Is Iowa adopting yet another waste of money in order to appear to be addressing education ineffectiveness? It appears so.
MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) — final report dated December 2012 — prepared by the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance shows waste is eminent. According to the Executive Summary, the MAP program includes computer-adaptive assessments administered to students three to four times a year and teacher training to access MAP resources on how to use the data to differentiate instruction. This is all the rage in educator publications — according to the study — so the study was done to see if the claims could be verified. Educator theories need to be tested because radical ones eliminated concepts, introduced a phonics program with rules so bad they fail to cover all words, and drove student proficiencies to the bottom of developed countries.
The study of the MAP process asked one primary question and two secondary questions: 1) Did the MAP program affect reading achievement after two years? 2) Were MAP resources received and used as planned? 3) Did MAP teachers apply differentiated instructional practices in their classes to a greater extent? The conclusion of the report was that teachers were not more likely to apply differentiated instructional practices in their classes. If the teachers are not following up with a change in their teaching methods, then the “dreamed of” results are not going to happen. This would put the fad into the category of yet another educator “fix” that cost millions but failed to get results.
I asked a representative of the Iowa Department of Education, about standards on MAP assessments since Iowa has been using the low standard of 41st NPR rather than grade level (making all results appear better than they are, including graduation rates), and his response was not encouraging. While some standards in some disciplines go up a point or two, others go down. Any claims that using MAP will raise Iowa proficiency standards cannot be supported according to the study.
The approach of applying differentiated instructional practices is a good one, but the problem is that Iowa teachers lack the training to do this, which is why schools force so many students into Special Ed. Effectively teaching concepts using differentiated instructional practices would significantly reduce the number of Special Ed students — including ESL students — not raise numbers, as Iowa schools are doing.
Sue Atkinson
Baxter