For your information - New York, California, and Indiana students among
others are the victims of the latest test abuse. This is one the test
company, McGraw-Hill has had to admit to causing.
Ken Goodman
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Date: Sun, 19 Sep 1999 21:48:15 EDT
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For those of you haven't followed this story...
New York Times
September 17, 1999
Miscalculation on Scores Shows
A Weakness of Tests
Related Articles
8,600 in Summer School by Error, Board Says (Sept.
16, 1999)
Chancellor Cites Test Score Errors (Sept. 15, 1999)
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
The revelation that a national testing company
miscalculated the reading and math scores of
thousands of New York City students opens a
window into the fragility of standardized testing,
even as school districts across the country are
increasingly using test scores to make high-stakes
decisions.
Officials for both the New York City school system
and the testing company, CTB/McGraw-Hill, one of
the three biggest in the country, have admitted that if
not for the persistence of one whistle-blower -- the
city's testing director -- the errors might never have
been discovered.
Yet those errors led to one of the bleakest chapters in
the tenure of Chancellor Rudy Crew, who had made
literacy a priority and then in June was forced to
announce the original low scores. The Chancellor
used the scores to make a host of decisions with
huge impact on the lives of children and educators:
from taking over failing schools to removing
superintendents to sending more than 8,600 children
to summer school who should not have been forced
to be there.
Now thousands of schoolchildren are trying to salve
the ache of being unfairly branded as failures, and the
mistake has tarnished the reputation of standardized
testing carefully cultivated by the testing companies
themselves.
"I don't think these kinds of errors are rampant," said
Michael J. Feuer, director of the board on testing and
assessment of the National Academy of Sciences.
"But obviously, when you're dealing with attempts to
analyze large quantities of data, errors are always
possible."
The error on the CTB/McGraw-Hill test, which the
company said also affected eight other systems, was
not the first for the testing industry. In the
mid-1990's, California introduced a statewide test
and was criticized after improperly releasing scores
to hundreds of schools that were based on inadequate
samplings of students.
The problems, critics say, graphically illustrate why
many educators and testing companies themselves
advise against using a single test given on a single
day as the sole criterion for making decisions about
promotion or graduation.
"It's clear that CTB/McGraw-Hill messed up," said
Monty Neill, executive director of the National
Center for Fair and Open Testing in Cambridge,
Mass. "But CTB did not make the Mayor, the
Chancellor or the Board of Education decide to use
test scores only, in violation of the standards of the
testing industry, to make decisions about kids."
In the New York City episode, the testing company
and Dr. Crew find themselves on the defensive. Yet
Dr. Crew, who just three months ago said he would
make "no excuses" for some of the worst test scores
in years, now boasts just the opposite situation: one
of the brightest pictures in years. The adjusted
statistics show that 48.5 percent of New York City's
third, fifth, sixth and seventh graders read at or above
grade level, not 44.6 percent as announced in June.
After a calculation to make the 1999 test comparable
to the 1998 test, Dr. Crew announced on Wednesday
that reading scores had risen 4.9 percent from 1998,
an unusually high one-year gain for any school
system.
Yet instead of basking in the glow of positive
headlines, the Chancellor has found that achievement
virtually ignored in the atmosphere of skepticism
created by the errors. While almost no one -- except
the school system's own director of assessment,
Robert Tobias -- raised doubts about the dramatic
10-point decline in math scores announced in June,
the new reading scores have drawn a different
reaction. (The board has not yet recalculated math
scores.)
"The fix is too good to believe," said Stephen Ivens,
vice president of Touchstone Applied Science
Associates, in Brewster, Putnam County, which
supplied its reading test, Degrees of Reading Power,
to New York City schools for 12 years before it was
replaced by CTB/McGraw Hill.
"Could you as a publisher make the data come out
more or less favorable?" he asked. "The answer is,
yes you can, particularly once I know what the
results are."
Dr. Crew said yesterday that he saw no reason to
abandon the use of standardized testing in making
high-stakes decisions like whether to promote
students. "That is a really, really cynical view," he
said of comments like Dr. Ivens'. " 'I paid them off';
I sold them my first-born.' There's a level of it being
absolutely insidious -- when the scores look like they
might be anywhere near decent, to just make this a
scandal. These teachers and these children, they
earned something."
Dr. Crew said he used the reading and math tests to
screen for summer school, despite Tobias's
suspicions, because the testing company strenuously
denied until last week that there was any problem.
David Taggart, the president of CTB/McGraw-Hill,
said yesterday that such scoring problems occur
rarely, and are normally detected, as in New York
City's case, by school district officials who notice
something amiss when they put the standardized test
scores in the context of everything else they know
about their students.
CTB/McGraw-Hill has posted a prominent warning
on its Web site, advising school districts that "no
single test can ascertain whether all educational
goals are being met."
Dr. Crew has removed five superintendents and put
four more on probation, again citing low scores.
Now, eight of the nine districts where he removed
superintendents or put them on probation show gains
in reading instead of declines.
Robert Riccobono, who was ousted by Dr. Crew as
superintendent of district 19 in East New York,
Brooklyn, said he believed his fate and that of the
other superintendents would have been different if
the erroneous scores had never been announced.
Riccobono is the only superintendent appealing his
ouster. The new data, he said, could only help his
case.
"Wow," he said, as he learned of the revised scores.
"It has to help, because it's clear to me that the only
reason we were under scrutiny to begin with had to
do with the lower performance on the reading test."
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/regional/091799ny-summer-school-edu.ht
ml
----------------------------------------
New York Post
TEST-SCORES DEBACLE ALSO
HITS INDIANA SCHOOLS
By SUSAN EDELMAN and
JESSICA GRAHAM
Chancellor Rudy Crew has company in his
call for an independent probe of the testing
company that botched test scores for
300,000 city kids - the state of Indiana.
The same "corrupted data" that
CTB/McGraw-Hill has admitted using in
New York also caused wrong scores for
300,000 Indiana kids in grades 3, 6, 8 and
10, officials there said yesterday.
"We used the same test, so obviously
we've got the same problems," Wes Bruce,
Indiana's testing chief, told The Post.
Suellen Reed, the Hoosier State's schools
chief, wants an audit of the embattled
testing company - after resisting calls for
such a probe for months, he said.
Indiana also wants to join forces with New
York City in getting to the bottom of the
scandal that has thrown both school
systems into chaos.
Asked if Indiana had contacted the Big
Apple, Bruce said, "No, but if you've got a
number, we'd like to. That's part of what
we're discussing."
Indiana's call for the probe comes after
repeated complaints by Fort Wayne, Ind.,
school superintendent Thomas
Fowler-Finn that the scores were skewed.
"I felt in my bones there was more to this,
but they kept pooh-poohing it,"
Fowler-Finn said.
In the wake of New York's debacle, he
called for an immediate suspension of all
CTB/McGraw-Hill test scores.
Like Bob Tobias, New York City's
school-testing chief, Fowler-Finn noticed
strange patterns in his city's test scores -
and asked CTB/McGraw-Hill to check the
data.
As it did to Tobias, the company
repeatedly assured Fowler-Finn everything
was A-OK.
And Fowler-Finn, like Tobias, finally got
a phone call from the company late last
week admitting it had goofed in ranking
students on a national scale.
"I want to know who checks this data - and
whether they're cutting corners. They have
very poor quality assurance," he said.
But the testing company has a conflict of
interest, Fowler-Finn
added.CTB/McGraw-Hill representatives
could not be reached for comment
yesterday, but firm president David
Taggert on Wednesday told New York's
Board of Education that the company
would cooperate with an audit that Crew
has demanded.
http://www.nypost.com/news/14234.htm
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