45% of LI test-takers boycott ELA exam; Bob Braun Blasts the Weak-Kneed Charter Expose in New Jersey Press; Welcome back to t
panaritisp
"In the Patchogue-Medford district, where only the paper-based test was given, the refusal rate of 75.9 percent ran about the same as last year.
Superintendent Michael J. Hynes said district officials had received materials from the state, including information to share with parents about changes the state had made in the exams.
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Good piece though it omits the rampant state test score inflation that occurred between 2003-2010 and the current inflation enabled by the continual change in scaling and/or cut scores that through politically manipulation makes it look like achievement is increasing while on the NAEP state scores have been flat for more than a decade.
by Fred Smith | New York Daily News | Apr 02, 2019 | 1:39 PM
Opening day for this year’s tests has arrived. But the annual New York testing program is worse than foolish. It has been fundamentally useless.
The federally mandated exams in reading and math are aimed at 1.2 million students statewide in grades 3 through 8. This week, 440,000 New York City students will spend much of two days taking the English Language Arts tests. Next month, two more days are scheduled for administering the math exams.
The inefficacy of our massive testing system can be seen by tracking changes in the program itself over the last decade — from the time the Common Core Learning Standards were being introduced to all public schools until now.
Basic transformations occurred along this “Core-aligned” testing timeline that render efforts to understand the results from year to year a nullity:
- The testing framework was revised in 2010 and 2011 at the insistence of the Board of Regents chancellor as part of her sweeping "education reform agenda,” which made more “rigorous” exams its cornerstone.
- A transition period (2012) allowed the new test publisher, Pearson, Inc., one year to familiarize itself with the scope of the statewide program prior to full-fledged inauguration of the Core Learning Standards.
- Core-aligned tests were initiated in 2013 to establish a baseline against which to measure student progress in meeting the standards.
- There was a seismic shift in the statewide testing population in 2014 and 2015, with 20% of the students opting out of the exams. (Note: Most of the resistance arose in schools and districts outside of New York City, where parents saw how education had been shackled by all the testing.)
- Time limits were removed from the tests in 2016, taking away uniformity in their administration and again making comparisons with previous years invalid.
- In 2017, a new publisher was brought in 2017 (Questar Assessment) after a handoff from Pearson. This is an unaccounted-for source of variation in the construction of the exams and the results they yield.
- Concurrent with the arrival of Questar, the State Education Department added another confounding variable by debuting computer-based tests in hundreds of schools that had the technological capacity to administer them. Have-not schools continued to take traditional, No. 2 paper-and-pencil tests. How did having two testing modes differentially impact the results? We don’t know.
- In 2018, the number of combined English and math testing days was reduced from six to four, the tests were shortened and the scoring scale was altered, further defying attempts to make sense of results or draw conclusions about progress.
How do you keep score, either of individual kids’ progress or of schools’ overall performance, when the rules keep changing and the goalposts keep moving? You can’t.
All these shifts has implications for the hot-button Specialized High School Admissions Test. The debate over the use of a single test score to decide the fate of 5,000 students seeking entrance into a prestigious high school is an argument that concerns the apex of the city’s educational pyramid.
It has drowned out serious discussion of what has happened to the 440,000 kids at the base — especially the youngest children, the 150,000 third and fourth graders who have been befuddled by the ELA and math exams, as well as the English Language Learners, special education students and children of color on whom the tests have a negative impact.
It has also cast doubt on proposals to weigh scores obtained on the seventh-grade state exams in some vague composite formula that, under Mayor de Blasio’s reform, would be used in lieu of the SHSAT. This would merely preserve the cruel farce of the current testing program and preclude serious consideration of alternative forms of student assessment.
We must recognize that in virtually every year from 2012 through 2018 there have been differences in the publishers, the test population and the test parameters.
Normally, within a given year, judgments can be made about where one student stands relative to another. But when time limits were removed from the exams in 2016, this possibility was lost. Some students took 50 minutes to complete a test, while others took as much time as they needed. Without uniform test-taking conditions, children in the same schoolroom, grade or district cannot reasonably be compared with others
Such discontinuity is antithetical to the establishment of a coherent testing system. When are we going to move on from this confusion?
Smith, a testing specialist and consultant, served as an administrative analyst for the New York City public schools.
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NYS Online Common Core ELA Test Crashes – Alan Singer on Daily Kos
 | Sooner or later State Education Departments (and maybe airplane manufacturers) are going to learn that computers, algorithms and high-stakes tests are not foolproof. Let’s hope they learn before they completely undermine education in the United States.... | |
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