A top adviser to the state Education Department is pushing Albany education officials to scour their test results for possible score inflation.
So far, state officials are not biting.The adviser, Howard Everson, a psychometrician at Fordham University who is chairman of the state's Technical Advisory Group and also advises the federal government on its testing regime, said he is confident that New York's tests are not getting easier, as some have speculated in the wake of large test score gains this year.
But Mr. Everson said he is concerned that the rises in scores could partially reflect an inflation phenomenon, in which practices at the school level make test scores rise regardless of whether true learning has occurred.
Practices can include teaching test material to the exclusion of other topics; "gaming" to get around rules by, for instance, giving students extra time, and outright cheating.
"I feel very comfortable that the tests have not gotten easier," Mr. Everson said in an interview this week. "I don't feel comfortable in saying to you and anybody else there's no such thing as score inflation. There are certain practices that are going on by school leadership; teachers; curriculum specialists — a whole range of folks whose jobs are in some ways on the line."
He added: "So are they doing inappropriate things to raise students' scores? Well, it's likely that some of them are."
Mr. Everson and a colleague, the Harvard education professor Daniel Koretz, are crafting a research project that would attempt to isolate real improvements from inflated results by rewriting tests as "self-auditing assessments." They approached an assistant commissioner of the state's education department, David Abrams, with the idea last year, asking if New York would consider participating.
"David wrote that NYSED was not prepared to participate at that time, in part because of the workload it would impose, but he did not rule out participation at a later date," Mr. Koretz said in an e-mail message yesterday.
A spokesman for the education department, Tom Dunn, said: "We have discussed a study and at this point the researchers are trying to determine a methodology and source of funding."
Asked about score inflation, Mr. Dunn said: "We already check for scoring reliability by reviewing a random sample of tests."
Mr. Everson said he believes real improvements are happening in New York's schools.
Vowing confidence in the tests themselves, he described a long battery of statistical tests that the state and its test maker, CTB/McGraw-Hill, use to ensure that measurements are comparable from year to year.
The confidence contradicts challenges from some education observers.
Writing in City Journal, the Manhattan Institute fellow Sol Stern argued that a main explanation for the improvements is "the degree of rigor (or lack thereof) of the specific state tests."
Other people have argued that blame may lay with test-making companies, which would appear to have an incentive to please its client by facilitating score increases.
Mr. Everson said the incentive is actually the reverse: To keep their contracts, companies take pains to avoid the kind of mistakes that led thousands of SAT takers to receive incorrect scores two years ago.
"The contracts can be null and void on the spot if there's a scoring error," Mr. Everson said. "That will put a testing company out of business."
Yet Mr. Everson said that concerns about score inflation have not been sufficiently addressed. "We don't want people like the mayor and the governor going around saying that the schools are doing very well when it could be inflation," he said.
The city's test score increases are the subject of a new television advertisement that airs this week, paid for by a nonprofit that works to raise donations for Bloomberg administration education projects, the Fund for Public Schools.
Mayor Bloomberg makes an appearance in the ad, touting the system's "progress."
