Art teacher Jen Scott entered a painting in a contest.
It shows New York State Commissioner looming happily over children who are answering multiple-choice questions.
If you like the painting, please vote for her here. See her piece here.
The contest ends tonight at midnight.
A Medina High School art teacher is seeking online votes in the second annual Vision Art Awards, in which she has entered a painting protesting the state-mandated standardized testing.
Vision Art Awards, sponsored by 464 Gallery at 464 Amherst St., Buffalo, seeks to support, encourage and celebrate the work of local and regional artists through a format that levels the playing field between emerging and established artists, said art teacher Jen Scott.
Scott’s oil painting titled “An Educational Experiment Engineered for Failure” shows the New York State Education Commissioner John King smiling through a classroom’s windows, while students are struggling with the influx of standardized testing.
“This painting really protests the over-reliance on standardized tests and how these tests focus so narrowly on reading and math skills,” Scott said. “Non-standard thinkers, like my son Matt, are penalized through these tests.”
Soon most states, including New York, will mandate so-called high-stakes tests in many subjects at several grade levels, Scott said.
She shared a statement from Howard Gardner, professor of Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education: “We must proceed cautiously before we place students’ minds and hearts at risk with tests of dubious quality, whose meaning can be over interpreted and whose consequences can be devastating. Yes, we need more rigorous academic standards, but we must also give youngsters models when it comes to developing the most crucial skills: love of learning, respect for peers and good citizenship. That is what they will need most to pass the test of life.”
Scott is asking people to vote for her painting by “liking” the 464 Gallery fan page on Facebook; clicking on the Vision Art Awards photo album; and clicking “like” on the painting.
Voting will be open until midnight on Friday.
An opening reception for the art show is scheduled from 6 to 10 p.m. Sept. 13. At this event, the winners of the People’s Choice Awards will be revealed, as well as the juried selections. In addition, some other works of note will be featured, as selected by 464 Gallery owner, Marcus Wise.
Leonie Haimson
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Blog of an e-marketer by Main Uddin.
““We must proceed cautiously before we place students’ minds and hearts at risk with tests of dubious quality, whose meaning can be over interpreted and whose consequences can be devastating. Yes, we need more rigorous academic standards,”
Those tests are of “dubious quality”. They are of very poor quality and are invalid and unreliable to tell us anything about what a student has learned and tell us even less, if that is possible, of the teaching and learning process. And the last thing we need are “more rigorous academic standards” as they suffer the same logical errors of construction and implementation that the tests do. To understand why read Noel Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Oh, that the esteemed H. Gardner would join “The Quest” to rid the world of these abominable educational malpractices.
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 logical 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 crap in-crap 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’ 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.
Those tests AREN’T of dubious quality.
Looks like she won!!! 850 (most within 24 hours). The official results come out next Friday.