Last month, Ohio released initial results from its PARCC test, a standardized test used by a group of states, showing that nearly 65 percent of students were proficient in math and English language arts. These numbers were a whole lot better than those of other states on the PARCC, so is Ohio leading the way? Politically, yes. Academically, no.
Ohio got these results by rejecting PARCC’s recommended cut scores to designate proficiency and adopting more generous ones. Ohio claims that 69 percent of its fourth graders are proficient in English, but if the state were using PARCC’s cut scores, the results would suggest that just 37 percent of Ohio students are on track for college or career. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, our current gold standard for evaluating student performance, reports that 37 percent of Ohio fourth graders were proficient in 2015.
One of the goals of the Common Core was that its tests would make it easier to compare student performance across states. Under No Child Left Behind, states had incentives to engage in a “race to the bottom,” lowering their proficiency standards to avoid federally-mandated sanctions and to make their schools look better. The Common Core promised a more uniform scoreboard that would give parents a better read on how schools were faring. But it seems increasingly likely that the Common Core will not deliver on that promise.
Ohio’s decision to lower its proficiency cut score is hardly the final nail in that coffin, but it’s certainly bad news for the Common Core. For one thing, it serves to undercut the notion that the Common Core was a “state-led” effort. From the start, the fact that states scrambled to adopt the standards in response to the promise of federal Race to the Top money had always made that claim a bit of a farce. But in the past few years states have been drifting away from Common Core aligned tests. PARCC participation has fallen from a peak of 25 states to 13 states, and four of those states (including Ohio) are not actually administering the test in the 2015-16 school year. Florida’s education commissioner has already suggested following Ohio’s lead and lowering cut scores, and Arkansas briefly lowered them before doubling back in the face of criticism (and isn’t even administering the test this year anyway). States are moving in only one direction with respect to the Common Core and PARCC: away.
Now, it’s possible that Ohio will prove to be an outlier. But it’s more likely that it will end up being a trailblazer. Politicians in other PARCC states have every incentive to do what Ohio has done. Think about the incentives for grade inflation at a university. Students want good grades, and professors want to be popular with students. So if the administration sends a stern memo telling professors to grade on an honest curve, some professors might initially comply because they think it’s the right thing to do. But eventually one professor might inflate his grades and reap greater popularity with the student body. At first, it might seem like an isolated case, but eventually other professors would feel the pressure to inflate their grades. If the administration can’t force professors to toe the line, the memo will be little more than a bump in the road to ever increasing grade inflation. State politicians are like professors; their citizens want to hear that their schools are doing well and that their kids are smart, so it takes an act of collective will to maintain high cut scores.
Whether or not the nine states administering the PARCC tests in 2015-2016 have that collective will remains to be seen. Either way, it’s worth taking a moment to consider where the Common Core stands in relation to its goals. The idea was that the initiative would lead states to adopt higher academic standards, align instruction to those standards, implement common assessments, and enable meaningful cross-state comparisons of academic achievement.
On the first count, very few states have dropped the standards outright, so that can be considered a success. It is, however, difficult to assess how effectively states have aligned instruction to those standards. Participation in the common assessments has plummeted. As noted earlier, most of the original PARCC states won’t be administering the test this year. Being able to compare your state to half of the other states in the union might tell you a lot; being able to compare your state to only eight others tells you much less about how your state is performing nationally. Moving forward, it seems vastly more likely that states administering the test will fudge their cut scores than that more states will hop on board. So it might be time to say that when it comes to meaningful cross-state comparability, the Common Core is on thin ice.
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