The first results of Utah’s Common Core tests are in, and they follow the pattern of other states: a sharp drop in the proportion of students who are “proficient.”
“The percentage of Utah students who scored proficient or better in science ranged from 37 percent to 45 percent, depending on grade level. In math, anywhere from 29 percent to 47 percent of kids scored proficient. And in language arts, proficiency ranged from 38 percent to 44 percent.
“Proficiency was defined as performing at or above standards for grade level.”
“Proficiency levels were much higher on CRTs last year. In science last year on CRTs, proficiency levels ranged from 58 percent to 76 percent, depending on grade level; in math, from 39 percent to 85 percent; and in language arts, from 77 percent to 90 percent.”
State officials, having bought into the Common Core, are not at all disturbed.
Parents and teachers should be outraged. Common Core tests are aligned with NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) “proficiency” levels, which are NOT grade level. NAEP proficiency represents “solid academic achievement.” I served on the NAEP governing board for seven years. Most students will not reach NAEP proficient because it is NOT grade level. I think of it as a high level of achievement.
May I remind you that we are one of the most powerful and most creative and most productive nations in the world. We didn’t get that way with a stupid population.
The Common Core tests are developmentally inappropriate. The achievement levels are out of reach of most students. You cannot reasonably expect a fifth-grader to answer questions on a seventh-grade level? Does Utah have plans for the 50-55% of their students who will not be able to graduate high school because of Common Core’s absurd definition of “proficient”?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
At least at this point, the test scores do NOT preclude students from graduating in Utah. The graduation test that Utah had for several years was cut in 2009 because of the financial costs. So the students have no reason to work hard on these tests. The only thing right now that the test scores are used for is the stupid school grade.
That being said, I’m sure these scores will give legislators all of the ammunition they need to begin attaching all kinds of high stakes to these tests, at least for teachers and schools.
Also, to be honest, I’m not sure WHAT the “standard” is that the tests are tied to, so I don’t know if it’s the NAEP proficiency standard or if it’s something else. No one has said.
“May I remind you that we are one of the most powerful and most creative and most productive nations in the world. We didn’t get that way with a stupid population.”
Thank you, Diane.
In spite of? For the most part we are dumbed down by the media and productivity has left the country. It is now on steroids. Like kids learn to read in spite of going to school says Frank Smith. George Bernard Shaw said he had the greatest education, except for the time that he was in school.
Joseph, this is for you: https://dianeravitch.net/2013/02/26/why-i-cannot-support-the-common-core-standards/
The Common Core testing fiasco is draining resources and attention from effective teaching, all to prove the reformer point that our schools are failing. Could our schools be better? Of course. We can always improve, and there are many educators dedicated to doing their best every day for their students. The bleak picture drawn by the Common Core test scores is inaccurate. Thank you, Diane, for again pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.
What should seem obvious but is being overlooked.
Anyone can make up a test where virtually everyone will pass. Most obvious: in arithmetic how much is 2 plus 2? Stupid but it makes a point. Most anyone can make up a test where most everyone will fail: In 20 words or less describe quantum mechanics. Again, stupid but the point should be made.
SO
what is the big deal about tests? Who makes them up and as stated so often here, are they age appropriate? Do they test what they purport to test? Why the test, how is it to be uses? Etc etc.
It is so tiresome to see the political “hay makers” utilize such ignorance and yes, stupidity in something so vitally important as our children’s education. Politicians fail to solve all kinds of societal and global problems but proclaim their brilliance in something like education about which they are so abysmally ignorant.
Tiresome and worse.
Well said, Gordon. That’s what I wonder, too. What the heck is “proficient?” And who died and left the person who deems “proficiency” in charge of the world?
Gordon Wilder, exactly right. One can make a test that all will pass or one that all will fail. And these days, state officials and test publishers can give you a test that will pass or fail whatever % you choose. If you want a 70% pass rate or a 70% fail rate, you can get it by design.
Indeed that is true, which is why saying that test results increase or decrease the “gap” does not make any sense. Differences in academic achievement between students do not change because of any test or pass rate.
So true. Tests only measure what is on the test. When we accept the limitations of tests rather than try to make tests something they are not, then learning can begin.
Gordon,
Why the tests?
Because Science.
““The percentage of Utah students who scored proficient or better in science ranged from 37 percent to 45 percent, depending on grade level. In math, anywhere from 29 percent to 47 percent of kids scored proficient. And in language arts, proficiency ranged from 38 percent to 44 percent.”
Gotta love those tight margins of error, eh!?
It’s because of the different grade levels involved, Duane. We have no specific scores by grade or student yet. Those are supposed to come out this fall–possibly as late as November. Although we have been told that the scores will be earlier next year–possibly before school gets out. Which means that computers are grading all of that written work (each student grades three and up has to write TWO full essays).
Threatened Out West,
From what I understand, computer grading of essays is a farce. The computer does not understand wit, irony, originality. It can’t tell when a fact is wrong. If a student writes that the Civil War began in 1945, the computer won’t recognize the error unless that is the topic of the essay.
Oh, I completely agree that the grading is a farce, Diane. The writing tests for Utah have been computer graded for years, and that was only for three grades. Now, with nine grades writing two essays a piece, there is no WAY that computers aren’t grading these essays. I use a computer writing program so that I can at least get essays that are spelled right. Then, I read the essays myself. Kids can completely plagiarize and the program won’t see it. Or use huge words that look nice together but are actually non-nonsensical when actually read by a human. I don’t think that parents realize that the writing for these tests is graded by computer. They would be furious if they knew, I think.
I still don’t understand why, not that long ago, it was a terrible thing that most students didn’t score proficient on the NAEP, but now it’s completely fine because NAEP is not “grade level.”
If it was a terrible thing, I’m guessing that it was because those declaring it so didn’t know what “proficient” on the NAEP meant.
Well, Diane was one of them, and as she notes here, she was on the governing board of NAEP.
FLERP,
NAEP proficient was NEVER grade level.
NAEP has four levels.
Advanced is super-duper, A++. About 5-8% reach it.
Proficient is solid academic achievement. I consider it to be a high B+ or an A, although NAEP doesn’t define it that way.
Basic is partly proficient. That would be (to me) a B or C.
Below basic is failing. D or F.
In 2005, you wrote this: “It is true that American student performance is appalling. Only a minority of students – whether in 4th, 8th or 12th grade – reach proficiency as measured by the Education Department’s National Assessment of Educational Progress. On a scale that has three levels – basic, proficient and advanced – most students score at the basic level or even below basic in every subject.”
Have the NAEP proficiency levels changed since then?
FLERP,
If your question is addressed to me, please remember that I was part of the rightwing cabal in 2005. I was on the board of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Koret group at the Hoover Institution. The glue that held us together was the conviction that public schools were failing and that charters and vouchers would save the nation’s children. I wrote a book–which you evidently never read–called “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining American Education,” explaining why I was renouncing views I had held for any years. I said I was wrong. What I wrote in 2005 about NAEP was wrong. It is absurd to use NAEP proficient as a pass-fail mark. Why don’t you read my last two books? I bet they are in your local public library.
But what do you mean “you were wrong”? You knew what the proficiency levels meant and how to interpret them. Are you saying you were willing to write something that you knew wasn’t true because it suited your agenda at that time? Or were you actually “appalled” by the performance of American students as recently as 2005?
FLERP, I believed it was true. I was wrong. Why don’t you read my book. I now think it was not only wrong but stupid to expect that almost all kids could reach NAEP proficient. It is a very high bar. Like expecting all kids to run a five minute mile, if they try hard enough. Will it ever happen? No.
Thank you for your responses. I will probably never truly understand how someone with such expertise could be so wrong about something as fundamental and obvious as you seem to suggest it is. It is what it is, I suppose.
I’ve read much of your penultimate book, by the way. 😉
FLERP,
Read “Death and Life.” You might understand, you might not. In our highly polarized society, people don’t understand how you can say two things:
1. I was wrong.
2. I changed my mind.
I say it and I am not ashamed to do so. It is the truth.
FLERP!,
It is always possible that Dr. Ravitch could change her mind again.
When states move to NAEP like performance levels this is exactly how all the stakeholders should view “basic.” Basic is a passing level of performance with this kind of standard setting.
FLERP! When I was younger, I thought tight jeans, drag racing, and Wendy’s Triples were the right thing to do. Stop the ridiculous “gotcha” politics and step away from the Google. People are allowed to re-evaluate their positions.
It was a more, “productive nation”—- before hedge funds. Peter Mallouk, in his recent book about investment mistakes, cites a 67% business failure rate, for hedge funds, since 1995.
In aggregate, 10,000 hedge funds are dragging down American GDP. Mallouk states, “In 2012, the S&P returned more than double the average hedge fund.” “A 60/40% stock/bond index portfolio performed better, with less volatility than hedge funds… 2013 marked the fifth year in a row that hedge funds lagged the stock market index.” “Long-term Capital Management, run by Nobel Prize winners and considered the greatest hedge fund of its time, collapsed overnight.”
“In 2008, Warren Buffett bet a hedge fund owner, $1 million dollars that the S&P would beat 5 of the, cream of the crop, hedge funds, over a ten year period. At the half-way point, the S&P index is up 43.8% the hedge fund group, up just 12.5 %.”
The conclusion is inescapable. It’s folly for a nation to base policy on the advice of hedge fund managers.
The great hoax perpetrated by hedge funds is that they contribute to the nation’s success . And, the great lie, created and perpetuated, is the failure of American public education.
Linda,
I have never forgotten a letter I received from an investment banker who said to me, never forget that hedge funds create nothing, produce nothing, yet make a handful of people very rich.
An investment banker complaining that hedgies are economic parasites? Wow, talk about pots and kettles…
As a general rule, the employees of the major banks are extremely jealous of the “sell side” institutions and long to join them. The investment bankers want to leave for private equity shops. The traders want to to leave for hedge funds. This is the way to break out of a measly $2 million salary+bonus and into some serious money. In the year leading up to the financial crisis, Goldman Sachs’s traders were working like dogs to sell Goldman’s loan inventory and short the subprime market through synthetic trades based on credit default swaps that were in turn based on residential mortgage-backed securitizations. Goldman made a couple billion dollars and avoided losing more, which is real money, but it was a shadow of what John Paulson had been doing since early 2006. They all want to be John Paulson.
sorry, meant the “buy side” institutions.
This is the same kind of stupidity I see in Japanese government’s attempt to mandate TOEFL-iBT exam to all students to sit out for entrance examination for domestic college –not North America for admission and graduation. An overwhelming majority of Japanese students don’t speak, write, or even read English(same as many adults, and needless to say, for many politicians and education ministry bureaucrats); many of those do not go beyond the basic level in junior high and senior high school. And, two thirds of those are not choosing to go to the North America after graduation. What can you expect local high school students who have little enough exposure to English to get “proficient” level of English in the exam adjusted to the difficulty level of GED??? It’s developmentally-inappropriate, lunatic and insane.
No such thing as grade level. It is just the mean of any group. It is not a standard.
If I may correct your statement, Diane:
“May I remind you that we are one of the most powerful and most creative and most productive nations in the world. We didn’t get that way with a [standardized] stupid population.
I had a child who passed Utah’s UBST(Utah Basic Skills Test) that was required for high school graduation a few years ago. The test was given in the sophomore year. If students failed they could take any part of the three part test over again through their senior year. Because my student passed the test, he could not see any reason to continue studying in high school, he had proof that he already had all the required skills. Consequently, he refused to do any more classroom work. He passed all classroom tests in addition to the UBST. But he failed to graduate, because he failed each class due to incomplete assignments. This to me is a strange example of the stupidity of these tests. Utah now gives the ACT in the students junior year. A second child, who has an IEP scored an 11 on this test. He however graduated high school with out any proof that he has high school level skills. Go figure!
“Utah: Common Core Tests Cause Proficiency Rates to Fall Below 50%”
Can’t agree with that title. The common core tests don’t do anything valid, they don’t “measure” anything, they don’t assess students “knowledge, etc. . . . The people who push these tests and set the cut points, etc. . . are the entities that cause the so-called “proficiency rate” to fall or rise or stay the same.
Folks, it’s all a bunch of mental masturbation on which we are spending oodles of money. Nothing good (and unfortunately much harm is done to the most innocent, the students) can come from this experiment in educational malpractices other than if we realize that it’s all a load of crap.
The newspaper where this link came from is quite supportive of the CC and thinks that all who oppose the core are crazy.
Tell the editorial writers to take the tests and print their scores. In 8th grade math. If they dare.
Ha! That’s a good idea. I wonder if they, or the legislators or state school board, for that matter, would actually do it…
Label me crazy then ToW. Nah, on second thought no need to, I already know that fact!
I didn’t think I labelled you crazy, Duane, but then again, I’m certifiable, so maybe I did it surreptitiously!
Conflating proficiency and grade level perfomance with a percentile norm (50% above/ 50% below on a given test) makes headlines, not sense.
Any judgment about proficiency, even for NAEP, is a daunting exercise that reflects a compromise between the aspirations of the persons setting the thresholds for scores and what they will signify on the one hand; and on the other hand what a bunch of test items may disclose about what students know, how they think, whether they can demonstrate what is required — on short notice under contrived and time-limited conditions.
There is so much misrepresentation of actual achievement and potential achievement in tests, to say nothing about the domain-specific nature of tests and the early-age of test taking.
SANE people would stop making inferences about the nation’s productivity, innovation, economic, well-being, international competitivenessbased on test scores and incremental dips and increases in these or the flat line thingy.
Two years ago I received a letter from a guy who said his 5th grade teacher in 1953 had made a life-long difference in who became and how he interacted with people from all walks of life. He is a landscape architect and urban planner who works against the impulse to gentrify. He had to play the role of a judge in a peer trial–designed as lesson in civics and also involving a classmate. Not just play-acting.
A family member was a high school dropout in 1948, whose career achievements are many, notably the design of the camerworks for the first earth resources satellite and work on other NASA imaging programs.
Multiply these examples of life stories and achievements not dependent on grades and those strictly “academic” tests in schools.
Diane is correct.
“May I remind you that we are one of the most powerful and most creative and most productive nations in the world. We didn’t get that way with a stupid population.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Yes, what you say is sane and full of common-sense. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I cannot believe that govt agencies & pols spouting insane & non-commonsensical theories are stupid. They have their political agendas. Econometrics is a great tool for the politician, as stats can be manipulated to prove & disprove anything at all. This is why I believe our way forward politically must be to call a spade a spade. We waste our time pointing out the idiocies in the details of those whose agenda is plain & simply to bust unions & privatize public services.
Is the Common Core responsible for those low science scores?
Bill Duncan,
Scores are whatever you want them to be? Was the material taught? Is it age-appropriate? Are you posing 8th grade questions to 5th graders? Are the passing marks set too high or too low? It is all subjective.
Diane,
Yes, I do agree that all of those questions are the right ones to be asking of this new Utah test. But I think that labeling the science results – or the math and ELA results for that matter – as Common Core results is false advertising.
You are right that the Utah tests are neither PARCC nor Smarter Balanced, but they sound like the same thing: rigor mortis for all.
“”When you raise the standards and align your assessments to the standards, proficiency is going to go down and that was our prediction,” Judy Park, state associate superintendent, said Monday. “If the proficiency hadn’t of dropped, then I think it would really make this whole idea of more rigorous standards questionable.”
State officials can get whatever results they want by setting the bar where they want. And they know in advance how many will pass or fail.
Yes, that’s my point. We have no idea – at least I don’t – what kind of bad test Utah might be giving. So the scores could be some unknown combination of higher standards, poor testing, arbitrary cut scores or who knows what. (Like NYS, it seems to me.) I think that’s the story.
Bill Duncan, yes. Standards that are developmentally inappropriate, tests that are cognitively misaligned, confusion reigns. Standardized tests are for standardized minds.
Diane, I do see that developmentally inappropriate case being made but it never seems to hold up when I look closely: http://anhpe.org/tag/developmentally-appropriate/
Nope, not false advertising, Bill. The test writers followed the Core pretty closely and wanted to test ALL indicators. Hence the length of the testing. This is Utah’s CC test. Utah opted out of SBAC two years ago.
Teachers cannot even LOOK at the test as the kids are taking it in Utah, Bill, so there’s no way to know if the questions are wonderful or awful. Test questions have never been released, and as far as I know, there is no plan to do so. In other words, it is impossible to judge the questions. A tiny group (about 20) of parents looked at the questions, but they are not allowed to talk about them.
Threatened Out West, if they won’t release the test, you can bet there are some ridiculous questions and they don’t want to show them. In NY, parents forced Pearson and the state to release 50% of questions.
Also, Bill, the testing took at least TEN HOURS over several days. Fatigue has to be a real concern.
I agree with the statements about the success of our nation. However, an explanation for why resourceful people allow themselves to be robbed by the parasitic1%, receiving no benefit from their productivity gains, begs to be answered.
On a more positive note, this afternoon, an e-mail was sent by “Making Change at Walmart” (linked to a food and service union). The e-mail asks people to sign a petition against the Walmart family’s attempt to destroy public education.
I firmly believe that, without Diane Ravitch, the campaign to protect our democracy and public education could not have launched. One woman can make a powerful difference.
In Utah, first grade teachers read the questions to the students. The questions were created by classroom teachers and then modified by computer techs who needed to match the question to the testing format. On the first go around, we had a couple of questions with no correct answer and one with four correct answers. These questions were corrected for the second go around this year. The biggest problem I see is the mis-understanding of the testing format by the students. They take the tests in a computer lab. While we have one question per screen, we found at the end that several students failed to answer a question before clicking to the next page. We had students clicking answers before the questions were read. We had posters in place to prevent student copying. First graders found ways to look at each other’s screens anyway. By the end of the year most of the children have learned not the yell out their answer, but every now and again a child will forget. On the math test, the students are allowed to use manipulatives to answer questions. I know that the idea is that these tools are supposed to make math more conceptual for the children, but I have nutty visions of my lower functioning students being tied to an abacus for life. In addition, some children become distracted by these tools. Some geometric shapes were hard to decipher. Some application problems require too many steps for young children. Some children cannot follow oral directions that require more than two steps. Abstract math questions that require too many steps that must be remembered as students cannot read the questions are DIP (developmentally inappropriate). This is also true of some of the math strategies used to teach math in first grade. When we broke down one strategy to its smallest pieces, there were 32 steps. The strategy only worked for some of the subtraction problems, not all. There is a different strategy used for the other problems. This is an added level of confusion for first graders.
First graders should NOT be stuck at a computer with a standardized test. And I want to meet the teachers who supposedly wrote questions, because I do not know one teacher that wrote questions for the Utah test. And sure, problems can be fixed, but since the public and teachers cannot see the test, what is the purpose of the testing?
Any test item that can be misconstrued, will be. This is a difficult challenge when constructing a paper test. Items must be written in a very clear and concise style.
This will become a much more serious problem with computer based testing. PARCC and SBAC exams will prove to be a national disaster for this reason. When test items confuse the test taker, scores become extra meaningless. The NY Pearson (paper) tests exemplified this issue, by design.
I agree that first graders should not be taking standardized tests in any form. There is a long history of reliability issues and invalid results in early childhood settings. We had a teacher at my school who helped write the questions. She mentioned how different the questions looked after formatting. The content in some of the questions was altered by the formatting.