This is part 3 of Jeffrey Weiss’s series in the Dallas Morning News on the pushback against testing in Texas. In this article, the hero is a soft-spoken professor, Walter Stroup, who challenged the validity of Pearson’s tests. His doubts caught the attention of some legislators who were not wedded to the testing beast.
Texas is where No Child Left Behind was generated and blossomed into a myth that became federal law and lives on and on, the undead law that kills the love of learning.
In earlier articles in the series, Weiss showed how the angry moms got organized to fight out-of-control testing requirements.
And he showed how brave State Commissioner Robert Scott shocked everyone by denouncing the overemphasis on standardized testing as the “heart of the vampire.” This emboldened the moms, the school boards, the superintendents, the parents, and everyone else who hated to see what the testing industry was doing to children and education.
The missing heroes in Weiss’s otherwise brilliant narrative are the hundreds of school boards, who voted to oppose high-stakes testing, creating a wave of local opposition that the legislature could not ignore. Eventually, nearly 90% of the state’s elected local school boards said “Enough is enough.”
In this article, Weiss addresses the question: if not the current regime of high-stakes testing, then what?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Born in upstate New York and Harvard-educated, Stroup talks softly and quickly. A short question often produces a long answer that jumps topics like a shuffled playlist. His confidence borders on arrogance.
But he visibly loves and values public education.”
I would say the crucial element is right there. “Agnostics” and “relinquishers” make lousy advocates. One has to actually value something before they’ll fight for it.
The problem is the expectation that this whole testing business is intended to be fair to children and to make educational sense. It isn’t and it doesn’t.
Standardized, high-stakes testing is a carefully designed and implemented tool with one purpose only: to “prove” that public schools, teachers, and their unions are “failures” that must be eliminated so corporations can take over and “save” us.
The sooner we all understand that the faster we can unite to defeat this evil money grab.
It’s anecdotal, but I was part of a community group last week on our local public schools, about 40 people, carefully chosen to represent a real cross-section, and we were unanimous on “too much reliance on standardized testing”.
When the superintendent explained the Common Core (really nuanced-she likes parts and dislikes parts) and reached the piece about the Common Core TESTS, the general consensus was “same old same old, more testing”. The whole discussion went back to testing.
I think there has to be a recognition that the “accountability” people in ed reform have lost some credibility on ALL tests because they went so completely insane with standardized tests that they had to be STOPPED by an outside force.
When would they have stopped in Texas without the uprising? 20 tests? 100 tests? Why can’t they police themselves and change course without an actual parent revolt?
Obviously, the process was captured by lobbyists, but they had to know that happened and this was doing no one any good except the testing companies. Yet they continued the grim, joyless, lock-step march.
It impugns their credibility. It should not have happened.
Chiara Duggan: you nailed this one.
In an open wide-ranging discussion, the supporters of CCSS who are going for the ‘nuances’ and ‘silver linings’ are now, and will in the future, find it impossible to explain how to disassociate what they like from the high-stakes standardized tests that are required and the accompanying [few] rewards and [many] punishments of that hazing ritual.
Why? Let me defer to an expert insider of the “new civil rights movement of our time.” Dr. Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute:
[start quote]
In truth, the idea that the Common Core might be a “game-changer” has little to do with the Common Core standards themselves, and everything to do with stuff attached to them, especially the adoption of common tests that make it possible to readily compare schools, programs, districts, and states (of course, the announcement that one state after another is opting out of the two testing consortia is hollowing out this promise).
But the Common Core will only make a dramatic difference if those test results are used to evaluate schools or hire, pay, or fire teachers; or if the effort serves to alter teacher preparation, revamp instructional materials, or compel teachers to change what students read and do. And, of course, advocates have made clear that this is exactly what they have in mind. When they refer to the “Common Core,” they don’t just mean the words on paper–what they really have in mind is this whole complex of changes.
[end quote]
Link: http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/the-american-enterprise-institute-common-core-and-good-cop/
As so often, courtesy of the redoubtable Dr. Mercedes Schneider.
“A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.” [Michael Kinsley]
😎
Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee did the exact same thing in their editorials on testing, about a year apart.
They blamed someone else for the over-reliance on standardized testing. Gates actually used my state as an example.
But this is their theory. They have to own it. They can’t look at the real world results and then abandon all responsibility when they theory fails at the local level. I guess it looked a lot better at the ed reform round table, but they’re the “accountability” people. This belongs to them. I don’t blame my local district. They get these ridiculous mandates from on high.
“No Child Left Behind. . . the undead law that kills the love of learning.”
“The undead law that kills the love of learning.”
I nominate that for our list of “quips of the year”.
TAGO!
Absolutely!
Test advocates confuse “accountability” with a twisted “retribution”. They seem more intent on using tests to silence and punish teachers for perceived offenses. The reformers cannot answer the question “how does VAM wnd testing make me a better teacher?”. Rather they embrace a flawed form of Social Darwinism where students and teachers are “eliminated” based on the reformer’s unproven standards. An historically dangerous social experiment.
Here in Ohio, we see the full display of anti-teacher vengence. The governor threatened to “break the backs” of teachers. The state teacher evaluation system is a mix of career blacklisting and public shaming. The House education committee leaders have publicly stated they want to end public education plus fire all teachers who are branded “ineffective” on the committee’s own ineffective stack ranking system.
As more light is shined on the insanity of flawed testing and VAM, the more likely a slumbering public will rise up against it. Testing and VAM has become alchemy and mysticism. To be science, the test questions and raw data must be publicly released and subject to an evidence standard through comfirmation and impartial peer review. The same with VAM. The fact these reformers hide in secrecy and protect their methods by laws rather than reason speaks volumes.
“have become”
BLAME CLINTON. Started with him….and it has gotten worse with each POTUS. At least Laura Bush supported libraries and wasn’t the smoking cop.
Some of Laura’s best friends from Texas renamed the Texas Reading Initative as Reading First and were appointed to positions in the Bush USDOE. They worked together to ensure corporations such as Wireless Generation were monitoring “reading progress.” Reading First was a 9 billion dollar corporate failure embedded with conflicts of interest.
Actually, I think we need to go back as far as Reagan and “A Nation at Risk.” Or maybe Carter and the creation of the USDOE in the first place.
It started long before Clinton. In the 1950s.
Nate Blakeslee’s Texas Monthly article, Crash Test is a must read for US parents and grandparents. Learn from TAMSA about how to push back the testing giant Pearson, lobbyists, misguided legislators and related profiteers.
http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/crash-test
“Texas is where No Child Left Behind was generated and blossomed into a myth that became federal law and lives on and on, the undead law that kills the love of learning.”
Ironic.
Texas is where it all started more than a decade ago and Texas is where the emergency brake is being applied first. It took Texans long enough to wake up.
Will it take that long for the rest of the country?
Here’s a piece from the Huntington Post: “George W. Bush’s Education Law, No Child Left Behind, Abandoned By Texas.”
“No Child Left Behind was primarily based on education reforms that originated in Texas. In the late-1990s, Sandy Kress, a White House official during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, became interested in education and proposed an accountability plan designed to shock Dallas’s schools out of their stagnation. Kress, a career politician with ties to business, called for giving schools more control over spending in exchange for consequences based on standardized test performance. These ideas became law under then-Gov. Ann Richards.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/30/bush-education-law-texas_n_4018971.html
Also, don’t know if you’re following Kansas (and maybe someone who actually lives there could elaborate!) but you’ll recall they gutted public school funding for tax breaks, and a court told them they were violating their own laws.
Ed reformers in Kansas are holding up school funding because they want the usual national agenda, and, as usual, no ed reformer in The Coalition was denied! It’s the whole boilerplate list they put in everywhere, from California to Maine: charters/vouchers, more testing, loss of rights for teachers, endless testing and data collection, well, you know the drill. It’s the same thing they did in your state, just fill in state name HERE 🙂
This is Kansas, but it could be anywhere:
“The Kansas House early Sunday rejected a school finance measure that would have packaged more money to level the playing field between rich and poor schools with conservative education reforms to promote school choice.
The House voted 67-55 against the bill following about two hours of debate that started late Saturday night and moved into Sunday morning. The vote culminated a day of haggling over a bill aimed at answering a state Supreme Court ruling that found wealth disparities between property-rich and property-poor school districts.
The House and the Senate passed school finance bills, but negotiators from both chambers moved ahead with a more politically toxic version that included education reform measures pushed by conservative lawmakers.”
They’re calling the ed reformers in Kansas “conservative” but as we all know, that’s nonsense. There’s nothing on the conservative wish list for Kansas that national Democrats haven’t enthusiastically backed.
How does “putting kids first” allow denying poor kids equitable funding for their schools unless the whole ed reform agenda is put it? I don’t think Kansas ed reformers are “putting kids first” at all. I think they’re putting their own agenda first.
http://www.kansascity.com/2014/04/05/4940366/kansas-lawmakers-draw-closer-to.html
Lloyd Lofthouse: ” It took Texans long enough to wake up.”
Please, don’t believe that BS.
Texas has not even gotten past the beta waves yet! Texas legislators are all hat and no cattle! They are as enmeshed with Pearson lobbyist as before, or probably more. Our fearsome Austin journalist Jason Stanford recently published an investigative piece exposing Bill Hammond, President and Chief Executive Officer of Texas Association of Business, as Pearson’s main lobbyist in Texas. Seems Bill wears a lot of hats and still has no cattle! But the reaction in the state to this conflict of interest was ….ho hum…..
The insanity of TEKS and STAAR obsession continues to increase in Texas and many elementary schools have a four hour practice STAAR test every week. The rest of the time kids are psychologically beaten down and burned out. Last week a 4th grade boy was taken to emergency after a suicide attempt following his four hour STAAR.
Texas is still a Mess! Trust me!
Kress and Hammond no longer run the testing rodeo in Texas. If their names are mentioned, social media works and parents contact local legislators to register complaints.
The child’s parents should file for damages based on child abuse by Pearson and Pearson’s cheerleaders in the legislature and at Texas Education Agency.