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We Don’t Know Yet What’s a “Good” Score on PARCC, But ASK and HSPA Weren’t Reflective of Grade-Level Proficiency

May 1, 2015

Laura Waters

From Leslie Brody in today’s Wall St. Journal:

As thousands of parents refuse to have their children take state tests in New Jersey this spring, one of their chief complaints is that the questions are too hard. What they may not know is that nobody has yet determined what qualifies as a good score…

“In the past three years under the 11th-grade state exam that is being replaced by PARCC,” Brody writes,”more than 90% of New Jersey 11th graders passed in language arts. About 80% passed in math.” Yet,

The New Jersey Council of County Colleges said that 47% of freshmen who entered the state’s public colleges and universities in fall 2013 needed at least one remedial course. They burn through college tuition catching up on material they should have learned in high school.

And,

In some educators’ view, raising standards nudges students to rise to the challenge. Jeffrey Nellhaus, chief of assessment at PARCC, said higher standards can be daunting at first, but they pay off. He was head of testing in Massachusetts when it started a new test in 1998. Initially, only 38% of 10th-graders scored as proficient in language arts. Last year, 90% did so.

Higher standards “can be a little scary to people at first,” Mr. Nellhaus said, “but staying the course, you see the improvement that the whole enterprise is trying to achieve.”

Laura Waters

1 Comment

Julia, May 8, 2015 @ 9:57 pm Reply

Laura,

Parents aren't refusing PARCC because it's too hard. They are refusing it because it is poorly designed and executed and more importantly, because high-stakes standardized tests like PARCC are narrowing the curriculum, leading to teaching to the test, and otherwise destroying public education.

Comparing proficiency rates on NJASK and remediation rates for community colleges is like comparing apples and orange. First, almost all public school students took NJASK whereas only a subset take community college placement exams. And that subset does not reflect the larger pool.

Second, the statistics that have been thrown around about community colleges and remediation are very problematic, as pointed out by Rowan Mathematics Professor Eric Milou, who wrote:

“(1) As stated by the American Association of Community Colleges, 63% of community college students are age 22 of older and thus many of those students have not had a high school course in many years. How is it the responsibility of K-12 for their remediation then?

(2) The placement tests at most colleges are either Accuplacer or Compass that are computer adaptive tests whose accuracy is questionable. The Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia (Belfield & Crosta, 2012) reports that Accuplacer severely misplaces 33 percent of all students, and Compass severely misplaces 27 percent. See full study here and also Carol Burris who writes more here. Note that both the College Board and ACT (creator of the tests) and the community colleges earn huge sums of money for the tests and the remediation courses respectively.

(3) The National Center on the Economy and the Education 2013 report entitled What Does It Really Mean to Be College and Work Ready? should be required reading for Hespe. It is available here. The reports states that placement tests that community colleges use to determine whether students need to take remedial courses in mathematics are based on the assumption that all students should be expected to be proficient in the sequence of courses leading to calculus in particular that they should be expected to be proficient in the content typically associated with Algebra I, Algebra II and Geometry. The report’s detailed research clearly shows that students do not need to be proficient in most of the topics typically associated with Algebra II and much of Geometry to be successful in most programs offered by the community colleges. This is a very serious issue. It is clear that many students are being denied entry to credit-bearing courses at our community colleges who are in fact prepared to do the mathematics that will be required of them in their applied programs. In other words, it is not the K-12 sector that fails them, it is in fact the obsolete and irrelevant tests that these students don’t need for success in their careers and life.”

“PARCC and the common core will NOT cure the remediation problem at all. If you are truly concerned about this problem, then ask community colleges to review their mathematics requirements in the light of what has been learned about what students need to know about mathematics to be successful in the careers they have chosen.”