Via Governor Jerry Brown’s twitter feed

The old California Standardized Tests are a thing of the past.

Governor Jerry Brown just signed Assembly Bill 484, which immediately suspends the old tests and funds a trial run this year of the new Smarter Balanced Assessments, which will be taken on computers and are aligned with the new Common Core curriculum.

“I’ve said from the beginning, California needs tests that measure how ready our students are for the challenges of a changing world,” State Superintendent Tom Torlakson said in a statement.

A number of groups, including Ed Voice, Educators 4 Excellence, Teach Plus, and Parent Revolution, had urged Brown to veto the new law on the grounds that it would leave school districts with a year of missing test data, which is often used to gauge the effectiveness of teachers, administrators and schools.

“At this critical juncture in our transition to Common Core, the public needs a thoughtful, rational middle approach that both gives teachers, students and parents space to adapt to new standards, and also maintains transparency for all our stakeholders,” Ama Nyamekye, executive director of Educators 4 Excellence, said in a statement. Unfortunately, AB 484 does not deliver on this important second task. By signing this bill, Governor Brown has created a black hole of information for students, parents and teachers.”

Superintendent John Deasy had also been deeply critical of the bill, on the grounds that it only funded either the math or English parts of the new Smarter Balanced Assessments. Deasy had been urging lawmakers to fund both tests.

Deasy now says that LAUSD will cover the costs of the test that the state doesn’t pay for and that he will try to find a way to use the Smarter Balanced testing data to gauge student performance.

*This adds statement from Educators 4 Excellence.

Previous posts: Coalition Calls on Gov. Brown to Veto Testing Bill, AB 484; CA Has a Plan for Using Test Scores — Even With No Tests (Updated); Superintendent Deasy Not Happy With Latest Testing Bill; California Could Face Year With No Meaningful Testing Data

But testing data from those field tests won’t be used for accountability purposes – they’ll simply be used as practice for students and school districts. That means that school districts would go through a year — this year — without testing data that is often used to judge how well schools and even teachers are doing — LA Unified’s new teacher evaluation system uses testing data, in part, to evaluate teachers. And schools would be without Academic Performance Index scores for the next two years.

“We’re essentially pressing reset on our current system,” says LAUSD lobbyist Edgar Zazueta. 

Only students in grades 3 through 8 and 11 would take the new Common Core tests – also known as the “Smarter Balanced test,” so named for the consortium developing assessments that align with Common Core. The tests are designed to deemphasize memorization while pressing students for a deeper understanding of the material. For some, that’s simply not enough testing.

“There will be only one assessment in high school,” says Arun Ramanathan, Executive Director of Education Trust West, bemoaning the lack of testing for 9th and 10th graders. “You’re going to wait until 11th grade until you know if your child isn’t doing well in English language arts or mathematics.”

Perhaps most controversially, there are currently no plans for standardized tests in a whole host of subjects, including history, biology, physics, algebra and geometry.

“Their intent has been to terminate all of the end-of-course exams, which to me is very bad public policy,” says education consultant John Mockler.

Zazueta says that could change in the future.

“The plan is to have new assessments in various subjects,” he said. “That’s at least the objective.”

The proposed law, Assembly Bill 484, introduced by Assembly member Susan Bonilla, a northern California Democrat, was largely the brainchild of State Superintendent Tom Torlakson, who said in a press release, “It’s time for a clean break from assessments that are out of date and out of sync with the work our schools are doing to shift to the Common Core and help students meet the challenges of a changing world.”

According to several sources, the newest version of the bill was crafted with input from Governor Jerry Brown, which indicates he’s likely to sign it. There may, however, be some amendments offered by the State Senate.

Under the original version of the bill, only 20 percent of California students would take the new Common Core tests. The newest version says that students in grades 3 through 8 and 11 in every school district will take either the English or the math section of the new tests.

An amendment may be coming out of the Senate that would allow some districts to field test both English and math. A number of district superintendents, including John Deasy of LA Unified, are said to be pushing hard for that change.

A recent poll by PACE/USC Rossier  found that nearly two-thirds of Californians feel that students should be tested in every single grade.

Previous posts: New USC Poll: Public Approval for Testing and Evaluations; California Could Face Year With No Meaningful Testing Data; LA Unified Getting $113 Million for Common Core Transition*; Slim Gains, Slight Drop in English for LA Unified in CA Test Scores

But the greater uncertainty could lie ahead.

The plan is for all students to be tested on a new curriculum — the Common Core State Standards — in 2015. Those tests will be administered on computers. But what about 2014? The State Assembly hasn’t quite made a decision on that front, but 2014 could be a lost year in terms of meaningful testing data.

Assembly Bill 484, which has been approved by the Assembly and is currently being debated in a state Senate committee, would eliminate all of the California Standardized Tests that high school students would have taken over the 2013-2014 academic year — tests in subjects like history, algebra, chemistry and physics. Some students will take the new Common Core tests, and students in grades 3 through 8 would still take the CSTs for Title 1 purposes.

“The tests will be irrelevant,” said John Mockler, an education consultant who served briefly as interim California Education Secretary and was one of the architects of Proposition 30. “Some kids are going to take these new Common Core tests, some kids are going to take the old STAR test. Either one of those or both will be invalid, because they test different things. They can’t be used for accountability purposes.”

If AB 484 doesn’t pass, most students would take the CSTs for one final year.

Either way, California testing will face, in 2015, the same sort of rocky results that New York is facing this year, when transition to the Common Core caused their scores to plummet.

Previous posts: Slim Gains, Slight Drop in English for LA Unified in CA Test Scores; California’s 2013 Testing Results to be Released Thursday; LAUSD Shows Improvement In State Tests

“We’ve outpaced the state in the last five years and continue to, in the face of severe budget cuts,” said Superintendent John Deasy.

The district scores, however, still lag behind the statewide scores.

All students in grades 2 through 11 take the California Standardized Tests (or CST) in a number of subjects. Their scores are placed into one of five categories: “advanced,” “proficient,” “basic,” “below basic” and “far below basic.” The statewide goal is that every student score either “proficient” or “advanced.”

The overall scores also reflect results of three other tests taken by various grades in various subjects, but the largest number of students takes the CSTs.

Test scores had been rising steadily over the last few years, but results this year suggest that the trend may be leveling off, with scores essentially unchanged from last year.

As the above chart shows, the percentage of students in LAUSD deemed proficient or advanced rose, albeit by less than a percentage point, in a number of subjects: math, history and science. The one subject that showed declines was English-language arts, where the percentage of students scoring above “basic” fell by a third of a percent, to 54.1 “proficient” and “advanced,” from 54.4 percent.

English scores dropped among students in elementary school, while they actually rose among students in 7th through 11th grades.

“Statistically, it’s difficult for me to understand why there’s been a slight drop,”
said Deasy, speaking of the English scores as a whole. “We can’t make sense of the state trend either.”

State scores fell this year, after rising every year since 2004

Statewide, test scores fell in both math and English. In a press release State Superintendent Tom Torlakson said did not directly address the slight drop in state scores, although he did suggest that “schools across the state continued to deal with the effects of years of budget cuts and financial uncertainties throughout the 2012-13 school year.”

Deasy pointed out that other important metrics of student achievement in LAUSD showed improvements this year.

“Our graduation rate is about to come out, and that went up again,” he said. “Our AP test score went up, and the number of students taking them went up. Suspensions were down.”

When asked why test scores showed little to no progress even as other numbers improved, he replied, “It’s counter-intuitive. Usually they’re aligned. But to hold flat means we held onto our previous gains.”

Indeed, the district’s gains in just the last five years have been impressive. Since 2008, the percentage of students scoring above “basic” in English has risen by more than 13 points. In the subject area of history, it has improved by 15 points; in math, by more than 10 points.

While black and Hispanic students in particular have shown impressive gains over the years, their test scores are still lower than those of white students, at both a district and statewide level.

“The long-standing achievement gap among student groups remains a matter of great concern and considerable challenge,” said Torlakson.

This was the last year that most students will take the CSTs as LAUSD begins to transition to the Common Core curriculum, a new set of federal standards. By 2015, all students will — supposedly — be taking standardized tests on computers.

“As valuable as (the testing) has been, we’re getting ready to raise the bar in California’s schools,” said Torlakson. “This coming year, many students will have their first chance to try tests that measure their preparation for college and the world of work. That’s a huge challenge for every part of our education system—but one we have to tackle to give every student the opportunity to prepare for a bright future.”

Previous posts: California Student Test Scores Coming Later This Morning, California’s 2013 Testing Results to be Released Thursday; LAUSD Shows Improvement In State Tests

UTLA President Warren Fletcher

While union president Warren Fletcher has claimed victory on a recent court-ordered tentative agreement on teacher evaluations, a closer look might leave rank-and-file teachers scratching their heads.

UTLA has consistently opposed any use of student test scores in teacher evaluations in the past. So it was unexpected when the union leadership signed off on using raw standardized test scores such as the California Standards Tests (CST) — a single test measure that UTLA has denounced for years.

Scott Witlin, an attorney who represented parents in the Doe v. Deasy lawsuit that compelled the district and union to reach the agreement, called UTLA’s acceptance of CST scores “ironic.”

“For years, the teachers union complained that individual test scores were insufficient because they didn’t account for other factors,” Witlin said.

The union’s decision to back an agreement using the CST over a more comprehensive student performance measurement that considers a host of socio-economic factors, called Academic Growth Over Time (AGT), has perplexed some UTLA-watchers.

Some LAUSD teachers have already taken issue with UTLA’s flip-flop on test scores.  Using CST scores “would distort or falsely attribute student performance to teachers,” David Cohen wrote on the Accomplished California Teachers blog

Academic Growth Over Time (AGT), a metric launched last year by LAUSD, takes into account numerous factors when measuring progress, including English language acquisition, single-parent households, and ethnicity, and is generally thought to be a more balanced tool to measure progress.

Larry Sand at Union Watch speculates that without AGT there is little accountability and, “way too much wiggle room.” (read it here).

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This is all good news.  But scores for Algebra, which is usually taught in high school, looked pretty dismal by comparison even though they were showing improvement.  Why are high school students so bad at math, and what if anything can LAUSD do about this? I put that question to Mark Ellis, a Professor of Secondary Education at Cal State Fullerton who specializes in mathematics, and he gave me some interesting answers.

LAUSD’s English scores showed real improvement (see a full breakdown of scores here). But as you can see from the following chart only 15% of 9th graders scored proficient or advanced in Algebra I, and that number drops to 9% in 10th and 11th grade.

Compare that with scores on the English-Language Arts part of the test, where 39% of 9th graders are proficient or advanced, a number that holds steady in 10th and improves to 41% in 11th.

The raw differences are pretty stark, even though they have improved over the last few years, and their improvement has largely tracked improvement in other subjects. Here is a chart of 9th grade mean CST scores in three different subjects:

“In this country, we lag behind in high school math,” he says. “Kids do reasonably compared with other countries when they’re young, and the gap gets wider as they get older. Once the kids get into more abstract math like geometry and algebra, they’ve not done so well.”

As to why, Ellis gives three explanations:

1. Cultural Beliefs: “Many people in the U.S. believe that mathematics is tied to ability – some people have it and some don’t.  In other countries, it’s the effort that matters more.  The result is, it’s a lot easier for people here to give up on math.”

2. How Math is Taught:  “In other countries, math is learned as a set of conceptual structures.  Mathematics is a very logically structured set of ideas, and it should be learned that way. Yet in the U.S., we learn it as set of skills to be memorized and mimicked.” Ellis says that students can get by with memorization and superficially understanding of math for a while– until about middle school. Once they get to Algebra and Geometry, their lack of understanding of the logic behind math catches up to kids, and their performance plummets. They see Algebra as this meaningless exercise in abstraction, and not as a continuation of a set of logical rules.

3. Assessments:  “No Child Left Behind forced states to create these assessment systems  that tend to be about low-level knowledge. That has led to the narrowing of the curriculum, rather than the approach of critical thinking.”

Ellis, however, hopes that adoption of the Common Core Standards by the LAUSD and other school districts will start to build momentum toward learning math in a new and (according to Ellis) better way.

Superintendent John Deasy has set some fairly lofty goals for the district– in four years, no student will be allowed to graduate without passing the “A through G courses” which include Algebra and Geometry. Despite modest improvements, it looks as if those high school math scores will be the biggest roadblock to Deasy’s goal.