Sharp drop in city test scores

New York State released 2010 test scores at the end of July that were dramatically lower across the board than from the previous year. The state had warned it was raising the proficiency bar this year so a downtrend was expected, but the depth of the declines took many by surprise.

“In light of the state’s more rigorous standards, the Department of Education’s success in raising pupil proficiency has turned out to be illusory,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew said. “The city desperately needs a real instructional strategy to improve our schools. Students are more than their test scores.”

Average English language arts scores went down 26 percentage points, to just 42 percent at Levels 3 and 4 (meeting or exceeding standards). Math scores dropped 28 points, to 54 percent meeting standards. The city should have sent 7,000 more students to summer school, the mayor said.

“We had to take several deep breaths,” a Bronx principal told The New York Times.

State Education Commissioner David Steiner said that “there is no blame for teachers,” who have been teaching to the standards reflected on the tests. In fact student scale scores were about even with last year.

But state education leaders said the tests have become too “narrow,” too “predictable” and too “easy,” and they no longer reflect what students need to know and be able to do to succeed in college.

Following a year-long review, the Regents reset the 8th-grade proficiency bar to mean that a Level 3 student had a 75 percent chance of passing the Regents exams at college-ready levels. The 3rd-through-7th-grade cut points were reset based on annual gains needed to meet that college-ready standard.

Harvard Prof. Daniel Koretz was commissioned by the state to analyze the test and found statistical evidence that the exam became easier to pass. His team determined the state had tested kids on too narrow a range of material from 2006 to 2009.

“There's an awful lot of noise in the system,” Koretz said. “The ranking of schools will likely be wrong if these rankings are based solely on these scores.”