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City students posted modest gains on elementary and middle school statewide tests this year, showing more improvement than students in the state as a whole and in the state's other large cities, state officials said Monday. But city and state scores both remain far below where they were two years ago, when sky-high scores made it seem that an education miracle might be at work in New York schools. Last year, state officials readjusted scoring after determining that the tests had become too easy to pass and were out of balance with national and college-preparation standards. As a result, scores plummeted.

John Merrow Gets It Wrong on Testing: Any education reporter or editorialist worth his salt has to admire the work of broadcaster John Merrow. But in his interview last week with Mother Jones, Merrow ended up embracing the wrongheaded view of so many education traditionalists when it comes to standardized Testing. Argues Merrow: "No Child Left Behind has done a great deal of damage… Testing is largely punitive. It's a "gotcha" game. We are disempowering teachers."

In education policy debates, the phrase "what works" is sometimes used to mean "what increases test scores." Among those of us who believe that testing data have a productive role to play in education policy (even if we disagree on the details of that role), there is a constant struggle to interpret test-based evidence properly and put it in context. This effort to craft and maintain a framework for using assessment data productively is very important but, despite the careless claims of some public figures, it is also extremely difficult.

The challenge of designing effective performance measurement and incentives is a general one in economic settings where behavior and outcomes are not easily observable. These issues are particularly prominent in education where, over the last two decades, test-based accountability systems for schools and students have proliferated. In this study, we present evidence that the design and decentralized, school-based grading of New York's high-stakes Regents Examinations have led to pervasive manipulation of student test scores that are just below performance thresholds. Specifically, we document statistically significant discontinuities in the distributions of subject-specific Regent scores that align with the cut scores used to determine both student eligibility to graduate and school accountability. Our results suggest that roughly 3 to 5 percent of the exam scores that qualified for a high-school diploma actually had performance below the state requirements. Moreover, we find that the rates of test manipulation in NYC were roughly twice as high as those in the entire state. We estimate that roughly 6 to 10 percent of NYC students who scored above the passing threshold for a Regents Diploma actually had scores below the state requirement.

Standardized tests in English and math taken by students in New York State are about to become slightly less tricky. Beginning next spring, a new company, Pearson, will write the standardized tests that the Education Department gives to nearly all third through eighth graders. The department switched to Pearson this year after its contract with another company, CTB/McGraw-Hill, expired.

As you are getting ready to go back to school, you may be feeling pleased that your child is going to a school with high test ratings. Before you decide if that's a good thing or not, read this story. You may be shocked at the lengths many schools and districts will go to, to raise their test scores.  After reading, go to your child's school and start asking some hard questions. Need help with the questions. Contact me.

Students receive abundant information about their educational performance, but how this information affects future educational-investment decisions is not well understood. Increasingly common sources of information are state-mandated standardized tests. On these tests, students receive a score and a label that summarizes their performance. Using a regression-discontinuity design, we find persistent effects of earning a more positive label on the college-going decisions of urban, low-income students. Consistent with a Bayesian-updating model, these effects are concentrated among students with weaker priors, specifically those who report before taking the test that they do not plan to attend a four-year college.

Ditch Testing: Lessons from the Atlanta Scandal (Part 3): No Technical Fix: Human Nature? Chester E. Finn says cheating on Test scores "is about human nature." Assuming cheating is human nature, then it would be logical to accept one of two assumptions: a) everyone cheats or has the tendency to cheat or b) some people are more likely to cheat than others by nature. But applying either one to the Atlanta situation raises more questions.

A simmering scandal in Atlanta over cheating on standardized tests came to a head this week as state investigators released a report that found in the city's schools "an enterprise where unethical-and potentially illegal-behavior pierced every level of the bureaucracy," according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The scandal follows closely on the heels of a USA Today investigation into possible cheating in the Washington, D.C. schools. The Hechinger Report talked with Robert Tobias, director of the Center for Research on Teaching and Learning at NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, and former head of assessment and accountability for the New York City schools, about whether high-stakes testing inevitably leads to cheating, and how it might be avoided.

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.

This report takes an important first step in assessing the consequences of relying on state tests versus study-administered tests for general, student-level measures of reading and math achievement in evaluations of educational effectiveness.

"New York's Common Core-based tests should be refused by parents. The tests drive an agenda that reduces local control of schools, supports questionable standards and over-emphasizes data collection."

"This essay briefly traces the history of testing in public schools from its beginnings in the 1920s, through the counter-productive No Child Left Behind (NCLB) federal law, to passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in December 2015. It then discusses the recent and rapid emergence of the testing resistance and reform movement."

Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch sounded perhaps her sharpest criticism yet of educational testing company Pearson for what critics call its shoddy handling of state standardized tests, but said the results would still be used by the state to evaluate teachers.

I personally have major concerns about the many negative impacts that the Common Core and its associated tests are likely to have. But my views are not the same as all of those we can count as allies in our efforts to defend schools and defeat the testing machine. We need to look at who we want to work with, and what we can ALL unite around to act.

Appearing with union officials in the Capitol, Governor Andrew Cuomo called the agreement "a victory for all New York State." Diane Ravitch, an education expert and professor at New York University, doesn't like the deal at all. Under the deal, 60 percent of a teacher's evaluation will be based on subjective classroom observations by the principal or other school officials, and up to 40 percent will be based on student scores on statewide standardized tests. In an email to me, Ravitch said, "40% is too much, in my view" and "evaluations should be conducted by experienced professionals." She said the plan could result in unfairly low evaluation scores for teachers dealing with students who are not prepared for standardized tests (for example, students with learning disabilities and those who are not proficient in English).

If rating teachers based on standardized test scores was such a brilliant revelation for improving the quality of the teacher workforce, if getting rid of tenure and firing more teachers was clearly the road to excellence, and if standardizing our curriculum and designing tests for each and every component of it were really the way forward, we'd expect to see these strategies all over the home pages of web sites of leading private independent schools, and we'd certainly expect to see these issues addressed throughout the pages of journals geared toward innovative school leaders, like Independent School Magazine.  In fact, they must have been talking about this kind of stuff for at least a decade. You know, how and why merit pay for teachers is the obvious answer for enhancing teacher productivity, and why we need more standardization… more tests… in order to improve curricular rigor?  So, I went back and did a little browsing through recent, and less recent issues of Independent School Magazine and collected the following few words of wisdom

This second report from the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project offers ground-breaking descriptive information regarding the use of classroom observation instruments to measure teacher performance. It finds that observation scores have somewhat low reliabilities and are weakly though positively related to value-added measures. Combining multiple observations can enhance reliabilities, and combining observation scores with student evaluations and test-score information can increase their ability to predict future teacher value-added. By highlighting the variability of classroom observation measures, the report makes an important contribution to research and provides a basis for the further development of observation rubrics as evaluation tools. Although the report raises concerns regarding the validity of classroom observation measures, we question the emphasis on validating observations with test-score gains. Observation scores may pick up different aspects of teacher quality than test-based measures, and it is possible that neither type of measure used in isolation captures a teacher's contribution to all the useful skills students learn. From this standpoint, the authors' conclusion that multiple measures of teacher effectiveness are needed appears justifiable. Unfortunately, however, the design calls for random assignment of students to teachers in the final year of data collection, but the classroom observations were apparently conducted prior to randomization, missing a valuable opportunity to assess correlations across measures under relatively bias-free conditions.

Changes to the state's testing program could leave public- schools kids in grades 3 through to 11 taking as many as nine exams per year in English and math - more than four times the current number, officials said yesterday. The potential jump comes from New York's participation in a federally funded consortium of 25 states that's seeking to make exams computer-based, more challenging and administered several times per year. The latest consortium plan calls for students to be tested as many as four times annually in math and five times a year in reading, starting in 2014.

Scores of professors and researchers from 16 universities throughout the Chicago metropolitan area have signed an open letter to the city's mayor, Rahm Emanuel, and Chicago school officials warning against implementing a teacher evaluation system that is based on standardized test scores. This is the latest protest against "value-added" teacher evaluation models that purport to measure how much "value" a teacher adds to a student's academic progress by using a complicated formula involving a standardized test score. Researchers have repeatedly warned against using these methods, but school reformers have been doing it in state after state anyway. A petition in New York State by principals and others against a test-based evaluation system there has been gaining ground.