For the past dozen years, there has been no louder cheerleader for No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and their demand for test-based accountability than the Néw York Times’ editorial board.
Despite the fact that greater test score gains were recorded before the implementation of NCLB than since; despite the finding of the National Research Council that test-based accountability was ineffectual; despite numerous examples of cheating, gaming the system, narrowing the curriculum, and other negative consequences of high-stakes testing, the Times’ editorial board has stubbornly defended this regime of carrots and sticks based on standardized tests.
Even now, in an editorial saying that testing had gone too far and had turned into a “mania,” the Times can’t resist referring to the passage of George W. Bush’s NCLB (based on the non-existent “Texas miracle”), as “a sensible decision.”
It was not. NCLB was a disaster for the quality of education in the United States. Furthermore, it sent the privatization movement into high gear, since “failing” public schools could, under the law, be closed, privatized, handed over to charter operators. We now know that none of these remedies actually works unless low-performing kids are excluded or kicked out, and we know that the overwhelming majority of so-called “failing” schools are schools that enroll mostly black and Hispanic students, many of whom are poor, have disabilities, or don’t speak English. Schools are being closed and privatized because they enroll the neediest students, not because they are “failing.”
Now the Times looks forward to the Common Core and the computerized testing it requires to bring the wonderful progress promised by NCLB.
It is good to see that even the Néw York Times and its education editorial writer Brent Staples recognize that enough is enough. If only they had said so five years ago, before so many schools were unfairly closed based on test scores. If only they would acknowledge that standardized tests mirror advantage and disadvantage. If only they would ask questions about how more rigorous testing will affect the kids who are now struggling with the current tests.
But let us be grateful that after 12 years of NCLB and four years of Race to the Top, the Times’ ardor for high-stakes testing has cooled.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
They also include lies about NCTQ…my comment isn’t posted yet. I asked them to read closely, research and resubmit. I recommended extra time since they don’t actually know what they are talking about. I provided the editors with links to Diane and Mercedes. I encouraged them to learn and think. Notice they don’t mention TFA “training”.
See here:
“This country, by contrast, has an abysmal system of teacher preparation. That point was underscored recently in a harrowing report on teacher education programs from the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and advocacy group. The report found that very few programs meet even basic quality standards: new students are often poorly prepared, and what the schools teach them “often has little relevance to what they need to succeed in the classroom.”
Linda, I didn’t have space to mention all the errors of the editorial. If I had, I would have included its misguided praise for the shabby NCTQ “report”
Don’t worry…..I posted here and on NYT so we are all working together.
I sent my comment to the public editor as it as never posted and they closed comment rather quickly. Thanks.
Ersatz and fast paced, MacDonald’s drive-through style journalism . . . Shame on the Times, which I hardly ever read after having found The Guardian.
Like you must have, I read with delight what I saw as an editorial as a moving away from a previous position without seeming to, still claiming that NCLB was a good and needed thing, but that, ahem, times have changed. I discount that defense of the indefensible and simply cheer. The Times hasn’t the strength of character to do what you have done, which is to admit that a past position was wrong. But it has changed its view, nonetheless.
And in less than 24 hours, they decided to close comments.
Notice which ones they flag vs. the readers’ choices.
The New York Times proudly joins Mississippi in the “Late to the Party Hall of Fame”.
MS was recognized for its recent abolishment of slavery http://www.blackenterprise.com/news/mississippi-last-state-slavery-13th-amendment-ratified/
The NY Times for finally noting that “the country needs to reconsider its obsession with testing, which can make education worse, not better.”
Sadly though, it is clear from the rest of the editorial that the Times is still guzzling (perhaps choking?) down ed reformer Kool-Aid.
The Times still can’t think outside the bubble. Nowhere does it make the case for better assessment–portfolio and performance-based. No, it’s similar testing with some changes in implementation.
Also, the inconvenient impact that poverty and other societal inequities have on achievement and life chances escape comment. What elephant?!
Great comment, Fred.
“Performance based” is a slippery and dangerous term. Consider, for example, the edTPA, that claims to be a performance based assessment of teachers. It is a wolf in sheep’s high-stakes-standardized clothing. Beware.
Ah…the edTPA…another product developed in conjunction with Pearson. A wolf in sheep’s clothing indeed! Heartily disappointed over the NYT’s need to cite NCTQ study as a reliable source of information!
Please excuse the overly long posting.
What happens when Arne Duncan’s recent incoherent broadsides directed at the 2013 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association comes to the attention of the editorial board of the New York Times?
Arne Duncan: “State assessments in mathematics and English often fail to capture the full spectrum of what students know and can do. Students, parents, and educators know there is much more to a sound education than picking the right answer on a multiple choice question.
Many current state assessments tend to focus on easy-to-measure concepts and fill-in-the-bubble answers. Results come back months later, usually after the end of the school year, when their instructional usefulness has expired.
And today’s assessments certainly don’t measures qualities of great teaching that we know make a difference—things like classroom management, teamwork, collaboration, and individualized instruction. They don’t measure the invaluable ability to inspire a love of learning.
Most of the assessment done in schools today is after the fact. Some schools have an almost obsessive culture around testing, and that hurts their most vulnerable learners and narrows the curriculum. It’s heartbreaking to hear a child identify himself as “below basic” or “I’m a one out of four.””
Link: http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/choosing-right-battles-remarks-and-conversation
NYT: “Testing did spur some progress in student performance. But it has become clear to us over time that testing was being overemphasized — and misused — in schools that were substituting test preparation for instruction. Even though test-driven reforms were helpful in the beginning, it is now clear that they will never bring this country’s schools up to par with those of the high-performing nations that have left us far behind in math, science and even literacy instruction.
Congress required the states to give annual math and reading tests in grades three through eight (and once in high school) as a way of ensuring that students were making progress and that minority children were being fairly educated. Schools that did not meet performance targets for two years were labeled as needing improvement and subjected to sanctions. Fearing that they would be labeled poor performers, schools and districts — especially in low-income areas — rolled out a relentless series of “diagnostic” tests that were actually practice rounds for the high-stakes exams to come.”
Read the full texts of both the NYTimes editorial and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s speech. Leave aside the glaring and contradictory incoherences for a moment and focus on one thing:
They are both responding to criticism they can no longer ignore!
Another recent sign was that Secretary Duncan felt compelled to respond in some fashion to an open letter by Diane Ravitch and Randi Weingarten.
The tide, slowly albeit painfully, is turning.
🙂
Thank you for writing and linking for us to read. You always give me hope. 🙂
Linda: ditto.
“Correction does much, but encouragement does more.” [Goethe]
Keep posting. I read them all.
🙂
The NY Times is a piece of corporate machinery. At this point, one has to really cherry pick the infrequently progressive, populist writing they used to offer as a staple.
The editorial board is by far the worst in years. . . .
For as long as I have been a reader of it, the New York Times has been the cautiously liberal voice of America’s elite, ever-faithful, despite criticism, to prevailing political and economic power. Its current, belated reservations regarding high-stakes testing are not so far removed from its “evolution” on issues such as the Vietnam war, African American civil rights, and marriage equality. That being said, an assessment must be made of its decision to criticize, however tamely, the results of high stakes testing. While we should certainly welcome it as an indication that an influential force is making concessions to criticisms it cannot ignore, we should be careful. Is this an attempt to co-opt our views and shore up existing policies or can we use this concession to advance the alternatives we believe in? Time and intelligent maneuvering on our part will tell.
Meaning what?
Meaning it is important to discern whether the nyt is making insignificant challenges to high stakes testing, or whether they are actually moving in the direction far enough and fast enough to have their influence be a positive thing. At least that is what it seemed to mean to me.
They play it safe.
“Blood-letting” continued to be used as a preferred treatment for a century or more despite results.
The standardized tests results are most useful in determining trends, and if translated correctly, these results can help educators adjust curriculum and/or instructional strategies. But these test results are antiquated in relation to tracking student learning. Students are not the same day to day, week to week, semester to semester. Their lives are not prescribed in flat symbols, rather students live lives of constant change as they evolve, grow, and learn.
As the Rosetta Stone was critical to understanding texts of the Ancient World, our standardized tests are the “ancient texts” of contemporary education. Standardized tests cannot be the only measurement the public gets to interpret on student and school performance since the results are limited as snapshots of the past. Student and school performance is best understood in looking at the timely combination of all streams of data. To do otherwise is to look at snapshots that are narrow, unchangeable, and, like many of those photos snapped in the British Museum, overexposed.
Full post: http://usedbooksinclass.com/2013/07/21/educations-ancient-texts-the-rosetta-stone-and-standardized-test-data/