Test scores up – not enough for feds
Record numbers meet API targets
California schools had their best year yet toward meeting their targets on the Academic Performance Index (API), the state’s ranking system. So it’s puzzling why thousands of schools could face sanctions for not meeting federal proficiency levels. Trying to make sense of the complicated formulas that cause this discrepancy is like being a kid in a Peanuts comic strip listening to the teacher say “Wah wah wah.”
In one corner, we have nine years of continued gains on the California Standards Tests, with a record 49 percent of the state’s schools meeting or exceeding the API target of 800, according to scores released Wednesday by the state Department of Education.
“At school after school, and among every significant ethnic group, California’s students are performing better than ever,” said State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, “even in the face of severe cuts to school funding.”
In the other corner are 913 schools about to join nearly 4,000 others already in Program Improvement status for failing to make large enough gains under the federal accountability system known as Adequate Yearly Progress. But here’s the rub: Many of the schools in Program Improvement and many of those succeeding in the state system are one and the same.
“We believe the No Child Left Behind policies are flawed,” said Torlakson during a call with journalists. “Despite 20- to 30-point gains, they [the schools] will be dubbed a failure; it doesn’t make sense.”
Torlakson sent a letter to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan last week seeking a waiver from designating anymore schools as failing to meet AYP. [Read our article here.]
William Habermehl, Superintendent of the Orange County Office of Education gave his full support to that request. On the same call with Torlakson, Habermehl said, “We need to let Washington know that they need to return the control of public education back to the states and the local levels and stop this nonsense.”
Different rulers and different measures
California’s Academic Performance Index is based on a scale of 200 to 1,000. The state has set 800 as the target for all schools to meet. According to the API results, 55
Source: California Department of Education (Click to enlarge)
percent of California’s elementary schools hit 800, while 43 percent of middle schools did so. At the same time, just 35 percent of elementary schools and 18 percent of middle schools met the federal targets.
The reason the state and federal results are so far apart is that API rankings are a composite of all student scores in each school. Although the State Department of Education does disaggregate test scores by race, ethnicity, language, and other traits, those aren’t factored into the API score.
The federal government has a higher bar. Under No Child Left Behind, every one of those subgroups must reach the proficiency level on the standardized exams in order for the school to pass.
But high schools are a slightly different beast.
They reversed the trend with just 28 percent reaching 800 on the API and 41 percent achieving Adequate Yearly Progress.
“Not only is the measuring stick different, it’s measuring something different,” explained Rachel Perry, director of assessment and accountability for the California Department of Education.
The API for high schools is a combination of California’s standards-based test scores and results of the California High School Exit Exam. But Adequate Yearly Progress is based just on exit exam scores, and, as we reported here last week, passing rates are increasing.
Here come the caveats
The state’s information guide on Adequate Yearly Progress runs 81 pages. Half-way through, on page 41, is the section on Safe Harbor. It would take an entire article to describe all the conditions of Safe Harbor – and we plan to do that very soon – but the gist of it is that it gives schools a second chance to reach the NCLB pass level if subgroups have shown improvement on test scores.
Another point of possible distortion is the increasing number of special needs students taking California’s alternative test, the California Modified Assessments. One of our regular Op-Ed contributors has a column on that today.
Then there’s the issue of what it means when a school reaches 800 on the API scale. The state Department of Education puts so much stock on the number that it’s taken
Source: California Department of Education. (Click to enlarge)
on a magical aura of success. But that’s not the case. As the chart on the right shows, each level, from far below basic to advanced, is assigned a numeric value. So a score of 800 doesn’t indicate that all the students in a school are proficient or better, just a little over half of them.
“Your API score doesn’t necessarily give you information about a subject area or grade level,” said Perry. “That’s part of the difficulty of the index. But it’s part of the beauty, too, because you know students are doing better.”
The quote:
“Habermehl said, “We need to let Washington know that they need to return the control of public education back to the states and the local levels and stop this nonsense.””
indicates a severe misunderstanding on the part of Mr. Habermehl. Washington is not interfering with control of public schools. They are simply saying “*IF* you want Federal Title I and other money we need to see evidence that you are putting it to good use by trying to educate everyone and that minorities aren’t being neglected” So the solution of Mr. Habermehl’s problem is obvious. Reject the Washington’s money if you don’t want to play by their rules and educate everyone. In the grand scheme of things it isn’t really that much and then you will be free to do as you choose. I would have thought he knew that but I guess somebody should tell him – money never comes free – strings are always attached.
Everyone (even I) agrees that you aren’t going to achieve 100% proficiency – though it is worth trying – so all kinds of waivers etc. are being made available. But as was pointed out in the NCES NAEP document cited in this very blog a few days ago (thank you for that, BTW), what most states (including CA) call Proficient, NAEP calls Basic, if that. So the bar is not as high as some make out. See pp 10-13 of:
http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2011458
What is interesting is that of the 9 states that made changes to their state testing standard, almost all raised the bar to more closely conform to NAEP (pp 18-21, op. cit.). This is likely out of shame that they set the standard so low since there is no federal mandate to change. Whatever the reason, they are to be commended for it. CA was not one who changed their testing standard. CA’s 4th grade math score cutoff for proficient was was barely above NAEP’s for Basic. For 4th grade reading, CA proficient is below NAEP’s Basic. And yet the whining never stops.
Those against testing need to admit they lost that battle and instead of losing time and credibility trying to fight a losing battle, get with the program and try to make the testing more relevant.
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Arguing that having both API and AYP is confusing and hence one should be abolished is no different from arguing that for simplicity reasons we should have only one type of driving license rather than different ones for motorbikes, cars, or ambulances. This puerile pursuit of simplicity seems to mask the undercurrent of making our educational assessment as useless as possible, so it can never be used for teacher accountability.
API was put in place to allow us to monitor the performance of our schools. STAR results are a component of API, but their weights are shifted across grades and over the years, as we learn and refine this measure. And currently we are talking about replacing it with EQI to include additional components. All this is right and proper, and it gives the state the flexible tool to try and improve its school system. In contrast, the AYP is essentially defined in Washington, applied uniformly (and rather inflexibly) across states, and intended to give the federal government a visibility into the overall education performance of states, with a particular focus on relative achievement among predefined ethnic and economic groups. At a large sense it is more about federal monitoring of equal opportunity than anything else.
Having multiple measures for multiple purposes is useful and not limited to API and AYP. We have HSEE to graduate high school, and we have A-G requirement to qualify for US and CSU. And we have SAT/ACT and IB/AP to qualify for selective colleges. Each one has its useful role, and attempts to combine them often end up corrupting one, or the other, or both. Common Core’s “career- and college-readiness” is a recent example of such idiocy that tries to equate high school graduation with both “career readiness” and with “college readiness.” The consequence is setting this single bar too low for entering 4-year state colleges, too high for those jobs that don’t require a college degree, and will decimate our high school graduation unless it is dramatically lowered closer to HSEE. A perfect example of what happens when one gives a few guys in Washington the power to dictate a single education policy to 50 states.
Equating AYP with API will effectively give up California’s control over its education system to the central planners in Washington. For those that believe in the bottomless wisdom of the federal government to regulate the minutia of 300 million citizen’s lives in their respective 50 states this may seem advisable. They also may believe that it is the role of the federal government to tell us which veggies we should eat, which light bulb we must use, or which insurance to buy. I only hope they also remember that the administration in Washington changes every 4 or 8 years.
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The Common Core movement will likely render moot the whole argument regarding different states having different standards and achieving proficiency at different levels which may or may not be consistent with NAEP: that’s an important part of the argument in favor of having common standards, increased comparability. But by the same token, when the United States has lower standards for proficiency in various subjects than those of competing economies, we may end up paying too much attention to achievements that are too slight to make much difference anyway. And other, fundamental questions are overlooked largely because of the fixation with these numbers and formulas.
For example, looking at the table accompanying the end of the article, one might assume the ideal way for a high school to proceed would be to make sure all tenth graders are advanced in English and math as tested on the high school exit exam: this would presumably please both the feds and the state. However, the only practical way of ensuring that is to exclude from school all non-advanced students in these subjects, and that would run afoul of other criteria that would ruin the school’s evaluation (besides being grossly immoral); so now we’re supposed to keep all of the students and make sure they’re all advanced in these subjects. We can get close to achieving that by having really top programs in these two subjects and devoting virtually all of our time to them; but who’s to say that all of our students really want to spend nearly all their time studying English and math only? Aren’t our programs supposed to reflect the actual desires, interests, and potentials of our students (and their families) at some point, and don’t we risk losing them if we don’t acknowledge and work with those desires, interests, and potentials?
Governments in Washington and Sacramento can sometimes at least imagine they can afford to take autocratic, dictatorial stances with regard to their constituents; they have the long arm of the law to enforce their dictates, and can often only be (at least legally) ignored by forcing dissidents to move to other jurisdictions. Schools in competitive environments cannot afford to be so dictatorial as to mandate that everyone pursue exactly similar outcomes.
Those legislators (many of them still in office) and the president who passed and signed No Child Left Behind in 2001, with its 100% proficiency targets, must have been recent graduates of the Lake Wobegon School of Social Planning.
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To help demystify the AYP/API discrepancy:
1. The AYP targets for this past testing year were just under 70% proficient (around 67/68%)
2. A school can earn an 800 API with about 57% to 70% of its students at proficient.
So the CA AYP targets are higher than the state API target of 800. And each and every subgroup must meet the AYP targets for a school to pass AYP.
Our CA AYP targets are lagging some other states – which already have AYP targets in the 90’s (each state was allowed to choose their trajectory to reach the 100% goal).
A question that our past Supe of Schools posed – is it time to raise the API goal from 800 to something higher? What percentage of students in our schools should be proficient?
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It should occur to policy makers that the steady rise of scores in CA is an argument that the current standards and assessments are working. I am aware of the opposing argument that familiarity with the test format makes the test easy; that argument is nonsense (think about it). How will the state justify spending billions it doesn’t have on a federal replacement?
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Solutions are often so obvious. The entire dilemma can be summed up with only one brief old time tested admonition : ”Whomever has (dispenses) the gold, sets the standard”. Simple!
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At some point, I would appreciate an article discussing the way that the 1-10 ranking of schools is calculated (there are two for each school, an overall and a Similar Schools rank). Comparing the number assigned to schools where I am familiar with the schools and the test scores, I am kind of mystified.
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