Aaron Pallas is one of the wisest education scholars in New York, and therefore (as we New Yorkers all believe) in the world.
He consistently brings a fresh perspective to the unfolding drama and spectacle that is now U.S. education.
And he is one of the few academics willing to enter the arena and engage with current events.
That is one of the clear benefits of tenure.
In this post, Pallas says that he predicted--with uncanny accuracy–how proficiency rates would change as a result of the Common Core tests.
He also notes the incomprehensible glee with which Joel Klein and Mayor Bloomberg reacted to the news that only one in five students of color are considered “proficient” after a full decade of their policies.
As he observes, Mayor Bloomberg sees everything on his watch as good news, whether scores go up, stay the same, or go down.
Pallas writes:
Here’s the dirty little secret: no one truly understands the numbers. We are behaving as though the sorting of students into four proficiency categories based on a couple of days of tests tells us something profound about our schools, our teachers and our children. There are many links in the chain of inference that can carry us from those few days in April to claims about the health of our school system or the effectiveness of our teachers. And many of those links have yet to be scrutinized.
Does Mayor Bloomberg understand the numbers? Perhaps he’d care to share with us the percentage of children in each grade who ran out of time and didn’t attempt all of the test items, and the consequences of that for students’ scores. Or how well the pattern of students’ answers fit the complex psychometric models used to estimate a student’s proficiency. Or how precisely a child’s scale score measures his or her performance. Or how many test items had to be discarded because they didn’t work the way they were intended. Or what fraction of the Common Core standards was included on this year’s English and math tests—and what was left out.
These are just some of the factors in the production of the proficiency rates that have been the subject of so much attention. And the properties of the test are just one link in the chain.
Hmmm. When no one understands the numbers, not the Mayor who is in charge of the schools, not the scholars who study the schools, not the State Education Department, no one: What does that mean?
The numbers matter only insofar as they can be used as weapons to coerce teachers and train students for complying with meaningless, though highly stressful, mandates from Above.
Rising test scores = so-called reformer success.
Falling test scores= accuracy of so-called reformer critique of public education.
It’s win-win for the profiteers and their ventriloquist dummies.
What do the numbers mean? They are a tool for corporate disruption of the public schools so as to undermine them, demoralize teachers and parents, confuse students, sow fear and vulnerability which put all constituents on the defensive, and smooth the way for a private takeover of this vast public sector with its enormous assets. Numbers can do that used as a tool of culture war like this.
I guess we don’t have results back yet in NC, but I liked what this cousin of mine in Charlotte (a widower father of 2) has to say (he pulled his daughters out of pubilc school over frustration about CCSS—and actually, he didn’t know what the frustration was caused by at first, but when he described the struggles to me I told him to look up the Common Core); and boy did he. Now he says the following:
“Yes. We are a common core state. The problem is this: The source of funds has moved further and further from the actual consumer. It used to be that a school system relied on local taxes. Schools knew this and worked hard to keep the community (the clients) happy because that’s where the money comes from. As we move to state, and now federal with the common core, sources of funding the consuming parent’s are no longer influencing the schools. The school administrators are chasing big-money funding from the higher up levels of government and the kids/parents have become just a means to to that end. It’s not really even their fault. They have to go where the money is, they can’t just make up new funding sources on their own.
It’s like sending all your money to a bank and the letting every place you shop and every service provider bargain with the bank for the price of the stuff you want/need. The idea of collective bargaining power seems like a good idea, but only if everyone needs the exact same product and service. Once there are more than a handful of homogenous needs, service levels drop to nothing because the bank does not care about service (they aren’t consuming it) just the overall cost. Then some bank executive (read politician) wakes up and realizes they have control over a HUGE sum of money and… well… it all just goes from bad to worse because at every stop up & down the taxation / redistribution chain there is someone taking a cut, a bribe, a whatever. It’s just a big damn mess. Charter schools are being pushed as the answer here, but I am afraid it is really just the other end of the spectrum. Thus I become part of the “evil” group that move their kids to private school and widen the proverbial gap between the haves and have nots. Not because I want to widen the gap, but because I don’t want my child going down with the sinking ship.
In a nutshell, the school system is a broken beast that has found the sweet teat of the federal government which also insulates it from pesky parents that would otherwise “vote” locally with their wallets to get their own child the best education possible. It a nirvana for schools not unlike Cable TV: a near monopoly buying large blocks of entertainment with the collective money of subscribers. Since the profit is made/lost with the huge deals being cut with sports franchises, networks, and movie distribution companies that is where the focus remains. The end consumer, the one actually paying the bill and consuming the service, is just a damn nuisance. One that is dealt with by all kinds of billing rules and polices that are established in governments as “industry regulation” but are in fact just purchased with lobbying expense.”
These are children we are testing.
Not widgets coming off an assembly line.
Yes, there is a difference.
A widget never went to bed and woke up hungry before a test. Widgets do not get bullied or sit on shelves feeling like their maker doesn’t really believe they can or will work. A widget will work whether the operator likes its color or not. All widgets have the same number of parents. Yes, a widget should work and test the same whether in California or Iowa, New Orleans or Philadelphia, in the poorest section of a blighted urban area or an affluent suburb. But widgets do not excel or dream or feel or become adult widgets that then become responsible for other widgets themselves.
But these are children we are testing.
There is nothing fundamentally flawed with testing. We do need to know if we’re teaching the right things the right way.
But there is everything wrong with fundamentally flawed testing.
Fordham pulls in ABT Associates to claim that “for profits” are effective but I don’t think ABT said that at all…. ABT is looking at benefits of preschool; it is not a good comparison because there are not enough in the public sector; day care etc. a lot of the programs are in homes???? Can someone explain to me how they make a link between ABT’s study and the push for “privatization”? quote: “Abt Associates’ Todd Grindal who shares that many pre-K for-profit schools focus on easily observed qualities like cleanliness, safety, and low child-to-staff ratios, which the authors argue have only a vague relationship to education quality. ”
I just can’t put their pieces together in the report that Fordham is citing and I can’t reach the inferences that they are making (Fordham Institute Daily Gadfly)
Here’s something I’ve been curious about but haven’t seen yet, as almost all of the discussion about students’ performance on these tests has been focused on the level-3 “proficiency” threshold: We know that the percentage of students scoring at level 3 or higher has dropped dramatically in NY, but how has the percentage of students scoring at *level 4* or above changed? I don’t think it changed much at all at my daughter’s school (I would have to double check) — for her grade at least, I think it was around 25% both last year and this year.
If the percentage of students scoring 4+ on these exams isn’t moving substantially (and I don’t know whether that’s the case or not), then one thing we might “understand about the numbers” is that there is a certain segment of NYC students who are pretty good at taking standardized tests generally.
I have been interested in that as well. Several posters here have argued that the fifth grade test was actually asking questions that were much more appropriate for eight grade students. If about a quarter of fifth grade students are capable of doing eight grade work successfully, why are they in fifth grade?
I think a major lesson learned from using more challenging exams is that the achievement gap is larger than previous tests showed. The highest performing students are more capable than we thought.
Spoken like a true scientist. Why don’t you get back to us when you know what you’re talking about.
Which part do you disagree with? It could be that the you believe the tests are, in fact, appropriate to the grade level or that a significant fraction of these students did extremely well on these exams.
I think K-12 education needs to think about the loss of control over the pace of education. There are at least two high school freshman in my little middle of the country high school taking calculus this year. How big will “the gap” be when they are seniors?
It means that the emperor has no clothes…
It means we’re all up S__it’s Creek unless we work to end this nonsense.
without a paddle.
Re: “understanding the numbers,” how about the NYC teacher evaluation system? Principals should be required to calculate these ratings on their own, including any VAM component, and write it up, and be sure to show their work. And then have a meeting with the teacher to explain how they arrived at the ratings and what they mean. And then be available to talk to any concerned parents about the same topics. It would be like deposing Lloyd Blankfein about how Goldman Sachs calculates its risk models. The teacher evaluation itself would read like a 300-page prospectus supplement, with 25 pages of disclaimers and a footnote stating that the principal performed “reasonable due diligence” to investigate the accuracy of the statements in the evaluation and has “no actual knowledge” of any inaccuracies therein.
I think as long as the tests are outdated multiple choice garbage we can assume that the numbers are pretty meaningless. I had some thoughts about this and quoted Pallas, who is not only right, he is witty with gravitas: http://alexandramiletta.blogspot.com/2013/08/testing-testing1-2-3.html