best of myshortpencil
• • • • •

School Systems Favor State Assessments
By Daniel de Vise / Washington
Post Staff Writer
November 10, 2005; T03

Standardized testing used to be a straightforward affair in Maryland. Once a
year, students brought home carbon-copy sheets filled with percentile scores
that compared them with children from Maine to California on a scale of 1 to 99
against a national average of 50.

These days, the percentile has fallen from favor.

How students stack up against the national average — the standard measured by
the Stanford Achievement Test, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and other
norm-referenced tests — is no longer the chief concern of teachers, principals
and superintendents in the Maryland suburbs.

But
it should still be a chief concern of parents. It’s the only way you can tell if
an "A" is really and "A" and academic excellence is truly
excellent. Your children will not be competing just against the other students
in your state. They will be in a nationwide and global competition for college
seats, scholarships and jobs. If you rely solely on state scores, you’re not
getting the important information you need to know what those scores really
mean.

Maryland, like Virginia and most other states, has embraced its own test and a
new way of rating the performance of test takers. The two-year-old Maryland
School Assessment (MSA) judges whether students have mastered material taught at
their grade level. Parents are urged to focus less on scores and more on three
broad categories of achievement: basic, proficient and advanced.

It’s
a system need, you understand.

Education leaders say the new rating system tells parents more than any
percentile could about whether students are performing at their grade level and
mastering academic standards set by the state. How those students rank against
their peers around the nation is a secondary concern.

Why?
What if your state has the lowest performance standards in the nation? You
shouldn’t be concerned, right? It’s ridiculous.

"The standardized tests are important, but they tell you ultimately far
less about your kid than what the teacher can tell you from the classroom,"
said Ronald A. Peiffer, Maryland’s deputy superintendent for academic policy.

That
has always been true. An the classroom teachers have been handing out A’s to
students who score in the 50th percentile on national standardized tests. Who
are you going to believe? Parents have got to know what those A’s, or 1, 2, 3
& 4’s, or basic, proficient and advanceds REALLY MEAN, and you can’t tell if
you don’t have a national standardized percentile to compare them to.

What’s going on here, really? Isn’t more information better? So, why are
educators telling parents to downplay national percentiles? You can be sure of
this much: It’s more in their interests than in your child’s interest.

* * *

[Parent Stephanie] Coakley said parents may find it more meaningful that a child
ranks at the 90th percentile, terminology familiar from their own childhoods,
than to know that he or she rates "advanced" on the MSA.

"Advanced"
can mean anything. A percentile on a national standardized tests has a known and
far less ambiguous meaning.

"Percentiles, we all understand," said Sara Seifter, another Howard
parent.

Peiffer notes, however, that he is hearing from an increasing number of parents
that the percentile scores "are of less interest to them" because they
have grown comfortable with the language of the MSA.

For many years before the era of custom-designed state tests, Maryland mandated
that norm-referenced percentile tests be given statewide. Over the decades, the
tests included the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, the California Achievement Test
and the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS).

That era ended in 1991 with the introduction of the Maryland School Performance
Assessment Program (MSPAP). Maryland resumed norm-referenced testing a few years
later, Peiffer said, because the state school board "became uncomfortable
with not having a national test to which we could compare Maryland
students." The CTBS became that test, mandated across the state until the
introduction of the MSA in 2003.

Around Maryland, most school systems abruptly scaled back their norm-referenced
testing so as not to duplicate the efforts of the MSA.

I
think I’ve figured out what’s going on. This is about the money. School
districts don’t want to have to spend the money for a test that has no meaning
to them, since they aren’t evaluating their curriculum based on the national
tests. So, they tell parents not to be concerned about them. "Just look at
your child’s report cards and state exam results."

Students are being tested a lot, but I’d still want a national reference point
to aid in the interpretation of the data coming from the school and the state. A
national standardized test should be given every three years as a check on
academic quality.

* * *

Norm-referenced tests serve several purposes. They provide parents a rare
perspective on how the local school system compares with those in the rest of
the nation. They provide teachers data on individual student abilities at an age
when instructors have little to go by; the MSA doesn’t test students below the
third grade. In some cases, percentile scores help schools identify gifted
students.

Academic leaders caution strongly against inferring too much from the scores.
While some tests, particularly those that form the core of the MSA, align
closely to what’s taught in the Maryland classroom, others do not. Each test has
its own content and design. The tests tend to offer a grab bag of material drawn
from several different states — usually large states, to attract more customers
– and they may confront Maryland students with material those students haven’t
yet learned.

There is a contrary argument: that norm-referenced tests are valuable precisely
because they come from outside the state testing apparatus. To parents who fear
that teachers are teaching only what’s tested on the MSA, and that students are
getting a comparatively shallow education as a result, such a test could provide
an independent measure of whether the lesson plan is sound.

While some academic leaders see little meaning in norm-referenced tests, others
say the tests provide a valuable reference point for how students rate against
their peers.

* * *

[I]n Calvert County, Ted R. Haynie, the director of system performance, said
there’s little interest in such comparisons.

"We truly believe," Haynie said, "that focusing on the progress
and learning needs of individual students and subgroups of students is more
educationally prudent than comparing how our students performed on a national
norm to students in North Dakota. Nothing against North Dakota."

OOPS!
Do you see the stereotypical "thinking" and prejudices that educators
have? Do you see how they just make stuff up to support their opinions?

BTW, Maryland ranked 17th in spending, given its academic performance on the
NAEP exams, so it appears the state has something to learn from North Dakota
both in terms of academics and in terms of getting a bigger bang for the buck.