Jonathan Pelto reports that 70% of students will fail the Common Core test called Smarter Balanced Assessment (SBAC); the tests were designed to “fail” 70% of students, as is the PARCC test. Both Common Core tests are aligned with the “cut scores” (passing marks) of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAEP “proficient” is set very high; Massachusetts is the only state where 50% of students rate proficient on NAEP.
Pelto points out that 90% of students with special needs are expected to fail SBAC.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This further proves that this assessment has nothing to do with testing students, it’s about teacher evaluations. What a waste of instructional time–not to mention the millions of dollars that could have been spent on things that really help children.
Looking for appropriate words. That is criminal. Here’s a sign: Will your child be one in 3 out of 10 or one in 7 out of ten? Yikes! What a way to end the week with that thought.
As far as i can see from publicly-released Common Core math questions so far, the level of reasoning that is required for passing any of these tests is very, very high, so assuredly, most students will fail, just as most adults would. The questions appear to be deliberately ambiguous and written so that only very mature people with lots of real-world experience will even have any clue as to what details are unnecessary and what background knowledge must be applied to the problem by the student.
Since these are only given to public school students – not to those in any private schools – and are also not modeled by any curriculum that I am aware of anywhere else in the world, the makers and backers of these tests will be able to trumpet that our public schools are failing. Of course, any kids anywhere would fail them, en masse, except for a handful of truly exceptional kids with lots of out-of-school experience and mathematical insight.
Don’t get me started on the inanity of the reading questions I’ve seen so far.
Where do you think the cut scores should be set, Diane? And what should the definition of proficient be?
Cut scores should be set at the Arne Duncan raw score.
They can re-name the testing experience:
“Are You Smarter Than The Dumbest Cabinet Secretary in US History?”
Bill form NH?
The Common Core tests are worthless making your question moot. I can say this with complete confidence having administered them all. They measure teacher (or school) quality as well as a broken thermometer would measure the quality of your Caribbean vacation,.
It seems that Bill is CC’ed through and through.
Very believable given what has been happening. Actually I posted recently with the belief that this was what was happening.
These people by and large do not care about children, only about their own pocketbooks. Short term gains. Myopic to long term results.
Tragic in several ways but one is that they themselves are, in the long run, working against their own interests.
It is difficult for educators to grasp this because we have been so involved with children and their needs. We have tried to present “truth” through objective scholarly research. THAT is NOT on their agenda. Propaganda to further their short term monetary interests is on their agenda.
God help us.
Reblogged this on My Blog and commented:
Common Core tests are so difficult, as a teacher I try to take the test with my students… Some questions are impossible to answer.
The results are known ahead of time based on field tests
Sent from my iPhone
>
People can never be reminded enough times that—
“The results are known ahead of time based on field tests”
Just one posting of many from this blog—Carol Burris: The Danger Done by “Fools with Tools”—
[start posting]
Carol Burris here explains the deep, dark secret of standardized testing.
Whoever is in charge decides what the passing mark is. The passing mark is the “cut score.” Those in charge can decide to create a test that everyone passes because the cut score is so low and the questions so simple, or they can create a test that everyone fails. In fact, because of field testing, the test makers know with a high degree of precision how every question will “function,” that is, how hard or easy it is and how many students are likely to get it right or wrong.
As Burris shows, New York’s Commissioner John King aligned the Common Core tests with the SAT, knowing in advance that nearly 70% would not pass. That was his choice. Whatever his motive, he wanted a high failure rate. As King predicted, 69% failed. It was his choice.
Policymakers in Kentucky chose a more reasonable cut score and only about half their students failed.
Are students in Kentucky that much smarter than students in New York? No, but they may have smarter policymakers.
Knowing these shenanigans gives more reason to opt your children out of the state testing. The game is rigged against them.
[end posting]
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2014/04/30/carol-burris-the-danger-done-by-fools-with-tools/
If anyone wants the short recap I’ll give it to you: if a 70% fail rate was not what you expected then the proper term to describe your state of mind and emotions is not “surprised” but “sucker punched.”
😧
Always glad to help.
Thank you so much for your comment.
😎
In California, the State Board of Education has questioned whether “proficiency” or level three on SBAC should be the sole or even primary measure of success or failure. In the public’s eye “proficiency” equates to grade level and any score below is treated as failure. However as Diane has noted SBAC proficiency levels are based on NAEP proficiency level three (out of four levels) which equates to A or B work and predicts success in a four year college. It is a fair measure for the approximately one-third of our students who plan to attend a four-year college (that’s why only about a third reach proficiency levels on the SBAC and PARCC tests) but highly unfair to judge all students or public education by this level only.
The leadership in California is contemplating using the levels appropriately–level three as measuring our success in preparing more students for four year colleges (a legitimate goal) but also devising the right measures for the larger number of students wishing to attend a tech-prep strand in a community college or other career tech trajectories who might be well-prepared for their chosen pathways but still below level 3. It is highly unjust and counter-productive to treat those students and the educators who successfully prepared them as failures. The leadership in the state is determined to use multiple measures of success and wants to studiously avoid treating “proficiency” as if it were the only measure of successful student performance.
“. . . is treated as failure.”
There’s the “F” word again. The most pernicious of all the words in the educational jargon.
While I echo the concern about SBAC et al and the craziness of the cut scores, there’s nothing in the source material Mr. Pelto cites that suggests the tests were “designed” to produce such high failure rates. One can argue that setting the cut scores so high was intentional, and presumably done so that folks who get that big wake up call, but IMO the culprits are the state people who blithely went along with the recommendation. I doubt many of them understood what Bill Honig states re: the salience of the NAEP levels, largely absent from any discussion I’ve seen. I’d much rather see solid reasoned discussion that distorted headlines begging for clickthroughs.
David Crandall,
I have written several posts explaining that the cut scores on both Common Core tests are aligned with NAEP proficient, which is nutty. NAEP proficient is equivalent to an A or a B+. The only state where 50% have reached NAEP proficient is Massachusetts. In most states, only 35% have scored that high. That is why Jon Pelto is right to say the tests are designed to fail most students.
Why was the bar set so high for “proficient” on NAEP?
FLERP,
Checker Finn was chair of the NAEP board when achievement levels were set. He believes that it is good to have very high standards. But no one ever thought that all students would reach NAEP proficient. Or that it is a passing mark.
So the bar was set so high because Checker Finn thought it was good to have very high standards?
And why did you think the NAEP cut scores should be used to define proficiency on state assessments under NCLB? You describe this above as “nutty,” but you were in favor of this yourself, right? Why? Because Checker Finn thought it was good to have very high standards?
@ FLERP:
No one who has studied the NAEP proficiency finds them usable. And that’s because they’re not. But they do get used time and time again.
You must be new to this mess. The call for “solid reasoned discussion” was rejected long ago by the reform crowd. We were not invited to their table – just force fed the bad policies and worst practices. They have rejected millions of years of actual teaching experience. And after three years of trying to offer our solid and reasoned input, they have flatly rejected it all. They have been as obstinate as they are wrong.
David,
Read and understand Noel Wilson and then get back to us.
“Reasoned discussion” = Edudeformers telling true educators how to do the job they (the edudeformers) haven’t, can’t and won’t do–actually teach
When the two consortiums applied for supplementary funds for curriculum work needed to do the test development, (a snafu in thinking from the get go—just do standards and tests, nothing needed in between), their respective grant applications contained these passages:
PARCC will “coordinate with the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium on… artificial intelligence scoring, setting achievement levels (cut scores), and anchoring high school assessments in the knowledge and skills students need to be prepared for postsecondary education and careers” (PARCC, 2010, December, p. 3).
The SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) asserted: “SBAC and PARCC are strongly committed to ensuring comparability between their assessments…[including] collaborative standard setting that will facilitate valid comparisons of achievement levels (cut scores) in each consortium’s summative test…” (SMARTER, 2011, p. 31).
Sounds to me like a master plan for reporting on national score equivalents from two tests of the CCSS (Form A test from PARCC, Form B from SBAC).
Also, turns out there is no there THERE for “anchoring high school assessments in the knowledge and skills students need to be prepared for postsecondary education and careers.” There are no national norms for entry into postsecondary programs, or common pre-requisites for careers paths.
The whole marketing of college and career “expectations” was contrived by Achieve, Inc. and organization set up by CEOs. The career theme was based on limited data from inteverviews and surveys conducted with a convenience sample of business persons in five states, and well before the economy tanked. A typical US worker has 11 jobs before the age of 44 and the typical duration of each job is 2 years. Source: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/nlsoy.nr0.htm
Common Core has ben the most lucrative snake oil sales job in history.
Conning the ignorant and coercing the powerless was one thing. When the business plan involved hurting children, your made your deal with the devil.
So, if the Common Core tests are designed so that most kids will fail, and if the ACT and SAT and AP tests are “aligned” to the Common Core (both ACT, Inc, and the College Board proudly insist that they are), then why are educators and parents and students not up in arms about those tests too?
Great question. Most parents see the SAT, ACT and AP exams as the holy grail of high school. They haven’t seen the new SAT questions with their inane common core stems or fully understood that courses like AP Bio are now based on inquiry learning. Imagine learning the Krebs cycle through inquiry learning! There is no organized voice helping parents understand the changes. They just know that their kids need AP for competitive colleges. They don’t realize that AP itself has changed. When a spokesman for college board opines that students really won’t be taking AP calculus in the future but rather will be taking AP algebra and AP statistics, you know something is amiss.The College Board is now offering an AP credential for students who complete certain AP courses. Students should abandon the SAT and apply to test-optional colleges. Schools should teach AP-type content in honors courses. It is time to divest from corporate testing and profits.
It’s way past time for educators (and parents and students) to disassociate themselves from the ACT and SAT tests. They just don’t predict much of anything other than family income. And they drive an awful lot of the craziness in public schooling.
AP is a perfect example. Kids take it to “look good.” The National Research Council looked hard at AP math and science courses and tests and determined they were “a mile wide and an inch deep” and didn’t conform to research-based principles of learning. The “old” AP was always more myth and hype than quality education, and I can’t imagine the “new” AP is any better.
But as I’ve noted countless times on the blog, both ACT, Inc and the College Board were instrumental in developing the Common Core. Both organizations have “aligned” all of their products to it. You cannot simultaneously be “for” ACT and SAT tests and AP programs, and “agin” the Common Core.
And yet, that’s where we are. Randi Weingarten has called AP courses a “pathway to a brighter future.” And Dennis Van Roekel, former head of the NEA – in a speech on education “reform” at the NEA conference in Atlanta in July, 2013 –– cited a school division in Maryland as exemplary because students were “taking AP courses at much higher rates than the national average.”
Of course, both Van Roekel and Weingarten endorsed the Common Core too.
Well considering any results from any of the educational malpractices-educational standards and standardized testing ARE COMPLETELY INVALID what we are left with is a bunch of mental masturbation.
We, yes, we have already been shown why they are COMPLETELY INVALID by Noel Wilson in his never refuted nor rebutted treatise on standards and standardized testing “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
By Duane E. Swacker
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bill-gates-pulled-off-the-swift-common-core-revolution/2014/06/07/a830e32e-ec34-11e3-9f5c-9075d5508f0a_story.html
Before this goes down the memory hole forever, remember that states used to have tests that were not designed to fail most students. They were relentlessly criticized by people who argued that the state tests were too easy and should be replaced a national test that was aligned with NAEP’s cut scores. This didn’t happen that long ago.
Are you referring to criterion-referenced tests?
Many of those who criticized public schools did so in the wake of A Nation at Risk, the Reagan-era screed that warned a “rising tide of mediocrity” threatened American national security and economic competitiveness. It was an awful lot of bad gas. But it did ignite the “reform” movement of standards and testing that led – ultimately – to No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and Common Core.
I’m just referring to the annual assessments that states were administering under NCLB for most of the 2000s, before Common Core. Many more students were scoring as “proficient” on those tests, in some some states as many as 80%. The critics said that meant the tests were too easy and that the states should all be taking tests based on the same standards and using the NAEP’s benchmark of “proficiency.” And then that’s what happened.
The NCLB tests you speak of did not have to fail most students in order to inflict their damage to Title 1 schools. Failure to meet AYP in any one of ten different sub-groups (All Students, American Indian, Asian, Hispanic, Black, White, Limited English Proficient, Special Education, Migrant Status and Free and Reduced Priced Lunch) resulted in SINI status and the sanctions that came with the label. To make matters worse improvements had to be made while comparing different sets of students using different tests. For example, a sub-group of 30 Hispanic students in my school had to show improvement in scores on their 8th grade 2010 math test in order for our entire school to meet its full AYP target. Improvement compared to the scores of 30 different Hispanic who took a different math test in 2009! The critics you referred to had no clue how the NCLB demands actually worked to punish.
Yes, I don’t remember seeing that part on the op-ed pages of the major papers.
The most mediocre thing I noticed in the 1989s stemmed from the words of Reagan himself.