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.

Purpose, Please?

Where is the purpose-driven curriculum? It’s an elusive concept that loading on more so-called common core standards and high-stakes tests will not make evident.

There’s a cartoon of a man coming home from work, saying to himself, “Well, there’s another day I didn’t use algebra.” In fact, most days most people don’t use algebra or another other form of higher mathematics. Some days we don’t even use basic arithmetic. And yet we have enshrined mathematics as sacrosanct. Why? Because it helps students learn how to think in another language, to transfer learned concepts from one context to another. Those are actual purposes for teaching advanced mathematics. Calculus, for the vast majority of people, is not a life skill; thinking is. Teaching thinking skills is a fundamental purpose of education.

The overwhelming emphasis on reading and mathematics skills, minutely detailed in standards and curricula and tested ad nauseam using high-stakes, life-altering exams, trivializes these subjects in the same way that curricular neglect denigrates and trivializes everything else, from the arts to civic education. The actual purposes of education are lost in a morass of trivia.

We spend an enormous amount of time and effort, paper and ink, to answer the question, How should we teach mathematics? The real question is, Why? Why should we teach mathematics, literature, the arts, civic education, and everything else? Why questions lead to purpose statements, which in turn should guide standards setting and curriculum development. Modern “reform” efforts don’t start here and so put the cart before the horse. It’s hardly any wonder that they don’t get anywhere.

What if we made Why? the starting point for every conversation about education—what we teach, how we evaluate students and teachers, and all the rest? If we can’t come up with an honest, important purpose, then maybe we should stop right there—before we muck around and make things worse instead of better.

Truth Teaching

An ugly truth about American public education is that Truth, writ large, has become an endangered subject. Schools have always had to battle censors and would-be censors, from the library to the classroom to the computer lab. Overprotective parents, bureaucrats, politicians, and others have long sought to control what students learn, often by denying teachers and students access to factual information. Free speech has never been free in school. The problem is getting worse, not better.

Let’s talk racism, for example. It’s a big example because racism touches every aspect of our social fabric and therefore every aspect of the school curriculum, ranging from underrepresentation—of authors of color in literature anthologies or libraries and lack of attention to historic figures who didn’t happen to be white—to outright misrepresentation. An example of the latter is a recent Texas decision, as reported in the Washington Post:

Five million public school students in Texas will begin using new social studies textbooks this fall based on state academic standards that barely address racial segregation. The state’s guidelines for teaching American history also do not mention the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws.

Furthermore, Texas school children are supposed to be taught that slavery was a “side issue” to the Civil War.

It’s easy to pick on subjects like literature and social studies where Truth has gone missing. But consider the compulsory over-testing of English and math skills that has pushed other subjects to the curricular fringe or over the edge entirely, such as music, art, civic education, and any sort of practical training—what we called in olden times home ec and shop. The truth is that the world of work, the world of human endeavor, does not rely merely on the ability to bubble in correct answers about standard prose and basic arithmetic. Turning our young into test-taking automatons is hardly an effective strategy for reaching the vaunted goal of “college and career readiness,” the latest in a legion of empty education reform mantras.

Racism is largely absent because it is, to use Al Gore’s pet phrase, inconvenient truth. Moreover it is a truth that is as plain as the nose on your face, to pile on another cliché. But it is a truth that must be ignored if we are to keep our future citizens in ignorance. And that is precisely what the rising rightwing proto-fascists (to borrow Henry Giroux’s term*) want in order to solidify and expand much of the political power they have already grabbed.

The threads of racism run through the social fabric of our country: in the wealth gap, in voter suppression, in subtle and not so subtle redlining and sundowning, in the grading of schools to reinforce the negative effects of poverty, in police brutality directed against blacks, in the over-population of our prisons with nonwhite inmates, and so much more. If we cannot teach this inconvenient truth, then we can never hope to change.

Writing in a recent article** Henry Giroux commented, “The United States has become a country that is proud of what it should be ashamed of.” That sentence calls to mind all of the recent waving of the Confederate battle flag by “patriots” hiding behind “heritage” to flaunt their fundamental racism.

Truth. How inconvenient.

Where are the rebels in our classrooms, our administrative offices, our school board meetings, our parent associations, our legislative bodies, who are willing to speak truth not merely to power, but to our children who deserve it most?

*Henry A. Giroux. Proto-Fascism in America: Neoliberalism and the Demise of Democracy, 2004.

**Henry A. Giroux. “The Racist Killing Fields in the U.S.: The Death of Sandra Bland.” TruthOut, July 19, 2015.