School officials in California say the state has received a threatening letter from the US Department of Education, the San Jose Mercury News reports.
Earlier this year, the state legislature passed and Gov Jerry Brown signed AB484, a law that abandons the grade 2–11 California STAR test, which was used for federal accountability purposes under the No Child Left Behind law. Despite a warning from US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan the night before the vote, which advised legislators that the bill would violate federal law, it passed easily.
The law directs schools to administer either the English or math part of the field test for the new tests being created by Smarter Balanced, a multistate testing consortium, to withhold scores on that field test from the public, and to abandon the old STAR tests, which aren’t aligned to the Common Core and test subjects covered under the state’s old standards.
But federal officials now say, long after this law was put on the books, that California risks losing about $3.5 billion in federal grants to the schools, including Title I funds for poor students and migrant education, Title II funds for professional development, Title III funds for English learners, and School Improvement Grants, which are sent to the lowest-performing schools. The special education money threatened amounts to about 30 percent of the state’s budget for those students, and officials aren’t certain they’ll be able to provide the resources special ed students need if the federal funds don’t show up.
State school officials, who thought they were hammering out a working arrangement with federal officials, were a bit confused by the threatening nature of the letter. The paper talked with State Board of Education President Michael Kirst, who said members of the state’s education department had been meeting with the feds in order to make the state’s new testing regimen compliant with federal law. “I don’t believe we are stuck at all,” he was quoted as saying.
What’s actually wrong with state tests these days?
California—like most states, including Maryland and, to a lesser extent, Illinois—has adopted a new set of learning standards, known as the Common Core, which essentially renders the old tests, like the California STAR, the MSA, the ISAT, etc., obsolete. These old tests fail to address several standards in the Common Core and, worse, test students on knowledge that isn’t part of the Common Core.
The Common Core was written with the idea of making lessons more relevant to students’ lives, promoting critical thinking, and getting students to solve problems instead of spitting back facts. As a result, several topics kids needed to be taught under former state standards, which they can easily look up using Google today, are completely gone from the Common Core.
For example, under California’s old learning standards, here, adopted in 1997, sixth graders were required to be able to find the mode of a set of data. The sixth-grade Common Core limits measures of central tendency in sixth grade to the mean and median. The mode, it turns out, isn’t relevant to very many real-world problem-solving tasks, so the writers of the Common Core wisely eliminated it.
You may disagree with the elimination of mode as a measure of central tendency, but that is a discussion for another day. It’s nowhere to be found at or before sixth grade, so teachers aren’t required to teach it if they’re following the Common Core, which, as I said, is what they’re doing in 46 states.
The problem is, what if a question on the STAR test asks an entire state of sixth graders to find the mode of a set of data? Some teachers may have taught it (the Common Core doesn’t restrict teachers from going beyond the standards); others probably didn’t. In any case, on a statewide assessment, this question’s unfair, because it requires knowledge that we’re not requiring teachers to teach.
It’s completely illogical to test students—or to evaluate teachers or schools—using a test with too many questions that require certain knowledge if teachers aren’t technically required to impart that knowledge to students. The devil is in the details, folks, and if those details contain too many mismatches between the material in the Common Core and the assessment limits on the STAR test, we’ve got a problem. Any results from the test would be invalid if too many mismatches occurred, which begs the question, Why give the test in the first place? (The answer is: There’s a federal law.)
Other states—Maryland comes to mind—are wrestling with the same issue of tests that contain too many unfair questions. Scores from these tests don’t give any indication how well students are learning the math and English in the Common Core, which the state adopted in 2010. The 24 public school superintendents even recognized how silly it was to give students a test that has less and less to do with what they’re learning. Maryland, however, decided to remain in compliance with federal law and give the test anyway. It won’t count in terms of school accountability, though.
The purpose of the tests, of course, is to reassure the federal government that the schools are using the money to educate students and not just house them for a babysitting session. But if California rescinds AB484 and gives the STAR tests in order to get billions for their schools, the feds are going to get some bad data. It would be inappropriate to interpret it as any indication of the quality of the state’s schools, especially since there will be so many questions on the tests that are unfair.
A former California superintendent and state board member writes about the insanity on the part of the federal government described in this article, here.