Note: You can send letters to your state legislators in support of the Right to Opt Out of High-stake testing bills mentioned below, Senate bill S5394 and Assembly bill A7744, with the help of NYSAPE here. The following is by Fred Smith, testing expert, focused on the upcoming stand-alone field tests. You can see which grade in your child's school is targeted for field tests and in which subject here.
As another test-burdened school
year comes to an end, we still have extra exams to give massive numbers of
children. These tests are not
mandated. Parents don’t know about them.
They are known as stand-alone
field tests (SAFT) and are being given so a commercial publisher can assemble
next year’s ELA and math exams.
The testing program and the need
to find out how many Level 1s, 2s, 3s, and 4s there are have become
inexorable. Only the test results are
vacuous.
It’s time to sound an alarm bell
about SAFT again to alert New York City public school parents about them and
explain why they should exercise the right to opt their children out.
The New York State Education
Department, under Commissioner MaryEllen Elia, has identified 869 schools in
New York City this year to give the field tests to 91,565 students. Here’s how the statewide and citywide picture
looks.
The
scope of this effort is vast. The field
tests began on May 20, when schools assigned to give computer-based tests
(CBTs) could choose a day to administer them.
All schools giving CBTs are self-selected.
The
paper and pencil versions of the tests (PBTs) are due to start this coming Tuesday,
May 28,and may be given on any day through June 7. These assignments are made
by NYSED in conjunction with the testing company, Questar Assessment, Inc.
Since
most of tests that remain to be given are paper-based, let’s focus on
them. The following chart accounts for
PBT schools and targeted students in New York City:
70,648 unwitting NYC students in 698 schools are the
target of the upcoming PBTs. They have
been volunteered to take them by NYSED with the complicity of City Hall and
Tweed which have not let parents in on the plan.
A chart pinpointing the schools and number of
students expected to take the PBTs is linked here to lets you in on the
secret. You can look up schools and the
grades that are involved in your district, find out if your children are
targeted and opt them out of the field tests if you choose. The detailed chart was posted by NYC Opt Out
with this admonition about the field tests:
Computer-based stand-alone field testing starts next
week, with paper testing following a week later. (Exact dates vary by
school.) Check the chart to whether any grades in your school have been
slated for field tests. If they have, you can: (a) ask your principal to
refuse giving them--there are principals who send the boxes of field tests back
unopened year after year or (b) send in a note saying you refuse to let your
child participate (and let other parents know to do the same).
Why? Stand-alone field tests are a further waste of
our children's time. They are not very good at determining item difficulty,
plus our children are not being compensated for what is essentially product
research. There are already field test items embedded in the actual spring
tests.
On May 16, the Daily News ran my opinion piece
about the fundamental flaws in stand-alone field testing. I indicated that neither the state nor City
Hall had taken steps to ensure that parents are informed about the extra round
of testing, which is arranged without their consent—and which is unethical and
disrespectful.
The Op-Ed refers to an SED expert conceding in 2009
that there are shortcomings in the stand-alone method. It also cites a barely noticeable statement
in the technical reports prepared by the test publisher. The two discredit the use of SAFT in test
development.
The
first points out that SED knew about the fundamental weaknesses of stand-alone
field testing years before the current testing program began. It contrasts the practice of embedding field
test items among operational test items with stand-alone field testing instead, issued at a time when the annual test results were getting
preposterously high.
Field tests allow test makers to
figure out how hard questions should be and set the scale used to judge
students. Exams like the SAT include field-test questions folded into the
actual exam, but students don’t know which questions won’t count toward their
scores. The experimental questions are then used again on future tests to gauge
their difficulty.
Unable to field test questions in
this real-world setting, the state must rely on no-stakes tests given to a
sample of students on a different date. [NYSED spokesman Tom] Dunn said that
students who sit for the field tests are told that the exams are only
experimental.
Top of
Form Bottom of Form
But when students know they won’t
get a grade for the field test, they might be less motivated to do their best,
[Howard] Everson chair of the state’s Technical Advisory Group, an
oversight committee that monitors state testing said.
As a result, field tests often
suggest that questions are more difficult than they actually are. And because
they’re used to set the scale by which the real tests are graded, the end
result is an easier state exam, Everson said.
“This is not ideal,” [Harvard testing
expert Daniel] Koretz wrote in an e-mail. “What we don’t know is how much of an
impact this has had.”
The
next one is from the New York State Testing
Program 2017: English Language Arts and Mathematics Grades 3-8 Technical
Report, Questar Assessment Inc. (p.7). It was posted by NYSED in April 2019 and
acknowledges the preferred method for trying out items–embedding.
Embedded Field-Test Items
In 2010, NYSED announced its
commitment to embed multiple-choice items for field testing within the Spring
2012 Grades 3–8 ELA and Mathematics Operational Tests. This commitment
continued for the Spring 2017 administrations of the tests. Embedding field-test items allows for a better
representation of student responses and provides more reliable field-test data
on which to build future operational tests. In other words, since the
specific locations of the embedded field-test items were not disclosed and they
look the same as operational test items, students were unable to differentiate
field-test items from operational test items. Therefore,
field-test data derived from embedded items are free of the effects of
differential student motivation that characterize stand-alone field-test
designs. Embedding field-test items also reduced the number of
stand-alone field-test forms during Spring 2017, although it did not eliminate
the need for them.
This
boilerplate appears in Technical Reports since testing was aligned with
the Common Core Standards in 2012 and Pearson was the publisher.
I emailed each member of the Board of Regents a
copy of my Daily News op-ed on May 17, urging them to consider the problematic
nature of stand-alone field testing and to take steps to suspend it before it
was scheduled to begin on May 20.
It seemed to be the perfect time for the Regents to
intervene—reinforced by the timing of two developments that address the need
for parents to be notified in advance of all testing.
At the end of April, State Senators Robert Jackson and Jessica Ramos put forth a
bill called the "right to opt out of high-stakes testing act" or Senate bill S5394. Their proposal was also introduced as Assembly bill A7744 by Assemblyman Harvey
Epstein. It has broad applicability and
affirms two principles: 1- Parents must be informed about all upcoming
tests; and 2) Parents may refuse to have their children participate (without
fear of punishment or coercion) in testing.
I felt it was imperative for the
Board to be polled on the matter of directing NYSED to suspend the vast,
un-mandated testing program until all parents had been given sufficient
notification about the tests so that their right to opt out could be
honored. I appeal to the Regents to confer today and to act
with dispatch.
There is certainly nothing
sacrosanct about having to administer field tests at this late time in the
school year. And we know that many, many schools in the rest of the state
reject the field test assignment—often returning the test shipments unopened,
making SAFT a farce.
An order from the Regents to NYSED
to desist would allow ample time to study the merits of the stand-alone
approach and to decide whether this method should be discontinued.
At the very least, giving these tests could be deferred until the fall.
I am not privy to what the Regents
did. But Commissioner Elia wrote a letter in response to my oped that appeared in the Daily News a week later.
I’m not going to parse the irrelevancies and
obfuscations in her response. She fails
to address the main issues—continued use of weak field testing methods to
perpetuate a bad testing program and failure to notify parents about
tests. If the Regents don’t see through
this, my conclusion is that they want to keep doing testing business as
usual.
Dear Readers, if any of you wish, please call or
email your Regent member and ask where they stand.
---Fred Smith
Post Script: It is noteworthy and ironic that the
percentage of students in NYC targeted for CBTs (23%) is far smaller than the
percentage in the rest of the state (60%).
This is an indication of the gap that exists between us and other
districts in technological readiness.
They are evidently more prepared to use computers in their classrooms as
we lag behind. This is significant
because the original goal of NYSED was that all state testing would be done on computer by the spring of 2020.
