I have often written that the Pearson Common Core tests are written and scored to fail most students. Not only are the reading levels two grade levels above the students’ actual grade, but the cut score is set artificially high.
Here is confirmation from a teacher who graded essay answers:
“When teachers score state tests, they are given formal training before they score actual student tests. Teachers are trained using student anchor answers that are culled from random field tests. Each student answer is used as an example and compared to the rubric to show how to score accordingly. There is always an anchor answer for each rubric score, meaning an answer that demonstrates a 1, another serves as an example of a 2 and so on and so forth. Teachers must then take a quiz using more student samples in order to gauge their preparation level before they move on to scoring actual exams.
“This year’s 5th(?) grade training guides DO NOT have anchor answers for the highest score on the essay. That has never happened before. That means that during the random field testing NO STUDENT was able to achieve an answer that would have met the highest criteria of the rubric. Pearson filled in this gap with their own mock version of an answer that would meet the highest score on the rubric. In other words, the test was too hard for even the most accomplished students to achieve full credit and therefore way beyond their ability.
“The training guides are embargoed and teachers are prevented from removing them from the scoring site.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Maybe Pearson has accidentally discovered a grade 5 writing gap. At age 10, writing skills collapse producing a black hole from which no coherent sentence can escape. Time to call the folks at Nature.
This posting is a must read.
Translation: the fix is in.
The results are established in advance, set to the clients’ requirements.
This should leave no doubt why I refer to high-stakes standardized testing as typically being:
1), A hazing ritual [complete with vomit bags; psychiatric follow-up care for the tested to be determined as need arises].
2), A sucker punch [the only surprise is that those that are sucker punched are, well, surprised.]
3), An exemplar of the hard bigotry of mandated failure [by the same crowd that brought us the vacuous slur ‘soft bigotry of low expectations.’]
Opt out of high-stakes standardized testing.
Opt in to genuine teaching and learning.
A Lakeside School education for all. No excuses. Whatever it takes.
😎
Why is your moniker KrazyTA? You speak only sanity and truth!
Oh, he, she, OR it is KOMPLETELY KRAZY!!
at least to those supposed champiñones of servile rights of all the poorly uneducated youth of today-the edudeformers.
“The results are established in advance, set to the clients’ requirements”
Or as Noel Wilson puts it: “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.”
*Even Wilson couldn’t escape the language trap of “measuring” student learning unless those were used tongue in cheek.
Please can you explain why test are set to be above the child’s abilities? What purpose does this serve?
Frankly, it all sounds like child-abuse to me. It is an abuse of power. In all my educational experiences and career, I have never come across information suggesting this is sound pedagogy. What is going on?
Sent from my iPad
>
The purpose is to show that kids are failing. If kids are failing, then schools – specifically, public schools – are failing them. If public schools are failing, shouldn’t we replace them with something more efficient? And what’s more efficient than the free market?
If you take actual concern for children out of the equation, it’s a brilliant marketing plan for privatization – something that would never be allowed on its own merits.
And of course, let’s not forget that if students are failing, it’s the teachers’ fault. Surely we can find better teachers out there. So we need to dispose of the ones we have now and hire newer, better ones. And while we’re at it, let’s take advantage of the church to lower salaries and link them to test results because, after all, the new teachers can surely ensure that their students meet increasingly ludicrous score requirements.
Churn! Not church. Obviously I haven’t had enough coffee yet. It’s been one of those weeks…
In my informal and unscientific survey of my son’s 6th grade friends my sense was they don’t have a clue how they did. They don’t know, because they’ve never taken a test like this. They were told over and over they would do “great!” so they seemed to be sort of parroting that. Once one says it they all kind of have to say it because one wouldn’t want to be the single person who didn’t do “great!”
My son once told me he didn’t complete half the questions on a different standardized test because he “didn’t know it was timed” and ran out of time. He did well on that test so I don’t know if he’s the most unreliable reporter in the world or no one completes this test in the time allotted. I told him not to worry about it and work as slowly as he needs to. He’s in 6th grade. He has time.
My daughter works slowly but is very precise and accurate. The standardized tests constantly penalize her because they are timed. She is constantly ranked low, so we took her to a reputable psychologist. Given a different look, she demonstrated slow pace but highly advanced abilities. It has been a constant battle all through school trying to get her into programs she can learn in without frustration. She’s off to college next year, so we can only hope.
It took 358 years before mathematicians proved Fermat’s Last Theorem, then the guy who did it, Andrew Wiles, spent over 6 years on the problem. So, yes, timed standardized tests are senseless and irrelevant.
Chiara, the teacher of my child’s fourth-grade class recently sent home in the weekly e-mail update to parents that “some kids did not finish, and will be making it up this week.” Even kids with IEPs have to finish same-day, right?
Corrupt Corrupt Corrupt. Send this to Lamar Alexander quickly!
It’s so great teachers are opening up the “black box” of this testing for parents.
We’re told, alternately, that the tests are exactly like what people have been doing for 50 years (so no big deal) and also amazingly different and determinative of “college and career ready”
Since they can’t be both things, we probably need better info than what we’re getting from The Marketing Department 🙂
Exactly. Time to blow the lid off. “Test security” would be a joke if it weren’t such a destructive violation of the rights of students, parents and teachers.
Who in his right mind thinks it’s OK to bar them from discussing ANYTHING that happens in school together, freely and openly? How else can critical, independent thinking be developed?
Teachers, find every possible means to get these tests and rubrics and anchor items before the public — but without getting fired!! We need you where you are.
Yes. Ohio releases past OGT exams for review. We should expect the same on these new tests. I also would like to see data and performance results.
Its not about test security. Its all about test scrutiny.
Did the teacher see a manual which came with the test that provides data on the establishment of validity and reliability? This info typically comes with tests that are valid and reliable.
That manual of psychometric mental masturbation that is supposed to come with these tests contains psychometric fudge* that is glopped up by GAGA teachers, adminimals and other purported to be educators. Wilson has proven the COMPLETE INVALIDITY of the who process of educational standards and standardized testing which no amount of psychometric fudging can overcome.
*To understand why any results of standardized testing are COMPLETELY INVALID due to the myriad epistemological and ontological errors in conception and execution of the process read and comprehend what Noel Wilson has proven in his never rebutted nor refuted treatise:
“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.
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.
For those of you unfamiliar with the TV and radio show “Democracy Now”, the final segment of the show today, May 8, was about charters. Fantastic program. It can be viewed on line.
As we are all incredibly aware, public schools are under attack and the above program also says it well.
AND
this is on a TV station with a LOT of listeners. HALLELUJAH.
It always helps when you provide a link. The video can be seen here: http://www.democracynow.org/
This is a great show. Thank you Gordon for the work you’re doing!
Juan Gonzalez also wrote about this matter yesterday, “Feds failed to keep tabs on $3B in aid doled out to charter schools” http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/gonzalez-feds-failed-tabs-3b-school-aid-article-1.2214712
The feds need to be held accountable for their actions. Where is the “evidence based” results to show the taxpayers are getting their money’s worth? If charters can’t do a better job under the same conditions as public education, we should call for a halt to the spending. They should have to put it to a public vote.
And here’s a direct link to the interview segment on Democracy Now: http://www.democracynow.org/2015/5/8/as_obama_admin_seeks_more_funding
It all makes me sick to my stomach. The results of these 2-3 grade levels ahead PARCC tests will be 50% of my next year’s teacher evaluation. Since it is developmentally inappropriate, the new common core is SO MUCH HARDER for my students. Then, add to that…….I have SO MUCH LESS TIME TO TEACH NOW. The PARCC monster has greedily gobbled up my second semester of instructional time. What are the younger teachers going to do? I am blessed, because I will retire in two years.
I do not know how Ohio teachers will survive these toxic policies. You are going to have excellent teachers being evaluated as ineffective teachers, even with good evaluations from their principals. If you are a value added teacher, you are already in the hole. I’ve had students drop from a 475 to a 472, and I get no credit for teaching them. Honestly, it has all become a “Twilight Zone.” The present toxic environment is unbelievable. I shake my head in constant disbelief. No one else in my family will ever suffer the abuse that I’ve suffered in this sad profession.
Your Ohio VAM formula is probably based on comparing your student’s scores to others in a similar demographic or comparing them to previous increases. Raw score data will not show growth without some sort of comparison.
Sad teacher, don’t retire! This will pass, because it has to. Children need teachers with a professional conscience to stay put. As parents in New York, my wife and I were among only a handful who opted out of the state tests in 2012. Only three years later we are among hundreds of thousands. This is moving faster than we dared hope back then — such a short time ago (at least as adults measure time). It is proceeding at different rates in different places, but the trend is overwhelmingly the same everywhere: as parents become better informed, they become outraged and take action. The basic principle is so simple: we cannot have a society in which the teachers of rich children are accountable to parents, but both the parents and the teachers of everyone else are excluded from decision-making. The false promises and disinformation of the “deformers” is being exposed ever more frequently and effectively. There will be a day soon, maybe sooner than we think, when the basic principle that parents, teachers and local communities should determine the shape of education will be restored.
I know, easy for me to say, because I’m not in a school every day trying to protect the children in my classroom from the educational malpractice of my superiors. But I believe this era of testing mania and forced teach-by-number is coming to a close.
Ohio has gone off the rails on testing, but the far right wave now governing has come into contact with reality. People may despise teachers in Ohio, but people generally like THEIR teacher. I do believe voters are starting to see the contrast between the teacher working hard every day for kids in the classroom, versus the self-interested politician in the marbled halls of the Statehouse in Columbus. Do people want a concerned, dedicated teacher guiding a child’s future or a misanthropic, corrosive governor who is off in another state campaigning for president?
I think the reformers have shot themselves in the foot with this. In order to discriminate between students you need their scores to be as spread out from each other as possible e.g. spread through the range. You also need them to guess as little as possible so it just doesn’t make sense to make the tests so hard and long that even the best students run out of time and just random bubble the ones they didn’t have time for. And fooling able students with answers that could be quibbled over don’t help either.
What this means is that it’s going to be really hard to differentiate between an able student and a lucky guesser but this in turn means it’s going to be really hard to differentiate between teachers with any confidence either. I suspects that it’s going to mean that the difference between teachers with the highest and lowest scores is going to be *very* small and that teachers are going to get quite different scores to whatever they had last time.
And both of these things are going to make holding the teachers “accountable” by testing a very inferior, very costly way of proceeding.
See Mother Crusader’s May 8 post re Pearson spokesman’s reply re John Oliver’s standardized testing video.
link?
I am a retired principal and for several years worked for Pearson (preCCCS) representing State assessments. As much as I agree with most anti high stakes articles, this one does not ring true. These papers are established in highly orgainzed range finding sessions in coordination with each department of ed. Each State forms their committees and “ranges” the rubrics.
Congratulations to the scorer for qualifying to score writing selections. It is difficult to qualify and then difficult to continue in the project via multiple analysis for scorer validity, frequency and calibration to trends.
We need to stay the course on ending the overarching concept of testing as a basis for punishing educators and overwhelming kids, but Pearson really does work hard with States to score the best that is possible. Pearson does not work alone in the process, often with State scrutiny at all points of the scoring.
I’ve scored the seventh and eighth grade tests for years, and it’s actually pretty common for Pearson to provide made-up high level anchor papers because no real students could achieve them. Every time I am forced by my school district to go to scoring days (leaving my classes with a sub), I realize that under our teacher evaluation system I am literally firing myself for low test scores. I’d like to think this insanity will pass, but even New York’s 200,000 plus ELA test refusals have yet to make any impression on our governor or on our state education department.
This doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to get the top score for this question. It simply means that none of the students that took the field test received the highest score. Keep in mind that for stand alone field tests the number of students that answer any given question is very small. In can sometimes be under 500. That’s 500 in the entire state. Many students don’t complete the field test, many don’t take them seriously. Given the random distribution of field test questions is it very possible that in any given year there will be 1 or 2 questions that fall into this category. Also keep in mind that the decision whether or not to use a question is made by the NYSED not by Pearson.
Howard, not certain I would believe that argument even if your syntax were correct. At this point Pearson does appear to be running the casino.
Help–how do I delete the comment above? I think I just violated my gag order!
Was this the NY test? I was a scorer leader for my district grading the 5th grade common core ELA exams this year and I did have anchor papers for both 4 pt essays. Not to say that this was a pleasant experience, though it was certainly an enlightening one. I wrote this piece to explain my frustration with the exam and with the scoring process:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/05/01/teacher-i-am-not-against-common-core-or-testing-but-heres-my-line-in-the-sand/
A must read.
This one example sums up the absurdity of Pearson (CC) approach to ELA:
In real life, if someone asks you a straightforward question, you most likely answer directly and succinctly with correct and appropriate details. In “test life” the best this can get you is partial credit.
Ie:
What time is it?
12:00 (partial credit)
What time is it?
12:00, which is noon when we eat lunch (full credit)
Thanks for bringing this to our attention! I’m printing it and handing it to the next person who tells me these are good tests.
“What time is it?
12:00, which is noon when we eat lunch (full credit)”
Not at my school. All lunches are done by noon. So I guess they would only get partial credit.
Hints as the importance of context and culture.
“What was educationally significant and hard to measure
has been replaced by
what is educationally insignificant and easy to measure.
So now we measure how well we taught what isn’t worth learning.”
– Arthur Costa, Emeritus Professor at California State University
If you need further proof, listen to Ms. Campbell:
One of the saddest things I’ve witnessed, having surveyed more than 300 anchor papers, is the proliferation of test prep language and evidence of test prep “brainwashing” jargon in student answers. Students relied on (and misused) catch phrases, almost always to the benefit of their score. Empty phrases and flowery transitions were sprinkled everywhere: meaningless drivel. Clear, concise writing was scarcely seen, and when it was, it was detrimental to the child’s overall score. It seems to me that the convoluted language of the test questions is being translated into the convoluted double-speak that has become the written language of our children. It breaks my heart.
Your two comments here both point to legitimate problems. However, these problems were present even when I went to school (in Sweden in the 1980s). Seeing that Sweden was slower than the U.S. to drop quality in schools from all I have heard, the problem is highly likely to have been present here to and the same time.
For that matter, I have a strong suspicion that these problems have been present more or less from the beginning of the school systems.
Correction: Prep language, testing, whatnot, are not necessarily part of what I speak. However, that students do not learn what is import is, that they are not tutored for understanding rather than data is, that the convenience of the school system, politicians’, or teachers’ take precedence over the students’ benefit is, …
It’s simple. Nobody does well, Pearson sells more remediation materials. End of story. Oh, and sales of Chicken Little are skyrocketing.
I am in no position to judge the overall benefits and problems with the tests you discuss. However:
“Not only are the reading levels two grade levels above the students’ actual grade”
It is well-known that the reading levels in the U.S. (and many other countries) have dropped considerably over time. There is a more than fair chance that it is not the test that is two years ahead—but school that is two years behind. If so, the test is not the problem. Instead, it merely reveals the problem.
I would think that those claiming that the test is written two grade levels above the grade being tested are judging the test using an ACCEPTED, STANDARD scale to determine reading levels such as Lexile, DRA, guided reading, or Flesch-Kincaid. These are researched leveling scales that are accepted standards when judging reading levels. So, your claim that schools are two years behind would not be supported according to the standard, researched, accepted methods of determining reading level. Somewhere, someone has decided that a more rigorous test means a test written at a higher reading level, not questions requiring more depth of knowledge or questions reflecting higher order thinking according to Bloom’s.
These are supposed to be minimum competency tests for ALL children, ages 8 to 14.
Not entrance exams to Phillips Exeter.
Your comment, as it stands and without further argumentation and explanation, tells me nothing and does nothing to discuss my comment.
Source that. Please tell me where you have evidence of that. Fifteen years ago first graders were required to be emergent readers by end of the year. Now we expect 5 year olds to come in almost reading. So now, because that expectation is developmentally inappropriate, we are telling k kids they are failures so it’s not our children aren’t reading as week. The expectations have become mostly unattainable. I mean babies can read right? This is what happens when people with a profit motive and people who don’t know education or child development make tests, laws, and stupid comments about children.
An older article of mine contains some discussions and several links that discuss the topic further: http://www.aswedeingermany.de/50Humans/50IssuesRelatingToEducation.html
However, it is not inconceivable that there has been a reverse change in the shorter time frame of 15 years.
Michael and Ro: you could both be right.
Perhaps a hundred years ago 15-year-old American school kids could read better than they do now on average, and the current tests for 8-year-olds bear no relation to reality then or now.
There never has been a successful push to accelerate academic competency for all very young children (there is no reason all five-and-six-year-olds should be pushed to read), and it is clear that developmentally inappropriate demands for academic performance are profoundly counterproductive. Yes Michael, the problem is the tests, for at least these two reasons: 1) they do not reflect our best understanding of what competences are most beneficial to have acquired at what age and 2) they remove the assessment of those competences from teachers and parents and place it in the hands of politicians and testing companies.
Nope, I have an ELA brain kid who scored in the 99% in 3rd and 4th grade. Her Lexile score indicates she is GIFTED 2 grades above her level (as a 4th grader she scored as a gifted 6th grader). In the 3rd and 4th grade tests the kids who scored in the 99% were placed barely into the 4th bracket, at roughly 77-78%. The tests were fixed so NO child, even the brains, could score well.
I think it could be a plain to fail our public schools in order to let for-profit charter schools get hold of the $750 billion + education bucket of money… I co-wrote this website and book to discuss the history of ed-reform and the weapons being used against our schools. The tests are meant to fail kids. The ed-reformers don’t have our best interests at heart. http://weaponsofmassdeception.org/
Wow. Fantastic website. Will read the book immediately! Thank you for tying it all together so powerfully! A couple years ago I was among those who wanted to believe the members of the “Billionaires Boys Club,” to use Diane’s term, were just misguided. You’ve done an enormous public service by laying out so comprehensively and accessibly just how wrong all of us who indulged in such wishful thinking have been.
This seems vaguely reminiscent of the literacy tests used during Jim Crow which were designed with failure as the goal.
Unfortunately, this is NOT new. I was a scorer on the 8th grade test last year, and one of the questions I was grading? Same. There was no anchor paper with a top score.
The fix was in from the beginning. My daughter scored in the 99th % in 3rd and 4th grade in ELA (her Lexile score in 4th grade indicated she was a gifted 6th grader – or an average 12th grader) If she’d gotten an evenly weighted numeric score she would have placed at about 93-94%. Instead, she and all the other little ELA brains were placed at about 77-78%, barely into the 4th bracket. That’s for being marked incorrect on 2 questions – which were probably unanswerable. I won’t know about the 5th grade test because we opted out this year.
First off: I am not familiar in enough detail with the tests in question to judge whether they are a positive or negative thing overall.
However, what I have seen repeatedly, and what caused me to write my first reply, is the irrational and over-emotional reaction to the tests.
Most people who complain seem to see the tests as inherently evil in a very unnuanced manner, without even trying an objective evaluation, without looking at the goals the test makers strive for, and without considering the possibility that the test merely reveal an existing problem (as opposed to, themselves, causing the problem).
This is particularly disturbing when it comes from teachers, who should be considerably over-average when it comes to rationality and thinking.
Indeed, the criticism sometimes falls down to the level of “My kid failed! Bad test!” or “My class failed! The test says that I am a failure! Bad test!” (for a parent respectively a teacher).
To answer two recent replies to my comments more specifically:
@cmat
> I would think that those claiming that the test is written two grade levels above the grade being tested are judging the test using an ACCEPTED, STANDARD scale to determine reading levels such as Lexile, DRA,
guided reading, or Flesch-Kincaid. These are researched leveling scales that are accepted standards when judging reading levels.
I would make different assumptions for several reasons, including the over-emotionality discussed above, the high degree of politics involved in schooling and previous testing for decades, and the fact that such tests must largely be seen in the context of a school system (and possibly other factors, like nutrition or lack thereof, that affect development): There is no natural law saying that a child of x years should read at level y. There are likely restrictions that prevent the average child from exceeding some given level, but the amount of schooling, interest in reading, proportion of reading vs tv, etc., will have a major effect
within that limit. It is not possible to say that a child of x years reads like a child of x years should without considering such parameters. In another environment, the average levels may indeed be as much as
several years different. Cf. also the PISA controversies. (Look e.g. at the enormous variations on https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/pisa2012highlights_5a.asp . Notably, even some countries that are close-by, have similar levels of development, and are genetically fairly similar have large differences, e.g. Sweden trailing Germany by 25 points or Norway by 21 points.)
> So, your claim that schools are two years behind would not be supported according to the standard, researched, accepted methods of determining reading level.
With the one reservation that some discussion seems to focus on the very young, whereas I speak of a broader age group, I stand by my impression. I also note that the U.S. educational system has a very poor reputation in e.g. Germany—to the point that the (admittedly unfair!) stereotype of a U.S. citizen is a moron who thinks that Hitler still rules Germany, that Europe is a country, or that Canada is a part of the U.S.
> Somewhere, someone has decided that a more rigorous test means a test written at a higher reading level, not questions requiring more depth of knowledge or questions reflecting higher order thinking according to Bloom’s.
I cannot judge this in detail, but I note that there is nothing wrong with testing reading ability, be it in a stand-alone test or as part of a multi-ability test. If nothing else, the ability to read is a key component in building knowledge and at least a contributor to improving thinking. It is arguably the single most important thing that school can realistically and successfully teach.
@jwnich179
> There never has been a successful push to accelerate academic competency for all very young children (there is no reason all five-and-six-year-olds should be pushed to read), and it is clear that developmentally inappropriate demands for academic performance are profoundly counterproductive.
Agreed. I was myself below average as an early reader (considerably above average just a few years later), and I have long claimed that the best way to learn is to have a wish to learn—while many schools positively destroy that wish in many children. However, as I state above, this is not just a question of the very young. There are, for instance, many high-school students (by no means restricted to the U.S.) who are pushed to their limits when reading a news paper.
> Yes Michael, the problem is the tests, for at least these two reasons: 1) they do not reflect our best understanding of what competences are most beneficial to have acquired at what age and 2) they remove the assessment of those competences from teachers and parents and place it in the hands of politicians and testing companies.
I will not judge 1), except in noting that we have two groups with a subjective opinion who think that they are right and the other group wrong. However, 2) is a problematic claim for several reasons, including that teachers and parents, on average, are not good judges of such matters, that a centralisation does not automatically mean “politicians and testing companies” (although there is a considerable risk) but could mean “experts on the subject matter, child development, pedagogy, …”, and that politicians already have a very, very strong influence on schooling.