Will The Public Turn Against The Reformers In New York State?

John King in the Wall Street Journal:

"We have been insignificantly aggressive in making the changes in adult behavior necessary to yield better student achievement," he said. "That's unambiguous."

Diane Ravitch explained in a post this morning why the state's tying the new Common Core 3rd-8th grade tests to the NAEP is wrong:

The state didn’t just “raise the bar.” It aligned its passing mark to a completely inappropriate model.

The state scores have four levels: level 4 is the highest, level 1 is the lowest. In the present scoring scheme, students who do not reach level 3 and 4 have “failed.”

NAEP has three levels: “Advanced” is the highest (only about 3-8% of students reach this level). “Proficient” is defined by the National Assessment Governing Board as “solid academic performance for each grade assessed. This is a very high level of academic achievement.”). “Basic” is “partial mastery” of the skills and knowledge needed at each grade tested.

“Proficient” on NAEP is what most people would consider to be the equivalent of an A. When I was a member of the NAEP governing board, we certainly considered proficient to be very high level achievement.

New York’s city and state officials have decided that NAEP’s “proficiency” level should be the passing mark.

They don’t understand that a student who is proficient on NAEP has attained “a very high level of academic achievement.”

Any state that expects all or most students to achieve an A on the state tests is setting most students up for failure.

If students need to reach “proficiency” just to pass, there will obviously be a very large number of students who “fail.”

B students and C students will fail.

The NAEP achievement levels have always been controversial. Many researchers and scholarly bodies have said they were unreasonably high and thus “fundamentally flawed.” That term “fundamentally flawed” occurs again and again in the literature of NAEP critics. This article by James Harvey is a good summary of these arguments.

Some on this blog have asked whether NAEP is a criterion-referenced test, and the answer is no. A criterion-referenced test is one that almost everyone can pass if they master the requisite skills. A test to get a drivers’ license is a criterion-referenced test. Anyone who studies the laws can pass the written test and qualify for a drivers’ license.

NAEP is not a criterion-referenced test. Massachusetts is the only state where as much as 50% of the students (and only in fourth grade) are rated proficient in reading. The NAEP tests are not designed to be criterion-referenced tests; they are a mix of questions that are easy, moderate, and difficult.

The achievement levels were created when Checker Finn was chair of NAGB. I think they are defensible if people understand that the achievement levels do not represent grade levels. If the public wants a measure of “grade level,” then “basic” probably comes closest to grade level. “Proficient” is not grade level; as NAGB documents state, it represents “a very high level of academic achievement.”

More important, the NAEP achievement levels were never intended to be measures of grade level, and New York officials are wrong to interpret them as such, especially when they mistakenly use “proficient” as the passing mark.

Any state that uses NAEP “proficient” as its definition of “grade level” is making a huge mistake; it will set the bar unreasonably high and will mislabel many students and misjudge the quality of many schools.

And that is exactly what happened in the New York testing fiasco.

If the state sticks to its present course of using NAEP “proficient” as its passing mark, it will encourage criticism of the Common Core standards as unrealistic and stoke parental outrage about Common Core testing.

People know their children, and they know their own school. The politicians may convince them that American education is floundering (even if it is not), but they can’t convince them that their own child and their own school are “failing” when parents know from their own experience that it is not true.

The corporate reformers now using the Shock Doctrine to bash the schools and disparage students may find that their tactic has backfired. They succeed only in adding fuel to the growing movement to stop the misuse of standardized testing.

What is happening in New York is likely to undermine public confidence in the state’s highest education officials and create new converts to the Opt-Out of Testing movement.

The Shock Doctrine may be a boomerang that helps to bring down the madness of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core, the Pearson empire, and every other part of the reformy enterprise.

New York may have inadvertently created by the most powerful recruiting tool for the Opt Out movement.

King arrogantly assumes parents will not question his aligning the state tests with the NAEP standards.

He arrogantly assumes that the public will take at face value when he says things like "We have been insignificantly aggressive in making the changes in adult behavior necessary to yield better student achievement."

King himself has warned that test scores in the state are not going to go up for a long time.

And now they're turning their attention to the Regents exams and looking to "raise the bar" there as well.

Graduation rates are going to plummet if they do to the Regents exams what they did to the 3rd-8th grade exams.

And the truth is, students aren't going to be any more prepared for college or career after taking these exams.

King and his NYSED and Regents compatriots in reform claim the new Common Core tests require deeper thinking and more analysis on the part of students.

But as one math teacher noted on his blog, all they did was increase the difficulty level of the questions and cut the time allotment given for students to complete the exam.

They took questions that used to be on the 10th grade math exam and put them on the 8th grade exam.

But the questions do not require any deeper thinking or more analysis on the part of students.

They simply require students to race through the exams.

Many students this year could not complete the tests in the time allotted.

That is one reason why so many "failed."

We'll see if King and his compatriots in reform get away with this.

For now, they're winning the media war as they're getting the tests framed as improvements over the old ones.

But Diane Ravitch may be right about parents and students being the ultimate linchpins on how this reform movement goes.

If more and more of them opt out of taking the state tests, thus starving the state of its precious data, and if more and more complain to politicians about the absurdity of the testing regime, John King and his merry men and women in reform are going to have to back down from their "not insignificant aggression" toward students, teachers and schools.

King and his education corporatists are winning battles right now.

But the war is far from over and they know that.

That's why they're assembling all of their p.r. weapons and making an all-out assault on the public this week to message these tests the way they want them framed.

Messaging works for a system as a whole.

But as Ravitch noted, parents will know when there is a disconnect between the messages being sent by the state and the business community in their p.r. and the experience they have with their own children in their own schools.