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State throws out CRCT results

Ohanian Comment: Read down into the article and you will see these are McGraw-Hill tests. McGraw Hill's $12.5 million contract is up for renewal.

But what is really disturbing is the determination now to focus on having teachers teach different material--so kids will do well on tests next time.

By Laura Diamond, Alan Judd, Heather Vogell

No one disputes that Georgia's system for evaluating middle school students broke down this year.

How, and why, became the topics of debate Wednesday, as the state threw out the results of two social studies tests and education advocates questioned the validity of eighth-graders' abysmal math scores.

Several possible explanations emerged for failure rates that ran as high as 80 percent: New curriculum standards that may have been too vague. A complicated process for creating tests. Flawed test questions. Inadequate training in the new curriculum for teachers. An unrealistically high passing score. A long history of poor test performance by Georgia students.

Whatever the reason, the widespread failures are making Georgia's high-stakes testing even more contentious.

"Any time you have that level of failure almost statewide, you've got to go back and re-examine the test and re-examine everything associated with the test," said Herb Garrett, executive director of the Georgia School Superintendents Association.

The math scores were particularly troubling, Garrett said: "There are a lot of youngsters who didn't meet the standards who are known by their local systems to be great math students."

Preliminary results from this year's Criterion-Referenced Competency Test have stirred up parents and educators all week. On Monday, state School Superintendent Kathy Cox announced that 70 to 80 percent of sixth- and seventh-graders had failed the social studies exam. About 40 percent of Georgia's 124,000 eighth-graders — or about 50,000 students — failed in math.

The math results are especially significant, since students who failed the test cannot advance to ninth grade. Those students will have to take the test again this summer, and many may have to forgo vacations to attend summer school.

Further, the test helps determine whether schools have met goals set by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Schools that repeatedly fall short of the goals face potentially severe sanctions.

The high failure rates have frustrated parents, some of whom weren't satisfied by Cox's decision to invalidate the social studies scores.

"This is just crazy," said Karla Penn, whose daughter Kamille failed the eighth-grade math test by five points at Shamrock Middle School in DeKalb County.

"The whole thing started with this new curriculum, and it's just gotten worse. You have students who aren't familiar with this information and teachers who don't know how to teach it, so of course this all happened.

"This whole thing is a fiasco. How can they think this is fair to the kids?"

Officials with the Georgia Department of Education sought Wednesday to calm concerns over the math results, even though about twice as many students failed this year as in 2007.

"The math test is very well aligned with the curriculum," said Dana Tofig, a department spokesman. "It is a new test, testing a brand new curriculum that's more rigorous."

Eighty-one percent of Georgia eighth-graders passed the math test in 2007. But in many other tests, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, at least one-third traditionally have failed.

"Math is an area where Georgia students have struggled for a long time," Tofig said. "This isn't out of line with what we've seen."

Cox said that while new material in math stumped some students, most will probably pass the retest. Students who fail again may appeal for promotion.

Parents, Cox said in an interview, need to accept that the revised math standards were necessary.

"As a state, we have set people up with low expectations and we didn't have a rigorous eighth-grade math curriculum until now," she said. "We were lulled into the sense middle school students were doing good work before when they weren't."

Unlike the math scores, the social studies results surprised state education officials. Cox announced Wednesday that the state will not count the scores for current sixth- and seventh-graders who took the social studies test this spring. Students would have advanced to the next grade even if they had failed the social studies exam, which plays no part in determining whether schools meet federal standards.

Cox acknowledged that the state may not have given teachers enough direction to prepare students for acceptable scores on the social studies exam. When the new curriculum came out in 2004, she said, officials tried to appease critics who complained about a new emphasis on history rather than geography in middle school.

Cox, herself a former social studies teacher, said that compromise did not work. "We put too much in the curriculum for teachers to teach and didn't get specific enough on what they had to teach," she said.

Georgia began revising its curriculum in all subjects earlier this decade, hoping that more rigorous instruction would lead to higher test performance. In math, teachers are supposed to steer students away from rote memorization and toward critical thinking skills, said Linda Segars, who trains Georgia math teachers in new content and teaching methods.

"This was never presented as, 'Immediately, we are going to see the great changes,'" she said.

The new curriculum was translated into annual tests through a complicated process of evaluation, review, field testing and more review that lasted more than a year, ending in December.

For each subject area, a committee of 12 to 15 Georgia educators developed a "test blueprint," said Tofig, the education department's spokesman, outlining the topics in which students should be competent.

That blueprint went to the state's testing contractor, CTB/McGraw-Hill, which assigned what it calls professional assessment specialists to draft questions. The company earns $12.5 million a year from a contract that is up for renewal next month.

Kelley Carpenter, a spokeswoman for CTB/McGraw-Hill, deferred specific questions about the testing program to Georgia school officials. After the test questions were written, another committee of Georgia teachers reviewed whether they aligned with the state curriculum. Approved questions were then inserted into student exams for field testing. Yet another committee reviewed the results from the field tests, checked for racial or ethnic biases and made the final decision on which questions would be on the test.

Changing both standards and testing, as Georgia has done in recent years, makes it tricky to evaluate either, said Brian Stecher, senior social scientist with the nonprofit think tank RAND Corp.

"In some ways, you're redrawing the map while you're driving," Stecher said. "It's very hard to make sure you're calibrated and heading in the same direction."

Stecher said all the results should be viewed in a larger context of what students are learning. "The right way is probably to not make so many decisions depend on a single test score," he said. "Test scores are fallible and people have to realize that."

Contact staff writers Alan Judd at ajudd@ajc.com, Heather Vogell at hvogell@ajc.com, and Laura Diamond at ldiamond@ajc.com

— Laura Diamond, Alan Judd, Heather Vogell
Atlanta Journal Constitution
2008-05-21


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