California students’ test scores flatline

Lack of improvement raises questions about new exam

Is there something weird about California’s standardized test scores?

Last year, 49 percent of California students who took the test scored as meeting the state’s reading and writing standards. This year, that number flatlined at 49 percent.

So despite most teachers and students having an additional year to get familiar with the exam, and an additional year of instruction conceivably tailored to improve on student weaknesses identified in the test, California public schools are no better at getting students to master state English standards.

That’s certainly plausible. State English standards are tougher now than they used to be since California adopted Common Core, a set of academic standards intended to measure a deeper understanding of math and English. And California’s relatively large population of low-income children and non-English speakers has long suffered from a persistent achievement gap that could make it difficult to significantly bump up test scores from one year to the next.

But it’s not only California experiencing lackluster 2017 scores. The other 12 states that have published scores and administered the same standardized test with the same questions — known as the Smarter Balanced Assessment — all saw their scores dip or remain stagnant. No state

among the 12 saw progress on the English portion of the test.

“When you see all states losing ground or holding flat, it’s like, ‘Really?’ ” said Paul Warren, an education researcher at the Public Policy Institute of California. “Everybody had that same problem? That bears some looking into.”

California’s Department of Education has not expressed any dissatisfaction with the test itself in any of its official communication. In a statement, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson said he is “pleased we retained our gains, but we have much more work to do.”

Chris Barron, a spokesman for the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, the organization that designed the test, said he has confidence in this year’s version of the exam.

“At this point, Smarter Balanced has every reason to believe that the spring 2017 scores accurately describe what students knew and were able to do related to the (English language arts) and mathematics content standards,” Barron wrote via email.

While English scores on the Smarter Balanced test plateaued or declined across all states, a different test intended to measure the same thing — how well students are mastering Common Core — yielded a markedly different trend. In the six states and one city that administer the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers tests, five saw increases in their English test scores this year over last.

“The most surprising thing to me is how different the growth patterns have been for Smarter Balanced versus PARCC,” said David Pearson, an education researcher at UC Berkeley who helped advised Smarter Balanced on the English component of the test. “The growth patterns on PARCC looks more like what you would expect” over the three years of the test.

Whenever a new standardized test is dropped on students, researchers typically see a trend: Proficiency scores decline markedly from the last year of the old test to the first year of the new test. Then in subsequent years, as students and teachers get familiar with the exam, scores improve.

The first two years of Smarter Balanced and PARCC — both first deployed in 2015 — roughly fit that trend. Many Smarter Balanced states saw larger increases in proficiency than PARCC states. California saw a gain of four percentage points on the English portion of the test between 2015 and 2016.

But the leveling off of Smarter Balanced scores — particularly in contrast to the upward trajectory of scores in PARCC states — raises a red flag.

“To me, the only thing that makes any sense is that ... there was something going on with the assessment or administration (of Smarter Balanced) that year that would account for that,” Pearson said.

Barron, the spokesman for Smarter Balanced, calls it misleading to compare the two tests.

“PARCC is a different test administered in different states with different achievement standards and should not be directly compared with Smarter Balanced,” he said.