More Problems With DCPS Curriculum and DC-CAS

Upon taking a closer look at the DCPS standards and the DC-CAS, I submit that they should probably both be ignored by any teacher who actually wants to do right by students. If you are doing a good job teaching the things that students should actually know, it won’t make much difference on their DC-CAS scores. Conversely, if you teach to the DC-CAS, you are short-changing your students.

Case in point: Standards in Geometry and Algebra 1 ostensibly covered on the 10th grade DC-CAS. Recall that all 10th graders at this point in DCPS have supposedly finished and passed Algebra 1, and are enrolled in at least Geometry by 10th grade.

I have prepared a little chart giving the standards (or learning objectives) for Geometry: the ones listed in the DCPS list of learning standards, and the number of questions that I found on the page of released DC-CAS questions that supposedly address that standard. There is almost no correlation at all. In fact, if you threw a dart at the topics and chose them randomly, you would do a better job than the test-writing company did.