Analysis Raises Questions About Rigor of Teacher Tests

Cutoff scores set lower than states' averages

The average scores of graduating teacher-candidates on state-required licensing exams are uniformly higher, often significantly, than the passing scores states set for such exams, according to an Education Week analysis of preliminary data from a half-dozen states.

The pattern appears across subjects, grade levels, and test instruments supplied by a variety of vendors, the new data show, raising questions about the rigor and utility of current licensing tests.

There are, in essence, two main ways to interpret the findings. Some observers say the data suggest most states set low passing marks, screening out only candidates with the very lowest level of content knowledge.

"If there's not a lot of variation in the performance of graduates by institution, it could mean that education seems to set a lower bar for institutions than other professions," said Dan Goldhaber, a research professor at the University of Washington Bothell, who has studied teacher-licensing tests.

The other point of view holds that most current teacher examinations are better thought of as a minimum screen, and should be considered alongside professional-entry mechanisms as a whole.

Beyond the Mean

The average scaled score of 2009-10 teacher education program completers from four states on the Praxis II Mathematics Content Knowledge exam were higher than the national average.

SOURCES: Educational Testing Service; Education Week

The tests "are not designed to assess anything a candidate learns in a credential program," said Teri Clark, the director of professional services for the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, the state's teacher-standards board.

She noted that California requires prospective educators to pass the tests typically before they complete their pedagogy work. "It doesn't make a lot of sense to prepare a person to teach the subject matter if they don't already have the subject-matter knowledge," she said.

The battery of tests varies by state. Some require basic-skills exams before entering a program; others require educators to pass tests measuring content or pedagogy knowledge before completing their preparation, as in California; still others require them before recommending a candidate for a license.

Where to Cut Off

The 2008 rewrite of the federal Higher Education Act establishes much more detailed licensure test reporting requirements than its predecessor.

Among other requirements, Title II of the law compels states to include both passing rates on the tests and candidates' average scaled scores. Scaled scores are, in essence, candidate performance translated from the raw number of correct answers to the scale on which the test is graded.

Though the U.S. Department of Education has not yet posted the state-generated "report cards" containing that information, Education Week obtained preliminary data from higher education institutions' reports and directly from state officials.

The states reviewed, selected at random, were California, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia.

States' average scaled scores for program completers in 2009-10 were compared with passing scores for each test obtained from test vendors and state websites.

Among the findings:

• Virginia's teacher graduates' average score on an elementary-content test, at 172, was nearly 30 points higher than the state cutoff score of 143.

• Among the tests California requires for licensure, only one consistently seemed to pose any significant challenge for graduates: the Reading Instruction Competence Assessment, required of elementary and special education teachers and updated in 2009.

• Of Georgia's tests, an infant/early-childhood teacher test had the smallest disparity between program completers' average scaled score and the state passing mark, at 13 points. By contrast, a music test and a Spanish test in Georgia show average scaled scores that were 41 and 38 points higher, respectively, than the cutoff scores on those tests.

• The cutoff score on a popular secondary math test in South Carolina and Indiana is set well below both the average scaled score of the state's program completers and the national average of all U.S. candidates taking the exam. (See chart, right.)

Data in Context

High overall passing rates on licensing tests have been well documented since the federal government started collecting information on the tests in 1998.

According to the Education Department, the overall passing rate on licensing exams by graduates of traditional teacher-preparation programs in 2008-09 was 96 percent. The high rates overall are, in part, a reflection that many states have made passing the tests an institutional ...

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