Remember when teachers wrote the tests for their students to determine way they knew and what they needed to study again? Remember when testing was feedback intended to inform instruction?
It’s all over!
Jersey Jazzman explains the crazy way that Néw York state decided to grade the tests.
Only a mad psychometricians would come up with a process so convoluted. It’s a triple Lindy. Maybe a quadruple Libdy. It’s dazzling. It’s complex. It is totally insane.
And this mad process will determine whether teachers have a job or get fired, whether a school is closed.
Hats off to John King, our state commissioner, who sacrificed the lives of children and teachers to perfect this nutty scheme.
It may be punitive. It may be costly. It may be wrong.
But it is what John King wants. And whateverJohn King wants, the Regents say yes yes yes. After all, he taught in a charter school for three years.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Why did we willingly sacrifice making children into well-rounded independent creative life long learners on the alter of “College & Career Ready” and have that be evaluated as by a test?
Working with high school students, I see an amazing change in our 10th graders vs. our 9th. And even in the 9th graders at the end of their year from when they first enter.
We do we assume a very particular learning arc for students when the way they grow is in spurts and not a steady upward trend?
That particular leap from 11th to 8th grade and then scaling it back steadily to 7th does not jive with any child cognitive development research I’ve read.
Exactly! Common Core IS NOT developmentally appropriate!
I completely agree with you. In 10th one can actually expect thinking, but hardly before EVEN if the student has read immensely, or so I found. This CC effort to push stuff lower smacks of the unrealism of NCLB. Maybe in math, but that’s not my field, so I don’t know.
Don’t be surprised if corporate “reformers” soon start making huge headways into higher ed, requiring that standardized testing prevail in college courses etc. as well. Neo-liberals have a habit of trying to fix what is not broken in education, as long as that means being able to milk an untapped resource where big bucks can be made, such as standardized tests.
“Reformers” are also likely to blame colleges for the necessity of triple lindy type maneuvers in lower ed, to justify and get the ball rolling on implementing potentially very lucrative higher ed reforms.
When the Nation at Risk first came out I went to a federal official from USOE and asked him why do we have to use mataphors like “Beat the Japs”? Because there was that extrme edge to it. In 1956 when Sputnik was launched there was a good bit of hysteria; my college professor said “we will get money to teach physics ” now and he said “you will learn physicis or you will learn Russian.” We had just come out of the McCarthy era and there was still that “communist under every desk” feeling. But he was a marvelous professor and he was honest ….. I believe it is in the intense Homeland Security fear that is ingrained in society and other people take advantage of the fears of the politicians and poicy makers. Then there are others who see the goal and go along with it for whatever reason but it is still “Beat the Japs” only now it’s beat Finland because then you can beat china etc. Totally wrong headed from my value system.
Absence Of Memory means too many do not recall what it was like when teachers wrote the tests (and related curriculum) for the children they taught. Teachers got paid to assemble the equivalent of FOSS kits which were actually used effectively to learn science. These same teachers ran Teacher Centers out of church basements where “make and take” was an act of resistance against entrenched bureaucracies determined to destroy the same kids now being targeted by the corrosive corporates. These teachers would have sent the Pearsons packing right back to the Plutocrats who purchased them and their “products.”
It would be an easy task to write a computer program to do what Dr. Maria Baldassarre-Hopkins described as her task for determining “cut scores” given the “Ordered Item Books (OIB) where all test questions for that grade were ordered by “experts” from least to most difficult” (I thought they were supposed to be the “experts”)and the “p-values”. ( http://theline.edublogs.org/2013/08/08/new-york-state-cut-scores-from-the-inside/ ). Note that Dr. Maria Baldassarre-Hopkins stated that their final cut scores were a recommendation to King not necessarily the actual cut scores.
Am I the only one that has sat on committees made up of Teachers, Parents, and Administrators that was steered by an Administrator to come up with a proposal that was already determined by the Administration? Yet, it can be said that the results were determined by committee!
No, Tim, the results were determined by John King.
The committees made recommendations to King. The final decisions about cut scores were his and his alone.
Yes, Diane, I agree and John King can claim that HIS decision was BASED on the recommendation of “Educational Experts”!
Tim,
Any time 70% of students fail a test, the “experts” were wrong. Tests are designed to reflect a bell curve. No bell here.
If they are criterion referenced, then most pass, not fail.
I’ve been on such committees. My only hope in sitting on them is that we can actually effect change or otherwise unanimously recommend changes so strongly that some of them might be adopted.
I don’t think I get that sitting out the argument.
However, does it lend an illegitimate sense of “approval” as they can now say they “consulted teachers” and not lie about it without needing to add “and we rejected their ideas”?
They can, and do. However, we as committee members then set the record straight and make it clear to everyone listen that this was NOT what we signed on for and the paper trail makes that undeniable.
Then they’re caught red-handed – it does not look good to seek advisement, waste days of professionals times doing it (and sometimes taxpayers money) to find out that none of the ideas suggested were followed.
If King had suggestions that would have made this a far better measure from trained educators, and then proceeded to make a measure that made children failures against all recommendations, then he needs to be fired, and we should rein in our commissioner’s powers to have to include communal and professional feedback.
This all-knowing all-controlling emperor on high &#** makes me sick.
“Am I the only one that has sat on committees made up of Teachers, Parents, and Administrators that was steered by an Administrator to come up with a proposal that was already determined by the Administration?”
No, been there and done that. It is a modified Delphi method/technique and a quite manipulative one at that. On “professional development” days whenever we get together in groups to “come to consensus” I do my best to throw a monkey wrench into the works as I always know what decision/consensus will be reached before we even start. Most teachers know they are being manipulated and when the moderator actually listens and acts upon what the teachers decide (which generally won’t be what the “true leaders” want) they are quickly eliminated from the “leadership” pool because obviously they couldn’t “lead” the group to the proper consensus.
This is the modus operandi in my school, district, and state. There will always be those willing to take these committee positions- either out of a desire to please, or the naive belief that he or she can make a personal and original contribution to policy.
The only part of teaching that appears to need reform is the part that targeted to schools of “high poverty.” Now, 47 percent of schools are high poverty.
I was surprised to read that one definition of a high-poverty school is where 20 percent or more of the students live in poverty. Now 20 percent of American children live in poverty, so by this measure, if America was one school district, it would be a high poverty district.