The Badass Teachers association responded to Arne Duncan’s mea culpa on testing with this statement:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 24, 2015
More information contact:
Marla Kilfoyle, Executive Director BATs or Melissa Tomlinson, Asst. Executive Director BATs
Contact.BATmanager@gmail.com
Today the Obama Administration released a statement calling for “a cap on assessment so that no child would spend more than 2 percent of classroom instruction time taking tests. It called on Congress to ‘reduce over-testing’ as it reauthorizes the federal legislation governing the nation’s public elementary and secondary schools.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/us/obama-administration-calls-for-limits-on-testing-in-schools.html?_r=0)
The Badass Teachers Association, an education activist organization with over 70,000 supporters nationwide, are reluctantly pleased with this announcement. Our vision statement has always been to refuse to accept assessments, tests and evaluations created and imposed by corporate driven entities that have contempt for authentic teaching and learning. Our goals have always been to reduce or eliminate the use of high stakes testing, increase teacher autonomy in the classroom, and include teacher and family voices in legislative decision-making processes that affect students.
Since No Child Left Behind and Race to The Top we have seen our children and communities of color bear the brunt of the test obsession that has come in with the wave of Corporate Education Reform. When resources should have been used for funding and programming, politicians and policy makers were focusing on making children take more tests in hopes that equity in education would occur. It didn’t work, and it will not work. We know as educators you cannot test your way out of the education and opportunity gap. The blame and punish test agenda has not closed either the education or opportunity gap . We are reluctantly pleased that the President and his administration are finally taking a stand, but sadly the devastation has already been done. We are confident that if the President and his administration make a commitment to work with educators, parents, and students we can fix it and make it right.
“Although this is a step in the right direction I feel we need to see what the policy is before we count this as a win. Given his actions in New York, I have no reason to trust John King, and I’m concerned that this is a ploy to get teachers on the side of Democrats aka Hillary Clinton.” – BAT Board of Director Member Dr. Denisha Jones
“The policy that stems from this statement needs to be mindful that important discussions about exactly what kind of testing is most beneficial to our students. BATS advocates for teacher-driven tests with immediate and relevant feedback that can be used to drive current instructional practices.” – BAT Assistant Executive Director Melissa Tomlinson
“The policies of Sec. Duncan and the USDOE have caused an immense amount of damage to our educational system, student morale, and teacher morale. I am very reluctant to be happy about this announcement and will watch closely as to what the President plans to do to fix the damage that has been done. Will he stand up to Corporate Education Reform? Will he end the test, blame, punish system for schools, students, and teachers? Will he return the elected school board? Will he end mass school closings?” – BAT Executive Director Marla Kilfoyle
The Badass Teachers Association would like to extend its voice and expertise to help get public education on the right track. Together we can work towards the real solutions that will make great schools for all children. We will be watching closely as this unfolds.
It stinks of a fake apology, like when you call to complain about something and the customer service person says, “I’m sorry you feel that way.”
Appointing King was just a slap in the face along with the snarky “kicking and screaming” part from Obama.
I think it is a ploy to get back some of the 3million + votes back after a botched hostile takeover, or maybe just enough packpedal to appease the white middle class soccer moms whose kids are not as smart as they thought they were ,and teachers and schools not as good as they thought they were.
Yeah, something about leopards and spots comes to mind.
Total equity in ALL schools ( charter schools are not public schools) for ALL children! Kill all high-stakes testing!!!:
http://unitedoptout.com/about/
Please help STOP the MADNESS: 6,464 emails/letters sent to Congress and President Obama to date:
http://www.petition2congress.com/15080/stop-common-core-testing/
Now at 6.536 . . . and counting! Thank you all.
There is no victory here. Obama’s administration suddenly does not care about our children. King doesn’t suddenly care either. These folks and their corporate cronies have been pummeling our public schools for how many years now and suddenly – now suddenly – they are listening and here to save the day? NO. As Morna McDermott (UOO admin) says – the folks who have been destroying you suddenly do not come up with a solution to save you. NO. Do not fall for the latest “testing action plan” from the US Dept of Ed. Arne is gone and now King (CHARTER SCHOOL KING???) is going to make things right? HELL NO. Not happenin’. They plan to roll out testing that is competency based – tied to our curriculum – impossible to opt out of – online – seamless – with no end of year test necessary. No victory. None.
Another token gesture meant to appease, PLEASE.
I’m glad we heard what a Facebook group has to say about this.
This stinks of everything political and nothing moral. Business as usual.
And no hint of an acknowledgement that teachers and parents were right all along on this.
Holy Hannah judging by the big BAT response you would think silly ole parents just sat and watched. When in fact it was actually parents that have and continue to do the heavy hitting. #SunsetESEA #StopCommonCore!
Back when this news of the Atlanta cheating scandal broke, what was Duncan’s take?
Mehhh, it’s no big deal.
ARNE DUNCAN (blase): “This is an easy one to fix: 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.
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. We need to do this MORE.
Check out this word salad (including the usual Duncan smarmy “snow job” of praising teachers and principles… the same folks whose profession Duncan has destroyed):
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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.”
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Really Arne? “Not too hard to do”? “Merit pay” and basing personnel 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 profteering, 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.
“Reluctantly pleased”??? Really? I do not agree with the BADASS team. They should be totally unpleased until there is a complete and total end to this nonsense with an admission of NCLB and RTTT’s huge failures by none other than our president along with his underling -Duncan. Children’s lives have been wasted and we do not have more minutes to waste on BS words that ring hollow – too many educational lives have been lost on this as well as the profession of education itself. And for what? A completely inept “education secretary” given complete control by our president. Time for this utter madness to stop. The president’s words appear foolish and nonsensical because it is the very policies he supported/created that put testing on steroids – SHAME ON HIM.
“The Badass Teachers Association, an education activist organization with over 70,000 supporters nationwide, are reluctantly pleased with this announcement.”
SUCKAS!!!
Either that or just plain gullible and stupid.
I agree with you. I’m a little shocked by the BATS’ statement. I figured they wouldn’t be so easily fooled.
Unfortunately, I believe that this a political ploy to make Democratic voters believe for some reason that things have suddenly changed in Washington and there is support for teachers and our legitimate concerns.
Now that Joe isn’t running, the Democrats will do anything to elect their anointed candidate. I certainly wouldn’t vote for any Republican running, but after four years with our first woman President, who thinks education is really going to be in a better spot!!! Seriously, think before you vote in the primary -Who is willing to stop the “reformers” ?! I truly believe Sen. Sanders is the only option for public education.
Do you know his stance on education (other than free college)? I’m having trouble figuring out how he feels about the Common Core and testing.
The problem is not simply the time taking the test. It also is the huge amount of time devoted to ‘test prep’ rather than education.
I (a retired teacher) recently attended an annual bonfire event hosted by a currently active teaching couple. Probably the largest group in that company were active, local public school teachers. When engaged in conversation, they talked about almost nothing but ‘testing practice’ and when the next ‘evaluation’ would occur. I probably made some provocative comment which I can’t remember, but I do remember the response by the young teacher. She said, “Yes, they may know very little about science, or math, or history or literature, but they will know how to take a standardized test.” Is this our nation’s goal?
You are right, but don’t go far enough:
Our school has been totally disrupted over the past three weeks as we attempt to give 2000± standardized, computer based tests. So, even students not taking the test are negatively impacted by these tests, and those who do take the test are impacted far beyond the 3 hours or so it takes to complete the test.
In addition, we are required to give a practice test, complete network testing etc. which all require students to be impacted and classrooms to be displaced.
And that is in addition to the classroom time devoted to preparing for testing.
This announcement actually means little and until the high stakes nature of the sting is removed, the testing juggxrnaught will continue without slowing down one bit.
I forgot to add, the 2000± tests are just retakes… we will be giving almost 9000 tests in the spring. And we have 2600± students in our school!
As long as high stakes are still attached to the tests, they will remain poison.
Even without high stakes the tests remain COMPLETELY INVALID and any results “vain and illusory” as Noel Wilson puts it, or as I put it 100% Pure Grade AA Bovine Excrement.
To understand that COMPLETE INVALIDITY I urge all to read and comprehend Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted total takedown of the educational malpractices that are educational standards and standardized testing:
“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 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.
One thing that could create more issues is this: if the tests continue to be punitive instead of diagnostic, teachers and districts will continue to have to do preparatory tests and expose children to the correct language and question styles and expectations. Otherwise, scores won’t be adequate, particularly if the tests continue to be developmentally inappropriate.
Until test scores are completely de-coupled from teacher (and school) evaluations, the time spent administering tests will remain irrelevant. This issue is a complete distraction from what is at the root of test-prep centered instruction: test-and-punish policies have poisoned and corrupted classroom dynamics and student/teacher relationships. Improving teaching and learning will never happen in a reform system built on mistrust of teachers, threats, coercion, and punishment. Never.
According to my calculations, 2% of instructional time for math would limit the Common Core math exam to a maximum of 2.0 to 2.5 hours. Here in NY it is currently 4.5 hours. Reducing test taking time by 2 hours (out of 100 instructional hours) will do nothing to change what’s wrong with the current federal testing regime.
We must abolish the misuse of “tests as weapons”. We should have the professional right to teach our students in a climate free of threats to our reputations, free of threats to our careers, and free of threats to our livelihoods.
And to every politician and reformer demanding that teachers must be accountable, and that standardized test scores are one of the best method to determine teacher effectiveness, I say, the truth is counter-intuitive. The best test takers will be taught by the best test-prep counselors, not the best teachers.
“We must abolish the misuse of “tests as weapons”.”
We must abolish the use of standardized testing all together as it is COMPLETELY INVALID. And an invalidity is a falsehood is a sham is a prevarication is a mendacity is hogwash is standardized testing
Thank you Badass teachers.
For what?
For being suckas?
I see some good news here in terms of politics. If the Republicans support high stakes testing as a means of closing “government schools” and the neo-liberals like Cuomo want tests to demonstrate schools are failing and need to be privatized, what levers will be in play for the push to privatize? The other good news is that this issue will likely be raised in the presidential debates… an issue that was avoided thus far.
But the BATs are right: until we see what King comes up with we should keep the champagne on ice!
“The other good news is that this issue will likely be raised in the presidential debates…”
And promptly forgotten by 99.9999% of American voters and by all the elected officials.
Hard to grasp why teachers would be “reluctantly pleased” regarding use of non-validated tests with convoluted formatting. Requiring highlight/drag and drop doesn’t mean a question is better than authentic assessment devised by classroom teacher.
“Although this is a step in the right direction I feel we need to see what the policy is before we count this as a win.”
What right direction? The right direction is to leave teachers and their students alone, but this is not what Washington is saying. No, they still want to continue to direct things from above.
The fact is, even if Washington says the right thing (namely “we’re gonna leave you alone, guys”), it doesn’t matter. What matters is what the real boss is saying. If Gates goes ahead and apologizes, arranges to pay damages, and goes to jail voluntarily, then we can start thinking, the promise of change is in the air.
Till then, there is absolutely no reason to waste energy to try to decipher what Barack or Arne meant to say.
Is there a single point in Obama’s speech at https://vimeo.com/14349185 which indicates, they will not execute Duncan’s grand plans from two years ago which he introduces with
“In short, I agree with much of the critique of today’s tests. Now, the essential question is where do we go from here?
Despite the flaws of today’s tests, we can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. I don’t believe that the problems of assessing student growth are so unsolvable that we should take a pass on measuring growth—or bar the consideration of student progress in learning from teacher evaluation.
Standardized assessments are still a needed tool for transparency and accountability across the entire education system. We should never, ever return to the days of concealing achievement gaps with school averages, no-stakes tests, and low standards.
The fact is that no one is more damaged by weak accountability measures than our most vulnerable students. We must reliably measure student learning, growth, and gain.”