Jason Stanford of Austin asks, what is the point of testing? The answer, he supposes, is to collect data. What is the point of data? Stop and think about it.
“To many, the answer is more testing. And because they’re testing darn near every child in America in most core subjects, now education reformers are going after the K in K-12. The Education Commission of the States says kindergarteners are now being given standardized tests in 25 states as well as the District of Columbia to measure whether they are ready for the rigor of crayons, naptime, and singing the alphabet song.
“These tests aren’t kid stuff, either. In Maryland, where teachers are asking for the state to suspend the tests, the average kindergartener takes more than 1 hour and 25 minutes to complete the tests. Teachers report that students don’t understand that they’re being tested to measure what they don’t know. When these 5-year-olds don’t know an answer, they think they’re stupid. We’re talking oceans of tears here.
“Remind me what the point of the tests is? To one state education official, the tests “will help improve early education,” which confuses things further. Remember, the thermometer doesn’t cook the meat.”
“So let’s go back to the original question: What is the point of data? With standardized tests, the point was supposed to be to diagnose which schools and students needed extra help. At least, that’s how they sold it to Dallas schools in the 1980s, then Texas schools in the 1990s, and then the whole country with No Child Left Behind.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
FYI… Cami Anderson has filed tenure charges against the principal that spoke out during her meeting with Senators the other day. A Senator asked was there anyone who sits in the “rubber room” and he stood up in response. This principal had his school taken away from him, hundreds of children displaced and he now sits in the “rubber room”. When Cami doesn’t get her way she throws a fit!
What ‘THEY’ explained WAS the point for this process, is not the reason for the tests.
The reason for the tests is to offer an ignorant, gullible public who has no idea what teaching/learning is all about, and offer them a ‘reason’ to send the teacher out the door.
If the principals or supervisors whose ‘evaluations’ WERE SWORN UNDER PENALTY OF PERJURY, they could not invent the reasons for the ‘documented’ incompetence of the teachers they throw out (ion order to keep the budget low and not have to pay benefits and higher salaries.)
Anyone who has been to the NYC hearings, for those teachers who do not run for their sanity when the harassment begins, knows that the the documentation, including the bogus tests of students who would fail no matter who was in front of that room of 40 youngsters, is a fraud… so until the teachers get their voice out there and say ENOUGH. it will continue.
What is needed is a class-action suit,say in CALIFORNIA, where every single teacher brought up on any and all charges WERE FIRED… all tens and tens of thousand of them!
So keep on talking endlessly about testing and VAM, while “THEY’ empty the schools of the dedicated, educated professionals, and while the media and their stooges (like Bill Maher) can point a finger at those ‘bad teachers’ and spin the lie that the problem is YOU CANNOT FIRE TENURED TEACHERS…. which was Mr Mahers last words this week.
I personally will never watch his show again, and I am asking that all of you here tell HBO that his final words had nothing to do with the cop situation which eh was describing… and were a disgraceful parting shot.. and A BIG LIE!
Bill Maher is a well-known misogynist. Not surprising that he’s openly hostile to a female-dominated profession.
What did Bill Maher say, and about what? The last time I remember his name coming up in connection with these issues, he was yelling at Michelle Rhee and defending tenure.
Weel, my dear Bill was ending New Rules with a rant about those cops and what they were doing… and how difficult it was to change the situation… and as his final words, he said with his usual sarcastic demeanor that Tenured teachers cannot be fired!”
And this was not meant to be sarcastic, but a jab at teachers!
Somehow Maher does not come across as anti-teacher.
The remark you allude to was part of a Bill Maher’s rant against the NYPD turning their back on Mayor Bill DeBlasio at the police officers’ funerals last week. He went on to talk about how the union members seemed to think they should not be scrutinized for their actions. He ended with the comment about tenured teachers. I thought he was trying to be sardonic rather than critical, since his sister is a New Jersey teacher. In other words, no comment about unions should miss taking a poke at teachers’ unions, the common punching bag today; I think it was an intentional non sequitur Maybe I am wrong, but that is how I took his remark.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
As an early childhood educator, I would argue that the most important time to test is the younger grades, when early intervention is crucial and can make the most difference. The type of testing is what we should be focusing on instead of whether it should happen.
Our state provides choices in how it can conduct testing on kindergarteners, and our districts are the ones who are rejecting the more labor-intensive interactive assessments in favor of computerized assessments that are not developmentally appropriate or accurate.
We know that little kids learn by play, but kindergarten is so more than singing the ABCs and coloring. These achievement gaps start in pre-K, widen in kindergarten, and will continue to follow kids if we do not do intervene. Stanford is right that the thermometer doesn’t cook the meat, but it will certainly indicate that there could be a problem before it because unmanageable. We do need to keep testing kindergarteners, but we should be more mindful of how we do it.
Kindergarteners do not need to be learning the kinds of math and reading skills that have been pushed down from first and even second grade and which are now being tested at that age. Earlier is not better. Some kids will naturally learn to read in kindergarten, but most aren’t developmentally ready for it until first grade or later. Trying to force it early has no benefits and many potential harms, not least of which is making kids hate reading.
Literacy and numeracy are both very complicated processes to acquire and there is a great deal of unfolding that must occur naturally. The acquisition of these facilities do not lend themselves well to standardized testing, which by nature misses the most important components of each because it reduces literacy to simple decoding and numeracy to being able to count. If you search for some of Robert (Bob) Shepherd’s past posts on Diane’s blog you will get a sense of the wonder and intricacy of how humans acquire language in all its forms.
Thank you Dienne!
Oh I completely agree. I do not believe reading should be forced in kindergarten. Totally agree. However, I have seen entering first graders who cannot write their name or tell a G from an H. This is a problem. I strongly believe that kindergarteners do not need to know how to read by the end of kindergarten and should not be pressured, but they should have basic skills in phonemic awareness, print recognition, etc before entering first grade. The ones who don’t, get behind, and I don’t think they can catch up. It is critical for K teachers to identify and help these kindergarteners who are behind before they get to first grade.
“It is critical for K teachers to identify and help these kindergarteners who are behind before they get to first grade.”
Why can’t K teachers be trained to identify and help these children without standardized tests?
I should add, I don’t have a problem with assessing kids for the need for early intervention. But such assessments start with a simple screen which takes just a few minutes to administer (in fact, most parents can answer the questions just from knowing their kids). As long as the child can do most of the items on the screen most of the time (as just one example, being able to complete a simple pattern of circle, square, circle, square, circle, ______ by age three or four) then the child is on target and there’s no need for further testing. Those who don’t do well on the screens do need further in-depth assessment and early intervention assistance, but that doesn’t mean there’s a need to subject all young kids to extensive standardized testing.
1st graders without letter recognition and phonemic awareness skills are not considered behind in schools and cultures where children are not pressured to learn on adult time-lines, such as at Waldorf and in Finland.
I am an Early Childhood Educator, as well as an Early Childhood Special Educator, who taught 1st Grade, Kindergarten, Preschool and Special Ed for decades. Most ECE professionals do not believe in developmentally inappropriate pushed down curricula nor in standardized testing of young children, including those of us involved in Defending the Early Years:
http://deyproject.org/
Flerp! Yes, they absolutely can and many have been doing so for decades.
I think kids tend to “catch up” very quickly under many different circumstances. I used to work at a long term residential facility for children, many of whom came from extremely chaotic backgrounds. Usually after they’d been with us for a year or so and started learning to trust and feel safe, their academics caught up practically overnight (of course, we had very small classes (eight or fewer), vast resources (we were affiliated with the University of Chicago) and great latitude for teaching).
This past summer I read Caroline Pratt’s I LEARN FROM CHILDREN. She was one of the early progressive educators in the tradition of John Dewey. She intentionally didn’t teach kids to read until they were about seven, at which point they had jobs within the school which they were very motivated to do and which required reading. Once kids realize there really is a reason for learning something, they often pick it right up.
In other cases, there may be an undiagnosed/untreated learning disability. Once a remedy or work-around for that disability is found, such students often zoom ahead to catch up with their peers. Think about what Helen Keller accomplished despite spending most of the first seven years of her life with almost no way to communicate.
I think the reason kids sometimes get behind and never catch up has to do with feeling like or being labeled as a failure and/or not feeling like there is a reason for them to learn “this stuff” anyway. Once they know they can learn and as long as they find some value in doing so, kids tend to soak up learning everywhere – it’s hard to stop them from learning.
As previously stated, I am for interactive assessments in which teachers are acting as professionals and not test administrators at the K level. That is why I said we should re-evaluate how we are testing and not that we are testing.
Also, to address the comment about first graders who don’t know their letters as being perfectly fine in Waldorf school or Finland- I wonder if those students face the same barriers at my urban school district students who may not even own a book at home. My first year of teaching was in the poorest school in my city, and that year changed my entire perspective. I’m sorry, but I just disagree with the idea that teaching kindergarteners to hear rhymes, or write their names, or identify their letters is push down practices.
I once had a wonderful principal who said that kids in middle class schools don’t really need their teachers. Feel free to do what you want there. They are going to learn regardless. But, in the poorest schools, we are truly needed.
No, we don’t need kindergarteners to be reading. But, I must object to the idea that teaching pre-reading skills is not part of a kindergartener teacher’s job. Especially when exposure to literature is 0. This doesn’t mean it isn’t fun or play. A good kindergarten teacher knows how to teach in a developmentally appropriate manner.
Dienne is absolutely on target. There is no reason to regularly subject every young child to testing, especially when we have screening tools that can identify children who are at-risk, as well as many skilled teachers who can recognize developmental delays.
We could learn a lot from Waldorf and Finland by providing enriching play-based learning environments for children in pre-primary and primary education. Instead, we have gone in the opposite direction with pushed down academics and the testing regime, as well as the elimination of play and recess at many schools. As a result, we often see developmentally inappropriate expectations and testing in preschool as well.
As Peter Greene facetiously put it, “because childhood is too long.”
Sarah – How long have you been teaching? I find your ideas about what standardized tests can do for kids to be troubling, but if you’re new to teaching I think it’s understandable. I hope you continue to read this blog.
“Stanford is right that the thermometer doesn’t cook the meat, but it will certainly indicate that there could be a problem before it because unmanageable. We do need to keep testing kindergarteners, but we should be more mindful of how we do it.”
At some point you have to trust teachers and parents to use their judgment about whether children need intervention. Teachers are trained to spot it; parents are hard-wired to worry about it. I’m not opposed to all standardized testing, but at least ask my permission before you stick a thermometer in my 5-year-old.
Sometimes you are an absolute gem. Don’t suppose you’re going to the NPE conference in April? We could use a contrarian like you.
Far too kind. But no, I’ll almost certainly be here in NYC banging on my keyboard as usual.
“Education Secretary Arne Duncan spelled out his priorities for a new federal education law Monday, calling on Congress to build in funding for preschool, add $1 billion annually in federal aid for schools with the neediest students, and maintain the federal mandate that says states must test students every year in math and reading. ”
This is just such baloney from Democrats. If preschool funding and “1 billion annually” had been a priority for the Obama Administration and congressional Democrats, they would have MADE it a priority. They didn’t.
They had two priorities: testing kids in order to rank teachers and expanding charter schools. You’ll notice they got those.
The one and only reason he’s adding to the list of his “priorities” is because testing is threatened and Democrats can’t put forth a list of “priorities” with one item on it- testing.
He’ll get nothing on preschool and nothing on increased funding but he WILL save his actual “priority” item, which is testing.
I agree, especially if what they offer is Common Core for toddlers! We don’t need to rank and rate them; we need to see where they are and where they need to go. Most of all we need to offer them learning experiences that are developmentally appropriate providing lots of opportunity to foster curiosity and exploration. “Play is the work of the child.”
In CT, it is Common Core for toddlers. And it will be captured in the Teaching Strategies Gold program, so someone, somewhere in some P20 database (called P20WIN in CT) will be able to track them so they are college and career ready.
I wonder of they had just approached this differently if it would have gone better. Just tell parents “we want yearly tests and in return for that gracious concession on your part we’ll seriously push for recess, art, music and field trips and we’ll stop bashing your schools to push charters”.
It’s just so freaking endlessly GRIM. It’s all directives. There’s no joy in any of it, and no back and forth.
The promise of providing additional funding and other resources for children who were identified as struggling, through the use of standardized testing, somehow never materialized.
With the increased cost of all of the testing, districts have no money to actually provide additional services for the children.
But of course providing additional services for children was never the goal.
I’m amazed people are still falling for it. I heard the exact same complaint on NCLB, then I listened to every Democrat in the country run against that, and then Democrats had Congress and the Presidency and they did exactly the same thing.
The fact is their “priorities” begin and end with testing, because we ALWAYS get the testing and we never get anything else they promise.
What is the point of this testing? Punishment. Revenge. Repressed childhood trauma of the sick adults who are projecting their own victimization and need to hurt and dominate children.
Long unrealistic torturing sessions of age inappropriate high stakes testing with ongoing focus on teaching to the test using methods of Authoritarian Behaviorism is the most efficient way of creating a master/slave culture. Anyone with common sense or some level of knowledge about psychogical abuse should see through this Machavillian Narcissistic Sociopathic guise. The Pearson lizard people hired to create the crazy making materials are simply pimping for the elite corporate & government perpetrators who get sadistic pleasure from hurting and dominating children. So, in summary, the purpose of this testing is dark. The REAL purpose is to provide the Narcissistic supply for cold blooded corporate/government sociopaths to dominate and hurt children. Unlike most common perps, these are billionaires, and their insatiable obsession with power is now focused on helpless children.
Don’t hold back – say what you really mean. 😉
But seriously, well said. Truth is brutal.
Socrates said: “An unexamined life is not worth living”.
Unfortunately, people with personality characteristics of the Dark Triad cannot examine their own lives and dysfunction since their denial is too powerful. Their denial is called DARVO by psychiatrists. (Google)
Therefore, when their abusive behavior to children can be observed, it is important for responsible others to step in and protect the children. That is not happening now with CCSS. Children are helpless victims of sadistic bullying and all we bystanders are watching in horror and feeling helpless to stop it. Teachers who have a conscious and are morally unable to participate in this bullying are resigning. Teachers, administrators, government and corporate participants of this bullying are themselves perpetuators and will get some satisfaction or pleasure from their dominance and punishment of helpless children.
Arne Duncan is the most obvious perpetuator and has the same personality characteristics and psychological profile as Jerry Sandusky.
Does that raise red flags?
DARVO
DARVO is an acronym to describe a common strategy of abusers: Deny the abuse, then Attack the victim for attempting to make them accountable for their offense, thereby Reversing Victim and Offender. This may involve gaslighting and victim blaming.
Psychologist Jennifer Freyd writes:
“I have observed that actual abusers threaten, bully and make a nightmare for anyone who holds them accountable or asks them to change their abusive behavior. This attack, intended to chill and terrify, typically includes threats of law suits, overt and covert attacks on the whistle-blower’s credibility, and so on. The attack will often take the form of focusing on ridiculing the person who attempts to hold the offender accountable. The offender rapidly creates the impression that the abuser is the wronged one, while the victim or concerned observer is the offender. Figure and ground are completely reversed. The offender is on the offense and the person attempting to hold the offender accountable is put on the defense.”
At the risk of sounding a little cynical:
The fixation on testing and collecting data is, in large part, a cop-out for those who need to feel like they are doing something, when they either don’t know what to do, or just don’t want to do it.
Here’s Duncan’s “priorities” for the new law. It’s so weird how he came up with this whole wonderful list of liberal priorities just as Republicans took over Congress and he won’t get any of them.
It’s almost like they weren’t actually priorities the last 6 years when he was focusing on opening charters and scolding people about testing.
http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/us-education-secretary-arne-duncan-calls-strong-education-law-protects-all-stude
I began school at 6. My mother had read books to me before that. The teacher said the sounds the letters made for the first words in Dick and Jane and I thought, Oh! And began learning to read. I had to read nearly half the school day because the teacher had also to teach second grade. My family had the reputation of being good spellers. I suppose we had good auditory and visual memory. I spent hours after school reading: Victorian and classic American fiction left to my father, women’s magazines, men’s magazines (Argosy, Mechanics Illustrated). I did little housework or farm work, just read.
We had no TV, so I visualized the radio stories. That is how working class kids managed to have decent ACT scores by graduation. Not by being tested every year or more often to see where they ranked. Decoding is not that difficult to teach. Having a vocabulary with which to develop decoding skill requires time and effort and broad information.
To reiterated for the purpose of hounding hungry-testing- politicians:
Who ever controls the testing controls the curriculum. If the tests are flawed the curriculum is flawed.
“I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.”—— Albert Einstein,
Saturday Evening Post interview, Alfie Kohn in his article in Education Week 9/27/2000 Standardized Testing and Its Victims-http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/standardized-testing-victims/ before the Common Core was imposed on the schools.
“Fact 1 Our children are tested to an extent that is unprecedented in our history and unparalleled anywhere else in the world.
Fact 2. Noninstructional factors explain most of the variance among test scores when schools or districts are compared.
Fact 3. Norm-referenced tests were never intended to measure the quality of learning or teaching.
Fact 4. Standardized-test scores often measure superficial thinking.
Fact 5. Virtually all specialists condemn the practice of giving standardized tests to children younger than 8 or 9 years old.
Fact 6. Virtually all relevant experts and organizations condemn the practice of basing important decisions, such as graduation or promotion, on the results of a single test.
Fact 7. The time, energy, and money that are being devoted to preparing students for standardized tests have to come from somewhere.
Fact 8. Many educators are leaving the field because of what is being done to schools in the name of “accountability” and “tougher standards.”
*The tests may be biased.
*Guess who can afford better test preparation.
*Standards aren’t the main ingredient that’s in low supply
*Those allegedly being helped will be driven out. “
Finney Boylan writes “Save Us from the SAT” 4/16/14 “It measures memorization, not intelligence.”
Finland the students take only one standardized test in their academic career. We are wasting precious student time with all this unnecessary testing and test preparation . “…
test prep and testing absorbed 19 full school days in one district and a month and a half in the other in heavily tested grades.”
Experts keep writing about the abusiveness but non-educated-politician don’t listen.
There is a difference between assessing and testing. Teachers assess all the time.
To answer the question: There is no point!
“The Point of Testing”
The point of testing
Is to test
If the molesting
is the best
Standardized testing = EIT
(Enhanced Interrogation Technique is what the CIA insists on calling what is commonly known as torture.)
Testing has been perceived by too many educators, administrations, boards, and politicians as tools for accountability. Some see them as part of a weeding out process, and some use them as punitive measures. How productive (sarcasm). One can occasionally hear calls to use them for improving instruction. One can occasionally hear reference to them as sources of insight into determining interventions. What is almost never heard is how they could be utilized as maps for students to reach their potential, as triggers for immediate and on-going feedback, and as a process that should seamlessly be incorporated into the learning experience. One of my chapters in Actualized Learning deals with this topic quite extensively. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/actualized-learning/x/9545377
Confirmation and affirmation.
So you would think that the tests to evaluate mastery of the CCSS would be designed to 1) test what students know and are able to do, and 2) show growth over time. However, if you are using a norm-referenced test, like the state tests under NCLB, then the purpose is to rank. That is the purpose for which they were designed, and they do it will. It’s easy to identify a norm-referenced test, because the results will be reported in a percentile ranking. Since last year was the ‘norming year’ for the SBAC (the same year that the test was ‘piloted’ with 4 million students (who had no choice in the matter) in 22 states; and since all I’ve seen about last year’s test data is a report of an estimate of how many students will score in each quartile (ish), I’m assuming it is a norm-referenced test, too. Spoiler: The ranking of students from highest to lowest scoring on the norm-referenced test has an extremely high correlation to ranking students from highest to lowest on the poverty scale.
I don’t have anything against assessing students; I do it everyday. Just use the right tool for the job, and the SBAC and PAARC are not the right tools.
Sarah
January 12, 2015 at 2:49 pm
“As an early childhood educator, I would argue that the most important time to test is the younger grades…”
Sarah, I cannot articulate as well as Barb does. So, please read the post as shown below:
barb
January 12, 2015 at 4:30 pm
What is the point of this testing?
Punishment.
Revenge.
Repressed childhood trauma of the sick adults who are projecting their own victimization and need to hurt and dominate children.
Long unrealistic torturing sessions of AGE INAPPROPRIATE high stakes testing with ongoing focus on teaching to the test using methods of Authoritarian Behaviorism is the most efficient way of creating a MASTER/SLAVE culture.
Anyone with common sense or some level of knowledge about psychological abuse should see through this Machiavellian Narcissistic SOCIOPATH guise.
The Pearson lizard people hired to create the crazy making materials are simply pimping for the elite corporate & government perpetrators who get sadistic pleasure from hurting and dominating children. So, in summary, the purpose of this testing is dark. The REAL purpose is to provide the Narcissistic supply for cold blooded corporate/government sociopaths to dominate and hurt children. Unlike most common preps, these are billionaires, and their insatiable obsession with power is now focused on HELPLESS CHILDREN. (end quote)
I do not know how many siblings or children that you have. I was raised in a family of 6 siblings who have different and distinctive skills and talents as being kids and into adulthood. My only child loves listen to stories of ninja, dinosaurs, and all kinds of nature like volcanoes, storm, and creatures in the forest and ocean. He loves singing and enjoy swimming, but he did not like to draw or write a short story until he is at grade 4. According to your belief, my child will be considered failed when he was grade 3.
IMHO, human beings are vastly different in their conscientiousness and have profoundly distinctive trait from superhuman (care for the unfortunate) to below-animal (= DARVO).
In this forum, you know and all readers know that TESTING serves only ONE PURPOSE in ranking to pay for the PROFESSIONAL and RELIABLE service to the power who hires the required/designated job accordingly.
All tax payers pull together to nurture and cultivate young generation to be the conscientious human beings who will always appreciate and enjoy learning for life. Please remember that reading between the lines (= think, feel, love learning through acting, singing, story narrating…) is better than recognizing alphabet in early age.
Here is the other public sentiment about life:
Visiting the June Jordan School for Equity in San Francisco last month, I was delighted to hear one of the staff members say, “I’d rather have a student come to us, drop out their sophomore year, and go on to be a good person than graduate with a 4.0 and go on to be an asshole who doesn’t know HOW TO DEAL with other people.” (To me, it is all about being considerate, NOT BEING SUBMISSIVE without logical mind). Back2basic
Teachers can and do accurately identify those students in need of help. Imagine what could be done if the monies being given to testing companies was used to fund remediaton rather than lining corporate pockets?!
Bravo!
It is so fascinating to read the endless discussions here about testing, after being the cohort in 1995 &6 for the Pew National Standards Harvard research called “THE 8 PRINCIPLES OF LEARNING” which said, unequivocally (as a PRINCIPLE OF LEARNING which are used by ALL EFFECTIVE TEACHERS):
that AUTHENTIC ASSESSMENT and GENUINE EVALUATION was FOR THE USE of the classroom teacher-practioner, in order that plans could be made to meet the needs of each emergent learner.
Notice all the words about LEARNING, not teaching.
Teaching and testing became the narrative and the mantra of Duncan and clones, so that the schools could be labeled ‘failing’ and the oligarchs who owned the media could ‘fix them.”
So here we are, decades later and still pointing out what EVERY TEACHER KNOWS that the classroom teacher NEEDS TO KNOW what each student has mastered and what still needs to be re-taught.
We grunts on the line, with those 30 to 40 kids, do use quizzes and tests, but we also use performance assessment — in some content where SKILLS (the actual application of critical analysis) are APPLIED, like in writing & speaking!
Performance is the key. in writing, music and art. I used portfolio and a weekly letter which the kids wrote TO ME (about their reading) from Sept. to June.
It was a no-brainer for anyone to see the improved writing. Kids who entered grade 7 barely able to write 100 coherent words, with correct punctuation and spelling, wrote 1000 to 3000 words in organized paragraphs, using lyrical and efficient language and giving references which they had learned, AND COULD NOW APPLY.
Perhaps, that is why, without a single test, my students were able to score 10th in the state, when the ELA writing exam was finally introduced… and 3/4 of NYC kids failed.
Perhaps, my performance assessment was unique, but I doubt it.
We know, by now, that the manic testing was engineered to evaluate schools so they would fail, and the teachers would be fired, and then the schools could be ‘fixed”…by transforming them into ‘charter schools,’ on the public dime.
Isn’t it time we stopped talking to the choir about this, and did something…. like stand up to the business people who are taking over our profession and say: ENOUGH! Je suis une TEACHER…. and I have had enough of your propaganda….get out of my practice, unless YOU plan to stand in this room and ‘teach’ these kids!