Backing Up State Scores Reflects ‘Badly’

ARKANSAS, OHIO ‘WATER DOWN’ STUDENT TEST SCORES, SHOW FALSE IMPROVEMENT

Ah, them darn student performance test scores.

Looks like Arkansas’ elected officials were intent on “fudging” a bit on the numbers to make the scores look good.

But The Washington Post, that darn Beltway newspaper at the center of the nation’s political center, called out the poor Southern state of Arkansas along with the rather urban state of Ohio for “fudging” the scores to make the statistics look a better to the average Joe.

Had not The Washington Post and some other Arkansas media checked those test score numbers? Well, interested Readers, you know the rest.

No one tells the absolute truth … until caught in a little shading of the truth.

State Education Commissioner Johnny Key, a former state Senator from Mountain Home and chairman of the senate Education Committee for several years, had to issue both a letter of correction and then trot himself out to meet the pencil press to explain things.

It seems after all the posturing and explaining that the state Education Department, at someone’s insistence, decided to change the way the scores have been reported in the past.

And this “new math,” if you will, as Key explained in a news conference: “... left a misleading impression that Arkansas was backing away from high standards.”

Even though the state of Arkansas ( and Ohio) was backing away from the high standards of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or better known as the PARCC test, the state tried to say it was not.

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Key told the media.

Well, I am not so sure of that.

Arkansas and Gov. Asa Hutchinson have said the state will no longer use the PARCC test. Maybe that’s how we can do away with bad test scores, fire the test and get another one? That won’t work.

Motions have already been made by both Hutchinson and Key to move the state to another testing company to chart the academic progress of our state’s students.

So did Key and Hutchinson know that the PARCC standards would be lower than they wanted to report to the public? One has to wonder. Basically, someone in the state Education Department or Administration seemed to find that if the entire top 3 levels of scores (3, 4 and 5) would make for statistics that show improvement —good improvement for this year’s progress report.

Too bad those level 3 scores, where a majority of Arkansas students rank, really do not show college-level readiness as the state tried to say in this latest assessment of the test scores. When Arkansas (and Ohio) officials include the level 3 scores — the state’s educational statistics look really good.

If the level 3 scores are deleted or not counted, the outcome is not so rosy. So is that why Arkansas (and Ohio) wanted to “fudge” the scores? Why did they do that? You just can’t live with them failing test scores in our poor, rural and largely underfunded public educational system. In our current system Charter schools and home schooling is all the rage and yet we expect higher public school test scores.

These test scores and their outcomes are important, but sadly many districts place more emphasis on Friday night’s kickoff outcome than the outcomes made Monday through Friday 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. And Arkansans sure can’t live without them — even in a Republican controlled administration.

Arkansas state officials, Hutchinson and Key had a little explaining to do this week while wiping a little egg of embarrassment off their faces.

Any national test, a standard test, cannot just be changed or altered to suit officials on a whim.

Arkansans and our state’s educational system have taken some publicity lumps over poor scores and poor performance. We will get an even blacker eye — if that’s possible – over this latest watering down of the official results to suit us.

That’s a test Arkansas officials have recently failed — and they deserve all the poor grades and bad publicity associated with this latest silly move.