Scoring NY Tests With the Triple Lindy!
One of my guilty pleasures is screwball comedies, and one of my favorites stars the great Rodney Dangerfield: Back To School. In the climatic scene of the movie, Rodney wins the big diving meet ("Hey gang, forget about the football game; let's get pumped for the big diving meet!") by flawlessly executing a dive that defies all known laws of physics: the Triple Lindy!What makes the Triple Lindy so difficult is that Rodney starts out on the high platform, then has to bounce from board to board over and over again before he finally slices through the water. It's one massive leap after another...
Just like the scoring on the New York State exams.
By now, you've undoubtedly heard about the huge dive test scores took this year in New York, thanks to new exams and new scoring methods that supporters claim are much more "realistic." This year, 31 percent of students were deemed "proficient" in reading and math; last year, 55 percent passed reading, and 65 percent passed math. I've argued that this was a deliberate ploy to make New York's schools look as bad as possible; reformies hope to usher in an era of privatization and deunionization on the "evidence" of these scores.
But how did NYSED come up with their definition of "proficient"? How did they determine the cut scores - the scores students would have to earn to be deemed to have achieved one of the four levels of "proficiency"?
Leonie Haimson pointed me to a fascinating document from NYSED that shows the method to this madness.Just like Rodney in the diving meet, NYSED bounced around from one external benchmark to another, taking massive leaps each time to justify where it placed its cut scores. By executing its own Triple Lindy, NYSED moved from its goal of defining "proficiency" as "college and career ready" to cut scores on the tests for levels as low as 3rd grade.
How about we play Greg Louganis for a bit and break down exactly how NYSED pulls off their Triple Lindy:
Starting Platform: "College and Career Ready." As I blogged before, this is a phony and useless phrase meant to conflate the education necessary to obtain a four-year bachelor's degree with the education needed for a job that that should pay well but often doesn't. Reformy NYSED Commissioner John King, reformy SecEd Arne Duncan, reformy Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, and many other reformy stalwarts say this is the goal for all children, which means, right off the platform, we have to make a massive leap:
Springboard #1: First Year Grade Point Average at a Four-Year College. As the NYSED document clearly shows, the benchmark used for "proficiency" on the state test is earning a B- or better in a freshman English course, or earning at least a C+ in a math course, at a four-year college or university.
For this benchmarking, NYSED relied on the College Board, the folks in charge of the SAT. Demonstrating