Emmanuel Felton and Sarah Butrymowicz write in the Hechinger Report that students in New York have shown little progress in three years of Common Core teaching and testing. Experts warn that three years may be too short a time line to reach a judgment. Nonetheless, the widening achievement gaps are cause for concern. According to the conventional wisdom, the writers say, scores were supposed to rise as teachers and students became accustomed to the new standards. The reality is different.
Three years into the transition to harder tests, scores across the board have remained low and largely stagnant.
Thirty percent of all fifth-graders passed the English exam, for instance – while just 7 percent of special education students did. In math, 43 percent of all fifth-graders were proficient, but only a quarter of black students were….
The past three years of testing have been rough for New York. Complaints began right away in 2013 when the state switched to the new exam and continued when the scores showed proficiency rates had dropped roughly 24 percentage points in English and 34 percentage points in math. In the subsequent two years, criticism grew – over the stakes attached to the exams, the tests themselves and the standards. A robust “opt-out” movement led by disaffected parents and supported in part by teachers resulted in 20 percent of New York students not taking the exams, up from 5 percent the previous year….
And scores have not improved much in the three years. A Hechinger Report analysis found that English scores were essentially stagnant across the state and math scores went up slightly. White and Asian students, however, drove this increase, while the gulf between black and Latino students and their peers has widened.
In 2013, for example, 30 percent of fifth-graders passed the state math exam. This year, when the vast majority of those students were in seventh grade, 35 percent of seventh-graders passed the test. But while white students went from 36 to 46 percent proficiency, black students only increased from 15 to 17 percent and Hispanic students from 18 to 20 percent…
In addition to looking a lot like last year’s results, these scores also match New York’s results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often called the Nation’s Report Card, which is considered the gold standard for student exams.
But the alignment with NAEP is precisely the problem. The state exams now consider “NAEP Proficient” to be a “passing mark.” This is utterly absurd. NAEP Proficient was never intended to be a passing mark, nor is it “grade level.” NAEP Proficient represents a high level of achievement. No state has seen as many as 50% of its students reach NAEP Proficient except for Massachusetts. As long as the states continue to use tests whose “cut scores” are aligned with NAEP, a majority of students will be considered “failures.” This is not sustainable. Think of the consequences of failing most students year after year.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“English scores were essentially stagnant.” Does anyone really know how to raise those scores? This is a serious question. What kind of teaching will raise those scores? It’s not good enough to say “good teaching”. We need specifics. I presume many teachers are using EngageNY modules, so it appears that EngageNY is not working.
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Yes, you raise the scores by fiddling with the mystery formula that determines the cut scores, IOW, the scores are bogusly determined.
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How can ANY teaching program raise the ELA scores when the NY Times made clear how terribly written (perhaps purposely) the questions are? That one passage from the 3rd grade exam had 2 questions that were inexcusable — one was particularly bad and well-educated adults had a decent chance of getting it wrong. If you look at the released 3rd grade questions — which I am sure have been vetted of the most embarrassing ones — there are other 3rd grade reading passages with questions arguably as bad. Now it is possible that teachers CAN try to teach this skill but in the long run, it will make these children perform worse on standardized tests when they most count, especially if their parents can’t afford to pay tutors to unlearn the 6 years of teaching bad thinking.
Look closely at the released questions and you will be impressed that in the straightforward ones that tested whether 3rd graders knew how to read and comprehend, 70 to 80% of the 8 years olds knew the correct answer. The poorly designed ones went down to 50% correct. And since only 30% passed, we have to assume there were more questions that far fewer students got right but I suppose we will never see them.
This is how 4th and 5th graders in private schools are tested (from ERB’s own sample ISEE exam):
2. In line 29, “imposter” most nearly means
(A) example. (B) fake.
(C) plant. (D) souvenir.
This is how much younger 3rd graders in public schools are tested (from the actual 3rd grade state exam)
Which word from paragraph 3 or 4 best helps the reader understand the meaning of the word “reveal”?
(A) whispered (B) understand (C) tell (D) assured
Why not just frame the question to the 3rd grader in public school the way 3rd graders in private school gets asked: “In line 29, the word “reveal” most nearly means: (A) whispered (B) understand (C) tell (D) assured If there was some educational advantage to expecting 8 year olds to have to decipher these kinds of questions, then someone better tell all the private schools where most of the people funding the “reformers” — and many of the reformers themselves – send their children. If you want to know why private schools have opted out despite being perfectly free to see if their own students are learning anything, it is most likely to avoid having to spend time teaching their students how to decipher and answer these kinds of convoluted questions. And private schools see no value in teaching 8 year olds how to “think like a test designer who wants to show how little public school students know”.
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I loved reading comprehension questions like that when I was a kid. No need to read the whole boring passage — just a quick glance to line 29 to make sure the test writers aren’t trying to pull any funny business.
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This makes me so sad…My daughter was completely freaked out by the third grade ELA test.
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You do have a point here. The insistent references to “the reader,” and the framing of every question in terms of what helps “the reader” understand X or causes “the reader” to conclude Y, it’s extremely annoying. Just admit that I’m “the reader” and let’s move forward.
Presumably this is an expression of way the Common Core wants students to think about texts. But the triangulation is exhausting. It’s like watching a bad movie and “hearing the script.” Except with these tests, I “hear the graduate student in English Literature.”
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I’m sorry – if it is any consolation the test is meaningless for 3rd graders anyway. But what could possibly be the purpose in these kind of twisted questions for 8 year olds? There is absolutely no need to distinguish between students who are really good at deciphering these ambiguous questions and students who aren’t. There IS a need to see if there are 8 year old students being passed along from grade to grade without knowing how to read. But you don’t need a test like the one given in NY State to figure that out. So what is the purpose of questions like that anyway?
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It’s people who don’t know what they are doing yet insist they know better than anyone else.
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NYC Parent, my guess the reason for making the question convoluted is that it is trying to tease out not just what the student knows (so nineteenth century!) but whether she knows that context clues will help her decipher nearby words. You see, using context clues is a “metacognitive reading skill” –doesn’t that sound more impressive –more “21st century” — than “knowledge”? This is all part of the spurious new gospel of reading instruction –that reading comprehension is not a function of knowing the words on the page, but rather of learning and practicing a suite of “metacognitive reading skills”. Few question this impressive and seductive dogma –not even teachers. However just a little critical thinking reveals that it’s wrong. The reason I can’t read Polish is that I don’t know what the words mean, not that I lack “metacognitive reading skills”. Similarly, kids need to know about 90% of the words on the page to get what’s going on. No amount of “reading skills” will help them if they know less than that. When kids don’t get a text, it’s because they don’t know many of the words. Therefore the royal road to making better readers is exposing kids to a lot of words in context. Traditionally this was done via a well-rounded liberal arts curriculum. In learning about the world, one learned the words used to describe the world. A wonderful by-product of learning about the world was vastly increased reading comprehension. Today’s false education doctrines lead teachers to neglect teaching about the world (ed schools have developed a vast intellectual edifice designed to denigrate teaching knowledge) so that they can teach these dry and rather useless “skils” and then practice them in the hope of “building them up”. Not only does this fail to make better readers, it leaves our graduates ignorant about the wider world. This doctrine is touted as “best practices’ and “21st century pedagogy” and the “Smarter” Balanced Assessments’ claim to be “smarter” and “better” is premised on the embrace of this new doctrine. I suspect the test designers believe that if ELA teachers teach and drill “using context clues”, kids will get that question right. But the fact is that the only kids who get that right will be the kids who have been exposed to the word “reveal”. Kids with professional parents will likely have this exposure. Kids who have content-rich curricula in school (rare these days, sadly) will likely have this exposure. But kids who get a “21st Century” pro-skills, anti-knowledge curriculum, are unlikely to get this exposure.
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“In addition to looking a lot like last year’s results, these scores also match New York’s results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often called the Nation’s Report Card, which is considered the gold standard for student exams.”
Perhaps that was true, but it looks life NAEP is vulnerable to conversion into another version of testing for the Common Core. I say that because Susan Pimentel is now a VP on the NAEP governing board. She was the lead writer of the ELA Common Core standards and active in the grand experiment to standardize public education from the get go. I think her movement into that position is bad news for the independence of NAEP–the major virtue that it had.
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“A Hechinger Report analysis found that English scores were essentially stagnant across the state and math scores went up slightly.” Really. Comparing three years of test scores that the state had in its powerpoint; that must have taken a lot of research and analysis (not).
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Internationally roughly a third of all students qualify for college and career. So where did we get the insane notion that by testing the heck out of students we could force a larger percentage to become “college and career” ready? What about their interests and abilities?
And never mind the impact of socio-economics on performance, which congress seems to be less concerned with than test scores. Perhaps here’s why: I watched John McCain in a blatantly Scrooge moment say that if more students attend college, there will be no underprivileged class to fight wars in exchange for a free education. Can you believe it?
Sometimes I wonder if the real intention behind current ed policy is to refine the cream and throw away the milk.
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Because teachers will “get better” at teaching the Common Core:
“Briggs, who advised New York on the creation of the new tests, added “but we would have hoped there would have been more of an increase in scores that reflect the fact that teachers are getting better at teaching the Common Core.”
That’s the plan. It’s all on you. Good luck!
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In district 2 (Manhattan), many families of means hire tutors for the exams since they are used for middle school admissions thereby further widening the achievement gap. There is little awareness of the opt out movement.
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That is scary. Another metric to feed the warping of the meritocracy.
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Oh and I neglected to mention the state test boot camp my neighbor enrolled her child in over spring break to prepare for the third grade test. The 3rd grade scores don’t “matter” for the middle school admissions process, but there is the feeling that you need to prep early so they are ready for the 4th grade test. This is the “benefit” of having a choice process for middle school…
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See edmusingsny.wordpress.com for an overview of how the tests have most profoundly failed English language learners, special education students and economically disadvantaged students. The percentage of students in these categories scoring at Level One (the lowest level) has exploded since the shift to Common Core tests in 2013, and the 2013 “recalibration” of cut scores and passing rates.
Remember, “equating” the scores from year to year, and setting the “cut scores” that define proficiency, are both POLITICAL processes, that have far, far more to do with the outcomes desired by the powers that be, than anything real about student learning or achievement.
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Why don’t they just set the cut score so low to demonstrate…hey, see, Common Core is the best thing since sliced bread. Amazing…scores are sky high since the Common Core.
Instead, they keep failing mill of kids, bashing teachers, running off the best experienced teachers & researchers. So, what is their mission? We thought it was $B of CorpProfits. The $B are rolling in only if mill of kids and teachers fail?
Would any business continue on a long path of failure and demand that we need to continue and fail more? What do these Evil-Doers want?
Is it torture & $B?
Twisted sadistic Evil-Doers?
Could never convince me that they did it for the children…never!
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I suspect they want to convince middle class parents that their public school isn’t very good so they will no longer support public education and switch to a charter. If you can make public schools less appealing – by starving them of money and convincing parents their kids are falling behind because their public schools aren’t as good as they think – you can destroy them. Basically it’s East Ramapo writ large, where the once good public school was left to the most at-risk kids and thus the powers that be no longer had to care or fund them and no one with any political power cared.
The crazed backlash against regular old parents who just don’t want their kids to take a silly state exam is way out of proportion. The privatizers are demonizing the opt outers – why? It seems to me that what they are most fearful of is that educated upper middle class parents think the test is bunk and thus won’t be convinced to leave their perfectly good (albeit now way underfunded public school) for the charter school that desperately wants to educate their kids.
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“Scores are stagnant.”
If a “test” is properly designed to always result a normalized distribution, the scores will be stagnant by necessity because the distribution would change if they increase. This is just basic math (OK, not so basic if you’ve never had an introductory statistics class).
And then there is the little discussed fact that a portion of the population can’t do well in these type of tests even if their life depended on it. They just simply can’t deal with the stress of dealing with question after question that are often non-sensical.
Now, I’ve never seen the score distribution of the NY tests, but if the number of white students judged proficient is hovering around 43%, then it is reasonable to assume that the average is at around 50%, and, therefore, roughly half the white cohort should be above the average since most likely the test questions were written by persons that adhere to “white cultural expectations.” Imagine if the test was written by people who see themselves as “black” of “Latino” culturally. (Years ago, I read an article that made the same exact point against the SAT because many of the questions seem as if written from an Ivy League POV. And who could forget “Airplane?”) It is no wonder there is an “achievement gap.”
So, it won’t matter how much funding they throw at schools: the scores will remain what they are because of the test is designed to produce these results. The question is how long will parents put up with that.
(An aside: back when I was looking at California’s tests, I looked for info on how to increase your child’s score. There was none other than the platitudes about “read books, eat well, and rest before coming to take the test.” Then a real-life psychometrician told me that you can train anyone to ace any test. It follows that if everyone did that, then test scores would be meaningless. Given that, I’d say they are already meaningless because it is nothing but a stack-and-rank system with little basis on actual academic achievement and growth.)
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And this is why Cuomo didn’t count test scores against the students. And now he is backing the parent’s right to opt out. Unlike King, Cuomo will not take on pissed off MOMS!!
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Personally I could care less about test scores. I care deeply about education, not about test scores. Test scores show something but are NO indication of quality education. Quality education shows in the lives of people not on government approved answers on a score sheet.
Too late we may find out like the Japanese, whose educational system we were admonished to emulate, that children when overburdened by scholasticism learn to hate schools and learning and not even learn the “facts” which their tests showed they had passed.
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