Marc Tucker recently published a position paper arguing that our current system of test-based accountability, testing every student every year in grades 3-8, has failed and that we need a new approach. His approach, as Anthony Cody argued, would test at transition points but would still have high stakes and would test more subjects. Tucker wrote a post criticizing Cody and me and arguing that high-stakes testing is necessary to raise test scores and improve education.
Yong Zhao here weighs in with a brilliant response to Tucker, sharply disagreeing with him on the value of high-stakes testing.
Zhao points to Tucker’s inconsistency thus:
“Why does one who condemns test-based accountability system so much want more test-based accountability? The inconsistency exemplified by Marc Tucker does not make sense to me at all. Yet it is widespread so it must make sense in some way. I try to put myself in the shoes of Tucker and other similarly minded people and learned the chain of reasoning underlying their inconsistency:
“Premise #1: Education quality matters to individual and national prosperity.
“Premise #2: Education is a top-down process through which students are instilled the prescribed content and skills (curriculum) deemed universally valuable by some sort of authority.
“Premise #3: Teachers and schools are responsible for the quality of education, i.e., instilling in students the prescribed knowledge and skills.
“Premise #4: How well students master the prescribed knowledge and content is measured by tests.
“Conclusion #1: Thus test scores measure the quality of education, and thus the capacity for individuals and nations to be economically prosperous.
“Conclusion #2: American students have lower test scores on some international tests, thus American schools offer a lower quality education than countries with higher test scores.
“Conclusion #3: Therefore, American teachers must be less effective than their counterparts in other countries.
“Conclusion #4: Therefore, to prepare Americans to succeed in the global economy, American teachers and schools must be held accountable for improving the quality of education, which is to raise test scores (Tucker’s goal: “the only acceptable target for the United States is to be among the top ten performers in the world” [I assume top 10 on the PISA league table]).
“Conclusion #5: Hence we must improve the test-based accountability system, which then leads to higher quality education, which then leads to economic prosperity.
“Bait and Switch
“Marc Tucker’s objection to Anthony Cody’s questioning his assertion that “the economic future of our students will only be guaranteed if we educate them better” is a standard bait-and-switch tactic, playing with the afore-mentioned logic. It starts with the premises. Education is a term that has a positive connotation, but in practice it has many different, sometimes, contradictory, incarnations, in the same way the word “democracy” is used in reality. For example, some of the worst dictatorial countries claim to be democratic. Thus whether education matters to the prosperity of individuals and nations depends entirely on what it means.
He concludes:
“When economies change, as Tucker notes, so fast and on a global scale, it has become even more difficult to predict the skills and knowledge that matters in the future. But one thing seems to be clear. Even if Americans are equipped with the same skills and knowledge as Chinese and Indians, America’s favorite competitors, Americans won’t have an economic advantage simply because it costs much less for these countries to develop the same skills. So more of the same skills and knowledge won’t work, neither will the same education. America does not need a quantitatively better education, it needs a different kind of education.
“There are of course other problems with Tucker’s chain of reasoning; for example, are American teachers truly worse educators than their counterparts in other countries? Again it depends on the definition of education. Is education about test scores? Or is it about cultivating diverse, creative, passionate, and curious innovators and entrepreneurs?
“Tucker has much faith in this plan. “We know this form of accountability will work because it is already working at a national scale in the countries that are outperforming us.” Even if Tucker were right, America will at best outperform the top performing country—China. But is that what we want? My answer is NO and my reasons are in my book ‘Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World.'”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So Tucker’s basically saying that we have to test ’em to get high test scores. I guess in a way it’s pretty hard to argue with that. Hard to get high test scores when there are no tests.
From the title of the post: “. . . The Case Against High Stakes Testing”.
“Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
That’s study is the most cogent, unrebuttable, unrefutable case that has ever been made. All should read and understand it.
“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. And 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.
By Duane E. Swacker
Too many geniuses and ordinary people–some of whom I know–were/are brilliant people who have succeeded in their fields and/or contributed to socciety. Yet, they did not do well in school. In fact, some of them dropped out because school was wasting their time. School has some value in civilizing people–and could do better in that respect. It is also important for teaching basic skills. But the idea that we know what every student should learn, remember, and use is nonsense. Moreover, the conviction that any test yet devised can tell us how capable a person is a sign of ignorance
This mania of testing to measure student growth while ranking and yanking teachers based on those scores and then closing schools to turn over to corporation owned Charters reminds of General Westmoreland’s White House supported VAM-like measures for winning the Vietnam War that was based on numbers too—enemy body counts.
The theory went like this: the more people U.S. troops killed, the happier Westmoreland and LBJ were and eventually Nixon—with his B-52 bombing of Cambodia, Laos and North Vietnam where the U.S. dropped more bombs than we dropped during all of World War II in both major theaters, The more U.S. troops killed the closer we were to winning the war.
About a quarter to a half-million Vietnamese civilians died, and a half million children have been born with birth defects since the war ended thanks to the use of Agent Orange that our troops were also exposed to. And that isn’t counting the half million to 1.1 million deaths of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops.
In the end, the U.S. lost the Vietnam War. I wonder how much suffering will be caused by NCLB, Race to the Top and the VAM driven Common Core agenda that is similar to the carpet bombing of Southeast Asia by Nixon, before the billionaires—for instance, Bill Gates—and Washington D.C. realize they lost this war too because using VAM-bombs wasn’t the way to improve public education to make it better than it already is.
Mark Tucker is eager to assume that teachers are responsible for the nation’s economic future.
He is clearly enchanted with test scores, data, and knows how to construe these metrics as proof of teacher incompetence, standards not being high enough, and so on.
He is an “expert on the economy.” He has made a career of blaming schools and teachers for the economic well-being of this nation. He knows well that teachers in our nations schools did not tank the economy in 2008 and that teachers and students are not in charge of the major determinants of the nation’s economy.
If he wants teachers in the United States to do nothing but vocational education, he should just say so.
I wonder of Mark Tucker and fans of econometric thinking ever, ever, ever seek data on the contexts in which teachers are working, including the time being taken away from instruction by testing, and what a scholar has aptly called “reform fatigue” a condition that almost every teacher is facing with the simultaneous rollout of the 1,620 CCSS standards (marketed as “fewer”) and teacher evaluation systems designed to make pay-for-performance the national norm….(teaching is piecework, production of test scores, meeting quotes for performance).
Has Mark Tucker sought data on the proliferating technologies in schools, with no metrics of the time these take to master or the mental gymnastics they require from students and teachers and administrators to fit the demands of the software and hardware, done a count on the bugs in the software? the failures of technology and the costs of “upgrades,” really looked a the costs versus the benefits?
How many reports on non-functioning toilets can he muster? Has he bothered to rate janitorial services provided to schools? How about broken windows, leaky roofs, wrong-size and broken furniture, closets without supplies, closets and windowless basements where kids are being instructed?
How about some discussion of the turnover in administrative leaders, superintendents and principals. The marketers of products and services that have no evidence, no field trials to support them?
How about the presumed availability of parents for in-school or internet conferences when they are working two jobs in what is now known as a “jobless recovery?”
A recent study from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows that teachers in the US are paid less and work longer hours in the classroom than almost all elementary school teachers in 34 countries. Did you hear that–paid less, work longer hours. (OCED Status of Education, 2014).?
I hope earnestly that Mark Tucker is not trying to write another “letter to Hillary” reviving his hoped for “transformation” of U.S. public education into a system of vocational education serving corporations.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Today’s ed policies double down on the obsolete metaphor of students as passive vessels to be filled with static information. It flies in the face of a world in which information and learning are easily available. Now as never before, learning how to learn trumps the swallow/ regurgitate model. Ed policy seems a backlash against reality combined with wishful thinking. Kind of like the workaholic two-career couples we see on HG reality shows insisting on gigantic hi-tech kitchens to which they can bring their 10pm take-out.
Ed Policy—aka Bill Gates and president Obama, and the fools who support this thinking—also ignore the fact that not all kids cooperate with the learning process and that far too many parents, especially those that lives n poverty, do not support the education process.
Judging teachers based on the results of standardized tests to carry out the impossible mandate of NCLB that 100-percent of children be college/career ready (whatever career ready means since 26-percent of the jobs in the United States don’t even require a high school degree and an auto mechanic may charge $100 an hour to repair a car or truck), assumes that all children are engaged in the learning process when in realty millions are not.