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| Stefan Pryor is Gov-Elect Raimondo's pick to head state Commerce Department. As Education head in Connecticut, he made a big mess of CT public education. |
In
their eagerness to prove that public schools are failing, Connecticut’s leaders
have agreed to passing marks on Common Core tests that are guaranteed to fail
most students.
Wendy Lecker explains that the “cut scores” (or passing marks) were selected with
full knowledge that most students would fail.
Outgoing state commissioner Stefan Pryor (soon to be
state commissioner in Rhode Island) and his aides:
“……voted to set the SBAC [Smarter Balanced
Assessment Consortium] cut scores so that only 41 percent of 11th graders will
pass in English and 33 percent will pass in math. In elementary and middle
school, only 38-44 percent of students will pass in English and only 32-39
percent will pass in math.
“Standardized test passing rates are based on
arbitrary and political decisions about how many students decision-makers want
to fail. SBAC admits it cannot validate whether its tests measure college
readiness until it has data on how current test takers do in college.
In fact,
SBAC declares that the achievement levels “do not equate directly to
expectations for `on-grade’ performance” and test scores should only be used
with multiple other sources of information about schools and students.
“Yet, with his November vote, Pryor guaranteed that
many successful Connecticut students and schools will now arbitrarily be declared
failures.”
Since NAEP state testing began in 1992, Connecticut
has consistently been one of the top three states in the nation, along with
Massachusetts and Néw Jersey. Yet most of its students, teachers, and schools
will arbitrarily be stigmatized as “failures,” by design.