Oklahoma education leaders proposed that the state should invalidate the state tests because of computer breakdowns.
“The Oklahoma Education Association stated in a release on their website that CTB/McGraw-Hill was “grossly deficient in its ability to meet the needs of Oklahoma schools and students.” This was after schools reported numerous issues with standardized tests this past spring.”
Will State Superintendent Janet Barresi have the courage to do what Indiana’s Glenda Ritz did? Ritz is suing CTB/McGraw-Hill because of the computer glitches that marred state testing.
Remember the days when teachers wrote their own tests, knowing what their students had been taught? Remember when teachers were trusted as professionals? Now, we put our faith in big corporations and their computers. Better to put our faith in well-prepared professionals.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Please look into Superintendent Barresi’s treatment of the Moore teachers and Moore Schools since the tornado. Courage may not be in the cards. Unless Jeb Bush and the Kochs say it’s ok.
Some NYC Regents exams have yet to be marked. Others were lost. Some marks made absolutely no sense to the teachers that know the students. Will Mayor Bloomberg admit that the 9.6 million dollar contract with CTB/McGraw Hill to grade exams was an error and invalidate the Living Environment, Global History and US History results they botched?
How many children in NYC will spend their summer vacation in summer school, only to undergo more test prep to take more unreliable tests? How many will be retained because of a punative system that bases their promotion on this one single measure? And now teachers will be assessed and schools graded via an abusive, destructive, mismanaged and misguided system while millions of public dollars are raided from childrens’ overcrowded classrooms and gifted to corporations. All this in the name of helping children succeed? I think not, and wonder where is the collective outrage and mass movement to pull on stop this runaway train that carries our children?
“. . . proposed that the state should invalidate the state tests because of computer breakdowns.”
Maybe, just maybe, NAH, NO DOUBT that the state shouldn’t even be in the business of mandating standardized tests since the whole process of developing “standards” and the tests that supposedly “measure” those standards is so rife with error to make the whole process COMPLETELY INVALID to begin with. Until ALL educators read and understand the implications of the most important educational policy analysis in the last 50 years, Noel Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700 , public education will continue to be plagued with the mental masturbation that is standardized testing. We attack each ant as it gets into our house but do nothing to destroy the nest from which the ants come-INSANITY DEFINED!
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms shit-in shit out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “something” which supposedly is specified by the test maker but the whole process is so error ridden that any conclusions drawn are invalid. The test supposedly measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
When money is to be made by corporations off the backs of our students and teachers, the corps. really don’t care about their lousy products. After all, $$$$$$ trumps student learning. I was asked by a corporation, “Are you able to let a product out the door that is not perfect, but instead MEETS deadlines?” OY! These corporate folks were NOT talking about a cheap toy.
Last year, the computer ate my 5th grade son’s state writing test, which had to be keyed into the computer and took 90 minutes. Several of his classmates were also affected. They made them do it all AGAIN! This year, we opted him and his older brother out of the testing.
“Remember the days when teachers wrote their own tests, knowing what their students had been taught? Remember when teachers were trusted as professionals? Now, we put our faith in big corporations and their computers. Better to put our faith in well-prepared professionals.”
Yes. Yes. Yes. Thank you, Diane!