Path to political success: Dumbing down student tests and claiming dramatic improvement
New York State students' math performance has risen sharply, according to state education officials. But national math tests say otherwise:
New York State’s fourth and eighth graders made no notable progress on federal math exams this year, according to test scores released on Wednesday, sharply contradicting the results of state-administered tests that showed record gains.
Are New York State education officials manipulating the tests or the scoring to make student performance look artificially good? It would hardly be the first time.
George W. Bush won was handed the presidency by the Supreme Court in 2000. Bush lied his way into the presidency in part by claiming to be a “compassionate conservative” and in part by bragging about the “Texas miracle” and his intention to be “the education president.” We later learned that Texas' “miracle” was nothing but Enron-style flim-flam, the kind that would make Bush’s pal “Kenny Boy” proud:
As a presidential candidate, Texas’s former governor, George W. Bush, contended that Texas’s methods of holding schools responsible for student performance had brought huge improvements in passing rates and remarkable strides in eliminating the gap between white and minority children.
The claims catapulted Houston’s superintendent, Rod Paige, to Washington as education secretary and made Texas a model for the country. The education law signed by President Bush in January 2002, No Child Left Behind, gives public schools 12 years to match Houston’s success and bring virtually all children to academic proficiency.
But an examination of the performance of students in Houston by The New York Times raises serious doubts about the magnitude of those gains. Scores on a national exam that Houston students took alongside the Texas exam from 1999 to 2002 showed much smaller gains and falling scores in high school reading.
Compared with the rest of the country, Houston’s gains on the national exam, the Stanford Achievement Test, were modest. The improvements in middle and elementary school were a fraction of those depicted by the Texas test and were similar to those posted on the Stanford test by students in Los Angeles.
Over all, a comparison of the performance of Houston students who took the Stanford exam in 2002 and in 1999 showed most did not advance in relation to their counterparts across the nation. More than half of them either remained in the same place or lost ground in reading and math.
…The Texas Education Agency found rampant undercounting of school dropouts. Houston school officials have also been accused of overstating how many high school graduates were college bound and of failing to report violent crimes in schools to state authorities.
Texas later admitted its test was dumbed down in a way that made students look artificially good:
Officials here now say that TAAS was only a test of “minimal skills,” paving the way for ratcheting up standards with a new exam.
Even leaving aside the fakery that let Bush pretend more testing produces better teaching, Bush’s testing fetish failed to improve education, instead simply dumbing down education by forcing schools to focus all resources on teaching kids to pass a few tests and strangling resources for history, science, art, music, gym and other such “frills.”
Why would state-level education administrators cheat on student achievement tests? Well, puffing up student test results has become a stepping stone for politicians. It worked for Bush’s Secretary of Education Rod Paige and may have given Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, his lofty perch:
The Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago, a supporter of Duncan and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s push for more control of city schools… says city schools have made little progress since 2003.
Its key findings stand in stark contrast to assertions President Obama made in December when he nominated Duncan as Education secretary…
In December, Obama said that during a seven-year tenure, Duncan had boosted elementary school test scores “from 38% of students meeting the standards to 67%” — a gain of 29 percentage points. But the new report found that, adjusting for changes in tests and procedures, students' pass rates grew only about 8 percentage points…
Blogger Alexander Russo, who writes about Chicago schools, says the findings show that nearly 15 years into mayoral control, the city school system “isn’t nearly as improved as many have been led to believe.”
“What I find particularly appalling is that Duncan and Obama — supposed champions of transparency and using research rather than ideology — have cited Chicago’s inflated test scores, even though they knew the increases were exaggerated.”
Posted by James on Thursday, October 15, 2009