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"When our schools are run for profit, there are disastrous consequences for both students and teachers. Teachers are "managed" through the "outcomes" they produce, meaning their students' test scores. This makes teachers focus not on their students strengths, not on their students' needs or interests, but rather on their deficits, on the skills and concepts the students must master to pass the next test. Students who are, for whatever reasons unable to produce test score gains (perhaps they might be uninterested, alienated, traumatized, hungry, special education, new to the English language, or a hundred other reasons) become a liability for the teacher and the school. Under the pressure to produce "profits" is the form of higher test scores, schools begin to systematically reject students like these, as we are already seeing among some charter schools. Schools care less about nurturing students or teachers. The environment becomes less humane. Turnover increases among teachers, and attrition rises for students. Residual public schools become a dumping ground for students too difficult to educate."

"Katie Zahedi is principal of Linden Avenue Middle School in Red Hook, New York, which is located in upstate Dutchess County. She is active in the association of New York Principals who bravely oppose the State Education Department's educator evaluation plan based mostly on test scores. Zahedi has been a principal and assistant principal at her school for twelve years. The views she expresses here are solely her own and not those of the district or her school. Suffice it to say that she is a woman of unusual integrity and courage, who is determined to speak truth to power. She wrote this piece for the blog in response to the release of the Common Core test results in New York, in which scores collapsed across the state."

"I recently published a post about how a teacher in New York was wronged by the state's controversial new educator evaluation system, which is based in large part on student standardized test scores. Here's a story about a school principal's personal experience with the scores. This was written by Sean C. Feeney, principal of The Wheatley School in New York and president of the Nassau County High School Principals Association. He is a co-author of  the New York Principals letter of concern regarding the evaluation of teachers by student test scores. It has been signed by more than 1,535 New York principals and more than 6,500 teachers, parents, professors, administrators and citizens."

"Given the magnitude of the recent recession, and the high-stakes testing the U.S. has implemented under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), it is important to understand the effects of large-scale job losses on student achievement. We examine the effects of state-level job losses on fourth- and eighth-grade test scores, using federal Mass Layoff Statistics and 1996-2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress data. Results indicate that job losses decrease scores. Effects are larger for eighth than fourth graders and for math than reading assessments, and are robust to specification checks. Job losses to 1% of a state's working-age population lead to a .076 standard deviation decrease in the state's eighth-grade math scores. This result is an order of magnitude larger than those found in previous studies that have compared students whose parents lose employment to otherwise similar students, suggesting that downturns affect all students, not just students who experience parental job loss. Our findings have important implications for accountability schemes: we calculate that a state experiencing one-year job losses to 2% of its workers (a magnitude observed in seven states) likely sees a 16% increase in the share of its schools failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress under NCLB. "

Yesterday, the state finally released school test scores; for NYC schools they are posted here.   Individual student test scores will only be made available August 17 - through the ARIS system, for which you will need your child's OSIS number.  Although the city showed gains of a few percentage points, the results were nothing to write home about: only 43.9 percent of city students in grades 3-8 met the standards in reading and 57.3 percent in math.

Next, Wednesday, August 17th is the next Panel for Education Policy (PEP) meeting at Murry Bergtraum High School, and on the agenda are contracts and the budget. Does anyone besides me notice a glaring omission from the agenda? What about the educational crisis surrounding the recently released test scores

Pearson Education Inc., the company that holds all three state contracts for Oklahoma school tests, did not accurately calculate the test scores of high school students at the school and district levels, The Oklahoman reported Monday (http://bit.ly/qCqYzd). Though individual test scores are believed to be accurate, the company's mistakes affect the numbers used to determine how schools perform under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Fewer topics in education arouse more controversy than value-added measures. There are disagreements about how value-added scores should be calculated. There are arguments about what value-added scores tell us about schools or teachers. There are differences of opinion about how value-added data should be used. The polemic received full public attention in August, 2010 when the LA Times published district teacher rankings based on individual teachers' value-added scores, custom-calculated for the newspaper by statisticians at the Rand Corporation. Union representatives were aghast, teachers were appalled, parents were intrigued, students were amused, and academic scholars were either supportive or critical. The problem was that Doug Harris's book Value-Added Measures in Education: What Every Educator Needs to Know had yet to be published, so the definitive resource for how best to assess the LA Times data was not available.

The College Board, which oversees undergraduate and graduate school entrance exams, released results for the 2011 SATs, revealing mixed news: More students took the test than ever before, posting scores that are some of the lowest in history. On reading comprehension, the 1.65 million students who filled out answer sheets earned a mean score of 497 out of a possible 800 - a three-point drop off from 2010. Comparatively, the results in 2005 showed a mean score of 507.

Given our extreme reliance on test scores as measures of educational success and failure, I'm sorry I have to make this point: proficiency rates are not test scores, and changes in proficiency rates do not necessarily tell us much about changes in test scores.

"For many years now, a common talking point in education circles has been that U.S. public school teachers are disproportionately drawn from the "bottom third" of college graduates, and that we have to "attract better candidates" in order to improve the distribution of teacher quality. We discussed the basis for this "bottom third" claim in this post, and I will not repeat the points here, except to summarize that "bottom third" teachers (based on SAT/ACT scores) were indeed somewhat overrepresented nationally, although the magnitudes of such differences vary by cohort and other characteristics. A very recent article in the journal Educational Researcher addresses this issue head-on (a full working version of the article is available here). It is written by Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb, Andrew McEachin, Luke Miller and James Wyckoff. The authors analyze SAT scores of New York State teachers over a 25 year period (between 1985 and 2009). Their main finding is that these SAT scores, after a long term decline, improved between 2000 and 2009 among all certified teachers, with the increases being especially large among incoming (new) teachers, and among teachers in high-poverty schools."

Although both economists and psychometricians typically treat them as interval scales, test scores are reported using ordinal scales. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study and the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey, we examine the effect of order-preserving scale transformations on the evolution of the black-white reading test score gap from kindergarten entry through third grade. Plausible transformations reverse the growth of the gap in the CNLSY and greatly mitigate it in the ECLS-K during early school years. All growth from entry through first grade and a nontrivial proportion from first to third grade probably reflects scaling decisions.

Louisiana's "School Performance Score" (SPS) is the state's primary accountability measure, and it determines whether schools are subject to high-stakes decisions, most notably state takeover. For elementary and middle schools, 90 percent of the SPS is based on testing outcomes. For secondary schools, it is 70 percent (and 30 percent graduation rates).* The SPS is largely calculated using absolute performance measures - specifically, the proportion of students falling into the state's cutpoint-based categories (e.g., advanced, mastery, basic, etc.). This means that it is mostly measuring student performance, rather than school performance. That is, insofar as the SPS only tells you how high students score on the test, rather than how much they have improved, schools serving more advantaged populations will tend to do better (since their students tend to perform well when they entered the school) while those in impoverished neighborhoods will tend to do worse (even those whose students have made the largest testing gains). One rough way to assess this bias is to check the association between SPS and student characteristics, such as poverty.

"From my experience, education reporters are smart, knowledgeable, and attentive to detail. That said, the bulk of the stories about testing data - in big cities and suburbs, in this year and in previous years - could be better. Listen, I know it's unreasonable to expect every reporter and editor to address every little detail when they try to write accessible copy about complicated issues, such as test data interpretation. Moreover, I fully acknowledge that some of the errors to which I object - such as calling proficiency rates "scores" - are well within tolerable limits, and that news stories need not interpret data in the same way as researchers. Nevertheless, no matter what you think about the role of test scores in our public discourse, it is in everyone's interest that the coverage of them be reliable. And there are a few mostly easy suggestions that I think would help a great deal. Below are five such recommendations. They are of course not meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather a quick compilation of points, all of which I've discussed in previous posts, and all of which might also be useful to non-journalists."

Analysts often examine the black-white test score gap conditional on family income. Typically only a current income measure is available. We argue that the gap conditional on permanent income is of greater interest, and we describe a method for identifying this gap using an auxiliary data set to estimate the relationship between current and permanent income. Current income explains only about half as much of the black-white test score gap as does permanent income, and the remaining gap in math achievement among families with the same permanent income is only 0.2 to 0.3 standard deviations in two commonly used data sets. When we add permanent income to the controls used by Fryer and Levitt (2006), the unexplained gap in 3rd grade shrinks below 0.15 standard deviations, less than half of what is found with their controls.

"In all my many posts about the interpretation of state testing data, it seems that I may have failed to articulate one major implication, which is almost always ignored in the news coverage of the release of annual testing data. That is: raw, unadjusted changes in student test scores are not by themselves very good measures of schools' test-based effectiveness. In other words, schools can have a substantial impact on performance, but student test scores also increase, decrease or remain flat for reasons that have little or nothing to do with schools."

Last week, New York City released performance ratings for 18,000 teachers based on student test scores, following a ruling the state's highest court the information could be made public. Here are responses from several Teachers College-affiliated experts to two questions: Should teachers be evaluated based on their students' test scores? Does the public have the right to that information?

"Here is the reason for the collapse of test scores in New York City and New York State. State officials decided that New York test scores should be aligned with the achievement levels of the federally-administered National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)."

Average SAT scores fell across the board this past year-down 3 points in critical reading, 2 points in writing, and 1 point in math. This year, 1.65 million students in the high school graduating class of 2011 took the college-entrance exam, up from 1.6 million for the class of 2010, according to results released today. The increase in test-takers can lead to a decline in mean scores, the College Board says, because more students of varying academic ability are represented.

Student test scores from 100 D.C. public schools still under investigation for cheating were used in value-added calculations that were incorporated into some teachers' evaluations this year, according to DCPS spokesperson Fred Lewis. More than 200 D.C. teachers were terminated last week on the basis of their evaluation results. Only when "instances of cheating were confirmed" were affected student scores removed from the value-added model, Lewis said.