This NPR report summarizes the 12th grade NAEP report: Scores for high school seniors are flat. Reading scores in 2013 were lower than in 1992.
While there were small gains for each racial and ethnic group since 2005, there were no gains at all since 2009, when Race to the Top was initiated.
Achievement gaps among racial and ethnic groups remain wide.
Secretary of Education gnashed his teeth and said the results were troubling, and he is right. The chair of the National Assessment Governing Board said the results were unacceptable, and he is right.
In mathematics, the states that made the biggest gains in proficient students were: South Dakota, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut and New Hampshire. Only one of these–Massachusetts–won a Race to the Top award.
Also in mathematics, the states that had a lower percentage of proficient students than the rest of the nation were: Tennessee, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Florida. Two of the lowest performing states won Race to the Top awards: Tennessee and Florida.
In reading, the states that outperformed the nation were Idaho, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Iowa, and South Dakota. Only one of these states–Massachusetts–won a Race to the Top award.
Also in reading, the states that had the lowest percentage of proficient students were: Tennessee, Arkansas, and West Virginia. Tennessee won a Race to the Top award.
These twelfth graders started school about the time that No Child Left Behind was signed into law, on january 8, 2002. Their entire school lives has been dominated by testing. The survival of their school depended on their test scores. Billions and billions of dollars have been diverted from classroom instruction to testing corporations. Many districts have increased class sizes and reduced services to students. Some leave closed libraries and laid off librarian, social workers, counselors, and psychologists. Many thousands of teachers have lost their job. But the testing industry has grown to be a multi-billion dollar enterprise, fattened by NCLB and RTTT.
Secretary Duncan is right. This is indeed troubling. It is time to change course. The policies of the Bush-Obama era have failed.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Is not the definition of insanity to keep knocking your head against the wall when it causes the same results every time – or some such idea?
” Reading scores in 2013 were lower than in 1992.”
I remember 1992…when teachers really taught instead of TESTING
That is the date that I wrote my first test item for the coming years of TESTING….and more TESTING……until it got so out of hand…I wanted no part of the Cr**P…… and looking back..my items were not as good as the ones I wrote for my own tests and quizzes.
The Government needs to get out of our schools as they have caused nothing but Chaos and a Lose-Lose Situation by their Gimmicky Money Giveaways..
We do not need Ipads that burn student’s eyes out,..,They need good books to read…..the need SOLID one to one without the worry of a “One Size Fits All”..
ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
NOR WILL IT EVER!!!
Amazingly, Connecticut’s Non-Educator Commissioner of Education claims that Ct 12th graders excelled on the 2013 NAEP because of the adoption of the Common Core (to which, obviously, these 12th graders were not exposed) and the “increased investment” the Malloy administration made in education, especially poor districts. Those “increased investments” were TINY- at most $200 per student, and weren’t even enacted until 2012.
Of course the media here in Colorado, the Denver Post and Colorado Springs Gazette are saying this just shows how much we need Common Core!!
Another example of ostrich heads buried in the sand. Did they hear of “senioritis” and “senior slump”. Finished with hs unless intrinsic passion inspires them like a WISE project. http://www.wiseservices.org
The response to this will be predictable and horrifying. Testing= Bad results. The solution will be more testing.
How can they be sure that the seniors are taking the test seriously? Remember, this test has no positives or negatives for these students, so why should they care? I watched for years as kids blew off state tests that had no importance for them. They did not see the point of trying on tests that just made them feel inferior. That attitude carried over to the exit exam. Students often do not take it seriously until 11th or 12th grade.
That’s addressed in this piece, as is this:
“Over time, as the graduation rate has increased, NAEP has included more students who would have dropped out in previous years. These students are often the lowest performers, and this demographic change would not affect fourth grade or eighth grade scores. But it may cause 12th grade scores to lag.
“What’s happening is that students who would normally drop out of school are staying in,” Carr said. “Students who would normally not be taking our assessment, they’re in there now at larger proportions.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/07/naep-2013-high-school_n_5276767.html
One of the reasons why more kids are taking the NAEP in senior year is because states such as mine raised the age at which students can legally drop out of school.
That’s what Dr. Ravitch has said many, many times here. That 12th grade NAEP scores are meaningless. I can understand why Duncan has to act like he takes them seriously, but I don’t know whether I should.
The most that should be taken from NAEP at any age level are trends, and data that looks like it is suggesting a trend should be disaggregated to see if we can come up with any potentially useful insights. Flat lines suggest that we have squeezed all the juice out of them and that they are giving as much as they are going to given their experience of schooling. NCLB does not appear to have done the seniors much good. If CCSS manages to hang on for a few years, we will see what can be teased from that data. If the reaction against CCSS continues to grow, I do not see that CCSS lasting much longer, but the battle is far from over.
No child was left behind because no one moved forward. High stakes testing is a failure
That’s rich!
LIKE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
What’s really sad is that, once again, we’ve wasted millions (billions?) of taxpayer money on unproven strategies when we have over fifty years of research telling us what works. When we start investing in proven strategies (infant and toddler healthcare and education, high-quality preschool, developmentally appropriate education, small classes, experienced teachers etc) then we’ll begin to see some authentic improvement in the education of American students.
Those things are so boring and slow, though, and there’s no “rock stars” involved in them 🙂
Also! Expensive! Don’t forget that 🙂
So true.
I don’t know if you-all read Bob Somerby, but he actually reads all the scores and applies some independent thought and he’s not a public school basher. He writes on this stuff a lot:
http://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-post-and-times-report-naep-scores.html
Take a breath. Then, scroll to the bottom of said email. Click “Unsubscribe.” I know. Mind boggling.
Can any of you who are more tech savvy than me help Ms. Wilson out? She says when she clicks the link to unsubscribe, this is what she sees:
ERROR
A RED STOP SIGN WITH AN EXCLAMATION MARK ON IT
And the message says Security Failure. The server reply is invalid.
Any thoughts? Thanks!
If I were her and I didn’t want to deal with troubleshooting at all, I would just try to unsubscribe again using either (1) a different browser; or, if that fails (2) a different computer.
Thanks, FLERP!. I’ll suggest those things to her.
In addition to changing browsers you can also clear the browser cache.
I thought I responded to this post, but somehow it ended up in a different thread.
Sorry about the length of this post, but I want to provide a few examples of the ways in which the standardizied summative testing to standards approach distorts curricula and pedagogy. It’s important for Ed Deformers to start to understand this stuff, and it can’t be communicated in sound bites. I shall try to be as brief as possible.
Though there is little reason to put great weight on the 12th-grade NAEP, it is also true that there is absolutely no evidence that over ten years of accountability based upon standardized summative testing to bullet lists of standards has had any effect on student writing, reading, mathematical, or thinking ability. And yet, despite this, the defomers have doubled down on their failed prescription.
Any tiny improvement at any particular grade level during the periods covered by NCLB and RttT is well within the statistical margin of error of the measurements employed.
Simply from the Hawthorne Effect, one would expect that there would be some improvement. But there has been none that has been validly demonstrated. None. What this suggests is that standardized summative testing to bullet lists of standards has actually negatively impacted student achievement, and there are many, many reasons to think that that is, indeed, the case. Much of the momentum of positive innovation in curricula and pedagogy was stopped cold by NCLB and continues to be impossible under Son of NCLB, NCLB Fright Night II: The Nightmare Is Nationalized.
Those who think otherwise, with no evidence, thereby evince cultlike, magical, faith-based thinking, and it is not on the basis of such thinking that we should be making national and state education policy.
Let me explain what I mean when I say that because of NCLB we lost “much of the momentum of positive innovation in curricula and pedagogy” that we had before.
When I started working in K-12 education thirty years ago, there were lots of studies showing that students were doing very, very little writing, and there was a reason for this. English teachers at the time thought that they had to edit every scrap of writing produced by students. So, if they assigned six classes of students a five-paragraph essay to write, they would have 840 paragraphs to line edit–basically the equivalent of a short novel.
All that changed thanks to the work of Donald Graves and others to introduce the writing process. I myself edited what I think was the first assessment program in a major U.S. grammar and composition basal that took the rubrics-and-anchor-papers approach to grading of writing, and I contributed to several texts that put forward a portfolio review model that involved students writing regularly and accumulating that writing in portfolios that would be assessed by various means that were actually doable. Suddenly, a kind of renaissance in writing instruction was happening all around the country, and that was very exciting. Various studies showed that students were writing a LOT more, and writing is one of those activities like tennis that becomes better only with practice.
But with NCLB, the momentum there was lost. Instead of having students do a lot of extended writing in authentic formats, people started teaching InstaWriting to the test–creating the five-paragraph theme or the short constructed response in answer to the essay prompt. Teaching InstaWriting replaced teaching writing. And many started using the rubrics-and-anchor papers approach was a way of avoiding having to have any significant interaction with students regarding their writing. Oh, yeah. This is a 4. That’s a 3.
This is just one of many, many, many ways in which NCLB and Son of NCLB have dramatically distorted and narrowed curricula and pedagogy in the United States and stopped positive innovation in those areas cold.
Meanwhile, NCLB and Son of NCLB have kept curriculum developers from doing the work that needs to be done to delineate and operationalize instruction in the large number of specific techniques used by accomplished writers so that students can develop a concrete toolkit of such techniques for use in their own writing. Attention to such techniques IS NOT REFLECTED AT ALL in the puerile new writing “standards,” which, instead, encourage the writing of more five-paragraph themes. Fortuantely, those new “standards” do give some lip service to doing research and writing reports, but because the “standards” serve as lists of supposedly measurable outcomes to be tested and because everyone knows that the tests will be tests of InstaWriting to the prompt, that’s what people are teaching, and that’s what districts and state departments are teaching them to teach.
If I suggested to a publisher, today, that it would be quite easy to come up with a list of many hundreds of specific concrete techniques used by accomplished writers that could be taught and that we should do that as part of our writing instruction across the grade levels, that publisher would have this response:
Sorry, that’s not in the “standards.”
This is what happens when amateurs write “standards.” Curricula and pedagogy become warped and narrowed, and innovation in both dies. And that, in sum, is what has happened since NCLB. The situation is even worse in other areas of the English language arts curriculum.
cx: distort, not distorts, in the first paragraph. Some other infelicities in the post as well. Alas. How I long for an editing feature on WordPress!
“…because of NCLB we lost ‘much of the momentum of positive innovation in curricula and pedagogy’ that we had before.”
That’s a really good point Bob!
Never apologize for length when you offer such information and insight. It is even worse in Langauge arts, since they replaced authentic teachers whose best practice enable real results when learning SKILLS ARE THE OBJECT.
Now, about the summative standardized tests themselves:
Nothing done by students on the new national assessments remotely resembles real reading and writing. In other words, what is done by students on these assessments is extraordinarily inauthentic, or unlike anything that actual readers and writers do in the real world. Therefore, these are not, and cannot be, valid assessments of real reading and writing. QED.
Attainment in ELA involves world knowledge (knowledge of what) and procedural knowledge (knowledge of how). The new national assessments test very, very little of the former (and do not set out to test the former explicitly at all) and purport to be tests of the latter but are based upon standards for the latter that are so vaguely formulated that one cannot operationalize them sufficiently to assess them validly. Therefore, these are not, and cannot be, valid assessments of attainment in ELA. QED.
Other varieties of assessment–diagnostic and formative and performative assessment–actually serve some educational purpose. These national summative assessments serve no instructional purpose (teachers cannot even see the questions and detailed breakdowns of which their students got right and wrong and so cannot use them to inform instruction) but do negatively affect instruction by a) leading to narrowing and distortion of pedagogy and curricula (for example to teaching of the InstaWriting required by the test rather than to the teaching of writing) and by b) imposing an extrinsic punishment and reward mechanism that is known to be highly DEMOTIVATING for cognitive tasks. The second of these runs counter to our prime directive as teachers, which is to nurture intrinsic motivation–to build self-motivated, independent, life-long learners.
Because these are criterion-referenced tests, the determination of cut scores for them is completely arbitrary and subject to manipulation for political rather than educational purposes. Want to show that everyone is succeeding? Change the cutoffs. Want to show that everyone is failing? Change the cutoffs. Or, you can be more subtle about this and manipulate what field-tested questions you include or your raw-score-to-scaled-score conversion charts.
These tests use many so-called “objective” question formats that are inappropriate, generally, for testing anything more sophisticated than simple factual recall, and because these questions formats are pushed into a kind of service for which they are unsuitable, generally, the questions tend to be convoluted and the results generated highly suspect.
The tests are invariant, but appropriate instruction should not be, for students are not widgets to be identically milled, and testing should, of course, be based on instruction.
Very well done. Great research + great writing = unassailable arguments. QED!
What’s particularly disturbing is that high stakes testing and standards can cause the lowering of educational quality. Here in Oregon, we are abandoning one high stakes system (OAKS) and moving to another (CCSS/SBAC) without ever asking the question: if we think there’s a problem isn’t it entirely possible that the fundamental high stakes approach caused it? Because if that’s the case, CCSS/SBAC will only make things worse.
But, would love to see a state educational official respond to that one. They didn’t even hold hearings about the change – just did it…
Hearings? Actually hearing from knowledgeable scholars, researchers, curriculum developers, and classroom practitioners? OMG. What do you think this is, a representative democracy, where evidence is put before the representatives of the people in an open forum? We’ve long since moved past that. We’ve adopted the banana republic modus operandi. These decisions are made for us all in backrooms by a few of the plutrocrats’ hirelings.
Sorry, Bob. I’d forgotten. 🙂
A friend of mine observes that we have a major problem in state legislatures because budgets are so low that major legislation and major changes never get “cross examined”.
Just imagine what a thorough cross-examination of the high stakes testing theory would reveal – and how healthy that would be for society.
Imagine that, Doug! Actual hearings on this, with actual evidence being presented by people with actual knowledge of curricula, pedagogy, assessment, child development–scholars and researchers and classroom practitioners! Or better yet, a Truth and Reconciliation postmortem on the entire failed era of Education Deform. One can dream.
No evidence is required by these liars.
As Krugman points out talking about the lies they spread about the health care bill’s failure.
“…the constant harping on alleged failure works as innuendo even if each individual claim collapses in the face of evidence. A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a majority of Americans know that more than eight million people enrolled in health exchanges; but it also found a majority of respondents believing that this was below expectations, and that the law was working badly.
So Republicans are spreading disinformation about health reform because it works, and because they can — there is no sign that they pay any political price when their accusations are proved false.
And that observation should scare you. What happens to the Congressional Budget Office if a party that has learned that lying about numbers works takes full control of Congress? What happens if it regains the White House, too? Nothing good, that’s for sure.”
I am scared for the future.
in Indiana, the people who know about such things are relegated to the end of a long line of potential speakers, each given 2-5 minutes, and the pro- people, those without much real training but who support the flavor of the day, seem always to be allowed to sign up to go first. By the time the real experts get to speak, the committee either adjourns early or turns the gavel over to the flunkies while the leadership goes to dinner with the lobbyists.
It is no surprise that scores on these tests for seniors are lower than desired. Ask any high school staff member who monitors these tests and she will tell you that unless these tests are important to graduation, GPA, or a college scholarship, the seniors by and large don’t give a rat’s patootie about them. Enough simply fill in blanks or give minimum effort to depress the overall scores for the class.
Maybe that is why so many states (including mine – RI) are trying to make passing the PARCC/what have you a Graduation requirement. It’s not because the test will help the student or make them smarter or more College and Career ready, it’s so that the 12th grade test data will be more accurate.
“. . . it’s so that the 12th grade test data will be more accurate.”
Ha ha! That’s a good one-more accurate. That may be so in the psychometrician’s world but in the logical world even if they are “more accurate” they are still COMPLETELY INVALID. Any conclusions drawn are “vain and illusory”. Noel Wilson has proven as much in “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
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.
I am knocked out by your ability to think like this and to express your analysis so well. I was never one for statistics and analysis, but my practice was a cohort for the national standards research, so I spent two years discussing performance standards and how to use performance evaluation in the classroom. It is astonishing to discover that in a few years after this zillion dollar authentic research into the principles that underly learning, all the results have disappeared. In fact, not a word is written anywhere about the genuine research on learning, because Duncan and crew have turned the conversation to teaching.
http://improvedshakespeare.wordpress.com
http://www.opednews.com/articles/BAMBOOZLE-THEM-where-tea-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-110524-511.html
Children internalize all evaluations, and when a child works hard DOES REAL WORK and discovers that there is pleasure in accomplishment and rewards for work as well as knowledge, then they are apt to feel good about themselves.
I often use the language of the standards folks when I write these days. DOING WORK was the buzzword.
Words like “authentic” and “genuine” permeated workshops (i.e the 4th principle of learning for TEACHERs was Authentic Assessment and Genuine Evaluation…for use by the teacher to plan lessons).
Expressions like “accountable talk” and ‘what does learning look like’ were the jargon, but always there was the push to help kids grasp the simple relationship between doing work and accomplishing outcomes.
In our classes, my humanities teammate and I pushed WORK. We spoke of it often, were clear as the criteria/expectations, and we offered incentives and rewards.
‘CLEAR EXPECTATIONS,’ & ‘REWARDS FOR GENUINE ACHIEVEMENT’ were the first 2 principles of learning for teachers.
( For TEACHERS — because there were 4 principles for administrators… whose job it was to support LEARNING IN THE CLASSROOM by providing:
1- a safe, clean, healthy and QUIET plant where learning can take place
2- the organization/programs and support staff that allows the school to run smoothly
3- the materials that are needed by the practitioner ( books, technology, equipment, etc) Teacher’s Choice in NYC is a joke… most teachers have no choice by to purchase what they need to run a genuine classroom practice.
4- TO HIRE and RETAIN educators who know the content and who grasp the science of learning… the methodology that allows the human brain to acquire BOTH knowledge and skills… which require 2 very different methods.
If you don’t see anything about tests or evaluation, it is because that is a bogus narrative.
Evaluating the proficiency of doctors, attorneys and scientists is understood. Evaluating teachers is a simple thing… successful teachers are easily identified within the site by their peers, by the student body and by the parents.http://www.opednews.com/articles/Learning-not-Teacher-evalu-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-111001-956.html
Making Pearson rich has been the only objective of the testing nonsense
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Magic-Elixir-No-Evidence-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-130312-433.html
The side effect is what you note– It “hinders” them by confirming a “lower position in the social hierarchy” and because they have no critical skills to help them understand — to analyze and compare– thus they cannot become “independent, critical and free thinkers.”
This is something I say all the time, when I speak as a teacher, here and at Oped.
The puppet masters, the oligarchs who run the show, do not want “independent, critical and free thinkers”, because the are is a threat to their control. Classrooms like I ran which I described in a reply to Bob Sheperd, cannot be allowed to produce such future citizens.
Teachers like me had to be made to leave. One hundred thousand veteran professionals did… and the public still knows nothing about the simple method that removed these Americans. http://www.speakingasateacher.com/SPEAKING_AS_A_TEACHER/No_Constitutional_Rights-_A_hidden_scandal_of_National_Proportion.html
LOL….but you have Hit the Nail right Square on the Head!!!
Means that current 12th graders get the short end of the stick because of two misguided federal policies–NCLB stands for NO CHAI HOLD BARS LEFT BEHIND(!) and RTTT stands for READ TO THE TEST…
Funny !! 🙂
RTTT is a sure way to FFTB
“Free Fall to the Bottom”
I appreciate your reference to the Hawthorne Effect, which should be elaborated to assert that all test prep makes the scores on a test invalid as measures of learning other than learning from and in test prep.
NAEP scores are far less prone to a test-prep effect than statewide tests.
Next round of tests for CCSS ( 2014-15) will be for high stakes, and the two groups developing them are supposed to have comparable cut off scores. In effect, federal dollars will have been invested in a” sort-of,” “kind-of” Form A and Form B standardized national test on curriculum materials that USDE financed just for test development. These materials should be in the public domain. I’ don’t have the energy or talent to seek disclosure, but any reply might be newsworthy. The USDE’s financing of the curriculum materials is illegal, but it is case that likely is hard to prove.
NAEP scores are far less prone to a test-prep effect than statewide tests
excellent point
There are many of these USDE funded curriculum development projects going on around the country. And, yes, that is illegal activity. I appreciate, very much, your pointing that out.
The results are no surprise to me.
It is not as if “THEY” (Koch, Broad, etc) did not know that ending PRACTICE of skills like reading and writing would end the ability to DO IT! If I know it, so do they.
But the PUBLIC does not know WHAT LEARNING LOOKS LIKE ;(the language of the authentic standards, once again.) They don’t know what enables or facilitates real learning and they certainly have no clue as to WHAT IT TAKES TO TEACH, so “THEY” told the people what teaching SHOULD look like, and devised the teaching plans we call curricula and the lessons, and burned the airwaves telling folks how to evaluate teachers and get rid of ” the dead wood.” One hundred thousand veteran teachers disappeared as a stressed public worried about mortgages, and climate change and terrorism.
They sold the bunkum! Now when the fan is dripping in experiment and the stink cannot be denied, it is UP to us, to ensure that the EVIDENCE IN NYC IS NOT BURIED so that they fight the same battle in Colorado or Chicago or LA.
Listening, speaking reading writing as real educators enable the SKILLS… not test prep and phony curricula. “THEY” replaced all that PRACTICE in AUTHENTIC THINKING skills which they THEN test in 12th grade. Did “THEY” really think that mind-numbing curricula created by everyone but TEACHERS would work? What did the imagine would happen when the stats hit the fan?
Trust me, they intend to HIDE THE EVIDENCE, SO WE MUST PREPARE TO DISSEMINATE IT. The people watch CSI… show them the EVIDENCE!
They will discover that the magic elixirs from snake oil salesmen does NOT WORK as well as the TRIED AND TRUE methods of teachers of yore. I wrote that essay years ago,
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Magic-Elixir-No-Evidence-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-130312-433.html based on Willingham’s piece in The American Educator.
How easy it WAS to substitute bogus curricula and ensure that the schools failed when people are so isolated from events, and the country is so BIG!.
I love Krugman’s essay “Inventing A Failure;”
“THEY” do this… “THEY” invent failures… in order to disseminate disinformation— so tha t”THEY” can ‘fix’ the problem. “THEY” have the answer to failing schools — “THEY” looked at working INSTITUTION that was the core of our opportunity machine… our democracy, and labeled them failures, and then “THEY” created a BUSINESS out of our INSTITUTIONS of learning, and turned a profit.
Show us the evidence of failure, as they say on CSI!
NOW, in NYC and across America the EVIDENCE IS IN, and the failure is of their deforming efforts.
Sooooo, what next. We preach to the choir here and at man fine blogs I read, where people like Leonie Haimison, Anthony Cody, Betsy Combier, Lenny Isenberg and Norm Scott, to name a few, have known the reality for at least a decade.
Now that we Do know — now that so many of us have PROOF of what WON’T WORK, of what utterly fails to do the job… FAILS to teach kids to think so they can find meaning in text… Fails to give kids practice in THINKING, we need to make it known to the PUBLIC!
Moreover:
We need to EXPLAIN THAT critical thinking skills are skills like any other, use it or lose it. Explain that it is NO surprise to authentic teachers that the tests show the loss of this ability, BECAUSE THESE ARE THE SKILLS THAT that underlie reading for meaning and writing for a purpose. By 12th grade, the loss of a skill cannot be hidden.
We need to EXPLAIN THAT the inventors of All Children Left Behind KNEW that critical thinking skills are like any other skill… A Power OF THE BRAIN , and thus (like all powers) can only be acquired by PRACTICE. If I know this, so do “THEY!” What Duncan and company has wrought is clear in the numbers and statistics that teachers are gathering everywhere, not just in NYC. All that practice in test prep, repetition and review did not help the emergent learner to think in critical ways.
Now is OUR time… I think. As I read on this blog, for just this week, I can see that with Diane’s information feed, and this forum she created to mull it over, you guys out there are PUTTING IT TOGETHER– all the HARD EVIDENCE of anti-learning shenanigans WHICH are coming to light in Connecticut, Texas, Ohio and all those states because parents and teachers ARE active, and in finding FACTS,.
Next we need to assign RESPONSIBILITY for enforcing the rules and regulations that allow authentic educators to run their practice for the benefit of the children, who are not kids for long…BUT OUR FUTURE CITIZENS…the ones who will fun the show when we are all very old… what a scary thought!
Bringing accountability to those who wrecked the system will never happen.
Making those who run the farmhouse accountable to the animals must occur!
If those who make education and administer education policy are not held accountable for their future behaviors, they will continue to choose profit rather than educating our citizens. “THEY” know there are 52 places with their own legislatures controlling education and thousands of school systems to obscure the malpractice and evidence of failure. All of you who talk and write about education must spread the statistics that feel the tale… make sure that the information about THIS failure, their FAILURE gets through the wall which “THEY” have erected to keep the voice of the teacher silent.
Let the people know what YOU know about NYC tests, because the same failure is everywhere, but they don’t know it in Oshkosh…. (which is in Michigan, by the way!
Sigh.
A correction to one word/
“THEY” sold the bunkum! Now when the fan is dripping in poop, and the stink cannot be denied, it is UP to us, to ensure that the EVIDENCE IN NYC IS NOT BURIED so that they fight the same battle in Colorado or Chicago or LA.
Here is the kind of curricula that earned my students top scores in citywide tests, including the first ELA test where they were tenth in th state of New York! I did no test prep, except for some guidance in test-taking, the days before the test.
I taught language arts and communication SKILLS with my humanities teammate, where we assigned the kind of reading which required comparisons and contrast– which enabled kids to apply analysis. We followed the important readings of literature and history of the time with lots of ACCOUNTABLE TALK and then they PRACTICED writing about what they observed when they read, hanging words on thoughts in letters to me. They also wrote stories, poems and plays in my class… easy to do when observing human behavior throughout history is the plan.
Writing and reading continued in young colleague, Aaron Feldstein’s, humanities class, where he took them through history. THUS, The emergent minds discovered what it was like to live when our county was new; LOTS OF TALK! Together, they read documents and stories created by people who had lived she our country was new. LOTS OF TALK… THEN they wrote essays for him; about history, and what they learned about the Zenger trial — which they actually had to argue it… down in Federal Hall, not far, by train, from our NYC school.
By the way, my teammates in math and sciences required writing, too. A biology report was expected to meet the criteria for the activity, which included documented research, details, explanations, summaries and conclusions, in clear paragraphs.
That kind of integrated language arts works.
I wonder how well these youngsters would do on these tests, if they had spent endless hours taking tests and preparing for them, with the repetition and review that develops only memory!
AND by the way, as I present the opposite of test prep (the kind of curricula that it takes to “TEACH’ the thinking skills that UNDERLIE all learning) I also taught the full 7th grade curricula in art/design. Yep. Integrated in my curricula. If the kids wrote well, according to our CLASS RUBRIC FOR GOOD WORK, then I would plan a WEEK’S immersion in art, examining the beauty of a line… not one by Steinbeck or Frost, but one by cartoonist Ben Shan, and comparing it to the bold stokes that we see in Maus, by Art Spiegelman.
BTW, I bought most of the books with my own money, putting several copies of that book in the class library…the collection of 1000 books that I put together for the 15 minute reading period that began EVERY ONE OF MY CLASSES. Get on the bike…learn to ride!. Read books… The kids took them home and finished them… Many read hundreds of books by June, including the ones we assigned and read together.
When I was in the rubber room for those six months, awaiting some word that explains why — “THEY” dismantled my room and gave those books to other teachers for their classroom libraries, despite the little stamp in each that said: “Property of S Schwartz.”
But, that story is for another time, appropriate here only because it is clear : There is no way to expect outcomes in reading or writing when you remove the expert who enables the skill… for skill it is.
wonderful to hear these stories, Susan. thank you for your service!!!
Thank you for reading my stories… I think that my experience is the model for what happened to all authentic teachers. They threw us away in order to bring in Pearson and friends, without a thought to how it affected dedicated professionals who had devoted their lives to teaching. They brought in their anti-learning nonsense, without a thought to what happens to a nation whose citizens cannot do the work required because they have poor thinking skills.
Weel, maybe the did think about it… and it suited them fine, because then they could disseminate the lies… endless streams of lies from the mouths of legislators, governors, judges and our from the executive office.
methinks they knew exactly what they were doing.
Oh my……
Real Teaching.
I got Cold Chills and a Warm Heart after reading this.
It is like reading “Back to real Teaching”
I can also say if Bob Shepherd likes your post, it is a for sure winner.
He is brilliant and he sees clearly the Error of the Era of Testing
It is a special thrill to be recognized here. Thank you.
My work was famous, by the way, recognized by the Learning & Research Development Center at the Univ. of pittsburgh which were the staff developers who became the observers for the National Standards ( the real third level research out of Harvard on THE 8 PRINCIPLES OF LEARNING.
After two years of observing every aspect of what I did in my practice, and filming it, they chose my work as UNIQUE among the thousands they observed, and I was one of six whose work was featured at their seminars for staff developers across the nation. They tell me they sent my work far and wide.
NY State English Council awarded me the EDUCATOR OF EXCELLENCE AWARD.
I tell you this, because it is so easy to recognize the criminality used to end the tenure of teachers who are excellent by any and all rubrics.
I was sent to the rubber room and charged with incompetence for THAT VERY YEAR. The NYC superintendent emptied by employment folder and filled it with her own ‘subjective documentation.’ Lawless is the word that comes to mind. No accountability is the reason.
That year, by the way, my students were 10th in the state on the new ELA exam which 3/4 of NYC failed. They were accepted to the top high schools in NYC.
NYC district 2 superintendent invented pure slander to document my work after my return from this teacher jail, where I was ‘teaching’ a few students each period in a store room, instead of the entire seventh grade with that famous curricula.
Until due process returns to the educational workplace, real educators do not stand a chance, but the real travesty is that the American people have no idea about the war on teachers. Media saw to that.
http://www.speakingasateacher.com/SPEAKING_AS_A_TEACHER/The_Insane_War_on_Teachers_and_Democracy.html
Nor has any investigation by the attorneys general ever uncovered the greatest constitutional scandal of the century.
http://www.speakingasateacher.com/SPEAKING_AS_A_TEACHER/No_Constitutional_Rights-_A_hidden_scandal_of_National_Proportion.html
But, but, but… we have Kevin Huffman in TN so I’m sure everything will be okay… even if we are still “racing” to the top (a race we seem to be losing apparently). Why I even “learned” from his TEDx Talk that that “everybody” takes the NAEP (and I thought it was only a sample of students from each state). Also, I “learned” that the NAEP has been around for ten years (and I thought it was much longer than that). But surely this is no time to stop what we’re doing, or perhaps we’re letting the adequate be the enemy of the mediocre.
If you look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IznMHnRH5c You will find the following quote:
“During his tenure, Tennessee has seen significant growth on its TCAP assessments. Additionally, on the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress, Tennessee had the largest gains across fourth and eighth grade math and reading of any state in the country. Under his leadership, Tennessee was one of the first states to receive a waiver from No Child Left Behind…”
SEE?
Huffman inspires me! He really does… http://joenashville.jimdo.com/
You know, even if TN’s 4th and 8th grade math and reading gains are “the largest of any state in the country” as is so often mentioned around here, it’s pretty bad that TN’s 12th grade NAEP is among the lowest percentages in the nation. Even if 12th graders around the nation don’t take the NAEP seriously, TN is still among the lowest.
Joe Nashville,
NAEP has been around since 1971.
State testing since 1992.
I remember reading about it in “Reign of Error.” Everybody should read that particular chapter if they’re going to mention the NAEP.
It’s pretty bad when TN’s commissioner of ed. doesn’t have the facts straight.
http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2014/05/pearson-eats-parcc.html
On the radio yesterday morning, the US DOE blamed teachers. No surprise.
They cannot be allowed to get away with blaming teachers.
I agree! All the “reform” rhetoric and blaming teachers is so cliche.
It works for 2 reasons:
1- The media is bought! The only reporting they do about teachers is to push stories of perversion, criminality or incompetence. One hundred thousand veteran teachers were sent packing while the media talked about dead-wood, to a public that is clueless about what it takes to teach, and which rinks anyone can be trained to teach. Not a single human interest story of the wrecked lives and trauma which are available at http://www.endteacher abuse.org.
No investigation by attorney’s general as dedicated public servants were deprived of the law of the land.
http://www.speakingasateacher.com/SPEAKING_AS_A_TEACHER/No_Constitutional_Rights-_A_hidden_scandal_of_National_Proportion.html
The war on teachers is literally unknown, 16 years after I experienced it when I was at the apex of my career.
http://www.speakingasateacher.com/SPEAKING_AS_A_TEACHER/The_Insane_War_on_Teachers_and_Democracy.html
Randi know what happened to me, by the way. She reduced me, but she was the head of the UFT when the reps on the job, it looked the other way and let the grievance process disintegrate.
Duncan and Obama hire another privatizer.
Looks like he’s headed to privatize public universities, though. Anyone who thought this privatization push would be limited to K-12 education is naive or in the tank. Public universities are next.
http://edsource.org/2014/ted-mitchell-former-state-board-president-confirmed-as-under-secretary-of-education/61855#.U2wnQq1dVH0
You think? Read “Option Three” by Professor Joel Shatzky. It is a satire which he wrote years ago when he saw the future of higher ed… which has no future.
What do you mean by privatizing public universities? We have always operated in an environment where students get vouchers from the federal government and having to compete to get students.
So sad that we know this doesn’t work, yet for my kids, your kids, all kids we are subjected to forced substandard directives from our government.
I honestly thought P{resident Obama would truly help us Climb out of the “No Child Left Behind” fiasco….but instead…
His Department of Education has dug the hole so deep, I am having trouble breathing at this point….Trying to reach for the hands of the students that are so covered in the mud ….I can not find them ….not at this point…..
I do not hear their Happy Voices or Smiling Faces greeting me in the morning.
I hear only the groaning ……after giving instructions for yet another Test Prep assignment.
Oh My …This is a sad day when a Testing has consumed all of the Human Aspects of Learning…..Learning was supposed to be exciting and always fun…
And the child speaks the truth….
.I was a Human Child….with emotions..Joy of Learning…..or so I thought…but they tell me I am a Stat…a Point on a Graph …My data points says I am behind..I am of no use in this world until I, too, can become an “Einstein Clone”…
Correction…
See their Smiling Faces…as they greet me…
** A little early and I’m late
I am sure an English teacher can help out with my post…but at this point, I am burned out with testing and care not to correct anymore.
By the Way….Did anyone see Chris Hayes last night??
I saw a little but not all of it.
I plan to research his news segment this weekend and watch the entire interview with Randi and some other lady. I missed her name.
I am troubled by the published report about which states scored the lowest percentage of proficient students in reading -Tennessee, Arkansas, and West Virginia. Why publish such information when the wrong comparisons are being made? There are five major reasons why students cannot meet the standards which the politicians hand out.
Reason #1
There is a connection between the reading program these 12th graders in Tenn. Ark., and WV. had in the primary grades and the level of achievement they have reached in 12th grade. Cunningham and Stanovich (1997) found that first-grade reading achievement strongly predicts 11th-grade reading achievement. These students were subjected to a reading program that was very problematic: NCLB is anchored in phonics. How can phonics be the primary approach to reading when there are so many varied speech patterns around the country? How can the same phonics program be taught throughout the states when only the Midwest uses Standardized English? How can different regions with their various accents and dialects teach phonics when so many sounds are distorted. For example, Massachusetts residents like to leave off the r sound. My son once stopped a Boston police officer for directions. He asked the officer to repeat it five times and finally gave up. My son could not figure out what the officer was saying. He left the officer confused and lost.
Being from the Midwest, I once was a stanch believer in the phonetic approach. It wasn’t perfect; e.g., a worksheets centered on the short o sound, pictured dog and log as two example of short o. But even the people from the Standardized English region pronounce the o in dog and log as aw as in law. But if it follows the rule, dog should have a short sound as in hot. Plus, there are countless words that do not follow the phonetic rule. It appears to me that students on their own must be using more of the whole word approach in lieu of sounding/blending or learning words through analogy. Furthermore, students have an unnecessary challenge in trying to learn through phonics – trying to decode words via Standard English and then translate into another language – their accent or dialect language. Do children from regions with heavy accents and various dialects have to learn to read via the unspoken language like the Chinese? It is like learning another language – Standard English in lieu of what they speak. Contrived and meaningless sentences compound the task. The year I taught in the inner, inner city of Newark gave me a new awareness. Too often my students didn’t understand me and I didn’t understand them. I still see a student holding his head and stamping his foot saying, ” What are you saying?! I don’t understand you!”
In a document published by nonprofit educational center, CELT, entitled “Center for Expansion of Language and Thinking” addresses the problem of different dialects in the teaching of phonics. “There is a single spelling across dialects that pronounce words very differently. .. The pretense of a single set of phonics rules is not only confusing; it damages people’s chances for school success. Most standardized reading tests have a section on phonics that asks students to match rhyming words or to identify words with similar sounds. …Out-of-context, uninformed phonics instruction is not only confusing; it makes the learning of phonics harder. And when the rules being taught in out-of-context lessons do not match the learner’s own dialect, it is that much more confusing and that much harder to learn. Yet another barrier for far too many children! ”
I look at the material my four year old grandsons bring home- letter a day. A letter a day is the wrong approach. Children shouldn’t begin formal instruction – direct teaching in reading until the end of kindergarten at the very earliest. Some may not even be ready then. Phonics should be taught simultaneously with other reading skills but four year olds are not ready for that.
Reason #2
The lack of prior knowledge is a very basic problem. Just because students didn’t pass the state tests doesn’t mean they can’t read- they are just asked to read material that is incomprehensible to them – they haven’t been given sufficient background knowledge. Frank Smith, a psycholinguist, in Comprehension and Learning maintains that what is behind the eye ball is more important than what is in front- the visual/text. But instead of building on their prior knowledge, Common Core directs teachers to the practice of “Close Reading.” “Closed reading” is contrary to what constitutes good reading. A good readers builds on his/her prior knowledge. In order to gleam some understanding of a text, the reader must be able to relate to the subject matter in some way.”Closed Reading” just attacks students confidence and makes the students more anxious. A good teacher sometimes spends an entire lesson on building background knowledge via a video, pictures, field trip, maps etc. If an academic text book is on a student’s frustration level, the teacher either needs to give the student an easier text which covers the same concepts or read the text to the student. What is the teacher’s objective: to develop concepts or is it to develop reading skills. Ordinarily a teacher should be able to accomplish both simultaneously but not if the text is too difficult. Also, Common Core negates the importance of prediction. Being able to predict is an indication that the student understands/comprehends.
Is it possible to create a test that is not biasd? Pearson Company, a British company whose main office is in England, publishes the tests. Who are the people who create them? The British?
Reason #3
The third major problem is stealing learning time away from students. In Finland the students take only one standardized test in their academic career. We are wasting precious student time with all this unnecessary testing and test preparation . “… test prep and testing absorbed 19 full school days in one district and a month and a half in the other in heavily tested grades.” The best way to increase reading skills is by reading independently. Instead of giving students time to do extended reading, students have to waste time in test prep and testing. “How much time do school districts spend on standardized testing? This Much “The Answer sheet 7/25/13
It is only through reading that a child can learn to identify new words on the basis of old. Too often formal instruction in reading doesn’t provide enough independent reading. Independent reading at school and at home supports the learning of reading.
As Dr.Carmelita Williams, former president of the NRA once told a group of educators,
“You do not have to read every night – just on the nights you eat.”
Reason #4
Failure to pass the reading portion of standardized test from first grade on starts eroding a student’s confidence and attacking the student’s ego. How many fail the standardized test because of the phonics portion or a lack of confidence? Frank Smith states, “…when an individual is anxious or unsure of himself/herself or has experienced an unhappy succession of ‘failures’, his/her behavior exhibits an inevitable consequence: he demands far more information before he makes a decision. His very hesitancy aggravates his difficulties. …The more anxious he is, the less likely he will be to rely on non visual information. …Where the relaxed individual sees order, the tense individual sees visual confusion.”
Frank Smith purports, “Remedial action with older students who are diagnosed as ‘reading problems’ may magnify difficulties rather than facilitate fluency. The main need of a student inexperienced in reading is to engage in reading that is both easy and interesting. Instead he is likely to get less reading and more exercise and drill and texts. Material that is challenging …rather than easy raises the anxiety level so that reading is neither meaningful nor pleasant. The problem of a fifteen-year-old who has difficulty reading may not be insufficiency of instruction, but that his previous years of instruction have made learning to read more difficult. …After ten years of instructional bruising a student may be far more in need of a couple of years …in education convalescence than an aggravation of his injuries.”
I maintain that students should never struggle. Regardless how far behind a student is from what is considered “on level” reading, a teacher must start instruction/reading at the student’s instructional level- the level in which the student makes no more than 10 errors per hundred running words. Easy reading builds up confidence and then the student can begin to make progress. Common Core totally ignores “instructional” level and advocates, at times, giving students text that will be a challenge/struggle- an erroneous mandate.
Smith maintains that reading is essential in order to read. Reading should be made as easy as possible for children. Instead of drilling phonetic elements and words in isolation, back ground knowledge should be developed so the child can identify with the text. The less the student can relate to the story the more difficult the task or reading. If the child meets a word he/she does not know he can predict or guess if the student has some familiarity with the topic.
Reason #5
My fifth point of concern is the absorbent cost of testing. “Many districts have increased class sizes and reduced services to students. Some leave closed libraries and laid off librarian, social workers, counselors, and psychologists. Many thousands of teachers have lost their jobs…” It boggles my mind how districts can spend millions of dollars on testing material but lay off teachers, close libraries…!!!!!!! Some are even getting rid of art, music, dance, electives, etc. The very activity that could give students a chance to excel, boost their ego, give them confidence is taken away! Oh woe to those who are out to destroy our youth. “With no gym, art class, librarians, or significant science or social studies…”!!!!!!!
School Testing In U.S. Costs $1.7 Billion, But That May Not Be Enough: Report 11/29/12 Huff Post
The Midwestern district spent $600 or more for standardized testing per pupil in grades 3-8; about $200 per student for grades K-2; from $400 to $600 per student for grades 9-11. The Eastern district spent more than $1,100 annually on testing per student in grades 6-11; around $400 per student in grades 1-2; between $700 and $800 per student for grades 3-5. The Answer sheet 7/25/13
If we gave only one standardized test during the students academic career as they do in Finland, think of all the money that would be available to hire the needed reading specialists for every building. At Risk students should received extra help daily with a reading specialists working in tandem with the classroom teacher- two classes of reading instruction daily. Teachers’ assessments should be good enough for the administration and politicians. It has been stated countless times: students are individuals each with their own gifts. Politicians nor the corporate world can standardized them. Can you imagine how boring life would be if every child had the same interests, acted and spoke the same way.
My last concern: What is the purpose of publishing scores; its a form of discrimination.