Fred Smith: The Pathetic Lies of the New York State Education Department, in Service of the Testing Regime

Last year the parents and guardians of 220,000 children opted out of the English Language Arts (ELA) and math exams. They are given to 1.2 million children annually in grades 3 through 8. Their administration becomes the center of attention for six school days. They are due to begin on Tuesday.

The effort to keep parents onboard this year depends on repeating the same misleading information the state provided in 2016. It must be challenged. There are also important test-related matters SED fails to advise parents about.

Seeking to turn back the opt-out movement, misinformation about testing has been reduced to a few scripted points to help SED and education administrators convey the idea that the testing program has improved: The number of questions on the exams has been reduced; more teachers have been involved in developing them; and the tests are untimed.

On the surface these seem attractive. But, fewer items make less reliable tests. The teachers who were involved reviewed but didn’t write the questions, which were developed by test publisher Pearson. And the removal of time limits means the tests are no longer being conducted under standard conditions, thereby nullifying attempts to measure growth.

Effectively, the results of the 2017 exams cannot be used to make meaningful comparisons over time. This should end their already shaky use to assess student progress, or be factored into value-added formulas to judge teacher effectiveness, or enter into the evaluation of school performance. Ipso facto, the inability to make year-to-year comparisons of achievement is a sufficient reason for opting out.

Another selling point the state makes is that, while the tests will continue to be given, no teachers or principals will be affected by the results. This may lull people concerned about the misuse of the tests into accepting their administration because negative consequences have diminished.

My experience tells me something different. Whenever there is an investment in testing, a use for the scores will be found to justify the cost and to shield decision makers, who lean on the results, from taking direct responsibility for their actions.

There is a darker side to the propaganda. In announcing the improvements, an SED spokesperson said, “It’s up to parents to decide if their children should take the tests and we want them to have all the facts so they can make an informed decision.”

Then why does State Education Commissioner Elia withhold information on a parent’s right to opt out of the exams? And why has the state continued since 2012 to keep parents in the dark about the field testing of questions that allow publishers to develop future exams for free by trying out test questions on children?

Both omissions are most notable in a one-page document posted on SED’s Engageny , titled The 2017 Grades 3-8 New York State Assessments: What Parents Need to Know. Evidently, they must know the tests are untimed, shortened, reflective of teacher involvement and the fact that some districts will give them on computers. The ultimate goal is a transition to universal computer-based testing. No reason they should know about opting out or about the field tests.

This is pure arrogance. Presenting information in a need-to-know manner implies that parents are like soldiers told only those things that are essential to the discharge of their duties—in this case, an obligation to take the tests. This is how we “enage” parents?!

Here are some more facts about 2017’s field testing that parents don’t need to know:

There are two approaches publishers follow to develop questions and determine which should be kept for subsequent exams. The preferred way is to embed try-out material (reading passages and associated questions) in the test booklets that students are striving to complete. In theory, students can’t tell which questions are experimental and do not count in scoring their tests from the operational ones that count. Thus, they should be motivated to do well on the trial items.

This year, 22% of the ELA multiple-choice items that appear in Test Book 1 (March 28) are being field tested. In grade 3, 25% of the items are being tried out. That is, one reading passage and six out of the 24 items are developmental. They don’t count, but they require time and energy to complete and their inclusion on the tests can have an impact on the results.

In math, embedded items will make up 14% of the tests, interspersed among the operational items. They are contained in Test Books 1 and 2 (May 2 and 3). Statewide, 1.2 million children have been volunteered to participate. Parents haven’t been asked for their consent.

The less preferred way to try out items, known as stand-alone field testing, has also been taken by SED, because embedding has not yielded enough items to build new tests. So, separate field tests are used to generate sufficient material for the next round.

Here too, parents are not told about these tests. The state has targeted 3,073 schools for ELA or math stand-alone field testing on one grade level any day between May 22 and June 9. 973 of them are being tapped to participate in the computer-based testing part of this experiment.

What makes stand-alone field testing weak is that students are not motivated to do well on tests that are given late in the year consisting entirely of questions they know don’t count. Therefore, the information obtained about how the try-out items functioned is tenuous when publishers must choose which ones will become operational.

Stand-alone field testing has been discredited and criticized as contributing to poorly constructed Common Core exams. There are no negative consequences for rejecting this shoddy approach.