FOCUS DC News Wire 9/27/13

 

 

District education officials defended their decision to score the city’s 2013 standardized tests in a way that yielded gains in both math and reading, arguing Thursday at a D.C. Council hearing that it was the best way to demonstrate student progress as compared with prior years.

 

But facing aggressive questions and accusations of score manipulation from the chairman of the council’s Education Committee, officials acknowledged that they made a mistake when they failed to publicly explain their decision as they celebrated historic gains on the tests this summer.

 

Another grading scale, which educators developed to reflect proficiency on tests newly aligned to tougher Common Core academic standards, would have yielded a larger gain in reading but a decline in math. District officials decided not to use that scale after seeing how it would affect scores.

 

“We need to communicate much better to all stakeholders, and you can be assured that next year’s [test score announcement] will be a very different rollout with a great deal more outreach,” said Emily Durso, interim leader of the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, which administers citywide standardized tests for the District’s public schools.

 

Durso said that OSSE plans to publish the school-by-school proficiency rates that the alternative grading scale would have yielded. Officials plan to release those rates to the council Friday and publicly on the agency’s Web site Monday, she said.

 

That news did not mollify the Education Committee’s chairman, David A. Catania (I-At Large), who argued that the scoring decision was made “under the cover of darkness” to inflate student progress and stymie sweeping education legislation he has proposed.

 

“Honest government would have used the professionally developed cut scores to give children an honest assessment about where they stand,” Catania said, referring to the minimum scores students need to be deemed proficient in a subject.Based on the city’s decision, students who had fewer correct answers on this year’s more challenging math tests could have been shown as having improved over last year.

 

Catania argued that the content of the new tests was so different from previous tests that “proficiency” no longer means what it did before. The District’s test vendor is developing a definition of the skills needed for proficiency on the 2013 tests.

 

“The administration goes out and tells everyone that we’ve made dramatic improvements in proficiency, and we have no definition of proficiency,” Catania said.

 

He also questioned why OSSE rejected the new grading scale only after seeing the impact it would have on proficiency rates. According to public documents and city contracts, the agency had been planning to adopt the new scoring method for more than a year.

 

OSSE officials said that the agency’s leadership, which has undergone substantial turnover in the past year, did not know that the agency was planning to adopt new grading scales for the tests. Jeffrey Noel, OSSE’s director of data management, took responsibility for testing in June and chose not to adopt a new grading scale but to instead hold difficulty constant — a method that is generally accepted as reasonable and that allowed proficiency rates to be compared across years.

 

 

Today, the Washington Post's Emma Brown describes a public hearing by the D.C. Council's education committee chairman David Catania on the subject of the grading scale OSEE used for this year's DC CAS this way:

 

"The council chamber at times felt like a courtroom; Catania interrupted witnesses and accused them of 'dancing' to avoid answering.

 

A spokesman for Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D), who has battled with Catania over education policy, compared the session to a McCarthy-era hunt for a conspiracy that doesn’t exist. 'It’s chilling to see that,' Pedro Ribeiro said."

 

The editors of the Washington Post add that last Tuesday in a meeting with the same organization on the same subject:

 

"Witness his behavior Tuesday morning, when he walked out rather than let an official from the Office of the State Superintendent for Education explain its decisions."

 

And finally consider his comments to me on Monday morning,

 

"However, Mr. Catania revealed, when OSSE determined that test scores would go down, the organization, at the last minute and against the recommendation of the consultants hired to design the grading of the standardized test, kept last year’s DC CAS scale."

 

I'm afraid that all of these behaviors and words will have a chilling effect on parents' decision as to whether to send their children to schools in the District of Columbia. It gives the impression that after years of progress in improving instruction, the physical appearance of our buildings, and the administration of our public school system, the message our families will take away from all of this is to move to the suburbs.

 

The impact will be felt more by DCPS than by charters. The growth of charters can mostly be attributed to word of mouth as people learned that there was a quality alternative to the traditional schools. Problems with the way a standardized test is administered will be, fairly or not, associated with classrooms run by the government.

 

All of this is due to having too many hands in the pot. Remember that when the most recent DC CAS scores were announced the Mayor asserted that we need to stay the course with what is working, an obvious slight to Mr. Catania's introduction of seven education bills. Yesterday, he accused OSSE of maintaining a grading scale that consultants said should be updated as a means to derail his legislative efforts. In order to avoid all of this the Mayor should reassert his lawful control over DCPS and let the council know that the focus of their work should be elsewhere.