Someone sent me this clip from Tennessee, where Arne Duncan was trying to salvage the federally-funded online Common Core test called PARCC.
“DUNCAN: TENNESSEE CAN STILL SALVAGE TESTS: At Brick Church College Prep in Nashville, Tenn., Education Secretary Arne Duncan showered the state with praise for becoming the fastest improving state in the country. But it still has a long way to go, he said after a town hall event [http://bit.ly/1tgEe8P ] with state chief Kevin Huffman. The legislature delayed Common Core-aligned PARCC tests for a year, but Tennessee has time for a fix, he said. “I think that having high standards is really important,” Duncan said. “Having an honest way to measure that you’re hitting those high standards and to have transparency across the country. So if all you’re able to do is measure Tennessee students against Tennessee students and not have any sense of how you’re doing versus Massachusetts or Kentucky or Mississippi, I think that misses the point. I think the state still has a chance to do the right thing going forward.”
Question: has Secretary of Education Duncan heard about the federally-funded National Assessment of Educational Progress? Since 1992, it has been measuring academic progress in the states. Using NAEP, it is possible to compare students in Tennessee to students in Massachusetts, Kentucky, Mississippi, and other states. Instead of testing every single student, it tests scientific samples in every state and nationally. It has no stakes attached. Isn’t that as much testing as we need to compare states?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Our Secretary of “Education” exhibits none of the qualities we hope to cultivate in our students, not the least of which is intellectual curiosity. I guess he’s well compensated to remain ignorant–and that’s one thing he does well.
NAEP certainly provides all the information we need to compare student achievement across the states. Thank you for shining the light of good sense on the prevalent myth that there is a need for ever increasing testing, no matter how much time and focus it takes away from instruction.
Duncan is more unqualified than the discredited Paige. Abolish the for-profit US Department of Corporate Education that focuses on monetizing children and teachers.
Arne is a basketball player but also has a degree from Harvard. He was a superintendent in Chicago.
He says he believes in honesty and transparency, but neither he nor his staff read and understand anything that might be at odds with the awful agenda of this administration.
NAEP is hardly perfect. NAEP is probably good for math and ELA comparisons where “proficiency” can be mapped for conventional content and well-defined skills and…test makers can assume that teaching–access to instruction–is not a problem. You are in trouble if you move beyond these subjects and easy-to-construct assessments.
Although NAEP asks some background questions to map differences in scores based on demographic characteristics of schools and communities, it is not always obvious to the public that scores will also reflect the usual SES advantages as well as the quality of instruction, curriculum emphasis, and amount of time students are engaged with a subject, in or out of school.
NAEP trend data is not available for arts education. Only 8th graders were tested the last time, only in music and the visual arts, with barely enough students actually enrolled to make any inferences about what was really being assessed.
He was “CEO” in Chicago. He is not qualified to be superintendent anywhere in the US or beyond. Obama’s education mismanagement by Duncan will turn the Senate over to the Republicans. Educators have had enough of Gates, Obama and Duncan.
I really have trouble with the idea of turning assessment of arts programs into a paper and pencil test. First of all, we have no idea what a quality arts program should look like. I should say “run of the mill” arts program because I am getting tired of calls for “state of the art” programming. Perhaps I should say ordinary. Ordinary is good. I am ordinary. I’m a nice person. Ordinary Americans have gotten us a lot of things. Our ordinary educational system has done what it should when we have allocated adequate resources ( and I’m not just talking about educational funding). I don’t think we have to race anywhere to be a strong, vital society. Perhaps we should just work on doing well by our ordinary citizens.
TAGO!
I find it interesting that Duncan frequently talks about honesty, either heralding his own, pushing others to be so, or accusing his critics of not having it. This seems to pop up in his speeches most often when has either just said, or is about to say something that is blatantly untrue, and that the listener can be reasonably sure Duncan knows is untrue.
I don’t find it “interesting”. I find it incredibly arrogant and manipulative.
This is a political campaign, and Duncan traveling the country calling every public school administrator a liar is part of that campaign
Only he and his 6 or 7 loyal deputies, like Mr. Huffman, speak the truth.
He’s calling everyone else a liar. That’s what he’s doing. Up until the rollout of the CC tests, in Stage One of this political campaign, he used the WORD “lying”
It’s not subtle.
My reaction as well. Kind of like when I had an administrator “question my integrity” when he was the one who had been deceptive. He didn’t seem to get it when I was offended by his polite way of calling me a liar.
I guess an advanced degree from Harvard doesn’t require you to enroll in a basic statistics course. Anyone who has taken such a course knows about sampling and how you can make assumptions if you truly have a random sample. Maybe Arne cut class that day to shoot hoops.
I would love to be able to review his transcript.
He also cut government class the day they discussed federalism
What percentage of the graduates of Harvard have taken a statistics course?
Probably way too few.
Fundamental statistics should be a part of basic high school math.
Charter school promoters like Duncan promoting “transparency” is a joke.
Let’s see the books in Duncan’s preferred charter schools before this privatizer lectures public schools on “transparency”
You have to sue a charter in Ohio if you
want “tranparency” and even tgen you won’t get it, because you’ll lose that lawsuit.
You can’t expect Duncan to be proficient in the nitty gritty of education. After all, he is a busy man. Busy forcing his personal agenda on all the states. It takes a lot of effort to strong arm all those governors into following ones dictum.
So, of course, we must make allowances if he gets his letters mixed up. NAEP? Please remind him what that means.
Reblogged this on TN BATs BlOG and commented:
Diane, please check out my recent post about my experience at the #WHSocial with Arne. Thank you- this relates to the testing theme.
http://activism4educators.blogspot.com/2014/05/bat-whsocial-teachers-tale.html
🙂 !
States with higher wages, as promised by higher standards and test scores, will attract corporations. Company migration, to southern states, seeking lower costs, will abruptly turn around. An interesting premise for the daft.
Rochester, NY had an experiment where inner city teachers were given a large increase in salary. The theory was that if the teachers were paid more, the students would do better in school. I suppose they thought that the higher the pay, the harder the teachers would work. It never occurred to them that the teachers were doing their best regardless of their pay grade.
Obviously, the experiment did not achieve the desired results.
I wish it had. It would have helped to settle the contract in Buffalo. “See, higher pay means that will now be able to get the same results as those ‘superior’ suburban teachers.” Even though we deserve to be paid more, it is because of continued efforts in the face of constant criticism, not because we are able to work miracles raising a standardized test score. Our miracles are not necessarily measurable, they are felt in the hearts and minds of our students.