A Pennsylvania School Report Card

The conservative Commonwealth Foundation assesses the PSSA and Pennsylvania student performance.

I see a lot of the Stop the School thinking in this report. That doesn't make it bad. It's nice to know where the mindset comes from.

It's also not meant to be another opportunity to cry wolf about the failures of the Morrisville school district. Feel free to address the tax inequities and failures of state testing where they belong: Harrisburg. Don't penalize Morrisville and its students and residents.

A Pennsylvania School Report Card: How the Commonwealth’s Public Schools Stack Up to the Rest of the Nation
Author: David V. Anderson

Executive Summary

Politicians and school officials frequently point to student performance on state tests as a primary measure of the quality of public education. According to the Pennsylvania Department of Education, the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) “is a standards based criterion-referenced assessment used to measure a student’s attainment of the academic standards while also determining the degree to which school programs enable students to attain proficiency of the standards.”

Unfortunately, exams such as the PSSA fail to adequately inform parents, teachers, and the taxpaying public about the quality of their schools. Indeed, a comparison between Pennsylvania’s achievement test results with those reported by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) shows that the PSSA significantly inflates the numbers of public school pupils who are deemed to be performing at or above grade level.

With few exceptions, schools are engaged in massive social promotion of children who are not academically proficient. Even the very best schools promote upwards of 10% of their children to levels for which they are not prepared. In the worst schools, more than 95% are improperly promoted, based on the NAEP standard of proficiency.

The PSSA reports, on average, 1.82 times the percentage of students “proficient” in reading and math as does the NAEP. With an 82% test inflation, Pennsylvania falls just below the median of the 50 states test standards. Pennsylvania’s reported proficiencies seem to foster a complacent attitude among stakeholders in Pennsylvania’s public schools. Were more accurate comparisons available, parents, school officials, politicians, and taxpayers might be more alarmed and seek stronger remedies. In cases where the proficiencies reported by the PSSA are in the 80% to 90% range, they are seen as a matter of pride, yet the equivalent NAEP scale proficiencies—a range of 50% to 60% proficient—are troubling.

This policy brief used a mapping procedure to convert PSSA test results into ones consistent with the NAEP. This provides stakeholders with more realistic performance results. They are, however, also more alarming.