Anthony Cody points out the contradiction between claims that the Common Core will prepare students for college and careers and the reality that the Common Core tests are designed to fail most students.
He also notes what happened to the GED graduation rate after Pearson took control of the program. The pass rate on the GED plummeted.
What is going on? Cody has two hypotheses:
“Hypothesis #1:
“Corporations are unable to find an adequate supply of highly skilled and educated people, and if we make it harder to graduate high school or earn a GED we will get a larger number of people on track for these skilled jobs.
“This is the basic reason stated by the Gates Foundation and other advocates of “higher standards.” This has been the rationale for the Common Core, along with the idea that we are somehow losing in an international race for higher test scores.
“If this were the case, we should see employers experiencing some sort of shortage of skilled workers. Economists can find no evidence of such a shortage. This report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the top seven occupations with the largest projected numerical growth require at most a two-year Associates degree, and most require only short-term on-the-job training.
“Hypothesis #2:
“Employers actually need FEWER employees with college degrees, and perhaps even fewer workers overall, due to increases in efficiency that are coming through technology. This creates a challenge to the stability of the system – how can we justify leaving many people who are willing to work idle? Perhaps we need a system to label these people “unready for college and career.”
“I do find some evidence to support this hypothesis. We are already in what has been termed a “jobless recovery,” which means that while corporate profits are sky-high, these profits are being made with fewer and fewer workers. A report in the MIT Technology Review suggests that in the next 20 years, 45% of American jobs could be eliminated as a result of computerization.
“There is an idea, most recently expounded by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, that any student, including those with significant learning disabilities, can pass ever more difficult tests. If our entire education system is re-tooled to prepare for Common Core tests, teachers are evaluated based on test scores, and energetic innovators produce new devices and “learning systems,” ALL students will somehow rise to meet the challenge. Where have we heard this premise before? Oh yes. The mythical 100% proficiency rates of No Child Left Behind. We have abandoned one myth simply to embrace another. I think it is time to call an end to this charade.
“Tests do not and cannot accurately measure who is “ready for college and career.” They can only serve to stigmatize, rank, sort, and justify the abandonment of an ever larger number of our students. The Gates Foundation’s Common Core project, in spite of Vicki Phillips’ reassurances, is NOT acting in the interests of our students when it labels large numbers of them as rejects. It is putting millions of them in grave danger. Fortunately, the Common Core tests are encountering serious trouble. The Pearson GED test ought to be rejected as well, and the sooner the better.
“Our public education system has as its noble mission the elevation of all students to their highest potential. This is not defined by their future usefulness to employers. And if corporations find ways to make their billions while employing fewer and fewer of our graduates, that will not be a failure of our educational system, nor of our students themselves. Our economic system ought to be critically examined and re-thought, if, in fact, “all lives have equal value.” As advances in efficiency allow greater productivity, those gains should be shared widely, not hoarded by the .01%. Any testing system that results in massive failure is an assault on our students and should be fought by anyone who cares for their future.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Given the criticism of the declining GED graduation rate, I am curious to know what folks here think the GED graduation rate should be and what standards should be meet by someone awarded a GED diploma.
Well and GED should also be abandoned, what about Praxis and National Boards?
What is your answer to your own question, TE?
For various reasons, lots of students didn’t do well in high school. Some were simply too young and immature and alienated. But as a practical matter, the GED offered them a way to get the credential that they needed in order to enter a vocational or community college program and learn a trade that would enable them to earn a living. Millions have done that. Now, a lot fewer can.
So, given your comment about the criticism of the declining GED graduation rate, I am curious to know what you think the rate of people told that they have no option for learning a trade because they have failed the gateway test ought to be.
Because I can design a test to give you any results you want.
Robert,
If having the credential is all that matters, by all means give everyone the credential automatically, say at their 17th birthday. If what is important is not the credential, but the level of academic achievement that the credential represents, we need to have a serious discussion about what level of academic achievement is necessary to enter a vocational or community college program.
TE, we are talking about a one-size-fits-all credential for every kid who is not going to pursue a tertiary academic career. Something tells me that the kid studying automotive mechanics and the kids studying cosmetology and the kid studying to be a nuclear medicine technician have different prerequisites.
Indeed different paths will have different academic prerequisites.
But just to clarify your position, do you think that a GED diploma should be automatically awarded or should the diploma represent some level of academic achievement? It seems to me if it is the latter, we should be discussing the appropriate level of achievement when thinking about the GED pass rates.
I think, TE, that at a minimum, the GED should require production of a book-length work that is a significant contribution to scholarship in the field of endeavor and a command of two of the following: group theory, Fourier analysis, tensor theory, differential geometry and topology, or algebraic number theory. One needs these abilities in one’s hair stylist.
Robert,
You don’t want to have a serious conversation? That is unfortunate.
TE, I don’t want to see more doors closed in the faces of more kids. And that’s what is happening with the new test.
Robert,
The way to keep the door open as wide as possible would be to simply award a GED diploma to anyone who turns 17 or 18 or 19, you can pick the age. If you don’t want to automatically award GED diplomas, it seems to me that a discussion of the standards for awarding one are in order.
I think that the standards for these tests should be quite low, that they should be tests of minimal literacy and arithmetic skills.
Skills should be at a level of functionally literate and mathematically useful for those who do not possess the drive or ability to go further, for whatever reason.
Robert,
Can you translate that into a grade level? Something like reading at a sixth grade level? Basic arithmetic but not fractions?
I recently completed work on a workforce training program in a technical area. These programs are being run by states across the country. Typically, they call for materials to be written at no higher than a fifth-grade reading level.
So you would suggest that the GED exam be designed to verify that an individual taking the exam reads, at minimum, the fifth grade level?
I am curious if you think that high school graduates should be held to the same standards or if graduating from high school should require a higher level of academic attainment.
heavy sigh
Robert,
It seems to me that any certification must have some meaning if we are going to bother to pay attention to the certification. You say that the GED is not the equivalent of a High School Diploma (though my university automatically admits students with a sufficiently high score on the exam). Without knowing what a GED diploma means there is no way to know if using a GED diploma is appropriate or inappropriate certification for all those doors that you do not want closed to people.
TE. As I thought I made clear, it is my contention that we should be looking at the practical use of this test not at some abstract notion about what it is supposed to mean. We should not be thinking of it as a high-school equivalency exam but, rather, as a test of possession of the minimum level of skill required for students to pursue these vocational tracks that they in fact pursue based on it.
I have often stated on this blog my position that if we are going to give summative standardized tests, these should be tests of basic skills, that they are not the right sort of instrument for determining general achievement. And the research bears out what I am saying. The SAT is such a test. It was originally called the Scholastic Aptitude Test because it was supposed to predict success in college. It didn’t. It was not valid for that purpose. So it was renamed the Scholastic Achievement Test. But it was not a valid measure of general scholastic achievement either. So, it was renamed the Scholastic Reasoning Test or simply the SAT because it was a valid predictor of Spearman’s g. High-school grades turn out to be a much more valid measure of high-school achievement. Portfolios of performance tasks, assessed by local teachers, would be much more valid as general assessments of achievement than are these high-stakes summative standardized tests.
BTW, it is more than a little uncharitable for you to ask such a question, don’t you think? From previous comments that you have made on this blog, it seems that you oppose general increases in the minimum wage. Should I ask you, because of your opposition to the minimum wage, questions like: “I am curious if you think that low-wage workers should starve and be homeless even though they are working full time?”
Robert,
My answer to your question would be to institute a negative income tax. I know that this would not be popular here as it was advocated by Milton Friedman, but it would prevent firms from having an additional incentive to substitute away from employing people and would create a guaranteed minimum income for individuals.
I don’t mean for my question about the meaning of a GED diploma to be abstract, rather I think we need a concrete idea of the kinds of skills represented by that certification if we are to know if a passing score does mean that students are in possession of the minimum requirements to pursue vocational tracks (by the way my institution automatically admits any student with a score of 2,550 on the GED exam and at least 510 on each subsection).
I agree with you about the negative income tax. I have been an advocate of this for many decades.
Most of these job training programs will require very little mathematics, but it depends on the program. A kid studying to become a pharmacy technician will need to be adept at addition and subtraction of decimals and fractions.
Which would be in keeping with their actual use–as gateways to community college and vocational programs. It’s a misnomer to call these high-school equivalency exams. They weren’t that in the past. They should not be now. That’s not the purpose that they serve. They don’t exist to prove that the student has the equivalent of a solid high-school education.
Bob Shepherd: a simple, direct and clear truism in the standardized testing biz—
“Because I can design a test to give you any results you want.”
Don’t expect to get a simple, direct and clear response to that statement by those in, or supportive of, the standardized testing biz because they have already staked out what they value most—
“The most beautiful words in the English language are ‘cheque enclosed.’” [Dorothy Parker]
😎
TE – But a credential is useless if everybody has it. You can’t scale signaling.
The Common Core may not be so bad for students suitable for a traditional college education. Roughly those with IQ’s in excess of 110. That would be about 25% of the population. I don’t know if the economy could actually soak up all those people in jobs actually requiring a college degree.
The Common Core is too difficult for the great majority of American students. I think we should try more vocational education. That may not be a panacea but it probably makes more sense than our present obsession with a college education.
According to Linda Gottredson people with an IQ of less than 75 are virtually unemployable in the US economy. The ongoing changes in US demographics will likely increase the percentage of the population with IQ’s under 75 from about 5% to 10% by mid-century.
Uncharacteristically, I find myself agreeing with you about something, Jim. Yes, we need to do more vocational education, and we need to start offering vocational tracks earlier.
There has been a push to de-emphasize the value of a votech education as if it were inferior. The bottom line, any kind of training is education. As an adult, having a job will sustain us. So there needs to be a recognition that all people matter. All jobs matter. All education matters.
To act as if this particular set of “standards” is applicable across the board to every student is absurd, condescending, and small minded.
Our county has one of the premiere votech schools in our state, if not the nation. They train policemen, firemen, nurses, provide for careers in culinary arts, designing, technology, agriculture, landscaping, childcare, cosmetology, hair design, welding, carpentry and many other fields. How is this NOT an education? Many of the students are nontraditional, not college bound, and there are even adult basic education classes.
We are in Southwest Ohio and not in an urban center but serve the entire county and some adjoining county districts. Some larger districts have in house votech for their students.
Do these kids need PARCC testing? No.
“Because I can design a test to give you any results I want.”
Exactly. This!
If I wanted to have most of my students fail I could design a test easily to do that.
Imagine if I designed a French test that utilized grammar concepts in French that we had learned in class, *but* created “critical thinking” scenario questions that did not test my students’ literacy in French of their grammar knowledge, but rather, their ability to extrapolate a hidden grammar point / vocabulary objective past what they had encountered…that is what Pearson does.
When I took my teaching certification test in French from Pearson, one of the questions was about an African cultural term-in an African language-that I had to understand from a contextual reading of a passage in French. This was not a commonly known term: in fact, none of my French friends knew it! So they were testing my knowledge of French by having me critically think about how other languages were used in a French passage. It was a timed test with one minute approx per question on a computer.
This is basically what Pearson does: now I can deal with it as a teacher: should all kids, on each side of the bell curve, equally answer a question like this correctly?
And don’t kids who are home schooled also take the GED? What about leaving THEM behind?
TE — These are good questions, and so is Bob’s first question below. What do you think the GED graduation rate should be? And what standards should someone have to meet to get a diploma?
Bob’s first question *above*, I should have written.
What should the GED graduation rate be? Historically, it has been about 60% of test takers for the past 30 years. The new Iowa HiSET test is normed to have a 60% pass rate. But the pass rate on the new Pearson GED test is designed to be so difficult that the pass rate is only 20%. That is not fair to young adults who urgently need their GED to go to college or get a good job.
I would look at the suitability of standards required to get a GED rather than the pass rate. If the standard is that students read at a fifth grade level and all students do read at the fifth grade level, the appropriate pass rate is 100%, not 60%. If no students in fact read at the fifth grade level the appropriate pass rate is 0%, not 20%.
I think the fundamental question is what you want the certification to communicate about the person being certified, not about the success rate for certification. If you want 100% certification, simply certify based on age (but of course the certification looses all meaning). If you want to certify that the person can read at the fifth grade level or above, than you should certify all that demonstrate the ability to read at the fifth grade level or above. That might be 100% of those attempting to become certified or it might be 0% of those attempting to be certified.
So, “TE”, are you implying that until now, the GED was simply “given away” to anyone who wanted one, regardless of their academic performance within the program?
Do you really believe this nonsense or are you just wedded to the truly obtuse—and somewhat sociopathic—notion that every single level of education from Kindergarten onwards, including the GED, should be made significantly more difficult because our “easy schools” have always been such a “piece of cake” in the past?
Weirdly, your other “article of faith” is that far too many students are dropping out of high school—even though today’s percentage of high school and college graduates is the highest in American history—and that this is yet another ‘CRISIS”!
And so, your “logic” is that if you make high school graduation significantly more difficult you’ll produce MORE graduates, just as if you make the GED more challenging and rigorous, you’ll have MORE people obtaining it.
Or is the “logic” that too many business owners have convinced themselves that the “public schools are all so bad these days that a high school degree used to demonstrate a level of competence, discipline and judgement that is no longer safe to assume today; so, for kids’ own good, we’re going to make it MUCH harder to graduate, while we continue to publicly decry the “failure” of our public schools to stem the dropout tide—as evidenced by Arne Duncan’s BIG art project consisting of empty desks near the Washington Monument a couple of years back.
And, you’re telling us that 1) You really believe this absolutely ludicrous and contradictory idea about it being BOTH “too easy” to get a high school diploma or GED, AND the “CRISIS” represented by the millions of dropouts for whom high school graduation is a lifelong impossible dream, and 2) By increasing standards for both GED completion and high school graduation, you’re going to “solve both problems” simultaneously?!?!
No sane adult could believe such truly laughable claptrap. But this is what it looks like when you attempt to paper over what is REALLY happening elsewhere.
The TRUTH—which neither you, “TE”, nor any of the other privatizers dare speak, is that the Common Core is DESIGNED to produce significantly more failures than any standardized tests that came before it.
Why? It’s pretty obvious. Because when the headlines begin to scream about “Record Failure Rates” everywhere, even in the most exclusive school districts, you and your ilk, having deliberately set Common Core up to get those results, can now join in together with the “New Talking Points for Privatization”, now that Common Core has “PROVEN” how “bad our schools are, everywhere”, we now have the PROOF that only private, for-profit businesses can “SAVE” public education.
With your Ultimate Goal becoming clearer every week, every month, every year: A complete phase out of everything “Public” and “Union” from public education by the 2030’s—except of course for those “guaranteed public funds”—as one Wall Street prospectus put it, that will now be diverted first into private pockets to enrich charter executives and shareholders.
Oh, and, at least for a while, they’ll retain the “public school branding”, given that to change it anytime with the first 10 or 20 years will be too abrupt a shock.
So, it’s pretty obvious what your real goal is. Your intentions are nefarious and your methods duplicitous, but at least THAT plan is clear, straightforward and logical.
No wonder you have to keep it under tight wraps and obscure it with wacky claims about “ineffective teachers who sit around like slugs all day, yet have time to be serial sexual abusers of our children and cannot be fired even for the most heinous of felonies before retiring at 43 with a pension—adjusted for inflation—of well over $100K.”
So, keep shadow boxing…it’s good exercise and it’ll keep people’s visions over in THAT direction, where they just apprehended “The Shoplifter! (GASP)—while the rest of your gang just drove off with most of Fort Knox when everyone was failing to pay attention.
There are reasons why people such as TE are avoided. They “needle” people by wearing them down with their personal brand of “superiority” by asking “questions” while attempting to apply the Socratic method to their “debate”. When one is completely oblivious to the kindness and tolerance of others and continues to pose these “deep” questions, the goal is obviously to try yo wear down or break the challenger and move on to the next victim. Like vultures, some sit on their Möbius strips and bait their victims with false interest and posing false scenarios. Quite distracting.
Deb,
My only goal here is to contribute to the discussion about finding a better education for all.
TE, I wish I believed you. But I don’t. You occasionally make a valid point. However, you tend to have a condescending manner that is off-putting and seems insincere. I have seldom found that your “questions” move any discussion further along. Forgive me if I am being less than hospitable, but you are very exasperating and create the “hamster in a wheel” level of frustrating.
I am certainly not implying that a GED was given away, I am trying to find out what criteria people here think should be used to award a GED diploma. Poster Bob Shepard says that it was never meant to be the equivalent of a high school diploma, so I am trying to figure out what it means in terms of academic achievement.
Please point to ANY post where I made any claim of “Ineffective teachers who sit around like slugs all day, yet have time to be serial sexual abusers of our children and cannot be fired even for the most heinous of felonies before retiring at 43 with a pension—adjusted for inflation—of well over $100K.” Your use of quotation marks suggests that I made such posts and that, of course, is false.
TE, I never said that the GED was never meant to be a high-school equivalency exam. That was its stated purpose, but the fact is that in actual practice it was a minimal level of achievement test, and it served us well by being that instead of by being what it claimed to be.
Robert,
I hope you can understand my interest in learning what the de facto minimal level of achievement actually is given that, as you say, the stated level of achievement is irrelevant.
Again, no one is served by creating a system that slams more doors in the faces of more kids. If the pass rate for the GED has dropped from 66 percent to 22 percent, that means that millions of kids will not have the necessary credential to enter a votech program where they will learn skills that will make them employable. Why should a public policy decision of such dramatic import be made by a private company? That seems, to me, shocking.
It sounds to me as what your saying is that the GED diploma as it is now awarded is not appropriate certification for vocational programs to require for admission. That may be correct. When I began teaching at my institution any student with a high school diploma was automatically admitted to the university. As the meaning of the high school diploma changed the admission policy changed with it.
I doubt that that was the sole or even the major reason for the change in your school’s admissions policy.
Actually it is not just my institution’s admission policy as all four year state schools in my state have a uniform admission policy set by our regents. We now require a 2.0 average across a set of academic classes as one possible way to be automatically admitted. Students who do not achieve that GPA can also be automatically admitted based on class standing or ACT score.
If you don’t think the changing nature of the high school diploma was behind this shift in admission policies, what do you think was behind it?
There is no evidence that a high-school diploma “means less” (in the sense that it signifies less attainment) today than in the past. This is a myth. Results from other measures–NAEP scores, state test scores, and college graduation rates have all remained relatively constant, with slight (very slight) increases.
We are not well served by closing more doors in the faces of more kids. We leave them with few alternatives, and among those is the highly negative alternative of participating in the underground economy. The same is true of our excessive use of the penal system in this country. We have the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. Three percent of American adults are in jail, in prison, or on parole. Few jobs will be open to those with criminal records. And so, with these sorts of policies, we create a vicious cycle. Not smart.
It seems to me that your concern is with the folks that are controlling the doors, that is the folks running the vocational training programs. If a passing score on the GED is a higher level of academic achievement,net than is required for successful completion of the vocational program, requiring a passing score on the GED is an inappropriate admission standard for the vocational program
My immediate concern is that Pearson took over the GED and revised it and pass rates dropped by 50 percent. That’s unacceptable. Who gave these people such authority? Certainly, no elected body did.
However, it is profitable for the company administering the exam to have people fail it, for then they have to take it (and pay for it) again.
Exactly.
And while I wish states would ease out of CCSS and fix the parts that need fixing (rather than just abandon them after all the expense and headache—even Linda Darling Hammond made that recommendation if I recall) I think the whole debacle will be lumped together as a really bad idea and we will move on. But what a mess to clean up in the wake of RttT and CCSS.
Like the XFL. I imagine a lot went into putting it together, and it was cancelled pretty quickly.
It all could have turned out better, I think, if these conversations had happened before the hasty and questionable implementation of CCSS.
Perhaps I state the obvious. But I still hear people trying to defend CCSS and just diss the testing. But meanwhile state after state is dropping CCSS.
Bad chapter in US education. I hope we learn something from it.
This point is central to the entire struggle over public education in a democratic society. Go back to Felix Adler in the 1880s–he’s the founder of the Ethical Culture Society, which is the institution behind Fieldston Schools in NY–and you’ll find education reformers talking about the misfit between the size and needs of the population of young people and the rate of growth of the economy. Between 1947 and roughly 1970, most kids could find jobs in a post-war economy that had few competitors anywhere in the world. But since then, we have fallen back into the long-term stagnating labor market, where there are just too many kids, and too much talent, to be absorbed by a corporatized economy that prizes profits and political control above the needs of the population. (Just consider the squeeze of young people going on in China these days.) “College and Career Ready”–just consider how vague, even empty, this phrase is! Yet it is the ultimate goal of the entire “reform” movement.
We need intense public discussion of what “career ready” really means. Such a discussion would reveal important truths about this “reform” movement. Education in a democracy should be related first and foremost to the actual needs of the people, not to the needs of corporations as they struggle to control power and resources around the world. Are kids created to serve corporations? Do states incorporate businesses only if they improve the public weal, or do they incorporate businesses to improve the bottom line of investors, no matter what the effects on the public weal? (I think we know what our current Supreme Court thinks about this choice.)
I’m just waiting for Gates to demand a one-child-per-family, and preferably a male! A bright male, a brilliant male, taught prenatal #ccss, and parents will be told which college or career path they must pursue. Life will be perfect then.
Gates can dream up ANYTHING and folks will follow.
Remember, his $Zillions Rule!
Human experimentation is not new in history. This is the .2000 version & the quality control scrap heap will be miles high with lost and damaged children.
This is such a bad dream, but so was Dr. Mengele…or was he real? As survivors!
Gates “elitism” with CCSS promotion of educational eugenics is oppression of the “inferior” who unfortunately are “children”!
@steve cohen…So what does “college and career” ready mean? What should it mean? I am pondering this question now. I think it should mean that a child has gone through schooling that makes him/her passionate about life.. about learning and gives him/her tools to become a lifelong learner with the ability to choose and pursue his/her passions. Ironic but this in the end will lead to national productivity… that corporate folk seem not to understand. Humans must be happy, healthy and feel as if they have a say in their destiny. SCHOOLING is not about making a student into “HUMAN CAPITAL” or “college and career ready”. The latter term “college and career ready” is a branding of the corporate world at this point synonymous with “forcing a student ready to work for the corporate world in some strange economic-based race to be the best in some man-made competition with other countries…
Re Cody’s piece, I draw your attention to David Kirps’s brilliant article in the University of Pennsylvania Law review, published in 1974; ” Schools as Sorters: The constitutional and policy implications of student classification”
http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5128&context=penn_law_review
We must remember that the issues we face today did not arise ex nihlo. Schooling and sorting is an old phenomenon. It has taken on a new twist. The goal has always been the same: feed the job need needs driven by the private sector, while keeping the powerless in their place. The new sorting process is called educational reform. The new twist is that public schools and teachers unions must be destroyed and replace by private sector and neutered public schools and teachers unions.
Thanks for this citation!
Yes, thanks for that link, john a!!
Duane, you have grown on me, so to speak. You do make me laugh, err, smile, even as we continue down. this dark tunnel appropriately called ‘school deform’.’
This post is spot on. There are many proponents of both the Common Core and the testing mania who simply don’t see the bigger picture. I am tired if wasting my time trying to convince enthusiasts that they are wrong.
As with any chance, some will benefit and some will not. To proclaim this wrong-minded approach as a solution to what they see as a nationwide problem is ill-advised and evidenced by the lack of educational practice and theory being applied to their decisions.
One size never fits all. To think otherwise is completely ignorant of facts. But let’s not allow facts to get in the way of “progress”.
A standard item in predictions of the future made in the middle of the 20th century in the United States was that in the future, because of efficiencies provided by technology and because of cheaper energy sources, people would work less and have more free time to develop their potential.
But what has actually happened is that while productivity has skyrocketed
a. wages have remained stagnant
b. the standard nuclear family consisting of two parents and their kids has become the exception rather than the rule
c. in those nuclear families, both parents are now working
d. both wealth and income inequality have INCREASED dramatically, and
e. the average work week has INCREASED dramatically
Now, the theory is that when workers are displaced by automation, that “frees them” to engage in more productive endeavor. But here’s what’s really happening, and it’s not pretty:
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/
Your points c and d are related. The increase in two income households and the tendency of people with high potential earnings to form households with other people with high potential earnings has contributed significantly to income inequality between households.
This is a serious question. Do you think there is any possibility that there is at least SOME self-interest involved when higher education promotes the idea that the reason costs keep rising is because students lack skills when they enter and need remediation? Is there any possibility of self-interest in play when higher ed blames K-12 for rising college costs?
Might that opinion be skewed by two facts: they are getting hammered for rising costs and they both order and offer the remediation courses, so therefore benefit from them?
Is it possible that one of the reasons low income students don’t graduate from college has something to do with colleges, either the quality of instruction or administrative focus or cultural/economic bias?
I just get suspicious when one education sector determines that another is responsible for all the problems. That’s a bit of a red flag for me 🙂
Chiara,
I am an economist and therefore see self interest in most places.
Remedial math classes, however, are not things that math faculty wish to teach. Given the number of people involved in teaching the remedial classes, I would be surprised if my institution, at least, broke even teaching these classes.
The cheapest way to get a college degree in my state would be for a student to attend a community college for two year for a little over $5,000 in tuition and transfer the credit over to my institution and pay a little over $20,000 in tuition for the final two years. Total cost of tuition for a degree would be a little over $25,000 for a degree from a research 1 university.
Really? Bill Gates is not richer than I am because his wife works. He’s wealthier because we have a system where it’s ok for the owners of a company to suck up all the wealth they can, with little regard to workers.
No, Bill Gates is not wealthier than you because his wife works, and Mark Zuckerberg is not wealthier than you because his wife, a former teacher, is a pediatrician.
My household, however, may be wealthier than yours because both of the adults have doctorates and work full time in positions that require doctoral degrees. My neighbor to the south may be wealthier than your household because both of the adults in that household have doctorates and work full time in positions that require doctoral degrees. My neighbor to the north might be wealthier than yours because one of the adults in the household has a doctorate and the other has two masters degrees and both work in jobs that require those degrees.
You might want to look at this: http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21595972-how-sexual-equality-increases-gap-between-rich-and-poor-households-sex-brains-and
My, my, TE, your true self is finally beginning to show. You seem to live in a preferred “catchment area” and even that can’t provide the “deservedly superior” schools you believe your kids deserve. You have done a good job of disguising your superiority until now. Keep that nose high and your blinders on.
The couple of blocks around me are popular with faculty at my institution because they are within walking distance of the university and the traditional commercial district of the town and some folks prefer older homes. The neighborhood elementary school has around 60% of its students on free or reduced price lunch. Does that make it a preferred catchment area?
You confuse correlation with causation. There are confounding effects, certainly. I could just as easily say higher inequality is caused inversely by the decline of unions. We are not quite to Asimov’s psychohistory and instead live with this fallacy in the media and regurgitated from ivory towers. Then, ignorant politicians seize the day creating public policies based on the poor application of good science mixed with junk models. Welcome to the world of Reinhart and Rogoff.
To say that there are things other than assortative mating that cause changes in income distribution is undoubtedly true, but that is not to say that assortative mating is not one of the causes of income inequality. Frankly I am surprised that anyone here finds this even slightly controversial.
And can the tendency for people with high potential earnings to form households with other people of high potential earnings constitute greed?
It seems to me that people are often attracted to others that share some of the same values, interests, and concerns. I don’t think it is a matter of greed that is the explanation for, say, people who eventually earn graduate degrees marrying others who eventually earn graduate degrees.
FLERP!
What are those clips from? Dang, I thought I had coined “idiocracy” but looks like not. Was “Idiocracy” the name of the movie?
Oops, I’m thinking of idiology which of course somehow must be related to idiocracy.
We leave a lot of economic policy to the elites. We are all busy people. But if the elites who think that creative destruction and disruptive technology will change things for the better, they should read their history. It could go either way. And if it doesn’t go their way, it won’t be pleasant.
He who would do good, must do so in minute particulars. William Blake.
I think it’s number #2. They want a smaller, more elite group going to college. This will be similar to Germany today. In Germany today around 30% go to college, and the others go into apprenticeship training, etc. It used to be around 10% in Germany before WW2. Many Germans think that this “democratization” since the war has dumbed down college in Germany. Imagine how dumbed-down undergraduate education in America is now! College for the majority is a scam and cruel. How many undergraduates today are intellectual or capable of advanced work? How many students will actually get jobs that require college degrees? Telling everyone to go to college (especially at these crazy costs) is just plain nuts. In a bigger sense they may be trying to quell this feeling of unrest and dissappointment in the country when these kids go to college and don’t get good jobs. It causes apathy and anger in the country. This is even happening in countries like Denmark with “free” university. Many students come out and become permanently unemployed or are forced to drive taxis, work in McDonalds, etc. People aren’t happy. We do need a better filtering system for who goes to college and who doesn’t, especially given the huge debts accrued. Some students “are” smarter or harder working than other students, and we have to face that reality.
I think, to some extent, self-selecting of colleges is going to happen. I’m a fourth-generation college graduate, and I expect that this streak will end with my sons, because we cannot afford college for them (my husband and I are both teachers), and I don’t want them going into ridiculous amounts of debt. I’m encouraging both of my sons to go to the local technology college to get a certificate in some kind of field that pays well–like welding or auto mechanics–and then decide if they want to go on to college from there.
What I mean is that kids are going to begin opting not to go to college because of the ridiculous costs. That may weed out some of the “less capable” kids, as you call them.
The reason for this nonsense is – wealthy people want more wealth, so they bought the politicians and imposed their agenda to get their hands onto all that public tax funding, right back to them. This is an end game for them. So what if certified, qualified teachers have to be fired? Bill Gates has an app for that. So what if unions have to be busted? And they do have to be busted because if allowed to continue, if allowed to collect money from union members, the union has financial resources to oppose the wealthy thieves. THAT is the reason they hate teachers and want them replaced with TFA, non-union, non-qualified, non-credentialed, non-certified, non-career “teachers” who will wash in and out of the classrooms between 6 months to 2 years, then go on to law school or wall street, or Broad Supe school or into education politics, or head a non-profit (really?) organization to funnel funds to suit their agenda. Period.
Get rid of the unions, get rid of the COLLECTION and POOLING of funds that is so anti-waltmartization of our country.
Close the public schools and open private charters that are private when it suits them, public when they get funding, and even when they start up and the 1%ers confer financial “awards of excellence” upon them (which is hilarious – its an INVESTMENT) or donates because it makes their philanthropic portfolios look good – oh, and lets not forget ITS A TAX WRITE OFF and its money they will never miss – there is a reward in the end…money begets money.
So it truly is bs, all of this rhetoric about wanting excellent teachers, then defining excellence as the TFA clerks.
Also, the technology field needs a new boon – enter blended learning, or like Rocketship Charter, all computers, all day, 100 kids in a room, with 2 clerks walking around to see if they are “hooked up” to the “learning.” No wonder the technocrats/educrats wanted computers that would spy on/watch the user, chairs that would record how much the student wiggled in his/her seat; why don’t they just suggest putting computer chips in all of our head for God’s sake? They want to data mine, monitor, dumb down, and see who may rise to the top with this lack of stimulation curriculum, so they can caste our children. Classify them as who is worthy and who is not, but make no mistake, unless a child comes from money. or has a talent like to become a star athlete, or musician, or has a new novel idea and/or just plain gets lucky to be at the right time at the right place (Facebook/Mark Zuckerberg). How did Zuckerberg’s Facebook surpass Myspace? Right time, right place. Think Zuckerberg is a genius? I think he’s a smart kid who got lucky. Perhaps in this social/economical/educational EXPERIMENT, he wouldn’t rise to the top – unless he comes from enormous family wealth.
Cut arts and music, and the poor may never have a chance on their own to excel at it. Cut sports, and you’ve lost many of your future basketball, football, baseball, etc. stars. Not everyone has a dad like Tiger Woods had who will get his kid swinging golf clubs at 1 year old, intent on making him a golf star. Your average poor family can barely afford food.
This assault on education from all ends, and all the rhetoric, is to make the poor, who they believe are dumb, believe that a charter school is the best “choice” or their children to succeed. The “choice” has been made for virtually every child in New Orleans. How is that working for those children? I hear – not so good.
cx: “for” their children to succeed, not or. Also, in my rambling, my point about kids rising to the top – in the world of the 1%ers, not so fast. Children must be sorted and caste into a system of worthy/not worthy. Most of us human beings, to the 1%ers, are not worthy.
“Any testing system that results in massive failure is an assault on our students and should be fought by anyone who cares for their future.”
The corollary should also be true: Any system that passes students, who otherwise should have failed, should be called into question. We continue to pass students who have not mastered content in courses required for High School graduation. Only now, we do so and have the audacity to label them “college and career ready”.
The most recent example of this is the NYState CC Algebra Regents. A student who achieves a 30 out of a possible 86 points (raw score), will pass the class. Am I to believe that a student who barely score 35% on their Algebra final is ready to do college level work? Let alone ready to take Geometry?!
So NYSED, administrators, teachers, school boards, parents, go on their merry way and play out this pantomime that we have increased standards and increased rigor, and willingly buy into the false premise that the adoption of the Common Core standards represents true educational policy change and will make our children internationally competitive. We continue to pad those GPAs and send students off to college and tell them that they are ready to do the level of work that their professors ask of them. We are lying to parents, to the public, and worst of all to students. I don’t see anything changing in the near future. If NYSED decides that it wants 73% of the students to pass subjects that are required for graduation, they will curve the test to make that happen. It’s a complete sham.
There was a lot of debate on the “skills gap”. No one heard any of it because politicians and business leaders seized on it to explain unemployment and stagnant or falling wages. Which is understandable. That takes the onus off of them. If the problem is workers, the problem isn’t THEM.
It was yet another example of how this isn’t a real “debate”. Debates have more than one side presented.
This is one of many, many papers where the existence of the skills gap was questioned:
Click to access skillsgap_2013-2.pdf
It was hard to punch through the noise once leaders in both political parties promoted the “skills gap” all over the county. I was amazed there wasn’t more scrutiny of the claim, because it is OBVIOUSLY self-serving, if you happen to be a politician or CEO.
For people who are supposedly promoting “critical thinking” and “innovation” they sure are herd-like. These narratives take off and they’re never even questioned.
Here’s more on the skills gap, and how it was promoted:
“But the belief that America suffers from a severe “skills gap” is one of those things that everyone important knows must be true, because everyone they know says it’s true. It’s a prime example of a zombie idea — an idea that should have been killed by evidence, but refuses to die.”
What’s really frightening to me is not that they all jumped onboard, as I said I understand the self-interest inherent in blaming workers for falling wages rather than CEOs or politicians. It’s that if they BELIEVE this they have no idea what they’re doing.
If it isn’t true and they all clambered aboard, everything they have done is informed by a belief in something that is false. That’s the truly scary part.
One of the issues that rarely comes up in these discussions is the abysmal quality of the new national tests tests. I can do a superb job of teaching kids how to take these, and in a time when high-stakes decisions are made on the basis of these tests, I have a moral obligation, as a teacher, to do that.
But the tests themselves are very, very poorly conceived, shockingly so.
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. I’ve reviewed a LOT of these tests. None of these tests would survive careful scholarly scrutiny, and that ought to be a national scandal.
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.
cx: tune out and drop out
Great analysis, clear, readable, in depth, keep posting elsewhere if you can.
Bob,
Have you posted this somewhere else, like on your own blog? It’s such a careful analysis, it deserves more airtime.
Bob~ as always, well said! Are you working on a book?
Gates stated that our students are not motivated. His mission is to test his way to Zillionaire & everyone in his tailwind will clammed to Zillionaire status…while Johnny becomes less & less MOTIVATED. DROP OUT? Fail the GED & drop out of life?
What are the options for the Johnny’s from the GatesEffect? Few, if any, second chances, no boot straps, no roads paved with ….
Bleak picture! Hollywood material. Sad beyond belief!
Bob Shepherd: kudos.
Concerning the role and effects of standardized testing, IMHO, one of the most succinct and readable expositions since Banesh Hoffman, THE TYRANNY OF TESTING (2003 paperback of the 1964 edition of the 1962 original).
Let me add this short bit in support:
“Fifteen years of scoring standardized tests has completely convinced me … that the business I’ve worked in is less a precise tool to assess students’ exact abilities than just a lucrative means to make indefinite and indistinct generalizations about them.”
[From the penultimate page of Todd Farley, MAKING THE GRADE: MY MISADVENTURES IN THE STANDARDIZED TESTING INDUSTRY, 2009, p. 241]
Keep commenting. I’ll keep reading.
😎
“. . . a lucrative means to make indefinite and indistinct generalizations about them.”
In plain English “. . . a lucrative means to make bullshit generalizations about them.”
This is what happens when amateurs are allowed (are paid) to design “standards” and the tests that go with them.
I had Ed Measurement back in 1974 at one of those no-count college teacher education programs. Among the topics were validity, reliability and appropriateness, as well as norm referenced tests and criterion referenced tests, and much dissection of the bell curve.
Imagine! Had David Coleman only been a classmate, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
Had an Ed Testing and Measuring course at about the same time, also at a no count state university. Little did I know at the time that the bullshit was just beginning in regards to assessing a student’s work.
Fortunately I’m currently an RT.
For those AI, RT = recovering testaholic. In other words deprogrammed from the Church of Testology so it might be DftCoT.
“I can do a superb job of teaching kids how to take these, and in a time when high-stakes decisions are made on the basis of these tests, I have a moral obligation, as a teacher, to do that.”
Since the tests are based on epistemological and ontological falsehood and are rife with error the ethical and moral obligation is to refuse to participate in these nefarious educational malpractices.
Well, I don’t have a soliloquy like Bob Shepard does, but in response to the op ed in that these CC tests are designed for failure, I would like to add my own hypothesis that gets to the crux of Common Core, in my humble opinion.
YES, these tests are designed for optimum failure. But Cody misses the real reason, and instead focuses on the end-result. I’m focused on the front-end game, which is to use these tests to give the illusion that public schools are failing. If one was to look the sweeping trend of how schools are to be measured, with an A – F rating instead of the “School of Progress” or “School of Distinction,” it becomes clear what the ultimate intent of Common Core really is…to maximize failure to give the illusion a school is “failing,” using a common grade scale parents can easily understand. Now, said parent is worried his/her child is in a “failing” school and starts looking for options. Cue the magical “charter school,” where public accountability is cloaked in a “legislative red cape” where these schools are free from the tyranny of Common Core.
Does anything really get “fixed?” Of course not. The system simply shifts to a “privatized,” for-profit model, which is ironic to me, since applying the notion of “free market” capitalism to a social good (public school), while ignoring the number one tenant of free-market capitalism – the right to FAIL – gets over-shadowed by greed cloaked in rose-colored glasses.
Zak ~ exactly!
Marketing strategy that has worked for a long time. Many journalists have participated in this for years and still do. Creating such paranoia influences the real estate market tremendously, the corporate movement into cities…the financial lifeblood of cities, etc.
Bashing all of education has now become a laser precision tool with fake and junk data to scare the he** out of every parent, and dash to the nearest private, charter or online school.
Orson Wells did not even stir up as much panic in War of the Worlds, as have Bush/Gates/Duncan/Obama & Co. Behind closed doors the $Zillionaires Club members are laughing all the way to the Cayman Islands, or wherever SuperRich frolic. I wouldn’t know…only a lifelong educator.
TAGO!
Wow! All of your comments are superior! I just had to write and let all of you know that. I wish all of you could be on a television panel and inform parents what is going on. A lot of parents are unaware of what is happening to their children.
My husband and I are middle class people with hours beyond our master’s degrees. Our daughter is 2nd generation college. Of course, we would never allow her to go into Education, and believe me, she wants no part of it – after seeing what my husband and I had to go through. I wanted all of you to know that much of what you are talking about – is already happening. Our daughter is very smart, graduating with a 3.88 from her high school (college prep track) along with leadership positions and a fantastic resume. Even with her scholarships (she got a ton), we are strapped in getting her through college. They are making it harder and harder for middle class parents to get student loans, and it is a big mess. My husband and I tell her that we are all in it together, and we will get her through it. It makes me sad that so much federal taxes are taken out of my husband’s and my paychecks to pay for the college tuition of the poor, but we are struggling to get our own daughter through. The rich and the poor are taken care of, but the middle class is dying. There is a war on our public schools, and there is a war to take away the college education of our middle class kids. Your comments are all right on the mark. Thank you! (:
“The rich and the poor are taken care of,”
Only half right.
As we cut services, including public schools, as the police become even more smoke and mirrors due to cuts, their neighborhoods become even more dangerous, their prospects even more dim.
No, the poor are not doing so well either.
Don’t buy into the “welfare queen” myth.
Ang, Please know I don’t buy into the welfare myth. I give a lot to my church to help our poor people. I truly believe our evil government traps the poor people. They want them to be poor. One parent told me that she had a ton of food stamps taken away because she got a job at Wendy’s. She was going to have less money for groceries, so she quit her job at Wendy’s. Why couldn’t they leave her food stamps alone and let her work at Wendy’s? The evil government wants her to remain poor. When she tries to break out, they stomp her down.
I was only referring to college tuition help. The rich parents are able to pay high college tuition and the poor are able to get grants and aid to take care of their tuition. The middle class college kids are having a tough time paying for the terribly rising prices of college tuition. In no way would I ever pick on the poor people. It is very hard to break out when you are beat down every day. The middle class people are close to being the working poor as we speak. We are all struggling in this economy, I think.
Sad Teacher: respectfully, the mock-Latin aphorism applies here—
“illegitimi non carborundum” = “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
As folks much wittier than I remarked years ago, just remind the inconsiderate about the current state of affairs where we have “welfare for the rich” and “socialism for the rich” [Ahhhhh, too big to fail? Don’t worry, unlimited handouts are yours for the asking!).
Thank you for caring when too many turn off their minds AND their hearts.
😎
Thank you so much, Krazy TA….I will nurture, love, hug, and teach my heart out to my students until the very last day of my teaching career, which isn’t that far away. It is so sad what they are doing to the teaching profession. My husband and I dedicated our whole lives to a low paying profession because we wanted to make a difference. Now, the rich politicians want those low salaries too. I find myself apologizing to my own two children that we don’t have more to give them. I had the brains to go into medicine, but I chose teaching – because I loved kids. I am now at the point in my life that I need big bucks to get my daughter through college. When I retire in two years, I am withholding money to go back and get my Associate’s degree in ultrasound technology. I love helping people, and it is the only thing I know what to do to get my daughter through medical school. Thanks again, Krazy TA, for your kind comments. Diane’s blog helps all of us so much. (:
Sad Teacher
“I was only referring to college tuition help”
Understood.
Agreed.
” It is very hard to break out when you are beat down every day”
So, so true!
Thank you for all you do.
Thank you for your kind response, Ang…and thank you for thanking me for all I do…I really appreciate it! It is so easy these days for teachers to get low self esteem due to all of these silly new policies. Thanks again, Ang! Happy 4th! (:
In 2006, between us, we earned about $100,000 and heard FAFSA would be useless. We are the middle class. We took a 2nd mortgage on our humble home for our daughter so she would not be saddled with loans. I’m not so sure 2nd mortgage monies are as available now.
She is a public school teacher (after 3 years of working “in education” and trying to find a job) and just completed her first year. I’m a little bitter, and extremely worried about her future.
She is turning 26 next week, still at home, as are most of her college-educated friends. Is 26 the new 18?
Hi Donna, I don’t know what our kids are going to do. Yes, I do think 26 is the new 18. I have no clue how our children will buy homes, set up a household, and have the American dream. Will they ever have it? I feel so badly for them.
Please tell your daughter that we desperately need great teachers like her in the profession. Hopefully, all of this will pass, and this is just a phase that public education is going through.
My husband and I tell our daughter that we are all in this together. No matter what or how long it takes she will eventually achieve her dreams. Thanks, Donna! I enjoy your posts. (:
In my state tuition for a four year degree (two years at a community collage and two at a research 1 university) would run a little over $25,000 dollars. Private schools like NYU are, of course, much more expensive, though it is much better to look at the net price than the sticker price.
My situation is much like yours. My husband and I were both career teachers (36 years for me, 32 for him), now retired. We have 3 kids (our second child was a set of twins) and we have no savings or assets other than the same house we raised our family in for going on 30 years. We do at least have pensions which seem to be unassailable, though 94% of the cost was funded through our own 11% payroll deduction and we are not eligible for Social Security.
When we got the FAFSA family contribution for our eldest, we thought there was a decimal point (or two!) missing. She finished in 3 years instead of 4 to save on tuition, but is still saddled with a lot of debt. For the next two, 4 years later, I was surprised to see that our EFC was actually MORE for both than it had been for one, despite our having student loans. They started school just after the melt down of 2008, but we were able to re-finance our almost paid mortgage at a lower interest rate, which allowed us to cover their first two years. And all 3 received substantial scholarships.
It sets my teeth on edge that interest on student loans is going to the DOE and that Duncan spends is on promoting charter schools!
My kids are all working in their fields, and despite their interest in public education, we have pointed them towards careers in which they will have more autonomy than teachers in public schools can hope for until there are systemic changes.
You will get your daughter through it, and she will be aware of the value her education has and what you have sacrificed to make it possible.
Wish I had more encouraging words!
Zac, I just had to write back in before I got my kids’ lunches. You are exactly right on the mark. My common core curriculum is much, much harder, and I have no clue how I am going to get my students to master it. Part of the common core curriculum that I have to teach next year I never learned in Grades K-12 or even when I got my Bachelor’s degree in teaching. I am not kidding….and they think a 11 and 12 year old has to master that? How silly……
You are so right. The results of the common core PARCC tests will be used against the public schools. Who wants their kids attending a D or F school? Then, you will see the charter movement and their Ed-tech alternatives even get bigger. Their plan is definitely in motion. They just need the time to carry it out. My workshops have already told us that our passage rate will drop to a 34% passage rate. My passage rate in June was a 92% (which depends on the class you have, of course.) Thanks, Zac…Just wanted to let you know I think you are 100% correct!!! The rich have sent all of our industry overseas, so they have to cash in on our helpless children. I hope the rich politicians like very hot places…They are all headed there.
Thank you Diane for letting folks know that the new Pearson GED is designed to fail students. We are two college instructors who run the website that Anthony referred to in order to warn folks about this issue. For more information on the drawbacks of the 2014 Pearson GED and information on a fairer High School Equivalency Test called the Iowa HiSET test, visit our website: restoregedfairness.org Regards, David Spring M. Ed and Elizabeth Hanson M. Ed.
Thank you, David, for the work you are doing.
The more these kinds of articles are written, the better it is. I am not very optimistic, but am hopeful that this information will dictate change.
Standardized tests, by design, are set up to distribute the population of test takers according to a “bell curve.” This feature of these kinds of tests means that if I gave such a test to a room full of Einsteins, say 100 of them, only 5 would score very high, and 50 of them would below average. So I can say for certain that most Einstein’s are idiots–the science of standardized testings says so! So not matter what anyone does “in school,” only a certain percentage of kids who take such tests can ever, in principle, achieve a high score, and there will always be 50% of the student population below average. Always. No exceptions.
If education is about distributing kids according to a bell curve, why bother with schools? Most of them are doomed to do a mediocre or worse job.
You are thinking, Steve, of normed tests. These are criterion-referenced tests that have arbitrarily set cut scores. And, of course, one can manipulate the results by field testing questions and selecting those that will yield the results that you are looking for.
Yes, I know. SAT is moving in the direction of becoming “the” national test of the Common Core. Thus it will be normed.
Also, in NY, where I work, we have no idea whether the so-called “cut scores” are normed, or whether the intention is to norm them at some point.
They may supposedly be “criterion referenced” but the fact remains each question is supposedly “field tested” so as to get the results of a norm referenced question, e.g., bell curve results. One’s that don’t are thrown out. So in essence they are “norm referenced”.
The big lie is that all of this relates to helping kids. The California system, pioneered by Gerry Brown’s dad, Gov. Pat Brown, I think best. High schools should provide advanced,
college prep, and remedial classes. High schools should include vocational classes.
Students in non vocational classes should have the chance to move up or down
depending on performance as measured by a variety of criteria not by teaching to
a test. Community Colleges should offer two year degrees and also serve as
possible conduits for academic students to transfer to state universities. The Brown plan takes into consideration that a student can “fail” in highschool for a variety of reasons.
Even an 18 yr. old without a GRE should have a chance at a Community College.
No one should feel badly is some students–especially working students–take 3 or 4 years to achieve an AA degree. And community colleges should not offer a single
way of prep. for jobs and life…all of this Gates,Duncan,Friedman, you name it educational big wig reform– relates to treating students as cogs in a machine,
apologies the Mario Savio’s memory…Savio by the way spent the last twenty
and more years of his life teaching remedial math to at risk Sonoma State
UNiversity students who needed help in math to proceed to a B.A. degree.
The present day “reformers” want to be gatekeepers and delight not in real
teaching but in flunking students out.
My dad got his GED after dropping out of HS and joining the marines in the late 50s. He retired many years ago as an engineer with IL Bell (then Ameritech). After he retired he owned a very nice house, a summer home, and has been able to tour the world with my mom ever since. At one time you didn’t need a college degree to become a well respected and productive member of society. You needed to work hard and have a company that backed your efforts.Bell educated their people in what they needed to know to do Bell’s work.In return my dad stuck with the company through strikes and cutbacks. In the end he has had a very good life.
We don’t need career and college ready students, WE NEED JOBS. All these companies abandoning the country that made them great. The country they still choose to live in personally but not to keep their companies in. It is very discouraging the number of companies that have outsourced their employees to other countries to save a few dollars. Money isn’t everything, contributing to your own community used to mean something to business…now even Walgreens is thinking about relocating to Switzerland.
sorry, I meant GED not GRE… hand is quicker than the eye.
After I retired from teaching high school English, I was asked by another district to teach a one night per week GED prep lab at their adult school. For my first two years, the non-profit GED was still being given, with its single essay. From experience, I would guess that it was normed somewhere around the 9th or 10th grade level, as is the CA high school exit exam. It was passable.
The current test has two full essays, both based on texts, and both requiring either deep background knowledge (social studies) or a thorough knowledge of argumentation (English). Most of my students are either immigrants or learning disabled. We are working hard, but they face a long and hard road before they are ready for this new test. Has anyone analyzed it to determine at what grade level it is normed? Seems like 12th grade or even higher to me.
Most of all, I object to the for profit aspect of what was for decades a not-for-profit enterprise designed to give dropouts and immigrants a second chance. I had much exposure to Pearson in my old district, none of it impressive.
You are correct that the former GED was normed on an 11th grade level while the new Pearson GED is set so that about 75% of high school seniors would fail the test and about 80% of young adults in general would fail the test. There is more information about this on our website restoregedfairness.org
Yes, a second chance…this is beyond Rhee,Coleman and their cohorts. We believe
in an America where kids deserve a second chance…not in a system that celebrates
making failure permanent but belief in process not sudden death testing. We believe
the the humanities because the humanities lead us to compassion and to the insight that
in educ. as in life one size does not fit all. And there are multiple ways of evaluating
achievement…If is very sad that a liberal,Democratic administration is siding with
the right wing charter school hypocrites.
As usual, Stephen Colbert knocks another home run on this subject: http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/nemi1a/common-core-confusion
So, “TE”, are you implying that until now, the GED was simply “given away” to anyone who wanted one, regardless of their academic performance within the program?
Do you really believe this nonsense or are you just wedded to the truly obtuse—and somewhat sociopathic—notion that every single level of education from Kindergarten onwards, including the GED, should be made significantly more difficult because our “easy schools” have always been such a “piece of cake” in the past?
Weirdly, your other “article of faith” is that far too many students are dropping out of high school—even though today’s percentage of high school and college graduates is the highest in American history—and that this is yet another ‘CRISIS”!
And so, your “logic” is that if you make high school graduation significantly more difficult you’ll produce MORE graduates, just as if you make the GED more challenging and rigorous, you’ll have MORE people obtaining it.
Or is the “logic” that too many business owners have convinced themselves that the “public schools are all so bad these days that a high school degree used to demonstrate a level of competence, discipline and judgement that is no longer safe to assume today; so, for kids’ own good, we’re going to make it MUCH harder to graduate, while we continue to publicly decry the “failure” of our public schools to stem the dropout tide—as evidenced by Arne Duncan’s BIG art project consisting of empty desks near the Washington Monument a couple of years back.
And, you’re telling us that 1) You really believe this absolutely ludicrous and contradictory idea about it being BOTH “too easy” to get a high school diploma or GED, AND the “CRISIS” represented by the millions of dropouts for whom high school graduation is a lifelong impossible dream, and 2) By increasing standards for both GED completion and high school graduation, you’re going to “solve both problems” simultaneously?!?!
No sane adult could believe such truly laughable claptrap. But this is what it looks like when you attempt to paper over what is REALLY happening elsewhere.
The TRUTH—which neither you, “TE”, nor any of the other privatizers dare speak, is that the Common Core is DESIGNED to produce significantly more failures than any standardized tests that came before it.
Why? It’s pretty obvious. Because when the headlines begin to scream about “Record Failure Rates” everywhere, even in the most exclusive school districts, you and your ilk, having deliberately set Common Core up to get those results, can now join in together with the “New Talking Points for Privatization”, now that Common Core has “PROVEN” how “bad our schools are, everywhere”, we now have the PROOF that only private, for-profit businesses can “SAVE” public education.
With your Ultimate Goal becoming clearer every week, every month, every year: A complete phase out of everything “Public” and “Union” from public education by the 2030’s—except of course for those “guaranteed public funds”—as one Wall Street prospectus put it, that will now be diverted first into private pockets to enrich charter executives and shareholders.
Oh, and, at least for a while, they’ll retain the “public school branding”, given that to change it anytime with the first 10 or 20 years will be too abrupt a shock.
So, it’s pretty obvious what your real goal is. Your intentions are nefarious and your methods duplicitous, but at least THAT plan is clear, straightforward and logical.
No wonder you have to keep it under tight wraps and obscure it with wacky claims about “ineffective teachers who sit around like slugs all day, yet have time to be serial sexual abusers of our children and cannot be fired even for the most heinous of felonies before retiring at 43 with a pension—adjusted for inflation—of well over $100K.”
So, keep shadow boxing…it’s good exercise and it’ll keep people’s visions over in THAT direction, where they just apprehended “The Shoplifter! (GASP)—while the rest of your gang just drove off with most of Fort Knox when everyone was failing to pay attention.
“Tests do not and cannot accurately measure who is “ready for college and career.” They can only serve to stigmatize, rank, sort, and justify the abandonment of an ever larger number of our students.”
No doubt that the tests rank, sort, and stigmatize and justify the abandonment of certain students. Not only that but they also harm those students who supposedly do well on the tests by narrowing what is considered to be educationally important.
Standardized tests cannot measure anything as they are not measuring devices. They may assess “something”, “something” that is never clearly defined or designated (you know, construct validity issues) which is just one of the epistemological and ontological errors identified by Noel Wilson in his “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700 that renders the whole standards and testing regime COMPLETELY ILLOGICAL, INVALID AND UNETHICAL. All should read and understand what Wilson has proven about those educational malpractices which are akin to phrenology, eugenics, etc. . . that did so much harm to many in the past.
Oops! Posted too soon: “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.
I like the change to point 1.
“These tests were made for failing” (after “These boots were made for walking” by Lee Hazlewood)
You keep saying you’ve got something for me.
something you call ‘reform” but confess.
You’ve been messin’ where you shouldn’t have been a messin’
and now someone’s kids are getting all your tests.
These tests are made for failing, and that’s just what they’ll do
one of these days these tests are gonna fail all of-a you.
You keep lying, when you oughta be truthin’
and you keep testin’ when you oughta not test.
You keep reformin’ when you oughta be studyin’.
Now what’s right is right, but you ain’t been right yet.
These tests are made for failing, and that’s just what they’ll do
one of these days these tests are gonna fail all of-a you.
You keep playin’ where you shouldn’t be playin
and you keep thinkin’ that you´ll never get burnt.
Ha! I just found me a great big batch of teachers yeah
and what they know you ain’t HAD time to learn.
Are you ready tests? Start walkin’!
We have found our anthem!!