Why New York Isn’t Celebrating Higher Test Scores

It is a big question without an easy answer: Are New York’s students improving in reading, writing and math?

Last spring, 950,000 third- through eighth-graders across New York state took standardized English and math exams. Across the state, they seem to have done better.

In New York City, scores jumped by about 6 percentage points in English and about 5 points in math — meaning just under 47 percent of city students passed the English test, and about 43 percent of students passed the math exam.

But instead of trumpeting the results, the state’s Department of Education delayed releasing them for six weeks. And then, in announcing them Wednesday, the department cautioned that the exams cannot be measured against previous tests and should be considered a new baseline.

That is because this year’s exams were redesigned to reduce the test length to two days from three; that made the tests too different to be compared, the department said.

Though state tests carry lower stakes now than at any other point in the past decade, the results are still the most commonly used measure of how much progress schools — and the city and state more broadly — are making in educating students.

“If the tests have changed a lot, then we won’t learn much about trends, maybe nothing about trends,” in student performance, said Daniel Koretz, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education who studies testing.

This year’s scores are the latest confusing data points in a long history of zigzagging test results in New York, but what they do tell us is how much the political pendulum has swung on standardized testing. Here’s why the numbers are often accompanied by asterisks:

New York has had a complicated relationship with test results over the past 15 years.

Try to make sense of these numbers: In 2009, 82 percent of test-takers in New York City passed the math exam. The next year, about half of city students failed it, and by 2013, about 70 percent of students were failing.

Starting in 2002, Mayor Michael Bloomberg based his aggressive, accountability-driven reforms of the city’s school system on the state’s standardized exams, and he made the tests matter much more for individual students and schools than they had before.

Bloomberg also teamed up with the state to make the tests tougher and increase the weight of the exams in teacher evaluations as part of the city’s winning bid for $700 million in federal Race to the Top grants.

Though students’ scores plummeted when they sat for the more rigorous exams in 2010, New York forged ahead with its plan to become one of the first states in the nation to adopt the new Common Core standards pushed by the Obama administration. After the state’s tests were aligned with those standards in 2013, scores dropped again.

Then the backlash began.

Bill de Blasio’s campaign for mayor in 2013 included a promise to lower the stakes associated with state tests, which he did shortly after taking office.

About the same time, parents in the city’s politically progressive pockets, the state’s wealthy suburbs and swaths of upstate New York pulled their children out of the state exams in protest of the Common Core and high-stakes tests. The opt-out movement crescendoed in 2015, when a fifth of New York students refused to take the exams — which, in turn, made the results less reliable.

Activists seized on one particularly memorable reading passage in an eighth-grade English exam involving a talking pineapple as proof of the absurdity of the tests.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, facing pressure from parents, retreated from a plan that year that would have further increased the role of exams in teacher evaluations. He also backed away from education reform and the Common Core more broadly.

This year’s results, based on shifting goal posts and shorter exams, may represent the final nail in the coffin for the state’s hopes of leading the nation on the Common Core.

The city and state teachers unions led the charge against high-stakes tests in New York, and the state union in particular has endorsed the opt-out movement. They seem to be winning the battle.

Just five years ago, it seemed the state was poised to have some of the toughest teacher evaluations in the nation, based on some of the most intensive exams. Today the opposite is true; there is a moratorium on the use of exams in teacher evaluations through the end of this school year.

De Blasio and the city schools chancellor, Richard A. Carranza, agree that individual students and schools should not be judged primarily on test scores, but now they are stuck without reliable evidence that students are making academic gains.

The pro-Common Core groups and education reform organizations that have watched their policy hopes diminish over the past three years will see this as another strike against high standards for New York’s students and accountability for the state’s teachers.

The unusually long wait for the scores this year frustrated New York City’s parents and students in particular, since they need their results to apply to selective middle and high schools. And if experts are confused about how to interpret the exams, parents undoubtedly will be, too.

“It does undermine the credibility of an assessment system when things change so much in a short number of years,” said Aaron Pallas, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College. “It’s very confusing even to people who are paying attention.”

The opt-out movement is shrinking, but it is not dead. The city’s test-refusal rate rose slightly in 2018, to 4.4 percent of students from 4 percent, and the statewide rate dropped by a point, to 18 percent. Long Island remains the epicenter of the movement, while charter schools and urban schools across the state had the lowest opt-out rates.

On the tests, New York City’s charter schools outpaced traditional public schools, as they typically do: Charter students made gains between 8 and 9 points in math and English.

Struggling schools in the city’s Renewal School program made gains at about the same rate as the city as a whole. That does not tell us much about how they are performing: If those schools posted bigger gains than the rest of the city’s schools, that would indicate that Renewals are getting better.

The city outperformed the rest of the state in English for the third consecutive year: 46.7 percent of city students passed the test, while 45.2 percent of students statewide did. But the state beat the city on math by just under 2 percentage points, with 44.5 percent of students statewide passing the test.

Gaping achievement gaps between the city’s black and Hispanic students and their white and Asian peers help explain why school integration has become a priority for Carranza. About 72 percent of Asian students passed this year’s math test, compared to 25 percent of black students — a nearly 47 point gap.

Experts cautioned that scores reveal only one element of how students and schools are performing.

“If you really want to know whether a school is good, it’s helpful to have test scores,” Koretz said. “But if you stop there, you don’t have the answer yet.”

Although state exam results have fluctuated wildly in the past 10 years, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, considered the gold-standard measure of academic growth, found that New York City’s students did not make progress in English or math between 2015 and 2017.

When the organization releases its next results in the spring, New Yorkers could get a clearer sense of how much to rely on state test scores.

This year’s results will no doubt influence fresh questions about education policy in New York, including the state Board of Regents’ decision about whether to use exam results in teacher evaluations. Those debates will reveal much about how New York, considered one of the country’s education-reform capitals just a few years ago, is tacking in an entirely new direction on education policy.