Test Scores Under Common Core Show That ‘Proficient’ Varies by State
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio seems to have taken a page from Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average.
Last month, state officials releasing an early batch of test scores declared that two-thirds of students at most grade levels were proficient on reading and math tests given last spring under the new Common Core requirements.
Yet similar scores on the same tests meant something quite different in Illinois, where education officials said only about a third of students were on track. And in Massachusetts, typically one of the strongest academic performers, the state said about half of the students who took the same tests as Ohio’s children met expectations.
It all came down to the different labels each state used to describe the exact same scores on the same tests.
That kind of inconsistency in educational standards is what the Common Core — academic guidelines for kindergarten through high school reading and math that were adopted by more than 40 states — was intended to redress. But Ohio is not alone in adjusting the goal posts. In California andNorth Carolina, state officials reporting headline results lumped together groups of students who either passed or nearly passed the tests. And in Florida, the education commissioner recommended passing rates less stringent than in other states.
“This was exactly the problem that a lot of policy makers and educators were trying to solve,” said Karen Nussle, the executive director of the Collaborative for Student Success, a Common Core advocacy group, “to get a more honest assessment of where kids are and being transparent about that with parents and educators so that we could do something about it.”
The Common Core was devised by experts convened by state education commissioners and governors to set uniform benchmarks for learning. But as it has been put into place, it has faced increasing backlash, both from politicians, who argue that it infringes on states’ independence to determine education policy, and from parents and teachers, who object to the more stringent testing that has come with the new guidelines.
Before the Common Core, each state set its own standards and devised its own tests. Some states made the standardized tests so easy or set passing scores so low that virtually all students were rated proficient even as they scored much lower on federal exams and showed up for college requiring remedial help. Here in Columbus, the school district is still recovering froma scandal in which many principals removed low-performing students from enrollment records in order to improve school ratings.
But as the results from the first Common Core tests have rolled out, education officials again seem to be subtly broadening definitions of success.
“That mentality of saying let’s set proficient at a level where not too many people fail is going to kill us,” said Marc S. Tucker, the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, a nonprofit think tank. “The global standard of what proficient is keeps moving up.”
Last spring, Ohio, 10 other states and Washington, D.C., used tests devised by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or Parcc, one of two groups responsible for creating Common Core tests. Before the grading process began, Parcc convened a group of educators from participating states to set five performance levels. Students scoring at the lowest level “did not yet meet expectations,” according to the Parcc Test Scores Under Common Core Show That ‘Proficient’ Varies by State - The New York Times: