New York experience shows Common Core tests can come at a cost for underprivileged students
Low-income students, disabled students and English language learners show sharper declines than general population in Common Core high school algebra exam
There’s been a considerable debate in New York State about when to demand that high school students master the new Common Core standards as a requirement for graduation. The state began upgrading its traditional high school exams, known as the Regents, to the Common Core standards in 2014. But because teachers hadn’t been teaching the new Common Core material for very long, officials decided to give students a safety net: they would continue to administer the old exam, along with the new Common Core exam, and the students could use whichever score was higher.
In the case of algebra, many students took both the old and new exams within a few weeks of each other during June 2014. And that created a wonderful laboratory experiment to see how these same students — most of them eighth and ninth graders — did on these two different algebra tests. It also may have given us a troubling forecast for what tougher Common Core exams will reveal as they are administered in the rest of the country.
David Rubel, an educational consultant in New York City, examined the algebra testing data by different groups of students, and he noted an interesting pattern, in a discussion paper posted on his website. Higher-income students, and those without disabilities or English language barriers, passed the new Common Core exam at about the same rate as they passed the old exam. That’s not because they had instantly mastered the new Common Core material. But rather, as part of the transition to the Common Core standards, policy makers set the passing mark at place where at least 65 percent of all test takers would pass it, which is approximately the same percentage of students that had passed the algebra Regents exam in previous years. As a result, a student could pass the new Common Core exam by answering as few as 35 percent of the questions correctly.
Even with the bar this low, Rubel pointed out steep drops in the passing rate among three particular groups: low-income students, English language learners and disabled students.
For example, only 54 percent of low-income students passed the Common Core algebra exam in June 2014. But 64 percent of low-income students passedNew York experience shows Common Core tests can come at a cost for underprivileged students - The Hechinger Report: