Chalkbeat

Philadelphia’s school selection process postponed to October

2026-08-31T21:50:50+00:00

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Philadelphia’s school selection process this year will begin later than usual as the district waits for state officials to finalize standardized test scores.

The process will now open on Oct. 5 at 4 p.m. and close on Nov. 24, according to a statement from district officials late on Monday.

The selective admissions process was originally scheduled to open on Sept. 8, Superintendent Tony Watlington told families as much in his back-to-school letter just last week. The district’s subsequent decision to postpone the admissions process was done to ensure “families have access to official, verified 2026 assessment data when making their school choices,” according to the district statement.

Delays in releasing scores from the 2025-26 PSSA and Keystone exams have left educators and school leaders scrambling this year, and created uncertainty for families. District officials did receive preliminary PSSA score information in June but have opted not to release those scores to educators and families. Instead, they’re waiting for the state to review and release official results, which officials expect sometime this fall.

Criteria-based schools in the city usually rely on the most recent PSSA exams as part of their admissions requirements. District officials had previously said students would take an “alternative assessment” that could replace the PSSAs.

Monday’s statement said students will use both their 2025 assessment results and the official 2026 data as part of their applications this year.

“Once the verified 2026 PSSA and Keystone results are released … later this fall, District staff will contact all applicants to assist them with submitting their scores,” the district said. “Families do not need to take any action regarding their 2026 assessment scores at this time.”

There are several other important updates to the selective admissions process this year:

The district will only consider final grades in English Language Arts (or reading), math, and science. Grades in social studies, writing, or any other class won’t be used to determine a student’s eligibility for school admission.
Students who attended the district’s summer career and technical education program will get priority if they are applying to such a program for the 2027-28 school year.
ZIP code preference is still a factor in the admissions system. Families whose home address is within one of the following eligible ZIP codes may receive priority consideration when applying to Masterman, Central, Carver, and Palumbo: 19132, 19133, 19135, 19138, 19140, 19141.
Prekindergarten students seeking to enroll in the same school for kindergarten will get lottery preference.
The individualized review process has been expanded. This process is used for students who are English learners and those with disabilities or 504 plans. Those students will receive an individualized review regardless of whether they meet the eligibility requirements for any criteria-based school to which they applied. District officials said this is designed to allow more qualifying students applying to criteria-based middle and high schools to be considered.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia’s state test scores are delayed this year

2026-08-18T22:51:00+00:00

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Typically, Philadelphia teachers and principals use state test scores from the prior school year to assess student learning, roster kids into the proper classes, and prepare for the year to come.

Not this year.

Several teachers told Chalkbeat this week they haven’t seen results from the 2025-26 PSSA or Keystone exams and aren’t sure why. In the past, these scores have been shared with educators and school leaders around June. Teachers returned to classrooms this week for professional development, and students will return on Aug. 24.

School district officials said the holdup is with the state.

The district “has been notified that the release of official statewide PSSA and Keystone results by the Pennsylvania Department of Education is on hold,” district spokespeople said in a statement to Chalkbeat Tuesday. They did not respond to requests for clarification.

A spokesperson from PDE said in an email that school-level data did get sent out to school districts in June but that a “review of preliminary data is still underway.”

The delay will have ripple effects for students, educators, and school leaders. Though they have some student data from STAR benchmark exams, school staff rely in part on state assessments to determine which students need additional support, where teachers are most needed, and where extra resources should be spent.

The district “cannot use the 2025-26 assessment results to evaluate year-over-year student achievement or as the required criterion for school selection,” according to its statement.

Instead, students will be able to take an “alternative assessment” in the fall and submit those results. Not having state test scores for school selection could pose a host of new issues for families when that process opens on Sept. 8, but without further information from the district, any potential impact on admissions is unclear.

Typically, the state releases PSSA and Keystone test data to districts early in the summer. District officials then have a period, usually from June through July, to review the data, share it with school leaders, and make sure nothing looks awry. After that, the state sends out statewide comparison data that districts can share publicly. In past years, that comparison data was shared at school board meetings by September or October.

According to a field message PDE sent Tuesday morning, the statewide comparison data is still being analyzed and is not being shared publicly. However, that message confirms districts received preliminary school-level assessment data in June.

It is unclear why the district wouldn’t be able to rely on those results to measure student achievement or make school selection decisions.

Several Philly charter school leaders have shared preliminary state test results with their teachers, Chalkbeat has confirmed.

At least one Pennsylvania school district — Conrad Weiser Area School District in Berks County — has shared its preliminary PSSA data, according to school board documents.

Philadelphia is not the only district grappling with test score controversy. Testing experts are calling for an investigation into New York City’s scores, and New Jersey educators say their state score delays are forcing schools to start their academic years without crucial data.

This story has been updated to include comment from the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Why a Philly district report on the success of its summer programs includes ‘imperfect data points’

2026-08-14T16:52:31+00:00

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From the field trips to the childcare, Philly kids and their families say they’re enjoying the summer school programs provided by the school district and the city.

But are these programs translating to more success in the classroom? That question has been a tough puzzle to solve for district officials. And a report conducted by the district doesn’t necessarily provide encouraging — or clear — answers.

Every summer, thousands of students participate in the bevy of free summer programs Philadelphia offers. They range from camps and sports to workforce training, traditional classroom learning, and safe spaces for young people. Superintendent Tony Watlington and Mayor Cherelle Parker have promoted the programs in part as a way to boost academic achievement and reinforce math and reading skills during the summer, when the threat of learning loss is greatest.

But a new report from the school district about summer programming in 2025 found some students in three grade levels who participated in Summer Achievers — a core part of Parker’s push for year-round school — experienced more learning loss in reading on the Star assessment compared with district students overall. The report’s authors caution that in general, district students’ fall Star test scores are lower than their spring scores from the previous school year, due to the “summer slide.”

The popularity of these programs is growing: From 2023 to 2025, enrollment in the five largest summer programs rose from roughly 14,800 students in 2023 to nearly 16,800 students in 2025. And national research has found that summer programs can help students’ academic progress in math and literacy.

But spotty attendance is one of the reasons why measuring academic outcomes for students in summer programs can be difficult. The district does not track whether students attend the academic portion of the summer programs, or which students come on which days.

Several researchers told Chalkbeat that the district’s analysis, which it published in June, is ultimately inconclusive. They also raised questions about how the district is measuring academic success for students in the program. Not all Summer Achievers students took the Star assessments. And the report doesn’t say how to distinguish outcomes for Summer Achievers, who are also district students, from the district’s overall performance.

“You can’t tell from this [report] whether or not the summer programs had any significant positive impact on participants relative to the district,” Jon Supovitz, director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at the University of Pennsylvania, said in an interview.

There are separate, broader challenges related to assessing these summer programs, like isolating the effects of academic-focused programs from recreational ones. The programs, most of which are voluntary and free, attract a different group of kids than the district educates overall.

District officials told Chalkbeat that summer programming isn’t like tutoring and shouldn’t be evaluated the same way. They said their test score analysis was meant to be descriptive and includes “imperfect data points” intended to guide future summer program planning efforts. The programs are evolving and are intended to help students succeed over a longer stretch of time, they added.

“Would we expect there to be dramatic changes? Probably not, based on the model of the program,” Joy Lesnick, the district’s deputy chief of research, evaluation, and academic partnerships, said in an interview.

The district is betting that getting young people in the habit and pattern of attending school — or school-like environments — will boost attendance rates and create a positive association with learning that will compound over time.

“If you’re in the pattern of going to school and it’s a fun thing that you do and you’re doing these things that you enjoy, then you’re going to keep coming,” Lesnick said.

Summer Achievers just wrapped up its third summer. It’s part English and math class staffed by district teachers, part summer camp. It’s not mandatory and runs for around six weeks for four days a week from June to July. Lesnick said that works out to around 20 days of programming — the academic portion can account for three to four hours of each day.

But district officials say the intent of the programs goes beyond boosting standardized test scores.

“Ultimately we want the academic achievement to improve,” Lesnick said. “We also know that engagement and a strong school climate and a love of learning are also really important things to keep going, especially if you’re young.”

The report did identify what the district considers successful outcomes from some of the other five largest summer programs, although those aren’t based on measures like test scores. Nearly two-thirds of students required to attend Summer School recovered one or more academic credits, and nearly 60% of enrolled seniors graduated over the summer of 2025 as a result.

For some students, the programs are having the desired effect in terms of changing their mindset about school.

“This program actually helped me,” one summer school participant said in a written response to the district’s survey included in the 2025 report. “I’m glad I experienced this because it was a wake up call to come to school more.”

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

How can schools better prepare students after high school? Here’s what a few experts say.

2026-05-13T19:19:39+00:00

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Several states — including Pennsylvania — have recently overhauled graduation requirements in an effort to ensure students are better prepared for college and careers.

Many now encourage students to earn credentials, like workplace safety certifications, to meet graduation requirements. But with little oversight over which credentials students earn, many in Philadelphia and elsewhere get low-value ones just to check a box.

“Philly is really a microcosm of what’s happening across the country,” said Matt Giani, a research associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, during a Chalkbeat panel event Tuesday. His research has found that credentials vary widely in how valuable they are to students. Without good oversight, schools often find the most efficient ways to help students get credentials — which often means offering ones that are cheap and easy to pass.

Panelists Monica Hawk, CEO of Philadelphia’s One Bright Ray Community High School, and Sean Vereen, president and CEO of the nonprofit Heights Philadelphia, said they’ve seen this play out with Philly students. It’s a good thing, they said, that students know there are paths to success beyond college. But so far, those paths don’t have enough support or funding, they said.

“I think there is a real opportunity,” said Vereen. “But it puts more pressure on the thing we don’t provide kids enough of, which is advice and good counseling.”

Some states are addressing this issue head-on. Ohio has created a tiered system of credentials to encourage schools and students to pursue the ones that are most valuable. And overall, “schools and states are learning how to do this better,” said Giani.

Catch up on the full panel discussion here.

Rebecca Redelmeier is a reporter at Chalkbeat Philadelphia. She writes about public schools, early childhood education, and issues that affect students, families, and educators across Philadelphia. Contact Rebecca at rredelmeier@chalkbeat.org.

After a $45 million math curriculum overhaul, Philadelphia sees results

2026-01-15T22:55:32+00:00

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Philadelphia students’ average scores on state math tests have reached their highest rate in nine years, marking a significant recovery from pandemic-era learning loss.

Students from almost every racial group made gains along with students who are English learners, district officials said Thursday at a non-voting Board of Education meeting.

“I’m giddy with excitement,” said Board of Education President Reginald Streater. He added that he remembered a time where these kinds of scores seemed “so far away.”

Still, only around one-quarter of students in grades 3-8 achieved proficient scores on last year’s math state test, called the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, or PSSA. That’s far from the district’s goal of more than half of the students in those grades achieving proficient scores in math by August 2030.

The gains come as the district struggles with declining scores in reading.

Philly schools began implementing a new math curriculum from Imagine Learning Illustrative Mathematics during the 2023-24 school year, following a $45 million overhaul. The district also recently expanded its high-impact math tutoring program for middle school students.

Deputy Superintendent of Academic Services Jermaine Dawson said scores in third grade math were particularly promising, with more than one third of those students achieving proficient scores last year. That indicates that both teachers and students are becoming more familiar with the new curriculum, Dawson said.

Superintendent Tony Watlington attributed the success to the district’s increased investment in coaching and supporting teachers as they implement the curriculum.

“Giving people more technology, more artificial intelligence, more Chromebooks, more stuff, more tutors, more mentoring — we’ve done all that for decades,” Watlington said. He said that having highly qualified, well-supported and stable teachers is what “moves the needle.”

Philadelphia’s success in math echoes a statewide trend of math scores increasing since the pandemic. But reading scores in Philly and statewide have gone in the opposite direction, and it’s unclear what’s fueling the decline.

Last year, Philadelphia implemented a new reading curriculum and rolled out more reading supports. Still, third grade reading scores remain below where they were a decade ago.

District data also shows a clear correlation between student attendance and achievement. Dawson said his team is focusing on working more with partner organizations and families to reduce the number of students who frequently miss class.

More Philadelphia students are graduating without passing state exams, new data shows

2026-01-12T19:37:10+00:00

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In the three years since Pennsylvania overhauled its high school graduation requirements, Philadelphia students have increasingly graduated without passing state exams.

Instead, students last year were most likely to graduate by fulfilling alternate requirements, according to new district data.

All students still must earn a certain number of course credits. But they can meet additional graduation requirements by being accepted into a four-year college, earning a certain score on career and technical education exams or SATs, and showing “evidence” that they’re prepared for college or jobs, among other options.

The change has been fast. The Class of 2023 was the first to graduate via the new system. Since then, the portion of Philly students who graduated by meeting certain score thresholds for their state exams dropped from more than 50% to around a third.

Tell us about your experience with Pennsylvania's graduation requirements

But lawmakers and state officials have published little follow-up that examines whether the shift has left young Pennsylvanians more or less prepared for their futures.

Pennsylvania Department of Education spokesperson Erin James said in a statement that it is “difficult to correlate graduation pathways with other postsecondary metrics” because it is hard to track students after high school. Researchers partnering with the district in Philadelphia say understanding the impact of the new system in the city will likely take years.

Since the switch, one alternative pathway to graduation has ballooned in popularity: submitting industry-recognized credentials. That’s a broad term used to describe certifications that are sought after by certain sectors, like medical assistant credentials, emergency first aid certifications, and auto mechanic qualifications.

Last school year, more than 3,400 Philly students — around 40% of those who had completed enough credits that made them eligible to graduate — submitted at least one industry-recognized credential to graduate. Some submitted them exclusively.

Neither the district nor the state publish a list of which credentials students are using to fulfill this requirement.

When then-Gov. Tom Wolf signed the new graduation requirements into law in 2018, he said in a statement that the aim was to give students “several options to demonstrate what they’ve learned and that they’re ready to graduate from high school to start a career or continue their education.”

The move permanently did away with the legislature’s previous plan to make passing the Keystones a requirement to graduate.

“How a student does on high stakes tests is not a useful way to decide if someone is ready to graduate from high school,” Wolf said at the time.

Yet amid the booming number of students earning industry-recognized credentials in Philadelphia and nationwide, some researchers worry that there isn’t enough evidence that they’re all useful.

“It’s great to have an alternative option, because there just are going to be some kids who aren’t going to go to college,” said Jay Plasman, a professor at The Ohio State University who has studied how earning credentials affects student outcomes. “The problem is not all credentials are created equally.”

Earning credentials is part of what’s called the “evidence-based” pathway to graduation. It requires students to submit three pieces of “evidence” from a pre-approved state list. Credentials count as evidence, as does being accepted into a two-year college; attaining a guarantee of full-time employment; earning a college-level course credit; achieving certain AP, IB, or SAT scores; and other options.

There are a total of 12 evidence options. Submitting credentials is the most popular one by far.

The state’s list of recommended credentials includes everything from certifications for barbers and child care workers to credentials related to Microsoft Office and ladder safety. Experts warn it’s important that states carefully review credentials to ensure they’re valuable to students and can lead to good jobs.

Philadelphia offers credentials from a subset of the state’s list, along with additional options based on student interest and industry recommendations for students graduating via the “evidence-based” pathway, according to district Executive Director of Career and Technical Education Michelle Armstrong.

It’s unclear which credentials are most popular among students, given the lack of public data about them.

The district’s graduation rate has risen in recent years, with more than 77% of students graduating within four years in the 2023-24 school year, the most recent year of data available.

Obtaining a high school diploma is valuable, and researchers have found that those who graduate high school are likely to earn more and live longer than those without.

But the increase comes as Philly students’ achievement on some state exams has fallen or remained largely unchanged. Last year, only around a third of Philly students achieved proficient scores on the state literature Keystone. Even fewer achieved proficient scores in algebra and biology.

Alyn Turner, co-director of the Philadelphia Education Research Consortium, which partners with the district, said her team is working to analyze which pathways students are accessing and what evidence they’re using to fulfill requirements. But she said the larger question of whether students are more prepared for jobs or college is still unknown.

“The extent to which this policy is supportive of that, or adding additional barriers to that, we just don’t know,” Turner said.

As more students in Philadelphia and statewide graduate without passing state tests, instead earning credentials or fulfilling alternate graduation requirements, Chalkbeat wants to hear from you: tell us about your experience with the state’s new approach to graduation.

We need your help reporting on how students, families, and teachers have experienced the new graduation requirements. And we want to understand how students graduating by earning credentials or fulfilling alternate requirements are faring during their final years of high school and after they leave.

Help us by filling out this survey.

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Philadelphia schools’ math scores rise but reading scores fall slightly on latest state tests

2025-11-14T19:12:00+00:00

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Superintendent Tony Watlington says it repeatedly: He wants Philadelphia to be the “fastest improving large, urban school district in the country.”

But state test scores from the 2024-25 school year, released Thursday, show the district still has a lot of work to do.

Around a quarter of students in grades 3-8 achieved proficient scores in math on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, or PSSA, last school year. That marks a slight improvement from the prior school year.

But elementary and middle school students’ reading scores dipped slightly, with around one-third of students achieving proficient scores.

The new data also shows big disparities in student achievement. Black and Hispanic students scored significantly lower than their white and Asian peers. Students who are economically disadvantaged also scored lower than the district average.

Scores remained particularly low for students with disabilities, even though district officials said last year they had a “robust plan” to boost those students’ achievement.

Around 8% of students with disabilities scored proficient in reading last school year, which is nearly identical to the year before. Around 6% scored proficient in math, a slight increase.

The state received a federal waiver for the science PSSA and did not report scores from the last school year because the state was in the process of adopting and implementing new science standards. Students still took a form of the science PSSA last year and the state reported participation rates.

In high school, when students take Keystone exams rather than PSSAs, nearly half of all students passed the literature Keystone test by 11th grade. Around one-third passed the biology Keystone and one-fourth passed the algebra Keystone. (Most students must demonstrate proficiency in Keystone subjects to graduate, but they can do so by meeting other requirements, like passing related classes.)

Preliminary data the district shared in October showed that last school year, student and teacher attendance rose several percentage points. The district also had more than 800 fewer students drop out than the previous year.

Test scores show statewide dip in reading achievement

Philadelphia students’ scores still remain far below the state average.

But the district’s struggle to boost reading scores isn’t unique. Statewide, reading scores of students in grades 3-8 fell by four percentage points last year — a larger drop than in Philly.

As part of the state budget, which passed Wednesday, Pennsylvania committed $10 million to literacy initiatives. The budget also included new requirements that all school districts must use evidence-based reading curriculum beginning with the 2027-28 school year.

Philadelphia implemented a new reading curriculum last year as part of its $100 million curriculum overhaul. The school year before that, it implemented a new math curriculum, and this year it rolled out a new science curriculum.

District officials previously said the new reading scores exposed weak points in how they implemented the new curriculum, and that they planned to provide more support for students and training for staff.

After a $25 million curriculum overhaul, Philly’s reading scores have fallen

2025-10-23T01:35:15+00:00

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When Philadelphia school officials announced preliminary new achievement data earlier this month, one trend was especially concerning: Philadelphia third graders are less likely to be proficient readers than they were a year ago.

The district — like many across the country — has spent millions to try to improve literacy instruction and reading scores. If kids can’t read by the end of third grade, research shows they’ll have an increasingly difficult time catching up.

The initial data is especially notable because during the 2024-25 school year, Philadelphia began implementing a new reading curriculum based on the science of reading at a cost of $25 million. State lawmakers have also pushed for legislation meant to ensure reading instruction follows research-backed methods.

Still, crucial third grade reading rates remain low, with fewer than 1 in 3 third graders able to read proficiently last school year, according to the district’s preliminary data from the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment test. That’s lower than scores the year before, when the district hadn’t yet adopted the new curriculum.

At a school board meeting earlier this month, Superintendent Tony Watlington said that he expected that progress would not be linear. District officials said they plan to continue to invest in training teachers on how to use the new curriculum and provide tutoring to struggling students.

But literacy instruction experts and advocates say the declining scores mean it’s urgent for Philadelphia to improve preparing teachers to teach the new curriculum and support students who fall behind.

“Just looking at the outright percentage of students who are reading proficiently, it’s extremely troubling,” said Laura Boyce, Pennsylvania executive director of the advocacy organization Teach Plus. “It just doesn’t bode well for our future workforce or our city as a whole if we aren’t able to accelerate things.”

New reading curriculum exposed weak points, officials say

At the school board meeting earlier this month, district officials said the low English language arts scores from last school year revealed crucial information.

Along with a dip of nearly three percentage points in the number of third graders scoring proficient or advanced on the state reading tests compared with the year before, the share of students in grades 3-8 with proficient scores also fell slightly. (Officials said further breakdowns of the data will be released in November.)

In addition, the preliminary data shows that the percentage of Philadelphia third graders who read proficiently is lower than it was a decade ago.

“What this curriculum has exposed for us is that many of these students did not have the foundational skills that were provided and what was expected of them on the state assessment,” said Jermaine Dawson, the district’s deputy superintendent of academic services, at the meeting.

Dawson added that to address some of the challenges, the district aims to “make sure that comprehension is more amplified” in English language arts instruction and grow its high-impact tutoring program.

District officials did not respond to Chalkbeat’s requests for information about how the district will address low reading scores. During a discussion of the curriculum at a board meeting last year, Watlington said, “When you try something new, outcomes get worse before they get better. It’s very common in education.”

When Chalkbeat spoke with Philadelphia teachers implementing the new curriculum last year, many shared concerns that they weren’t adequately trained on the new materials. Though teachers said they were glad the new curriculum followed research-backed methods, some said there was not enough support for struggling readers in the program.

Kymyona Burk, senior policy fellow at ExcelinEd, an education policy advocacy organization, said training teachers to implement new curriculum and providing support is essential to achieving results.

“There’s nothing that’s going to be this kind of magic pill,” said Burk, who previously served as the state literacy director at the Mississippi Department of Education, where she led implementation of Mississippi’s landmark literacy law. “It’s the preparation that goes into it.”

Burk and other literacy experts said Philadelphia’s new curriculum, from the curriculum company EL Education, is well regarded.

But to be effective, the curriculum overhaul must include in-depth teacher training, coaching, professional development, parent engagement, and screening of kids to understand what’s working, Burk said. She estimated it takes teachers at least a year to get acquainted with new curriculum materials, even with support.

Though Philadelphia school officials have provided training to teachers on the new curriculum, the low scores indicate more is needed, said Julia Cadwallender, managing director of the local advocacy organization Read by 4th.

As teachers get used to the curriculum, she said she’s hopeful the district’s reading scores will begin to improve, just as the district’s math scores have risen two years after it implemented a new math curriculum.

“We have to recognize the ups and downs that exist in actually creating any lasting change,” Cadwallender said.

Philadelphia NAEP scores rise in fourth grade math but stay flat in other subjects

2025-01-29T05:07:00+00:00

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Philadelphia students’ fourth grade math scores are on the rise, according to newly released test results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as NAEP.

However, city students’ scores in math and reading are still well below their peers’ scores in Pennsylvania, below the average for all large cities, and below national averages.

In the other subjects that NAEP tests — fourth grade reading and eighth grade math and reading — Philly students scored about the same as they did in 2022. Black and Hispanic students in Philly continue to score far below their white and Asian American peers, highlighting the persistent equity gaps that exist for these students.

According to a Chalkbeat analysis, Philly students’ NAEP scores — and scores nationwide — were rising in both math and reading from 2009 to 2013. But since then, students’ scores have dropped precipitously, especially in eighth grade math.

Superintendent Tony Watlington told Chalkbeat the new scores “absolutely validate” that “there is some real progress occurring in this school district.” He added he was not surprised to see fourth grade math performance improve because he’s seeing similar trends in the district’s internal and state test data for third and fourth grade. Watlington said it’s all “part of the strategy to concentrate resources in those early grades.”

Watlington says he is particularly proud of Philly students’ post-pandemic performance. He frequently cites a Stanford University “recovery scorecard” that showed Philly students demonstrated the fastest 2022-23 post-pandemic recovery in math for grades 3-8, and the second-fastest recovery for reading in grades 3-8, among large urban school districts. (The study is based on a weighted comparison of student performance on state tests.) The district has also invested millions in updated curriculum and resources which Watlington says will only compound Philly’s gains in the years to come.

“We’re seeing some immediate improvement” due to the new math curriculum, Watlington said, which he thinks will also be the case for English Language Arts as classrooms continue to adopt new resources for that subject. “I fully expect, in two years, when we give the NAEP assessment again, to begin to see some movement in fourth grade reading,” he said.

NAEP is administered to a representative sample of fourth and eighth graders in reading and math, unlike the state PSSA test, which is given to all students. City students also show low proficiency rates on the PSSA compared to the rest of Pennsylvania. Because only some students take the exams, NAEP results come with some uncertainty in the form of a margin of error.

“One of the reasons why our city has underperformed the Commonwealth average is because our kids have significantly lower attendance in school,” Watlington said. At the same time he pointed to district data showing student attendance has been increasing in Philly recently and the number of students dropping out has been decreasing.

NAEP scores show Philly students gained in math

In fourth grade math, Philadelphia saw a seven-point increase in the average scores from 209 in 2022 to 216 in 2024, which is a higher rate of improvement than Pennsylvania overall. Average scores statewide held steady at 238 — the same as in 2022. NAEP results are reported as average scores on a 0-500 scale.

The percentage of Philadelphia students at or above NAEP proficiency also increased to 19% from 13% in 2022. Philly still falls well below the state however: In Pennsylvania, 41% of students scored at or above proficiency, about the same as in 2022.

In eighth grade math, Philly performed about on par with 2022, with 15% of Philly students at or above NAEP proficiency, compared to 13% in 2022. The average score in eighth grade math was 252 — the same as in 2022. Philly is still below Pennsylvania’s overall average score of 276, which rose from 274 in 2022.

In fourth-grade reading, Philadelphia students scored 195 on average — the same as in 2022. Pennsylvania students overall scored 216, a slight decrease from an average score of 219 in 2022 but not a change NAEP officials deemed statistically significant. In relation to their peers from all large cities, Philly students came up short. In 2024, 17% of students in Philly scored proficient or better, while 26% of their peers in large cities as a whole scored proficient or above. Nationwide, 30% of students scored proficient or better — down from 32% in 2022.

In eighth grade reading, Philly and Pennsylvania students maintained their scores from 2022. Philly students scored on average 242, the same as in 2022. Statewide, students scored on average 259, the same as two years ago. Philly students remain well below their statewide and national peers in the percent of students who scored proficient or better: In Philly, 18% of students scored proficient or better, compared with 31% of students in Pennsylvania, 26% in large cities, and 29% nationally.

Philadelphia, which has the highest poverty rate among all big cities, outperformed just a handful of urban districts. For instance, in fourth grade math, Philadelphia scored lower than 21 districts and higher than four districts — Cleveland, Milwaukee, Detroit and Baltimore City — among the 26 that are included in the Trial Urban District Assessment. In eighth grade math, it did a little better, performing lower than 17 districts, on a par with six, and higher than two, Cleveland and Detroit.

The last time the federal government released NAEP scores over two years ago, they were used as a barometer for how well students had recovered from the pandemic, a period marked by school closures. Philadelphia’s schools closed for in-person learning in March 2020 and did not reopen until the beginning of the 2021-22 school year.

Philadelphia’s 2022 NAEP scores were well below the national and Pennsylvania averages, but scores for city students did not decline as much as they did for students in some other big cities. Fourth grade math scores dropped, but the other scores — in fourth grade reading and eighth grade reading and math — were statistically unchanged.

Even so, Watlington saw hope in the 2022 results. “Given the many challenges that all school districts have experienced these past three years is encouraging news that we intend to build on going forward,” he said at the time.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Math achievement in Philadelphia is improving but remains very low, data shows

2025-01-17T14:47:56+00:00

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Philadelphia students’ proficiency rates in math are rising modestly but still remain low, according to an update the Philadelphia Board of Education received Thursday.

Deputy Superintendent Jermaine Dawson told board members that on the district’s most recent internal assessments — called “Star Assessments,” which are different from the state’s annual standardized tests — 22.8% of students in grades 3-8 scored at or above proficiency in math, an improvement from 18% at the beginning of this school year.

Dawson’s presentation was part of an update on the district’s Goals and Guardrails initiative, a strategic plan adopted by the school board just over four years ago that set targets for academic achievement. Board members expressed hope about the numbers but also said more must be done to help schools get on track to meet the initiative’s aims.

Students in all racial and ethnic groups improved, although persistent disparities on the Star Assessment for math state tests remained. For instance, 13% of Black students were proficient in math, compared with 14% of Hispanic, 43% of white, 50% of Asian American, and 30% of multi-racial students, according to the Star Assessments.

Board members also got an update on trends for state tests. The percentage of third through eighth graders who scored proficient or advanced in math on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, or PSSA, rose from 16.5% in 2021-22 to 22% last school year, said Joy Lesnick, the district’s deputy chief of research, evaluation, and academic partnership.

The Goals and Guardrails plan calls for 52% of students in grades 3-8 to be proficient on the PSSA by 2030. The state released last year’s PSSA scores in November.

This school year is the second that the district is using a math curriculum called Illustrative Math. It’s part of a $100 million curriculum overhaul the district adopted in 2022 shortly after the arrival of Superintendent Tony Watlington.

“There were some growing pains” in implementing both a new English Language Arts and math curriculum, Watlington said Thursday. But he added the district has been working closely with principals and teachers, and with their union leadership, to enhance the quality of classroom instruction.

Students in kindergarten through second grade are also improving on mastery of the appropriate curriculum benchmarks between the fall and winter of this school year, Dawson said. Such benchmarks include recognizing numbers, understanding the concept of quantity, and being able to add and subtract numbers up to 20 by the time students are in second grade.

“If we continue on this trend, that will be a contributing factor in [improving] performance of our students in third grade” and beyond, said Dawson, a former math teacher.

Board President Reginald Streater said that “while we’re still not where we want to be,” the progress is encouraging. “No one in this room is satisfied, but we are extremely pleased,” he said, especially with the collaboration among teachers, principals, administrators and employee unions.

“We are making more progress in lifting the floor, trying to raise the ceiling as well,” Watlington said. He noted that big goals — he used the example of losing weight and building muscle — aren’t reached all at once but are reached as a result of “incremental growth.”

Board member ChauWing Lam praised Dawson “for the sustained, steady progress of the past few years.” But she noted that reaching the 2030 goal for math proficiency will require a faster rate of improvement than has been occurring so far.

“I do believe strongly that we will get there,” Dawson responded, citing the district’s investment in extensive professional development for teachers and principals. He added that the district is working to provide “intensive supports” to schools that need them.

The district is also expanding high-impact tutoring from 16 tutors working in two schools to 53 working in eight schools, where they will help 447 students.

It also plans to restart Parent University, which offers classes to parents and caregivers in academics and other topics so they can help children with their school work.

“We don’t have a deficit view of our parents,” said Watlington. While it is parents’ responsibility to send their students to school on time and prepared, he said, “It is absolutely educators’ responsibility to teach kids to read, do math … we are excited to be working in partnership with our parents.”

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

See how your Philadelphia school did on the latest state tests

2024-11-26T22:30:16+00:00

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Philadelphia students made some nominal gains in their standardized test scores last school year, but most remain below proficiency, according to new data released by the state on Tuesday.

In addition, major gaps between student groups remain. Black students are still scoring far below their white and Asian peers in all subjects. And students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds are struggling to achieve proficiency.

“We are on the right track but the data also tells us we have an awful long way to go,” Superintendent Tony Watlington said at a school board meeting last month when releasing some initial test score data. “It absolutely is not enough.”

Spokespeople for the Philadelphia school district did not release any new statements or comments on the scores as of Tuesday evening.

Philly schools are in the midst of implementing a $70 million curriculum update for English Language Arts, math, and science. District officials have praised the new instructional materials as “state-of-the-art” and a core part of Watlington’s five-year strategic plan for improving the district.

But, Watlington has acknowledged that new curriculum overhauls can often lead to early “implementation dips” at the start, as students and educators get adjusted to the new materials. In the long run, Watlington said last month, he expects these curriculum changes to have significant benefits for students.

“When you try something new, outcomes get worse before they get better. It’s very common in education,” Watlington said at October’s Goals and Guardrails meeting.

Scores released Tuesday from the 2023-2024 Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, or PSSA, show that about a third of Philly students score proficient or above in English Language Arts (ELA), and only a fifth did so in math. The percentage proficient in ELA was unchanged from the prior year, while in math, the percentage increased by 1.4 percentage points. In science, the share of students performing at or above proficiency improved by .3 percentage points.

In ELA, 34.2% of Philly students in grades 3-8 scored proficient or above in 2023-24 — the same percentage as in 2022-23. Statewide, students’ English Language Arts proficiency decreased from 54.5% in 2022-23 to 53.9% in 2023-24.

In math, 21.8% of Philly students in grades 3-8 scored proficient or above in 2023-24, an increase from the 20.4% scoring proficient of above in 2022-23. Statewide, 40.2% of all students scored proficient or above in math in 2023-24.

In science, 41.3% of Philly students in grades 4 and 8 scored proficient or above in 2023-24 compared to 41% the previous year. Statewide, 59.2% of students in those grades scored proficient or advanced in 2023-24.

In ELA, just 24.6% of Black students reached proficiency, compared to 57.7% of white students and 61.6% of Asian students. For Hispanic students, the figure was 23.4%

In math, all groups had lower proficiency rates than in ELA, and the achievement gaps were even bigger. Just 10% of Black students and 12% of Hispanic students reached proficiency, compared with 46.8% of white students and 55.3% of Asian students.

Test scores for students with disabilities fell in all subjects last year, something district officials say they “have a very robust plan” to improve.

Senior Reporter Dale Mezzacappa contributed to this story

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Philly students making ‘incremental progress’ on test scores and attendance, district says

2024-10-10T22:56:39+00:00

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Philadelphia students are showing up to school more often and improving their standardized test scores — albeit incrementally — according to the school district.

Over the past two years, the percentage of third grade students scoring proficient or better on their English and math standardized tests have increased, the district said, citing preliminary data from this year’s state standardized tests, the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, or PSSA, and the Keystone exams.

In addition, the number of students attending schools regularly has increased and the number of students dropping out has fallen, the district said.

Students are making “consistent, incremental progress” said Superintendent Tony Watlington at Thursday’s Board of Education meeting about the district’s progress towards meeting its strategic plan for academic improvement known as its “goals and guardrails.”

“We are on the right track but the data also tells us we have an awful long way to go,” Watlington said. “It absolutely is not enough.”

Watlington said the district will release the full PSSA and Keystone results and data for the district once the Pennsylvania Department of Education releases statewide figures in November.

To boost student achievement, Philadelphia is overhauling its curriculum for English Language Arts, math, and science, in a process spearheaded by Watlington. The new math curriculum was introduced last year and schools are continuing to implement it this year, educators are beginning to teach the new ELA curriculum. The district is slated to roll out the new science curriculum next school year.

Though the early results look promising in some areas, Watlington and district officials highlighted areas that need to improve.

Students with disabilities’ test scores have not increased over the past few years, according to district officials. Part of that is due to a history of schools pulling students with Individualized Education Programs — or IEPs — out of general education classes. Now that they are implementing the new math curriculum, it’s more important than ever that students with disabilities are able to access that curriculum, said Deputy Superintendent of Academic Services Jermaine Dawson.

“We must be honest about it,” Dawson said. “We have to make sure that our students with IEPs are in that classroom receiving the same level of instruction, and we have a very robust plan to increase those numbers.”

And in high school Algebra 1, the early PSSA data shows students’ scores decreased by 2.9 percentage points in 2023-24. Dawson said the district is especially concerned about those scores because Algebra 1 is considered a “gatekeeper” to success in later math courses and in the workforce specifically in STEM-related careers.

Watlington said to address this decline, the district is looking to “double down” on high-impact tutoring programs and ensure tutors are working in concert with classroom teachers.

“It’s expensive and it takes a lot of time to get the right people into the classroom, but it’s one thing we are going to work on,” Watlington said.

Though district officials did not share specific graduation numbers on Thursday, Watlington said when the full results are released, “we are confident that the graduation rate will go up.”

Here are some other key data points from the last two years via the district:

The number of students with regular attendance (defined as attending 90 percent or more days) rose by over 3,500 — an increase of 1 percentage point from the 2022-23 school year. Watlington said the district is building a new dashboard to track student attendance more regularly.
The number of students who dropped out of school over the last two years fell by 1,400. The district reported 2,517 students dropped out of grades 7-12 in 2023-24.
The percentage of third grade students scoring proficient or advanced in reading increased by 6.2 percentage points
The percentage of third grade students scoring proficient or advanced in math increase by 6.6 percentage points
The number of students passing exams for students in career and technical programs — known as NOCTI tests — rose by 13.5 percentage points.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Students will get more power in Philadelphia’s revamped school admissions process

2024-08-13T19:33:41+00:00

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The Philadelphia school district is revising its selective admissions lottery process yet again by giving students the ability to rank several choices, adjusting waitlists, and employing a widely used algorithm.

Officials are instituting the changes after a survey by the consulting firm Accenture found widespread dissatisfaction among students and families with how the system worked in its first year in 2022-23.

The new system “will allow us to do a better job extending more offers and when we have vacancies we can more quickly fill those vacancies with qualified students,” said Superintendent Tony Watlington at a back-to-school event on Tuesday.

The district decided to change its high school admissions process three years ago in order to expand access to the district’s citywide and selective middle and high schools. Historically, those schools enrolled relatively few Black and Hispanic students from low-income families living in certain parts of the city.

But so far, the new system, which also prioritizes certain ZIP codes, has made slow progress in reaching its goal. And last year, the lottery left many other citywide admissions schools with hundreds of unfilled seats, sparking anger and causing staff cuts. After the 2023 audit, the district tweaked its admissions process for the 2024-25 school year, but has decided another overhaul is warranted.

The school selection process for the 2025-2026 school year opens on Friday, Sept. 13, 2024 at 4:00 p.m., and closes on Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2024 at 11:59 p.m.

These are the major changes to the selective admissions process that will take effect for the 2025-26 school year:

Students will rank their schools and waitlists will operate differently. Students will be able to rank their top five choices. If they are accepted into their third choice, for instance, they will remain on a waitlist for their first and second choices, but dropped from consideration for their fourth and fifth choices. Currently, students submit five schools in no particular order and might be accepted into all five or none of them, even if they meet the qualifications. In a statement, the district said that “offers will be made based on the order in which an applicant ranked their five schools, the applicant’s eligibility, and seats available at the school/program.”
The district has changed the priority ZIP codes: From its inception, the lottery system prioritized students from certain ZIP codes, most of them in North and West Philadelphia. They are 19121, 19140, 19133, 19136, and 19124 and 19134. For the coming year, it is dropping 19132, and adding 19134, based on data showing which ones have the lowest representation of students at the most highly selective schools.
Offers to qualified middle school students who want to stay at their school are guaranteed. Students in five selective schools that start in fifth or sixth grade and go through high school will be assured a ninth grade seat if they rank their school as their first choice and meet all admissions requirements. The schools are: Girard Academic Music Program (GAMP), Carver High School of Engineering and Science, Hill-Freedman World Academy, Masterman, and Science Leadership Academy at Beeber. Before, these students had to enter the lottery like everyone else.
The district is using a different algorithm to match students with their choices. It will now use a version of an algorithm that previously won the Nobel Prize and is known as the “deferred acceptance” algorithm. It’s been used for everything from matching medical students with residency programs to connecting potential dating partners on the Hinge app. A version of the new algorithm is already in use by the city’s Apply Philly Charter enrollment system.
Students have a new way to research options. In February, the school board approved a $1.6 million contract with Avela, a software company. According to the Accenture report, the system under the company the district previously contracted with, SchoolMint, was rife with technical difficulties and errors that frustrated families and school counselors. Avela’s tool, called Explore, is a more comprehensive and user-friendly tool for students to research their school choices, according to the district.
Schools will no longer accept PASA scores in applications. The Pennsylvania Alternate System of Assessment is a standardized test for students with significant cognitive impairments. It is taken by under 1% of students in the district.

Questions about algebra, tests linger for selective admissions

The lottery system, which debuted in 2022, replaced a longstanding process that relied heavily on principal choice and favored students who attended schools with enough counselors to provide advice and help with applications.

The district has different entry requirements for its array of selective admissions and citywide admissions schools, most of which are middle and high schools. Qualifying students must meet minimum percentiles on standardized tests — ranging from being in the top 50% to the top 20% for magnet schools like Masterman and Central — and satisfy grade and attendance requirements.

The new admissions system won’t address all of the challenges and controversies around admissions.

One of the more high-profile issues involves eighth grade algebra. The district is working to expand algebra access, but most schools in the prioritized ZIP codes don’t offer it. And Masterman, Philadelphia’s flagship high school, requires applicants to have taken eighth grade algebra. District spokesperson Christina Clark said she did not have information on whether algebra access is expanding for this coming school year.

Most district students take the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, or PSSA, and can use those standardized test scores to satisfy admissions requirements. Students coming from private and charter schools may submit scores from a different standardized test, such as the Terra Nova. But judging the impact of eliminating the PASA could be difficult.

Under a 1995 consent decree known as LeGare, the district has been under a court order to offer equitable access to all its schools to students with disabilities and English learners. In announcing the new system, officials did not make any reference to LeGare.

Abigail Beljean, who has two children in the district, is a former counselor at the Wissahickon Charter School. She helped students make their high school choices, and said that she hoped the new system would not impede opportunities for students with disabilities to schools.

In her experience, a student who might need an alternative assessment like the PASA could also “be an incredible artist or musician,” she said, and could succeed at schools like Creative and Performing Arts High School (CAPA) and GAMP.

She noted that before the lottery, principals could use their discretion to admit students who missed the required percentile on a standardized test by just a point or two. They no longer have that option.

Overall, she said, while the district “has made some good changes,” to make the process more fair, she hopes it maintains “some kind of pathway” for students who barely miss a test-score cutoff, or who have in the past taken the PASA test rather than the PSSA.

“If a kid can’t take the PASA, but has no other standardized test to submit, what do they do?” she said.

Clark said the PASA test doesn’t translate easily into percentile achievement, so is not suitable for judging readiness for the magnet schools. The district is encouraging students with Individualized Education Programs to take another approved alternative standardized test, or they can apply to waive that requirement.

Overall, said Jane de Lartigue, whose seventh grader at Houston Elementary School in Mount Airy will be applying to high schools this time next year, the new system “seems more equitable.”

Lartigue said that parents she has talked to and those in online discussion groups are hoping that students will now “have a better chance of getting into a school that they would prefer.”

“In theory it will help parents get a school that best matches their needs, while also freeing up other school spots sooner in the process,” said parent Emily Chaudhury in a comment posted to the NW PHL Public Schools Discussion Group on Facebook. “This will get more kids offered spots in the few rounds of wait-list offers than what has happened in previous years, leaving fewer kids without spots and fewer schools with empty seats – and staff reductions.”

While most admissions occur at the high school level, the new lottery process will apply to students currently in pre-kindergarten through eleventh grade who are applying to any school outside their regular neighborhood catchments that have admissions standards.

Philadelphia Bureau Chief Carly Sitrin contributed to this story.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

New Philadelphia curriculum goes all in on science of reading

2024-07-26T16:45:08+00:00

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Kristyn Kahahaloe still remembers a little boy from her class in a New Jersey early learning center when she was a rookie teacher starting students on their journey to becoming readers.

The boy, who was in kindergarten, “just couldn’t figure it out the way I was teaching it,” she said. “This bright blossoming flower kept shrinking and shriveling, and I didn’t know what to do.”

Despite her years of teacher education, Kahahaloe, now a kindergarten teacher at the John Hancock Elementary School in Philadelphia, concluded that “my lack of knowledge was why he was not learning how to read.”

For decades, disputes over how best to teach students to read has divided teachers, scholars, and policymakers. Was the answer phonics or “whole language”? What about “balanced literacy” versus “structured literacy”? New terms like “phonemic awareness” and “foundational skills” entered the vocabulary, but didn’t settle the debate.

Like their colleagues nationwide, Philadelphia teachers were buffeted about by the debates. Many received scant training in their teacher preparation programs in explicit reading instruction. And once in the classroom, they were often left with a hodgepodge of materials and resorting to “doing what they think is best,” as Kahahaloe put it.

That is about to change. For the upcoming school year, the Philadelphia school district is putting into practice a new reading curriculum as part of a $70 million investment in updated instructional materials in English Language Arts, math, and science. The early grades language arts curriculum from EL Education replaces a teacher-driven one, and is grounded in the science of reading, the now-accepted consensus on what works best for literacy instruction. Given what recent test scores say about reading skills in district schools — and classrooms nationwide — such an intervention could make a big difference in school and beyond.

“There is no question at this point that the science of reading is the way to teach students to read,” said Nancy Scharff, a literacy expert and professor at St. Joseph’s University and a consultant with Read by 4th, the Philadelphia-based campaign to have all children read proficiently by the time they enter fourth grade.

But adopting a curriculum that matches best practices doesn’t guarantee it will succeed in classrooms. There are concerns about whether teachers have been sufficiently prepared to use it, and the district cautions that it will take some time for educators and students to see results.

‘More continuity for teachers and for kids’

The “science of reading” is built around a five-pronged approach — phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension — that is based on research on how the human brain works.

Concerns about how reading is taught and low reading scores have spurred many states to pass laws recently mandating what approach and curriculum their schools should use, with the science of reading often at the foundation of such statutes.

The Pennsylvania legislature considered putting provisions in its 2024-25 budget requiring districts to adopt the science of reading approach, with mandated teacher training and sophisticated testing of students to detect learning differences. But those provisions — estimated to add nearly $70 million to the budget next year— were cut from the final bill.

For the past several years in Philadelphia, the district had been adhering to a curriculum that was created in-house by teachers themselves. But it often lacked sufficient materials to go with it. Many teachers were stressed out trying to find the right books to use.

“I think this will allow for a lot more continuity for teachers and for kids,” said Meredith Mehra, the district’s deputy chief of teaching and learning. “A lot more resources are embedded that will take the pressure away from teachers to create them.” Teachers “can think more about the kids in front of me than what text I am going to use.”

Just 34% of students in grades 3-8 achieved proficiency on the Pennsylvania reading tests last year, although scores did improve in some respects in 2023.

Research shows that being a proficient reader by fourth grade makes a huge difference in future life outcomes. Yet state test scores show that 71% of city fourth graders are not reading at grade level, notes Read by 4th. And half the city’s adult population is functionally illiterate, according to federal data estimates.

Jennie Bogoni, executive director of Read by 4th, said she sees the new curriculum as a step forward because it will standardize instruction across the district and is grounded in the science of reading.

She also cited a federal report from earlier this year that Philadelphia has been ahead of most other urban districts in making up pandemic-driven learning loss in reading and math.

“The district has made incredible progress bouncing back from the pandemic, and this curriculum should accelerate this change,” she said.

Scharff said that the new EL Education curriculum equips all teachers with the tools “to make sure children learn to read, emphasizing what we call foundational skills.” They include not just instruction in decoding, phonics, and phonemic awareness, but the development of background knowledge.

“If a student can decode a word competently but doesn’t know what it means, it doesn’t matter. Background knowledge needs to be part of the program. This curriculum does that effectively,” she said.

She noted that many children in Philadelphia come to kindergarten without much exposure to books — although many groups are working on access to reading resources — and so lack a strong knowledge base: “The best thing is to teach them to read so they can broaden their knowledge base … .the ‘science of reading’ is not just phonics.”

Third grade teacher K.P. Edwards said has been reviewing the curriculum on his own over the summer and hoped that it will make his job a little easier. Students come to him with a wide range of skills; in one class, he said, he had a girl reading at a seventh grade level and another who could barely recognize letters.

“I am cautiously optimistic,” he said.

Science of reading curriculum isn’t a cure-all

Scharff noted that while a new curriculum that covers all the right bases is helpful, it is not a magic bullet. “It is going to take time for teachers to be comfortable with it, learn it, and become adept at using the new materials,” she said. “We have to be very careful about looking for instant gratification.”

Laura Boyce of Teach Plus, which works to recruit teachers to Philadelphia, is a bit more skeptical.

“Things have gotten polarized in the science of reading debate,” said Boyce. If educators only focus on phonics and don’t develop skills around building content knowledge and vocabulary, “that’s a problem,” she said. So is an approach that assumes students will deduce words from pictures and other cues and downplays explicit phonics instruction, she said.

Boyce is also concerned about whether teachers have been adequately prepared to use the new curriculum: ”From what I’ve seen so far, there’s no evidence of a super strong plan for teacher development.”

The district held a week-long training session earlier this summer that was attended by about 400 teachers, and is planning more professional development in the weeks before school starts after they start teaching. They also plan ongoing teacher coaching throughout the school year.

Mehra estimated that “it will take a whole year’ for teachers to become comfortable with the curriculum and see results. “It’s unfair to teachers to expect more than that,” she said.

K.P. Edwards, a third grade teacher at Philadelphia's Muñoz-Marin Elementary School, said he's "cautiously optimistic" about the ability of the new curriculum to improve students' reading ability, and feels fortunate that he's received prior training that helps him with it.

Edwards, who teaches third grade at Muñoz-Marín Elementary School in Kensington, where all of the students in his school were from economically disadvantaged families and nearly 90% were Latino, many with limited English skills, the school’s demographic data from last year showed.

“I’m lucky, I’ve had a school based coach who helped me develop strategies for teaching literacy,” he said. Those strategies relied on many of the principles embedded in the new curriculum, including explicit phonics teaching.

“I’m hopeful,” he added. “With that model we had some gains. I’m hopeful next year we will have actual workbooks and more resources.”

Kahahaloe’s difficult experience with the boy who wasn’t responding to any of her efforts motivated her to find the proper training for teaching reading.

She enrolled at Fairleigh Dickinson University in north New Jersey to learn the Orton-Gillingham approach to reading instruction, which was designed for students with dyslexia but which can work for all children.

She thinks the new curriculum will help. But for her, the people in the classroom will be the decisive factor for whether it works.

“A curriculum doesn’t teach kids, teachers teach kids,” she said.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Pennsylvania students must take state standardized tests online by 2026

2024-04-18T20:06:29+00:00

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Pennsylvania will require nearly all students to take state standardized tests online by 2026, Gov. Josh Shapiro announced Thursday.

During a press conference at Pittsburgh’s Northgate Middle School, Shapiro said the move would free up more classroom time for learning, save the state money, and reduce time spent on test preparation and processing.

Schools across the state can already choose to administer their Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) and Keystone state exams online or using pencil and paper. But by 2026, all schools will be required to give all tests online, Shapiro said. However, paper-and-pencil assessments will still be available for students who need special accommodations, according to a statement from the state Department of Education.

The Philadelphia district already administers online assessments and each student is provided a laptop or tablet device, said spokesperson Christina Clark in an email. Though “we do not know what the specific requirements for online PSSA/Keystones districtwide will be,” she said, “we are confident that we will be able to make any necessary adjustments that are needed by 2026.”

The window for administering this year’s PSSA in schools, including Philadelphia, starts next week. According to a statement from the state Department of Education, 32% of schools in Pennsylvania have already started giving their assessments online.

In explaining the decision, Shapiro said that students do “a ton of interactive learning on their computers” and moving the tests online would be a better fit for their classroom experience. The state also plans to adapt the online tests to include more items like drag-and-drop elements, sorting, and graphic manipulation questions.

Educators have long argued state tests are a burden and impact classroom flow while providing limited information on what students are learning. Forty-eight states, including Pennsylvania, already offer optional online testing. And New York City is also moving to drop the pencil and paper alternative for some grades by 2026.

“We are spending too much time on these fill-in bubble sheets,” Pennsylvania Secretary of Education Khalid Mumin said, adding that this move is part of Shapiro’s promise to “reimagine” public education in the commonwealth.

The traditional tests, mostly multiple choice, are limited in value and “take too damn long,” Shapiro said. He also said they place a major bureaucratic burden on teachers that’s separate from their primary job.

To be sure, online tests have their limits. There is some evidence that students tend to perform worse on exams taken on a computer, tablet, or other device than on one taken with pencil and paper.

Shapiro’s announcement about online exams wasn’t the only testing news from Thursday’s event.

To better assess student progress and achievement, the state Department of Education is also developing a new “benchmarking” tool to help educators identify if students are on track to succeed, flag any potential issues early so they can be addressed before testing begins, and help teachers “respond to unique student needs to set them up for success.”

“What we really want [is for] our teachers and students to be able to collaborate on learning, that’s the environment that we want to create,” Shapiro said.

At the same time, Shapiro took the chance to criticize testing broadly. He said the state is working to “get rid of [standardized] tests entirely.” But he noted he can’t do that without losing $600 million in federal aid.

The main federal law governing K-12 requires standardized testing in certain grades and subjects. Shapiro said his administration is working with the federal government to relax the standardized testing requirements on states.

“Trust me, the moment that they provide some easing of those requirements, we will ease them as well here in Pennsylvania,” Shapiro said.

Mumin said the Pennsylvania Department of Education will be ready to help districts make the switch in 2026 through professional development, webinars, tutorials, monthly newsletters, a help desk, and more.

“No student is going to be inhibited by this process or held behind by this process,” Shapiro promised.

In a statement following the announcement, Shapiro’s administration also claimed the move to online testing would save the Commonwealth $6.5 million a year and reduce its carbon footprint by cutting back on printing, packaging, and shipping test materials.

Carrie Wynn, an 11th grader at Northgate who appeared at the press conference, said taking her state tests online eased some of the pressure that can come with the exams.

“I cannot stand here today and say that moving to online testing has made me more excited for testing, but it was not the nerve wracking change that I had anticipated,” Wynn said. “It was more similar to the way we learned in class than the old paper tests … while they still aren’t fun, that made these tests less stressful for me.”

The PSSA is given in the spring to students in grades three through eight in English Language Arts, math and science.

The Keystone exams are administered in winter and spring to high school students in Algebra I, Biology and Literature. Keystones are currently most commonly administered via pencil and paper.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

See how your Philadelphia school did on the latest state tests in English and math

2023-11-08T21:51:41+00:00

Philadelphia students’ state test scores are slowly recovering back to pre-pandemic levels, but most students still aren’t proficient in English language arts, math, and science, while longstanding performance gaps between student groups persist, according to new state test scores.

And the city’s students are still scoring far below their peers in the rest of the state on the tests, which were administered last spring. The scores, released on Wednesday, essentially confirm preliminary data shared with the Philadelphia Board of Education in early September showing that Philadelphia students made small gains from last year, but that most are still not proficient. The scores also indicate that Philadelphia has far to go to meet the school board’s own long-term academic targets.

Scores released Wednesday for the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, or PSSA, data for grades 3-8 show major disparities between white and Asian students and their Black and Hispanic peers in Philadelphia district and charter schools. Those gaps are most pronounced in math: Only 9.3% of Black students scored proficient and above on the math tests, while 44% of their white counterparts scored proficient or above. Some 11% of Hispanic students scored proficient or better in math while nearly 53% of Asian students scored the same.

Just 15% of economically disadvantaged students — who make up more than two-thirds of all city students — scored proficient or better in math.

Overall for the 2022-23 school year, 34.2% of Philadelphia students in grades 3-8 scored proficient or better in English, 20.4% of students in those grades scored proficient or above in math, and 41% of students in grades 4 and 8 scored proficient or better in science.

In 2021-22, the proficiency rates were 34.7% in English, 16.2% in math, and 37.1% in science — though the district’s science scores from that year do not include charter school students.

Philadelphia’s scores do show that students are gradually catching up to where they were before the COVID pandemic.

In 2019, 21.6% of students in Philadelphia scored proficient or better in math, while in English, 35.7% of students were proficient or better.

In late 2020, as part of a multi-year “goals and guardrails” plan, the district and school board set a goal that by 2026, 52% of students in traditional district schools, in grades 3-8 would achieve proficiency on the state math exam, and 65% of students would achieve proficiency on the state English exam.

Statewide, students scoring proficient or above in English increased slightly from 54.1% in 2021-22 to 54.5% in 2022-23. Over the same period, proficiency scores in math increased from 35.7% to 38.3%, and science scores increased from 54.4% to 58.9%. (Students did not take the state tests in 2020, while state officials say 2021 scores are not truly comparable to pre-COVID results.)

“This year’s assessment results underscore what we have said before — that with each passing year, participation and achievement will continue to improve,” Secretary of Education Khalid Mumin said in a statement Wednesday. “Pennsylvania’s results are well on their way to returning to pre-pandemic rates and we look forward to helping our students exceed those levels in the years ahead.”

But just as a much higher share of white and Asian students were proficient on state exams than Black and Hispanic students, there is a similar disparity when it comes to the lowest scores.

In English, 13.9% of white students in grades 3-8 scored below basic, compared to 29.4% of Black students, 33.4% of Hispanic students, and 9.6% of Asians, 14.1% of those who identify as multi-ethnic, and 27.7% of economically disadvantaged students.

In math, such differences are also stark. Overall, 57% of students in grades 3-8 scored below basic. That included 32.6% of white students, 69% of Black students, 66% of Hispanics, 22% of Asians, 45.4% of multi-ethnic students, and 45.4% of those who are economically disadvantaged.

District officials and board members said they were heartened by the increases from last year — however small — but said there’s more work the district can do.

Tonya Wolford, the district’s chief of evaluation, research, and accountability, told board members in September it is important to keep in mind that students “likely are not going from below basic to proficient in one year.” She said Philadelphia students will need more time, resources, and support to make the jump.

To emphasize the importance of students achieving proficiency in reading by third grade, the district also set a goal for 62% of third graders to score proficient on the state exam by 2026. Yet in 2022-23, only 31.2% of third graders scored proficient or above on the PSSA.

On Keystone exams — another state standardized assessment for high school students in literature, biology, and algebra — Philadelphia students also lag behind peers statewide. Just 25.1% of city students are proficient or better in algebra, compared to 34.2% of students statewide.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia school leaders celebrate small gains in standardized test scores

2023-09-07T22:48:37+00:00

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Some Philadelphia students are making minor gains in math, English, and science and are catching up to their pre-pandemic scores, according to preliminary standardized test data the district released Thursday.

While the increases are incremental — only a few percentage points in each category — and many students still have not reached proficiency, school leaders said they are hopeful they can keep up the momentum this school year and in the years to come.

According to early data from the 2022-23 Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, or PSSA, students scoring “proficient” in math in grades 3-8, English in grade 3, and science in grades 4 and 8 increased from 2021-22, and students who scored “below basic” declined in those grades and subject levels.

“Students may not have reached … proficiency [yet] but they are moving in the right direction,” Jermaine Dawson, the district’s new deputy superintendent of academic services, told board members on Thursday. “We are catching up and we are closing the achievement gap in those areas.”

Superintendent Tony Watlington cautioned the final data — including a deeper look into disaggregated data sorted by race, gender, and grade level — would be coming in the late fall or early winter.

Board members expressed optimism that Philadelphia students may be making progress.

“Knowing that there are thousands of more students who are now proficient at math … that excites me,” Board President Reginald Streater said.

English Language performance

Third grade students — who have been under the national microscope as districts across the country confront the way they teach reading in their classrooms — were given special attention in the district’s presentation on Thursday.

The percentage of grade 3 students who scored “proficient” or “advanced” on the English PSSA rose from 28.1% in 2021-22 to 31.3% in 2022-23 — an increase of 3.2 percentage points.

The percentage of grade 3 students who scored “below basic” on the PSSA ELA declined during that time period, from 38.2% to 30.3%.

According to the district’s data, the percentage of students in grades 3-8 who scored “proficient” or “advanced” on the English PSSA “remained stable,” dropping 0.3 percentage points from 34.4% in 2021-22 to 34.1% in 2022-23.

The percentage of students in grades 3-8 who scored “below basic” in ELA dropped from 28.2% to 25.4% between 2021-22 and 2022-23 — a decline of 2.8 percentage points.

Watlington said the district has committed to shifting schools towards implementing structured literacy, sometimes known as “the science of reading,” to students in the years to come and are looking to implement new curriculum in that vein next school year.

“We’re not saying that teachers have to take away academic creativity and freedom … but we have to draw the line in the sand and say all kids will have a rigorous and guaranteed viable curriculum,” Watlington said. “The best available in the United States.”

Math performance

Watlington also highlighted the new math curriculum that’s already being rolled out in classrooms citywide this week. He said he hopes those new materials will build on the gains reflected in the PSSA scores.

The percentage of students in grades 3-8 who scored “proficient” or “advanced” on the math PSSA rose from 16.5% in 2021-22 to 20.1% in 2022-23 — up 3.6 percentage points.

In 2022-23, 57.3% of students in grades 3-8 scored “below basic” on the math PSSA, down from 61.7% in 2021-22 — a decrease of 4.4 percentage points.

The percentage of grade 3 students who scored “proficient” or “advanced” on the math PSSA rose from 20.8% in 2021-22 to 26.0% in 2022-23 — a gain of 5.2 percentage points.

In 2022-23, 52.1% of grade 3 students were “below basic” on the math PSSA, down from 58.9% the previous year — 6.8 percentage points.

Science performance

The science portion of the PSSA is only given to students in grades 4 and 8. The district reported from 2021-22 to 2022-23, the percentage of students scoring “proficient” or “advanced” on that test increased from 37.1% to 40.5% — an increase of 3.4 percentage points.

Still a long way to go

To be sure, even with the gains, last year’s scores remain well below levels school officials said they’d like to see.

“We know we’re not where we need to be. We’re not even close to where we know the kids deserve to be,” Board Vice President Mallory Fix-Lopez said.

Tonya Wolford, the district’s chief of evaluation, research, and accountability, told board members it’s important to keep in mind, “students likely are not going from below basic to proficient in one year.” They’ll need more time, resources, and attention to catch up to their peers.

Philadelphia also didn’t see the drastic “drop in performance” during the pandemic from 2018-19 to 2021-22 that districts saw across the country and across the state, Wolford said. “But we’re still not back to pre pandemic levels.”

What are they doing about it

Dawson, Wolford and Watlington all pointed to their efforts to increase student attendance and implement some high-dosage tutoring through a pilot at six to eight schools this year.

Board member Joyce Wilkerson said the board would need to know more details about specific efforts that are working or not in schools across the city, especially as federal covid relief funding comes to an end and dollars may need to be stretched.

“We’re going have to make some budget decisions in the next couple of months, and we’re going to need to know and in fairly specific ways what are we going to fund and what are we going to cut out,” Wilkerson said.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia student test scores, attendance, school climate ratings decline on district scorecard

2023-05-08T20:47:07+00:00

The latest “district scorecard” for Philadelphia schools highlights challenges the district faces in the pandemic’s wake, including test score declines, a sharp rise in students who are frequently absent, and deteriorating school climate scores.

The district, which released the scorecard Friday, reported declines in students’ scores in English, math, and science on state standardized tests in the 2021-22 school year. (A Chalkbeat analysis from last December revealed score drops on the state exams.) Student and teacher attendance rates were also down, though the district’s four-year graduation rate remains higher than it was before the pandemic.

The data was included in the district’s annual School Progress Report on Education and Equity (SPREE) released on Friday, along with comparable data from prior reports as far back as the 2012-13 school year. The district uses SPREE to measure test scores, access to Advanced Placement courses, racial disparities in school discipline, and other measures of equity.

In a letter accompanying the report’s release, Superintendent Tony Watlington said the SPREE is “closely aligned” with the school board’s Goals and Guardrails, which the district adopted in 2020 and include several district-wide targets related to reading and math scores, as well as measures of college and career readiness, by 2026. The Goals and Guardrails also highlight the “conditions needed in each school to empower all students to succeed in and beyond the classroom.”

“I think this data does show that in many of the areas we are missing the targets,” Tonya Wolford, the district’s chief of evaluation, research, and accountability, told reporters on Friday. But she cautioned that the targets set in the district’s Goals and Guardrails were set before the pandemic started and haven’t been adjusted since.

District officials cautioned that state test scores were not available for comparison for 2019-20 and 2020-21, because these standardized exams were halted or abbreviated during the COVID-driven school closures.

According to the district scorecard, 34% of students in grades 3-8 met state standards for English last year, down from 36% in 2018-19. Math outcomes were more dire: Only 17% of students met the proficiency standard in 2021-22, down from 22% in 2018-19.

In science, 37% of students in grades 4-8 met standards, down from 40% pre-pandemic. For those career and technical students entering the workforce, the district reported that around 43% of 12th grade CTE students were “meeting industry standards” in their respective fields; the district did not report this statistic pre-COVID.

The district is also having trouble getting students to show up to class.

Only 37% of students attended at least 95% of instructional days in 2021-22, according to the district scorecard, and 20% of students reported attending fewer than 80% of instructional days. In 2018-19, 47% of students attended at least 95% of instructional days, and just 10% attended fewer than 80% of instructional days. Student attendance became a nationwide concern during the pandemic.

Teacher attendance also dipped last year: The scorecard said 53% of teachers were recorded as attending at least 95% of days in 2021-22, down from 61% in 2018-2019.

And school climate ratings from parents, teachers, and students all declined from 2020-21 to 2021-22. (The district did not report these climate scores before 2020-21.) Some have worried that declines in student attendance are due at least in part to COVID’s negative impact on school climates.

Not all the scorecard’s key measures showed a decline. The district’s four-year graduation rate was 71% in 2021-22, compared to 69% in 2018-2019.

The SPREE also provided a breakdown of suspensions showing students of color and those with economic disadvantages were suspended at much greater rates than their White, Asian and wealthier counterparts.

The vast majority — 86% — of suspensions were given to students who are economically disadvantaged. Additionally, 71% of suspensions were administered to Black students, 17% of suspensions were given to Latino students, and 31% went to students with Individualized Education Programs, or IEPs.

Going forward, Wolford said she would “definitely” like for the school board to reevaluate their goals for Philadelphia students. She said the districts had targets for “several years on the books that we had no way to meet.” Now, she added, “we are just picking up as if it was business as usual.”

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

To meet new state graduation rules, a Philadelphia school holds students and staff accountable

2023-02-15T12:30:00+00:00

In August, when Philadelphia district officials briefed their high school teachers and administrators on the state’s new graduation requirements, Sayre High School Assistant Principal Nina Brevard could only react with worry and disbelief.

“We were all scared,” she said. “We thought, ‘You want us to do what, by when?’”

Until this school year, in order to graduate from Philadelphia public schools, students needed to complete a senior project and earn 23.5 credits distributed across four subjects: English Language Arts, math, science, and social studies. But starting with the Class of 2023, they also have to meet at least one of five graduation pathways under a law enacted in 2018 called Act 158.

In theory, the most straightforward one is to score proficient or advanced on three Keystone exams in English literature, biology, and algebra. Alternatively, they can score proficient or advanced on one Keystone and not score below basic on either of the other two while having a composite score that reaches a minimum threshold.

Not many students would make it either way at Sayre, a small high school in West Philadelphia with an enrollment of fewer than 400 students, including 90 seniors, most of whom come from challenging socioeconomic circumstances.

In 2018-19, the last full school year before COVID disrupted state exams, just 11% of Sayre students scored proficient or advanced on the English Keystone, just 2% did so in biology, and not one student scored that high in math. The school’s four-year graduation rate was just 61% in 2021-22, compared to 75% district-wide the same year, while just 26% of Sayre’s students go on to college, according to recent data.

So at first, the law seemed to impose a new mandate on students and teachers already struggling with difficult circumstances. But what started out as a daunting, government-mandated task — what some feared would create another barrier for struggling students and more work for already overwhelmed educators — has led to a largely positive response from students and staff who are working hard and in new ways to achieve it.

For one thing, it has focused students on considering their futures. Principal Jamie Eberle said that before this year, many students had no idea about their post-graduation plans.

The pathways, which include opportunities for internships and industry certifications, encourage them to think long-term beyond just taking required courses that may not interest them.

The school also has had a proactive strategy. Teachers became directly responsible for monitoring students’ progress and helping them stay on track. School administrators began the year by laying out clear information to parents as well as students. And Sayre staff, in turn, encouraged students to come to them with concerns and hold them accountable.

“The easiest way to attack it is to make sure all students are touched by a caring adult,” said Eberle.

Although there’s still lingering skepticism and uncertainty about the new graduation rule, students have largely embraced the pathways requirement as worthwhile.

When junior Sheanee Bentley, 16, first heard about the new mandate, “I thought they were doing too much. But the more it was explained, I thought it was good.”

She said it “helped students think about how to navigate after you get out of high school.”

She intends to take the armed forces qualifying test to satisfy Act 158.

Looking beyond standardized tests for a diploma

In 2018, amid concerns about the value of a high school diploma, the Pennsylvania General Assembly discussed legislation that would require students to pass the three Keystone exams in order to graduate.

But teachers unions and others raised concerns about overreliance on standardized tests as such a crucial gatekeeper, especially given wide disparities in district resources and data showing that students of color and those from low-income backgrounds were less likely to do well on them.

The bill that became Act 158, enacted that year, grew out of this concern. It outlined the additional pathways, which were originally slated to become effective for the Class of 2021; the state pushed back that date by two years due to COVID.

The three pathways that don’t hinge on Keystone exams rely on various factors, including other tests.

First, students can use the pathway of achieving minimum scores on the PSAT, SAT, or ACT, which are college entrance tests, or the ASVAB Armed Forces Qualifying Test. As part of this pathway, they can also score well on AP and International Baccalaureate exams in the Keystone subjects in which they were not proficient, successfully complete courses in those subjects, complete an apprenticeship program, or be accepted into a four-year college.

Second, career and technical education students can satisfy one of the pathways by getting an industry certification. They can do this by passing the industry-standard test, called the NOCTI, in their specialty. Students not already on the career-technical education track in school can satisfy this pathway by earning an industry certification on their own. Examples of such certifications are those needed to work with children, such as being a mandated reporter and learning CPR.

Third, students can attain three goals from a list of 12 items. These include minimum scores on the SAT, Advanced Placement, and International Baccalaureate exams; successful completion of a college-level course; a letter guaranteeing employment; military enlistment; or acceptance to a postsecondary institution that is not a four-year college.

The challenge Sayre faces with respect to the Keystone pathways isn’t unusual. School district officials told the City Council at a hearing last month that, in the district as a whole, just 26% of students score proficient or advanced on all three Keystones.

District spokesperson Christina Clark said Tuesday that of the district’s 8,120 seniors, roughly 3,815 (about 47%) had achieved an Act 158 pathway and were also on track for the credit requirements. Roughly 4,220 seniors, or 52%, had achieved a pathway, according to the district.

“This is doable. We have to make sure students have what they need,” Deputy Superintendent Shavon Savage told the council.

At Sayre, a few seniors did get sufficient Keystone scores to put them on track to graduate, Brevard said, and a few are retaking the tests. But many never took the test at all, either because of the pandemic or because they hadn’t previously been enrolled in school in Pennsylvania before coming to Sayre.

Sayre has a highly transient population, with students from disparate backgrounds coming and going throughout the year.

Recently, the school got new students from as nearby as Lancaster, Pa., and as far away as Bangladesh, Canada, and Jamaica, Eberle said.

In addition, about 85% of the students come from low-income families, and four out of 10 students receive some form of special education services.

Students and staff proud of achievements

At the beginning of the school year during orientation, Eberle and Brevard held a town hall-style meeting with the seniors and their parents to make sure they understood what the graduation requirements were and what it would mean for them.

As the school leaders explained what was happening, many parents and students “were looking lost,” Brevard said. But that gradually changed. Once the school year was underway, seven teachers and Brevard each each took on a caseload of seniors, approximately 10 each, to guide through the process.

Just as important, Eberle and Brevard wanted students to take ownership of the process. So they told students that they should expect the person monitoring their Act 158 progress to contact them and stay in touch.

“You have the power now, come tell me if they haven’t seen you,” Eberle said. “We were giving students the power to hold adults accountable.”

Despite her early skepticism, Brevard has reached the conclusion that the requirement benefits students. After all, not every student’s strength is passing tests like the Keystones.

“I tell them that these are things you can put on your resumes,” Brevard said. “When they apply for jobs, especially those who are not college bound, they already have some certifications like CPR.”

And then there are less quantifiable benefits, like the pride Brevard said that students feel when they meet the requirements of a pathway, and how they go from feeling “frazzled” to having a new skill set.

Nia Devard, 17, a junior at Sayre, said she finds it “kind of amazing” that she satisfied two of the pathways by achieving an acceptable score on the PSAT and on the test necessary to enter the military, the ASVAB.

Many other students have similar sentiments, although not all their concerns about post-graduation plans have gone away.

Noah Williams, 18, a senior on the basketball team, satisfied one pathway by scoring well enough on the test to qualify for the military. He plans to enter the Marines “because that’s the hardest” of the military service branches, he said.

He is proud of his achievement. Still, he worries about his peers. While acceptance to college helps satisfy one pathway, higher education isn’t a practical option for some.

“What if they can’t afford college?” he said.

Then there are the students who had to adjust to more than a new state law. Cinthia Rosario, 17, came from West New York, N.J., to Sayre for the 12th grade last summer.

Meeting the pathway was just one more big thing she had to worry about at Sayre. “It was hard,” said Rosario, who is originally from the Dominican Republic. “I had to get used to a new school, new people, new state.”

But she is fitting in. She is a cheerleader, and she has already met a pathway: she has been accepted into Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and she wants to study psychology.

Social studies teacher Joseph Fafara is one of the teachers with a caseload of students. At first, he thought the whole process would be unwieldy.

But with “teamwork and effort,” he said, the task has been manageable for staff and students. He’s been pleasantly surprised so far.

“Preparing students for the next step in life is what our job is,” Farfara said.

Sayre teacher Kate Conroy talks to students in her journalism class. Conroy has mixed feelings about Pennsylvania’s new graduation requirements.

Kate Conroy, another of the teacher-mentors, is hopeful about the requirements but harbors some doubts. She is concerned that due to the pathways the school district dropped the requirement for a research-intensive senior project, although the pathways offer the option for one.

“Will more students go to college, and will more students stay in college?” she said. “I guess you could say I am slightly skeptical that this will achieve what the state hopes it will achieve, but I would love to be proven wrong.”

In addition to making sure this year’s seniors are on track to meet a pathway, Sayre is also working on preparing younger students for what’s ahead.

Echoing Brevard’s comments, sophomore Sage Turner, 16, said the requirement “helps people focus.”

“I feel like, okay, they are difficult,” she said of the pathway requirements. “But that’s in order to see what people are really made of.”

She is a career and technical education student who is planning to go into nursing, and hopes that she can meet the pathways by getting a health-related certification.

“That is my passion,” she said.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Nearly half of Philadelphia seniors still working to meet new state graduation requirements

2022-12-21T00:40:12+00:00

Nearly 4,000 high school seniors in Philadelphia schools have yet to meet new graduation requirements imposed by a state law that goes into effect for this school year.

As of last week, 52% of seniors, or 4,223 out of 8,120 students, had met state requirements for graduation, according to district officials who testified before the City Council on Friday.

In their presentation to the council, Philadelphia school officials estimated that only 28% of seniors scored proficient or advanced on all three state Keystone exams, which is one of the paths students can take to earn a diploma. (The Keystones are generally taken in the 11th grade.) Another 290 students — or 4% — are on track to graduate because they passed one state test and had a high enough composite score in all three.

The remainder have used alternate pathways created by Act 158, the state law signed by former Gov. Tom Wolf in 2018 as a way to offer students who do not score at least proficient on the three Keystone exams more opportunities to graduate. It takes effect with this year’s graduating class.

Aside from relying on proficiency and composite scores on state exams, students can earn diplomas by attaining an industry-based certification in a career and technical education program; scoring high enough on tests like the Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate exams; or following an “evidence-based” pathway approved by the Pennsylvania Department of Education, which can include work or internships outside of school and acceptance into a four-year college.

The district reported that 94 students so far have met requirements by getting a CTE certification, 452 through an alternate assessment, and 208 through an “evidence-based” project. In addition, 326 students with disabilities approaching the age of 21 are on track to graduate via a separate state law, and another 587 are meeting the goals and objectives of their Individualized Education Plan.

That leaves 3,897 students who the district characterized as still “in progress” to meet the requirements.

Those statistics track with a recent report from the Philadelphia Education Research Consortium on the implications of the 2018 changes to graduation pathways.

Using data from 2018 and 2019, the group projected that more than half the district’s students will need additional help to either pass state Keystone exams, or graduate under one of the other pathways. The group also found that in 2018 and 2019, only about a third of students scored high enough on all the Keystones tests to graduate based on those results under Act 158.

“The share of students who would have met or almost met Keystone pathways varied based on race/ethnicity, economically disadvantaged status, and other student characteristics, reflecting local, state, and nationwide historical inequities in standardized tests,” the consortium said in its October report.

Principal Brianna Dunn-Robb of Constitution High School said there’s an intense effort under way to help those students who aren’t on track to earn a diploma yet.

“We’re working hard in collaboration with the district to meet the needs of all individual students,” she said. “It takes a lot of planning and working to see what pathways students will follow. There is a lot of data collection on a weekly basis.”

Students can “flow in and out of different pathways” throughout the year, she said. The key is to get more cooperation from local businesses to increase internship opportunities and institutions of higher education to expand dual enrollment, she said.

School officials also told council members that the city government itself could offer internship opportunities, recruit private employers to offer them as well, and establish a database of participating businesses and organizations.

“I hope we look upon this as not just a school district issue, but a city of Philadelphia project to assure all our graduates are college and career ready,” Dunn-Robb said.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia reintroduces test score requirement for magnet admissions

2022-08-17T12:52:36+00:00

Philadelphia school district officials announced Tuesday they will resume using state standardized test scores as a criterion for admission to the city’s most selective high schools for the class that will start ninth grade in September 2023, but the acceptable minimum scores are being reevaluated, they said.

The cutoff score on the state test — the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment or PSSA — for each magnet school “will be adjusted this year in light of the learning loss and other challenges our students have experienced,” Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. said in a letter to parents Tuesday. Historically, minimal acceptable scores for the most selective schools have been in the 88th percentile or higher.

“There is a place for the PSSA as a standardized measurement criteria for the school selection process, but we realize that it’s just one test score achieved on one day,” Watlington said. “Multiple measures of student performance are always preferable.”

The new PSSA cutoff scores for magnet school admissions — for students who took the test last spring and will be applying for admission this fall for entrance in 2023-24 — will be made public by the end of September, according to a district statement. The application window is between September 16 and November 4.

Philadelphia’s selective admissions policy that directs Philadelphia’s best students into a group of prestigious magnet schools is a hot-button issue in the city. Families of all backgrounds covet admission to these schools, and they often make decisions on whether to stay or leave the city based on expected access to selective schools like Central and Masterman. The district’s move to once again make test scores part of the admissions process will likely stir controversy among parents and educators.

The district will also continue to use a centralized lottery system for qualified students to determine who can attend the city’s most selective schools. The district adopted this system last year for the current incoming class as an attempt to increase participation among students from historically underrepresented schools and neighborhoods, and to remove any “implicit bias” in the process. Previously, principals at magnet schools traditionally made final admissions decisions.

Students qualify to enter in the lottery based on their grades, attendance, and now, their standardized test scores. Each school has somewhat different criteria.

The district’s announcement of its plans for the 2023-2024 school selection policy comes just over a week after a federal judge dealt a setback to plaintiffs who filed a lawsuit challenging the new system.

In 2020, the district removed the test score requirement for magnet admissions out of necessity: The PSSA, generally given in April, was not administered in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic. For several of the most selective schools, it substituted a controversial MiWrite writing test, but that requirement will now be eliminated.

The PSSA was administered this past spring, albeit in an environment significantly affected by COVID.

The district has not provided data on whether participation dropped. But some principals expressed concern that students may have opted out of the tests because they didn’t think they would be used in admissions decisions.

Most selective admissions start in high school, and students apply in the fall of eighth grade for high school and the fall of fourth or fifth grade for a few selective middle schools. That means seventh grade PSSA scores are used for high school admissions, while third grade or fourth grade PSSA scores are used for middle schools.

However, the district said any student who missed the 2022 PSSA could submit the results of an alternative test, such as the TerraNova and the Educational Records Bureau. These have long been used by private and parochial school students who apply to these schools.

The district plans to hold three meetings where families can get information about the admissions system. Virtual meetings will take place Aug. 25 and Sept. 1, and there will be an in-person meeting Aug. 30. The application window for admission to schools for 2023-24 opens Sept. 16 and closes Nov. 4.

Diversity in the spotlight at top Philly public schools

In a statement to Chalkbeat, district officials said the lottery system had been “successful” in meeting its goals — encouraging participation, increasing access, and removing bias — and had changed the demographics at the district’s four most selective schools.

At the four most selective of the 21 criteria-based schools and programs — Central, the Carver High School of Engineering and Science, Masterman, and Academy at Palumbo — the new policy gave preference to students residing in six ZIP codes in North and West Philadelphia with large proportions of low income students of color, which had the lowest residential representation of students attending these schools.

For those four schools, “the percent of offers that were allocated to students from the identified ZIP codes ranged from 11.1% at Central to 13.5% at Masterman,” according to a district statement. “Those same zip codes accounted for less than 10% of total enrollment at these four schools from 2017-18 through 2020-21.”

In the statement, the district also reported that under this system, 11,479 eligible eighth grade students applied to the 19 selective high schools and magnet programs located in two neighborhood schools, double the number from years prior.

The ZIP code preference also significantly increased the diversity of the qualified applicant pool for the four most selective magnets, the district said. However, district officials did not indicate whether it had studied or determined how the lack of PSSA test score requirement affected the size of the qualified applicant pool.

In his letter, Watlington said that he would appoint a group to review the selection process for the 2022-2023 class and provide recommendations going forward.

In April, three parents whose children failed to be admitted to their first-choice schools sued the district in federal court, calling the new admittance criteria “a blatantly unconstitutional race-based system,” primarily citing the ZIP code preference.

The plaintiffs, who are represented by attorneys connected to conservative causes, including the America First Legal Foundation, argued that the new policy violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as well as the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause.

On Aug. 8, U.S. District Court Judge for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Chad F. Kenney ruled that the plaintiffs, whose children are white, Black, and biracial, denied a preliminary injunction to bar implementation of the new system. Kenney ruled that the plaintiffs were unlikely to succeed because they “have failed to show a reasonable probability of eventual success on the merits because they have not shown any evidence that the changes to the admissions policy have had a racially discriminatory impact.”

At Masterman and Central, the city’s two best known magnets, Black and Hispanic students are underrepresented while whites and Asians are overrepresented, an imbalance that drew backlash following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

Tuesday’s selective admissions announcement represents Watlington’s first major policy decision.

“As the new superintendent, I want us to communicate clearly and take the time to engage a diverse project team in careful and thorough analysis of the school selection process,” said Watlington. “This approach will strengthen our decision making in preparation for the 2023-2024 school selection process.”

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Correction, 11/9/2022: A new policy gives admissions preferences to four of the district’s most selective high schools to students from six ZIP codes that currently account for less than 10% of the enrollment at those schools. Due to incorrect information provided by the school district, a previous version of this story said those students accounted for less than 1%

Philadelphia won’t use test scores for admissions to selective schools for 2022-23

2021-05-27T13:54:15+00:00

Philadelphia will not use standardized testing to determine admissions to selective middle and high schools for the 2022-23 year and is seeking ideas from the public on what criteria should be prioritized.

The policy grew out of necessity — very few students this spring have taken or will take the state test due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This means there are no recent test scores to determine eligibility for the selective schools.

But the decision has implications for the future, and the experience will inform whether the policy will continue.

“We are gathering community input on alternative ways of matching students with good-fit schools by considering different admission requirements,” the school district says on its student placement web page, called “Find Your Fit.” The survey, which is in 10 languages, takes about 10 minutes and can be filled out until June 11.

It asks respondents to rate in relative importance 15 possible indicators, including some already used, such as grades, attendance, interviews, teacher recommendations and auditions. Among other choices are student-generated projects and videos, extracurricular activities, and service and work experience. Earlier standardized test scores and school-based, quarterly benchmark testing in reading and math are also given as choices. The survey also provides space for other ideas.

“As an organization working to address any issues of inequity and fairness, the Office of Enrollment and Placement is looking at the school selection process and determining the best ways to consider students who seek to attend schools with [admissions] criteria,” said district spokeswoman Christina Clark in a statement. “As we move forward with reviewing the policies and practices related to the school selection process from an equity lens, there will likely be changes that are yet to be determined. That’s why we are seeking input.”

Traditionally, students seeking admission to 19 selective admission high schools and five selective middle schools have needed to score in at least the 70th percentile in the state PSSA test in reading and math. For the most selective schools, including Central High School and Julia R. Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School, the cutoff is the 90th percentile.

There is a growing chorus of activists and educators concerned that the current process, with its heavy reliance on test scores, discriminates against Black and Latino students. According to district data, about a third of the students who meet the minimum selection criteria are Black or Latino, even though those groups make up 70% of the district’s enrollment.

Their representation in the most selective schools is even lower and has precipitously declined in the past decade.

In the 2011-2012 school year, Black students made up 33% of Central and 31% of Masterman. By the 2019-2020 school year, those numbers had dropped to 20% for Central and 15% for Masterman. During that time period, the percentage of Asian American students increased substantially, while the percentage of white students remained about the same.

There are huge differences among racial and ethnic groups in the percentages of eighth grade students who meet the qualifications for selective high schools, ranging from more than half of Asian Americans to just one in ten Black students, according to the district’s most recent report on the admissions process.

These disparities constitute “an area of urgent focus,” the report said.

One of the Board of Education’s five-year targets in its “goals and guardrails” initiative — its effort to concentrate on ways to improve educational opportunity and quality across the district — is to increase Black and Latino representation in these schools from 33.8% to 52% by August 2026. Board members will discuss this at its Thursday meeting. Addressing special admissions is the first goal under the fourth guardrail, which is “dismantle racist practices.”

“I am not an anti-standardized test person,” said board President Joyce Wilkerson. “It’s not the testing per se. What’s problematic is the quality of preparation of children before they get to the test.”

The board has been studying elementary schools to identify those that are considered “off-track,” as measured by benchmark test scores and other academic indicators, with the objective of directing more resources to them. Almost all of these schools are in the poorest neighborhoods and predominantly enroll students of color, while the “on-track” schools, for the most part, enroll more white and middle class students.

Activists applauded the decision to eliminate PSSA scores from consideration during the next admissions cycle, but expressed doubt over whether the step would address all their equity concerns.

Dropping the test for this year “is a good step in the right direction, and was a long time coming,” said Keziah Ridgeway, a teacher at Northeast High School and member of the Caucus of Working Educators and the Melanated Educators Association. “I don’t think testing should be used in any form in the admissions process for Philadelphia high schools. It is discriminatory against students who come from different socioeconomic backgrounds. When you think about testing, it is inherently corrupted. Quite honestly, it is a tool to continue to oppress students of color.”

Last spring, the PSSA was canceled entirely due to the pandemic. So for this year’s selection process the district decided to use older scores — from fifth and sixth grade. It also relaxed the requirement for all As and Bs to allow for one C.

According to a detailed study of this year’s process from the district’s Office of Research and Evaluation, the new rules increased the pool of qualifying eighth graders — from 14% to 20.2%.

The report attributed the jump to the use of two years of data, which gave students “multiple opportunities” to meet the minimum qualifications.

But it also highlighted the huge disparities in qualification rates among the different groups. All racial and ethnic groups saw a higher percentage of students meet the standard — but not to the same degree. The percentage point increases for white and Asian American students were larger than that for Black and Latino students, and the already wide disparities in qualification rates only grew wider.

For instance, 55% of Asian American students qualified this year, compared to 45% in the 2019-20 school year. But just 11% of Black students met the qualifications, up from 7% the year before.

White students increased their qualification rates from 27% to 37% from last year to this year, while the percentage of qualified Latino students rose from 8% to 14%. The rate for multiracial students went from 17% to just under 20%.

Because there are so many more Black and Latino students than white and Asian American ones in the system, the overall pool actually grew somewhat more diverse under this year’s revised system. Still, “the increases in qualification rates did not benefit all students equally,” the report said, concluding: “The district has identified disproportionality in qualification levels as an area of urgent focus [in an effort to] address root causes of inequity in educational opportunities.”

And the data show that even with the changed admissions requirement, little progress was made toward the goal of diversifying the enrollment at the district’s two most sought after schools, Central and Masterman.

Central’s enrollment this past year was 20% Black and 8% Latino, but among the district eighth grade students who have decided to attend Central for ninth grade next year, 14% are Black and 4% are Latino. Those percentages do not account for private and charter school students admitted to Central, who make up about one-third of the incoming ninth grade class, so they could go up.

At Masterman, where all but two of the admitted students come from within the district — usually Masterman middle school — the next class is 36% white, 32% Asian American, 14% Black, 9% Latino, and 9% multiracial.

The inequities go beyond the numbers. The racial reckoning of the past year ignited by George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer also forced a close look at the practices and atmosphere at the two schools.

In July, there was a leak of racist and sexist messages exchanged by some male students. Black alumni began pouring out their experiences with racism and issued statements demanding change — including an overhaul of the admissions process to admit more students of color — which the principals and the district agreed to consider. Many Masterman and Central faculty endorsed the calls for change.

Pennsylvania wants to allow districts to delay standardized testing until fall

2021-02-23T22:19:09+00:00

Pennsylvania Education Secretary Noe Ortega has informed the U.S. Department of Education that he wants to allow districts and charter schools to delay administering state exams until September, taking advantage of an option offered when federal officials told states on Monday that they must resume testing this year.

Acting Assistant Education Secretary Ian Rosenblum sent a letter to chief state school officers Feb. 22 telling them to administer standardized tests for 2020-21, despite the disruption caused by the pandemic and the prevalence of virtual learning. The department did not offer states the option to avoid giving tests entirely but offered flexibility, including the ability to give the tests later in the year rather than in the spring, as is customary.

“State assessments and accountability systems play an important role in advancing educational equity, by enabling states, districts and schools to use data to target resources to the students with the greatest needs,” Rosenblum’s letter said. “In addition, parents need information on how their children are doing.”

In response, Ortega on Tuesday posted on the department’s website a draft letter to Rosenblum stating that 320 of the state’s nearly 750 districts and charter schools are offering remote-only instruction due to state health guidance regarding the spread of the coronavirus in their areas. He said it would be “impossible” within the next six weeks to balance health concerns while “safeguarding … the validity of any assessment results.” The letter asks federal officials to issue one of the permitted waivers on the testing requirement.

Noting that the all-remote districts and charters enroll disproportionately high numbers of students who are economically disadvantaged, English learners, Black and Hispanic, or have special needs, Ortega said that the complex logistics of administering the tests in the spring would result in lower test participation and therefore defeat the purpose.

“The very student groups that have faced the greatest historical disadvantages will be systematically underrepresented in any near-term statewide assessment administration,” Ortega’s letter to Rosenblum said. “To be clear, Pennsylvania feels a moral imperative to assess students as one means of understanding and documenting learning loss; however, the assessment administration itself should not serve to aggravate or confound the issue.”

In Philadelphia, the district has remained entirely virtual as have most of its more than 80 charter schools, which together enroll more than 200,000 students.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced schools across Pennsylvania — and the nation — to shut down in March, a few weeks before the scheduled administration of the state standardized test, the PSSA. Since Rosenblum’s letter, several states including Michigan and Colorado took immediate steps to suspend the usual testing or substitute local assessments to fulfill the requirement.

Many civil rights groups told President Joe Biden’s administration that they opposed waiving the tests entirely, saying such assessments are necessary to expose entrenched educational inequities among different student groups and help direct resources where they are most needed.

While affirming that view, Education Voters of Pennsylvania, a leading advocacy group, issued a statement saying it agreed with Ortega’s position.

The group said the decision allows educators “to focus their time and energy for the remainder of this school year on teaching and supporting students” and on determining how to invest “one time federal funding to help mitigate the harm that Pennsylvania’s most vulnerable students have experienced” due to the pandemic.

The public is invited to weigh in on Ortega’s letter to Rosenblum by emailing RA_EDESEAWaiver@pa.gov.

Pa. cancels standardized testing because of coronavirus

2020-03-19T18:32:36+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The extraordinary decision to close schools statewide due to the coronavirus outbreak has prompted Pennsylvania to make another extraordinary decision:

The state will not administer standardized tests this year.

That includes the PSSA tests given to students in grades 3 through 8, the Keystone Exams given to high school students, and the Pennsylvania Alternate System of Assessment.

Annual testing is mandated by federal law. Secretary of Education Pedro Rivera said Pennsylvania will apply for a waiver from the federal government.

“Our school communities are operating within unprecedented conditions,” said Rivera in a statement. “Schools are making extraordinary efforts to remain connected to students and families, to provide food service and to put appropriate systems in place to continue student learning. Assessments should not be the focus of school leaders right now.”

The decision comes amid national pressure to cancel high-stakes testing — an annual tradition in America’s public schools. Figures as divergent as the Chicago Teachers Union and the right-wing American Enterprise Institute have called for for a testing hiatus.

State Senator Andy Dinniman (D-Chester), a longtime opponent of state testing, had been pushing hard for Pennsylvania’s Department of Education to cancel this year’s round of tests, which were set to take place in late April. Under normal circumstances, many schools would have been preparing students for state tests in the coming weeks.

“For people to have to worry or think about the test — whether they be students or teachers — makes absolutely no sense at this moment in time,” Dinniman said.

And national figures as divergent as the Chicago Teachers Union and the right-wing American Enterprise Institute are calling for a testing hiatus.

The state testing window is in late April and students would be busy prepping for those exams right now. Factor in the prospect of a prolonged school closure — as alluded to by some other governors — and it’s easy to see how coronavirus mitigation could wreak havoc on the state testing process.

The cancellation may come as welcome news to many — including some of the students who sit for exams.

But canceling these annual exams will also cause ripple effects across an education system that relies on testing data in myriad ways.

Now, state and local leaders will need to find workarounds for a lot of different items.

They include:

Identifying schools in need of intervention

Every year, Pennsylvania releases a list of struggling schools that have to implement improvement plans. The state, in part, uses student test scores to generate that list — and then doles out federal money earmarked for school improvement.

Philadelphia has a similar system in place for placing schools in what it calls the “acceleration network.” Schools in this network have to craft turnaround plans, some of which include hiring new teachers or administrators.

Student test scores play a crucial role in identifying which schools receive these kinds of interventions — and which earn praise. Philadelphia’s school-rating system — known as SPR — is used as an annual benchmark of school success. By melding test-score data with other factors like attendance and parent engagement, the district decides which school strategies to replicate and which schools need interventions.

In general, the tests give some key insights into how schools are serving students of different races and economic backgrounds — most often showing a clear correlation between poverty and poor academic performance.

Admissions for magnet schools

Philadelphia has a large group of magnet schools, many of which use standardized test scores to make admissions decisions. According to the district, 24 schools have admissions thresholds based on how well students perform on the statewide PSSAs.

High schools use seventh-grade PSSA scores to make their determinations, while many middle schools rely on third- or fourth-grade scores when winnowing candidates.

For years, seventh-graders like Alfred Safier, a student at Penn Alexander School in West Philadelphia, have been told that this is a crucial year for mapping their educational future. Now that the fate of state testing is up in the air, Safier wonders what will happen.

“If they don’t have it at all it’s going to make the high school applications probably more complicated,” he said. “But they’ll probably figure it out.”

When Keystone Crossroads reached out to principals of Philadelphia’s magnet schools, most said they weren’t worried yet about next year’s admissions process. There are bigger challenges to confront before then.

“We need to make decisions right now that are in the best interests of everyone’s health and well-being,” said Chris Lehman, principal of Science Leadership Academy. “If that means schools have to rely on all the other data next year, we can figure that out.”

The School District of Philadelphia said it’s awaiting further clarification from the state as it formulates backup plans.

“The School District of Philadelphia is working with the Pennsylvania Department of Education and has not received further guidance at this time regarding assessments,” said spokesperson Megan Lello in a statement. “The District will work on a contingency plan in the next two weeks and will continue to monitor the situation.”

Charter-school evaluation

Charter schools seeking renewed contracts must make a pitch to their local school boards.

Those renewals allow charters to remain open — typically for another five years. Nonrenewal can lead to a school closing its doors forever.

School boards have some discretion in how they make these renewal decisions, but testing data often figures prominently. If schools up for renewal in 2020-21 don’t have recent performance data, local boards will have to either delay the renewal process or find workarounds that satisfy all parties involved.

Teacher evaluation

Pennsylvania has a statewide teacher evaluation system and student test scores are a major part of the calculation. Excising test data from the system would cause more trouble for a system that many already want to change.

The practical implications of this will vary. Districts can use teacher-evaluation data when making layoff decisions.

Distributing private-school scholarships to students

Pennsylvania makes $50 million in tax credits available each year for a program that supports private-school scholarships for students who live in neighborhoods with low-performing schools.

To qualify, students must be assigned to attend a public school that ranks as one of Pennsylvania’s worst. The state creates this list of “underperforming” schools by looking at student test scores.

Eliminating standardized exams would require some sort of temporary solution to determine who qualifies for this aid.

District test scores improve, but lag in proficiency

2018-11-08T20:51:44+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The School District of Philadelphia released results last week from the 2018 PSSA and Keystone exams. Although there were improvements in every subject, the District still struggles to bring students up to proficiency.

District officials are celebrating the incremental victories.

“I congratulate our students, teachers, and principals on their continued academic progress,” said Superintendent William Hite.

“These results clearly show the hard work, dedication, and determination of everyone is making a difference.”

Between 2017 and 2018, the District overall showed small increases on the PSSAs in the number of proficient and advanced students in math and English language arts, but science showed the biggest improvement, moving from 32 to 35 percent. These tests are given from 3rd through 8th grade.

The Keystone exam results showed noticeable improvements in all subjects. Proficient and advanced percentages increased by four points in biology and algebra, and by five in literature. The Keystones are for high school students and given by the 11th grade.

However, Philadelphia continues to lag behind the state as a whole in proficiency rates. While 65 percent of students statewide are proficient and advanced in science, just 35 percent of city students are. In English language arts, the comparable figures are 61 percent and 35 percent, and for math, 41 percent and 20 percent.

The District highlighted Horatio B. Hackett Elementary School for showing exceptional increases in the number of proficient and advanced students in English language arts and science.

Last year, 39 percent of students tested at the school were above basic in English. This year, that number jumped to 52 percent. For science, the number grew from 51 to 63 percent.

“We are thrilled that the dedication of the entire school community is paying off and that our students are making such significant improvements in early literacy and science,” said Hackett principal Todd Kimmel in a statement.

Click here to find the PSSA and Keystone scores by school.

Pa. test scores stay flat in 2018

2018-10-25T17:11:35+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Editor’s Note: Due to a calculation error, the original version of this story said that science scores went up significantly. There were some increases in fourth and eighth grade.

Student performance on Pennsylvania’s suite of standardized tests didn’t change much in 2018.

The results, released Tuesday by the Pennsylvania Department of Education, show no improvement in math and reading tests given annually to elementary and middle school students. Similarly, there was little change in how high school students fared on algebra, literature, and biology Keystone Exams.

Although there was some improvement in individual grades — offset by declines in other grades — PSSA scores in math and english language arts were almost identical to their 2017 counterparts.

In 2018, 61.4 percent of Pennsylvania students tested advanced or proficient in English, compared to 61.2 percent in 2017.

In math, 42.0 percent of students tested advanced or proficient, against 42.6 percent a year ago.

There was some improvement in scores on science tests given to 4th and 8th graders.

Read the rest of this story at WHYY News

The SRC years in review – full list of charts and data

2018-07-10T20:36:08+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

A look at Superintendent Hite’s record on meeting his anchor goals

2018-07-10T20:35:34+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Updated 7/16/18: this article now uses per-pupil spending and revenue data from the Pennsylvania Department of Education, adjusted for local inflation and presented in 2018 dollars.

In the summer of 2012, Superintendent William Hite took charge of the Philadelphia School District. It was a year after Mayor Michael Nutter asked Superintendent Arlene Ackerman to resign after complaints about a lack of accountability over school violence and unethical contracting practices.

When Hite took over, he created Action Plans that set goals for the District. Action Plan 2.0, released in 2014, outlined a series of ambitious “anchor goals,” and in most areas, the District has made at least some progress: More high school students are graduating, more 8-year-olds are reading at grade level, and the District has balanced its budget.

But this was at the tail end of the term of Republican Gov. Tom Corbett (2011-14), who cut roughly $1 billion in state funding for public schools, with hundreds of millions coming out of the District’s operating budget. So where did the District get the money it used to fund these goals and balance the budget?

Some came from the city, and when Gov. Wolf, a Democrat, was elected, he restored part of the state funding lost during the Corbett years. But it wasn’t until this year that Wolf even proposed enough additional education funding to restore the amount lost under Corbett.

Data from the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

While the District invested more in an effort to increase high school graduation and promote early childhood literacy, it was saving millions on labor costs in a contract stalemate with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers that resulted in its members getting no raises for five years. The District also saved money when it outsourced substitutes, although the original contract with the company Source4Teachers turned out to be a disaster that left schools far more in need of substitutes then under the old unionized system. The District has since hired another company, Kelly Services, which has improved the substitute fill-rate.

In the final year of the contract stalemate, the District said it had relatively few teacher vacancies. But the union pointed out that there were also 181 vacancies in support positions and conducted a survey finding that there were 613 classes with more students than the contractual limit, which depressed the actual teacher-vacancy count.

These practices made it hard, if not impossible, to reach another of the anchor goals: All schools having great principals and teachers. That’s not to disparage the teachers themselves, but working conditions depressed recruitment and affected the quality of instruction teachers could provide.

And these savings on labor costs came after the District closed a deficit in 2012, caused by Corbett’s state aid reductions. Nearly 5,000 positions were slashed, which was 25 percent of total staff positions at the time. This resulted in roughly 3,800 layoffs.

The same 2014 District document that outlines these layoffs, the Financial Supplement to Action Plan 2.0, describes saving money on labor costs as “paramount” to accomplishing the action plan’s goals. It took three years after that document was released for the teachers’ contract to be settled.

The goals related to labor, however subjective, do not seem to have been prioritized. Considering the lack of a teachers’ contract, it’s hard to imagine that the District was able to “improve recruitment and hiring practices to attract the highest quality candidates,” let alone “strengthen the principal and teacher pipelines.” The District did not “retain and promote high-performing staff,” because the lack of a contract made teachers unable to earn raises at all, let alone the promotions they were owed for earning higher credentials.

But Action Plan 2.0 had far more objectives than the ones labeled anchor goals. Most are vague and hard to quantify. But some can be measured objectively.

There are some that the District undoubtedly accomplished: improving student nutrition, reducing violent incidents in schools, promoting project-based learning and Career and Technical Education, creating and launching new school models, and implementing a new school evaluation measure in the form of School Progress Reports.

As the accompanying charts show, progress on standardized test scores increased under Gov. Ed Rendell (2002-10), roughly correlating with increases in state funding. These positive trends on the PSSAs reversed by 2012, roughly correlating to when Corbett began cutting state funding. The numbers seem to continue to decline, though some of this is because of the higher PSSA standards, implemented between 2013 and 2015, that made it more difficult to score proficient and easier to score below basic.

Since 2015, the year the standards were finalized and newly elected Gov. Wolf began restoring Philly’s education funding, PSSA scores either leveled off or improved slightly, depending on the grade and subject. Eleventh-grade reading and math scores improved the most.

For a handful of goals, the District’s progress is debatable. One example is using the Renaissance school turnaround program to “make poor-performing schools better” by turning them over to charter operators while keeping their neighborhood catchment areas. The Renaissance program has not technically been abandoned, but it has been two years since the District used it.

Many of the Renaissance schools made initial gains, but then leveled off. In 2016, the SRC overruled Hite and awarded Wister Elementary in Germantown to Mastery Charter Schools, despite the fact that the school had made enough academic improvement that it did not qualify for turnaround. Wister’s School Progress Report rating under Mastery declined slightly the next year.

The SRC turned over 21 schools to charter operators through the Renaissance initiative, though since 2016 it has voted to close two of those schools due to questionable financial practices: Stetson and Olney, run by Aspira. The charter office also recommended the closure of Universal Vare, but the SRC last month renewed the school’s charter with conditions that include automatic charter surrender if it doesn’t meet stringent conditions after four years. Universal’s Audenried High School has also been recommended for non-renewal by the Charter Schools Office, but the SRC declined to take a vote.

Since 2016, the District has relied instead on internal turnaround models that don’t involve charter operators.

Another goal was to “ensure all charters are good school options.” Although the District has some high-performing charters, the SRC has lagged in pursuing closure recommendations from its charter office for any but the most egregiously poor-performing schools. A minority of Philadelphia’s charters received a passing academic score from the state, a point mentioned in the District’s Action Plan 2.0.

The explanation of that goal states the District will “actively seek the non-renewal and revocation of the lowest-performing charter schools.” The included financial document states that the District will “aggressively seek to close the lowest-performing charter schools.”

But the District has only closed a few charter schools in the years since. And dozens of charters are operating under expired contracts — a situation that would cause any other contractor receiving taxpayer dollars to cease operating.

These schools are allowed to continue collecting state funds as their dispute with the District over the terms of their operation remains unresolved. At its last meeting, the SRC only voted to close one charter school. Some others signed agreements after initially balking, but 25 continue to hold out.

In fact, another part of that goal was to “ensure all charter schools have signed charter agreements” – something that has clearly not been achieved.

Another goal was to “implement effective, aligned business processes.” But the District was recently sued by a bidder for arbitrarily awarding a contract to a favored company, and the District’s response to the lawsuit was to maintain that it has no obligation to follow city or state law or its own procurement procedures. The bidder has also filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education.

Another goal was to “provide a clean and comfortable building environment in all schools,” which would include “executing a more aggressive preventative maintenance plan.” The action plan cited research finding that students did better academically in buildings in “standard” rather than “poor” condition.

But since then, the District has found unsafe lead levels in at least one drinking water outlet at 53 percent of schools. After pushback from activists and community groups, the District arrived at a remediation process that involved faster testing, more thorough methodology, and the installation of filtered water fountains in every school. City Councilwoman Helen Gym’s office organized public hearings in Council on the issue and authored the legislation that Council ultimately passed.

The District also had mold outbreaks last summer, largely due to malfunctioning HVAC systems that caused excess humidity in school buildings, including Munoz-Marin and J.B. Kelly Elementary Schools.

All this prompted the Philly Healthy Schools Coalition, along with City Councilman Derek Green, to demand that the District publicly disclose its school-level environmental data on matters concerning public health.

Earlier this year, the District had to reboot a lead-paint stabilization project after the union’s environmental scientist found that workers were not fully cleaning up the dust left behind after sanding down the flaking paint. The project was started after a 6-year-old at Comly Elementary was found eating lead paint chips. The shoddy work wasn’t discovered until parents invited the union’s environmental scientist to inspect rooms at Jackson School. At that point, work was already underway in 16 other schools.

“Whether it’s lead paint or mold or asbestos, every month it feels like there’s another incident. Munoz-Marin in August, and then J.B. Kelly closes for a week, but those schools had problems for many years and the reaction was only triggered when some teacher posted something on Facebook,” said David Masur, director of Penn Environment that organizes the Health Schools Coalition. “Then you get Comly, and now Jackson. We shouldn’t be dealing with this like the Dutch boy putting his finger in the dam. We don’t have to live our lives this way.”

As a result, the District was called before City Council to explain how they would reform the process going forward to be more thorough in the scope of work and involve the community in advance as the project continues in the 46 schools needing stabilization.

A bill in City Council would require the District to make environmental test results publicly available and inform parents and community members in advance of such projects — the very thing that the Healthy Schools Coalition is demanding. It was introduced by Councilman Mark Squilla and is co-sponsored by Council members Derek Green, Helen Gym, Cindy Bass and Bobby Henon.

Wolf proposed that the state will split the cost of a $15 million emergency cleanup measure this summer that will remove asbestos, lead, mold, and other environmental hazards in 57 schools.

The District had a specific goal in skimping on maintenance. It ran up the deferred maintenance list to nearly $5 billion – though former City Controller Alan Butkovitz told City Council that his office found the real number to be $10 billion.

The District repairs its buildings by issuing bonds. But bond issues under Hite have been relatively austere, because one of the District’s highest priorities has been to earn a higher credit rating. It worked, saving the District money. The District did this by keeping annual debt service payments below 10 percent – in other words, by issuing fewer bonds each year to make repairs than were issued under previous administrations.

“We have to continue to balance the needs the District has for facilities investment with the need to not have our annual debt service cost eat up our annual operating [budget],” Uri Monson, chief financial officer for the District, told the Notebook last year.

Click for the full list of graphs and sources

Notebook interns Hannah Mellville, Sam Haut, and Alyssa Biederman compiled the data and graphs for this article.

NAEP results show Philadelphia still below average for big cities

2018-04-11T17:07:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Philadelphia finds itself once again near the bottom among big cities in scores on the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress tests.

The tests are given every two years to selected samples of 4th and 8th graders to gauge students’ reading and math achievement nationwide. Results of the NAEP are sometimes called the “nation’s report card,” because the test provides the only standard assessment across the country and allows for international comparisons as well.

Overall, the NAEP scores this year were mostly flat, continuing a trend from 2015 after two decades of slow but steady improvement. But achievement gaps are growing, with top-performing students doing even better and struggling students falling further behind.

The results are reported for each state, and 27 large districts, including Philadelphia, allow their scores to be broken out separately through the Trial Urban District Assessment, referred to as TUDA. The student samples come from traditional, charter, and private schools.

The results for both Philadelphia and Pennsylvania show wide achievement gaps between white and Asian and black and Hispanic students that have gotten bigger since two years ago, the previous time that the test was administered.

And although big cities as a whole showed slightly higher gains than the nation overall, Philadelphia did not appear to contribute to that improvement. For instance, in 4th-grade math, nationally 79 percent scored at or above basic, while the big city tally was 71 percent. In Philadelphia, the number is 49 percent — which is down from 54 percent in 2015.

And the white-black score gap in 4th-grade math grew starkly — from 23 to 37 percentile points. The white-Hispanic gap grew from 24 to 37 percentile points.

In 8th-grade math, the differences between Philadelphia and the TUDA districts as a whole were less stark but still statistically significant. Nationally, 69 percent of students tested at the basic level and above, compared to 61 percent in big cities and 45 percent in Philadelphia, a decline from 53 percent basic or better in 2015.

The 8th-grade gap also widened, though not as much — from 25 to 29 points between whites and blacks and 23 to 26 points between blacks and Hispanics.

In reading, the gaps are also large, and growing. In 4th grade, test results for African American students in Philadelphia were back at the level they were in 2009, after the scores had risen in the interim, while white students’ scores increased.

District officials issued a statement in response to the NAEP results: “Across our Philadelphia public schools, we continue to build up our educational supports after years of statewide budget cuts. In recent years, we have made large investments for pre-K to 3rd-grade students in order to improve early literacy and math competency. We hope to see the results of these investments as those students continue their education in our District. This is why it is important to maintain focus on our youngest learners in order to improve, just as we have seen progress in our state assessments.”

On those state assessments, called the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA), Philadelphia has shown slight improvement, with the biggest gains shown for the 2017 test in 3rd-grade reading, from 30 to 35 percent.

The 2017 NAEP tests were administered via tablet for the first time, rather than using paper and pencil.

PSSA scores up slightly in District; biggest gains in early grades

2017-09-27T20:50:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Updated with quote from Read by 4th

The Pennsylvania Department of Education released the 2017 PSSA scores today, and Philadelphia showed marginal gains across almost all subjects and grades. The biggest jumps were in 3rd- and 4th-grade English Language Arts, indicating that the city and District’s campaign for early literacy is having an impact.

In most cases, the percentage of students scoring proficient or advanced fluctuated only by a point or two from year to year. But for 3rd-grade reading, it increased by 5 percentage points, from 30 to 35 percent. Fourth-grade reading proficiency went from 28 percent to 31 percent, a 3-point gain.

Overall, math PSSA scores had the same minor fluctuations, but there were no big jumps in 3rd and 4th grades. Proficiency rates in almost all grades are lower in math than in language arts, with less than 20 percent of 3rd through 8th graders scoring proficient or advanced.

High school students made significant gains in the Keystone biology exam, increasing proficiency rates from 23 to 29 percent. Literature scores also showed improvement, from 38 to 43 percent. Algebra gains were smaller, from 19 to 21 percent.

District officials touted the results as "steady, in some areas significant, gains," and cited them as evidence supporting the investments and priorities of Superintendent William Hite.

"Students are making progress, and that’s because of the tremendous work happening in schools by teachers and administrators, and it’s also a result of our focus on instruction, particularly in the early grades around literacy," Hite said in an interview. "While we have a long way to go still, that we’re seeing progress where we have focused attention, that’s encouraging and very exciting for us."

Hite also emphasized that fewer students are scoring at the lowest level, below basic. "There is a large number of children no longer at the lowest level, although not yet proficient," he said. "The whole trend for us is moving in a positive direction."

While indicating progress, the results show that Philadelphia still lags significantly behind the state numbers, which is not a surprise because the city educates a far higher proportion of students with complex needs – those who live in deep poverty, suffer from trauma, or are English language learners, or some combination of those, for example.

Statewide, nearly 65 percent of 3rd graders and 61 percent of 4th graders scored proficient in reading. But Philadelphia’s gains compared to 2016 tracked or exceeded those of the state in most areas.

Among subgroups, proficiency rates for African American and Hispanic 3rd graders increased by 4 percentage points, and males improved by 6 points.

Hite pointed out that huge jumps from year to year are not expected and "communicate something different," i.e., the possibility of cheating. "You don’t get to 100 percent overnight," he said.

Other points emphasized by the District in commenting on the results include a reduction in below-basic rates in algebra and biology, fewer below-basic students from 3rd through 7th grade, and improvements among male students and those in special education.

The early literacy initiatives in the District include improved and expanded teacher training, better assessments that allow teachers to keep track of individual student progress, early literacy coaches in many classrooms, "leveled libraries" that allow students to pick out books that are at their reading level and aspire to move up to the next one, and a 120-minute daily literacy block. In eight schools with particularly low scores, the District invested in more books, technology, and learning tools.

Partners in the city’s early literacy campaign include Read by 4th, the Fund for the School District of Philadelphia, the Free Library, and several foundations, including William Penn and Lenfest.

Jenny Bogoni, executive director of Read by 4th and an executive of the Free Library, said that "all of us at Read by 4th are heartened by the progress" in the results and praised the "strategic and systemic investments … in early literacy." She said that Read by 4th partners would work to "continue building the momentum" around the core ideas of the initiative: supporting school readiness, home libraries, attendance, quality instruction, working with students to prevent "summer slide" and Reading Captains in communities.

Notebook reporter Greg Windle contributed to this story.

The results confirm that the District’s Read by 4th program, which invests millions into early literacy curriculum and teacher training, is money well spent.

Wolf, Rivera announce reduction in time spent on Pa. tests

2017-08-14T17:10:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Flanked by education advocates, Gov. Wolf and state Secretary of Education Pedro Rivera announced Monday that schools in Pennsylvania will reduce time spent on state standardized testing by 20 percent in grades 3-8.

The change came after discussions between the Department of Education and stakeholders as the department developed its consolidated plan for the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

“As I have traveled the commonwealth on the Schools That Teach tour, I have heard from parents, students, and educators concerned about the amount of time devoted to taking standardized tests,” said Wolf during a tour stop at Susquehanna Middle School in Dauphin County. “This reduction will ease the stress placed on our kids and will allow students and teachers to focus more on learning than on testing. This change should also reassure parents that we’ve listened to their concerns about over-testing.”

Starting this fall, students in grades 3-8 will spend 20 percent less time on average on the PSSAs, and students in the younger elementary grades will spend nearly 25 percent less time on the tests. The Department of Education removed one section from the PSSA’s English portion, removed one section from the math portion, and reduced the number of questions asked throughout the science portion.

Students in grades 3-8 will save an estimated 48 minutes on the new PSSA math assessment, 45 minutes on English and language arts, and 22 minutes on science.

In a statement, Tamara Willis, superintendent of the Susquehanna Township School District, said: “Each year, teachers spend an inordinate amount of time preparing students to pass the PSSA. The current system has resulted in a low of creativity and innovation within our classrooms and growing pressure for teachers to ‘teach to the test.’ Shortening the PSSA will restore much-needed instructional time and give teachers greater autonomy to address the needs and inspire the creativity of every learner.”

The Philadelphia School District issued a statement in favor of the move, saying that it "welcomes the recent reduction in PSSA test-taking time that Gov. Wolf announced Monday. Research shows that these types of reductions, which result in increased instructional time, are beneficial to students. The District will continue to work on its own and with the state to maximize learning time for students."

The Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA), the state’s largest teachers’ union, also applauded the decision.

PSEA vice president Dolores McCracken said in a statement: “Gov. Wolf today reaffirmed what educators have been saying for a long time—that too much emphasis on standardized testing interferes with teaching and learning. PSEA members are eager to work with the governor to continue to make common-sense, research-based changes to our state’s testing policies. We want to make sure that our testing policies work for our students, teachers, and support professionals. Public schools are places where students learn. By creating a more balanced, research-based, and appropriate use of standardized tests in Pennsylvania’s public schools, we can find the right balance — and do what’s right for our kids.”

Earlier this year, the PSEA produced a policy brief on standardized testing, in which they advocated for reducing the time spent on testing, separating Keystone Exams from graduation, and ensuring that statewide standardized tests are used only for government accountability requirements.

The PDE plans to identify ways to further reduce time spent on standardized testing.

Details about the PSSA reduction and the Future Ready PA Index are available in Pennsylvania’s ESSA Consolidated State Plan on the Education Department’s website. The plan is open to public comments until Aug. 31.

Pa. unveils new school accountability system that puts less emphasis on standardized testing

2017-08-02T19:24:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The Pennsylvania Department of Education will unveil a new school quality metric in 2018 — dubbed the Future Ready PA Index — that it believes will foster a more holistic student experience, one less narrowly focused on state standardized tests.

The change was announced Wednesday as part of PDE’s plan to comply with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). That is the flagship federal education law, updated under President Obama in 2015.

Under that law, states were given more leeway in how to set education policy and spend federal public school dollars.

"It’s provided Pennsylvania with a once in a decade opportunity to revisit our assessment, accountability, and student support systems and make changes with greater autonomy than we’ve been able to do in the past," said department deputy secretary Matthew Stem. "It’s really given us an opportunity to focus on more holistic supports and holistic instructional strategies."

Pennsylvania will still have a strong, federally required commitment to standardized testing with scores broken down by subgroup, but Stem says the new plan will push schools to foster better critical thinking and collaboration skills.

He says this will happen, in part, based on a change in how the state evaluates school quality and reports the results.

"We believe that trying to use one number to say that one school is better than another is a flawed approach," said Stem.

Read the rest of this story at Keystone Crossroads

These 5 Philly schools made big test-score improvements. What’s their secret?

2016-10-10T14:47:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

When Tammy Thomas, principal at Eleanor Emlen Elementary School, first saw her school’s standardized test scores for 2016, she didn’t feel excited. She felt relieved.

"My reaction was: ‘Thank goodness we didn’t go down in anything,’" said Thomas, who heads the K-5 school in East Mount Airy.

That may sound fatalistic, but it’s understandable.

In 2015, test scores plummeted around the state as Pennsylvania introduced new versions of the math and English PSSAs — standardized exams given to 3rd- through 8th graders. These updated assessments were aligned to the Common Core standards and designed to be much tougher than their predecessor exams.

Many wondered whether scores would start to rebound in 2016 as everyone adjusted to the new tests.

For Philadelphia schools, the short answer was no. Philadelphia students did about as well — or about as poorly — in 2016 as they did in 2015. Math scores went up one percentage point, from 17 percent on grade level to 18 percent. English scores were flat, with 32 percent of Philly kids testing proficient or better.

Read the rest of this story at Newsworks

Wolf administration seeks to move Pa. graduation requirements away from standardized tests

2016-08-19T12:30:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Pennsylvania continues to wrestle with an essential question for the future of its people and its economy: What should a high school diploma mean, and what should it take to earn one?

In the last decade, the state has moved toward prioritizing standardized testing as a graduation requirement.

But the pendulum now seems to be swinging in the opposite direction.

A quick history lesson

In the mid-2000s, Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell’s administration pushed to create new standardized tests that students would need to pass in order to graduate high school.

By 2010, the measure had become law, and it was decided that there would be 10 end-of-subject "Keystone" exams.

Only three of these were developed — algebra, literature and biology.

Students began taking the tests in 2012, and performance was supposed to affect graduation for the class of 2017.

But then, many more students than expected weren’t passing the exams.

Annual pass rates have been below 60 percent for more than half of all District and charter schools, with lower pass rates for low-income students and students of color.

The state offered no additional resources to help students remediate or complete alternate project-based assessments — a nightmare for districts and parents.

Many districts spent millions of dollars attempting to get students on track. Cash-strapped districts, often tasked with serving the greatest needs, braced for the worst. Students across the state missed other learning opportunities to focus on the tests.

In January 2016, as the political fallout grew, lawmakers pushed back the effective date for two years.

"I still support the concept. I just think in rolling out the implementation of this graduation requirement, we ran into a lot of problems," said State Sen. Lloyd Smucker, a Lancaster County Republican who chairs the education committee, speaking in January.

The bill delaying the requirement had unanimous bipartisan support, a major rarity.

And it asked the state Department of Education, now under Gov. Wolf, to sketch out some possible alternatives.

Read the rest of this story at Newsworks.

Wolf approves delay of Keystone exams as grad requirement

2016-02-03T16:44:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The Keystone exams are officially on the back burner.

On Wednesday, Gov. Wolf signed into law a plan to delay the controversial high school requirement for Pennsylvania students.

The tests in algebra, biology, and literature were created in 2009.

They were intended to show colleges and employers that a Pennsylvania high school diploma is backed up by high academic standards. But critics say some schools didn’t have the resources to prepare students for exams, re-dos, and cumbersome alternative assessments.

Wolf called the tests "flawed" and pointed to the legislature’s unanimous support for postponing the graduation requirement.

Read the rest of this story at NewsWorks

In Philly, U.S. ed secretary says it’s time ‘to look beyond’ math and English scores

2016-01-22T05:37:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Major revisions to federal education law mean new options for Pennsylvania legislators, and acting U.S. Secretary of Education John King was in Philadelphia on Thursday to encourage states to take advantage of the changes.

"There’s now much more flexibility for states to look beyond just English and math test scores," King said. "Are students getting access to advanced coursework? Are students getting access to art and music? Are students succeeding in art and science and social studies?"

King appeared at the School of the Future on Thursday to tout the Obama administration’s latest education priorities, which include encouraging states to maintain high academic standards and provide parents and policymakers with clear assessments of academic progress.

The revised No Child Left Behind Act — now renamed the Every Student Succeeds Act — still requires states to test students and intervene in struggling schools. But the rewritten law gives states much more leeway about exactly how to test and respond.

This expands the alternatives to charter takeovers for the lowest-performing schools. States will be free to experiment with more targeted interventions, King said.

"For example, in a struggling elementary school, it might be the right thing to expand early learning," said King, a former teacher and principal named to his post after former secretary Arne Duncan resigned last fall. "In a struggling school with lots of English language learners, it may make sense to provide much more professional development for teachers to learn how to work effectively with English language learners."

Read the rest of this story at NewsWorks

Wolf to sign bill delaying Keystone graduation requirement

2016-01-20T17:26:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Pennsylvania high schoolers in the class of 2017 are breathing a huge sigh of relief.

On Wednesday, the state Senate unanimously signed off on a House-approved measure that pushes back by two years a requirement for students to pass state standardized Keystone exams in Algebra, Literature and Biology in order to graduate.

Gov. Wolf says he will sign the bill.

Pressure on lawmakers had mounted over the last few years to repeal or punt on the requirement as recent test results indicated a possibly large decline in the state graduation rate.

If students didn’t pass the tests after two tries, they were to complete a project assessment, but districts were to receive no additional funding to help remediate the children.

Districts across the state feared a nightmare scenario. Based on recent pass rates, a quarter million students would need help with projects – especially based on performance on the Biology exam.

"I still support the concept. I just think in rolling out the implementation of this graduation requirement we ran into a lot of problems," said Sen. Lloyd Smucker (R-Lancaster), the majority chair of the Senate Education Committee. “The purpose of this bill is to reset that decision and see whether there’s a better way to place requirements around graduation."

Lawmakers have now pushed back the requirement to begin with the class of 2019. In the meantime, they have asked the state Department of Education to offer a redesign plan within six months.

"One of the potential ideas here is, instead of just using the Keystone exam test as the requirement, maybe there’s a broader menu of requirements, and a student could basically be proficient in any of those tests," said Smucker, who specifically mentioned the possibility of an alternate assessment for career technical education students.

“While the governor believes we should have high standards, there have been issues with implementation and it is prudent to allow more time,” said Wolf spokesman Jeffrey Sheridan, in a statement.

Although Keystone exams have not yet affected students, they have affected teachers and schools – both of which are judged, in part, on standardized test scores.

The bill drew support from every single senator and representative – a major rarity in Harrisburg lately.

"Some things, when they make sense, we can all agree," said Smucker.

Dale Mezzacappa of the Notebook contributed to this report.

So far, 23 educators have been disciplined by the state for test cheating

2015-12-08T13:41:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The state Department of Education (PDE) has provided a list showing that 23 educators statewide have so far been disciplined in connection with adult cheating on the PSSA tests as a result of investigations that started in 2011.

Philadelphia educators make up just over half of those sanctioned, and they have faced the harshest penalties.

Officials will not say how many more cheating cases are still in the pipeline.

While details about the state’s inquiry into cheating are still sparse, PDE has also clarified the process that triggered its ongoing scrutiny of nine Pennsylvania districts where testing irregularities were found. These include two charter schools in this area: Chester Community and Imhotep Institute Charter Schools.

Of the 23 sanctioned educators, 12 were from Philadelphia District schools. One other had worked in Philadelphia Electrical & Technology Charter School in Center City.

Another, as reported by the Notebook last month, was a nine-year employee of Chester Community Charter School who, state databases show, served as a teacher, testing coordinator, assistant principal, and principal.

Other educators sanctioned were from a variety of districts across the state, including the cities of Erie and Reading. There were a few Philadelphia-area districts involved, including Quakertown and Penn-Delco.

Using state data, the Notebook has assembled a chart detailing the 23 disciplinary cases, their outcomes, and their locations.

Not included on the state’s lists are five criminal cases involving educators that are going to trial in Philadelphia court.

Process can take years

The state disciplinary actions, which can take a long time to wend their way through due process, started showing up in 2013 on the PDE website set up to publicize sanctions taken against educators. That year, state education officials sought additional funds to clear a backlog of 500 cases of teacher misconduct for all reasons.

Since 2013 there have also been several cases of reciprocal sanctions imposed against educators working in Pennsylvania schools for cheating-related offenses committed in other states.

Five PSSA cheating cases with 2015 settlement dates were posted in recent months. The state changed its process in September, requiring that all actions go through the Professional Standards and Practices Commission. Before, PDE could impose a penalty on its own.

Cases involving PSSA cheating make up a tiny fraction of state actions against educators; most are for offenses such as inappropriate contact with students and behavior that resulted in criminal charges.

None are reported publicly until the investigations are complete and the penalties are imposed.

All the Philadelphia educators involved, except for one who received a two-month suspension over the summer, surrendered at least some of their credentials. The two who worked in the local charters had their licenses suspended for multiple years.

Outside of Philadelphia and the two area charters, most of the penalties were far more mild – public reprimands and temporary license suspensions for periods as short as three days.

The statewide cheating probe began after the Notebook and NewsWorks revealed the existence of a forensic analysis of 2009 test results that revealed multiple irregularities, including statistically improbable numbers of wrong-to-right erasures. A statewide investigation was launched.

In 2012, under the administration of former Gov. Tom Corbett, a PDE spokesman said that it was pursuing disciplinary actions against 140 educators statewide in connection with the cheating scandal. But the Corbett administration did not provide an update on the status of those complaints before leaving office last winter.

Confidentiality concerns

Current PDE spokesman Nicole Reigelman declined to confirm that number or give any further information about how many other disciplinary actions are in the pipeline.

“The number of complaints that were filed is confidential,” she said, “as the process is confidential, if and until professional discipline is imposed. PDE’s current administration cannot address why prior administrations provided those numbers.”

So there simply is no way of knowing how many more cases involving individual educators may come to light as a result of the state disciplinary process.

State officials say an active investigation of cheating continues only in Philadelphia, which is now entering its fifth year. Nine other districts and charters, including Chester Community Charter, are in what the state calls “open/watch” status, with continued close scrutiny of their testing procedures.

The “open/watch” label could cause confusion because the state also describes the cheating investigations in these nine districts and charters as “closed.”

Reigelman said that the difference between these nine and other districts where the investigation has concluded is the ongoing monitoring.

In an email, Reigelman explained that open/watch status means “An investigation was conducted but the local education agency (LEA) failed to come to any conclusions relating to the high number of students with a high number of wrong-to-right erasures on their tests. PDE then mandated that test administrators could not administer a statewide assessment to their own students or proctor any students alone. Additionally, PDE added the schools to a list of schools to be monitored during future PSSA administrations.”

The districts in open/watch status were also investigated by the state, Reigelman said, “and open/watch letters were issued after PDE’s investigation concluded.”

“In some instances, school entities were permitted to conduct internal investigations after the initial round of interviews at those schools concluded. Results of the internal investigations had to be reported to PDE and those results informed PDE’s determination of whether the school entity received an open/watch letter or a closed letter.”

Besides Chester Community, these seven districts and one charter are also in “open/watch” status:

Delaware Valley School District
Derry Area School District
Harrisburg City School District
Lancaster School District
Monessen City School District
Hazleton Area School District
Imhotep Institute Charter School (Philadelphia)
Reading School District

Arts and high test scores co-exist at FACTS Charter

2015-12-07T11:33:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Around noon on Wednesdays, the beating of African drums reverberates throughout all five floors of FACTS Charter School in Chinatown.

It’s ensemble time, a staple of the curriculum at FACTS, which stands for Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures. There are six types to choose from, including martial arts, Indonesian dance, and Chinese opera.

Third through 8th graders can participate in an ensemble once a week, which is just one of the folk-arts experiences available at the 10-year-old school.

While about 20 students under the tutelage of artists Edward Smallwood and Ama Schley learned the rhythms of the sang ba, kinkany, and dun dun – with upturned recycling buckets standing in for drums – another group was playing the Vietnamese zither with linguist and musician Ngô Thanh Nhàn.

As 5th grader Fionna expertly strummed the harp-like dàn tranh with elegant fingernail picks, she revealed that she can play nine musical instruments, eight of which she learned at FACTS.

This is not test-prep. It is the opposite. Yet FACTS students, most of whom come from low-income families, have PSSA proficiency rates in reading and math that are among the city’s highest.

“We truly believe that the social curriculum is just as important as the academic curriculum,” said Pheng Lim, the principal. “We believe in educating the whole child.”

One of the most important elements of that is to honor the students’ backgrounds and languages, part of a culture of respect that permeates the school.

That is the route to high scores, Lim believes – not rigid test prep or pep rallies that cause anxiety and pressure at many schools.

Yes, there is some effort “to familiarize students with what the test is like,” said Lim. But she also gives students a letter reiterating that the test “does not tell us how good a person you are … how hard you work to learn new things [or] how smart you are.”

http://files.photosnack.com/iframejs/embed.html?hash=pt3qxe08x&t=1449508479

In 2014, FACTS received the highest K-8 score in Philadelphia, 88.4 out of 100, on the state’s school rating scale. That year, 84 percent of its students scored proficient or advanced in math, and 75 percent in reading.

In 2015 the PSSA was overhauled; statewide, scores plummeted. FACTS’ proficiency rates declined, especially in math, but were still good enough to place it among the top schools in the city.

“I expected the scores to go down a lot more,” said Lim, called Principal Pheng (pronounced Pang) at school. “I was pleasantly surprised.”

Asians comprise two-thirds of FACTS’ nearly 500 students. The families, many with refugee experience, are from countries including China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Indonesia, and India. Twenty percent are African American, and the rest Latino, White, and mixed race.

Some say FACTS’ scores are high because most students are Asian, who generally do better on standardized tests than other groups, including Whites.

But an analysis of the 2014 PSSA, the last one that was broken down by race and demographic category, shows that FACTS’ Asian students outperform Asian students districtwide by an average of 15 percentage points in each grade.

The data also show that other subgroups, such as African Americans and students learning English, score significantly higher across subjects than the city average for those groups in most grades.

In addition to the folk arts experiences, the FACTS curriculum emphasizes values like stewardship. In social studies and science, often given short shrift in elementary schools, students do projects to study how issues “like hunger, food, and water affect people, and what can you do to make a difference,” said Lim. Literacy lessons include a lot of writing, and math concentrates on learning concepts in depth.

“That’s why we get the good results we get here,” said Ricque Porter, a teacher for seven years and now an administrator. “Students get a good foundation in academics and the skills they need, but we also focus on the whole child.”

And, she added, “We make sure they have a sense of community here.”

Pa. House OKs delaying Keystone exams as graduation requirement

2015-11-30T14:05:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

This story was published by NewsWorks on Nov. 25

The Pennsylvania legislature is one step closer to pushing back the use of standardized tests as a graduation requirement.

State law now mandates that, starting with the class of 2017, high schoolers must pass Keystone exams in Literature, Algebra I and Biology to graduate.

In a unanimous vote, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives voted this week to bump back the testing requirement by two years, so it would begin to be enforced for the class of 2019.

The Senate previously passed a similar measure by unanimous vote. The only difference is that the House wants the state Department of Education to study a possible alternative and make a recommendation within six months.

If the Senate concurs on that addition, the bill will head to Gov. Wolf, who has said he will sign it into law.

Read the rest of this story at NewsWorks

Testing, testing: A look at other assessments

2015-11-30T11:14:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

In Pennsylvania, the PSSAs and Keystones are probably the most familiar standardized tests, in part because of the high stakes associated with them.

But students in the School District of Philadelphia take a number of other assessments each year whose names are less well-known. Some help identify for the teacher that a child is not making sufficient progress in learning to read, and others pinpoint why.

These assessments include the Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA2), AIMSweb, the Kindergarten Entry Inventory (KEI), the Writing and Reading Assessment Profile (WRAP), and the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests. The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS), an assessment that measures students’ early reading skills, was discontinued in the District after the 2014-15 school year.

Generally, the purpose of these so-called formative assessments is to give teachers a snapshot of students’ reading performance at a particular moment. They are instructional tools because they determine the level at which a child can read independently as well as the instructional reading level – the level at which a child can read with some support. Teachers can also use these assessments to chart a student’s growth in reading over a school year and entire academic career.

Such tests differ from the PSSA and Keystones in terms of whom and what they assess, when and how they are administered, and how the results are used to evaluate students and schools.

Who and what is assessed and how often?

The PSSA is administered once a year to measure the extent to which students are meeting the Pennsylvania Core Standards for reading and math in grades 3-8. Students in grades 4 and 8 also take the PSSA in science.

High school students take the Keystone exams for algebra, biology and literature. If they don’t pass, they can take them again. The Keystone exams are offered three times a year.

The diagnostic assessments are different. They are given at least twice a year, usually once at the beginning and once at the end, as a screening tool to measure reading proficiency. They are not mandated by the state (with the exception of the KEI). When administered in the early years – grades K-3 – they support the push for proficient reading by the time students reach the 4th grade.

The KEI, an observation-based tool, is unique because it is completed by the teacher only once – in the first 45 calendar days of the school year – and because it measures kindergartners’ noncognitive skills, such as their social and emotional disposition, in addition to their math and reading skills. The KEI is based on Pennsylvania’s Learning Standards for Early Childhood.

This chart identifies the differences among five formative assessments in terms of their purpose, who and what they test, and how results are reported. (Click image to see enlarged version.)

When and how are the assessments administered?

The PSSA is administered in the spring of each school year to the entire class at once. Students may answer a combination of multiple-choice, selected-response (which have more than one part and in which more than one answer can be correct), and open-ended questions. The Keystones can be administered as an end-of-course exam, but all students must take it by the end of 11th grade.

The District and schools decide when and how often to administer the diagnostic assessments. They are often given to monitor the progress of individual students in mastering specific skills, or as benchmarks to measure how the whole class is doing.

For progress-monitoring, teachers administer any of the assessments as often as needed. For example, if a teacher wants to monitor whether a particular reading intervention is effective, the teacher may test a group with AIMSweb once every two months to record student growth. If a school uses any of these assessments as a benchmark, teachers administer it to all students at a designated point in the school year, typically at the end of the first, second, and fourth quarters.

Most formative assessments are given through one-on-one teacher-student conferences. (The exception is the Gates-MacGinitie, which is administered whole-group.) Students typically read a text aloud as the teacher takes notes on the student’s reading behaviors and errors. Students then retell the story and answer comprehension prompts about the text orally or in writing.

How are results used?

The PSSA and Keystone exams are scored by the company that develops the test. Results are reported in the fall of the following academic year. The state uses PSSA and Keystone results to track school progress, identify low- and high-performing schools, and compare student performance across school districts. Results are now a factor in teacher evaluations as well.

Philadelphia uses PSSA and Keystone results to identify schools that need more resources and support and to target low-scoring schools for interventions or even closing. The results also can help the District and schools record academic performance trends over time to determine which instructional approaches and policies positively influence student outcomes.

For formative assessments, teachers usually do the scoring themselves and so get immediate feedback on student performance, allowing them to modify and differentiate instruction accordingly and employ any needed interventions. The results may also occasionally be used to track District-wide reading progress and inform decisions about teacher professional development.

What are the benefits and drawbacks of the formative assessments?

A major benefit of these assessments is that they help teachers identify the behaviors that strengthen or hinder a student’s progress in reading. The results of these assessments can also be shared with parents so they can support their child’s literacy development at home. Over the school year, teachers can assemble a record of each child’s reading development.

But the use of these assessments also presents some issues for teachers and schools. Teachers must be trained to use them effectively, which is time-consuming. Teachers must organize class time around administering the assessments, which require extended one-on-one sessions with students. If the teacher doesn’t have help, such as a reading specialist also in the classroom, it is very difficult to keep the tested student free of distraction while assuring that the rest of the students are usefully engaged.

In addition, most of these assessments are subjective. Teachers must use their discretion to determine what constitutes an error in reading. Different teachers can come to different conclusions; the District tries to address this through thorough training. Oversight for how teachers score these assessments varies by school. Efforts are made to ensure that teachers don’t exaggerate student progress. For instance, if multiple students in a teacher’s class exit a grade reading on a high level, but enter the next grade reading on a low level, this is grounds for a District inspection.

Past Chester Community Charter testing head disciplined in cheating scandal

2015-11-27T08:09:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

A former testing coordinator at Chester Community Charter School, the state’s largest bricks-and-mortar charter with more than 3,000 students, has been sanctioned by the state for “systemic violations of the security of the PSSA exams” over the five-year period between 2007 and 2011.

The school was under scrutiny for testing irregularities by the Pennsylvania Department of Education as part of a statewide cheating scandal that broke in 2011.

CCCS is operated for profit by a company owned by Vahan Gureghian, a major Republican donor and power broker who was among the largest individual contributors to former Gov. Tom Corbett’s campaign and a member of his education transition team. During his term, Corbett visited CCCS to tout it as an exemplar of high-quality education for low-income communities.

Now with three campuses, CCCS has drawn more than half the K-8 students who live in the Chester Upland School District.

The state’s disciplinary action against the former coordinator, Patricia A. Sciamanna, was for violating testing rules during years that CCCS was struggling to meet federal student proficiency targets used for critical decisions, including whether a charter should be renewed.

The Pennsylvania Professional Standards and Practices Commission (PSPC) suspended Sciamanna’s instructional and administrative licenses, as well as her eligibility to work in a charter or cyber charter, for two years.

It also banned her permanently from ever “participating in, proctoring, monitoring and/or overseeing the administration of the PSSAs.” Although the action was taken in April, it was only recently posted on the PSPC website that tracks disciplinary actions against educators.

An effort by the Notebook to reach Sciamanna through her Facebook page was unsuccessful.

CCCS spokesman A. Bruce Crawley issued a statement on the disciplinary action, saying it is against the school’s policy to comment on “issues related to individual staff members.” He did not respond to a request to clarify when Sciamanna started working at the school, when she left, and what positions she held.

The school’s statement reiterated its longstanding position that PDE has made no determination against the school itself in regards to cheating.

“The PDE closed its review of CCCS in September 2012, with no finding of wrongdoing by the school,” the statement said.

That month, a letter from PDE sent to CCCS, however, cited “overwhelming evidence of testing irregularities” and required the school to adopt strict testing protocols.

CCCS is now one of nine districts or charters in the state on an “open watch list,” meaning that its test administration continues to be closely monitored and supervised by PDE.

Test scores at the school plunged under new security measures and have remained relatively low since.

A statewide probe

Although much of the public attention around adult cheating on standardized tests in Pennsylvania has been focused on Philadelphia schools, the statewide investigation launched in 2011 probed suspicious results in 38 districts and 11 charters across Pennsylvania.

One was CCCS.

In July 2011, the Notebook and NewsWorks reported on a state-commissioned analysis showing widespread test score irregularities at dozens of Pennsylvania schools in 2009. In response, the Pennsylvania Department of Education commissioned a further analysis of PSSA results from 2010 to 2011, then launched an investigation into those whose results was most suspicious. CCCS was flagged multiple times for an unusually high number of wrong-to-right erasures on the test booklets.

The investigation went on for more than a year. The September 2012 letter, sent by then-Deputy Education Secretary Carolyn Dumaresq, recounted how PDE initiated the probe “based on the statistical improbability that the students made these erasures themselves.”

But PDE then allowed the school to conduct its own investigation, “which did not yield clear conclusions notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence of testing irregularities,” the letter said.

In February of that year, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, CCCS attorney Francis J. Catania had written to Dumaresq that the school’s investigation “uncovered absolutely no evidence of testing improprieties or irregularities” – instead establishing that “improvements in PSSA test scoring are the direct result of hard work, innovative educational programming and persistent preparation by the students, teachers, administrators and parents at CCCS, and not some purported nefarious conduct or ‘cheating.'”

Catania suggested the erasures were due to test-taking strategies taught to the students.

Nevertheless, after the school reported the inconclusive results, “PDE returned to complete its investigation,” according to Dumaresq’s letter. PDE then spelled out strict testing protocols that the school said it would follow, including 24-hour security cameras where the tests are stored and in all classrooms in which students take them. In addition, PDE sent outside monitors to supervise all test administrations.

Through its history, CCCS struggled to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), the test score and performance targets under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The school made AYP in 2004 but then fell short for four years in a row from 2005 through 2008.

A fifth year of failing to meet targets would have triggered sanctions under NCLB, including a potential change in management.

The scores climbed in 2009, and for three years in a row, through 2011, they were high enough for the school to earn Adequate Yearly Progress status, an indicator that enhanced the school’s credibility in the Chester community. The school’s enrollment saw continued growth.

After the strict test protocols were put in place in 2012, proficiency rates at CCCS plummeted by an average of 30 percentage points in every grade and subject. In letters to parents and the media, the school blamed the drop on budget cuts.

Since then, scores have remained low – similar to scores of some Chester-Upland district schools.

That district has been in dire financial straits for decades, most recently exacerbated by its huge payments to CCCS and two other charters. Due to quirks in the state charter funding formula, the district sends $40,000 for each special education student at a charter, a figure that far outstrips any other in the state and has helped to virtually bankrupt Chester schools.

This fall, when it was unclear whether Chester’s district schools could afford to open their doors, Gov. Wolf sought a rescue plan for the district in which, among other actions, the payments to the charters for special education students would be lowered to $16,000. The charters, including CCCS, agreed to accept a payment of $27,000 per student as part of a compromise plan that was approved by the courts..

Little information on inquiries

Apart from periodic information about individual educators on the Professional Standards and Practices Commission website, the state has provided little information on the findings of its investigations of cheating. Both the state and districts cite confidentiality on personnel matters.

In Pennsylvania, discipline actions against educators are made public by the PSPC once they are final, and they can take years to resolve.

PDE spokesperson Nicole Reigelman said, “The Department takes allegations of educator misconduct seriously. The investigation, negotiation of settlement and/or prosecution of the educator misconduct complaints may require significant time, and there are no mandated timelines for resolving cases. … PDE does not share information regarding investigative findings.”

In 2012, the state Department of Education reported that it was pursuing complaints about PSSA cheating against at least 140 individual educators from schools across the state.

But on the website where it announces disciplinary actions against educators, the state has still only reported a handful of such actions for PSSA cheating, mostly in Philadelphia. And Reigelman did not provide an update on how many such cheating complaints are still outstanding or say whether complaints are pending against other CCCS educators.

The settlement with Sciamanna was the result of a negotiation. The state Department of Education, which brought the complaint in October 2013, had initially sought permanent revocation of her credentials but settled for the two-year suspension.

A review of the state’s website listing disciplinary actions against Pennsylvania educators shows most of those implicated in the cheating scandal in Philadelphia received harsher punishments than did Sciamanna. For example, the five Philadelphia School District teachers identified by the state for disciplinary action in 2014 – Radovan Bratic, Michael Reardon, Phyllis Patselas, Alene Goldstein, and Deborah Edwards Dillard – all had to surrender their teaching certifications.

A backlash against pervasive testing

2015-11-25T16:29:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Growing up in China, Janet Zheng got used to taking tests. But she also got used to getting the preparation she needed from her classes, which is why the American system makes no sense to her.

“You take this much test,” she said, holding her hands apart, “with this little knowledge,” pulling them together.

Zheng is a junior at Northeast High School. She’s aced the Algebra I Keystone exam and takes AP calculus. But the two other Keystones have been a struggle, especially Biology. The test material doesn’t line up with what’s taught in class, she said. Teachers try to help, but support is hit or miss, especially for English language learners like her.

And part of the problem, she said, is that everybody has so many other tests to worry about.

“Northeast is a good school, but we just don’t have time,” she said. “We don’t have, like, one month just for Keystones. PSATs is crazy enough.”

Zheng doesn’t think it’s fair to judge her or other students based on how she does on Keystones or similar tests. The way she sees it, if she does well on her SATs, she’ll be on her way to the college of her choice, no matter what.

“You didn’t pass the Biology Keystone, now you can’t go to college?” she said, shaking her head with smile. “That’s crazy!”

It’s for students like Zheng that the region’s “opt-out” advocates hope to grow their slice of a small but growing movement.

The goal, they said, isn’t just to get students to skip exams. It’s to pressure state officials to relax the demanding testing regimen, reduce the stakes for schools and students, and return control of the classroom to teachers and principals.

“When we make [it] known that we aren’t taking the test, we change the way they teach all year long,” said Tomika Anglin, of Parents United for Public Education, while speaking at a recent forum at St. Joseph’s University.

Anglin was one of the first to embrace the movement locally, opting her daughter out of PSSA exams in 2013. Since then, buoyed by a surge of concern about testing, opt-out advocates have found support in Pennsylvania districts of all kinds, urban and suburban alike. Many of their complaints are being echoed by educators and officials around the nation.

And this fall, a sudden bipartisan surge has lawmakers reworking the landscape in favor of opting out. In Harrisburg, a proposal to delay the Keystone requirements is advancing fast.

In Washington, a call from President Obama and a deal in Congress have the nation on the brink of a major rewrite of the No Child Left Behind Act, the federal law that has driven so much testing.

That would be a rare and “significant” moment of unity in a deeply partisan age, said Ted Kirsch, head of the Pennsylvania Federation of Teachers. Kirsch predicts “a bipartisan bill that not only has the support of the House and the Senate, but also of the president.”

In Philadelphia, District officials are getting ready for the shift. A newly formed task force will soon revisit and reassess their full range of assessments.

But another trend remains in place.

Testing is deeply embedded in state laws nationwide. Support for “data-driven decision-making” remains strong among many lawmakers and advocates. Education reformers and civil rights groups alike back aspects of the practice.

And in Pennsylvania, by law and practice, test data still plays a major role in decisions of all kinds, including teacher evaluation, school transformation, placement in magnet schools, and more.

Opt-out supporters think those policies will backfire, leading to an interest in what many see as a form of social protest.

“New York is in the lead, and it really took on strong in New Jersey last year,” said Alison McDowell, a parent advocate and opt-out organizer with the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools. McDowell recently joined Zheng at an opt-out conference at Temple University.

“I think Pennsylvania’s year is coming up.”

Defining the movement

Shakeda Gaines, a volunteer at Thomas K. Finletter School, said she felt empowered when discovering the opt-out movement because her daughter gets so stressed out during testing time. (Photo: Harvey Finkle)

“Opting out” is shorthand for declining to take a standardized test. Pennsylvania students are legally entitled to do so, but until recently just a few hundred skipped exams each year.

Those numbers began to climb significantly around 2012, as opting out began to pick up steam in other states, and parents and organizers spread the word.

In 2015, Pennsylvania’s opt-outs tripled from the year before, with more than 4,000 students declining to take the PSSAs. Most opted out formally, using the state’s official (and somewhat cumbersome) “religious objection” opt-out process.

But others opted out informally, simply refusing to take the test on the day it was given.

For Philadelphia’s Shakeda Gaines, whose daughter gets good grades but feels badly stressed when tested, discovering opt-out was deeply empowering.

“I remembered that I was a parent, and these are my children,” she said. “If I say they don’t take the test, they don’t take the test.”

Variations on Gaines’ attitude can be found in Pennsylvania communities of all kinds – urban, suburban, and rural.

Agendas and interests differ somewhat among those constituencies. Suburban communities often see tests as unnecessary intrusions that dilute quality programs. Urban advocates often see them as unjust demands on underfunded schools, engineered to trigger closures or charter conversions.

But what unites all sides is the belief that over-testing is undermining learning. Parents in cities and suburbs alike cite the same factors: stressed-out students, overburdened teachers, ever-rising test-prep demands and a distinct lack of valuable information from the entire process.

“The biggest change is how we spend the school day. It’s all about more time for instruction,” said Marissa Golden, a Lower Merion school board member and professor of political science at Bryn Mawr College. “I worry that tests encroach on well-rounded people.”

Even in her prestigious and relatively prosperous district, she said, arts and electives are down, test prep and remediation are up, and the test results produce little useful feedback for schools.

“It’s hard to use them as an educational tool,” Golden said.

The result is growing frustration among parents and administrators and one of the state’s highest opt-out rates. Last year, almost 300 Lower Merion students opted out.

One such abstainer is Katy Morris, a Lower Merion 8th-grade teacher and mother of two. She not only opted out her own children, but also told parents that she wouldn’t be interrupting her regular classroom schedule for any special test prep.

“I wasn’t going to throw on the brakes,” she said.

Instead she offered students the option of afterschool help or take-home test preparation projects.

“Parents came and said, ‘Thank you,’” she recalled.

Widespread discontent

Such opt-outs, while growing, represent just a tiny fraction of Pennsylvania’s 800,000 test-eligible students – about one half of one percent of the total.

In Lancaster County, for example, opt-outs have doubled each year for three years, but still involve just a few hundred students. In Philadelphia, the number of PSSA opt-outs jumped by a factor of about 30 last year – from about 20 students to 595, in a district of about 130,000.

But even where actual opt-outs are low, school officials are registering many of the same complaints as opt-out promoters: that testing has become intrusive, expensive, and counter-productive.

School boards statewide – Pottsgrove, Upper and Lower Merion, West Chester, Spring-Ford and more – have passed resolutions calling on the state to relax and rethink its test regimen. The Pennsylvania School Boards Association has done the same.

And in Muhlenberg County, near Reading, one school board member who struggled to solve rigorous new 4th-grade math problems said, “At some point, I start to applaud the opt-out movement. All we’re doing is teaching the test and then stressing the heck out of the kids for two weeks while we give them this test.”

All this suggests that the opt-out movement is less radical fringe than leading edge.

“They’re driving an important conversation, staking a position about how harmful tests are when they’re misused,” said Susan Gobreski, executive director of Education Voters Pennsylvania.

“There’s a place for testing, but it should be limited. … [We shouldn’t] load everything and the kitchen sink into the results,” she said.

Experiences in other states show that the movement can gain significant traction when conditions are right. In New York, fueled by unhappiness with new Common Core standards, refusal rates have reached 20 percent. Controversy over New Jersey’s tests has driven opt-outs there as high as 15 percent – leading to a new state law prohibiting financial sanctions for districts with high refusal rates.

And this fall, the movement got a national boost when the Obama administration endorsed new research showing that the average U.S. student now takes about 112 mandated tests between kindergarten and graduation – a system the report labeled “illogical” and “incoherent.”

In the wake of that report, by the Council of the Great City Schools, Philadelphia School District’s new task force will reconsider all of its assessments, accepting recommendations to make them more effective and less intrusive.

Among those welcome to join are opt-out advocates. Chris Shaffer, the District’s head of curriculum and leader of the task force, said, “I want to get something that’s representative of everybody.”

The downside of opting out

If the tide of public opinion is turning somewhat in the test skeptics’ favor, another trend has been at work too: one that has embedded testing ever deeper at every level of state and district decision-making.

Much of that trend has been driven by federal law. That may soon change – a tentative deal in Congress could eliminate a wide range of No Child Left Behind mandates – but for now, test data is still used to drive charter school conversions, teacher evaluations, and closures.

In Pennsylvania, even as lawmakers consider relaxing Keystone mandates, they’re also considering new, data-driven laws around teacher layoffs (replacing seniority as a deciding factor with performance scores) and school transformations (requiring districts to turn low performers over to charters or private providers).

In Philadelphia, exams and assessments of all kinds are now being given virtually every day to one group of students or another. These include diagnostics, benchmark tests, mandated PSSAs and Keystones, PSATs, SATs, NAEPs, and more.

And although students may face no formal penalties for opting out of a given test, they can definitely lose opportunities. PSSAs are already a requirement for students seeking admission to Philadelphia’s magnet middle and high schools. And for now, Keystone exams remain a a 2017 graduation requirement.

“There’s a lot of parents in Philly who might be happy to opt out their kids, to their kids’ detriment,” Gobreski said. “When test scores are used to help evaluate kids for magnet schools or college, parents have to weigh the choices carefully.”

Opting out is a chance that not every family can afford to take, Gobreski said.

“Well-off parents are in a better position to take risks,” she said.

Nor is it a choice all parents have time to worry about. Tonya Bah, a mother of two opted-out teenagers from Philadelphia’s Olney area, said, “In my neighborhood, folks are worried about putting food on the table.”

And for many, the concept cuts deeply against the grain of family culture.

“For achievement-oriented parents who want to be the best, these tests are one more marker,” said Lower Merion’s Golden.

Some parents, like Gaines, aren’t worried about any of this. If her daughter skips the Keystones and needs to get a GED to get into college, she said that she’s fine with that.

“Temple takes kids without diplomas,” she said. “She’ll still have her credits.”

But testing still has strong support in many political and advocacy circles.

“The system needs a feedback loop,” said Donna Cooper, executive director of Public Citizens for Children & Youth, who helped develop the Keystones as a top aide to former Gov. Ed Rendell.

Qualitative assessments are “the only available, consistent, and objective source of data about disparities in educational outcomes,” wrote a coalition of civil rights groups, including the NAACP, in a recent statement.

This fall’s developments in both Harrisburg and Washington could eventually bring significant changes to Pennsylvania policy – changes that could make it easier for legislators and administrators to reshape all of the state’s data-driven decisions.

“It’ll be interesting to see how it works out – if there will be a need for opt-out,” said Kirsch.

But for now, Pennsylvania’s basic testing framework remains in place, and parents like Bah hope the state can make the best of it.

“Should there be testing? Absolutely. But there needs to be some kind of response to the answers,” she said.

“I would like to trust teachers again, empower teachers again. I want to go back to where I can get something wrong on a test, and then follow up so I can correct what’s wrong.”

End of a nightmare?

2015-11-25T12:01:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

High-stakes standardized tests are falling out of favor. From President Obama and Congress to School District leaders, we are finally hearing recognition of the unintended consequences of over-testing and overemphasizing test results.

Philadelphia schools have lived through 20 years of test-based accountability. At first, it involved rewards and some punishments for schools based on standardized test scores.
Over time, the stakes for schools, staff, and students were steadily raised. Punishments for low-scoring schools have included curtailing autonomy in decision-making and imposing a highly regimented, dumbed-down, remedial curriculum. Lately, the threat has been charter conversion or outright closing.

Some key architects of test-based accountability – from former Superintendent David Hornbeck in Philadelphia to Sen. Ted Kennedy in Congress – saw it as a way to enforce higher learning standards in schools that chronically underserved their students. Test-based rewards and sanctions were supposed to force schools once and for all to address deep-seated race and class inequities. Measuring the disparities and racial gaps in outcomes would go hand-in-hand with providing equal inputs.

But resources were seldom delivered where they were needed. Instead, schools were labeled as “failing” wherever teachers, parents, and students couldn’t achieve at high levels.

Schools trying to avert shutdown or charter conversion narrowed the curriculum to tested subjects, primarily reading and math. Writing, art and music, science and social studies all became endangered. Frenzied test prep squeezed out intellectually worthy activities. Pep rallies to hype test performance became normal and accepted. So did both subtle and blatant adult cheating on tests.

The pressure to raise test scores wasn’t limited to underfunded city schools. And the pushback grew – including a national movement to opt out of standardized tests.

Pressed by families refusing to cooperate, embarrassed by cheating scandals, and lacking evidence that high-stakes accountability is working, education leaders have started to rethink the approach. Obama – who like many top officials sends his children to private schools that downplay testing – has acknowledged the overkill. Congress appears poised to roll back the No Child Left Behind rules mandating interventions in low-scoring schools – though not the annual testing requirement.

A new School District committee set up to examine assessment practices here must digest the collateral damage from high-stakes testing and create a very different assessment and accountability system – one that focuses on diagnosing problems and providing supports, rather than declaring schools and students failures.

The PSSA and Keystone exams may not go away, but they still aren’t the best vehicle to ensure individual student needs are met. We do need assessments to make sure that students are learning to read and do math in the early grades. But we also need a system that doesn’t devalue other vital areas – from writing to social and emotional skills.

The District committee should look to its own schools for ideas about project-based and other alternative, authentic assessments to help build skills that students will actually need in their lives. It should also look outside – to find assessment strategies that will have real meaning for students.

In short, it’s time to rethink our testing system from top to bottom.

Raza, clase social y los exámenes estandarizados

2015-11-24T16:08:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

¿Qué es lo que se conoce como brecha de desempeño?

Esta brecha se nota en las puntuaciones de los exámenes; en la amplia mayoría de los exámenes estandarizados, las puntuaciones de los estudiantes afroamericanos y latinos son mucho más bajas que las puntuaciones promedio de los estudiantes blancos y asiáticos. Muchos se oponen a llamarle a esto “brecha en desempeño”, citando fuentes sumamente diferentes disponibles para los estudiantes en diferentes circunstancias. La brecha en puntuaciones se ha reducido en las últimas décadas, pero todavía es amplia y persistente.

¿Cuán grande es la brecha entre las puntuaciones de negros y blancos?

El NAEP del 2015 (National Assessment of Educational Progress) es un examen nacional a menudo llamado “el informe de calificaciones del país”. Este año, en los exámenes de lectura y matemáticas, el 43 por ciento de estudiantes blancos en 8vo grado obtuvo calificación de Proficient o mejor, en comparación con el 13 por ciento de los afroamericanos.

En el SAT 2015 tomado para admisión a la universidad, la puntuación combinada promedio de los blancos fue 1576; la de los afroamericanos, 1277. En el examen de álgebra Pennsylvania Keystone del 2015, el 57 por ciento de los estudiantes blancos en 11mo grado en Filadelfia obtuvo calificación de Proficient o mejor, mientras que solo el 30 por ciento de los estudiantes negros en 11mo grado obtuvo esa misma calificación.

¿Y qué tal con los latinos y asiáticos?

En los exámenes NAEP de lectura y matemáticas del 2015, el 19 por ciento de los latinos y el 61 por ciento de los asiáticos obtuvo puntuación de Proficient o mejor.

En el SAT del 2015, la puntuación promedio de los hispanos estuvo entre 1343 y 1347, dependiendo de su nacionalidad. En el caso de los asiáticos, el promedio fue 1654. En el examen de álgebra 2015 Keystone de Pensilvana, el 26 por ciento de los hispanos y el 72 por ciento de los asiáticos en Filadelfia obtuvieron puntuación de Proficient o mejor.

¿Cuáles son las razones de estas brechas?

Muchos investigadores dicen que una ‘brecha en oportunidad’ resulta en una ‘brecha en desempeño’. Los factores socioeconómicos, entre ellos niveles de ingresos, logro educativo, tasas de empleo, opciones de vivienda, tasas de crimen en los barrios, y recursos disponibles para las escuelas, son en promedio peores para los afroamericanos e hispanos que para los blancos. Estas circunstancias a menudo resultan en menos oportunidades de acceso desde el momento de nacer para los niños afroamericanos e hispanos a una amplia variedad de actividades y experiencias en un ambiente educativo enriquecido.

Los afroamericanos e hispanos a menudo no cuentan con las ventajas educativas propias de alguien con más recursos financieros. Hay más estudiantes blancos con padres que fueron a la universidad que los negros e hispanos – de hecho, el nivel educativo de la madre es un pronóstico mayor de las puntuaciones de examen. En exámenes como el SAT, los estudiantes más afluentes pueden pagar por tutorías privadas.

Muchos niños hispanos viven en casas en las que el primer idioma no es inglés, complicando su situación educativa y a veces dándoles acceso a menos recursos educativos.

En cuanto a puntuaciones más altas por los asiáticos, en promedio, un estudio reciente concluyó que ‘los jóvenes asiáticos se esfuerzan más debido a creencias culturales que enfatizan una fuerte conexión entre el esfuerzo y los logros. Hay estudios que demuestran que los estudiantes asiáticos tienden a ver las habilidades cognoscitivas como cualidades que se pueden desarrollar mediante esfuerzo, en vez de ser cualidades innatas.

¿Cuán grande es la correlación entre la pobreza y las puntuaciones en los exámenes estandarizados?

Hay una fuerte relación. Un estudio de la entidad Research for Action de Filadelfia de los resultados escolares en los exámenes PSSA y Keystone del 2012-2013 en todo el estado mostró esto claramente: “Las excepciones son raras”, dijo. En la puntuación de lectura, “de más de 2,200 escuelas en la muestra, 187 muestran puntuaciones de dominio (proficiency) de 90 o más. Es estas, solo siete escuelas (3.7%) tienen una matrícula de estudiantes en desventaja económica de un 50% o más; cinco de las siete son escuelas magnet de Filadelfia”.

Muchísimos otros estudios muestran los mismos resultados. Un investigador escribió que la manera más segura de predecir las puntuaciones de examen de un estudiante, en promedio, era fijándose en la tasa de pobreza de su código postal.

¿Los estudiantes de menos ingresos obtienen puntuaciones mucho más bajas que sus compañeros de ingresos medios y más altos?

Sí. En el NAEP del 2015, solo un 18 por ciento de estudiantes de 8vo grado elegibles para el Programa Nacional de Almuerzos (un indicador de pobreza) obtuvieron una puntuación de Proficient o mejor en matemáticas, mientras que un 48 por ciento de los no elegibles para almuerzo gratis (por el ingreso de la familia) obtuvieron puntuación de Proficient o mejor. En los demás exámenes hay una brecha similar.

Otra investigación ampliamente citada asevera que la brecha de exámenes entre los estudiantes más ricos y más pobres está aumentando.

¿En los exámenes mismos se nota parcialidad en cuanto a raza y clase?

Algunos defensores e investigadores señalan diferencias culturales en los exámenes – por ejemplo, esperar que los estudiantes sepan la contestación de una pregunta que tiene mayor probabilidad de ser familiar para los estudiantes afluentes que para los más pobres.

El experto en exámenes Jay Rosner dice que el examen SAT muestra un patrón de descartar algunas preguntas que en las pruebas de campo los estudiantes negros aciertan más a menudo que los blancos porque están buscando mantener la fiabilidad del examen, lo cual significa tomar en consideración las puntuaciones relativamente más altas de los blancos.

Los redactores del SAT dicen que las preguntas son neutrales en cuanto a raza y pasan por una ‘revisión de imparcialidad’ antes de ser incluidas en el examen. Los desarrolladores del examen dicen que están constantemente evaluando preguntas potenciales y vigilando los exámenes para detectar señales de parcialidad y tratar de eliminar cualquier imparcialidad que encuentren.

El núcleo de lo que hace a los exámenes inequitativos no es los exámenes mismos, dicen muchos investigadores y defensores, sino las circunstancias a partir de nacer de los niños que los toman.

Para leer más artículos del Notebook en español, visite nuestra página en
línea thenotebook.org/español.

Cheating: Tell us the truth

2015-11-24T10:09:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

In 2011, the Notebook obtained a Pennsylvania Department of Education forensic analysis of state test results that found implausible numbers of “wrong-to-right” erasures and irregularities at more than 200 schools statewide, including nearly 100 in Philadelphia. News coverage triggered District and state investigations at many of those schools.

We are still largely in the dark about their findings. Disciplinary action was taken against several dozen educators; some lost their certifications. Eight local educators were indicted. Besides those charges, the state and the District have provided only the sketchiest details – and nothing on lessons learned.

We have a brief report on the District’s investigation of 19 so-called “Tier 2” schools, saying that three schools were exonerated and findings at three others were inconclusive. But we don’t know which schools. Nor do we have any account of what went on at the 13 schools where cheating was confirmed – just that 69 educators were implicated. Unlike the thorough cheating inquiry in Atlanta, no light was shed on systemic practices or the involvement of District leaders.

Individual rights to due process must be honored. But the District and state owe the public a full accounting of what happened. Education officials and school reformers seem to want us to think this was just a mysterious batch of bad apples. In fact, cheating has been a pervasive feature of the high-stakes testing era. Critical decisions, including school closures, have been based on bogus data.

Understanding how badly things ran amok should top the agenda of the District’s new committee on testing. Beyond pursuing cases against individuals, the District or state should convene an independent, diverse truth commission – one that can bring closure to this dark era by fully exploring the cheating and other damage wrought by high-stakes testing.

Accommodations for special ed and ELL students

2015-11-24T09:53:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

“For both sets of parents, it’s important for them to know what their rights are: Students with disabilities and English language learners [ELLs] are entitled to accommodations on standardized tests. It’s important to discuss these issues with their schools well in advance of when the testing is taking place.

“For students with disabilities, the decision of what accommodations will be provided is made by the IEP team. That includes whether the child will take the test or not, and what type of test the child will take. For example, there’s a PSSA, but there’s also something called the PASA, which is available for students with disabilities.

“In the context of the IEP plan, there is a set of decisions about accommodations in respect to the testing itself and what will the environment look like for that student. There are many different types of accommodations.

“Many students with disabilities get minimal accommodations. The most popular one is probably extended time – when in fact, they have a right to many more.

“They can have the test read to them. Instead of writing answers, it can be audio- or videotaped. Those issues need to be discussed with families.

“With students who are ELL, many times the issue of accommodating standardized tests doesn’t even arise. You don’t have that meeting as you would with an IEP team to discuss it. Those issues need to be raised with the student’s teacher – particularly with the English as a Second Language teacher who often knows the children very well.

“For ELLs, allowable accommodations, for example, are qualified interpreters and sight translators for the Math PSSA and the Keystone Algebra 1 and the science tests – both the PSSA and the Biology.

“Unfortunately, due to budget cuts in the School District, accommodations are rarely available. Often, it doesn’t come up. All of these accommodations are voluntary, none of them are mandatory for ELL. It’s a significant issue that needs to be raised with families.”

Maura McInerney, senior staff attorney for the Education Law Center, was interviewed by Notebook intern Brianna Spause.

5 things to know about the financial cost of testing

2015-11-24T09:51:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

1. Pennsylvania’s Gov. Wolf has requested a total of $58.3 million for testing in the current budget.

The Pennsylvania Department of Education contracts with Data Recognition Corp. for the PSSAs and the Keystones. The contracts cover test development, administration, scoring, and reporting. In 2014-15, the company received about $30 million for the PSSAs – about $39 per student tested – and $27 million for the Keystones.

2. The actual costs of testing to districts and schools – including staff time, prep, and materials – are hard to estimate.

Districts and schools generally don’t separate out these costs. In Philadelphia, for example, assessment, curriculum, and instruction are combined in one department. The state also does not break out separate testing administration costs.

A recent report by the Council of the Great City Schools analyzed testing expenses for the 200,000-student Hillsborough School District in Florida and found the total to be $2.2 million, or 0.1 percent of the district’s annual budget.

The Council’s report cited a recent study by the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution estimating that states collectively spend about $1.7 billion annually on standardized assessments – about $34 per student.

3. Districts generally don’t track the costs of test preparation activities as distinct from other instructional time.

Philadelphia District schools are supplied with materials to aid in teaching subjects that are tested, but they are given no special test preparation materials. Individual schools, however, may purchase materials and dedicate time strictly for test preparation.

4. Besides the PSSA and Keystones, the state mandates and pays for several other tests, targeted to specific groups.

These include the Kindergarten Entry Inventory for incoming students, the ACCESS tests for English language learners, and the Pennsylvania Alternate System of Assessment (PASA) for students with severe cognitive disabilities who cannot take the PSSA. Their cost per year, in state and federal funds, is roughly $7 million.

5. The federal government expects to spend $157 million this year on its one mandated test.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests a sample of students from every state to determine academic performance against a national standard.

In Philadelphia and 20 other urban districts, a random sample of students participates every other year in the NAEP’s Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA).

The PSSA and Keystone exams: The basics

2015-11-24T09:42:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

What are the PSSAs and the Keystones?

The Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) launched the PSSAs (Pennsylvania System of School Assessment) in 1992. They are standardized tests administered annually and are based on state standards for what students should know and be able to do at their grade level.

The Keystxones began in 2011, two years after the state Board of Education voted to establish end-of-course exams that set uniform benchmarks for key academic subjects. The tested subjects are Algebra I, Biology, and Literature.

Who wrote these tests?

Both tests are developed and scored by the Minnesota-based Data Recognition Corp., which has worked in at least 12 states. The state sets the “cut scores” for the PSSA to determine proficiency levels and reviews potential Keystone questions.

Who decides how the tests are administered?

The state Department of Education sets the rules and trains school personnel to ensure that this is done uniformly statewide. Districts determine how to prepare students for the tests.

Who takes these tests and when?

Pennsylvania students in grades 3 through 8 take the PSSA in English Language Arts and math. Fourth and 8th graders also take the Science & Technology exam. About 775,000 students in district schools, charters and cyber charters took the PSSA tests in 2015. They are administered in the spring.

The Keystone exams are given in high school, or in some cases to younger students who take Algebra I, Literature, and Biology, generally at the end of the course. They are offered in the winter, spring and summer.

Students with high scores on International Baccalaureate and Advanced Placement Algebra, Biology or Literature courses can skip the Keystone test in that subject.

Special education students can be exempted entirely, and parents may opt out their children, but only for religious reasons.

How many hours do they take to administer?

A 3rd grader will generally take the PSSA for a total of five hours and 40 minutes over the course of a week. The 4th-grade test, which includes science, takes more than eight hours. Keystone tests, each with one multiple-choice and one open-ended section, take two to three hours.

How are the test results used?

PDE says that PSSA scores help teachers pinpoint students who need additional help and determine how the curriculum and instruction could be improved. But scores are also used to evaluate teachers and schools. Teacher evaluations are based in part on the building’s overall scores and on PSSA performance in that teacher’s classroom. Results also factor into a school’s rating on the state’s School Performance Profile and influence district decisions about turnaround, closings, and charter renewals.

How do Keystones count for students?

If state law doesn’t change, starting with the class of 2017, students must pass all three Keystone exams in order to graduate. But they can take it as many times as they want, and schools must provide supplemental instruction.

Students can also complete the alternate Project Based Assessment for that subject to meet the graduation requirement. That is an 8- to 10-week series of activities based on the same subject matter as the exam developed by educators. They must be finished by January 2017 and will be graded by panels set up by PDE.

What are proficiency rates statewide?

In 2015, 60 percent of students scored Advanced or Proficient on the PSSA in English; less than 40 percent of students did so in math. In science, 68 percent scored Proficient or Advanced.

On the Keystones, in 2015, 73 percent of students statewide scored Proficient or above on the Literature test, but only 54 percent did so among those designated as “historically underperforming” – economically disadvantaged, English Language learners, or special education students.

On the Algebra I Keystone, 64 percent of all students scored Proficient or above and 44 percent of historically underperforming students did so. On the Biology Keystone, 59 percent of students were Proficient or above and 37 percent of historically underperforming students met the mark.

In Philadelphia, scores were lower than the statewide averages, and there were wide racial gaps. For example, in Algebra, White students had a 57 percent pass rate, compared to 26 percent of Hispanics and 30 percent of African Americans.

The PSSA was made harder this year. Why?

To align it with new and more rigorous Pennsylvania Core Standards. Statewide results showed a 31-point average drop in math proficiency rates and a 9-point drop in English. State Education Secretary Pedro Rivera called the new PSSAs “fundamentally different,” cautioning against equating the drop in scores with a decline in student performance.

Were there other reasons for the drop in PSSA scores?

Teachers and districts complained that curriculum materials from the state were inadequate and late to arrive. Teachers also said that there were insufficient funds to help them prepare students to meet the higher standards.

In Philadelphia, greater demands on students, teacher layoffs, and school closings were also factors cited by Chris Shaffer, deputy chief of curriculum, instruction, and assessment. “We lost the capacity to deliver the implementation, from resources to professional development, parent outreach – the whole gamut,” Shaffer said.

What is controversial about these tests?

Supporters – including some civil rights groups – say they help maintain high standards for all students and necessary feedback for teachers, students, and parents.

But critics describe tests as a waste of time and destructive in their impact – narrowing the curriculum to tested subjects, squeezing out subjects like social studies and art, and, in some cases, leading to adult cheating because of their high-stakes nature. They say that results come too late to influence instruction and heavily reflect other factors, like poverty.

As for making the Keystones a graduation requirement, proponents say a rigorous, uniform, statewide standard in core subjects is crucial because a high school diploma today does not guarantee that a student has minimal knowledge and skills. Critics say that a few high-stakes tests should not deny students’ diplomas in an atmosphere of vast inequalities among schools and districts – including, often, shortages of qualified teachers. Citing the high failure rate, they say that the tests will lead to more dropouts and severely cramp students’ life chances.

Legislation is under consideration in Harrisburg that would change the requirement that students pass the Keystones in order to graduate.

5 things to know about the financial cost of testing

2015-11-23T11:09:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

1. Pennsylvania Gov. Wolf has requested a total of $58.3 million for testing in the current budget.

The Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) contracts with Data Recognition Corp. (DRC) for the PSSAs and the Keystones. Both contracts run through June 2016 and cover test development, administration, scoring, and reporting. In 2014-15, the company received about $30 million for the PSSAs – about $39 per student tested – and $27 million for the Keystones.

DRC also provides classroom diagnostic tools and other preparatory materials through the eDirect website.

2. The actual costs of testing to districts and schools – including staff time, prep, and materials – are hard to estimate.

Districts and schools generally don’t separate out these costs. In the Philadelphia School District, for example, assessment, curriculum, and instruction are combined in one department.

PDE also does not break out separate testing administration costs.

The Council of the Great City Schools, in a report issued in October, analyzed testing expenses for the 200,000-student Hillsborough School District in Florida and found the total to be $2.2 million in testing expenses, which made up about one tenth of one percent of the district’s annual budget of $2.2 billion.

The Council’s report cited a recent study by the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution estimating that the expenditure on standardized assessments by states across the country is about $1.7 billion annually – or about $34 per student – and said: “Although the number appears high, the report suggests that if these dollars were reinvested in classrooms or teacher raises, the student-teacher ratio would fall by only 0.1 student, and teacher salaries would increase by only $550 per teacher annually.”

3. Districts generally don’t track the costs of test preparation activities as distinct from other instructional time.

In the Philadelphia School District, for example, schools are supplied with materials to aid in teaching subjects that are tested, but they are given no special test preparation materials. Individual schools, however, may purchase materials and dedicate time strictly for test preparation.

4. Besides the PSSA and Keystones, the state mandates and pays for several other tests, targeted to specific groups.

*The Kindergarten Entry Inventory, to indicate a variety of individual needs for incoming students.

*ACCESS, a measurement of academic language proficiency for English language learner (ELL) students.

*The WIDA-ACCESS Placement Test, a screening test to identify ELL students.

*The Pennsylvania Alternate System of Assessment (PASA), for students with such severe cognitive disabilities that they cannot meaningfully participate in the PSSA.

Their total cost per year, in state and federal funds, is roughly $7 million.

5. The federal government expects to spend $157 million this year on its mandated test.

Randomly selected students from a sample of schools participate every year in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which tests them in a variety of subjects to determine academic performance against a national standard.

NAEP provides data for states but does not for individual students or schools. Selected students in the School District of Philadelphia participate every other year in the Trial Urban District Assessment, or TUDA, a NAEP exam given in 21 large urban districts.

Both tests are administered and fully paid for by the federal government.

Research group calls for revisions to Pa. school quality index

2015-11-23T09:41:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Does Pennsylvania’s school rating system make the grade?

In a recent brief, Research for Action argues that the state’s School Performance Profile index leaves much to be desired.

Under former Gov. Tom Corbett, the Pennsylvania Department of Education introduced the SPP scale in 2013 as a replacement for Adequate Yearly Progress. It scores every school on a 100-point scale using a metric that relies on state standardized tests for 90 percent of its tally.

Federal guidelines have mandated state accountability indices for schools for more than two decades. And 2001’s No Child Left Behind calls for each state to publish an annual school report card.

Proponents of the current SPP system argue that it offers a clear numerical rating that holds all schools equally accountable for their efforts to imbue students with the skills needed to show mastery of the state’s academic expectations.

Opponents argue that SPP’s heavy emphasis on state tests blurs what could be a more nuanced portrait of school worth. They argue that SPP offers little but a codified way to shame schools with high concentrations of impoverished students with deep special-education needs.

A previous RFA report found that – even when analyzing growth measures – low SPP scores were strongly correlated to student poverty.

Since entering office in January, Gov. Wolf has frequently stated his desire to create a more holistic school-quality metric, but his attempt to revise the system remains ongoing.

"Representatives from PDE have been visiting the state’s intermediate units where they are meeting publicly with lawmakers, advocates, educators and administrators, around what measures would make the SPP a better evaluation tool," wrote state Department of Education spokeswoman Nicole Reigelman.

Read the rest of this story at NewsWorks

Race, class, and standardized tests explained

2015-11-20T12:33:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The Notebook is examining standardized testing this month. The topic is the focus of our upcoming December-January edition.

What is the so-called achievement gap?

This gap manifests itself in test scores; in the vast majority of standardized tests, scores for African American and Latino students are, on average, significantly lower than scores for White and Asian students. Many object to calling it an “achievement” gap, citing vastly different resources available to students in different circumstances. The gap has shrunk over the last few decades, but is still wide and persistent, as is the gap in resources.

How large is the Black-White test score gap?

The 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is a national test often called “the nation’s report card.” This year, on reading and math tests, 43 percent of White 8th graders scored Proficient or above, compared to 13 percent of African Americans.

On the 2015 SAT taken for college admission, the combined score for Whites was 1576; for African Americans, it was 1277.

On the 2015 Pennsylvania Keystone exam in algebra, 57 percent of White Philadelphia 11th graders scored Proficient or advanced, while 30 percent of Blacks met that mark.

How about Latinos and Asians?

On the 2015 NAEP reading and math tests, 19 percent of Hispanics and 61 percent of Asians scored Proficient or above.

On the 2015 SAT, Hispanics’ scores ranged from 1343 to 1347, depending on their nationality. For Asians-Americans, it was 1654.

On Pennsylvania’s 2015 Keystone exam in algebra, 26 percent of Hispanics tested and 72 percent of Asian Americans in Philadelphia scored Proficient or above.

What are the reasons for the gaps?

Many researchers say that an “opportunity gap” leads to an “achievement gap.” Socio-economic factors including income levels, educational attainment, employment rates, housing options, crime rates in neighborhoods, and resources available to schools, are worse for African Americans and Hispanics, on average, than for Whites. These circumstances often lead to fewer opportunities for African American and Hispanic children to access a wide range of activities and experience an enriched educational environment from birth onward.

African Americans and Hispanics often do not have the educational advantages that more wealth brings. More White students than Blacks and Hispanics have parents who went to college – the mother’s education level is a major predictor of test scores. For tests like the SAT, more affluent students can pay for private coaching and test prep.

Some researchers and advocates say that African Americans and some Hispanics, because of the legacy of segregation and the persistence of discrimination, on average attend worse schools in more troubled neighborhoods than Whites, even if they are not poor. And many Hispanic children live in households where English is not the first language, complicating their educational situation and sometimes giving them access to fewer educational resources.

As for the higher scores, on average, by Asians, a recent study concluded that “Asian and Asian American youth are harder working because of cultural beliefs that emphasize the strong connection between effort and achievement. Studies show that Asian and Asian American students tend to view cognitive abilities as qualities that can be developed through effort,” rather than inborn.

How great is the correlation between poverty and scores on standardized tests?

There is a strong relationship. A 2015 statewide study of school results on the 2012-13 PSSAs and Keystone exams by the Philadelphia-based Research for Action showed this clearly: “Exceptions are rare,” it said. For the reading score, “of more than 2,200 schools in this sample, 187 post proficiency rates of 90 or above. Of these, just seven schools (3.7%) have economically disadvantaged enrollments of 50 percent or higher; five of the seven are Philadelphia magnet schools.”

Countless other studies show the same results. One researcher wrote that the surest way to predict a student’s test scores, on average, was by looking at the amount of poverty in their zip code.

Do lower income students score far below their middle- and upper-income counterparts?

On the 2015 NAEP, 18 percent of 8th grade students eligible for the National School Lunch Program, an indicator of poverty, scored Proficient or above on math, while 48 percent of those whose family income priced them out of lunch eligibility scored Proficient or above.

A 2014 Wall Street Journal article said that according to calculations from the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (also known as FairTest), “students from the wealthiest families outscored those from the poorest by just shy of 400 points.” On the 2015 Keystone test in algebra, 58 percent of Philadelphia students who were not economically disadvantaged scored Proficient or above, while 33 percent of economically disadvantaged students achieved that benchmark.

Some widely cited research asserts that the testing gap between wealthier and poorer students is growing. One study found that the proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a bachelor’s degree increased by 18 percentage points over a recent 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students grew by only 4 points.

Is there race and class bias in the tests themselves?

Some advocates and researchers point to cultural biases in the tests – for example, expecting test takers to know some aspect of a test question that more affluent students are more likely to have encountered than poorer children.

Testing expert Jay Rosner says that the SAT shows a pattern of discarding possible test questions that Black students get right more often than White students in field tests because they are seeking to maintain the reliability of the test, which means taking into account the relatively higher scores of White test takers.

The makers of the SAT, the College Board, say that the questions that make it into the test are and should be race neutral and undergo a statistical “fairness review” before their inclusion.Test developers say that they are constantly screening potential tests questions and monitoring tests for signs of bias and work hard to eliminate any that they find.

The core of what makes the tests inequitable, many researchers and advocates say, is not mainly the tests themselves, but the circumstances, from birth onward, of the children taking them.

Understanding the PSSA exams

2015-11-18T12:37:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The Notebook is examining standardized testing this month. The topic is the focus of our upcoming December-January edition.

What are the PSSAs?

The Pennsylvania Department of Education launched the PSSAs (Pennsylvania System of School Assessment) in 1992. They are standardized tests administered annually and are based on state standards for what students should know and be able to do at various grade levels.

Who put them together?

They are developed and scored by the Minnesota-based Data Recognition Corp.

The state sets “cut scores,” determining what results are considered Advanced, Proficient, Basic, or Below Basic.

Who takes them and when?

Every Pennsylvania student in grades 3 through 8 is assessed in English Language Arts and Math. Every student in grades 4 and 8 is also assessed in Science & Technology. This applies to students attending District schools, charters, and cyber charters. About 775,000 students took the PSSA tests in 2015.

Special education students who have an Individualized Education Program that specifically says they should not take the test are excused. Parents may opt their children out, but only for religious reasons.

The tests are taken in the spring. In 2015, it was in April. Schools get a separate one-week window to give each of the three tests.

How many hours do they take?

A 3rd grader will generally be tested for 3½ hours in English in four sections over a one-week period and in math for two hours and 10 minutes in three sections in a second one-week period, for a total of five hours and 40 minutes.

Fourth graders are tested for four hours and 20 minutes in English, two hours and 10 minutes in math and one hour and 40 minutes in science, for a total of eight hours and 10 minutes.

How are results used?

According to the Pennsylvania Department of Education, “individual student scores, provided only to their respective schools, can be used to assist teachers in identifying students who may be in need of additional education opportunities, and school scores provide information to schools and districts for curriculum and instruction improvement and planning.”

But the scores are also being used to evaluate teachers and schools. Teacher evaluations are based in part on the building’s overall scores and on PSSA performance in that teacher’s classroom. Results also factor heavily into a school’s state’s school rating system, the School Performance Profile. School scores are used by districts in decisions about school turnaround interventions and school closings, and in the charter school renewal process.

In 2015, the state got a one-year waiver from the U.S Department of Education from using the PSSA to rate teachers or schools. This was due to plummeting scores from 2014 after the test was made considerably harder.

What are proficiency rates statewide?

In 2015, 60 percent of students scored advanced or proficient in English; less than 40 percent of students did so in math. In science, 68 percent scored proficient or advanced.

Why was the test made harder?

This was the first year that the tests were fully aligned to new and more rigorous Pennsylvania Core Standards, the state’s version of the Common Core standards. Statewide results showed a 31-point average drop in math proficiency rates and a 9-point drop in English. State Education Secretary Pedro Rivera called the new PSSAs “fundamentally different” and cautioned against seeing the drop in scores as a decline in student performance.

Were there other reasons for the sharp decline?

In Philadelphia, greater demands on students, teacher layoffs, and recent rounds of school closings were also factors cited by Christopher Shaffer, deputy chief of curriculum, instruction, and assessment.

‘We lost the capacity to deliver the implementation, from resources to professional development, parent outreach – the whole gamut,” Shaffer said.

Who decides how the tests are administered?

The state Department of Education. It also trains school personnel to ensure that this is done uniformly throughout the state. Districts determine how to use curriculum materials to prepare students for the tests.

What is controversial about the PSSA?

Supporters – including some civil rights groups – say they are a valuable asset in maintaining standards throughout a state or a district.

Donna Cooper, executive director of Public Citizens for Children & Youth, says, “As a school district, we are well-served when everyone is improving on common measures. … A test is one common measure. The system needs a feedback loop, and the kid needs it, and the parent needs it. … They are signals, and getting rid of them is getting rid of signals.”

Critics describe tests as a waste of time and destructive in their impact.

“It narrows the curriculum,” says Jerry Oleksiak, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, skewing it toward subjects that are tested and away from non-tested subjects like social studies and art. The high stakes attached to the PSSA have led some school administrators and teachers to cheat by changing student answer sheets to boost student test scores.

Critics also say there is little evidence that tests like the PSSA improve learning outcomes and argue that the time involved would be better used for instruction. They point out that student results don’t arrive until after the school year is over, too late for teachers to adjust their approach with those students. And they say that test scores heavily reflect other factors, like poverty.

Keystone exams: Questions and answers

2015-11-17T14:40:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The Notebook is examining standardized testing this month. The topic is the focus of our upcoming December-January edition.

What are the Keystone exams?

In 2009, the Pennsylvania State Board of Education voted to establish statewide end-of-course exams in order to set uniform benchmarks for key academic subjects. The tests began in 2011. The tested subjects are Algebra 1, Biology, and Literature.

Seven other subjects were to be added later. Civics & Government and English Composition are supposed to be tested next, but no rollout schedule has been set.

Originally, test scores were to count for at least 30 percent of a student’s final grade for each subject; it was left to each school board to determine whether the exam would be a graduation requirement, but if not, districts would have to develop a local test that met state approval.

In 2013, the 30 percent requirement was dropped, but passing the Algebra, Biology and Literature Keystones or an equivalent local or national exam became a graduation requirement, starting in the 2016-17 school year.

Who put together the Keystones?

The tests were developed by Data Recognition Corp., which also developed the PSSA tests that are used by the state in the lower grades. DRC has developed tests in a dozen other states as well.

DRC submits potential test questions to panels of Pennsylvania educators and to the Pennsylvania Department of Education for review.

Who takes the Keystones and when?

The Keystone exams are mainly for high school students, though some students who study Algebra 1 in the lower grades take them as well. The tests are administered in all public schools that offer Algebra 1, Literature, and Biology courses. They are usually given at or near the end of those courses, though they can be taken without enrolling in the course. They are offered in the winter, spring and summer of each school year.

Students with high scores on International Baccalaureate and Advanced Placement Algebra, Biology or Literature courses can skip taking the Keystone test in that subject.

Because passing the exam is becoming a requirement for high school graduation, students who do not pass it the first time must retake it until they pass or until they successfully complete an alternate, project-based assessment. Students must take the exams for the first time by the end of their junior year.

What are they like?

All three tests have two modules, or sections, that are given separately, either online or in paper and pencil format. The Algebra and Literature tests have 23 multiple-choice questions and four open-ended response questions in each module. The Biology test has 32 multiple-choice questions and four open-ended questions.

The Algebra test modules are Operations and Linear Equations & Inequalities in the first and Linear Functions and Data Organizations in the second.
The Biology test modules are Cells and Cell Processes and Continuity and Unity of Life. The Literature modules test the comprehension of fiction and nonfiction passages.

How much time do they take?

The tests are untimed. Each of the two modules is administered separately, usually taking 60-90 minutes to complete. The estimated time for most students to take one whole test is two to three hours.

How are results used?

Starting with the senior class of 2017, most students must pass all three Keystone exams in order to graduate. The tests replaced the 11th-grade PSSA (Pennsylvania System of School Assessment) tests that have been used to meet No Child Left Behind requirements. Along with a numerical score, results are classified as Advanced, Proficient, Basic, or Below Basic, with the first two considered acceptable scores. The performance level appears on students’ transcripts.

The test results are used as a key component of the state’s School Performance Profile, a rating system for schools. Results are also one element used in required annual teacher evaluation ratings.

What happens if someone doesn’t pass?

Any student whose overall score is below Proficient must take it again. Schools are required to give students supplemental instruction before a student takes the test again. There is no limit to how many times a student can retake a Keystone Exam.

What’s the alternative assessment?

Starting in the 2016-17 school year, graduating seniors who have not scored Proficient on a Keystone exam must participate in Project Based Assessment (PBA) for that subject. Successfully completing the PBA fulfills the graduation requirement.

Each PBA is a series of activities based on the same subject matter as the corresponding Keystone Exam. They are developed by groups of Pennsylvania educators, and only one will be available each year for each subject module. A tutor and test administrator (which can be the same person) oversees each student’s work on the PBA, which takes an estimated 8-10 weeks to complete and must be finished by January 2017. Completed PBAs are graded by panels set up by the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

What is the Keystone pass rate statewide and in Philly?

Statewide in 2015, about 73 percent of students scored Proficient or above on the Literature Keystone. Only 54 percent of students designated as “historically underperforming” – those who were economically disadvantaged, English Language learners, or special education students – scored Proficient or above.

On the Algebra Keystone, 64 percent of all students scored Proficient or above and 44 percent of historically underperforming students did so. On the Biology Keystone, 59 percent of all state students were Proficient or above and 37 percent of historically underperforming students met the mark.

In Philadelphia, scores were lower than the statewide averages and there were wide racial gaps. For example, in Algebra, 38 percent of all students scored Proficient or above. White students had a 57 percent pass rate, while 26 percent of Hispanics and 30 percent of African Americans were Proficient or better.

What is controversial about requiring passing scores for graduation?

Keystone advocates say that when graduation requirements are based on local tests that vary in rigor from district to district, there is no assurance that a high school diploma means students are able to meet the demands of college and the workplace. Many employers say that high school graduates come to them without the basics they need to get or hold down a job. Many students starting college need to take remedial courses. The Keystone exams are supposed to remedy those situations, setting a rigorous, uniform, statewide graduation standard in core subjects.

Proponents add that those who fail the tests get supplemental help and the PBA will take care of those who simply are not good test-takers. Also, a student can graduate if their IEP says they should not take the Keystones, and a district can grant waivers allowing a student to graduate if specific circumstances dictate.

Critics say that a few high-stakes tests should not determine whether students can graduate and go on to good jobs or college. They argue that the tests do not fairly measure all students’ abilities and that some districts may lack enough qualified teachers or other resources to prepare students for the exams. They say that the tests will lead to a higher dropout rate and more students denied the chance to even try for good jobs and a college education. They point out that the failure rate for students retaking the test is very high; in 2013-14, for example, only 21 percent of Algebra re-takers passed, 14 percent passed in Biology and 23 percent passed in Literature. Legislation is under consideration in Harrisburg that would change the law requiring students to pass the Keystones.

Have Keystones led to curriculum changes?

The Keystone tests are based on Pennsylvania Core Standards, which are closely related to national Common Core standards that have been adopted by 42 states. All these standards are said to be more rigorous and difficult than most state standards were before their adoption. Pennsylvania adopted the Common Core standards in 2010 and amended them in 2014. Districts generally have been revising their curriculum to reflect the new standards and prepare students better for the exams.

District to create task force on testing

2015-11-12T18:11:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The Philadelphia School District plans to convene an assessment task force to study the impact of all the tests administered to city students and make recommendations for changes.

Chris Schaffer, deputy chief for curriculum, instruction and assessment, said that the task force will include parents, teachers, community members, and perhaps students.

The goal is to have its members in place by the December break and start meeting in January to reconsider the District’s approach to testing.

"The task force will have access to all assessment information and staff to help inform our assessment plans for the future – inclusive of recommendations to adjust the frequency, duration, and types of assessments we administer. This group will consist of school and community members representative of the District’s landscape," Schaffer said.

How many members will be named, and how they will be chosen, is still being decided, Schaffer said.

"I want to get something that’s representative of everybody," he said – including parents and teachers who have been vocal in the opt-out movement that encourages families to decline to allow their children to take tests.

District officials said they were responding to several recent developments that highlight concerns about testing.

A two-year study on standardized testing in 66 big-city public school districts in the United States, released Oct. 25, found that students take an average of eight standardized tests per year, consuming between 20 and 25 hours of classroom time. It was commissioned in 2013 by the Council of the Great City Schools to better inform public debate about testing reform.

Michael Casserly, the Council’s executive director, said in a statement: “Everyone has some culpability in how much testing there is and how redundant and uncoordinated it is – Congress, the U.S. Department of Education, states, local school systems. … Everyone must play a role in improving this situation.”

At the same time, President Obama issued a statement that urged a rethinking of testing. In a video on the White House’s Facebook page, President Obama said, “In moderation, smart, strategic [testing] can help us measure our kids’ progress,” but "tests shouldn’t occupy too much classroom time or crowd out teaching and learning."

The president’s latest education policy called for states and districts to limit the time spent on standardized tests to no more than 2 percent of classroom hours. The president has called on Congress to make this limit a law.

Last spring, City Council passed a resolution urging the District to "analyze the financial, human and financial impact" of testing and take steps to minimize its use.

Another looming issue is that unless there is a change in state law, Pennsylvania students will be required to pass Keystone exams in English, algebra, and biology in order to graduate starting in 2017, and many will struggle to do so.

School Reform Commission Chair Marjorie Neff said that she wants the District’s task force "to be a stakeholder discussion, including the kids affected and parents."

Neff, former principal of Masterman middle and high school, said the task force will grapple with big questions.

"It boils down to that tension between how do we make sure we are holding kids and educators to high standards while at the same time not making these tests a barrier for next steps for kids," she said. The task force will also look at the amount of testing and the impact of high-stakes tests on the qualiy of instruction in the classroom.

Neff said that she would like to see the task force come up with two sets of recommendations: one for the administration of Gov. Wolf and Secretary of Education Pedro Rivera and another for internal use, "to make sure testing is not eclipsing everything else we do in the District."

The Council of the Great City Schools study found that in 8th grade, the most intensive year for testing, big-city public school students spend an average of 4.2 days, or 2.3 percent of all classroom time, taking standardized tests – not including the time used to prepare for these tests.

The study found no correlation between larger amounts of mandated test time and improved reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test also known as the Nation’s Report Card.

The Wolf administration has also said it wants to re-evaluate the use of testing in schools in the commonwealth.

“Secretary Rivera and Gov. Wolf believe that while standardized tests can provide useful benchmarks for growth, they are not the sole indicator of student achievement,” Nicole Reigelman, press secretary for the Pennsylvania Department of Education, said in an email. “The administration is exploring additional means to more holistically assess student and school achievement.”

Robert McGrogan, head of Philadelphia’s principals’ union, said that the estimates of how many hours it takes to administer tests are likely understated.

“The whole day is really lost to the assessment," he said.

McGrogan said that, on days when testing is scheduled in the morning, shorter class periods and student frustration “make the post-test portion of the day a decompression period, and certainly not one where quality instruction is facilitated.”

Help the Notebook as we examine standardized testing in Pa.

2015-11-06T17:16:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The debate about standardized testing has taken center stage in recent weeks, with the Obama administration acknowledging that its policies have contributed to a climate of overtesting in schools.

The Notebook‘s December print edition will take a deeper look at the role and impact of standardized testing in Pennsylvania. We’ve kicked off our coverage with online stories on recent national developments, the latest PSSA exam results, and the trends on the national NAEP exam.

And we need your help!

This is a hot-button issue that affects everyone involved in schools. We will be exploring topics like the requirement that students pass Keystone exams to graduate from high school, the use of test scores in teacher evaluation, cheating on standardized tests, teaching to the test, the opt-out movement, and the Black-White test score gap.

If you have information you would like to share, or if you would like to be interviewed for this edition, please let us know by filling out the attached, confidential form.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1LyeWq9Xbj8NLKm0w5y5ojaxcH3IZTMG9xF4HD4xjTaA/viewform?embedded=true

Pa. high schools get their grades

2015-11-04T17:06:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

High schools received their grades Wednesday as the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) released the School Performance Profile scores that it uses to rate schools, along with results on the Keystone Exams.

The state’s school accountability system provides a snapshot of student achievement and growth that takes into account numerous measures, with most of the weight going to standardized test scores.

Statewide, proficiency rates on the math and English Keystones remained flat from last year. But overall school ratings dipped across the state, said Matt Stem, deputy secretary for elementary and secondary education.

“The overall trend is slightly downward," he said. "There are a number of schools that improved their SPP scores year after year.” But a larger number had decreases, he said.

Only those schools with an 11th grade — the year students’ Keystone results are counted — received scores for the 2014-15 school year. Schools that only administered the PSSAs, which are given in elementary and middle grades, did not receive an SPP score.

In August, the U.S. Department of Education granted Pennsylvania a waiver, allowing PDE a one-year reprieve from assigning these schools performance grades after the PSSA results showed huge declines in proficiency.

The PSSA scores were released earlier this fall with the proviso that the large declines resulted from the rollout of the new, more rigorous, PA Core Standard-aligned tests. Education officials have repeatedly discouraged comparisons to prior PSSA years.

The Keystone Exams, however, have been aligned to the Common Core-type standards since 2012-13.

For the first time, this year, the state has elected to use the best scores from 11th-grade students who took the same Keystone tests in earlier grades. If a student took a Keystone exam more than once, only the highest score would be “banked” in the 11th-grade year, officials said.

“The score that you’ll see on the SPP are scores that reflect last year’s 2014-15 junior class,” said Stem. “It will be the highest score that is reflected in their junior year.”

In addition to test scores, according to the PDE, a school’s SPP score measures how a school performs in relation to college readiness, graduation, promotion, and attendance, among other indicators. But test scores carry the most weight.

Gov. Wolf and his education secretary, Pedro Rivera, have said they want to change that imbalance. In a statement Wednesday, Rivera reinforced the goal to reduce the influence of high-stakes standardized tests in rating schools’ performance.

“While SPP scores can be a useful tool in assessing school performance, the Department is engaged in conversations with multiple stakeholders to consider comprehensive measures in evaluating schools.”

On Wednesday, Stem, the deputy secretary, echoed that plan. “We’re looking at ways that we can make the SPP a more effective tool … looking at more holistic ways to measure student success.”

The School Performance Profile scores – and their component measures – for Philadelphia’s District and charter schools can be found below.

https://public.tableau.com/views/2014-15SchoolPerformanceScores/2014-15SPP?:embed=y&:showVizHome=no&:tabs=no&:toolbar=yes&:animate_transition=yes&:display_static_image=yes&:display_spinner=yes&:display_overlay=yes&:display_count=yes&:showTabs=y

Greg Windle contributed reporting.

Philly NAEP scores below average for urban areas; nationally, scores slip

2015-10-28T15:01:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Students nationwide showed a marked dip in math performance and a somewhat smaller decline in reading proficiency, according to 2015 results of the only standardized achievement test administered across the country by the federal government.

It was the first reversal of a steady upward trend that held for the more than two decades that U.S. students have been taking the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Philadelphia students continue to score below the national average for big cities, according to analysis of the scores from 21 urban areas. Both nationally and in the city, there are huge achievement gaps among racial and ethnic groups.

Here are some key facts on the NAEP and its significance.

What is the NAEP?

The NAEP has been administered since 1990 to a representative sample of the nation’s 4th and 8th graders. (There is also a 12th-grade pilot in several states.) Designed to measure what students know and are able to do, the NAEP, also called the Nation’s Report Card, is considered the benchmark against which to evaluate assessments given by the states. It is also used to compare American students with those in other countries. Like other standardized tests, however, it has its critics.

How is it different from other standardized tests?

NAEP is the only common exam that has been administered nationally and for an extended period. This allows for periodic comparisons across states of how students are doing, and whether they are improving over time, against a single standard. It is not a high-stakes test in that it is not used to evaluate individual students or schools. The NAEP is also considered a more rigorous test than most state exams, like Pennsylvania’s PSSA.

How often is it given and to whom?

Demographically representative samples – not every student – in 4th and 8th grade take the test once every two years. The effort is to get students from district, charter, and private schools so that the sample is truly representative. Results are tabulated nationally and for each state. Private school results are not included in the reporting.

What are the 2015 results and trends?

This year, for the first time since test administration began in 1990, scores showed a dip. In a media call about the results, Peggy Carr, acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said: "This isn’t a pattern that we saw coming. It was an unexpected downturn."

At the same time Carr pointed out that the overall scores are still much higher than they were in the 1990s and that it is too soon to draw conclusions about a trend. Another reason suggested for the downturn is that new curricula adopted by many states in the wake of the Common Core standards put what is taught in what grade out of sync with what NAEP measures.

What is the TUDA?

The Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) started in 2002, when six urban districts voluntarily allowed their NAEP results to be disaggregated and analyzed. There are now 21 districts that participate; Philadelphia joined in 2009. TUDA results include only students in district schools, not those in charters.

How did Philadelphia do, and how does it compare to other cities?

Philadelphia students score below the national average, the Pennsylvania average, and the average for big cities in 4th and 8th grade and in both reading and math. Scores in 2015 are not significantly different from the scores six years ago; overall proficiency rates remain low. For instance, just 14 percent of 4th graders scored proficient or advanced in reading and 15 percent in math. Philadelphia’s 4th-grade proficiency rates were in a cluster near the bottom; only Detroit scored significantly lower. For 8th graders, the proficiency rates were 16 percent in reading and 19 percent in math. The comparable numbers for all the large city districts were higher: For 4th grade, reading was 27 percent and math, 32 percent. For 8th grade, both reading and math were 25 percent.

City scores also show wide achievement gaps based on race, ethnicity, and gender. For instance, 17 percent of 4th-grade females, but only 11 percent of males tested as proficient readers. The gender gap in reading scores persisted to 8th grade: 20 percent of females and 12 percent of males were proficient.

Among ethnic groups, gaps were even starker. In 8th-grade math, for example, 56 percent of Asians, 31 percent of Whites, 10 percent of Blacks and 13 percent of Hispanics were proficient in math.

But other than in 4th-grade math, city scores did not decline from two years ago, somewhat bucking the downward national trend.

What does the School District say about the results?

District spokeswoman Raven Hill issued a statement: "Given the lack of fundamental resources that our system and schools confront, we are encouraged about mostly defying downward national and state trends. … The decrease in 4th-grade math scores is an obvious area of concern. Those scores may reflect a misalignment between NAEP and our state Common Core standards. Several tested objectives on NAEP are either sequenced for later grades or not included in the PA Common Core."

What about Pennsylvania?

Pennsylvania’s overall reading and math scores for 4th and 8th graders are slightly above the national average, but there are significant gaps by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.

What has been the reaction to the 2015 NAEP scores?

Advocates, union leaders and others who weighed in agreed that the results are cautionary. This holds true whether they favor testing or not.

Some examples:

Kati Haycock of Education Trust has long promoted No Child Left Behind and tests disaggregated by subgroups to draw attention to the needs of underserved students. She said: “Any way you look at it, today’s NAEP results are sobering. Compared with results from 2013, scores for the nation’s low-income students and students of color mirror those of all other students: mostly flat or declining performance.

“While there may be plausible explanations for these patterns — among them the disruptions caused by the transition to new standards — any interruption of the slow but steady progress these groups have made over the past two decades is cause for great concern."

American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten said the scores "should give pause to anyone who still wishes to double down on austerity and make competition, scapegoating teachers, closing rather than fixing schools, fear, and testing and sanctioning the dominant education strategies."

She also blamed poverty and a halt to school desegregation efforts, and called for reduction in testing, focusing on the "whole child," more art and music, wraparound social services, better teacher training, and more community involvement. "High-stakes testing has eclipsed all else. … Our kids have lost the joy of learning and teachers have lost the latitude to be creative as the focus has simply become test scores and their consequences."

Michael Cohen, president of Achieve, a reform group advocating standards and accountability, said in a statement, "A dip in the national average on the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is cause for concern, but not alarm. The majority of states actually saw no change in their scores from 2013. However, the decreases for many states in 8th-grade math are unexpected and need a full review.

"It is far too soon for us to have a full understanding of the causes of the score changes; fingers have been pointed at demographics, reform policies, the ongoing implementation of the Common Core State Standards, poverty, and more. It is going to take careful analysis to disentangle and assign weight to the range of possible causes and then determine what local, state, and national responses should be."

PSSA scores drop, as expected; Keystones largely flat

2015-09-02T15:36:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Updated | 5:30 p.m.

Student proficiency rates in Philadelphia District schools in math and language arts dropped precipitously on PSSA tests in 2015 from the prior year, reflecting the rollout of a new test and following a statewide trend.

Just 17 percent of students grades 3 through 8 scored proficient in math, down from 46 percent the year before. In language arts, the rates went from 43 percent to 32 percent. Science stayed steady at 37 percent.

In a press release, the District said the new state tests "differ significantly from the tests given in 2014" and are based on "more challenging content and skills." It said that an "apples to apples" comparison is "not appropriate."

On 11th-grade Keystone exams, which did not change, the proficiency rates stayed within a few percentage points in Algebra I, biology, and literature. A District press release said that among first-time test takers, the literature proficiency rates jumped 7 points from 2014.

"The 2015 results are a new baseline to build off as we seek to ensure that all of our students have access to opportunity and are college- and career-ready," said Superintendent William Hite in a statement. "We know that this kind of significant transition will take time and requires investments in teacher training, curricular materials, student tutoring, and other supports."

The new state tests were changed to reflect the Pennsylvania Core standards, which are similar to the national Common Core standards. In math, they require students to understand concepts and explain the reasoning behind how they solved a problem, many of which are anchored in real-world situations. Before, the test mostly contained problems with multiple-choice answers that students could figure out if they had mastered the algorithm.

The results are available school-by-school and grade-by-grade. On the new math PSSA test, half or more of the students scored proficient or advanced In just seven District schools. For English Language Arts, half or more of the students scored proficient in 23 schools.

Lower PSSA scores spur some school districts to call for less testing

2015-08-19T21:28:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Last month, the Pennsylvania Department of Education shared preliminary test data for its new, Common Core-aligned tests — and the results weren’t pretty.

As a result, some area school districts are lobbying Harrisburg to dial back the number and consequences of standardized tests, sooner rather than later.

Pottsgrove School Board Director Rick Rabinowitz said the new scores make it hard to gauge school progress.

"The trend was up for most of our schools. And we’d been working very hard to continue to improve," said Rabinowitz. "It’s like pulling the rug out from under us."

In response, Pottsgrove passed a resolution asking legislators to "minimize the amount of mandated testing" and urging its own faculty and administrators to stay focused on "quality teaching of quality content, and to minimize time spent on preparation for standardized testing."

Rabinowitz said he is also worried about how lower scores will affect teachers, who are evaluated partially on test scores and progress.

Based on the PDE’s preliminary data, last year’s PSSAs — reading, math and writing tests administered to 3rd through 8th graders — show a drop in average test scores across the board. For math, the test scores declined an average of 35.4 percent across those grades.

In addition to changing questions on the tests to align with Pennsylvania Common Core standards, state officials changed the "cut scores" — or what score constitutes a passing grade. Some administrators argue that this unfairly deflates scores. The department has said that comparisons with previous years are moot and that this year should be treated as a baseline.

Read the rest of this story at NewsWorks

Pa. lawmaker: Added rigor of tests calls for spending increase

2015-08-17T10:09:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

A top Pennsylvania Democrat is calling for substantial new investment in education in light of more rigorous state standardized tests.

State Sen. Vincent Hughes of Philadelphia said poor results on recent tests make a clear argument for lawmakers to adopt Gov. Wolf’s proposal to increase state education funding.

The 2014-15 school year was the first in which the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests – taken in grades 3 through 8 – were aligned with Pennsylvania’s version of the Common Core state standards.

Based on the added difficulty of the tests and the state’s higher expectations for performance, proficiency rates dropped on average by 35.4 percentage points in math and 9.4 percentage points in English language arts.

In some schools, math proficiency rates dropped by more than 40 percentage points.

Officials from the Pennsylvania Department of Education say it is misleading to compare student proficiency rates to prior years; 2014-15 should be considered the "new baseline," the department said.

The sharp declines in scores have been making waves across the state, as educators and parents grapple with how to adjust to the higher expectations.

"High standards are appropriate, but the thing that’s the crime in this is not having the resources available to meet those standards," said Hughes.

Hughes, the minority chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, specifically called on his colleagues to agree to Wolf’s proposal for an increased tax on natural gas drilling.

Hughes said he hasn’t taken a head count within the Democratic caucus of support for Wolf’s pitch for a tax increase in sales and personal income.

Wolf is seeking these taxes, along with an increased state cigarette tax, in concert with a local property tax reduction to infuse public schools with an additional $500 million in basic and special education funding.

Read the rest of this story at NewsWorks

Sharp climb in number of students opting out of state standardized tests

2015-08-12T19:49:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

In a sign that the opt-out movement continues to grow, the number of elementary school students who refused to take Pennsylvania’s state standardized tests rose dramatically over the past two years.

Between 2013-14 and 2014-15, opt-outs on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment math test more than tripled – from 1,017 students to 3,270. That’s a 220 percent jump.

In the same years, PSSA English language arts opt-outs jumped 139 percent – from 1,355 to 3,245.

Opt-outs on the science test jumped 263 percent – from 309 to 1,123.

These are the largest jumps in nine years of available data.

These numbers, though, actually account only for parents who formally opted out. The state also counts students whose parents refused to have them take the test without going through the opt-out process.

When both categories are combined, the increases are starker in math and English.

Between 2013-14 and 2014-15, the PSSA math test saw total exclusions jump by 240 percent – from 1,292 to 4,394.

Likewise, the PSSA English language arts test saw total exclusions jump 155 percent – from 1,789 to 4,567.

Total exclusions on the science test jumped 258 percent – from 456 to 1,635.

"It’s a recognition that there’s already substantial concern among some parents about the climate with standardized testing," said Adam Schott, director of policy research at Research for Action. "And so it’s just important that policymakers be attentive going forward."

Opt-out numbers for the Keystone exam taken by high schoolers were not yet available.

While the PSSA opt-out jumps are high, total exclusions represent an extremely small fraction of the state’s students.

Read the rest of this story at NewsWorks

Pa. school leaders brace for impact of state test declines

2015-08-06T18:01:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

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Last month, WHYY/NewsWorks reported that scores on state standardized tests have dropped precipitously based on the implementation of more rigorous tests.

Educators across the state are reeling now that they have learned how much scores have plummeted in their individual schools.

Elementary and middle school principals in Philadelphia are reporting 10 to 20 percentage-point drops on the English language arts exam and 30 to 40 percentage point drops on the math exam.

The 2014-15 school year was the first in which PSSA tests – taken in grades 3 through 8 – were aligned with Pennsylvania’s version of the Common Core state standards.

For that reason, officials from the Pennsylvania Department of Education say, it is misleading to compare student proficiency rates to prior years; 2014-15 should be considered the "new baseline," the department said.

Despite that advisory, principals and administrators are bracing for how the news will affect parents, students and teachers.

"My concern is really messaging it to my teachers because my teachers worked so hard last year," said Anh Brown, principal of Nebinger Elementary in South Philadelphia. "They worked really, really hard."

Preliminary scores at Nebinger show a 40 percentage-point drop in math and a 20 percentage-point decline in English language arts.

"We knew it was going to go down, but we didn’t know by how much," she said.

Eileen Hoffman, principal of Shawmont Elementary in Upper Roxborough, also said scores dropped by 20 percentage points in English and more than 40 percentage points in math.

"It’s going to be a very difficult conversation," said Hoffman. "We have to change our instructional practices and improve instruction for our kids. … It’s a culture shift."

Logan Elementary School principal Chuanika Sanders-Thomas said her school’s proficiency rate in math dropped from 50 percent to 16 percent.

"We’re going to cry for a moment, but we’re going to dust ourselves off and help the kids learn more this year," said Sanders-Thomas. "We have to talk to parents about how times have changed. It’s not like it was when you were in school. The expectations have changed. So we need you to get on board."

On the bright side, Logan’s English language arts score held steady.

"At least I get to have the positive to go along with the bad news," said Sanders-Thomas.

Another elementary school principal speaking anonymously blamed the drops on insufficient teacher training. Only a small core of her teachers was motivated to change methods, she said.

"One of my biggest problems is not having teachers trained to teach in a way that meets the standards of the new PSSA," the principal said. "This is a big wake-up call for us. We can’t keep doing the same things."

Read the rest of this story at NewsWorks

Pa. educators brace for fallout from plunge in PSSA scores

2015-07-20T13:50:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

As districts across Pennsylvania brace for an anticipated plunge in scores on the state’s standardized test, educators are worrying about the repercussions while questioning the value of using the volatile test results to make high-stakes decisions about teachers and schools.

Districts and schools will not receive their preliminary results until the end of the month. But statewide data show that the proficiency rates of students on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment test have dropped precipitously, especially in math – in some grades by as much as 40 percentage points compared to last year.

Plus, math proficiency rates dropped in each grade, starting at 48.5 percent of students in grade 3 and dropping to 30 percent by grade 8. The drops ranged from 26.6 percentage points for 3rd graders to more than 43 percentage points for 7th and 8th graders.

Overall, the proficiency rates were higher and the drops much smaller in language arts.

Educators noted that a drop in scores is not unusual after a test is revised, as this one was to reflect the new Pennsylvania Core standards. In fact, it is likely.

The state adopted these standards in 2013 in an effort to teach and measure more complex 21st-century skills, such as problem-solving and critical thinking. The tests are also heavier on writing. The “cut scores,” or passing levels, were changed significantly to reflect the new test.

At the same time, the rollout of the new standards and the new test in Pennsylvania has been especially disorganized and confusing, said Christopher McGinley, a professor at Temple University and a former superintendent in Cheltenham and Lower Merion.

Initially, Pennsylvania indicated that it was on board with the Common Core standards, which were drawn up by states under the auspices of the National Governors Association. But when conservatives started blasting the Common Core as an example of federal overreach in education, the Corbett administration dropped any association with the Common Core and instead adopted a version of its own, called the Pennsylvania Core standards. The state never opted into one or the other of the two major Common Core-aligned tests, called PARCC and Smarter Balanced.

Among districts, when the Pennsylvania Core was adopted, “there was confusion as to what exactly it was,” McGinley said. “There were districts that bought textbooks and instructional programs for the Common Core and trained teachers, and then had to set them aside and revamp everything.”

Then, according to McGinley and others, the rollout of the new test this year was less than ideal. Educators knew the test this year would be more rigorous. But teachers didn’t get sample problems until the middle of the year – and for some grades, they never got them.

According to one Philadelphia principal interviewed: “It was frustrating. We knew things were going to change, but we didn’t know exactly how.”

Because of the confusion, McGinley said, “Only districts well-resourced had the wherewithal over the last few years and the staff to implement anything that came out of Harrisburg. Everyone is playing catch-up.”

McGinley suggested that the precipitous drop in scores in math was probably because teachers didn’t cover material that was on the test. According to the results posted on the Pennsylvania Department of Education’s website, last year, 70 percent of 8th graders statewide were deemed proficient in math; this year, that plummeted to about 30 percent.

Christopher Clayton, assistant director for education services at the Pennsylvania State Education Association, said the new standards call for a lot of topics to be taught one grade earlier than before; for example, what had been 8th-grade material was moved to 7th grade, and 9th-grade material to 8th grade.

In addition, the questions were substantially different, especially in math. For instance, instead of abstract math problems with multiple-choice answers, students were asked to solve word problems that anchored the math in real-world scenarios and then explain how they got the answers.

Retraining teachers to instruct students differently so they can answer those questions correctly is expensive and time-consuming, said Clayton and others, and many districts didn’t have the time or resources to do it well.

Lawrence Feinberg of the Keystone State Education Coalition, who is also a member of the Haverford Township Board of Education, said that the combination of shifting standards, lack of time to adjust, “and the fact that the more financially challenged districts are still recovering from huge budget cuts” account for the drop.

Feinberg wants to see testing significantly ratcheted back and used to “inform instruction, not label schools and teachers.” But educators who are not so critical of testing and concerned about having good accountability measures are also worried about the repercussions of the test-score drop.

Ben Speicher, principal of KIPP Philadelphia Elementary Academy, said such huge swings in proficiency from one year to the other don’t make sense to many people. And if the results don’t seem to make sense, more people will become more skeptical about the value of testing in general.

“People are going to raise questions on what is this data actually showing us about how kids are doing and how well teachers are teaching,” Speicher said. They will be unconvinced, he said, simply by arguments that “the tests are harder, and harder is good.”

As a result, “It could give the opt-out movement more momentum [as parents conclude] ‘Why are we doing this? It’s not worth it.’”

Speicher also says there needs to be more “honest conversation” about testing itself and how it affects students and teachers. The PSSAs this year – in reading, math, and science – took up the better part of three weeks. Teachers and administrators must spend hours on security measures before and after the test is administered.

“It has a big impact on teachers, kids, and families, and if we don’t talk honestly about it, we could hurt the case for accountability,” he said.

Several people also said that for teachers, parents, and students, vastly different test results can be a huge morale-buster.

Parents “will be shocked if their child has a history of being advanced or proficient, and they are suddenly notified their child is no longer considered proficient,” said McGinley. Teachers and students will also be devastated, he said.

Donna Cooper of Public Citizens for Children & Youth has a different take. She applauds the new standards and the tests, because they are seeking to bring U.S. students on par with the rest of the world. “Better they learn in 8th grade” rather than in high school what they need to learn and do in order to be competitive later, she said.

But she agreed that districts need more funds and resources to properly prepare students and teachers for more rigorous exams. PCCY is at the forefront of statewide lobbying efforts for more funds for education.

It appears that despite Gov. Wolf’s public concerns about overemphasis on testing in general, his administration has not yet sorted things out regarding the new test and the higher standards. Spokespeople for the Pennsylvania Department of Education said that the new scores would factor into both teacher evaluations, as required by a new law, and the School Performance Profiles that rate and rank schools.

Philadelphia officials are concerned about what the new results will show. The District has been doing its best to align instruction with the new standards, but the implementation varies by school, said spokesperson Fernando Gallard.

Preliminary data “does point to the possibility of some significant shift in the scores compared to prior years,” he said. “But we’ve got to wait and see.”

Test scores dropped sharply in 2015 because of added rigor, Pa. officials say

2015-07-14T23:36:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The number of Pennsylvania students who scored "proficient" or "advanced" on state standardized tests in 2014-15 fell precipitously compared with the previous year.

And it marks a fourth straight year of test score declines.

The Pennsylvania Department of Education confirms the drop, but will not provide specifics – citing the need to finalize data.

But a chart available on the department’s website provides a clearer picture of preliminary results.

Analysis shows that the proficiency rates in grades 3 through 8 dropped by an average of 35.4 percentage points in math and 9.4 percentage points in English language arts on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) exam.

Department officials attribute the declines to the increased rigor of the state standardized tests.

The 2014-15 school year was the first in which every question aligned with the Pennsylvania Core Standards – which are similar, but not identical to the Common Core standards adopted in other states.

Last week, based on the new standards, the Pennsylvania Board of Education voted to readjust its expectations for how the more difficult tests would be scored – setting new cutoffs for "advanced," "proficient," "basic" and "below basic." This process is known as setting the "cut scores."

Read the rest of this story at NewsWorks

Editorial: Keystone quagmire

2015-06-01T12:34:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The elephant in the room when discussing graduation rates is Pennsylvania’s Keystone exams. This year’s sophomores will have to pass tests in algebra, biology, and English to earn a diploma when requirements take effect in 2017. If they fail, they can repeat the test or try to pass a “performance-based assessment” that takes an estimated 10 hours to complete.

The District has estimated that only 22 percent of this year’s seniors would meet the new graduation standards. Even in high-performing districts, barely 70 percent of students are passing biology Keystones.

Unquestionably, we must ensure that a high school diploma actually means something is necessary. As districts push hard to improve graduation rates – and as administrators try to avoid the “failing school” label – pressure mounts to graduate students even if they haven’t met basic requirements. Beyond the horror stories of functionally illiterate, unemployable Philadelphia grads is the more widespread problem of students who should be college-ready but can’t place out of remedial community college classes.

There’s nothing wrong with the idea of a competency exam that identifies student weaknesses and helps teachers prepare them to improve. But experience with standardized tests in Pennsylvania is that they provide limited diagnostic information while effectively narrowing the curriculum. With everything riding on these three exams, other important subjects (social studies), and skills (writing, oral communication) may get ignored altogether.

The effort is fairly described as an unfunded mandate. Districts like Philadelphia already lack the resources they need to remediate students who are below grade level. Educators are still becoming familiar with the tougher standards and tests. How on earth can they be expected to provide the supports students will need to pass, or to complete an alternative assessment?

The clock is ticking toward 2017. The path we are on will be a punitive nightmare. The Wolf administration had better quickly take the current plan for Keystones back to the drawing board.

Monitoring social media for PARCC test cheating in NJ: ‘Creepy’ or necessary?

2015-03-17T14:04:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Social media monitoring by Pearson, the London-based company that runs PARCC testing in New Jersey, has tipped administrators off in some North Jersey school districts to students who might be cheating on the tests.

But it’s the monitoring itself that now has some parents worried.

The Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers assessments, known as PARCC, are Common Core tests used in several states, including New York and Ohio.

In the past, parents resistant to the PARCC tests have expressed concerns about factors ranging from the time spent teaching to the test to the vulnerability of test data collected and stored online.

An email from Watchung Hills Regional High School District Superintendent Elizabeth Jewett to other superintendents was posted to the blog of investigative reporter Bob Braun (bobbraunsledger.com) late Friday, kicking off a firestorm among parents already wary of the PARCC tests.

Privacy concerns have motivated some parents, including Stephanie Hare, mother of a 5th grader and an 8th grader in the Moorestown School District, to opt their children out of tests.

"It’s the sharing of the information," said Hare, that bothers her. "It’s not staying within the school."

The New Jersey Department of Education contracts with PARCC, which hired Pearson as a test vendor. Pearson works with Tracx Inc. to monitor social media for confidential information from the tests.

Over the weekend, Tracx removed a study from its website featuring its social media monitoring work with Pearson.

Julia Rubin, a Princeton School District parent and co-founder of Save Our Schools New Jersey, a group that promotes opting out of PARCC tests, called the monitoring "creepy."

"No one gave us a piece of paper and said this is going to happen," said Rubin of the lack of transparency. "[Parents] were just completely excluded from the process."

Rubin said the Department of Education has not made clear what kinds of information students are or are not allowed to share about the tests, and with whom.

"You’re dealing with children as young as 8, and you’re dealing with a protracted testing context," said Rubin. Over the span of the test month, "it’s much more difficult to tell children not to discuss any aspect of that test."

Read the rest of this story at NewsWorks

Students who are still learning English fuel Philly opt-out movement

2015-03-11T17:56:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

In 2014, Pennsylvania parents opted about 100 kids out of the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, or PSSAs. This year, that many are opting out of tests just at the Feltonville School of Arts & Sciences, a middle school in North Philadelphia.

In some cases, parents and teachers object to the tests for philosophical or political reasons. But many Feltonville parents have a more immediate concern: their kids can’t understand them.

Nomar Rodriguez, is one of these parents. Rodriguez and his family moved to Philadelphia from Puerto Rico in 2013. Although his three sons — Nomar, Jomar and Keven — took some English classes in Puerto Rico, they are now all in English language learner (ELL) classes.

ELL students, by definition, do not perform at grade level. But in Pennsylvania, those students, along with special education students, are evaluated at grade level for statewide standardized tests.

Vici Smith, an English Language teacher at Feltonville, said that for that reason, the tests don’t give her valuable feedback for teaching students during the school year. "You know they’re not on level. What else do you need to know?"

Smith and other teachers at Feltonville have been vocal about parents’ right to opt out under Pennsylvania law, sending letters home with students and holding meetings. Philadelphia School District officials chastised those teachers, but Rodriguez said, through an interpreter, that he did not feel coerced into pulling his three sons out of testing.

"What they say about the teachers, it’s completely false," he said. "The standardized tests are in English, therefore the tests are an obstacle for them. You know the kids have talents, but they can’t show that on the tests. It’s not fair."

But he added, "If the tests were in Spanish, I would let them take it."

Opt-out rising

Rodriguez and the parents in Feltonville are joining a growing opt-out movement across the country. It includes liberals, libertarians, and conservatives, who take issue with standardized testing for a variety of reasons.

Some parents in wealthy New Jersey suburbs who object to the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) tests believe that those standards are too rigid and that they waste time and money.

In Philadelphia, the opt-out movement mingles with existing debates about school funding and poverty in a district with a lot of high-needs students.

Teachers like Smith have also said that the tests are demoralizing for students. In times of budget scarcity, low test scores can put schools on the top of the District’s list of schools to close or turn into charters.

Read the rest of this story at NewsWorks

Parents, students slam high-stakes testing at opt-out forum

2015-02-27T13:31:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Among the lineup of speakers at a forum on high-stakes testing Thursday night, two young people stepped forward to share firsthand knowledge of the toll that the state’s annual standardized assessments can take on learning in the classroom and life beyond high school.

“My mom opted me out,” said Guillermo Santos, a 6th grader at Masterman, facing a room of 90 to 100 educators, parents, and students crowded into a conference room at the Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine St.

He described how “all the art, all the posters, all the beautiful things” on the walls of classrooms and hallways are covered up during the testing period in April. “I remember the PSSAs,” he said gravely. Often among the first to finish, he could not leave the room until the last child turned in the test, he recalled. “We would have to sit there in complete silence for hours and hours.”

Then, Guillermo, a slight, bespectacled child, choked up. His mother, Cheri Honkala, stepped forward. She told the audience that the approach of the tests stirred anxiety in her son.

“We should applaud the kids who are opting out,” said Honkala, an anti-poverty advocate and founder of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign. “They are courageous and they are starting a movement.”

Ruby Anderson, a senior at Science Leadership Academy in Center City and a member of the Philadelphia Student Union, said the Keystone exams, taken in high school, harm students’ chances of winning a high school diploma — the essential first step, she said, to finding a career that will lead to economic security.

“These tests set us up for failure,” Anderson said, and they also eat up classroom time with test prep and test taking. “We are more than just test scores.”

The event was billed as informational, with parents given a chance to examine sample test questions. But the testimonies of these two students, along with teachers and parents, drew the greatest response, with frequent finger-snapping and applause.

The opt-out movement has been growing across Pennsylvania and the country. In Philadelphia, the Feltonville School of Arts & Sciences has been at the eye of the storm. Teachers at the middle school report that parents of at least 90 children, or 17 percent of the school’s students, have signed letters refusing to have their children take the PSSAs, set for April.

The sponsors of the event were the Caucus of Working Educators, Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools, Teacher Action Group, Philadelphia Student Union, Parents United for Public Education, and ACTION United.

Participants also heard from City Councilman Mark Squilla, who told the room he was “a big advocate” of the opt-out movement. “I believe testing should be part of the curriculum, but it is not the only measure” of student or school success, Squilla said. He lamented the lost instructional time and the high costs of test administration and test-preparation materials.

Helen Gym, a candidate for City Council and a co-founder of Parents United, also attended.

Tiffany Bhavnani, a teacher of English language learners at Furness High School, decried requirements that students who have recently immigrated to the United States take the PSSAs when they speak, read, and comprehend very little English.

What the tests don’t reveal, she said, are the strengths that students bring with them to this country, like “adaptability, courage, resilience.”

Bhavnani denounced the “weeks of wasted class time” and called on parents to “refuse to have your children labeled basic or below basic with no benefit to them.”

Last week, schools Superintendent William Hite said, in response to questions asked at a School Reform Commission meeting, that the District was preparing handouts for parents about the upcoming assessments. The handouts will include information on steps that parents can take to opt their children out of taking the standardized tests.

Should Pa. require students to pass standardized tests to graduate?

2015-01-28T17:22:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The clock is ticking.

By 2017, in order to graduate high school in Pennsylvania, students must pass three state standardized tests: algebra, literature, and biology.

Based on most recent student scores — especially in biology — if trends continue, Pennsylvania will soon see far fewer of its students walking down the aisle in cap and gown.

In order to preempt that scenario, State Rep. Mike Tobash (R-Dauphin) has introduced a bill that would repeal the state-mandated graduation requirement, leaving the decision to local school districts.

"The children of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, they need to learn, they need to be assessed, but when we’ve gone so far that we end up handcuffing our educational system with really an overwhelming amount of standardized assessment," said Tobash, "we need to stop and put the brakes on here, take a look at it."

The bill would also halt the creation and implementation of the seven other subject-specific Keystone exams called for by existing state law.

Tobash, who testified on the matter at a hearing at Philadelphia City Hall in November, is skeptical that the tests are judging students on material that’s applicable to a modern workforce.

State Rep. Stan Saylor (R-York), newly minted as majority chair of the House education committee, has scheduled a hearing for the bill in Harrisburg on Feb. 12.

"There definitely is support for it," said Saylor. "Is there overwhelming support? I’m not sure."

Read the rest of this story at NewsWorks

Election near, but still no 2014 Pa. test scores; 2013 results showed a downward trend

2014-10-30T22:18:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Have standardized test scores declined for a third year in a row in Pennsylvania?

We’re not likely to find out before the gubernatorial election next week.

This year, the Pennsylvania Department of Education has waited longer than usual to publicly release any data on test scores or school performance.

State officials say they are still checking for errors and don’t have a release date. And they say also that PDE is now focused on its new school rating system, the School Performance Profile (SPP) and is de-emphasizing comparisons of standalone test scores. The SPP includes multiple measures of achievement, including attendance and student progress.

The state says it is being especially careful.

“The reason why there is an extra effort this year to make sure that the scores are accurate is because the 2013-14 School Performance Profile is the first year that impacts teacher evaluations,” said PDE spokesman Tim Eller.

One high-ranking Senate Democrat says that is hogwash and that the scores are being delayed for political reasons – because they will hurt Gov. Corbett’s re-election chances.

The fact that scores went down two years in a row, in 2013 and in 2012, has scarcely been reported in the press.

Statewide data for 2013 is not prominent on the PDE website, but shown on a separate site containing data required for federal reporting purposes and linked to the new performance profiles.

When the Notebook and NewsWorks examined the data on that site this week, they found that between 2012 and 2013, statewide proficiency rates on the PSSA exam dropped for every grade level (grades 3-8) in reading and math, by an average of 3 to 4 percentage points.

The scores also dropped for almost all subgroups of students – most dramatically for at-risk populations, including economically disadvantaged students and African American students.

Eller contended that he did not know whether scores went down statewide between 2012 and 2013, saying, “I have not specifically looked at that. I’m focused on SPP only now.”

However, he said, the tests were adapted to more rigorous standards starting in the 2012-13 school year, which could account for any decline.

Putting the 2013 statewide test results on a website that was never publicized is one of several moves by the state that, deliberately or not, served to obscure the statewide trend of declining PSSA scores in an election year when schools are at the top of the political agenda.

For instance, PDE never publicly announced the 2013 statewide results or pointed out that this was the second consecutive year that scores went down. It changed the format of its required state report for 2013, so that year-to-year score comparisons for subgroups that used to be presented are no longer available. And it never posted the 2013 PSSA results on its web page that links to historical data for each year’s state assessment going back to 1995.

Last fall, even though the state released PSSA test results for every school in the commonwealth, officials did not provide any accompanying statewide PSSA data – in an abrupt departure from past practice.

Over the last year, the extent of the statewide decline in 2013 PSSA scores appears never to have been reported in the media.

This year, as of late October, PDE has sent only preliminary test-score information to school districts, but has released no data at all to the public.

In past years, preliminary district-by-district results were made available as early as June, and detailed statewide reports have generally been out by the end of September.

The exception was last year, when acting Secretary of Education Carolyn Dumaresq unveiled the new School Performance Profiles on Oct. 4, saying that PDE was overhauling the way it evaluates schools and giving each of them a score based on multiple performance measures.

At the time, Dumaresq said the state would no longer highlight year-to-year comparisons of proficiency rates for schools, districts, and the state as a whole.

For nearly a decade before that, state officials had played up those comparisons –annually trumpeting statewide PSSA improvements when they released test score data. The release of data in 2012 broke that streak, when then-Secretary of Education Ronald Tomalis said that scores had declined by 1-2 points due to new anti-cheating test security measures.

Requests for results rebuffed

State Sen. Andrew Dinniman, D-Chester, the minority chair of the Senate Education Committee, has been petitioning the Department of Education for statewide test results for months. He says he’s been denied.

He dismisses PDE’s rationale for delaying the release, calling the delay “unconscionable.” He described it as a ploy to deflect negative publicity from Corbett’s reelection campaign.

“The department can use whatever excuses it wants,” he said in a telephone interview. “It’s clear to me that the administration is purposely not releasing these scores because they fear a discussion that will focus on negative impacts of the Corbett budget cuts and of his education policy.”

“In my view, they’re not going to release this until after the election, and they’ve been playing games,” he said. “All the school districts are waiting. Everyone’s waiting.”

Told of Dinniman’s charges, Eller laughed and disputed them.

“This has nothing to do with an election,” he said, reiterating that the state is focused on making accurate data that will have an impact on teachers’ evaluations. Dinniman is the one playing politics, he said, calling the senator’s remarks “unfortunate,” but not surprising.

Many school districts were asked to comment for this story. Most did not return calls. The Philadelphia School District declined.

Jack Silva, the assistant superintendent of the Bethlehem Area School District, said the delay in releasing the scores has affected the district’s ability “to complete our evaluation of employees that require the scores.”

Silva said Bethlehem’s preliminary look at its 2014 scores showed small declines in most tested grades and subjects, a fact he said could not be divorced from “years of budget cuts and not replacing staff – and reduced supports for kids.”

Dinniman believes the scores will show a continued downward trend, which he says comes as a direct result of districts’ having less support for classroom spending under Corbett’s watch.

“When you cut money from places like Philadelphia and Reading and York, you’re going to see the results in test scores,” he said.

“The larger story is that the Corbett educational policies, they don’t want to show the results of them in terms of the tests.”

Eller’s view is different. The amount of money is not the issue, he said. “It’s how that money is used.”

Delay criticized

The release of state test score data this late goes against federal best practices. The U.S. Department of Education’s guidance to states urges release “before the school year begins or as early in the school year as possible.” This is better for parents and educators, the guidance says. Officially, though, the data isn’t due until January.

The delay in releasing state data raised questions for some testing experts, including Andy Porter of the University of Pennsylvania.

“This all sounds very strange to me, that you wouldn’t report state results in a timely fashion because you think they aren’t accurate,” said Porter, dean of Penn’s Graduate School of Education. “Why aren’t they accurate?”

Porter said that publicizing statewide results is important, especially if a state institutes new policies, as Pennsylvania has done. He said it’s especially important given that now there is a major shift in how teachers are evaluated.

“The state is initiating new teacher evaluations. Don’t we want to track if student achievement gets better after major policy changes?”

PDE’s Eller countered that nothing is being obscured. “It’s completely transparent.” He acknowledged, though, that the statewide scores “could be more prominent on the department’s website.” He also said that the 2013 scores should be the “new baseline” rather than looking at earlier years.

Concerned about downward trend

Others are concerned about what the 2011-2013 test scores show, saying that the consistent downward trends make it all the more important to see the 2014 scores.

“It is increasingly urgent for PDE to release the 2014 PSSA test results,” said Kate Shaw, executive director of Research for Action and a former state deputy education secretary.

“Between 2011 and 2013, scores have dropped in every subject, in every grade, and among every group of students. Drops are particularly steep among students most at-risk — Black, Latino, English language learners, and the economically disadvantaged. In some instances, we see double-digit decreases for these groups.”

She added, “This is not surprising given what’s happening in Pennsylvania. We are moving towards higher academic standards during a time when state funding for our public schools has plummeted.”

Shaw said that the consistency of the downward trends makes them more worrisome. “I don’t think you can dismiss that,” she said. “It’s pretty notable.”

She and other researchers suggested that these scores be compared with the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is given every other year to a sampling of 4th and 8th graders and is considered the “gold standard” of testing. In most states, including Pennsylvania, proficiency rates on the state test far exceed proficiency rates on the NAEP.

Although the overall scores are lower, the NAEP trends between 2011 and 2013 in Pennsylvania look better than the PSSA trends. Eighth-grade scores on the NAEP were up in reading and math, while 4th-grade results were flat.

Eller says that it is premature to draw conclusions about any patterns or trends in PSSA scores.

“There have been a lot of changes in the standards over the last several years,” he said. “Now we’re at a point where the standards [and exams] have been stabilized. … I think you’re going to start seeing the exam results starting to improve because now everything is on level ground.”

Silva, Bethlehem’s assistant superintendent, isn’t so sure that will happen unless districts are able to restore some of the programs and personnel they have lost.

“You can’t deny that access to resources – afterschool programming, reading specialists, family and mental health supports, all those other things that removed obstacles to help students learn – when those services aren’t there, the obstacles to learning stay put.”

This story is the product of a reporting partnership between Philadelphia Public School Notebook and WHYY/NewsWorks.

Two former principals charged in state cheating investigation

2014-09-25T15:09:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane has filed criminal charges against two more former Philadelphia principals.

Barbara McCreery, 61, former principal of Communications Technology High School, and Arthur "Larry" Melton, 70, former principal of Bok Technical High School, were arrested Thursday as part of the state’s ongoing investigation into adult cheating on standardized tests.

They were taken into custody and charged with crimes of "tampering with public records or information, forgery, and tampering with records or identification," according the attorney general’s office.

A grand jury presentment said that Melton admitted to making an answer key and to personally changing students’ answers on test sheets as early as 2008 or 2009. In an interview with investigators, Melton had cited an "intense" pressure on principals from the District with respect to PSSA test performance.

McCreery, too, admitted to fixing test booklets in 2009 and 2010. According to a grand jury statement, she estimated fixing up to 15 booklets each morning in her office using an answer key she created after reviewing the test herself.

Melton and McCreery are now the sixth and seventh District educators to be criminally charged for their role in the culture of cheating that led to sizeable gains in PSSA reading and math scores. In many cases, the increases were astronomical and the scores came down precipitously after stricter test protocols were put in place.

Bok and Communications Technology are among the 11 so-called Tier 1 schools being investigated by the attorney general’s office, where statistical evidence — an improbably high number of wrong-to-right erasures on score sheets — indicated that cheating was highly likely and often nearly certain.

At Communications Technology in 2010, the percentage of 11th-grade students proficient in math leapt 40 points in one year. After McCreery’s departure that year, scores plummeted.

McCreery was among the first District educators to be sanctioned in the state’s cheating probe in April 2013, when she surrendered her credentials, along with Lola Marie O’Rourke, a former Locke Elementary principal. Melton surrendered his credentials earlier this month.

At Bok, where Melton served for over a decade, scores sank after the strict test-monitoring rules were enforced in 2012. In math, profiency rates declined 45 percentage points, from 71 percent in 2010 to 26 percent in 2012.

Both Bok and Communications Technology were among 24 schools that closed in 2013, when the District downsized.

The attorney general earlier this year charged five former educators from Cayuga Elementary, also a Tier 1 school, including principal Evelyn Cortez. They are currently awaiting trial.

Attorney for Cayuga teacher calls cheating investigation an ‘inquisition’

2014-05-08T18:02:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The attorney for Ary Sloane, one of the educators from Cayuga Elementary School who was criminally charged in the investigation of cheating on standardized tests, has called the state attorney general’s probe "an inquisition."

Sloane, former Cayuga principal Evelyn Cortez, and three teachers were arrested Thursday on charges that included conspiracy, forgery, and tampering with public records.

Cortez, Jennifer Hughes, and Lorraine Vicente were also charged with perjury and "corrupt organizations," a first-degree felony that is similar to racketeering. (The federal RICO law stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.)

"This matter is serious, but I think the extremes by which the state attorney general is going to proves this case is really unfair," said Michael Coard, who represents Sloane.

He called the "corrupt organizations" charge levied against three of the educators "ridiculous. You’re talking about the Mafia, organized crime."

Prosecutors in Atlanta, home to what has been the most wide-ranging criminal investigation of test cheating in the country so far, also used racketeering laws to charge educators. There, 35 educators faced criminal charges; 21 pleaded guilty and 13, including former superintendent Beverly Hall, are facing trial.

The Pennsylvania Department of Education had flagged 53 District schools for possible cheating and investigated 11 so-called "Tier 1" District schools — those with the most suspicious statistical irregularities. These included Cayuga.

The District is investigating the remaining schools and has taken disciplinary action against 15 other educators. But these are the first five to face criminal charges. Three Philadelphia charters were also flagged by the state and ordered to investigate themselves.

Cortez’s lawyer, Matthew Sedacca, has told reporters that the charges are false and that his client is shocked by them. In the grand jury report, teachers describe Cortez as orchestrating various cheating scenarios and ordering them or others to comply.

Sloane had been at Cayuga for 15 years, from 1993 to 2008, in the last years serving as the PSSA testing coordinator. She admitted to the grand jury, according to its report, that on the orders of principal Cortez, she made test booklets available to teachers so they could review the material with students in advance, in violation of the rules.

Sloane also said that she observed other teachers helping students with answers and saw them take students who had not missed the original testing to the make-up room for do-overs.

She also said that she saw Cortez remove booklets from their secure location, take them into her office in the company of other teachers, and close the door.

Another teacher who was charged, Rita Wyszynski, told the grand jury that she, Sloane and Cortez would come into the school on Saturdays and change test answers. She also said that Sloane would coach students on test content before they took the test.

"These allegations are just that, allegations," Coard said. "Based on my investigation, my client is not just presumed innocent, but factually innocent. … Without pointing the finger at anybody else, it seems to me that if there’s any blame to be had, it certainly is not to be directed at my client."

The investigation covered the testing years of 2007 to 2011. Most recently, Sloane served as principal of Bethune Elementary. She and the others were suspended immediately and will be paid until a disciplinary hearing that will probably take place next week, according to District spokesman Fernando Gallard.

Leno Thomas, attorney for teacher Jennifer Hughes, said his client was "100 percent unequivocally not guilty. … We look forward to vigorously defending her and addressing these issues in court."

The grand jury report quotes teacher Barbara Dolt saying that students told her that Cortez and Hughes, a special education teacher, helped them fill in answers to the test. Dolt took notes and had the students sign them.

Another teacher told the grand jury that Hughes performed duties that she was not authorized to perform because she was not the testing coordinator, and that she and Cortez watched small groups of students retake the test when they were not eligible to do so.

Asked why the grand jury included her in the charges, Thomas said, "I have no idea. My client participated in the grand jury investigation. Every time she was asked to come down, she came down. She never once took the Fifth Amendment. She’s always told the truth and she was never part of any cheating. I’m not saying that it didn’t go on there. I’m just saying she was not a part of it."

Attorneys for Wyszynski and Lorraine Vicente, the other teacher charged, could not be reached.

The grand jury report says that Sloane and Wyszynski cooperated and answered questions and the three others denied that any cheating took place.

Gallard said that in the District’s own investigation of 19 so-called Tier 2 schools, 15 educators have so far been disciplined. The discipline process for educators is a civil procedure. The District can take action, such as termination, and then refer the case to the PDE for further sanctions, such as revocation of credentials.

To date, three principals and three teachers have been terminated, he said. Three others, a principal and two teachers, were suspended for finite periods of time. One person has been barred from ever being a testing coordinator, while two former employees, a principal and teacher, have had their termination pay held while their cases are referred to PDE. Two former principals were barred from working again in the District and their termination pay deducted.

Past press reports have noted that two former principals surrendered their administrative credentials in April 2013. The three terminated principals were identified in January. One teacher lost his teaching credentials for the summer, which was noted on a state website. One charter school administrator was also disciplined by the state. The other employees have not been named.

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Philadelphia’s NAEP scores are below average for big-city districts

2013-12-18T15:42:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Philadelphia students in District-run schools lag 7 to 14 percentage points behind the average for big cities in math and reading achievement in 4th and 8th grades on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the only test that compares students across the entire country.

NAEP is considered the gold standard of standardized assessments and is the benchmark that state tests are measured against, amid complaints that some of those tests are not rigorous enough. Higher percentages of Philadelphia students score proficient on Pennsylvania’s state assessment, the PSSA. The NAEP results are potentially more reliable because they involve a sampling of students and there are no high-stakes consequences attached.

Just 19 percent of Philadelphia students scored proficient or above on 4th-grade and 8th-grade math, little change from 2011, the last time that NAEP was administered. In reading, 14 percent of 4th graders and 16 percent of 8th graders scored proficient or above. That compares to big-city averages of 33 percent proficient in 4th-grade math, 27 percent in 8th-grade math, and 23 percent in both 4th-grade and 8th-grade reading.

This is according to the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA), begun in 2002 to gauge the progress made in urban districts. Now 21 districts voluntarily have their NAEP scores disaggregated and analyzed. Philadelphia began in 2009, and its results in both grades and both subjects have remained basically unchanged since.

Overall, scores in the large districts improved faster than in the nation as a whole, although they still lag behind the national average.

Philadelphia’s NAEP performance "is now and continues to be low, and they haven’t made substantial movement in the last couple of testing cycles," said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of Great City Schools. He attributed that, however, to "mitigating circumstances," especially over the last two years, including "all the upheaval that has gone on." He mentioned school closings, the lack of collective bargaining agreements with the major unions, and budget cuts. "They were going through a substantial amount of upheaval that keeps them from focusing on instructional reforms I know they want to put in place."

Casserly did point out, however, that scores did not decline this year even though Philadelphia now includes more special education students and English language learners as part of the sample than it did in 2011, the result of stricter rules on the part of the National Assessment Governing Board, which administers the NAEP.

Philadelphia ranks near the bottom of participating cities, along with Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Dallas and Fresno, Calif. These, for the most part, are the districts with the highest level of low-income students. In Cleveland, 100 percent of students are eligible for free and reduced-price lunch, one measure of poverty; Philadelphia’s rate for 4th graders is 94 percent, the same as Dallas and just above Fresno, Baltimore, and Detroit. Several other cities — notably Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, both of which have somewhat lower levels of poverty — made statistically significant gains in one or more grades and subjects.

"Seeing those results, we are flat, and that’s a place we don’t want to be and are currently aggressively thinking about how to change those results," said David Hardy, the District’s new chief of academic supports. "We realize as a District we can and will do better and we’re creating a strategy to do so." He would not offer a preview of what the strategy is. Nor would he comment on Casserly’s observation that the turmoil in the District over the last two years contributed to its inability to move forward.

In Philadelphia, females generally do better than males in reading, especially at 4th grade, but not in math. And the test-score gap beween Whites and African Americans and Latinos is smaller than that of the nation overall. But Whites in Philadelphia District-run schools score considerably lower than the large-city, Pennsylvania, or national average.

The Philadelphia results are from a sampling of District-run schools and doesn’t include charters. However, charter schools participate in NAEP, and it is possible to look at statewide NAEP charter results through the extensive interactive website run by the National Center for Education Statistics.

A quick look shows that students in charter schools in Pennsylvania on the whole score lower than those in non-charter schools, even when comparing just low-income students. But the sample size for charters is small, and the standard error for the results is much larger.

About half the charter schools in Pennsylvania are in Philadelphia, but there is no indication of how many students from city-based charters were in the statewide sample.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan issued a statement on the TUDA results, calling the progress in urban areas "encouraging."

“The 2013 TUDA results show student performance in large cities continues to both improve overall and that large-city schools nationwide are improving at a faster pace than the nation as a whole. While we still have a lot of work to do to close achievement gaps in our largest cities, this progress is encouraging. It means that in 2013, tens of thousands of additional students in large cities are Proficient or above in math and reading than was the case four years earlier. In particular, three districts that pressed ahead with ambitious reforms — the D.C. Public Schools System, Los Angeles, and Fresno — made notable progress since 2011.”

American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, whose union represents mostly urban teachers, said that the results "show incremental progress despite the challenges urban schools face, but poverty and economic inequality — as economists and even the Pope have acknowledged — will stymie long-term gains unless policy makers face these issues head-on."

Pennsylvania’s stops and starts over new classroom standards

2013-10-18T11:32:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

by Sara Neufeld, The Hechinger Report

In the beginning, Pennsylvania was going to be like most other states, following a new set of national education standards and administering new national standardized tests.

But a lot has happened since 2010, when the state signed on to participate in what’s known as Common Core, an initiative designed to make the United States more globally competitive by ensuring students’ ability to meet basic benchmarks.

A Democratic administration turned Republican, and Gov. Tom Corbett took seriously conservatives concerned about the federal government infringing on states’ rights. In March 2012, Pennsylvania officials released their own document, known as the Pennsylvania Core Standards, which they call a hybrid between the national Common Core and the state’s own guidelines.

They also halted plans for the commonwealth to participate in one of two national assessments, instead keeping Pennsylvania’s existing elementary tests and creating new ones for high school. The Pennsylvania standards were due to go into effect July 1 of this year, but last spring, Corbett asked the state board of education to wait on a final vote. The vote finally occurred on Sept. 12, when the board approved the state standards as well as “Keystone exams” in algebra, literature and biology that will be a high school graduation requirement.

“We have to stop being so schizophrenic about what we do with our kids,” state board of education member Mollie O’Connell Phillips said moments before the vote that day, as she urged her colleagues to take decisive action.

But the policy still isn’t set in stone until it makes its way through Pennsylvania’s regulatory review process. And opponents of the standards on the right are still fighting to halt them in the House and Senate education committees. So are Keystone exam opponents on the left, worried about imposing high stakes on students without adequate resources to prepare them. The business community, meanwhile, is advocating strongly on behalf of the standards and new exams.

Where have all the twists and turns left Pennsylvania’s 501 school districts? In limbo.

“Instructionally it’s very difficult for us as administrators when we don’t have all the answers and when there are so many pieces missing,” said Wagner Marseille, assistant superintendent of the Lower Merion School District, northwest of Philadelphia. “You’re caught with, what do you share with teachers? ‘We really don’t have the final map or layout of what you’re going to do, but let me explain what we’re going to do so far.’ Then you have anxiety and confusion from teachers who feel they’re not getting all the information they’d like and in a timely way.”

With 7,990 students, Lower Merion is one of the wealthiest and highest-performing districts in the state. But even there, Marseille said, educators need time to prepare for a major instructional change. “A new administration comes in and we’re asked to stop, pivot, turn and look at something different,” he said. “It causes a tremendous amount of anxiety for teachers, rightfully so, and puts us in a very difficult position at the district because we don’t have the complete answers.”

Marseille said that implementing the standards requires extensive professional development. He estimated it would be a three- to four-year process for all teachers to become proficient in the new standards. The district also must review its textbooks and instructional materials to see what needs changing. “There’s so much information out there. You have to vet through what’s really quality,” said Marseille, a former Olympic hurdler who represented his native Haiti in the 1996 games. “Every textbook, every resource paper has ‘Common Core’ written somewhere on it… What we didn’t want to do prematurely was begin to go out and purchase textbooks just because they had a sticker on them that said ‘Common Core-Ready.’”

Now that training and curriculum changes are underway, he said, “we hope they don’t do a 180 and go back.”

The Pennsylvania State Education Association, which represents teachers in 483 of the state’s 501 districts, reports that different schools are at different stages of implementation. Some districts immediately began to phase in the national Common Core after Pennsylvania’s 2010 adoption; others took a wait-and-see approach. “There is a great deal of confusion and uncertainty,” said Wythe Keever, a spokesman for the union.

Even before the vote to adopt the state’s standards in September, the Pennsylvania State Department of Education had instructed districts to proceed as though they were in effect. School was starting, and they had nothing else to go on.

In math, there are substantive differences between the national and Pennsylvania versions of Common Core. But in English, there are fewer significant differences, prompting some critics to call the state document a political ploy.

Those critics were in abundance last month on a clear evening at the Living Faith Church in West Chester for a presentation organized by the West Chester Tea Party. About 50 people, mostly concerned grandparents along with a local school board member, gathered to hear Peg Luksik, a former Republican candidate for governor and U.S. Senate who had a long career in education. Luksik now spends her time traveling the state and the county campaigning against Common Core.

While a common fear among teachers is their ability to get students meeting minimum standards, Luksik believes the benchmarks are too low. Algebra 1, for example, is the highest math a student must complete to pass Pennsylvania’s new state graduation exams linked to the standards. “How can that be college and career ready?” she asked in an interview. Although her opponents counter that minimum standards are meant to be exceeded, Luksik said, “if that’s all the school district is accountable for and they all have money crunches — and you know they all do — they’re only going to do what they’re accountable for.… It is a lowering of standards despite the constant use of the word ‘rigorous.’”

Luksik is also worried about a potential violation of privacy with a major federal initiative to track students from elementary school until after graduation using, in part, data from Common Core-related tests, which could be sold to educational researchers.

Like many in Pennsylvania, she is concerned about the cost of implementing the Core Standards and does not believe state claims that it won’t cost anything more than school districts already spend to train teachers and periodically adopt new instructional materials. Unlike many others, she’s poured through state documents online trying to pinpoint the cost.

Standing before a large screen in West Chester with one of her trademark PowerPoint presentations, the white-haired mother of six was part teacher and part politician. She walked the audience through the state’s 2010 application for money from the federal Race to the Top competition. The application, signed by then-Gov. Ed Rendell, asked the federal government for $400 million over three years for initiatives including Common Core. It said the state would supplement the money with $140 million and $2.6 billion from separate pots of its own funding.

That brought Luksik to the conclusion that the three-year implementation cost would be $3.14 billion. (The Race to the Top application encompassed reforms beyond Common Core, including some that could only happen with the grant money. The group Pennsylvanians Against Common Core estimates an implementation cost of $645 million based on a 2012 report by the Pioneer Institute and American Principles Project.)

Luksik asked everyone to stand. Only sit down, she said, if you can meet the standard named.

“Sing like Pavarotti,” Luksik began. When no one sat, she lessened the challenge: Sing for the New York Metropolitan Opera. Next: Sing for a church choir. When Luksik got to “sings in the shower and enjoys it,” most of the attendees sat. Her point: The state sets standards that everyone can meet, and there’s no reward for going beyond them. “What about the student for whom the standard should have been Pavarotti?” she asked. (Defenders of the standards say nothing should stop a student from excelling far beyond basic benchmarks, which are necessary to bring up the legions of students falling short of them.)

Making the case that Common Core will try to make all children the same, Luksik posted a photo of her baby granddaughter on the screen. “I’m going to fight for her, and I beg you to join me,” she said.

The state board of education’s vote on the standards was to occur the next day. Luksik knew it wouldn’t go their way, but she urged the audience to continue fighting with her in the General Assembly, where she has found more sympathy for her cause.

“Let me tell you a little thing about politics,” she said. “It’s never over, unless you give up.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet affiliated with Teachers College, Columbia University.

Find out more about Common Core.

In the suburbs, conflicting emotions over new school mandates

2013-10-17T10:50:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

by Sara Neufeld, The Hechinger Report

Upper Dublin High School had the 10th-highest SAT scores of any public school in Pennsylvania last year. It occupies a gleaming, just-completed $119 million building where a sushi chef supplements the cafeteria offerings on Wednesdays. Its graduation rate exceeds 99 percent, and more than 95 percent of graduates go on to two- and four-year colleges.

Yet even here, teachers are worried about being able to get all their students to pass state exams in algebra, literature and biology, which will likely be required for a diploma beginning with the current freshman class. So where does that leave the rest of Pennsylvania?

“It would be a shame if we set kids up for failure,” said Dan Ortiz, a social studies teacher at Upper Dublin High, a 1,500-student school in Philadelphia’s northern suburbs that was graced with the new building after a 2007 voter referendum.

With student diplomas potentially at stake, the pressures that high-poverty urban schools have experienced for years around standardized test scores may now be heading to the suburbs. For years, suburban educators have had far more instructional freedom than their counterparts at urban high-poverty schools because the stakes attached to testing didn’t pose much threat to them.

But the new “Keystone exams” are significantly harder than the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests they replaced, and those tests were not required for graduation. During a trial administration of the Keystones in 2011, only 38.6 percent of students statewide passed in algebra, 35.7 percent passed in biology and 49.9 percent passed in literature. In a federal grant application that year, state officials set a goal of 66 percent passing algebra and 63 percent passing biology by 2015.

Students will have multiple chances to take the exams, and those unable to pass will be offered the opportunity to do projects in the same subjects instead. For those who still can’t pass then, district superintendents will have the authority to grant waivers to up to 10 percent of students, though districts that use that authority liberally will be required to submit a corrective-action plan.

A divided state board of education signed off on the graduation exams last month at the same time it approved Pennsylvania’s version of Common Core, a set of national standards designed to make U.S. students more competitive globally. No one on the board objected to the standards, but a vocal minority opposed the imposition of high-stakes tests with neither a cost estimate nor additional funds allocated for student remediation. (The board’s decision is now in the state regulatory review process.)

State board member and Democratic Sen. Andy Dinniman, who represents portions of Chester and Montgomery Counties, said every superintendent in both those counties opposes the Keystone exams as a graduation requirement, but all are in favor of the Pennsylvania Core Standards.

That also seems to be the prevailing sentiment among teachers and administrators at Upper Dublin High, located in Montgomery County outside Dinniman’s district.

Several educators interviewed at the school said they like how the standards require reading and writing in every subject, not just English, and they like the collaboration among departments that is occurring as a result. They praised the critical thinking that both the standards and the exams demand, in contrast to the low-level memorization skills gauged on most state standardized tests.

But they’re concerned about what the Keystone exams will mean for lower-performing students.

“They’re going to struggle with it,” said Mike Fogle, who teaches math subjects including Algebra 1, the Keystone-tested subject.

Added Ortiz, the social studies teacher: “For a majority of our kids, it might not be a concern, but we can’t just go on a majority.”

They also worry about what changes their school, which has never emphasized teaching to a test, will need to institute to ensure that no one is denied a diploma.

“Will kids no longer be able to take electives so they can sit in a remedial math class?” asked principal Robert Schultz. The decision is his, technically, but will he really have a choice?

Electives are often the classes that give struggling students a reason to come to school, Schultz said, and he fears that staff and students will get caught up in a time-consuming cycle of testing, remediation and retesting. (A student first takes a Keystone exam at the end of the related course — so the algebra Keystone could come as early as middle school — and then has the opportunity to keep retaking it until high school graduation.)

“I don’t want to say it’s much ado about nothing, because it’s not nothing, but it’s more ado about something than it should be,” said the principal, who graduated from Upper Dublin High in the 1980s and now has a daughter there.

Science teacher Rick Schmidt questioned why knowledge of biology is considered an essential life skill for a high school graduate. In the workforce, he asked, “What is the essential nature of biology for most people to do what they need to do?”

In addition, he sees the biology Keystone as contradicting a central tenet of Common Core: to go deeper in fewer subject areas. “We’re trying to hit everything, so you hit everything an inch deep, and by the end of the year, you’re exhausted,” said Schmidt, recipient of a 2012 Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching.

Around the country, many states are switching over to one of two new national exams linked to Common Core. Those assessments are also seen as more difficult than the state tests they are replacing, but not all states are using them as a graduation requirement.

About half of states have high school exit exams in some form. Of those, eight had linked their exams to Common Core or similar standards, and 10 others were looking into doing so, according to a 2012 report by the Center on Education Policy.

“Students who are already struggling with the current state standards will soon be expected to pass exit exams aligned to more rigorous standards, and there’s a good chance many will fail to do so,“ said the report’s author, Shelby McIntosh, in a statement that accompanied the report’s release. “While high schools should prepare all students for college or careers, policymakers must consider whether all students have had the opportunity to learn the content of these new, more rigorous standards before attaching such high stakes to the exams.”

At the elementary level, Pennsylvania is keeping its existing PSSA tests, but beginning in 2015, it will align the test questions with the state’s Core Standards. In the meantime, with the new standards becoming official but one more year of tests on old benchmarks, “we truly are in limbo,” said Janet Blenheim, a math coach for the Upper Dublin School District, which serves 5,000 students in four elementary schools and one middle school in addition to Upper Dublin High. The district headquarters where she keeps an office occupies a 1793 barn and farmhouse that is a stop on the Underground Railroad tour.

When Upper Dublin elementary schools sampled some questions for the new version of the tests, “we did have some tears,” Blenheim said. Still, she called the standards “focused, coherent and rigorous,” and “the best thing to happen to math in decades.” Faced with messy problems, she said, “we want our children to persevere.”

In English, teachers at both the elementary and high school level said they are excited about the standards’ increased emphasis on nonfiction, even though it means fewer novels. Tre Milrod, a fourth-grade teacher at Maple Glen Elementary, said the change will better prepare students for college.

“So far, I love it,” said Deborah Kim, an English teacher at Upper Dublin High. “It’s a lot of work, but it’s created so much energy in the teachers.” At the same time, she said, “maybe I’m young and naïve, but … if one day I had to teach to a test, I’m not really sure I could continue to do this. I teach because I believe in what I’m teaching.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet affiliated with Teachers College, Columbia University.

Find out more about Common Core.

Forum takes on standardized testing

2013-05-16T11:21:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Two icons of the progressive education movement spoke in Philadelphia on Wednesday night to decry standardized testing and urge that a “justice-oriented framework” drive school reform instead.

“Test score gaps are used to label schools as failures without providing resources or strategies to eliminate the gap,” said Stan Karp of Rethinking Schools, an education journal and publisher.

Michelle Fine of the City University of New York (CUNY), who once taught at the University of Pennsylvania and helped drive Philadelphia’s small schools movement 20 years ago, said that high-stakes testing was “corrupting and curdling” education in New York City and elsewhere.

She called standardized testing “the scientific ink of tattooing failure on the bodies of children, teachers, and now school closings." Real change, she said, only comes when schools are “designed by educators with parent and student passion at their heart.”

Karp, a former teacher in Paterson, N.J., said that high-stakes testing narrows the curriculum, puts pressure on the most vulnerable children, leads to adult cheating, and inflates the profits of testing companies without providing children a real education.

Also, statistical analysis of the results is often flawed in high-stakes situations, Karp said. He cited a recent incident involving the testing giant Pearson and a test used to assign students to coveted "gifted and talented" programs in New York City.

Barely hours after he spoke, the School Reform Commission approved a three-year, $1 million contract with Pearson to develop a high-stakes teacher and principal evaluation tool.

“High-stakes tests are the credit default swaps of the education world,” Karp said. “They encourage bad behavior on the part of people in charge” while propelling the forces of inquality.

The proliferation of high-stakes tests brought on by the No Child Left Behind law in 2002 helped lead to the virtual abandonment of other strategies for educational improvement, including racial and economic integration and more services for high-poverty schools, Karp said.

“Never have schools had more tests, and never have those tests done more to block real teaching and learning,” he said.

He warned that tests related to the new Common Core standards, which have been adopted by almost all the states, will be used to “sort and label students while rationing educational opportunity and access.”

Karp said he wasn’t opposed to charter schools in principle. But the charter school movement, he said, “provides fabulous opportunities for some, but unequal access and opportunity for the many."

Plus, market-based education reform has “eroded the common ground that public education needs to survive,” he said. “Parents should be treated not just as customers seeking services, but citizens seeking rights.”

He urged a broader testing “opt-out” movement, which has begun to take hold in some cities and states, to make more room for student and parent voices and heightened transparency regarding the tests and the test companies.

Fine noted that the city pioneered the small schools movement in the early 1990s, when she was involved with the Philadelphia Schools Collaborative and several large neighborhood high schools formed small learning communities — then called “charters.”

The movement engaged students and teachers in inquiry-based learning and raised academic expectations and standards in many neighborhood high schools. Students consigned to keyboarding courses suddenly had access to advanced math and science courses, as well as the opportunity to think deeply about social justice and other big issues.

But the movement floundered on the shoals of ambivalence on the part of both the teachers’ union and the administration about "good practice" — what Fine called a "structural betrayal" that is still evident, she said.

Real school reform must come from parents, students, and teachers and can’t be commodified — what the education reformers call “scaling up,” she said. Creating a formula and ordering schools to adopt it will not work, she said, unless there is deep community involvement and buy-in.

More than 100 people attended the forum, held at Arch Street Methodist Church in Center City and moderated by Helen Gym, who along with Karp is an editor of Rethinking Schools. Gym is also a regular contributor to the Notebook.

Rethinking Schools has published a book called Pencils Down, a collection of essays that takes on the standardized testing industry.

State has taken over probe into 2009-11 tests at Wagner Middle School

2013-01-09T19:50:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The Pennsylvania Department of Education has taken over the probe into possible widespread cheating on state tests at Philadelphia’s Wagner Middle School in 2009, 2010, and 2011.

The investigation had previously been the purview of the School District of Philadelphia. District spokesman Fernando Gallard confirmed the switch, saying the state informed the District of its plan at the end of September. No reason for the change was given, Gallard said.

A state-commissioned analysis found extremely high numbers of "wrong-to-right" erasures at Wagner in multiple grades and subjects in all three of those years. District Chief Academic Officer Penny Nixon, now on sabbatical, was Wagner’s principal in 2009.

Wagner was originally designated a "Tier 2" school, to be investigated by attorneys from the law firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, which has been providing pro bono services to the district since last May.

Superintendent William Hite said recently that the District is "close to wrapping up" those investigations and that educators found to have cheated could soon face discipline.

The state Department of Education has given no timetable for completing its investigation of 11 so-called "Tier One" schools — plus now Wagner.

Pennsylvania Department of Education spokesman Tim Eller would not confirm that the state has assumed control of the Wagner investigation.

Wagner is also under scrutiny for more recent allegations of adult cheating on state tests.

Last month, NewsWorks and the Public School Notebook reported that Hite had reopened the District’s investigation of cheating reports on the PSSAs at Wagner in 2012. Multiple eyewitness accounts of serious testing violations at the school by trained test monitors were minimized or ignored, and the District omitted key information about the alleged infractions in its report to the state. One of the monitors was subjected to a disciplinary hearing. The other was fired in July.

Findings from that investigation are expected sometime this month.

This article was produced as part of a partnership in coverage of the Philadelphia schools between WHYY/NewsWorks and the Public School Notebook.

Philly schools chief vows ‘strong message’ against cheating on tests

2013-01-07T19:22:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Superintendent William Hite says the Philadelphia School District is "close to wrapping up" its piece of a far-reaching investigation into cheating on state tests, adding that some city educators may soon be disciplined.

"I feel very strongly about the evidence that is there," Hite said.

"We’re intending to send a very strong message publicly about individuals who are found to have participated in cheating our students."

Hite’s comments came during an interview to discuss his new "Action Plan v1.0," which outlines the new superintendent’s priorities for the District. Included in the plan is a commitment to "ensure testing integrity."

Last year, a state-commissioned analysis found suspicious erasure patterns on student response sheets on the 2009, 2010, and 2011 Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) exams at dozens of schools across the state, including 53 District-managed schools and four area charters.

The Pennsylvania Department of Education has been investigating 11 of those city schools, dubbed "Tier One" schools. In an email, Tim Eller, the department’s press officer, wrote "there is no specific timeline" for the state’s end of the investigation to be completed.

For its part, the District has been working since May with pro bono attorneys from the law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP to investigate 20 "Tier Two" schools. That group includes Strawberry Mansion High, Huey Elementary, and a number of other schools with telltale signs of adult cheating in multiple grades, subjects and years. Some of these schools have now been slated for closure.

"The [Tier Two] investigations were comprehensive. They were thorough. They were done by a third party, not by the District itself," Hite said. "We think [they are] going to provide us some pretty significant information on which we can act."

The probes into the city schools in the third group, many of which also showed signs of serious adult manipulation, have not yet begun.

The Wagner probe

Last month, Hite ordered his general counsel to reopen an investigation into serious cheating complaints at Wagner Middle School during the administration of the 2012 exams. That decision came after NewsWorks, together with the Public School Notebook, reported that senior District officials minimized or ignored multiple reports of infractions witnessed firsthand at Wagner by District test monitors.

District officials are expected to handle disciplinary action taken against educators found to have cheated, including possible suspensions or terminations. The state Department of Education could also move to revoke educators’ licenses or certificates.

To date, no cheating-related disciplinary action has been taken against any Philadelphia administrators, said Robert McGrogan, the president of the Commonwealth Association of School Administrators, which represents principals.

The state, meanwhile, has filed more than 140 professional misconduct complaints against educators statewide, Eller said.

Stakes in testing to go higher

Even as District officials vow to crack down on cheating and continue tightening test security, the stakes attached to state standardized tests continue to rise. Beginning next school year, student results on the exams will play a major role in how Pennsylvania school districts evaluate teachers.

Hite said the research is clear that overreliance on test scores can "create incentives for the wrong types of behaviors."

But he said he’s confident that the new teacher evaluation system won’t exacerbate the cheating problem in Philadelphia and elsewhere.

"I think the state system allows for enough multiple types of measures to ameliorate the concern that one test will drive the evaluation of an individual," Hite said.

Going beyond the multiple-choice test

2012-12-04T16:16:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

While high-stakes testing continues unabated, educators skeptical of the annual assessments are not just experimenting, but making headway in finding better ways to evaluate – and improve – student learning and whole-school performance.

For instance, about 30 schools in Philadelphia and its suburbs are participating in a $2.4 million research project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that gives students multiple chances to learn math content and resubmit assignments. It also helps them persist in scoring better on math tests, take more difficult courses, and stay in school.

Other examples include work at Science Leadership Academy, where educators call their testing regimen “standards-based assessment” with instruction, student projects, and testing aligned with state academic standards.

At the Sustainability Workshop School at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, the focus is on project-based learning. And a cluster of schools in and around New York City have devised what they believe is a roadmap for “authentic accountability” in assessing both student and school performance.

Sure, testing in those schools still exists, but many school leaders have shifted their focus away from testing days to creating learning environments that fine-tune instruction and address school climate and individual student achievement.

This approach to measuring school quality has come none too soon, says Monty Neill, longtime critic of standardized tests and a founder of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest) in Boston, a clearinghouse for research and information on testing trends in the country.

There’s an upsurge in protests over testing, including a nationwide petition drive, Neill said.

“It’s more than frustration. There’s a lot of anger being expressed,” he said.

“You hear about kids crying and vomiting, corruption of the curriculum, damage to school climate and of course cheating. And for what?”

Neill added that average student scores on the national NAEP test have “not moved much if at all, and they have been doing this stuff for a decade or more.”

Helping students become proficient in math is the centerpiece of the Philadelphia-area NSF-funded research project, conducted by the 21st Century Partnership for STEM Education, a research group in Conshohocken headed by F. Joseph Merlino. Thirty high schools in the region, including a dozen public, charter and Catholic schools in the city, are participating.

“We think this is a game changer for kids and for teachers … a better way to go than just standardized test scores. This is much richer and friendlier to the learning process,” Merlino said.

The approach has three main components.

First, teachers agree to a dozen main learning objectives and what students would have to show to meet those objectives.

“We don’t want 100 items, we want the big-ticket ideas,” Merlino said.

Second, students are assessed not with letter grades but rather on whether they are high-performing, proficient or not yet proficient. Students not yet proficient receive more instruction, then another shot at the test.

Third, the schools use a software program that helps manage the learning outcomes and determine whether students are proficient. The data are available to teachers, school leaders, students – and parents.

“The way assessment is done now, it’s really about grading and kids passing or failing, and it discourages them from being persistent,” Merlino said. “You need a system that encourages learning. With this approach, when a kid is not yet proficient, the conversation with the teacher changes from, ‘Will you give me a D so I can pass?’ to ‘What can I do to show you what I know?’”

Merlino calls it “assessment for learning and not judgment.” In the early 1990s, the approach was called mastery learning and drew some attention in Pennsylvania as part of the “outcomes-based education” initiative that was thwarted by conservative factions across the state and overtaken by the standards movement later that decade.

Some schools, including the Young Women’s Leadership Charter School in Chicago, tout its success. To graduate, students in the Chicago school must show proficiency in 85 percent of 600 learning objectives.

Here in Philadelphia, Science Leadership Academy also puts the focus on proficiency over test-taking. Students who fall short on a test re-study the material and re-take whatever part of the test they failed.

Public and charter schools in Philadelphia and elsewhere in Pennsylvania have no choice but to administer the PSSAs. And the Keystone exams being introduced in January 2013 at the secondary level (and replacing the 11th grade PSSAs) are mandatory–no opting out–making it tough for schools to fully embrace alternative assessments.

In New York, however, the New York Performance Standards Consortium – a group of 26 public schools, most in New York City – won waivers from the state’s traditional Regents exams to try a different approach. To graduate, students must complete four performance-based assessment tasks, typically in grades 11 or 12: an analytic essay, a social studies research paper, a science experiment, and an applied mathematics problem. They also must take the state English/language arts test.

The results show dramatic decreases in dropouts, higher graduation rates, especially for English language learners and students with disabilities, increased teacher stability, fewer suspensions, and more students still in college after two years, according to the consortium, citing city Board of Education data. “These kids are not only college-ready, they are succeeding in college,” Neill said.

“What we say is a combination of looking at kids’ work, limited standardized testing, like every other year, and some kind of school quality review represents a better way to evaluate schools.”

Lawrence Feinberg, Haverford school board member and a founder of the Keystone State Education Coalition, an advocacy coalition, praised a Boston program called City Connects, which identifies the needs of every child K-8 and then creates interventions and enrichments both in school and in the community at a cost of about $500 per child.

“That’s what’s going to make a difference with these kids who have these needs. But to test the hell out of them, it’s a crime,” Feinberg said.

Haverford’s superintendent, William Keilbaugh, was among 14 Delaware County superintendents who petitioned state Education Secretary Ron Tomalis in August, seeking relief from testing mandates. By Keilbaugh’s calculation, training, testing, and retesting will affect 106 instructional/work days, almost 60 percent of the school year.

“As we constantly test, retest and, yes, practice test because of its importance to graduation, there will be no time for other subjects,” the superintendents wrote.

Feinberg said, “Testing is like a blunt instrument they are using to pummel public schools. … Instead, we should be looking at test practices – things, like City Connects, that are actually helping kids in high-poverty districts.”

At the Sustainability Workshop School, students pursue large and small civic and environmental projects with workshops and some lectures rather than semester-long coursework.

There are quizzes, but the emphasis is on learning by doing.

Co-founder and teacher Simon Hauger, in a recent blog, restated a central tenet of the school, citing a raft of longitudinal studies: “Accountability through standardized testing doesn’t produce long-term success for students – surprise. Kids are not widgets and education should not be an assembly line.”

Update: Paragraph 22, about the PSSA, has been revised to clarify that while taking the Keystone exams is mandatory for high school students in 2013, passing the tests is not yet a requirement for high school graduation.

Investigations at 53 schools continue without resolution

2012-11-26T15:11:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Pennsylvania’s investigation of possible cheating on state tests in Philadelphia is entering its second year with no results announced and with little information about its scope and depth.

So far, no area educators or school officials have been publicly charged with wrongdoing. Both the School District of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania’s Department of Education (PDE) have vowed to take disciplinary action, but those actions can take place behind closed doors.

Of 53 District schools deemed to have suspicious statistical patterns of wrong-to-right erasures over a three-year period, the state has directed the cash-strapped District to conduct its own probe of most of them. And while PDE has paid some $750,000 to get help from a private law firm, the District is relying on pro bono legal help.

The latest estimate for the investigation’s completion, from the District at least, is sometime in December.

Secretary of Education Ronald Tomalis has said that some 100 educators statewide – presumably including some from Philadelphia – would be sanctioned for their role in tampering with test booklets or other violations of test security. Department sources have said that there have been confessions.

But unlike in Atlanta, considered the gold standard of such investigations, the PDE, the state’s Office of Inspector General, the District and the private attorneys helping them are proceeding without subpoena power.

Robert Wilson, who helped lead the Atlanta investigation, said that this is a major impediment.

“It’s an essential power you have to have in order to find the truth in these situations,” he said. “Of 1,500 interviews we did in schools, we never had one teacher or principal admit wrongdoing” in that setting.

“We had to have subpoena power to get them to a location of our choosing, out of the environment they were comfortable in,” he said. “Only then we began to get people to tell us things.”

Documents show that, from the beginning, PDE anticipated resistance from schools, including lawsuits. It hired the law firm Pepper Hamilton LLP last fall, initially to help it with litigation.

“External investigations are slated to begin shortly and we anticipate litigation related to those investigations,” reads the rationale for a $250,000 contract signed in October 2011 with Pepper Hamilton, available on the state website.

Later, it says PDE anticipates that “some schools may resist PDE’s investigation, and litigation may ensue.”

PDE spokesman Tim Eller did not respond to questions about what prompted those fears and whether any litigation was actually filed.

A second contract with Pepper Hamilton, signed in December for $200,000, was to help conduct the investigation itself. That contract was amended in the spring to add $250,000 and extend it to June 2013.

Between October 2011 and June 2012 at least a dozen Pepper Hamilton partners, associates and paralegals worked with PDE attorneys and the Office of Inspector General on the case at hourly rates ranging from $180 to $460, according to invoices for the firm obtained under the state Right to Know law. While portions of the invoices were redacted by the state, it appears that most of the legal work has involved schools in Philadelphia, both District and charter, as well as the Chester Community Charter School.

The law firm also worked on investigations in the Reading and Hazleton districts.

Pepper Hamilton was first hired by the state four months after the Notebook uncovered and reported the findings of a forensic analysis showing widespread statistical irregularities in 2009 testing, and two months after Tomalis announced he was ordering an analysis of wrong-to-right erasures for 2009, 2010 and 2011.

In Philadelphia, Pepper Hamilton is working with the state primarily on the “Tier One” schools – 11 of the 53 District schools with anomalies the state considered most severe.

PDE asked the School District to investigate the second and third tier schools itself.

To conduct its investigation, the District has relied on pro bono help from the law firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP. Its investigation didn’t start in earnest until this fall.

The state also allowed at least two of the four area charters with flagged test results to conduct their own investigations (see Info is scarce on cheating probes at 4 area charters).

Wilson, from Atlanta, said that such self-investigation is rarely fruitful.

“If you are going to investigate a school that has a wide standard deviation from the norm, you have to interview everybody in that school, and that includes many times the custodial staff,” said Wilson. “In order to do that, it takes a large number of trained people. … You can’t do this with first- and second-year associates.”

In Georgia, Gov. Sonny Perdue at first asked Atlanta and other districts to explain the statistical deviations that a forensic analysis had uncovered.

“The Atlanta system formed a blue-ribbon commission and hired a large accounting firm to do the interviews,” Wilson said. “They couldn’t begin to handle it. They didn’t have enough trained people to do the interviews, it didn’t go deep enough, and they didn’t have subpoena power.”

Perdue then ordered a state probe with full subpoena powers.

“We had two separate law firms, myself and another person were appointed special investigators; at one time we had 70 people” working full time, Wilson said. “These interviews didn’t take 10 minutes, and many had to be done again and again.”

They made their findings public in a 400-page report implicating 178 people at 44 schools over a period as long as 10 years. The probe contributed to the retirement of longtime superintendent Beverly Hall and sent a strong message that producing high test scores by any means necessary was not acceptable.

More than 120 of the implicated Atlanta educators retired or resigned, and 10 were terminated. A few contested the charges, and some of those have been reinstated.

The Pepper Hamilton invoices indicate that the firm’s lawyers studied Atlanta and researched whether Secretary Tomalis had subpoena power and other tools that could compel schools or individuals to cooperate, as well as “litigation strategy.”

PDE’s Eller did not respond to detailed questions regarding the scope of the investigators’ power and how it might hamper getting results.

Sources close to the investigation here indicate that it has been marked with uncertainty over how to handle educators who admit to wrongdoing or are accused of it by eyewitnesses. Short of that, it is hard to bring any disciplinary action.

Andrew Porter, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education and an expert on testing, said that from what he has seen so far, Pennsylvania hasn’t had the tools to do the kind of probe that would sanction wrongdoers, send a strong message that cheating won’t be tolerated, and minimize it in the future.

And even if the state never sorts out the current crop of suspicious scores, Porter recommends that it establish clear, consistent testing protocols for every school.

“I wouldn’t just do it at the places that look suspicious. I would want a good, solid, secure protocol throughout,” Porter said. “I would expect oversight, and random visitations, I’d put in a hotline. … It creates a larger, systemic climate of oversight and concern to make sure that the data have integrity. That’s the kind of culture that we need to create, so that people don’t think about cheating.”

Test security: Philadelphia gets strictest treatment

2012-11-21T14:06:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Heightened security measures are expected to again be in force throughout the School District of Philadelphia when state standardized tests are administered next spring. Changes are unlikely at least until current cheating investigations are brought to a close, according to Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) spokesman Tim Eller.

Security will again be tightest at 53 District schools under suspicion of cheating. But the most controversial change made this year – a ban on teachers administering the tests to their own students – continues to apply districtwide. Some educators believe this could lower test scores and put the District’s students at a disadvantage compared with their peers in most Philadelphia charters and statewide.

Taking teachers out of the classroom testing situation “is just not a good idea,” said Peter Kuriloff, an educational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “Children are very sensitive to the testing environment.” This would be particularly true in the lower grades, he said, and particularly true if the student has good rapport with the homeroom teacher.

While there are no studies on this exact point, Kuriloff pointed to research indicating that a child is likely to score 10 or 15 points higher on an IQ test administered by someone he or she knows well than on one given by a stranger. He said there was reason to believe that there could be a similar difference in PSSA results.

Christina Puntel, a Spanish teacher at Parkway Northwest High School, explained that “for many students, the test has no meaning except that the teacher has been working with them on it all year. They have a relationship. Without the teacher in the classroom, there is a huge paradigm shift. It’s a huge loss.”

“Some children are anxious when it comes to testing,” said Philadelphia Federation of Teachers president Jerry Jordan. “The classroom teachers know their kids. They know their frustration level when it comes to testing.”

With teachers removed from their classrooms last year, principals’ union president Robert McGrogan said his members also reported that “the atmosphere was different – not nearly as nurturing or comforting.”

Banning teachers from testing their own students is not standard practice, according to John Fremer, president of Caveon Consulting, a national test security firm. He recommends that teachers be allowed to administer the test but with an outside monitor in the room as well.

According to Eller of PDE, there is no ban on the teacher being in the classroom during testing. “The teacher of record could be in the room,” he said in a statement, “just not alone.”

But Philadelphia District officials say that they simply do not have enough personnel to do that: The teachers are needed as monitors in other classrooms.

This year’s ban on teachers administering tests to their own students only applied to a handful of districts and charters under suspicion of cheating. Besides the School District, they included the Hazleton School District, the Chester Community Charter School and three Philadelphia charters.

Other key changes in the test security system in Philadelphia included increased monitoring and tightened control over testing materials at the 53 schools targeted for investigation and increased emphasis districtwide on training, particularly for principals.

Under these heightened security measures, violations of testing rules were reported at 27 Philadelphia schools last spring, but most were easily corrected, such as posters with test-related information that needed to be removed from classroom walls. (The state has so far declined to respond to questions raised by a Notebook/NewsWorks story about one case where more serious testing violations were alleged at Wagner Middle School.)

“We’re committed to the same level of security” in 2013, said Rosemary Hughes, director of the District’s Office of School Innovation and Best Practices.

Chris Baugh, the District’s assessment development coordinator, said PDE officials monitoring the administration of last year’s tests had not recommended any additional security steps.

With more than 200 District schools not suspected of any testing impropriety, Fran Newberg, the District’s deputy of educational technology, accountability and assessment, said security was tightest last spring at the 53 schools in which the state had started investigations or was planning to. She said the District’s approach at this list of schools was “closely aligned” with the state’s priorities.

The PDE had already tightened control over testing materials statewide, requiring that not just principals but also assessment coordinators and proctors sign statements that materials had not been tampered with.

In the District schools under the tightest scrutiny, boxes containing test booklets were sealed with tamper-proof tape that only monitors – usually central office staff – could remove.

The 53 schools under suspicion of cheating were divided into three tiers that got different levels of follow-up. Newberg and Baugh said that the 11 schools under the tightest scrutiny were most frequently monitored by District officials during the testing period. “The upper tier schools had monitors on site every day,” Baugh said. “In some cases they practically lived at the school.” PDE monitors also dropped in on these schools unannounced, he said.

Baugh also stressed the role of training, partly because “a lot of people didn’t remember the rules. We really reviewed the do’s and don’ts.” Before testing last spring, more than 500 principals and test coordinators attended day-long seminars on testing procedures run by the PDE and their Minnesota-based testing contractor, Data Recognition Corporation (DRC). Previously, only test coordinators had been trained.

District officials say they have been able to provide enhanced security by juggling current staff and with virtually no extra expense – literally just storage boxes and tape.

Increased training for test administrators and awareness that there will be a forensic review of the test booklets for suspicious patterns are the two steps most effective in preventing cheating, according to Phillip Rogers, executive director of the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification. Both of these are now in place here.

But PFT president Jordan has strongly objected to districtwide measures that specifically target Philadelphia, saying they “make the assumption that all teachers are cheating and they’re not. Most [teachers] are insulted.

“You have a ‘test and sanction’ environment in this country, not just in Philadelphia,” he said in an interview. “Principals and teachers are put under a tremendous amount of pressure. There is a lack of resources going into the schools, and the expectations keep getting greater.”

Some educators, in fact, think that this environment has in the past encouraged cheating.

In an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Gregory Cizek, a professor of educational management and evaluation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said that there has been “typically no incentive for anyone to take threats to test security seriously.

“Educators are happy when test scores go up,” Cizek said, “parents are happy when their children do well, students are pleased when they are declared to be ‘proficient.’ The public is assuaged when all schools appear to be increasing learning.”

Acciones prohibidas durante el examen

2012-11-21T13:30:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Esta es una lista del Departamento de Educación de Pensilvania de lo que los maestros, administradores del examen y funcionarios escolares no pueden hacer.

1) Ayudar a los estudiantes más allá de alentarlos y darles instrucciones generales. A los estudiantes de educación especial se le puede dar cierta ayuda adicional de conformidad con su IEP.

2) Dejar a un estudiante solo en cualquier momento durante el examen.

3) Permitir que un estudiante saque el folleto del examen o la hoja de respuestas fuera del área del examen sin supervisión adecuada.

4) Alentar a un estudiante a cambiar o modificar de cualquier manera su respuesta a una pregunta.

5) Revisar un borrador de la respuesta del estudiante a una pregunta abierta.

6) Reproducir o copiar los materiales del examen.

7) Mostrarles cualquier pregunta del folleto de examen a los estu-diantes, o usar las preguntas como ejemplo durante la preparación para el examen.

8) Permitir el uso de materiales que no sean los proporcionados para el examen.

9) Permitir el uso de aparatos electrónicos que tengan “capacidades de comunicación inalámbrica, captación de imágenes o envío de mensajes de texto”.

10) Poseer folletos del examen sin autorización del coordinador de examen del distrito.

11) Devolverle los folletos de examen completados a un estudiante excepto en casos especiales como por ejemplo en una sesión de recupera-ción por ausencia.

Seguridad en los exámenes: las medidas más estrictas para Filadelfia

2012-11-21T13:20:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Una vez más se esperan medidas de seguridad estrictas en todo el Distrito

Escolar cuando se administren los exámenes estandarizados la próxima primavera. Lo más probable es que no haya cambios al menos hasta se cierren que las investigaciones actuales de trampa, según dijo Tim Eller, portavoz del Departamento de Educación de Pensilvania (PDE).

En 53 escuelas del Distrito en las que se sospecha que los estudiantes se copian la seguridad será otra vez sumamente estricta. Sin embargo, el cambio más controversial de este año – que los maestros no les pueden administrar los exámenes a sus propios estudiantes – seguirá aplicándosele a todo el distrito. Algunos educadores opinan que esto podría reducir las puntuaciones en el examen y poner a los estudiantes del Distrito en desventaja cuando se comparen con los estudiantes de la mayoría de las escuelas chárter de Filadelfia y de todo el estado.

Sacar a los maestros del salón de clases “no es buena idea”, dijo Peter Kuriloff, sicólogo educativo de la Universidad de Pensilvania. “Los niños son sumamente sensitivos en un ambiente de examen”. Esto es particularmente cierto en los grados más bajos, dijo, y particularmente cierto si el estudiante tiene una buena re-lación con su maestro de salón hogar.

Aunque no hay estudios sobre este punto específico, Kuriloff señaló que hay estudios que indican que un niño tiene más probabilidad de lograr 10 o 15 puntos más en un examen de inteligencia (IQ) si lo recibe de alguien que co-noce en vez de recibirlo de un desconocido. Él dijo que hay razón para asumir que podría haber una diferencia similar en los resultados del PSSA.

Christina Puntel, maestra de español en la Escuela Superior Parkway Northwest, explicó que “para muchos estudiantes, el examen no significa nada excepto que el maestro ha estado preparándolos para tomarlo todo el año. Es decir, existe una relación entre ellos. Sin el maestro en el salón de clases, hay un gran cambio en el ambiente. Es una pérdida enorme”.

“Algunos niños se sienten ansiosos al tomar un examen”, dijo Jerry Jordan, presidente de la Federación de Maestros de Filadelfia. “Los maestros conocen a sus estudiantes. Ellos conocen su nivel de frustración cuando se trata de tomar un examen”.

Al remover a los maestros de los salones el año pasado, Robert McGrogan, presidente de la unión de principales, dijo que sus miembros también informaron que “la atmósfera era diferente – no era tan acogedora ni comóda”.

Prohibir que los maestros le impartan el examen a sus propios estudiantes no es una práctica estándar, dijo John Fremer, presidente de la compañía nacional de seguridad en exámenes Caveon Consulting. Él recomienda que a los maestros se les permita dar el examen pero también teniendo un monitor externo en el salón.

Según Eller del PDE, no se prohíbe que el maestro esté en el salón de clases durante el examen. “El maestro podría estar en el salón”, dijo en una declaración, “pero no puede estar solo”.

No obstante, los funcionarios del Distrito Escolar de Filadelfia dicen que ellos simplemente no tienen suficiente personal para hacer eso: Los maestros se necesitan para ser monitores de otros salones de clase.

La medida de prohibir que los maestros les administren el examen a sus propios estudiantes sólo se les aplicó a un puñado de distritos y escuelas chárter bajo sospecha de que los estudiantes se copiaban. Aparte del Distrito Escolar de Filadelfia, éstos incluyen el Distrito Escolar de Hazleton, la Escuela Chárter Chester Community y tres otras escuelas chárter en Filadelfia.

Otros cambios clave en el sistema de seguridad en los exámenes en Fi-ladelfia incluyó más vigilancia y un control más estricto sobre los materiales del examen en las 53 escuelas bajo investigación y más énfasis en adiestramiento en todo el distrito, particularmente para los principales.

Bajo estas medidas de seguridad más estrictas, la pasada primavera se reportaron violaciones a las reglas del examen en 27 escuelas de Filadelfia, pero la mayoría fueron corregidas fácilmente, como por ejemplo remover de las paredes de los salones carteles que contenían información relacionada con el examen. (Hasta ahora el estado no ha querido contestar las preguntas hechas por un artículo de Notebook/NewsWorks sobre un caso donde se alegan violaciones más serias en la Escuela Intermedia Wagner.)

“Estamos comprometidos al mismo nivel de seguridad” en el 2012, dijo Rosemary Hughes, directora de la Oficina de Innovación y Mejores Prácticas del Distrito.

Chris Baugh, coordinadora de desarrollo de exámenes del Distrito, dijo que los funcionarios del PDE que supervisaron la administración de los exámenes el año pasado no habían recomendado ninguna medida de seguridad adicional.

Con más de 200 escuelas del Distri-to sin ninguna sospecha de impropiedad durante el examen, Fran Newberg, subdirectora de tecnología, responsabilidad y evaluación del Distrito dijo que esta pasada primavera la seguridad fue más estricta en las 53 escuelas en las que el estado había empezado investigaciones o estaba en planes de hacerlo. Ella dijo que el proceder del Distrito en estas escuelas fue de acuerdo con las prioridades del estado.

El PDE ya había aumentado el control sobre los materiales de examen en todo el estado, requiriendo que las certificaciones de que los materiales no habían sido modificados por nadie fue-ran firmadas no sólo por los principales sino también por los coordinadores y los proctores del examen.

En las escuelas del Distrito con el escrutinio más estricto, las cajas que contenían los folletos del examen estaban selladas con cinta adhesiva a prueba de alteración que solamente los monitores – usualmente personal de las oficinas centra-les – podrían remover.

Las 53 escuelas bajo sospecha de impropiedades fueron divididas en tres grupos que recibieron diferentes niveles de seguimiento. Newberg y Baugh dijeron que las 11 escuelas bajo el más estricto escrutinio fueron vigiladas con más frecuencia por los funcionarios del Distrito durante el periodo de los exámenes. “Las escuelas del nivel superior tuvieron monitores todos los días”, dijo Baugh. “En algunos casos los monitores prácticamente vivían en la escuela”. Los monitores del PDE también se presentaron a estas escuelas sin anunciarse, dijo él.

Baugh también enfatizó el rol del adiestramiento, en parte porque “mucha gente no recordaba las reglas. Por lo tanto, repasamos bien lo que se puede y lo que no se puede hacer”.

La primavera pasada antes de los exámenes, más de 500 principales y coordinadores de examen asistieron a seminarios de todo un día sobre los procedimiento del examen impartidos por el PDE y su contratista de exámenes con sede en Minnesota, Data Recognition Corporation (DRC). Antes, sólo los coordinadores del examen recibían adiestramiento.

Los funcionarios del Distrito dicen que han podido proporcionar mayor seguridad empleando el personal actual y prácticamente sin incurrir en gastos adicionales – literalmente sólo con cajas de almacenamiento y cinta adhesiva.

Dos de los pasos más eficaces para prevenir el fraude son más adiestramiento para los administradores del examen y crear mayor consciencia de que habrá una revisión forense de los folletos de examen para determinar si hay patrones sospechosos, dijo Phillip Rogers, director ejecutivo de la Asociación Nacional de Directores Estatales de Educación y Certificación de Maestros. Ambas medidas ya están implantadas aquí.

Pero el presidente de la PFT Jordan tiene fuertes objeciones a las medidas para todo el distrito que se enfocan espe-cíficamente en Filadelfia, diciendo que “suponen que todos los maestros están cometiendo fraude y eso no es cierto. La mayoría de los maestros se sien-ten insultados.

“Hay un ambiente de ‘examen y sanción’ en este país, no sólo en Fi-ladelfia”, dijo en una entrevista. “Los principales y maestros quedan bajo una enorme cantidad de presión. Faltan muchos recursos en las escuelas, y las expectativas siguen creciendo”.

De hecho, algunos educadores opinan que este ambiente en el pasado ha motivado al fraude.

En una entrevista con el periódico Atlanta Journal-Constitution, el profesor de administración y evaluación educativa de la Universidad de Carolina del Norte en Chapel Hill Gregory Cizek dijo que “típicamente no hay incentivo para que la gente tome en serio las amenazas a la seguridad en los exámenes.

“Los educadores se alegran cuando las puntuaciones suben”, dijo Cizek, “los padres están felices cuando a sus hijos les va bien, los estudiantes se complacen cuando se les declara como ‘proficient’. Al público le gusta cuando todas las escuelas parecen estar mejorando el aprendizaje”.

El periodista independiente Paul Jablow contribuye artículos regularmente para el Notebook.

Traducción por Mildred S. Martínez.

Cheating: Time for answers

2012-11-21T12:02:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

For nine years in a row, up through 2011, every summer brought cheery news that test scores went up in Philadelphia schools. Sure, performance wasn’t where it should be, but things were on the right track. More and more students scored proficient and many schools met their adequate yearly progress targets.

To some skeptics, it didn’t compute. Why were we still seeing dismal results on other assessments like the SAT and the NAEP? Why were graduates still crowding remedial classes at Community College of Philadelphia? But the likes of former superintendents Paul Vallas and Arlene Ackerman kept trumpeting the rising test scores.

Now much of that progress has been cast in doubt.

In 2011, the Notebook uncovered a state report showing that nearly 100 Philadelphia schools had implausible numbers of wrong-to-right erasures, according to a forensic analysis of the 2009 PSSA exam. When the state also looked at the 2010 and 2011 tests, they apparently found further signs of adult cheating. The Department of Education ordered investigations at 56 city schools – 53 District, three charters – and put tough security measures in place for 2012. Add in some severe state budget cuts, and lo and behold, at half the schools, scores plunged.

Investigations of past wrongdoing are dragging on. But the state says this year’s results are valid, and with new security measures, everything should be fine going forward.

We don’t buy it.

First, the results of investigations so far give us no confidence that the past messes have been cleaned up. We have heard no explanation of what happened, so how can we know it won’t happen again? Unlike Atlanta, where widespread cheating was uncovered, these investigations are low-profile and low-budget. Without subpoena power, investigators have no leverage getting those who witnessed cheating to talk. Some schools were allowed to investigate themselves. Surprise – they found no evidence of cheating.

Second, we do not have a consistent testing system in place. Experts say that uniform procedures are important for test integrity. Yet District schools are forced to follow different rules for proctoring the exam from other schools in the city and state.

Above all, the evidence of widespread cheating points to the lengths to which people will go under a high-stakes testing regime when so much is riding on one exam – from teacher evaluations to school closings. Perhaps the overt cheating can be curtailed by tough security. But there are other ways to game the system: manipulating which students are tested, coaching on past test questions, or simply engaging in the intensive test prep drills that are commonplace at low-performing schools.

Until we get a thorough accounting of all the ways that test results have been manipulated, how can anyone have confidence that these are valid assessments of how students and schools are doing? How can critical decisions like closing schools be based on suspect data?

We cannot resume the testing business as usual. We need answers: details about how the scores were manipulated – and by how much. Where was the chain of command? Who participated, who encouraged it, who looked the other way? Those involved need to be held accountable. And we need to build some alternatives to this high-stakes assessment system so that we don’t keep repeating this folly.

A distorted reality

2012-11-20T17:40:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

In July 2010, when Saliyah Cruz was named principal of Communications Technology High, state test scores said the small citywide admission school in Southwest Philadelphia was one of the best in the city.

Everything else said something different.

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SAT scores were poor. Summer enrichment programs were empty. Loads of kids tested into remedial reading and math. According to Cruz, even the police complained that many students had spent much of the previous school year at the nearby Penrose Plaza strip mall instead of in class.

“Those kinds of things didn’t add up for me,” she said. “If my kids were out in the street when they belong in school, how were they scoring [75] percent proficient?”

Two years later, an answer appeared: A mountain of circumstantial evidence now suggests that Comm Tech’s results on the 2010 Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) exams were inflated by adult cheating. The school is one of 53 District schools and four area charters involved in a state-led investigation that has prompted questions about the validity of test results between 2009 and 2011.

Cruz, now a middle school principal in Delaware, says the suspect scores at Comm Tech hurt students. She also believes they reflected a districtwide culture of rewarding improbable PSSA gains while dismissing steady improvement.

“The message quite clearly was, ‘Here’s what’s expected in the School District of Philadelphia,’” said Cruz. “All the principals, all the teachers, all the kids need to be able to make these giant leaps forward.”

Testing experts say the ripple effects of inflated scores go even wider, especially because the District continues to rely heavily on data that is likely tainted to measure success and make high-stakes policy decisions.

“I think the implications are pretty profound,” said Jonathan Supovitz, a University of Pennsylvania professor who co-directs the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE).

“If we can’t assume the stability of the data, then any sense of guidance about what we’re doing well or not well is broken down.”

District officials declined to be interviewed for this story.

“It is too early to say how the PSSA scores have been affected by the allegations of testing improprieties,” wrote spokesman Fernando Gallard in a statement, citing ongoing investigations.

Each year, students in grades 3-8 and 11 take the PSSA in reading and math. Their scores are used to determine whether schools meet federally mandated performance targets, known as adequate yearly progress (AYP). In Philadelphia, they’re also used to make big decisions, including which schools get closed or converted to charters.

In 2010, 75 percent of 11th graders at Comm Tech scored proficient or above in reading. That was a 22 percentage-point jump over the previous year.

In math, 70 percent of Comm Tech 11th graders scored proficient or above, 40 points higher than the year before.

An analysis commissioned by the Pennsylvania Department of Education suggested the results may be illegitimate. In both 2009 and 2010, a high number of student response sheets at Comm Tech had suspicious patterns of “wrong-to-right” erasures – a telltale sign of adult cheating.

Before the 2010-11 school year started, Comm Tech’s principal, Barbara McCreery, was replaced. That year, under Saliyah Cruz, the suspicious erasures went away. The school’s scores tanked, dropping 38 points in reading and 45 points in math.

McCreery, now the principal at Bok Technical High, declined to comment for this story.

Cruz says she wasn’t sure what to think when she walked into Comm Tech.

“I thought I was taking the helm of a high-performing school,” said Cruz. “Although there were some red flags.”

She says she tried talking to Comm Tech staff to get a handle on what was going on.

“‘Guys, help me understand this. What were we doing last year that accounted for the kind of academic performance the kids had?’”

In response, says Cruz, staff pointed to “Study Island,” a computer-based test prep program used at many District schools.

“It didn’t make any sense,” she said.

Despite her skepticism, Cruz says the 2010 PSSA results still led her to believe that only a small proportion of Comm Tech’s students needed remedial help. Rather than overhaul staffing patterns and course schedules to allow for a schoolwide intervention, she expanded use of Study Island.

But early indicators signaled disaster. Reports generated by Study Island suggested that students didn’t understand the material. Interim tests used to predict PSSA performance pointed to huge score drops. Cruz’s own eyes told her that students weren’t learning.

Some of her staff refused to believe any of it, she says.

“I got a lot of pushback,” said Cruz. “‘I don’t care what all this data is saying, our PSSA scores say something different.’”

Her efforts to get some staff to change their instruction or re-teach content were rebuffed.

“I felt like I was running into a brick wall,” said Cruz.

As a result, says Cruz, students at Comm Tech got a Band-Aid when they needed surgery.

“I don’t think the kids got the supports they needed,” she said flatly.

Shortly after beginning her second year at Comm Tech, Cruz left the District altogether.

‘Wow’

Supovitz, the head of CPRE, has studied educational testing for 15 years.

A strong believer in standardized tests, he says that exams like the PSSA provide a reasonably accurate look over time at whether kids across a school or district are learning what they’re supposed to learn.

Shown the wild fluctuations in Comm Tech’s test score data between 2009 and 2011, Supovitz offered a one-word reaction:

“Wow.”

The sharp spike in the 2010 Comm Tech scores should have provoked a closer look from the central office, he said.

“That’s the usefulness of these kinds of data,” said Supovitz. “An administrator overseeing 250 schools can look and ask questions.”

That’s not generally how the scores have been used in Philadelphia, however.

Cruz says that if anyone inside District headquarters took a critical look at Comm Tech’s PSSA results, she wasn’t aware of it.

“I was not a part of any conversations like that,” she said.

Instead, District officials held up schools with improbable results as exemplars.

Huge gains lauded

Cruz recalls vividly a citywide principals’ meeting in 2010 at which former Roosevelt Middle School principal Stefanie Ressler was invited to present on her school’s astronomical test score gains.

“I’m sitting there going, ‘Well, how in the heck did she do that?’” recalled Cruz, who had just been removed as principal of West Philadelphia High. “I have the same resources, and I’m pulling my hair out, and I can’t make those kinds of leaps.”

Several members of Roosevelt’s staff later accused Ressler, now principal of Wilson Middle School, of cheating. The state-commissioned analysis found overwhelming signs of suspicious erasures in every tested grade and subject at Roosevelt between 2009 and 2011. An investigation is ongoing.

Accounts from the unfolding cheating scandal have been hard to swallow, says Cruz.

Despite making widely praised improvements in the climate when she was at West, she was told during the 2009-10 school year that test scores weren’t rising fast enough. Superintendent Arlene Ackerman designated the school for a complete overhaul as part of her Renaissance turnaround initiative. Cruz was ousted.

“Slow, incremental growth got dismissed,” said Cruz, while questionable results were allowed to “distort what’s actually possible.”

Since 2010, 26 schools, including West, have been either converted to “Promise Academies” or handed over to charter operators, largely on the basis of poor test scores. Last year, the District closed eight schools, based in part on the same scores.

Although it is impossible to undo any of those decisions, it is not too late to “build a system that produces stable data we can have confidence in,” said Supovitz.

No action yet from city or state

To date, though, both the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) and the School District have declined to address the distorting effects of artificially inflated PSSA scores.

Both continue to use the three years of questionable results to hold schools accountable and guide significant policy decisions.

In September of this year, Secretary of Education Ronald Tomalis contended that 2012 is the first year in which the public can be confident that “PSSA scores are a true reflection of student achievement and academic progress.”

Regardless, PDE does not appear to have adjusted the past AYP status of any district or school. Roosevelt Middle, for example, is still deemed to have met its performance targets in both 2009 and 2010 – which gives it a more favorable AYP status now – despite the likelihood that its results from those years were tainted by cheating.

Through a spokesman, Tomalis did not respond to interview requests.

In an email, PDE spokesman Timothy Eller suggested that the state is waiting for its cheating investigation to conclude before making any decisions about adjusting AYP determinations.

“The department is considering the various options, and decisions will be announced when they are made,” he said.

The District has taken a similar stance.

No moves have yet been made to either remove the suspect data from use or to adjust it. Officials in Philadelphia still plan to use AYP status to help determine which schools to close this year. They also will apparently continue feeding questionable PSSA results into their School Performance Index, used to rank schools.

“The District will wait for the [investigation] findings before providing further comment on this issue,” wrote Gallard.

Saliyah Cruz has been affected by it all as much as anyone.

From her office in Delaware, she still wonders where Philadelphia schools would be now if officials had set a “realistic target” for growth instead of touting implausible test score gains as the norm.

“When you set up a system like that,” Cruz concludes, “it’s only a matter of time before you get the issues that we have now.”

Quicktakes: Is cheating on standardized tests a problem in the District?

2012-11-20T16:49:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

We also asked how anyone caught cheating should be handled.

What to do with tainted PSSA scores?

2012-11-20T16:39:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Howard Wainer poses a question:

If you measured the height of a group of kids and later found out some had been standing on a stool, what would you do?

“The statistical approach would be to try to estimate the height of the stool and make [an] adjustment,” says Wainer, answering himself. “If the stool is a foot [tall], and everybody is suddenly a foot shorter than they measured, then you have to do something.”

A leading national expert on testing and statistics, Wainer spent 21 years as the principal research scientist at the Educational Testing Service and is the author of “Uneducated Guesses: A Guide to Using Evidence to Uncover Misguided Education Policies.” He says the stool analogy is useful when considering the dilemma facing the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) and the School District of Philadelphia.

A state-commissioned analysis found strong circumstantial evidence of adult cheating on state standardized tests in 2009, 2010, and 2011 at dozens of Pennsylvania schools, including 53 District-run schools and four area charters. After scores dropped precipitously last year, state Secretary of Education Ronald Tomalis made comments suggesting that PDE did not have confidence in the validity of the past results.

So what has been done?

A source familiar with the cheating investigation says officials from both the state and the District have quietly attempted to calculate how big an impact the cheating had on scores during the years in question. But so far, it appears that no one has used their results. The questionable, unadjusted scores continue to be used to hold schools accountable and make a wide range of high-stakes policy decisions.

Through their spokespersons, both PDE and the District suggested they are waiting for investigations to conclude before taking action. Both declined interview requests.

The Ohio Department of Education recently took a different approach. After finding evidence that attendance records in the Lockland School District near Cincinnati had been manipulated in order to boost test results, the department downgraded the ratings of the district and some of its schools.

“We want to make sure we give the taxpayers, the parents, and the students an accurate picture of how well their school is doing,” said John Charlton, the associate director of communications for the department.

Wainer says it’s not difficult to understand why an agency might move slowly to correct inflated test scores that created the false impression of improvement.

“Trust me, [a test score] wouldn’t be used if it was 20 percent lower than it should have been,” he says. “They would fix it.”

A snapshot: Cheating scandal in two cities

2012-11-20T15:44:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

(Click to enlarge)

Info is scarce on cheating probes at 4 area charters

2012-11-20T14:33:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Update: Pennsylvania Department of Education officials now say that “the department did not close its investigation related to Walter Palmer.” See below for details.

Walter Palmer knows it sounds odd to ask a school suspected of cheating to investigate itself. And he knows it might raise eyebrows when the state closes that investigation even though the school can’t come up with any answers.

That’s exactly what happened at the Walter D. Palmer Leadership Learning Partners Charter School, a K-12 school where an internal investigation found no explanation for what state officials called “extensive evidence of testing irregularities.” But its namesake, founder, and board chair insists that his school would not and did not cheat.

“I can say to you, unequivocally, that would be a no-no,” Palmer said. “You’d have to know my team, and you have to know me, to know how strongly I feel about that.”

Palmer’s school is one of four Philadelphia-area charters that remained under investigation this year after first being flagged by the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) in 2009 for statistically improbable test results. State officials now confirm that investigations at two of those four charters – Palmer’s school and Chester Community Charter School (CCCS) in nearby Chester – were closed even though internal reviews produced no answers.

Investigations at two other schools, Imhotep Institute Charter and the Philadelphia Electrical and Technology Charter (PET), remain underway, according to PDE spokesperson Tim Eller, but he would not say whether those probes are purely internal or involve outside investigators. Administrators at Imhotep and PET did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Additional information about any of the investigations is scarce. State officials provided copies of the letters closing the investigations at Palmer and CCCS; the letters say PDE may still adjust the schools’ adequate yearly progress ratings under the No Child Left Behind law. But officials did not respond to detailed follow-up questions.

Andy Porter, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, said it made sense to give schools the first crack at addressing their own issues.

But he said an inconclusive internal probe at a school with strong statistical indications of cheating should be followed by an external investigation. “A strong message has to be sent that cheating is unacceptable and it will not be tolerated. It will be sought out, and it will be stamped out,” Porter said.

He didn’t see that message in the PDE letters closing the investigations at Palmer and CCCS.

“Reading those letters left me breathless,” Porter said. “I didn’t hear any shoe pounding on the table.”

‘The state never came’

Palmer, a charter pioneer and longtime advocate for community-controlled schools, said it was a “shock” to learn that his 1,300-student school had been flagged by PDE for possible cheating, based on a statistically improbable number of wrong-to-right erasures on the 2010 and 2011 PSSAs.

Palmer said that once notified of the state’s concerns, his administrators conducted an extensive internal review. They “talked to every individual teacher,” he said, and were “constantly in touch with the state.”

But no independent investigators ever visited the school, he said – neither PDE officials, nor investigators from the Office of the Inspector General, nor attorneys working for the state. “The state never came to our school. … And they never monitored the tests that came after that,” Palmer said.

Palmer’s internal review yielded only theories about what might have happened, he said.

New testing security measures put in place for 2012 were followed by a significant drop in scores. For 11th graders, proficiency rates dropped by 38 points in reading and 46 points in math.

Palmer said that may be attributable to the arrival of new students: “We expanded [and] took in a bunch of [new] kids, all in the testing grades.”

Palmer said that once his staff had completed their investigation, the school pressed state officials for a resolution for months. In October 2012, a letter from Deputy Secretary Carolyn Dumaresq arrived, which read, “We understand that the Charter School has concluded its investigation … and notwithstanding the extensive evidence of testing irregularities, the Charter School’s investigation did not yield any clear explanation for the cause of the high number of wrong-to-right erasures.”

The letter directed the school to “vigilantly” secure future tests, following a “security plan” approved by PDE. The department prohibited teachers from proctoring tests for their own students or proctoring any students alone.

Palmer also provided a copy of an email from attorney Mark Seiberling of Conrad O’Brien, who wrote that PDE officials told him that unless more evidence of cheating emerges, “neither PDE nor the Office of the Inspector General intends to interview any teachers or administrators at the school.”

Palmer is relieved that the investigation is over, and untroubled by its impact on his school’s reputation. “We have a 2,000-student waiting list,” he said. “People believe in us. They trust us.”

‘This is a school that defends itself’

A more complex story surrounds the investigation at Chester Community Charter School, a 3,000-student school run by the for-profit company of Gov. Corbett’s largest single campaign contributor, Vahan Gureghian.

There, the state initiated an investigation, then for unknown reasons stepped aside and allowed the school to investigate itself, documents show.

According to a September 2012 letter from PDE’s Dumaresq to the school, CCCS was flagged for having “a very high number of students with a very high number of wrong-to-right erasures in 2009, 2010, and 2011.” The department launched its probe “based on the statistical improbability that the students made these erasures themselves.”

But the letter notes that “after discussions with PDE, CCCS then conducted its own investigation,” which “did not yield clear conclusions, notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence of testing irregularities.” The letter says that state investigators returned to “complete” their investigation after the internal investigation concluded, but it does not indicate what they found.

Neither state officials nor a CCCS spokesperson would comment on the “discussions” that led PDE to turn the investigation over to CCCS staff.

However, documents on the state’s website show that in October 2011, PDE sought a contract with the law firm Pepper Hamilton for help handling potential probe-related lawsuits.“Some schools may resist PDE’s investigation, and litigation may ensue,” the contract says.

Two months later, in December 2011, invoices from Pepper Hamilton obtained under Pennsylvania’s Right to Know law show that while the attorneys were researching CCCS, they were also looking into PDE’s authority to subpoena documents or compel schools to cooperate.

Asked if CCCS was considering suing the state over the investigation, school spokesperson Bruce Crawley said he did not know, but added that the state was surely aware that CCCS had separately hauled it and the Chester Upland School District into court over finances.“Maybe they [thought that] if they were doing things worthy of a filing, there would be a filing,” Crawley said.

“They know that this is a school that defends itself in a court of law.”

Crawley said the internal investigation indicated that the high numbers of wrong-to-right erasure marks were likely the result of students’ test-taking strategies. “These kids were advised that they should be very careful to make sure they have the right answer, and if it isn’t right, don’t be concerned about going back and checking their answers,” he said.

And he suggested that a subsequent plunge in test scores was due to severe budget cuts the school endured during the battles over Chester Upland’s finances. “When you take away 50 percent of the budget [and] cause a school to lay off 53 people … the model has to be impaired,” Crawley said.

With PDE supervising the 2012 PSSA testing at the school, scores dropped 30 points in both reading and math.

Despite the inconclusive investigation, PDE has put CCCS under stringent testing procedures going forward. Materials must now be stored in a locked room monitored by a 24-hour surveillance camera under the control of an outside security firm. Students will be tested in rooms equipped with security cameras. CCCS must hire an outside agency to train all employees on proper test administration and employ an independent auditing firm to make sure procedures are followed.

Crawley said the school was happy to take steps to raise public confidence. “Monitoring to show that … all the rules [are] appropriately followed – why would we have a problem with that?” he said.

Penn’s Porter said that no matter how suspicious a school’s test scores might look, holding individual educators accountable is never easy. “No statistical analysis is going to prove who cheated, or even that there was cheating,” he said. “About the only thing you can get is a confession.”

Walter Palmer acknowledges that the current high-stakes testing policies create an incentive to cheat. “The state puts pressure on the superintendents. The superintendents put pressure on the principals. The principals put pressure on the teachers,” he said. “I suspect that some people might say, ‘My God, my job’s on the line.’

But he said he’s never heard any educator from any school admit to cheating, and he doesn’t expect to anytime soon.

For now, while the investigations at Palmer’s school and CCCS have ended, both Imhotep Charter and Philadelphia Electrical and Technology remain under scrutiny. Both await consideration for charter renewal, a process meant to take place last spring but delayed due to the ongoing investigation. While District officials wouldn’t comment, a source close to the administration said there has been frustration at the state’s inaction.

“PDE was saying, we’re going to have something in two weeks, four weeks, it’s imminent. We kept punting,” the source said. “We wanted their investigation to be complete; that will help SRC make a decision.”

Update (11/25/12):

State education officials insist that the Walter D. Palmer school investigation is “not closed,” contradicting the school’s officials, who said in a recent statement that “the Pennsylvania Department of Education and its attorneys confirmed that as of October 3, 2012 that the letter Walter D. Palmer LLPCS received was a closure letter and the end of an investigation.”

Asked to explain the discrepancy, PDE spokesperson Tim Eller said, “I cannot speak to Palmer’s position. The department stands behind its position that the investigation is not closed.”

Eller would not elaborate on what investigation-related steps may remain for state investigators or Palmer staff. However, he did say that the non-closed status of Palmer’s investigation was not due simply to the fact that Palmer must observe strict testing security measures in the future. “The future monitoring [is] a separate issue in this process,” Eller said.

Reached for comment, Walter D. Palmer, founder and board chair of the school, said that “whatever the state says is required, we’ll do. We want to cooperate.”

Palmer has said previously that his understanding was that the cheating investigation was complete and no future inquiry or action on the school’s part, outside of maintaining the future test-taking security measures, was expected.

The school’s officials have said they determined that their case was “closed” after their attorney Mark Seiberling spoke directly with PDE officials order to clarify the significance of PDE’s Oct. 3 letter. Seiberling emailed to Palmer officials that PDE attorneys Pat Fullerton and Samantha Snyder had “confirmed that the Oct. 3 2012 letter … was a ‘closure letter’ with regard to the PSSA cheating investigation.” Seiberling also wrote that he understood PDE’s position to be that unless new evidence were to emerge, “neither PDE nor the Office of the Inspector General intends to interview any teachers or administrators at the school.”

The Notebook has asked both Eller and Seiberling to help clarify what was said in the conversation between Sieberling and PDE’s attorneys. Neither responded immediately to the request.

Eller also declined to elaborate on why Palmer’s status differs from that of Chester Community Charter School. Both schools received PDE letters less than a month apart noting that they’d completed inconclusive internal investigations and would be required to employ special security measures during future test administration. Neither letter explicitly declared the school’s cases “closed” or “cleared.”

However, in a Sept. 21 statement updating the status of cheating investigations PDE officials confirmed that the CCCS case was “closed.”

Asked to explain the difference between Palmer and CCCS, Eller said PDE’s letters to Palmer and CCCS show “clear differences between the two.” Eller declined to immediately elaborate on what those differences may be.

The print version of this Notebook story states that “state officials now confirm that investigations at … Palmer’s school … were closed.” This report, which reflected our understanding of the situation at the time, was written and went to production prior to the Notebook’s receiving Eller’s detailed responses on Nov. 20. The Notebook regrets any confusion.

The Notebook is seeking further clarification about this situation and will update the story when further information is available.

Update (11/21/12): Subsequent to press time for our print edition, Pennsylvania Department of Education spokesman Tim Eller sent more detailed, written responses to questions the Notebook had sent earlier about the charter investigations. In general, he said, “Even when a PSSA investigation has been completed, these matters are not necessarily closed as there are multiple dimensions including imposing conditions on future administrations of the PSSA and the possibility of professional discipline.”

On the Walter D. Palmer investigation specifically, Eller said that the Oct. 3 letter received by the school from PDE and shared with the Notebook “speaks for itself. However, the department did not close its investigation related to Walter Palmer.” Eller pointed out that the Oct. 3 letter “does not state that Walter Palmer was cleared for 2010/2011.”

But the school’s officials say they have been informed by the state that the investigation is closed. Walter Palmer officials shared with the Notebook an email dated Oct. 25 from one of its attorneys, Mark Seiberling, saying that he had confirmed with PDE that the investigation is closed. On Nov. 9, the school issued a press release reiterating those same points.

Forbidden during testing

2012-11-20T13:19:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Pencils Down: It’s time to rethink tests

2012-10-30T13:44:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

How reliable are tests in measuring what really matters for 21st-century learning? And should high-stakes tests really be used as a punitive evaluation of teacher quality? With all the controversy surrounding standardized tests and cheating, it’s time for teachers, parents, districts and policymakers to consider alternatives. Pencils Down, an anthology that takes a stance against high-stakes testing, may just be the book to offer those alternatives.

The editors of Pencils Down, published by the education nonprofit group Rethinking Schools, have culled together articles that not only critique the impact of high-stakes testing, but offer viable options for resisting and providing visionary forms of assessment that are authentic, fair, and democratic.

In the introduction, the editors confront “the tsunami of high-stakes testing and accountability” and the “free market” education that reduces teachers and teaching to test scores. The refrain reverberates for anyone in the education trenches — parents, students, teachers, principals, District officials:

Now, students = test scores. Now, teachers = test scores. Now, teaching = test scores. Now, learning = test scores. Now, education = test scores.

The authors in Pencils Down take a clear position against standardized tests, arguing against expanding charter schools, busting unions, merit pay, and other popular free-market education policies. This hard-hitting anthology may rail against the high-stakes test, but that doesn’t mean the writers are opposed to assessment or accountability. Many of the articles, essays, and analyses in this collection demonstrate that teaching and learning are more complex than numbers. Pencils Down works to demystify, for readers ranging from teachers to parents at the PTA meeting, the Holy Grail of high-stakes testing.

The first four sections — “Testing, Testing 1,2,3,” “Testing Kids,” “Testing Teaching,” and “Testing the Test” — present critical questions, narratives, and perspectives on the impact that standardized tests have on students, teachers, and classrooms throughout the country. Written in a way that is accessible to both non-educators and educators, the contributions are diverse, including questions and answers about standardized tests, the historical contextualization of assessments as a civil rights issue, strategies to assess what matters, and poignant tales of teachers’ struggles.

In “About Those Tests I Gave You • An Open Letter to My Students” Ruth Ann Dandrea apologizes for the “perpetual and petty testing that has become a fungus on the foot of public education.” Todd Farley’s contribution, “A Test Scorer’s Lament,” invites readers into the “lab” of scoring standardized tests. If scoring open-ended essay prompts is scientifically based research, he writes, “then I’m Dr. Frankenstein.”

Going beyond critiquing and lamenting the impact of tests, the final sections of Pencils Down — “Resisting and Responding to High-Stakes Testing” and "Beyond High-Stakes, Standardized Testing” — offer approaches for creatively complying with or pushing back against testing mandates.

In “’High-Stakes Harm,” Rethinking Schools editors Linda Christensen and Wayne Au explore how teachers can retain a critical stance on assessment while preparing students to take mandated tests. She encourages students to critically examine tests and even construct their own test, using the culture, content and vocabulary used in local communities.

Peggy Robertson, a former schoolteacher and current administrator for the United Opt Out National campaign, describes a movement taking root to stop the harmful effects of extensive standardized testing. She also includes an Opting Students Out of State Test letter template for parents to petition schools to exclude students from taking standardized tests.

So, what are the alternatives to inaction? More pressure that leads to a culture of cheating? The misuse of student scores to evaluate teacher effectiveness? Assessments that do not prepare our youth for 21st-century job skills?

Rethinking Schools should be commended for taking on tests. Pencils Down is a must-read for anyone concerned about providing students with assessments that really matter.

U.S. says Pa. Education Department ‘acted prematurely’ in charter AYP change

2012-10-16T15:13:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Pennsylvania Secretary of Education Ron Tomalis "acted prematurely" in changing how to calculate adequate yearly progress for charter schools, according to the U.S. Department of Education. The rule change made it easier for some charters to make AYP.

But a federal spokesperson also said in an email that the change may ultimately be approved.

The Pennsylvania Department of Education "does not have the authority to apply this methodology … until [the federal Department of Education] has had an opportunity to review and approve its expanded application," according to the email from the federal department spokesperson. "The Department understands the pressures of time in getting these analyses done, reviewed and published, however, PDE acted prematurely."

But federal officials have yet to rule definitively on whether they will approve, ex post facto, Tomalis’ action, which was sought by charter proponents and has likely resulted in more charters making AYP this year than would have otherwise.

Tomalis said he made the change because charter schools in Pennsylvania are legally the equivalent of school districts, and so should have their AYP calculated under those rules, instead of under rules for individual schools, which are more strict. The state first applied for the change over the summer but had not heard back before releasing the 2012 test results.

The rules divide school districts into three grade spans — 3-5, 6-8 and 9-12 — and allow them to make AYP if one grade span reaches its goals. In contrast, individual schools must reach goals for all grades and demographic subgroups in order to make AYP.

The email, attributed to Deputy Press Secretary Daren Briscoe, added: "If charter schools are districts under state law, they are treated as districts in all circumstances. PDE would be in compliance by applying the district AYP procedure to charter schools if, under state law, the charter is authorized as a district." It added that the decision is still pending review by legal counsel.

In Pennsylvania, each charter is legally a separate local education agency, the equivalent of a school district.

Investigación sobre fraude continúa; puntuaciones bajan en la mayoría de las escuelas

2012-10-03T10:54:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

El Departamento de Educación de Pensilvania (PDE) y el Distrito Escolar de Filadelfia continúan investigando un posible fraude en los exámenes estandarizados en 53 de las escuelas del Distrito de acuerdo con evidencia forense – en su mayoría, hojas de respuestas de los años 2009, 2010 y 2011 en las que aparece un número estadísticamente improbable de respuestas incorrectas borradas para ser cambiadas a la respuesta correcta.

Hasta ahora, ni el Distrito ni el estado han tomado acción contra los educadores que pudieran haber manipulado las hojas de respuestas o participado en otros comportamientos fraudulentos. Ambos dicen que necesitan tiempo para ser exhaustivos y asegurar que nadie sea acusado injustamente.

“La idea en el Distrito es que la determinación sea tan contundente, que de seguro se identificarán a las personas correctas”, dijo David Adamany, quien fue presidente de la Temple University y está sirviendo como “asesor de integridad en exámenes” para el Distrito. “Se está teniendo suma precaución, y es lamentable que no podamos movernos más rápido”.

El estado tiene poder para revocar o suspender la licencia de un educador, mientras que el Distrito puede despedir o descender a alguien como resultado de un comportamiento no ético. El Distrito dijo que espera completar su investigación para fines de diciembre.

En septiembre, tres escuelas chárter del área – Instituto Imhotep, Walter D. Palmer Leadership Learning Partners, y Philadelphia Electrical and Technology – también tienen investigaciones en proceso. Docenas de otros distritos y escuelas chárter del estado han sido exonerados en una investigación que comenzó cuando en el 2011 el estado publicó un análisis de las puntuaciones de exámenes hecho en el 2009 después de que el Notebook se lo solicitara. El PDE luego ordenó más análisis de las respuestas cambiadas en los exámenes del 2010 y 2011.

A raíz de la evidencia forense, el estado impuso protocolos de examen más estrictos en Filadelfia y varios otros distritos y escuelas chárter para el examen PSSA del 2012. La publicación oficial de las puntuaciones en el examen estatal PSSA a fines de septiembre mostró que después de nueve años de un aumento constante, los porcentajes de proficiencia han bajado.

El Notebook ya había obtenido antes documentos que demuestran que las bajas más drásticas – algunas de ellas por más de 40 por ciento – fueron casi todas en las escuelas bajo investigación debido a patrones sospechosos de cambio en las respuestas.

SRC considers consultant report; more school closings to come

2012-10-03T10:00:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Last fall, the District was weighing a consultant report that recommended closing 26 schools.

Now, the SRC is weighing another report that recommends closing about twice that many schools by the next school year.

Last spring, after a months-long process, the School Reform Commission voted to close just eight. Now, facing huge funding shortfalls and committed to continued charter growth, the District says it must be more aggressive this time and close 29 to 57 schools – possibly as many as 50 of them this year.

The variation in the target number depends on decisions including whether to target smaller elementary schools or large high schools, whether to standardize grade spans, and whether the SRC should use a districtwide building utilization target of 85 or 95 percent.

The utilization rate is a comparison of each building’s student population compared to its capacity. The District’s current utilization rate is 72 percent, according to the Boston Consulting Group report – 59 percent for high schools and 79 percent for K-8.

BCG recommended the District aim for 90 percent utilization “in the initial year of the plan to reduce the need to conduct ongoing right-sizing in later years. We project that to achieve this target the District would need to close approximately 40 to 50 schools in the initial round,” depending on the mix and size of schools chosen.

The first step in the process is a series of meetings between late September and mid-October to “illustrate the types of right-sizing strategies” and get community feedback, according to District spokesman Fernando Gallard. Information about specific schools will not be provided.

Instead, participants will be polled and invited to present “alternate strategies,” Gallard said.

Schools designated for closure will be identified by late November, Gallard said. Then, a round of state-mandated public hearings will be conducted. Final decisions are expected by next March.

Advocacy groups have begun mobilizing. Members of Youth United for Change and the Philadelphia Student Union traveled to Washington, D.C. with students from other cities on Sept. 20 to protest federal policies, and demand a moratorium on school closings and mandates to “turn around” low-performing schools.

They cited statistics showing that school closings disproportionately impact communities of color and do not improve test scores or graduation rates.

Cheating investigation continues; scores decline at most schools

2012-10-03T09:43:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Pennsylvania’s Department of Education (PDE) and the School District are continuing to investigate possible cheating on standardized tests at 53 District schools, based on damaging forensic evidence – primarily answer sheets from 2009, 2010, and 2011 that show statistically improbable numbers of wrong-to-right erasures.

So far, neither the District nor the state has taken action against any educators who may have tampered with answer sheets or engaged in other cheating behavior. Both say that they need time to be thorough and make sure that no one is unfairly blamed.

“The idea in the District is to have this so well nailed down, you’re sure to get the right people,” said David Adamany, the former Temple University president serving as an unpaid “testing integrity advisor” to the District. “There’s a lot of caution being exercised, and it’s heartbreaking we cannot move faster.”

The state has the power to revoke or suspend an educator’s license while the District can fire or demote someone based on unethical behavior. The District said it expected to complete its investigation by the end of December.

As of September, three area charters – Imhotep Institute, Walter D. Palmer Leadership Learning Partners, and Philadelphia Electrical and Technology – also have ongoing investigations.

Dozens of other districts and charters around the state have been cleared in a probe that started when a 2009 forensic analysis of test scores was released by the state in 2011 after the Notebook asked for it. PDE subsequently ordered more erasure analyses of 2010 and 2011 tests.

In the wake of the forensic evidence, the state imposed stricter testing protocols on Philadelphia and several other districts and charters for the PSSA exam in 2012. The official release of state PSSA scores in late September showed that after nine years of steady increases, proficiency rates had dropped. The Notebook had earlier obtained documents showing that the biggest drops – some of them more than 40 percentage points – were nearly all in schools under investigation for suspicious erasure patterns.

Making college prep a priority

2012-10-02T16:37:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

I hope the issue on college access and success (Focus on a Broken Pipeline to College, Summer 2012) motivates high school and college staff to ramp up efforts to prepare high school students for college and ensure that colleges provide needed support to earn a degree.

Unfortunately, since there are lax standards for achieving the 23.5 credits needed for graduation, too many students earn a diploma that is little more than a ticket to remedial college courses, making them the least likely to earn a degree. Our graduation rate is 61 percent, yet only 36 percent of 11th graders scored advanced or proficient this year on the math PSSA and only 43 percent were proficient or better in English. We need rigorous promotion and graduation standards with the proper supports to ensure that students are ready for college.

There has been little emphasis on improving college supports, especially for first-generation collegians who may likely find college to be an alien environment. High school counselors should direct students to affordable colleges and universities with high graduation rates.

Colleges should publish their graduation rates to inform decision-making and increase institutional accountability, and they should make tuition affordable. Defaulting on a student loan leads to bad credit, which makes it difficult for students to get a job or rent an apartment. We should not let our students take on the risk of drowning in debt, which has become the experience for far too many.

– Debra Weiner
The writer has been an education advocate, analyst, activist, and consultant since the early 1970s.

How’s our portfolio doing?

2012-10-02T16:30:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Portfolio management is a hot trend in school reform, and Philadelphia school leaders have embraced the concept. Nationally, Democrats, Republicans, and big foundations are on board. It’s a strategy for cities like Philadelphia that have many students in low-performing schools and want them in high-performing ones.

How is it supposed to work? For starters, shrink the size and role of the central office. Shift its focus to identifying and closing poor performing schools and finding managers who can operate better ones.

Two key but tenuous assumptions are that no harm is done to communities by closing low-scoring schools and that enough talented school managers are available to start up good new ones. Under a portfolio approach, these managers are given autonomy to run their schools. Parents then should have more choices to migrate out of poor schools and into good ones.

Most experts agree that the model is still experimental. It looks different in each of the few dozen districts that are pursuing it. There’s not much research yet, which is reason to be cautious.

Philadelphia officials are encouraged by early results of their signature reform initiative: turning over schools to outside managers through the Renaissance School program. In the first year, there were signs of improved performance, and neighborhood students flocked back to some of these schools. Schools are trying out some innovative new approaches to discipline. But it’s premature to proclaim the initiative a success at all 17 schools. And most of the city’s low-performing neighborhood schools are untouched by this effort.

Another SRC strategy in recent months has been to increase the numbers of slots in high-performing schools – both District and charter. Sounds simple, yet we know about successful small schools that expand and lose their mojo.

The idea of a system run by an array of providers is firmly entrenched in Philadelphia. One out of every four publicly funded schools is now managed by a charter organization. But there’s much to figure out about how to oversee this new system – an enormous challenge for a gutted central office. Low funding levels also make it hard to attract school operators to Philadelphia; charter managers say state cuts are undermining their model.

Strong monitoring of school performance is vital. But we should not rely on questionable test score results that have been the basis of accountability systems. New metrics are needed; that can’t happen without a strong accountability office. Nor is a charter school office with a staff of six going to be adequate to evaluate more than 80 schools and protect against abuses.

Equity concerns must be central to the monitoring process. A recent District study of charters found that most had created significant barriers to entry, contrary to the spirit of the charter law. If charters are siphoning off the most motivated families, we are further stratifying the system.

A key question: Are we actually increasing the number of students who are doing well, or just shifting around high-performing students? We won’t know we’re succeeding until the city’s full portfolio of schools starts graduating significantly more students who move on to postsecondary success.

Pa. test scores drop; state officials blame past cheating

2012-09-21T15:56:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

By Benjamin Herold and Dale Mezzacappa
for Notebook/NewsWorks

Standardized test scores have dropped slightly across the state – and dramatically in Philadelphia and other Pennsylvania schools suspected of cheating between 2009 and 2011.

The disappointing results on Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) exams are the product of less cheating and tight new test security measures, according to state Secretary of Education Ronald Tomalis.

“This is the first year the department can confidently report that PSSA scores are a true reflection of student achievement and academic progress,” Tomalis said.

He said that even though the state’s probe of possible cheating covers only 2009, 2010, and 2011, it’s “highly probable” that test tampering took place earlier than that.

“The 2011-12 PSSA scores should be viewed as a reset point for student achievement in Pennsylvania."

Statewide, the percent of students scoring proficient or above in math and reading both dropped about one-and-a-half points. Seventy-five percent of students were proficient in math, and 72 percent were proficient in reading.

In Philadelphia, math scores dropped 8.7 percentage points and reading scores dropped 7.1 percentage points.

“These results are clearly disappointing,” said new Superintendent William Hite in a statement. “They simply remind us of the work we have ahead in developing a strong system of schools in Philadelphia and in supporting our students’ learning.”

PSSA exams are administered each spring to students in grades 3-8 and 11. In 2011-12, more than 930,000 Pennsylvania schoolchildren took the exams.

In July 2011, the Notebook/NewsWorks reported on a study showing widespread test score irregularities at dozens of Pennsylvania schools in 2009. In response, the Pennsylvania Department of Education commissioned an analysis of PSSA results from 2009 to 2011, then launched an investigation into 10 charters and 38 traditional school districts across the state.

Nine districts, including Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and three charter schools, all in Philadelphia, are still under investigation.

Tomalis revealed Friday that the education department has already taken unspecified “personnel actions” against a “small number” of educators who “participated in tampering of student answer sheets.”

The department will also soon file complaints against more than 100 additional educators, he said.

“When a few individuals act inappropriately, everyone, including students, is negatively impacted,” said Tomalis.

Fifty-three District schools and three area charters remain under investigation. Last month, NewsWorks and the Notebook reported that suspicious patterns of “wrong-to-right” erasures had been found across multiple grades, subjects, and years at the vast majority of those schools, including many determined by the state to be “lower priority.”

PDE is still investigating 11 District schools and at least one of the charters. A District-led investigation of 20 so-called “Tier 2” schools started last May and is expected to conclude by the end of December. The District is also now responsible for investigating 22 “Tier 3” schools that had previously been subjected only to further “analytic review.”

NewsWorks and the Notebook had previously reported sharp declines in the District schools that were under investigation.

Proficiency rates also dropped precipitously in the three city charters still under investigation. At Imhotep Institute, they plunged 30 points in reading and 38 points in math. At Philadelphia Electrical and Technology Charter, they went down about 30 points in both subjects at the high school level. At Walter Palmer Leadership Learning Partners, they went down 38 points in reading, and 46 points in math among high schoolers, with smaller declines in the lower grades.

State officials also said that 30 districts and charters have been cleared of any wrongdoing. Investigations have been closed in six others, including Chester Community Charter School, but the department will “continue to monitor” the involved schools.

Chester Community’s proficiency rates plummeted about 30 points in both reading and math, and the declines were fairly uniform across all grade levels and demographic subgroups.

The school, with more than 2,500 students on two campuses, is the state’s largest brick-and-mortar charter and is operated for-profit by Gov. Corbett’s single largest campaign contributor, Vahan Gureghian. Its CEO sent a letter to parents blaming the sharp drops on severe state funding cutbacks that caused “sharp declines in services.”

Chester Community also sent out a release declaring that no disciplinary action will be taken against it and saying it will implement more stringent testing protocols, including special teacher training.

PSSA results are used for a variety of accountability purposes, including as a measure of whether schools and districts have met their federally mandated Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) targets.

All told, just under half of Pennsylvania’s 1,439 charters and traditional public schools met AYP targets in 2012. That number is down dramatically from last year. The targets were raised this year.

In Philadelphia, just 33 schools made AYP in 2011-12, down from 110 last year.

Although state officials argued that test score declines were attributable solely to anti-cheating measures, district and charter officials said other factors, including deep cuts in state funding and corresponding cuts to school budgets and support staff, played a role.

“I don’t buy that excuse,” said Tomalis.

District promoted principals from schools under suspicion for cheating

2012-09-18T15:35:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

By Benjamin Herold and Dale Mezzacappa
for the Notebook/NewsWorks

Updated: see note below

In 2009, Strawberry Mansion High School appeared to be something of a miracle.

A neighborhood high school in a rough part of North Philadelphia, Mansion saw more than two-thirds of its students score "proficient" or above on that year’s state standardized tests.

Today, though, compelling evidence indicates that Mansion’s unusually high test results were driven by adult cheating.

Documents obtained by NewsWorks and the Notebook show Mansion students raised alarms about cheating as far back as 2005. Suspicious patterns of "wrong-to-right" erasures on test sheets, a tipoff for adult cheating, have also been spotted in both reading and math for the 2009 and 2010 testing cycles.

Listen to Ben Herold’s NewsWorks Tonight interview

Now, Lois Powell-Mondesire, the principal who presided over the school’s testing gains, is no longer there, and Mansion’s test scores are back in the tank. Barely 10 percent of students scored proficient or above on last spring’s exams.

But Powell-Mondesire wasn’t disciplined.

She was promoted.

In 2010, Powell-Mondesire was tapped for a new central office position advising other principals on how to turn around struggling schools. While Mansion struggles to get back on its feet, Powell-Mondesire will make more than $145,000, just shy of the top possible salary for a Philadelphia principal.

A statewide probe involving 53 regular city schools, four area charters, and a number of other districts across Pennsylvania is still ongoing. It is possible for cheating at a school to occur without a principal’s knowledge or involvement. No proof of cheating by specific administrators has been made public, and no Philadelphia school administrator has been charged with wrongdoing.

But in a number of cases, telltale signs of adult cheating at specific schools correlate to the tenures of individual principals. Some of those principals were rewarded by the District after overseeing eyebrow-raising test-score gains.

That practice has continued, even after District officials became aware of evidence of suspicious erasures. For example, Barbara McCreery, who oversaw dubious test score increases at her former school, Communications Technology High, was installed just this summer as the new principal at Bok Technical High.

"I think this is willful blindness," said Michael Josephson, a leading national expert on ethics and education and the president of the nonprofit Josephson Institute of Ethics.

"There’s a deliberate looking the other way," he said.

Fairness or slow reaction?

Powell-Mondesire did not respond to requests for comment.

But principals’ union president Robert McGrogan was adamant that it is unfair to associate individual administrators with cheating until an investigation being led by the Pennsylvania Department of Education is complete.

"I believe that the media is trying people, and I think that is inappropriate," said McGrogan, the president of Teamsters Local 502, Commonwealth Association of School Administrators.

"An investigation is under way. The truth will be made known. People need to be patient until we reach that time," McGrogan said.

Cheating on state tests can be conclusively proven only by confessions or credible firsthand accounts. Seeking that kind of hard evidence, state and District investigators have been interviewing staff at about a third of the 53 District schools where there are signs of cheating.

Pennsylvania Department of Education spokesperson Timothy Eller would not comment on the investigation.

The District is taking the lead on the cheating probes at 20 so-called Tier 2 schools. District spokesperson Fernando Gallard said the District would make no comment on the cases of individual educators until those investigations are complete, likely by the end of December.

David Adamany, the former president of Temple University who is serving as an unpaid "testing integrity adviser" to the District, called that caution appropriate.

"The idea in the District is to have this so well nailed down, you’re sure to get the right people," Adamany said. "If they bring charges and charges don’t stick, you do terrible damage to someone’s reputation and open up the impression that the School District is unable to trace wrongdoers and get them out.

"There’s a lot of caution being exercised, and it’s heartbreaking we cannot move faster."

Josephson, however, calls the lack of action problematic.

"Of course, we want to be fair," he said.

Update: Michael Josephson has asked that this quote be clarified:

"But if fairness prevents you from making decisions that are obvious or important, it perpetuates [cheating] behavior." to say

"But a fair result can be achieved expeditiously and dragging out the process is often an excuse for not dealing with a problem," he said. "In this case it seems they have or can easily get the information they need to make a fair decision and process is being used in a way that is excusing the failure to make an obvious and important decision and this will perpetuate cheating behavior." End update

A trail of suspicious erasures

Edward Penn opened the new school year as one of the highest-paid principals in the city. Yet forensic and statistical evidence points to possible cheating at two schools while he was principal.

In 2008-09, Penn was the principal of Thurgood Marshall Elementary. He earned $96,634, according to information obtained by NewsWorks and the Notebook under Pennsylvania’s Right to Know law.

That year, Marshall, a K-8 school in the city’s Olney section, saw big gains in the percentages of its students scoring proficient or advanced on Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) exams. (The other possible ratings are basic and below basic.)

Schoolwide, the rates of students scoring proficient or above in math and reading shot up 17 percentage points. In 4th grade, reading scores rose 37 points. In 6th grade, math scores rose 40 points.

The scores dropped slightly the following year, while he was still principal.

In summer 2010, Penn was promoted to the same new post given to Lois Powell-Mondesire: "turnaround principal."

His duties?

To support the leaders of the District’s six initial Promise Academies – struggling schools targeted for massive intervention in the hopes of generating quick improvement.

With the promotion, along with a shift from being a 10-month to a 12-month employee, Penn got a 42 percent raise, to $137,311 per year.

Shortly afterwards, he was installed as the principal at Clemente Middle School, a new Promise Academy off to a rough start.

In Penn’s first year, Clemente saw modest school-wide gains, with proficiency rates rising 4 percentage points in reading and 10 points in math. Gains in some grade-subject combinations were more dramatic. In 6th-grade math, proficiency rates rose 30 points; in 7th-grade reading, they rose 20 points.

Then, last August, the state Department of Education commissioned a statewide analysis of PSSA answer forms from 2009, 2010, and 2011. The goal was to find schools where a high number of student response sheets had unusual numbers of incorrect answers that had been erased and changed to the correct answer – a strong signal of the worst type of adult cheating.

That analysis revealed big trouble at Thurgood Marshall Elementary during Ed Penn’s time there.

According to confidential documents and information obtained by NewsWorks and the Notebook, Marshall’s 2009 PSSA results were flagged for suspicious "wrong-to-right" erasures in seven out of a possible 12 grade-subject combinations: in both math and reading in grades 3, 4 and 6 and in math in grade 7.

In 2010, the school was flagged four of a possible 12 times. Proficiency rates dropped.

In 2011, after Penn left Marshall, the suspicious erasure patterns went away, and test scores kept trending downward.

That same year, similar signs of cheating appeared at Clemente, now under Penn’s leadership for the first time.

After not being flagged even a single time for suspicious erasures previously, Clemente was flagged six of a possible eight times for its 2011 results.

In grades 5, 6, and 7, where the signs of cheating appeared, Clemente’s test scores went up in both reading and math.

In 8th grade, which was not flagged, scores went down 14 points in both subjects.

As a so-called Tier One school, Clemente has been a target of investigators from the the state Office of the Inspector General. No findings have yet been made public.

Penn did not respond to requests for comment.

Other examples

A NewsWorks/Notebook analysis showed other examples where evidence of improper erasures correlated with the tenures of individual principals.

In 2008-09 and 2009-10, Michelle Burns was the principal of Tilden Middle School in Southwest Philadelphia.

In both years, Tilden was flagged for suspicious erasures in every possible grade and subject.

In summer 2010, Burns was reassigned to be principal at Kensington Urban Education High School. She also went from being a 10-month to a 12-month employee. Her annual salary rose 25 percent, to $134,775.

In 2011, the first year after her departure, the suspicious erasure patterns at Tilden stopped. The school’s PSSA scores plunged 28 percentage points in both reading and math.

Burns did not respond to requests for comment on the evidence of possible cheating at Tilden.

By 2010, Barbara McCreery’s last year as principal at Communications Technology High, 11th-grade proficiency rates had soared to 75 percent in reading and 70 percent in math.

The school’s results were flagged for suspicious erasures in reading and math in both 2009 and 2010.

In 2011, the first year after McCreery’s departure, the signs of cheating at Comm Tech went away. That year, the school’s proficiency rates plummeted, dropping 38 percentage points in reading and 45 percentage points in math.

McCreery spent the last two years filling in at other schools, mostly on special assignment. Last spring, the state decided to have the Inspector General do an on-the-ground inspection at Comm Tech.

This summer, the District named McCreery the new principal at Bok Technical High.

District officials would not comment on her new assignment.

McCreery did not respond to requests for comment.

This year, she’ll make $142,724.

Signs of trouble not heeded

Long before Strawberry Mansion High’s test scores reached their peak in 2009, Powell-Mondesire started tussling over testing issues with one of the city’s student organizing groups, Youth United for Change.

In public, YUC members testified about excessive and inappropriate test preparation at Mansion. They were particularly displeased with the school’s practice of pulling select students out of their core classes for intensive test-prep drills.

In private, according to documents, YUC students and staff alleged cheating by staff at the school. They shared with high-ranking District officials the results of an extensive but unscientific survey in which almost one-third of the 153 Mansion students who responded said they had received help on standardized tests.

The complaints led to some districtwide changes to how schools handled test preparation and administration. But the district does not appear to have taken any action regarding Powell-Mondesire or other adults working at Mansion at the time.

Three years later, a staggering number of Mansion’s student PSSA test answer sheets showed extremely high numbers of suspicious "wrong-to-right" erasures, according to confidential documents and information obtained by NewsWorks and the Notebook.

State officials say the average PSSA response sheet might have one wrong answer that is changed to the correct answer.

At Mansion in 2009, 78 percent of student response sheets on the math exam had five or more such erasures. In reading, 47 percent of student response sheets had five or more suspicious erasures.

Statistically, it is all but impossible that those patterns occurred by chance.

In 2010, Powell-Mondesire’s last year at the school, Mansion was again flagged for suspicious erasures in both math and reading.

The next year, the flags disappeared in reading, though not in math.

By 2012, Mansion’s fall from grace was complete; math proficiency rates were down about 60 percentage points and reading proficiency rates were down more than 50 percentage points from their 2009 pinnacle.

No hard evidence of cheating at Mansion has been made public. Even if such evidence were found, it might not implicate Powell-Mondesire or other senior administrators at the school.

Scores have rippling effects

But Mansion’s dubious PSSA scores from 2009 and 2010 likely shielded it from some of the harsh consequences recently experienced by other struggling neighborhood high schools.

In both 2010 and 2011, Mansion was spared while seven of Philadelphia’s other neighborhood high schools with chronically poor test scores were either reconstituted or converted into charter schools as part of the District’s Renaissance Schools turnaround initiative. At the time of intervention, those schools – Audenried, Germantown, Simon Gratz, Martin Luther King, Olney East and Olney West, and West Philadelphia – all had test scores similar to, or even better than, Mansion’s 2012 results.

And just last spring, the School Reform Commission voted to close two of Mansion’s neighboring high schools, FitzSimons and Rhodes. Poor academic performance was one consideration for the decision. Those schools’ students are now being sent to Mansion.

Josephson, the ethics expert, called school systems’ lack of action in the face of dubious results like Mansion’s "cowardly." He said such inaction can breed cynicism and mistrust among staff, parents, and the larger community.

And experts agree that the greatest harm from cheating is done to children– a point acknowledged recently by incoming Philadelphia Superintendent William Hite.

Adult cheating "impacts our students in such a way that we have no idea whether or not they have learned anything," said Hite.

"I don’t think that’s fair to them, and that’s certainly not how I want this School District represented across the state or across the nation."

Chalkbeat

Philadelphia’s school selection process postponed to October

Philadelphia’s state test scores are delayed this year

Why a Philly district report on the success of its summer programs includes ‘imperfect data points’

How can schools better prepare students after high school? Here’s what a few experts say.

After a $45 million math curriculum overhaul, Philadelphia sees results

More Philadelphia students are graduating without passing state exams, new data shows

Philadelphia schools’ math scores rise but reading scores fall slightly on latest state tests

Test scores show statewide dip in reading achievement

After a $25 million curriculum overhaul, Philly’s reading scores have fallen

New reading curriculum exposed weak points, officials say

Other districts struggle to boost student reading scores

Philadelphia NAEP scores rise in fourth grade math but stay flat in other subjects

NAEP scores show Philly students gained in math

Math achievement in Philadelphia is improving but remains very low, data shows

See how your Philadelphia school did on the latest state tests

Philly students making ‘incremental progress’ on test scores and attendance, district says

Students will get more power in Philadelphia’s revamped school admissions process

Questions about algebra, tests linger for selective admissions

New Philadelphia curriculum goes all in on science of reading

‘More continuity for teachers and for kids’

Science of reading curriculum isn’t a cure-all

Pennsylvania students must take state standardized tests online by 2026

See how your Philadelphia school did on the latest state tests in English and math

Philadelphia school leaders celebrate small gains in standardized test scores

English Language performance

Math performance

Science performance

Still a long way to go

What are they doing about it

Philadelphia student test scores, attendance, school climate ratings decline on district scorecard

To meet new state graduation rules, a Philadelphia school holds students and staff accountable

Looking beyond standardized tests for a diploma

Students and staff proud of achievements

Nearly half of Philadelphia seniors still working to meet new state graduation requirements

Philadelphia reintroduces test score requirement for magnet admissions

Diversity in the spotlight at top Philly public schools

Philadelphia won’t use test scores for admissions to selective schools for 2022-23

Pennsylvania wants to allow districts to delay standardized testing until fall

Pa. cancels standardized testing because of coronavirus

Identifying schools in need of intervention

Admissions for magnet schools

Charter-school evaluation

Teacher evaluation

Distributing private-school scholarships to students

District test scores improve, but lag in proficiency

Pa. test scores stay flat in 2018

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The SRC years in review – full list of charts and data

A look at Superintendent Hite’s record on meeting his anchor goals

Click for the full list of graphs and sources

NAEP results show Philadelphia still below average for big cities

PSSA scores up slightly in District; biggest gains in early grades

Wolf, Rivera announce reduction in time spent on Pa. tests

Pa. unveils new school accountability system that puts less emphasis on standardized testing

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These 5 Philly schools made big test-score improvements. What’s their secret?

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Wolf administration seeks to move Pa. graduation requirements away from standardized tests

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Wolf approves delay of Keystone exams as grad requirement

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In Philly, U.S. ed secretary says it’s time ‘to look beyond’ math and English scores

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Wolf to sign bill delaying Keystone graduation requirement

So far, 23 educators have been disciplined by the state for test cheating

Process can take years

Confidentiality concerns

Arts and high test scores co-exist at FACTS Charter

Pa. House OKs delaying Keystone exams as graduation requirement

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Testing, testing: A look at other assessments

Past Chester Community Charter testing head disciplined in cheating scandal

Little information on inquiries

A backlash against pervasive testing

Defining the movement

Widespread discontent

The downside of opting out

End of a nightmare?

Raza, clase social y los exámenes estandarizados