Thank God for Alabama and Mississippi

Today's Sacramento Bee on NAEP results--

California's average reading scores for students who were eligible for free and reduced-price lunches were the lowest of any state in the nation, at both fourth and eighth grade. Sixty-seven percent of California's poor fourth-graders scored "below basic" in reading (meaning they could not even demonstrate "partial mastery" of the subject matter for their grade level). In New York, 49 percent scored "below basic"; in Texas 52 percent; Florida, 51 percent. In eighth-grade math, the percentage of California poor children scoring "below basic" was 62; only Alabama and Mississippi had more low-scoring students.

It's a sad day when Californians can look at test scores and say, "thank God for Alabama and Mississippi."

Real neighborhood schools

People sometimes find it hard to imagine how schools might look under a competitive system. One specific neighborhood in Milwaukee offers a glimpse of the real choices available to parents and their kids when a single provider no longer has a monopoly over local education dollars.

Hickenlooper said he was impressed by a unique partnership he saw among schools in the largely black community of Garden Homes.

The private Lutheran school there also houses the Garden Homes Montessori School, a public "contract" school similar to a charter school. Across the street is the neighborhood public school, Garden Homes Community School.

Officials of all three schools advertise their options in one brochure given to neighborhood families.

Garden Homes Lutheran School Pastor E. Allen Sorum said the partnership came together because families were sending their children to schools outside Garden Homes. A church survey asked families what they wanted for their children. Some said Montessori; others wanted a Christian education but couldn't afford it.

The church then worked with Milwaukee Public Schools to add a Montessori program and vouchers to help families pay tuition at the Lutheran school.

Proficiency Doublespeak

The new test results from the federal NAEP, reveal how arbitrary and low many state proficiency levels are:

Thursday, the day that the U.S. Department of Education released the 2003 NAEP results, Achieve Inc., a nonprofit group that works to lift academic standards, put out a report comparing 2003 state testing results with 2003 NAEP results.

Of 29 states giving tests in eighth-grade reading, all but Louisiana and South Carolina came up with more proficient and advanced readers than did the nation's report card.

And Maryland's discrepancy was small compared to most others. Texas found 90 percent of its eighth-graders reading at the proficient and advanced levels. The national test of the same middle-schoolers found 26 percent at those two levels.