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This is a big question with no easy answer: do New York students improve reading, writing and math?
Last spring, 950,000 postgraduate students in New York State took standard English and math exams. Through Statethey seem to have done better.
In New York, scores increased by about 6 percentage points in English and about 5 points in math – which means that just under 47% of students in the city passed the English test and about 43% of students.
But instead of shedding light on the results, the state's Ministry of Education delayed releasing them for six weeks. And then, by announcing them Wednesday, the department warned that exams can not be measured against previous tests and should be considered as a new reference.
This is because this year's exams have been redesigned to reduce the duration of the three-day test; this made the tests too different to compare, the department said.
Although state tests have lower stakes than at any other time in the last decade, results remain the most commonly used measure for assessing school progress – and city and state in the broad sense – in the education of pupils.
"If the tests have changed a lot, we will not learn much about trends, maybe nothing about trends," says Daniel Koretz, a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education.
This year's results are the latest confusing points in a long history of zigzagging test results in New York, but what they tell us is how much the political pendulum has evolved on standardized tests. Here's why numbers are often accompanied by asterisks:
In test, what happens …
New York had a complicated relationship with the test results of the last 15 years.
Try to understand these numbers: In 2009, 82% of New York candidates passed the math exam. The following year, about half of the city's students failed, and in 2013, about 70 percent of the students failed.
From 2002, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg based his aggressive and impulsive reforms of the city's school system on standardized state examinations and he made testing much more important for students and schools before.
Bloomberg has also partnered with the state to make testing more difficult and to increase the weight of exams in teacher evaluations as part of the city's bid for $ 700 million in grants from the federal Race to the Top program.
Although student results collapsed during the more rigorous reviews in 2010, New York continued its plan to become one of the first states in the country to adopt the new common standards proposed by the Obama administration. After state tests were aligned with these standards in 2013, the scores dropped further.
Then the game started.
… must come
Mayor Bill de Blasio's campaign for 2013 included a promise to reduce issues related to state testing, which he did shortly after taking office.
At about the same time, parents in the city's progressive political pockets, the wealthy suburbs of the state and New York neighborhoods prevented their children from taking state exams to protest Common tests Core and High Stakes. The so-called withdrawal movement came in 2015, when a fifth of New York students refused to take the exams, which made the results less reliable.
Activists have captured a particularly memorable reading passage in an eighth grade English exam involving a pineapple speaking as evidence of the absurdity of the tests.
Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, faced with pressure from parents, withdrew from a plan that year, increases the role of exams in teacher evaluations. He has also moved away from the reform of education and common core.
This year's results, based on changing goals and shorter exams, can be the last nail in the coffin for the state's hopes of running the nation on the common core.
Who wins when tests have less meaning?
The city and state teacher unions led the charge against high-stakes testing in New York, and the state union in particular approved the opt out movement. They seem to win the battle.
Just Five years ago, it seemed like the state was about to have some of the country's most challenging teacher ratings, based on some of the most intensive exams. Today the opposite is true; there is a moratorium on the use of exams in teacher assessments until the end of this school year.
Mr. de Blasio and Chancellor of the Schools of the City, Richard A. Carranza, agree that students and schools should not be judged primarily on the results of tests, but now they are without reliable proof that students are making progress school.
Pro-Common Core groups and education reform organizations that have seen their political hopes shrink over the last three years will see this as a new strike against high standards for New York students and teacher accountability of State.
The unusually long wait for scores this year has frustrated Parents and students in particular because they need their results apply to selective middle and secondary schools. And if the experts do not understand how to interpret the exams, the parents will definitely be.
"It hurts the credibility of an evaluation system when things change in a very short time," said Aaron Pallas, professor at Columbia University's Teachers College. "It's very confusing even for the people who pay attention."
What do the test results show?
The movement of exclusion decreases, but it is not dead. The city's test rejection rate increased slightly in 2018 from 4% to 4.4% for students, and to 18% for the country as a whole. Long Island remains the epicenter of the movement, while chartered schools and urban schools across the state had the lowest withdrawal rates.
In testing, charter schools in New York City outpaced traditional public schools, as they usually do: charter students earned between 8 and 9 points in math and English.
Schools in difficulty as part of the city's renovation program made gains at about the same rate as the city as a whole. This does not tell us much about their performance: if these schools posted larger gains than the rest of the schools in the city, this would indicate that renewals are improving.
The city surpassed the rest of the state in English for the third consecutive year: 46.7% of students in the city passed the test, while 45.2% of students in the state passed the test. But the state beat the city in mathematics by just under 2 percentage points, with 44.5% of students passing the test across the state.
Success gaps between black and white students remained at the state level, reducing by only one percentage point in mathematics and English.
Experts warned that the results only reveal one element of student performance and schools.
"If you really want to know if a school is good, it helps to have results," Koretz said. "But if you stop there, you do not have the answer yet."
Although the results of state examinations have fluctuated wildly over the last 10 years, the national assessment of education hasal progress, considered the benchmark of academic growth, showed that New York students had not progressed in English or mathematics between 2015 and 2017.
When the organization publishes its next results in the spring, New Yorkers may have a better idea of the dependence on the results of state tests.
This year's results will undoubtedly influence new questions about education policy in New York, including the decision of the State Board of Governors to use exam results to evaluate teachers. These debates will reveal a lot about how New York, considered as one of the country's educational reform capitals only a few years ago, it is adopting an entirely new orientation in education policy.
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