jonetta rose barras: Spinning the numbers

It appears District of Columbia education leaders and elected officials, including Mayor Muriel Bowser, have conspired to deliberately mislead the public about the academic achievement of public school students on this year’s standardized tests. They have focused almost exclusively on results at the top two levels.

The Partnership Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) is administered each year to students in third grade through high school. There are five performance levels, with a score of 4 or 5 indicating that a student met or exceeded expectations established for his or her grade level and is on track to be college- or career-ready, according to the Office of the State Superintendent for Education.

Citywide, 33.3 percent of students in traditional and charter public schools who took the English Language Arts (ELA) portion of the exam reached level 4 or 5. Of those who took the math portion of the test, only 29.4 percent reached level 4 or 5.

Do the calculation and don’t let your eyes glaze over: More than 67 percent of students who took the ELA portion of PARCC and nearly 71 percent who took the math did not meet expectations. That stunning failure has been muted or outright ignored.

“We are making real, meaningful advances and our students are rising to meet the high expectations we’ve set for them,” Bowser said at last week’s news conference announcing the test results. Interim DC Public Schools Chancellor Amanda Alexander echoed that sentiment, declaring herself “thrilled” that “for the third consecutive year the DCPS has made steady gains” on the PARCC exams. Scott Pearson, executive director of the charter school board, said the “good news is that public charter school students are continuing to improve.”

They are not suffering some delusional disorder. They are engaged in an orchestrated and deadly game of number-spinning — playing with statistics to cast a bright and glorious light on themselves.

“The PARCC results demonstrate that the investments Mayor Bowser has made over time are working and are a testament to the talented and hardworking educators we have in the District,” said education superintendent Hanseul Kang.

Even the focus on a combined number for levels 4 and 5 exaggerates the truth. Consider that only 7 percent of students who took the English Language Arts (ELA) tests and 5 percent who took the math actually reached the advanced level of 5. The others — 26 percent in ELA and 25 percent in math — were at level 4, which essentially represents proficiency, according to information that appears on the OSSE’s website.

I know, some people reading this are cautioning against placing too much emphasis on standardized test results. Undoubtedly, the PARCC scores are not the complete public education story in DC. They are, however, important and reliable evaluative tools — not just for students but also for those charged with providing them a quality education.

Can our children or this city afford to ignore the fact that 0 percent of the students at Maya Angelou Public Charter School who took the math portion of the PARCC reached level 4 or 5? The same is true at Ballou High School. At Cardozo Education Campus, where the mayor recently held a forum to receive public input on the selection of the next DCPS chancellor, 12 percent of the students reached the desired level in English and only 3 percent in math.

Even some of the city’s signature schools performed miserably: At Ron Brown College Preparatory High School, only 1 percent of test takers reached the 4 or 5 level in math and only 14 percent in English.

One published media report suggested that the District is inching toward closing the gap in English Language Arts between blacks and whites. The data make clear that such a conclusion is nothing less than delusional. The performance difference between those two groups is persistent and disturbing: 82.1 percent of white students who took the ELA this year scored at the 4 or 5 level while only 24.7 percent of black students reached those levels.

The city has spent billions of dollars in the past decade to construct shiny facades. Just this last week, Bowser cut the ribbon on five new schools, including Ward 8’s Lawrence Boone Elementary (formerly called Orr). There, more than 88 percent of the students failed to meet the expectations established in math for their grade level. How is that possible when the District is spending as much as $2 billion on public education?

Thousands of students who have regularly attended school and sat in their assigned classes may have legitimately received their high school diplomas, without being ready for college or a decent, well-paying job. In other words, the District apparently is bolstering a permanent underclass. If elected officials and education leaders don’t recognize that, they can’t be trusted to reform the system, let alone transform it.

jonetta rose barras is a DC-based author and freelance writer. She can be reached at thebarrasreport@gmail.com.