Test Scores
State test scores were officially released on Thursday. You can access the info for my school here.
Across the state, scores remained about the same, which is to say, low. "Proficient" on the MCT is really failing -- I believe you only need a 50 or 60% to be proficient. Advanced is where it is at; advanced means you get it. A look at the state reading tests scores is bleak. The students shift slowly from 40% advanced in 2nd grade down to only 12% advanced in 8th grade, while the other numbers shift accordingly. Only 6% of 2nd graders fall into Minimal, the lowest category, while about 19% of 8th graders do. it is as though Mississippi teachers are only teaching most of what they should be teaching in a given grade, and he few things that get left off each year never get added back, and the students just slip further and further behind.
I wonder about cheating, too. In the book Freakonomics, the author discusses cheating on standardized tests. The hardest to catch are the teachers who cheat. There was a big investigation of teacher cheating in Houston several years ago. They pinpointed many suspected cheating teachers and retested their classes and some control classes and uncovered exactly the results they were expecting; the classes with suspected cheating teachers' scores declined while the scores in the control classes went up slightly (since they had a few extra weeks between the original test and the retest and had continued teaching.
First graders aren't tested, so I had nothing to do with the MCT at my school. It would have been hard to cheat, though, because there were State Department monitors patrolling the testing classrooms. But the middle school, there weren't as many monitors. One teacher there had a tremendous leap in scores. Almost all of his students were proficient or advanced. When the administration praises teachers for their hard work and their improvements in test scores, I hear that they do not praise this teacher. I think they may be suspicious.
The only reason that my district had monitors was because we were under state control. Other districts did not have the same level of scrutiny. It would have been easy for a teacher to cheat -- change a few answers on some tests before she handed them in. It would only have taken a few minutes.
Read another article on teacher cheating here.
Across the state, scores remained about the same, which is to say, low. "Proficient" on the MCT is really failing -- I believe you only need a 50 or 60% to be proficient. Advanced is where it is at; advanced means you get it. A look at the state reading tests scores is bleak. The students shift slowly from 40% advanced in 2nd grade down to only 12% advanced in 8th grade, while the other numbers shift accordingly. Only 6% of 2nd graders fall into Minimal, the lowest category, while about 19% of 8th graders do. it is as though Mississippi teachers are only teaching most of what they should be teaching in a given grade, and he few things that get left off each year never get added back, and the students just slip further and further behind.
I wonder about cheating, too. In the book Freakonomics, the author discusses cheating on standardized tests. The hardest to catch are the teachers who cheat. There was a big investigation of teacher cheating in Houston several years ago. They pinpointed many suspected cheating teachers and retested their classes and some control classes and uncovered exactly the results they were expecting; the classes with suspected cheating teachers' scores declined while the scores in the control classes went up slightly (since they had a few extra weeks between the original test and the retest and had continued teaching.
First graders aren't tested, so I had nothing to do with the MCT at my school. It would have been hard to cheat, though, because there were State Department monitors patrolling the testing classrooms. But the middle school, there weren't as many monitors. One teacher there had a tremendous leap in scores. Almost all of his students were proficient or advanced. When the administration praises teachers for their hard work and their improvements in test scores, I hear that they do not praise this teacher. I think they may be suspicious.
The only reason that my district had monitors was because we were under state control. Other districts did not have the same level of scrutiny. It would have been easy for a teacher to cheat -- change a few answers on some tests before she handed them in. It would only have taken a few minutes.
Read another article on teacher cheating here.
posted by Jessica at 11:07 PM
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