From: The Network for Public Education
To: Members of the United States Senate
Re: The Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
To the Senate:
We, the below undersigned organizations oppose high-stakes testing, because we believe these tests are causing harm to students, to public schools, and to the cause of educational equity. High-stakes standardized tests, rather than reducing the opportunity gap, have been used to rank, sort, label, and punish Black and Latino students, and recent immigrants to this country.
We oppose high-stakes tests because:
- There is no evidence that these tests contribute to the quality of education, have led to improved educational equity in funding or programs, or have helped close the “achievement gap”.
- High-stakes testing has become intrusive in our schools, consuming huge amounts of time and resources, and narrowing instruction to focus on test preparation.
- Many of these tests have never been independently validated or shown to be reliable and/or free from racial and ethnic bias.
- High-stakes tests are being used as a political weapon to claim large numbers of students are failing, to close neighborhood public schools, and to fire teachers, all in the effort to disrupt and privatize the public education system.
- The alleged benefit of annual testing as mandated by No Child Left Behind was to unveil the achievement gaps, and by doing so, close them. Yet after more than a decade of high-stakes testing this has not happened. Instead, thousands of predominantly poor and minority neighborhood schools —the anchors of communities— have been closed.
As the Seattle NAACP recently stated, “Using standardized tests to label Black people and immigrants as lesser—while systematically underfunding their schools—has a long and ugly history. It is true we need accountability measures, but that should start with politicians being accountable to fully funding education and ending the opportunity gap. …The use of high-stakes tests has become part of the problem, rather than a solution.”
We agree.
Yours sincerely,
Network for Public Education
50th No More (Florida)
Action Now
Alaska NAACP
Alliance for Quality Education
Badass Teachers Association
Better Georgia
Chicago Teachers Union
Class Size Matters
Community Voices for Education
Defending the Early Years
Delaware PTA
EmpowerEd Georgia
FairTest
HispanEduca
Indiana PTA
Indiana Coalition for Public Education
Indiana State Teachers Association
Journey for Justice
More Than A Score
Newark Parents Union
Newark Students Union
NJ Teacher Activist Group
NY State Allies for Public Ed
Northeast Indiana Friends of Public Education
Opt Out Orlando
Oregon NAACP
Parents Across America
Providence Students Union
Rethinking Schools
Save Our Schools March
Save Our Schools NJ
Seattle King County NAACP
Students United for Public Ed
Texas Kids Can’t Wait
The Coalition for Better Education
The Opt Out Florida Network
United Opt Out
Voices For Education (Arizona)
Washington State NAACP
We Are Camden
Young Teachers Collective
[Readers: If your organization wishes to add its name to this statement, please contact NPE executive director Robin Hiller at rhiller@voicesforeducation.org
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Great!
Thank YOU!
“Many of these tests have never been independently validated or shown to be reliable. . . ”
And they never will be “independently validated” because those standardized tests contain all the epistemological and ontological errors and falsehoods in the making of, usage of and disseminating the results of that render the whole process COMPLETELY INVALID as identified by Noel Wilson 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
And as Wilson shows that without validity there is no reliability.
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.
Or read Wilson’s review of the testing bible “Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing” put out by American Educational Research Association; American Psychological Association; National Council on Measurement in Education. (2002). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association:
“A Little Less than Valid: An Essay Review” found at http://www.edrev.info/essays/v10n5.pdf
He starts the review:
“As a test maker I worked for the Australian Council for Educational Research for six years. As a result I had always regarded this book in its previous incarnations as a sort of bible, a reference of last resort. So not until I wrote my Ph D thesis on Educational Standards and the Problem of Error did I subject the 1985 version of Standards to a more critical analysis (Wilson, 1997). As that analysis was not overly complimentary, I thought it only fair to look at the 2002 version with similar critical gaze. As before, I focus on validity. Why? Because, as the good book says, ‘Validity is, therefore, the most fundamental consideration in developing tests’ (p. 9). I concur. If the test event is not valid, if indeed the test is invalid, then all else is vain and illusory.”
You are great… ♥
Back when this news of the Atlanta cheating scandal broke, what was Secretary of Ed Arne Duncan’s take on the Atlanta cheating scandal?
Mehhh, it’s no big deal.
ARNE DUNCAN (blase): “This is an easy one to fix: (with) better test security.”
Watch the August 2011 video:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/07/atlanta-cheating-scandal-_n_892169.html
Oh, I’m so glad Arne got to the bottom of this whole problem, and identified the cure. We can all relax now. Implicitly, he argued, the only problem were these corrupt teachers and administrators.
This interview is great. Apparently, this was just some local Atlanta reporter, but she asked some pointed questions.
She asks him if the unrealistic expectations of NCLB are part of the problem, and he’s totally non-responsive… he doesn’t give a yes or no to this. Instead, he just says, “There are great teachers who are amazing… beating the odds… blah blah blah”
Later, she says that “a lot of this is about money”, and asks if punishments and monetary rewards “need to be de-coupled from student learning.” Instead of owning up and admit this obvious reality—painfully obvious, in the light of what just happened in Atlanta– Dun-an says… oh no… not at all. Instead of de-coupling testing from punishments and rewards, we need to do double-down on this and do it MORE.
Check out this word salad (including the usual Duncan smarmy “snow job” of praising teachers and principals… the same folks whose profession Duncan has destroyed):
————————————————————–
DUNCAN: (at 02:30) “Well, I think rewarding teacher excellence is important. I think I would argue the opposite (i.e. don’t “de-couple”), that far too often we haven’t we haven’t celebrated great teachers. We haven’t celebrated great principals who are making a huge difference in students’ lives. You just want to make sure that they’re doing it honestly, and again, the vast majority of teachers are doing an amazing job, often in very difficult circumstances, in helping students beat the odds every single day. I think we need to do a better job of spotlighting that, and incentivizing that, and encouraging that, and learning from that.
“In education, we’ve been far too reluctant to talk about success. We just need to that. We just need to make sure that we’re doing it with integrity.
“Not too hard to do.”
————————-
Really Arne? “Not too hard to do”? “Merit pay” and basing personnell decision on test scores has been tried countless times for over 100 years, and it has always failed.
What you claim is “not hard to do” HAS NEVER WORKED.
IT WILL NEVER WORK.
In fact, when it’s tried, it actually causes severe harm—narrowing of the curriculum, turning schools into test prep factories, etc.
Duncan’s corporate reform masters need testing to drive privatization, corporate profiteering, and union-busting, and so Duncan will defend to the death the misuse, the over-emphasis on testing, the massive over-testing in general, etc.
Here’s a post from KrazyTA about testing
A long posting. Please bear with me…
Consider the following.
On the one hand, the self-styled “education reformers” blather on and on about “grit” and “determination” and “Work Hard. Be Nice.” and “character” and “it’s all about the kids.”
But when it comes to the massive incentives put in place by these self-same leaders and backers of the “new civil rights movement of our time” to degrade genuine learning and teaching by mandating high-stakes standardized tests and the VAMania it feeds and nurtures, they dismiss the great harm caused by their own actions by—to quote one of their thought leaders, Dr. Raj Chetty—turning “Campbell’s Law” into “Campbell’s Conjecture.”
A HuffingtonPostEd piece featuring that most celebrated EduGenius of our time, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan:
[complete posting start]
In a video interview Wednesday with 11Alive News, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said he was “stunned” when he learned of the teacher cheating scandal in Atlanta Public Schools.
Duncan calls the scandal a result of a “rotten” culture, but isolated to Atlanta and Baltimore, where several schools have recently seen similar problems. Duncan says in the interview:
“This is an easy one to fix [with] better test security.”
Still, despite the problem’s isolation, the root of the issue is systemic, Duncan says.
“The answer here is very simple, you just have a culture of integrity and you have better security measures in place. but again what was so disappointing for me here was not an isolated individual or two, this was clearly systemic, this was clearly a part of the culture in Atlanta. That simply can’t happen, that is absolutely inexcusable.”
His surprise and response has drawn attention from Twitter users, several of whom said the problems come from No Child Left Behind and leadership and policy issues.
[complete posting end]
Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/07/atlanta-cheating-scandal-_n_892169.html
So any manipulation of those standardized test “hard data points” by mainly teachers [Yes! Those rascals!] is not really widespread.No, it’s attributable to lack of integrity and lax security and other isolated missteps and flaws.
Hmmmm…
Yet the above HuffPostEd piece points to a systemic problem. It’s spelled T-E-A-C-H-E-R-S.
Don’t believe me? Hey, TIME magazine pointed out all the bad apples! And If VAM could just be applied across the board [with all those multiple measures that align with it so that it appears accurate and trustworthy] then we could reward the highly effective apples, er, teachers and get rid of all those grossly ineffective rotten apples, er, teachers. And do this over and over again, every year.
*Caveat: only to be applied to the vast majority of students aka OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN. When it comes to THEIR OWN CHILDREN, self-proclaimed “education reformers” know better.*
And then there’s all that useless money-wasting public school support staff. They need to go too. Plus, don’t forget to scale up the mandated high-stakes standardized tests too, and ensure that curriculum and day-by-day teaching are aligned in order to make test takers everywhere comparable to test takers anywhere.
What am I contrasting? Just look at it this way: if you abandon reason and logic and consistency and decency, and completely ignore ethics and sound pedagogy, and replace it with the worst business/management practices that the heavy hitters in “education reform” employ, then “data manipulation” is an affront to all free market fundamentalists because—
When you’re in business, it’s all about the bottom line. You’re in it to win it. Winning isn’t everything, it ’s the only thing. What sort of business lauds the competition and supports its rivals?
The business of business is business. In this case, the ed business. And in the ed business, the bottom line is a single all-important metric that can be quantified: $tudent $ucce$$.
So partly in response to Chiara’s comments the other day about “systems thinking” I think one way to approach it is:
— when it is necessary to lie by commission and omission and to deflect, take systemic “ed reform” failures as individual atomized character flaws and inexplicable glitches;
— when it is necessary to guarantee and increase the bottom line, any systemic framing that supports and promotes and defends charters and vouchers and privatization. If that means subjecting numbers & stats to the enhanced interrogation techniques of accountabully underlings, then who’s to say their massaged and tortured numbers & stats are wrong? The opposition, the competition, that’s who! You can’t believe a Mercedes Schneider or Gary Rubinstein or Bruce Baker or GF Brandenburg or Mark Weber or Audrey Amrein-Beardsley! They’re self-interested parties, aka the envious and jealous of miracle schools like $ucce$$ Academy!
😱
To conclude, consider just this one of a number of bizarre examples: when you sing the praises of merit pay, oh boy, that pile [?] of dough and the public praise that accompanies it (and keeping your job to boot!), hey, it is gonna incentivize world-class teaching and results. First and foremost, it’s all about the Benjamins! That’s what people want above all else! But when you make people’s pay and jobs and reputation depend on the chimerical results of VAM, it is a mystery why they will act unethically. Sure, like the Atlanta cheating scandal‚ that can only be understood as being a lack of proper character and moral upbringing.
😒
And for those that accuse the self-designated cage busting achievement gap closing disruptive innovators of our time of double speak and hypocrisy? It’s like water off a duck’s back. They’ll stick like super glue to Marxist fundamentals:
“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”
¿Marx? The only one that counts, natcherly. Groucho.
That last post is from the comments to this article:
So needed!
Excellent roster of organizations! May it continue to expand…
Diane and readers…hope you see this and take the time to read. Let’s start using this messaging! I don’t think the arguement against charters that they do not perform better is strong enough. This article has helped me to frame the issue differently….hope it helps you to!
http://host.madison.com/news/local/writers/paul_fanlund/paul-fanlund-why-progressives-fail-to-grab-the-moral-high/article_a0d72b1d-8901-5c4d-b176-32fec61e4dc7.html
Congratulations for those that have taken a stand re this high stake testing!
It is sad and obvious that union leaders and most of civil rights leaders do not have INTELLIGENCE, COMPASSION and COURAGE in order to stand tall and to point out the invalidity of testing scheme = no transparency, no matching with research protocol for age appropriate level, and lots of stresses on teaching and learning.
Please be honest to our own conscience that would each of leaders and governors enjoy being tested on the subject that is beyond your level?
It would be sensible and very understandable that each leader who has more experiences and are keen in running public service needs to put themselves in people’s shoes, so that they can properly manage their responsibilities [= protect and support public from the public taxes.
Greed, ego, and lust for power and fame are the real culprit that kills leaders’ conscientiousness. All business corporations SHALL BE BANNED from running public administrative positions or doing lobby works due to their manipulation for personal gain and harmful to national economy and security. Back2basic.
It is important to repeat that: (from article: Paul Fanlund: Why progressives fail to grab the moral high ground?)
[start quote]
…
If you get cancer or break a leg and do not have health insurance, you are not free.
If you can’t get a decent education, you are not free.
If you are a woman and do not control your body, you are not free.
If you cannot marry someone you love, you are not free.
If your work largely benefits only the wealthiest of the wealthy and not you, you are not free.
If you are treated with suspicion or disdain because of your race, you are not free.
If a few billionaires determine election outcomes, you are not free.
If you cannot easily vote, you are not free.
If you are not protected from harmful products and fraudulent business practices, you are not free.
If companies are allowed to foul the air you breathe and the water you drink, you are not free.
Get the picture? Government not as the evil enabler of a nanny state, but as an indispensable agent for freedom.
Sounding evangelical, Lakoff then riffs at length about how he thinks Democrats fail to effectively frame things. Here’s a sample: “Take pensions. What is a pension? A pension is payment for work already done. If you cut pensions you’re stealing people’s money that they’ve earned. Or health care paid for by employers, so-called ‘benefits.’ They’re not gifts. They’re part of salaries. You cut benefits, you’re cutting the salary.
“Those obvious things need to be said. Unions are about freedom from corporate slavery or wage slavery. They’re freedom from an employer telling you that you have different work hours every week, that you’re not going to get paid for overtime and or you have to work under dangerous conditions. I mean unions free you from stuff like that. They free you from that kind of slavery. People have to say it out loud.”
In summary, Lakoff asserts, “Politics is primarily about morality. What the conservatives are very good at is getting their moral views out there.” Progressives, he says, not so much. In fact, he says, they are pretty much “disastrous” at messaging in moral terms.
Well then, let freedom ring.
Read more: http://host.madison.com/news/local/writers/paul_fanlund/paul-fanlund-why-progressives-fail-to-grab-the-moral-high/article_a0d72b1d-8901-5c4d-b176-32fec61e4dc7.html#ixzz3dMctRk70
[end quote]
sorry, ..beyond THEIR level? (NOT your)
Too much testing leaves too little time to teach and learn
As a parent and educator I oppose high stakes testing.