From Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

By HEATHER VOGELL, LAURA DIAMOND, ALAN JUDD
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/22/08
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 of 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 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 anticipated 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 if 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 weregiven 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 if 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."

While the State Department of Education in Georgia was planning to use the state test to demonstrate the failure of the majority of Georgia students (yes, they knew it ahead of time), it was also giving a nod to legislation to dramatically expand the presence of charter schools in Georgia--legislation recently signed by Gov. Perdue (R). Now it seems entire systems are contemplating shifts to the corporate-style charters. No collective bargaining required, no state retirement, no libraries needed, slashed services and salaries. Will Georgia citizens wake up before their public schools are gone?

Now the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that the State seems to have no plans or uses for the tests or test scores beyond their use to demonstrate that most children are failing in their public schools. Can a class action lawsuit be far behind? Where is the public outrage!

By ALAN JUDD, HEATHER VOGELL
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/25/08
About 36,000 Georgia eighth-graders tried but never passed the math test required for high school admission in 2006 and 2007. After that, state officials have no idea what happened.

The state doesn't know how many of those students were promoted despite failing the mandatory test. It doesn't know how many repeated the eighth grade. It doesn't even know how many of them dropped out of school.

Despite the high-stakes nature of Georgia's Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests, which cover subjects that students in certain grades must pass before moving up, the state doesn't track the ultimate outcome of those who fail.

Instead, the state lets each of Georgia's more than 180 local school systems decide whether to promote students who fail the required tests, after an appeals process that may vary from district to district. But some school systems — such as Gwinnett County, the state's largest — say they don't keep up with the failing students, either.

As a result, while state officials suggest that most of the 36,000 students were promoted, they acknowledge that's just an assumption.

The lack of information and an inconsistent appeals process undermine the state's ability to measure whether the no-pass, no-promotion law is effective, testing experts say.

"In order to make effective decisions about students, you have to have good data," said Ron Dietel, an assistant director of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing at UCLA. Georgia's approach, he said, "sounds like a situation that would produce very messy outcomes and not good decisions."

The fate of students who failed since 2006, the first year the math test helped determine promotion to high school, took on new relevance as details emerged last week about a colossal failure rate on this year's exam.

Forty percent of the state's eighth-graders — roughly 50,000 students — failed the math test this spring, twice as many as in each of the past two years. The state's schools superintendent, Kathy Cox, said the math results, which are preliminary, would stand.

But Cox invalidated social studies scores for sixth- and seventh-grade students, 70 to 80 percent of whom failed. Unlike eighth-grade math, the social studies exam does not count toward promotion.

Cox blamed a vague curriculum for the social studies results, but she defended the math test as appropriately rigorous.

The high failure rates have enraged parents and teachers and created uncertainty for tens of thousands of students who must decide whether to go to summer school before taking the test again.

Many parents say their children were expected to answer test questions about concepts not covered during social studies classes. Others complain that, by falling just a few points short of an arbitrary passing score on the math test, many high-performing students could end up having to repeat a grade.

During the past two school years, about 28,000 students failed both the eighth-grade math test and a retest, according to documents obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Another 7,900 failed the math test once but chose not to take it again, rendering them ineligible for moving to the ninth grade.

If that pattern holds, as many as 29,720 students could be in jeopardy of being held back in the eighth grade next fall, according to the Journal-Constitution's analysis of state school statistics.

State officials assume the vast majority of students who failed the eighth-grade math test in 2006 and 2007 moved up to ninth grade anyway. They expect the same result this year.

"A lot of these students get promoted even if they haven't passed the retest," said Dana Tofig, a spokesman for the Georgia Department of Education. "But we get them extra help where they're struggling."

In a separate interview, Tofig dismissed concerns that large numbers of students will be retained in the eighth grade.

"Not going to happen," he said.

In 2007, he said, school systems statewide retained about 68,000 students in all grades — about 4 percent — for all reasons.

"I would feel confident saying less than 10 percent" will be held back in the eighth grade because of the math test, he said.

Tofig acknowledged, however, that state officials reach those projections "anecdotally."

"We don't collect that data," he said. "The school districts collect that data. It's a school district decision."

In Cherokee County, for instance, about 5 percent of the 291 eighth-graders who failed the math test in 2007 repeated the grade this year, Superintendent Frank Petruzielo said.

But similar data is not available for the Cobb County schools, a spokesman said.

In Gwinnett, spokesman Sloan Roach said in an e-mail, "the placement process ... occurs at local schools and is not collected centrally."

State law requires students in the third, fifth and eighth grades to pass certain standardized tests to advance to the next grade. The promotion rules, which former Gov. Roy Barnes signed into law in 2001, aim to stop so-called social promotion and have been phased in.

Since the law took effect, the state education agency has studied how only one group of students fared on tests they had to pass to advance: third-graders who took the reading exam in 2004.

Nearly 2,800 students failed that test twice, according to a state report. But 61 percent of those students advanced to the fourth grade, anyway.

Among the 1,100 or so who repeated the third grade, 31 percent failed again the next year. The report does not say whether they were held back again.

Without statewide data, officials cannot look for differences in failure and promotion rates among districts, said Dietel, the testing researcher. Districts with similar types of students should have comparable rates, he said. If they don't, it could signal a problem.

"My guess would be most districts are probably going ahead and letting students go on to the next grade," Dietel said. "But if you don't know that, how do you know if the test is doing what it is supposed to do? How do you know if the remediation is doing what it's supposed to do?"

The state requires school systems to offer summer school or other remedial instruction to students who failed tests required for promotion. But the students don't have to attend. Cox, the state superintendent, said last week that summer school teachers will focus on aspects of the test that stumped most students.

"The children will receive the help they need," Cox said.

In June or July, schools give the test a second time to those who failed in the spring.

Students who fail a second time may appeal to the school principal and a teacher. Only parents, not school officials or the students themselves, may request a hearing.

The consequences of failing the math exam have flustered many parents, especially those whose children are strong in math.

Leah Smith's eighth-grade daughter Alex is an A/B student who failed the math test by five points — essentially one question, the mother said.

Her daughter's math class in Cobb County's Awtrey Middle School had three teachers over the course of the year, she said. When Smith talked to school officials last week, she said they told her that even if her daughter failed the retest, she would likely be successful in an appeal.

But Smith hopes Alex won't need the back-up: The two have already bought study guides.

"We'll be going over those the next four weeks," she said. "It's hard for me not to be upset with the school. But she's got to do her best and learn there are these things in your life you have to go through."

Staff writer Laura Diamond contributed to this article.

Will parents tell the idiots in charge of their state schools where to put this year's flagrantly flawed math test--the one being used to keep their children from going to 9th grade next year?

The State response so far? Throw out the social studies test, the one that doesn't count in holding back students.

How long will will the madness continue?

By LAURA DIAMOND, ALAN JUDD, HEATHER VOGELL
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/21/08
No one disputes that Georgia's system for evaluating middle school students broke down this year.

How, and why, became the topics of debate Wednesday, as the state threw out the results of two social studies tests and education advocates questioned the validity of eighth-graders' abysmal math scores.

Several possible explanations emerged for failure rates that ran as high as 80 percent: New curriculum standards that may have been too vague. A complicated process for creating tests. Flawed test questions. Inadequate training in the new curriculum for teachers. An unrealistically high passing score. A long history of poor test performance by Georgia students.

Whatever the reason, the widespread failures are making Georgia's high-stakes testing even more contentious.

"Any time you have that level of failure almost statewide, you've got to go back and re-examine the test and re-examine everything associated with the test," said Herb Garrett, executive director of the Georgia School Superintendents Association.

The math scores were particularly troubling, Garrett said: "There are a lot of youngsters who didn't meet the standards who are known by their local systems to be great math students."

Preliminary results from this year's Criterion-Referenced Competency Test have stirred up parents and educators all week. On Monday, state School Superintendent Kathy Cox announced that 70 to 80 percent of sixth- and seventh-graders had failed the social studies exam. About 40 percent of Georgia's 124,000 eighth-graders — or about 50,000 students — failed in math.

The math results are especially significant, since students who failed the test cannot advance to ninth grade. Those students will have to take the test again this summer, and many may have to forgo vacations to attend summer school.

Further, the test helps determine whether schools have met goals set by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Schools that repeatedly fall short of the goals face potentially severe sanctions.

The high failure rates have frustrated parents, some of whom weren't satisfied by Cox's decision to invalidate the social studies scores.

"This is just crazy," said Karla Penn, whose daughter Kamille failed the eighth-grade math test by five points at Shamrock Middle School in DeKalb County.

"The whole thing started with this new curriculum, and it's just gotten worse. You have students who aren't familiar with this information and teachers who don't know how to teach it, so of course this all happened.

"This whole thing is a fiasco. How can they think this is fair to the kids?" . . . .