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Put the Department of Education’s Deputy Chancellor for Accountability Shael Polakow-Suransky in a room with Diane Ravitch, one of the city’s most outspoken critics, and you might reasonably expect sparks to fly.

But when NYU’s Wagner Education Policy Studies Association put them together on a panel earlier this week, where they agreed turned out to be notable.

The topic of the panel was how federal involvement shapes local education policy. (I moderated the panel; Evan Stone, the founder of Educators 4 Excellence, also spoke.)

Ravitch opened by sharply criticizing the move to hold teachers and schools accountable for their students’ scores on standardized tests. But when talk turned to how future standardized tests should be built, Ravitch and Suransky agreed with each other. Ravitch said:

I’m very supportive of the idea of developing new assessments, and I think it’s a very important thing. But it will take years.

Just as these common core standards were written in a little over a year — it took me three years working on the California history standards. I worked on history standards in other states, and it was never done in only a year. So I would like to think that it’s going to take a lot of time to do this well because anything that’s done hurriedly is not going to survive…. (more…)

The difference between being anti-testing and being anti-today’s testing regime can sometimes get glossed over. But the wide space between the two positions was demonstrated damningly in a paper published this spring.

Written by two vehement advocates for the national tests now under construction, the paper is mainly a blueprint for what a re-imagined national testing system could look like. But it begins with a succinct, damning description of what its authors call our current “testing bind”:

Though no one intended to do so, we have created a testing bind that, as it tightens, drives attention away from the intended standards. The effects are greatest in the poorest schools. The nation’s current approach to raising achievement and increasing equity in the education system is having an effect opposite from the intended one. It is trapping poor children in a basic‐skills teaching program that gives them little chance to acquire the deeper knowledge and abilities we seek for everyone. And it may be lowering the learning opportunities even for many more privileged children as schools turn their energies to the test‐based basic skills program.

The paper, “An American Examination System,” is written by two people who may very well have a hand in shaping the new testing regime: University of Pittsburgh professor Lauren B. Resnick, who helped draft the “common core” standards endorsed by President Obama and many states, and Wireless Generation CEO Larry Berger, whose company is likely to make a bid to build the technological pieces of the national tests that will be tied to those standards. (more…)

McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw III, appearing on CNBC. The full interview can be seen here.

What goes on at McGraw-Hill, the mysterious Midtown company that makes New York’s state tests? One answer: The company is not-so-quietly producing a slew of ratings lambasted for being inflated, corrupt, and totally bankrupt.

I don’t mean more state test scores. I mean credit ratings churned out by Standard and Poor’s, the ratings agency that makes up nearly half of the company’s business, according to CNBC.

Yes, that’s the same ratings agency that has been criticized for inflating the value of companies from Enron to Bear Stearns.

One of the biggest criticisms of S&P and agencies like it is that their customers have an inherent interest in being rated highly. (more…)

As discussed here and here, the state released the results of the 2009-2010 Grade 3-8 Math and English language arts test results last week. The focus has been on the new, higher bar for passing the tests and the resulting large drop in the percentage of students judged as proficient. Charter schools, like traditional public schools across the city, saw their much-touted proficiency gains plummet. Barbara Martinez at the Wall Street Journal did a good job of summarizing charter schools’ results in New York City. In order to give a more complete picture, I analyzed the 2009-2010 results for charters to see which schools performed best and how the schools performed compared to their traditional public school counterparts. I also posted data on individual schools below and in this spreadsheet.

PROFICIENCY

I defined proficiency in the customary way: as the proportion of students at a charter school that scored a Level 3 or higher on the ELA or math tests. In order to look at overall school performance, I averaged the proficiency rate across grade levels broken down by subject, and then took the average of both the ELA and math tests to come up with a single “proficiency” number. The schools that had the highest average proficiency rates were Harlem Success Academy, Icahn Charter School 2, the Bronx Charter School for Excellence, and the Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School. (The other two Icahn Schools also scored in the top 10 of all charter schools.) To be clear, different schools serve different grades and comparing performance across grades can be misleading.

I’ve posted a chart below that lists the average proficiency rates as well as the ELA and math proficiency rates, for every charter school that posted test results during the 2009-2010 school year. Scroll over the name of the school to find out what grades the school services, which grades were tested, and other salient information relating to the school’s performance.

(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…)

Beginning next year, state math and reading tests will be given in May, rather than two months apart in January and March, the state decided earlier this week. But beyond the barest outline of the schedule, details about the change are still unclear.

Details up in the air include when exactly the tests will be given and how results will be tabulated in time for the start of the next school year. “Work is now underway to revise current examination calendars and scoring timelines,” State Education Department deputy commissioner Johanna Duncan-Poitier said in materials released this week.

The schedule change is throwing schools’ plans for next year into question just as teachers are leaving for the summer. Steven Evangelista, the principal of Harlem Link Charter School, said his teachers have already planned their lessons for all of next year, and finding out that the state tests are moving is forcing them to revise the plans.

“At this late date, when we have already mapped out our entire curriculum and assessment calendar for 2009-10, changing the date of high-stakes tests throws a monkey wrench in our plans,” Evangelista said, adding that he wondered whether getting results over the summer would give teachers enough time to use the data to inform their instruction. He said he hadn’t heard about the Regents’ debate before this week.

In the past, some schools have focused more heavily on reading before the state test in January, then shifted their focus to math in the months before the March math test. Some schools also plan different kinds of lessons for after the state tests, when the pressure to prepare students for the exams has lifted.

Even schools that shun explicit test prep, including Evangelista’s, say the schedule change could pose problems for them. (more…)

A Daily News report this week cast doubt on the validity of the state’s math scores. A major problem the News pointed to is that the math tests seem to repeat themselves, broken-record style, making it easy for teachers to coach their students on how to give correct answers — without necessarily understanding the underlying math. A second problem is that the tests may be getting easier over time, the story said.

Here’s a graphical portrait of what this means in practice, courtesy of Jennifer Jennings, the doctoral student at Columbia University whose analysis informed the News’s story.

A math question seventh-graders answered in 2009:

A math question for seventh-graders in 2008:

And finally a question from the same test’s 2007 version, assessing the same concept, but in a much more difficult way: (more…)

Next year, the state’s English tests could be missing one crucial component: writing.

That’s the conclusion that educators are drawing after the Board of Regents weighed a proposal earlier this month to eliminate the open-ended question section of the state’s standardized tests — the only part of the third through eighth grade testing regime that asks students to write out their answers in sentences.

The proposal is one of several ideas the Board of Regents, the state panel that sets New York’s education policy, is considering in order to speed up the test-grading process, following a new federal regulation ordering states to tell schools sooner whether or not they are meeting states standards. (State test scores play a large part in making that decision.) Changing the way the tests are graded could also cut costs.

The Regents have been studying how to meet the new federal requirement for almost a year. The prospect of scrapping writing first surfaced publicly when the Regents published the findings of a survey the board conducted to study the question. Of 22,000 parents and educators surveyed, 85% said the essay questions should remain. (more…)