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Written by Communication Co-Director
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Thursday, 10 January 2008 |
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Doing the No Hurdles is intended to provide perspective on the difficulty of CSAP testing when compared to other state's testing and national testing.
Doing the no hurdles While I have known for some time that the Colorado CSAP tests were set at levels lower than the national standards tested in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) I didn’t realize until recently how much lower. In fact, I recently read an article published by McLatchy Newspapers that addressed the question “What does proficient mean.” It was not fun to see that they had used Colorado as the example of the lowest standard for state testing among the 25 states they compared in their research. In that group Massachusetts has the highest standards. It is a very large difference as you would expect going from the lowest to the highest discussed in the article. The article referenced a report from the Fordham Foundation that had done the in-depth analysis, called The Proficiency Illusion. The Colorado section of the report is worth reading and states, “When setting its cut scores [level defining proficiency] in reading and math for NCLB purposes, Colorado aimed low, at least compared to the other 25 states in this study. Colorado’s low cut scores have declined even further in recent years in several grades. As a result, Colorado’s expectations are not calibrated across all grades; students who are proficient by the third grade are not necessarily on track to be proficient by the eighth grade. In addition to better calibrating the state’s cut scores, Colorado policymakers might consider raising those scores across the board so that parents and educators can be assured that scoring at the NCLB proficient level means that students are truly prepared for success later in their educational careers.” So what does this mean? First, the Colorado Dept of Education is complicit with the other education power groups in keeping standards low so that the poor performance being achieved by Colorado school districts can look better than it is. Thus, the CSAP “hurdles” the schools whine so loudly about are really only painted stripes on the pavement, not hurdles at all. In reality none of the states should be happy with their achievement scores as they are not competitive at all with our best international competition.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 10 January 2008 )
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