Honesty is the best policy

To the editor:

In order for government and public institutions to work there has to be trust in them.

This is rarely achieved by keeping the key parts of the process hidden from public view.

In March almost all of the students in the state of Alaska sat down in front of a computer to be weighed and measured in reading, writing and math using computers, a very public process.

This should have resulted in quicker results to parents and districts, in order to do intervention over the summer or in the next school year.

This is not the case, because this is a new test it has to be calibrated, questions that were missed by all students need to be removed. And then the bar set for cutoff scores indicating levels of proficiency in these areas.

I miss the old days, paper pencil Iowa tests administered in the 1980s were scored and returned before the end of the school year. Parents and teachers could look at the results which included a grade level equivalency and a percentile score of their child from last year’s test and this year’s and decide, do we need to do summer school or enrichment classes, truly a collaborative effort.

Tuesday, the most important part of this year’s testing process will occur behind closed doors. Results will be unavailable to schools until November, seven months after testing ended.

Invited educators and others will look at test items and remove those deemed too hard, and too easy, but more importantly they will set the cut scores. These scores will inform districts and parents if the state of Alaska Department of Education believes their child is proficient, and will be used in teacher evaluations.

Setting the scores should be a simple math problem, one I taught in seventh grade math, the closer the median (middle), mode (most frequently occurring) and median (average) are to the peak of the bell curve, the truer the result. The farther any one of these three is from the others, the more skewed (less true) the result.

I hope the attendees to the scoring meetings take their task seriously and follow one simple rule; if you do not like what the data is telling you, look at changing the system producing the data, do not manipulate the data to raise our students’ achievements.

Be honest with us. Parents, teachers and lawmakers deserve the truth.

David Nees

Anchorage