Oklahoma failed students with lowered state test scores
11 mins read

Oklahoma failed students with lowered state test scores

Kaneb0

Nuria Martinez-Keel
| Oklahoma Voice

Jennie Scott cried tears of joy when she saw her students’ latest state test results.

Her fifth graders appeared to have made great strides on the math and English language arts state tests they took this spring. The public school where she works bought more materials from learning programs it believed had been very successful in driving up test scores.

“We celebrated at the school board meeting,” Scott said. “We made a whole lot of assumptions and celebrations based on data that now seems like it doesn’t mean what we thought.”

Scott said she and her colleagues still expect their newly acquired program to be effective, but the 2024 test results are not as firm a basis for that belief as she originally hoped.

After parents and schools received student test results showing dramatic increases across the country, media reports revealed that Oklahoma had quietly lowered the bar for the performance required to make a proficient score, a concept known as reducing the average score.

The Oklahoma State Department of Education had not publicly acknowledged the significant drop in score change until the news media, including the Oklahoma Voice, revealed it.

In the months since, teachers and parents said the education department’s handling of the test results eroded their confidence in the agency and in state testing itself. States that similarly lowered the average score has faced national criticismalso.

The License Education Department has since obtained more additional information showing that the increase in test scores is the product of lowered expectations. In late October, the agency released records comparing the 2024 score with the equivalent score in 2023.

The comparisons, called concordance tables, show that the lowest grade for 2024 would have been considered below grade performance in 2023.

State Superintendent of Schools Ryan Walters, who heads the agency, has tried to distance his administration from the drop in scores.

Walters’ spokesman, Dan Isett, said resetting proficiency goals is routine for many states, including Oklahoma. That process hasn’t changed, he said.

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“The state’s high expectations for students are reflected in Oklahoma’s academic standards, developed through a rigorous process that includes dozens of Oklahoma educators across multiple disciplines,” Isett said. “Similarly, cut scores are measured by Oklahoma teachers and ultimately approved by the (Educational Quality and Accountability Commission), not the (Education Department).”

Education department officials, with a hired test provider and assessment experts, convened and supervised the groups of Oklahoma teachers who developed the new expectations. Agency officials then presented the resulting average scores to the state’s Commission on Educational Quality and Accountability, which approved them in July.

The commission will conduct a study of the scoring average process to compare Oklahoma’s performance expectations with other states, said Megan Oftedal, executive director of the Office of Educational Quality and Accountability. The commissioners can then reset the average score if they want, she said.

Jeb Bush: Lowering expectations is ‘just wrong’

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, now an education policy advocate, said in Oklahoma City last week that public schools must be held to high standards when defining math and reading skills.

Lowering those standards by lowering scores is a disservice to students and only masks a failing school system, Bush said at a recent national summit of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a think tank he founded.

When a state labels a majority of its students as proficient but national tests show only a minority performing on grade level, Bush said “you have to call bulls—-.”

“It’s just wrong,” Bush said in the summit’s keynote speech. “If everybody is above average, nobody is. That’s kind of where we are in some of these states.”

Setting high proficiency standards ensures students are ready for college or a career, said Christy Hovanetz, a senior policy fellow at the Bush Foundation, also known as ExcelinEd.

Scores below a proficient level on state tests send a clear signal to parents that their child needs more help and resources, even if the student has earned A’s and B’s in classwork, Hovanetz told the Oklahoma Voice.

“If we’re not honest with kids in elementary and high school about how they’re performing, it’s going to work its way into our finances later,” she said.

State registers show reduced average scores increased skill levels

Oklahoma’s 2024 test results showed 51% of third graders scored at least a proficient grade in English language arts.

Only 28% — similar to last year’s performance — would have been considered proficient or higher had the average scores not changed, according to internal Department of Education documents obtained by Oklahoma Voice from a source involved in the testing process.

Comparisons of the 2024 and 2023 scoring scales show that students who met the minimum measure of English proficiency this year would have been considered reading well below their grade level had the performance expectations not changed.

On third-grade English tests, the performance needed to earn a proficiency score of 300 would have earned a score of 283 the previous year, data show. That would have dropped a student well into the basic category, which is defined as having only partial mastery of year-level skills.

English scores in all tested age groups, grades 3-8, showed similar deviations.

Eighth-grade English scores had the largest gap, 18 points, between a proficient score in 2024 and what would have been required to reach the same proficient benchmark in previous years. The sixth scale had the smallest gap for English with a difference of 11 points.

The math proficiency score also declined, but the difference from year to year was much more limited than in English language arts.

Scott, an Oklahoma teacher, said she believes it was appropriate to change the average score, but the lack of transparency from the state Department of Education was a breach of trust.

Opinion: Oklahoma schools won’t get better until Walters OSDE goes in a different direction

Oklahoma’s previous scoring system had some of the highest standards in the country for students to achieve proficiency. Scott said some of her students would perform well on reading assessments throughout the school year but struggled to reach the high level on spring tests.

“It seemed like our scores were too difficult so I’m fully convinced they should be re-evaluated, but not telling us means we’re making comparisons we can’t make,” Scott said. “We would not have used this data in all the ways we currently use it if we had known these changes had been made.”

States traditionally announce score changes well in advance so families and districts know the new scores aren’t comparable to past years, says ExcelinEd’s Hovanetz.

Once districts and families receive their scores, she said there is usually a “definitive line drawn to show parents and the public that this is different.”

Senate Minority Leader Julia Kirt, D-Oklahoma City, said the Department of Education failed to communicate the change and it had a direct impact on her daughter’s school experience.

Kirt has always been skeptical of state testing, she said, but she was “shocked and delighted” when her daughter made great strides in her seventh-grade scores. Her daughter, who attends Oklahoma City Public Schools, has dyslexia so standardized testing is a challenge.

“We always knew she was brilliant, but we knew multiple-choice tests wouldn’t show that,” Kirt said.

Previously, her daughter spent an optional class period in a study hall to give her more time to complete schoolwork and tests. This year, Kirt said, the family chose to forgo the study hall period and enroll their child in a full selection of electives, believing she had made significant academic progress.

It’s hard to say whether the lowered GPA would have led to a different decision, Kirt said, but her family “wouldn’t have been as confident in making that change.”

She was critical of both the new scoring method and the state’s failure to announce it.

“Don’t change things midstream on our kids when we’re trying to get a sense of where they are and how they’re doing,” Kirt said. “Don’t tell us it’s a diagnostic tool and then change it in the middle of the diagnosis.”

Schools are looking for more reliable tests

Oklahoma school leaders say the scoring change further reduced the usefulness of state tests they already found less useful than other assessments.

Many districts purchase benchmark tests for students to take multiple times during the school year. More frequent testing provides an updated look at student learning progress.

These are more useful than a once-a-year state test whose results don’t come out until the school year is long over, said Shannon Woodson, assistant director of curriculum and instruction at Moore Public Schools.

“It really gives us a more consistent look at where our students are when they start school in August and where they are when they leave us at the end of May,” Woodson said. “So data is very, very important, but we don’t put a lot of weight on state test data.”

Indiana is piloting a new version of its statewide assessments to test students three times a year, said Katie Jenner, the state’s top education official. She said 1,700 schools in Indiana signed up for the pilot.

Testing at the beginning, middle and end of the school year can better support teachers, track student progress and keep families “fully in the loop,” Jenner said.

In doing so, she said Indiana maintains high grade point averages that are comparable to strict national expectations found on the nation’s report cards. Oklahoma’s previous average scores also mirrored national test standards, but the state deviated from that this year.

“We don’t talk a lot about the high expectations,” Jenner said. “We’re talking more about how we best leverage assessment and accountability to not be (a) judgment zone, but to really inform the parent and family and school leaders about how we can better move the needle for kids.”

Oklahoma Voice is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. The Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein with questions: [email protected]. Follow the Oklahoma Voice on Facebook and Chirp.

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