RALEIGH — North Carolina’s annual testing program was introduced in the early 1990s and then melded with a performance-bonus system to create the ABCs program in the mid-1990s. As I’ve written before, I think that the basic concept — giving annual standardized tests in core subjects and using the results to evaluate and reward good performance — is a sound one. And there is no doubt that the annual testing regime has aided North Carolina students in improving their performance in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), in which our state has shown significant growth during the past decade.
Unfortunately, the problems with North Carolina’s end-of-year and end-of-course tests have also become evident. State writing tests have proved to be difficult to grade accurately, and have ignored the importance of student mastery the basics of grammar and spelling. More generally, student performance on the state’s own exams can’t be compared meaningfully to the performance of students in other states, nor does the public have access to the tests themselves to determine whether they are appropriate and rigorous.
This week, the State Board of Education had a chance to address one longstanding complaint about North Carolina’s testing program: that the tests are too easy to pass. The so-called “cut scores,” the percentage of questions a student must answer correctly to meet a given level of achievement, have been notoriously low in the past. Even today, as I understand it, students in some grades can reach Level 3 — the status considered “at grade-level” — by answering far fewer than half of the questions correctly.
Quite apart from whether the questions themselves are sufficiently challenging, the cut-score problem has the potential to invalidate much of what North Carolinians think they know about the performance of their public schools. Since the tests are multiple-choice exams, students trained to discard one or two obviously wrong answers and then to guess among the remaining two choices can expect to get the right answer 50 percent of the time. Obviously, if a student knows just enough to answer a few easy questions and then proceeds to guess this way on the remainder, he or she has a very good chance of being rated “at grade-level” on a test with a cut score of less than 50 percent, regardless of the real academic achievement attained.
There is an argument for low cut scores. Defenders of North Carolina’s program say that because it includes a Level 4, considered proof of advanced achievement, there must be enough difficult questions on the tests to allow such achievement to be distinguished. Without access to the actual questions, however, how are we to evaluate this claim? More importantly, even if it is true, it’s a case of the tail wagging the dog. The outcome that educators, politicians, judges, parents, and taxpayers pay by far the most attention to is the number of students at Level 3. Surely the system should be designed to maximize our confidence the validity of that outcome.
Seeming to understand the importance of this issue, members of the State Board of Education this week nevertheless decided not to consider the idea of raising the cut scores on state exams. Perhaps they should take another look at it in a few years, said State School Superintendent Mike Ward, but to do so now would be “technically complex” and “political disastrous,” according to The Charlotte Observer‘s account. Ward went on to warn that making the change the year after a large apparent rise in the proficiency of North Carolina students “might look mighty like we were punishing success.”
State Board Chairman Howard Lee, a serious man and a former state senator from Chapel Hill, then moved to express what he thought to be the consensus of the panel. “What I’m hearing is that we’re all fairly comfortable with where we are and we ought to let sleeping dogs lie for now,” he said.
I found this to be a horrifying statement. Either North Carolina’s costly, controversial, and high-stakes tests mean something or they don’t. I see no reason to continue administering tests that we know don’t truly measure grade-level proficiency. Children are not sleeping dogs and their parents don’t deserve any more lies.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.