Scores Drop on Ky.'s Common Core-Aligned Tests
This from
Education Week:
Results from new state tests in Kentucky—the first in the nation
explicitly tied to the Common Core State Standards—show that the share
of students scoring “proficient” or better in reading and math dropped
by roughly a third or more in both elementary and middle school the
first year the tests were given.
Kentucky in 2010 was the first state to adopt the common core in
English/language arts and mathematics, and the assessment results
released last week for the 2011-12 school year are being closely watched
by school officials and policymakers nationwide for what they may
reveal about how the common standards may affect student achievement in
coming years. So far, 46 states have adopted the English/language arts
common standards; 45 states have done so in math.
Two federally funded consortia are working on assessments based on
the common standards, and those tests are not slated to be fully ready
for schools until 2014-15. But Kentucky’s tests are generally understood
to be linked to the common core.
“What you’re seeing in Kentucky is a predictor of what you’re
going to see in the other states, as the assessments roll out next year
and the year after,” said Gene Wilhoit, the executive director of the
Washington-based Council of Chief State School Officers, which
spearheaded the common-core initiative along with the National Governors
Association. Mr. Wilhoit was also previously Kentucky’s education
commissioner.
Falling Scores
The drop in Kentucky’s scores conform to what state education
officials had expected: that students in grades 3-8 taking the new,
more-rigorous Kentucky Performance Rating of Education Progress, or
K-PREP, would not be able to reach their achievement levels of prior
years. Kentucky began implementing the common standards in the 2011-12
school year.
The biggest drop came at the elementary level. On the previous
Kentucky Core Content Tests, 76 percent of elementary students scored
proficient or higher in reading in the 2010-11 school year. That
percentage plunged to 48 percent for the K-PREP results in the 2011-12
school year, a drop-off in proficiency of more than a third.
In 2010-11, 73 percent of elementary students were proficient or
better in math, but that fell to 40.4 percent. That drop represents a 45
percent decline in the share of proficient students.
Middle schoolers’ decline was a little less steep. In reading,
they dropped from a 70 percent proficiency level in 2010-11 to 46.8
percent in 2011-12, a decline of a third. In math, proficiency-or-better
levels declined slightly more than that, from 65 percent in 2010-11 to
40.6 percent in 2011-12.
Overall, students in grades 3-8 demonstrated somewhat higher proficiency levels in reading than in math.
When new tests are introduced, states can expect scores to fall in
most cases, said Douglas McRae, a retired assessment designer who
helped build California’s testing system. “When you change the measure,
change the tests, then you interrupt the continuity of trend data over
time. That’s the fundamental thing that happens,” he said.
Kentucky developed its tests in conjunction with Pearson, the New
York City-based education and testing company, which is also crafting
curricula for the common core.
K-PREP does not represent the final, polished version of common-core assessments. The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium
are designing the tests that most states have signed on to for gauging
students’ mastery of the common standards nationwide beginning in the
2014-15 school year. (Kentucky belongs to the PARCC consortium.)
But Mr. Wilhoit said K-PREP represents the state’s best effort,
along with Pearson’s, “to develop an assessment that was representative
of the common core.”
Proficiency drops also occurred in the end-of-course tests in
reading and math Kentucky administered to high school students. But
those declines were smaller than those in the earlier grades, and a
state study shows that while the K-PREP tests are completely aligned
with the common standards, the high school end-of-course tests (from the
ACT QualityCore program) are only about 80 percent to 85 percent aligned to the standards.
The proficiency level in high school reading dropped from 65
percent to 52.2 percent (a figure 6 percentage points higher than the
state’s prediction), based on the end-of-course tests, while proficiency
in math fell from 46 percent to 40 percent on the Algebra 2 test,
beating the state’s prediction by 4 percentage points.
Commissioner’s Take
Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday said that students beat the state’s predictions
for both the K-PREP and end-of-course exams. Using a statistical model
that predicted ACT performance based on academic results in reading and
math in 2011, for example, the state estimated a 36 percentage-point
drop in elementary reading scores in 2011-12, instead of the actual
28-point drop.
“We’re just a little bit above our prediction, which I think is a pretty good testament to our teaching,” Mr. Holliday said.
Earlier exposure to the common standards, he suggested, would help younger students at first.
“It’s going to take a little longer to see middle and high school
growth on these tests,” Mr. Holliday said. “It’ll take about five years
to see an overall growth of significance at all levels.”
But based on national benchmarks, the new K-PREP tests may not
have been rigorous enough, said Richard Innes, an education policy
analyst at the Bluegrass Institute, a conservative-leaning Lexington,
Ky.-based think tank.
In a report released the week of Oct. 29 for the institute, Mr. Innes compared
the K-PREP math scores for 8th graders this year (41.5 percent
proficient or better) with the results on the ACT Explore test this year
(30.5 percent) and the National Assessment of Educational Progress
proficiency levels in 2011 (31 percent).
“There are questions in my mind as to whether they are rigorous
enough in several areas,” he said. Different subject tests appeared to
have been more rigorous in different grade levels, Mr. Innes said. The
math in middle schools appears to be the subject where K-PREP is less
rigorous than NAEP or Explore tests, he noted. He drew the same
conclusion about K-PREP reading results at the elementary school level.
One number that went up: the proportion of students qualifying as
college and/or career ready, which rose to 47 percent in 2011-12, from
38 percent the previous year. Mr. Holliday attributed that rise to the
state creating more career pathways and bringing more introductory
college courses to high school seniors to prevent the need for
postsecondary remediation.
“To get that much improvement in the first year is extraordinary, I
think,” said Bob King, the president of the Kentucky Council on
Postsecondary Education, based in Frankfort, Ky.
Preparing the Public
To combat a potential public backlash from the lower scores, Mr.
Holliday noted that he had enlisted the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce as
part of a yearlong public relations campaign.
Florida schools earlier this year endured a significant backlash
when proficiency rates on its state writing tests dropped by two-thirds
after a tougher grading system was introduced, forcing the state school
board to change the test’s cutoff score retroactively.
“We knew the scores were going to drop, but this is the
right thing for our kids, our schools,” he said. “You’re going to see
quite a different reaction in Kentucky because we watched what happened
everywhere else,” Mr. Holliday said.
But the transition for schools can be disappointing for some,
especially in the short term. Carmen Coleman, the superintendent of the
Danville Independent district, said she was proud of how the school
system had progressed over the past three years from a ranking of 110th
to 24th among the state’s 174 districts, only to tumble back to the
middle of the pack in the newest rankings of school districts.
“It’s a tough blow for teachers and students,” she said.
The Kentucky PTA has received grant money from the National PTA to
educate parents and others about the new standards, but the state
group’s president, Teri Gale, said it doesn’t mean people won’t be
caught off guard by the lower-than-usual results.
“They’ve heard us talk about it. They’ve seen the newscasts and
everything,” Ms. Gale said. “But until they actually see the scores, I
don’t think it’s going to hit home that this is what we were talking
about.
Related story at
State Ed Watch:
So we've provided you with a lot of election coverage
here at Education Week, but this week perhaps the biggest piece of K-12
news comes from Kentucky, when the first set of results from tests
based on the Common Core State Standards have been released.
You can read my story on the results here.
The highlight is that proficiency rates on the K-PREP tests for grades
3-8 dropped by roughly a third from their 2011 levels, although in
middle school math the plunge reached 45 percent. But when I spoke to
him, state Education Commissioner Terry Holliday said that Bluegrass
State students actually beat the predictions
for how well they would score, and attributed that relative success to
the good teaching in classrooms this year, the first the common
standards were implemented in Kentucky.
Is Holliday right? Or are the tests (which are not the common core
tests being developed by the two state consortia for 2014-15) not really
as rigorous as they should be? Both points of view are represented in
my story. But there's no doubt school officials across the country are
looking at the results, which could be a sign of things to come for
administrators, parents, teachers and students used to seeing relatively
high proficiency rates on accountability tests.
1 comment:
It's interesting! One comment says one cannot compare the new test with the old. The next set of comments does just that. In the early days of proficiency levels in NAEP it was said that such cut-points are arbitrary but not capricious. I think Kentucky now has both.
It would be interesting to compare rank orders of schools prior to KERA and those obtained in the latest testing. Looks to me like the rich remain rich or richer and nothing has changed for poor schools.
Skip Kifer
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