The New York State Education Department released the test scores for 2016 and warned that they were not comparable to previous years due to significant changes in the tests, then proceeded to declare that the scores had grown substantially over the previous year.
The New York State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE), which led the opt out movement, reported that the opt rates continued to be high and even increased. The students who opted out in the eighth grade were no longer part of the testing cohort, but new students took their places. Despite threats and blandishments, parents of more than 200,000 students said no to the tests.
Here is NYSAPE’s statement:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: August 1, 2016
More information contact:
Lisa Rudley (917) 414-9190; nys.allies@gmail.com
Jeanette Deutermann (516) 902-9228; nys.allies@gmail.com
NYS Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE) http://www.nysape.org
NYSED Declares Scores Not Comparable, Opt Out Grows Across State
This past Friday afternoon, the New York State Education Department (NYSED) released the results of the 2016 NYS Common Core 3-8 ELA and math results. Despite expensive ad campaigns from Gates-funded advocacy groups and the distribution of “Anti Opt-out” toolkits by Commissioner Elia aimed at persuading parents to opt in to state tests, the test non-participation rate increased from 20 percent last year to 22 percent.
As Chris Cerrone, a school board member and NYSAPE member from Western NY said, “Given Commissioner Elia’s public relation blitz across the state and all the interviews she did with the media, as well as all the money spent by the pro-Common Core groups, the increase in opt out numbers indicates that parents remain very concerned about the low quality of these tests and the direction of education in our state.”
An increase in test refusals were seen across the state, including in large urban districts like Buffalo and New York City. In only 5 percent of districts statewide –38 out of 686 — was the test participation rate at or above 95 percent for ELA and math. If the current proposed Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) regulations are adopted, this would mean that the state would have to punish the vast majority of schools by giving them low grades or imposing aggressive intervention plans. (see chart below)
“Despite the relentless and well-funded PR push back we received in the city, more and more parents are becoming educated on just how harmful standardized testing is for their children. The increase in opt-out is a significant win for immigrant families, students with special needs and students from low income households. Our grassroots approach is resonating with parents seeking true equity in public education,” said Johanna Garcia, NYC parent and Co-President of District 6 President’s Council.
“Overall, these exams not only demonize our students and teachers, but the entire city of Rochester. I will not allow my child to take an exam that does not accurately reflect her progress. I’m not against testing, but I am against tests with no educational value,” Eileen Graham, Rochester parent of 4th grader and founder of Black Student Leadership.
Long Island districts again this year opted out in large numbers, some as high as 84%. Many other districts also experienced over 50% of student refusing to take the tests. (see chart below)
Jeanette Deutermann, Long Island public school parent, the founder of Long Island Opt Out and a member of NYSAPE said, “The opt out movement continues to expand despite the aggressive campaign to thwart our efforts and marginalize our voices. Parents demand nothing short of a complete overhaul to our excessive testing system, a ban on the mining of sensitive personal data, replacement of flawed Common Core with research-based standards, and a permanent decoupling of evaluations from test scores.”
Despite their own warning that this year’s test scores could not be compared to last year’s because the tests were shorter and untimed, NYSED still claimed that increases in this year’s ELA scores over last year’s scores justified their continuing to implement the Common Core standards and Common Core aligned exams. These contradictory statements undermine NYSED’s credibility.
The reality is that without a more careful analysis of the tests themselves, their length, and the impact of giving them untimed, it is impossible to ascertain if achievement increased, decreased, or stayed the same as last year. In addition, the fact that so few schools and districts had a 95% participation rate also undermines their reliability.
“The fact that 95% of school districts in NYS did not meet the federal and state participation requirements significantly weakens the reliability and validity of test scores for accountability purposes. How can Commissioner Elia claim that these scores are valid or show any improvement in achievement,” asked, Jessica McNair, Central NY public school parent, educator, and Opt Out CNY founder.
“There is little doubt that parents will continue to exercise their right to refuse harmful state tests and right now it is imperative that Commissioner Elia and the Board of Regents advocate for a revision in the proposed ESSA regulations, or else face having to intervene in most of the schools in the state,” said Marla Kilfoyle, Long Island public school parent, educator, and BATs Executive Director
“Parents were very concerned when MaryEllen Elia was named Commissioner, due to her links to the Gates Foundation in Florida. Skepticism was withheld to give her the benefit of the doubt while changes were discussed. However, her continued failure to address the concerns of parents have only further eroded confidence in her leadership and in the State Department of Education,” said Lisa Rudley, Westchester County public school parent and founding member of NYSAPE.
In response to increases in test refusal, Commissioner MaryEllen Elia attacked critics and claimed that parents refusing the state tests were unaware of “important” changes made to the tests. Bianca Tanis, Ulster County Public School parent and educator said, “The small changes and tweaks made by the NYS Education Department are simply not enough. Nothing has changed for the individual child and to suggest otherwise is just plain wrong.”
Said Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters: “Between 2003 and 2009, the NY State Education Department engaged in rampant test score inflation, by making the tests and the scoring easier, without admitting this. After that, the bubble burst and the scores fell radically with the introduction of Common Core-aligned exams, when our Commissioner was intent on proving to parents their children and their schools were failing. I fear that state officials are still manipulating the scores for political ends. It is no wonder that New York parents do not trust these exams to give an accurate picture of their children’s learning.”
“NYSED must work more consistently with teachers, parents, and students, to create policy that supports whole child initiatives in every community. It’s tiresome to continue to sell our children and families short by engaging annually in narrow discussions about learning that only focus on ELA and mathematics, while continuing to neglect science, the arts, and civic engagement,” said Jamaal Bowman, Bronx public school educator and parent.
“Why would anyone support tests designed for over 60 percent of students to fail? If a teacher gave a test in her classroom where over 60 percent failed she would rightly question the validity of her test. This is insanity,” said Tim Farley, Hudson Valley principal and public school parent.
It is clear that the over-emphasis and misuse of test scores with questionable validity and no educational purpose continue to rob our public schools of valuable instructional time and resources. Until the leaders of public education in NYS begin to focus on closing the opportunity gap by addressing the inequitable resources in our schools and heed the demands of parents and educators for evidence-based and child-centered educational policies, the opt out movement will continue to grow.
2016 Test Refusal Analysis – Public School Districts
ELA Tests
2016
# of districts – less than 95% participation
648
% less than 95% participation
94%
# of districts – 95% or more participation
38
% 95% or more participation
6%
Math Tests
2016
# of districts – less than 95% participation
655
% less than 95% participation
95%
# of districts – 95% or more participation
31
% 95% or more participation
5%
Test Refusal increase from ELA to Math
2016
# of districts
582
% of districts
85%
Test Refusals by Percent Thresholds
% of Districts*
20% and over test refusals
72%
30% and over test refusals
48%
40% and over test refusals
30%
50% and over test refusals
19%
*Based on NYSED math test opt out figures
# of public school districts (includes big five): 686
NYSAPE is a grassroots coalition with over 50 parent and educator groups across the state.
The test scores, up or down, are still invalid and a huge waste of time. I’m guessing they were rigged to improve to advance the agenda of more high stakes testing.
“The test scores, up or down, are still invalid. . . ”
See below for details on that invalidity.
Another writing by Wilson, a review of the testing bible (I am currently reading the last three testing bibles to get an historical sense of the changes involved) the APA’s, AERA’s and NCME’s “Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing” focuses on the invalidity of these malpractices:
A Little Less than Valid: An Essay Review
Click to access v10n5.pdf
From A Little Less than Valid:
“To the extent that these categorisations are accurate or valid at an individual level, these decisions may be both ethically acceptable to the decision makers, and rationally and emotionally acceptable to the test takers and their advocates. They accept the judgments of their society regarding their mental or emotional capabilities. But to the extent that such categorisations are invalid, they must be deemed unacceptable to all concerned.
Further, to the extent that this invalidity is hidden or denied, they are all involved in a culture of symbolic violence. This is violence related to the meaning of the categorisation event where, firstly, the real source of violation, the state or educational institution that controls the meanings of the categorisations, are disguised, and the authority appears to come from another source, in this case from professional opinion backed by [supposed] scientific research. If you do not believe this, then consider that no matter how high the status of an educator, his voice is unheard unless he belongs to the relevant institution.
And finally a symbolically violent event is one in which what is manifestly unjust is asserted to be fair and just. In the case of testing, where massive errors and thus miscategorisations are suppressed, scores and categorisations are given with no hint of their large invalidity components. It is significant that in the chapter on Rights and responsibilities of test users, considerable attention is given to the responsibility of the test taker not to cheat. Fair enough. But where is the balancing responsibility of the test user not to cheat, not to pretend that a test event has accuracy vastly exceeding technical or social reality? Indeed where is the indication to the test taker of any inaccuracy at all, except possibly arithmetic additions?”
Opt out is one of the only ways parents can protect their children from unreasonable amounts of useless testing. We need to return to educational decisions made by educators, not politicians or billionaires with political agendas. Testing should not be the focus of education. Testing only attempts to measure that which most teachers already know. It is not a program or a solution to anything. Students deserve a diverse comprehensive curriculum, not mindless test prep. Teachers are tired of being in a vice grip of government control and mandates.
Common Core testing, courtesy of Pearson, has driven over 200,000 students and their parents away from what had previously been considered an un-alarming, perfunctory school responsibility.
The Regents Reform Agenda, created by Race to the Top requirements, completely changed the stakes for standardized testing in NYS. We would not be having this discussion if the USDOE hadn’t permanently welded the CC standards, CC standardized tests, and teacher evaluations based on CC standardized test scores together – and then used this unholy marriage to threaten schools, threaten teachers, and stigmatize children as failures. And so, the Common Core tests became the only standards that mattered. Witness the many hundreds of standards that are not tested – and therefore not taught.
NY parents have rejected Common Core tests that purposefully produced hyper-inflated failure rates. They also rejected a narrowed, scripted, test-centric, EngageNY, curricula. And they rejected the loss of so many other educational opportunities and experiences displaced by all-things Common Core.
Any educator or politician or policy maker that claims these minor bumps in the 2016 test scores (which are admittedly incomparable) somehow reflect progress with Common Core math and ELA standards has wrecked their own credibility.
It’s time for all educators, politicians, and policy makers in NYS to reject Common Core testing and the rest of the Regents Reform Agenda. It has inflicted far more damage than first imagined while delivering virtually zero benefits. The money wasted is one thing. The time wasted is something this generation of students can’t get back.
“. . . somehow reflect progress with Common Core math and ELA standards. . . ”
Once the educrats, school boards, GAGA teachers and adminimals accepted the concept of “Common Core” the logic must then follow that one has to “raise” the test scores come hell or high water. Manx Cats all them them chasing their not existent tails and being/looking foolish the whole time while harming the innocents in their charge the children who are students.
“The reality is that without a more careful analysis of the tests themselves, their length, and the impact of giving them untimed, it is impossible to ascertain if achievement increased, decreased, or stayed the same as last year.”
THE reality is that with understanding THE MOST CAREFUL ANALYSIS ever by Noel Wilson of any standardized tests and the standards upon which the tests are made, IT IS POSSIBLE TO ASCERTAIN that all the results from year to year are COMPLETELY INVALID, a waste of educational resources, time and monies, not to mention the harm caused to many students.
To understand the complete invalidities, the onto-epistemological errors and falshoods and the psychometric fudging involved all one needs to do is to read Wilson’s seminal work, never refuted nor rebutted: “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 words 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.
Exactly. I’ve been pushing this truth for years: we’re teaching our lowest income students how to stay in “their place” by endlessly testing them, and then publicly touting the concept of failure for not only them BUT THEIR SCHOOLS and thus their entire community.
“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”
~ Winston Churchill ~
We are not winning. Admit it.
If we let this political season escape us and allow this reform to become a back-seat issue … we become the fools. And we deserve that tattoo.
The Opt-Out movement has served us very well. It’s the first effort that stitched resisting states together in united opposition against Common Core’s high stakes’ testing. We owe those leaders great gratitude.
But now we need to add to our resistance repertoire … and we need to seize a special circumstance that will not last long.
We’re being smiled and nodded to death. Painted in nonsense words and soaped in foggy promises by political operatives who think us unserious and even peevish. And we are … because we seem easily soothed.
Common Core cannot be conquered by a three-week skirmish each spring. This resistance needs to remain nimble and opportunistic.
This is the current reality.
John King smirks us and treats as an after-thought while he retools our schools, experiments on our children, and ignores us. He’s loathe to even mention the Opt-Out effort save for when he speaks of punishing schools for resisting his edicts.
We must become more aggressive. And we had better do it quickly because the federal government is casting a larger shadow every day.
Teachers have been declawed, parents dismissed, school leaders deceived … and the public is largely disengaged. Warriors in this effort are painted as amusing renegades, wayward anti-reformists … progress-blockers who are more a nuisance than anything else.
And now King has proposed the coup de grace … the death blow … for the Opt-Out effort. Many schools will buckle under his threats … and our resistance may become crippled.
If I were King, I’d do the same. He doesn’t fear us … he mocks us.
King’s death-star for public education is nearly complete. If this issue becomes a back-bench concern for the major political players during this exciting election season … well, our time is up. And we will have lost.
We need drama. BIG drama! Right now.
Something that rises above the usual headline noise. And we need it in the next 8 weeks … NOT NEXT SPRING.
We need to empty the schools … nation-wide … this fall. For a day or two or three.
We need to capture the candidates … and the media … and make them want to inspect our issues. The optics of a school walk-out will demand attention … it’s serious attention we lack.
Now we can talk ourselves out of this bold action … and reason away the best opportunity we’re likely to ever have … or … or we can spine-up and do what warriors do and make mayhem. Make people listen. And worry. And respond. To us.
Or we can pretend a bit longer that we are who we are not … and search for words to explain an ugly future to our children.
Now is the moment. We can be bold … or we can go home.
Denis Ian
“We are not winning. Admit it.”
Sorry, no can do.
NYS teachers have not lost jobs due to VAM.
APPR is a running joke.
Many districts are using ONE SLO for all teachers.
The Lederman case set an important legal precedent.
Charter schools are self-destructing.
Common Core standards have lame duck status.
The testing moratorium is in effect.
Cuomo has been silenced.
The new BOR will propose significant changes.
Legislators will not ignore angry suburban parents.
NYSED’s psycho-magicians refuse to let HS exams derail graduation rates.