Parents Across Rhode Island

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The following is testimony submitted to the Rhode Island General Assembly in support of legislation protecting students from the harmful and negative effects of high stakes testing and the rush to implement the Common Core standards with it's accompanying tests.  For additional testimonies, please return to

T e s t i m o n y : R i c k R i c ha r d s

Delay High Stakes Testing

Last year (2012-13) the NECAP counted for students.  If you were an 11th grader and got a “1” on the NECAP, you could not graduate with a diploma.  And, about 40% of last year’s eleventh graders got a “1” on the NECAP, triggering a whole set of scrambling exercises hastily put in place to get as many students as possible over this last hurdle.  This is the sausage factory side of the high stakes testing (HST) policy.

The important question to ask about the 2012-13 scores is whether they are an improvement over the 2011-13 scores. A large part of the “theory of action” behind the test requirement is that it will motivate students and teachers to higher levels of performance.  And, if we look at the 2011-12 test results, we can see that the test looks like it did motivate better performance: there is around a 5% decease in the percentage of students failing the test for most of the student groups shown in Chart 1.   The exception is English Language Learners (LEP), whose performance declined.

So, it looks as if there is some impact on the system that improves performance before the senior year emergency maneuvers kick in: it looks as if knowing the 2012-13 scores would “count“ caused the system to work better for traditionally under supported students.

Some of this impact held up for the 2013-14 test: the percentage of Black, Hispanic and students eligible for free or reduced lunch (FRL) failing the test again decreased by about 5%.  At that rate, these students will achieve 100% passing rates—but not proficiency—in 20 years.  But the accumulating evidence looks like there are no real gains for students with IEPs or ELLs.

But how much of this improvement is real?  If we go back another year, we see that the scores on the 2012-13 test look a lot like scores from two years earlier (the 2010-2011 scores).  Since scores from different years come from different groups of students, demographic shifts in population may account for the changes in scores for Blacks, Hispanics, and students eligible for free or reduced lunch as much as improvements in the education system.

Consequently, the jury is still out on the question of the effectiveness of the theory of action behind high stakes testing and accountability.   RIDE’s declarations of victory cannot yet be taken at face value.

Instead, all we have certain knowledge of is the impact of a HST policy on learning and teaching: the test will continue to distort what is taught to students and curriculum will continue to narrow.  Learning will increasingly be thought of as what students can do on a standardized test instead of as their ability to engage real world problems, create novelty and sustain entrepreneurial processes.  Teaching will increasingly be thought of as preparing students for the narrow requirements of the standards that will be tested rather than the interactive process in which teachers try to engage students in real time and address the multitude of different learning needs they bring to the class every day.  Schools will increasingly be thought of as places that “output test scores” instead of places where adults support one another and their students in a learning community that tries its best to help families fulfill their dreams for their children.

When we look to Massachusetts to see what a “successful” implementation of the HST policy looks like, we have certain knowledge that many performance gaps don’t close--that Black and Hispanic students, students with IEPs, and ELLs fare poorly and are disproportionately harmed, just as they are in our state.  We also have certain knowledge that many students who pass the test are not college ready.  About two thirds of the students entering Massachusetts community colleges and half the students entering state universities need to take at least one remedial course.  Success on the test is not mirrored by success in college.

All these numbers say we need to balance the perceived benefits of the HST policy with the known harms and perhaps find a better way to improve our schools.  To do that, we need time and a fully transparent process.

Rick Richards, February 25, 2014