A little over a week ago, FITS published an in-depth report exploring the political maneuvering behind the “dumbing down” of South Carolina’s new statewide academic standard, the Palmetto Assessment of State Standards (PASS) test.
It’s a sad, sordid tale replete with cozy backroom deals and special interest-driven decision-making … one that keeps the state’s taxpayer-funded lobbyists and educrats well-paid, but prevents thousands of South Carolina public school children from reaching their full potential each year.
Sadly, because South Carolina’s failed status quo has proven utterly incompetent when it comes to educating our children (both poor black ones and “rich” white ones), it has resorted to “moving the academic goalposts” in an effort to fool parents into thinking the job is getting done.
“Fake it till you make it,” in other words.
For example, our report noted that the new PASS test standards proposed by the S.C. Education Oversight Commission “guarantee that thousands of students and dozens of schools will now magically “pass” the exam – without any measurable increase in academic performance whatsoever.”
Now, that analysis has been confirmed by the nation’s leading testing authority – the Seattle, Washington-based Northwest Evaluation Association.
In fact, here’s an excerpt from a new analysis prepared by the NWEA:
Whereas the older PACT standards were among the highest in the nation, the newly proposed PASS standards would rank among the bottom quartile in a recent cross-state comparison of proficiency standards within 27 states. Use of the lower standards would result in dramatic increases in the percentages of students meeting standards in South Carolina schools, even with no actual improvement in student performance.
Wow.
Did you catch that? Here’s the critical conclusion again, in case you missed it …
Use of the lower standards would result in dramatic increases in the percentages of students meeting standards in South Carolina schools, even with no actual improvement in student performance.
This quote originally appeared Monday morning on the website of The Voice, South Carolina’s leading pro-parental choice website, prompting a flood of complaints from educrat sources who oppose the website because of its consistent advocacy for more choices for parents.
FITS spoke with Dr. John Cronin of the Northwest Evaluation Association on Monday, however, and he confirmed the authenticity of the quote, as well as the conclusions reached by the NWEA – which take all the air out of educrat arguments in favor of the PASS test modifications.
After all, proponents of this deliberate “dumbing down” of South Carolina standards have been claiming all along that they were merely attempting to reconcile the new text with existing standards.
“We’re not lowering the standards,” a spokeswoman for the S.C. Association of School Administrators told The State newspaper last week. “We’re not lowering the expectations of what students are expected to learn. We didn’t change the standards at all. We’re just saying that meeting the standards on PASS means the same thing as meeting the standards on PACT.”
Yeah … right.
South Carolina school teachers have consistently supported the implementation of tougher standards, but they have always been overruled by school administrators who favor lowering the bar.
PASS was approved this year to replace the hated Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test, which has been administered for years by Data Recognition Corporation – a company with ties to a well-heeled status quo lobbyist.
PACT was loathed in the education community because it was not a “diagnostic” test, meaning it failed to provide parents and teachers with real-time results of their children’s academic progress. It also failed to meet federal No Child Left Behind reporting standards because it didn’t let administrators accurately compare our children’s academic progress with the progress of kids in other states.
On top of all that, PACT was one of the country’s most expensive assessment tests, forcing South Carolina taxpayers to spend three to four times what other states spend per child on testing.
Amazingly, the same company responsible for this mess – Data Recognition Corporation – was paid over $800,000 by the state to recommend changes to the flawed PACT, and not surprisingly also won the contract to administer the dumbed-down PASS exam.
UPDATED: Here’s a copy of the report complete with a bunch of handy-dandy charts and graphs …
By Toyota Kawaski October 12, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Yesah Mr.Rich may i half’s another.Yesah your Yankee Money spends well downs here sir’s
By You're Intellectually Bankrupt October 12, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Funny thing about Toyota, all he/she can do is attack the messenger. He/She can’t dispute the message. Typical big government liberal.
By PalmettoCPA October 12, 2009 at 6:32 pm
“Bottom quartile of 27 states” sounds an awful lot like cherry-picking. Are these 27 states a true cross-section, or is this the top 27 in the country? That makes a huge difference in evaluating where the new test would fall.
By John Cronin October 12, 2009 at 7:35 pm
The quotation from our analysis is entirely accurate, but a clarification of its meaning is in order.
Under PACT, the state operated with two different standards for evaluating schools. For purposes of accountability within the state the “Basic” level on PACT was considered to meet state expectations. For purposes of federal accountability under NCLB the state’s higher “Proficient” standard was used.
Our understanding is that the “Met” standard under pass is equivalent to “Basic” (which our analysis verifies) so that the standard for meeting state expectations essentially did not change. What has changed is that the “Met” standard was also adopted for purposes of federal accountability.
The fairest interpretation of events would be to say that the state’s internal standard for accountability remained the same in this process, but that the state has adjusted the standard for federal accountability downward to make the two consistent. Our analyses evaluated the difficulty of the state’s NCLB standards relative to other states, and it is fair and accurate to say that the revised cut score does change the difficulty of South Carolina’s federal accountability standard relative to its peers.
By Ron October 12, 2009 at 9:13 pm
Deliberately Dumbing Us Down
By Sam Blumenfeld
Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt’s book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, is one of the most important publishing events in the annals of American education in the last hundred years.
Iserbyt has done what no one else wanted or could do. She has put together the most formidable and practical compilation of documentation describing the well-planned “deliberate dumbing down” of American children by their education system. Anyone who has had any lingering hope that what the educators have been doing is a result of error, accident, or stupidity will be shocked by the way American social engineers have systematically gone about destroying the intellect of millions of American children for the purpose of leading the American people into a socialist world government controlled by behavioral and social scientists.
By Ron October 12, 2009 at 9:18 pm
“What has changed is that the “Met” standard was also adopted for purposes of federal accountability.” John Cronin
Our schools for all practical purposes have apparently been federalized. Local control? Yeah right!
By BIN News October 12, 2009 at 9:58 pm
What Toyowaski means is that sic(k) willie is nothing but a cheep paid political pimp for Howie and his carpetbuggers.
They twist and distort any facts to attack public education in S.C., and they care nothing for the truth.
They just love them some voucher scam.
They know the voucher scam would only leave those who need help the most even further behind. They care nothing about those kids.
Want proof? Check it out.
They know the standard in SC for public education is “minimally adequate.”
They seem happy with that. sic(k) willie never speaks to that shame.
sic(k) willie, the voucher scam is dead in SC. Jake said so. So has the Legislature over and over and over and over.
BIN News Funding Editor
Flair and Balanced
By You Can Call Me Ma'am October 13, 2009 at 12:09 am
Toyota: The dumbing down of education started way before your hatin’ did. And long before Howard Rich or anyone else you put on the Yankee blame train ever set foot in South Carolina. If this was a business, this would be called cooking the books. The “PASS” South Carolina needs is a pass to school choice. And speaking of pass, why don’t you give your half-ass attempts at humor a pass from now on.
By Toyota Kawaski October 13, 2009 at 8:30 am
You can call me a bitch why don’t you and the rest of these VOUCHER CLOWNS come up with a real plain.Vouchers are not the answer. I agree education system needs an overhaul from federal level right down to area districts.
By JR October 13, 2009 at 8:41 am
Ah yes, the PR machine churns out more dribble. Never mind that the EOC’s actions would have been in violation of state law (3 cuts by law versus the EOC’s 5); or that this is the year that AYP is reassessed by the USDOE, oh no, you can ignore all that in pursuit of a slanted argument. Now onto the methodology of the “report.” It states that samples varied on population size, location and socioeconomic data, this is fair enough and is to be expected, but what is the error level of their analysis? If these are merely descriptive statistics then is may make for a pretty picture for someone untrained in data analysis, but as for anything substantive it is sorely lacking.
By William October 13, 2009 at 9:06 am
Wow Sic, you are actually basing your argument on a report that makes comparrisons using non-normalized, non-parametric data. Why don’t you just cut open a goat and read the entrails, it should give you the same level of accuracy.
By Tiger Mom October 13, 2009 at 9:39 am
It does not matter if it was EOC, the State Department, or the idiots in the House and Senate who passed the bill.
The point is our schools are wretched and now the standard has been lowered to try and hide it.
We NEED tax credits and more charters to foster innovation, not name calling and special interests who take upon themselves the name of “the kids.”
By Make it up as you go. October 13, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Pouring countless dollars into a broken system is clearly the way to go.
It is the new American way.
By HMMM October 13, 2009 at 5:16 pm
JR — How can the EOC’s actions be in violation of state law when state law was changed to require three cut levels on the state test instead of 4? And AYP is assessed by the feds EVERY year. What would have been a good year to change?
By BIN News Editorial Staff October 13, 2009 at 7:55 pm
Toyota –
Our Funding Editor wants you to know she is very proud of you for standing up against the voucher scam and Howie’s voucher clowns. It’s no accident that the same tired voucher scam rhetoric is being flushed from sic(k) willie, voice for voucher scams and S.C. for irResponsible voucher scams.
BTW, reliable unnamed inside sources who prefer not to have their names mentioned (you know, like all of sic(k) willie’s bogus sources) have told our Funding Editor that Howie is very displeased with his voucher clowns.
It seems he never expected his voucher scam to cost so much. Howie appears to be tired of pouring his money down the voucher scam grease trap.
Voucher are dead in S.C. Jakie said so.
BIN News Editorial Staff
Flair and Balanced
By JR October 14, 2009 at 7:28 am
HMMM, because a functionary of an agency does not have standing to extend the law beyond its context. This is not the case for a state extending federal law – it only has to be as stringent but there are no requirements that it can not be more stringent up to the point that it would be in violation of the state’s law but not the federal law. As previously mentioned, a functionary of an agency (the EOC) does not have this power. As for the “change” AYP is assessed, cut points are not – which even arguing that is a flaw of logic because it assumes that the cases are not independent, i.e. it presumes that the performance of a third grader last year somehow affects the performance of a third grader this year – a notion like that is patently false and absolutely ridiculous.
By Ron October 14, 2009 at 10:29 pm
“In previous international mathematics assessments, the United States has always been above the international average at the upper elementary level, somewhere close to the international average at the middle school level, and below the international average at the high school level,” said math education Professor Peter Kloosterman. “This may be related to the fact that, in comparison to many other countries, the U.S. middle and high school curricula are based on having students complete a larger number of less challenging problems.” Kloosterman and Frank Lester, also a math education professor in IUB’s School of Education, are experts on large-scale assessment in mathematics. They co-authored the book, Results and Interpretations of the 1990 through 2000 Mathematics Assessments of the National Assessment of Education Progress, published last month by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. “The poor showing of U.S. students on the PISA assessment reflects our national focus on skills, with much less concern for application of those skills to solve realistic, everyday problems,”
By Ron October 14, 2009 at 10:37 pm
Tied with Latvia for 27th Place
More Math Bad News: U.S. Lags In Two New Comparisons
Two respected international tests of math skills indicate that U.S. students continue to perform poorly compared to other industrialized countries, according to reports released in December.
American 15-year-olds ranked 24th among 29 countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which sponsored one of the studies, using tests administered in 2003 by the Program for International Student Assessment. In a larger group that also included 10 non-members – many of them developing countries – the U.S. tied Latvia for 27th place.
One-quarter of the U.S. 15-year-olds scored at or below the bottom rung, while only 2% scored in the top rung of the six-point scale. The gap between whites and Asians versus Hispanics and blacks remains enormous. The top math scorers were Hong Kong, Finland and South Korea. The test also covered reading, science, and problem-solving skills.
No lack of self-esteem
Only a generation ago, U.S. high school students ranked number one overall. (Wall Street Journal, 12-15-04) Now, they show confidence but not skill: The same test found that U.S. 15-year-olds were far more likely to say they were good at mathematics and received strong grades in that subject than their peers in Japan and South Korea, who on average easily outperformed Americans in math.
A test by the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study found mixed results in 2003 compared to 1999 for American 4th- and 8th-graders on math and science tests, but it was clear that they still lag behind a number of industrialized countries. Singapore students led the pack in math and science in both 4th and 8th grades.
Of the 45 countries ranked in the 8th-grade survey, the U.S. was 15th in math and 9th in science. Of the 25 countries in the 4th-grade survey, the U.S. was 12th in math and 6th in science. Singapore has 44% of its students at the advanced level, while the U.S. has 7%. U.S. 4th- and 8th-graders made no progress in math since the last such test was given four years earlier.
This study was released by the International Study Center at Boston College and was analyzed by the National Center for Education Statistics. It included about 9,000 American 8th-graders in 230 schools and 10,000 4th-graders in 250 schools. The results indicated some narrowing of the test-score gap between blacks and whites.
By Mark Pennington October 17, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Check out what to trust and what not to trust regarding assessments at http://penningtonpublishing.com/blog/reading/eliminating-the-trust-factor-with-diagnostic-elareading-assessments/.