A National Study Confirms Our Worst Fears About Our School Standards and Tests

In my opinion, the Common Core based tests such as the Louisiana LEAP tests and our high school end of course tests (EOC) are just not valid for any purpose, and I now have data to back that up. Right now the LEAP and EOC tests are used for measuring the achievement levels of our students, the effectiveness of our teachers and the ratings of our schools. The evidence is building that our tests are not good for any of those purposes.

My most recent post on this blog describes how the State Department of Education has lowered the standard for passing LEAP and EOC to appallingly low levels. This was done primarily to show false progress in improving student achievement in ELA and math. My post showed that this so called progress is contradicted by the NAEP tests. But it was also done because the tests are much too difficult for our students. Now a study just released by NEPE (The National Education Policy Center) provides more than adequate cause why these tests should be trashed before they do more damage.

The NEPE study titled "A Consumer’s Guide to Testing under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA): What Can the Common Core and Other ESSA Assessments Tell Us?" is a long technical report that would be extremely difficult for any lay person to comprehend. In addition, it was obviously written in such a way as to avoid offending the powers that keep our school systems chained to the Common Core standards. But buried in the report are some shocking findings, if you look hard enough to find them.

The most shocking finding of the NEPE report is not to be found in the summary of the findings even though it should have been included as one of the most significant concerns. This finding is about the validity of the PARCC tests upon which at least 90% of our Louisiana tests are based and it is just casually mentioned on page 44 of the 60 page report. It reads as follows:

2. Currently, PARCC’s Items are Prohibitively Difficult
Item analysis results from the first operational testing of PARCC show that test items across grades, subject areas, and modes of testing are extremely difficult for targeted students by grade. On ELA/L items the median proportions of students who were able answer items correctly ranged from 37%- 47% only in 2015-16. On math items those median proportions ranged from 22%-55% only (PARCC-Pearson, 2017, pp 64-65). Users and test-makers should examine the possible causes for this finding, as that report uses data collected five years after reform implementation began. Discussions on how best to align CCSS reform implementation in schools with the testing schedule under ESSA need to occur immediately, so as to optimize results with higher levels of content-based validity.

Notice that this analysis recommends the discussion of immediate changes to the PARCC tests if they are to be brought to some valid level. So why are so many states continuing to use a group of invalid tests? Remember, in Louisiana, these tests are used to grade schools and as a 35% portion of each teacher's evaluation.

What this finding means is that nationwide, the average proportion of questions answered correctly on these tests was less than 40%. This is the generally same conclusion I got when I reviewed the raw scores of our Louisiana students. As I pointed out in the previous post, such low performance and such low cut scores makes outright guessing a major factor in the test results. If students can come close to passing the tests by just making random guesses then the test is measuring very little of the student's real knowledge. 

There is another important factor that some teachers have brought to my attention that may be invalidating our state tests. Teachers are observing that a significant number of students are so discouraged by the difficulty of the tests, that they often turn in their test paper with most of the questions left unanswered. Some kids just quit trying after attempting just a few questions. These test results are totally invalid in my opinion. Yet in Louisiana, a student who answers none of the questions on a LEAP test gets a score of 625 out of 850. Such a score is meaningless and extremely misleading. 

On page 10 of the report James Harvey, the Executive Director of the National Superintendents Roundtable states the following:

“In education today, measurement experts occupy the exalted status of Irish priests. With their figurative back to the schools, these prelates genuflect at the altar of Item Response Theory and mumble confidently amongst themselves in a language known as psychometrics. No one in the school congregation understands a word of it, but we are assured these mysteries are based on science...”

The entire education community has been bamboozled by the testing companies and our fake state and national education reformers into adopting a set of standards that are totally inappropriate for our students and that allow these "priests" to tell us what it all means since it is assumed we are not qualified to make such interpretations.

Louisiana Education's Myth of High Standards

If there is one thing Louisiana State Superintendent John White stands for its higher standards!
In 2012 Governor Jindal and the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI) engineered the appointment of John White (An individual with basically zero education credentials) to the office of State Superintendent. The one thing they expected him to implement were higher standards. Accordingly, in numerous presentations White often emphatically makes the case for higher standards. It is an article of faith to reformers such as White that if standards are set high, then teachers and students will rise to meet them. This post examines the standards that White has established for Louisiana students and the real achievement levels accomplished.

At the same time that John White was in the process of being appointed, Louisiana was in the middle of adopting the new Common Core Standards. This was a set of academic standards primarily in math and Language Arts that were considered tougher and more appropriate to prepare our kids for life. It was believed that if our students were required to master these tougher standards that they would be better prepared for college and careers.

Much of the project for the adoption of the new standards was promoted by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, whose support was obtained by a brief  high level meeting between the Gates' and the creators of the standards. The Obama administration was sold on the project by his outspoken Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. (Another person with no real experience in teaching) The Federal government then found ways around the law prohibiting the Department of Education from mandating curriculum by handing out a lot of money to states that "voluntarily" adopted the program. Louisiana adopted the standards, sight unseen, before they were even written.

Never mind that the Common Core standards had been hurriedly put together by a supposedly elite group of college testing experts who had little experience actually teaching students at the k-12 level. Never mind that the proponents were in such a hurry to implement these new standards all across the nation that they did not bother to run field trials of any kind. (Like what we would do before we subjected our children for a new pharmaceutical drug) It was just assumed that these tougher standards were just the medicine our students needed to make them smarter and more able to compete in the world job market.

A major part of the implementation of the standards included the adoption of new tests for all students at the end of each school year as a way of insuring that the standards were being met. State law, even before the adoption of the new standards already required that students in 4th and 8th grades could not get promoted to the next grade if they failed their state tests in both math and English. So the new tests would be used as further evidence that our students were learning what they needed to know before they moved into high school. Also students at the high school level would not be allowed to graduate unless they passed certain competency tests in critical subjects.

The real promotion standards as measured by the new state tests are low enough for outright guessing to become a major factor 
The state BESE approved standard for receiving a passing grade in course work has long been 67%. In addition, students are expected to meet attendance requirements before they can be promoted.

But an exception was made for the new Common Core tests. Basically the Department of Education was allowed to set any standard they chose relative to the percentage of questions answered correctly. And they were also allowed to change that underlying percentage for passing without consultation from year to year. The passing standard has been quietly watered down over a period of years without the public or the legislature being informed. So at the end of the 2017-2018 school year my public records requests revealed that a student on average only needs to get about 30% of the questions right on their math and English tests in order to get a passing score. That's just a little above what a student who knows absolutely nothing could attain with outright guessing.

My most recent public records requests reveal that 20% of our 4th and 8th graders did not meet the extremely low standard for passing both English and math in 2018
State law still clearly requires that students who fail both math and English are not supposed to progress to the next grade. But John White and BESE found a loophole in the law that allows school systems to implement alternatives to retention for students who do not meet those standards. So by getting local school officials to fill out a little paperwork, all students can magically pass.

The new BESE rules for promotion basically allow any student to be promoted to the next grade even if there is absolutely no evidence of learning in their present grade. 
Even though 20% of students are repeatedly failing their state tests, public records reveal that only 1.8% of 4th and 8th graders are denied promotion. The truth is that the Louisiana Department of Education, using the latest BESE policy, expects our local school systems to promote basically all students to the next grade each year whether they have learned the material or not. Then the teachers in the next grade are magically supposed to teach them the new material in addition to what they did not learn in previous grades.

How can students graduate if they are promoted to high school with little or no knowledge?
As this blog explained in an earlier post, the improved graduation rate of Louisiana students is achieved using even more of the John White standards magic. Using the secret raw score standards implemented by John White, a student can pass his/her algebra I test by scoring only 15% correct answers. Geometry requires only 12% correct answers. English I can be passed by getting 17% of the questions right. Louisiana's improved graduation rate was achieved by faking the stats.


Here are the real results of the proficiency of Louisiana students as measured by an unbiased and untainted testing system
The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) is a national test that is considered the gold standard for measuring proficiency of students in 4th and 8th grade in reading and math. On the latest NAEP test given, only 26% of Louisiana 4th graders achieved a proficient rating in reading, only 27% of Louisiana 4th graders got a proficient rating in math, only 25% of Louisiana 8th graders got a proficient rating in reading, and only 19% of Louisiana students got a proficient rating in math. My analysis reveals that our state tests have been inflated an average of 59% in recent years compared to the NAEP tests.

How have Louisiana's children fared during the term of John White compared  to students in other states?
The latest NAEP test results which compare Louisiana student performance in reading and math to all other states places Louisiana at its lowest ranking ever. We now rank at the bottom of all state systems. The only area scoring lower on NAEP is Washington D.C.


Don't blame the students or the teachers. The fact is the Common Common core standards are so bad, so age inappropriate, so filled with stuff these kids will never use, that the tests should not be used for any purpose, much less the promotion and graduation of students. Meanwhile our students are being denied instruction in real world problems and truly useful reading and writing skills.

I would dare any BESE member or legislator with a college degree to take the 8th grade LEAP math test and make their raw score public. 

The Louisiana Association of Business and Industry need not complain if their new employees cannot read, write, or do math. These kids have passed the "higher standards" LABI and White forced on us.

Charter School Advocates Moving to a Complete Takeover of EBR Schools

The Advocate reports here on a trip to Indianapolis for EBR school board members paid for by pro charter school, super rich donors. These out-of-state education reformers seem to believe that the transfer of more and more of our school tax dollars to support new charter schools will somehow improve education. Yet there is more and more evidence piling up demonstrating that these charter schools have the absolute worst results as measured by the very tests that the reformers rely upon to measure school success. The average ACT scores for the Charter school graduates in EBR are the absolute lowest (14.6 out of a possible 36 points) in the state. Performance on the elementary math and English tests place EBR charter takeover schools 5th from the bottom of the state's 72 school districts.

Here is an Advocate article about some of the out-of-state donors who have worked for several years to elect more charter advocates to the EBR school board. They have now basically succeeded in taking over the Board. EBR superintendent Warren Drake's job is now in jeopardy if he does not quickly jump on the privatization train.

But apparently evidence of performance is not important to the reformers once a school is converted to a charter. The reformers rely on performance data mostly as justification for taking over our public schools and converting them to mostly "for profit" charter schools. Then they can conveniently ignore the data.

Even the so called "non-profit" charters usually end up being a cash cow for the operators. Since the charter school operators get to appoint their own boards, they can pay themselves high salaries. Charter operators also hide some of their profits by having the charter school pay management fees and rent to companies that they also own. Some of those high salaries and fees coupled with mismanagement often result in collapse or bankruptcy of charters, with the taxpayer getting stuck with the tab to restart the school. See this report by Mercedes Schneider on some of the failed New Orleans charters. EBR recently had a couple of charters that went under without paying their utility bills and other obligations.

The most appalling thing about this story is that the takeover of our public schools is being aided and coordinated by the Baton Rouge Area Chamber of Commerce (BRACC). Somehow our business community has been duped into pushing this ill conceived scheme.

Much of the funding for promotion of privatization of our schools will be the newly formed City Fund, already worth a cool 189 million. This fund will be used to promote what is called the "Portfolio Model" for the privatization of our public schools. This City Fund was created by wealthy hedge fund managers and the owners of Netflix. The name "Portfolio model" is appropriate since hedge fund managers made their fortunes by managing portfolios of other people's money. Now they want to "manage" our tax money by giving it to charter operators.

Without a shred of evidence to support the assumption that privatized charter schools provide a better education for our public school children, these self-appointed stewards of our school tax money will be pushing the EBR school board to turn over more of our taxes to unqualified operators of these independent schools. That's our school tax money being diverted without our permission.

How are they doing it? Are they using some of that out-of-state money to buy school supplies, textbooks, modern science equipment or to boost teacher salaries so we can attract the best educators to teaching jobs? Nope, not a penny for those things! At least, not so far. The money mostly goes to buying influence by electing school board members dedicated to privatization, and to giving campaign contributions to legislators who pass laws making the creation of charter and voucher schools a priority. In politics, money is a powerful weapon.  A few years ago out-of-state money helped to elect our Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, also dedicated to privatization. Pro-Privatization governor Bobby Jindal and the new BESE members appointed our latest state superintendent in January 2012 with the goals of increasing testing and test prep, blaming teachers for any low ranking of our education system and to increase privatization.  How has that worked?

The results of reform and privatization in Louisiana:
Here, again, is some of that pesky data on student performance: When White was appointed, our state was ranked about about 5th from the bottom of all states in student test performance on the national NAEP test. Now our average ranking is last among all states and just a hair above the District of Columbia schools. Recently, BESE and White removed basically all standards for student promotion from one grade to the next, and have lowered the passing standard on high school end-of-course tests to less than 20% correct answers on most of the state tests. It's no wonder that our graduation rate has increased in recent years.

How could the State Board of Education and even the reformers themselves condone and approve such ridiculously low standards for high school graduation? Probably because at least some of them don't know what the cut scores for passing grades really are. The raw cut scores for passing are kept secret from almost everyone by converting them to scale scores that look pretty good. For example, the lowest scale score for passing is 700 out of a possible score of 850 on the new LEAP 2025 tests. A simple calculation would seem to be 700/850 =  .82 or 82%. But scale scores cannot be converted in this manner to raw percentage scores. The conversion can only be done by using a conversion table originally known only to the testing company and to the LDOE. The conversion tables were revealed only because of public records requests backed up by the threat of lawsuits to enforce the law. For Algebra I, the conversion table reveals that the true passing score is only 14.7%.

Another investigation that reveals misleading practices of the LDOE is the revelation that in the last few years there has been great inflation of the various levels of achievement on the state LEAP tests compared to the NAEP. See this post. This practice makes it look like our students are doing a lot better in their basic skills courses than is indicated by the national tests.

But it's easy to fool people who have complete faith in educational reform and the people they have installed to implement it.  The Chamber and the big donors just want to believe that privatization and the blaming and shaming of teachers have produced real improvement. But in this era of alternate reality and alternate facts, sooner or later we need to come to grips with the real facts. Maybe then the hedge fund managers and the Chamber of Commerce will consider putting professional educators in charge and returning our public schools to the Louisiana taxpayers.