Mike Deshotels, veteran educator, exposes the myth of high standards in Louisiana in this post.
He discovered that John White, the State Superintendent of Education, has systematically and secretly lowered the state standards to make it appear that the state was making progress every year.
The raw scores on Louisiana’s state tests are kept secret from the public and the legislature. Deshotels got them by making public records requests backed up by 4 successful lawsuits that he won against John White for withholding public records.
All anyone ever sees are the scale scores which seem to be stable, but the underlying raw scores change depending on what the LDOE wants them to show. So, White has now inflated the state test scores compared to NAEP by an average of 59% in just a few years.
“Basically the Department of Education was allowed to set any standard they chose relative to the percentage of questions answered correctly. And they were also allowed to change that underlying percentage for passing without consultation from year to year. The passing standard has been quietly watered down over a period of years without the public or the legislature being informed. So at the end of the 2017-2018 school year my public records requests revealed that a student on average only needs to get about 30% of the questions right on their math and English tests in order to get a passing score. That’s just a little above what a student who knows absolutely nothing could attain with outright guessing….
”Even though 20% of students are repeatedly failing their state tests, public records reveal that only 1.8% of 4th and 8th graders are denied promotion. The truth is that the Louisiana Department of Education, using the latest BESE policy, expects our local school systems to promote basically all students to the next grade each year whether they have learned the material or not. Then the teachers in the next grade are magically supposed to teach them the new material in addition to what they did not learn in previous grades…
”As this blog explained in an
earlier post, the improved graduation rate of Louisiana students is achieved using even more of the John White standards magic. Using the secret raw score standards implemented by John White, a student can pass his/her algebra I test by scoring only 15% correct answers. Geometry requires only 12% correct answers. English I can be passed by getting 17% of the questions right. Louisiana’s improved graduation rate was achieved by faking the stats….
“The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) is a national test that is considered the gold standard for measuring proficiency of students in 4th and 8th grade in reading and math. On the latest NAEP test given, only 26% of Louisiana 4th graders achieved a proficient rating in reading, only 27% of Louisiana 4th graders got a proficient rating in math, only 25% of Louisiana 8th graders got a proficient rating in reading, and only 19% of Louisiana students got a proficient rating in math. My analysis reveals that our state tests have been inflated an average of 59% in recent years compared to the NAEP tests…
”The latest NAEP test results which compare Louisiana student performance in reading and math to all other states places Louisiana at its lowest ranking ever. We now rank at the bottom of all state systems. The only area scoring lower on NAEP is Washington D.C.
“Don’t blame the students or the teachers. The fact is the Common Common core standards are so bad, so age inappropriate, so filled with stuff these kids will never use, that the tests should not be used for any purpose, much less the promotion and graduation of students. Meanwhile our students are being denied instruction in real world problems and truly useful reading and writing skills.”
Shocking as this is, John White may have learned this trick while he was working for the Bloomberg-Klein regime in New York City, where the same thing happened on the state tests. The State Education Department watered the passing standards down every year from 2006-09, and it magically appeared that there was steady, even dramatic progress. The scoring on the tests was changed so that the number of students who scored a 1 (the lowest) fell to the lowest number ever. Bloomberg was able to boast about the “New York City Miracle” during his 2009 re-election campaign. The miracle disappeared after he was re-elected, after the State Board of Regents brought in outside experts to review the results, and after the scoring was recalibrated. At the time, the chair of the State Board of Regents was Mayor Bloomberg’s good friend, billionaire Merryl Tisch.
You can read the story in my book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” pp.-78-79.
Here is the short version. The state began annual testing in 2006, and every year from 2006-09, the state made it easier to pass. “In 2006, significant numbers of New York City Students scored at level 1 and were subject to retention. The number of students at level 1 dropped so low that level 1 could hardly be considered a performance level. In 2006, 70,090 students in grades three through eight were at level 1 in mathematics; by 2009, that number had fallen to 14,305. In reading, the number of level 1 students fell from 46,085 to 11,755…In sixth-grade reading, 10.1 percent were at level 1 in 2006, but by 2009, only 0.2 percent were.”
Students in level 1 were denied promotion and entitled to remediation. Most were bumped from level 1 to level 2 by lowering the standards, thus allowing them to advance but denying them the remediation they needed.
The standards dropped so low that many students could reach level 2 by guessing.
A neat trick so long as no one notices.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
What are the odds that this is happening across the country? Introducing tests to hold teachers accountable, while allowing politicians to claim victories/improvements, all the while, the status quo was maintained, and in some instances, worsened. SMH
That pretty much sums up what has been happening nationwide.
While the charter/choice game grew, our school where lowest-income kids had been pulled together as other more affluent kids were skimmed off and enrolled elsewhere was suddenly under the microscope for its very low ACT scores…and the solution, besides blustering and fussing and blaming and complaining from many top-down managers and coaches and facilitators, was to hire “Test Beater” type companies which would come in and teach teachers and kids how to “beat” (scam) the test. Think about what message that sent to the students…
“What are the odds that this is happening across the country? ”
It’s a certainty, but I’d extend the investigations to higher ed as well, especially to those states that have funding formulas involving graduation rates.
Wasn’t John White a product of Eli Broad’s unaccredited “Subvert Democracy” Academy that teaches narcissists how to be successful frauds?
John White has double credentials: TFA and Broadie.
Triple credentials: Chiefs of Change, also.
White’s ed. associate, Erika McConduit is Pahara and Education Trust.
That makes White a double Wrecking Crew Fraudy and means if he loses his position withint the Kochtapus in one city or state, he’ll be reassigned by his master/s to another city or state to lead the destruction.
As a former Louisianan, I can vouch for the fact that the terms “Louisiana” and “academic standards” are mutually exclusive. The line from the Randy Newman song “Rednecks” sums it up:
College men
From LSU
Went in dumb
Come out dumb too
Steve Scalise is Exhibit A.
That’s an impossible-to-quote song. But here is a little bit fuller exposure of the contents
We got no-necked oilmen from Texas
And good ol’ boys from Tennessee
And colleges men from lsu
Went in dumb – come out dumb too
Hustlin’ ’round Atlanta in their alligator shoes
Gettin’ drunk every weekend at the barbecues
This scam is being run all over the country. It’s to be expected. The tests themselves are a scam. The treatment of the “data” from these unreliable and invalid tests is a scam on top of a scam. Time for it to end.
I know that folks here have argued against forcing students to repeat a grade if they fail to achieve a specified test score but here many are appalled that students are past to the next grade without showing that they have a foundation to succeed in the next grade.
When it comes to students repeated a grade, what should be the policy and what percentage of students would you expect to repeat a grade under that policy?
How would you like to be detained in a homeopathy hospital until homeopathic cures cured you?
Well said!!!
It seems to me that the problem with defeating this movement is that the opposition to the movement has to use the same “metrics” that the reform movement uses to create the perception of the existence of a crisis. Since Nation at Risk, we have centered the debate around the idea that tests showed that Johnny could not read. All the while, tests were deceptive tools of a group of people who shared the self interest of channeling solutions to the supposed problem through them.
We do have a problem in American education. I can see it when students do not do their homework and when their parents vote for political figures who tell them things that are absurd on the face of it. I can see it when students cannot write or read. I do not need an expensive test to tell me we have a problem. What I need is a political leadership that is not afraid to speak truth, even if that means higher taxes, lower bottom lines, investment in the future, and adjustment to prevailing perceptions of needed return on investments.
If we do not abolish testing, we will be obliged to continue to base the arguments about continually adjusting our methods to help kids on expensive, worthless tests. These tests will continue to dominate debate over whether we should do this or that, and charter advocates, who benefit financially, will get to use their cooked books to demonstrate their efficacy. Down with the test. Up with the teacher.
To second Mike Deshotels’, Diane’s and Bob Shepherd’s related points about cut score manipulation and the main objective of testing programs: to give politicians data they can lie about with “quantitative” authority.
Here is an example from NYC in 2009. That year, kids could receive a Get-Out-of-Level-1 Free card by guessing–thus, reaching Level 2. This centers on the “chance score,” which is the number of points that can be expected on a multiple choice test by random guessing. So, on a 50-item M-C test with four choices per item, the chance score would be 12.5 (one quarter of 50). And if the cut score for reaching Level 2 it set at 12–then students are able to pass it by filling in bubbles without even reading the question or the material on which the item is based.
It happens that 2009 was an election year in which Mayor Bloomberg was seeking an illegitimate third term. He had gained mayoral control of the school system and said he wanted to be judged by how well he and his unqualified Chancellor (Joel Klein) would lead education. He adopted a policy that required pupils to pass the cut point for Level 2 based on test performance. Short of reaching that criterion, (scoring within the range of Level 1) meant kids would be held back the following year.
When virtually every student made Level 2 in 2009, he boasted that his educational initiatives and wisdom were behind for such sudden, remarkable success.
A closer examination revealed that the reason the percentage of students in Level 1 shrank to virtually nil, was because the bar for reaching Level 2 was set below the chance score. Nearly all kids were promotable. And Bloomberg coasted to victory largely on the false claim of his excellent management of the school system.
“Charlatans profiting off of the monetized starvation and exploitation of urban schools”- taken from Dr. Keith Benson’s paper linked by Diane 2-16-2019.
Dr. Keith Benson explained the motivation- the traitorous lot who represent corporate interests get a national platform, corporate backing and a healthy bank account.
In White’s case, unfortunately, the public is paying for it, literally and figuratively. After White leaves La., maybe he can join Arne Duncan and have the widow Steve Jobs put dollars in his wallet.
Ha, ha, ha. Common Core has failed! But here’s why I should stop laughing: educators bought Common Core’s false promises and are going to buy the next fake cure too. Read Diane’s Left Back: our profession has, with a few exceptions, been a joke for more than a century. Bad ideas rise to the top, and they never die. Because too few of us know our history. Too few of us read the literature (e.g the brilliant work of E.D. Hirsch and Diane Ravitch and Daisy Christodoulou and Richard Clark and Paul Kirschner). And too few of us are critical thinkers. Our profession is intellectually feeble –charlatans leading sheep. Teacher, educate thyself!
Read Willingham too. (Why Student’s Don’t Like School?)
This book will open your eyes by explaining why so many educations fads like discovery or project based learning are doomed to fail.
We lose credibility when we blindly follow the latest magic bullet and we do a disservice to students when we feed them these snake oil cures like they are gospel.
Common Core’s bastard child, doomed to failure, is already being served up as the next great thing. NGSS is worse than a new fad; it is an old and debunked fad, wrapped in some shiny new paper.
Educators had to accept Common Core or lose their job. Common Core was forced on us by politicians who do not even send their children to public schools. The teachers knew how backwards Common Core was and it did enormous damage to the reasoning skills of a generation. Let professional educators (teachers) developed the curriculum, not politicians looking to demonize public education to force Charter Schools and privatization.
A great example of bad curriculum from the new Next Generation Science Standards. When teaching Physics in Soulth Louisiana, they wanted us to use an “anchor phenomenon ” of ice skating and ice hockey to explain forces. This is totally outside most of our student’s experience so it made teaching the topic harder and less effective
Diane,
An update from Sandra Stotsky on CC
Unsolved Problems with Common Core-Aligned Tests
MARCH 6, 2019 BY SANDRA STOTSKY LEAVE A COMMENT
There are many teeth in the Common Core Standards project. These teeth do not lie in visits by monitors from a department of education (in place of a school’s principal) to each elementary classroom in a school. Soft regulatory teeth lie in the Common Core-aligned textbooks, professional development, and instructional materials, software, and other products teachers are encouraged or required to use.
The teeth are most prominent in the tests based on Common Core’s standards to determine whether students have learned what the tests claim to assess or can do satisfactorily what the test items expect them to do. According to proponents of accountability, student scores are the major means by which policy makers and school administrators will judge whether teachers have taught to these standards. Common Core’s tests are high-stakes for teachers, less so for students. Only the tests for “college readiness” in grades 10, 11, or 12 will be very high-stakes for students as well as for teachers. Yet, as the Common Core drama unfolds, we don’t know much about the tests aligned to them.
Common Core-aligned tests MUST by law be based on a state’s official standards. That is why the tests given in the Bay State (aka MCAS 2.0) are aligned to Common Core. Despite their name, they are based on the Common Core standards for English language arts and mathematics adopted by the state board of education in 2010 and slightly revised by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) in 2016 for the four-year state education plan required by Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). (Since the tests are given in the Bay State, they are legitimately Massachusetts tests, except for the fact that they are totally unlike the original MCAS tests. For example, no Open Response or OR test items, which were very useful for assessing content-based writing. On the original MCAS tests, there were four OR test questions on every test given at every grade level.) The state’s four-year plan was submitted to the U.S. Department of Education in 2017 for review and approval, in exchange for Title I money. Approval by the state legislature and local school committees was not required or obtained for four-year plans that no one in the state debated or voted for.
Since all states today use Common Core-aligned tests, that means almost all schools (including public charter schools) teach to Common Core’s standards. It is not possible to understand the growing opposition to Common Core’s standards without understanding several key issues now being raised about the tests aligned to them.
A. Criteria Used for Selection of Passages for Reading Tests
The first questions a responsible parent would ask about Common Core-aligned reading tests are: (1) What is the basis for selecting reading passages? (2) Who actually selects them? We don’t know the answers to these questions for any Common Core-aligned tests, whether given in the Bay State or elsewhere, regardless of name.
It would have been reasonable for the original USED-subsidized testing consortia (Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Career or PARCC, and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium or SBAC) to use the criteria that developers of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests are supposed to use for NAEP reading tests. Why? Primarily because the chart showing the “percentage distributions” of basic types of reading passages on NAEP reading tests (informational or literary) is already in Common Core’s English language arts (ELA) document, and the chart is recommended as a guideline for the school reading curriculum even though these percentages were never intended by NAEP to guide the K-12 curriculum. NAEP documents tell us only that these percentages are for the different kinds of reading passages to be used on NAEP tests. In fact, NAEP Steering Committee members were told that NAEP test developers deliberately do not assess dramatic literature (plays) on the grounds that test passages would have to be very long and would exceed word limits for test passages.
Mary Crovo, recently retired as Deputy Executive Director of the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) in December 2016 and, prior to 2005, Assistant Director of Test Development at the time I was on the Steering Committee for the development of the 2009 reading assessment standards, is one of the few people who can speak to this issue because of her many years of work with NAEP. NAEP’s decision to exclude assessment of dramatic literature makes it clear that the percentages of literary and informational passages recommended at different educational levels for a Common Core-based K-12 curriculum were NOT intended by NAEP to shape a K-12 reading and literature curriculum. (Dramatic literature—think Shakespeare—was considered by many as the central genre to be studied in high school English.)
Nor is there any research suggesting that a heavy dose of informational reading in secondary English classes develops reading skills as well as, or better than, the literary essays, biographies, and well-known speeches English teachers have always taught in their courses. David Coleman, lead writer for Common Core’s ELA standards and now CEO of the College Board, probably didn’t understand this or know that members of NAGB in 2004 had helped to develop criteria for the kind of reading passages to be chosen by NAEP test developers.
Passage Source: Among other criteria, the NAEP document on item specifications for the 2009 NAEP reading assessments says that reading passages are to “reflect our literary heritage by including significant works from varied historical periods.” USED could easily have insisted on this criterion for the Common Core-aligned reading tests it funded since several of Common Core’s high school standards require the study of this country’s seminal political documents, as well as significant texts or authors in American literary history. But so far, no sample test items for college and career readiness tests can be found addressing this country’s seminal political documents. Released PARCC test items can be located via this website. SBAC provides sample test items here. Apparently, few test developers and educators care what is assessed by Common Core-aligned reading tests.
Overuse of Informational Snippets: Many sample passages in grade 10 or 11 test items aligned to Common Core’s reading standards cannot assess college readiness because they are snippets from what could be a long curriculum unit in science or history with a heavy discipline-based vocabulary load. Surely, if college readiness is to mean anything at all it should mean the ability to follow the gist of long stretches of prose or poetry. It’s hard to see how college readiness can be determined by test items consisting chiefly of short informational articles drenched in subject-related vocabulary.
The sample test item passages for grade 10 released by PARCC about 2013 (but no longer available, alas) demonstrated the use of whole selections at a high school reading level. A sample literary test item required students to compare “Daedalus and Icarus” by Ovid with a poem by Anne Sexton that was related in content. The sample informational selections for grade 11 included a letter by Abigail Adams to her husband and a letter on July 3, 1776 from John Adams to his wife. While these short, related selections constituted a promising set of selections, we do not know how typical these kinds of selections were or are in PARCC test items. It is certainly not clear if any Common Core-aligned informational test items will be of an adequate length for judging readiness for, say, reading a chapter in a frequently assigned college science or history textbook.
Other Test Issues: As of 2019, we still do not know what specific people have vetted test items in either reading or mathematics and how demanding the items are for high school college and career readiness tests (or for the revised SAT or ACT tests now judged by USED as legally usable as high school exit tests). We do not know if college teaching faculty in mathematics, science, engineering, and the humanities have been involved in determining cut-off or pass scores for college readiness. Nor do we know exact costs to the schools of what are called college readiness tests (say, compared to pre-Common Core MCAS in the Bay State) and, of far greater importance, what their scores mean to academic experts in the subjects tested.
B. Low Expectations for College- and Career-Readiness
We must above all consider what Common Core means by “college readiness.” Common Core itself claims that by addressing its standards, students will graduate from high school able to succeed in entry-level, credit-bearing academic college courses and in workforce training programs. College readiness thus means that students will not have to take a remedial course in mathematics or English if they seek to attend a non-selective college or a community college.
In Mathematics: Yet, with respect to the coursework implied by the math standards themselves, college readiness reflects a relatively weak algebra II course, as mathematician James Milgram pointed out. Both logarithms and the standard algebraic analysis of conic sections are missing, according to his examination of the math standards. With only a few advanced (+) standards in trigonometry filling the void between the algebra II standards and introductory college mathematics, Common Core’s standards apparently cannot help to prepare students for STEM careers, which require extensive high school coursework in trigonometry and/or precalculus.
In English: We know much less about what college readiness in English language arts means. Common Core’s ELA standards suggest few specific texts to read, and the range of titles in Appendix B in its ELA document illustrating the quality and “complexity” of what students should read from grade to grade is so broad by the high school years that no particular level of reading difficulty above grade 5 or 6 can be discerned. A variety of research studies suggest that the reading level of the average American high school graduate is about grade 6. Moreover, we don’t yet know where the pass score has been set in ELA or reading (or, if it has been set, who set it and what it means to English professors or anyone else).
C. What College Readiness Test Scores Tell Us
What, then, can college readiness test scores in mathematics and reading tell us? Since tests based on Common Core’s standards cannot address the mathematics requirements of selective public or private colleges/universities (because major topics in trigonometry and precalculus are not in Common Core’s standards, and state-mandated tests by law cannot address topics that are not in the state’s official standards), scores on Common Core-aligned tests can tell us only how many students may be ready for a non-selective or community college. It is unclear whether most colleges now have any reading requirements; they may rely simply on a score on a presumably college-related test such as a literature or language Advanced Placement (AP) test. Although, now that AP tests are aligned to Common Core’s standards, it is not clear what AP test scores themselves mean.
What will we as a society have gained and lost by the use of Common Core’s “college readiness” tests? We will likely gain a much larger number of college graduates, assuming that more students will complete a college degree program because they haven’t had to take remedial coursework in their freshman year. But they are unlikely to know any more than they would have known if they had had to take remedial coursework because their for-credit college coursework will likely be adjusted downward to accommodate their lower level of high school achievement.
Recall that the level of college readiness in Common Core mathematics is, to begin with, lower than what is currently required for admission to most two- and four-year colleges in this country. What this means in effect is that our colleges will become expensive high schools.
College readiness tests based on Common Core’s standards will play two significant roles. First, they will guarantee the presence of credit-bearing courses with low academic expectations in mathematics, reading (English), and possibly other freshman subjects. Second, they will change more than the college courses they are enrolled in. How, we do not yet know. But it seems logical to expect large numbers of relatively low-performing high school students who have been declared college-ready based on a test with low expectations to have an impact on the other students in the college courses they are entitled to enroll in
I no longer post anything from you since you include Trump messages.
It seems that we have reached a stage in education that results, matters come what may. Our task is to teach in such a way that some students may learn and others will no matter what we teach.