Gene V. Glass is one of our mation’s superstar researchers of education. His field for many decades was measurement. He describes how hopeful the field was that better measurement of students would solve important problems.
But in this post, he explains that he is resigning from his field. Measurement has over promised and under delivered.
“The degrading of public education has involved impugning its effectiveness, cutting its budget, and busting its unions. Educational measurement has been the perfect tool for accomplishing all three: cheap and scientific looking….
“Teachers and many parents understand that children’s development is far too complex to capture with an hour or two taking a standardized test. So resistance has been met with legislated mandates. The test company lobbyists convince politicians that grading teachers and schools is as easy as grading cuts of meat. A huge publishing company from the UK has spent $8 million in the past decade lobbying Congress. Politicians believe that testing must be the cornerstone of any education policy.
“The results of this cronyism between corporations and politicians have been chaotic. Parents see the stress placed on their children and report them sick on test day. Educators, under pressure they see as illegitimate, break the rules imposed on them by governments. Many teachers put their best judgment and best lessons aside and drill children on how to score high on multiple-choice tests. And too many of the best teachers exit the profession.
“When measurement became the instrument of accountability, testing companies prospered and schools suffered. I have watched this happen for several years now. I have slowly withdrawn my intellectual commitment to the field of measurement. Recently I asked my dean to switch my affiliation from the measurement program to the policy program. I am no longer comfortable being associated with the discipline of educational measurement.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
When I was learning research statistics, the standard cautionary tale on construct validity featured the foibles of Phrenology, the onetime pseudoscience that sought to psych out a person’s aptitude and character by measuring the bumps on his or her head to the last decimal place.
It appears that Phrenology never dies, it just fads away in ever new fashions.
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Jon,
Eugenics had lots of “science” behind it, and many people were sterilized on the basis of that “science”
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WOW Very powerful indeed. Anyone who knows what I am about knows that I am a believer in building a positive school culture and in putting people first. My book is all about that and how we built an exemplary school by putting caring about others first.
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And?
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Good for him but it probably means he just doesn’t get invited to conferences anymore.
Bill Gates himself, our national education czar, ridiculed the state of Ohio for a standardized test that measures gym teachers and it didn’t make a bit of difference.
They’re putting in a new one:
“Many of you are aware that the Ohio Physical Education Standards have recently been updated. In addition, the required physical education (PE) evaluations have also been updated to reflect the revised standards and to incorporate feedback received from PE teachers throughout Ohio.
The Ohio Department of Education is looking for all physical education teachers interested in piloting the updated physical education evaluations. Volunteering to take part in the pilot is on a teacher by teacher basis. If you do not choose to pilot the revised evaluations, you will simply continue assessing using the same evaluations that you have been required to complete the past 3 years.”
Maybe the whole thing will be moot because they just cut public education funding again so “gym teachers” are probably going the way of “art teachers” or “music programs”- frills that get in the way of sitting in front of screens taking tests.
Carry on, ed reformers.
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Great comment, Chiara!
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THANK YOU, Chiara. It’s insane.
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Completly agree that a two hour test given in a particular moment in time can not and will not ever capture the intelligence of the whole child. It’s only one method that should never be holding the weight it’s currently holding. A child’s growth needs to be determined using mutiple sources of assessment which includes quantitative and qualitative measurements. The information should then be used to assist the teacher with designing and implementing differentiated instruction. Authentic rigourous performance assessments that include multiple intelligences and designed by our teacher leaders in the field should be holding a high priority.
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“The information should then be used to assist the teacher with designing and implementing differentiated instruction.”
Interesting use of the passive voice. Who, specifically, should assist the teacher with this?
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Why? Computer$ and $oftware of cour$e!
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Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
A world-class expert in the field of measurement explains why using VAM (the results of student standardized tests) to judge public teachers and their schools is corrupt, destructive and fraudulent.
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It’s just common sense…so many dollars wasted…Imagine if all of that money had gone to fund pre- and after school programs, hiring more teachers and counselors, great shop, phys ed, music and art programs, field trips, decent classrooms, buildings, facilities and supplies…
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Duncan now says in interviews that preschool is the most important issue. If only there had been some government official with billions of dollars in discretionary funds and a completely asleep-at-the-wheel Congress to put something like that in….. 🙂
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Then, they need to visit quality preschools and not fall for some cyber preschool that pitches the cheap path to excellence. They really need to understand human development before they jump on a bandwagon.
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Well yeah, but anyone at all who has any historical or even just plain ‘scientific’ interest in this issue should and would have known this from the beginning. So, better late than never I guess, but he leaves a disaster in his wake that he’s in part responsible for creating. (Phrenology is just one of a long, sordid trail of wreckage of this sort of thing through the ages – I believe Steve Gould wrote a book about this — yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_anthropometry
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This is so sad. Glass did the first real meta-study showing the benefits of class size reduction, which led to the STAR study, one of the best large-scale experiments ever done in education, this study proved the quantifiable benefits of small classes for all students, but especially for poor kids, narrowing the achievement gap. We need more good research like this, and for people like Glass to stay in the field to be able to rebut the weak studies pushed by the corporate reformers.
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Yep….though I took the Glass piece to be both slap at current notions of “reform” and a pledge that he’ll devote his knowledge and experience to honest education policies.
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Besides saying he’s leaving measurement to focus on policy, I thought these were two of the most important points that Gene Glass made:
“Many teachers put their best judgment and best lessons aside and drill children on how to score high on multiple-choice tests. And too many of the best teachers exit the profession.”
I’d add that too many — far, far too many — administrators and education organization “leaders” and education “consultants” (do PLCs ring a bell?) are coercing teachers to do what they know is wrong.
Schools are opening across the country for a new academic year. What are teachers being told in pre-school meetings? Which “consultant” ideas are being pushed in their school divisions? How much emphasis is put on the ACT and SAT? On Advanced Placement courses and tests? How are teachers evaluated for their work?
The system criticized by Gene Glass is the same one that – in most places – is being implemented and perpetuated.
Why aren’t the “leaders” actually leading?
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People have forgotten. Back sometime ago when we were to emulate the “great Japanese educational system”, when their children spent horrific amounts of time in academic preparation they found out to their sorrow that when children finished high school they had learned two things. how to pass tests and to hate school and learning. They had not even learned the material. Because someone can parrot back “facts” on written tests does not mean that they necessarily understand the concepts behind the statements.
Too, it is more than worth mentioning when the “state” makes out the tests, grades them and validates the learning by the state conceptions of “truth” democratic forms of government succumb to totalitarianism. Hitler and others have shown the way and we better take heed. Now that this happens and that the “state” is keeping records of how susceptible to this propagandizing is we are in deep doo doo.
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Gene Glass and I were at the same institution early in his career. I was working in arts education, a field with no deep tradition of empirical research of the kind that Gene mastered early and with mentors who were the great authorities.
In arts education, our early ventures into grants-based R & D was aided by the Cooperative Research Program from USDE and the coincidental founding of the National Endowment for the Arts, an organization then clueless (if not hostile) to the very idea of empirical research and skittish about any formal instruction under the auspices of public schools.
I appreciate the long perspective Gene Glass gives on this career and the decision that he has recently made. This is clearly a matter of conscience.
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I’d love to hear what Gene Glass thinks of the SBAC ELA test. What does it measure?
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I commend Gene Glass for his decision to leave the study of measurement because of its misuse.
What is next? How does he plan to help fight the reformost juggernaut now?
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I think I am sad. Are we losing the voice of someone who can expertly debunk the excesses of testing explain the misuses of measurement?
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Are we losing the voice of someone who can expertly debunk the excesses of testing [and] explain the misuses of measurement?
@2old…
I dunno …. it’s not my impression that there’s a shortage of people or texts pointing out the perfidies and rotten studies and “scientific” abuse. There’s a shortage of folks *listening*. There’s a shortage of critical thinking and critical reacting.
Personally, I feel quite sad about the state of affairs where it feels millions are brought to the water of knowledge daily, and yet they explicitly refuse to drink (“read”) of it. That’s, to me, what’s sad. And I think it’s also in part the subtext of this declaration. You can debunk until you’re blue in the face, but the onslaught of quackery is unremitting. In some sense engaging in it is contributing to it — OK, maybe he didn’t say that last (I did). But regardless, there’s this big, empty, open void into which whooshes the real question: ¿ How do you convey truth to power effectively, not to mention to those who enable the powerful?
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I think I figured out how to discuss the junk science VAM thing, and, by extension, any b.s. policy in which I’ll use numbers and calculations to scare people.
Suppose I have a b.s. claim, let’s look at different methods to present, to market that claim. I’ll call those methods CASE 1 and CASE 2.
CASE 1.) IF I tell people, “The earth is flat, I need to fix the formula ax+by=c, a is in the set of reals, b is an integer.” THEN NO ONE is going to pay attention to me, to anything I claim, and to the phake & useless formula!
CASE 2.) IF I tell people “I need to fix the formula ax+by=c, a is in the set of reals, b is an integer, and then I can show the earth is flat” , THEN people will freak out, and a HUGE % of the population will scamper away, or defer, or hide, cuz, the formula freaked ’em out – regardless of how stupid the claim is!
Suppose I want to peddle junk VAM or any b.s. … well, clearly, throw down some math, as in CASE 2, & you’re 90% on the way to winning with over 50% of the population!
rmm
“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”
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I’d just like to say Gene Glass has always been a scholar of integrity and his action here is admirable and alarming. I trust his response and reasoning, which makes it all the worse. But all credit to him.
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this is also on Jan ressiger’s blog today and Harold Capenter reblogged it on Opt Out (CALIFORNIA)…..
What Gene Glass reminds me of is the current experiment with “social impact bonds” in Massachusetts and New York. When the Riker’s Island (privatizing prison programs/services) was failed/withdrawn there was a congressional hearing. I was proud of the Independent Senator King from Maine who said : “this is an admission that government isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do”…at the congressional hearings… by using hedge funds, privatized funding of risks to offer the programs and services at the prison to lower recidivism.
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If the US does less testing, low-income countries will just have to do more. And since they can’t pay, lobbyists are hitting USAID for taxpayer money to give grants to testing companies. So, it’s your money either this way or that way…
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Sentiments similar to those of Lee J Cronbach in the last edition of his Essentials of Psychological Testing.in last chapter
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