Dive Brief:

• As results from the past year’s Common Core-aligned tests are made public, one thing is becoming clear: Comparisons won’t be so easy to make despite comparability across states being one of the standards’ original intentions.
• For example, in Ohio, Massachusetts, and Illinois, students took the same PARCC tests, but with very different cut scores for proficiency — meaning proficiency rates vary by wide margins from state to state.
• The confusion is being amplified by states dropping out of testing consortia, providing even less opportunity for comparable results from the same tests.

Dive Insight:

The details of how the Common Core's vision of easy performance comparison across states was compromised are political. For example, the Ohio legislature laid out in law that students would be ranked along five tiers, rather than four, and that the third tier would be proficiency. On the PARCC guidelines, that tier is designated as “approached expectations” — not exactly a widely understood definition of proficiency. Part of the reason for the lowered bar is pushback from parents and schools who felt the new tests were too hard. But experts say that move reflects the wrong impulse if education is to improve.

“That mentality of saying let’s set proficient at a level where not too many people fail is going to kill us,” Marc S. Tucker, the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, told the New York Times. “The global standard of what proficient is keeps moving up.”

Recommended Reading

New York Times: Test Scores Under Common Core Show That ‘Proficient’ Varies by State