The head of Néw York state’s Board of Regents Merryl Tisch says everyone should calm down about the collapse of test scores across the state. Next year, she promised, the scores will go up.
You can count on that, because the state commissioner can lower the cut score if he wants to avoid another embarrassment like this year.
What you can also count on, sadly, is the humiliation that 70% of the children in grades 3-8 will feel when they learn from their teacher that they failed the state tests. The numbers who failed are even higher among children who are black, English language learners, and students with disabilities.
This year, the state decided to align its categories with NAEP, not understanding that NAEP proficient is set at a very high level–not a “passing” mark at all– and that the only state where as much as 50% of students reached proficient on NAEP is Massachusetts, after 20 years of NAEP testing. Apparently New York is content to tell the majority of its students that they don’t deserve high school diplomas or the chance to go to college.
Consider this: the proportion of students who “passed” under the new Common Core baseline was only 31.1% in total. (Last year it was 77.4%).
Among English language learners, only 3.2% “passed.” (Last year it was 11.7%.)
Among children with disabilities, only 5% “passed.” (Last year it was 15.5%.)
Among black students, only 16.7% “passed.” (Last year it was 37.2%.)
Among Hispanic students, only 17.7% “passed.” (Last year it was 40.0%).
Among white students, only 39.9% passed. (Last year it was 85.9%.)
But not to worry, litttle children. New York and the Common Core will make you global competitors.
How do we know? We don’t. Forget about critical thinking. Don’t ask for evidence. Take it on faith. This is, after all, faith-based policy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Scores will go up because the tests have been administered once, and now teacher will have a better chance to teach to the test.
How do you teach to a test that no one has the questions or the answers to?
The scores will go up because she will change the cut scores and we will have another “miracle”
“How do you teach to a test that no one has the questions or the answers to?”
They administered it once. That’s all it takes.
ME,
Teachers and administrators were forbidden to discuss the tests. Students and parents are not allowed to see the actual questions their students missed because they are protected by copyright law. Suzanne is right–the cut scores will be changed just like the chocolate ration in 1984.
is he on glue??? lord….
Merryl Tisch is a woman.
It’s a little sickening how transparent they are. It’s like a magic trick – only without the magic part.
There are neither enough palms nor enough surface area on my face for the adequate number of facepalms.
Ha, ha, ha,
Of course the scores will go up. But a comparison to Babe Ruth is laughable. Just how ignorant does Ms. Tisch think New Yorkers are?
By the way Meryl, the Babe was not allowed to move the home run fences to make himself look better (the way Bloomberg, Klein and Cerf did with NYC tests).
New York: striving to become the educational Mississippi of the north!
Not to mention that the “called shot” most likely never happened.
As educational measurement folks well know, proficiency score (or passing scores) are abominable metrics and extremely limited in what they convey about group performance on tests. The reformers love them because they can be so easily manipulated to maintain the fables of ed reform to the public. Lies, damnable lies, and sadistics (as my undergrads called statistics…)
Ugh. I shudder to think what will happen if the scores don’t go up. Another round of school closures? Larger classes? Get rid of recess? Sitting in front of a screen running computer drills?
School reform can’t fail, it can only be failed. By third graders. Don’t let Merryl Tisch down, third graders! She’s very, very important.
Well, 30% passing was predicted last year before any child took the tests. Great psychometricians they are. Now Meryl says, “the scores will go up next year”, without a single pencil hitting a piece of paper or computer key. Where is her crystal ball???Hmmm…
Every student in the state of New York should refuse to take the test next year. I would love to see the Board of regents and commissioner King try to reprimand millions of students and thousands of teachers.
If less than 95% of students in a district take the exams the state simply withholds money as punishment for non-compliance.
If all students in a district refused to take the test, I seriously doubt that the state would defund the district.
The feds always threaten to cut funding to low-income districts that refuse to follow the rules, but in nearly 35 years, they have never done it.
Only true for Title I schools. My children’s school is one of several that had a large opt out, no punishment to school or children. Opting Out or refusing the test is the key to ending high-stakes testing.
In New York state, 88.5% of the schools are Title 1. Although funding may not be withheld, administrators are under tremendous pressure to reach 95+% compliance. Last school year teachers in NY received a CYA from our union (NYSUT) directing us to remain silent regarding student opt-outs.
Chris,
In my opinion, opting out is the key. I agree with you.
Further though, I believe it is the ONLY way to slay this beast. BUT, the reformers know it and will push back mightily. Educators may need to put their jobs and reputations on the line!
That’s the answer…if only! How about if the test givers decide to refuse to give the tests and loudly proclaim DO NO HARM!!
Certainly for the challenged learners you would save them from the PTS they will surely suffer from their school experience of test mania.There seems to be no decency or professional ethic coming from the let us measure the life out of these students and when they don’t perform to our need of sorting for the future global workforce we will kick them to the dustbin of life. I could not be more disgusted and fedup with the rhetoric of simple answers like just pull yourself up by your boot straps, just say no, we will do better. On scores figures can lie and liars figure. And it goes round and round and children get stomach aches, don’t enjoy or want to go to school, parents are left to grieve the notion that their children will have happy school days and the measuring meanies haunt everyone’s dreams. This is not getting better it is getting worse and the mantra should be
DO NO HARM!!
Oh, the scores will go up all right, but we now know what that means.
Even more of what’s good for us!!
Posted this at the site:
For years Mayor Bloomberg has celebrated the apparent academic gains made during his time in office. Yet, now, with the latest round of New York State tests, tied to the common core standards, we learn that there is a huge drop in student academic achievement, as well as a widening of the achievement gap state-wide, and in New York City. This begs the question: What on earth have we been doing for the last decade, and how can Mayor Bloomberg, Joel Klein, John King, Arne Duncan, Dr. Merryl Tisch, and all the other policy makers who have little or no real teaching experience, celebrate anything?
The same policy makers who presided over ed reform for the past ten years now tell us that the state tests during this time were misaligned, to easy, and flawed. An investment of one decade and hundreds of millions of tax payer dollars not to mention should have more to show for it than this.
The expectation that you are going to tie teacher evaluation, salary increases, and school ratings to test scores on the one hand, and yet
de-emphasize the focus on test scores and teaching to the test, on the other (hand), is like believing in unicorns. This is unrealistic to the point of being incompetent.
One of the main arguments against high stakes testing is that it creates a learning culture whose priorities inevitably are shaped by the punishing consequences of the test. Changing the culture from one of learning, to one of gaming the system and suvival.
I have about a half dozen effective diagnostics and assessments that I use, through-out the school year, to monitor my fourth graders progress. While these “tools” require some training to use effectively, they are not rocket science, however, they give me an intimate and reliable understanding of how each student is progressing.
If nothing else,The recent New York State tests, show that the multimillion dollar, big data, high stakes testing agenda surely supports some sectors of our society, just not education.
Well said. Thank you.
I wonder how many other states are going to pay this despicable nonsense game.
No need to wonder; 44 states are signed on to CCSS along with PARCC and SBAC national testing.
I meant play not pay.
Pay works too.
Sadly, many other states will do both: play and pay.
In Georgia, we have been given a conversion table to estimate what our passing rates will be like next year. Cut scores are a big hoax!
Here’s an excellent piece by Larry Cuban on why (facetiously speaking) the CCSS will succeed. Ms. Tisch should read it:
Issue Tisch her Pink Slip at the same time King receives his.
Merryl Tisch is to NY schools and testing as
Lucy Van Pelt is to Charlie Brown and football.
People of NY… just stop taking these tests. This will put an end to the madness.
What’s her prediction for 2014/15 when the new, semi-national PARCC exam cut scores fall out of NYSED control?
All math and ELA teachers (grades 7 and 8) in NY should file a class action law suit against NYSED. These exam results are in many cases (small districts with one teacher per subject) are NOT confidential as promised. The pass rates published by NYSED might as well put teacher names next to the abysmal scores. Teachers in larger districts have no such issue. However, ALL math/ELA (7/8) do have a legal case based on the use of these exams towards their APPR scores. Math and ELA teachers are doomed by these exams to be labeled “ineffective”; reputations are being ruined. Teachers in other subjects are free to make up their own pre and post tests. Calling all lawyers. There’s $$$$$$$$$ to be made.
Chancellor
It does not take an engineer to know the test always go up the 2nd -3rd-4th-5th-etc year.
You used the 1st years students as guinea pigs and threw the teachers under a bus.
your curriculum is scattered..chaotic and totally unstructured.
Teachers teach tests in your state..period
..
Curriculum: quote: “Curriculum designers at the NY SEA are interpreting the new English standards in exactly the direction critics warned of last year. With the exception of the “Romeo and Juliet” unit, they apparently envision English as a social studies class, not a language and literature class. And the Common Core itself does not contain enough machinery to restrain them.
If the city wants to be fully consistent with the spirit of Common Core, and if it wants to serve the thousands of English teachers who entered the field because they love Charles Dickens and Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, not news reports and science tracts, the department will produce five more units on “The American Short Story From Poe to the Present,” “The Romantic Poets” and other literary subjects.
Literature is not a second-class subject. It ought to be at the very center of a high-quality public education.”
Bauerlein is an English professor at Emory University and author of “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.”
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/common-core-great-literature-article-1.1394249?pgno=1#ixzz2cv6H7N8e
Enriched kids will appear to flourish under Common Core in school & on the SAT’s. I don’t hear private school parents complaining. I could be wrong.
Many enriched children in NY (and elsewhere) are enriched because their families invest in the stock market (CCSS aligned products/spin-off) or work on Wall St. The parents of the enriched children will keep on making $; continue to enrich their children who may inherit wealth. I have nothing against people who have money. I have nothing against enriching children.
The White children passing (39%) will never decrease. Baseline.
CCSS could be stopped based on the lack of security protection of student data. Which lawmaker has the guts to watch the market take a huge dip & lose money for investors? CCSS are supported by stimulus money. Someone was supposed to make money. And they are.
What happened to educating children? Should’t the money for schools via US ED been for learning & not shopping?
I feel both embarrassed and horrified to be a teacher these days. What keeps me going is being with the students and knowing I am helping them. However, as a member of this ‘profession’ I am completely disheartened and turned off by the politics and the bobble-headed morons who make decisions that impact all of us. It’s like being on a plane without a pilot….or a train without a conductor….or a carriage without a horse…or….well, you get the picture. It’s bad.