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TechCentralStation
Davis' Failed Test
by Howard Fienberg
September 23, 2002
California's
ambitious and costly school testing system, the Academic Performance Index
(API), appears severely flawed. The regime under which improving schools and
their teachers receive cash awards fails to include the test scores of one
out of every 5 students in the state. According to an investigative series
from the Orange
County Register, that omission results in an average 20 point margin
of error in schools' test scores. It may be that some California schools which got awards did
not actually earn them, while other schools were unfairly left wanting.
Governor Gray Davis pushed legislation for the API through
the state legislature shortly after taking office in January 1999. The Public
Schools Accountability Act was signed into law in April 1999, and the
governor appointed a committee to sort out the details of creating the
testing system. Schools get an API score out of a possible 1,000 points,
based on the Stanford 9 standardized test. Score improvements are rewarded
with cash. But it seems that some details were never really worked out - the
margin of error was never discussed, except for in passing at a September
meeting that year.
The OC Register's investigation reveals that
various loopholes mean that about 828,000 students of the 4.5 million second
through 11th graders statewide are dropped from the API. Not only are some
students not taking the exams, but many others that do take them have their
scores removed afterwards. California
claims that 98-99 percent of all its students are tested, but it appears
that, on average, only 82 percent of students are counted in the end. It also
appears that small schools are more likely to win awards, since it is easier
under the API system for them to change their scores.
All testing systems have some error, but where is all this
error in the API coming from? State lawmakers decided not to count the scores
of students new to a school district. There may have been merit to this
position, since it is not very fair to judge a school based on children it
has not yet had a chance to educate. Disabled students were granted special
rules, like extra time, a common practice in most tests. But the scores of
disabled and special education students were frequently excluded from the
API, and parents could sign waivers to excuse their children from it. In
their defense, lawmakers and state officials told the OC Register that
there was no way they could have known the number of students who would be
excluded when they were designing the API.
Under the API, if schools meet a certain target score,
they qualify for awards. However, some schools which appear to have scored
too low to qualify may have actually made their target score and others which
qualified for awards may have missed their target score. The large margin of
error means that, if a school's score falls within the boundaries of the
margin of error around a target score, we have no way of knowing for certain
if they hit the target or not.
The Complications of 'Grouping'
The API awards system was not only designed to reward
improvements in overall scores, but also scores in each major ethnic and
racial group, as well as among the poorest students. The OC Register
found the unintended consequence of the 'grouping' system was favoritism for
the least diverse schools when it came to getting awards. The paper compares
it to the difficulty of winning consecutive coin tosses. "The fewer
groups, the fewer coin tosses a school has to win." About 58 percent of
schools statewide with only one major ethnic/racial group won awards in 2001,
compared to almost 29 percent of schools with four or more groups. As a
result, mostly white schools received an average of $21 per student, while
the most diverse schools nabbed an average of only $9 per student.
Such disparities in outcome would not be quite so
disturbing were it not for the API's margin of error. The complexity of the
state's 'grouping' system creates extra problems on top of the regular error.
Error rates grow as the API measures smaller and smaller sub-groups,
inevitably obscuring real gains and losses. While schools with less than 100
students don't receive API awards because of the unreliability of their
scores, the OC Register points out that the scores of groups can
include as few as 30 students.
What Now?
Stanford
University researchers,
commissioned by the state to look for ways to improve the API, concluded that
so many students were left out that the scores were unreliable. "I just
don't think (the API) is accurate," Margaret Raymond, a co-author of the
Stanford study, told the OC Register. "It's not an accounting of
what they are doing with all the students in the school."
California
officials call the system a work in process. The API should be more reliable
this year, as a federal education push will include more students in the
counting. Further, any dispute over who gets or misses out on awards is not
currently an issue - California's
budget deficit has led to a temporary suspension of cash awards.
State officials told the OC Register they didn't
disclose the API's error rate for three years because it would have been too
confusing to the public. What is more confusing is how California could have seemingly ignored
the problem while doling out $744 million to schools based on score
improvements with minimal statistical significance. Measuring educational
performance is a worthwhile goal, but accuracy and method should not be
ignored in the process.
See the original: http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=092302A
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