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Many school administrators in New York have expressed concern over recent changes to their state test proficiency standards (see, for example, the New York Times story or David Singer’s Huffington Post blog).  The New York State Education Department believed that the state test proficiency standards were too easy, so they made them harder.  Consequently, there has been a dramatic increase in the percentages of students failing to “meet standards” on the state test, and a corresponding increase in the number of schools failing to make AYP.

One can applaud the New York State Department of Education for their courage to take potentially unpopular actions they deemed necessary for the well-being of New York students. However, I personally question whether their efforts will matter one whit – at least, for improving student outcomes.  Earlier this year, the Kingsbury Center released a study examining the relationships between proficiency standards and academic growth across 32 states, concluding that the difficulty of the state proficiency standards made little to no difference.  Students in states with easy standards tended not to show any more/less growth than students in states with harder standards.  But if proficiency standards don’t really matter, then what does?

First of all, it’s important to differentiate between proficiency standards (what NY just changed) and content standards.  Proficiency standards, also called cut scores, determine the passing grade that a student must achieve on the state test in order to “meet standards”.  Content standards refer to the actual concepts a student must learn in each grade.  Being able to compute fractions is a content standard.  Scoring a minimum of 360 on a state test is a proficiency standard. Both kinds of standards have consequences, of course, just not necessarily for student learning.

In my opinion, the real problem with our school accountability system is that it lacks three important characteristics, or three Cs.  The system is not clear, consistent, or concise.  Proficiency standards are not clear because they are not connected to real, measurable outcomes that everyone understands (a good example is college readiness).  When states can simply change their proficiency cut scores across years to modify their school AYP outcomes (making them harder as New York has just done, or making them easier like South Carolina did last year), then those proficiency cut scores no longer have any connection to anything real.  If the standards don’t mean anything, then why have them?

Proficiency outcomes should also be consistent, both within and across states.  In many states, a student may be proficient during the elementary years, then make normal/expected growth during the middle school years, but fail to meet middle school proficiency standards (see the 2007 Kingsbury Center Report, The Proficiency Illusion).  The failure occurs not because middle schools and their teachers are ineffective, but because the tests and the proficiency standards are poorly designed.   Furthermore, it makes no sense to me that student who meet standards in Illinois may fail to meet standards in Massachusetts.  Math is math, whether you live in Arizona or Arkansas.  Under our current system, such inconsistencies are the norm (see the 2009 Kingsbury Center Study, “The Accountability Illusion”).

Finally, proficiency and accountability standards must be concise and simple to describe.  If a lay person cannot understand how accountability is being measured, then how can they possibly be expected to correctly interpret and make use of the information?  Arcane rules that differ across states or across schools about how student proficiency rates are measured (for example, using wide confidence intervals to boost a school’s reported proficiency rate, or different minimum standards for determining the presence of various subgroups within schools), render any kind of concise interpretation impossible. 

The proposed changes under the Obama administration’s ESEA (Elementary and Secondary Education Act) re-authorization may be a step in the right direction, in that they strive to connect state test proficiency standards to “College and Career Readiness”.  But without measurable evidence to demonstrate that students who meet the standards are truly ready for college, the label constitutes nothing more than a marketing slogan.  Without clarity, consistency, and conciseness, we won’t be any closer to a system that helps student learn.