Fred Smith worked for many years at the New York City Board of Education as a testing analyst. For all the parent groups who are upset by the over-testing of their children and concerned about the quality of the tests, Smith has become the go-to guy, who can be counted on to give a tough review of what the testing corporations are doing and what they should be doing.
In this post, Smith takes the New York State Education Department to task for withholding the technical report on the 2013 state tests. Just this week, responding to public outrage about its lack of transparency, the Department released 50% of the questions on the April 2014 tests. Until 2011, the SED released the entire exam with questions and answers. But no more. Since Pearson became the state’s testing agency, the state has been parsimonious in releasing questions and also technical data needed to understand the validity of the tests and the items.
The technical report for the 2013 tests should have been released in December 2013, but was not made public until July 2014. This is ridiculous. The information was available in Albany but was kept under wraps.
Smith says it is time for transparency and truth in testing. The public cannot trust the tests without seeing it and without allowing experienced experts like Smith to review its technical quality.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
If you are experiencing getting responses on inquiries on testing, I recommend filing an FOI or Freedom of Information formal request through the legal channels in your state.
Do not ever let anyone stonewall you if you are denied easy and convenient access to public information.
It appears that there may be something that someone wants buried.
Therefore, the information should be shared with the most effective media sources that you have access to.
Good luck!!
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Ha! FOI in Texas is a joke! The TEA, as well as individual districts refuse to give out any STAAR testing questions or information from previous tests, And whose gonna make them???
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If these tests are like the Ohio Achievement Assessments have become, each year the tests are different. There is a chance that a question might show up on a later test. They do release half the questions for examination by parents and teachers if you care to go online to the ODE website. They are free. Teachers use them to give students practice with understanding the types of questions that might be on the tests when May rolls around.
However, knowing what WAS on the test doesn’t predict what WILL BE on the test. They are concerned about cheating, of course, and sharing answers. If everyone knew all the questions, then the chances of everyone passing would be increased and the test wouldn’t be a test.
All these questions can do is to give a student a feel for what they might expect as to format, content, wording, and style. Ohio has been known to openly say that they change up the directions and vocabulary used … story, passage, item, paragraph, article, etc. for students in all grade levels. So, we have had to try to make sure that all the kids know those terms for the piece they are reading. A kid can sit for 15 minutes puzzling over a word like “excerpt” if he/she has never seen or heard it before. On a timed test, this can be very problematic.
We also have text boxes in which students “show their work” (no matter if their handwriting is huge). Anything outside of that box can’t be scanned by the grading program. No one told us about this for 20 years … Little things like that can truly change a student’s life. But, these things are seldom addressed.
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Thank you, Fred, for your tireless efforts and valuable work.
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Thank you, Patrick. I can assure you that there is more to be ferreted out of even the late and limited data that SED and Pearson begrudge us. They have little regard for transparency and violate most standards of truth-telling.
Deb, NYSED hides the truth and uses cost factors and self-serving arguments about how this preserves test integrity in order to justify the lack of meaningful disclosure. Operational items should be revealed after their appearnce and not re-used. Embedded field test items, of course, should not be exposed until after they reappear on a subsequent test. Anything short of that is subterfuge,
If state education departments can’t meet the need for transparency or comply with the principles of truth in testing, that’s their hardship–but it’s a burden they must bear. Secrecy is inexcusable. If they can’t let the sunshine in, they and their chosen test publisher/vendors should yield to more authentic forms of assessments. As long as they are allowed to continue to operate in a shady manner, it will preclude the advent of better alternatives.
Fred
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Fred Smith: thank you for all your efforts.
😎
P.S. Using my finely honed CCSS ‘closet’ reading skills [aided and abetted by lots of extra flashlight batteries] I can tell you appreciate a good joke.
Here goes. Up until, uh, a certain vegetable and a certain animal were let out of the bag and exposed to unnecessary public ridicule, this made the rounds among employees at NYSED and Pearson as a possible (if, in their words, an “unintentionally” funny) test item. *See my comments below.*
[hilarity starts]
A hare goes into a bar. He sits down next to a pineapple. They get served drinks by a bartender named Daniel Pinkwater. They get to talking. In the spirit of camaraderie and jocularity aided by copious amount of alcoholic beverages, the pineapple asks the hare, “How many tricks do I have up my sleeve?”
[hilarity ends]
There were to be four misleads/decoys/distractors and one ‘best’ answer. The joke was that the only ‘good’ answer [not suggested for inclusion] was ‘None of the above” because—
Pineapples don’t have arms so don’t wear shirts so don’t have sleeves. No tricks.
Believe it or not!
A laugh riot, I am sure you will agree, but all merriment ceased when transparency killed the entire pineapple/hare line of test items.
A tragic loss, I am sure you will agree, but $tudent $ucce$$ requires great rigor and grit. Nothing else makes ₵ent¢.
😏
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I am an EL teacher this past spring we were given strict instructions not to to look at the test or to answer any questions, from students. I also had to administer the Pearson New York State English As A SECOND Language Achievent Test. The test was old I had administered this 2 years in, a row. It’s unbelievable all that money and we give the same test 2-3 years in a row. There are so many underhanded and unethical things going on in New York State Ed dept.it should be investigated by an outside group.
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I suspect close scrutiny of the ELA test items will show the whole test and its results to be a big muddle, like the rest of the Common Core enterprise. Let’s see those test items and let’s give them a good close reading! What, if anything, are they really measuring, and what, if anything, can teachers realistically do to prepare kids for them, other than drilling on sample test items? What if success on the tests depends on reading comprehension ability that no ELA teacher can impart since that’s mostly a function of slowly-acquired background knowledge that kids get from a multitude of sources? What if success on the test depends on built-in capacities of the brain that no teacher can impart (e.g. short-term memory power)? What if success on the test is mostly a function of doggedness at performing tasks that are annoying and tedious but otherwise doable by any human with an elementary grasp of the language and no brain damage? Another question to ask: do the tests really measure the skills enumerated in the CCSS? I tend to think that the designers and promoters of these tests are dangerous frauds. We should be as wary of these unduly complex instruments as we are of Wall Street’ s complex financial instruments. Opacity and complexity are often cover for fraud.
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Let me make this even more simple than Campbell Brown, a founder of Parents Transparency Project, not demanding that Pearson and NYS be transparent.
Google “pineapple” and “hare” and “Daniel Pinkwater.”
I’ll make it easier and give y’all one link. Interestingly, it involves NYS!
Just a teaser from the first paragraphs of the WSJ piece:
[start quote]
Eighth-graders who thought a passage about a pineapple and a hare on New York state tests this week made no sense, take heart: The author thinks it’s absurd too.
“It’s hilarious on the face of it that anybody creating a test would use a passage of mine, because I’m an advocate of nonsense,” Daniel Pinkwater, the renowned children’s author and accidental exam writer, said in an interview. “I believe that things mean things, but they don’t have assigned meanings.”
Pinkwater, who wrote the original story on which the test question was based, has been deluged with comments from puzzled students — and not for the first time. The passage seems to have been recycled from English tests in other states, bringing him new batches of befuddled students each time it’s used.
The original story, which Pinkwater calls a “fractured fable,” was about a race between a rabbit and an eggplant. By the time it got onto standardized tests, however, it had doubled in length and become a race between a hare and a talking pineapple, with various other animals involved. In the end, the animals eat the pineapple.
The tests can be used to determine whether a student is promoted to the next grade. Once new teacher evaluations are put in place, the tests will also affect teachers’ careers.
[end quote]
Link: http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2012/04/20/daniel-pinkwater-on-pineapple-exam-nonsense-on-top-of-nonsense/
Ponderosa: good idea! Let’s give them furslinger tests a real CCSS ‘closet’ reading, er, ‘closed minded’ reading, er, Gettysburg Address reading without context and see how they stand up!
One little question for everyone: when did the definition of “transparency” get replaced with the definition of “opacity”?
Or maybe I’m just too stuck in the pre-cage busting achievement gap crushing 20th century…
😎
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I went to Engage New York and only viewed the third grade questions from the ELA test. It was all I could tolerate. I found reading selections with paragraph numbers very distracting. The questions….ridiculous! My heart breaks for children in schools today.
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Of course, it’s not because Pear$on i$ $o worried about “te$t $ecurity” & “cheating.”
They ju$t don’t want US to see how THEY are cheating American school children, parents & teachers by selling the states their lousy “standardized” (NOT–NEITHER valid NOR reliable–never have been & never will be) tests and test prep materials.
Of course, we all know that there are many, many, many more nonsensical questions, incomprehensible reading comprehension selections, impossible to solve math questions and questions having either NO correct answer, MORE than one correct answer or similar answers (any one of which could be correct, but only Pear$on can determine the one that IS correct {according to their [actually non-existent] “standards”}. And–don’t get me started on their methods of scoring–please, all you have to do is read Todd Farley’s 2009 (2009–& nothing has changed but, conversely, has gotten even worse) “Making the Grades–My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry.” Have you all seen their brightly colored (including balloon!) ads in your city’s newspapers for recruiting test scorers? (These color ads may have cost $4K a pop!) And–last but most certainly not least–computers scoring student essays! (Just think of the way SpellCheck works–can’t tell the difference between word usage–“elicit” & “illicit” for example–wouldn’t be corrected, & if you don’t edit your writing, you could be in a whole lot of trouble!)
And THIS, America, is what determines “successful” public schools and effective teachers. One solution and one only: Parents–OPT your kids OUT NOW! Have your letter of intent ready to turn in on the very first day of school (go to United Opt Out to find the information for your state).
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