The Scores Have Arrived! The Scores Have Arrived! Now What?

For months now, city, state, and national education officials have been warning that the student scores on the newly redesigned standardized tests taken in April were not going to be pretty.  Well, they weren’t kidding. The actual scores were released today for public schools in New York State, and the results are probably even worse than most parents and educators expected.  In NYC, only 26.4% of students met or exceeded the English and Language Arts proficiency standard, while only 29.6% met or exceeded the math proficiency standard. (For the results of individual school, you can wade through this data dump, but please note that individual student scores won’t be available for a couple of weeks.)

Designed to meet the higher Common Core educational standards that New York State adopted this year, the tests—given in grades three through eight—were more difficult than in past years, requiring more stamina, concentration, and in-depth reasoning. How much more difficult?  In last year exams, NYC kids were much more proficient, with 47% of students passing in English and 60% in math. As parents and students and educators absorb the scores, their release is also likely to heat up the debate between supporters of standardized testing (as a key markers of classroom learning) and opponents who feel they impel teachers to spend too much time “teaching to the test” over more creative and engaging forms of learning.

In introducing the new testing system, the DOE had expressed hope that adopting the Common Core standards would boost the quality of education in grade schools and ultimately better prepare students for college-level academics and careers over time. According to the Common Core State Standards Initiative, “[Many] students are graduating and passing all the required tests and still require remediation in their postsecondary work.” Send students who are truly ready for college-level work to college, the thinking goes, and they’re not only more likely to succeed, but we’ll also help colleges—and many public colleges in particular—save time, money, and effort spent on remediation programs.

For now, o f course, what’s mostly on the minds of many New York City parents with children in public school is what harder tests and lower scores mean for their children’s immediate classroom education and admissions prospects as they look to upper grades. DOE Chancellor Dennis Walcott wrote in a letter to public school parents that “struggling is understandable” and encouraged students to “take on the challenge.” Although scores will be dramatically lower, they should serve as a new baseline against which to measure future growth, Walcott said. AllNew Yorkstudents took the same new tests, and scores are compared with one another, not with their 2012 counterparts. So, DOE Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky reassured, “No one is being punished because the test got harder.”

The immediate impact of the scores, if felt at all, will be borne most heavily by outgoing 4th and 7th graders, who will be applying to middle and high schools during the coming school year. There’s likely to be some confusion as parents try to determine how much value particular schools are putting on the new tests. The Huffington Post shares how principals from 15 selective New York City middle and high schools have vowed not to even take the test scores into account when choosing which students to admit. In a letter to applicants, the school leaders protested the new, more difficult tests, arguing that they “take away time for quality instruction and authentic learning and teaching.” But the leaders of other specialized schools may have different policies.

Beyond the practical impact of the scores in the short run, educators and parents alike are likely to ask more questions about the Common Core curriculum and its goals, not to mention what its implementation means for the hot button issue of standardized testing and its usefulness as a measure of evaluating teachers and classroom learning. Critics of extensive standardized testing hold that when scores are used to measure not only students’ but also teachers’ and schools’ performance, “teaching to the test” inevitably follows, magnifying the pressure that the schools already feel to help their students do well on standardized tests and gain admission to selective schools and programs in the middle and upper grades.

The Common Core Initiative, however, lays out loftier goals, explaining “Standards will establish what students need to learn, but they will not dictate how teachers should teach. Instead, schools and teachers will decide how best to help students reach the standards.”

As the The New York Times reports, the release of the scores may also stir things up in the mayoral race, with candidates staking out their positions on the Common Core and how they would have implemented it—and what their education priorities would be if elected.