NJ PARCC English 11 Scores Changes Over A Year: Differences Due to Socioeconomic Factors Minimized by Excluding Elite Students

Eugen G Tarnow  January 4 2017 06:49:41 PM

By Eugen Tarnow, Ph.D.
Avalon Business Systems, Inc.
http://AvalonAnalytics.com

On September 9th, 2015 Commissioner Hespe allowed 11th grade students who were enrolled in AP or IB courses AND took the assessment associated with those courses a “waiver” from the PARCC grade 11 ELA assessment.

The consequences of excluding the elite students from the PARCC test were large and strongly correlated with socioeconomic characteristics, see the plot below.  "A", "B" etc. refer to "District Factor Groups" and the order is low to high socioeconomic characteristics.  



The waiver decreased the scores of high performing schools and increased the scores of low performing schools.  The score differences as a function of socioeconomic characteristics are shown below:



The consequence can be seen the clearest in the graph below that shows the average scores by socioeconomic group for the two years plotted against each other.  The score differences in 2016 are only 44% of the differences in 2015.  It looks as if socioeconomic factors are only 44% of what they were before.



Another way to put it: the F test for socioeconomic characteristics yielded 29 in 2015 but only 14 in 2016.

As always, I reserve the right to be wrong.
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