Joel Klein, The Man Who Hawked Inflated Test Scores As Chancellor, Lectures People About Inflated Test Scores

You can't make this stuff up.

Here's the former NYCDOE chancellor and current head of Rupert Murdoch's for profit education technology division, Joel Klein, lecturing people about how inflated New York's test scores were in the past:

For years, states around the country dummied-down standards to make it look as if students were more prepared for success after graduation than they actually were. This may have made some politicians look good, but it has been a terrible disservice to our kids.

Raising standards will mean we now have a more true measure of how well our students are learning. In the near term, it will also mean that previously inflated test scores will drop.

While some may confuse lower scores as a negative development, the fact that we’re finally being honest about academic achievement is a very positive sign.

For decades, states and local school districts have been responsible for their own education standards; the quality varied widely. A student deemed highly successful in one state could fail in another. The lack of uniform expectations didn’t do our students any favors. In fact, it doomed many to mediocrity.

If anybody rode the wave of inflated test scores in the past, it's former NYCDOE Chancellor and current head of Rupert Murdoch's for profit education technology division, Joel Klein, and his former boss, Michael Bloomberg.
To wit, Joel Klein stood next to his boss, Mayor Bloomberg, back in 2005 as Bloomberg gave a press conference outside P.S. 33 to tout "historic" and "record-breaking" gains in the city's test scores statistics, with P.S. 33 leading the way.

Sol Stern picks up the narrative from there:

One morning in May 2005, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office bused the city hall press corps to P.S. 33, an elementary school in one of the Bronx’s poorest areas. In the school’s auditorium, overflowing with happy children and teachers, the mayor proclaimed a miracle. With an enrollment 95 percent Hispanic and black, and with 100 percent of the students poor enough to qualify for free lunch, P.S. 33 had hit the jackpot on the state’s fourth-grade reading test. Over 83 percent of the school’s 140 fourth-graders scored at or above proficiency (or grade level), the mayor explained, compared with only 35.8 percent in 2004—an unheard-of one-year gain of close to 50 percentage points. The school’s terrific score was just four percentage points below the average for the richest suburban districts in the state.

The P.S. 33 success was the cherry topping off a very sweet election-year gift for Mayor Bloomberg. At the press conference, he could report “historic” and “record-breaking” gains in reading—59.5 percent of all Gotham fourth-graders had achieved proficiency on the state test, a gain of nearly ten percentage points from the year before. The results proved, the mayor contended, that his education reforms “really are paying off for those who were previously left behind.” Media coverage the next day echoed the mayor’s claims. It was clear that mayoral candidate Bloomberg had hit a home run right on the home field of his likeliest Democratic challenger, Fernando Ferrer.

When the 2006 reading scores came out in September, however, Bloomberg was in California, burnishing his national political image and spreading the gospel about the benefits of mayoral control of urban school districts. It was up to schools chancellor Joel Klein to discuss this year’s results at a reporters’ “roundtable” at his Tweed Courthouse headquarters (no gala press conference this year, no miracle schools to visit). Klein acknowledged that fourth-grade reading was down slightly but noted that Gotham remained ahead of most of the state’s urban districts. And though eighth-grade reading was still dreadfully low—only 36.6 percent of city students had attained proficiency—it was up three points over 2005.

The education reporters seemed rather incurious about what happened to the P.S. 33 fourth-graders whom they celebrated as heroes last year. Too bad, because it would have been easy to find out. The federal No Child Left Behind law now requires state education authorities to test students in grades three through eight and make the scores public. Thus, one can for the first time track a particular student cohort’s test scores on the same battery of state tests as they move from grade to grade. One discovers that the miraculous achievement of P.S. 33’s fourth-graders in 2005 completely disintegrated in 2006, with the pass rate plummeting to 41.1 percent in the fifth grade. This year’s fourth-graders at the school achieved proficiency at only a 47.5 percent rate.

Put aside the raw numbers and consider the human consequences of this collapse. Last year, the mayor publicly honored 120 poor Hispanic and black children for beating the odds and passing the reading test. This year, half of those kids discovered that they were failures after all. Last year, they shone as stars of a mayoral campaign. This year, they were truly “left behind.”

No one from city hall or the education department came to the school to explain how so many kids could be high achievers one year and failures the next. Nor was the school’s miracle principal, Elba Lopez, around to explain the shocking setback. After last year’s triumphant press conference, she retired, collecting a $15,000 bonus for her school’s spectacular 2005 performance, boosting her pension $12,000 for life. Meanwhile, the school’s wildly fluctuating test numbers are so unbelievable that they should attract the attention of state education authorities and the city school system’s special office of investigations. 

Joel Klein has a lot of chutzpah to lecture anybody about "lying" to children with inflated test score results when he spent his entire 8 years as NYC chancellor hawking inflated test score results as proof positive that his reform agenda was working.

In fact, Klein's bogus test score stats fell further in 2010 when NY State finally admitted the state tests had been inflated to make the results look better.

Diane Ravitch picks up the story:

Since 2006, scores have gone through the roof. Teachers and principals quietly told reporters that the tests were getting easier to pass, but no one listened. A few critics and testing experts warned that outsized annual gains were not credible, but no one listened.

At the same time that the state was announcing phenomenal annual gains, national tests administered by the federal government - exams considered the gold standard - told a different story. On those tests, the state's scores in reading were flat from 2000 to 2009. Math scores were up in fourth grade, but not in eighth grade, where they were flat from 2005 to 2009.

New York Commissioner of Education David Steiner made a bold move. He decided to end the inflation - and administer some shock therapy. The sharp contrast between mostly flat scores on national tests and dramatic annual claims by the state made it necessary for him to act, and he did.
Now we know the painful truth. Last year, 86.4% of the state's students in grades three to eight were deemed proficient in mathematics; today it is 61%. Last year, 77.4% of students in the same grades were deemed proficient in reading; today it is 53.2%.

When the scores were released, there was a sound of bursting bubbles across the state. What once were miracles turned into mirages.

Since 2005, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein have trumpeted historic gains. But after the state's adjustment, the pass rate on the state reading test among city students fell from an impressive 68.8% to an unimpressive 42.4%, and from an astonishing 81.8% to a disappointing 54% in mathematics. Overnight, the city's historic gains disappeared.

Now, look at the achievement gap between the performance of white students and that of minorities. Last year, black students were 22 points behind white students in passing the state English exam. This year - after the state corrected its scoring - the gap increased to 30.4 points.

In math, the gap grew even more. Black students were 17 points behind whites last year. Now they've fallen 30 points behind.

Charter school advocates saw their bubble burst as well. The pass rates in the state's charter schools, overall, dropped even faster than those in regular public schools. In third grade math, it plunged from 96.1% to 61.6%, and in eighth grade, from 84.5% to 50.4%. On the 2010 reading tests, the scores of charter students in New York City were nearly identical to those of district schools: 43% compared to 42%.

In math, 63% of the city's charter students passed, compared to 54% in public schools, which was an advantage but nothing like the miraculous results previously claimed by charter promoters.
Among other bubbles that popped were the city's school report cards, which based 85% of their grades on the state's test scores, mostly on gains on the test now proven to be vastly overstated. Some schools were given an A for "progress" on dumbed-down tests, and others were closed because they didn't make the grade. But the measure was a deeply flawed instrument.

The hundreds of millions of dollars that the city has spent on test preparation turned out to be a bad investment. Students were learning test-taking skills, not truly learning reading or mathematics.
As a result of the fiasco, we now know that the bonuses of more than $30 million handed out last year to teachers in schools that made "gains" on the state tests were a waste of precious money.

Why does test score inflation matter? Aside from the fact that the state misled the public, the inflated scores caused tens of thousands of students to be denied needed remediation. The inflated scores also help to explain why 75% of the city's high school graduates require remediation when they enroll in community colleges at the City University.

It's not a surprise that Klein conveniently forgets his own role in hailing inflated test scores as "historic" gains or claiming the achievement gap between white and Asian students and black and Latino students has disappeared, nor is it a surprise that his current boss, Rupert Murdoch, gives him space in the NY Post to spin the new scores to help his old boss, Michael Bloomberg.

Both of these men have their own self-serving reasons to carry on the fiction that Klein himself and his old boss, Bloomberg, aren't charlatans.

But the truth is, Klein is full of it and so is his piece.

The test score results in 2010 - real ones, not inflated ones - prove that.

Klein has no business lecturing anybody about bogus test score results, not with his record of hawking inflated test score results to anybody who would listen as evidence of his education reform genius.