This collection has been gathered to raise awareness about concerns related to high-stakes standardized tests and related assessments and as a research tool to organize online content. There is a grey funnel shaped icon at the top right corner of the screen (in desktop view mode) where one can enter keyword searches of content (such as PARCC, SBAC, Smarter Balanced, CAASPP, SAT, Pearson, validity, etc.). The following is the link for the Smarter Balanced (SBAC) subset of posts: https://www.scoop.it/topic/testing-testing?q=SBAC. Readers are encouraged to explore related links within each post for additional information. Views provided here are for information only and do not necessarily constitute an official position of the curator nor her employer. For more updates, see Educator Resources tab at http://EduResearcher.com [Links to external site].
"After his stint as a “lead architect” for the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), David Coleman landed the presidency of one of the CCSS insider groups, the College Board.
He decided to “redesign” the SAT– but he apparently did not redesign the test security to go along with it."...
"Results from a 2015 survey of more than 1500 NEA members teaching the grades and subjects required to be tested under No Child Left Behind (grades 3-8 and 10-12 in ELA and math) indicate that a vast majority of these educators – 70 percent – do not believe their primary state assessment is developmentally appropriate for their students. Only 13 percent agreed that the NCLB-required state standardized test their students took met that standard.
Teachers learn during their training and through experience that each child’s readiness to learn new skills and concepts varies by many factors in addition to age. They also know that each child’s ability to learn something new depends on both the individual child’s prior experiences and skills and on the particular concept being taught. While one child may be developmentally ready to learn multiplication, another child of the same age may not. However, the child who is not ready for multiplication may be ready to learn to play a musical instrument while the other child may not. New learning requires that a child has the background and prior skills to learn.
Unfortunately, standardized tests based on a narrowly prescribed curriculum and linked to specific grade levels are not a good way to judge student or teacher success.
The survey also found that while a majority of teachers did not think any of the state tests (i.e. PARCC, SBAC, and state-specific tests) were developmentally appropriate, there were statistically significant differences among the tests. Specifically, PARCC was seen as the least developmentally appropriate with Smarter Balanced and other state tests somewhat less so.
Educators working at different school levels also viewed the appropriateness of state tests differently. Teachers in elementary and middle schools were more likely to say the tests were not appropriate (77 and 75 percent, respectively) while a smaller majority (58 percent) of high school teachers said they were not.
Developmental appropriateness, according to the NEA survey, is just one of many requirements a standardized test must meet to be “most useful.” Such assessments should also assess content that students have had the opportunity to learn, provide feedback to students that helps them learn, and assist educators in setting learning goals.
The survey also revealed that school demographics resulted in no significant differences in how teachers viewed the tests. A school’s percentage of students eligible for free and reduced price lunch, a school’s student-teacher ratio, and the percentage of Black students in the school were not associated with differences in teachers’ perceptions of the developmental appropriateness of state tests.
Teachers’ expertise about their students’ needs and abilities is critical to the successful implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). Passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama in December, ESSA abandons the top-down accountability and testing regime of No Child Left Behind, replacing it with by a more inclusive system based on collaborative state and local innovation.
In addition to providing funding for states to audit, streamline and improve assessments, ESSA creates a pilot program for state-designed assessment systemsthat are driven by teaching and learning, rather than accountability. By calling for decisions to be determined by collaboration between educators, parents and other community members, ESSA guarantees that educator voice will play a role in shaping future state tests.
“We know that there are innovative performance assessment systems out there that were just waiting for the necessary flexibility to flourish. We know that there are educators and principals who have tapped into the best ways to engage students with integrated curriculum and they were just waiting for the necessary flexibility to make it work in their schools,” said Eskelsen García.
"The National Federation of the Blind, along with seven national disability advocacy and technology organizations, sent a letter on January 23, 2015, to the governing board of Smarter Balanced, a consortium of twenty-one member states that will administer Common Core assessment tests to K-12 students starting this spring. The letter advises the board to take immediate action to fix outstanding accessibility barriers and policies before the tests are launched.
The letter identifies five issues that, if left unresolved, will prevent students who are blind or have other disabilities from participating equally in the tests, and from receiving necessary accommodations, as required by federal law.
The issues include Smarter Balanced’s policy that prohibits the use of text-to-speech on certain parts of the English-language assessment for grades three through five, exclusion of other commonly used and necessary accommodations, persistent accessibility barriers on the test platform, failure to make the test accessible to screen-access software programs and devices used by many students with disabilities, and a flawed process to deliver tactile graphics. For more information, please read the full text of the letter below or read the PDF version."
Attached is an updated handout (July SBE meeting, Item # 1) on highlights from the CA Peer Review submission to the feds in June, updated to include information from the Smarter Balanced Peer Review submission that I received August 1. Also attached is an updated “Initial Observations” document on this material, to provide the detailed observations from both submissions that led to the highlights on the updated handout.
The attached material provides good context material for the upcoming release of 2016 CAASPP results that include 2016 Smarter Balanced scores. In particular, the updated highlights and observations show that
Opportunity-to-Learn issues (i.e., degree of implementation of Common Core instruction) have not been addressed by either the CDE or SBAC over the past two years, despite indications from SBAC that OTL surveys would be done for both spring 2015 and 2016 test administrations. The lack of information on OTL hampers sound interpretation of SB scores, and underscores a conclusion that it will be 2018 or so before SB test results will become truly meaningful for CA’s students and teachers, schools, districts, and public. I’d also note that the evolution of capability to take tests on computers also contaminates interpretation of Smarter Balanced results, especially for underserved students who most likely have had fewer opportunities to experience technology-based instruction.
The Smarter Balanced Peer Review information “revealed some gaps in item coverage at the low end of the performance spectrum” that clearly led to compromised reliability (or accuracy) of results for low wealth students, EL’s, and SWD’s, especially for the Math tests and especially for the secondary grades most prominently for the HS Math results. This information needs to be taken into account when interpreting 2016 Smarter Balanced scores, particularly comparative information for subgroups across content areas and grade levels.
The concerns that scores from roughly 30,000 students who participated but responded minimally to test questions were excluded from 2015 public aggregate results were not addressed in the Peer Review material. These concerns led to inflated performance level percentages for selected schools and districts for the 2015 results."
Douglas J. McRae, Ph.D.
_____________________
Document attached to this message may be downloaded by clicking title of post.
"Last spring, Julia Kim’s students with disabilities at Fairmount Elementary in San Francisco were ready to take a new standardized test. They were excited that it had been built especially for them.
In past years, students with visual perception disorders had test questions read out loud. This time, the students sat in front of their computers awaiting the new technology designed to help them complete the test on their own for the first time.
But as soon as the first question appeared, students complained that the print was too small.
The color contrast tool, which used a background to minimize visual distortions, had been developed for the Common Core test to make it easier for special education students to see. But in practice, the tool prevented the one student in Kim’s class who used it from reading questions and marking answers. “I can’t see it,” he told Kim. It was too dark to read.
The Common Core tests, which are based on learning goals adopted in 43 states and the District of Columbia, offer many state-of-the-art technological tools to level the playing field for special education students. But Kim’s students were not alone. School employees across California have reported glitches in the tests’ enhancements for students with disabilities.
A field test administered in 2014 was meant to iron out the kinks. As a result, a noise buffer and closed captioning were added, according to an email sent last April on behalf of Michelle Center, who is now the California Department of Education’s director of the Assessment Development & Administration Division.
Still, according to teachers and administrators, special education students across California spent days last spring toiling over computerized tests that their teachers say often made it more difficult, not easier, for them to access the material.
“The majority of my students weren’t able to process any of the tests,” Kim said.
In San Francisco, one school found that text-to-speech tools read passages too quickly for students to follow, so teachers had to jump in and read the text out loud — distracting other students. The California School for the Blind found that different accessibility tools, such as Braille, could not be used at the same time as text-to-speech. In the Santa Ana Unified School District, curriculum specialist Gabriela Aguirre said she was concerned that the text-to-speech voice was distracting to students because it sounded robotic.
Precisely how many problems occurred with the tools known as accommodations last spring is not known. The California Department of Education didn’t specifically track accessibility glitches, Pam Slater, who worked as a CDE spokesperson until last week, said in an interview this fall.
Kim administered the exams to 14 students with disabilities in third through fifth grades. She and other teachers said they had problems with the accommodations. Those glitches only worsened anxiety about a test they had already worried was going to be especially difficult because of the tougher new standards.
Test scores for students in general, including those with disabilities, were low, as the state announced this fall. While there is no way to know what effect the lackluster accommodations might have had on the results, it’s clear that tools meant to help students with disabilities take tests as effectively as their peers need a lot of improvement.
Of the more than 300,000 students with disabilities who took the tests in California, 88% did not meet achievement targets in English language arts and 91% did not meet targets in math, according to data on the state’s testing website. Among California’s general education students, 52% failed to meet achievement targets on the exam in English language arts and 63% failed in math. Students with disabilities across the country similarly had lower scores than their peers on the new tests."...
Illinois is ditching the controversial state PARCC exam for high school students, instead giving 11th-graders a state-paid SAT college entrance exam next spring"....
"Did you wake up feeling relieved this morning? Your child’s data will be in the trusted hands of Microsoft and Dell and others in the edtech world, and you should trust them with it, because they said so. They built a website, they paid for participating school districts to fly out and create a logo and trusty seal of approval that is supposed to make you feel better about them collecting, leveraging, and sharing your child’s data. Meet TLE, soon to be plastered on schools everywhere (once districts prove themselves and pay the required fee "....
"Will the U.S. Department of Education take action on recommendations made by scientists and medical doctors who document the need for safety precautions regarding the use of wireless devices in schools? The answer remains to be seen. On Tuesday, January 19th, the U.S. Department of Education held a Public Hearing at UCLA to gather comments for transition to the new ESSA Every Student Succeeds Act. Approximately eighty speakers from a variety of educational institutions and organizations made statements and recommendations related to the new law. Each speaker had five minutes to comment. I spoke during the afternoon session and am posting here an adapted version of the written statement submitted to the regulations page."...
By Carolyn Leith "The Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 (ESSA) is being sold to educators, parents, and the public as being somehow better than No Child Left Behind (NCLB). You may remember NCLB as the law which declared every student in the United States would be proficient in math and reading by the year 2014 – because ridiculous mandates make things happen. To the surprise of no one, 2014 came and went and proficiency wasn’t achieved. In short, the ESSA is better than the last federal education law that was an absolute failure. But why let some inconvenient facts get in the way of a perfectly good marketing strategy?
This may explain why the rollout of the ESSA was so short on specifics, but all about celebrating the historic bipartisanship which went into its passage. Peak bipartisanship was reached this summer when the NEA made Patty Murray and Lamar Alexander co-recipients of their friend of public education award for getting the ESSA job done. Similar bills had failed in 2007, 2011, and 2013. Personally, whenever a bill in Washington D.C. is praised for its bipartisan nature – I get worried. The common ground discovered by Democrats and Republicans, usually comes at our expense. Let’s take a look at the ESSA and see if my theory holds.
We know the ESSA continues the grade span testing of NCLB and also maintains the 95% participation requirement for these tests. The ESSA also preserves the “failing schools” rhetoric of NCLB and the stipulation for intervention to turn these “failures” around. For charter schools, the ESSA is a dream come true. There’s dedicated federal funds and state grants for the expansion of charters, required timely allotment of Title 1 funds, plus minimum accountability for the first 2 years of a new charter school’s existence. (I wonder why Patty Murray didn’t talk about charters during her friend of public education acceptance speech before the NEA? The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools saw passage of the ESSA as a “big win” for charter schools.)
ALEC sees the new law as an opportunity to introduce its own student-centered accountability systems through the state control provision of assessment in the ESSA.
If you aren’t familiar with ALEC, they’re a neoliberal organization bent on privatizing public institutions and solving societal problems through market-based solutions.
Some legislative success for ALEC is Right to Work Laws and Florida’s infamous Stand Your Ground Law.
RESOLUTION IN SUPPORT OF STUDENT-CENTERED ACCOUNTABILITY SYSTEMS
NOW THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, that the American Legislative Exchange Council recommends that states, utilizing their properly restored authority under the ESSA, consider the creation and implementation of STUDENT CENTERED ACCOUNTABILITY SYSTEMS designed around the following general principles:
Timely Provision of Student-Level Data
Measure Student-Specific Progress and Restore the Focus of “High-Stakes” Testing to be on Advancing Individual Student Instruction and Growth
Develop Important Individualized Measures Beyond Sole Reliance on “High-Stakes” Tests, Including Engagement, Teacher Input and Assessments, and Satisfaction
Account for Mobility in Graduation Calculations and any other Aggregate Data Indicators
Recognize and Respect Parental Intent
Do Not Devalue Parental Choice by Treating Schools of Choice Differently
Support and Protect Students Succeeding in Schools of Choice
ALEC’s push for “market based solutions” in public education is nothing new. Choice has always been code for charter schools and/or vouchers.
What’s interesting is their embrace of “student centered accountability systems” and “individual student instruction and growth” which most likely is a reference to “personalized learning“, also termed “blended learning”, when a student is in front of a computer most of the school day rather than interacting with a teacher and their peers in a typical classroom setting.
Why is this important?
Six days after the signing of the ESSA, iNACOL release a webinar where the speakers gushed over the prospect of states introducing personalized learning through the innovative assessment clause of the ESSA.
They’re the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL). A non-profit whose mission “is to catalyze the transformation of K-12 education policy and practice to advance powerful, personalized, learner-centered experiences through competency-based, blended and online learning.”
What Does It All Mean?
The short answer: We’ve been had.
Not only does the ESSA preserve most of the negatives of NCLB, it also opens the door to a tsunami of charter schools AND the introduction of personalized learning — where the online curriculum is also the test. This is going to be really hard to fight on a state by state basis. It’s bureaucratic divide and conquer. I have a hunch those who drafted, lobbied, and pushed for the ESSA’s passage had this exact difficulty in mind.
"Many of you complained computer problems undermined the second year of the Georgia Milestones in your school systems, putting the scores in doubt for students coping with stalled tests and frozen screens.
(A refresher on testing lingo: It’s now End of Grade or EOG for the Milestones in elementary and middle, and End of Course or EOC for the Milestones in high school.)
As my AJC colleague Ty Tagami reported today out of the state board meeting:
There were some schools that had intermittent issues, said Melissa Fincher, director of testing for the Georgia Department of Education. Results were transmitted, but some kids may not have performed at their best because of the disruption, she said, so it wasn’t fair to them to use the scores.
She said 7 percent of test “sessions” had been affected as of Friday. Each student in grades three through eight has nine sessions. Close to half the nearly 1 million students in that age group took online exams this year, the largest in state history.
The school board voted to void the results for use in decisions about promoting students to the next grade.
Of course, few kids actually are retained in Georgia. (See the state policy on the appeals process.)
However, there seems to be stress around the question as I heard from a therapist who said, “I have been inundated with anxious young people and their parents about the Milestone’s effect this year on retention.”
At this point, the results of the End of Course tests in high school will still account for 20 percent of student grades as there have been fewer reports of glitches. (Fewer testers are going online at the same time with the high school tests.)
The state DOE is also asking to delay using Milestone scores to rate teachers, but that has to be approved by the multi-agency Educator Effectiveness Committee, an advisory group created to improve teacher quality.
In its statement DOE said:
During this year’s administration of the Georgia Milestones EOG tests, some local school districts reported technology-related interruptions of online testing. While some of these events were short-term and quickly resolved, with minimal impact on student experiences, others required more extensive technical support. The GaDOE believes that further analysis of the possible impacts of these interruptions is warranted prior to the release of student scores, given the stakes involved for students.
“I am committed to a responsible approach to accountability that ensures public trust in the process,” State School Superintendent Richard Woods said. “Given the technology issues experienced by some students during the online administration of the Georgia Milestones EOGs, we believe it is best to proceed with caution when it comes to basing promotion, placement and retention on the outcome of the tests. While many districts tested online without a major incident, in the interests of our students, we asked the State Board of Education for a waiver of the promotion, placement and retention portion of the rule.”
State law requires that students in grade three earn an At/Above Grade Level designation in reading to be promoted to fourth grade. In grades five and eight, state law requires that students earn an At/Above Grade Level designation in reading, as well as score in the Developing Learner achievement level or above in mathematics to be promoted to the next grade. These are the promotion, placement, and retention requirements being waived for the 2016 EOG administration. Some local school systems have additional promotion criteria, and this waiver will not preclude school districts from applying local policies and protocols for promotion and retention decisions for individual students.
Pending the approval of the Educator Effectiveness Committee, student growth will be held harmless for the Teacher Keys Effectiveness System (TKES)/Leader Keys Effectiveness System (LKES) this year, and will not count next year with the revised evaluation system. The Teacher Assessment on Performance Standards (TAPS) component of the TKES and the Leader Assessment on Performance Standards (LAPS) component of the LKES will continue to be the sole measure used to determine the performance rating of teachers of record and leaders reported by employing school systems and charter schools to the GaPSC for certification purposes."...
En la reunión de la Junta de Educación del Estado, el 2 de septiembre de 2015, ustedes escucharon comentarios públicos del Dr. Doug McRae, un experto, jubilado de exámenes y medidas que durante los últimos cinco años ha comunicado directa y específicamente a la junta de educación los problemas de validez de las nuevas evaluaciones. Ha enviado los siguientes comentarios escritos para el Punto #1 [Actualización de CAASPP] en la última reunión y habló de nuevo sobre la falta de evidencia, sobre la validez, confiabilidad y justicia de las nuevas evaluaciones."...
"Students across New York began taking their state-mandated Common Core standardized tests on Tuesday — and already there are problems with the administration of the test."...
By Benjamin Herold "Students who took the 2014-15 PARCC exams via computer tended to score lower than those who took the exams with paper and pencil-a revelation that prompts questions about the validity of the test results and poses potentially big problems for state and district leaders.
Officials from the multi-state Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers acknowledged the discrepancies in scores across different formats of its exams in response to questions from Education Week.
"It is true that this [pattern exists] on average, but that doesn't mean it occurred in every state, school, and district on every one of the tests," Jeffrey Nellhaus, PARCC's chief of assessment, said in an interview.
"There is some evidence that, in part, the [score] differences we're seeing may be explained by students' familiarity with the computer-delivery system," Nellhaus said.
In general, the pattern of lower scores for students who took PARCC exams by computer is the most pronounced in English/language arts and middle- and upper-grades math.
Hard numbers from across the consortium are not yet available. But the advantage for paper-and-pencil test-takers appears in some cases to be substantial, based on independent analyses conducted by one prominent PARCC state and a high-profile school district that administered the exams.
In December, the Illinois state board of education found that 43 percent of students there who took the PARCC English/language arts exam on paper scored proficient or above, compared with 36 percent of students who took the exam online. The state board has not sought to determine the cause of those score differences.
Meanwhile, in Maryland's 111,000-student Baltimore County schools, district officials found similar differences, then used statistical techniques to isolate the impact of the test format.
They found a strong "mode effect" in numerous grade-subject combinations: Baltimore County middle-grades students who took the paper-based version of the PARCC English/language arts exam, for example, scored almost 14 points higher than students who had equivalent demographic and academic backgrounds but took the computer-based test.
"The differences are significant enough that it makes it hard to make meaningful comparisons between students and [schools] at some grade levels," said Russell Brown, the district's chief accountability and performance-management officer. "I think it draws into question the validity of the first year's results for PARCC."
4 of 5 PARCC Exams Taken Online
Last school year, roughly 5 million students across 10 states and the District of Columbia sat for the first official administration of the PARCC exams, which are intended to align with the Common Core State Standards. Nearly 81 percent of those students took the exams by computer.
Scores on the exams are meant to be used for federal and state accountability purposes, to make instructional decisions at the district and school levels, and, in some cases, as an eventual graduation requirement for students and an eventual evaluation measure for teachers and principals.
Several states have since dropped all or part of the PARCC exams, which are being given again this year."...
On October 12, 2015, the following email from Louisiana superintendent John White was forwarded to district superintendents, accompanied with 12 files detailing raw-score-to-scale-score conversions for the tests given to Louisiana students in spring 2015 in grades 3 through 8 in ELA and math: Attached please find charts for converting raw scores to scale scores for…
"As schools across the country go high-tech, incorporating data-driven educational apps and software into classrooms, fears about the privacy and security of students' personal information are on the rise.
These concerns may be putting the brakes on school district's efforts to personalize learning, but not in Miami-Dade County, Fla. The 345,000-student district is a pioneer in digital learning, and has given teachers and students access to a host of online apps and programs.
At iPrep Academy, students work almost entirely online. Computer programs collect tons of information about students' interests, preferences, even the names of their friends, to customize lessons. Although Superintendent Alberto Carvalho is confident that the safeguards in vendor contracts, along with his data-security team, are protecting digital data, the threats are real. Hackers try to infiltrate the district's system every day, and not too long ago a cafeteria worker with access to the database stole hundreds of students' names and social security numbers.
John Tulenko of Education Week visits iPrep Academy to see how teachers are using the technology to personalize classroom instruction and what the district is doing to protect student data.
This video segment appeared on PBS NewsHour on April 5, 2016."
By Manuel Alfaro "Friends, colleagues, members of the assessment development community:
My posts are not an indictment of the test development industry. I love what I do for a living. I left the best job I’ve ever had, working at American Institutes for Research, to contribute to a vision that turned out to be a sham.
I am a WHISTLEBLOWER. I am letting the world know that the College Board has committed global fraud. Their actions are analogous to the Volkswagen carbon emission scandal. When VW created the defeat devices, it was not fraud: it became fraud when they installed them on cars and sold them. Similarly, when the College Board claimed to build the SAT using the processes they describe in public documents and in proposals to state clients, it was not fraud: it became fraud after they administered the SAT tests this spring.
In the VW case, the fraud affects the environment and the millions of people that bought the cars. In the College Board case, the fraud significantly affects the lives of the millions of students that took the SAT (and the lives of the hundreds of thousands whose PSAT score is being used to determine scholarship eligibility). Further, some states are now using the SAT for accountability, so the fraud has the potential to affect the lives of thousands of high school teachers in CO, CT, DE, IL, ME, MI, and NH.
As I researched the movement for SAT reform, I came across dozens of organizations and groups working to make the SAT optional or to get rid of it altogether because, by the College Board’s own admission (see FairTest.org), grades, class rank, and course difficulty are a better predictor of success during the first year of college than SAT scores. Through this post, I call on those groups to join me. I promise that this time we will win. And that we will win for the best of all reasons. We will win because we have facts on our side.
If you really want a to take a good look inside the black box of the College Board, please sign my petition on the White House Petitions site, We the People: https://wh.gov/is3Sf.
I hope this post clarifies some of the confusion caused by my prior posts. As for me, I’m still trying on the “whistleblower” description for fit, as I would a new suit. I’m sure it will become more comfortable with a little wear and tear."...
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![Carta Abierta a la Junta de Educación del Estado de California Respecto a la Publicación de Calificaciones [Falsas] SBAC // (Spanish Translation of Open Letter on EduResearcher.com) | "Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3..." | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/-ZvOglyelf10b1e6cI995Tl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
