Misdirection and Avoidance: International Math Results Edition
Kilpatrick’s Reply to Peterson
Contact:
Jeremy Kilpatrick
(706) 542-4163
jkilpat@uga.edu
William Mathis, NEPC
(802) 383-0058
William.Mathis@colorado.edu
BOULDER, CO (January 25, 2011) -- The National Education Policy Center (NEPC) released today a reply by Jeremy Kilpatrick as part of an exchange with Paul Peterson about Kilpatrick’s damning review of U.S. Math Performance in Global Perspective: How Well Does Each State Do at Producing High-Achieving Students?, a report authored by Peterson, Eric Hanushek, and Ludger Woessman. In the reply, Kilpatrick explains that Peterson has issued a response that is really a nonresponse. Instead of engaging with Kilpatrick’s critiques, Peterson merely erected (and then triumphantly knocked down) straw people—arguments and statements that Kilpatrick never made.
The report was published in November 2010 by the journal Education Next and the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG). Kilpatrick’s review was released by NEPC on January 11, 2011, as part of its Think Twice think tank review project. Peterson then published a response on the Education Next website.
While an exchange of this type can be extraordinarily helpful for readers and possible users of a study, real benefits arise only when arguments are addressed substantively and without distortion.
Professor Kilpatrick, Regents Professor of Mathematics Education at the University of Georgia, is an expert in mathematics education and assessment who has worked on the programs that produced the tests used in Hanushek, Peterson, and Woessman’s analysis: the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). In his reply published today, Kilpatrick does not take issue with Peterson’s argument that only a small percentage of U.S. eighth graders were at the so-called advanced level on NAEP mathematics in 2005 or that only a small percentage of U.S. 15-year-olds were at the so-called advanced level on PISA mathematics in 2006. Instead, he faults the study’s research methods and therefore the specific conclusions that it reaches.
Kilpatrick charges that ranking the percentages of advanced-level students in countries, states, and urban districts is a misleading practice when many of those percentages are not significantly different from one another. He also argues that Peterson and his coauthors were not justified in putting on the same scale percentages of students who came from cohorts that were not comparable and who took tests that measured different aspects of mathematical proficiency. The study offers essentially nothing to educators or policymakers interested in improving U.S. school mathematics.
Please visit http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-us-math to read Kilpatrick’s original review and his full reply.
The original report and Peterson’s response are available at the following urls:
Original report: http://tinyurl.com/2czgu4p
Peterson’s Response: http://tinyurl.com/6ypc6jb.
The Think Twice think tank review project (http://thinktankreview.org), a project of the National Education Policy Center, provides the public, policy makers, and the press with timely, academically sound, reviews of selected think tank publications. The project is made possible in part by the support of the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.
The mission of the National Education Policy Center is to produce and disseminate high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. We are guided by the belief that the democratic governance of public education is strengthened when policies are based on sound evidence. For more information on NEPC, please visit http://nepc.colorado.edu/.
The aforementioned review and Kilpatrick’s reply to Peterson’s response are also found on the GLC website at http://www.greatlakescenter.org/