At a rally against high-stakes testing in New York City, high school teacher Rosie Frascella explains the uselessness of high-stakes tests. The students get no feedback about what they did well and where they need to improve. As their teacher, she learns nothing about how well or poorly they did and why. The tests are useless other than for data for bureaucrats nd for the bottom line at Pearson. The interview was conducted by a local television station in New York City but never broadcast. Fortunately it was also taped by retired teacher and videographer Norm Scott.
Share it with your friends and colleagues, with parents and students.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
If you want to hear Rosie again, and others… Come to the Taking Back Our Schools Rally on Saturday, May 17 at 2:00 pm at city hall park in NYC.
Pearson designed tests are “useless” as a measure of validity for authentic learning; but, they are “helpful” to the 1% who are using CCSS to create a school environment that produces submissive workers for a “totalitarian” society. The CCSS Environment indoctrinates elementary age children with the same punitive authoritarian system that causes “learned helpless”. As an elementary school counselor, the symptoms that I have observed in many children in this environment, over a period of time, are the same symptoms of “desensitization” that result from chronic “traumatic stress”, like that of “battered person syndrome”. The CCSS Environment is emotional abuse for children.
http://psychcentral.com/encyclopedia/2009/learned-helplessness/
If we model totalitarian behavior for children in their every day environment, that is what they will learn.
Yes. This is the value of these tests. This is what they actually accomplish.
Wow, when did we ever hear Commissioner King use the word “writing process”?
Go Rosie! What a wonderful video. Thank you to whoever provided it. The battle has become an all-out war . . . I believe in TEACHERS to take back our SCHOOLS–one classroom at a time.
Sorry, that’s not the video I copied the code for.
Hopefully, this embed from YouTube will be the right video.
High-stakes testing takes the passion out of teaching and learning…this teacher really demonstrates her frustration at not being able to be passionate about teaching her students.
I wish I COULD share this with parents and students and colleagues, but in my state, we have been told by the state superintendent that we cannot speak out against the tests and/or encourage opting out, or they will take action against our teaching licenses.
What state?
worse than useless
damaging
but useless, yes
billions and billions of dollars for these, and they are utterly useless
and damaging
The Pearson contract for PARCC (spell that backward) will generate for that company, alone, a little over a billion dollars in revenue in the first three years. SBAC will do the same for its vendor. But that’s just a tiny, tiny portion of the cost. Factor in billions more for computers to take the tests on, billions in teacher time spent proctoring these tests and giving practice tests and doing test prep. And all the opportunity cost. And all the demotivation of students. And all the narrowing and distortion of curricula and pedagogy.
The costs rapidly become astronomical, incalculably high.
And the tests are completely invalid and utterly useless for any instructional purpose. Completely, utterly useless.
and damaging
“And the tests are completely invalid and utterly useless for any instructional purpose. Completely, utterly useless. . . . and damaging”
Yep, Yep and No Doubt!
Rosie Frascella is someone I would have been very pleased to have as my own kids’ teacher. I hope you will all listen to her clear, honest, informed assessment of the assessments. Here’s someone who actually knows what she is doing. She has more sense that the whole pack of idiots in the Department for the Standardization, Regimentation, Dehumanization, and Privatization of U.S. Education, formerly the USDE.
Really, if you didn’t listen to this teacher, please do. Rosie Frascella is awesome!!!
The utter INVALIDITY and uselessness of educational standards and standardized testing was shown by Noel Wilson in his never rebutted not refuted seminal study “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.