Arne Duncan is one of the most fervent advocates of the Common Core standards and testing. As Valerie Strauss explained in this article, Duncan said:
“I am convinced that this new generation of state assessments will be an absolute game-changer in public education. For the first time, millions of schoolchildren, parents, and teachers will know if students are on-track for colleges and careers — and if they are ready to enter college without the need for remedial instruction.”
Nope, the new tests will not be a “game-changer.” States keep pulling out, and more are thinking about following suit.
Strauss writes:
“With Tennessee’s recent departure from PARCC, that consortia is now down to 15 members, 14 states plus D.C. public schools, and Smarter Balance has 22 members.
“An Education Week analysis found that in the next school year, 19 different accountability tests will be given in various states in which, collectively, more than half of America’s students go to school.”
Reminder: there is still NAEP, which has been comparing states’ academic performance since 1992.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s reassuring to know that the US Secretary of Education can be relied upon to utter some trite and insipid sports metaphor (“game changer”) to illustrate the depth of his thought about complex and daunting problems. So let me offer my own cliche. In an administration that has provided so many disappointments, he truly towers above the rest.
Playing the game of what Arne should have said, started by a recent blog post here and originating with a more gifted writer than I am.
“I am convinced that the education of this generation of students has been an absolute game-changer, with students enrolled in our public schools and the institution of public education the great looser. For a decade and a half, millions of schoolchildren, parents, and teachers have known that our federal policies on education are harmful, have failed to close the acheivement gap, and more recently have narrowed the aspiration gap to little more than ‘being on-track’ to pass or fail tests that are based on deeply flawed one-size-fits all standards and tests.”
“We know that life offers, and requires, more than passing stadardized tests. We know that strictly academic skills and knowledge, while valuable, cannot be the exclusive focus of education for children and young citizens in a democracy. For this reason, this administration is undertaking “remedial instruction” on what education should be for beyond college and job preps, improving the economy, and vague competitions on a global scale.”
I can’t spend the whole day on this.
Test,test,test. I’ll save the deformers millions. The kids in the suburbs will do well while many of those in the inner city, low socio-economic levels will continue to struggle. It’s not a standards problem. It is a great excuse for corporate commandeering of public education.
NY Times, 6/29/14: Math Under Common Core Has Even Parents Stumbling
Not true if by “game-changer” you mean “not beating up on public school teachers and staff anymore”—
[start quote]
In truth, the idea that the Common Core might be a “game-changer” has little to do with the Common Core standards themselves, and everything to do with stuff attached to them, especially the adoption of common tests that make it possible to readily compare schools, programs, districts, and states (of course, the announcement that one state after another is opting out of the two testing consortia is hollowing out this promise).
But the Common Core will only make a dramatic difference if those test results are used to evaluate schools or hire, pay, or fire teachers; or if the effort serves to alter teacher preparation, revamp instructional materials, or compel teachers to change what students read and do. And, of course, advocates have made clear that this is exactly what they have in mind. When they refer to the “Common Core,” they don’t just mean the words on paper–what they really have in mind is this whole complex of changes.
[end quote]
Link: http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/the-american-enterprise-institute-common-core-and-good-cop/
The above is from a December 2013 blog posting by Dr. Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute. A genuinely articulate charter member of the $tudent $ucce$$ education establishment.
The tail of testing is wagging the dog of teaching and learning. *CAVEAT: for OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN [aka the vast majority]. For the BBBBC [BusyBody Billionaire Boys Club] edupreneurs like Bill Gates and their political enablers like President and Mrs. Obama and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and NJ Governor Chris Christie and their edubully enforcers like Michelle Rhee, for THEIR OWN CHILDREN nothing but Lakeside School and Sidwell Friends and U of Chicago Lab School and Delbarton School and Harpeth Hall and the like.*
Their motto? I think they’ve been following Henny Youngman too closely:
“If you’re going to do something tonight that you’ll be sorry for tomorrow morning, sleep late.”
😎
Stephen Colbert, 4/8/14: Common Core Confusion
“Common Core testing prepares students for what they’ll face as adults — pointless stress and confusion”
When Arne opens his mouth, I barf.
TAGO!
I am not trying to brag but rather attempting to make a point. I have a niece who is a Sophomore in High School. Yes she is a “Go getter” who has a permanent hearing loss.
She is in the orchestra, band, honors band and first chorus. She is taking all AP courses and an average between 101-102 % including the AP. On the regents exam she scored 97%, on the common core she scored 87%. You can just take this at face value.
and your point is what?
Cathy- And yes this is a public school.
Sigh.
Some of the states that are “dropping” the Common Core are simply renaming them, so it’s not like they’re “gone.” They’re not.
The Common Corte is still very much alive, and a two-year delay in Common Core testing makes little difference, no matter what people like Randi Weingarten say.
The ACT and the College Board were key players in the developing the Common Core standards. Both now openly tout that their products –– the ACT test, the PSAT, SAT and AP –– are all “aligned” with the Common Core.
So, the testing is already here.
There can be no abandonment of the Common Core and its assessments without also relinquishing Advanced Placement courses and tests, the ACT, and the SAT.
Are school boards, administrators, students, parents and teachers willing to heed the research and top believing in silly myths?
“So, the testing is already here”
Yep, part and parcel of educational standards, flip sides of the same coin.
And yes we were warned about these ILLOGICAL, INVALID and UNETHICAL educational malpractices and the concomitant harm done to the most innocent of society, the children, by Noel Wilson in his never refuted nor rebutted “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 description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional 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 the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
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 attempts to measure “’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.