This is a beautiful statement. Computer-graded essays represent the ultimate dumbing down of education. Professor Les Perelman of MIT has has written many studies about the stupidity of machines. They are indifferent to factual accuracy. They don’t understand tone or irony or wit. They can be fooled by pretentious gibberish.
Keep fighting!
Open Letter to Ohio Department of Education from English teachers. Concerning: Computer-graded exams.
by inthevalleyofthedoanSeptember 8, 2018
OPEN LETTER
TO: Paolo DeMaria
Superintendent of Public Instruction
Ohio Department of Education
superintendent@education.ohio.gov
CC: Office of Curriculum and Assessment:
Brian.Roget@education.ohio.gov
Sarah.Wilson@education.ohio.gov
Shantelle.Hill@education.ohio.gov
Daniel.Badea@education.ohio.gov
Sarah.McClusky@education.ohio.gov
FROM: English teachers of Shaker Heights High School
September 7, 2018
Dear Superintendent DeMaria and the Office of Curriculum and Assessment,
We are English teachers at Shaker Heights High School, and we would like to voice our profound dismay over the direction that the Ohio Department of Education has taken with the End of Course exams.
In the nation’s unthinking rush to test, test, test, we have reached a new low: We are now expected to teach our students how to write for a machine to read.
We have been given a document called, “Machine-Scored Grading: Initial Suggestions for Preparing Students,” produced by the Westerville City Schools “in consultation with the ODE.” According to these guidelines, “When composing text to be read by a computer, the writer cannot assume that the machine will ‘know’ and be able to interpret communicative intent.”
Imagine for a moment how humiliating it is for students to hear that what they write will be read by a machine, not by a human. Can you think of anything as pointless? Would anybody be inspired to do their best work?
The message that we send students is this: Your inner self, the ground from which all writing springs, has no value, no relevance. We do not care about the content of your mind, only that you have the mental machinery to decipher and generate informational text.
Writing for a computer is antithetical to everything that led us to become educators. Our overseers in Columbus, however, have a very different attitude. In support of machine scoring, this is from an official statement from an Associate Director of the Office of Curriculum and Assessment:
“This is the only way to get to adaptive testing and to return results faster, with the goal to be eventual on demand results, which has been an extremely vocal issue by the field to legislators, ODE Leadership, etc.”
First of all, this is an appalling sentence. But once we get past the errors in syntax, grammar and capitalization, and the sloppy, confusing phrasing, we are still left with an absurdity. We teachers are supposed to set students before a computer and then wait breathlessly for the machine to tell us how well or poorly the student writes? That is the ultimate goal? And the person in charge doesn’t even know how to write? How much are Ohio taxpayers spending on this?
There are always the same three justifications for computer grading:
It’s fast.
It’s cheap.
It’s objective.
But we can point to a system that is faster, cheaper, and maybe even more objective. There just happens to be a group of trained professionals handy: people who are dedicated to the wellbeing and growth of Ohio’s schoolchildren, people who love writing and literature, people who are trained to the standards of the Ohio Department of Education, people who continually strive to improve their ability to provide meaningful evaluation of student writing:
Teachers.
We can do the job fast because we’re with the students every day. We can do it cheap, in fact at no extra cost to Ohio taxpayers, because it’s what we’re paid to do anyway.
You might assume that machines have us beat when it comes to objectivity. But computers are only as objective as the humans who program them. And we have good reason to distrust multinational corporations when they invoke proprietary trade secrets to hide the systems that determine the fates of millions of public school children.
But objectivity may be the wrong criterion. As English teachers, we love writing because it is one of the most subjective things taught in school. We love the teaching of writing because we love to see students develop their unique voices, their sense of themselves as the subjects of their own lives.
If we begin our thinking with the assumption that standardized tests are a sacred imperative, then, surely the fastest, cheapest, most objective thing is to grade them is with a machine. However, if we begin our thinking with the belief that students should learn how to write well, then we see that artificial intelligence is not just irrelevant, but counterproductive.
Superintendent DeMaria, what is truly being tested here is the ODE itself. Are you so captive to the testing-industrial complex that you throw millions of taxpayer dollars into an unnecessary technology? Or are you so committed to educating students that you are willing to use your available human capital to do it for free?
Yours sincerely,
English teachers at Shaker Heights High School
So ironic that in the alleged age of meaningful personal feedback you have this, its utter opposite.
The new Battle of Shaker Heights. Greenlight that!
The Technocrats are STUCK. That screen has many technocrats bamboozled. Good grief.
That screen is: Making us dumb.
Reblogged this on What's Gneiss for Education and commented:
Beautiful letter.
“Writing for a computer is antithetical to everything that led us to become educators.” I would add teaching any subject/course/lesson in effort to pass computer tests to this statement.
Thank you. Agreed.
The GED is a computer test now I’ve heard.
Students I work with wanting to pass the GED don’t have a computer at home. One has never used a computer. Never.
Our truly at risk students, those who did not graduate high school, are taking a high stakes test on a computer.
Makes more sense to me for AP students to test online.
Sigh.
In the frenzy to collect more data, teachers keep getting pressured to accept falsehoods. Even the best AI cannot examine a student’s writing with same level of accuracy and understanding that a trained English teacher can. Corporate interests continue to try to force teachers to accept higher levels of stupidity in the name of cheap and easy
In my area, I believe, high stakes essay test “scorers” were being hired off of Craig’s List. For $15 an hour. “Training” provided.
“This is the only way to get to adaptive testing and to return results faster, with the goal to be eventual on demand results, which has been an extremely vocal issue by the field to legislators, ODE Leadership, etc.”
Spoken like a true computer.
Yes, And the mischief goes back to Partnership for 21st Century Skills report for Ohio “Results that Matter (2006)”
As readers may recall. Ken Kay, the founder of the “Partnership for 21st Century Skills” was a lobbyist for tech industry who tried twice to get his garbled scheme and simple meme (with rainbow) into federal legislation with a corporate tax break to businesses that would support it, In 2006, most of the 21st Century Partnership members (but not all) were tech companies/foundations: Adobe Systems Inc., Agilent Technologies Foundation, Apple, Bellsouth Foundation, Cable In The Classroom, Cisco Systems, Inc., Corporation For Public Broadcasting , Dell Inc., Educational Testing Service, Ford Motor Company Fund, Intel Foundation, Ja Worldwide, Leapfrog Schoolhouse, McGraw-Hill Education, Microsoft Corp., Oracle Education Foundation, Pearson Education, SAS, SAP, Texas Instruments Inc., Thomson Gale, Time Warner Inc., Verizon. Also on board with tech-centric education were the American Association of School Librarians, American Federation of Teachers , and National Education Association. http://www.p21.org/storage/documents/RTM2006.pdf
In 2009, the legislature in Ohio passed SB 311, a “Credit Flexibility Plan” with language from Ken Kay’s marketing scheme for the tech industry. The scheme allows students to by-pass traditional credit hours and seat time by enrollment is a competency-based online program rationalized as meeting “the demands of a 21st educational system.” Here is part of the law.
“School districts, community schools, and chartered nonpublic schools shall integrate technology into learning experiences whenever practicable across the curriculum in order to maximize efficiency, enhance learning, and prepare students for success in the technology-driven twenty-first century. Districts and schools may use distance and web-based course delivery as a method of providing or augmenting all instruction required under this division, including laboratory experience in science. Districts and schools shall whenever practicable utilize technology access and electronic learning opportunities provided by the eTech Ohio commission, the Ohio learning network, education technology centers, public television stations, and other public and private providers.” http://archives.legislature.state.oh.us/bills.cfm?ID=126_SB_311 ( Section 3313.603 (7).
Here is the website for looking at Ohio’s computer graded tests, including adaptive testing (non-stop). http://education.ohio.gov/Topics/Testing/News/Information-regarding-Ohio’s-State-Tests
One district in Illinois is implementing e-learning, CBE, and “learning anytime, anywhere.”
It is spending close to $20 million to redesign their high school campus so that it more resembles a corporate campus. Freshmen are expected to do all their work on a chrome book, and new classrooms in the pod look more appropriate for housing cubicle farms. Teachers are being told administrators will be checking their google classroom for “rigor” without any meaningful policy on how K-12 student data will be safeguarded given that it’s all on a Google platform, Teachers are being told they no longer have a desk or classrooms.
The Library and Media Center has been demolished, and a new, much smaller space has been renamed the “Student Success Center” – the better to commodify the students. Books, who needs books?
The district superintendent brags to the local paper that she was able to take an online Spanish course in college and received an A without ever seeing the teacher. She apparently can’t distinguish how adult learners are different from K -12.
Shiny bells and whistles, but no substance.
Sad.
Shakespeare couldn’t have written it better! Standing ovation!
Two schools I taught at had us, the English teachers, do all this extra grading for no extra money during two ridiculously busy times of year. It was a killer! Dozens and dozens and dozens of extra grading time twice a year.
Was it better than machine scoring if writing? I think so. We were concerned with being accurate, fair, consistent among ourselves and often traded sets of essays to correlate grading.
But it was a killer and one reason I’m not a full time teacher anymore. Adding weeks’ worth of unpaid extra work into an already heavy workload wasn’t and isn’t sustainable. If we were paid extra it’s still time we didn’t have.
I don’t have the answers. Grading writing is labor intensive. I’d rather a writing teacher grade writing.
But they are already overburdened with a heavy workload.
There is an easy solution: eliminate the test.
If there is no test, there is no need to grade it.
When I took high school English, my teachers corrected the papers I wrote throughout the year, but I didn’t have writing tests.
In many areas, they are required as a way to evaluate teachers. An extra set of papers that don’t count for the student!
I wouldn’t, but I could easily teach my students to manipulate an AI scorer. The highly gifted students would figure it out for themselves, though.
Beautiful letter.
But we are fighting against a tide of ignorance–a trend, if you allow me, that is reflected in the words of Obama in contrast to the utterances of Trump. The latter who cannot speak, read, write or think in English. The perfect role model for the devaluation and desecration of language.
Read the final comment to the letter by Wrenchinthegears.
Yes, this has been in the works for a very long time. The ALEC plan &, also, read Nancy MacLean’s book, Democracy in Chains.
K-12 Virtual Schools tried to invade 11-12 suburban school districts in ILL-Annoy; their presenters thought they’d just walk in & take over.
Every single one of those districts did their homework, peppered the rep. w/??? he was unprepared to answer, stated (i.e., school board members & administrators) publicly that the company would, in effect, be taking money away from their brick-&-mortar schools, & showed them the door (i.e., refused to grant charter approval). K-12 was going to appeal to the ILL-Annoy Charter School Commission, but then didn’t bother. Also, their regional director resigned.
We all have to be aware & fight back…hard.