What do the powers-that-be do when students perform badly on reading tests? Why, sometimes they make the test easier.

According to a study by the New York City teachers union (good for it!), the difficulty of a reading test used to judge students across New York State plummeted by as many as six grade levels between 2004 and 2005.

What’s interesting here is the discussion of how this “dumbing down” was measured, for example, by comparing differences in length of passages and complexity of questions.

The director of New York University’s Center for Research on Teaching and Learning, Robert Tobias, calls these latter two indicators “pretty powerful stuff” (although he has some reservations about other of the test’s measures). (The New York Sun)