Daniel McGraw tells the sad story of what happened to the GED after Pearson took it over and aligned it with the Common Core: Passing rates plummeted.
The GED was designed to give adult learners who never finished high school a second chance. McGraw begins with the experience of a young man in Cleveland who is trying to put his life back together and needs a high school diploma to enter the construction trades:
“As he sits in a study room at Project Learn — a non-profit on Euclid Avenue that offers adult education programs — with sample questions for the GED (General Education Diploma) waiting on a computer screen, 29-year-old Derwin Williams explains why getting his diploma is so important. He wants to get into the construction trade, maybe as a roofer or drywall hanger, and he knows he needs a diploma to get into vocational technical classes to get that done.
“Williams dropped out of East High School more than a decade ago, in part because of a gunshot wound that left him hospitalized for six months and required the removal of his kidney. He’s had some legal problems since then too, mostly from a DUI conviction a few years ago, but he’ll be sober three years this coming March. He started thinking about a GED when his probation program encouraged him to do so.
“Williams is unemployed and has been studying for the four-part GED since January. In previous years, 11 months of prep would likely have given him a decent chance of success. But the test was radically changed in January, and like many, Williams hasn’t yet made enough progress to take any of the four sections. According to some sample tests he’s taken, he’s getting close in the math and science portions, but is still pretty far out in the social science and language parts.”
His story is typical. Large numbers of men and women who would have passed the GED in the past are now failing. The changes in the GED are literally closing the door to opportunity for hundreds of thousands of people.
McGraw writes:
“The numbers are shocking: In the United States, according to the GED Testing Service, 401,388 people earned a GED in 2012, and about 540,000 in 2013. This year, according to the latest numbers obtained by Scene, only about 55,000 have passed nationally. That is a 90-percent drop off from last year.
“And there are serious repercussions. As national economic policy is emphasizing more adult education programs, and most jobs (even Walmart shelf stockers) require a high school diploma, the new GED test has pretty much moved the goal posts way back. And that includes the incarcerated, where so many prison re-entry education programs include getting the high school drop-out population to pass the GED test.
“Has the GED test always been hard? Some would say so. Especially if you are 20 years or more removed from high school and haven’t thought of quadratic equations or Thomas Jefferson’s verbiage since then. But for those trying to take the GED test in 2014, passage of the high school equivalency is probably less likely than at any other point in the 70-year history of the test…..
“The changes were made to bring the test up to date, in some people’s eyes. That meant adapting the test to reflect the new Common Core standards being taught in most high schools across the country, doing it online only and not on paper, and requiring more essays. The results have been dramatic:
“Based upon preliminary findings by Scene, about 350,000 fewer people will earn a GED nationally than in 2012, and close to 500,000 fewer than last year. The GED accounts for 12 percent of all the high school diplomas awarded each year.
“In Ohio, 16,092 passed the test in 2012, and 19,976 did so in 2013, but only 1,458 have passed so far this year.
“Other states have similar rates. The drop off in Texas was about 86 percent; Florida, about 77 percent; Michigan, about 88 percent.
“About 2,100 prisoners in the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections earned a GED in both 2012 and 2013. Only 97 have earned the GED in 2014.
“Project Learn, the local program contracted to tutor inmates in the Cuyahoga County Jail, saw a total of 80 inmates pass the GED test in the past three years, but only one county jail inmate has passed so far this year.”
The rhetoric about the Common Core is misleading. Infusing Common Core into the GED is a huge error. It has made the GED so rigorous that vast numbers of young people will never pass it. Do they’re really need to master algebra to work as a laborer in the construction trade or a shelf stocker at Walmart? Do they really need to demonstrate close reading skills to get an entry-level job to support themselves and their families? Why erect a barrier so high that large numbers of people will be trapped in poverty, unemployment, and unskilled low-wage jobs?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Could you just imagine if these greed driven unethical psychos were in the medical field selling testing and the treatments for anything?
They ARE in the medical field. Gates Foundation controls the budget of the World Health Organization. He “gifted” the organization with a data analysis center in Seattle, through which he determines which health programs can be funded by world’s health contributions and the foreign exchange of victim nations. He lobbies massively and unethically for “market driven” investment and diverts all the resources to his corporate cronies. Just like here.
Why doesn’t Nigeria have a national health system?
Bill Gates does have his finger in the medical pie. And he is causing lots of harm camouflaged as philanthropy there as well.
Bill Gates Connection to Glaxo Drug Fraud Scandal:
Even the Gates Foundation has been linked to this massive scandal through the swinging doors of employment. According to a July 3 report by Tom Paulson on KPLU 88.517:
As previously reported, Avandia has been found to be profoundly dangerous—a fact hid by GSK for over 10 years, as they knew it would adversely affect sales. This was revealed in a Senate Finance Committee report, released by Max Baucus and Charles E. Grassley in February 2010. The report also asked why the FDA allowed a clinical trial of Avandia to continue even after the agency estimated the drug had caused an estimated 83,000 heart attacks between 1999 and 2007.
One of the most high-profile GSK executives alleged to have engaged in misbehavior is Tachi Yamada, former head of global health for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation who was before that head of research and development for GSK.
Yamada, while he was head of global health for the Gates Foundation, was accused in a U.S. Senate hearing of bullying a scientist to not publish negative findings about a GSK diabetes drug. This was fairly big news at the time and such behavior is part of the federal complaint against the drug firm… But so far as I can tell, nobody has made any mention of Yamada’s role in this case. Yet he was pretty high profile — at the center of the controversy surrounding the drug company’s attempt to cover-up adverse side effects of its diabetes drug Avandia.
– See more at: http://healthimpactnews.com/2012/celebrity-doctors-and-bill-gates-linked-to-glaxosmithkline-fraud/#sthash.9crI9S1o.dpuf
Bill Gates Admits None of his Grand Challenge Grants are Successful
“But I was pretty naive about how long that process would take,” Bill Gates told the crowd gathered at the Westin Hotel for the meeting, which ended Wednesday. Gates repeatedly used the word ‘naive’ when talking about the philanthropy’s original expectations for this initiative.
The foundation’s metrics for assessing success or failure within the Grand Challenges program have not been made public. But after a decade and nearly a billion dollars spent on more than 1500 projects aimed at solving the philanthropy’s select Grand Challenges, not a single project has been judged a Grand Slam, or even a home run.
http://www.humanosphere.org/science/2014/10/no-home-runs-yet-for-the-gates-grand-challenges/
90% drop off! This is not right!
I agree! How many people with valuable skills are now marginalized out of the free market? This is a travesty for these skilled individuals and for those who would benefit from their expertise.
The statistics are quite literaly staggering.
literally
Why so hard? To keep the population “dumb” for the financial and political agenda of those supporting the Common Core. IMHO
It’s another step towards removing ladders of mobility. I think most would agree you can’t substitute a true high school diploma (4 years of learning) with a test you can study for in a year. The GED is more of a minimum competency test to show you have high school level math and numeracy but not necessarily at the level to do college level work. The GED and High School diplomas are not regarded equally by many.
By removing it, you create an entire class of people that may become permanently disenfranchised, and unemployable in many senses. If career ready is truly a goal of CC, then getting something to say you have adult cognitive abilities is part of getting into a career late in the game.
Without it, the only educational measure employers have is someone’s middle school diploma…which is a far cry from someone that probably graduated middle school a decade ago (nevermind the amount of maturation in that period).
See the ladders of class mobility shrink away, as we set the bar so high, it creates a permanent upper class and under class. Meaning, if you become a high school drop out, your path back is nearly impossible for many even if you change, even if you study hard, even if you are pursuing work that doesn’t demand content mastery of everything you learn in high school. Part of the GED is simply showing you have the capacity to learn – and vocational jobs can train on the job, someone that they know has the motivation and ability to learn the material.
This is a travesty – it’s almost saying the GED is a pathway to a standard 4 year college track when someone who needs one might have kids, might have medical issues, probably has financial issues, and has a weak support net (hence their need of the GED in the first place) and these people are not going to be able to attempt a 4 year college education likely just on a practical level (I could NOT do the training I did as a late teen/early adult now that I have a family of my own).
Mass Failure by Design!
Disaster for millions of people. What is the MasterPlan? Bringing outsourced jobs back to the US and setting up our own ‘Sweat Shops’ paying below poverty wages? Exploiting the Poor even more?
Where is the GatesGotcha-World-Vision going?
Tripple Dare all politicians, CEOs & Disaster Capitalists to take the CCSS-GED & POST THEIR SCORES publically.
90% FAILURE!? Don’t we have enough problems in this country?
Add to that the generations to come who are being tattooed with the CCSS & squeezed through the CutScore duJour.
Painful!
People who study for their GED are now being victimized. When one has to support themselves and/or themselves and their family and employment hinges on passing the GED, it is abhorrent that their success is not based on their efforts but rather on a test designed without taking their needs and life experiences into consideration. If a small percentage fail after studying and taking GED classes, then that would be on them, but when a huge percentage fail, then something is wrong with the test. Question: Who designed this NEW test and on what was that design based? How long did the design take?
“Test to the Top”
To monetize the public schools
They had to bastardize the rules
To make the schools about a test
Which passes few and chucks the rest
When standardized testing (the NECAP, in NH) first started, I always said I wondered why my plumber would have to be able to analyze a Robert Frost poem (which the tests always seemed full of, for some reason).
This!
Two pipes diverged in a house, and I
I snaked the one most traveled by
And that has made all the difference
TAGO!!!!
“Stopping by pipes on a snowy evening”
Whose pipes these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his pipes freeze up below.
That herd of dear must think me queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the house and frozen lake
The coldest evening of the year.
I give the frozen pipe a shake
To see if ice will simply break.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The pipes are frozen, hard and [bleep!],
And I have promises to keep,
And pipes to thaw before I sleep,
And pipes to thaw before I sleep.
We dance round the sink and suppose, but the hairball sits in the drain and knows.
All wonderful, but this is my fav!
(A close reading seems to indicate that the hairball’s name is Arne.)
“Good plumbers make good neighbors.”
Stop – you’re killing me! How do you come up with these?
Dienne, I was going to say, “You slay me.”
IMHO, “SomeDAM Poets also make good neighbors.”
And good truth tellers—
“There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.” [Dorothy Parker]
Thank you for so deftly telling truth in rhyme and verse.
Which reminds me of something that Dylan Thomas wrote, and he wasn’t even Greek!
“A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.”
So thank you for your contributions to this blog.
Keep writing. I’ll keep reading.
😎
“Rust and Cracks”
Some say pipes will end in rust,
Some say in cracks.
From what I’ve heard of pipes discussed
I hold with those who favor rust.
But if I had to face the facts,
I think I know enough of steel
To say that for disruption cracks
Are also real
And like an ax.
Keep writing your poems; I’ll keep reading.
Thank you for this! Have a Happy New Year!
I genuinely don’t understand how this was allowed to happen. They know there’s a huge group of people who take the GED simply so they can get a job. They can’t even work as a temp in a factory here without a GED. Everyone knows that.
Also, did they coordinate this with social services/child welfare/probation departments/courts in states? People are often told to work toward a GED when they enter those systems. What happens there now? Were courts and social services agencies notified ahead of time?
If they think it’s bad now wait until word gets around (if it hasn’t already). People talk to each other. The people who try will tell other people not to bother.
I know that the people who need a GED are not a prized political constituency, they’re probably the definition of “powerless”, but how did state education people allow this to happen? Aren’t they supposed to be the advocates for the public?
THEY are SUPPOSED to be advocates for the public, but THEY don’t care about John Q Public anymore and haven’t for awhile, I don’t think.
quote: “Also, did they coordinate this with social services/child welfare/probation departments/courts in states? People are often told to work toward a GED when they enter those systems. What happens there now? Were courts and social services agencies notified ahead of time?” my friend who teaches GED classes said that the student/adult learner is told “join up with Job corps” as the only other alternative ; for those who don’t fit that particular milieu or cannot take the Job Corps option I just don’t know what on earth is available and the social services people don’t either. No one has thought through the implications of thees policies…. it is similar to the decision to close state hospitals for developmental disabilities or others with mental health /illness and the community services were not in place. Gerry Stevens is still a name that haunts the halls in Massachusetts (community agencies were not available and not prepared for the impact of policy shifts)
First, we really need to know how the cut score was set. There are established ways in testing to do this. It’s part of test design and field testing.
Second, this is one more example of the great problem with implementation of CCSS. Even the best, most appropriate standards should be implemented from the earliest grades up, over time. Kids in high school should not be meeting CCSS for the first time.
So GED should have been changed over time.
But having a more challenging assessment and curriculum is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. The GED does have to be credible. If done thoughtfully.
I think there has to be a recognition that there’s real practical urgency for a lot of people taking the GED. They are literally just trying to get an entry level job. They may have plans past that but “working” is really essential so they can start to climb out of the hole they’re in. Courts and social service agencies use a GED and a job as a measure of whether they’re serious and attempting to straighten out. Everything else hinges on that 200 dollars a week. It’ll be nearly impossible for people who have been thru the court system without that money. They won’t make it.
You are of course right about going from early grades up. Cn’t frame the house without the foundation!
quote: “First, we really need to know how the cut score was set. There are established ways in testing to do this. It’s part of test design and field testing.” Peter, when we did this in the past we were using standardized achievement tests (you could look them up in Buros and fid the reliability and validity)…. and the local staff in the schools had some autonomy to decide which of the achievement tests was more appropriate for the population in the schools and their knowledge of the curriculum. Today it is experimental tests that haven’t proven their validity at all (and the taxpayer is paying the R&D to establish validity and calibrate tests)… this is wrong on so many levels.
Jean & Peter,
“Even the best, most appropriate standards. . .”
“Peter, when we did this in the past we were using standardized achievement tests (you could look them up in Buros and find the reliability and validity)…. ”
Peter, there are no “best most appropriate standards” and Jean, those achievement tests never had “the reliability and validity” that you found.
As pculliton stated, albeit not in the sense that I give it here, “Can’t frame the house without the foundation”. Wilson has proven the COMPLETE EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL INVALIDITY of the concepts of educational standards and standardized testing. Standards and standardized testing has no “foundation” whatsoever in logical thought and rationality.
To understand why see Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted 1997 dissertation that destroys these two educational malpractices:
“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.
“those achievement tests never had “the reliability and validity” that you found.” I know full well what you are saying Duane as we have shared many comments in the past.
They were the best we had to go on at that time….. in special education we needed something (observation and performance testing are not sufficient by themselves)…. But my major point was accountability is being pushed and trade offs on the autonomy scale — as professional educators in special education we had some autonomy do choose, decide about what tests would be used; when the basic skills legislation “Back to the Basics” was promulgated there was some agreement about curriculum alignment with measures (outside the school). There was a major need for Buros in the work but we also had judgments about the selection of an appropriate measure at the time for the student in front of us. All of that has been taken away with this supposed “accountability” from the Arne Duncan flawed policies. But I do understand, Duane, the point you are making ; that is why teacher judgment is so important and in special needs we wanted “clinical judgment” as well — some of our best practitioners were trained in the clinical models of the hospital settings — we needed instruments that would capture those observations of “clinical judgment” to share. Boston Children’s Hospital offered us (at no charge) the instruments they were using (at the time)…. it took two years to get inter-rater reliability on the observations and rating scales (to attempt to get at validity of what we were seeing between/among nurses and doctors and teachers)… I had the fortunate experience of sitting in while the Chief of Ambulatory Care at Children’s was training Nurse Practitioners — being a lowly teacher I was enthralled. We needed ways to capture the knowledge of the best , most experienced clinicians. There were some excellent films available at the time that have not been replicated of late by Else Hauesserman whose expertise was with children that had severe and profound disabilities. Otherwise without the “tests” or instruments or rating scales the student would be lumped into a class for “vegetables” (sorry to use a pejorative here but that is a crude way of describing the children in cribs who were blind and deaf and had no adult stimulation throughout the day.) Tests are by no means a magical response to the situation so Duane I share everything you are saying… I am hoping that we can stop this horrid use of experimental computerized “junk science” that is being used because it is fraud and malpractice and people (old like me) have to speak up.
jeanhaverhill@aol.com
this is truth; but in practicality we need tools of different kinds — including tests — the first thing at the doctor’s office they take my temperature and blood pressure (I don’ think the weight has anything important to tell them except if someone has drastically lost pounds) ; and the measures in a school cannot be idiosyncratic or anecdotal because that is then magic or witchcraft. Judgments of professional people, with valid experience with the populations need to be captured and shared. I am feeling somewhat hopeful that the judge’s mandate in the Boston School for ELL students does not require an IEP or a “test” to say that the student must have access to resources…. hopefully something will come from that…..
EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL INVALIDITY of the concepts of educational standards and standardized testing. Standards and standardized testing has no “foundation” whatsoever in logical thought and rationality.
jeanhaverhill@aol.com
Jean,
I didn’t put this in my original response and should of: Thanks, Jean, for the opening for me to bring in Wilson’s work.
You and I both know the problems with these educational malpractices. And I enjoy your commentaries, keep em coming!!
So we can expect an immediate admission that this was perhaps a reckless and poorly-informed change and an immediate course correction now that this data is in, right?
That’s the other side of “data driven”. It isn’t intended to be used solely to batter the subordinates into submission. It’s supposed to also be used to show policy makers and managers that they may have made poor decisions.
This!
I keep waiting for that. “We looked at the data and we made a terrible error” Not teachers. Not students. The designers of these policies. The managers made an error. I’d find them a lot more credible if I heard that, even once.
If we never hear that you know “the data” is not being used properly, because no one is infallible. If they never do a course correction they’re not using the data to evaluate their own work because no ordinary mortal can make rock-solid plans years into the future without modifications. That just doesn’t happen. I don’t care how smart you are.
It is so exhausting and demoralizing watching the way that common core has completely infiltrated the daily life of every single US citizen. Big money has purchased public education and they have sealed off every exit essentially sentencing the whole of society to a predetermined, censored education that steals the souls of not only the students, but the teachers as well. Next on the horizon? Healthcare. Big business has begun inroads there as well. “Managing” healthcare will mean rationing healthcare according to distant formulas presided over by anonymous non medical personnel. All of our learning and healthcare will be determined by the state and as they say “you can’t fight city hall”. Indeed we gave given everything to Ceasar.
“Big business has begun inroads . . . given everything to Ceasar.”
The two, big business and “Caesar”, i.e., the government, are two different multiple entities. You are confusing and conflating the two (which is okay if you are implying that they have merged into fascism) and it is the “big business” end of the pole that is an unexamined, private, not open to inspection by the people that is a major problem (not that the unexamined (having never completed the annual audits as required by law of it) part of the government, the Department of War, oh, I mean “defense” that is also a major source of societal problems.
I taught GED prep for several years, to young mothers in Roxbury, MA. My heart is just broken over this. I swear, if there is more I can do, I’ll do it, but my life is already given over to teaching and defending the coming generations form these sociopaths.
I think everybody who is reading this blog ow understands what’s at stake. We somehow have to step it up, and get more clarity and reason into the crazy, distorted public struggle. Not just on-line, but everywhere you can meet with people, every politician you can confront, every committee where you can speak out.
Chemtchr: “I think everybody who is reading this blog ow understands what’s at stake. We somehow have to step it up, and get more clarity and reason into the crazy, distorted public struggle. Not just on-line, but everywhere you can meet with people, every politician you can confront, every committee where you can speak out.” you are absolutely on target; civic engagement at every level… from the mayor , school committee on up to the top and from the top through all of the levels of the “marble cake” that represent anyone in elected office. A concertsd effort by the good folks here to reach out everywhere ….
This fits in nicely with the new requirements in many states where being proficient on common core standardized tests is now part of earning a HS diploma. Those that cannot meet that hurdle will be passed on to the GED testing environment.
What will kicking people when they’re down accomplish? These GED folks are aspirational. They should be encouraged to move forward to change their lives. Without opportunity, some people may be enticed to make a living through criminal activities. America has always been about second chances; Britain has always been about ranking and keeping people “in their place.” Why should a few corrupt politicians whose palms have been greased by Pearson allow this company to dictate the terms through which Americans can get ahead? Success breeds success. Pearson needs to go! We should contract with any number of American institutions of higher education that can write a valid GED test with a realistic cut score.
Yes, Pearson definitely needs to GO!
Maybe we need a Boston Test Party to dump a boatload of Pearson tests into the harbor.
No testing without representation!
It would make my day to dump my entire 1st grade Pearson Scott Foresman Reading Street Common Core series into the harbor! What a grand start to the new year that would be!
You’ll get arrested for littering.
You know what happens then?
While I suspect this will not get any better if/when Common Core is fully implemented, it is asinine to think that individuals attempting to pass the GED who left school before the Common Core Standards were even written would be able to pass a test based upon those standards.
Even in the best case it would be twelve years from the implementation of the standards until all students would have been prepared under the standards since the first grade. In fact, any sensible roll out of any new set of standards should be implemented from the bottom up over ten to twelve years.
This is a senseless tragedy in every way. The economic cost to the individuals and their families is needless. And the potential harm to society as a while cannot be measured. We are all in this boat.
The problem for Pearson with the old GED test model was that all sorts of folks could horn in on the preparation market. Now that they’ve established that they are guarding the gates to a GED, Pearson can make a bundle marketing the prep for it.
Our local GED classes used a variety of materials to prepare people to take the exam. Now they purchase a full Pearson prep program.
This will be a huge money-maker. Pearson already jacked up the price of taking the exam (almost double). Now the numbers of passing exam takers will rise again, but every one of those passing scores will represent money spent on a Pearson GED-prep package.
Well, if there’s any teeny glimmer of a silver lining to this, it’s that maybe, just maybe, some more people will wake up to how ridiculous it is to base a person’s whole life on one invalid test.
How sad is is that the ultimate high stakes test, the test to determine if you will EVER get even an entry level job was not even mentioned in our national Common Core testing “debate”.
I always thought that the GED was more about determining a person’s willingness to learn and their ability to be trained. In other words, if they took a job would they be able to follow their supervisor’s directions and learn on the job. It is disgraceful to put this disastrous common core into the equation and to accept an extraordinary failure rate. Passing this new fangled test in no way indicates that the test takers are not capable of working at jobs requiring a high school diploma. It serves as a barrier. It indicates a bureaucracy not interested in the best interests of its citizens. This should become a Supreme Court case – now to find the legal argument which will bring justice to the people wanting to be self sufficient and productive members of society but being prevented from doing so thanks to a ridiculous test. Oh and can we put Coleman on trial too for building this national “architecture” without having the proper licensing to do so!
I know a young person who took the GED in 2011. She could not attend high school due to health reasons. She is a voracious reader. She reported that much to her surprise the GED (at that time) was pretty much a reading comprehension test. Except for the math, which was quite basic, the rest of the questions were all based on reading passages on various subjects. You didn’t need to be familiar with the subjects. You just needed to know how to read and comprehend what you were reading to ace the questions. She passed it with no problem and never took any preparation courses. She went on to complete college and is gainfully employed today. Who knows how she would do on a GED test that is Common Core aligned? Why should the GED be a roadblock instead of the alternative solution it was intended to be?
Obviously this move is not for the benefit of anyone who is not making money on Pearson test prep and the cost of the test itself which would have to be repeated over and over. Bill Gates and David Coleman are an unethical duo with many other wealthy players in their game of disenfranchisement for all.
The ELA SBAC test doesn’t require any prior reading either. The CCSS would make you think it would, but it doesn’t!
The morning Providence Journal just ran a story about the dismal performance of individuals taking the new GED. The RI Dept. of Ed. spokesperson passed it off as being the fault of the students who didn’t study hard enough. Such bull! What do we need to do to get Pearson to implode?
Well, glad to see they’ll be taking responsibility and will be held accountable! The students are at fault. Everyone is held accountable except the people at the top.
Are ed reformers in management ever wrong? Is there a documented instance where a single one of these people ever admitted a mistake?
There better be, because no one is infallible and “staying the course” when one makes a mistake isn’t “brave”, it’s ego-driven, careerist and selfish. A 100% success rate on anything this complex is a lie. If they’re not admitting error, ever, they’re lying about their performance.
If a teacher was to make a test with a 90% failure rate, it would be all over the news, and the teacher would probably be fired. But a multi-billion dollar company does it, and the STUDENTS are blamed? Disgusting!
Threatened out West: what you said.
😎
TAGO!
quote: “The RI Dept. of Ed. spokesperson passed it off as being the fault of the students who didn’t study hard enough. Such bull! What do we need to do to get Pearson to implode?” it was in RI that I first learned about the harsh , punitive “turn around” models being implemented; and the commissioner of ED in RI has been questioned about her own doctoral work and her study is not available to the public???? is there any more on that? I was just curious …. each state has it’s own little peculiarities; I also watch what they do with their “mayor’s schools” that are presumably show cases (part of the little fiefdom I guess)… just curious
This all breaks my heart. How can just a couple filthy rich people, like Gates, the Walton Family, the Koch Brothers…cause so much havoc?
I think we can all see how a one world order will be very, very easy to achieve. It is all insanity, and it breaks my heart. All they want is a low level job that no one else would even want.
I’ve never seen greed at the level it is in our country. They just cannot get enough cash. But, I’m very afraid they do not want these people to get a job. That’s the purpose of basing the GED on the dreaded Common Core. They want to keep these people “beat down.” They want the middle class to disappear (which it is gradually) and ALL OF US begging in the streets for food. It is scary.
In our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income . You are in substance saying to that man that he has no right to exist. … —Martin Luther King, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience (1968)
Dawn, thanks for the quote from M.L.K. I had never come across it before; it makes me think of the despotism and tyrants in Cambodia — conveying the message “your life has no significance; your death has no meaning”…. how do we get into that philosophy of life? and how does this version of psychology find it’s way to get embedded into our schools???? we need more discussion of the psychology of learning and organizing /structuring schools….
Here’s a question: is a GED, any GED, a test of what a graduating senior should know after 13 years of school? Or
should it be a test of what a person two, three, or more years after graduation would know and be able to do?
No doubt what happened here is not good. But maybe we also need to decide what GED should be – before we let Pearson decide for us.
High School graduation or a GED was supposed to mean at least minimum skills in the basics—reading, writing and math. College ready is maximum skills in these areas and more, and no, someone who roofs houses doesn’t need to be college ready. Basic reading skills are enough if that is who that individual has become.
For instance, not everyone in the United States is an avid reader so do we force all children to become avid readers?
There are about 65 million avid readers in a the US with a population of more than 316 million people. The average avid reader reads about 10 books a year. The average American reads about 1 book a year.
I thought freedom meant freedom of choice—to be an avid reader or not to be one. We already know the oligarchs have no respect for democracy or the voice of the people.
What is Bill Gates going to do now—force every American to be an avid reader or send them to prison becasue they won’t read at least 10 books a year and then take their Pearson tests to prove they read the books? Does Bill Gates plan to pick the books everyone has to read too?
The funny (not ha ha) thing is that all the “reforms” will chase many students away from being avid readers. Who would be an avid reader if all you know about reading is short excerpts and being stopped every sentence to define words and do a “close reading”?
Frankly, I think our corporate overlords would be perfectly happy if no one ever read another book, except they’d have to figure out how to replace the lost profits from book sales.
For most of the 30 years I was a teacher, I required a monthly book report and encouraged the students to read books they enjoyed reading. I also taught them the five finger rule to make sure they could read a book without frustration.
The book report was homework but every Friday for the last 20 minutes of class, SSR for that book in an attempt to prime the reading pump for the weekend.
Book reports could be turned in early, graded, and then revised to improve that grade if the child wanted to improve that grade. Some students revised five and six times to take the Fail grade to an A+, and I got to correct the same improving book report a half dozen times.
:o)
So wrong, sad and scary….
The Pearson test is based on Common Core so this is a classic case of “garbage in /garbage out”.
“The Common Door”
The Common Core
Is common fail
A common door
From school to jail
One thing I left out of this story, but wish I had put in. Many of the high academic folks I interviewed about the process in changing the GED all said the changes were made because the old test “wasn’t fair” to HS graduates. They explained saying that if a HS senior had to know a certain amt. to graduate, it wasn’t fair to them if someone passing a slightly lower standard GED got inot college as well. I then said for something not “to be fair” to a party, you must prove that that party had been harmed in some way. They couldn’t pinpoint any real harm, and were sort of disgusted by that line of questioning. But their thinking was very real in that every one of them had the same talking point: that somehow a 2013 HS grad college freshman and their parents would experience some harm if they went to college and their kid was sitting next to a GED grad. The problem here is that we do not make education/economic policy based on whether some group “thinks” that policy is fair or not. We look at the bigger pictrure. And in this case, the college presidents and administrators overseeing this change were thinking more along the lines of fairness to their perceived constituency rather than a policy for thre greater good of the country. BTW, thanks for all the comments.
Of course, plenty of home-schoolers who never set foot in a high school classroom go to selective colleges!
According to USA Today, the average number of test takers is 800,000. The cost of the new test is now $120 from a previous cost of $40 in some States. That is $64 MILLION extra that the testing company will be receiving!
Do you really think they care how many will pass? They get paid for how many take the test not how many pass, just like the PARRC!
“Do you really think they care how many will pass?
NOPE!
TAGO for your comment, Tim!!
I think students around the world should have second thoughts about taking PISA tests next year. They need to know the truth about the myth of corporate-promoted internationalization/globalization–disseminated by this British Imperial Testing Company.
The reformers are creating a caste system that will change this nation unless we stop them.
One more thing. The Pearson/ACE folks are going to spin this huge test drop as the same thing that happened when the test was changed in 2002. I’ve seen those comments already in some stories. But here is the national data: in 2001, 680,000 passed the GED test, and in 2002 it was 360,000. In 2013, 540,000 passed the GED Test and the final 2014 # will be around 60,000. In both 2001 and 2013 numbers were higher than in prior years because test-takers wanted to get it completed before the changes came into play, but anyone can see that the 2002 drop and the 2014 drop are in no way even close (the percentage drop is double in 2014 over 2002). And that is because the 2014 test is much harder to pass and much harder to take.
Unreal! Where do these Disaster Capitalists meet and communicate every minute aspect, detail & air tight Total Take-over of EVERYTHING EDUCATION related & $B profit assurance? Every turn we take, they figured the angle, have implemented all aspects, and we find out after the stats appear. No leaks of information anywhere. No heads-up until we only have information to react to. No secret recording. No email. No text. No tweet. These guys are not that smart! They conduct Disaster Capitalistic business without a trace. What gives? Education is going down and we play with ethical behaviors, while they surprise us at every turn.
Carroll Quigley answers your question in his book, Tragedy & Hope. In 1921, J.P. Morgan bought up 25 of the most influential newspapers in the United States and installed his own editor-in-chief at each one. His top lawyer then established The Council on Foreign Relations, an educational resource and think tank where all of the top executives and capitalists could gather to discuss how to usurp the powers of the federal, state and local governments through money, manipulation, key appointments of just the right people to the right positions. They are members of secret societies, like the Knights of Malta. Their allegiance is not to the Constitution but to the establishment of a world government.
The CFR provides the talking points that are disseminated as “news” throughout the U.S. and information is suppressed and controlled by a small circle of elite players continuing to this day with David Rockefeller. People who deny the possibility of this scenario are willfully ignorant at this point because the names have been named, dates and places detailed, signed documents have been photographed, archived and verified. The facts point to a grand conspiracy of bankers and politicians colluding to control the destiny of the U.S.
Read Tragedy & Hope by Carroll Quigley. Watch “The Ultimate History Lesson” by John Taylor Gatto. Read The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America by Charlotte Iserbyt. Read America’s Secret Establishment by Antony Sutton. Read them and weep.
Our media has been captured since that time. Anyone who thinks they are watching “news” when they turn on any TV channel is delusional. Turn the TV off. At least the Chinese and the Russians are aware that the state owns their air waves and disseminates propaganda at will. Here in America, we are sleep walking while we play with our iPhones.
Let’s see, who started that rumor that our public schools and teachers are no good? A task force headed up by Joel Klein and Condoleeza Rice over at the CFR published a report claiming that undereducated students constituted a national security issue for our country. Bill Gates came to the rescue, buying his way into the Department of Education and the rest is history. This doesn’t come out of nowhere. This is a very carefully choreographed play and we are all pawns in Brzezinski’s chess game. Read.
The reality is there are plenty of quite sane folk who see through this smoke and mirror veil of democracy. Sadly, they are marginalized as either conspiracy theorists or humiliated as ignorant and “clinging to their guns and bibles”.
As a distaction they drum up every opportunity to race bait and turn the truly disadvantaged against the middle class and use the angst of the struggling to knock anyone who has managed to pull themselves up a few rungs on ladder back to the ground.
The facist corporate/state marriage has turned the greatest experiment in democracy into a mockery.
it is filtering through media; such as the CEO of Pharma who says the elderly are a burden and that is why medicines are so expensive; or on NPR when they say we have “Surplus people” — so the tests become “gates” — a form of rationing. Same thing is true for women in their late 40s or 50s who have worked all their lives (not taking time out to have children in some cases) and then at 52 they can’t through the gate that says “where is your college degree”?…… I see it with young women in NY , in TX, in WA (I am 75 so I am looking at the cohort of younger women that are the age of my nieces; two of the women in TX went to Afghanistan for work and didn’t tell their families until they had already arrived there).
From the 2014 GED website:
SAMPLE LANGUAGE ARTS, WRITING QUESTIONS
Directions: Choose the one best answer to each question.
Questions 9 through 10 refer to the following letter of application:
June 24, 2002
Jonathan Quinn
Employment Director
Capital City Gardening Services
4120 Wisconsin Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20016
Dear Mr. Quinn:
(A)
(1) I would like to apply for the landscape supervisor position advertised in the Sunday, June 23rd edition of the Washington Post. (2) My work experience and education combined with your need for an experienced landscape supervisor have resulted in a relationship that would profit both parties. (3) In May, I graduated from Prince William Community College. (4) Graduating with an associate of arts degree in horticulture. (5) My concentration within the program was designing gardens and choosing the appropriate plants for particular soils and regions. (6) I have also had considerable supervising experience. (7) For several years, I have worked with a local company, Burke Nursery and Garden Center, and have been responsible for supervising the four members of the planting staff.
(B)
(8) Our community knows that Capital City Gardening Services is a company that does excellent work and strives hard to meet the demands of its clients. (9) As my references will attest, I am a diligent worker and have the respect of both my coworkers and my customers. (10) I will be, as a landscape supervisor at your firm, able to put to use the skills and knowledge that I have obtained from my professional career and education. (11) I have included a copy of my resume, which details my principal interests education, and past work experience. (12) I have also included photographs of the landscape projects I have supervised as well as drawings of proposed projects.
(C)
(13) I am excited about the opportunities and many challenges that this position would provide. (14) Thank you for your consideration, and I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Patrick Jones
1219 Cedar Lane
Manassas, VA 20109
Question 9: Sentence 2: My work experience and education combined with your need for an experienced landscape supervisor have resulted in a relationship that would profit both parties. Which correction should be made to sentence 2?
1.insert a comma after education
2.change combined to combine
3.change have resulted to would result
4.replace profit with prophet
5.replace parties with party’s
Question 10: Sentences 3 and 4: In May, I graduated from Prince William Community College. Graduating with an associate of arts degree in horticulture. Which is the best way to write the italicized portion of these sentences? If the original is the best way, choose option (1).
1.College. Graduating with
2.College, I graduated with
3.College. A graduation with
4.College. Having graduated with
5.College with
To me, this seems a completely reasonable assessment. The SAT and composition subject tests, as well as many other standardized tests, have LONG asked questions such as these. It’s simply recognizing sentence errors and improving sentences. Further, this assessment item does not ask the test-taker to analyze something s/he will most likely never need to encounter in the future (see my previous comments about plumber and Robert Frost poems).
Should an entire English class be focused on recognizing sentence errors and improving sentences? Of course not. But it is a reasonable skill to expect a high school graduate to possess.
As far as having students write authentic pieces goes, those have by their very nature to be graded very subjectively. The process can be done more objectively — sort of — by having the response scored by several different people and then coming to a consensus. This how the open-response items on an AP exam are scored. But the item reproduced here is cut and dried and very useful in determining whether or not a person knows how to put a sentence together.
Essays will be graded by a computer. My son was very surprised when he took a the English and Math assessment for college entrance that the essay he wrote was graded on the spot in seconds by the computer. No remediation required. He wondered how it could possibly validate his ability to write well.
Students will learn after a while that their essays for all Common Core assessments will be graded on a computer and they can write accordingly. Lengthy words. Five paragraphs. But it doesn’t have to make sense.
Did you know that so-called computerized and programmed authors are writing books that way?
Here the article on this topic: Patented Book Writing System Creates, Sells Hundreds Of Thousands Of Books On Amazon
“Philip M. Parker, Professor of Marketing at INSEAD Business School, has had a side project for over 10 years. He’s created a computer system that can write books about specific subjects in about 20 minutes. The patented algorithm has so far generated hundreds of thousands of books. In fact, Amazon lists over 100,000 books attributed to Parker, and over 700,000 works listed for his company, ICON Group International, Inc. This doesn’t include the private works, such as internal reports, created for companies or licensing of the system itself through a separate entity called EdgeMaven Media.”
http://singularityhub.com/2012/12/13/patented-book-writing-system-lets-one-professor-create-hundreds-of-thousands-of-amazon-books-and-counting/
The oligarchs and their corporations to boost profits through autmoatcion are slowly making about 97% percent of the people irrelevant. What happens to everyone but millionaires and billionaires when all the jobs and professions have been automated?
“There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears so to speak. Producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”
– Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
(Aldous was the author of “Brave New World” and the brother of Julian Huxley, the first Director General of UNESCO and the president of the Eugenics Society in England)
I think that day has already arrived for far too many people when the average American spends about 10 hours a day dividing their time up between watching TV, texting, playing video games and listening to music with ear buds plugged in every moment they are away from the TV.
Almost every time I walk to town, I see people with ear buds in or texting on their smart phones—that automatically track their location and every action and report that back to a private sector information gathering company—-with two blurring thumbs and not paying much attention to where they are walking or what or who they might bump into. In this way, millions have disconnected from the real world.
This fairy tale world of the brainwashed and addicted is an attractive candy that’s hard to say no too.
I’m proud to say that I’m ear bud free, I never text, and I do not allow myself to turn a TV on until after 8:00 pm and then I only watch TV from a DVD—actual TV is hypnotic, mostly mindless and I avoid it like the plague. In fact, I talk on the phone less than 5 minutes a month, and I don’t even stream movies—streaming films at home makes it too easy to sit around watching endless movies. Instead, I walk the mile and half to town to watch most of the films I’m interested in—that is a three mile walk at least once a week of not more.
Then that’s a departure from the way AP exams are graded. I have seen several “AP-type” questions on the SBAC ELA exam so assumed we were going more in that direction. Interesting.
The wouldn’t it be better, Dawn, to use the type of question in which a test-taker reads a passage and then has to re-organize some things and so on? I’m sure you know what I mean. Those types of questions have been around for generations.
The sample letter is twice as long as it should be. All the excess verbiage makes it harder to spot the errors.
What the test taker is being asked to do is unnatural and unauthentic. The editing process is so awkward and annoying. No wonder so few students passed this ridiculous, contrived nonsense!
If you want to ascertain that students can write, have them truly write something with intention and meaning. Forget the bubbling!
My observation for the past 30 years or so is that it is the open-ended writing sections, not the “bubbling,” that are causing the drop in scores and the exponential increase in hours given over to testing.
I’ve said this before…it bears repeating.
The Common Core is tied (“aligned”) to the GED.
Both the ACT and the College Board proudly tout that they’ve “aligned” all of their products with the Common Core. That means the ACT test, the PSAT and SAT tests, the Advanced Placement program, and the various tests the ACT and College Board produce to assess college and workforce “readiness” in the middle grades.
While there is push-back to the Common Core testing (PARCC, for example), the Common Core is embedded in other testing that many educators revere and seldom question.
So where – exactly – does that leave public education?
It leaves it bought….and sold.
quote: “As national economic policy is emphasizing more adult education programs, and most jobs (even Walmart shelf stockers) require a high school diploma, the new GED test has pretty much moved the goal posts way back. And that includes the incarcerated, where so many prison re-entry education programs include getting the high school drop-out population to pass the GED test.”
this is also true for our students who were in special education classes (for example, at the vocational technology schools)…. largely anecdotal, I can think of 3 students (a) Josh who is now 30 who dropped out of the school and finished an “on line” technology degree — which was in No Way comparable to a GED program — he finished by guessing and repeating the same tests until he got the % correct never reading any of the books; and (b) Peter who could do the technology components, some electrical wiring, other lab components but could not pass the Reading portions of the tests and is now jobless at 28; and © a neighbor’s son who was seriously dyslexic/developmental disabilities who is now in prison. I am concerned about all of these students and what the GOAL Posts are and will be. If a student finds at 28 that he has the motivation to finish a high school degree, and the shift in the past 10 years puts it completely out of reach because of tests ???? what do I say as the parent or teacher ??? Similar thoughts I have for teacher in training who has taken the teacher’s test 16 times and I know there are flaws in the experimental tests.
in 2007, teachers who had already done summer trainings at various Cal States, requested that LAUSD adopt a 12th grade curriculum called the ERWC (Expository Reading and Writing Course). It was designed by Cal State professors, working with some high school teachers, to help students learn how to read and write rhetorically so that they could pass the placement test and not have to take remedial classes, and so that students would be better prepared for college writing.
Here’s a released sample of the test, called the EPT:
**********************************************************************************************************
TOPIC III:
Directions:
You will have 45 minutes to plan and write an essay on the topic assigned below. Before you begin writing, read the passage carefully and plan what you will say. Your essay should be as well organized and as carefully written as you can make it.
“Recently, major tobacco companies agreed to pay a financial settlement to several states, including California, for health problems caused by cigarette smoking and other kinds of tobacco addiction. If this course of action is right for tobacco companies, then manufacturers of other legal but harmful products such as alcohol and guns should also have to pay financial settlements in return for the problems they cause.”
–Irving Coffman
Explain Coffman’s argument and discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with his analysis. Support your position, providing reasons and examples from your own experience, observations, or reading.
********************************************************************************************************
Essays are graded on a 6-point rubric, and give the schools enough of an idea of how that student writes to judge whether or not he/she will be able to handle college writing. I taught the modules, scaffolded but with great success, to my students at a continuation high school. Each year the modules evolve and are updated. It’s a great program.
Since my retirement, I have been teaching a 3-hour GED prep lab at the adult school in my home district. Until this year, I had students who were passing. This year, zero.
The ELA writing sample for the GED is much, much harder. Students are given two multi-paragraph texts, and asked to write an essay in which they must do the following:
“In your response, analyze both positions presented in the article to determine which one is best supported. Use relevant and specific evidence from the article to support your response.”
Let’s unpack this. First, they have to read two, much longer selections and locate the argument in each. Next, they must locate all the supports offered for each argument, Then they have to evaluated those supports. Finally, they must choose one selection, explaining why its supports are stronger, while also exposing the weaknesses of the second reading’s supports. And it’s all done on computer.
There is a second essay for social studies that is also ridiculously difficult.
No wonder so many are failing. Pearson has created a test that is overly complex. It would have done better to “borrow” the EPT format from CA.
It seems to me that if we follow the current trend to its logical solution, this is what we’ll have:
Unprecedentedly large number of k-12 students will not pass the standardized tests, as previewed in New York. Because teacher employment is tied to test scores, unprecedentedly large numbers of teachers will leave the profession, either voluntarily or because they are forced out.
Unprecedentedly large numbers of adults will not pass the GED, as outlined in this blog. Because much employment is based on a high school diploma or GED, unprecedentedly large numbers of adults will be denied access to the job market.
What I keep asking myself, is who wins? It seems to me that, in the short run, the testing companies are the big winners. Who are the big winners in the long run?
The Common Core was implemented in part because students from the United States were being compared to other nations taking the NAEP and were found lacking. We have been told for years now that underperforming students, regardless of the reason for the underperformance, were going to find themselves unprepared for the job market in an information economy. As a classroom teacher, every day I see students with brilliant minds make the choice not to take advantage of wonderful learning opportunities offered on a daily basis. Most all students (now I admit this is clearly an opinion) have the innate potential to meet the broad goals of the common core. We also know under what condition students (speaking mainly of children) learn best. It’s just that for one reason or another, too many students are not achieving to their full potential. Why that is happening will not be agreed upon widely. Many blame poor lesson design by classroom teachers. My colleagues would say the effects of (relative) poverty and apathy together are largely the culprits. Whatever an individual cites as the reason, American students have the potential, I believe to do much better than they do. It is a matter of harnessing outstanding intellect that children today on the whole possess, with a will to master well-presented content. We should not fault the Common Core for doing what it was in part designed to do–expose where we are weak and promote the ability to think and survive in a world where the jobs of the future have not been created yet. They will emerge as I feel will the American educational system; better in the future for the birthing pains endured today.
The Common Core was designed to do exactly what it is doing…..destroy the teaching profession, deplete unions of members and money, wreck public schools, create the appearance of failure so that publicly funded charter schools can become acceptable replacements for neighborhood schools.
Haven’t you read anything about Bill Gates, Sir Michael Barber, David Coleman, Joel Klein and Rupert Murdoch? Don’t you find it odd that the head of the NY Board of Regents and the Governor of NY are so anxious to bring in more and more charters even when the charter school track record is abysmal?
Why are you defending this indefensible scheme?
quote: “Most all students (now I admit this is clearly an opinion) have the innate potential to meet the broad goals of the common core.” and I would agree with you; however, the implementation should start with Curricuum Frameworks; these were very carefully developed in social studies, for example, and when it came to the implementation in Massachusetts — “sorry we have no money we have decided to buy the Pearson PARRC tests for reading and math” good bye to the social studies…. You cannot take one set of objectives and mandate them in every state; (please note that I refuse to call them standards — they are merely lists of objectives that have been around for decades)…. So I do fault the process and I do fault the “intent” and the motivation of those who did this and I don’t trust them…. in particular, when the Commissioner of Education has repeated trips to London and insists that all the states must purchase the Pearson PARRC curriculum and tests…. I don’t know how you can have an Ed.D. on your name and not understand the implementation process from curriculum / purpose/objective through — with professional autonomy of teachers and administrators who develop the standards. I know we have had this quote many times on the blog but “I won’t care who writes your poems and literature as long as I get to control the tests” (I am putting it in the vernacular — hoping you wil understand (Rick Perlstein attributes this statement to D. C. Heath but at this point it is apocryphal yet carries a major message). I can give you lots more reasons in Massachusetts why we failt the so called common core but this is the essence ….and I do failt it.
A bit skeptical of “social studies” standards developed by bureaucrats that have circumvented the political process.
Jean H.,
The way i heard it was, “I care not who writes a nation’s poems or songs, so long as i can write its tests.”
“I care not who writes a nation’s poems or songs, so long as i can write its tests.” First time I’ve seen it in print anywhere) is in Rick Perlstein’s book… where he cites “Let me publish the textbooks of a nation and I care not who writes its songs or makes its laws.” (page 297) and he says “according to the Gablers, ” the founder of D.C. Heath actually did say it but he probably got it from someone else earlier? Gablers ran “a right wing textbook evaluation shop out of their hometown — Hawkins, TX, population 761 — doing so they always told reporters from their modest kitchen table.” So this version actually puts the test maker corporation above the laws? I would imagine it goes through different interpretations over the decades… will try to follow up …. track it down…
Perlstein’s book is quite enlightening ; if people have limited time I would recommend his Chapter 15 because it discusses more about the educational policies…. Title: “The Invisible Bridge” it has Reagan’s picture on the cover but it is not a biography — so to speak — it is more history and political science,
thanks for the kindness of your response — jean
jeanhaverhill@aol.com
“I care not who writes a nation’s poems or songs, so long as i can write its tests.” possible source: I haven’t verified it; also found it quoted in Southern Methodist Review 1887 and by Judge Dillard : “Influence of Poetry on National Development ” 1878…..
Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (1653 – September 1716) was a Scottish writer, politician and patriot. He was a Commissioner of the old Parliament of Scotland and opposed the 1707 Act of Union between Scotland and England.
Sourced I said I knew a very wise man so much of Sir Christopher’s sentiment, that he believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads he need not care who should make the laws of a nation, and we find that most of the ancient legislators thought that they could not well reform the manners of any city without the help of a lyric, and sometimes of a dramatic poet. . ‘An ACCOUNT of A CONVERSATION concerning A RIGHT REGULATION of GOVERNMENTS For the common Good of Mankind:In A LETTER to the Marquiss of Montrose , the Earls of Rothes, Roxburg and Haddington , From London the first of December, 1703’. Later variants express the sentiment in the first person, e.g.: .. Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws. .. Give me the making of a people’s songs, and I care not who makes its laws.
just goes to show we need some more help from SomeDamnPoet!!!
jeanhaverhill@aol.com
Very impressive research, Jean Haverhill. I first heard the phrase about 40 years ago when I interviewed an MIT professor about testing.
“Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes it’s laws”–Mayer Rothschild.
I had always thought it came from Voltaire, but he may have stolen it from Fletcher or others.
FLERP it could be Voltaire; I was hoping i could find more on the “Influence of Poetry on National development”…. that is what we are saying about keeping the arts/music and creative aspect of the curriculum not just the constant focus on STEM and hard sciences…
I had always thought it came from Voltaire, but he may have stolen it from Fletcher or others.
jeanhaverhill@aol.com
Thomas Carlyle? Robert Burns? What’s with all these Scots? 😉
FLERP you were closest with your Voltaire …. in Carlyle’s Essay on Burns, the “fletcher aphorism is drawn, in substance, from Plato: The Republic of Plato.”
quote: “create the appearance of failure so that publicly funded charter schools can become acceptable replacements for neighborhood schools.” …….. this has been going on for too long; I remember it clearly when I was in high school as “Sputnik” and the “cold war” and it increased fear and paranoia… then it came back when I was teaching and it was “beat the japs” (sorry for the pejorative term here but that is at the time and the jokes were not funny then and they are not funny now). Students/people/countries do not compete but corporations do on a global basis ; they beat up on the teachers to get the students to do everything faster (calling it productivity that goes to the top 1%)…. it is fueling the paranoia and the “war” themes and the increased production of weapons of war… I don’t want the ethics of the schools to be part of the war machine or this total fear/paranoia (when I was in high school it was the atom bomb and today it is “terrorism” and the extremes of fear created to convince or persuade people that we must do something — not in the interest of the people (i.e., our students , children and grandchildren). I had a wonderful physics professor but he tried to motivate us with fear: “learn physics or learn Russian”… I don’t believe that is the best way to motivate youth. I did study Russian but not until much later and it was Berlitz more for enjoyment and travel purposes.
again quoting: “create the appearance of failure so that publicly funded charter schools can become acceptable replacements for neighborhood schools.” It is the appearance as you have said — and then false illusions (logic models)…..
it is also used in some other countries ; for example , they tell the students in southern Italy that they are not as “intelligent” as the students in northern Italy and they do it with these “dumb tests”…. there are trade offs in speed/accuracy and perceptual motor speed so it can be an artefact of the test — making the southern students in Italy look relatively less proficient. All of the IQ tests have added weights to the perceptual /motor/speed of performance so that many of the students with creative talents and abilities cannot qualify for gifted programs (or lose their gifted status)…. These are major decisions about what the curriculum should offer and what goals for education are deemed worthy and purposeful.
quote: “We should not fault the Common Core for doing what it was in part designed to do–expose where we are weak and promote the ability to think and survive in a world where the jobs of the future have not been created yet. They will emerge as I feel will the American educational system; better in the future for the birthing pains endured today.”
I am not certain that you have captured here what it was “designed to do” because there is no trust with the powers that insisted that a “national curriculum ” was essential — in my state we have had objectives (tens of thousands of them) for decades and they have been used in the Curriculum Frameworks. They were of substantial value and had proven to be worthwhile with our MCAS tests aligned. Unfortunatley, the work of the teachers was shoved aside and we are forced to use the Common Core and can only add 15% to the “national curriculum” ; so an inferior product was put in place of what we had that was working quite well. So I do failt it in several ways; the most important being that teacher’s professional autonomy was reduced and restricted but also in these ways: (a) a new experimental version of “objectives” was inserted where we already had a proven product (it was working in Massachusetts; I can’t vouch for any other state (b) the experimental tests were added and they were never aligned with Curriculum Frameworks. © huge amounts of money were provided to one monopoly to develop R&D (using rasch model theory ) and the tax payer would pay the bill and then promise to be a “customer” of the tests and computers year after years.
I am not sure if you are a parent or a teacher ; but in the work that I do we differentiate the (a) tens of thousands of objectives (b) Curricuum Frameworks © tests (d) textbooks/resources (d) standards….. There seems to be a discussion in the country that you can go from the “objectives” listed in the so=called Common Core directly to Standards and you can’t . It is not a good logic model and it doesn’t work in the short-cutting of the steps to do something experimental in such a hurry. The corporate powers have led the mandarins at the State Department to believe that “standards” can come from the computer — deus ex machina.
Ms. Ravitch,
Thank you so much for writing on this important and often overlooked topic. I would like to add insight about the TASC exam, which has replaced the GED in New York State and Indiana (their website also names New Jersey and West Virginia). I’m not sure about the new GED, but for the TASC it is important for people to know *how* the new test has become harder.
The old GED was a reading test that sought to test the test-taker’s ability to read, synthesize, and comprehend complex text in the content areas. The test taker would read a passage about, say, methods of union suppression during the early 1900s, and then respond to a series of text-dependent questions. McGraw Hill could have chosen to make the test more rigorous and more Common Core aligned by increasing the text complexity and deepening the questions. They did not do this.
The new TASC exam is a content test. In the science and social studies sections, the texts have been removed, and the questions are straight out of Trivial Pursuit: “What does red shift of light from a star indicate about that star?” If you know the answer, you pass. If you don’t, too bad.
I work with recent immigrants who need to pass this test in order to pursue life, academic, and career goals. In the old GED days, we would work on English together and improve reading and writing abilities – basically getting them ready for college, and by proxy, the test. These days we struggle to help students remember a large number of discreet academic facts and trivia, hoping that by some magic, what they learn through sitting in my class for six months will be what appears on the test.
I do not have a problem with the idea of the test of career and college readiness getting harder. I do have a huge problem with this new exam. The test has gotten stupider, and it seems to be a worse measure of a student’s career and college readiness.
Thank you again for helping to spread the word.
Mle Davis
NYC Teacher
I am living proof of what you say to be true. I live in Arkansas where they only have the option of the 2014 ged. I’m 34 years old, I haven’t been to school in 17 years and I have been working so hard to get the ged. I might as well go back to high school for 4 years. It’s to much!!! All I want is a fair chance. It seems that Arkansas and other states forgot the real purpose of the ged.. What can be done about this?