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The Department of Education will start 2012 without a longtime official who has supervised number-crunching about test scores.

Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger, a two-decade veteran of the city schools who is currently a senior advisor to Chancellor Dennis Walcott, was picked last week to be Baltimore’s first schools “achievement and accountability officer.” Starting Jan. 3, she will head data efforts for Superintendent Andres Alonso, himself a product of New York City’s central schools administration. (She is already listed as chief accountability officer on Baltimore Public Schools’ website.)

The city will select a replacement within a month to take over Bell-Ellwanger’s responsibilities, which include managing research and analysis about the city schools and working with the state to align the two education departments’ policy agendas.

“She has built a strong and effective team, and I’m confident the DOE will remain in good hands,” Walcott said in a statement. “I thank Jennifer for her contributions and look forward to seeing all the great work that comes out of Baltimore.”

Bell-Ellwanger’s departure comes just weeks after the state’s seven-year data chief, David Abrams, resigned abruptly. His resignation followed the leak of a memo about much longer state tests. The two departures leave the city and state with key vacancies at a time when efforts to revamp assessment programs are ramping up. (more…)

Elementary and middle school students across the state will sit for more than four hours of math and reading tests this spring.

The total number of testing minutes has more than doubled in the last two years for third- and fifth-graders and is higher than last year in all grades, according to the state’s assessment schedule, which it released today. On average, students will spend an hour longer taking tests in 2012 than they did last April.

The total testing time is far lower than threatened in an SED memo that was leaked last month, which suggested that students might spend more than two hours in a single day taking tests. (The state’s seven-year testing chief resigned abruptly days after the leak.) But it still reflects a sharp increase as the state works to toughen tests following a 2010 revelation that previous scores had been vastly inflated.

In April, all students in elementary and middle school will spend three days each on reading and math exams. Last year, each test lasted only two days, with the exception of elementary-grade reading tests. (more…)

Two years after sending state tests to the end of the school year, the state is moving them earlier again, but its motives for doing so – to move forward on teacher evaluation plans – hit a road block today.

The 2011-2012 school year testing schedule published by the State Education Department this week has state tests for students in grades 3 through 8 starting April 16 and being graded by May 3. Last year, the tests began May 3, and scoring didn’t end until May 26.

The new dates might not be set in stone, because April 16 is the first day that students in New York City and many other school districts return from spring break. But the test scores will definitely be available earlier next year, state officials promised.

The earlier timing is necessary for state to put new teacher evaluation requirements in place, Commissioner of Education John King told district superintendents in a letter, sent Monday, that implored them not to be distracted by policy debates. The evaluation plan sets at least 20 percent of a teacher’s rating to be based on student test scores, but local districts still need to negotiate with unions if it wants more, according to a court ruling today.

Two years ago, the state moved test dates from January and March until May in part to make it possible to attribute a student’s performance to his teacher that year. A side effect is that scores came out later — this year, not until mid-August. That timeline meant that had the evaluation plan been online, teacher ratings couldn’t have been completed. It also meant that for the second straight year, the city had to send students to summer school based on predicted scores, which were sometimes wrong. (more…)

Despite our ongoing attempt to streamline the mountain of information that came with the state’s release of the 2010-2011 test scores, there are still plenty of takeaways that haven’t been said on a press release or at a press conference.  After taking a slightly deeper look at the data, here are 10 worthwhile bulletins to consider:

• Some of the neediest students took a step back; others showed progress. Students who are identified as English Language Learners, or ELL, improved slightly in math, but took another step back from statistical gains they made on the english test (ELA) earlier in the decade. While nearly half of the city’s non-ELL students met the state’s ELA standards, just 12 percent ELL students did so. That’s down from 34 percent two years ago, when the standards were easier and 1 percent drop from a year ago. The ELL students improved slightly in math. Special education students improved in both ELA and math.
• The achievement gap remains vast. Schools in poor neighborhoods still struggle the most. In the South Bronx — one of the nation’s poorest congressional districts — and central Brooklyn, average proficiency rates were below 30 percent in ELA and below 40 percent in math. (Citywide rates were 57 percent in math; 44 percent in ELA). In the city’s more affluent neighborhoods, like Bayside, the Upper West Side and lower Manhattan, scores hovered at significantly higher rates. District 26 in Queens topped out in both subjects, with 74 percent proficiency in reading and 88 percent proficiency in math.
• New doesn’t always mean better. More than a dozen schools in their first year of testing spanned both extremes of the performance spectrum. Half of them, including The Active Learning Elementary School, whose entire 20-student third grade class was perfectly proficient, significantly outperformed other schools in their districts. But many others struggled just as much as the closed schools that they were supposed to replace. In four such schools, less than a quarter of students did not meet reading standards. Just 5.8 percent of students at one school, Urban Scholars Community School, were proficient in reading.
• Charter schools outperformed their neighbors, mostly. Citywide, 69 percent of students in charter schools met standards in math, up from 63 percent last year. In ELA, 45 percent were proficient, up from 43 percent last year. Both beat citywide averages. Nearly 75 percent of the charter school classes that took a state exam scored better than their districts, on average. (more…)

Confronted with heightened standards on the state exams, only half of all summer school students graduated to the next grade this year, city officials said today.

New York State education officials made the annual math and English exams more difficult to pass this year after realizing that, over the course of the last three years, the tests had become too easy. As a result, the number of students who failed the exams and had to attend summer school rose from 10,000 in 2009 to about 22,800 this year.

But even after weeks of summer school, the bar remained too high for many students to pass. Roughly 11,500 failed the exams again on the second try and are being held back. The other 11,300 passed the tests and have advanced to the next grade.

Last year, when students sat for the then less-difficult exams, about 80 percent were promoted onto the next grade at the end of summer school. (more…)

In the wake of new evidence that New York State’s standardized tests have become easier to pass, education officials and state legislators have focused on moving on and improving the exams. But Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. would like to revisit the past.

In a letter to Senator Suzi Oppenheimer, who chairs the State Senate’s education committee, Diaz demanded that Oppenheimer call State Education Commissioner Richard Mills in to testify at hearings about the exams. Mills oversaw the State Education Department for 14 years and retired in 2009.

“Many of the issues occurred under his watch and he has a responsibility to answer the many questions that these recent results have raised,” Diaz wrote.

Oppenheimer has already said she plans to hold hearings in Manhattan that will focus on the now-lowered passing rates and re-calibrated proficiency standards, but she told the New York Post that she doesn’t want to drag Mills to the witness stand.

“‘I see no value in it,” she said. “He did what was best back then.” (more…)

What does it mean for tests to get easier? And is that really what happened to New York’s tests?

The analysis that has spurred that idea in the last few weeks actually found something slightly different. The tests aren’t necessarily easier, in the way that a kindergarten spelling bee is easier than the SAT. Instead, between 2007 and 2009, students who hadn’t learned much came out looking like they had.

This is an important distinction because it points to a different culprit behind the dropping standards than simply the individual test items themselves. Instead, Harvard professor Daniel Koretz – the lead author of the analysis commissioned by the state education department — names two possible causes: a phenomenon called “score inflation” and a possible psychometric error tied to an obscure state law.

The actual questions on the test play a role in both, but just as important is the practice of prepping students extensively for tests. Another key is a state law that forces New York to release all test items publicly, making it easier for teachers to practice test prep and making it harder for officials to keep tests consistent over time. (more…)

Even if New York State education officials had not decided to raise the scores needed to pass the state exams, today would not have been a particularly good news day for the city.

That’s because in addition to having the state call fewer students proficient, both the city and state saw students’ average raw scores stagnate.

For years, state and city students average scores on the math and reading exams have risen. But from 2009 to 2010, the city students’ average reading exam scores held steady at 662. This trend continued on the math test, which also saw no significant increases or decreases in students’ average scale scores.

When the scores were separated out according to students’ ethnicities, they showed the same result: a flat line.

Speaking at Tweed Courthouse today, Mayor Bloomberg said the steady scores were a sign of progress. “The numbers that really matter are the actual scores,” he told reporters, adding that the state had made the tests more difficult this year. (more…)

Source: New York State Education Department

The day of reckoning has arrived.

After weeks of warning that adjusted standards would mean far fewer students passing state exams this year, state education officials released the exact numbers today.

Average raw scores on the state third through eighth grade math and reading exams remained flat. But because the state decided to raise the scores required for a student to be deemed proficient, the number of students passing fell sharply.

In New York City and other big cities, the number of students passing reading exams dropped by more than a quarter — from 68.8 percent of city students passing last year to 42.4 percent this year in reading, for example.

Just over 53 percent of third through eighth-grade students statewide passed the reading exam, compared to 77 percent last year. Around 61 percent of students passed their math exams, compared with more than 86 percent last year.

Pass rates of students learning English, students with disabilities, and poor students fell the farthest. The percentage of students learning English who passed the reading exam fell by more than half, from 36 percent to under 15 percent. Just 15 percent of students with disabilities passed the reading exam, compared to 39 percent last year. (more…)

A reader recently drew my attention to a deceptively unassuming chart that the city often uses to defend its heavy reliance on state tests.

The chart shows how neatly eighth graders’ scores on the tests predict their future academic success. The higher the score they get, the better their shot at graduating high school with a Regents diploma — the only kind that will count come 2014.

But the reader pointed out that the chart also includes a more frightening statistic: Students who score at a level considered proficient by every measure, a 3 out of possible 4, only have a 55% shot of getting a Regents diploma.

(more…)