A new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research says that high-stakes testing leads to an increase in the incarceration rate.
Olesya Baker and Kevin Lang conclude that the use of high-stakes tests as a graduation requirement leads to a lower graduation rate and a higher incarceration rate.
Anthony Cody has an excellent column about this study here. As he puts it, “exit exams boost the school to prison pipeline.”
The recent NAEP Long Term Trend report showed almost no test score gains from 2008-2012, the era in which high-stakes tests were ubiquitous.
Please, someone, remind me why Congress and Secretary Duncan and President Obama and every governor and legislature is obsessed with testing. Is it confusion, incoherence, indifference, ignorance, or something else?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Why the powers that be push for high stakes testing? It’s because of the money. They are pandering to corporations and billionaires to make more money. In their minds, I honestly believe that they think they are doing the right thing. After all if you can have your cake and eat it too, why not? If you can help students and make a buck too, why not?
It is something else. M.O.N.EY.u
I would argue it is something else…PROFITS!
Bingo.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
And the privatizers are all high-fiving over this news as we speak.
Q: Why obsession with testing– Is it confusion, incoherence, indifference, ignorance, or something else?
A: something else: money. see also: http://bit.ly/KlyN4A
With a few exceptions in poverty schools during the few years of “Reading First,” this country has had whole language now called balanced literacy for the past 25 years in the longest pendulum swing I’ve witnessed. I’m in classrooms around the country at least once a week and see the massive “pretend reading. Of course these students are stressed by high stakes tests!
WIth a few exceptions, the early teaching of phonics to the 40 – 60% of students who needed it has never rebounded and the reality is that only 26% of the students who graduate from our high schools can read college level text. In many urban cities no more than 20% can read a newspaper. ANd IT’s NOT THEIR fault. Watch the video on dysteachia at http://www.childrenofthecode.org/Tour/c3/dysteachia.htm Of course these students are stressed by high stakes tests! When you can’t read the words or read too slowly to comprehend these tests stress you out. And when you can’t read, your likelihood of being incarcerated increases exponentially.
And our inability to effectively teach reading extends beyond teaching reading in an age when “students learn best when they teach themselves” still abounds. Read a copy of the new British curriculum at http://bbc.in/15CjJGQ. When I assign student teachers to teach math facts to students in schools (and in many schools the students don’t know them even by middle school), I get the angriest emails you can imagine from teachers who tell me I am old fashioned because teaching math facts is no longer important because of calculators. My explanations about how it is now recognized that learning the language of numbers through math facts is now considered important falls on deaf ears. Of course these students stress out on high stakes tests. They never learned the basics of math or if they did they didn’t have enough practice to manipulate numbers fluently.
When I work in schools where reading achievement increases, teachers always report back to the principal that during the high stakes state test , students were more focused, answered questions seriously, and didn’t have the behavior problems seen in the past during the testing week.
Now if we could just have those high stakes test given the last week or two of school. In every district where I’ve worked I’ve observed what one teacher from the south described when she confided “all teaching in this district stops after the state test.” Given that most of these tests are given in April, that typically leaves the last six weeks of the school year filled with game days, video watching, field trips to baseball games, cut and paste art projects, and a whole lot of “down” time.
I’ll go for ignorance, arrogance, pompousness, and money.
If Arizona is typical of other states, it is the money to be made in private prisons. Members of the governor’s staff associated with private prisons plus enormous sums donated to elect supportive candidates.
It’s something else…INSTITUTIONALIZED RACISM and $$$❗
I’ll go a different direction: No one wants to deal with the real societal issues because they are difficult to discuss (very emotional) and “too hard.” It is much easier to continue doing what we’ve always been doing than it is to search for the root causes of of these issues. I’m somewhat in agreement with Vinh: I think there are those who think they’re doing the right thing (i.e., education = employment = less poverty), but their equating education with high-stakes testing is where their thinking is off-track.
So it’s working …
Good to see the work of economists taken seriously if only when it goes along with the narrative.
TE,
We gotta throw you a bone every now and again!
Either that or it’s that economists only get it right every now and again!
Stopped clocks and all….
Judging the quality of the research by the conclusions reached is dangerous.
“Do you think I can stuff any more caraway seeds in?”
TE,
Not familiar with the caraway seed comment. Please enlighten!
Thanks!
It is a history of science reference from The Mismeasure of Man by Steven Gould. I was referring to Morton’s work. You can read a bit about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man
Thanks, helps make sense of your comment.
And I hope you took my first comment with all the humor intended.
Wonderful Post Diane
Reblogged this on Decolonize Chris! and commented:
If we ever needed proof that a veritable school-to-prison pipeline exists, the evidence cited by this recent study should serve as proof.
Diane, you ask an excellent question, that I find myself wondering about often.
Here is one thought on the subject:
I am always amazed at how unaware many people, who may be close to the classroom, but not actually in it, are about the real issues around teaching. They have ideas and assumptions on the subject that are remarkably wrong. Of the 7 school principals I have worked with over the past 18 years, while teaching in low income, urban schools, six of them fit this description. Only one has actually shown a real and grounded understanding of the dynamics involved with effective instruction. The one significant difference between her and the other six is that she actually taught in the classroom for 8 years before becoming a principal. Unlike many school principals, with limited, or no experience teaching, she is an instructional leader and understands how to meaningfully support teachers. Originally, the term principal was used to describe a school leader who was the “principal” teacher, and thus qualified to run a school. This is not to say that you have to spend years teaching in order to understand education, but it seems to help. Many leaders in education today are like desk bound, paper pushing, war time officers, on a leadership track, who have a mostly theoretical awareness of life on the front and in the trenches.
There is an entire corp of education leaders and policy makers who have practically no classroom experience and who are informed by people who have little or no experience in the field. These people like Gates, Broad, Duncan, Obama, Rhee, Emanuel, Bloomberg and etc. are arguably not in it just for the money, but have this feature, of limited experience, in common. Thus, they become insular in their out look. They imagine themselves to be informed, but in truth, seem unaware of how much they don’t know. I suppose this is a kind of ignorance.
So, in addition to the tremendous pressure that the venture “philanthropists” daily exert to privatize the six hundred and ten billion dollars (or so) of public education funds, there is a great deal of genuine ignorance shaping, and apparently, scuttling public education.
The world seems to run a great deal on how we imagine things are, as opposed to how things actually are.
“This is not to say that you have to spend years teaching in order to understand education, but it seems to help.”
Yes, one does “have to spend years teaching in order to understand education”, minimum seven years. Requirements for becoming a principal should be a minimum of ten years teaching a full time schedule in the class room. And then all the district’s administrators should have to teach at least one class per semester in order to keep up the understanding of the teaching and learning process.
This is crazy. There are a lot of law enforcement out there who understand the implications of K-12 failure and its effect on the criminal justice system. L.A. County Sheriff Leroy Baca is working with other sheriffs nationwide studying this subject. At the last CORE-CA dinner I sat for dinner with Sheriff Baca and he and I had an extended conversation on just this subject. Everyone else at the table just listened. We talked about the pipeline and what happens when they enter his system. How may have mental problems and no education. Presently, Sheriff Baca has 40% of his 18,000 prisoners in 7 hour a day normal education and life skills training. It works. Violence in the jails and those returning is showing a decrease. Through others who work with him on these projects they are introducing to the sheriff the help that installing art in the jails can do with this process as is shown in the hearing book put out by the Joint Committee on Arts in the Jails and how it helps prisoners back to a thoughtful life even if in for a long time. One we listened to had been in for 30 years and as a result of arts in the prison he is now out and will not get into trouble again. It has the long term studies in the book.
So, the bottom line is “If Common Core helps more to go into the criminal justice system why are we doing this?”
Not being a subscriber to the study’s organization, can you tell us if the study found a correlation or a causation?
Alex, I’ll take greed, the will to power and racism for $1,000.
I wish some of you folks would stop with the cries that it’s all about the money–In other words, that anyone with whom you disagree is just mean and venal and out for the buck. It’s far more complicated than that. Public education has been dumbed down for years, as Diane has carefully documented in “Left Back,” and the most victimized have been minority students in inner cities who are oblivious of the dynamics involved. Teachers are victims, too, of the bad educational theories advanced in schools of education that rail against social injustice, but then neglect the core knowledge students need to surmount their current status. The good teachers rise above what they were taught in schools of education and try against the odds to give their students what they need.. But those trapped in inner city schools need the ability to escape, and vouchers and charters can provide that escape for some. But the problems will not be addressed until we address curriculum in the public schools from kindergarten forward along the lines advocated by Hirsch and the Core Knowledge Foundation. The high stakes testing and the “teaching to the test” prompted by NCLB is a natural consequence of the fact that curricula have for too long failed to teach the substantive subject content that the tests measure. If curricula were alligned to the tests, there would be little or no need to teach to them. But how many educators have identified this as a problem? A great article by Roger Shattuck entitled “The Shame of the Schools,” makes this very point.
Shatuck says: “Furthermore, his [i.e. John Dewey’s] conversion to a sequenced, specific curriculum throws light on a complaint often heard today about standardized tests: namely, that tests oblige teachers to teach to the test. But just reflect for a minute. The reason for teaching to the test is not the mandated existence of tests. It is the lamentable absence of a clear curriculum. If there’s no coherent curriculum to teach to and to base tests on, then one has to teach to the test. Here lies the great pedagogical short-circuit and break-down, brought on by the empty promises and dummy documents called “standards.” Without a specific curriculum, there can be no standards.”
Last year, Connecticut bought into the teachers’ unions demands for more money, adding more than $100 million to the state education budget, most of it going to inner city schools. But it will make little ot no difference if curricula are not fixed.
If it was all about the money, the DC schools would be the finest in the nation, and the Kansas City public schools, which doubled educational expenditures per court order, would have improved their performance. But nothing changed because the underlying theories and curricula stayed the same. We have tried spending more money, lowering class sizes, buying more computers, and constructing fancy new buildings. But if what goes inside the classroom doesn’t change, it’s all for naught. Taxpayers cannot be bled forever without results.