Georgia notifies parents before releasing awful test scores
As many of you know, I have been very outspoken against Kathy Cox’s use of the failed, recycled Math 123 in Georgia. I warned it would hurt gifted children and drive up the drop out rate! The recently released, distasterous results—which may hold back 40% of Georgia’s eight graders—mean it is time for voters to insist that Kathy Cox resign! Please contact Kathy Cox at (404) 656-2800 or state.superintendent@doe.k12.ga.us
AJC-Georgia school leaders were so shocked by dismal scores on state math and social studies tests, the state superintendent released a statement Monday to prepare parents and others for the results.
According to the unofficial results, only 20 to 30 percent of Georgia’s sixth- and seventh-graders passed the state social studies exam. In math, about 40 percent of eighth-graders could be held back because they failed the test.
The state will release official scores from the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests next month.
Parents whose children failed the math test will be notified by local schools. The state requires eighth-graders to pass the reading and math exams to move to high school.
May 20th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
This is what happens when Japanese teaching methods and curriculum are applied in America.
I agree with you John re: Kathy (”with a K”) Cox. I doubt that teachers have the necessary skills to teach the new curriculum…it has been forced into the system too quickly.
But we both know that certain publishers made big bucks with the very expensive textbooks that had to be purchased for all 180+ Georgia school systems…what a disaster.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:27 am
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May 21st, 2008 at 6:50 am
Bart
You did a great job researching the cost of the books on tax payers. You should tell everyone the cost!
May 21st, 2008 at 8:30 am
I was driving to work when I heard Kathy Cox claim that the reason we did so bad on the SS is she gave them the wrong test.
I am not sure if she is not telling the truth or is just flat outincompetent!
May 21st, 2008 at 11:05 am
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May 21st, 2008 at 11:16 am
This is representative of the intrinsic deficiencies of the federally controlled, top down, leviathan called the Dept. of Education. Get back to local control and teaching facts and stop the social engineering.
Grrrr
Phil
May 21st, 2008 at 1:54 pm
I agree Phil!
May 21st, 2008 at 8:50 pm
I am baffled at the incompetence that our government has played in the lives of all the students in Georgia. These students have gone through the months of listening to teachers teach and then when they took the test it was written up totally different than the way it was taught. Someone needs to also look at the math test. When are we going to start listening to the common sense of teaching, children are only learning how to take test. I know a middle schooler whose complete year comprise of multiple choice test. Yes, they are easy to grade, but do we really understand a child’s concept of a skill. Kathy fooled us for a while now the mess has hit the fan.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:26 pm
Georgia spends almost $13B on education to finish 49th every year…why not just eliminate the $13B, we can only go back one spot…
I will have to find the cost factor John…but it was interesting as I recall; only one publisher had the textbooks available and they cost something like $45 each. Plus each teacher’s workbook was $125.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:35 pm
John,
If Kathy (with a K) Cox does not voluntarily resign, she should be impeached (or whatever provision is allowed under GA law to force her removal from office with potential for prosecution to follow). Now she has rescinded the CRCT Social Studies scores because the tests did not fit with the curriculum taught (implemented too quickly as I suggested in Post 1).
From the AJC website this evening: — and remember, Georgia spends $13B annually on ‘education’…when will parents DEMAND choice?!
State throws out CRCT results; Social studies tests for 6th and 7th graders were flawed
By LAURA DIAMOND
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/21/08
Results from the state social studies exams sixth- and seventh-graders took earlier this year will be thrown out because of problems that caused the majority of students to fail, State Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox announced her decision Wednesday afternoon in a letter to local school superintendents.
Scores from the eighth-grade math exam — which students must pass to move to high school — will stand, even though about 40 percent of test-takers failed.
Students took new, harder tests this year to correspond with the state’s more rigorous curriculum in math and social studies. Cox said it’s common for tests scores to drop with a new test and explained students’ math scores on the state test correspond with how Georgia children have performed on national exams.
But Cox was shocked by the awful social studies results. Only 20 to 30 percent of the students passed, according to preliminary results. “Simply, the performance appears to be implausibly low, which raised serious questions,” Cox wrote.
There would have been no consequences for students who failed the social studies exam. Official scores on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests are expected next month.
Teachers and students have said exam questions didn’t match what was taught in class. Students took the exams earlier this spring.
Cox acknowledged a disconnect between the standards, the test questions and what teachers taught. She plans to ask a group of teachers and other experts to review the test and new standards to determine what went wrong.
The committee will have the authority to rewrite the new curriculum, which was approved by the State Board of Education in 2004. The panel may also suggest changes to the test.
Cox wrote there was nothing wrong with the scoring of the tests.
“This decision is based primarily on the conviction that we need to revise the curriculum and the assessments to better evaluate the knowledge and skills that represent student achievement in social studies,” she wrote.
Tests scores plummeted this year in math and social studies. Last year about 83 percent of the sixth-graders and 86 percent of the seventh-graders passed the social studies CRCT test, according to state figures. About 81 percent of eighth-graders passed the math test last year.
Parents whose children failed the math tests will be notified by local schools. Students can retake the math tests this summer. Schools will provide free voluntary classes to get them ready. Families with vacation plans can download study guides and other materials from the state Web site.
May 22nd, 2008 at 5:18 am
I agree Bart!
May 22nd, 2008 at 5:20 am
BTW I thought that was the book price you told me.
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:29 am
So when will they throw out the 8th grade math tests? That would be good for my daughter who missed it by 14 points.
May 22nd, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Sharon
You should call Kathy Cox and let her hear your voice!
May 23rd, 2008 at 11:16 am
From today’s AJC, Georgia Board of Education in July of last year that a very high percentage of the test takers would fail. Yet they allowed the test to be administered anyway…wonder how much this cost us taxpayers?
State foresaw testing fiasco
Mass failures on middle-school social studies exam were predicted by Education Department months early, but officials didn’t warn schools.
By Heather Vogell, Laura Diamond, Alan Judd
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/23/08
The state Department of Education knew as early as July 2007 that tens of thousands of sixth- and seventh-graders were on track to bomb on this year’s mandatory social studies test, documents obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution show.
But officials allowed the testing to go forward, apparently without warning schools, teachers, parents or students of the likelihood of widespread failures.
State school officials released the documents as criticism mounted Thursday over how they handled this year’s statewide Criterion-Referenced Competency Test.
“This is atrocious and unforgivable,” said Jason Adams, a seventh-grade teacher at Lost Mountain Middle School in Cobb County. “… This is the kind of thing where a heads-up to teachers would have been nice.”
Dana Tofig, the education agency’s spokesman, said early projections were based on pilot questions given to students who hadn’t been taught the state’s new social studies curriculum. Officials assumed students would score higher this year.
The documents show students taking the pilot test answered large numbers of questions incorrectly.
By February, six weeks before testing began, officials had put a precise number on the predicted failures: 69 percent of students in both grades would likely not meet the bar.
The prediction proved generous.
Students, teachers and parents learned this week that 70 percent to 80 percent of middle schoolers in the two grades had failed to pass the social studies test this spring. On the eighth-grade math test, which students must pass to go on to high school, only about 60 percent had passed —- 20 percentage points fewer than the year before.
Teachers ‘devastated’
The results are preliminary. Official and complete results are due next month.
Yet on Wednesday, state Superintendent Kathy Cox announced the state was throwing out the social studies results, blaming a vague curriculum and imprecise direction for teachers. She said the math results would stand and defended the test as necessarily more rigorous.
The state’s testing contractor, CTB/McGraw-Hill, tried out 80 potential new questions with a sampling of Georgia students in the spring of 2007, according to state education documents. Committees made up largely of Georgia teachers chose 60 questions for the 2008 test, despite the poor results from the pilot.
Tofig said Cox was not available for an interview Thursday.
He said the pilot, or “field,” test results were speculative and useful only for setting the minimum score, known as a cut score, needed to pass the test. Pilot scores are not always predictive, Tofig said, noting that a cut-score committee projected 52 percent of eighth-graders would fail the math exam, while only 40 percent actually did.
“You really don’t know what’s going to happen until you get the data,” Tofig said.
The department made no changes based on the predicted social studies scores, he said. Nor did it share the projections beyond a small circle of state officials.
“A limited number of people had seen that in February,” Tofig said. “That whole process is secure.” To protect the tests’ integrity, he added, “it has to be secure.”
The state made the projections public in April when the state board approved cut scores for the tests.
The results “came as a great surprise to curriculum leaders” in the school districts, said Deborah White, executive director of the Georgia Association of Curriculum and Instructional Supervisors. “Teachers were devastated.”
Cherokee County Superintendent Frank Petruzielo also said school systems had no idea what was coming. But he said the result should not have surprised state officials.
“Maybe they underestimated,” he said. “But they knew the failure rate was going to be extraordinary.”
Petruzielo agreed that vague teaching guidelines contributed to the high failure fate in social studies. But he said the state also raised the standards on eighth-grade math enough to trip up even accomplished students. He said state officials may have been “overreaching” to improve student test performance.
“The bar was simply set too high too soon,” Petruzielo said. “We weren’t able to show how much progress kids have made year to year when just getting over the bar was such a Herculean task.”
The state Board of Education raised the cut score in sixth- and seventh-grade social studies from 23 and 22 correct answers, respectively, to 32 and 31 right answers out of 60 questions. In eighth-grade math, the cut score decreased, from 35 to 32.
State board member William Bradley Bryant said he expected a gap between performance last year and this year.
“The only thing we could have done with the cut scores was say, ‘Are we more comfortable with more people passing the test even if that meant lowering the bar?’ ” said Bryant, whose district includes Gwinnett, DeKalb and Decatur. “It would look good on paper, but it’s more important for them to leave the grade with the content knowledge we think they need.”
He said he wasn’t sure whether a connection could be made between the projections and the results released this week.
Tim Callahan, spokesman for the Professional Association of Georgia Educators, said state officials should have acted to head off disaster when they saw the warning signs in the pilot test.
“You would not have let the train continue on in the dark and wreck like it has now,” he said. A panel Cox is convening to look into what happened will likely do some things that should have been done before, he said.
Superintendents not told
Teachers have complained repeatedly about inadequate training as the curriculum has been revamped, said Callahan —- whose group’s 72,000 members are mostly teachers.
In recent weeks, as dismal scores trickled in, teachers called the state in alarm, Callahan said. “The initial response was kind of flippant and cold,” he said. “They were like, ‘Well, you didn’t do your job.’ ”
Gwinnett Superintendent J. Alvin Wilbanks said local superintendents were given no direct information that the failure rates would be so high. School leaders did know scores would drop because of the new tests and higher standards.
He said he doesn’t know whether sharing the projections would have helped.
“With those projections, what you got is what you got, and I don’t know what knowing about it would have done,” Wilbanks said. “But it’s always nice to have information and prepare people. I don’t know if you’d still administer the test.”