RALEIGH – On Sunday, just as Gov. Mike Easley and former Sen. Patrick Ballantine were preparing for their first debate Monday, devoted to education issues, the Greensboro News & Record continued its impressive string of stories challenging the mythology that surrounds the performance of North Carolina’s public schools.
Bruce Buchanan, the N&R education reporter who has done more than perhaps any other journalist in the state to explain how the state’s end-of-grade testing really works, wrote Sunday about the Department of Public Instruction’s continued practice of making it relatively easy to achieving a “passing” grade. Despite numerous examples in the past of the problem of low “cut scores” – the percentage of questions students must answer correctly to reach Level 3, considered grade-level – North Carolina officials have refused to address the issue reasonably.
Thus we still have the spectacle of eighth-graders being able to pass their math tests by answering only 33 percent of questions correctly. Other grades also take math tests with cut scores in the 30s, with most of the cut scores in reading higher but still below the 50 percent mark.
Simply put, if you make the cut score on a multiple-choice test lower than 50 percent, you are asking for trouble. Assuming four possible answers, students can usually eliminate one answer as obviously wrong, even if they don’t truly understand the material. Often, a second answer can also be eliminated. Combine the situation with a few easy questions that virtually any student can answer correctly, and you make it statistically probable that many students who do not have grade-level proficiency in the subject will nevertheless “pass” their test.
Don’t take my word for it. Buchanan quotes Sam Miller, the chairman of UNC-Greensboro’s department of curriculum and instruction, as saying that the passing bar on the EOGs is set so low that “you could almost fall over it” and that Miller has personally met children who passed their tests without knowing the material. I have talked to other education professors and experts, some rather hesitant to speak out against DPI, who nevertheless have offered a similar critique.
This technical, statistical argument against North Carolina’s easy testing system isn’t the only persuasive one. Another is what I call the “common-sense test.” Because the ABCs of Public Education is a system for public accountability, not just a diagnostic tool, parents and taxpayers have a right to receive useful and practical information. My guess is that if state politicians and officials actually fanned out among average North Carolinians, boasting of the prowess of their students because they can answer a third of their math questions correctly, they’d be laughed – or glowered – out of the room.
The cut-score scandal is part of a larger issue, which is that North Carolina is among the few states to grade itself – essentially to design its own state-level tests rather than purchasing an off-the-shelf test from one of several national testing companies. Education officials argue that their approach is better because it results in a closer alignment of our tests to our curriculum. So what? The results are invalid. Independence is necessary to ensure that annual testing results are meaningful, that the conflict of interest of politicians and DPI folks (both of whom benefit if scores rise) is minimized, and that North Carolina’s performance in multiple grades can be compared across the country (National Assessment of Education Progress tests are useful for this purpose but are infrequent and limited to two grades).
It is impossible to overstate the import of this issue. Most of the debate over school reform, ranging from teacher quality and class-size issues to parental choice and charter schools, rests on the structure of our testing system. Claims and research findings about them use the EOGs scores, which tell us not very much of value.
At Monday’s education debate, I would hope that both Easley and Ballantine would be challenged on this point. Do they favor retaining North Carolina’s current testing and accountability system, upon which so many reform proposals and millions of tax dollars are predicated, even though it is so obviously broken and misleading? Or do they have the courage to demand fundamental change?
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.