New York City’s chief academic officer–a testing zealot–here announces that scores will plummet on the new Common Core tests administered last spring for the first time. They will plummet because the state decided to align its standards to NAEP, which are far more demanding than those of any state.
Over the years, many researchers have maintained that the NAEP achievement levels are “fundamentally flawed” and “unreasonably high.” If you google the terms NAEP and “fundamentally flawed,” you will find many articles criticizing the NAEP benchmarks. Here is a good summary.
What you need to know about NAEP achievement levels is that they are not benchmarked to international standards. They are based on the judgment calls of panels made up of people from different walks of life who decide what students in fourth grade and eighth grade should know and be able to do. It is called “the modified Angoff method” and is very controversial among scholars and psychometricians.
Setting the bar so high is one thing when assessing samples at a state and national level, but quite another when it becomes the basis for judging individual students. It is scientism run amok. It is unethical. It sets the bar where only 30-35% can clear it. Why would we do this to the nation’s children?
Nonetheless, these “unreasonably high” standards are now the guidelines for judging the students of Néw York.
Consequently, teachers and parents can expect to be stunned when the scores are released.
The good news is that teachers and schools will not be punished this year. The punishments start next year.
With state tests aligned to NAEP standards, you can bet thousands of schools will be declared "failing" and tens of thousands (if not a hundred thousand or more) teachers across the state will be declared "ineffective."
That has always been the goal of the reform movement - to get the public to believe that schools and teachers all across the spectrum, urban, rural, suburban, are failing and some drastic and disruptive solutions need to be imposed to solve the problems.
NYSED Commissioner John King comes from the charter school world and Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch has family in the online for profit education world.
It shoudn't be a surprise that two of the solutions these officials will promote if they get the public to buy into the horrific scores as proof positive the system is failing is to charterize much of the school system and provide more opportunities for the online for profit education entrepreneurs.
With Cuomo having put together an education reform committee ready to provide a blueprint for future reforms, you can see that we are now at the end game of the destruction of the NY State public education system.
They've got the new Common Core in place that ratchets up difficulty levels without actually providing teachers with the material they need to teach the children to be prepared for the new tests, they've got the new APPR teacher evaluation system in place that ties evals to test scores and puts much of the onus on teachers to prove competence and effectiveness, and now they've got the new Common Core tests aligned to unrealistic benchmarks that are, in Ravitch's words, “fundamentally flawed.”
The fix is in and NYSED Commissioner King and Regents Chancellor Tisch are licking their lips to take it to the district leaders and teachers and administrators tomorrow when the scores are released to the public and complete their work of privatizing much of the school system around the state.
That's why I have been calling for the state to release not only some of the test items from these vaunted new Common Core tests but the tests, in their entirety, along with the grading rubrics and scoring charts.
Let the public truly see the fairness and relevance of the tests, the rubrics and the scoring the NYSED and the Regents are using to declare students, teachers and schools "failures."
This could be a possible boon for teachers. Why? They will start this year with low student scores, thus it could be easier to improve scores at end of school year? Since the test data part of assessment starts this semester, isn't it better to start with lower test scores?
ReplyDeleteAlso,when will the DOE release the test data targets which will inform teachers what % they have to improve each student?
Yep, you're right - for NYC teachers, that's so, thanks to the battle between the UFT and the DOE that kept an agreement from going into place last year. Doubtful that was the plan engineered by the geniuses at 52 Broadway, but it does seem to be the consequence.
DeleteAs to yuor second question, my sense is the DOE has no idea when they will release that algorithm or benchmark. I suspect they don't know what it is and they'll pull it out of Shael's back end when the time comes to release it. Which means this stuff will be eimintely sueable, since it is really difficult to see how any firing decision made on something this half-assed and rigged will stand up in court.
But we'll see. They've been loading the courts up with corporatists, so you never know.
Parents must see that the bottom line is that there are tremendous financial interests driving the agenda about OUR public schools...Pearson, inBloom, Gates Foundation, Merryl Tisch's making deals with her entrepeneurial friends. We are at war...demantling public education as we know it. Hundreds of public schools in neighborhoods that are struggling with the effects of poverty will be closed in less than 2-3 years and later turned into charter FOR-PROFIT schools. We must fight back!!!
ReplyDelete