Steven Singer, who teaches in Pennsylvania, explains the planned insanity behing standardized testing, rigged for failure. He likens the situation to a video game that he played with his friend as a child, where the questions and answers might suddenly and arbitrarily change.
In Pennsylania, the privatization movement started with deep budget cuts. Then comes a new standardized test. Too many students did well, so the tests were made more “rigorous.” Now, most students “fail.”
Did they get dumber? No. Did he become a worse teacher? He says no.
So what’s up? The students are set up to fail. The teachers and schools are set up to fail? Why? It clears the way for charters and vouchers.
One hopeful sign in Pennsylvania: Governor Tom Wolf wants to help public schools, not destroy them. Unlike his predecessor, Tom Corbett.
Singer writes:
“In my home state, the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) and the Keystone Exams are high stakes versions of my buddy’s moronic quiz. The purpose isn’t to fairly assess: it’s to stump as many kids as possible.
“And it’s working. For the fourth year in a row, student test scores have declined statewide. Previously, students had been doing relatively well. Why the change?
“It began with budget cuts. The legislature slashed almost $1 billion every year in school funding. That means higher class sizes, less teachers, fewer electives, tutoring, nurses, services, etc. And districts like mine weren’t exactly drowning in money to begin with.
“Students now have less resources, therefore they can’t prepare as well for the tests.
“So what did the legislature do? Did our lawmakers fix the problem by putting back the money they had repurposed as gifts to the natural gas industry?
“Heck no! They made the tests even more unnecessarily difficult.
“As a result, the steady decline in test scores this year fell off a cliff!
“After all, this was the first year in which the Commonwealth fully aligned every question of its mandatory testing with the Pennsylvania Core Standards – which are similar, but not identical to the Common Core standards adopted in other states.
“Proficiency rates in grades 3 through 8 dropped by an average of 35.4 percent in math and 9.4 percent in English language arts on the PSSA. Nearly half of all seventh and eighth graders dropped an entire proficiency level in math in just one year.
“If I made up a test like this in my own classroom, gave it to my students and got results like these, my first assumption would be that there was something horribly wrong with the test. I must have messed something up to fail so many students! Teachers are always on the lookout for unclear or bad questions on their self-created exams. The for-profit corporations that create our state-mandated tests? Not so much.
“Though state Department of Education officials acknowledge the continued decline in scores, they insist problems will work themselves out in subsequent years – as if a 4-year trend is just an anomaly. Move along. Nothing to see here, folks.
“My students used to make impressive gains on the tests. My principal stopped by today to give me the scores for my current students and those I taught last year. No surprise. Very few passed….
“It’s almost impossible to avoid certain conclusions about this whole process. Standardized testing is designed to fail students – just like my buddy’s movie quiz was designed to stump me.
“These tests constitute fake proof of inadequacy. They attempt to “prove” our public schools are failing and should, therefore, be replaced by private corporations – maybe even by subsidiaries of the same for-profit companies that make and grade these tests!
“When my buddy unfairly stumped me, we both knew it was a joke. We’d laugh and play another video game.
“But there’s nothing funny about this when it’s perpetrated by the state and federal government.
“Pennsylvania’s standardized test scores are a farce just like the scores in every state and territory throughout the country. They’re lies told by corporations, permitted and supported by lawmakers, and swallowed whole by the media and far too much of the public.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So what happens when they succeed in turning most public schools into charters, and the charter school students also keep failing the standardized tests?
Will they then make the tests easier, in order to “prove” that charters “work”?
Yes. Isn’t that what Bloomberg did in NYC to prove his reforms were working. Just gradually lower cutscores annually.
Well, we all know that’s going to happen over and over again.
If you can’t get the results you “want,” manipulate the tests and the standards so that you can achieve your goals of destroying public education, privatizing schools with little or no public oversight, destroying teachers’ unions, etc, etc, and so forth.
Oh, there will still be “public schools.” But they will be filled with the disabled, the emotionally disturbed, the kids with behavior problems, and kids who don’t “fit in” with the charter/privatization model, because they cost a lot more to teach effectively, they require more resources, more well-trained teachers, more specialists such as occupational and physical and speech therapists.
Which, if people like Rahm Emanuel (who has slashed teachers and funding for special education) get their way, will not happen. These kids will be essentially “warehoused,” as was the case years ago.
Instead, we should be supporting all public schools, all children, and most importantly, we need to address the effects of poverty on our children and schools, and on our communities and society at large.
YESD, MY DEAR…EVEYON EKNOWS THIS: Instead, we should be supporting all public schools, all children, and most importantly, we need to address the effects of poverty on our children and schools, and on our communities and society at large.”
HOW DO YOU STOP THE COUNTER NARRATIVE of charter schools, and the magic elixir,, and UN bamboozle the people!
http://www.opednews.com/articles/BAMBOOZLE-THEM-where-tea-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-110524-511.html
The mayor of New York does enjoy the powers of undemocratic and unaccountable mayoral control, but he or she has nothing whatsoever to do with where cut scores are set on state exams. This is a good recap of score inflation in New York State before 2010:
http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_2_ny-education-testing.html
Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads.
In Ohio this is how a B+ school became an F rated school in less than a year……..something very wrong with this. Stay tuned to see how matters fare for the Youngstown School District as they fight state-takeover. They are waiting to see if the court will allow them to proceed with their case against the state.
cross posted at http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Stephen-Singer-How-to-Cre-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Destroying-Non-corporate-Competition_Diane-Ravitch_Education-Curriculum_Education-For-All-151004-44.html#comment565776
and each these sites below have embedded links if you go to the OPED comment I wrote.. This wordpress blog does not add embedded links. sorry.
If You wish the truths about what it really takes for kids to learn, try reading The American Educator, where authentic teachers tell how to enable learning.
and find out the carefully planned devastation at links where teachers…THE REAL EDUCATORS… explain the horror of what is occurring while the media points to magic elixirs like charter schools.
For more on the destruction of Public education
Go to the NPE site and learn what you can DO as parents and as citizens!The Network For Public Education | We are many. There is power in our numbers.
Diane Ravitch
EdNotes Online
PERDAILY
Curmuducation
NYC Educator
NYC Rubber Room Reporter and ATR
nycrubberroomreporter.blogspot.com
Mercedes Schneider’s Edu Blog
NYC Educator
NYC Rubber Room Reporter and ATR
The Assailed Teacher
EdWize UFT
Accountable Talk
MORE Caucus
NYC Eye
Protect Portelos
Hemlock on the Rocks
South Bronx School
Chaz’s School Daze
With a Brooklyn Accent
B-LoEdScene
Urban Ed
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé.
At this point Pennsylvania is ahead of New York as they don’t have the bottom 5% rule that will keep the charters humming. They now have a reasonable governor that has to clean up the mess left by Corbett and his cronies, and they still call the shots in Philadelphia.
Reblogged this on History Chick in AZ.
Thank you so much for writing about my article, Diane. It’s been such a hard week on teachers with all the reformy news. I really appreciate your help in amplifying my voice. And thank you to all the bloggers, readers, activists, teachers, principals, parents, students and hell raisers out there who are fighting to save our schools from the constant attacks. You mean the world to me.
Stephen Singer, THANK YOU! Your words speak volumes.
And to Diane, another THANK YOU.
It’s really repulsive what is going on. Makes ya wonder about the words spewed in tha name of reforms, which is actually DEFORMS.
As I understand them, the whole point of standardized tests is to separate the top people from the rest, so if a teacher were to teach so well that his students got 90 – 100% on the test, the test would be changed so that even these well-taught students would shake out toward the bottom, leaving a handful at the top….. again. That’s the point. What people who design tests like that do not understand in development; they believe each person is born with a quantifiable (by their test) amount of some factor (those knowledgeable about the history of testing can fill that in) and those with lots of it float to the top. Now, if you think about it, they do not really believe in education b/c people like Charles Murray believe Head Start is a waste b/c “those kids” will never rise to a higher level, i.e. no development. Anyone who does not believe in the capacity for development of the individual should never be allowed to have anything to do with schooling.
When you are a member of the the “1%” (or maybe the top 10 or 20%), you begin to believe (or have always believed) that you have achieved this level because you are “golden,” according to their lights. You are the ones who know best, who must be in charge, because you “know best.” (And they think they “know best” because, well, they are where they are.)
As for everyone else, they perhaps need enough education (and indoctrination) to perform the work that is necessary to keep the top people comfortable, to work in their factories, to do the jobs that the kids of the elite are not going to do.
Ah, well, that’s probably a gross exaggeration. And I’m sure that some of them (maybe) are naive and well-meaning. But as for the rest of them? Maybe not so much.
But then, what do I know? I’m only a retired special education teacher, and I’ve also always been a politically active, way-to-the left person.
{{Sigh}}
pbarret: standardized tests, especially those on testosterone like the high-stakes varieties, are designed, pretested and produced to “discriminate” i.e. to get a point spread.
In real world terms: to label, sort and stack rank. Under existing social and political conditions, measure-to-punish in order to produce a few winners and many many losers.
I humbly suggest the following reading list:
1), Daniel Koretz, MEASURING UP: WHAT EDUCATIONAL TESTING REALLY TELLS US (2009, paperback). *Note: Koretz is a psychometrician, i.e., has been a standardized test designer, tester, administrator and scorer, plus is a professor. Insider view.*
2), Todd Farley, MAKING THE GRADES: MY MISADVENTURES IN THE STANDARDIZES TESTING INDUSTRY (2009, paperback). *Priceless insider view of how actual standardized tests get scored.*
3), Banesh Hoffman, THE TYRANNY OF TESTING (2003, paperback). *Also reference, per Duane Swacker, Noel Wilson’s work.*
Thank you for your comments.
😎
P.S. Google “pineapple” and “hare” and “Daniel Pinkwater” and you will be surprised at how much your understanding of standardized testing will increase. I especially recommend his interview with the WSJ [yes, the WALL STREET JOURNAL!].
I also am very grateful for this site and all of the information and insight that is made available here. At this point, all here have helped me decide or not decide my “rest-of-life” path (juggling all the variables and options).
Next step is the next baby step. I’m all in with whatever I can do to make it better for the childrens’ futures.dd
When the calls to oppose privatization are raised, no attention is paid to the teacher jail (Los Angeles) and rubber room (NYC) which have succeeded in removing thousands of senior teachers. Will less experienced teachers be willing to engage in this fight that we think is so obvious or have the privatizers already succeeded in creating teaching as a temporary job?
How do we get the corporate foxes out of Public Ed. They are driving this mess because of their insatiable greed.
The PSSA results account for 50% of a teacher’s VAM (value added measure) which is 50% of a teacher’s evaluation. One can only imagine what a VAM score looks like if a teacher has a class with 10 IEP’s. Special education Is modified for the PSSA testing. The children are so stressed over these tests. Thank you Stephen, for advocating so vocally on behalf of the children and the teachers.
In PA test scores count for 15% Still to much
““Pennsylvania’s standardized test scores are a farce just like the scores in every state and territory throughout the country.”
NO!, They aren’t farcical! They are COMPLETELY INVALID!
Noel Wilson showed/proved all the epistemological and ontological errors and falsehoods involved with the two totally intertwined educational malpractices of educational standards and standardized testing that render any results, as he puts it “vain and illusory” or as I contend COMPLETELY INVALID in his never refuted nor rebutted 1997 dissertation “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700 .
Since Wilson has proved the falsehoods and invalidities of those malpractices any usage of the results HAS TO BE UNETHICAL. What kind of person believes that using UNETHICAL POLICIES AND PRACTICES that cause harm and is violent to/violates innocents is desirable, okay, fine and/or justifiable??? Perhaps the “good German” but certainly not a decent human being would do so.
All you who support and “go along to get along with” these educational malpractices should be immediately prohibited from any contact with the innocent-the students and banned from the teaching profession until they learn, understand and refuse to enact such atrocities.
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 words 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.
“And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.”
Half the fun of having feet is Red Goose shoes…
By and large, it seems, salvation by consumption, starts by
reducing “future” customers” to zero, as soon as possible.
“But the sleepless and lost
push their squeaking carts
Down the rows of clothes
And see nothing at all…”
24-Hour Store, The Handsome Family, (Singing Bones)
KrazyTA
Thanks. Also Richard E. Nisbett Intelligence and How to Get It.
Thank you Steven Singer for putting your name out there! I’ll be following PA.
Intimate friends tell me that the destruction of public education in PA started over a decade ago with the PARCC tests, an early pioneer in needlessly and intentionally confusing tests.
Jake,
PARCC did not exist 10 years ago. Arne funded it a few years ago to test the Cimmon Core.
My mistake, Diane. I mean the PSSA tests, which started in the late 90s. I just wanted to point out the dismantling of public ed in PA started before Tom Corbett and even George W Bush.
I just received a lesson plan checklist on my k-2nd grade special ed self-contained class’ plans. They want me to go around to all the teams and get their plans to incorporate into my individualized plans. I refuse to be a robotic teacher. I teach to their needs attempting to increase their progress and self esteem. Diane, I am at GH Reid Elementary, Richmond Public schools. We are priority status and being micro-managed by pearson employees. I can’t do this. I am ready to quit, but I have no savings to fall back on. They won’t even allow our REA association to meet in a school building anymore. We need help down here. We are drowning.
It’s my opinion that taxpayers and parents like having some accountability in place. What we need to work on as a society is having more local control of our schools and trust that the inputs and outputs are fair to all involved, most importantly the students. What is a fair share per pupil spending number for spending? What is a fair accountability system for academic achievement? What is a fair system of assessment for administrators and teachers when they do fail our students? I think there are some districts that are working hard to solve these problems and others not so much.
Hmmm. You think local control would be a good idea.? There are 15,880 districts! Education was set up to allow local control. But as Paul Horton explains the ‘market theory”, and the actions successive administrations have set up our current race to the bottom. With the billionaires running the show, there will be no change unless there is revolution from the parents…and they are clueless, busy and stressed, and led by the media. it just ain’t gonna happen.
I am seeing the governor of Indiana promoting charter and private schools at the expense of public schools. He has managed to strip out Superintendent of Education of many of her powers because she cares about students. I agree that public schools as we knew them before the Obama administration will soon be a thing of the past and our children are going to pay the price.