In the alphabet soup land of education, that’s English Language Arts and English Language Learners, and the relationship between the two has lately stirred cayenne into the cauldron.
When the Dept. of Education announced the results of this year’s English Language Arts exams May 22, Chancellor Klein claimed progress across the board and an overall 2.8-point gain. But that was leaving out ELLs. Once ELL test results were factored in, scores declined in grades 3-5, were up modestly in grades 6 and 7, and gained significantly only in 8th grade. Overall, scores for grades 3-8 were up just one-tenth of one percent.
Was it fair to leave out ELLs for purposes of the more rosy comparison? In some ways it was. Statewide, more than twice as many ELLs took the ELAs in 2007, because this year new federal rules required any student who had been enrolled in the district for more than a year to take the test. Previously, students with less than three years in the system took an alternate test.
In New York City 31,000 more ELLs were tested in 2007 than 2006. Backing out ELLs tested in both 2006 and 2007 then is a reasonable apples to apples comparison. However, it’s not a simple mathematical matter.
As Juan Gonzalez wrote in the Daily News May 23, leaving out immigrant students essentially blamed them for the declines in early-grade scores. What’s worse, Gonzalez, citing research by Fred Smith, a former DOE analyst, reminded readers that two years ago, when scores shot up, the Chancellor claimed credit and didn’t separate out ELLs, even though there were 4,364 more ELL exemptions in 2005 than 2004. Nor did DOE emphasize that 3,000 third grade Level 1s had been held back at the end of 2004, helping raise 4th grade achievement that next year.
Smith wrote a fine piece in yesterday’s New York Sun, revealing that it took him a freedom-of-information-law request and 9 months to get a breakdown of ELL counts for 2004-05 out of DOE. When he finally got them, he recalculated scores and showed that the achievement gaps had not narrowed by anywhere near as much as the chancellor had claimed in 2005. The chancellor cannot have it both ways–good news by excluding the ELLs this year, but then good news without mentioning the increase in ELL exemptions and the 3rd grade retention policy in 2005.
(Smith is working on a book about the city test reporting, tentatively titled “Failing the Test.”)
Let’s remember, the city has 141,000 ELLs, and more than 55,000 of them took the 2007 ELA. This is hardly a small population. The chancellor seemed more like a grade-grubber than the statesmanlike leader of an inclusive system in rushing to exclude them from the counts, evidently in order to boost the city results.
He even had his press guy, David Cantor, fire off a churlish reply to Gonzalez in the Daily News May 30, claiming DOE had revealed the 2005 exemptions. Maybe in a footnote, but nowhere did it admit what Smith found: that 4th grade scores were inflated by 4.3 points that year from the extra ELL exemptions and 3rd grade retention, close to half that historical 2005 gain.
And here’s an irony. What went unremarked in the chancellor’s test score announcement was the fact that a higher percentage of ELLs in the city achieved the learning standards in 2007 than in 2006. Sixteen percent of ELLs met standards in grades 3-8, up from 10.7 percent in 2006, and this included the 31,000 ELLs who had been in city schools just a year or two. At the same time, there was an 11-point drop in the percent of ELLs scoring at Level 1, the lowest level. That sounds like good news, not news to be buried. In 2005, the city’s ELL students weren’t doing as well as ELLs in the rest of the state, with about 70 percent of NYC ELLs meeting progress standards on the alternate test compared with 76 percent statewide.
Bilingual and ESL educators should be proud of their students’ 2007 achievements, even if the DOE is screwing around with the numbers.
5 Comments:
1 jd2718
· Jun 2, 2007 at 10:21 am
I renew my observation on this data-mush: comparison of this year’s grade 4 to last year’s grade 4 is far less meaningful than comparison of this year’s grade 5 to last year’s grade 4, or this year’s grade 8 to four years ago’s grade 4.
But collecting and analyzing meaningful data is far harder than creating their number-porridge. And good data might show how absolutely unreliable their assessments are.
Jonathan
2 Chancellor Klein's School(System) Progress Report: Part 2 Student Progress FAILED! CHEATING! « Ed In The Apple
· Jun 3, 2007 at 7:20 am
[...] NYSun, the teacher union blog and Diane Ravitch have all sharply questioned the methodology of the [...]
3 phyllis c. murray
· Jun 3, 2007 at 7:55 am
Equity for All: Myth or Reality
By Phyllis C. Murray
In “Beyond No Child Left Behind ” Thomas Sobol states the following: “Jefferson tells us and most of us know, our form of government and ways of life depend upon an educated citizenry. Preparing young people for effective participation in a democratic society is a fundamental purpose of our public schools.” Sobol continues, “Today we are experiencing an influx of “foreign” children, largely from Asia and Central America. How we handle these children – who will soon become a majority in large parts of our country – will determine what their lives will be, and what ours will be in turn. The stakes are high, so the questions abound: how can we best get these children to speak, read, and write English? Who goes to school, with whom? How should schools communicate with non-English-speaking parents? What kinds of tests should immigrant children be required to pass? How can we close the “achievement gap” between these children and those in the majority population? How can we make “Americans” of these children in their own lifetime, while respecting the cultural identity of their families?We need to raise and debate these questions now, or leave the outcomes to blind chance and happenstance. One way or another, our nation will be changed. ”
I believe academic excellence must be the goal for all students and educators. Our schools must not be allowed to become battlefields for minorities and other students. Education must be the sole priority. Hence, these standards must be set high, and all students must be held accountable. The reward for achieving academic excellence also must be clear. Furthermore, teachers must be treated as professionals, rewarded as professionals and held accountable to the standards of their profession. They must be allowed and, in fact, encouraged to be involved the decisions that affect their work and the academic performance of their students.
We need to do whatever we can to provide the resources all students need. Our goal should be to establish standards the will challenge all students to do their best, and that will help schools to stay focused on their primary mission… the education of our students. If the “preparation of our students for effective participation in a democratic society.” is the goal of public education, no child should be left behind. Nor should the “one-size fits all” test practice become the new mantra for NCLB.
Phyllis C. Murray
UFT Chapter Leader
District 8 Region 2
4 Jackie Bennett
· Jun 3, 2007 at 8:51 am
2005 … bumping the scores up….an election year, as I recall…
5 jd2718
· Jun 3, 2007 at 9:30 pm
Jackie,
that may be intentional… but I don’t think they are necessarily good enough at test making to get consistent results (or even specially tweaked results) year after year. But if the 2005 scores look to be out of whack, I agree we should be suspicious.
Jonathan
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