
generally.

problems that are outside the textbook.
Texas Instruments brought me to a school
in Baltimore to help students explore the
STEM behind making ice cream. You can
bet the students weren't bored when they
realized a kitchen can be a laboratory
where all sorts of delicious science happens.
Perhaps it also means expanding the type
of math that kids are exposed to, including
things like statistics and logic.

accept that math is like eating vegetables.
Passion can be contagious. And if a
teacher encounters a kid with an aptitude
or interest in STEM, he or she should
encourage that kid to pursue it as an
important and exciting ambition. In that
respect, it wouldn't hurt teachers to be
more like football coaches. Kids should
be encouraged to think that what they do
matters, and they should dream big.

Looking back on your own K-12 experience,
what advice would you offer teachers on
the frontlines to instill a lifelong love of
math in their students, especially as the
subject matter increases in difficulty?

Moving beyond the classroom level, are
there any structural changes to education
policy more broadly you would like to see
in how we approach math education in this
country?

It's important for teachers to express
their own love of the subject, not just to

Not every kid needs to take calculus. It
may be more important to give kids a firm

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Education Week - April 25, 2018

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