So many questions about NY state test results
Does it include students in temporary housing? Where are the raw scores? And a problematic press release from City Hall
Yesterday, the New York State Education Department (NYSED) released data on ELA, Math, and Science state test exams.
Mayor Adams and the NYC DOE were quick to celebrate the results and issued a problematic press release.
The more I looked at the data, the more questions I had:
The NYC data doesn’t have the test scores breakdown for students in temporary housing (STH) as it had in previous years. Are the test scores of STH included, but they forgot to classify them, or were their test scores not included? If they were not included, it could change the overall trends.
How can Mayor Adams claim that we now have “the highest percentage of students meeting proficiency standards, as set by New York state Education Department since 2012”??? The state test had its cut scores (the minimum required to be considered basic and proficient) changed multiple times since 2012 - you can not make these comparisons! The last change was right after COVID, so we could not see the significant decline in performance after they closed schools and mandated masks for a long time. NAEP (the only reliable long-term test that we have now) shows that our kids’ performance is far from where it was just 5 years ago.
NYSED stopped publishing the Raw Score to Scale Score Conversion Charts since the last change in cut scores. We would need that to understand the % of questions a child needs to get right to be classified at each level (basic, proficient, etc.) Why is this data no longer available to the public?
I am a strong supporter of NYC Reads and I sincerely hope that the data published yesterday is complete and we can all celebrate the reading gains in early grades. Though, as warned us “NYC Reads is a long game. If we’re serious about raising literacy rates, we need to sustain this effort across years, mayors and chancellors.”
We must be honest about how the pandemic learning loss is still impacting our students. My youngest son is taking the 3rd grade state test next Fall. Despite the gimmicks of NYSED with the data, I won’t lower my expectation for his reading compared to what I expected from my oldest son when he took the test a few years ago.
We should not lower our expectations for all NY students either.
What I am reading
I read “Arcadia” by Tom Stoppard, a play about how our egos and desires can get in the way of academic research and life. I read “Leopoldstadt” before and love his style of going back and forth through family’s generations.
Top Queens high school bans summer do-at-home essays to curb ChatGPT cheating (NY Post)
New National Study Finds Summer Boost Accelerates Learning for Second Consecutive Year (Bloomberg Philanthropies)
Illinois’ Disastrous School Mental-Health Program (City Journal)
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Contact me if you want to help bring education freedom to NY! #SchoolChoiceNY
"We must be honest about how the pandemic learning loss is still impacting our students."
The declines in reading and math preceded COVID (and then, yes, school closures accelerated them.) Your framing suggests all was well until COVID, but this unhelpfully politicizes the declines and gives the other factors contributing to those declines a free pass.