The passing marks (cut scores) on the Smarter Balanced Assessment were set last November. They were set in such a way that most students were certain to “fail.” The SBAC predicted that most students would fail. The executive director, Joe Wilhoit, quoted in the article below, predicted that “over time, the performance of students will improve.” Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. It is a dirty trick to play on students. The cut scores are close to the “proficient” achievement level in NAEP. In twenty-three years of testing the states, Massachusetts is the only state in the nation in which 50% of students reached the proficient level. That indicates that it will be many years–if ever–until half of the students are able to reach these absurdly high cut scores. If they are used for promotion and graduation in the future, most students will not be promoted and will not graduate.
Catherine Gewertz of Education Week wrote:
In a move likely to cause political and academic stress in many states, a consortium that is designing assessments for the Common Core State Standards released data Monday projecting that more than half of students will fall short of the marks that connote grade-level skills on its tests of English/language arts and mathematics.
The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium test has four achievement categories. Students must score at Level 3 or higher to be considered proficient in the skills and knowledge for their grades. According to cut scores approved Friday night by the 22-state consortium, 41 percent of 11th graders will show proficiency in English/language arts, and 33 percent will do so in math. In elementary and middle school, 38 percent to 44 percent will meet the proficiency mark in English/language arts, and 32 percent to 39 percent will do so in math.
Level 4, the highest level of the 11th grade Smarter Balanced test, is meant to indicate readiness for entry-level, credit-bearing courses in college, and comes with an exemption from remedial coursework at many universities. Eleven percent of students would qualify for those exemptions.
The establishment of cut scores, known in the measurement field as “standard-setting,” marks one of the biggest milestones in the four-year-long project to design tests for the common standards. It is also the most flammable, since a central tenet of the initiative has been to ratchet up academic expectations to ensure that students are ready for college or good jobs. States that adopted the common core have anticipated tougher tests, but the new cut scores convert that abstract concern into something more concrete.
Smarter Balanced is one of two main state consortia that are using $360 million in federal funds to develop common-core tests. The other group, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, is waiting until next summer—after the tests are administered—to decide on its cut scores. Smarter Balanced officials emphasized that the figures released Monday are estimates, and that states would have “a much clearer picture” of student performance after the operational test is given in the spring.
But as surely as night follows day, test-to-punish will produce educational miracles, right?
Rheeally! But not really…
How can I assert that?
Hmmmm….
Howzabout the testimony of not just a participant in, or partisan supporter of, or “thought leader” of self-styled “education reform” but an actual enforcer who meted out the punishment part of the “test-to-punish” regime—
LATIMES, Op-ed. 9-10-15. The whole kit and caboodle.
[start]
When I was the general counsel of the Los Angeles Unified School District, it was extraordinarily difficult to dismiss underperforming teachers who had tenure. One major problem was that we lacked objective measures of teacher effectiveness. So when the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act brought the nation annual standardized testing for math and reading, I applauded.
Congress is now seriously considering new legislation, the Every Child Achieves Act, which would continue the same testing program. But 14 years on, I think that’s a mistake. I believe our exam system is deeply flawed, especially when it comes to teacher evaluation.
First, the results are too variable. Teachers may one year be rated “highly effective” while the next year they are merely “effective” or worse, even though there are no observable changes in their teaching skills or strategies. And researchers have shown that even small variations in the evaluation formulas can produce disparate results. This seemingly uncontrollable variability produces great teacher anxiety that is not worth the damage.
Second, there is reason to doubt the relationship between test scores and an individual teacher’s competence. When we had one teacher per classroom, it might have been fair (or at least fairer) to ascribe poor test results to a particular teacher. Now we have more team teaching, and reading and math specialists who, if they are good, can pull up test scores notwithstanding the primary teacher’s lack of skill.
We also have come to recognize that merely by changing principals, school scores can rise or fall dramatically. This phenomenon suggests that the synergy created by high-quality leadership (or the dysfunction of bad leadership) may have a significant impact on teacher ratings.
Third, we have the vagaries of student class assignment. In places that still track students on ability, some teachers get high-achieving kids, and a virtual pass, while others have to sweat every day. Similarly, principals often give newer teachers a disproportionate share of students with special needs or disciplinary problems because older teachers don’t want them.
None of the above even takes into consideration the segregation by race or class of school populations because of the continued (indeed, increasing) segregation of housing patterns. Without some means of modifying expectations to the degree of difficulty associated with teaching a particular group of kids, the results penalize teachers who are willing to work in tougher schools. Some states and districts have tried to make adjustments, but no one has developed a widely accepted formula that educators see as fair.
Fourth, the tests are too narrow in scope. They largely focus on math and reading, which obscures the value of elementary teachers who do a great job teaching history, science or music, and makes evaluation of secondary teachers of non-tested subjects like “apples” in comparison with math and English teacher “oranges.”
Finally, there is the little matter of the “cut score,” or standard for proficiency. At one point, it looked as if Common Core was going to impose a national standard. That did not happen. Instead, over the last decade, states have lowered the cut scores when legislatures want to cover up failing schools, and increased them when they want to show their commitment to more rigorous education. So teacher evaluations are at times as much a statement about politics as teaching ability.
Of course, the tests are problematic for students as well as teachers. Just one example: Standardized tests are generally given in the spring, disrupting weeks of learning.
If Congress acknowledges these issues and decides not to continue the current testing regime, that will leave us with two questions.
One is how to evaluate teachers. Do we need standardized test results to distinguish good teachers from bad? Fair and accurate tests could be helpful, but the answer is “no.” Before standardized tests, some districts had great evaluation and professional development programs that weeded out low performers. Others did not. Adding test data can’t turn weak programs into effective ones, as is reflected by the lack of a significant increase in teacher terminations in most districts in recent years.
The other is whether there is any useful role for standardized tests at all. Civil rights advocates worry that without standardized tests, the troubling disparities in our public education system will sink back into the mists and be hidden from public view. I concur. But we don’t need annual testing to demonstrate the problem. Testing at the end of fourth and eighth grade can meet that need, especially if coupled with college matriculation and dropout rates, SAT or ACT scores, and Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate program results.
Holding teachers and schools accountable is important, but the means should be accurate and fair. The current standardized test program doesn’t pass muster.
[end]
Link: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0910-kwalwasser-standardized-testing-problems-20150910-story.html
You can’t get a more unimpeachable witness to the failure writ large that is rheephorm.
Is the above too long? Isn’t it just the monotonously “shrill” and endlessly “strident” testimony” of a “Ravitchbot” or [in the spirit of Peter Cunningham’s call for more civility in the ed debates] an “acolyte of Ravitch”?
When you get folks like Mr. Kwalwasser publicly coming out with the above, as toned down and mild in its assertions and descriptions as it is, this is a ear-shattering alarum from the belly of the rheephorm establishment.
Self-proclaimed “education reform” is not just going to fail in the future. It’s not just failing now. It’s been failing for a long time.
😎
Diane, I think it is very important to be clear about what 11th grade level 3 and 4 represent in SBAC. Those levels are designed to predict success in a FOUR YEAR college credit bearing course consistent with the NAEP levels of “proficiency” again meaning success in four year college work. As you have written that is equivalent to A or B work or honors in high school. Levels three and four in the lower grades predict success on that 4yr college pathway.
Somehow, the powers that be assume that if a student has not qualified for a four year college, he or she has failed or in your parlance “failed”. While I am a supporter of Common Core, one major problem with those standards is that when they say “college and career ready” they mean “4yr college ready”. Currently about 40% of students nationwide reach this level and only about one-third attend four year colleges. It is certainly a legitimate goal to increase the four year college pool and a target of over 50% (like Mass.) would be realistic. Reaching levels three and four is one indication (not even close to the best) of how well states or districts are meeting that goal.
But assuming that all students will eventually be qualified for four year colleges and students have failed if they don’t is absurd much like the 100% goal of NCLB.
Instead, we should be also discussing what are realistic, rigorous goals and how best to measure the performance of the students who don’t plan to attend a four year college but instead want to pursue a tech/prep pathway such as precision manufacturing or nurse practitioner in a community college. Work is just starting nationally on this issue. The upshot is that for some tech jobs level 3 is appropriate but for most intermediate algebra required by common core for example, is not necessary and many of the level 2 scorers are actually prepared for a tech/prep pathway. For these students a non-common core course such as quantitative reasoning or statistics would be much more useful. It is doing a great disservice to label as failures large numbers of students who while not reaching 4yr college levels are actually on track to succeed in their chosen career pathways.
In California, we have tried (with limited success) to emphasize the point that the “meet or exceeds standard” represented by levels 3 or 4 is a 4yr college bound standard and not the whole picture. We have avoided terms such as “proficiency” and described level two as near or approaching the 4yr standards. We are working on how best to measure the success of those not seeking to attend a 4 yr college.
“Instead, we should be also discussing what are realistic, rigorous goals and how best to measure the performance of the students who don’t plan to attend a four year college but instead want to pursue a tech/prep pathway such as precision manufacturing or nurse practitioner in a community college. Work is just starting nationally on this issue. The upshot is that for some tech jobs level 3 is appropriate but for most intermediate algebra required by common core for example, is not necessary and many of the level 2 scorers are actually prepared for a tech/prep pathway. ”
Do you think this will work, though, given how the Common Core testing has been sold? It’s been sold as “College and Career Ready” to parents. End of sales pitch. Given how much we absolutely adore reductive and often misleading rankings and lists and scores in this country, can a couple of people change that whole mindset, especially as ed reform seems to celebrate and encourage it with the constant recitations of test scores as a proxy for anything and everything?
I think if one hands people a 1-4 ranking system one has sold as “honest” and “the truth” they will use it and rely upon it, understandably and almost inevitably. What if that happens?
“a tech/prep pathway such as precision manufacturing or nurse practitioner in a community college”…Nurse Practitioners have a 4 year BSN degree and a masters level in whatever their specialty is. This is hardly a Jr College ASN. They can diagnose and prescribe in private practice without a physician.
David Coleman had to admit the “college and career ready” meant junior college ready. Dr Sandra Stotsky said that the students would graduate at a 8th grade reading level in reading and Dr James Milgram said that they would be behind 2 years in math.
While it is important to maintain high expectations, there is also a danger in pigeonholing people early on in school. People are not static beings, and they change over time. Some people require more time before they are ready to tackle college, and for them the path may be different. They may be better off attending community college and then transferring to a four year school. They may find what they are looking for at a two year school as Ciara points out. The path to higher education is not always a one size fits all deal.
Whatever students decide, we need to make sure that students can graduate and get a decent opportunity. Many students find themselves in debt without a decent paying job. Wages are stagnant, and it needs to be addressed. http://theweek.com/articles/575139/why-college-degree-isnt-worth-what-once
Sorry: Chiara
California has not been using good measurements for “who is ready for college”. see this recent article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pamela-burdman/math-lies-and-validity-st_b_8052634.html?utm_hp_ref=standardized-testing
Mr. Honig,
I have a test that has one question: “What is Nieman Marcus?” A high percentage of those who pass this test graduate from four-year colleges. Ergo, this test measures the skills required to succeed in college.
Assuming there is a correlation between success on SBAC and success in college (of course we don’t yet know if there is, since the SBAC is brand new), it does not follow that the best things schools can do is to gear kids for the SBAC. Just as it does not follow that schools should gear kids to recognize high-end department stores. And just as gearing kids for the Nieman Marcus test would have a deeply invidious effect on kids’ education, so gearing kids for the SBAC could have a deeply invidious effect on kids’ education. You assure us that it won’t, but how, really, do you know?
If knowledge is power (and I believe it is), then the Common Core regime as it is unfolding (even more intensely now that the scores are being released and panicking principals) will make our kids impotent. Is this what you want your legacy to be? The core mission of schools is the beautiful and important task of empowering our kids’ naturally nimble brains with useful knowledge that no kid is born with. All Common Core does is egregiously obfuscate the real meaning of education and lead us down dismal and dark dead ends.
Bill…why is this far more realistic direction of using our great California Community Colleges to train nurses, child care specialists, mechanics, technicians, etc. when it has long been known that vocational education is key to making so many high school graduates, and non graduates, prepared for the work force. Two years ago Prez Obama had Hilda Solis announce a large amount of federal funding apportioned to this very purpose. In LA, as I recall the amount was about $12 Million. What ever happened to that proposed voc ed support?
Also, how can poverty level students enter the workforce with the high cost per unit for their training?
Addendum…and if Eli Broad succeeds in buying the LA Times, as he is trying to do, plus the San Diego daily paper, the public will never again have any smidgen of real truth about public schools, the failures of testing, and the failures of Common Core. So we all need to know now how to deflect the inflated info, lies, being told about the results of charter schools.
How do you suggest, Mr. Honig, that we do that? I know you have had contact with Broad over the years…so what do you advise the LA public who are the taxpayers supporting LAUSD, to do right now to protect our public schools from complete privatization, as is Broad’s goal.
My middle son was a poor test-taker. He’s 22 now. He’s an apprentice electrician. He just had the wrong speed for standardized test-taking- he would regularly complete 40 or 50 questions out of 100 and he always, always felt bad about it particularly because his older sibs were speedy. He’s really deliberate and careful, which is probably a good trait in an electrician 🙂
I think a “failing” national score in 3rd grade would have made him ashamed. It was bad enough without the 1-4 or 1-5 ranking.
“He’s really deliberate and careful, which is probably a good trait in an electrician”
Yeah, I hope electricians are never judged on how fast they do their job. Yikes! Again we have taken one measure, speed, and turned it into a standard for proficiency.
Kudos to him Chiara. In a few years he will be earning a greater salary than most teachers, and doing satisfying and important work as an electrician…and a precise careful one at that.
Gates & Co. – BIGGEST SOCIAL EXPERIMENT, and we allow them to do it.
Our children are tagged “FAILURES FOR PROFIT” by CorpProfiteers.
Why don’t we go back to measuring head circumference to predict intelligence?
Passing CCSS tests or meeting the properly accepted head measurements have similar outcomes – designed for FAILURE & PUNISHMENT, along with endless profit for Rheeeformers.
Educational child abuse. Simple as that. When will this madness stop?
Interesting in light of Mr. Honig’s comments: 56% of California 11th graders scored 3 or 4 on the ELA test and 29% of 11th grades scored at 3 or 4 on the Math test.
Bill Honig is the former Superintendent of Public Schools Education in CA, an elected position. He is pro Common Core (https://dianeravitch.net/2014/01/07/bill-honig-why-california-likes-the-common-core-standards/). His answers will support the scores.
Excellent link, Jill. Where is Bob Shepherd when we need him, as he so eloquently and insight fully did in this old link on the topic of CC, with Bill Honig comments?
Here is an example.
Robert D. Shepherd
January 7, 2014 at 9:58 am
a. The standards on which they are based are badly conceived. The CCSS in ELA, in particular, seem to have been written by amateurs with no knowledge of the sciences of language acquisition and little familiarity with best practices in the various domains that the standards cover.
b. Having national standards creates economies of scale that educational materials monopolists can exploit, enabling them to crowd out/keep out smaller competitors.
c. Kids differ. Standards do not.
d. Standards are treated by publishers AS the curriculum and imply particular pedagogical approaches, and so they result in DRAMATIC distortions of curricula and pedagogy.
e. Innovation in educational approaches comes about from the implementation of competing ideas; creating one set of standards puts important innovation on hold.
f. Ten years of doing this stuff under NCLB hasn’t worked. The new math standards are not appreciably different from the preceding state standards, and the new math tests are not appreciably different from the preceding state high-stakes math tests. It’s idiotic to do more of what hasn’t worked and to expect real change/improvement.
g. In a free society, no unelected group (Achieve) has the right to overrule every teacher, curriculum coordinator, and curriculum developer with regard to what the outcomes of educational processes should be.
h. High-stakes tests lead to teaching to the test–for example, to having kids do lots and lots of practice using the test formats–and all this test prep has significant opportunity costs; it crowds out important learning.
i. A complex, diverse, pluralistic society needs kids to be variously trained, not identically milled.
j. The folks who prepared these standards did their work heedlessly; they did not stop to question what a standard should look like in a particular domain but simply made unwarranted but extremely consequential decisions about that based on current practice in state tests.
k. The tests and test prep create enormous test anxiety and undermine the development of love of learning.
l. Real learning tends to be unique and unpredictable. It can’t be summarized in a bullet list.
m. We are living in times of enormous change; kids being born today are going to experience more change in their lifetimes than has occurred in all of human history up to this point, so they need to be intrinsically, not extrinsically, motivated to learn; high-stakes tests belong to the extrinsic punishment/reward school of educational theory.
n. If we create a centralized Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth, that is a first step on a VERY slippery slope.
o. The standards-and-testing regime usurps local teacher and administrator autonomy, and no one works well, at all well, under conditions of low autonomy.
p. The standards and the new tests have not been tested.
q. The standards and the new test formats, though extremely consequential in their effects on every aspect of K-12 schooling, were never subjected to expert critique; nor were they subjected to the equivalent of failure modes and effects analysis.
r. The legislation that created the Department of Education specifically forbade it from getting involved in curricula, but as E. D. Hirsch, Jr., pointed out on this blog a few weeks ago, the new math standard clearly ARE a curriculum outline, and the federal DOE has pushed this curriculum on the country.
And these are just a few general observations. I haven’t even begun, here, to speak of problems with specific standards and guidelines within the standards.
Bad people who know nada, but like to spout because of the $$$$$ train and the NEED to CONTROL … arrogance and narrcicism.
A test that fails most of its takers is a failed test. Period.
“The establishment of cut scores, known in the measurement field as
“standard-setting,”“fudge-packing” marks one of the biggest milestones in the four-year-long project to design tests for the common standards.”Fixed.
Glad to be of help.
Yikes.
I am thinking of all the kids whose talents, affinities, possibilities for thinking about the future are being shut down, shot down by this preoccupation with careers, and career pathways, and college and “helicopter hovering” about that in KINDERGARTEN.
These college and career constructs and those 1620 Common Core Standards (including parts a-e) were built on sand to begin with. Only by mighty tugs and pulls and false reports, big money, and a well-oiled propaganda machine did they become the one and only mantra of the day–complete with a method for teaching reading and “because I said so” formulas for selecting texts and “because I said so” rules for focussed teaching on literary versus informational texts–pretty much forget the rest.
This agenda is functioning with all the force and effort of a command and control dictatorship by self-appointed groups whose distain for educational expertise and wisdom was and is palpable.
As a thought experiment—Drop all of this nonsense and talk with children and teens and parents–and teachers and principals–about their here-and-now enchantments, wishes, fantasies, what they are good at, proud of, cherish. Take back the conversations about life and education and act on those impulses. Forget rigor and grits and academic studies stripped bare of curiosity, interest, passion.
I love your deep thinking. I wish more were capable of this kind of thinking (which surely no SBAC test could ever detect).
So maybe that is the goal. To fail all these kids so they cannot go to college and will have to be TRAINED to work for the likes of Bill Gates and others. Because that is what is happening. They will tell parents their kids just aren’t cutting it and have no alternative but to put them into job training programs as early as the 3rd grade. It is coming folks and that has been the agenda all along. The few children that score high will be the only kids that go to college. So it appears as if Ze’ev Wurman and Dr. Milgram’s prediction that only 20% will go to college under America’s education reform prolicies were right. And you can betcha Gates and Obama’s kids will be going to college and they also are not being subjected to Common Core. Sorry but as long as we continue to feed this beast the beast will continue to destroy our children. STARVE THE BEAST. Take away the ONLY thing it needs to survive……our kids!!!