Exam school test administrator clashes with BPS over use of admissions test

Bostonians are still chasing after the snark of black educational competence.  Only by destroying all assessment will they ever find it.  They are moving towards that.  Ideology will have a hard job trumping reality but Leftists do it routinely in their own minds so maybe one day they will be able to force that upon everybody. Brave New World!

Boston Public Schools have for years misused the test results that help determine admissions to its coveted exam schools in a way that makes it harder for “underrepresented” students to gain entry, according to the organization that administers the controversial exam.

As a result, the Education Records Bureau decided last spring to sever its relationship with the city’s school district — its largest client — after 25 years, according to an e-mail the Globe obtained from the organization’s president Tom Rochon. The e-mail was sent Tuesday to some of the bureau’s other clients, including 30 independent schools in the Boston area that use the test in admissions decisions.

“District leaders have not yet chosen to make this information public, but when they do so we want to be sure you have the necessary background,” Rochon wrote. He said his organization has been trying to get the district’s attention on the issue over the last eight years.

Boston school officials, however, strongly maintain that they are the ones who walked away from the relationship in search of a fairer and more equitable test. Superintendent Brenda Cassellius, who joined the district in July, said that she has “often and publicly” noted that this is the final year of the district’s contract with the Education Records Bureau. Under the current year-long contract, the district is paying the organization about $600,000.

"Boston public schools is committed, and actively working, to expand equitable access to our exam schools,'' Cassellius said in a statement.

The fairness of the admissions process to the three exam schools — Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy, and the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science — has been a contentious subject in recent years. Several civil rights groups and community organizations have argued that the admissions process, based half on student grades and half on their scores on the test, called the Independent School Entrance Exam (ISEE), has disadvantaged low-income students, particularly Blacks and Latinos.

And now, the test’s administrator appears to be confirming some of those fears. The district’s “misapplication of ISEE scores has been one factor in perpetuating admissions outcomes that disproportionately affect students belonging to underrepresented groups,” Rochon wrote. The dispute raises questions about who is more to blame for a potentially biased process — the test creator or the district that uses the test.

Civil rights leaders called the letter’s revelations “damning” to Boston public schools and City Hall, saying the district appears to have knowingly left in place an admissions process biased against students of color. Tanisha Sullivan, president of the Boston chapter of the NAACP , demanded an investigation into Boston’s exam schools process, saying the city needs “a moratorium on any test for exam schools admissions until that investigation is completed.”

“This is a shocking development in our fight for exam schools equity,'' she added.

Cassellius said her administration will release a request for proposals within the week for a test that has been shown to be free of bias and is more aligned with state standards than the ISEE. Boston’s contract with the records bureau expires June 30.

“Almost immediately upon my arrival in Boston, it was brought to my attention that there were concerns that the ISEE test was potentially creating barriers for some students seeking admission to BPS’ exam schools, particularly underrepresented students,” Cassellius said in the statement.

Black and Latino students combined make up just 20 percent of the student body at Boston Latin, the most competitive of the three schools, compared to 72 percent of the school district. They constitute 66 percent of the students at the O’Bryant and 47 percent at Boston Latin Academy.

Previous public debate about the test has focused on the fact that it is not aligned with most Boston public schools’ curriculum — or state standards—and as a result privileges private school applicants, who are disproportionately white and whose schools frequently sync their teaching and curriculum to the test. It also provides an advantage to wealthier Boston Public Schools students whose families can afford to hire private tutors or others to help prepare them for the ISEE.

"Given that it’s an exam that is completely foreign to students and requires parents and outside resources to help prepare them, it doesn’t make sense as a tool for identifying which students are going to be able to succeed in a rigorous academic environment,” said Joshua Goodman, an associate professor at Brandeis University. Goodman authored a 2018 study that found the school system’s reliance on the ISEE potentially blocked thousands of students of color from accessing the exam schools. The study recommended using Massachusetts’ standardized test, the MCAS, to boost diversity at the schools.

But Rochon spelled out other problems in his e-mail, claiming that for years the records bureau has asked district leaders to use the test scores in an “appropriate way” — for instance stopping their practice of summing student results in the different sections (verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, mathematical achievement, and reading comprehension) into a single score.

Instead, Rochon said in an interview, that the four sections are intended to be considered individually as part of a broader assessment of an applicant’s merits — which ideally would take into account their past educational experience. Too much emphasis on a summary test score can disadvantage students from more marginalized groups. But Rochon added that “it is obviously up to the citizens of Boston to decide how to weight academic achievement ... with the really important issues around equity and access.”

Charlie Drane, vice president of enrollment at the private Boston College High School, said his school uses the ISEE exam, along with factors including teacher recommendations and grades, when judging applicants for seventh grade.

School counselors consider students’ backgrounds when weighing their ISEE scores, Drane said. For example, if a student is a recent immigrant with limited fluency in English but has excellent teacher recommendations, the school may not give much weight to a low reading score on the ISEE. If "his recommendations say he’s a hard worker, he’s going to do great here and we’re going to go after him,” Drane said.

Rochon said the organization offered over the last eight years to fund research studies for BPS to determine the fairest way to weight the test scores. “But we were always rebuffed,’’ Rochon wrote. After what Rochon describes as the most “recent refusal,” the bureau notified Boston officials in April 2019 that they would cut ties within a year.

Boston school officials acknowledged that the Education Records Bureau approached them about funding a study. But Cassellius said the district, already eager to find a new test, declined the bureau’s offer to avoid giving undue advantage to “any one particular vendor.”

School officials provided copies of exchanges between Rochon and district leaders shortly after Cassellius took charge. In one e-mail dated in August, the superintendent said she was "hesitant to do any collaboration with a vendor that could eventually seek advantage on a future RFP.”

District officials said they had no record of the bureau reaching out to them about studying the test process several years ago. They added that they have recently studied whether weighting one subject over another could lead to a more equitable process and found that it would have no impact on exam school demographics.

The blame for the controversy falls on both sides, said Michael Contompasis, who served as headmaster at Boston Latin School from 1976 to 1998, and again on an interim basis from 2016 to 2018. Contompasis said the bureau pushed the district to study the test’s fairness after a string of media reports questioned whether it was biased against Black and Latino students.

“The district should have done a validity study on the exam when it was first asked," he said. "It should be something that is periodically done.” And the bureau should have raised their concerns more forcefully well before severing ties.

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Higher Education in an Increasingly Diverse Culture

Howard Mumford Jones, an English professor at the University of Michigan and later at Harvard, long ago commented that American colleges and universities echoed rather than critiqued contemporary culture. In our increasingly diverse culture, is it any wonder higher education today more resembles a cacophony than an echo? While the major functional difference between a university and a college has been that the former places a higher premium on research while the latter focuses more on pedagogy, all students should benefit from exposure to ideas that prepare them to live responsibly enough to make the world a better place for their having been part of it. In this Information Age, the nature of globalism pushes humanity toward a form of moral relativism beyond historical context to the point it renders truth ambiguous if not irrelevant. Thomas Hobbes warned that a world with a multitude of choices devoid of essential truth could lead to lives “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.” Higher education done right can avoid that.

Higher education should accrue to standards attendant to individual and public integrity, respectful of human rights, and instill a willingness to live responsibly for the common good. Without these, no society, especially a democratic republic, can survive for very long. I spent nearly four decades of my professional life in military service and in teaching; a great portion of it simultaneously. As an intelligence officer, I learned to search for truth — the lack of which can prove fatal. Truth cannot be based on the degree of pleasure it brings or reflects. As an educator, I found the pedagogical function of a college or a university is to prepare students for responsible citizenship. In an increasingly diverse society, it is incumbent on institutions of higher education to bear the burden of pursuing and perpetuating knowledge undergirded by definitive truth.

A century ago, long before the advent of the turbulent 1960s, when as a student I first dove into the waters of higher education, this was not as vital as it is today. In American society before the 1950s, individual character was formed by three powerful institutions: church, family, and school. Since then, the weakening of church and family have left a heavier burden on our schools.

Concerning the church, a 2019 survey indicated 65% of Americans self-identify as Christians; down from 85% in 1990, 81% in 2001, and 12% lower than the 78% reported in 2012. Furthermore, a 2018 poll indicated only 20% of Americans regularly attend religious services. Constant cleavages among Protestant denominations over social-justice related issues left much of American Christendom polarized between a large number of social activist congregations and a smaller number of more conservative iterations. There are rifts along similar lines in Catholicism and Judaism. None of this is healthy.

What about families? Currently, married couples make up 68% of all households with children under 18 years of age, compared to 98% in 1950. In many of those homes, both parents work, leaving childrearing to K-12 schools and after-school care. A lot of these families gather only for dinner and then adjourn to television, computer games, or internet and social-media chattery, diminishing opportunities for moral and ethical guidance.

Given this situation, schools are expected to provide for individuals what used to be accomplished at home or in Sunday school. What is undertaken in many schools depends on the quality of teachers. That is where higher education becomes critical. Among today’s unpleasant truths is that college and university classrooms may function as the last resort where individuals can learn anything about ethics, morality, personal integrity, and the eternal truths long ago propounded by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in the Athenian academy where students were imbued with concepts attendant to responsibilities of citizenship.

Higher education underwritten by the pursuit of truth through academic excellence is where the values attendant to Western civilization must be presented and then infused into the next generation. Analogously, colleges and universities should provide students a calm pool for a vigorous swim through a current of ideas and concepts to prepare them for careers in the professions, business, or various forms of public service. Those four years between childhood and citizenship are the best, perhaps the last, opportunity for the next generation to acquire those aspects of spirit and mind enabling happy and successful lives as responsible American citizens in what will be an increasingly complex world. A diverse, multi-cultural society inimical to — or ignorant of — the ideals that emerged from Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome is unlikely to produce responsible citizens needed to perpetuate a democratic republic.

This is why Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania, where I taught for over a decade, and places like it — and these are few — are so critical.

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Outcomes before inputs in education

Each new school year elicits mixed emotions for parents and children, ranging from excitement to anxiety. For policymakers, the new year needs to be greeted with a steely-eyed determination to lift schooling performance for the benefit of the four million Australian students in school, and ultimately for the national good.

That means putting aside the habitual mudslinging, buck-passing and tinkering at the edges by policymakers of both parties and at each level of government. Too often, politics has clouded education policy — perhaps more so than any other major portfolio — much to the disservice of students, families and educators.

The way forward must necessarily start with a candid, sober understanding of what has gone on in the past and be followed by a clear vision for the future. Holding up a mirror to the school system will be confronting but it’s past time for an honest accounting of success and failure.

Any serious introspection will note the inconvenient truth that, everywhere in education policy, performance has become a dirty word — for students, schools and teachers — while productivity and getting education bang for the buck are long gone as policy priorities.

Last year the OECD-run Program for International Student Assessment revealed that Australian students’ test results, particularly in mathematics, have continued to slump considerably. All the while, education ministers across the country have boasted about providing “record funding” to schooling.

It is easy to see that a cabal of vested interests and the same old players hold tight control of policymaking, particularly in relation to assessment, competition and performance management. The losers every time are students, taxpayers and even teachers.

It’s no secret that student assessment isn’t what it used to be, and PISA shows we’re certainly a class below high-performing countries when it comes to setting high expectations at school. There is a national commitment to “learning progressions” — which privilege students making progress rather than achieving to an expected standard.

That means those who start behind the curve are likelier to lag behind their peers and have their career opportunities hindered — since employers will invariably want the best candidate for the job, not the most improved.

There is also a push to do away with end-of-school examinations and exit scores on the basis that testing is simply too stressful and ranking a student’s performance might shatter their fragile confidence. But tests are just that — a test of performance under pressure, much like what happens daily in adult life and work.

National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy reporting remains under constant fire. Its opponents say it’s unfair to measure a school’s performance according to such arbitrary and summative measures as test results in basic literacy and numeracy. State education ministers routinely flirt with the idea of scrapping the tests altogether or hiding the results from the public.

However, watering down competition around performance is no recipe for improvement. Quite the opposite: it licenses an accountability-free protection racket, ripe for slackers.

But it is teachers who may be most let down by an inadequate performance management system. Once in the classroom, staff performance is not assessed consistently, independently or objectively, and principals often feel their hands are tied — both for teachers who exceed expectations and for those who don’t meet the bar. Teachers don’t enjoy the benefits of further development from the basic performance management practices found in just about any other Australian workplace.

There is virtually no nexus between pay and performance for teachers, and wage increases are doled out across the board, thanks to centrally determined pay deals with the unions.

If teachers aren’t working in an environment requiring, encouraging and helping them to meet high standards, is it any wonder that students don’t perform?

An aspiration for school policy, characterised by an unapologetic and unrelenting drive for higher performance and productivity, should be an obvious imperative, no matter one’s political persuasion. It also means putting to bed the naive assumption that simply spending more will deliver better outcomes. We’ve already tried that, to no avail.

If doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity then repeatedly spending more money on the same thing for the same results makes policymakers look utterly braindead. All the Gonski “needs-based” funding in the world won’t improve education outcomes without a change in performance culture throughout the system, root and branch.

A new vision for school funding should be outcomes-based. Simply dishing out funding based on inputs (the number and demographics of students), rather than outcomes, doesn’t make for a productive education nation.

Market-based incentives can be used to cultivate greater competition, stimulating the drive for better performance and productivity.

Most school funding goes to paying staff. If this pay were performance-based (particularly in terms of student achievement), it could revolutionise the culture within schools. A renewed focus on performance would flow through to students’ attitudes towards learning and assessment. It’s well documented that highly motivated students, with high expectations set for them, are much likelier to do well.

It’s often said that a country’s education system is a predictor of its future economic prosperity, since human capital is key to national productivity. Last month’s national accounts revealed a persistent, long-term slide in Australia’s labour productivity results, spelling bad news for future economic capacity. It’s no coincidence that productivity has collapsed, as the education system has shirked performance for too long.

The new year is as good a time as any to chart a new policy course. At a national level, the interests of the country and its students must finally be put ahead of the unaccountable, vested interests that have been a dead weight on Australian schooling. For the sake of our future productivity and prosperity, education policy in 2020 needs a jolt of market-based reform — accountability with high expectations, competition, and performance management.

Glenn Fahey is an education research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies and was an expert witness to the Inquiry into Measurement

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