The New York Times editorial board, which has uncritically endorsed every bad piece of legislation or policy that is based on high-stakes testing, warmly endorses the absurd results of the Common Core tests in New York. It echoes Secretary Duncan in asserting that the tests prove how terrible US public education is.
The Times displays its ignorance of the scoring rubric, in which Commissioner John King decided to align New York’s test scores with those of NAEP.
Any student who is not proficient has failed, according to the inexperienced Mr. King.
King seems not to know that the NAEP definition of proficiency does not demonstrate grade level performance, but a very high level of achievement representing superior performance. In everyday terms, proficient on NAEP is a solid A.
But in John King’s world, anyone who is not proficient has failed.
If New York continues to use this definition of proficiency, in which anything less than an A is failure, the majority of New York students will be failures forever.
This is a recipe for killing public education and destroying children’s lives and crushing teacher morale.
Are you listening, editorial writers at the Times?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Tweeted my disgust to the NYT and cancelled my electronic subscription again, linked Diane’s Daily News article:
@andyrNYT punishing kids for adults failures, now I will cancel my NYT subscription, you are all clueless. http://t.co/yJR7bfWnGZ
Andrew Rosenthal
@andyrNYT
Editorial Page Editor of The New York Times
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Thanks for this, I don’t even download my free 10 articles anymore. They’ve changed.
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NYT is not ignorant of the scoring rubric and knows exactly what it is doing – trying to fear-monger more copies of its horrible “newspaper”. Same with John King as it was a deliberate and strategic move on his part to align NY test scores with NAEP. He was after that big number illustrating failure because it will be used as the catalyst for the next steps in this extremely orchestrated process of evisceration.
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I don’t even know what to do as a teacher anymore. The union feels impotent since it has pretty much gone along with this.
Parents are angry but under the threat of punishment (summer school + more tests) I don’t see them opting out of the tests.
Election season seems too far away and none of the NYC candidates that stand a real chance seem to be willing to take a stand against this madness.
We can continue to teach as best as we can – but what do we tell our students when the bar seems impossible to reach in a year’s time? How realistic are the learning goals when we still have the same amount of content we had last year, and now we have to do it all in more depth which could take twice as long.
I simply do not know what to do other than look for another career now because it feels like there’s no end in sight to this madness and I fear for my family and my ability to meet outrageous expectations with our students.
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“King seems not to know that the NAEP definition of proficiency does not demonstrate grade level performance, but a very high level of achievement representing superior performance. In everyday terms, proficient on NAEP is a solid A.”
I thought that the NAEP had different levels of “proficiency” — e.g., basic, advanced, etc. What does it mean to say that “proficient on NAEP is a solid A”? Does it mean that the minimum NAEP proficiency level is a solid A, that the highest proficiency level is a solid A, or something else?
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There are only 3 levels on the NAEP – Basic, Proficient, and Advanced.
What has been suggested is that in order for a student to obtain the passing “proficient” they in fact need to be far more advanced than is appropriate for that to be the “average” level where we’d want students to be with some excelling and hopefully few in basic.
The levels are also cumulative in that it’s assumed that an advanced student knows things appropriate to that tier plus has the other 2 mastered.
What’s contained and measured is often considered inappropriate and too high a standard so someone who is considered “average” according to NAEP is actually a high performing student. It’s very very difficult to get advanced on it.
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