Ohio and Washington State shredding cross-state Common Core test comparability

Education Week reports in “One Set of PARCC Test Results, Two Different Descriptions in Ohio” that Ohio’s state education department just decided to use its own scoring scale on the Common Core aligned PARCC tests. The impact will be enormous. EdWeek says that in Ohio:

“…on the 4th grade English/language arts exam in PARCC, only 37 percent of students met or exceeded PARCC's expectations for performance on the exam. Yet Ohio will report that 69 percent of students were proficient or better on the test.”

That gross inflation is going to make a lot of parents in Ohio feel good. However, this decimates a major Common Core selling point that using common national standards would lead to each state’s own assessments producing scores that could be directly compared to the other states’ assessment results.

Ohio’s action makes it abundantly clear that this Common Core promise is on the rocks, but Ohio isn’t the only state monkeying with supposedly common testing from Common Core. Washington State, which is a member of the other new Common Core test consortium, the SBAC, says it won’t use the SBAC’s own grading scales to determine who graduates from high school, either.

Supposedly common tests with uncommon scoring -- it’s a major Common Core fail!