The current push toward PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests aligned to the new Common Core standards have come in part as a natural response to our historical apples and oranges testing situation, I am sure. Data wizards of the past must have been regularly scratching their heads as they tried to compare Mississippi to Maine. Without common tests, that comparison could not be made, and in bygone days when states devised their own tests, no overarching, statistically valid comparison between states was possible.
Among other considerations, the Common Core was developed to help standardize data between states. I would like to pose a few questions, though. Do we need Mississippi and Maine to be comparable? If so, why? How do our students benefit? Will the benefits from that common test be worth the cost? Costs have been ignored in the Common Core experiment, yet those costs loom huge for many districts. Districts are rewriting curricula, sometimes virtually from scratch, buying thousands and thousands of dollars of new books, changing tried and true classroom lesson plans and materials, sending out entire staffs for professional development, buying new software, and re-teaching test-taking strategies across schools, among other changes demanded by the Common Core.
The costs and losses in the above sentence represent real commitments of time and money. I have worked on curriculum writing committees. The curricula I recently published for kindergarten and first grade in a near district? Teachers and administrators spent many hours, many school-day equivalents, choosing the materials expected to be presented in each grade. That time carried an opportunity cost. While developing a curriculum, teachers cannot be preparing lesson plans, calling parents or grading homework.
That re-teaching of test-taking strategies may represent days of lost learning time for students. Strategies for taking computerized, multiple-choice tests with multiple right answers for the same question are so different from the strategies needed to succeed on the old, paper-based, single-answer, multiple choice tests that schools may be spending days teaching new test-taking skills. Yes, students are learning during these days, but I’d still call those lost days. Teaching how to take new tests does not provide a great deal of actual knowledge that students can use to add to their understanding of English, math or the world around them.
Like No Child Left Behind, the Common Core curriculum represents a vast experiment conducted on America’s students, and one concern leaps out at me as educational bureaucrats push for the development of a single set of more demanding, national standards. To piggy-back on yesterday’s post, the idea that America’s educational ills somehow rest in our educational standards and that we can escape those ills by fixing the standards has no basis in evidence. By making the standards harder, we seem to believe, we will make our students smarter. We have zero proof for this assumption.
For data analysis purposes, attempting to standardize our standardized testing system makes sense, but the benefits of that data have never been explained to my satisfaction. What are we getting for our many changes? Fear of these new, harder tests has spawned an opt-out movement with the potential to render U.S. test statistics even less trustworthy than in the past. Unless students are stopped from physically opting out, passive-aggressive resistance to testing can destroy the reliability and validity of test results from new Common Core testing. If enough students refuse to test, gathering accurate data will become impossible.
Students who opt-out skew statistics based on already unreliable numbers. The following snippet from U.S. News and World Report, (Carolyn Thompson, Associated Press, Aug. 12, 2015) helps demonstrate why proof of academic progress as defined by standardized test scores cannot currently be demonstrated and, in fact, is becoming less demonstrable.
BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — About 20 percent of New York’s third- through eighth-graders refused to take the statewide English and math tests given in the spring, the state’s education chief said, acknowledging the opt-outs affected assessment data released Wednesday, which otherwise showed a slight uptick in overall student achievement.
About 900,000 students sat for the Common Core-aligned tests in April, while 200,000 opted out as part of a protest movement against what’s seen in New York and other states as an overreliance on testing in measuring student and teacher performance.
About 5 percent of students opted out of last year’s tests.
When one in five students refuse to take a test, any “acknowledgement” by the state’s education chief that assessment data was “affected” can only be considered disingenuous, especially when followed by an assertion that student achievement shows improvement. With that many missing numbers in the equation, it’s entirely possible that state student achievement went down, not up. New York school officials are hiding the truth if they suggest anything else. The population of students who opt-out will not reflect the population who take the test. I’d hazard it’s likely that many students who opt out will be those who have not done well historically on state standardized tests, students who expect to do badly on the new test. If so, state test scores might have been appreciably lower if scores from this group had been included along with those from students who chose to take the test. I can’t know whether this is true or not, though. I don’t have the data. Neither does the state of New York.
We seem to be in the process of upending American education in pursuit of yet another goal that will remain unreached and unreachable.
Eduhonesty: For readers who recognize the above quote from previous posts, I’ll confess I am using past material inside this post. But right now I have this blog of a hammer, and all these tests have begun to look like nails. I’ll take a break tomorrow from testing. I don’t want testing to keep becoming yesterday’s news, though.