Ted Dintersmith

And I think they're probably doing, you know, I visited every state on a trip I took, but that was 10 years ago.

I suspect two things.

I suspect they figured out some things like, you know, the science of reading before other schools figured that out.

But also, like, if you make one thing you're all in focus, if you get all sorts of pats on the back for a reading score boost for fourth graders, then that's what you're going to do.

And if you just direct all in focus on those two measures, you know, you would hope you'd get some improvement.

And they've gotten some.

But I actually think—and this sparked me to write the book—

is, you know, I feel like there's a general sense of futility in the way people deal with these scores.

You know, because it's a cardinal scale that comes from the National Center of Education Statistics, and the scale runs from 0 to 500.

And so we'll see swings of like three or four points on a scale of 0 to 500, and we impute the most significant consequence to that.

And when I interviewed the people who designed those tests, you know, it's like you realize, I think a lot of the people in these positions of authority and power are pretty math confused themselves.

And I think the people who report on it don't know how to make sense of it.

And then you'll see, and this is something most people are familiar with, you see kind of a cheap data visualization trick.

So if you have a four-point swing on a scale of 0 to 500, show it on a compressed scale of 10-point range or 20-point range, you can make three points look catastrophic or miraculous if you show three points on a 10-point range instead of a 0 to 500-point range.

So I pay attention to the scores.

I feel like our testing, if we used it thoughtfully and diagnostically, would yield some information.

But that's what we chase.

And that's how we measure the success of a school or a district or a state or even a kid.

And my issue with that is, look at what's happened.

You know, like nationally, those scores have been flat for years.