D.C. officials" choice allowed student tests to show gains The four-point gains D.C. public school students achieved citywide on the most recent annual math and reading tests were acclaimed as historic, as more evidence that the city's approach to improving schools is working. But the math gains officials reported were the result of a quiet decision to score the tests in a way that yielded higher scores even though D.C. students got far fewer math questions correct than in the year before. The decision was made after D.C. teachers recommended a new grading scale - which would have held students to higher standards on tougher math tests - and after officials reviewed projections that the new scale would result in a significant decline in math proficiency rates. Instead, city officials chose to discard the new grading approach and hold students to a level of difficulty similar to previous years," according to city officials as well as e-mails and documents obtained by The Washington Post. The decision - made after students took the tests in April and May and about six weeks before city officials announced the results at a celebratory news conference in July - resulted in the largest overall testing improvement since 2008. Experts said that the District's approach is generally a reasonable one but that it does not track with those of other jurisdictions that have made recent high-profile transitions to tougher tests, including New York, Kentucky and Virginia. In those states, more-difficult tests and tougher scoring resulted in students" scores immediately plummeting. Officials in those states presented the lower scores as a temporary price that must be paid to spur higher expectations and more rigorous instruction. In the District, the discarded grading scale would have yielded a mixed picture of achievement on the 2013 tests. The reading proficiency rate would have been 6.6 points higher than was reported in 2012, but math would have been 3.6 points lower. The choice that D.C. officials faced suggests that proficiency rates - which are used to make employment and pay decisions for teachers and principals and to judge the city's efforts to improve public education - are as much a product of policymakers" decisions as they are of student performance. Proficiency is not an immutable thing. Proficiency is a judgment call, and there's a lot of things that go into making that judgment call," said Charlene Rivera, an education research professor at George Washington University. Rivera serves on the technical advisory committee for city officials who administer the test but was not involved in the decision. Officials at the District's Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) - the agency responsible for administering exams for the city's traditional public and public charter schools - said they decided not to adopt the teacher-recommended grading scale because it was important to continue comparing student performance consistently from year to year. The OSSE made an unwritten commitment years ago to maintain that trend line as a way to judge progress and the effectiveness of reform efforts, said Jeffrey Noel, who oversees testing at the agency. Adopting a new grading scale for the city's test program - known as the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System, or D.C. CAS - would have made such comparisons complicated or impossible, disrupting teacher evaluations, charter school rankings and other accountability systems, he said.