I honor the Ossining School District in Néw York for having the good sense and courage to say “no” to field testing. The school superintendent Raymond Sanchez says in the letter below that he must protect instructional time for the students, who recently lost seven hours to testing. Enough is enough!
The people of Ossining have confidence in their public schools. The school budget recently passed with the highest approval rate in its history (72%).
From: Superintendent’s Office [mailto:oufsd@ossiningufsd.ccsend.com] On Behalf Of Superintendent’s Office
Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2014 12:03 PM
Subject: New York State Field Tests
May 21, 2014
Dear Parents/Guardians:
Annually, the New York State Education Department randomly selects school districts to administer the New York State Field Tests. This year the Ossining School District was selected to administer the exams in 4th, 5th and 8th grades. These exams are intended to “provide data necessary to ensure the validity and reliability of the New York State Testing program.” The field tests are a series of standardized exams developed by the independent testing company Pearson. The company uses the field tests as trial for questions it may use on future exams.
After a discussion with the building administrators and the Board of Education, I am recommending that the Ossining School District not administer the field tests. My reasons are as follows:
1. Protect Instructional Time: Due to inclement weather, we have lost a significant amount of instructional time. In addition, students were recently administered 7 hours of exams. Administering the field exams will lead to additional lost time. Instead, our goal is to use the time to continue to provide our students with appropriate direct instruction.
2. Lack of Transparency: These exams do not provide parents, teachers or administrators with information regarding each child’s progress.
I want to reemphasize that I feel that this decision is in the best interest of the students we serve in our school district. It is critical that we protect the instructional time we have with our students.
If you should have any questions after reading this notice, please feel free to contact your building principal – Ms. Regina M. Cellio, Ms. Kate Mathews, or Dr. Corey W. Reynolds.
Sincerely yours,
Raymond Sanchez
Ossining Union Free School District
190 Croton Avenue Ossining, NY 10562
(914) 941-7700 | jforsberg@ossining.k12.ny.us
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There we go! Someone who is actually standing up to the machine!
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“Only a few years ago, the ambitious initiative to use shared assessments to gauge learning based on the new common-core standards had enlisted 45 states and the District of Columbia. Today, the testing landscape looks much more fragmented, with only 27 of them still planning to use those tests in 2014-15, and the rest opting for other assessments or undecided”
That’s interesting. I didn’t know only 27 states were actually (still) committed to using the tests. So 27 (or fewer) are “field testing” the tests, right?
You read the “45, 45, 45” over and over again so you think that’s still accurate.
Which testing consortium is losing more states, I wonder? Does that matter, or not? Is one better at this than the other?
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/05/21/32assessment_ep.h33.html?cmp=SOC-SHR-TW
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Yes. If Pearson wants guinea pigs, let Pearson pay parents for students to show up and take them.
I love this idea because this is aligned with pay for some medical studies and the perks from marketing companies, many in my hometown.
Pearson would have to do, or contract for a lot of paperwork, test security at the site, and the site might not be “free.”
Pearson or contractor would face timing and staffing issues, including proctors, and they would have to find demographic information not easily swiped from school records.
The free stuff that schools contribute to a typical field-test study for the reliability and validity of test items should be costed out to the last penny. That sum, an “in-kind contribution” to Pearson should be included in the Dear Parent letters sent by courageous administrators like this one, indeed to every parent.
In the Florida FCAT tests (statewide) with an average of 50 items for each sub-test, about 10% are not counted in the actual score because they are being field tested. In effect, students and teachers are subsidizing the unregulated testing industry in ways too rarely brought into full view.
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Excellent pov.
Pearson won’t refute the logic of free enterprise. Will they provide funding to politicians to legislate against it?
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“These exams are intended to “provide data necessary to ensure the validity and reliability of the New York State Testing program.”
Ha, ha ha ah ha ha, je je je je je, ha ha-to ensure the validity and reliablilty-Ha, ha ha ah ha ha, je je je je je, ha ha!!!
Wilson has proven the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, due to the myriad epistemological and ontological errors involved in the whole educational standards and standardized testing processes. To understand read his never refuted nor rebutted 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.
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PRECISELY, Duane! When the geniu$e$ at Pear$on ACTUALLY figure out even how to use data (let alone ever making their te$t$ “valid and reliable”), hell will freeze over & pigs will fly. Also agree with Robert’s comments below.
Wish the Illinois school district supers/admins had had the props to say no loud & clear. As you might recall, we also had a number of days of for extreme winter weather, like Ossining. Field testing was done (last week, I believe) in at least 16 school districts. One of our local sds had a write up in the paper (guess what–one of those New Trier H.S. feeder schools!). It was reported that kids liked the computer usage (testing on computers) the first day, but not so much the second–eyes tired, would rather have paper-&-pencil test, etc. Also, students complained about inappropriate questions–“too old for grade,” i.e., questions above actual grade level tested. Hmmmm,,,wonder if Pear$on will correct those, in order to make their te$t$ “valid & reliable.”
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…in Ossining, NY. Read this superintendent’s letter. I am hoping you went to sleep. Just call when you’re up for next steps…. I.
> >
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I applaud my superintendent of the Ossining public schools for refusing to take on this field test. I am speechlessly proud of the Ossining BOE, the parents, the PTA, the faculty, the Ossining Teacher’s Association, and the community at large for supporting this refusal as well.
Our superintendent and BOE also continue to fight fearlessly for the funding owed to our district from Albany.
In this field test refusal, we have protected precious instructional contact time and given the message to Pearson, the state legislature, NYSED, and Mr. Cuomo that a lack of transparency (will parents really know how their children did on the test and why?) has sub-zero tolerance.
Pearson is a multi-billion dollar corporation and should be conducting compensated participant pilot studies like any other product research and development department of an enterprise . . . .
We must remember that out system of taxation has allowed Pearson unspeakable and unthinkable tax loopholes that have facilitated the company’s avoidance of paying its fair share of taxes. It adds fire to the gasoline to have to subsidize Pearson with free pilot studies. The state has only aided and abetted Pearson in this whole testing industrialized complex foisted upon us by primarily non-educators.
Not coincidentally, I am preparing to enter a new course of study, my second Masters if all goes well.
I am required to pay a $500 fee to the prospective college, and for what?
I am required to spend the money on an online text book put out by – who else – Pearson. I don’t even get a hardline copy, and if I want any of it printed out, I have to depreciate my own printer and use up my own ink to do so.
Pearson is not a psychometric design company; it is a three headed monster with wings and claws and fangs, and it is attempting to swallow far too many people whole in its monopolization of testing materials . . . .
It’s time the voter and constituent slay the beast . . . . .
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Sorry, but I am biased:
GO OSSINING COMMUNITY !!!!!!!!!!
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The AFT report “Testing More, Teaching Less” put the cost of standardized testing and testing-related activity in the US at between $700 and $1,000 per pupil.
Let’s take the lower of these figures. According to the Institute for Education Statistics, average school size in the US in 2009-10 was 546.4.
So, $382,480 was spent on standardized testing and tested-related costs PER SCHOOL.
Think of what that money could buy in your school.
This standardized testing has ZERO INSTRUCTIONAL VALUE.
And think of the opportunity costs.
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