Educators who cheat on tests could face criminal charges

This from H-L:

The Senate Education Committee unanimously passed a bill to make it a crime for educators to cheat on any state tests. The measure now goes to the full Senate.

Senate Bill 64 would make it unlawful for educators to allow students to see test questions prior to the test, copy any test booklets, provide guidance or answer keys during the test, or correct student answers afterwards.

Any charges could be reported to a prosecuting attorney or the attorney general for investigation. Punishment would include fines of up to $1,000 and an investigation by the Education Professional Standards Board.

The bill comes in the wake of a cheating scandal in Perry County in 2010 on the ACT test. Recently, the standards board suspended the educational certificates of two employees implicated in the matter.

Cheating is already against state education rules, but there are no criminal charges attached.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2012/01/13/2025994/educators-who-cheat-on-tests-could.html#wgt=rcntnews#storylink=cpy

Bad Score

This from HDNet:

While our students take mandatory evaluation tests nationwide – who is evaluating the evaluators? We investigate how the grading and evaluation of national, standardized testing works – or in some cases doesn’t work. We hear from a group of whistleblowers who tell us how erratically and unfairly the tests are scored.

Longitudinal Measures Approximating Student Attainment of Kentucky Core Academic Standards

The Kentucky Department of Education has been whittling down possible names for the new state assessment mandated (but not exactly paid for) in Senate Bill 1.

From a long list of possible terms, the KDE leadership team narrowed the possibilities to three.

TASK - Testing and Accountability System of Kentucky
BEST - Bluegrass Education Standards Test
K-PREP - Kentucky Performance Rating for Educational Progress

Now they are asking folks (this means you) to vote for the one that best describes the new system. The survey also gives people the opportunity to suggest their own name.

Take the survey here.

It is, perhaps regrettable - perhaps not - that the wordsmiths at KDE passed on a few suggestions from KSN&C readers, like...

• Do-Over Grading System
• SB1T
• Keep It Strong and Stable
• the corporate sponsored, McDonald's Happy Meal Test
• NTLS - No teacher left standing
• KONCEAL - Kentucky's Official Need to Conceal Educational Achievement Legally
• KCAT - Kentucky Core Assessment Test
• BS1 - better standards 1

Plus, the department is working on a new Senate Bill 1/Unbridled Learning page for the KDE website. Click on the Unbridled Learning logo on the KDE homepage, or lookie here to see that page.

ACT: Not the Only Measure of College Readiness

Council on Postsecondary Education honcho Bob King recently argued in the Herald-Leader that CPE's High School Feedback Report allows the state "to look more deeply into actual performance measured by an external, unbiased resource — the ACT exam."

King suggested that the ACT, by itself, was superior to predictions of college-readiness derived from combinations of data. Discounting graduation rates and average GPA in favor of a single test prompted our resident testing expert to retort.

NOTE: H-L seemed to struggle editing Skip's piece, so here's the unadulterated article the paper titled:

ACT not key measure of college readiness

By Skip Kifer

If I were to assert that a player who cannot make 56% of his free throws is not "ready" for the NBA, a fan would point out that there is much more to basketball than shooting free throws. An astute fan with a historic prospective would point out that Wilt Chamberlain, Shaquille O'Neal and a bevy of other current players would not be "ready" using that arbitrary standard. One facet of basketball does not make or break a player's "readiness."

Bob King, president of Kentucky's Council on Postsecondary Education, in a recent op-ed piece applies the council's arbitrary standard of using a single test score to determine whether a student is "ready" for regular course work in Kentucky's public universities. He implies a test score is a better predictor of grades in college than is a high school record. He then presents results from one high school that lump higher performing students (those with above average high school records) with lower performing ones in a misguided approach to justify his position. A test score, however, does not make or break a student's "readiness" for higher education.

Decades of research indicate: performance in academic courses in high school is the single best predictor of success in higher education; a combination of the high school record and test scores predict better than the high school record alone; and, how good the prediction is and how the components are combined vary depending on the institution. Although there is a general pattern of the primacy of the high school record, there is no one-fits-all model to predict grades in different courses or different institutions.

In addition to the thoroughly suspect notion of labeling a test score readiness, the council's use of a single score for placement purposes violates standards for the proper use of tests. Those standards include the following:

In educational settings, a decision or characterization that will have major impact on a student should not be made on the basis of a single test score. Other relevant information should be taken into account if it will enhance the overall validity of the decision.

In addition:

When test scores are intended to be used as part of the process for making decisions for educational placement, promotion, or implementation of prescribed educational plans, empirical evidence documenting the relationship among particular test scores, the instructional programs, and desire student outcomes should be provided. When adequate empirical evidence is not available, users should be cautioned to weight test results accordingly in light of other relevant information about the student.

Apparently, the council determines readiness by doing statistical analyses of ACT scores and grades in first year courses without regard to institution. A certain ACT score produces a 50/50 chance of getting certain grades, say C, or better. I could find no information about this or other investigations done by the council. And, although it is possible to present information about how good a model is, I could not find any information of that kind either.

To give a sense of the power of statistical models to predict first year grades I report analyses conducted years ago on University of Kentucky student samples. The question was whether results of KIRIS, the first commonwealth assessment related to school reform, could be used for admission and placement in a university.

If a model exactly predicts grades one can say that the model accounts for 100 % of what could be known. If a model cannot at all predict grades, one can say that 0% is accounted for. One way, then, to talk about the power of a statistical model is determine what percent the model predicts.
The table below gives those percents for different courses at UK for three different statistical models: High school record only, High School record + ACT scores and High School record + KIRIS scores.

The first thing to recognize is that the models are not particularly powerful. They rarely account for 25% of what could be known leaving 75% to be explained. That 75% may be differences in students' study habits, class attendance, interests, any of a thousand other variables or simply things not explained statistically.

The pattern of results, however, is clear. Adding an ACT score to a model containing GPA makes the prediction better but not greatly so. The same is true for KIRIS scores, too. Incidentally, that was without including the KIRIS writing sample.

These are not unusual results. They point, obviously, to gathering more information about a student before making a placement decision. Here is what ACT says:

ACT offers a variety of tools to ensure postsecondary students are quickly and accurately placed in courses appropriate to their skill levels. Assessment tools from ACT offer a highly accurate and cost-effective basis for course placement. By combining students' test scores with information about their high school coursework and their needs, interests, and goals, advisors and faculty members can make placement recommendations with a high degree of validity.

To that, I would add, for obvious reasons, it is desirable for an educational agency to use tests in exemplary ways.

The op-ed piece goes on to exhort parents to ask right questions, asks an undefined "we" to fear international test results, says admissions offices should align themselves with the council's readiness standards, and the still undefined "we" to serve teachers more effectively. Such exhortations would be more convincing if, in the first instance, the council could propose placement procedures based on a robust notion of "readiness" that in addition did not violate test score use standards.

F-word earns extra marks on Exam

This from the Mirror.co.uk:

You might think a pupil would be marked down for writing a note on their English exam telling tutors to "F**k off".

But one was rewarded with extra marks - because it was better than leaving the page blank and demonstrates "nominal skills".

The pupil was given 7.5 per cent by top marker Peter Buckroyd for leaving the expletive on his paper. And incredibly, the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) chief examiner said adding an exclamation mark would have taken the score to 11 per cent by showing proper punctuation.

Mr Buckroyd said: "It would be wicked to give it zero, it does show some very basic skills, conveying some meaning and some spelling...

Results of Pop Quiz on Testing

Sometime before Harry Moberly gave Senate Bill 1 a long rest in committee, KSN&C asked readers to answer the following quiz question. (Results after each answer)

POP QUIZ: Public school students should be tested…

a.) often; so that a teacher might catch learning problems early, adjust instruction and report to parents how well their children are learning specific objectives (7 "responses" - 25%)

b.) annually; in order to inform parents whether or not their children are “college material” (1 response - 3%)

c.) annually; in order to hold schools accountable for the performance of all of their students (1 response - 3%)

d.) all of the above (4 responses - 14%)

e.) a & c only (15 responses - 53%)

And the usual disclaimer that this poll is so thoroughly unscientific that no attempt should be made to extract actual meaning from it - unless is fits your preconceived biases, of course, in which case you should quote it often.

A New Approach to Accountability in Kentucky

From time to time I have referred vaguely to a "value-added"system for assessing the effectiveness of Kentucky schools. Today the Dallas Morning News gives us a peek at the kind of thing I have in mind.

If I had a magic wand, testing would exist to inform better instruction and provide parents with annual information about the progress of their child. But accountability would look something like this:

'School Effectiveness Index' changes wisdom

on what makes a good Dallas ISD campus

'Effectiveness index' considers demographics in measuring campuses

How good is your kid's school?

It seems like a simple question, but factors like student backgrounds can make clear-cut answers elusive.

What if you could find a way to evaluate schools that doesn't penalize them for their students' language barriers, lack of parental involvement or other social factors that impact learning?

With virtually no fanfare, the Dallas Independent School District does exactly that. Every year, it produces a "School Effectiveness Index," a rating that levels the playing field between schools, no matter where their students come from or what they lack in life.

DISD has been calculating the scores since 1992 but has never publicized the ratings, even though parents are hungry for information showing how their neighborhood schools stack up. The Dallas Morning News recently collected nine years of effectiveness scores from the district and has made them available at dallasnews.com/disdblog.

One of the district's top researchers, who helped develop the ratings, cautioned parents not to view the scores in isolation. Many other factors also are important, he said, such as personal interactions with teachers.

"From a parent standpoint, I would be far less concerned about the school [ratings] than I would be about what my kids are telling me about their teacher," said Robert Mendro, the district's director of evaluation. "A kid will tell them about which teacher requires homework, which teacher is tough."

The News recently shared the effectiveness scores with about 40 parents, educators and community members. Some found the scores helpful in a general sense.

"Rather than choosing the highest-ranking school in a measure of best, I would look for consistency in the top 10 percent of performing schools," said parent Randy Hazlett, who has a child at Townview Magnet Center. "Still, the rating system will reward those schools which accept students from low-performing feeder schools and significantly boost their test scores."

The scores turn conventional wisdom about which schools are "good" on its head. For example, the most effective school in the district last year, according to the ratings, was Rusk Middle School. By way of comparison, the Talented and Gifted magnet school – widely lauded as one of the best public schools in America – ranked No. 29.

That happens because the ratings compare schools by isolating the impact teachers have on student achievement. The ratings measure how far a student advances with his teacher in one year.

Through a complex statistical analysis, the district isolates student characteristics that affect learning, such as family income, ethnicity and English mastery. A school's score is designed to eliminate advantages campuses gain from the social and demographical characteristics of their students.

That's a completely different approach from the state's accountability system, which looks at how many students pass annual standardized exams. Low-income students tend to score lower on such tests.The district's "value-added" ratings focus on how much students learn in a year, not whether they pass certain tests, such as the TAKS, Dr. Mendro said.

Such calculations are a growing trend in education as researchers try to determine how far schools push their kids along the learning curve...

Test score inflation: Coming soon to a state near you

One of Kentucky Education Commissioner Barbara Erwin's first duties will be to announce remarkable gains made by Kentucky students as measured by state tests.

The announcement will be made this coming fall.

The tests, recently completed, have not been scored. No reports are out. I have no scientific studies to back me up. No official statements have been issued by KDE that support my...let's call it a hunch.

And perhaps, I'm jumping the gun here, but I find it curious that I still haven't been able to find a teacher or principal - not one person - who thinks this year's test was as hard as past assessments. And I've been trying. The best I can offer is one 10th grade social studies teacher who thinks the test is about as difficult as before.


One elementary academic coach (in a tough school) actually laughed at my inquiry, giving me a big Cheshire Cat grin that only comes with that certain feeling of future success, and job security.

But all around central Kentucky, teachers and principals are smiling sheepishly because they believe the test they just gave to Kentucky students is noticably easier than past assessments.

Something's going on here and the most likely explanation is that Kentucky has (silently) joined the group of states that have dumbed down the test in order to realize numerical gains. Nationally—in response to NCLB—states have been tinkering with their state exams, in part, to help boost pass rates.

It makes for a better press conference.

It is almost comical that - if my hunch proves true - once again, Barbara Erwin will benefit - just as she did in Illinois last year.

The "benefit" comes from her ability to claim sole responsibility for impressive student achievement gains as though they were a result of her action. In reality, big gains were seen across Illinois only AFTER significant changes were made to the assessment.

In March, the Chicago Tribune reported, "Why test scores went up."

Illinois elementary school pupils passed the newly revamped state achievement exams at record rates last year, but critics suggest it was more the result of changes to the tests than real progress by pupils.

Overall, children passed 77 percent of all math, reading and science exams they took in 2006, compared with 69 percent the year before, according to a Tribune analysis of test data.

The 8 percentage-point gain is the biggest one-year increase since the state started giving the Illinois Standards Achievement Test in 1999.On most exams, the 2005-2006 gains outpaced the improvement made over the previous five years combined.
Low-income and minority pupils posted the largest increases, which helped narrow the pernicious gap between their performance and that of their white, Asian and more affluent counterparts.

...Most notably, the state dramatically lowered the passing bar on the 8th-grade math test. As a result—after hovering at about 50 percent for five years—the pass rate shot up to 78 percent last year.

...Pupils also were scored on one extended response, compared with two the year before. Extended response, which requires pupils to answer in essay form, is tougher than multiple choice.

"...It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that something doesn't compute here," said Lawrence Aleamoni, an education professor at the University of Arizona who has written extensively about tests. "The big jumps tell me something is going on here. All of the changes they made to the test will certainly inflate the scores."

But state education officials argue that the 2006 exams are just as difficult as the previous tests."Everyone on our staff wholeheartedly believes that teachers prepared their kids well," said Becky McCabe, who oversees testing for the Illinois State Board of Education, which administers the tests. "The kids were prepared for the tests and it shows in the results."

Statistically, the lower the pass rate, the easier it is to show progress. It's tougher to move from 80 to 90 percent passing, than from 30 to 40 percent. In Illinois, the test changes helped lift the scores of all but 52 of 766 elementary and unit school districts. The pass rate of low-income pupils on the 8th-grade math exam doubled, from 32 percent in 2005 to 64 percent last year.

"It's an anomaly that blows the credibility of this test," said Jeff Mays, president of the Illinois Business RoundTable, which opposed changes to the 8th-grade math test. "I think we need an independent party to come and look at this and help us build a road map to credibility."

From another Chicago Tribune piece: "There is clearly a race to the bottom going on," said Kevin Carey, a policy director at Education Sector, a think tank that studied state testing changes. "When states change rules under No Child Left Behind, it's always changes that will make it easier for schools. One state will come up with an `innovative' way to give schools the statistical benefit of the doubt and then every state will follow suit."

Education Sector's analysis from Thomas Toch's "Flunking Tests:"

Testing industry experts say that many of the tests that states are introducing under NCLB contain mostly questions that require students merely to recall or restate facts rather than doing more demanding tasks like applying or evaluating information, largely because it's easier and cheaper to test the simpler tasks.

Experts say that "open-ended" questions, which require students to produce their own answers rather than select from among answers supplied by test-writers (the format of multiple-choice questions), are a good way to gauge students' grasp of higher-level skills....Low-level questions have a role; it's important that students grasp the most basic skills.

But NCLB has sought to lift the level of teaching in the nation's classrooms by requiring states to set challenging standards. Tests that demand students learn only low-level skills give teachers incentives to drive down the level of instruction in their classrooms.

They also give an inflated sense of student achievement.

Scores on reading tests that measure mainly literal comprehension are going to be higher than those on tests with a lot of questions that require students to evaluate what they've read by, say, reading two passages and identifying themes common to both. The same is true in math.

That's how it was in Illinois when Erwin's District 303 posted what would have otherwise been impressive gains.

I'm guessing that's how it will be in Kentucky. But here, too, testing officials will ignore the obvious and claim that the gains are real. What else can they do?

But you can credit Barbara Erwin...if you want to.

Defiant Virginia officials say federal directives for testing students with limited English will only set up students for failure

Meeting Brings No Headway in 'No Child' Stalemate

U.S. education officials and several Virginia school superintendents met yesterday to discuss tests for students with limited English skills under the No Child Left Behind law but made no progress toward solving a standoff over what the local educators call an unacceptable federal mandate.

This from the Washington Post.

Ed. Dept. Releases Final Rules on Tests for Special Education Students

This from Education Week: by Christina A. Samuels

The U.S. Department of Education today released final regulations to guide the creation of tests for students in special education who are capable of learning grade-level content, but not as quickly as their peers.

Currently, the only options available for such students are to take the general assessments that are given to all students, which may be too difficult, or tests intended for students with significant cognitive impairments, which are too easy. The new tests will allow a more accurate assessment of what these students know and how best to teach them, Deputy Secretary of Education Raymond J. Simon said during an afternoon press conference.

The tests may also allow some schools to make adequate yearly progress under the No Child Left Behind Act when they had not before. Up to 2 percent of students’ proficient and advanced scores on these particular tests, which the department calls “alternate assessments based on modified achievement standards,” may be counted when measuring AYP. Two percent of all students is equivalent to about 20 percent of students with disabilities.

The Education Department also allows up to 1 percent of all students in a state—equivalent to 10 percent of students with disabilities—to take a different type of alternate assessment and be counted as proficient for purposes of AYP. Those tests, which are the ones used with students with significant cognitive impairments, are less complex and comprehensive.

This testing flexibility was first announced in April 2005, with draft regulations released in December 2005. In the meantime, states were allowed to use a mathematical model to adjust their scores as if the policy were already in place. That flexibility will be allowed for the 2006-07 school year, but after that, if states want to continue using the model, they have to enter into a partnership with the Education Department to develop the “2 percent” tests, Mr. Simon said.
“We believe a state that has not done anything so far, should be able to do what we ask them to do over the next two school years,” Mr. Simon said. “Only those who participate with us in a meaningful way” can use the mathematical model, he said.

Content Important
The final regulations, like the draft version, also make it clear that out-of-level assessments would not be allowed to serve as appropriate tests for students in special education. So, a 6th grader who reads at a 3rd-grade level would not be allowed to take a test intended for younger students.

“The reason we’re taking that position here is we’re really trying to emphasize the importance of students getting access to grade-level content,” said Kerri L. Briggs, the acting assistant secretary for planning, evaluation, and policy for the Education Department.

However, the tests can still be easier than the tests given to the general student population, while reflecting grade-level content. Examples of changes in the tests include offering three choices on a multiple-choice test, instead of four; using math manipulatives to illustrate test answers; or allowing students to receive test questions in spoken word or pictures, in addition to print.

Some states already have begun offering such assessments to their students, Mr. Simon said. Though those tests haven’t gone through the department’s peer-review process, he said they can be used as a starting point for other states as they consider their own tests.

The response to the new regulations during a teleconference held today with state school chiefs was positive, Mr. Simon said. He said the state school leaders who have created tests told their colleagues that the tests “have given us information that we’ve needed” to improve education for students with disabilities, Mr. Simon said.

The department plans to launch an effort to assist states as they create the tests, including $21.1 million in grant funds for technical assistance, a meeting with the states scheduled for July, and monthly teleconferences.

LOWERING STATE'S EDUCATION STANDARDS A BAD IDEA

Lexington Herald-Leader (KY)
January 2, 2007
Author: Richard Day

(At issue: Commentaries by Herald-Leader contributing columnist Marty Solomon, "Testing bar set too high for Kentucky schools, children," Oct. 6, and "Testing focus muscles out real education," Nov. 29)

Since June 2002, Herald-Leader contributing columnist Marty Solomon has written several articles on the achievement gap and the federal No Child Left Behind law. I have tended to agree with his understanding of the research and his views -- until recently.

Over nine articles Solomon enumerated data points while referring to research and observations from the professional literature that suggest: poverty is a major factor in the achievement gap, anti-intellectualism threatens strong black students who are accused of "acting white," money matters, white racism matters and federal lawmakers shackled schools with unprecedented levels of testing under an arbitrary scheme that will unfairly label far too many schools as failures.

Despite the credible scholarship that supports Solomon's reporting, his conclusion that standards for Kentucky students should be lowered would, if implemented, yield sad consequences for education reform in Kentucky and, more important, for Kentucky's children.

NCLB required all states to achieve proficiency but, inexplicably, left it to each state to define proficiency. This single act rendered any hope of fairness to reform-minded states dead on arrival. After several years of determined talk about enforcing the law as written, federal education officials, this year, began cutting deals with states that want to lower standards -- not to improve education but to avoid looking bad under NCLB.

In the 1980s, Kentuckians had a saying: "Thank God for Mississippi." If not for the Magnolia State, Kentucky would have ranked dead last in support of schools. Today, Mississippi leads a small band of states that are competing to see who can require the least of their students.

As New York Times Magazine editor Paul Tough reported in the Nov. 26 issue, Mississippi lowered its standards and "declared 89 percent of its fourth-grade students to be proficient readers, the highest percentage in the nation, while in fact, the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that only 18 percent of Mississippi fourth-graders know how to read at an appropriate level -- the second-lowest score of any state."This kind of gamesmanship, designed to neuter federal requirements, might stick it to the authors of NCLB's deeply flawed accountability system, but it does so at the expense of education.

When I think of how schools should be, I rarely look back to the "good ol' days." I am much more motivated by the recent explosion of information technology, global competition, rising Medicaid costs and the overpowering need for a highly educated work force.Lowering standards may relieve pressure on some folks in the short run, but it's not good for Kentucky in the long run. Solomon's solution would return Kentucky to the 1980s -- with 1980s accountability. That's not the right solution for Kentucky's future economy.

Low expectations are much worse than high expectations. Low expectations are a recipe for low performance. For a principal, low expectations remove the need for results. For a teacher, it is an invitation to ease up and allow a certain percentage of hard-to-teach students to fail; and students always do better when teachers really try.

Motivation is important in any human endeavor, and that includes teaching. What gets inspected gets respected. Reasonable accountability systems, applied humanely, give the public useful information about the performance of schools without harming children in the process. In its present form, NCLB is not that system.

It is important to remember that Kentucky already had a well-developed accountability environment before NCLB came around. Kentucky school districts were already accountable for achievement by all subgroups of students under Senate Bill 168.Testing in our schools has been ratcheted up to its highest levels in history. With the addition of NCLB on top of Kentucky's CATS assessment, it is arguably too high. But Kentucky teachers have responded well by using a variety of assessment data to help identify students who need more or different kinds of instruction.

If we really want to increase student achievement we should keep the state accountability system, but focus more on improving the instructional tools teachers can access. The development of assessment technologies that would give teachers immediate feedback on student progress, with minimal loss of instructional time, ought to be one of the state's major initiatives.In the meantime, let's call on the new Congress to improve NCLB's assessment scheme by using a research-based calculation that takes student achievement growth into account and that defines proficiency with an eye toward the needs of the new century, not the last.

Caption:- Richard Day of Lexington is a former principal of Cassidy Elementary School.
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