Merryl Tisch And John King Have Rigged The State Tests To Produce "Failing" Results

Diane Ravich posted this today:

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."

Fred Smith: What Passage Topics Were Field Tested In The 3rd-8th Grade ELA Tests?

Fred Smith left a comment on this post I wrote about the Daily News editorial that took Pearson to the woodshed over the G&T test fiasco but left them unscathed over the Common Core tests.

Fred wants to know the passage topics from each of the various test forms in each grade, 3rd-8th, so we can know which one's Pearson was field testing.

Here's what he wrote:

The likelihood and level of incompetence extends to the April 2013 Common Core ELA and Math tests. And to hide the operational items from scrutiny, to fail to issue technical information on the tests in a timely way, to conceal basic information on the structure of the statewide exams and to forbid teachers and principals from uttering a word about the exams is an automatic condemnation of their quality and worth.

Perdido, I saw the Grade 5 ELA (Form C) Book 1 at the Daily News last week.I know the subject of all six reading passages on that form. Do you think we could ask 5th grade teachers who gave the other three forms (A, B and D) to share their recollections about the passages on the form they administered? We're not asking about the specific content or about the multiple-choice items. We're asking about the topics that were covered (similar to the way the Daily News described: A poem "Aloneness;" What are Wind Tunnels;" and "From Rock into Soil.")

That way we would know what the readings dealt with and we could figure our which passages were being field tested. Those would be the passages that were unique to each form. Thus, since SED and Pearson won't even tell us how many items were field tested, we would have a way to know and to determine how many of the Book 1 items actually counted and how many were being taken to help Pearson develop the next round of tests--which we're paying for twice--to develop and to sell to us--all the while keeping us in the dark.

It's a way to break the veil of secrecy and give parents and teachers a chance to say they're are a part of the equation--not sheep to be led around in silence.

The field testing Pearson is conducting in these state exams is one more reason why the tests should not be used for high stakes decisions.

One of the biggest criticisms of the tests was that students didn't have enough time to finish all the items on the exams.

One of the reasons why students couldn't finish their tests is because Pearson was field testing exam passages and questions for future state tests, taking away precious time from students to work on the exam questions that counted toward their scores.

That Pearson, the NYSED and the Regents continue to think they can keep these test contents secret is outrageous.

I am sure Governor Andy will back them up on that, but it will be interesting to see what the courts say when the first lawsuits make their way there.

Especially if these tests are used to hold back students, evaluate teachers or close schools, as is expected (despite assurances from Merryl Tisch and John King to the contrary.)

Why Doesn't The Daily News See Pearson Problems With The Common Core Tests Too?

So the Daily News gets a lot right with this editorial on Pearson and their G&T test screw-ups:

Herewith a question that could well appear on the tough new Common Core standardized exams, developed by the giant testing company Pearson and administered to the city’s school children:

You are chancellor of an education department that insists on admitting 4-year-olds to gifted-and-talented programs by testing them and offering spots in strict rank order of their scores, using a formula that takes into account their birth dates.

You are the chancellor of an education department that also hires Pearson to apply the formula, which is impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t aced a grad school-level statistics course.

Your education department also knows that Pearson has messed up administering and grading exams across the country.

Pearson reports the G & T scores, only to have parents figure out that the company got them wrong for thousands of kids. You promise stern action. Pearson scores the test again. A parent questions the results and, again, Pearson is forced to admit that its geniuses got them wrong.

Who is dumber:

A) Pearson

B) You

C) It’s a tie

Explain your answer.

Here's the problem with this DN editorial:

 

They get that Pearson is a screw-up of a company that cannot be trusted to handle the high stakes on the G&T tests, but they don't apply the same logic to the Pearson-developed Common Core tests.

 

If Pearson screwed up the G&T tests twice even after assuring that they had performed quality control after the first round of screw-ups, what makes the Daily News editors think they haven't screwed up the Common Core tests as well.

 

Sure, Pearson assures us they haven't.

 

But they assured us after the first round of G&T errors as well that they had fixed the problem.

 

But they hadn't.

 

Now the Common Core tests are secret and any teacher who reveals the contents is under threat of losing her/his job.

 

The DN did get its hands on one exam and claims that after scrutinizing it, the exam holds up.

 

But that's not a good enough quality assurance for parents and teachers all across the state.

 

We need to know what all the tests, 3rd-8th grade, in both math and ELA look like and we need to know what the scoring rubric looks like as well.

 

It's not as if we don't have ample proof that Pearson is a company of incompetents.

 

The G&T and Hare and Pineapple fiascos are the ample proof of that.

 

So while I appreciate the DN coming down hard on Pearson and the city for the G&T debacle, I don't understand why they don't come down hard on Pearson and the state for the Common Core tests as well.

So long as they are kept secret, we cannot know if Pearson's "quality control assurance" is as good as the one they issued over the G&T tests.