Lackluster LEAP test performance and lax promotion/retention practices combine to shortchange students. Public records requests reveal the bleak truth.
The Louisiana Department of Education released LEAP test
scores in math, English, and Science last week. The average test scores were stalled at
approximately the same levels as 2016. Unfortunately since the new ESSA plan
submitted by Superintendent White requires growth to mastery by 2025, the LDOE
felt a need to spin the results using a three-year time span. The press release
attempted to put the best face on stalled performance by combining the last two
years and comparing the combined result to the first year of Common Core
testing. Educators and many parents are not fooled.
State Superintendent John White claims that in recent years,
Louisiana has raised expectations for student performance as measured by state
tests. Actually, my public records requests show that the expectations of
student performance have been lowered drastically to the point that they are
almost non-existent! Also Public records data provides the evidence
that Louisiana standards are not actually enforced as required by state laws
affecting student promotion. The lack of expectations of students is resulting
in many of our students being awarded meaningless diplomas after 12 years of
schooling. Too many of our students are totally frustrated by being forced to sit
through a curriculum that is not appropriate for their needs. A major part of
the problem is that not every student can or should be prepared for college. Students
are all different and capable in their own unique ways. They should not be treated like
identical widgets.
One of my recent public records requests asked the Louisiana
Department of Education to provide records on the number of students failing
both of their all important state tests in English/language arts and math. I also requested the number of students
retained in their present grade level for the past school year. The data shows
that over 25% of students in grades 3 to 8 failed both their ELA and math tests
in 2016, yet only approximately 2.5% of students were retained in grade. Pupil progression policies are supposed to
relate promotion to academic performance. The actual data shows that there is
almost no consequence to students who fail their critical courses. At the same
time teachers are reporting extreme pressure to pass students to the next grade
even though many students have no significant academic achievements in their
present grade.
Here are the failure rates for students in grades 3 through
8 from the latest round of state testing: ELA 30%, math 38%, and science 35%.
Could it be that the new standards are so rigorous that
students cannot be expected to excel for the early years of implementation of
the Common Core related standards, but that they will benefit in the long run. Let’s
examine how rigorous the new testing is compared to previous standards.
Students taking state tests in math, and ELA are assigned
scale scores ranging from 650 to 850. The lowest passing scale score on these
tests are all set at 725 out of 850. But how much do students really know when
they achieve the minimum passing score on 725? The scale scores tell us nothing
about how many questions the students got right on the state tests. To get that
information, you have to make a public records request for the raw score to
scale score conversion tables. That’s when you find out that a score of 650
actually means that students got zero points on their test. A Scale score of
725 actually represents only about 30% correct answers. Some of the
passing scores are set as low as 25%. Before adoption of Common Core based
standards, passing scores were set approximately 20% higher. The official BESE
standard for the lowest “D” is 67%, but apparently that does not apply to the
supposedly “higher standard” state tests.
So if a student fails both his ELA and math tests, it is
clear that he/she understood less than 30% of the course work in those two
subjects. Yet when students fail to achieve even these ridiculously low
standards, they are still promoted to the next grade. Even so, the new ESSA plan submitted by White proposes that the majority of students will achieve mastery
performance by 2025.
So the best way to describe the rigor of the new standards
and the expectations for our public school students is that there is little
rigor and there are practically no expectations of achievement for students. A
very large proportion of Louisiana students are being routinely moved up to the
next grade even though they have learned almost nothing in the most basic
academic subjects. What lesson do such students really learn when they are
rewarded for zero performance?
I pointed out to the Accountability Commission during their
hearings this past year that it is not appropriate to place all of the
accountability on teachers and schools. Many parents do not regularly send
their children to school, nor do they insist that students study and do
homework. Yet the new system rewards such students with automatic promotion and
a meaningless diploma.
On the other hand, most educators including this writer do
not believe that massive failure of students is effective or desired. Students
generally do not benefit from being separated from their similar age cohorts,
and often demonstrate behavior problems when left behind with younger students.
I am not proposing massive grade retention of students. Instead our public
school system should address the needs of each student at his/her present level
of achievement and performance. Students
who have learned almost none of the material taught at the 7th grade
level will not benefit by being subjected to 8th grade material. Yet
that’s how our present system works.
Proponents of the new standards believe (without any
scientific basis) that all students perform better when confronted with higher
expectations. The data does not support this assumption. Students just fall
further behind to the point that they can no longer participate effectively in the
classroom. Teachers in middle school are forced to practice a form of academic
triage, where the students with low achievement are mostly ignored so that
maximum effort can be concentrated on students who have some potential. That’s
the kind of warped result we get when the system punishes teachers and schools
that do not demonstrate the mandated overall growth. Some of the most at-risk
students fall by the wayside.
My previous post below concludes that the Louisiana math standards
for middle school students are not appropriate and teachable for the majority
of our students. There was no field-testing of these standards before they were
implemented. Instead all of our students became guinea pigs in a grand
experiment in attempting to teach college prep math to all students. The
results have been disastrous. The results with English/language arts and
Science are almost as bad.
Herb Bassett, a Louisiana teacher who is an excellent
analyst of testing and standards has observed that in general when a state
adopts new standards and a new regime of testing is implemented, the scores
will usually go up after the first year as students and teachers adapt to the
new tests. But there is no reason to believe that students will continue to
improve significantly over a longer time frame. We get a new set of students each year! The results this year, even
with maximum pressure on teachers and principals to continuously improve test
scores, are not impressive. The expected improvement in test scores happened
last year, but then stalled in the 2017 spring testing. There is no indication
that Louisiana will come anywhere near meeting the ambitious goals set by John
White by the 2025 school year.
The data shows that Louisiana is not succeeding in teaching
the experimental common core standards to even the majority of students. Why
are our amateur education reformers so determined to blindly follow this questionable
course with an entire generation of students?
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