Just weeks before the state is expected to deliver bad news about test results, the U.S. Department of Education has given the state permission to pause for a year in the way it uses the results of the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests.
The PSSA results won’t be used for computing School Performance Profile academic scores — which give school buildings throughout the state a rating of 0 to 107 — nor will they be used in teacher evaluations during the pause, Gov. Tom Wolf announced Tuesday. Without the federal permission, Pennsylvania would have had to calculate the SPPs, which likely would have been lower than those for the prior year, potentially affecting whether teachers were considered proficient and causing image problems for schools.
State officials later this month plan to release school-by-school results, which are expected to show that districts throughout the state have fewer students who are considered proficient or advanced on the PSSA tests in math and English language arts in grades 3-8.
The most recent PSSAs tested students on new standards — known as the Pennsylvania Core Standards and based on the Common Core State Standards. Many view the new standards as more rigorous, including requiring students to learn some skills at earlier grade levels, and the new tests as more difficult, including the level of reading required even for math.
The changes are significant enough that last year’s results can’t be compared with this year’s, said Allison McCarthy, executive director of curriculum, instruction and assessment for Pittsburgh Public Schools.
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Like officials in other districts, Pittsburgh had been expecting lower results. “We know it’s not because our students have changed or the quality of our teachers has changed. We understand it’s because of more rigorous assessments, more rigorous standards,” Ms. McCarthy said.
Statewide, nearly all grade levels showed decreases except fifth-grade English language arts, which compared with reading in 2014, went up 2 percentage points to 62 percent proficient or advanced.
The biggest decrease was in math, where the biggest drop was 43 percentage points in eighth grade. Eighth-grade math fell from 73 percent to 30 percent. Seventh-grade math also took a steep drop of 42 percentage points. Those trends are reflected in the scores of some local districts.
The smallest decrease in math was 24 percentage points in fifth grade, from 67 percent proficient or advanced to 43 percent.
In a news release, state Education Secretary Pedro Rivera said, “While it is critically important to hold our schools and educators accountable for student success, we must take care to do so with indicators that are fair and accurate. This year’s PSSA scores establish the new baseline from which we can most effectively measure student progress in future years.”
School Performance Profile scores won’t be computed for “any school with students in any grade 3 through 8,” according to state Department of Education spokeswoman Nicole Reigelman. So those buildings won’t have SPP scores, which now account for 15 percent of most teachers’ evaluations under state law.
SPP scores will be computed for buildings in which students take the Keystone Exams — secondary-level exams in Algebra 1, biology and literature — because those exams were not subject to the major changes that took place with the PSSA.
The state will continue to use test results to compute student growth.
This would have been the third year for statewide use of SPP, which, while largely dependent on test scores, also takes into account other factors such as graduation rates and attendance. Used for federal accountability, SPP was intended to provide a more comprehensive measure of school performance than a test score alone.
The state’s news release noted the pause is “part of a broader discussion regarding potential revisions to the SPP.” It said the governor has asked the department to see how “the tool could be adjusted to be a more comprehensive measure of school student performance beyond single, high-stakes test performance.”
The federal government granted the pause in its approval of an extension to the state’s waiver from certain requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, formally known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The No Child Left Behind Act called for, among other things, all students to be proficient in math and reading by 2014. Given that no states were nearing the mark and Congress had not updated the law, the U.S. Department of Education began giving flexibility waivers in 2012. So far, 42 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia have been granted flexibility. Pennsylvania is among those that sought a renewal of the flexibility granted earlier. Congress continues to debate how to change the law.
Some local educators were pleased with the pause.
Linda Hippert, executive director of the Allegheny Intermediate Unit, said, “We are very pleased to hear of the waiver and PDE’s commitment to using data correctly. The changing of the standards is not isolated to a specific grade level. Skills are cumulative from one grade level to the next, so therefore it is likely that the greatest effects of the changes are at the higher grade levels.”
Quaker Valley School District superintendent Heidi Ondek said the announcement indicated the state administration “is listening to its constituents.”
In addition to providing for a new baseline to be established, she said the one-year pause will give districts the chance to thoroughly examine the test score data, determine which concepts students struggled with and make changes to curriculum.
Bethel Park superintendent Nancy Aloi Rose said, “Our scores dropped as other schools have, but it was a moral victory to know the governor recognized the unfairness of the situation and took some actions to get relief.”
Ms. Rose said her staff will be reviewing the data and will be in communication with other districts to see if there are common areas in which students fell short.
Test scores were the subject of a public presentation at the education committee meeting of the Plum school board last week, where it was announced that PSSA scores were down markedly from the previous year.
The move, however, did not bring universal approval. Steve Miskin, press secretary for the majority leader of the state House of Representatives, challenged whether the Wolf administration has the legal authority to refrain from calculating an SPP for use in teacher evaluations.
First Published: September 8, 2015, 3:09 p.m.
Updated: September 9, 2015, 3:53 a.m.
