New York State is set to release its annual testing data today. Throughout the state, and especially in New York City, we will hear a lot about changes in school and district proficiency rates. The rates themselves have advantages – they are easy to understand, comparable across grades and reflect a standards-based goal. But they also suffer severe weaknesses, such as their sensitivity to where the bar is set and the fact that proficiency rates and the actual scores upon which they’re based can paint very different pictures of student performance, both in a given year as well as over time. I’ve discussed this latter issue before in the NYC context (and elsewhere), but I’d like to revisit it quickly.
Proficiency rates can only tell you how many students scored above a certain line; they are completely uninformative as to how far above or below that line the scores might be. Consider a hypothetical example: A student who is rated as proficient in year one might make large gains in his or her score in year two, but this would not be reflected in the proficiency rate for his or her school – in both years, the student would just be coded as “proficient” (the same goes for large decreases that do not “cross the line”). As a result, across a group of students, the average score could go up or down while proficiency rates remained flat or moved in the opposite direction. Things are even messier when data are cross-sectional (as public data lmost always are), since you’re comparing two different groups of students (see this very recent NYC IBO report).
Let’s take a rough look at how frequently rates and scores diverge in New York City.