OPINION: HONEST ANSWERS ABOUT PARCC RESULTS VERSUS SCORES ON NJASK
What is PARCC telling us about New Jersey schools that we can’t learn from NJASK results? Nothing.
- Mark Weber
Are New Jersey’s new state tests more “honest” than its old ones? Now that the data has been released, we can confidently say:
No.
For the last few years, New Jersey’s education policy has been focused on the transition from the old NJASK test to the new PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers), a nationwide test that was created by a consortium that has seen its membership dwindle to half of its original states.
Despite a growing resistance to the Common Core State Standards on which the PARCC is based, and a burgeoning opt-out movement here and around the nation, both the New Jersey Department of Education and a group of education “reform” outfits have declared that PARCC is a better test than the NJASK, and vitally necessary to improve student outcomes.
We can debate whether the content standards of the Common Core are better than those of New Jersey’s previous standards. We can debate whether PARCC is a better assessment of learning than the NJASK. I’m hardly a fan of the old test, which, to my knowledge, was never properly assessed for its validity anyway.
But now that we have PARCC school-level results], it’s quite clear that PARCC isn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know about New Jersey schools. And it only takes a couple of graphs to prove it.
Figure 1 is a chart showing the distribution of each school’s average grade 8 English Language Arts (ELA) score for the 2014 NJASK test. The shape is quite close to what statisticians call a “normal” distribution, commonly referred to as a “bell curve.” A few schools scored, on average, high on the NJASK, a few scored low, and most scored in the middle.
If you look at the scores for any tested grade in either math or ELA, you’ll find the same shape. That’s because the tests are designed to yield these bell curves: they have some easy questions, some hard questions, and some in between. When it comes to test scores, normal distributions are … well, normal.
I’ve included a red line in the chart: it shows the “cut score,” or the test score necessary to get a score that is described as “proficient.” In 2014, about 88 percent of New Jersey’s schools that tested on the grade 8 ELA got an average score that Opinion: Honest Answers About PARCC Results Versus Scores on NJASK - NJ Spotlight:
