Fifty- one points

Why the state Benchmark had to go

FIFTY- ONE points. Sounds like a bad CEO’s business plan. Fifty- one points. Your favorite football team won’t score that many points in a conference game this year. Fifty- one points. That’s a score for a college basketball team— sometimes a winning college basketball team. Fifty- one points. In case you missed it, that was the gap between the scores on one of the tests the state of Arkansas gave its kids last year, and another test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress but which goes by the more common name NAEP, but is even more commonly known as the Nation’s Report Card.

The kids took the state’s Benchmark exam and— wow!— look how many did so well! Why, 83 percent of the fourth- graders in Arkansas scored Proficient in reading and writing.

But . . . when fourth- graders took the national test, only 32 percent scored that high.

Do you think there was a reason the state needed to give up the Benchmark test? That maybe that test’s standards were so low as to be laughable? That is, if you could laugh after realizing what harm such low standards do to our kids. Not only by not challenging them enough, but by luring them into a false sense that they’re learning more than they are. And the rest of us wonder how come so many of our young people drop out of college before they get their degrees. Who knew education took work? Especially if a minimal amount of it gets you good grades on a state’s Benchmark test.

Arkansas has now phased in the more challenging Common Core test, thank goodness. Although, for some strange reason, there’s some effort, a loud effort, to do away with that much better test. As if “federal standards” meant “the feds are coming for you.” The best part of the current administration in Washington, D. C., might be its Education Department, led by one Arne Duncan, who might be the best secretary of that department since a man named Bill Bennett held the spot back in the 1980s. ( Lord, if this administration had that kind of competence at State, Defense, Veterans Affairs, the Oval Office . . . .)

If the state can keep its collective head, and keep Common Core, then things might change for the much better in the next few years as the new standards become accepted.

How big an “if” that is, is anybody’s guess at this point.

As we were writing this editorial, as if an occult hand, the journal Education Next came out with a report in its summer 2015 edition. Two researchers, Paul E. Peterson and Matthew Ackerman, sifted through the published numbers of state- only tests and the results from the national test. The researchers found . . . .

That 20 states had upped their standards. But another eight states had actually lowered theirs.

Arkansas was one of those eight. In fact, the researchers gave every state a letter grade, and several states, including some in the South, got As. Arkansas got a D. Conclusion: The Benchmark was worse than we thought. And getting worser. Even if it boils down to the kids just getting used to the state test, in the end it means they weren’t being challenged. Or challenged enough.

Let’s not go back to that. Our kids should expect better not only from themselves, but from us.