GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Schools are still waiting for the results of state ELA and math tests, exactly one year after the 2010 scores were announced.

The July 26 Principals’ Weekly newsletter said that the state had “postponed the release” of the grade 3-8 scores, though the New York State Education Department said today that results were right around the corner.

“The release this year is imminent and will be announced shortly,” NYSED spokesman Tom Dunn said.

The Principals’ Weekly item told principals that after the scores are released, they will need to send “July promotion update letters” to students who had been held back, and to students who failed the tests but had been promoted to the next grade on the expectation that they would pass.

Now, it looks like those July updates may not come until August.

Clemente Lopes, principal of Horace Greeley Middle School in Long Island City, said that he was anxious to see his school’s scores—for planning, but also out of curiosity.

“I’d like to see how my students perform. I’m like a parent—I want to know how my kids did,” he said. (more…)

When the state announced plans to push back the date of the annual tests, some teachers and administrators bristled. But now the change is complicating a rite of passage: figuring out which students are promoted to the next grade and which are going to summer school.

This year’s delayed testing schedule puts New York City in the awkward position of choosing which students to send to summer school without knowing whether they passed the state’s annual math and English exams. Currently, schools have their students’ raw test scores, but they don’t know whether the scale score passes the official state cut-off for passing, because the state hasn’t set cut-off scores yet.

In response, the city is working with the state to set their own cutoff scores months before the official results come out in August. (more…)

Where can you find the most bored children in New York?

Last week I visited P.S. 13 in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn, a school where you would expect to see some anxiety before the high-stakes English exam that will be given next Monday. Instead, I met a cast of bright and precocious students plodding through test prep worksheets with little supervision.

P.S. 13 has been a troubled school for years though its last city-issued progress report calls it a “B” school. In 2004, it managed to remove itself from the state’s list of schools at risk of being closed, but it’s now in danger of landing back on that list. Students know a lot is riding on their test scores. During my visit, many could rattle off the dates of the upcoming tests from memory.

Morning announcements over the loud speaker included test tips like encouraging students to get a good night’s rest and eat a full breakfast (84 percent of P.S. 13 students qualify for free or reduced lunch). In advance of the test, the regular schedule had been altered so that on Thursdays students only focused on reading and writing and Fridays were math-only days. (more…)

Passing the state reading test might be even easier than recent criticism has suggested, a former Department of Education testing analyst is arguing.

Independent statistician Frederick Smith examined the way free-response questions were graded and found that virtually every student received enough points on that section to then pass the test by guessing randomly on the multiple-choice questions.

Smith’s finding expands on an informal study by a city teacher who concluded that arbitrarily filling in a pattern of multiple-choice answers and leaving the open-response section blank could yield scores high enough to promote a student to the next grade in New York City. That amounts to eight correct multiple choice answers on the fifth-grade English Language Arts exam.

Smith found that students who answered only 6 multiple choice questions correctly almost certainly would also pass the Level 2 bar. That’s because an overwhelming majority–99 percent–of fifth-graders who took the exam in 2009 received at least two points on the open-ended essay and free response sections, which would boost them to the eight-point cut-off level.

In addition, more than 97 percent of students received three or more points on that section, meaning that they would have had to answer just five multiple-choice questions correctly to receive a Level 2 score. (more…)

City schoolchildren will need to boost their test-taking endurance before next spring, when students in grades 3 through 8 take two state tests just four school days apart.

A revised exam schedule released by the state today dramatically condenses the testing timeline. It also halves the length of time alloted to scoring, eliciting concern from educators statewide about how schools will manage the new schedule.

The state announced last month that it would be moving state English language arts and math tests, previously given in January and March, closer to the end of the school year. City schools officials said then that they had lobbied for the change but hoped that the two tests would be separated by at least some time.

The schedule released today separates the two tests by just four school days. (more…)

An effort to move state tests later in the year is gaining momentum, following a state Education Department survey that shows wide support among teachers for the change. More than 80 percent of nearly 23,000 parents, teachers, and school administrators the department surveyed this spring said they favor at least some rescheduling of the tests, and the state Board of Regents could implement a change as soon as the 2010-2011 school year, a member said.

Right now, students take English tests in January and math tests in March, but critics have said the timing doesn’t give teachers enough time to bring students up to grade level. The early testing also makes it difficult to use test scores to evaluate teachers’ effectiveness.

The Board of Regents, the state board that sets education policy, requested the survey. Betty Rosa, a Regents member from the Bronx, said that the Regents are likely to propose a change in the timing of tests for the 2010-2011 school year. “All the members have been very, very united on this front,” Rosa said.

Merryl Tisch, the new Regents chancellor, did not return several requests for comment. (more…)

Much ado is made every year about how students do on state tests. But are individual students’ test scores useful for them and their teachers?

Ruben, a Bronx teacher who blogs at Is our Children Learning?, says they might not be, because the scores come months after the tests are given and don’t give specific information about students’ skills. In a post about finding out his students’ reading scores yesterday (some improved; others showed a decline), he writes:

What’s most frustrating is how little the numbers tell me. We’re talking about a test that was taken in January. So the data doesn’t really even speak to the students I’m currently teaching. The data doesn’t really speak to anything at all, because it isn’t dissected in any way to show strengths in needs in specific areas such as vocabulary, drawing conclusions or writing. All I have are numbers, numbers that in many ways contradict what I know to be true about the reading and writing abilities of my students.

Of course all this is inconsequential, because even if the test was flawed, or too easy (the whole city went up 20%? Really?), those flaws apply to 4th grade students (and their teachers) universally. … Ultimately, I know my students should have done better, because pretty much everyone else did better. So, now it’s time to figure out what went wrong, so I can get it right next year.

Ruben’s objections to how the state delivers test scores represent two of the reasons Department of Education has offered to justify the introduction of more frequent, rapidly scored interim assessments in city classrooms.

I’ve posted about Ruben’s insights before, here, here, and here.

A screenshot (including a caption) from today's online press conference about state test scores, featuring State Education Commissioner Richard Mills and Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch.

More students across New York State scored proficient on the state reading and writing test this year than ever before, and gains by black and Hispanic students drove the improvements. The difference between white and black students’ average scores is now at 18 points, down from 28 in 2006.

More students in New York City scored proficient, too; proficiency rose 18 percentage points to 69 percent from 51 percent in 2006. According to the city Department of Education, the difference between the percentage of black and Hispanic children who scored proficient on the test and the percentage of white students who did now stands at 22 percentage points, down from more than 29 three years ago.

State school leaders described the gains across New York as “moderate” because much of the increases were driven by a greater proportion of children just squeaking past the proficiency cutoff, State Education Commissioner Richard Mills explained during a press conference this morning.

The difference comes from looking at the actual scale scores students received, rather than the percentage of students deemed proficient. Scale scores are considered the most statistically useful way to evaluate test score gains. (Aaron Pallas has written about this on GothamSchools.)

Mills explained the distinction by providing three ways to look at this year’s sixth-grade scores. The first is by looking purely at what proportion of students in the grade tested at basic proficiency. According to that metric, 81 percent of this year’s sixth-graders met proficiency, compared to 60.4 percent of sixth-graders in 2006, the first year of a new statewide curriculum and testing program.

Looking at proficiency over time, 69 percent of children in 3rd grade in 2006 met standards; those are the same children who posted an 81 percent proficiency rating as sixth-graders this year. But the scale scores of that same cohort of children actually dropped slightly over the same period, from 669 to 667. (more…)

Some people think scoring the state English language arts exam is a piece of cake. But judging from the experience of one teacher-blogger who was sent away from her school last week to grade tests, it’s not actually an easy job at all. The teacher, Miss Brave, writes that the new requirement that tests be scored at centralized locations makes the task even harder:

My fellow graders and I did our best to be thorough. We frequently passed tests around the table to get a second opinion, and for those essays we were truly on the fence about, we had spirited discussions and consulted our rubrics frequently before committing to a final grade. When grading the editing passages, in which students have to correct grammatical errors, I always counted twice to make sure I was grading correctly. But we were only one room, and who knows what was going on in the other rooms at the other grading sites? Some schools sent intermediate and junior high school teachers to grade third graders’ exams, and some of those teachers had to be gently reminded that they were dealing with the writing of eight-year-olds, not teenagers. Some graders seemed to be handing out 4s to nearly every essay, while others seemed to be unwilling to give the students the benefit of the doubt. Despite our supervisors’ best efforts to get everyone on the same page of the same rubric, grading the ELA, I learned, is frighteningly subjective. The exams we graded, for example, all came from districts outside our own — districts that tend to be high-scoring. I teach a population of mostly ELLs in a low-scoring district, so I was pretty impressed by the work that I read — until I thought about teachers who are used to teaching high-scoring kids in other districts who would be reading the exams from my district and wondering what the kids could possibly be thinking.

Miss Brave also says her grading site was disorganized, and little attention appeared to be paid to concerns about cheating. Read her whole account here.

Teachers across the city are leaving their classrooms this week to grade the state reading tests required by the No Child Left Behind law. This is a change from last year, when they were paid extra to grade the tests after school and on weekends. But the new arrangement also carries costs. Meredith Kolodner recently pointed out in the Daily News that schools lose not only the teachers’ time but also the money it costs to pay a substitute.

This could be a matter of “too bad, but move on.” In terrible budget times, the system has no choice but to use school time to grade the exams. Except for one thing: It might be that the time allotted to grade the tests is too long.

Eva Moskowitz, the Harlem charter school operator and former City Council member, says that when her teachers graded 60 children’s practice third-grade English Language Arts tests earlier this year, under exactly the prescribed conditions, the whole procedure took just 43 minutes. Yet grading of the ELA tests in district schools began last week and will go on through the middle of February. Charter schools, whose grading is coordinated by the New York City Center for Charter School Excellence, are being asked to send teachers for three-day stints.

“This is a very lickety-split operation,” Moskowitz said. “How you would drag it out over three days, I don’t know.” She said that the actual tasks required are simple. “This is like two sentences and an editing passage. And the rubric is very strict,” she said. “I don’t know why we’re asking teachers to do this, frankly. To me, high school students would suffice. Maybe even good middle school students would suffice.”

Andrew Jacob, a spokesman for the city school system, said there is a simple reason for the time demands: “We have a lot of tests to grade and we have a lot of measures in place to ensure that the tests are being graded accurately.” James Merriman, executive director of the charter center, said the grading process follows strict guidelines meant to ensure credible results.