The roiling controversy about the legitimacy of Florida’s testing regime is growing by the day.
Many school boards have passed their version of the Texas anti-high-stakes testing resolution.
FAIRTest says that Florida may be the worst “misuser” of testing of any state in the nation. Students spend 38-40 days each year preparing to take tests and taking tests. That is a bit more than 20 percent of the school year. What reasonable person would want their child to spend 20 percent of his or her school life on testing? That time should be reallocated to instruction, to physical education, to art and singing and play, to activities that stimulate the mind and body, not to the arcane skill of bubble guessing.
When the Florida School Boards Association passed their own resolution and voiced their disapproval of the state’s obsession with testing, State Commissioner Gerard Robinson accused them of giving up “hope.” Somehow, he suggested, they were giving up on the children.
This is such errant nonsense that one hardly knows where to begin or when to stop sputtering. The children of Florida don’t get “hope” by taking more tests and spending more time preparing to take tests. The FCAT mania is solely for the benefit of the adults, who parade around the country boasting of the test scores that “they” increased by turning up the pressure on children and teachers.
Commissioner Robinson should take the Florida high school tests and publish his scores.
You gotta wonder if these people even care about children.
The good news, as blogger Coach Sikes predicts, is that public confidence in the accountability system is rapidly declining. He says it is near collapse. I hope he is right.
The idea of giving letter grades to schools is absurd. Schools are complex institutions. They do some things well, some things poorly. A letter grade cannot capture their quality or their challenges. And the whole testing enterprise is highly political. The passing score is set by the State Department of Education, which works for the governor. The standards are politically derived, not based on some objective scientific measure.
The sooner the public realizes this, the sooner this whole child-abusing structure should collapse. And good riddance!
Once the debris is cleared away, Florida can begin to improve its public education system and aim to make it good for all children.
Oklahoma, in theory, will follow Florida and other states down the A-F Report Card path. I doubt the State Department can get the data right in time to release the report cards, but we’ll see. In any case, I’m sure it will be an abject disaster just like Florida.
Glad to see giving letter grades is seen as ridiculous. Under Bloomberg NYC has been giving schools letter grades for years. Some schools were given high grades by NYC while NYS test results showed just the opposite and vice versa.
Bloomberg copied Jeb Bush when he gave letter grades
An absurd idea wherever applied
Imagine if your child came home from school with a report card and all it contained was a single letter, with explanations.
Parents would be furious
Diane Ravitch
“The idea of giving letter grades to schools is absurd. Schools are complex institutions. They do some things well, some things poorly. A letter grade cannot capture their quality or their challenges.”
Let’s change the wording a little: “The idea of giving letter grades to STUDENTS is absurd. STUDENTS are complex INDIVIDUALS. They do some things well, some things poorly. A letter grade cannot capture their quality or their challenges.”
“Imagine if your child came home from school with a report card and all it contained was a single letter, with explanations.”
That already happens now when the letter grade is converted to “points” and the a “grade point average” (GPA) is assigned to the student’s immeasurably complex learning. And then we “rank” them. I’m glad I never was at the bottom of those rankings-wouldn’t it be great to know that you’re dead last in GPA! Why it’d probably just make one want to go back and try harder, not!!
And schools Bloomberg chose to close had gains in test scores and schools facing closures didn’t fare any worse than the ones that the city saved. (GothamSchools)
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/turnaround-bronx-school-boasts-gains-state-exams-big-drops-math-english-scores-article-1.1117017
http://gothamschools.org/2012/07/18/seven-takeaways-from-a-closer-look-at-the-state-test-scores/
So maybe the emperor doesn’t really know what he is doing. They always seem to be making it up as they go along. Spin and then spin for the spin.
I just feel sorry for all of the children that have to endure this madness. We need to make it up to them somehow.
“The idea of giving letter grades to schools is absurd. Schools are complex institutions. They do some things well, some things poorly. A letter grade cannot capture their quality or their challenges.”
same is true for the learner, no?
even more absurd, because we are now talking about the abuse of the human spirit – not a building or institution.
perhaps we stop measuring learning.
Imagine if your child comes home from school with a report card that has only one letter on it. And she says, either proudly or with embarrassment, I am a A student or I am a D student. Isn’t that stupid? The letter may represent one test, but surely there is more to school than that one test.
Yes it is stupid.
And you have committed (you’re not alone, almost everyone does this) one of the many errors that Wilson points out, that of a logical attachment error. To attach the assessment, whether a grade, rubric score or even a narrative one, onto the student, to name the student as an “A” student or an “F” student or any other “label” confuses the assessment of the interaction of the student with whatever assessment event, test, performance, writing, drawing, singing, etc. . . with a “quality” of the student. It does not logically hold that the assessment of the event is an assessment of the individual and therefore cannot be used to make a statement about the student.
Attachment errors are, unfortunately a daily occurrence, are so socially embedded into the teaching and learning process that is public education that to question the pinning of a label onto the student as a characteristic of the student is to be considered outside the realm of acceptable discourse and is viewed as blasphemous (not to mention the looks one gets when one brings up these attachment errors).
To put it a little more simply, the testing/assessment event is not the student and therefore the student can’t logically be labelled with a label that should be pinned on the event.
FL just released the list of the ‘100 worst elementary schools in FL’ based on test scores. We have a few in our county. Surprise, they are all at least 90% free and reduced lunch. Now these schools are required to add an hour a day of reading instruction to the school day. Did the state allocate money for this? Of course not. So districts are scrambling trying to figure out how to pay teachers for an additional hour, how to transport those children on a different schedule from the rest of the district, what reading instruction they will use. And of course that doesn’t address the question of why the students in those schools who are on grade level now have to endure an extra hour of remediation.
FL also just released this year’s school grades. This year the state changed the cut scores for the tests, ensuring there would be lower grades. They also increased the difficulty of the tests. In March or so, the DOE decided to make a one year only rule that no school would fall more than one grade level this year. This was to avoid the spectacle of thousands of schools becoming D’s and F’s. So now we have real grades and fake grades. A school that was an A last year and should have been a C this year based on the number of points the school earned in the convoluted algorithm, would actually be a B, but a B with an asterik (B*). Sort of like Roger Maris’ home run record. However, these * schools are being treated as if they actually were the lower grade, being put on priority lists, getting called into superintendent’s offices. So one has to ask, what was the purpose of the fake grades? There was only one purpose: to fool the public. The public would have been outraged at the drastic change in school grades. That, coupled with the fiasco with the writing test grades (because of a new scoring system, almost all schools would have fallen about 50%, so the state lowered the cut score), shows the games being played with FL’s testing system. And the children and teachers are paying the price. The public needs to know exactly what is going on.
Letter grades in Louisiana public schools as well. Will they be given to schools receiving vouchers? To be announced! But, I doubt it.
Thank you once again for pointing out that Florida has been draining the creative spirit and joy in learning from our children. I too hope your source is correct about the ‘collapse’ of this ludicrous system!