NAEP Scores Fall, Arne Duncan Says Nothing To See Here

Heckuva job education reformers:

For the first time since 1990, the mathematical skills of American students have dropped, according to results of a nationwide test released by the Education Department on Wednesday.

The decline appeared in both Grades 4 and 8 in an exam administered every two years as the National Assessment of Educational Progress and sometimes called “the nation’s report card.” 

The dip in scores comes as the country’s employers demand workers with ever-stronger skills in mathematics to compete in a global economy. It also comes as states grapple with the new Common Core academic standards and a rebellion against them.

Progress in reading, which has been generally more muted than in math for decades, also stalled this year as scores among fourth graders flat-lined and eighth-grade scores decreased. The exams assess a representative sampling of students on math and reading skills in public and private schools.

 And of course reformers have all sorts of excuses for why the scores dropped:

“It’s obviously bad news,” said Michael J. Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning education policy group in Washington. “We don’t want to see scores going in this direction.”

“That doesn’t mean we should completely freak out,” he added. “This could be a one-time variation, and maybe we’ll see things come back next time. But if it were the beginning of a new trend, it would be quite disappointing and disturbing.”

And:

“It’s not unusual when you see lots of different things happening in classrooms to first see a slight decline before you see improvement,” said William J. Bushaw, the executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policies and achievement levels for the tests.

Arne Duncan claims there's nothing to worry about here, that the scores indicate nothing about the efficacy of his reform agenda, that his education reform policies will eventually show big dividends on the NAEP in the "long term," but Carol Burris says he's wrong:

It is difficult to see any real growth across the board since 2011, with math scores backsliding to 2009 levels, eighth-grade reading flat for four years, and a small uptick in fourth-grade reading that is not a significant increase from 2013, which, in turn, was not significantly different from 2011.

Considering that the rationale for the Common Core State Standards initiative was low NAEP proficiency rates, it would appear that the solution of tough standards and tough tests is not the great path forward after all. For those who say it is too early to use NAEP to judge the Common Core, I would remind them that in 2013, Education Secretary Arne Duncan used NAEP increases to do a victory dance about the states that had already implemented the Core at that time—and I never heard any reformer complain.

Two years ago, Duncan attributed  Tennessee’s, Hawaii’s and the District of Columbia’s NAEP score increases to their enthusiastic adoption of Race to the Top. Likewise, he attributed increases in Kentucky, Delaware, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi and North Carolina to their early embrace of the Common Core.

This year, the District of Columbia and Mississippi had fourth-grade score gains in mathematics, but the rest of Duncan’s superstars had mathematics scores that dropped or were flat. All of Arne’s superstar states had eighth-grade scores that dropped or did not budge.

The District of Columbia, Mississippi, Kentucky and North Carolina had score gains in fourth-grade reading this year, but so did states like Oklahoma and Vermont that have resisted Race to the Top reforms. And in Grade 8 reading, all of Duncan’s superstars had scores that were flat or took a dive.

Colorado, a state that recently received high praise from Bill and Melinda Gates for its implementation of corporate reforms, had reading scores that were flat and math scores that significantly dropped.

NAEP scores were not the only disappointment this year. A few months ago, we saw a significant drop in SAT scores—7 points in one year alone.

Although NAEP and the SAT were not designed to align to the Common Core, they measure what the Common Core Standards were supposed to improve—the literacy and numeracy of our nation’s students. Considering the billions of dollars spent on these reforms, one would expect at least some payoff by now.

As usual with education reformers, there is no accountability for the mess.

Falling SAT and NAEP scores - but hey, it's all good.

Just wait - you'll see improvement in another ten years or so.

Sure we will.

Daily News Applauds NY Tests Rigged To Show NY Schools Are Failing

The editorial page at Daily News cheers for failing test scores:

The squeaky-wheel parents and accountability-fearing teachers unions who have rebelled against Common Core exams claim to be shielding students from the distortions of high-stakes testing.

What they’re really at war with is reality.

New York’s exams have delivered urgent but inconvenient truths about our public schools’ failures. That’s the conclusion of a powerful new report by two advocacy organizations, Achieve and the Collaborative for Student Success.

The groups looked at state proficiency scores in reading and math — and lined them up against results from the federal National Assessment for Educational Progress, widely considered the gold standard for measuring achievement.

In most of the nation, states systematically deceive parents and teachers about what students know. But New York earned the honor of being the nation’s top “truth teller” — with exams that paint an honest picture of what kids are learning.

That’s something to celebrate. Unless you can’t handle the truth.

Let's talk about "handling the truth."

Here's a Diane Ravitch post from August 2013 on what the NAEP "proficiency" score really means:

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.

Ravitch was quite prescient that New York's rigging of the Common Core exams would create a powerful recruiting tool for the Opt Out movement.

It certainly has done that.

As for not being able to handle the truth about failure, the editors at the Daily News really ought to look into the mirror.

The paper is losing $30 million a year and Cablevision just pulled back a $1 dollar bid to buy the paper because an internal analysis showed they would still lose a ton of money after purchasing the DN for just a buck.

The Daily News should spend less time trying to sell the new Common Core tests as accurate pictures of reality and more time trying to sell copies of the Daily News.

The data (i.e., $30 million a year in losses) does not lie.

New York State Tests More Difficult Than The National Assessment Of Educational Progress Exams

How's this for rigged?

New York is one of only two states where more students are earning proficient scores on the “nation’s report card” than are passing the state’s own standardized tests.

That’s according to a new analysis from the nonprofit Achieve, which advocates for tougher standards and tests. The organization compared passing rates on each state’s exams in 2013-14 with its students’ scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, given to a representative sample of students in fourth, eighth, and twelfth grade nationwide.

Typically, the score gaps are reversed: States say most of their students are proficient, while NAEP scores paint a grimmer picture. But two years after introducing new, tougher state tests, New York appears to have moved the furthest in the other direction.

In eighth-grade math, 22 percent of students earned what New York state called a passing score last school year, while 32 percent were deemed proficient on the NAEP exams. In fourth-grade reading, 33 percent passed the state test, while 37 percent of students earned a proficient score on the NAEP test. (Massachusetts was the other outlier, with more students earning a proficient score on the eighth-grade math NAEP test than on the state’s own tests.)

New York is “at a level of rigor that NAEP is, in terms of what it means to be proficient,” Achieve President Michael Cohen said. “And that’s a pretty significant shift for any state, and a shift for New York, and it says they set the bar pretty high.”

The secod part of the reform equation after rigging the tests?

Declare the results proof positive the system sucks:

NEW YORK –A new education report today found that New York State gets a poor return on its education investment – ranking first in the nation for per-student spending, but 31st in reading and 33rd in math. The analysis, released by High Achievement New York, detailed New York’s history of high education spending and its disconnect from student achievement. HANY is calling for spending to match high education standards in order to be a sound investment.

Fred Smith puts the whole sham into perspective for us:

In the magical Alice in Wonderland world of Common Core-aligned testing, built on indefensible stand-alone field tests, the law of gravity is suspended and Down is the new Up! We are finally underperforming the NAEP. Clearly a triumph of rigor and a return to the days of higher standards. The evidence is underwhelming.

Also, this comment:

This is no surprise. It is obvious that the newest state tests by Pearson were designed to fail a high number of students. It's very important to convince middle class parents to stop supporting public education and simply telling them that their kids' teachers were greedy, awful, incompetent people wasn't working. Their next step was to prove to parents that their kids weren't learning -- see, look how many kids "failed". And yet as this article shows, a good many of those failing students weren't failing at all.

Does it really matter what any teacher does or whether students cram for 60 hour weeks/ 52 weeks a year? In the end, whatever results are desired will be determined with the setting of a cut score. If the people in power want 75% of the students to fail, they will fail. No wonder so many parents are opting out. They have the critical reasoning skills that so many politicians lack. But no problem -- I'm sure if politicians were ever given a competency exam, the cut score would be set so that 99% of them pass.

The problem for the education reformers is that enough parents see through the reform scam and are calling them on it.

The state will try and hide the official opt-out numbers as best it can, will tout the number of students who took the exam (especially in urban areas where the percentage of opt outs was small), but the reality is, the more they rig the exams for failure, the more the opt out movement will grow.

Honesty is not a trait of the education reform movement - manipulation and expediency is.

Alas, the manipulation and expediency the movement exhibits will ultimately be its undoing.

Cuomo Employs Shock Doctrine To Blow Up New York's Public Education System

You claim the following:

The fact that only about one third of students are proficient on state tests in math and language arts was “simply unacceptable,” the letter said.

In fact, the test scores were rigged by NYSED Commissioner King and Regents Chancellor Tisch so that only one third would be "proficient."

Here is Diane Ravitch from 2013 on that rigging:

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.

This is Shock Doctrine in action from Andrew Cuomo and the so-called education leaders in this state.

They artificially lowered the scores by increasing the "rigor" of the tests (done before any of the new curriculum for the new tests was developed, btw), now they claim the lowered scores are reason for why they must blow up the school system and radically "reform" it.

They created the problem, now they use it to push through the policies they want anyway (i.e., school privatization.)

Sometimes It's Cool To Do Nothing

NAEP scores out - small gains on math and reading.

WE MUST DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS!!!

WE CANNOT ALLOW THIS!!!

SOMEBODY MUST BE FIRED, WE MUST CHANGE EVERYTHING AND MAKE SURE THIS DOESN'T HAPPEN AGAIN!!!

WE CANNOT WAIT ANY LONGER!!!!

CHANGE COMES NOW!!!!

Tests As Shock And Awe

Leonie Haimson weighed on what the education reform establishment is doing with by rigging the scores to dramatically fall: 

So why are King, Arne Duncan, Joel Klein and the billionaires like Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch who are pulling the strings, so determined to prove that more that 69% of the students throughout New York State are failing?  This is the Shock Doctrine at work.  Naomi Klein has observed that when you scare people enough, it is easier to persuade them to allow you to make whatever radical changes you want, since the status quo will be perceived as so disastrous. In the case of these men, they would like to convince parents that their corporate agenda, including a steady diet of developmentally unsound standards, the Common Core’s rigid quota for “informational text” and overemphasis on testing,  and their favorite policies of closing schools and firing teachers based on test scores, expanding charter schools and online learning, data-mining and outsourcing educational services to for-profit vendors will somehow improve the quality of education in our state, even though there is little or no evidence for any of these policies.  

And Leonie reminds us that it is King who set the bar for the scores and that bar is an arbitrary one:

The truth is that the new cut scores that determine the different proficiency levels on the state exams – which decide how many kids “pass” or are at Level 3 and 4 -- are arbitrary and set by Commissioner King.  He can set them to create the illusion that our schools are rapidly improving, as the previous Commissioner did, or he can set them to make it look that our public schools are failing, as King now is doing, to bolster support for his other policies.

       The primary evidence that Commissioner King now bases his overly-harsh cut scores upon is that the results are mirror the percent of students who test “proficient” or above on the NAEPs.  Yet while the NAEPs are reliable to discern trends in test scores, because they remain relatively stable over time, the cut scores that determine the various NAEP achievement levels are VERY controversial. See Diane Ravitch on how the NAEP’s benchmarks are “unreasonably high”; or this article that reveals that even the National Academy of Sciences has questioned the setting of the NAEP proficiency levels, and how many experts believe that level 2 on the NAEPs – or basic -- should be used instead to estimate which students are on track for college:

Fully 50% of 17-year-olds judged to be only basic by NAEP ultimately obtained four-year degrees. Just one third of American fourth graders were said to be proficient in reading by NAEP in the mid-1990s at the very time that international assessments of fourth-grade reading judged American students to rank Number Two in the world.

Despite running a pretty good report, WABC 7 didn't get to the real meat of the story:

The tests were rigged to make the state's schools look bad, to make teachers look bad, to make students look bad, because there is an agenda at work here - the Shock Doctrine.

So Much For Michelle Rhee's "Miracle" In D.C.

From Bill Turque at the Washington Post:

Michael Casserly is not a reporter, so he can’t be accused of “burying the lead,” newspaper parlance for failing to place what’s new and most significant at the beginning of a story. Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a non-profit that provides research and other support to urban school systems, wrote an opinion piece for Sunday’s Post (“A Chancellor Up to the Challenge” ) supporting the nomination of Acting Chancellor Kaya Henderson for the permanent post. Henderson is scheduled to appear before D.C. Council on Thursday.

Casserly, also a strong supporter of Henderson’s predecessor, Michelle A. Rhee, walks through the signs of progress in the District, including increased enrollment and graduation rates, and impressive growth in fourth and eighth grade scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

But wedged into the seventh paragraph is this caveat:

“An analysis by my organization also indicates that the D.C. public schools score well below what one would expect statistically, compared with other cities with similar poverty, language, race, disability and family characteristics. Students show unusual difficulty reading and interpreting texts, evaluating and critiquing information, identifying appropriate measurement instruments, and solving problems involving geometric shapes. There is much more work to be done.”

Casserly says the full report will be available soon. It’s likely to generate a news story or two.

Casserly can try and hide the truth all he wants - if the NAEP scores for D.C. do not compare well to other cities with similar poverty, language, race, disability and family characteristics, but D.C.'s own test scores show great improvement even as allegations of widespread cheating abound under Rhee, something funky happened in D.C. under Rhee.

It is amazing to me that the two most prominent "education miracle workers" - Klein and Rhee - still have cache in D.C. and other power broker circles.

Klein left NYC with the test scores as low as when he came in and the achievement gap between white and Asian students and black and Hispanic students was larger than before he took over the school system.

Rhee is under scrutiny for widespread cheating on D.C. tests and now an NAEP analysis will show that D.C. does not score as well as other cities with similar poverty, language, race, disability and family characteristics. This indicates that those vaunted D.C. test score gains Rhee bragged about may have indeed come from cheating.

And yet, even after all this Rhee, Klein still gets to write jive opinion pieces in the Washington Post and Rhee gets to do the same in the NY Daily News.

Both stand to make millions from their "education reform" work.

What a country.