Leonie Haimson assesses the latest test scores from New York. New York is still using the Common Core, but with a new name, so of course the majority of students in the state “failed,” which was the purpose of the Common Core standards, to make public schools look bad so that privatization would be easier to sell to the public.
Leonie has something that no one in the New York State Education Department has: a historical memory, clear knowledge of the frequent changes in cut scores, constant manipulation of the data.
Leonie writes:
“The NY state and city test scores were released this week. Proficiency rates statewide increased again though by a smaller amount than last year. In English Language Arts, the percentage of students in grades 3-8 who scored at proficient levels increased by an average of 1.9 percentage points; from 37.9% in 2016 to 39.8%. In math, the students who scored at proficiency rose to 40.2%, up 1.1 points from 29.1% last year.
“In NYC the increases were a little larger: a gain of more than two points in ELA proficiency to 40.6% and 1.4 points to 37.8% proficiency in math.
“Commissioner Elia, Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Farina claimed that the increase in proficiency since 2013 was strong evidence that our students and schools are making progress.
“Yet the reality is that the trends over the last 15 years have not matched any of the trends on the more reliable national test called the NAEPs, for either NYC or the state as a whole.
“In fact, the NY State Education Department has appeared unable since 2002 to produce a reliable test and score it consistently enough to allow one to assess if there’s been any sort of improvement in our schools. Instead, Commissioners and their staff have repeatedly changed cut scores and set proficiency rates to make political points.
“There are many ways to show increases in proficiency — a metric notoriously easy to manipulate — including making the tests easier, shorter, giving them untimed, and/or changing the scoring by lowering the raw scores to scale scores or the cut scores need for proficiency. The state has used all these tricks over time.”
Read it all. She nails the fraud perpetrated by the state and ignored by journalists.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Teachers are getting more adept at gaming the system by teaching formulaic writing. Test scores are manipulated behind the scenes. Shenanigans all around. Meaningless tests to fulfill profits on the backs of our children. Elia is deluding herself.
Yes, yes and yes.
” the majority of students in the state “failed,” which was the purpose of the Common Core standards, to make public schools look bad so that privatization would be easier to sell to the public.” I would like to know….as a person who voted for Obama twice, but remains critical of whatever he did regarding education….”is this an aspect of what Duncan and Gates pushed hard for….it seems very like a very ruthless use of children and parents. But I do not want to criticize them unfairly.
Of course it was a ruthless use of children and parents! When people have a lust for money, they really don’t care about collateral damage. Children and parents are nothing more than collateral damage to the likes of Gates, Duncan, Broad, Koch Bros, Waton’s etc etc etc etc…..$600 billion in education tax dollars(yearly) is a lot to salivate over and they all want the largest piece! Follow the money!
Jeb Bush pushed hard for Common Core, and he wants to eliminate public schools.
Joel Klein and Condi Rice wrote an alarmist report saying that the public schools were a threat to national security and the only way to save the nation was to adopt the Common Core, charters and vouchers.
And from the headline of the Baltimore Sun 2-3 days ago…..Less than half of students pass English, math assessments. We are strapped with Common Bore and PARCC thanks to our Gov who wants to push vouchers (BOOST). What better way to get what he wants…..but I really think that it’s Finn and Smarick with some help from Petrilli who are the true masterminds of the deal with the Gov acting as a puppet.
Fordham Institute (Finn and Petrilli) got several million from Gates to promote Common Core.
And both Finn and Petrilli will never concede that they were WRONG! For the love of money, our children suffer daily.
“…more reliable national test called the NAEPs….”
Reliably what? Certainly not reliably valid, since there is no such thing.
Can we please be honest that there simply is no way to “fix” the tests to make them meaningful (even if that were the intent, which it clearly is not)? Anyone need a refresher on Wilson?
A shorter version by Wilson on the invalidities involved in standardized test scores: A Little Less than Valid: An Essay Review
http://edrev.asu.edu/index.php/ER/article/view/1372/43
Knew I could count on you.
That line that you pointed out caught my eye also!
“In fact, the NY State Education Department has appeared unable since 2002 to produce a reliable test and score it consistently enough to allow one to assess if there’s been any sort of improvement in our schools. Instead, Commissioners and their staff have repeatedly changed cut scores and set proficiency rates to make political points.
This is not just a NY story.
An amazing chart shows the dramatic increase in large class sizes for grade 3. That is another sign of not giving students and teachers and real support.
FRAUD is precisely the right term for this. These are tests of standards [sic] so vague and abstract that operationalizing them enough that one can reliably or validly test for achieving them is not simply difficult but literally impossible.
The tests are unreliable and invalid, and the results are easily manipulated. State departments have been been doing major manipulation/massaging of their results for decades now. It’s time for the dishonesty to stop and for the whole standards-and-testing regime, which has turned our K-12 schools into test prep organizations, to be relegated to the Museum of Really Bad Ideas alongside Galton’s eugenics and Stalin’s collectivization of farms.
When are people finally going to get it? It’s ALL arbitrary. The Ed. Department changes the cut scores and scoring all the time, and it usually disadvantages SPED students. It’s ARBITRARY and they shift the rules all the time. Students are just pawns in an ugly game.
Adjusting the tests by throwing out or adding back in questions with low pass rates is only one item in the toolkit that state department of education have for perpetrating fraud in their reports of test scores. Another is manipulating the raw-to-scaled-score conversions. Have a look at what New York has done with those conversions over the past few decades. The raw-to-scaled score conversions should be linear, but graphs of those conversions in New York look like random walks by gerbils on methamphetamine.
“What are the outcomes?”
“I don’t know yet. What outcomes do you want?”
Fraud.
But the bigger issue is that any standardized test based on standards [sic] as vague as the existing ones are will be invalid and unreliable. Given one of these vague standards, I can write a test with any degree of pass rate that you want.
Again:
“What are the outcomes?”
“I don’t know yet. What outcomes do you want?”
The Common Core is awesome. It’s the only test that has some transparency. What’s the problem? A child goes from one district to another and is already on the same page. NYS has had HS regents for years. Stop basing the common core.
Even if that’s true (it’s not), why is that necessarily a good thing? Do kids have some kind of existential nervous breakdown if they go from district A to district B and have to jump in at a different point? I did it three times growing up and I don’t think it scarred me.
For that matter, why should every kid in the nation be learning the same things at the same time? Sally is a whiz-bang at science, but her writing kind of lacks; she has a special interest in horticulture. Joey is doing algebra in the 4th grade but has trouble making it through a Junie B. Jones book; he’s learning the trumpet and writes his own music in his free time. Amy has already written and published a book but can’t make head nor tails of fractions. Tommy can paint a landscape that would make you cry, but isn’t much for academics. Why can’t each of these kids learn the basics at their own pace while having plenty of time to pursue their own strengths and interests? Why must the entire nation be standardized? Children are not interchangeable plugs.
For that matter, teachers aren’t interchangeable plugs either. Mr. Smith used to run his own autobody shop, so he likes to bring that experience in to his math and science classes. Mrs. Johnson is an earth mother type who likes to teach her kids about nature. Ms. McGillicuddy writes poetry while Mr. Jamison writes rap songs – they both bring those experiences into their English classes. Why must all of those teachers teach the same things?
Most experienced teachers that I respect have told me that their classes are never the same year to year. You have different kids with different abilities and different interests that react different ways to your strengths, weaknesses and interests, so you have to figure it out fresh with each new group of kids. I’m not a teacher, but if I were, I’d think that would be the joy of teaching. Anyone can read from a script – how boring.
Beautifully said, Dienne!
Second that! Dienne, your argument is one that would make sense to any parent or politician, not just to us “experts”. Thank you. Your words will come in handy soon, to be sure.
This is PERFECT! Thank you, dienne77
^^I want to add that there was a time before the education “reformers” got involved and decided to use these tests to prove how terrible public schools and their teachers are when standardized tests served a reasonable purpose.
Instead of being used to bash schools, they were something a school could use internally that provided additional information about a student beyond what the teacher might see and help make decisions about class placement as they moved to the next grade. The test scores weren’t used in a vacuum but meant some students might get a closer look after the results came in. Perhaps a quiet, overlooked student turned out to score very high in math and could handle more challenging work or a student who the teacher thought was reading well scored unusually low in reading comprehension. Perhaps it was just a perfectly competent student who had a bad day or a brilliant student who overthought standardized test questions. Or perhaps the student really did need extra help and it had been missed. It was just another way to help teachers with 30+ students understand what COULD be their strengths and weaknesses but only in the context of the whole child. Back in those days, they were low-stakes and useful for a school and parents with the caveat that they provided one piece of information along with what the teacher saw in the classroom.
Private schools give these kind of yearly standardized assessments whose results aren’t seen by anyone but the school and parents.
And when I was a kid, we were given “Iowa tests” that I suspect most parents never paid any attention to. I don’t think having a child assessed is a terrible thing as long as we understand — as we used to — that it is not about “meeting standards” that are politically decided. It is about helping to figure out where a child’s strengths or weaknesses MIGHT be that could have been overlooked in a classroom of many children.
Thank you. You are right on the mark with your reply. We need more outspoke people such as you. For some reason many teachers remain silent and just do their job. It saddens me that they watch this going on and do nothing. They just follow orders. When did they get so complicit?
A complex, extraordinarily diverse economy doesn’t need this top-down regimentation, even if it were at all well done–which it hasn’t been–the current “standards” and the tests based on them are a bad joke.
There is nothing transparent about Common Core testing. The results come back 4-6 months after the testing. Teachers are not allowed to discuss the questions or learn what students got right or wrong. They get a score and a ranking. No information of any diagnostic value.
Nothing transparent about these tests.
And the “passing” marks are set so high that at least 60% are supposed to fail.
What page are you talking about? Common core are standards, not a curriculum, right? At least that’s what I’ve been told.
The CC$$ in ELA seem to have been written by amateurs with no knowledge of the sciences of language acquisition and little familiarity with best practices in the teaching of English. If Gates and Achieve had handed Coleman a copy of the 1858 edition of Gray’s Anatomy and sent him to a cabin in Vermont to write new “standards” for the medical profession based on it, we would have had similar results.
Having de facto national standards, which is what we have, creates economies of scale that educational materials monopolists can exploit, enabling them to crowd out or keep out smaller competitors, leading to a terrible sameness of product in educational materials–think manufacturing in Soviet Russia.
Kids differ. Universal standards do not.
The standards are treated by educational materials providers AS the curriculum and so have led to a terrible narrowing and distortion of curricula. English class is now test prep class.
Innovation in education comes from implementation of competing ideas; creating one set of standards ossifies; it precludes potentially extraordinarily valuable innovation.
A couple decades (almost) of this standards-and-testing regime has led to no statistically significant improvement in scores.
In a free society, no unelected group (the CCSSO) has the right to overrule every community, teacher, curriculum coordinator, and curriculum developer with regard to what the outcomes of educational processes should be.
High stakes tests lead to teaching to the test–they turn our schools into test prep organizations–and all this work on test prep exercises has significant opportunity costs–it crowds out valuable learning.
A complex, diverse, pluralistic society needs kids to be variously trained, not identically milled.
The folks who prepared these “standards” did their work extraordinarily sloppily; they did not stop to question what a standard should look like in a particular domain but simply made unwarranted but extremely consequential decisions about that based on current practice in state standards that were themselves the product of lowest-common-denominator educratic groupthink.
The tests and test prep create enormous test anxiety and undermine the development of love of learning.
Real learning tends to be unique and unpredictable. It can’t be summarized in a bullet list; the “standards” have led to the Powerpointing of U.S. K-12 education.
We are living in times of enormous change; kids being born today are going to experience more change in their lifetimes than has occurred in all of human history up to this point, so they need to be intrinsically, not extrinsically, motivated to learn; high-stakes tests belong to a nineteenth-century and older extrinsic punishment/reward school of educational theory and fly in the face of the prime directives of the educator: to identify the unique gifts of unique kids, to build upon those, and so to assist in the creation of intrinsically motivated, independent, life-long learners.
A centralized Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth is a first step on a VERY slippery slope. Have we come to the point in the United States where we are comfortable with legislating ideas?
The standards-and-testing regime usurps local teacher and administrator autonomy, and no one works well, at all well, under conditions of low autonomy.
The standards were never tested before they were implemented; they now have been tested, and they have yielded no positive outcomes.
The legislation that created the Department of Education specifically forbade it from getting involved in curricula, but as E. D. Hirsch, Jr., once pointed out on this blog, the new math standards clearly ARE a de facto curriculum outline, and the USDE forced this curriculum outline on the country.
No mechanism exists for ongoing critique and revision of these standards by scholars, researchers, and practitioners.
The ELA standards are a bullet list of abstractly formulated skills that barely touches upon knowledge of what (world knowledge) and that treats procedural knowledge (knowledge of how) so vaguely–without operationalization–that valid assessment based on the standards as written is impossible. I heartily approve of some of the general guidelines that surround these standards–read substantive, related texts closely–but I disapprove of the narrow New Critical emphasis of the standards generally (texts exist in context) and of the general formulation of the CCSSO bullet list as descriptions of abstract skills. Wrong from the start.
The creators of these “standards” did not seem to understand that much learning in ELA is acquisition–is not acquired by explicit means. ALMOST NONE of the vocabulary and grammar that a person commands was learned via explicit teaching of that vocabulary and grammar. It’s extremely important that English teachers understand this and understand how, in fact, grammar and vocabulary are acquired so that they can create the circumstances wherein this acquisition can happen, and they are not going to begin to do that based on this bullet list, which, in its treatment of acquisition of linguistic competence, can most charitably be described as prescientific–as instantiating discredited mythologies or folk theories on which it is counterproductive to build curricula and pedagogy.
Not a complete list of the problems–not by a long shot–with the new de facto national “standards,” but it’s a start.
If I may ask what I consider to be a few pertinent questions:
In what public school capacity do you work/are affiliated with? Parent? Teacher? Adminimal?
How long have you been in that capacity?
Why do you say “It’s the only test that has some transparency.” Please explain.
I use my real name, what is yours?