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Education Watch: It’s not easy to understand why students perform dismally on high school standard math tests

Julia Steiny

When I was a teenager and we got our standardized test results back, I would deflect interest in my actual scores by bemoaning the fact that I got an "F" in sex. It was a serviceable joke because it took people a moment to let go of the knee-jerk assumption that I'd failed, and grasp that the "F" on my test-results sheet meant that I was female.

Recently, the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) announced that a pathetic 22 percent of the state's 11th graders were proficient on the new math test, the NECAP (New England Common Assessment Program). The number is shocking. Sixty percent proficient would have been upsetting, but 22 is just plain wrong, absurd, criminal.

Until — like my teenage joke — you understand what the number means.

In an Education Week article, the president of Achieve, Michael Cohen, called the NECAP test an "honest assessment" and "one of the first times we've had this at the 11th grade."

Achieve is an organization sponsored by state governors and the business community that acts as a national watchdog for academic standards. One of its beefs is that high school tests tend to be easy because 26 states won’t let the students have diplomas unless they pass the state tests. Achieve developed its own rigorous standards.

So, should the state develop an honest test that many students fail, or should the test be so easy most kids pass it and get the diploma they need?

Rhode Island is trying to solve this dilemma with a diploma system that uses what educators call "multiple measures," meaning the diploma requires three measurements of ability: Students must complete required course work, do a portfolio or senior project, and pass the tests.

The tests only count 30 percent toward getting the diploma. Not passing one or two state tests, even after several tries, is not the kiss of death to a student's ability to graduate, assuming his other work is strong. The aim isn't to push the student to drop out by demoralizing him. States that use tests as gatekeepers to graduation see drop-out rates rise significantly.

While 95 percent of the Massachusetts high school students pass state tests — the MCAS — high school graduates are showing up at the community colleges needing roughly the same remedial work they needed before the MCAS was implemented. Community colleges require at least a 10th-grade level of math and English skills, so passing the MCAS — considered one of the best state tests — does not mean a student achieved a 10th-grade level of skills. This is true of state tests nationally.

The NECAP certifies 10th-grade skills.

Rhode Island developed the NECAP with New Hampshire and Vermont. Interestingly, Vermont is the least diverse state in the nation. New Hampshire's students often have the highest SATs, and neither of those states has urban areas remotely comparable to those in Rhode Island. But the tests and the standards are exactly the same.

On this first round of testing, 29 percent of New Hampshire's 11th graders were proficient, as were 30 percent of Vermont's. So none of the three states whose kids took the test got more than a third over the proficiency threshold.

They're in the same boat we are, which is to say — being brutally honest with themselves.

Back in 2002, the test developers collected the best of the available standards, including those set by Achieve, the National Council of the Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), and international tests such as the TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study). They looked at the textbooks that the community colleges use to ramp students up to college-level skills because the new NECAP would guarantee those 10th-grade skills.

Teachers from all three states used those documents to create the NECAP standards to develop the tests.

The hard part of this process is what's known as "alignment." With the high school standards as the goal, the three states’ teachers had to work their way backward to identify the building blocks to prepare students for the test: What does the student need to know by the end of kindergarten, the end of first grade, and so on? These became the Grade Level Expectations (GLE) for grades three through eight, and the Grade Span Expectations (GSE) at high school. (They're on RIDE's Web site.)

Recently, I spoke with John Grey, principal of Barrington High, whose students scored the highest in the state — 63 percent. Surprisingly, he was disappointed with his school’s results because as soon as the state released the GLEs and GSEs, his district — and his school — had taken up the hard work of aligning their curriculum to the tests. Teachers all along the K-12 continuum had sweated through changing what they taught, when and how. So Grey expected better. Of course, each incoming ninth-grade class will have been exposed to more years of the aligned curriculum, which will certainly help.

In a survey RIDE conducted, nearly 20 percent of the principals said they had not started the work of integrating the GSEs into their curriculum.

And as Barrington found out, even if you do the alignment work, it's a hard test.

Officials at RIDE insisted I get the problems from the test that have been released to the public and do them myself. They're also on RIDE's Web site. I could figure out some problems with sheer logic and time. But many were the stuff of my recurring nightmare about having to take a math test with symbols I don't recognize, requiring functions and formulas I never learned.

Go solve these problems yourself. You might start to think, as I did, that 22 percent was looking understandable, if not exactly good.

You also might wonder, as I did, whether every high school graduate really needs this sort of knowledge. Mary Ann Snyder, RIDE's director of assessment and accountability, strongly resists lowering the standards, but agrees that we need a public conversation on the subject.

The test raises more questions than it answers. But these are questions for the nation as a whole. As Snyder put it, "Is Rhode Island, is the whole country ready to take on the responsibility for providing the support to teachers and kids to meet these standards?" Hard to say.

But far from a mark of failure, that 22 percent turns out mainly to measure the guts of the three states for setting truly rigorous goals and being honest about the extent to which we’ve reached them so far.



— Julia Steiny
Providence Journal
2008-03-30
http://www.projo.com/education/content/se_educationwatch30_03-30-08_G59GLMR_v12.26ecb42.html

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