Somehow, Andrea Gabor got a copy of most of the New York State English Language Arts Common Core-Aligned State tests.
She writes:
Once again I am in possession of a bit of educational contraband.
For the second year in a row, I have received a copy of the New York State English Language Arts tests for grades 6 to 8, which were administered in April. (Though, this year, my set appeared incomplete as it contained only books one and two for each grade–not the three books that were included last year and that I was told were given this year. So my analysis here is confined to only two booklets for each grade.)
Anyone who has followed the controversy around the introduction of the New York State’s “common-core aligned” tests, knows that there has been a growing backlash–and not necessarily against the common core itself. Rather, a great many educators object to the quality and the quantity of tests–in addition to six days of “common core” testing, New York kids are now finishing the Measurements of Student Learning (MOSL) tests, the sole purpose of which is to evaluate teachers, as well as field tests for next year’s “common core” tests. In the fall, students as young as kindergarteners endured base-line testing for the MOSL.
Most importantly, educators are outraged by the secrecy in which the tests are cloaked.
Pearson, which has a $32 million contract with New York, will not permit teachers or anyone else to see the exams.
They are hidden by a gag order.
This is insane.
The value of tests is to learn what students do and do not know or understand
If the students, parents, and teachers are not allowed to review the tests, then nothing can be learned from them.
There is no point in having tests that are hidden from the view of those who most need whatever information they provide.
Of course, the gag order also protects Pearson from public scrutiny and possible discovery of poorly written or inaccurate questions, like the Pineapple questions.
So who benefits from the gag order? Not the students.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I have a master’s degree; these questions were confusing and exhausting to me the reader. So unnatural. Those poor students; tricked by their Education Dept.
Book 3 doubled down on this nonsense. The only difference on day 3 was that students were suffering from test fatigue while trying to parse these inane test items.
After reading these very representative samples, it is plain to see that these tests are test-prep-proof. A lot of time wasted in ELA classes trying to prepare students for this crap.
Now to really understand the blunt force trauma perpetrated by these tests one must picture a small testing room with 12 learning disabled students, some with IQs in the 60s and 70s, some dyslexic, some reading at the first grade level (or lower), most defeated before they started, sitting for up to 8+ hours trying to complete these exams. Look next door and you’ll see a small class of ELL students, the children of immigrants who moved here specifically for the educational opportunities, working as hard as anyone in the system, often under extraordinary parental pressure to succeed, never quitting, but never really having a chance. If grit made the difference they would all do well.
Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground.
Mother Earth will swallow you, lay your body down.
So true so sad.
Now that brought back some memories. Thanks Duane.
amen
Why is no one suing Pearson? Public contracts need be transparent. There would seem to be legal foundation among parents and teachers being exploited for the profit of a foreign company with very poorly justification by naive or misinformed politicians and bureaucrats.
If this does not trigger the Great Parent Revolt, nothing else will.
And if anyone tells you that PARCC tests will be better, ask them what their smoking.
Hey, don’t go blaming it on what they’re smoking, maybe what they’re drinking.
I don’t think alcohol can make you hallucinate.
Absinthe?
Absinthe has often been portrayed as a dangerously addictive psychoactive drug. The chemical compound thujone, although present in the spirit in only trace amounts, was blamed for its alleged harmful effects. By 1915, absinthe had been banned in the United States and in much of Europe, including France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and Austria-Hungary. Although absinthe was vilified, it has not been demonstrated to be any more dangerous than ordinary spirits. Recent studies have shown that the absinthe’s psychoactive properties (apart from that of the alcohol) have been exaggerated.
NY, in the quantities at which alcohol is consumed at ALEC dinners around the country, it can.
In the world of the 1%ers,
Hallucination = Tax deduction
Why not turn this copy over to Wiki Leaks and ask them to publish it? Is Pearson more powerful and dangerous than the U.S. government and military?
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I am so with you on this. I would like to know why WikiLeaks is not all over CCSS assessments. The full monty should be out there on the internet for all to see: internet is the last bastion of democracy.
Probably not for much longer.
This really does invite litigation – but by serious law scholars (a great law school project, quite fundable by parents and progressive foundations, as well as a bellwether project for deBlasio against Coumo). What’s wrong with New York politics???
The wheels of justice turn slowly and they are not well oiled. What you call for, may happen yet.
Beckmann,
Andy and Bill are working together. Have you been out of the country?
So were Stalin and Roosevelt. At issue is to build the case for other measures. And the building is, at this stage, only defensive and provincial.
We need to form a national movement outside the unions. See Perdido Street Blog thread.
NJ Teacher
When the PARCC/SBAC fiasco of 2015 occurs, frustration and anger level will be at a head. Teachers and parents. The Great Revolt will then be possible. What you have read here in the Pearson ELA is just the tip of the iceberg that will sink the CCSS reform movement.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I agree w/NY Teacher. I cruise every ed article on google news. All the namby-pamby ‘I like CCSS’ comments to news articles come from states who have not yet implemented CCSS assessments.
Agree. Students and teachers are not employed by Pearson. Since the taxpayers are paying for the test, they should have the right to review them. Is it legal for a third party to enter into an agreement with minors? That might be cause for a legal claim.
Secrecy to prevent scrutiny. It was never about security.
Bob Shepherd please report to your Pearson ELA test item analysis station. We want a full report ASAP. Let me thank you in advance for your professional wisdom on this topic.
At one time these kinds of questions would appear on a reading test and a good reader could answer them. Now that school has become test prep for the “skills of the 21 century”, this is all that kids are doing with boring stories. Science an Social Studies reading is minimal and often the teacher reads, or they do “round robin” reading. Much of doing math is all about reading and understanding the question. Poor readers are usually poor in math.
Here are the boring skills, where staff developers meet with teachers and spend hours on just one concept:
Main Idea, Facts and Details, Understanding Sequence, Recognizing Cause and Effect, Comparing and Contrasting, Making Predictions, Find Word Meaning in Context, Drawing Conclusions-Making Inferences, Distinguish Between Fact and Opinion, Identify Authors Purpose, Interpreting Figurative Language, Summarizing.
Chatted with a test maker yesterday. Intelligent woman, but not trained in making tests at all. Writers of the tests must search for passages within Pearson material or .gov websites. Then they must make questions to fit criteria given (2 inference, 3 text-evidenced, etc. ) which defies logic. Quality of materials is not important just pumping out product. There is no reliability or validity to these tests. Pearson must be investigated and held accountable. Teachers will be fired, children impacted negatively, and schools shut down over these faulty tests.
That is the goal Fed up. They want to dismantle the entire public school system in the United States.
I would expect the lawyers to be attracted to this like sharks to a bloody seal. When HS graduation is on the line based on this nonsense, they will pounce.
You are very optimistic today NY teacher. I have been arguing all week with my colleagues at my school. Most of them have their heads buried so deep in the sand they will never be dug out. I don’t want to tell you the silly arguments they proffer.
Time will tell.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx NJ Teacher I’m glad you speak sense to your colleagues. Though their response is disappointing, it seems typical of many people to just block out things that might cause them conflict or negativity in the workplace. They don’t see any risk-free alternative, so they don’t want to see it.
I hope we NJ parents/ taxpayers can & will pick up the slack. I do my share of jawboning among parents. So far I am shocked at the obstinate, wrong-headed, or even blatantly classist responses I get (of the ilk of– nothing can touch my fabulous school system, & who cares what happens elsewhere!)
Which county are you in Spanish and French?
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Live in Union County; ‘classist’ comments from Westfield, Summit; I teach in Middlesex & Essex, where people are more aware… & in Warren, where they’re in their own bubble…
Where is the class action lawsuit involving the teachers’ unions, teachers, parents AND STUDENTS? Why aren’t students, like the Vergara plaintiffs (though we know they were paid puppets) bringing a suit that these tests are designed solely to CREATE failure?
We are still looking for our own billionaire to save us.
We can only save ourselves.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx student outcry will only come from areas where progressive parents observe the outrage & express themselves… & perhaps from those inner-city schools [for me this means Newark] where well-performing schools are being forceably closed to make room for charters. It is among the parents that the consciousness-raising must occur.
Advice for Avoiding PARCC Muggings
The Common Core Curriculum Commissariate College and Career Ready Assessment Program (CCCCCCRAP) needs to be scrapped. Here are a few of the reasons why:
1.The CCSS ELA exams are invalid.
First, much of attainment in ELA consists in world knowledge (knowledge of what—the stuff of declarative memories of subject matter). The “standards” being tested cover almost no world knowledge and so the tests based on those standards miss much of what constitutes attainment in this subject. Imagine a test of biology that left out almost all world knowledge about biology and covered only biology “skills” like—I don’t know—slide-staining ability—and you’ll get what I mean here. This has been a problem with all of these summative standardized tests in ELA since their inception.
Second, much of attainment in ELA consists in procedural knowledge (knowledge of what—the stuff of procedural memories of subject matter). The “standards” being tested define skills so vaguely and so generally that they cannot be validly operationalized for testing purposes as written.
Third, nothing that students do on these exams EVEN REMOTELY resembles real reading and writing as it is actually done in the real world. The test consists largely of what I call New Criticism Lite, or New Criticism for Dummies—inane exercises on identification of examples of literary elements that for the most part skip over entirely what is being communicated in the piece of writing. In other words, these are tests of literature that for the most part skip over the literature, tests of the reading of informative texts that for the most part skip over the content of those texts. Since what is done on these tests does not resemble, even remotely, what actual readers and writers do in the real world when they actually read and write, the tests, ipso facto, cannot be valid tests of real reading and writing.
Fourth, standard standardized test development practice requires that the testing instrument be validated. Such validation requires that the test maker show that the test correlates strongly with other accepted measures of what is being tested, both generally and specifically (that is, with regard to specific materials and/or skills being tested). No such validation was done for these tests. NONE. And as they are written, based on the standards they are based upon, none COULD BE done. Where is the independent measure of proficiency in CCSS.Literacy.ELA.11-12.4b against which the items in PARCC that are supposed to measure that standard on this test have been validated? Answer: There is no such measure. None. And PARCC has not been validated against it, obviously LOL. So, the tests fail to meet a minimal standard for a high-stakes standardized assessment—that they have been independently validated.
2. The test formats are inappropriate.
First, the tests consist largely of objective-format items (multiple-choice and EBSR). These item types are most appropriate for testing very low-level skills (e.g., recall of factual detail). However, on these tests, such item formats are pressed into a kind of service for which they are, generally, not appropriate. They are used to test “higher-order thinking.” The test questions therefore tend to be tricky and convoluted. The test makers, these days, all insist on answer choices all being plausible. Well, what does plausible mean? Well, at a minimum, plausible means “reasonable.” So, the questions are supposed to deal with higher-order thinking, and the wrong answers are all supposed to be plausible, so the test questions end up being extraordinarily complex and confusing and tricky, all because the “experts” who designed these tests didn’t understand the most basic stuff about creating assessments–that objective question formats are generally not great for testing higher-order thinking, for example. For many of the sample released questions, there is, arguably, no answer among the answer choices that is correct or more than one answer that is correct, or the question simply is not, arguably, actually answerable as written.
Second, at the early grades, the tests end up being as much a test of keyboarding skills as of attainment in ELA. The online testing format is entirely inappropriate for most third graders.
3. The tests are diagnostically and instructionally useless.
Many kinds of assessment—diagnostic assessment, formative assessment, performative assessment, some classroom summative assessment—have instructional value. They can be used to inform instruction and/or are themselves instructive. The results of these tests are not broken down in any way that is of diagnostic or instructional use. Teachers and students cannot even see the tests to find out what students got wrong on them and why. So the tests are of no diagnostic or instructional value. None. None whatsoever.
4. The tests have enormous incurred costs and opportunity costs.
First, they steal away valuable instructional time. Administrators at many schools now report that they spend as much as a third of the school year preparing students to take these tests. That time includes the actual time spent taking the tests, the time spent taking pretests and benchmark tests and other practice tests, the time spent on test prep materials, the time spent doing exercises and activities in textbooks and online materials that have been modeled on the test questions in order to prepare kids to answer questions of those kinds, and the time spent on reporting, data analysis, data chats, proctoring, and other test housekeeping.
Second, they have enormous cost in dollars. In 2010-11, the US spent 1.7 billion on state standardized testing alone. Under CCSS, this increases. The PARCC contract by itself is worth over a billion dollars to Pearson in the first three years, and you have to add the cost of SBAC and the other state tests (another billion and a half?), to that. No one, to my knowledge, has accurately estimated the cost of the computer upgrades that will be necessary for online testing of every child, but those costs probably run to 50 or 60 billion. This is money that could be spent on stuff that matters—on making sure that poor kids have eye exams and warm clothes and food in their bellies, on making sure that libraries are open and that schools have nurses on duty to keep kids from dying. How many dead kids is all this testing worth, given that it is, again, of no instructional value? IF THE ANSWER TO THAT IS NOT OBVIOUS TO YOU, YOU SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED ANYWHERE NEAR A SCHOOL OR AN EDUCATIONAL POLICY-MAKING DESK.
5. The tests distort curricula and pedagogy.
The tests drive how and what people teach, and they drive much of what is created by curriculum developers. This is a vast subject, so I won’t go into it in this brief note. Suffice it to say that the distortions are grave. In U.S. curriculum development today, the tail is wagging the dog.
6. The tests are abusive and demotivating.
Our prime directive as educators is to nurture intrinsic motivation—to create independent, life-long learners. The tests create climates of anxiety and fear. Both science and common sense teach that extrinsic punishment and reward systems like this testing system are highly DEMOTIVATING for cognitive tasks. The summative standardized testing system is a really, really backward extrinsic punishment and reward approach to motivation. It reminds me of the line from the alphabet in the Puritan New England Primer, the first textbook published on these shores:
F
The idle Fool
Is whip’t in school.
7. The tests have shown no positive results.
We have had more than a decade, now, of standards-and-testing-based accountability under NCLB. We have seen only miniscule increases in outcomes, and those are well within the margin of error of the calculations. Simply from the Hawthorne Effect, we should have seen SOME improvement!!! And that suggests that the testing has actually DECREASED OUTCOMES, which is consistent with what we know about the demotivational effects of extrinsic punishment and reward systems. It’s the height of stupidity to look at a clearly failed approach and to say, “Gee, we should to a lot more of that.”
8. The tests will worsen the achievement and gender gaps.
Both the achievement and gender gaps in educational performance are largely due to motivational issues, and these tests and the curricula and pedagogical strategies tied to them are extremely demotivating. They create new expectations and new hurdles that will widen existing gaps, not close them. Ten percent fewer boys than girls, BTW, received a proficient score on the NY CCSS exams–this in a time when 60 percent of kids in college and 3/5ths of people in MA programs are female. The CCSS exams drive more regimentation and standardization of curricula, which will further turn off kids already turned off by school, causing more to turn out and drop out.
This message not brought to you by
PARCC: Spell that backward
notSmarter, imBalanced
AIRy nonsense
CTB McGraw-SkillDrill
MAP to nowhere
Scholastic Common Core Achievement Test (SCCAT)
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (“All your base are belong to us”)
The tests are designed to fire teachers, close public schools and open charter schools. The oligarchy has no interest in valid tests of reading and writing skills in the real world. The goals are to develop markets and sell products. When all is said and done, they will have eliminated unions and public employee pensions. If you have a fire, you will put it out yourself. Police officers will rarely be needed as workers will be occupied at their jobs from sunrise to sunset. Everyone will be employed filling on-line orders, their driving trucks, or ripping burgers. Their rating is highly effective. They are doing a terrific job of destroying democratic institutions while the American public sits on the couch, watches television and eats junk food.
driving trucks
flipping burgers
My phone keeps correcting me. Sorry, I do have some basic literacy skills.
Governor Cuomo has publicly absolved students from suffering any consequences based on the scores from these Pearson tests. he called them “unfair and anxiety provoking”. In the very next breath he reminded NY teachers that they still count toward their APPR evaluations. Nice guy.
The Sacrifice
dolce et decorum est. . . .
Row on row, row on row,
Row on row stationed
Sick at their monitors
Sat the six hundred.
“You may now type your Username”
Said the test proctor.
Set up for failure
Sat the six hundred.
“Enter your password key!
“Mercy upon you!
“During the testing
“No one may help you.”
Someone had blundered.
That much was certain.
Theirs was not to make reply,
Theirs was not to reason why,
Theirs was but to do or die,
Theirs was but to try and cry.
Set up for failure
Sat the six hundred.
Text to the right of them
Complex, out of context,
Bubbles in front of them,
Plausible answers,
Tricky and tortured,
Boldly they bubbled and well
Though smack in the mouth of hell
Sat the six hundred.
This is what reading means,
Now that Gates/Pearson
Has reified testing
So far beyond reason.
Pearson not persons.
Plutocrats plundering,
Taxpayer dollars
Spent to abuse.
The children are used
They bubble and squirm
To reveal their stack ranking
And never again
Will know joy in learning
Never again
Humane joy in reading
And writing, no never again,
Not the six hundred.
Text to the right of them
Complex, out of context,
Bubbles in front of them,
Plausible answers,
Tricky and tortured,
Boldly they bubbled and well.
Gritfully slogging through hell
Sat the six hundred.
When shall their innocence,
Innate curiosity,
Joy in their learning
Ever return?
Alas this is not to be.
Theirs is to gritfully
Show the obedience
Proper for proles,
Their rightful roles
In the new feudal order.
Standardized children
With standardized minds,
Common, not great,
Though sufficient to serve
The ends of the state,
Lost to themselves
And the fruits of their labors.
Honor this children’s crusade.
Honor the price they paid.
Remember when they played.
Our once-young six hundred.