Monday
October 06, 2008
by desertjim
Last Friday, the Chicago Public Schools released the results attained by city high school juniors on the Prairie State Achievement Exams (PSAE). The scores dropped for the third year in a row. City officials immediately dismissed this year’s results. Chicago Schools CEO Arne Duncan said, “This is screwy, It’s impossible to be down.”
Duncan blamed the results on a decision to weigh the second day of testing lower than the first day, which is devoted to the ACT. CPS juniors did better on four of six tests taken over two days, but the district’s overall pass rate went down. This may not be “screwy”, but it certainly gives support to Duncan’s claim that changing the way the test was scored may well be a factor in the results. Changing test grading methods can have serious effects on the results. This August, the Chicago Tribune reported that over one million of Illinois’s elementary exams had to be regraded due to problems with the protocols being used.
The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) federal education law requires that high stakes testing such as the PSAE be used to hold schools accountable. Matt Vanover, a spokesman for the State Board of Education, said federal officials reviewed the new scoring and found it to be comparable to that of previous years. Nonetheless, In a letter to CPS principals district officials cautioned against comparisons to previous results, citing changes in the scoring. The CPS administration found 32 high schools for which the reading scores on the PSAE went up on both days of the test, but the overall reported reading scores went down. In math, 19 schools went up on both days, but down overall in math.
As educators, we know that ranking schools only on the basis of high stakes standardized tests is not a good idea. We know that the tests have always varied from state to state, which creates scores that cannot be compared. The tests are given to different groups of students each year, so the scores for this year’s class of juniors are not really telling us anything about their growth as individuals or as a class. Now, we find that the tests aren’t even being consistently scored from year to year.
PSAE scores have serious ramifications for Illinois schools. Failing to meet Adequate Yearly Progress on the exams has consequences. If the scoring protocols can be changed, as they clearly were this year, how is any of this information supposed to be of use? Can “accountability” have any meaning when the test results are so easily called into question? What can be done to ensure that scoring is consistent from year to year? Does a system which selects a single group of students and tracks growth from year to year hold more promise? If public schools must demonstrate that children are learning, what type of demonstration might actually be useful?
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