In a quest to help parents understand how their children are really doing in school — but not make them feel bad in the process — state officials are moving this week to change the way they describe student performance on standardized tests.
Student scores have been ranked in one of four categories on California’s annual tests in math, reading and science: Standard Exceeded; Standard Met; Standard Nearly Met, or Standard Not Met.
But the consortium that manages the Smarter Balanced test told California officials in a presentation last September that there has been confusion about what those levels mean. The consortium — which includes representation from California — suggested new labels, according to state officials: Advanced, Proficient, Foundational and Inconsistent. The State Board of Education was prepared to adopt them in November.
But concerns were raised by advocacy groups, who said the terms for the two lower levels were confusing and potentially misleading. They also chastised the board for not seeking any public input, which officials then agreed to do.
The process pushed back the decision to the Wednesday meeting of the State Board of Education, where officials can take into consideration the work of focus groups that included students, parents, educators and advocates.
Some participants didn’t like the original terms Standard Nearly Met and Standard Not Met, calling them vague, according to a state report. Some perceived the term for the lowest level as failure and noted that it “was often received as discouraging or demotivating,” the report said. And they didn’t like Foundational or Inconsistent, again saying the terms were confusing.
Another set of labels is also up for consideration: While Advanced and Proficient remain unchanged, the proposed names for the two lower-scoring categories are Basic and Below Basic.
Advocacy groups appear to support the latest proposal, which the state board can adopt or further modify.
If approved, the new terms would be the same as those used for many other standardized tests, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP, known as the nation’s report card.
The debate over test labels comes as national and state state scores remain low and have generally failed to recover from the pre-pandemic levels of 2019. Math and English test scores of fourth- and eighth-graders largely held steady or declined nationwide over the last two years — results that were about the same in Los Angeles and California.
The current proposal “is a step forward in providing parents with an accurate picture of how well their children perform in school,” said Natalie Wheatfall-Lum, director of education policy for EdTrust-West, an Oakland-based advocacy group. “However, our focus should be on providing clear descriptions of these labels so that parents can understand how well their children are performing in school, recognizing that a state assessment is one way to measure that.”
Given that grades, teacher feedback and comparison with peers can be subjective or vary from class to class or from school to school, “the standardized score and its label might be important in shaping how well students and parents understand the students’ skill levels relative to a common standard,” said Sean F. Reardon, professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford. “For that purpose, [tests] should have simple, transparent labels.”
All the same, he added, “a once-a-year, four-category score label is a pretty crude way of telling parents or students how they’re doing. Teachers and schools can convey information to parents much more frequently and with more nuance than a state test report.”
Testing debates; low achievement
California’s Smarter Balanced test is computer-based. If students are doing well, the program sends the student harder questions. If the student is faring poorly, the program sends easier questions. The goal is to get a more precise reading of a student’s skills, but the test represents only a snapshot of a student’s performance.
Experts acknowledge that the prime goal of education is not high scores on standardized tests — which are an imperfect measure of deep and relevant learning. Still, tests provide a marker to help keep students, teachers and schools on track toward skills students are supposed to be learning in each grade.
And by this marker, students in California and across the nation could be doing much better.
Not only are few students scoring as Advanced or Proficient, but fewer are achieving this test’s version of a Basic ranking, the next level down, according to the overall results from NAEP.
On the most recent results from this test, for example, the percentage of L.A. students who scored as Proficient or better in fourth-grade math was 27%. For California it was 35%.
In fourth-grade reading, 25% of L.A. students tested as proficient or better. California’s rate was 29%.
On California’s tests, student proficiency rates are higher, but still widely trailing pre-pandemic achievement levels that themselves were considered unacceptable at the time.
And yet this reality is coupled with research indicating that parents think their children are doing quite well in school — possibly because of grade inflation.
What do the labels mean?
Both rounds of proposed changes were meant to provide clarity. There also was a goal of expressing student performance in a positive way — called an “asset-based” approach — even if the scores themselves are low.
So, rather than sending out the message of Standard Not Met, the term proposed in November was Inconsistent. One board member suggested that term, too, might be too negative. Maybe “developing” was a better choice.
Even the original terms had euphemistic elements to them.
The phrase Standard Nearly Met, for example, includes a wide range of scores — some that were in fact nearly Proficient and others that ranged nearly to the lowest category.
In the November proposal, Foundational and Inconsistent drew strong outside objections.
“We are deeply concerned,” wrote the groups, which included EdTrust-West, Children Now, California Charter Schools Assn., Alliance for a Better Community and Teach Plus.
“The reality we are facing is many students across California are facing significant challenges when it comes to meeting grade level standards, particularly many low-income students, students of color, English learners, and students with learning differences,” the letter stated. “The proposed changes to these achievement level descriptions would make the data more confusing and misleading.”
Calling scores Foundational or Inconsistent “will only serve to obfuscate the data and make it even more challenging for families and advocates to lift up the needs of our most underserved students and ensure they have the support needed to thrive.”
An apparent compromise
If approved, the new categories are “the most common set of labels across the 50 states,” said Morgan Polikoff, professor of education at the USC Rossier School of Education, who was not involved in the decision. “My personal preference would probably be for as many states as possible to use consistent labels.”
The latest proposal is an improvement, said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University.
“I do question whether what may be a slight improvement in clarity is a distraction from the real issue: solving for the fact that California students are not mastering core subjects.”
The four achievement labels used by NAEP will not mean exactly the same thing if they are adopted in California. In general, the NAEP labels represent a more rigorous grading standard, with a higher threshold for achieving a rating of Proficient or Advanced. This means the higher levels are harder to achieve on NAEP than on California tests based on research that compared state tests with the national NAEP exams.
In addition, the discussion at the state board meeting in November included the concept that students who are one level below Proficient should still be viewed by the public as working at grade level — even if they might require extra support to achieve grade-level standards.
This direction alarmed advocates who said they want families to get a clear message when their child is not proficient.
Overall, the state tests offer a more precise check than NAEP on what students in California are supposed to be learning. The NAEP test, in contrast, tests a small sample of students to allow for state-to-state comparisons and does not send student scores to families.
It’s what happens with the information that’s ultimately important, said Thomas Kane, professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
If teachers explain to parents what a low score means, “parents are more likely to listen to their child’s teacher than to take to heart a government form letter that arrives in the mail. But it’s a difficult conversation to have and many teachers avoid it. It would benefit teachers, parents and students to provide an excuse (i.e. requirement) to have that conversation.”