Laura Chapman says it is no improvement to substitute student growth in test scores for plain old test scores. Both reduce teaching and learning to multiple choice test questions.
She writes, in response to this post:
“Instead of judging schools solely by test scores, they might be judged–at least in part–by student growth.”
This is not an improvement of any kind, but the precise language from Race to the Top Legislation (see reference below).
In federal and state policy “student growth” is just a euphemism for a gain score from pre-test to post-test, or year-to-year. In other words, the term “growth” has been thoroughly corrupted to mean just another score, and preferably a score with properties that can be processed to produce a VAM–value added score. (See reference below on the new grammar…)
Do not be mislead. The marketeers of “growth” as if this is some gold standard or “fair” measure for judging educational activity are engaging in a propaganda campaign. Participants include USDE and its hired hands who know that this term “growth” has a rich and elaborate semantic reach in education. They are cynically trying to cut away understandings of growth and development as teachers understand it for individual students–multifaceted and asynchronous (e.g. bright but socially awkward; coordinated dancer, but not an athlete; enchanted with calligraphy but has terrible handwriting). To be sure, there are normative patterns for a large number of students, but so-called “developmental levels” also mask all of the wondrous variability in students. Forget all that, the new meaning of “growth” is a gain or increase in a metric derived from a test.
A perfect example of the marketing effort on behalf of redefining “human growth” (as a difference in metrics) is the infamous “Oak Tree Analogy” (see reference below)–that conveniently ignores that fact that students, unlike trees, have minds of their own.
I call this a cynical move because the oak tree analogy is framed to place teachers in the role of workers in a nursery in charge of providing the “nutrients” that are needed for trees to thrive. This frame, as Lakoff and Johnson remind us, taps a “nurturing parent” metaphor for teachers, and also the traditional role for women. The campaign to portray teachers as bad nurturers, lay, soft, uncaring is nowhere more evident that in the excessive use of “rigor” and “rigorous” as obligatory adjectives for almost everything bearing on “improvements” in education. See Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2008). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago press.
Repeat. Federal and state policy documents define “growth” as a gain in pre-test to post test scores, and a gain in year-to-year scores. Such scores are used to radically simplify judgments about districts, schools, teachers, and students. The distorted views of education produced by aggrandizing tests and “metrics” as if these refer to the actual complexities of human growth and development–perceptual, intellectual, social, physical, creative, aesthetic–is a fraud.
For federal language for “growth” see: Final Definitions 559751-52 Federal Register / Vol. 74, No. 221 / Wednesday, November 18, 2009 / Rules and Regulations DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION 34 CFR Subtitle B, Chapter II [Docket ID ED–2009–OESE–0006]
RIN 1810–AB07 Race to the Top Fund AGENCY: Department of Education.Retrieved from http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2009-11-18/pdf/E9-27426.pdf
For the false comparison of human development and oak tree “growth” see:
Value-Added Research Center. (2012). Teacher effectiveness initiative value-added training oak tree analogy. Madison: University of Wisconsin. Retrieved from Retrieved from http://varc.wceruw.org/tutorials/oak/index.htm
For the cynical promotion of a preferred “grammar” for education see:
Reform Support Network. (2012, December). Engaging educators, Toward a New grammar and framework for educator engagement. Author. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/implementation-support-unit/tech-assist/engaging-educators.pdf
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I have yet to find an answer as to “negative growth”. These are students who score lower on the post-test compared to pre-test. Guess that is an oak tree reverting to a sapling.
Lipstick on a Pig is Diane’s title to start this thread, along with a few lines of post-surgery gibberish or wiggles in the iPad
Diane’s title is fortuitous. She is probably not aware that I am from Cincinnati, home of the Big Pig Gig and Flying Pig Marathon, and sundry events that honor our legacy as the city that sent pigs to Chicago the real “Hog Capital of the World” and leveraged remains of pigs to make soap, lots of it, with Proctor and Gamble one the main by-products of that activity..world headquarters here.
Negative growth actually exists in the lexicon of reform. You calculate it by conjuring the concept of academic peers–students who score the same (plus or minus a few points) on a standardized test in one year and are tested again in the next year. If some members of these academic peer groups score higher than others from the baseline year to the next year, they have “an accelerated growth trajectory.” If the scores of academic peers stay in about the same location from the baseline year to the next (think bell curve) then are making “expected progress.” If some students fall behind their academic peers, then they are not meeting expectations. They are falling behind, have negative growth. They and their teachers are are in need of a “rigorous” intervention.
These creative formulations of the meaning of “growth” are extended to produce judgments of teachers. In some districts, a teacher is judged highly effective if and only if they produce “more than a year’s worth of growth” and so on. “A year’s worth of growth” is a totally fictional concept propagated as is if every school is in session 365 days. The accountability year for teachers of “non-tested” subjects, (about 70% or all teachers) is from the end of November to the middle of April–pretest to post-test–with a bunch of paperwork to prove they have hit their ” growth targets.” Myths, misrepresentations, falsehoods, lies, fraud–all marketed as “objective” measures.
The reasoning is a combination of No Child Left Behind’s “adequate yearly progress” and Race to the Top rhetoric with targets and trajectories, plus some high jumps produced by raising the bar, and a deep well of other very mixed and very dangerous metaphors.
Thanks. I’ve heard this explanation that a student who demonstrates growth, but below a relative “year’s worth” benchmark is labeled as having “negative growth”. But the model seems to assume all students exhibit a positive trend.
My question is students who exhibit a negative trend. In other words, the post test score is lower than the pre test score. Since the pre test measures past knowledge prior the year’s worth of instruction, a lower post test means the student lost knowledge the measured teacher never taught. Rationally absurd.
I am truly trying to understand this. I want to see an explanation in terms of VAM. For my population of students, this situation has a major effect on rankings as much as much as two levels upward.
Two levels upward if the absurd lower post test scores are removed as biased or flawed.
“Since the pre test measures past knowledge prior the year’s worth of instruction, a lower post test means the student lost knowledge the measured teacher never taught. Rationally absurd.”
No, that isn’t “rationally absurd”. I believe your “negative growth” is called in everyday parlance “forgetting”.
But in calling a spade a spade one should realize that all the mental masturbation that goes on over student test score growth, pre and post testing, etc. . . is “VAIN AND ILLUSORY” as shown by Noel Wilson. The complete INVALIDITY of the educational standards and standardized testing process due to myriad epistemological and ontological errors has never been refuted nor rebutted.
To understand why read Wilson’s “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.
Negative growth could mean that the student learns stuff that is wrong, in which case common core would pass that student on to the next indoctrination class.
As an example of where this falls apart. Students who are excellent learners and perform well in class can freeze when taking tests.
In particular, when presented with a question with a written response, if the student doesn’t perceive a specific nuance, she might write completely off-track. This may have nothing to do with “growth” per set, but with maturity, “schema”, or confidence.
I have seen excellent students freeze up during tests. I have seen kids double check an answer and suddenly panic only to erase their answers and run out of time rewriting their responses.
With strict compliance to test security measures, teachers can’t encourage or intervene in any way. The students were stressed and virtually “hung out to dry” emotionally. I think this is unconscionable.
“I think this is unconscionable.”
It is and you’re not the only one to think so. It is also child abuse.
When will those who believe with you in your statement stand up and say “NO!, I’m not doing this anymore!!!”?
I am doing what I can within the constraints of my influence. The teacher’s union is starting to wake up. The superintendent is actively involved in the morale created at schools in the district.
“The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) today released new guidance confirming that the same federal civil rights laws that apply to other public schools apply equally to public charter schools.
“Charter schools play an important role in the educational landscape and are serving more and more students all over the country,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, assistant secretary for civil rights. “Since our last guidance on the topic in 2000, thousands of new charter schools have opened. This guidance underscores that charter schools must satisfy the requirements of the federal civil rights laws.”
Well, not exactly.
Should read “since our last guidance on the topic, we’ve both subsidized and promoted the opening of thousands of new charter schools, and we just lobbied for a big federal funding package to open thousands more, funding that public schools aren’t eligible for.”
Charter schools, as we have learned, are the central focus of their education policy, along with various schemes to rank and sort teachers. Public schools? Not so much.
2010:
“U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Monday that parents have a right to know if their children’s teachers are effective, endorsing the public release of information about how well individual teachers fare at raising their students’ test scores.
“What’s there to hide?” Duncan said in an interview one day after The Times published an analysis of teacher effectiveness in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest school system. “In education, we’ve been scared to talk about success.”
Spurred by the administration, school districts around the country have moved to adopt “value added” measures, a statistical approach that relies on standardized test scores to measure student learning. Critics, including many teachers unions and some policy experts, say the method is based on flawed tests that don’t measure the more intangible benefits of good teaching and lead to a narrow curriculum. In Los Angeles, the teachers union has called public disclosure of the results “dangerous” and “irresponsible.”
2014:
” Many states are implementing new teacher evaluation systems that place a greater emphasis on student growth measures because the Obama administration has required them to do so if they want to keep their waivers from No Child Left Behind. In fact, Education Secretary Arne Duncan in April revoked Washington’s waiver because its legislature failed to implement a teacher evaluation system that met the federal requirements. The waiver requirements stipulate that states should have these systems in place for the 2014-15 school year and used to influence personnel decisions by the following year.
But the Department of Education on Friday sent updated guidance to state education chiefs, saying it would grant some states extensions on their waivers even if their teacher evaluation systems aren’t yet acceptable, Education Week first reported.
That flexibility could give states more time to more intensely study the relationship between value-added measures and teacher performance, Polikoff says.”
Seems like there’s an apology or correction or something missing in that timeline where we went from “what are you AFRAID of!?” to a quiet advisory to slow down.
Maybe it’s me 🙂
Oh no! Say it ain’t so! From Mississippi- test results now in question, which were coincidentally were quite beneficial to the school district. Race To Cheat indeed?
http://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2014/05/13/clarksdale-faces-cheating-allegations/9065667/ Clarksdale faces cheating allegations
“After another year of hard work, the school achieved an A, the highest accountability status in the state. Its achievements helped lift the entire district from an F to a D and played a role in it winning a $10 million federal Race to the Top grant in December.
Clarksdale was one of five districts nationwide and the only one in Mississippi to win the coveted grant from the U.S. Department of Education.
The state Department of Education noticed Heidelberg’s scores last year, too. They were among those flagged as “unusual” by internal data analysts, said James H. Mason, the department’s director of student assessment.”
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
Ecologies are healthier than are monocultures.
To the extent that we are standardizing and regimenting education, we are undermining our fundamental purpose as educators, which is
to create intrinsically motivated, independent, life-long learners and creative thinkers
who have discovered discovered in the process of the great cultural handoff that is schooling
those areas that suit their talents and interests and passions
and have pursued those, building upon them and developing unique sets of skills and knowledge
so that they might take on one of many, many widely differing roles
in an incredibly complex, diverse, pluralistic economy and culture
and contribute in ways that are innovative and creative,
producing new material to be passed on to future generations.
Kids differ, and so do the needs of the society. Invariant standards, invariant learning progressions, and invariant summative standardized tests do not. Because these are all products of centralized committees, they tend to be unimaginative and insipid and uninspiring, hackneyed and backward, and they often instantiate common sense that is, in fact, common error.
Absolutely true!
“I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.”
— Albert Einstein, Saturday Evening Post interview, 10/26/1929
“There’s no bullet list like Stalin’s bullet list.”
—Edward Tufte, “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint”
Oh, inspiring sarcasm–better than Caesar and Cleopatra!
Thank you, Ms. Ravitch. As a retired teacher and AFT leader I am shocked that the same things we fought for smaller classes etc NOW are o.k. For Charter Schools but not financially feasible for public schools. CHARTER SCHOOLS MUST BE HELD TO
THE Same LAWS WHICH PUBLIC SCHOOLS FOLLOW. the AFT was in to peer review and mentoring programs for new teacher in the early 60s. We were the vanguard not
Charter schools.
Marcy Dunne Ballard
AFT Local 1481 AFL-CIO
San Mateo County, CA
We used to hold up as among our highest ideals, in this country, that of autonomous individuals pursuing, responsibly, their own ideas and initiatives.
Now, in a billion subtle and not-so-subtle ways, we undermine individual autonomy, we turn teachers and learners into robots carrying out a prepackaged, canned agenda.
Such micromanaged, paint by number education will be no improvement. Quite the contrary. It will undermine motivation and initiative and creativity. It will lead to a deadly sameness. It is already doing so. We are teaching, now, not writing but InstaWriting for the Test, for example.
And shockingly, appallingly, people are referring to a system that leads to this sort of leveling, this institutionalization of mediocrity, as one that is “higher,” that introduces “rigor.”
In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek warns of just such centralization and its consequences. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx warns against the alienation that occurs when workers no longer have intrinsic, personal investment in the products of their labor. One cannot imagine two thinkers more different, more distant from one another than these, but both would understand what a dangerous, soul-crushing, innovation-destroying, mediocrity-producing road the education deformers–Gates and Pearson, Duncan and Jeb Bush and Michelle Rhee, the CCSSO and NGA and Achieve, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, and others–have put us on.
Ed Deform will eventually fall down under its own terrible dead weight. But we cannot wait for that to happen because, in the meantime, lives will be lost–children will be stack ranked and told that they are failures because they didn’t fit a particular mold, curricula and pedagogy will be terribly narrowed and distorted, innovation will die, a generation or more will be lost.
I risk a lot my posting about this stuff. Powerful people with lots and lots of money and influence are behind these deforms. But I have a duty to do so, for the deforms are doing grievous harm to children, and I cannot stand idly by while that happens.
My apologies for the occasional typos in these posts. Oh for an edit feature on WordPress!
Thank you for your posts. I think they are quite eloquent.
“But we cannot wait for that to happen because, in the meantime, lives will be lost–children will be stack ranked and told that they are failures. . . ”
No doubt Bob, with students internalizing what the authorities proclaim about them through these educational malpractices. Concrete, visceral, actual harm is being done to millions of students on a daily basis all to satisfy the gods of metrics-the edudeformers and the GAGAers who enable these monstrosities to continue.
What is the first sentence supposed to say?
Diane is recovering from surgery. Many, many of us are concerned, hoping that this is going well!
Thank you, Bob. Recovery is slow but progressing. I moved from the hospital to a rehab facility today and look forward to regaining use of my left leg, which got a new knee.
I think your posts have been great. Sedation can hamper a person’s typing ability!
Deb, I am often a victim of auto correct and failure to proof read
Diane, most of us are likewise victimized by autocorrect! When on a roll, I post before I remember to look. Take care.
So glad to hear from you.
Does it matter?
Does anyone really know what time it is???
Shelley,
I messed up the first sentence of this post. I wrote the intro while medicated, and it shows. Apologies.
dianeravitch: the decontextualized “close reading” of Kommoners Core aside, I find your opening sentence charming in its own way. Because—
Considering what you are going through, it is amazing that you are writing and posting anything at all.
“What he greatly thought, he nobly dared.” [Homer]
After the thinking and daring, take some time to rest and rehab.
Most krazy props.
😎
The new head of the Broad Foundation, who formerly worked for the USDOE:
“We’re trying to provide more and better options in urban schools by increasing the number of good charters and closing down bad charters.”
I don’t have any problem with that, nothing wrong with passionate advocates for charter schools, but they should probably stop calling it “ed reform” and call it “opening and closing charter schools” and that probably shouldn’t be the sole focus of the USDOE or governors.
Calling it “ed reform” makes it sound like they have some interest in public schools.
Teeny bit deceptive 🙂
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-morrison-reed-20140514-column.html#page=1
“Teeny bit deceptive”
You’re being nice, Chiara, being nice!
It’s true. Here’s Arne Duncan doing his daily charter school promotion:
Arne Duncan @arneduncan · 3h
Excited to see what comes from @usmayors’ focus on equity in education! Every child deserves the best at school. http://www.theroot.com/articles/politics/2014/05/mayor_kevin_johnson_how_mayors_can_help_improve_the_quality_of_public_education.html …
Read the piece.
Kevin Johnson’s fix for “under-resourced” public schools is to open more charter schools. That and TFA. There is no mention at all of public schools except in reference to replacing them with charter schools.
Whatever the question, charter schools and TFA are the answer!
One would think the US Secretary of Education would occasionally promote something that actually purports to improve an existing public school, but it’s all charters, all the time, and it’s the same 15 people, over and over and over…
“The distorted views of education produced by aggrandizing tests and “metrics” as if these refer to the actual complexities of human growth and development–perceptual, intellectual, social, physical, creative, aesthetic–is a fraud.”
Whaaat??? You’re saying the United (USDOE & educorps) Church of Testology is a FRAUD????
May you be banished to He#$an when you pass from this realm.
And for your listening pleasure, this evening, ladies and gentlemen,
Arne Dunkin’ and the Test-tots-ster-tones
Laughing out load, but not less concerned. Thanks to all, especially Diane for “Lipstick on a Pig.”
Perhaps, “Student Growth” is an euphemism for VAMification.
Another day, another stern, patronizing lecture on Common Core from an opinion columnist:
“There are two big problems with the hysteria from right-wing critics and teachers’ unions over Common Core: lack of easily available alternatives with comparable rigor to Common Core standards, and timing. In more than 40 states, Common Core is already happening, although the implementation issues are not trivial.”
That’s generous. She’s willing to consider your complaints regarding “implementation issues”, but as for the rest, forget it. Too late!
I love, too, how she thinks she has to tell both teachers and public school parents that Common Core is “already happening”. None of us noticed this giant national testing experiment being conducted in public schools. We needed this pundit to clue us in.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2014/05/14/common-core-critics-offer-too-little-too-late/
Chiara, that’s the old “train has left the station” argument. As you state, no one knew the train was in the station. Beyond that, it is a claim of inevitability that is unproven
This is really hilarious. This writer is so used to pulling out the union-bashing line that she didn’t even realize that the teacher’s unions have become propaganda ministries for Lord Coleman’s List. LOL!
And the Washington Post publishes this crap.
I find it simply astonishing that those creating ‘explations’ like the oak tree analogy always say…”but this doesn’t tell the whole story”…Please!!! The purpose of adminstrative regimes is NOT to tell the whole story…but to placate politicians (or parents) to create a ‘reduction to an absurdity’ (to translate from the pithy Latin saying) to provide safe (career) cover for administrators to keep and expand their budgets and staffs. Single numbers like ‘growth measures’, IQ tests and other absurdities provide the reduction of complex nature to something simple and unambiguous (and usually ineffective).
Oh, BTW: Every retail chain on Earth measures its managerial performance first and foremost by comparison of same-store-sales-year-to-year. Exactly like the oak tree analogy. Does that make it right?