Mary King, a teacher in Pittsburgh, will not give the tests to her English language learners. She is a conscientious objector. She believes the tests hurt her students.
She writes:
“I am an English as a second language teacher in grades four to eight at Pittsburgh Colfax K-8. The other day one of my ESL students passed me a note with a shy smile as he left our classroom: “Learn English is the best thinks a never have in my life.” My heart melted. This student arrived just last spring with absolutely no English. He is finally starting to speak above a whisper.
“But this student is being crushed, intellectually and emotionally. Despite the fact that he is still so new to English, he is in the midst of his scheduled 16 hours of PSSA testing; my other ESL students are scheduled for between seven and 20 hours.
“It is my professional opinion that this experience will set my student back, that it will hurt his progress, but my professional opinion will never be weighed against the many requirements — federal, state and district-wide —which demand that these tests be given.”
Her professional judgment doesn’t count. The civil rights groups that demand these tests should visit her classroom.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Wow…a Teacher of Professional Conscience. Hat Tip!
More teachers have to follow in the foot steps of Mary King.
Mary King has more sense and heart than our leaders. Why are we subjecting ELLs to this useless travesty? Since NCLB is demanding “evidence based” approaches to instruction, where’s the evidence to support forcing students that are new to English to take a test many levels above them will improve their outcomes? All it will do is to frustrate and demoralize them. Politicians should have to show “evidence based” outcomes before they torture students and teachers with pure nonsense. If they bothered to read the research, it takes five to seven years to reach a level of proficiency that would allow them to compete on these tests. (Krashen, Cummings) I’m a retired ESL teacher with a master’s degree in ESL and 37 seven years of experience, but what would I know?
There is no research based evidence to back up any of this testing madness. We have ELLs in my school who are barely literate in their native langauge to say nothing of English.
Many ELLs have academic gaps as well as needing to learn English. It may take them many years to become literate in English, especially if they are illiterate in their first language.
Nothing is more mad than to force students who just come to the US yesterday to put +12 hours of high stakes exam conducted in a language they don’t understand. Learning English alone takes years of life: 7-10 years at minimum.
“. . .but what would I know?”
Probably about as much as this retiring old fart Spanish teacher. . .
. . . which between the two of us is a gazillion times more than all the edudeformers, privateesr and corporatizers of public education combined know and have stored in their left pinkie.
Are you retiring Duane?
Yep! Didn’t quite want to yet, but they offered us two years of paid health, dental, and vision insurance. Plus we got a new principal, one of the enforcer types who is best friends with the superintendent. This adminimal really defines adminimal. He had never heard of the “undercurrent” of a work situation, didn’t know what inane meant, I could list many other things not to mention his overbearing style. I have tried to counsel him but he knows who butters his bread. Plus they will be instituting SLO & SGP crap this coming year. It would have been pure hell. This past year has been one of the most idiotic I’ve endured and next year it is guaranteed to get worse.
Congrats, Duane.
Thanks FLERP!!
And what you said is what most people say and I really appreciate it. But at the same time I don’t feel any need to be congratulated at all-hell I have been working like most everyone else-what I do is no more important, and probably less so than many other occupations.
I didn’t really want to retire quite yet, but I can’t fight this battle at the school level anymore. And next year probably would have killed (literally) me from the stress that will be there with all the bullshit SLO/SGP and other concerns that I would be getting written up for every other week for not complying with. If it ain’t what I consider right, I don’t do it.
I plan on writing a book about “Educational Malpractices” and get involved in as many ways as possible to help preserve probably the most important government institution, the public schools.
Again, muchas gracias, FLERP!
I challenge the makers of these high stake tests that are linked to the Common Core (Pearson et al.) to take a test in a language that they have been exposed to for less than a year. Politicians and Bill Gates too. How about Chinese? Do you think the tests will show that they are failures?
To answer your last question: “I don’t think the tests will show they are failures, I know it would (using subjunctive because I know that they would never “stoop so low” as to take an 8th grade test.)
I challenge the makers of these tests to prove to us that they are good tests.
They can’t prove that. Wilson has already proven the complete invalidity of the educational standards and standardized regime in his never refuted nor rebutted 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.
The test developers and item writers are completely hamstrung by the CC standards, especially in ELA. The Common Core ELA standards are devoid of content. In stead they are made up of subjective/abstract skills and strategies that cannot be measured using objective, MC format tests. There is no scalable and efficient test format that can work with the ELA standards. Its like trying to measure Bill Gates ego with a triple beam balance.
It probably will never happen but it may be that the only way we can stop this madness is when a strike nationwide by the teaching PROFESSION stands up for our children and nation. We send our military to fight for freedoms and many give their lives. It would take tremendous courage, resourcefulness and organization and is probably impossible to implement to have a nationwide strike but what an accomplishment it would be if it would happen.
There is so very much research, credible research to support an endeavor like this but I fear that that MAY be the only way to successfully fight for our children. We would be asking nothing for ourselves but only for our children and the future of education in our nation, ergo, the future of our nation.
I have watched this madness grow since “A Nation at Risk” raised its ugly head.
The money issue, so much tax payer money wasted in charters and testing that should be shouted to the skies.
I am retired, for over 25 years and thus am not deeply involved in teaching at present but already there are teachers, like the above one, who are fighting back but it is a lonely fight for these incredibly courageous ones. I salute them.
This is what a real “civil rights movement of our time” looks like.
Or to rephrase: it’s what human rights movements always look like.
Mario Savio, Dec. 3, 1964, end of his speech to the U of Berkeley Free Speech Movement before they began a sit-in:
[start]
We have an autocracy which runs this university. It’s managed. We asked the following: if President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the Regents in his telephone conversation, why didn’t he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received — from a well-meaning liberal — was the following: He said, “Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his board of directors?” That’s the answer! Now, I ask you to consider: if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the board of directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I’ll tell you something: the faculty are a bunch of employees, and we’re the raw material! But we’re a bunch of raw material[s] that don’t mean to have any process upon us, don’t mean to be made into any product, don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings!
[Wild applause.]
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
[Prolonged applause.]
Now, no more talking. We’re going to march in singing “We Shall Overcome.” Slowly; there are a lot of us. Up here to the left — I didn’t mean the pun.
[end]
Link: http://www.fsm-a.org/stacks/mario/mario_speech.html
Public school staffs and students and parents and their communities—not a product to be processed by the self-proclaimed “education reform” movement aka the BBBC [Bored BillionaireBoysClub] and their political enablers and edubully enforcers.
Opt out of the demeaning hazing ritual called high-stakes standardized testing.
Opt in to genuine learning and teaching.
A Lakeside School education for all. No excuses. Whatever it takes.
Krazy props to Mary King—and she will not be the only one.
😎
More power to you, Mary. You have my admiration and respect. These invalid tests measure nothing and help no one. They only serve to create a toxic environment for both students and teachers. The WIDA ACCESS test is one of the worst. When I taught ESL I was required to end services for an entire month in order to administer this travesty of a test. Hang in there, Mary and stay strong. If we stick together perhaps we can end this destructive malicious cycle of testing.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
Schools are forced to give the tests or else get a ZERO for all students who do not take the test. Of course, it is idiotic and waste of time, paper and money. But the testing company will make lots of money. But it is educationally unsound and financially unwise. ELL/ELD students are tested all the time but should only take subject area proficiency tests 1) after they have taken them 2) after they have had some considerable exposure and immersion in English. We have an 8th grade summer bridge program (English Literacy) for six weeks and it make an enormous difference for our students. Many take the program two or three summers. It is taught by a full time English teacher and a part-time English teacher (me) who also teaches all the EL Social Studies classes at our school plus a English High School Exit exam tutoring class.
I am nearing retirement, so it is much easier for me to take this stance than most teachers. It is still possible I will lose my teaching certifications… now considered a “critical incident”…waiting to hear what, if anything, happens. I made the decision based on what I know is best for my students and on my core values, not as a political action. But….I am gratified that Diane included my op ed. Perhaps it will plant the seed for other retiring teachers next year to do the same…. acts that could help to chip away at the inane and destructive testing culture. I appreciate the support from commenters and my teaching colleagues. Mary King