Talk about a messed-up, incomprehensible system!
Many students across the nation have returned to school or will return this week, without their Common Core test scores!
Didn’t the cheerleaders for the tests say that students needed to know, parents needed to know, teachers needed to know what those scores are? Didn’t they say that no one would know how students are doing compared to students in other districts and states without those scores? I don’t happen to know any parents who actually care how their child compares to another child across the nation, but someone does. Maybe someone in the U.S. Department of Education.
Blogger Perdido Street School points out that things go slowly because the benchmarks are set after the tests are given.
Just as with the New York Common Core tests, the benchmarks aren’t set until long after the students take their tests.
With the old New York State Regents exams, the benchmark scores were set before students took their tests and were posted right after the test ended.
That seems like a fair and honest way to do things – set the passing mark before students take the test.
But in the Era of Common Core, when educrats and reformers wanted to rig the tests for 70% failure rates, all of these Common Core tests, including the high school tests, are benchmarked long after students take their tests and the results are in.
Rigged?
You betcha!
If not, why not set the benchmarks before, the way they used to with the Regents exams?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is terrible! How are the teachers going to know what to teach without the Common Core test scores to guide them? How could they possibly know what students need to work on???
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You are right. I am calling Bill and Arne to ask about my lesson plans for next week. If a student asks for help, all I can do now is recite name, subject, and license number. We are all lost and wandering the dark foreboding halls near the boiler room and supply closet. Save us, oh Common Core! Give us you wisdom of triangles and equations for we know not what they truly mean! I await the command.
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Democrats are moving away from K-12 for the election. Too “controversial” which means “unpopular”. They’ll be focusing on college and prek.
Real profiles in courage, these guys. They aren’t willing to actually run on what is Jeb Bush’s K-12 plan, so they’ll just avoid the whole issue this cycle.
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Not a single candidate in either party has mentioned K-12 except Jeb Bush. His plan is to privatize public education and welcome for-profit entrepreneurs to take over the schools, just as he did in Florida. Charters and vouchers galore.
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“Many students across the nation have returned to school or will return this week, without their Common Core test scores!”
All the better. The sooner all realize that those scores are COMPLETELY INVALID and therefore a total waste of time, energy and monies, the sooner we will get rid of this scourge of educational malpractices that are educational standards and standardized testing.
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“The sooner we will get rid of this scourge of educational malpractices that are educational standards and standardized testing.” Well said, Totally Agree.
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Ohio won’t reveal the benchmarks until next week, Not that it matters since the kids will be taking yet another new test this year.
They were busy with the charter school ranking scandal, and they’ve now devoted 9 months to NOT passing charter school regulation so it’s completely understandable how no one in state government could be bothered with the “government schools” that 93% of kids attend.
John Kasich is MIA as usual. He’s a hands-off manager. He doesn’t even come to work anymore which is a new level of “relinquishment”, I must say. It won’t matter to his family since they don’t attend “government schools”.
Just another year in the chaos that is ed reform! Public schools are pretty resilient. They’re almost “gritty”, really. I’m confident they’ll soldier on as the Best and the Brightest spend yet another year bickering over charter school regulations and how many vouchers they can possibly distribute.
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In Washington state the high school end of course exam was scored wrong so it got sent back to the contractor to get scored again! MEANWHILE….those who don’t know if they passed or not have to register for classes without knowing which ones they need to take. This is the test where the state made it a requirement to pass, then lots of kids failed and didn’t get to graduate with their peers. The state then changed their minds about this after graduation, called the families up and told them they could now get a diploma!
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I feel sorry for the “experimental population” who were near-completion or halfway thru when this was put in.
I’m sorry “the adults” are such reckless, careless zealots and that group bore the brunt of that. Gotta break some eggs to make an omelet! They got in the way of the big machine.
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There is talk about changing the ranking models to account for transience, second language, poverty, and other factors. It would more accurately describe varying student populations, rather than compare Whitehall against Bexley. I think getting rid of the entire VAM ranking system is a given at some point as it merely is a measure of wealth at the macro scale of state and nation, and random at the micro level of teachers and schools. VAM will crumble by its already seen cracks.
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I would like to see some discussion of the fact that both the Senate and House ESEA reauthorization bills have deleted Common Core and have also prohibited the use of test scores by the federal government for any purpose. These bills are far from perfect but what they include and don’t include needs discussion.
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William Pulte, Mercedes Schneider has written about this extensively and most of her commentary has been reposted here. Both bills bar the federal government from imposing any standards or tests and significantly reduce the role of the federal government. They eliminate most of what Arne Duncan has done. His biggest accomplishment, other than the closing of many schools in low-income neighborhoods, is to diminish the role of the federal government.
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Diane, this is where you lose me. You know full well those scores are not “rigged”. The scorers must validate one test against the other by comparing similar questions on successive years’ tests. That way the tests are consistent. Until a sufficient test bank is established, it will likely require some time to perform.
As for the pass rates, those merely correspond to the percentage of kids who are fully prepared for college by the end of 12th grade. You, yourself, said that not all kids need to go to college so what’s wrong with having only 40% of kids be ready? Just state that 40% is an acceptable number. This will actually further your point that it’s unrealistic to give our $B’s in college subsidies for kids who don’t need to go to college, right?
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Virginia, I know far better than you that the scores are rigged. The cut scores were set last fall, and it was determined in advance that the majority of test-takers would fail. I call it what it is: rigging the outcome.
Suppose you were on a baseball team, and you went into the most important game of the year. Suppose you were told before the game that the score at the end of the ninth inning would be 6-2, and your team would lose. Wouldn’t you call that rigging the score?
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Diane, why do you make such dishonest statements? While we may “know” (based on probability and stats) that it is a virtual certainty that the majority don’t have the skills and knowledge to pass, it is not absolute. If somehow all those kids learned enough in school to answer enough questions correctly, literally 100% of the students could pass! Do you deny this? While unbelievably improbably, do you deny that if students answered the questions correctly, they would pass?
Your definition of “rigged” means that every test is rigged. In other words, if they set the cut score such that it was very easy and stats suggested 98% would pass, that must also be “rigged”. In your world, “rigged” no longer has any meaning. You can argue that the goal for K-12 education should be that kids can read an elementary book and do basic addition/subtraction to “pass”. Our scores would be much higher then. But if we set the passing scores to mean that kids are “ready for college” at the end of K-12, these are the scores you get. It may be that a 40% pass rate means public schools are doing a good job. Say that. But you sound like you have invented your own doublespeak and we are back in 1984!
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Virginia, that is ridiculous. The tests are field-tested. Then the cut scores are set. The cut scores are subjective and arbitrary. It is determined in advance that 2/3 of the students will fail. There is no way that 100% will pass. Have you forgotten NCLB? Weren’t we supposed to have 100% proficiency by 2014. If you were a teacher, you would not say something so silly.
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Virginia is starting to remind me of people who see the label “all natural” on a bag of chips and assume they must be health food.
The utter credulousness when it comes to accepting that value added measures have strong research backing them and that the standardized tests we are talking about undergo validation processes that would be recognized as valid would be amusing, if it were not wrapped in so much smugness.
Value added measures could be useful in system level analysis — there is no substantial research basis to assume they are valid for single teachers’ classrooms using a single year of data. The tests we are dealing with today are given to for profit vendors who have little incentive to use all of the expensive procedures that make tests useful for the limited purposes they serve well.
And yet, here we are, day after day, with the same nonsense and backhanded insults to you and everyone else here.
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DanielKatz2014 reprimands me for backhanded insults while continuing to insult me. Diane, you know that I encourage all comments to be posted so I welcome all of Daniel’s ridiculous remarks. Daniel, as I said before, you name the subject, date and time, and we can debate anything you like. You really have no clue but I guess that’s what they pay you to do in those ivory towers… speculate about real world concepts without having ever worked in the real world, right?
retired teacher, thanks for pointing out that males score higher on the SAT (or IQ tests) than females. Of course, this is not to pass judgment on any individual as I learned at a young age how brilliant girls can be. But the discrimination against boys simply because they don’t want to sit still and be teachers’ pets is harmful to boys individually and our society as a whole. If folks truly value the free-spiritness and creativity they claim on this site, you would see the inconsistency between SAT scores by gender and college admissions as a big problem.
Furthermore, lack of discipline is not uncommon for 18-yr-olds going to college. There are many solutions. The military has traditionally been one of the main ways that kids learn about themselves, the world, and mature prior to going to college. I recommend it for many. The Mormons use of missions has also proven to be very effective if not designed for that specific purpose. But we shouldn’t hold everyone back because some have not matured to the point where they can succeed in college at 18. No stigma against those who are not ready or choose to take a different path, though.
Diane, this is what gives me heartburn. You know the statement “It is determined in advance that 2/3 of the students will fail” is misleading. Yes, you and Amrein-Beardsley and Hammond know the distinction between being an impossibility and a statistical improbability but many of your readers do not. You simply will not answer the question: If all students get every question right, will they all be labeled as advanced? The answer is yes. In fact, if all students simply answer enough questions on PARCC to be deemed proficient on NAEP, then they would “pass” PARCC. You know it’s true. I know it’s true. The researchers know it’s true. But you continue to let some gullible readers think these scores are actually “rigged” like the lottery not paying out money to a winning lottery ticket.
The ONLY issue you have with the scoring is that the “pass” scores have been set at the proficient level on the NAEP. You think the NAEP proficient standards are too high for public schools and never want that to be considered “passing”. But you offer no alternative standard for what score on PARCC/SBAC should be “passing”. And we know that only 1/3 of our students traditionally graduate from college. Even at that 1/3 rate, professors on here are stating that their new students need remediation. Thus, by definition, they were not prepared on day 1 for college. With which of the following points do you disagree?
1. A goal of K-12 should be to prepare many/most of their students for success in college?
2. If a student is ready for college, he/she should not need remedial classes on day 1 of college?
3. Only 1/3 of K-12 students have traditionally been fully prepared for and graduated from college?
4. The NAEP proficient scores roughly track that 1/3 of K-12 students who continue on to and graduate from college?
5. The PARCC and SBAC passing rates are synchronized to correspond to the NAEP proficient scores?
6. The tests are “aligned” by comparing similar questions from different years. Thus a score of 50 out of 80 in one year might correspond to 48 out of 80 in another year if the latter year’s questions were slightly harder.
7. Any child (or all children) can pass or even get an advanced rating on any test if they answer enough questions correctly. In other words, if students in FY16 were touched by a higher power and correctly answered questions on PARCC that were traditionally missed, the passing rate could jump from the mid-30’s to the mid-90’s -> there are no “rigged” scores.
When you refuse to acknowledge simple facts, I dare say you lose a lot of credibility. I had come to expect more of you.
MathVale, did you even read my posts? I never said use tests to improve the tests. What are you talking about? Tests and scores are “aligned” from year to year by using similar/same questions. How else can you compare scores? You can’t give the exact same questions every year or are you really suggesting that? These achievement tests have been shown to predict performance on other open-ended tests of higher level thinking as well as positive outcomes years down the road. For you to say that it doesn’t measure “true learning” just shows that you simply cannot be taught. We understand you don’t want any accountability but please come up with better excuses. I am starting to believe you are one of the confused I described in my comments to Diane above.
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” You really have no clue but I guess that’s what they pay you to do in those ivory towers… speculate about real world concepts without having ever worked in the real world, right?”
I cannot imagine why people have trouble taking your comments seriously.
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>You, yourself, said that not all kids need to go to college so what’s wrong with having only 40% of kids be ready? Just state that 40% is an acceptable number.
Ah, speaking of putting a foot into someone’s mouth. No one is saying that 40% is acceptable. Pointing out the problem with test scores and its system is NOT the same saying that the given stats are acceptable.
You have a serious comprehension issue.
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Ken Watanabe, you have never heard me say that 75%+ should pass PARCC. I haven’t seen research on this but based on my understanding of the scores and our kids, I believe:
1. a 60% pass rate is an impossibility. Don’t care who teaches these kids you will never see a 60% pass rate period.
2. a 50% pass rate may be possible after years of reform and improvement in the system. Think Diane mentioned only Massachusetts with a rather high overall SES achieved 50%+ rate once. If the US never achieved 50% overall, I would not be surprised.
3. a 40-45% pass rate would be an achievable rate in my opinion. I still don’t think we need 45% of our kids graduating from 4-yr colleges but having more kids with more depth in their K-12 education would be a good thing.
4. a 30-35% pass rate is too low. I think we can do better than that.
5. None of this relates to any one school. A school might have 75%+ pass rates if it has a very high SES. Some inner city schools will likely never surpass 25%. That’s fine. It’s the growth among their students that we measure to determine if the teacher, school, or district is performing well. At the aggregate level (state and US) the overall pass rates matter.
dmxj.., of course I can’t give you an exact number on college rates but my guess is somewhere between 30% and 40%. I’m sure you are familiar with the studies that show both 1. kids don’t learn much in college and 2. kids often don’t use what they learn in college in their fields. College is largely intended to teach kids how to think. How to approach problems. How to logically deduce solutions. How to break problems down into their individual subcomponents which are easier to solve. How to analyze assumptions and validate whether those assumptions still apply in a larger context. To provide enough base knowledge about the world that kids understand how other fields may be of use and to understand the cultural and historical backgrounds of various issues. I’m not sure many colleges do a great job of teaching these skills and facts. I’m pretty sure the marginal students (after the first 30%) are not learning much of any of this. I do think the MOOC’s and the micro-certification trend will drastically undermine the traditional value of a standard college degree. And that’s a good thing. Personally, I could care less about someone’s college degree when I hire them. I mean look at Daniel Katz – would you hire him? I want to know 1) do they learn quickly (intelligent), 2) are they interested in our field/subject and 3) do they play well with our team. I can see any aptitude test for #1. #2 is harder and it will determine whether they have the discipline to perform the work. And #3 is largely about personalities. Nowhere in there do I really consider their college degree except as a signal for #1.
Follks, note that when MathVale says VAMs are a proxy for SES, you realize he has no clue what’s he’s talking about. Yes, pass rates or achievement score averages are largely determined by SES. The differential growth among similar students (VAMs) is not. The whole premise of “similar students” in VAMs negates this notion. Even in the Lederman case, she is arguing that it was the “high SES” that biased her VAMs downard. MathVale would have you think Lederman had it easier because she taught rich kids. Even though he calls himself “MathVale”, there is no math understanding in that brain.
Bob Shepherd, I don’t even know where to start with you. “One cannot, for example, set a pass rate of 25 percent for a multiple-choice test with four possible answers to each question because that’s what one would get, on average, simply by guessing. Suppose that I give a classroom test and 90 percent of my students score less than 50 percent on it. Such failure rates suggest a couple possibilities” Do you even understand how foolish this sounds? In college, we sometimes had tests where nobody in the class scored about a 75. Maybe the mean was a 60. That didn’t mean nobody passed. The prof understood the test was unusually hard and still passed 3/4 + of the class. The “pass rate” has nothing to do with the absolute value of the % of questions answered correctly. Are you getting the cut score (% of questions correct needed to “pass”) and the passing rate confused? And just like Carol Burris misunderstood, a cut score will always be above the expected value of a multiple choice question (if 4 possible answers, expected value on each question is 0.25). But raising the cut score just slightly above the expected value of guessing (say from 25% correct to 35% correct) implies the student knew quite a few answers and couldn’t have simply had lucky guesses. Also, the test makers know how good there questions are. The SAT even has an entire section just for research. It compares the answers on those questions with how many students correctly answered other questions which have been given before. They can then determine that is a student knows X, he/she will get this question correct and can use that question in future exams. Since the students don’t know which section is for research, they have to actually try on all sections. You do realize that students can miss questions and still get perfect 800’s on some of the national tests like the SAT and GRE, right? Did you really think that the score was just a straight proportion of the questions answered correctly? Diane, lots of training needs to be given to these teachers on the whole field of testing. It’s pretty disappointing that so many “professionals” don’t understand such a key part of their “profession”.
Chiara can’t say if Duncan incorrectly took credit or not for trade school. I prefer a model such as Germany (and many in Europe) where kids decide in 7th-9th grade if they want to pursue a vocational trade or college. Kids wouldn’t have to take all this college prep CC if they chose a vocational skill. Many an entrepreneur with an electrical business or a building contractor business is wildly successful without a college degree. Don’t you think it’s odd that those entrepreneurs then have to subsidize the college loans of kids who probably shouldn’t be in college anyway? Those entrepreneurs didn’t get any subsidies like that since they didn’t go to college. If a kid benefits from college in terms of long-term earnings, let the kid pay for it himself since he will stand to gain. Of course, folks like Daniel Katz who are looking for gov’t subsidized funding think that’s an awful idea to take away his gravy train.
Let’s stop the stigma of not going to college. But let’s put in place real trade classes in K-12. It must start from the President and unions on down who complains that not only do we not have enough folks going to 4-yr colleges but we need more graduate degrees too. Say what?! If we had a goal to put 40-50% of our kids through a valuable trade school track in HS (need basic math and language arts classes too), then we would be much more successful and those kids would enjoy school as well.
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Virginia, you are hopeless. Why do you think the Common Core tests are a better measure than the one they replaced? What if they are much, much harder, which produces a wider achievement gap? Why do you think all children can get 100% on every test but then say that not all children are college-material? Don’t you see the contradiction?
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Diane, the Common Core tests are aligned to “college ready skills” such that proficient students would not need to take remedial classes. This is:
1) a standard benchmark against which all states, divisions and schools can compare themselves. Despite the NAEP being a good measure, most districts and all schools cannot see how they measure up.
2) it has actual meaning whereas most states previously had some arbitrary standard not tied to college readiness. You can say that only a “basic” level on CC is necessary and you’ll have the stats to report as well.
3) They will produce a wider “reported” achievement gap since they are much harder. That gap exists now and simply not reporting the gap on a harder test doesn’t make it go away.
4) I’m simply saying many readers believe you when you say the “tests are rigged so that 2/3 will fail”. That implies that no matter how many questions students answer correctly, the scorers will change the ratings to make 2/3 of students fail. That is patently false. If divine intervention occurred, and all students answered 90% correct, then all students would pass. It is not “rigged” in the common sense of the word. You know you are misleading your readers.
5) Yes, it’s practically impossible (without divine intervention) for kids to learn the skills and knowledge necessary to pass at greater than a 40% rate nationwide at this point. There is no contradiction in saying that any person in the world can theoretically win next years 2016 Olympics 100m dash (if they run the fastest time) but acknowledging that only a handful of men have a realistic chance at winning.
Many of your readers for the first time are realizing that they have misunderstood what you’ve been saying for months and years. They only now understand that the tests are not “rigged” in the historical sense of the word. However, rather than acknowledging their misunderstanding, they will simply change their vocabulary and jump on the “not fair to base state tests on college readiness bandwagon” and continue trucking. However, nobody can maintain the internal dissonance that occurs when one realizes they’ve been lying to themselves for so long. It’s corrosive to one’s ethics and will lead one to realize the selfishness of the cause. It might not change their support for the cause but all notions of a “higher ground” are gone forever.
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Virginia,
I hate to break this to you, but there is no evidence that CCSS is aligned with college and career readiness. Just because David Coleman says it is doesn’t mean it is true.
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Emperor Virginia,
I don’t even know any single nation in which 3 out of 4 students are able to pass the exam no matter what socio-economic condition. Even in Japan, 30-35% of students at 5th&8th graders are not doing well on national state standardized tests–they are below average. Should the pass score mark were set higher, more students would fall into the lower half of bell curve. This means that they are considered failing the test.
You just sound like a clueless Japanese education minister who thinks rigorous testing motivates students to study English for practical communication–which is patently dumb. It’s kind of like saying, “Only 1/3 of Japanese junior high school students are able to reach to elementary level of English. So, what are we gonna do? Standardize the English exams. Set the pass level higher to beginner level. Report test scores, and disclose school names if scores are really bad. Name & shame that school principal and teachers.”
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Virginia, as someone who went a vocational route after high school (I later went on and did something different) and as someone who has a son who is an apprentice in a skilled trade, I’m glad that neither he nor I were “tracked” for that beginning in 3rd grade.
Maybe we could give these kids a little room to breathe, like “the adults” who were in charge when we were coming up did? There’s something really appalling about all these adults from elite schools crowing about how these kids have to be sent to work.
My middle son got the same space that his two elder sibs got when they were finding what they wanted to do. Rest assured, he found a skilled trade.
There’s a lot of reasons skilled trades were diminished and one of the bigger reasons is DC’s ridiculous hatred for labor unions. It also didn’t help that we practically grovel at the feet of the finance sector as if they’re driving the economy. If you want to be Germany you’re going to have to change a lot more than testing. They value work, ALL kinds of work, and they weren’t stupid enough to think they could base an economy on trading paper.
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Diminishing or devaluing trades was also regional. It didn’t happen where I live. We’ve always had a vocational school and it’s always been a popular option.
This chant that no one respects skilled trades and ed reform invented the idea is baloney, and limited to where ed reform comes from, which is DC.
Duncan is currently taking credit for a high school in Ohio that is a magnet school for skilled trades. The school was started in the 1990’s and it was a coordinated effort between a unionized school district and the United Auto Workers. If they want skilled trades maybe “the movement” should stop spending millions of dollars union-bashing since unions TRAIN skilled trades. Just a suggestion.
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Virginia, Using tests as the primary means to improve the tests is as bad as using test scores to raise test scores. You describe a self-referential, bootstrapping problem. Just like the dog trying to catch its tail and happily spinning off into irrelevance. Even if the tests are very precise, the are invalid because they do not measure true learning. Setting arbitrary and politically motivated cut scores might be a great idea to misguided eugenicists, but it does not serve our future generations with the knowledge and skills they will need. And how often have we heard “the tests will get better, just wait …”.
I enjoy reading Asimov. His laws of robotics are science fiction genius. While fictional, they have a serious message that humans should not blindly turn over their existence to technology. If you want to use tests as one tool in a teacher’s diagnostic toolbox, fine. But as proxies for human judgment in high stakes decisions, the tests are a poor substitute and favored only by those who will not, or can not, see the individual.
Until then, you are the dog chasing its tail. Enjoy the view.
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And seeing the individual is huge, huge, huge in fiery 3D font. We know little of the complexity of the mind. It’s likely almost all possess strains of genius, though they may not intersect with our world today or matters that push our society forward. And then there are all kinds of brilliance, talents and expansive and pioneering minds; giants in fields and great minds that can truly transform. True, some seem hardwired, so to put it, for certain things, as some people have total recall, some don’t. But the dichotomy of low aptitude people versus high aptitude people is a fallacy unless one is referring to some singular and narrow skill set. And even then there would be issues with absolutist distinctions and assessments of such. And many great thinkers did not immediately come to the fore. Many great talents did not express themselves until late in life. Many people have issues with our present conventions in various fields and sometimes take a long, long time to come to terms with it; sometimes it involves matters of conscience.
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Virginia, how many kids should go to college? Is this what tests are for?
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That’s just what we need, a movable test score, that can be defined and manipulated as politics mandates. The is obscenely crooked! Everyone should opt-out and refuse to allow their children to be pawns in a political game of “gotcha.” What a waste of tax dollars and teaching time!
By the way Florida is still waiting for scores. The superintendent of Escambia County said in reference to the scores, “We don’t need them; we know what to do.” He’s right.
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Hello…whoo hoo out there! High test scores do NOT necessarily equate to “college and career readiness!” What about those little things like emotional maturity, ability to focus for long periods, discipline, self-motivation, a loving and stable support system like family, self-reliance, ability to resist peer pressure, ability to cope with stress, ability to care for oneself, passion and interest for what one is doing, etc.
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Thank you Mamie. Also they don’t equate with college and career readiness because the cut score is based on the NAEP. We already know that a “proficient” on the NAEP is a high level of advancement. “Basic” is at a c level and is more reasonable than expecting all kids to be A level students.
But my issue is why rely on the test? I did fabulous with my SATs because I was behind in math, so I had just taken geometry, and I liked reading. That said, I was a lazy, angry student due to an out of control home situation and I repeated my junior year. When I dropped out of college at 19 pretty much that test score that I was college ready was invalidated IMHO. But working helped me develop patience, organization, and a work ethic and when I returned at 28 to community college while working full time I blossomed. I ended up graduating with honors from Berkeley, but according to some of the clueless people on here, apparently that test score should have proved that I was ready for college the first time around lol.
So glad that my high school teachers did not lose their jobs due to my high school anger issues.
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Titleone,
Thank you.
I think this is one of the great things about our education system. One CAN return to school and begin an entirely new career. No so in many other nations. Students are judged and tracked from an early age.
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To prove your point, men score better on the SAT, but women perform better in college. The SAT is not the final infallible word!
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To prove your comment about high test scores and emotional maturity, I offer my son’s life as an example. He scored very high on the SAT, started off in a competitive college with a scholarship, and left after one semester. It didn’t help that his roommate died in October due to an undiagnosed congenital heart defect. My son decided he wanted to play guitar, which he did off and on, for close to a decade during which he took a few community college courses. To make a long story short, he just finished college at age thirty-one. When he went back to school, he was “ready” and did super well.
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To prove another point of our test obsessed world, I just saw this item and had to post this. Nobel prize winner, Malala, is considering Stanford. She has to take the SAT! http://www.rantchic.com/2015/09/10/stanford-is-requiring-malala-yousafzai-to-take-sats-because-a-nobel-peace-prize-is-meaningless-these-days/?utm_campaign=RantChicFB&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=referral
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Several points:
1. I doubt that people intentionally rigged the tests to cause massive failures. The false flag theory of the Common Core exams seems to me more than a bit over the top. I suspect, rather, that the test proponents truly believed that they were making new, more rigorous tests that would drive improvement in education generally but that now, having given those tests, they have seen such dramatically low scores that they are confronted with the opposite problem of how to pass some kids. All this was entirely predictable. If the states set the pass rates low enough to pass some of the kids, then those cut-offs will be so low as to show the tests to be ridiculous. One cannot, for example, set a pass rate of 25 percent for a multiple-choice test with four possible answers to each question because that’s what one would get, on average, simply by guessing. Suppose that I give a classroom test and 90 percent of my students score less than 50 percent on it. Such failure rates suggest a couple possibilities: a) I failed to teach them what I thought I was teaching them, or b) I wrote a lousy test. Suppose that I refuse to accept that I am making unreasonable demands or that I wrote a lousy test, and so I decide to monkey around with the pass rates. I figure out that if I set the pass rate at 30 percent, then half the class passes. But that score is barely above what would would get if one simply guessed or Christmas-treed. So, the test makers have a problem. If they set the cut scores reasonably high, then almost everyone fails. If they set them too low, that’s an admission that their tests are poorly conceived, and no one wants to admit that they spent many millions of dollars to make terrible tests.
2. Often, in the past, New York and other states did ex post facto fiddling with the cut scores. If one graphs the cut scores for New York Math and ELA exams over the past few decades, one will see that they jump around like gerbils on methamphetamines. The cut scores were in fact set after the fact. That’s an old game that education departments have indulged in so that they could show growth toward AYP goals. Such shadiness is nothing new, and it’s sad that the “data driven” folks at the Department of Education haven’t been hip to this old con.
3. It’s always been the case, and this is nothing new, that in ELA, on these state tests, the results came too late and were not disaggregated enough to be of any practical value to classroom teachers. These tests were always touted as providing actionable data, but for the most part, they never have because, in ELA, the standards they are based on are so vague and the tests are so poorly conceived and written and at any rate, the teachers never got the data in time or in a form that would actually be concrete enough to be actionable. This is a problem or, rather, these are several problems.
4. The ELA standards are for the most part a vague, content-free list of abstracted skills. For the most part, they cover neither specific world knowledge (knowledge of what) nor specific procedural knowledge (knowledge of how). They are not concrete enough to be operationalizable in a way that would make possible valid testing. To understand what I am saying here, imagine a standard that says, “The adult American citizen will be able to make inferences.” Well, what kinds of inferences, by means of what procedures, about what? Are they to use reductio to make inferences about the logical validity of arguments in papers on quantum chromodynamics, or are they to surmise that the character Martha in “A Visit to Uncle Bob’s Farm” is a duck because it has a bill and webbed feet? There is going to be, inevitably, a vast disconnect between any set of test questions produced to measure a standard that vague (and the new ELA standards are, indeed, that vague) and any instruction done to “teach the standard.”
5. The makers of the current generation of ELA tests have violated basic rules of test creation. First, they have tried to use, for the most, objective test formats (multiple choice) to test “higher-order thinking” (to use the EduSpeak phrase), so they have created test questions that are convoluted and confusing. In an attempt to make their tests rigorous, they have made their distractors “plausible,” but a plausible answer is one that one might reasonably choose (that one might choose based on good reasons). I’ve looked at a lot of the sample release questions, and many of them are so badly written that a) the actual answer to the question is not what the test maker thought it was; b) there is no correct answer to the question as written; or c) the answer to the question, as written, is arguably one or more of the distractors and not what the test maker believes to be the correct answer. So, like someone trying to use a micrometer as a hammer or a yardstick to measure the width of synaptic junctions, they have used the wrong tool for the job. Second, they have produced no studies whatsoever to show that their questions actually validly and reliably test SPECIFIC STANDARDS. So, for these tests, even the most minimal standard of acceptability for standardized tests have not been met.
6. In a democracy, we are supposed to have transparency. There is nothing transparent about these tests. We are not allowed even to look at the actual tests, much less to subject them to public discussion and critique. How can people rationally respond to that which they do not know? That’s absurd. The test makers put out a few sample release questions, and even those, which doubtless represent their best foot forward, are appallingly badly conceived and written. God only knows what the actual tests are like, but one can draw some conclusions based on what we do know of them, as I have done, above, and those conclusions aren’t pretty.
No one wants to admit, here, that these billions have been wasted. The Emperor has no clothes.
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cx: Last sentence of Paragraph 5, “has,” not “have”
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Bob…so wonderful to have your voice here. Miss you when you disappear for periods of time. I quoted you here just the other day.
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…and the fact that my kids were tested to death and literally lost all interest. Even many of my best students wouldn’t take the tests seriously.
I was also in a public urban school where students were tested about 12 times in a given school year.
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Read the comments with a lot of interest. CC$$ = more than BAD!
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