Cut Score Shenanigans

Periodically (as in now, incidentally) controversy arises over the setting of “cut scores,” that point that demarcates pass from fail or several points denoting A from B, B from C, and so on. As any student can tell you, one point can mean the difference between success and failure. Where that point sits on the continuum of possible points, or scores, on a given test is critical—and, in fact, almost wholly arbitrary.

There is no such thing as an objective test. All tests are subjective, from the choice of test topics to the construction of individual test items, from the determination of correctness to the number of correct responses that constitutes success or proficiency or mastery or what have you. These are human decisions up and down the line and therefore subject to human idiosyncrasies.

Let’s say a test is composed of 100 items, thus 100 possible right answers. One group might decide that a score of 50 or more correct answers constitutes success. This group bases its cut score on one set of factors. However, because the factors that go into determining success are so numerous, it is impossible to consider all of them. Another group, basing its decision on a different but equally reasonable set of factors, might set 70 or more correct answers as the cutoff for success on the same test.

The point is that because cut scores are arbitrary—based on whatever criteria the decision makers choose to use or to ignore—they can be infinitely manipulated. Want to make a test look rigorous? Raise the cut score—in other words, make it harder to score enough points to pass. High failure rates often are referenced by our snake oil politicians and education “reformers” to say, “Look, we have high standards—and most student can’t meet them because schools are lousy.” But set the cut score lower and those same oily folk are likely to lament, ”Look, too many students are skating by, so our standards must be too low because our schools are lousy.”

If the same snake oil sellers want, they can (and do) change cut scores from year to year for essentially the same test, and so can make it appear as though students are scoring better or worse over time, depending on which result resonates with their ideology and political ambitions. Beating the drum of rigor to an accompanying wail about the lack of student “progress” on standardized achievement tests is the theme song of the ongoing manufactured crisis, to use Berliner and Biddle’s term, in public education—that “crisis” in which the public schools are the scapegoat for all of America’s ills.

Cut score shenanigans victimize test takers—students—and, through the misuse of standardized tests to judge teachers, rate schools, and characterize communities, a host of other stakeholders, all of whom are held hostage to ideologically driven policies regarding the importance of testing. Faith in the power of testing and the accuracy of cut scores is ill placed. It’s not going to cure any supposed ills of our public schools. It’s just snake oil, folks.

Note: For the uninitiated I recommend David Berliner and Bruce Biddle’s The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools. It was published in 1996—twenty years ago next year—but it remains spot-on.

Combatting Racism

The election of a black President, far from demonstrating our progress as a society in eradicating racism, ripped away a polite veneer of covert racism to reveal the racist core of American culture. At no other time since the Civil Rights era of the 1960s have we been called on as a people to confront not only our racist past but also our racist present.

Racism to a large degree is founded on and fostered by ignorance, and ingrained by segregation. The public schools have never been a complete answer to the problem of racism, but they have, at times, been one mechanism for addressing issues of inequality, of which racism is an inherent element. In fact, schools in the distant past contributed to our national racism, for example, during the “separate but equal” period under doctrine set down by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). It wasn’t until 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, that “separate but equal”—a mantra as disingenuous as Fox News’ “fair and balanced”—was discarded and a national effort was begun to dismantle school segregation.

However, racial minority status and low socioeconomic status are strongly linked.  Any number of scholarly reports have affirmed a correlation between poverty and poor school achievement, and minority children are mostly likely to feel the consequences. Indeed, the spurious emphasis on evaluating students and schools on the basis of standardized test scores is a tacit expression of racism. Instead of spending thousands of dollars to line the coffers of testing corporations, a glance at existing economic census data would yield substantially the same results in identifying “successful” and “unsuccessful” schools. Superficial interpretations and misuses of test data are, at their center, racist—by result, if not (and I am being generous here) by intent.

“Success” is misdefined if it is characterized solely by test scores. Set aside the question of testing altogether, and the deck is still stacked against poor and minority students by the structure of our society. Public education has the potential to address racism but that potential is diminished during the current era because the persistent attacks on public education are imperiling its very existence. Overuse and misuse of standardized tests, union-busting, cuts in funding, and other destructive maneuvers by policy makers at every level have undermined public education and are contributing to the destruction of American democracy.

Public education could be a powerful instrument in the battle to eradicate racism. But public education in its currently weakened state is on life support. Until we, as a society, stop attacking and start rebuilding our nation’s public education system, we cannot realistically hope that our schools will be able to contribute meaningfully to the elimination of the racism that mars us as a society.

Two Goals for the New School Year

Working for positive change in public education often seems like poling a flat-bottomed boat through a stagnant swamp; however, some glimmers of progress have appeared in recent months that, one hopes, are more than merely swamp gas. As fresh-faced school children head back to classrooms tidied and buffed over the summer recess, it seems to be an apt moment for concerned citizens, parents, and educators to rededicate ourselves to two goal that, if achieved, would be monumental in the future of American public education.

First, the pushback against mindless mass standardized testing has begun to gain momentum, and now is the time to push back even harder. Apart from the wasteful shunting of public money into the coffers of the corporate testing industry, mass testing demoralizes teachers and students because it narrows the curriculum and forces rote learning, which displaces higher-level thinking and the acquisition of true problem-solving skills. Mass testing codifies compartmentalized, segmented curricular structures that fail to take into account individual differences and discourage innovative teaching and learning. Questionable test results and their consequent misuse artificially segregate students, mischaracterize schools, and disproportionately affect the disadvantaged in multiple negative ways. The ills of mass standardized testing are now well documented, and proponents of continued use of such tests increasingly find themselves challenged to justify testing beyond the hollow platitudes about preparing students for “college and careers” and comparing achievement between schools, communities, states, and countries. The time is now to push for transparency and the reallocation of public money to support education for the common good, not the corporate good.

Second, the disastrous results of legislative “leadership” in education are more and more evident with each passing month. Education determined by political ideology is a weak system, particularly when the ideology is anti-democratic, anti-public, and anti-common good. It’s time to get politics out of education because the bottom line is that politics is driving educators out of schools. States, including Indiana, are suffering from artificial teacher shortages—artificial because there is no lack of teachers. Rather, teachers are being driven out of the profession because public education is under constant attack. Good teachers are fleeing public schools in the way that any sensible person would flee a war zone. Current conditions are not likely to encourage newcomers to enter the profession either. While many school problems can be laid at the statehouse door, local school boards and administrators are not blameless. Local school boards are communities’ education leaders, elected by local citizens not to be the lapdogs of the state legislature but, rather, to be the voice of the public school citizenry. The time is now to urge local officials to stand up for local concerns, to institute innovations locally that blunt the negative effects of legislative missteps, and, above all, to listen—not merely nod and smile—and truly respond to local concerns.

Neither of these goals is at all modest. They are massive. But they cannot remain unaddressed if we are not only to preserve public education for our democracy but also to reinvigorate public education for a brighter future for all.

Opt-Out Movement Growing

The opt-out movement is gaining strength as more and more parents recognize that over-use of standardized testing is damaging their children’s education and psychologically harming their children in the process. In New York State, for example, more than 183,000 of some 1.1 million students refused to take a recent English exam, more than triple the number last year.

Opting out is going to continue to gain momentum. It’s not, as some have asserted, about labor unions disputing with legislators because over-testing looks a lot like union-busting, though that would certainly be another reason to opt out. Boycotting tests is a grassroots action by increasingly better informed parents and students to stop a harmful, time-wasting, money-wasting, and educationally useless practice, namely, testing for the sake of testing—and for the sake of enriching testing corporations with public tax dollars. That’s the bottom line.

Of course, there is push-back from those in power whose corporate overlords don’t take kindly to even a modest damming of the money flowing into testing corporations—or their long-term objective to bust unions, lower wages, and control education workers, those folks we used to call teachers who now mainly function as test preppers and proctors. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan says the federal government will be “obligated to intervene” if too many students opt out and states don’t reach their testing quotas.

By “intervene” Duncan means cut federal funding, which as most people know, flows mainly to programs that assist low-income students. In the way of the world—or at least the way of the United States in recent years—punishment will be meted out to those who are most vulnerable. Underfunding education, a consistent pattern of abuse of education that increasingly happens at all levels of government, is a way to destroy public education and thus complete the transformation of the United States into a third world oligarchy.

Some states are already ahead of others in the race to the bottom. In Kansas, Governor Sam Brownback’s failed financial policies and radical tax cuts are causing school districts to shut down early this year because the state’s education coffers have been depleted. This and similar problems are not the result of grassroots movements by parents and students to push for better education. They are the consequence of bad government, of government that has ceased to be by the people or for the people but is, instead, by the few for the few—those few being the corporate elites for whom destruction of public education is a fundamental objective in their war for wealth and power.

Posttraumatic Test Disorder: A New Disability?

One might posit a Maslow-style hierarchy of responses to the standardized test mania that has swept the United States as the misbegotten child of “reform,” another word for corporatization of public education. Pearson and other test-producing corporations are raking in profits at the expense of parents, children, and educators. At the top of this response hierarchy are the academic arguments against testing: that standardized tests are being cobbled together contrary to acceptable practice standards for test development, that tests are being overused and misused to draw unwarranted conclusions about students, teachers, schools, and communities. All of these are true, but they aren’t the concerns that trouble parents.

At the most basic level of this hierarchy parents are worried about the health, welfare, and safety of their children who are being exposed to toxic levels of testing. If test mania continues we may need to consider a new category of disability: PTTD, or Posttraumatic Test Disorder. You may think this is a joke; it’s not. Consider how “shell shock,” a World War I era term, has evolved into our current understanding of posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, the physical/mental response to trauma. Similarly, we may soon need to reconsider old-fashioned “test anxiety” in a new, more serious light.

Parents’ concerns are justified. As increasing amounts of testing have been mandated by federal and state legislatures, more and more parents are noticing in their children the symptoms of stress associated with test anxiety, such as headaches, nausea, anger, and fear. When these anxiety responses occur occasionally, they may be fairly easily managed. But the ramping up of teaching to the test, practicing for the test, and taking the test renders such anxiety a nearly constant companion, an endless trauma state.

“Stressed elementary students in grades two through four tend to show emotional stress behaviors such as crying, throwing tantrums, wetting themselves, and vomiting,” says Tim Urdan, assistant professor of psychology at Santa Clara University. “The older kids, such as those in high school, are more likely to show ‘rebellious’ responses: refusal to participate, cutting class, and deliberately undermining the test by answering incorrectly on purpose.”* Parents cannot fail to notice these anxiety symptoms, and they are worried and angry that mandated over-testing is the problem, regardless whether the tests themselves are good or bad. They are bad for kids.

The dirty, not-so-little secret of test-oriented education systems is that they produce more problems than positives. They are conformity-based and do not encourage creativity, but even more problematic is that the stress caused by intensive standardized testing tends over time to inhibit learning. Tiredness, worry, lack of appetite, and increased infections—all stress-related—disrupt the ability to concentrate.

Sometimes test anxiety leads to more dire consequences. Across Asian test-oriented education systems, for example, student suicide frequently is attributed to test anxiety. The researchers who wrote China’s annual “Blue Book of Education” (2014) concluded that “most of the teenagers who killed themselves are in middle school, and they did so mainly because they could not bear the heavy pressure of the test-oriented education system.”**

Increasingly, worried and angry parents are demanding an end to the overuse and misuse of standardized tests because toxic test anxiety is traumatizing their children. Such abuse needs to stop before PTTD becomes an actual disability designation.

*Quoted in Edelstein, D. (2000, July 12). “Tests + Stress = Problems for Students.” Brain Connection. http://brainconnection.brainhq.com/2000/07/12/tests-stress-problems-for-students/

**Zhao, X. (2014, May 14). “China’s School Tests Blamed for Suicides.” China Daily. http://www.chinadailyasia.com/news/2014-05/14/content_15135133.html