Lessons from the 2010 state tests

 

Proficiency Declines, General Education

% Level 3+4 MATH	2008	2009	2010	Percent decline 2009 to 2010*
Gen Ed	81	88	61	-31%
Special Ed	43	55	23	-58%
ELA % Levels 3+4
Gen Ed	64	76	49	-36%
Special Ed	24	35	13	-63%

 

Proficiency Declines, English Proficient Students vs. English Language Learners

% Level 3+4 MATH	2008	2009	2010	Percent decline 2009 to 2010*
English Proficient	77	84	58	-31%
ELL	59	68	32	-53%
ELA % Levels 3+4
English Proficient	63	74	47	-36%
ELL	23	35	13	-63%

Welcome back! And let’s not waste a moment. Here is your first multiple-choice question of the new school year:

Actually, all the answers are wrong, even maybe “d.” The test results — showing steep declines in student proficiency — signal the start of a statewide, four-year process to revise standards and rewrite tests that will quickly reach into every classroom.

Change is gonna come

In a sense, all that happened this year was the state reported test scores using a higher cutoff, so more children fell below the proficiency bar. Tougher grading was all it was, city education officials said, and we’re all for it.

But in reality a lot more than that happened. As Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and State Education Commissioner David Steiner explained, the state tests had not simply become too easy. They had become bad tests.

The tests have been assessing only a narrow band of state standards and virtually ignoring the rest of the state curriculum. The same questions have been repeated from year to year, making it easy to game the tests. And the tests do not reflect what students need to succeed in college and careers. Tisch and Steiner intend to change that.

Scores as a forecast

The 2010 revisions were the first step. With a higher performance bar and some new content, this year’s tests were designed to reveal just how many grade 3-8 students were actually on track to do well enough on their high school Regents that they would have a good chance of entering college without needing remedial coursework.

That was the way the State Education Department pegged the new test standards, as a numerical forecast of Regents and college success. And by that measure just 42 percent of city students would survive college literature classes and 54 percent would make it through freshman math, both categories down more than 25 percentage points from 69 and 82 percent, respectively, last year.

As UFT President Michael Mulgrew put it, “In light of the state’s more rigorous standards, the DOE’s success in raising pupil proficiency has turned out to be illusory.”

Scale scores did not fall but remained mostly flat. It’s not that student learning declined but that the standards the students have been tested on since at least 2006 were judged to be (no surprise to most teachers) way too low.

Revelations by subgroup

The results also revealed disturbing patterns for minority students, English language learners and special education students. Many of these “subgroups” fell even further than the citywide averages.

Black and Hispanic students lost much more ground as a group than did whites or Asians. If you compare the racial gaps from 2009 to the 2010 gaps you see:

• The black-white performance gap doubled in math and grew by 50 percent in ELA.
• The Hispanic-white gap doubled in math and grew to 30 percentage points from 23 in ELA.
• The city’s English language learners, who have logged steady performance gains over the last several years, fell back hard to just 13 percent meeting ELA standards, down from 35 percent in 2009, while English–proficient students lost only about a third of their gains.
• Just 23 percent of special education students met math standards, down from 55 percent in 2009.

What happened?

Many higher-needs students, who have made legitimate gains over the last several years, were shown to be hovering just over the Level 3 line. When the cut score went up, it snared those students, pushing them down to Level 2.

They had perhaps received just enough test preparation, but not enough advanced education. When the bar was raised, their lack of mastery over grade-level knowledge and college-preparatory skills was revealed.

Going from here

Over the next three years, the state tests will be rewritten. They will become longer, test more material, have more open-ended questions and require more writing. They will aim to assess not whether students learned “test-taking tricks,” in Commissioner Steiner’s words, but whether the students can apply knowledge and explain their answers. By 2014-15 the goal is that our state tests will be able to tell students honestly if they are on track to succeed in college.

At the same time, with $700 million in new Race to the Top funding, the state plans to revamp curriculum and train teachers to implement it. It has signed on to a national common core standards effort led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State Schools to create uniform K-12 education standards. There are hints that the state will soon take aim at the Regents tests, which many teachers say have become too easy.

While city education officials are still trying to make the case that minority students have made some gains, the agenda has changed.

It seems to be dawning on state leaders that, as teachers have warned for years, a test-prep curriculum does not develop academic mastery. And a consensus seems to be forming at the state and national levels that new curriculums and assessments are the next frontier.

On that voyage, teachers have no multiple choices.