More Numbers Games with Common Core Assessments

New York city's numbers are in for the first major round of common core testing and the news looks bad.  According to the New York State Education Department only 26 percent of students in 3rd-8th  grade passed the state exams in English, and 30 percent passed in math.  You may remember that last year Kentucky saw similar results. The news headlines are declaring this proof that better standards and tests were necessary.  But is it really, or is it just a numbers game to create the type of crisis Rahm Emmanuel likes to take advantage of that nudges us, as Cass Sunstein wants to do, into making the "right" choices?

Note that the figures reported are for students who "passed" the test, not raw scores of the percentage correct on the exam. Some body determines what "passing" means, usually referred to as cut scores, and that number can be set low, as Oklahoma did with NCLB assessments, or set high, as many are claiming the New York Regents just did with their latest assessments. There are problems with both approaches.

The situation in Oklahoma is actually one of the major justifications for common standards and assessments. On paper, OK students looked great because percentage wise so many of them were passing their state exams. That is because they set the passing bar fairly low. Unfortunately, most businesses don't take the time to really study a state's education figures (they don't do their homework) and OK was able to lure companies into their state by touting inflated student performance figures. The other governors wanted to put a stop to that. That is what gave us SBAC.

New York has a different agenda. They want to prove that their previous tests were too easy and that their kids NEED common core's "rigor." 

Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters provided this look at the numbers.

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. (emphasis added) 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”:

This last paragraph foretells what currently complacent suburban schools with good statistics should be on the look out for in the very near future.

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.