The news that the Colorado State Board of Education wants to keep Colorado from finding out how well our students performed on recent science and social studies assessments makes me eager to deliver some recent test results before they, too, are suppressed.
Other states have faced similar apprehension that the new tests would produce alarming results. Well, the bad news was delivered in states like Kentucky and New York. Apparently both states survived.
I was encouraged by a on Kentucky’s testing. “Kentucky is in its fourth year of testing linked to Common Core State Standards, at a time when most other states are counting the tests for the first time,” Journal reporter Caroline Porter wrote.
“In the first year of the new, harder tests, students’ proficiency ratings dropped about 30 percent from the previous year.” Since then, “scores on standardized tests have begun to pick up. Pushback from teachers unions, which has been fierce in a number of states, has been minimal here.”
Apparently the Colorado State Board of Education is worried we can’t handle the truth. Perhaps we’re too fragile. The majority of board members have grave concerns about the validity of the tests and the impression the results will leave.
At a May 14 board meeting, Republican board member the cut scores as subjective, saying they would be misused to portray a crisis.
So Aurora, Denver and Pueblo students will find out how they did compared to other students inside their district, but will not see how far behind their district performed compared to the state average. That has been the case in these low-performing districts, among others, over the past eight years of CSAP/TCAP testing.
But we don’t want our students to know this, not this time. Let’s keep it a secret.
“Someone explain to me why we can’t set cut scores and release them?” during the May 14 discussion. “That is our responsibility.”
Board member Val Flores responded, “Because adults give horrible meaning to the results.”
I am not sure when the Colorado Department of Education has given “horrible meaning to the results” in the past, when our students took part in national assessments and our scores were — how can I put this without sounding horrible? — unimpressive. Some of us have felt CDE has actually put a positive spin on results that looked quite dismal.
Or, equally disappointing, it released results with hardly a trace of emotion. And so it goes, as if it had grown weary of giving the all-too-familiar update.
Anyway, in case the state board fears that adults like me are out to “give horrible meaning” to the results of student assessments, and decides to purge the records of all recent Colorado scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, I thought I’d write this little reminder, with little worry about our self-esteem and confident that, however unpleasant, we can handle it.
(It’s an exciting feeling, to be honest. Is this how Boris Pasternak or Alexander Solzhenitsyn felt, sneaking their novels out to the West before the authorities did their best to silence them?)
If Siberia is my next stop, please write. Until then, here are NAEP results for Colorado. Uncensored. Straight from NAEP’s website (nces.ed.gov).
On a national test, the last time Colorado students participated (2013), in only one subject in one grade (fourth-grade math) were 50 percent of our students proficient.
In other grades and other subjects, no more than 42 percent were proficient (in eighth-grade math).
Please do try to find meaning in that. It would be horrible not to.
Peter Huidekoper Jr. is an educational consultant in Denver and coordinator of the Colorado Education Policy Fellowship Program.
