Congratulations to the Providence Student Union, which exposed the inadequacy of the NECAP (New England Common Assessment Program) as a high school graduation test. As a result of their activism, the Boston Globe today opposed the use of NECAP for that purpose.
Instead of just protesting or writing letters to the editor or to elected officials, the PSU engaged in political theater. They invited 60 accomplished professionals to “take the test,” a test made up of released math items. And of that group, 60 percent would not have received a high school diploma.
Way to go, Providence students!
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STARTING THIS spring, Rhode Island high school seniors will have to pass the New England Common Assessment Program to get their diploma. The new requirement is the latest effort by the Rhode Island Department of Education to improve low-performing high schools. But does high-stakes testing ensure the state’s students are properly prepared to succeed in a 21st century workforce? A group of local high school students is raising the question.
The Providence Student Union, a student-led advocacy group, last month organized an event at which 50 prominent Rhode Islanders took a shortened version of the math NECAP. Sixty percent of the test-takers – among them elected officials, attorneys, scientists, engineers, reporters, college professors, and directors of leading nonprofits – failed to score at least “partially proficient,” the standard education officials have set for graduation. Under the new rules, many of those 50 successful individuals would not have been allowed to graduate.
The good news is Rhode Island’s 11th-graders do score slightly better than the adults. In October 2012, 40 percent failed to achieve “partially proficient” for math, and 8 percent fell short in reading. And those who didn’t pass will have another chance to take the test next fall.
The fundamental problem, though, is that the test wasn’t originally designed to be a graduation requirement and isn’t suited for that purpose. Schools need more high standards and accountability, and the NECAP was designed not to evaluate individual students’ proficiency, but to rank the quality of the schools they attend. Unlike tests meant primarily for student assessment, such as the MCAS in Massachusetts, the NECAP expects a certain portion of test-takers to fail. Research suggests that percentage will likely come from low-income, working-class neighborhoods – the students who are least likely to return for a fifth year of high school, even if skipping it means going without a diploma.
Plus, as the adults’ mock exam suggests, the NECAP may not even be testing the right skills. The Rhode Island Department of Education should reconsider its graduation requirement – and not only to salve the embarrassment of so many high-salaried professionals.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Kmareka.com and commented:
The Providence Student Union leads the discussion on how to improve education and make graduation requirements more meaningful. Yay!
Think about how to save America’s public education system – Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America’s Schools by David Kirp…this is just out from Oxford University Press. If you don’t have time to read it , buy a copy and send it to me. I would be delighted to write a review. M
Reblogged this on thefreshmanexperience and commented:
It appears testing has reached its peak…
Dear Diane and my colleagues:
I am trying to sort this out, and it’s giving me problems, so I need to write it down.
I teach at Arroyo Grande High School, which, according to the Washington Post and Newsweek, is in the top 3% of American high schools. We did so well on the most authoritative international measure of learning, the PISA test, that we were one of four high schools in the nation featured in a documentary by a prestigious educational foundation.
But according to the federal government and the State of California, we are a Program Improvement School, in the fourth year of Program Improvement, which means—it won’t happen, but theoretically, it means—that the principal and entire staff could be fired and the school taken over by the state.
This penalty comes because of No Child Left Behind, a Bush-era law which is universally despised by both lawmakers and educators and is being phased out, But, since it’s NOT COMPLETEY phased out, the penalties—which won’t happen—still apply.
We are on Program Improvement because, in 2000, an arbitrary year was picked—2014. By that year, 100% of our children were to score “proficient” or above on state exams, which are called STAR tests.
100%. All children. Even you—yo, kid! The one who just came to this country two weeks ago from Kazakhstan! That’s right. Even that kid.
It’s education’s equivalent of Enlightenment.
We’re supposed to have 2,132 teenaged Buddhas by next year.
Now, those STAR tests are administered for two or three weeks in April. If a student is lucky enough to score extremely well on the STAR test (English, math, science, social science), here is what happens:
Nothing.
On the other hand, if a student blows off the STAR test and draws—oh, kitties or phallic symbols all over the answer document, here are the consequences:
Nothing.
Yup. The student has no stake whatsoever in taking this test. It doesn’t affect his grade, it doesn’t prevent him from being promoted to the next grade, and it doesn’t earn him any kind of distinction (like, for example “AP Scholar”) that might help him get into a good school.
Nothing.
But those scores determine whether we are a successful school. So schools are reduced to promising pizza feeds—we’re using gift certificates—to try to motivate their kids to do well on these STAR tests.
It gets better.
The STAR tests are on their way out (educational fads change more often than Lindsay Lohan’s hair color). They are not, after all, adequate measures of what we want California students to learn.
This comes after 10 years, in my department, of countless hours outside the classroom re-designing the entire curriculum so that our students do better on the STAR test.
We call that “teaching to the test.”
Not teaching, oh, writing. Or thinking. Or how to become a better reader. Or, how about a little enrichment with music, or art, or maybe we can teach you how to research a topic and teach yourself how to learn. Nope.
We have them fill in bubbles.
But, within a few years, all of that work will be rendered pointless, because the test that makes us a “Program Improvement” School will be eliminated.
STAR will be replaced by the Common Core. Education theorists, administrators and writers have been talking about the Common Core for several years now.
Remember the Stealth Fighter? How they kept it under wraps and then it suddenly made its debut in the first Gulf War and it was so incredibly awesome and cool-looking?
I hope we get something like that.
Problem is, we teachers, who are expected—any time now (“Therefore keep watch, for you do not know on what day your Lord will come” Matthew 24:42)–to shift from STAR to the Common Core—we have no idea what the Common Core is. We aren’t being prepared for it, we don’t know what it’ll look like, we don’t know what we’re going to be teaching or, even more important, what we’re supposed to learning.
To paraphrase Joseph Heller: That’s some core, that Common Core.
It’s kind of like the Russian Army in World War I. Russia wasn’t industrialized, yet they went to war with Germany, by then the most highly industrialized Great Power in the world. That problem began to manifest itself when the Russian Army mobilized and they noticed there was more Army than there were rifles.
Not to worry, men. You just follow your regiment into battle. Rifles will become available.
That’s how prepared we are for the Common Core.
But, in the meantime, according to NCLB—the law that everybody hates?—we suck.
One reason we suck is that we have a good number of students—not a huge number, but a statistically significant number—who score “far below basic” on the STAR test, the one that the state is going to eliminate and replace with the Common Core.
We have those students because many of them have really crappy attitudes toward the STAR test because they have the audacity, the unmitigated gall, to be poor, or homeless, or hungry, or abused, or depressed, or addicted, or scared. In their worlds, filling in bubbles on a standardized test is an exercise in surrealism. They don’t seem to get it: If they do really well on the STAR test, nothing happens. But, on the other hand, if they do poorly on the STAR test, nothing happens. These aren’t kids: They’re characters in a Camus novel.
The federal government has given us $1.2 million to bring those kids’ scores up. Thank God.
If we bring those scores up, we will lose that money, because we obviously don’t need it anymore.
If we don’t bring those scores up, and go into another year of Program Improvement, then the entire staff will be sent to the Gulag along with the kulaks.
I give up. Stalin has won.
Who’s Lindsay Lohan, California’s Secretary of Public Education?
“We call that “teaching to the test.” I call it training, you know like what one does with a dog or parrot or on a more human level training humans to kill other humans on command-kind of like your WW1 example.
Yes, he has won, and is now the President of these Dis-United States. It makes no sense, but if you think the USSR was the pinnacle of nonsense in the known universe, wait until you see the US(SR) in 2016. By then Orwell’s ironies will be surpassed by this geographic region’s realities, and with David Foster Wallace gone, who will describe them? Time for homeschooling? A sweet little charter? An online school? A private school? Imagine, a place where the kid gets what he works for.
The USSR was no more the pinnacle of nonsense in the known universe than predatory unfettered capitalism unleashed by the corporate fascist oligarchical system that is now our governing system.
“Imagine, a place where the kid gets what he works for.” How about a community public school?
Your transparent Marxism is refreshing. So many are not even aware that’s what they are professing. Community public schools, as far as I can see, except for the AP track, are in the business of giving kids grades and degrees for what they did NOT earn, just like on the old Soviet communes, where the rule was get as much as you can for as little work as possible, just as in the modern unionized auto plants before that mind-set brought them to bankruptcy. I’ll bet, Duane, you even think everyone is entitled to a job.
Goodness! I apologize for provoking so many incoherent responses.
Just trying to understand the insanity and incoherence of the situation you describe.