The phantom collapse of student achievement in New York

In August 2013, New York State Education Commissioner John King released initial results of the state’s new assessment, which was designed to measure college- and career-readiness relative to the Common Core State Standards. King noted that proficiency rates on the assessments dropped significantly from the prior year’s — from 55% to 31% in reading and from 65% to 31% in math. These changes in student test performance caused educators and policy makers to question how test results were used and included calls to delay evaluations of student and teacher performance based on the results.

But in reality the observed drops in proficiency rates reflect an increase in the proficiency standard and not a decrease in student scores or performance. That is, the state raised the cut scores on these tests, which denote whether a student was proficient. That act made it more difficult for students to meet the new proficiency threshold. In a press release, the commissioner said the new standards broke from past practices:

Unfortunately, the Commissioner’s message that student performance did not decline, rather that students were held to a higher proficiency standard, was not fully understood. For example, a New York Times headline read, “Test scores sink as New York adopts tougher benchmarks” (Hernandez & Gebeloff, 2013). The Times correctly said the new tests were aligned to a more rigorous set of standards but inaccurately reported that test scores sank. In fact, the number of students passing these tests dropped dramatically, as the Commissioner noted, but the Times and other media failed to acknowledge that the changes in proficiency did not indicate a drop in performance. This distinction is extremely important.