necap – Page 4 – RI Future

July 24, 2013July 24, 2013

ACLU to sue state over high stakes NECAP requirement

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The stakes are being raised if the state wants to push ahead with using the NECAP test as a high stakes graduation requirement. The policy of using the school assessment test to assess individual students used to just be unpopular, but it will soon also be the subject of lawsuit brought by the RI ACLU.

Executive Director Steve Brown said this morning that the public would have to wait for a event later this morning to learn about the specifics of the lawsuit. We’ll post more information on this as it is available.

“The lawsuit is a follow-up to a petition that 17 organizations signed last month calling for an end to the high stakes test mandate,” according to an email from the ACLU yesterday.

The ACLU and others have said using the NECAP test as a high-stakes graduation requirement violates the civil rights of special education and English language learners.

In May, Education Board Chairwoman Eva Mancuso told RI Future that the Board would reconsider using the NECAP as a graduation requirement.

The NECAP test as a high-stakes graduation requirement has become a flashpoint in public education politics in Rhode Island, as many of the arguments against the test have gained traction during Deborah Gist’s high-profile contract debate. Here’s how the ProJo described the flashpoint in an article published this morning:

Opposition to the testing requirement has gained momentum over the past six months, with students, parents and teachers arguing that the test is unfair, especially for urban and minority students who they say haven’t been adequately prepared, especially for the math portion of the test.

Educators have faulted the test because they say it was not designed to be used as a so-called high-stakes test.

The General Assembly recently passed a non-binding resolution expressing its objection to linking the NECAP to a high school diploma.

State Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist has come under heavy criticism for her refusal to back down on the testing mandate, and, at one point, her fate in Rhode Island appeared tied to the NECAP. She recently received a two-year extension of her contract after a protracted closed-door discussion by the Rhode Island Board of Education, which oversees K-12 and the state’s three public colleges.

July 15, 2013July 16, 2013

Public to Board of Ed: No NECAP grad requirement

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Activists opposed to using the NECAP as a high stakes graduation requirement came in large numbers to the Board of Education meeting on Monday night. But only a small number were given time to talk.

As such, I thought I’d post some of the comments from the public that the Board didn’t get a chance to hear live. Among them are a former school committee chairwoman, a former RIDE employee and the head attorney for the Rhode Island Disability Law Center.

If you prepared remarks for last nights meeting but didn’t get to share them, please post them in the comments at the end of this post.

Jean Ann Guliano, parent, former East Greenwich School Committee chairwoman:

My name is Jean Ann Guliano and I have a 17 year old son on the autism spectrum who will be starting his junior year at East Greenwich High School in a few weeks. I am also a former Chairman of the East Greenwich School Committee, a former member of the Rhode Island Special Education Advisory Committee and the Rhode Island Association of School Committees Executive Board.

I will first refer to a white paper written by Dr. Michael Russell who is Sr. Vice President, Strategic Development at Measured Progress, Inc., entitled Digital Test Delivery: Empowering Accessible Test Design to Increase Test Validity for all Students. The paper advocates for a digital content, computer based test design in order to improve accessibility for all students. He explains that in designing multiple choice paper and pencil tests, like the current NECAP, test items are created assuming that:

Students are reading at or near grade level

Students speak fluent English

Students do not have a disability that prevents them from accessing the question being asked (motor skills, executive function skills, visual acuity, language processing skills, etc.).

If a student has any of these limitations, there is a concern over validity. This concern stems from that fact that the test results may be showing the limitation instead of the desired outcome. In addition, utilizing accommodations, after the fact, raises further concerns over validity as the conditions of the test administration is being fundamentally changed. Based on these concerns, I would urge the Board to ask representatives from Measured Progress if the test scores on the NECAP are valid for all students taking them no matter what their limitations.

The consortium for the new PARCC tests are attempting to use a similar methodology in creating their computer based universal design tests.   It should be noted that this test has not yet achieved an acceptable level of accessibility. Just last week, a technical review panel set up by the U.S. Department of Education told the PARCC consortium to go back and research how the test items will be accessible for students with different disabilities and for English language learners. They also recommended retraining their test item writers and to provide more field studies for the full range of disabled students. Obviously, creating a one size fits all test for all types of learners is extremely difficult to accomplish. PARCC isn’t there yet, and NECAP is simply not there.

In addition to my concerns about NECAP, I am also very concerned about how our state treats students with disabilities and learning differences. In the recent Birch School interim settlement, the U.S. Justice Department was very clear in their criticisms regarding opportunities for these students. Specifically, Birch students were:

“…excluded from the opportunity to receive high school diplomas, and are only awarded certificates of attendance.”

This practice, as they pointed out, exposes students to the “…significant and often lasting stigma attached to not receiving a diploma” as the “…lack of a high school diploma impacts negatively upon employers’ perceptions of potential employees.”

In citing the report by the Council of Great City Schools, the Justice Department settlement also stated that there were “…no expectations that students graduate with a regular diploma.”

To remedy this, the interim settlement states that students should “…not be unnecessarily or unjustifiably excluded from the opportunity to receive a high school diploma.”

This is not isolated to Birch. In every district in this state, there are students who have been placed in an alternative learning environment, whether a tech program or alternative learning program, who will only receive a certificate – not a regular diploma. Therefore:

Should students who want to learn a trade or tech skills be denied a diploma?

Should developmental or cognitive ability determine if a student is worthy of a diploma?

Should students who have not had an opportunity to learn be denied a diploma?

These are crucial questions the Board needs to ask if they wish to continue with the diploma system as it is scheduled to be implemented in September.

Students who will be entering their senior year in a few short weeks who did not achieve partial proficiency on the October 2012 NECAP, (the results for which they received a few months ago) will be required to take it again this October.   These students will not know until 2 months before they are supposed to graduate whether or not they met the partial proficiency requirement. If they still do not meet that requirement, they will need to take another version of the test within a few weeks of graduation. The timing of these tests is still not clear. Only after taking this final test will they be eligible to apply for a waiver, take another test to show proficiency, or, if they still do not pass, be denied a diploma. Why?

Instead of using the last year of a student’s school experience to cram for a test (on concepts that they may or may not be able grasp), why not sit down with that student’s IEP team and their parents to determine what goals can be accomplished in this final year to make this student successful in their post-high school future. Provide alternative measures that enable the student to demonstrate progress towards the goal of achieving to the best of their ability. In addition, utilized true multiple measures to assess a student’s knowledge and abilities, not simply multiple administrations of the same test.

True multiple measures will enable students to demonstrate their unique strengths and abilities. For example, some learners with disabilities simply do not understand algebra – particularly those who are visual thinkers. The inarguably brilliant, autistic and self-proclaimed visual thinker, Dr. Temple Grandin, points out that she never understood algebra because it can’t be visualized. Her brain simply doesn’t work that way. Yet, it is undeniable that her visual skills are invaluable in livestock handling design.

The same can be said for those who can visualize geometric concepts but not comprehend geometric equations.   Both skills have value. Education is supposed to be ‘the great equalizer.’ Instead it’s become ‘survival of the fittest.’ And, the fittest are those who can answer questions on a one-size-fits-all standardized test. What some may view as having a diploma that ‘means something,’ I view as a systematic disenfranchisement of children with intellectual disabilities, developmental disabilities, or other language barriers.

It doesn’t have to be this way. If you have students with diverse learning styles, schools provide differentiated instruction. Therefore, if you provide differentiated instruction to accommodate those diverse learning styles, why wouldn’t you provide differentiated goals and assessments?

If we teach all students to the very best of their abilities, from the brightest to the most challenged, we will raise the standards for everyone.

Bob Houghtaling, Director, East Greenwich Drug Program; former RIDE employee:

This evening you will hear compelling testimony from many groups and individuals pertaining to the ineffective and unfair use of standardized tests as a graduation requirement. Without question, English Language Learners, students with special needs and young people burdened with socio-economic concerns are negatively impacted by this practice. With this being stated, I have additional concerns.

While many have commented about standardized tests’ negative impact in terms of critical thinking skills, creating a teaching-to-the-test dynamic and the over-emphasis on some subjects at the expense of others, still more needs to be looked at.

I have worked in the human services for approximately 35 years. Over this span, my experience includes: serving as an outpatient clinician; director of a half-way house (for alcoholics and drug addicts); a consultant to the Training School; an adjunct professor at Providence College, the RI Department of Education and presently the Director of the East Greenwich Drug Program. I point this out merely to illustrate that I have worked with young people and folks suffering from mental illness for some time.

The way we are educating young people today is significantly different from how they were educated 15-20 years ago. Some schools have eliminated recess. Many others have eliminated study halls.

Students are required to take more classes, factor in senior project and pass a standardized test to graduate. In my practice, I have witnessed that this accelerated pace has caused significant stress for many young people. Because of this stress, more and more kids are being prescribed medications to help them cope. In East Greenwich, where I work, there has been a rise in prescription drug use/abuse among our youth population. I believe that a portion of this can be attributed to stress caused by an inability to adjust to the rigors and expectations imposed on them by our present educational system.

In fact, the American Psychological Association has expressed concern about using a single measure such as a standardized test as a requirement for graduation. Instead, they advocate including other relevant and valid information, as well. The issue is not so much the test but how it is applied.

Once, educators factored in Montessori, Piaget, Gardner and Elkind into their decision making process. Now, it appears that folks like Bill Gates and numerous testing companies carry the most weight. Using the NECAPs as a graduation requirement exposes many concerns. As you already know, the test was never intended to be used as such. All students are negatively impacted under the present system.

Thank you for your consideration regarding this matter. Education can and should be fun. It can also be done in a way that promotes a lifelong respect for learning. Teaching to the test has established a survival of the fittest scenario. Unfortunately, in this instance, even the fittest might not be very fit.

Anne Mulready, Supervising Attorney, Rhode Island Disability Law Center

Thank you for the opportunity to address the Board of Education. I am writing on behalf of the Rhode Island Disability Law Center (RIDLC). We are the federally funded non-profit law office designated as the state’s protection and advocacy agency for individuals with disabilities in Rhode Island. Over the last thirty years, a major focus of our work has been advocacy for the rights of students with disabilities.

Last month, RIDLC along with sixteen other community agencies petitioned the Board to initiate rule-making so that the Board of Regents regulations for high school graduation could be reconsidered. On behalf of RIDLC, I am here today to urge you to do so, and urge you to adopt the regulatory amendments proposed by our organizations. Our proposal would amend the Proficiency Based Graduation Requirements to eliminate the use of state-wide assessments as a high stakes test for graduation. We believe that state-wide assessments should be used only to measure school and district performance and to target reform efforts.

Children with disabilities were identified as one of the “at-risk” groups to benefit from federal and state education reform efforts. These reforms were supposed to ensure access to a high quality curriculum and close the equity gap for at-risk groups. For children with disabilities in Rhode Island, our use of a high stakes test is having the opposite effect – it’s widening the equity gap. Eighty-three percent of students with disabilities in the Class of 2014 are at risk of not graduating due to their scores on the NECAP. And, as RIDE has acknowledged, theachievement gap between students with disabilities and those without continued a general widening trend for all grade levels tested in 2012.

These results are not surprising given what we know about educational best practices for students with disabilities. A one-shot, one-size fits all test as a measure of achievement is counter to what we know about how students with disabilities learn and demonstrate their skills.

In April 2012, the National Center for Educational Outcomes published its study on “Diploma Options, Graduation Requirements and Exit Exams for Youth with Disabilities: 2011 National Study.” In that study, the National Center recommended “mak[ing] high school education decisions based on multiple indicators of student’s learning and skills,” and supported “multiple pathways” to demonstrating graduation readiness.

Even in Massachusetts, a state often touted as a high-stakes testing model, requiring the passage of MCAS as a condition of graduation, has had a disproportionate negative impact on students with disabilities. A recent study by Louis J. Kruger and Timothy McIvor of Northeastern University, indicates the number of general education students failing the high school MCAS has decreased 58% since its inception through 2012. However, the number of special education students failing the high school MCAS has increased 12% during that same period. As the authors note, rather than promoting high standards, the current system has evolved into a method of depriving some of our most vulnerable students of a decent future.

On behalf of students with disabilities, we urge you to revisit the current ProficiencyBased Graduation Requirements, and adopt a system that gives all students the opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge and achievements.

July 14, 2013July 15, 2013

NY Times editorial chides high stakes ‘testing mania’

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As the Board of Education readies to reconsider RIDE’s reliance on the NECAP test as a graduation requirement, The New York Times weighs in with some much-needed nuance on the national controversy erupting over using high-stakes tests as a means of improving public education.

“In other words,” concludes the editorial, “the country needs to reconsider its obsession with testing, which can make education worse, not better.”

In several sections, it’s as if The Times is directly mimicking the criticism the the local left has lobbed at the high stakes testing in general, and the NECAP test in particular. To wit:

“…it has become clear to us over time that testing was being overemphasized — and misused — in schools that were substituting test preparation for instruction.”
“That the real tests were weak, and did not gauge the skills students needed to succeed, made matters worse. Unfortunately, most states did not invest in rigorous, high-quality exams with open-ended essay questions that test reasoning skill. Rather, they opted for cheap, multiple-choice tests of marginal value.”

This paragraph in particular seems as if it was written about what has happened in Rhode Island as we’ve chased Race to the Top money perhaps at the expense of high quality education:

“The government went further in the testing direction through its competitive grant program, known as Race to the Top, and a waiver program related to No Child Left Behind, both of which pushed the states to create teacher evaluation systems that take student test data into account. Test scores should figure in evaluations, but the measures have to be fair, properly calibrated and statistically valid — all of which means that these evaluation systems cannot be rushed into service before they are ready.”

The Board of Education meets Monday, 5:30 pm at Rhode Island College and progressive education activists are expected to be there asking board members to reconsider using the NECAP test as a high stakes graduation requirement.

July 11, 2013July 11, 2013

URI professor: NECAP not good higher ed prep

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Dr. Diane Kern, a well-respected URI education professor, thinks using the NECAP test as a high stakes graduation requirement doesn’t prepare students well for college.

“Higher educators are looking for creative, curious, critical thinkers who will succeed at our institutions, not fill-in-the-bubble students who have achieved partial proficiency on the NECAP,” she said in a statement released today. Her statement comes as the Board of Education plans to begin discussing this issue it monthly meeting, Monday, July 15, 5:30 at Rhode Island College.

She went on:

“As the entire University of Rhode Island Equity Council has publicly stated, instead of using high-stakes test scores to determine college and career readiness, we must employ a research- and evidence-based assessment system that fairly and adequately utilizes multiple measures. Such a system needs to be similar to college and university admissions, in which we examine grades, class rank, results of standardized exams like the SAT, work ethic, multi-disciplinary achievements, evaluations by teachers, and what students have done in life.”

Kern has a Ph. D in education and has been a professor at URI since 2005. Prior to that she was a RIC professor. She is also a certified RI teacher who has taught in Barrington, South Kingstown and Block Island, according to her resume.

Kern joins the litany of locals who have voiced issues with using the NECAP standardized test as a graduation requirement, most recently the General Assembly. The ACLU and groups representing special needs students have said it is a civil liberties violation. Others, such as Tom Sgouros, have made the case that NECAP test isn’t designed to assess individuals. The Providence Student Union has brought national attention to the issue by holding high-profile actions such as zombie protests and an adult-version of the test.

Here’s Kern’s entire press release:

Days before the Board of Education is set to meet, a range of voices from the Rhode Island higher education community and college readiness experts have made a new call for the Board to rethink Rhode Island’s new make-or-break standardized testing graduation requirement, citing the policy’s potentially damaging effects on students’ preparation for college.

Diane Kern, an Associate Professor of Education at the University of Rhode Island, said she is concerned about how the state’s NECAP requirement may affect future populations of students in her classes. “Higher educators are looking for creative, curious, critical thinkers who will succeed at our institutions, not fill-in-the-bubble students who have achieved partial proficiency on the NECAP,” she said. “As the entire University of Rhode Island Equity Council has publicly stated, instead of using high-stakes test scores to determine college and career readiness, we must employ a research- and evidence-based assessment system that fairly and adequately utilizes multiple measures. Such a system needs to be similar to college and university admissions, in which we examine grades, class rank, results of standardized exams like the SAT, work ethic, multi-disciplinary achievements, evaluations by teachers, and what students have done in life.

While dozens of student, parent, community, and other organizations have protested against the new testing requirement – and the General Assembly recently passed a near-unanimous resolution calling on the Board of Education to delay and consider changing the policy – the higher education community has been seen by some as relatively supportive of the regulation.

But this is not the case, according to Earl N. Smith III, a scholar-activist and an alum of URI’s Talent Development Program. “I have been able to achieve tremendous success throughout the course of my 20 year career in higher education; success that I may have never accomplished had my opportunities rested entirely on my test scores. Pursuing higher education is a fundamental freedom, and this NECAP requirement is another obstacle which – like the Black Codes of another era – will disproportionately impact people of African descent, as well as people with learning challenges, thus depriving our higher education institutions of all that these students could bring to them.”

Other experts on college readiness have also begun voicing their concerns about RIDE’s policy. “The Annenberg Institute’s national college readiness work with districts demonstrates that college preparedness depends on a strong set of student supports and services at the classroom, school, and district level,” said Angela Romans, Principal Associate with the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. “For RIDE to create a high stakes test requirement without the proper school- and district-based supports places the burden solely on the backs of young people and teachers without holding the system and the broader community accountable. The Department of Education would be wise to take a more balanced approach to accountability for high school graduation that broadens the responsibility for improvement and recognizes that career readiness is measured through multiple outcomes that are weighted equitably based on students’ access to learning.”

Concerns about the NECAP’s accuracy in measuring college readiness were echoed by students like Sol Camanzo, an alum of Cranston East High School who just finished her second year at McDaniel College. “I graduated from high school with honors back before the NECAP was being used as a graduation requirement. Although I did well with the reading and writing portions of the NECAP, I scored below proficient on the math portion,” Sol said. “This did not prevent me from getting my high school diploma, nor did it prevent me from getting accepted to an institution of higher education. Today, I am proud to say that I am a biology major and I am doing well in all of my classes – including all of the math-based courses. My hopes are to one day go to medical school and become a pediatrician. I am living proof that this policy is premised on false assumptions.”

Last month, a coalition of 17 organizations representing youth, parents, the disability community, civil rights activists, college access organizations and other constituencies filed a formal petition with the Board of Education to initiate a public rule-making process to rescind the high-stakes testing graduation requirement. Under the law, the Board has thirty days from the groups’ June 24th filing to respond to the petition, either by denying or it by initiating a public rule-making process.

July 8, 2013July 9, 2013

How NY, RI differ on high-stakes tests, grad requirements

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As the recent legislative session wound down on Smith Hill, the General Assembly passed resolution H5277, which asked the Board of Education not to use the high-stakes, standardized NECAP test as a graduation requirement.

It said, in part:

“…this General Assembly hereby urges the Board of Education to reconsider the current graduation requirements including the use of the state assessment and examine using a weighted compilation of the state assessment, coursework performance, and senior project or portfolio; and be it further

RESOLVED, That this General Assembly respectfully requests that the Board of Education delay the state assessment portion of the graduation requirement to allow for adequate time for students to be immersed in the common core curriculum;”

Now the ball is in the Board’s court. Newly constituted and charged with a broader set of responsibilities than either of it predecessor boards, how they react to this resolution will be an indicator of how seriously they take their responsibility to re-examine a policy not of their making. Will they, elect for a “quick fix”, or will they take the opportunity to consider what is best for meeting the needs of the Rhode Island public education system?

Anticipating this question, I wrote to a noted critic of standardized testing, Diane Ravitch. In my email, I said I was interested in measuring learning “using instruments that look like the kinds of challenging performances schools and businesses require.”

Ravitch replied:

“The best example I know is the NY Performance Standards Consortium
20 years old
Great results”

So I looked up the New York Performance Standards Consortium and was amazed by what I found—it was as if I had entered a different world from the one that is being put in place here. Before I describe that world—at least partially—let me back up and review the reasons why finding an alternative world is so important, just sticking with issues related to testing students.

Many arguments have been advanced against using the NECAP as a graduation requirement. To my mind, the most significant are:

Its negative impact on the most vulnerable students in the system, the students with learning and behavior disabilities, the students just learning English, and the students from disadvantaged economic backgrounds. All these students fail the NECAP in much higher proportions than “normal” students. Each of these kinds of students face different challenges in their struggles to achieve proficiency, but none of these categories of students receive the educational and programmatic support required for success. For these students, in the absence of improved support, the NECAP shuts the door to graduation.
Its negative impact on curriculum, where the NECAP exerts a powerful influence on perceptions of whether a course is valuable or not. Recently, courses that are not viewed as contributing directly to better test scores, such as the arts and other electives, have disappeared from the curriculum. This is not entirely the fault of the test, since the recession, budget cuts have played a large role in shrinking educational provision to students. Nonetheless, the way courses are selected for elimination I highly influenced by the test.
Its negative impact on the depth of instruction. One of the targets of educational reform has been the style of teaching in which teachers lecture and the student memorize material. Students then demonstrate their mastery on quizzes and tests that cover the factual content of the lecture. However, the NECAP, because it asks questions that are either right or wrong, reinforces this style of learning. Teachers react to the NECAP by teaching content rather than thinking about content.

All three of these problems are related—the NECAP tends to create classroom environments that are narrowly focused and these are environments where students with less support fail.

The challenge then is to find an assessment system that keeps curriculum broad, pushes learning and teaching to be challenging and thoughtful, and supports weaker learners. The response to this challenge, as exemplified by the New York Performance Standards Consortium (NYPSC), is to develop tests that assess performance according to the New York standards. A performance assessment is distinguished from a standardized test by requiring a student to think about, and do something with, academic content beyond memorizing it.

As soon as you begin to test thinking, the idea of scoring a performance as right or wrong becomes nonsensical because thinking is seldom completely correct or completely wrong. Instead, the meaningful performance standards that can be applied to thinking include qualities such as completeness (did the student include the relevant facts, information, evidence, etc.), coherence (did the student assemble the evidence into an internally consistent argument), persuasiveness (did the student address other perspectives in this/her argument), and other similar criteria. As the consortium literature explains:

“The tasks require students to demonstrate accomplishment in analytic thinking, reading comprehension, research writing skills, the application of mathematical computation and problem-solving skills, computer technology, the utilization of the scientific method in undertaking science research, appreciation of and performance skills in the arts, service learning and school to career skills.”

If these are the criteria that students need to meet, then it is easy to see why performance assessments avoid the trap described in item 3 above, lowering the depth of instruction. By making explicit, and describing, the kinds of thinking students need to be able to do within content, these assessments serve as constant reminders of the appropriate depth at which learning and teaching should be conducted.

Because performance assessments are embedded in courses and do not test abstract “reading” and “math”, they do not tend to narrow the curriculum. Instead of eliminating courses because they do not teach math or reading, states, schools districts and schools can make decisions about what students need to know in order to graduate. They could, for example, decide that every student needs to demonstrate proficiency in a set of core courses, but then allow the student freedom to demonstrate proficiency in an elective area of interest. All of a sudden, the system becomes much less “one size fits all”. It does not take a lot of imagination to think up ways that graduation requirements based on performance can be elaborated in ways that intrigue, incent, and reward students in a wide variety of ways.

In order to be more concrete, let’s take a look at what performance assessments in English/Language Arts and math look like in the NYPSC:

Literary Essays That Demonstrate Analytic Thinking:

Why Do They Have to Die: A Comparative Analysis of the Protagonists’ Deaths in “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” “Metamorphosis” and “Of Mice and Men”
What Role Do Black Characters Play in Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” and Flannery O’Connor’s Short Stories?
How Do Puzo’s Characters Change from Book to Film in the Godfather Saga?
Insanity in Literature: “Catch-22,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and Selected Short Stories

Problem-Solving in Mathematics That Demonstrates High Level Conceptual Knowledge

Regression Analysis for Determining Effect of Water Quality on Cosmos Suphureus
Finding the Parabolic Path of a Comet as It Moves Through the Solar System
Developing a Computer Program to Create the Brain Game
Determining and Proving Distance Between Two Points Using Trigonometric Formulas
Isaac Newton’s Laws: Discoveries and the Physics and Math Behind a Model Roller Coaster.

As I look at this list, it becomes a lot harder to think of performance assessments as fluff—they are the real deal and a serious challenge to the NECAP. They have been in use for twenty years in the consortium (it was formed in 1997). In the consortium, school and district professional development is focused on promoting the ability of teachers to get students to think well—that is, to pass the assessments. Somehow, I don’t have a negative reaction to this version of teaching to the test.

The integrity of the assessments is maintained by an outside Performance Assessment Review Board, which does what most school districts do in the other English speaking countries—England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where the testing system is much closer to this form of performance assessments than it is to NECAP. Those countries, by the way, tend to perform better than we do on international measures of reading and math. You can argue why that is the case for any number of reasons, but it’s hard to argue their performance assessment system is holding them back.

But what about the first objection to the NECAP that I listed—that the NECAP, as a graduation requirement, has a negative impact on the most vulnerable students in the system?

I’ve already argued that performance systems hold out the possibility of vitalizing teaching and learning for everyone, which would help these students. I also believe that assessing knowledge in context, not as isolated facts, is also a more natural way to think, so that would also help. But I see the issue of the 4,000 students who would loose their diplomas in the name of “high standards” as an issue of responsibility related to the use of the NECAP rather than an educational issue related to the nature of the NECAP.

It is very easy to use a test—any test—to draw an arbitrary line in the sand that separates one group of students from another. But who takes responsibility for the students on the wrong side of that line? Who changes the classrooms, develops the teachers, revises the curriculum, and puts in the support programs these students need to get over the line? And if the line consigns many more children to failure than we can get over the line, then it is irresponsibly destructive to draw the line.

June 24, 2013

PSU, ACLU petition RIDE: ‘Don’t test me, bro’

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The Providence Student Union, the ACLU, the RI Disability Law Center and 14 other organizations with a vested interest in equitable public education in the Ocean State are formally asking RIDE to stop using the NECAP test as a graduation requirement.

“The new Board of Education has never had the opportunity to fully discuss, much less take a position on, the actions of its predecessor – the Board of Regents – in approving high stakes testing,” said RI ACLU Executive Director Steve Brown, a frequent contributor to RI Future. “Through this petition, we are hopeful that the Board will take a stand and agree with the many organizations signing this petition that high stakes testing is bad policy.”

Board of Education Chairwoman Eva Mancuso told RI Future in May that the new board would reconsider the policy.

“I think that’s an important issue to come before the board,” she told me in May. “I certainly want to look at that issue.”

She also said: “I don’t think it’s the best test.” And added, “40 percent of kids are not going to not graduate from high school if I have anything to do about it.”

Using the NECAP test as a graduation requirement has emerged as one of the most controversial initiatives of Deborah Gist’s embattled tenure as education commission of Rhode Island.

Not only has using high stakes tests as a graduation requirement become more controversial across the country, the issue is further strained in Rhode Island because there are unanswered questions about the validity of the NECAP test in particular to measure individual student performance.

Tom Sgouros, Rick Richards and other RI Future contributors have painstakingly detailed how it is designed to measure school, not individual aptitude. The Providence Student Union made national news when it challenged adults to take a version of the NECAP test.

Here’s the full press release sent from the Providence Student Union today:

A coalition of 17 organizations representing youth, parents, the disability community, civil rights activists, college access organizations and other constituencies have filed a formal petition with the state Board of Education to initiate a public rule-making process over a proposal to rescind Rhode Island’s controversial new high-stakes testing graduation requirement. Under the Administrative Procedures Act, the Board will have 30 days to respond to the petition.

“The clock is ticking, and the futures of literally thousands of Rhode Island teens are hanging in the balance,” said Steven Brown, ACLU of RI Executive Director. “The new Board of Education has never had the opportunity to fully discuss, much less take a position on, the actions of its predecessor – the Board of Regents – in approving high stakes testing. Through this petition, we are hopeful that the Board will take a stand and agree with the many organizations signing this petition that high stakes testing is bad policy.”

Questions about the validity of high stakes testing as a graduation requirement have been a source of great concern and debate in recent months. In a cover letter accompanying the petition, the organizations echoed the views of many students and teachers that, rather than educating students, the policy has led to too much time being spent teaching to the test. In fact, earlier this month RIDE supported legislation that explicitly authorizes school districts to pull students out of core classroom instruction to prep for the test, if doing so is deemed to be in the student’s “best interest.” The groups also point to RIDE’s own failure to meet 32 of 33 goals it set for itself in improving achievement for traditionally vulnerable students as “ample proof of the validity of our concerns.”

RIDE has repeatedly assured worried parents that many students at risk of not graduating need not fear the testing requirement. But the signatories, like many citizens across the state, remain concerned – especially for the significant cohort of ELL and special education students.

“Use of high-stakes testing has a disproportionate impact on students with disabilities and is counter to what we know works best for these students,” said Anne Mulready, supervising attorney at the RI Disability Law Center. “Our state and school districts have made significant investments in building the capacity to provide individualized instruction for students with disabilities that focuses on individual student strengths and learning styles, as required by federal and state law. But these investments are being needlessly squandered by the use of a high-stakes test to determine who gets a high school diploma.”

The Board of Education has been in existence for six months, but has never formally discussed or voted on this controversial requirement, despite the extensive public comment the subject has received at Board meetings. Under the Administrative Procedures Act, the Board has thirty days to initially respond to the petition, either by denying or it by initiating a public rule-making process, where testimony will be accepted and the Board can, as the groups note, “consider in a timely but deliberate manner whether to accept, modify, or reject this proposal.”

As Hector Perea, a member of the Providence Student Union noted, “The petition does not make the Board take a stand on high-stakes testing. It just pushes the Board to start a public process where they have to, at the very least, think about whether to debate the issue. We think the thousands of concerned students and parents of Rhode Island deserve at least that.”

Among the groups signing the petition are The Autism Project, Children’s Policy Coalition, College Visions, NAACP Providence Chapter, Providence Student Union, ACLU of Rhode Island, Rhode Island Disability Law Center, Rhode Island Teachers Of English Language Learners, Urban League of Rhode Island, and Youth in Action.

June 24, 2013June 25, 2013

Letter from Measured Progress: All is Well!

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On June 3, 201, Commissioner Gist received a letter from the Principal Founder of Measured Progress concerning the NECAP. It said, in part:

“While graduation decisions were not a consideration when the NECAP program was designed, the NECAP instruments are general achievement measures that are reliable at the student level”

First of all, it is interesting to speculate why such a letter would be sent at this particular time, well after setting the policy requiring the use of NECAP for graduation decisions. I speculate that the letter was requested to reassure a restive Board of Regents, but that is just my guess.

Still, if this is intended as reassurance from Measured Progress, it can only be read as tepid. First, the letter acknowledges that the NECAP was never designed to measure the learning of individual students. It was, instead, designed as a general achievement measure. Unspoken is the reality that, if the NECAP had been designed to measure the learning of individual students, it would have been designed much differently. But, that question, which drags in issues of test validity, was not asked and was not addressed.

There is not a word about test validity in the letter. That is, there is no claim that the test provides information that predicts “college and career” readiness any better than a large number of other contending measures: grades, recommendations, work or leadership experience, portfolios, senior projects, or socio-economic background.

Actually, test scores track socio-economic background so closely that it would be difficult to do a good job of distinguishing the two in a validity study.

So, there is no claim in the letter that the test is more useful than information that is already available. But there is the important claim that the test is reliable at the student level. And, after all, it is the reliability of the NECAP score that contributes so much to its attraction– that attraction being the simplicity of reducing a complex history of learning into two numbers–one for reading and one for math. After all, what could be more objective that a single number? Like the current balance of a bank account, this number tells us how much reading and math the student knows.

But the test score number is not like the current balance of a bank account, which is an exact number. Instead, it is an estimate of how much a student knows. Part of the test score is what the student really knows—the true score–and part of the test score is the mistakes the student makes—getting something wrong he/she really knows, or getting something right that he/she really does not know. These mistakes create error in the test score–the more error in the test score, the less reliable it is.

When testing companies like Measured Progress talk about reliability, they talk about the reliability of the test. They mean that, using different analytical techniques, they can tell how much measurement error the test contributes to the score of a student.

Using a camera as an analogy, this is like telling someone how much the lens distorts a picture. In photography, where the subject doesn’t contribute distortion to the picture, this is all you need to know. If, to pick a number, the test is reliable at the .85 level for students, that means that .15, or 15% of the test score is error.

The usual way to deal with the error is to turn it into an error band around the reliable portion of the score. Thus, when RIDE creates a cut-score for graduation, it puts an error band around it and takes the score at the bottom of the error band as the cut-score. Voila, fair and true cut scores!

But in testing, the person tested has long been acknowledged as a source of distortion, or variation, or measurement error (see Thorndike, 1951). Beyond the test itself, the person tested contributes random variation based on “health, motivation, mental efficiency, concentration, forgetfulness, carelessness, subjectivity or impulsiveness in response and luck in random guessing”.

If you ask teachers, parents, or anyone else who actually knows students, one of the first things they bring up is how differently students behave from day to day. They worry about whether a student will have a good day or a bad day when they take the NECAP. They assert as commonplace knowledge that the same student can get very different scores on the same test on different days. This kind of variation is called test-retest error.

Yet there is no reporting on this source of measurement error in the NECAP Technical Report. Partly, this is because getting test-retest reliability entails serious logistical problems—large numbers of students need to take parallel forms of a test in a relatively short period of time. It’s difficult and prohibitively expensive.

But recent improvements in techniques for analyzing tests (Boyd, Lankford & Loeb, 2012) have changed this and, all of a sudden, we can begin to understand the reliability of students when they take “general achievement measures”, i. e., standardized achievement tests.

To return to our camera analogy, in addition to understanding how much distortion the lens produces, we can now begin to understand how much distortion the object of observation causes. Now, instead of one layer of error, we have two layers of error and they impact each other as multipliers. If, for example, the lens is .85, or 85%, reliable, and the subject is also .85, or 85%, reliable, the total reliability is .85 X .85, or .72.

Reliability of .72 means that more than a quarter of the score (28%) is error. In other words, taking the student into account, the test is a lot less reliable than we thought it was when we only took the test into account. As the authors cited above report:

“we estimate the overall extent of test measurement error is at least twice as large as that reported by the test vendor…”

The test referred to by the authors– developed by CTB-McGraw Hill–is very similar to the NECAP.

All of this casts stronger doubt on the wisdom making the NECAP a graduation requirement. Not only is the NECAP flawed in the several ways discussed in this column before—it discourages students, victimizes the weaker students in the system, constricts curriculum, and degrades teaching and learning–but one of its chief virtues, its reliability, is seriously oversold.

Underestimating test reliability is bad for a student graduation requirement, but we should also consider the impact on the whole accountability structure: teacher assessments are based not on just one student test, but several, so increases in unreliability puts the evaluation system in doubt. Likewise, accountability associated with schools—the measures defining Priority Schools and, school progress and gap closing, to name a few. The whole house of cards is now exposed to a stiff breeze.

May 28, 2013May 28, 2013

Mancuso: RI Board of Ed will debate NECAP use

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Eva Mancuso, chairwoman of the new state Board of Education, doesn’t think the NECAPs are the best test to use as a graduation requirement and said the board will revisit the decision to use it as such. There are unanswered questions about the tests effectiveness and whether or not local school districts support it, she said.

This will be the Board’s first debate on the NECAPs as a graduation requirement and/or high stakes testing as a graduation requirement (two separate debates, mind you!). The idea was initially passed ~~two years ago~~ (correction: Jason Becker said it was 2008) by its predecessor, the Board of Regents.

High stakes standardized tests as a graduation requirement, a major effort of the so-called education reform movement that is causing controversy from Seattle to New England, became a high profile political issue this year when 40 percent of high school juniors didn’t score well enough to graduate from high school. This is the first year Rhode Island is using a standardized test as a graduation requirement and, unlike other standardized tests, the New England Common Assessment Program was not designed to be used as a graduation requirement.

Tom Sgouros has argued it isn’t an effective tool for measuring individual student performance. The Providence Student Union raised the profile of the issue even higher when they organized a group of adult community leaders to take the test; 60 percent of them didn’t do well enough to warrant a high school diploma.

May 23, 2013May 24, 2013

Gist, education reform blasted at BoE meeting

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Neither Dr. Gist nor the education reform movement came off very well at the Board of Education meeting earlier tonight. She only had one supporter among those who gave testimony. I was unable to speak, time ran out, so later in this post I’ll write what I was planning to say. Before I get to that, a few notes about the meeting.

Important: the BoE is accepting written comments on the Gist renewal up until June 1. No vote was to be taken tonight. Submit early, submit often.

For those of you who want a blow-by-blow account of the early part of the meeting, look at my Tweets: @gusuht

Those who did get to speak were outstanding. The vast majority of the speakers were teachers with lots to say. Chairman Mancuso, noticing the lack of time, bumped up parents and students to the front of the line. By far the most telling and moving testimony was given by a student who graduated from a RI High School a year ago, and has since been in college. Roughly, he said that in high school, with all of the testing and teaching to the test and test practice he had lost his love for learning. Once in college he was freed from the dehumanizing testing regime and regained this love. The Gist reforms had hindered his learning, not helped it. It had emptied his spirit, not nurtured it. I hope Bob caught his name. Interestingly, he was the only one who came without a prepared text, but I think he had the most impact. Or I hope so.

OK, my almost-testimony. Actually, the major part of it was a Letter to the Editor, by someone else, in a New Yorker issue late last year. The Letter was in response to an article in an earlier issue (“Public Defender,” by David Denby, the New Yorker, November 19, 2012). That article was about the famous reformed education-reformer Dr. Diane Ravitch. Briefly, up until ten years ago she was a leader of the education reform movement, pushing testing, charter schools, etc. What happened? Ten years ago she looked at the results and they stank. So she switched 180 degrees and is now speaking out around the country against the education reform movement.

Here’s the Letter; it’s from the December 24 & 31, 2012 issue of the New Yorker, in the Mail section, page 8. I have not modified it in any way.

As Ravitch argues, reform strategies based on extensive reading and math tests, followed by rewards and punishments for teachers and schools based on those test scores, along with the encouragement of vast charter-school expansion, have not brought about significant improvements in student performance. Tellingly, no nation, state, or district that has gone from mediocre to world-class in the past twenty years — including Ontario, Canada; Massachusetts; Finland; Singapore; and even the Aspire charter schools — has followed this strategy. Successful schools and districts have supported the development of professional teamwork, and have completely revamped how they attract, train, and support teachers. Building the teaching profession around what is known about quality teaching, and allowing teachers the time and giving them the support to continually get better at what they do, has been the secret of educational success around the world.

Bill Honig, Chair, Instructional Quality Commission, California Department of Education, Mill Valley, Calif.

On an historical note, the New York Times columnist Gail Collins has written in her recent book ( “As Texas Goes….,” Liveright Publishing, 2012) about the origins and history of “No Child Left Behind.” That is/was former President George W. Bush’s signature education reform program that is the major source of all of the fuss today. Bush actually started an equivalent program in Texas when he was governor there, before becoming president. Going on to Washington he foisted his miracle cure onto the entire nation. Unfortunately, back in Texas they discovered that the program didn’t work. Somehow that never visibly appeared in the national conversation. And the bad idea spread throughout the land.

May 23, 2013May 23, 2013

Former Gist supporter is now anti-NECAP activist

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Jean Ann Guliano is the Robert McNamara of the Rhode Island ed reform movement, said our mutual friend Bob Houghtaling. It’s a good analogy. Diane Ravitch works too.

Guliano is a former school committee chairwoman from East Greenwich who ran for Lt. Gov. on the Moderate Party ticket. As chairwoman, she was very fiscally conservative – at one time she tried to outsource school custodians. She was also a big fan Deborah Gist fan and Race to the Top supporter. (who in East Greenwich wouldn’t want to race the likes of Central Falls and Woonsocket to the top).

She also has a son with autism. He’s one of those kids who might not fare so well on a standardized test. But he’s certainly smart enough to warrant a high school diploma. And Guliano is far and away smart enough to help him through that situation. The issue, as I see it, is not every kid with autism has a smart, politically connected and hard-working mom like Guliano.

Here’s how she put it in a recent GoLocal post:

As a former school committee member, business person and interested parent, I was an early supporter of Race to the Top and Commissioner Gist when she came on board in 2009. I also signed off for my district on the RTTT application. The goals sounded promising. Who wouldn’t want every child to receive an excellent education? Many of the numerous high profile goals of RTTT, especially those that have appealed to the business and political community, have been vigorously addressed. These include areas such as funding reliability, increase in charter schools, elimination of seniority-based promotion, teacher evaluation systems, data gathering, progress monitoring, accountability, etc.

However, with all of these accomplishments, the one thing that has not improved is the outcomes for our most vulnerable students. The original goals of both No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top were not about turning schools into businesses or testing companies into a cottage industry. They were about improving the educational outcomes for those students on the fringe – those who are economically disadvantaged, have limited English proficiency and special needs. These students generally don’t have powerful lobbyists. Businesses don’t necessarily line up to hire these students, and even schools even know that these are the students who bring down their test scores.

Read the whole thing here.

May 23, 2013May 23, 2013

WaPost: Gist controversial on national level too

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Deborah Gist is not only raising hackles with the education community here in Rhode Island, she’s doing it on a national level too! On Tuesday, Chiefs for Change released a letter attacking labor leader Randi Weingarten for opposing high stakes testing. Gist is on the board for Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change group and she co-signed the letter.

Only problem is, according to the Washington Post, Gist and the letter criticized Weingarten for something she didn’t say.

How’s this for a trick? Jeb Bush’s “Chiefs for Change,” a group of former and current state education superintendents, have attacked American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten for something she didn’t say — without even mentioning her name!

That’s right, a Washington Post education blogger – a fairly well-credentialed one, at that – says Gist and Chiefs for Change were being tricky. Valerie Strauss goes on to explain:

Let’s get this straight: Weingarten didn’t argue (as testing experts do) that using student standardized test scores to evaluate teachers and principals is wrong because the results are not reliable. She didn’t call for a permanent ban. She asked for a moratorium to make sure everyone is ready. Given that teachers are being evaluated on the student test scores, it seems only fair to give them enough time to actually learn the standards, develop lessons around the standards, and give students time to absorb them.

I don’t know if she was referring to Tom Sgouros specifically when she wrote that TESTING EXPERTS DO NOT THINK HIGH STAKES TEST RESULTS ARE RELIABLE, but she did give a shout to to the states that are struggling through the politics of it (emphasis mine):

Students in some states this spring started taking standardized tests supposedly aligned with the Common Core and there have been enormous problems reported by teachers and principals.

It’s well worth noting that Sgouros’ loudest criticism’s of Gist have been that the NECAP test isn’t aligned with Common Core. And like this Washington Post blogger, he’s also called her out for being disingenuous, too.

May 20, 2013May 20, 2013

PSU students challenge Gist to debate

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With public school teachers organizing to Dump Gist (they meet today at 4:30 at Cranston West High School) as her continued employment is debated later this week, students from Providence are applying some pressure as well. Following up on the Providence Student Union‘s high-profile action in which adults took the NECAP test, they now want to debate the issue with the adult behind the high stakes testing regime.

After meeting with Gist last week, they sent her a letter asking her to discuss the same issues in public.

“Students appreciated meeting with her behind closed doors, but believe that the discussion needs to happen in the public,” said Aaron Regunberg, an organizer of the student group.

Here’s the letter they sent:

Dear Commissioner Gist,

In the name of open discussion and the free exchange of ideas, we, the members of the Providence Student Union, respectfully request that you participate with us in a public debate regarding Rhode Island’s new high-stakes standardized testing graduation requirement. We suggest the following terms:
– We agree on a neutral setting
– We agree on a neutral moderator.
– We agree on a neutral format (our suggestion is to copy the debate done by Leadership Rhode Island for and against the resolution, “The Rhode Island Department of Education should reverse its decision to make NECAP scores a high school graduation requirement,” using some variation of the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues’ public debate format).

We believe this will be a great opportunity for the people of Rhode Island to hear both sides of this important issue. We would like to propose June 8th as a possible date for the debate, although we are very willing to be flexible as we know you are busy. We sincerely hope you will take us up on this offer. Thank you.

Sincerely,

The Providence Student Union

May 10, 2013

Our schools and the truth about policy

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The commissioner of education has an op-ed in the Providence Journal this morning. Entitled “Our Schools and the Truth about Testing” it painted a rosy picture of what high performance in schools means:

“Every high-performing school I have ever visited has been a vibrant, rich educational environment where learning is fun and well-rounded, and where students and teachers are joyful and engaged in meaningful, relevant activities.”

That sounds great, doesn’t it? But:

What about the schools that are not yet high-performing? Exactly how does the simple imposition of a stern graduation requirement move a low-performing high school towards an environment “where learning is fun and well-rounded”? The evidence on the ground is quite thin, and all the schools I know about are addressing the problem through testing drills and prep sessions, hardly a route to joyful engagement.
And what about the high-performing schools who have watered down their curricula because, though they do fine on the tests, they don’t show “Adequate Yearly Progress” as Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) policy demands. My daughter attends one of these, and her educational options have been diluted and curtailed in order to improve what are already fairly respectable scores on the NECAP test. Her “educational environment” is less “vibrant” and “rich” as a direct result of RIDE policy.

After describing the sweetness and light of her vision for education, the commissioner goes on:

“In Rhode Island, we use our statewide standardized assessment, the New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP), for a variety of purposes, yet there isn’t a single decision about students or teachers that we base solely on the state assessments.”

And then contradicts herself in the very next sentence:

“For example, as part of our Diploma System, we expect students to attain at least a minimum level of achievement on the NECAP or to show progress in order to earn a high-school diploma.”

If you expect students to pass the NECAP test in order to graduate, or at least to improve, then graduation is a decision based solely on the state assessment, despite words to the contrary. There may be other factors, but unless those other factors can override a poor performance on the test, graduation is determined solely by performance on the test and the rest is just decoration.

In public statements like these, the commissioner takes pains to point out that other tests can substitute for the NECAP test. The word I’ve heard is that few students are informed of these options, and that it takes activist parents to use them.

In a similar vein, the commissioner writes:

“Unfortunately, some schools do have too many tests, and these tests can disrupt classroom instruction. It is our responsibility to work with our local educators to ensure a proper balance of high-quality and useful assessments”

And here, perhaps, is the nub of the problem. When the majority of schools are implementing RIDE policy in a way that hurts education, is it the fault of the schools, or the fault of the policy? Are we to excuse the people who created the policy because they claim that everyone is implementing it badly?

To review:

The NECAP test was designed to assess students and schools: to tell which are ahead and which behind their peers. This is a good thing. I wish the tests were less intrusive, but valid assessments are a useful tool, and NECAP seems to be a decent assessment test.
The NECAP test was not designed to assess mastery of a body of knowledge, though grade-level standards were used to develop appropriate test questions.
The high stakes applied to the test — graduation requirement for students, job evaluations for teachers and principals — have distorted the test results and forced many schools to devote increasing numbers of classroom hours to test prep, or disguised test prep, such as a new science “survey” class whose purpose is to introduce topics that might be covered on the NECAP.

The result is that most schools find themselves far from the rosy picture of high performing schools painted in the commissioner’s op-ed, and those high-performing schools are themselves under pressure in ways that darken the picture.

The second point in the list is important, and it has been the source of a great deal of confusion. Imagine yourself designing an end-of-term test for a class you taught. Maybe you’d have 20 questions on the test, and maybe 15 of them would be questions anyone could answer who had been paying attention. The other 5 would be questions that might distinguish the A students from the C students, and maybe you’re throw in another question for extra credit. The NECAP designers, for perfectly valid statistical reasons, feel those first 15 questions are a waste of time and they leave them out. Consequently, students who might have gotten 16 questions correct on a properly designed end-of-term test get only one, and probably flunk.

To this day, I’ve heard no valid rebuttals of this criticism. I have heard the critique misconstrued so it can be brushed aside. I’ve seen test technical materials changed to reflect RIDE policy rather than have RIDE policy reflect the limitations of the tests, which would be more appropriate. And now I’ve seen a vision of glorious education, full of that ol’ sweetness and light, but completely lacking in the details of how we get there.

I share the commissioner’s vision for what a high-performing school should look like. I share her commitment to a rigorous education, too. But the evidence that we’re on track to get to that Nirvana is extremely hard to find. Simply repeating an outline of that vision does very little to get us there.

There are very specific RIDE policies that I argue are actually working against that vision, and those ought to be the subject of any discussion, not further description of the fantasy. Where is the defense of requiring financially strapped districts to provide more test prep? Where is the defense of demanding “Adequate Yearly Progress” of schools that are already doing very well? Are they not allowed to add enriching activites instead of just pushing harder on the test prep? Where is the defense of demanding better results without providing a plan (or resources) to get us there? As the commissioner writes, we absolutely do:

“…need a system that brings excellent educators into our schools and classrooms and that provides teachers with the resources and support they need to do their job well.”

Unfortunately we do not have this at the present, and I see no plan that will actually create that so long as RIDE policy is based on little more than simply demanding that the world conform to their fantasy.

May 7, 2013May 8, 2013

More illogic from RIDE

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In a reply to my post about sneaky changes in the NECAP documentation, the RI Department of Education spokesman wrote this:

“The NECAP assessment is designed to measure whether students have attained the knowledge and skills expected at each grade level, that is, whether students have met grade-level standards.”

This, of course, is the heart of the matter, isn’t it? I claim the test is a poor measure of the mastery of a body of knowledge, and therefore it is, shall we say, an outrageous act of irresponsibility to use it for a graduation test. RIDE, of course, says otherwise. This is precisely what is at issue in this whole controversy, and simply stating it as fact at the head of a reply doesn’t really address the point at all, but simply seeks to override it with the voice of authority.

In truth, as was pointed out by the psychometricians I’ve spoken to, RIDE has done little or no work to demonstrate the “validity” of the test, this very question. For an employment test, by contrast, the laws insist that the employer demonstrate — with real data — that good performance on the test is a good way to identify good employees. RIDE relies on correlation between NECAP scores and survey questions that ask piffle like “how much homework do you do in a week?”

The NECAP test was designed with the grade-level expectations (GLE) in mind, and it uses questions relevant to those GLEs. Does that make it a good measure of whether a student has mastered those or not? Tom Hoffman, who runs tuttlesvc.org, a great education resource, showed us at a Senate hearing that performance in Massachusetts and Rhode Island is not so very different on the 8th-grade math NAEP tests (administered by the federal Dept of Education and widely considered the “gold standard” of testing). Overall, Massachusetts does do better than Rhode Island on that test, but they’re not in a different league. But performance is dramatically different on the 11th-grade math tests administered by each state (NECAP in RI, the MCAS in MA). Can anyone explain this? Do our kids get dumber in the 9th and 10th grades? Or are the tests different in ways that haven’t been adequately explained?

“NECAP was not designed to provide, in isolation, detailed student-level diagnostic information for formulating individual instructional plans.”

This is a quote from the NECAP documentation, earlier in the paragraph that they “clarified.” According to RIDE, then, we should read “in isolation” in the sentence above as “only taking it once”? This is comparable to the way RIDE claims that “multiple measures” is to mean that you can take the NECAP more than one time. This is silly. What the above means is that NECAP is a clue to student achievement, but should only be used as one of several measures, as was policy under the previous commissioner. Making passage a graduation requirement is contrary to the meaning of the NECAP designers’ instructions.

Let’s end with a brief but important digression.

One hundred years ago, Henry Goddard, who went to school at Moses Brown and was a member of the first generation of psychological testers, persuaded Congress to let him set up an IQ testing program at Ellis Island that eventually proved that most immigrants were “morons.” (He coined the term.) During World War I, intelligence tests used to select officers were later shown to have profound biases in favor of native-born recruits and those of northern European extraction, which is another way to say that lots of Italian-American soldiers were unjustly denied promotions. For decades, misused IQ tests classified tremndous numbers of healthy children as disabled, or mentally deficient — well into the 1960s and 1970s. The history of testing in America is littered with misuses of testing that have had profound and unjust effects on millions of adults and children. Does the available evidence about the NECAP test persuade you that we are not in the middle of one more chapter of this terrible history?

A graduation test is not a trivial thing. The results of a test can have a significant impact on a young person’s life. It seems to me that the burden is on the people who think a high-stakes graduation test is the only sensible way forward to demonstrate — with a great deal more rigor than they have so far bothered to do — that a test measures what it is supposed to measure. The IQ tests at Ellis Island, in the officer corps, and in the schools, did not measure what they claimed, and thousands upon thousands of lives were changed, few for the better.

If these policy changes are being made for the sake of our children, then can’t we stand to have a little more compassion while we’re making them? This means intellectual honesty, and it also means being careful not to ruin lives you say you’re trying to help.

May 7, 2013May 7, 2013

Department of Education responds to Sgouros post

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Tom Sgouros’ as a graduation requirement caused quite a stir yesterday. As such, RIDE spokesman Elliot Krieger sent me this email yesterday afternoon:

Commissioner Gist has been forthright about the changes in our interpretation guide regarding the use of NECAP. She has developed a prepared statement that she has used in several presentations, and we have presented this statement to some in the media who have asked for her comment on this point. For example, I know we provided this statement to a TV reporter in late January – probably to others, but I don’t have a complete list. Here is the statement; the context is significant, not the highlighted passages only:

The NECAP assessment is designed to measure whether students have attained the knowledge and skills expected at each grade level, that is, whether students have met grade-level standards.

We use the results of the NECAP assessments for several purposes, including communication with parents, guiding instruction for individual students and groups of students, evaluation of educators, classification of schools, and accountability for schools and districts – as well as in determining readiness for graduation.

Nothing in the design, construction, or administration of the NECAP assessments prevents them from being used in the process of making decisions about educational programs and referrals, promotion, and graduation. Confusion about this point arose because of some language in the initial interpretation guide that all NECAP states used. That language said:

NECAP results are intended to evaluate how well students and schools are achieving the learning targets contained in the Grade Level Expectations. NECAP was designed primarily to provide detailed school-level results and accurate summary information about individual students. NECAP was not designed to provide, in isolation, detailed student-level diagnostic information for formulating individual instructional plans. However, NECAP results can be used, along with other measures, to identify students’ strengths and weaknesses. NECAP is only one indicator of student performance and should not be used for referring students to special education or for making promotion and/or graduation decisions. (Highlights added)

Clearly, the point of this passage, in context, is that single-administration NECAP results alone should not be used for making graduation decisions.

We have since clarified the language in this passage to accurately describe the proper use of the NECAP assessments, and this language is in our current guide:

Use of NECAP Student-Level Results NECAP results are intended to evaluate how well students and schools are achieving the learning targets contained in the Grade Level and Grade Span Expectations. NECAP was designed primarily to provide detailed school-level results and accurate summary information about individual students. NECAP was not designed to provide, in isolation, detailed student-level diagnostic information for formulating individual instructional plans. However, NECAP results can be used, along with other measures, to identify students’ strengths and weaknesses. NECAP is only one indicator of student performance and results of a single NECAP test administration should not be used for referring students to special education or for making promotion and/or graduation decisions. (Highlight added)

Neither the first version of the guide nor the clarification referred to test construction, design, or administration, but rather to the philosophy about the use of test results.

May 6, 2013May 6, 2013

Students missing math classes needed for NECAP

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More than a third of Providence high school students who took the NECAP test in October may not have taken either the necessary algebra or geometry classes to fare well on the test, according to the Providence Student Union. A full13 percent of NECAP test takers haven’t taken either algebra and geometry in school, the two prominent disciplines on the math NECAP.

“How can the commissioner possibly think it is fair to hold kids answerable for material they haven’t been introduced to yet?” said Ken Fish, the former director of middle and high school reform for the state Department of Education, which has made the NECAP test a new graduation requirement. “How can the Board of Education go ahead with this diploma system when the evidence against it continues to grow and grow? This is an unethical policy, and it needs to be put on hold.”

Education Commissioner Deborah Gist has come under intense scrutiny as of late for pushing ahead with an unpopular proposal to use the NECAP test as a graduation requirement. The Providence Student Union, a group of urban high school students who advocate for a student-centric education, have led the protest.

“It’s really just confirmation of what we have been saying all along,” said Monique Taylor, a member of the Providence Student Union and a student at Central High School. “The NECAP is not aligned to our curriculum, so lots of students are being held ‘accountable’ for things we haven’t even been taught yet. How does that make any sense at all?”

Tom Sgouros, writing for this blog, has done substantial research to show that the NECAP isn’t meant to be used as a graduation requirement and that it isn’t an effective tool in measuring individual student performance. His reporting has also shown that RIDE and Gist have tried to cover up these points. Today, he reported that .

PSU members they plan to collect course data from other districts to show that in other urban school districts students aren’t getting the necessary course training to perform well on the NECAP tests.

“The information we have is from Providence, but I bet we’re not the only district with a bunch of students who’ve been set up to fail like this,” said Hector Perea, another PSU member and a student at Hope High School. “We plan to try to get data from other cities, as well, to show how truly ridiculous RIDE’s current policy is.”

May 6, 2013May 7, 2013

Sneaky changes in NECAP documentation

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The NECAP-as-graduation-test has occupied a lot of my attention recently. As I have written before, the NECAP test is a fundamentally different kind of test than one you would use as a graduation test. The questions you’d put on a graduation test are exactly the ones that the test designers consider a waste of time and leave off. This is a matter of relatively simple statistics, and even if it were not, there are plenty of psychometricians (testing experts) who agree with me.

In discussions of this matter, it’s tempting to quote a page from the “Guide to Using the 2012 NECAP Reports” on the subject, and several people have drawn my attention to this passage:

“NECAP is only one indicator of student performance and results of a single NECAP test administration should not be used for referring students to special education or for making promotion and/or graduation decisions.” (page 6)

At a hearing on the matter a couple of weeks ago, a Senator read that passage to Deborah Gist, who replied by pouncing on him to emphasize that the word “single” was the key word in that sentence. She pointed out that giving kids who flunk the opportunity to take the test again complies fully with this caution.

At the time, I wondered how any sentient speaker of English could read that sentence and think the critical word in it was “single.” To me, it seems like a caution against using the test as a graduation test or a special ed placement test. In truth, the sentence is a tad gratuitous, since the statistics of the test say the same thing, and say it in much stronger language. It seems odd to read the sentence any other way. However, if it was my career and reputation that depended on reading it in just the right way, I suppose I too could find a way to claim that never has the word “single” played such an important role in any sentence of the English language.

So imagine my surprise when I learned that the word “single” was added to that sentence in 2011. Measured Progress, the company that designed the NECAP test, publishes a “Guide to Using the NECAP Reports” each year. For the most part the report is just boilerplate, updated each year by changing it slightly to accommodate some of the changes to the test. That year, for example, was the first year for the writing test in the 3-8 grades, so there was some text about that. But before February 2011, when the guide was reporting on the 2009 test, the sentence above — same page, identical rest of the paragraph — read like this:

“NECAP is only one indicator of student performance and should not be used for referring students to special education or for making promotion and/or graduation decisions.”

Let’s have a big hurrah here for the internet archive’s Wayback Machine, from which I learned that the old version was still on the RIDE web site as late as January 18 of this year, and that the change was made for the report on the 2010 results, in early 2011.

What’s interesting to me is that the earlier sentence seems pretty clear — and to be clearly different than it became after 2011. There is no wiggle room in “should not be used.”

More important, this is how the text read back when the NECAP was adopted as a graduation requirement. At that time, it seems that the Department of Education was fairly clearly contradicting the advice of the NECAP designers — who subsequently changed that advice! Are we to assume that the technical documentation for this test is only advisory? Or maybe not proofed very well? Which other simple declarative statements in the documentation are ok for the department to ignore? Can schools ignore some of it? How about students?

Or is it only the people who pay Measured Progress who can get them to change their advice?

The guides for the NECAP science tests were never changed — after all, they’re not used for graduation tests — so they continue to read just as the reading and math guide did before 2011. (The 2011 science report is here. A friend downloaded the 2012 report a few weeks ago, but there appears to be no link to it any more on this page, so maybe they’re changing that one now, too.)

What we’re talking about here is dishonesty. This isn’t the same as simple dishonesty, or lying. This is intellectual dishonesty, and here’s the problem with that. The world is what it is. The facts of the world do not care about your opinion, or your triumph in some argument. Intellectual honesty is important in science because it’s the only way to get our understanding of the world to approach the world. Fudge your results, and you’ll find that your cure for cancer doesn’t work, that your miracle glue is really an explosive, or that your economic policy just makes things worse. This is why science is supposed to progress by scientists checking and criticizing each others results: that’s how you maintain intellectual honesty. Sometimes the disputes get personal or political and distract from the real aim, but the real aim is to get at the truth via intellectual honesty, enforced by the scientific community.

The truth is that the NECAP wasn’t designed to be a graduation test, and this was obvious from the very beginning. It has been coerced into the role not because it was good for kids, but because it was cheaper than designing a dedicated graduation test. The features that make it a bad graduation test are objectively true facts about the test and its design. Neither editing technical documentation, committee-hearing filibusters, or cutting off public comment at Board of Education meetings will change those facts.

I have no doubt at all that the commissioner can fend off challenges from the public over these matters, indefinitely. But reality will — as it usually does — have the last word. And children will pay the price. The question for Board of Education members, legislators, school administrators, teachers, and parents is which side they want to be on.

April 29, 2013April 29, 2013

2 speech Tuesday: State of Education; State of Student

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Deborah Gist has been doing her darnedest to ignore the Providence Student Union as of late. But before her annual “State of Education” speech tomorrow night at the State House, they will be giving the inaugural “State of the Student” speech there as well.

“Students are the ones who actually experience the “State of Education” every day, so PSU has decided to take this opportunity to share our vision for the schools Rhode Island’s students deserve,” they said in an email that went out today.

Gist, in her joint session to the House and Senate tomorrow, will no doubt talk about the $75 million in Race to the Top money is helping advance the so-called “education reform” agenda she has proscribed for the Rhode Island. The students from Providence will preempt her by letting everyone know that it hasn’t been working out for them yet.

Here’s their full email:

Okay, what are we talking about?

Every year, the Rhode Island Commissioner of Education gives a “State of Education” address to the General Assembly detailing the Department of Education’s vision for Rhode Island students.

That is all well and good. But members of the Providence Student Union (PSU) feel that these speeches miss an important perspective – namely, the voices of Rhode Island’s students themselves.

Students are the ones who actually experience the “State of Education” every day, so PSU has decided to take this opportunity to share our vision for the schools Rhode Island’s students deserve.

Please join us tomorrow at the First Annual State of the Student Address to hear PSU’s recommendations for the changes our state’s young people need to achieve high standards in high school and beyond, with topics including teaching and learning, curriculum, school repairs, assessment and high-stakes testing. We hope to see you there!

Sincerely,

PSU’s State of the Student planning committee (Hector, Kelvis, Leexammarie, Cauldierre and Aaron)

P.S. In case you can’t make it tomorrow but still want to participate, we will be offering live-streaming coverage of our Address starting at 4:30 p.m. on our Facebook page.

The Providence Student Union, led by local adults Aaron Regunberg and Zach Mazera, has drawn significant attention to the NECAP graduation requirement, even getting a mention in a Boston Glove editorial. Gist, however, has cautioned local adults not to pay attention or participate in the student’s attempts to criticize the new policy (see statement from the commissioner’s office regarding this characterization).

April 14, 2013April 14, 2013

What’s wrong with the ed. reform movement

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psu testing rally — Photo by Sam Valorose.

While it is great that so much emphasis is being placed on the misuse of NECAP testing there is much more that needs to be looked at regarding how our present youth population is treated by the education system.

Recent studies indicate that nearly 1 in 5 school aged youth are taking prescription medications. In addition, the abuse of medications like Adderall, Klonopin and Oxycontin has resulted in a number of kids becoming addicted, going to jail and/or overdosing (sometimes death resulting).

I point this out because being a young person today is proving to be more stressful than for the last generation. Sure, each era has its concerns, but for today’s kids the pace of the world is often difficult to keep up with.

In trying to keep up with the tests, extra school requirements, after school activities, friends, navigating through cyberspace, parents etc., etc. some young people either shut down or are given medications to keep up. In an odd way a Cottage Industry has been created – benefiting testing companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, psychiatrists and so-called education reformers.

While all of this goes on, kids are being exploited and miseducated. With little emphasis on applicability, today’s education system is oftentimes perfunctory. Even kids who ‘keep up’ are cheated. For those who struggle it is remediation, medication, dropping out, counseling and/or a feeling of failure.

We are creating an alienation factory. Too many are prescribed powerful medications so they can remain on the conveyor belt.

There is much more to the NECAP story than just the test. Where once child development was central to how we taught kids – test scores have become the major player. Where once Piaget, Erikson, Gardner and Montessori were discussed, young students are now educated as if in a Dilbert episode.

Addressing the importance of the NECAP is essential. However, doing so is only a part of the battle. The stress being placed on today’s youth is enormous. Somehow we have to step back and look at this.

I am amazed that we are allowing this all to occur under our noses. There are school officials afraid to speak for fear of losing their jobs. There are politicians supportive of all of this reform stuff because it can be supposedly measured by tests. In the end the kids pay the heaviest price. Years from now many will wish they had spoken up.

April 11, 2013

Boston Globe Says No To NECAP Requirement

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An editorial in today’s Boston Globe recommends that Rhode Island not use the NECAP test as a graduation requirement.

While Education Commissioner Deborah Gist keeps comparing the NECAP to Massachusetts MCAT, the state’s biggest newspaper agree with what Tom Sgouros has been writing about on RI Future:

The fundamental problem, though, is that the test wasn’t originally designed to be a graduation requirement and isn’t suited for that purpose. Schools need more high standards and accountability, and the NECAP was designed not to evaluate individual students’ proficiency, but to rank the quality of the schools they attend. Unlike tests meant primarily for student assessment, such as the MCAS in Massachusetts, the NECAP expects a certain portion of test-takers to fail. Research suggests that percentage will likely come from low-income, working-class neighborhoods — the students who are least likely to return for a fifth year of high school, even if skipping it means going without a diploma.

The editorial also lauds the Providence Student Union for raising attention to the issue:

The Providence Student Union, a student-led advocacy group, last month organized an event at which 50 prominent Rhode Islanders took a shortened version of the math NECAP. Sixty percent of the test-takers — among them elected officials, attorneys, scientists, engineers, reporters, college professors, and directors of leading nonprofits — failed to score at least “partially proficient,” the standard education officials have set for graduation. Under the new rules, many of those 50 successful individuals would not have been allowed to graduate.

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