The results are in.
Most of the adults who took the test would not be able to graduate.
Are we a failed nation of illiterate professionals or are the tests unreasonable?
Here’s a thought: Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates, and Arne Duncan should take the test.
This is the press release from the Providence Student Union:
PRESS RELEASE
March 19, 2013
CONTACT: Aaron Regunberg | Aaron@ProvidenceStudentUnion.org | 847-809-6039 (cell)
STUDENTS RELEASE “TAKE THE TEST” RESULTS –
SUPER MAJORITY OF ACCOMPLISHED PROFESSIONALS SCORE BELOW DIPLOMA THRESHOLD
Providence, Rhode Island – March 19, 2013 – Members of the student activist group the Providence Student Union (PSU) released the results of this weekend’s “Take the Test” event today. Of the 50 accomplished adults who took a shortened, sample version of the Math NECAP exam, 60% scored at a level that would put them at risk of not graduating under Rhode Island’s new diploma system.
“In total, 50 people—successful elected officials, attorneys, scientists, engineers, reporters, college professors, and directors of leading nonprofits—took a sample version of the Math portion of the New England Common Assessment Program that we put together from released items on RIDE’s website,” said Darren Fleury, a junior at Central High School and a member of PSU. “According to RIDE’s scoring guidelines, 4 of these 50 people would have scored ‘proficient with distinction,’ 7 would have scored ‘proficient,’ 9 would have scored ‘partially proficient,’ and 30 individuals—or 60%—would have scored ‘substantially below proficient,’ meaning they did not get a high enough score to receive a diploma.”
The Providence Student Union’s “Take the Test” event was the latest component of a campaign that students—along with parents and other community members—have been organizing against a new Rhode Island policy that turns the state’s main standardized test, the NECAP, into a make-or-break barrier to graduation.
“My eyes have been opened,” said Teresa Tanzi, a State Representative from Wakefield and a participant in Saturday’s “Take the Test” event. “As one of the many capable and relatively accomplished participants who scored ‘substantially below proficient’ on this exercise, I do believe this points to a problem with our state’s new diploma system. The fact that a majority of very successful adults—nearly all of whom have completed college and many of whom have advanced degrees—cannot meet this requirement should make us reconsider whether a NECAP score, on its own, is an appropriate arbiter for a high school graduation decision.”
“This is a fundamental misuse of this measurement tool,” explained Tom Sgouros, a policy analyst who also took the test. “The original goal of NECAP was to evaluate schools, and, to some extent, students within the schools. In order to make a reliable ranking among schools, you need to ensure that the differences between one school and another are statistically significant. To do that, the statistics demand that you design it to ensure that a significant number of students will flunk. If every student passed this test, they would redesign it. That’s what it means to be a diagnostic tool. To attach high-stakes to such an exam is simply an abuse of the tool, and one that will have real consequences for many young people.”
Priscilla Rivera, a junior at Hope High School and a PSU member, offered additional context to the results. “Of course, it is true that many of these professionals who participated in our event had not been prepared to take the test,” she said. “But our point is, neither have we. For 10, 11, or 12 years we have been taught to different standards. We have not been following a curriculum aligned with this test, and we are trapped in an education system that is failing to give us the education we deserve. If it does not make sense to punish adults for not being prepared to take this particular test, we believe it does not make sense to punish us for not having been effectively taught this material over a period of years. Give us a good education, not a test!”
“We know different people show their knowledge in different ways,” said Dulari Tahbilder, the executive director of Breakthrough Providence. “I did not do very well on that test. But I am more than a single test score, and I think our students are too.”
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Congratulations to the kids who pushed this! Huzzah! Huzzah!
Arne,
No eraser, no extended time, no tips from Rhee, no cheating…you’re on your own.
Let Arne have all the help he wants from Michelle… she couldn’t pass it, either!
“…we are trapped in an education system that is failing to give us the education we deserve.”
Edu-reformers, are you listening to Priscilla Rivera, a high shool junior?
This cannot continue! It is no less than a crime!!!!
Deborah Gist shoud be fired….she has been rated ineffective…tweet, tweet.
Oops … “SCHOOL”
Yes, Linda, I find this situation a travesty for the students. How many students across this country have been short changed? It is truly painful to contemplate. The situation at this high school is just the tip of the iceberg. Time for positive change!
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
I want to say first that this data is inherently unreliable because anyone who had an agenda that encouraged it could intentionally fail the test.
However, that being said — I’m grinning ear to ear imagining Debbie Gist doing her impersonation of Sauruman the White from the movie “The Two Towers” in that scene where the Ents come marching in and tearing up the war machinery at the base of his tower.
“Release the river!”
Wow! How incredible that in the end it’s our students who refuse to go down without a fight, maybe they’ll get a label too? How about those “thinking thugs”. How dare they?
They will ultimately be the ones to turn the tide by defending themselves against the onslaught of insane rheeforms. Isn’t this the type of behavior that extreme reformers are trying to eliminate?
People are saying it’s not a true standardized test, of course it wasn’t but it was made up of past questions. Good enough for me!
You’re correct, mom/ed. This fight will be won by the students and the parents The testing WILL stop in 2014 (the year we are ALL supposed to make 100%).
If this data can be purposely manipulated by the motives of the test taker, that only underscores why it is an inherently unreliable assessment as a single measure. I mean, hundreds of schools have been closed with similar (standardized) measures, and teachers can lose their jobs with these measures. Having taught in middle school,junior high and high school.I definitely think that if a classroom teacher has a reputation of being one of the “no nonsense” teachers, students could surely retaliate against him or her by failing a test, especially if they think they have nothing to lose by doing so. By blaming teachers for a student’s academic/classroom failure, the student ends up with zero accountability. They first fail to prepare to pass the curriculum by doing what is necessary or required, thus they earn a grade of F. If the teacher refuses tp pass the student by rasising the score to a D upon request, the student then retaliates by bombing the test that reflects the teacher. Boy, that teacher really looks like a loser no matter HOW you slice it. Is it really that hard to connect the dots? Unreal.
Sorry for my typos. I need my glasses. 🙂 Raising* and to*…
What does a shortened, sample version mean? Does it mean an altered version of the NECAP math test where only the hardest questions were selected? This test solves absolutely nothing unless the adults took the actual NECAP math test.
The test consisted of released items. The test itself is obviously secure.
Brave, beautiful kids, doing the right thing.
Here’s an irony: SOME educators in NH (which also gives the NECAPS) reported that one of the reasons HS juniors did poorly on the NECAPS was that “there were no consequences” to the tests— they didn’t count for a students’ grade and they didn’t get reported to colleges… The HS kids in Providence made the point that needed to be made: the whole standardized test regimen is bogus.
Scary
Also, in NH, only 8% score a “1” in reading, but it is 36% in math, so you have to believe the lack of consequences only affects math. Those numbers are 8% and 40% in RI, so it is pretty much the same story.
I’d love to see every state education commissioner and governor take this test. Let’s see how much they enjoy having their test results published. Bravo to these kids! They are the leaders. Teachers barely see the tests, very hard for them to challenge. It’s the kids who really know the impact of this ridiculous agenda.
DITTO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I downloaded, printed out, and took the NECAP Grade 11 Mathematics (Released Items 2012) test. I haven’t looked for the answer key yet because I know I bombed it.
There were questions on probability I just didn’t know how to do. There were questions on finding the nth term in a series I don’t know how to do. There was one question about a rotating bicycle wheel that I suspect requires trigonometry and angle of rotation formulas. There was a clever question about the distance across a river that required knowing that the tangents of vertical angles would be equivalent.
My impression is that ANYONE GOING TO COLLEGE should know what’s on that test because the beginning math class in most colleges is Calculus I.
Now whether readiness for Calculus is a criterion you want to set for graduation from high school for all students in Rhode Island is a policy question. The test itself, however, seems just fine to me, if that’s what you want to set as your state education goal in mathematics.
“ANYONE GOING TO COLLEGE…”
That’s an interesting observation, Harlan. It begs the question — should ONLY those who will be capable of finishing college be allowed to graduate high school?
Amen, Ron, amen…
As a community college math teacher, I challenge your assertion that Calculus I is the beginning math class in most colleges. Even at the most prestigious of the University of California campuses, most students are allowed to fulfill their mathematics general education requirement with College Algebra or Statistics. Only those entering a STEM area are required to complete Calculus. Please research your claims.
Harlan, I agree that IF college-ready is your goal, in particular calculus and the sciences, then yes, the test is fine. HOWEVER, that should not be the goal of high school, nor should it be.
Test should be designed with educational goals in mind from the beginning. Guiding questions should be: What does this group of students need to learn, and why? When they’re finished learning it, what should they come out with when they’re done? How can they demonstrate what they know?
And that’s just the beginning. How do we accommodate various groups, i.e., students with IEPs, students with various disabilities, ELL students, etc.? Learning is not, has never been, and never will be one-size-fits-all. THAT is why these tests are failing…
A brilliant, undeniable, object lesson.
I hope that these officials taking the test come to realize that keeping high and challenging standards, which I believe to be a benefit to children, is NOT the same thing as operationalizing standards with high stakes.
Standards can be controverted, but high stakes testing is inherently wrong.
“This is a fundamental misuse of this measurement tool,” explained Tom Sgouros, a policy analyst who also took the test.”
Ya think?
Broken NECAPS indeed.
Good one, LG!
So the arguments attempting to shoot down the validity of this experiment’s results seem to boil down to two major assertions. One is that the PSU didn’t use the “real” NECAP test, and the other is that it’s to be expected that adults would not be able to do well on the test twenty or more years after high school.
The first falls apart when you consider that PSU used actual release questions from NECAP on their test, with as close to the same variety of the same different types of questions as possible. The only thing I would wonder about is whether or not the questions are assessed some sort of difficulty level and whether or not PSU accounted for this and included the same number of questions of each difficulty level as the actual NECAP. If anyone from PSU can comment on this I’d appreciate the feedback.
The second argument is, in my experience, a crock. Last year I took the GRE exam, and scored VERY high on the verbal sections and quite well (80th percentile or so) on the math section. I graduated from college in ’95 and as I was not a math major I don’t think I took an actual math course since high school (graduated from LaSalle in ’90). I’ve been teaching English for the last decade and a half so it’s not like I’ve been exercising my high school math knowledge much in the intervening years.
Maybe the people making the second argument have suffered from some sort of “brain atrophy” as they have aged, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have.
Thank you, brave Providence students, for forcing this issue. There is no way that one test, however well written (and many of these types of questions are terrible) can summarize what a student knows. How is it that our school systems have, for the past two hundred years, been able to produce many of the world’s best thinkers/creators/inventors/artists, without a graduation requirement test? Because a test is not necessary. In fact, the test is destroying good education. Get rid of the test, and get rid of the ambulance-chasers and gold-diggers and the entire self-serving infrastructure that has sprung up around these tests.
@mrmell. How do you get rid of the damaging effects of the high-stakes tests and keep the positive effects of a rigorous, thinking, creative curriculum (assuming that the CC standards could provide that)?
I believe that anyone who is contemplating running for U.S. Senator or Representative should have to pass their state’s standardized test in the four core areas in order to qualify for that position. Those students who are on a college track should be tested. Unfortunately, many of the students with disabilities and those who desire a trades occupation are discouraged by school because of these tests…they need to be tracked in a way different from those who aspire to go to college.
Students & Parents everywhere..PLEASE LISTEN UP!
Have your state administer the Adult Tests…..
These Test-Writers are so busy writing Tricky Test Items that have nothing to do with what you will face in your lifetime.
CCSS is CHAOTIC-UNORGANIZED-UNFAIR-TOO FULL OF GLIBS AND GLOBS of useless info..TOTALLY USELESS INFO…
Totally agree with almost everyone here! I would love all of our Legislators here in the great state of Flori-DUH to take the FCAT, even Jeb for that matter since he implemented it!
If any of them fail, they should lose their jobs!