Washington State officials acknowledged that 53% of high school juniors opted out of the Smarter Balanced Assessment. Yesterday early estimates predicted the number was 27-28%. Obviously a gross underestimate.
Participation rates in 3-8 were high.
Archives for category: Standardized Testing
A few days ago, I posted a statement by a teacher-candidate of Hispanic origin who was trying to get certification as a teacher of special education. She had a high grade point average, she took and passed several state-required tests, at great expense, but she could not pass the edTPA. And she could not afford to pay Pearson again. As a result of the post here, she was contacted by someone in the Néw York State Education Department (I supplied her contact information). Several readers offered to pay the cost of taking an alternate assessment. Someone helped her.
The woman who wrote the post sent me this email:
“I cannot thank you enough for providing me with a platform to express myself freely and share it with the public! After that post, I shortly received a voucher to take the safety net test. None of this would have been possible without your help. I was just trying to raise awareness of the exploitative practices and fees from Pearson. I think the amount of tests and the prices were exaggerated. If teacher candidates are expected to pass more challenging exams at expensive rates while obtaining a Master’s Degree then they should be paid accordingly. Again, thank you for your time and efforts! It will never be forgotten.”
The Pioneer Institute is a conservative think tank in Boston. Unlike most conservative think tanks, it opposes the Common Core and the associated testing. This week, Pioneer called on State Commissioner if Education Mitchell Chester to recuse himself from deciding whether Massachusetts should keep its MCAS state tests or drop them for PARCC. Chester is chairman of the PARCC board. Pioneer says he has a conflict of interest. Seems obvious, no?
Here is Pioneer’s statement:
“Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester Should Recuse Himself from the Upcoming Decision on PARCC and MCAS
“BOSTON – Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education Mitchell Chester, who later this year will make a recommendation to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (the board) about whether to replace MCAS tests with those developed by the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), chairs PARCC’s governing board.
“Pioneer Institute calls on Chester to recuse himself from the MCAS/PARCC decision process for the following reasons:
“1. As commissioner of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (the department), Chester serves as secretary to the board of education and oversees the state agency and hearing process for choosing between MCAS and PARCC. The agency he heads gathers the information on which the policy decision will be made and conducts the internal evaluation. Commissioner Chester ultimately makes a recommendation to the board about which test to choose.
“This is clearly a conflict of interest. Taking this matter out of the context of education makes the point perhaps more evident. Imagine that the general manager of the MBTA also chaired the board of Keolis or Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad when the two companies were competing for the $2.6 billion contract to operate the T’s commuter rail system. Such a conflict of interest would never have been tolerated, yet this is precisely the situation given the commissioner’s leadership role at the PARCC.
“2. In its role managing a series of five statewide public hearings that are currently underway on whether the board should officially adopt PARCC and abandon MCAS, the department chooses who to invite to deliver expert testimony. The invited experts speak first and are allowed more time than members of the general public. Thus far, in the first four hearings, a strong majority of the invited experts have been supporters of PARCC.
“3. Commissioner Chester has also formed a team of Massachusetts/PARCC Educator Leader Fellows within the department. According to a memo Chester sent to district and charter school leaders, the PARCC fellows, who receive a stipend, should be “excited about the content of the Common Core State Standards” and “already engaged in leadership work around them.” The department has no MCAS fellows.
“4. The commissioner’s interactions with local education leaders have led many to believe that the decision to abandon MCAS has already been made. Brookline Superintendent and Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents President William Lupini, in a 2014 letter to the town’s school committee, flatly stated that “MCAS will be phased out in favor of either PARCC or another new ‘next generation’ assessment after the 2015 test administration.” (No other “next generation” test or MCAS 2.0 is under development or consideration.)
“5. Given that the PARCC consortium originally included 26 participating states and Washington, DC, but now includes only seven and DC, there is enormous pressure on the commissioner, as the chairman of PARCC, to ensure that the testing consortium does not lose any more states. This is especially so after a spring during which numerous states declined further participation in PARCC; just last week one of the few large states remaining in the consortium (Ohio) left the consortium.
“The financial viability of PARCC is in great part a function of the number of students it services. When PARCC included 26 states and DC, it could plan its pricing strategy on the basis of serving over 25 million (of the over 31 million) public school students enrolled in those jurisdictions. With the loss of Ohio, PARCC has been reduced to serving just over 5 million. Additional consortium states, most immediately Arkansas, are actively working toward similar departures. Massachusetts’ almost one million public school students are of considerable concern to the consortium’s financial viability, therefore creating an untenable ethical position for the Commissioner.
“Sadly, the larger process of choosing between Massachusetts’ previous academic standards and Common Core, which led to the current MCAS/PARCC issue, is already one that has been rife with at least the appearance of conflict of interest. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has invested hundreds of millions of dollars to develop and then to market Common Core. Oddly, Commissioner Chester relied on three studies conducted by Gates-funded entities, directly or indirectly, to inform his 2010 recommendation that the board of education adopt Common Core. A 2010 WCVB-TV 5 investigation found that Chester and other department personnel accepted $15,000 in luxury travel and accommodations from Common Core supporters prior to the board’s adoption of the Common Core.
“As a gubernatorial candidate in 2010, Governor Baker opposed Common Core and PARCC. In March of this year, he criticized the MCAS/PARCC process and earlier procedures that resulted in the adoption of Common Core, telling the State House News Service, “I think it’s an embarrassment that a state that spent two years giving educators, families, parents, administrators and others an opportunity to comment and engage around the assessment system that eventually became MCAS basically gave nobody a voice or an opportunity to engage in a discussion at all before we went ahead and executed on Common Core and PARCC.”
“Such practices need to end, and the public’s trust in the department’s ability to manage a publicly impartial, transparent and accountable process needs to be restored. The first step is for Commissioner Chester, who chairs PARCC’s governing board, to recuse himself from the upcoming policy decision about whether to replace MCAS with the PARCC test.
“In cases where there are several apparent conflicts of interest, recusals are an appropriate administrative response meant to uphold the public trust.”
A new blogger enters the education fray with timely questions about the validity, reliability, and fairness of the Smarter Balanced Assessment, the Common Core test paid for by the U.S. Department of Education.
Dr. Roxana Marachi, Associate Professor in the Department of K-8 Teacher Education at San Jose State University has launched a blog called http://eduresearcher.com/.
In this post, she raises important questions, such as:
Q1: How is standardization to be assumed when students are taking tests on different technological tools with vastly varying screen interfaces? Depending on the technology used (desktops, laptops, chromebooks, and/or ipads), students would need different skills in typing, touch screen navigation, and familiarity with the tool.
Q2: How are standardization and fairness to be assumed when students are responding to different sets of questions based on how they answer (or guess) on the adaptive sections of the assessments?
Q3: How is fairness to be assumed when large proportions of students do not have access at home to the technology tools that they are being tested on in schools? Furthermore, how can fairness be assumed when some school districts do not have the same technology resources as others for test administration?
Q4: How/why would assessments that had already been flagged with so many serious design flaws and user interface problems continue to be administered to millions of children without changes/improvements to the interface? (See report below)
Q5: How can test security be assumed when tests are being administered across a span of over two months and when login features allow for some students to view a problem, log off, go home (potentially research and develop an answer) and then come back and log in and take the same section? (This process was reported from a test proctor who observed the login, viewing and re-login process.)
Q6: Given the serious issues in accessibility and the fact that the assessments have yet to be independently validated, how/why would the SmarterBalanced Assessment Consortium solicit agreements from nearly 200 colleges and universities to use 2015 11th Grade SBAC data to determine student access to the regular curriculum or to “remedial” courses? http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2015/04/sbac.html.
She includes a startling graph produced by SBAC, with projected failure rates in the 11th grad math tests for different subgroups.
67% of all students are expected to fail
83% of African-Americans ” ”
80% of Latino students ” ”
93% of English language learners ” ”
She adds:
“Evidence of Testing Barriers and Implementation Problems
The Board is encouraged to consider the following evidence documenting serious concerns regarding the validity, reliability, security, accessibility, and fairness of the SmarterBalanced Assessments.
SmarterBalanced Mathematics Tests Are Fatally Flawed and Should Not Be Used documents serious user-interface barriers and design flaws in the SmarterBalanced Mathematics assessments. According to the analyses, the tests:
“Violate the standards they are supposed to assess;
Cannot be adequately answered by students with the technology they are required to use;
Use confusing and hard-to-use interfaces; or
Are to be graded in such a way that incorrect answers are identified as correct and correct answers as incorrect.”
“The author notes that numerous design flaws and interface barriers had been brought to the attention of the SmarterBalanced Assessment Consortium during the Spring 2014 pilot test, and remained unresolved during the Spring 2015 test administration.”
The post includes comments by teachers and administrators about the problems with SBAC.
She closes her blog with this reflection on the predicted failure rates:
“My letter to the Board is to encourage responsible, ethical, and legal communications about the assessment data that will apparently soon be disseminated to the public. Students’ beliefs about themselves as learners will be caught up in the tangle of any explanations surrounding the assessments, and as we know, decades of research demonstrate the power of student belief to be a factor impacting subsequent effort and persistence in learning.”
The revolt against high-stakes testing continues in a big way in Washington State.
Nearly 30% of 11th grade students refused to take the Smarter Balanced Assessment, the test of the Common Core standards paid for by federal funds.
“Over one quarter of eligible Washington state high school juniors opted out of taking the Smarter Balanced exams this past spring, according to preliminary statistics released by the state education department—but in reality, the opt-out rate could be much higher.
“Officially, 27.4 percent of eligible students were “confirmed refusals” for taking the Smarter Balanced English/language arts exam, and 28.1 percent of them were confirmed refusals for the math exam. However, the percentage of potential refusals for the state could actually be much higher—the department puts the share of “potential refusals” at anywhere between 28 percent and 53 percent for both the math and E/LA tests, which are aligned to the Common Core State Standards.
“That means more than half of juniors didn’t take the test. But the state isn’t yet sure whether some of them officially refused the test or didn’t take it for some other reason.”
Mercedes Schneider reviews the D.C. Merry-go-round, where legislators who are not educators are deciding what to do to the nation’s schools.
The Senate’s bipartisan Every Child Achieves Act has the singular distinction of telling the Secretary of Education that he is prohibited from meddling in state standards and tests and teacher evaluations. Until now, Arne Duncan claimed to be very satisfied with the bill. Maybe he actually got a briefing, as the Obama administration now says it is not happy with the bill.
Civil rights groups continue to clamor for federally mandated annual testing, even though Black and Hispanic students have seen their schools turned into test-prep centers, with loss of non-tested subjects.
Higher education groups are lobbying for the Common Core, which has sinking support. Apparently they look forward to shrinking enrollments, since most students fail the “rigorous” CC tests. They will see an especially large decline of Black and Hispanic students, whose failure rates in PARCC and SBAC are scandalous. Do they care?
Expect more federal funding for charters and more charter scandals.
Leonie Haimson, leader of Class Size Matters and Student Privacy Matters, writes here about the Every Child Achieves Act and the distortions that are filling her email box these days. Haimson is also a member of the board of the Network for Public Education and a fearless supporter of public education.
She writes:
Over the last few days, I have been flooded with blog posts, Facebook comments, memes and tweets, claiming that the bi-partisan bill to be debated this week in the Senate, called ECAA, or Every Child Achieves Act, must be opposed, because it “locks in” Common Core and many of the worst, test-based accountability policies of Arne Duncan and the US Department of Education.
Yet this is far from the truth. For nearly 13 years, students have suffered under the high-stakes testing regime of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the 2002 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). NCLB was likely the dumbest law ever passed by Congress, because it required that all public school children in the United States reach “proficiency” by 2014 as measured by test scores, or else their schools would be deemed failing.
The inanity of NCLB was exacerbated by Race to the Top and other policies pursued by Arne Duncan that put testing on steroids. These policies treated our children as data points, reduced our schools to test prep factories, and attempted to convince parents that their education must be handed over to testing companies, charter operators, and ed tech corporations. This disastrous trend resulted in huge parent protests and hundreds of thousands of students opting out of state exams last spring.
The current Senate bill is admittedly far from perfect. It still requires annual standardized tests in grades 3-8, as did NCLB. It would allot far too many federal dollars and too little accountability to charter schools, while encouraging merit pay for teachers – all policies likely to lead to wasted taxpayer funds that would be better spent on programs proven to work, such as class size reduction. It would do nothing to protect student data privacy, while allowing the continued disclosure of sensitive personal information to vendors and other third parties without parental knowledge or consent. Hopefully this critical issue will be addressed separately by Congress, by improving one or more of the many student privacy bills introduced during the past few months.
Yet ECAA still represents a critical step forward, because it places an absolute ban on the federal government intervening in the decision-making of states and districts as to how to judge schools, evaluate teachers or implement standards. In particular, it expressly bars the feds from requiring or even incentivizing states to adopt any particular set of standards, as Duncan has done with the Common Core, through his Race to the Top grants and NCLB waivers.
It would also bar the feds from requiring that teachers be judged by student test scores, which is not only statistically unreliable according to most experts, but also damaging to the quality of education kids receive, by narrowing the curriculum and encouraging test prep to the exclusion of all else. The bill would prevent the feds from imposing any particular school improvement strategy or mandating which schools need improvement – now based simplistically on test scores, no matter what the challenges faced by these schools or the inappropriateness of the measure. Finally, the bill would prevent the feds from withholding funds from states that allow parents to opt out of testing, as Duncan most recently threatened to do to the state of Oregon.
It is true that many states have already drunk the Common Core/testing Koolaid, led by Governors and legislators influenced by the deep pockets of corporate reformers or tempted by RTTT funds. ECAA also still requires annual testing, which the Tester amendment would replace with grade-span testing, as many organizations including FairTest and Network for Public Education have strongly urged. (Full disclosure: I’m on NPE’s board.) The bill has a provision aimed at alleviating over-testing, by requiring that states audit the number of standardized exams and eliminate duplication, though it’s not clear how effective this requirement will be.
But with or without the Tester amendment, ECAA would release the stranglehold that the federal government currently has on our schools, and would allow each of us to work for more sane and positive policies in our respective states and districts. For this reason alone, it deserves the support of every parent and teacher who cares about finally moving towards a more humane, and evidence-based set of practices in our public schools.
The Delaware Legislature passed a strong Opt Out bill.
The legislation — House Bill 50 — was introduced in March by state Representative John Kowalko, a Democrat, and state Senator David Lawson, a Republican.
After months of wrangling over the language and the scope of the proposal — debates that local media reports often became “a shouting match,” with the public gallery at the legislature filled to the rafters — the final compromise version of the two bills was approved by the state House of Representatives on June 23 by a vote of 31-5 and then a few days later the state senate followed suit, voting 15-6 to send the bill to the desk of Democratic Governor Jack Markell.
It now goes to the governor, Democrat Jack Markell, who opposed it, based on concerns by business leaders and civil rights groups. The legislation has strong parental support.
In Delaware, a majority of parents seem to support the bill. In fact, the state Parent Teacher Association (PTA) openly called for its passage.
PTA President Terri Hodges told DelawareOnline, “Smarter Balanced in its current form does not provide a true picture of student learning. “The results of tests are not available until the end of the year. That provides very little value to me as a parent or for a teacher.”
Here is the legislative language:
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
148th GENERAL ASSEMBLY
HOUSE BILL NO. 50:
AN ACT TO AMEND TITLE 14 OF THE DELAWARE CODE RELATING TO EDUCATION ASSESSMENT.
BE IT ENACTED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF DELAWARE:
Section 1. Amend § 151(k), Title 14 of the Delaware Code by making deletions as shown by strike through and insertions shown by underline as follows and redesignating accordingly:
(k)(1) Notwithstanding any other provision in this section to the contrary, any parent or guardian of a student in any public school or charter school shall have the right to opt out of the statewide assessment.
(2) The parent or guardian must notify the student’s school in writing at least 2 school days prior to the scheduled exam. Schools shall honor any timely request and provide alternative educational activities during testing times.
(3) There shall be no academic or disciplinary repercussions on the student’s record for opting out of participating in the statewide assessment.
(4) The Department shall maintain a data system to track the student’s opt-out decisions.
(5) The Department shall report opt-out numbers in accountability ratings to provide context and impact on school and district ratings; however, the opt-out numbers shall not factor into the accountability ratings.
(6) The districts and charter schools shall notify all parents and guardians of this right no later than 15 days prior to the start of the assessment via its website and mailing. The Department shall also post a notification on its website no later than 15 days prior to the start of the assessment.
(7) A student having reached the age of majority shall solely possess the opt-out rights under this subsection.(l) Rules and regulations pursuant to this subchapter shall be proposed by the Secretary subject to approval by the State Board of Education.
SYNOPSIS OF THIS LEGLISATION:
This bill creates the right for the parent or guardian of a child to opt out of the annual assessment, currently the Smarter Balanced Assessment System.
The fast-shrinking PARCC testing consortium dropped by another one as Ohio pulled out.
Governor John Kasich signed a bill to replace the trouble-plagued PARCC with another test.
The number of states in the federally-funded PARCC consortium has declined from 25 in 2011 to only 11 in 2015.
The Ohio decision was the result of voluminous complaints about PARCC, from technology glitches to the hours of time the tests require. PARCC has agreed to cut
AIR may well get the Ohio contract, but some parents and educators are unhappy with AIR.
PARCC also agreed in May to shorten its tests by 60 minutes in math and 30 minutes in English.
But that change wasn’t the dramatic reduction many sought. Students took about 10 to 11 hours of PARCC exams in just English and math this year, depending on their grade. With that much testing, the combined 90-minute drop amounts to a 15 percent cut at the most.
PARCC is rapidly losing states who are unhappy with the quality and time required for the PARCC tests.
PARCC states, as of 2011(25): Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, District of Columbia.
Note that some states, like New York and Massachusetts, use PARCC in a far more limited way than Ohio has.
PARCC states now (11): Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Jersey, New Mexico, Rhode Island, District of Columbia.
Arkansas is in the middle of a battle between the governor, legislature and state school board over PARCC’s future there.
Peter Greene brings us back to the halcyon days when central planners at the U.S. Department of Education dreamed of one big set of national standards–the Common Core–and two testing consortia, both dependent on the same set of standards. The Gates Foundation funded the Common Core and continues to fund various organizations to advocate for it and to “demand” annual testing mandates. The federal government funded the two testing groups–PARCC and Smarter Balanced Assessment–with $360 million of our taxpayer dollars.
It turns out not to have been a sound investment. PARCC started with 24 (or 25) states in its consortium, and more than half those states have abandoned the Pearson-made PARCC. With Ohio’s exit from PARCC, the number is down now to 10 states plus D.C. Some of those 10 are likely to drop PARCC. The technological problems have been extremely annoying, and the amount of time required for the testing (8 to 11 hours) is burdensome. Here is a question: Why is it that teachers can give a 45-minute test in reading and math and find out what their students know, but PARCC requires 8 to 11 hours to get the same information.
The market for PARCC has shrunk so dramatically that Peter Greene thinks it is only a matter of time until Pearson executives decide that the tests are not worth their time, the revenue stream is too small, and bye-bye PARCC.
Diane Ravitch's blog 