State guts its test of reading, union charges

The difficulty of a reading test used to judge students across New York State dropped by as many as six grade levels between 2004 and 2005, according to an internal study by the New York City teachers union.

The study, written in March 2006 by the United Federation of Teachers, found that passages in the 2005 test hovered around third- and fourth-grade reading levels, down from a ninth-grade level in 2004. It also found that the 2004 test was characterized by longer passages, smaller print, crammed text, and more complex questions, such as asking a student to make an inference. Despite this apparent drop in difficulty, however, the number of correct answers needed to pass — known as the “cut score” — was just slightly higher in 2005 than in 2004.

This article appears in The New York Sun.