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Anthony Cody: Accountability Is Designed to Set Schools Up to Fail

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2013 //
33

In a hard-hitting essay, Anthony Cody describes how accountability has been turned into a weapon to create demoralization, failure, and privatization of public schools.

He reviews the recent fiascos involving Tony Bennett and New York’s Common Core testing.

He notes that both the AFT and the NEA are trying hard to meet the demands of the corporate reformers. Both are trying to help teachers prepare for the Common Core sledge hammer, but Cody says it is a fruitless enterprise. The game is rigged. The reformers’ goal is to generate failure so they can advance privatization.

Cody writes:

“Our response must be, as members of the teaching profession, and as members of the unions that represent educators, to reject as baseless these phony, politically-driven accountability systems. These systems to rate schools based on proficiency rates are really much more accurately reflecting levels of poverty, rather than the quality of teaching in effect. Many of those advocating them are, like Tony Bennett, attempting to promote their own favored competitors, in a race in which they have made themselves the rule-makers and referees.

“When someone sets up a competition that is rigged from the start, our response cannot be to ask for more time to prepare. The answer is to expose the machinery at work behind the scenes, and demand that our schools be accountable not to some state or federal bureaucrat, but to the students and parents of their communities. We will not overcome poverty by firing those who have chosen to work with the poor. Our schools and students need support, not more means by which they can be ranked and rejected. Real support from our unions means educating and organizing members to respond with vigor and pride about our students, our schools, and our work as professionals. Teachers cannot “succeed” under these systems because that is not their design. So rather than trying to prepare for tests many of our schools were never meant to pass, we need to prepare teachers to defend and reclaim their schools, and reject the accountability scam.

Categories Accountability, Florida, Indiana, New York, Testing, Unions

NY Parent: The Kids Didn’t Fail, the System Did

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2013 //
21

Tim Farley and his wife opted their children out of the state testing.

They don’t care to know whether their young children are college-and-career-ready.

They know their children are doing well in school. They think the system is sick.

They know the tests will inflict unnecessary pain on children who have disabilities and children whose native language is not English.

They are doing what they can to break the system.

They are conscientious citizens.

May their numbers grow.

Categories Common Core, New York, Testing

Who Set the NY Cut Scores—and What We Still Need to Know

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2013 //
19

In this post, teacher Maria Baldassarre-Hopkins describes the process in which she and other educators participated, setting cut scores for the new Common Core tests in New York.

She signed a confidentiality agreement, so she is discreet on many questions and issues.

At the end of the day, Commissioner King could say that educators informed the process but in reality they made recommendations to him, which he was free to accept, modify, or ignore.

As many teachers have pointed out, in blogs and comments, no responsible teacher would create a test with the expectation that 70% of students are sure to fail. It would not be hard to do. You might, for example, give students in fifth grade a test designed for eighth graders. Repeat in every grade and the failure rate will be high. Or you might test students on materials they never studied. Some will get it, because of their background knowledge, but most will fail.

Why would you want most students to fail?

Commissioner King has repeatedly warned superintendents, principals, and everyone else that they should expect the proficiency rates to drop by 30-35-37% and they did.

This is a manufactured crisis. We know who should be held accountable.

It is Commissioner John King and Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch. They wanted a high failure rate. They got what they wanted.

***********

A response to the post above, by Fred Smith. Fred worked for many years as an assessment experts at the New York City Board of Education. He has now become an invaluable resource for those who are fighting the misuse and abuse of high-stakes testing.

Fred writes:

Folks,
 
Kudos to Maria Baldassarre-Hopkins.  This is an extremely important piece–an outline and an articulate account of how the 2013 cut scores were set. We’re finally getting a glimpse inside the testing program’s “black box”–how cut points are/were established.
 
Three points grab me and support contentions I share with other observers:
 
First, the cut scores are after-the-fact. “Cut scores were to be decided upon after (emphasis hers) NYS students in grades 3-8 took the tests.”  I believe the standards were set in late June/early July.
 
Second, the review committee’s work is advisory–Despite the committee’s elaborate review process, the end results are recommendations to the commissioner.
 
Third –  “(During the review) We were given more data in the form of p-values for each question in the OIB – the percentage of students who answered it correctly on the actual assessment.”  This and the timing of the review strongly suggest that item-level data (item statistics) from the April 2013 operational tests were used to inform the determination of cut scores. That is, data generated by the test population were used–changing the concept of a standards-based test (as in testing aligned with the common core learning standards) to one that depends on the performance of students who took the test. 
 
This makes the Level 2, 3 and 4 thresholds dependent on how well kids did on the exams–bringing the test score distribution into play and rendering judgments about cut scores and student achievement relative to the composition of the students who took a particular set of items at a particular time–a normative framework instead of a standards-based one.  These factors will vary from year to year, and since 2013 was a baseline year with little it could be anchored to, it is even murkier to see how SED can justify what was done.
 
Let’s not forget either that the items on the April 2013 exams were largely generated via the indefensible June 2012 stand-alone field testing, a procedure that could not have yielded reliable or valid information to construct the core-aligned statewide tests–and, as a further consequence, would call the item stats the review committee worked with into question.
 
SED’s slide show presentation to the Regents in late July about the cut scores, this week’s news management spin campaign and its web site power point barrage on the release of the scores do not address important remaining questions about the quality of the 2013 exams and the cut scores. 
 
There is information the SED obviously has in its possession (and desperately wants to keep hidden), as strikingly noted by Ms. Hopkins. We must demand and obtain: 1- P-values (difficulty levels) for all field test items that were selected for inclusion on the operational April tests–both the field test p-values and the corresponding operational test p-values. 2- In addition, we must have complete item analysis data — showing the percentage of students who chose the correct answers, the percentage who chose each distractor (each incorrect mislead) and the percentage of omissions (no response to item). 3 – We must be given the same information demanded in #1 and # 2 but broken down by ethnicity and separately by need/resource capacity. 
 
Even if SED refuses to produce all of the 2013 operational items that it owns for our scrutiny, there is no justification for refusal to provide the statistical data we are demanding–because none of the data involve exposure of the items and their content.  SED and Pearson have no legitimate excuses for keeping us in the dark based on the immediate availability and nature of the information we are seeking.
 
The only way forward for all of us who want to have public schools that work is to cry out for sunshine, transparency and truth-in-testing.   Short of that we can have no faith in anything coming out of Albany about its latest vision of reform.  The messengers of bad news are on the run.  Blow the trumpets. Get your representatives on board.  Don’t let them slip and slide.  This is a pivotal year
Fred
Categories Common Core, New York, Testing

NY Superintendent: Trying to Make Sense of Common Core Test Results

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2013 //
30

Jere Hochman superintendent of the Bedford Central School District in New York, tries to make sense of the latest test results in this blog.

He has a series of spot-on metaphors.

The state’s policy is based, he writes, is best described as “Fire. Aim. Ready.”

He adds:

“Raising the bar?  High expectations?  Every student means every?  Rigorous standards?  Benchmark assessments?  No problem.  But don’t make kids and teachers collateral damage due to accelerated, unmapped, make-up-the-rules-as-you-go-along implementation.”

What is it like to be controlled by a state education department that makes up the rules as it goes along, turning students, teachers, and administrators into collateral damage for their half-baked plans and policies?

Categories Accountability, Common Core, New York, Testing

David Steiner Defends Test Score Collapse, Critic Corrects Him

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2013 //
35

David Steiner, who preceded John King as New York Commissioner of Education, wrote an article defending the collapse of test scores in New York. Like Joel Klein and Arne Duncan, he agrees that we are finally telling the truth about the widespread failure of public schools (and, one might add, the even greater failure of charter schools, which had a higher fail rate than public schools). It’s amazing how those who were in charge, who made decisions about resource allocation, curriculum, standards, teacher qualifications, class size, and everything else that affect schools, now stand back and absolve themselves of any accountability.

The first letter responding to Steiner’s article nailed an important difference between Massachusetts, which has led the nation on NAEP in reading and math, and New York, whose scores have been almost flat for the past decade. Gregory McCrea wrote:

“Mr. Steiner leaves out one important point when he compares reform efforts in New York and Massachusetts. At the same time Massachusetts was demanding higher standards through their Education Reform Act, they were dramatically increasing funding to public schools. In fact, from 1993-2002, state spending on public schools increased 8% a year, for a total of over $2 billion.
New York has failed to do the same. Instead, funding for schools in New York has decreased or flat-lined through the political shell game known as the Gap Elimination Adjustment. Despite the politician’s suggestions otherwise, funding has not increased and GEA continues to be the most significant drain on public school funding across the state. More recently, boards of education have had to deal with a tax cap railroaded through by the governor and the legislature. As in Massachusetts decades before, the New York tax cap has made school districts more heavily dependent on state aid which only worsens the funding equation.

“Anyone who actually works in a New York public school (something most of the State Ed. bureaucrats have never done) will tell you that the dramatic shift in testing requirements combined with cuts in funding will decimate learning opportunities for New York’s children. Urban and rural schools alike, wrought with poverty, will be forced to redirect funds toward unproven curriculum models and canned materials based on the false promises of Common Core alignment and improved test scores. Music programs will be cut, art teachers will be directed to teach reading modules, class sizes will increase dramatically, and districts will be forced to cut valuable extra-curricular activities. Students will lose enriched learning opportunities and be herded into “interventions” to increase learning and achievement, the very thing that will most certainly not occur.

In his rush to defend his former employer, Mr. Steiner has narrowed his focus on increased standards for all and ignored the influence of funding, poverty, and parental involvement on student achievement (the latter two have the most significant impact). I am disappointed, but not surprised, that he could not offer a more complete review of the challenges facing schools today.”

Categories Accountability, Common Core, New York, Testing

The Error That Caused the New York Test Scores to Collapse

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2013 //
66

Here is the reason for the collapse of test scores in New York City and New York State.

State officials decided that New York test scores should be aligned with the achievement levels of the federally-administered National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

This is an excerpt from a press release prepared by Mayor Bloomberg’s office:

“The new State test results are in line with previous results for student’s readiness for college and careers and show New York City students have maintained gains made over the past decade. The percentage of New York City students meeting the new, higher bar for proficiency in math (29.6 percent) is similar to the percent of students measured proficient on the 2011 National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) tests (28.0 percent) – up from 20.5 percent on the NAEP test in 2003. The percentage of New York City students meeting the new, higher bar for proficiency in English (26.4 percent) is similar to the results on the most recent NAEP English test (26.5 percent), up from 22.0 percent on the NAEP test in 2003.”

Now, leave aside for the moment the odd fact that the mayor is boasting about the appallingly low percentage of students in New York City who met the new proficiency standards after a decade of his control of the schools. The key point here is that the mayor, his Chancellor Dennis Walcott, Regents’ Chancellor Merryl Tisch, and State Commissioner John King all agreed that the state and city scores should be comparable to the NAEP “proficiency” level.

That is a huge mistake. It explains why the scores are invalid.

The state didn’t just “raise the bar.” It aligned its passing mark to a completely inappropriate model.

The state scores have four levels: level 4 is the highest, level 1 is the lowest. In the present scoring scheme, students who do not reach level 3 and 4 have “failed.”

NAEP has three levels: “Advanced” is the highest (only about 3-8% of students reach this level). “Proficient” is defined by the National Assessment Governing Board as “solid academic performance for each grade assessed. This is a very high level of academic achievement.”). “Basic” is “partial mastery” of the skills and knowledge needed at each grade tested.

“Proficient” on NAEP is what most people would consider to be the equivalent of an A. When I was a member of the NAEP governing board, we certainly considered proficient to be very high level achievement.

New York’s city and state officials have decided that NAEP’s “proficiency” level should be the passing mark.

They don’t understand that a student who is proficient on NAEP has attained “a very high level of academic achievement.”

Any state that expects all or most students to achieve an A on the state tests is setting most students up for failure.

If students need to reach “proficiency” just to pass, there will obviously be a very large number of students who “fail.”

B students and C students will fail.

The NAEP achievement levels have always been controversial. Many researchers and scholarly bodies have said they were unreasonably high and thus “fundamentally flawed.” That term “fundamentally flawed” occurs again and again in the literature of NAEP critics. This article by James Harvey is a good summary of these arguments.

Some on this blog have asked whether NAEP is a criterion-referenced test, and the answer is no. A criterion-referenced test is one that almost everyone can pass if they master the requisite skills. A test to get a drivers’ license is a criterion-referenced test. Anyone who studies the laws can pass the written test and qualify for a drivers’ license.

NAEP is not a criterion-referenced test. Massachusetts is the only state where as much as 50% of the students (and only in fourth grade) are rated proficient in reading. The NAEP tests are not designed to be criterion-referenced tests; they are a mix of questions that are easy, moderate, and difficult.

The achievement levels were created when Checker Finn was chair of NAGB. I think they are defensible if people understand that the achievement levels do not represent grade levels. If the public wants a measure of “grade level,” then “basic” probably comes closest to grade level. “Proficient” is not grade level; as NAGB documents state, it represents “a very high level of academic achievement.”

More important, the NAEP achievement levels were never intended to be measures of grade level, and New York officials are wrong to interpret them as such, especially when they mistakenly use “proficient” as the passing mark.

Any state that uses NAEP “proficient” as its definition of “grade level” is making a huge mistake; it will set the bar unreasonably high and will mislabel many students and misjudge the quality of many schools.

And that is exactly what happened in the New York testing fiasco.

If the state sticks to its present course of using NAEP “proficient” as its passing mark, it will encourage criticism of the Common Core standards as unrealistic and stoke parental outrage about Common Core testing.

People know their children, and they know their own school. The politicians may convince them that American education is floundering (even if it is not), but they can’t convince them that their own child and their own school are “failing” when parents know from their own experience that it is not true.

The corporate reformers now using the Shock Doctrine to bash the schools and disparage students may find that their tactic has backfired. They succeed only in adding fuel to the growing movement to stop the misuse of standardized testing.

What is happening in New York is likely to undermine public confidence in the state’s highest education officials and create new converts to the Opt-Out of Testing movement.

The Shock Doctrine may be a boomerang that helps to bring down the madness of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core, the Pearson empire, and every other part of the reformy enterprise.

New York may have inadvertently created by the most powerful recruiting tool for the Opt Out movement.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, NAEP, New York, Testing

Arne Duncan: Will He Resign?

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2013 //
88

In his comments at a press conference about the collapse of the New York test scores, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said,

“Too many school systems lied to children, families and communities,” Mr. Duncan said. “Finally, we are holding ourselves accountable as educators.”

Since he used the term “we,” it means that he too is accountable for the lying and debacle in New York, where it was revealed that 70% of the students couldn’t pass the Pearson-made Common Core test that Duncan funded.

Does he really mean “we”?

If he holds himself accountable, will he resign?

After all, he has been Secretary of Education for five years, and he can’t escape accountability.

New York adopted the  Common Core and the tests because it won Race to the Top funding, Duncan’s signature program.

Duncan pushed Common Core. Duncan pushed the testing.

Duncan is right. He too is accountable for the children’s low scores.

Now, what will he do about it?

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Duncan, Arne, New York, Testing

Leonie Haimson: Don’t Believe the New York Scores

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2013 //
13

Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters and administrator of the New York City parents’ blog, wrote this analysis of the new state test scores:

Dear parents: As you may have probably heard, the new state test scores were released to the press and they are disastrous.

Only 31% of students in New York State passed the new Common Core exams in reading and math. More than one third — or 36% — of 3rd graders throughout the state got a level I in English; which means they essentially flunked. In NYC, only 26 percent of students passed the exams in English, and 30 percent passed in math – meaning they had a level 3 or 4. Only 5% of students in Rochester passed.

Though children’s individual scores won’t be available to parents until late August, I urge you not to panic when you see them. My advice is not to believe a word of any of this.

The new Common Core exams and test scores are politically motivated, and are based neither on reason or evidence. They were pre-ordained to fit the ideological goals of Commissioner King and the other educrats who are intent on imposing damaging policies on our schools.

Here are five reasons not to trust the new scores:

1- The NY State Education Department has not been able to produce a decent, reliable exam with a credible scoring system in at least ten years. That’s why there have been wild gyrations from year to year in the percent of students making the grade. For example, 77% of NYS students were at level 3 or 4 in English in 2009; this dropped to 53% in 2010 and 31% now. The last two years of exams created by Pearson have been especially disastrous; from the multiple errors in questions and scoring on the 2012 exams (including the infamous Pineapple passage) to the epic fail of this year’s tests – which were too long, riddled with ambiguous questions and replete with commercial logos for products like Mug Root Beer. Top students were unable to finish these shoddy exams, and many left in tears and had anxiety attacks. To make things worse, the exams featured reading passages drawn straight from Pearson textbooks which were assigned to some students in the state and not to others.

2- For nearly a decade, from at least 2003-2010, there was rampant test score inflation in NY state, with many of the same people who are now supporting the current low scoring system claiming with equal conviction that the earlier, rising test scores showed that NYS and NYC schools were improving rapidly. The state test score bubble allowed NYC Mayor Bloomberg to coast to a third term, renew mayoral control and maintain that his high-stakes testing regime was working, when the reality was that, according to everyone who was paying attention, the exams had gotten overly predictable and the scoring too easy over time. At the same time as the state exams showed huge increases, scores on the more reliable national exams called the NAEPs showed little progress. In fact, NYC made smaller gains on the NAEPs than nearly any other large school district in the country during these years.

3. The truth is that the new cut scores that determine the different proficiency levels on the state exams – which decide how many kids “pass” or are at Level 3 and 4 — are arbitrary and set by Commissioner King. He can set them to create the illusion that our schools are rapidly improving, as the previous Commissioner did, or he can set them to make it look that our public schools are failing, as King now is doing, to bolster support for his other policies.

4. The primary evidence that Commissioner King now bases his overly-harsh cut scores upon is that the results are mirror the percent of students who test “proficient” or above on the NAEPs. Yet while the NAEPs are reliable to discern trends in test scores, because they remain relatively stable over time, the cut scores that determine the various NAEP achievement levels are VERY controversial. See Diane Ravitch on how the NAEP’s benchmarks are “unreasonably high”; or this article that reveals that even the National Academy of Sciences has questioned the setting of the NAEP proficiency levels, and how many experts believe that level 2 on the NAEPs – or basic — should be used instead to estimate which students are on track for college:

Fully 50% of 17-year-olds judged to be only basic by NAEP ultimately obtained four-year degrees. Just one third of American fourth graders were said to be proficient in reading by NAEP in the mid-1990s at the very time that international assessments of fourth-grade reading judged American students to rank Number Two in the world.

In fact, by using NAEP levels as support for his cut scores, King is either confused or disingenuous about what these levels really represent.

5. So why are King, Arne Duncan, Joel Klein and the billionaires like Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch who are pulling the strings so determined to prove that more that 69% of the students throughout New York State are failing? This is the Shock Doctrine at work. Naomi Klein has observed that when you scare people enough, it is easier to persuade them to allow you to make whatever radical changes you want, since the status quo will be perceived as so disastrous.

In the case of Commissioner King, Bill Gates and Arne Duncan, they would like to convince parents that their corporate agenda, including a steady diet of developmentally unsound standards, the Common Core’s rigid quota for “informational text” and overemphasis on testing, and their favorite policies of closing schools and firing teachers based on test scores, expanding charter schools and online learning, data-mining and outsourcing educational services to for-profit vendors will somehow improve the quality of education in our state, even though there is little or no evidence for any of these policies.

NYSED has even tried to persuade parents to accept their unethical plan to share the personal data of the state’s children with inBloom and for-profit vendors by saying this will help ensure these students are “college and career ready.” (By the way, as Politico reported last week, North Carolina became the fifth state to pull out of inBloom; now only New York, Illinois, and Colorado are still involved, and Massachusetts is sitting on the fence.)

Joel Klein, who wrote an oped for Rupert Murdoch’s NY Post this morning, appropriately entitled the The Good News in Lower Test Scores, now heads Amplify, Rupert Murdoch’s online learning division, which is the largest contractor for inBloom. For Klein and Murdoch, the drastic fall in state test scores is indeed good news, because it will help them market their computer tablets, data systems, and software products to make more profit. In the case of Pearson, the world’s largest educational corporation, more schools will now be convinced to buy their textbooks, workbooks, and test prep materials, as 900 NYC schools have now done – in hope that their students may do better on the Pearson-made exams, that may even include the same reading passages as happened this year.

Rick Hess, the conservative commentator at Education Week, revealed the motives behind the promoters of these exams in a column called the “Common Core Kool-aid”:

First, politicians will actually embrace the Common Core assessments and then will use them to set cut scores that suggest huge numbers of suburban schools are failing. Then, parents and community members who previously liked their schools are going to believe the assessment results rather than their own lying eyes… Finally, newly convinced that their schools stink, parents and voters will embrace “reform.” However, most of today’s proffered remedies–including test-based teacher evaluation, efforts to move “effective” teachers to low-income schools, charter schooling, and school turnarounds–don’t have a lot of fans in the suburbs or speak to the things that suburban parents are most concerned about….Common Core advocates now evince an eerie confidence that they can scare these voters into embracing the “reform” agenda.

My advice is not to let this ruin your summer or your view of your child’s school. When you receive your children’s scores, do not allow the results to wreck their self-confidence. These new Common Core exams and harsh proficiency levels are meant to scare parents.

To achieve their ideological ends, politicians, billionaires, and educrats are not only willing to define your children in terms of their test scores, but also to redefine them as failures – to help them implement their mechanistic, reductionist, and ultimately inhumane vision of education. It is all a high-stakes game, carried out by people with little thought about how these wild test score gyrations affect the self-esteem of the children whose fate they claim to care about.

For an eloquent critique of the callous thinking at work, please also read Carol Burris, NYS principal of the year, in today’s Washington Post, and Diane Ravitch, on the political motives of the people who are setting these standards.

Below are links to articles about the scores, and the NYSED website.

Talk to you soon,

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
212-674-7320

http://www.p12.nysed.gov/irs/pressRelease/20130807/home.html

Click to access 2013ELAandMathemaitcsDistrictandBuildingAggregatesMedia.pdf

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
212-674-7320
leonie@classsizematters.org
http://www.classsizematters.org
http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com

Categories Common Core, New York, Pearson, Testing

My Article in the NY Daily News about the Testing Fiasco

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2013 //
38

This was my effort to educate the public about the fiasco created by the Common Core testing in New York.

The ending may surprise you. Or may not.

Categories New York, Testing

New York Times Loves High-Stakes Testing, No Matter How Absurd the Scoring

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2013 //
6

The New York Times editorial board, which has uncritically endorsed every bad piece of legislation or policy that is based on high-stakes testing, warmly endorses the absurd results of the Common Core tests in New York. It echoes Secretary Duncan in asserting that the tests prove how terrible US public education is.

The Times displays its ignorance of the scoring rubric, in which Commissioner John King decided to align New York’s test scores with those of NAEP.

Any student who is not proficient has failed, according to the inexperienced Mr. King.

King seems not to know that the NAEP definition of proficiency does not demonstrate grade level performance, but a very high level of achievement representing superior performance. In everyday terms, proficient on NAEP is a solid A.

But in John King’s world, anyone who is not proficient has failed.

If New York continues to use this definition of proficiency, in which anything less than an A is failure, the majority of New York students will be failures forever.

This is a recipe for killing public education and destroying children’s lives and crushing teacher morale.

Are you listening, editorial writers at the Times?

Categories Common Core, NAEP, New York, Testing
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