Steven Singer has a straightforward and sensible proposition: accountability should begin with the people who make the rules and allocate resources.
Instead they have created a blame game for those who try to play by the rules they created, not matter how wrong those rules are.
Read the following and read his post to learn the Code of Conduct he has devised for those who make the rules.
He writes:
School Accountability Begins With the People Who Make the Rules: A Code of Conduct for Politicians and Test Makers
Standardized testing is all about accountability.
We’ve got to keep schools accountable for teaching.
We’ve got to keep students accountable for learning.
It’s kind of a crazy idea when you stop to think about it – as if teachers wouldn’t teach and students wouldn’t learn unless someone was standing over them with a big stick. As if adults got into teaching because they didn’t want to educate kids or children went to school because they had no natural curiosity at all.
So we’ve got to threaten them into getting in line – students, teachers: march!
But that’s not even the strangest part. It’s this idea that that is where accountability stops.
No one has to keep the state or federal government accountable for providing the proper resources.
No one has to keep the testing companies accountable for creating fair and accurate assessments.
It’s just teachers and students.
So I thought I’d fix that with a “Code of Conduct for Politicians and Test Makers.”
After all, that’s what we do when we want to ensure someone is being responsible – we remind them of their responsibilities.
You see, the state and federal government are very concerned about cheating.
Not the kind of cheating where the super rich pay off lawmakers to rig an accountability system against the poor and minorities. No. Just the kind of cheating where teachers or students try to untie their hands from behind their backs.
They’re very concern about THAT.
When you threaten to take away a school’s funding and fire teachers based on test scores, you tend to create an environment that encourages rampant fraud and abuse.
So the government requires its public servants to take on-line courses in the ethics of giving standardized tests. We have to sit through canned demonstrations of what we’re allowed to do and what we aren’t allowed to do. And when it’s all over, we have to take a test certifying that we understand.
Then after we proctor an exam, we have to sign a statement swearing that we’re abiding by these rules to ensure “test security.”
This year, for the first time, I’m supposed to put my initials on the answer sheets of all of my students’ Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) tests to prove…. I don’t know. That I was there and if anything went wrong, it’s my fault. Burn the witch. That sort of thing.
Even our students have to demonstrate that they’re abiding by the rules. Children as young as five have to mark a bubble on their test signifying that they’ve read and understood the Code of Conduct for Test Takers.
I still don’t understand how that’s Constitutional.
Forcing children to sign a legal document without representation or even without their parents or guardians present – it sure looks like a violation of their civil rights.
But that’s what accountability looks like when you only require certain people to be accountable.
So back to my crazy idea.
Perhaps the corporate flunkies actually designing and profiting off these tests should be held accountable, too. So should lawmakers requiring all this junk.
Maybe they should have to sign a “Code of Conduct for Politicians and Test Makers” modeled after the one the rest of us peons have to use to sign our lives away.
Read Steven’s “Code of Conduct for Politicians and Test Makers.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Steven Singer’s article is OUTSTANDING.
Every link needs to be carefully.
Thank you, Steven Singer and thank you, Diane for posting this fabulous and most revealing article. .
Politicians and people like bill gates are plain simplistic and unfortunately will never understand nor can see the complex nuances of teaching and learning.
I couldn’t agree more. When scandal hits other organizations, they own it and contract for independent investigations. When the NBA learned that a referee may have been betting on games, they hired an outside lawfirm to investigate and to come up with new protocols to prevent any further action. Why why why hasn’t anyone been calling for the College Board to do the same? Why hasn’t the College Board itself decided to do this? With cheating proctors there is no credibility to its tests — at all. If these tests are to be used at all (a larger issue in itself) there must be extensive investigation and recasting of security protocols.
It wasnt just cheating proctor’s. One fellow (Harvard grad Mark Riddell took tests for students for OVER six years before being caught.
How many others did the same and went undetected?
College Board call for an investigation of itself?
Ha ha ha!
Good one.
That’s about as likely as Bill Gates admitting he was wrong — about anything.
College Board is not going to do anything that will affect its billion dollar revenue stream.
In this post Singer lampoons the hypocrisy of accountability. All the testing burden falls on the teachers and students. The politicians and testing companies bear no burden for all the flaws and missteps in mass standardized testing. Singer’s commonsense idea is that we should go back to the era before the feds and billionaires inserted themselves into public education prior to NCLB. That was a time when students and what was best for them were the priority. Now the preoccupation is with collecting erroneous data to undermine public education.
Teachers and parents need to support Opt Out. They also need to get parents to understand that the testing is not accurate. It is rigged. The state tests based on the CCSS have never been validated, and the cut scores are politically decided. These tests have never been subjected to the scrutiny of validation, which is a lengthy, expensive, laborious process. The public needs to understand this. It has been repeatedly reported that the test are deliberately written on the frustration level of students in order to fail large numbers to subject students to make their public schools look terrible. Why are we subjecting large numbers of students to illegitimate, inaccurate testing simply because the wealthy want to privatize our public schools? These tests serve NO academic value, only the political one that the 1% is trying to use to swindle our public schools from us.
Fordham should be held accountable, at a minimum, in the state of Ohio and in D.C.
AEI’s Frederick Hess should be held accountable.
Howard Fuller and others associated with BAEO should be held accountable.
Catholic leaders exploiting the opportunity crafted by hedge funds and tech monopolists
for plunder of the common good should be held accountable.
But, most of all, the funders behind them should be held accountable.
No education center attached to a university should offer a program about school accountability without a corresponding session demanding accountability of self-appointed billionaires for their ed policies.
And, if the Democratic establishment who, prior to 2018, lost governorships, 1000 legislative seats, and the presidency think that blacklisting the political strategy firms that work for primary candidates, running against incumbents, is going to garner votes, they are sorely mistaken.
Exactly.
The issue of this century is about ACCOUNTABILITY. Not a shred of it exists for businesses and banks, the monied power elites. And there has been no accountability for the behavior of the school principals who have actively eradicated the autonomy the teachers to enable and facilitate genuine LEARNING, in the classroom.
But, as the national conversation about schools, and ‘CHOICE’ promotes the business model, lets take a look at the business practices of Boeing.
What, you say? What has this to do with schools?
If the business mentality runs the school to ensure profits, then like Boeing, the good of the people will be the last thing considered.
SHAREHOLDER’S PROFITS ARE FIRST!
BOEING’S mongrel businessmen, decided that ‘upgrades’ for the software on the planes, should be SOLD.. To ensure more $$$$$ coming in for their share holder, they decided that companies that use the product,(the 737) should PAY for upgrades. But, we ‘re not talking about upgrading the seats, or the food! We are talking about keeping the planes nose pointed UP!
Boeing did not tell the companies that bought their MAX 737s, that the software upgrade and TRAINING was important if the pilots wanted to actually keep the plane airborne!
Yea. Let the business model be the one for our education system.
Throw yet another institution for the COMMON GOOD, into the trash heap, so businesses can make a profit from selling the real estate when the school fails.
Or, so the school administrators and owners can make a bundle.
Profit for the power elite.
Money for the shareholders. From on elf Diane’s blogs, “This post https://medium.com/orchestrating-change/whos-who-in-the-arkansas-charter-school-movement-7d85d80951f5 will make your head spin. Public schools in communities of color are taken over by the state, and charter schools open. One high-powered chain. spreads it’s tentacles across the state, scooping up the best students. A rotating cast of characters plays musical chairs at the state board, the state education department, and superintendencies. Behind it all: ALEC, the Koch brothers, and the Walton Family.
The Walton Family owns everything and every body.
Schools? Education? An afterthought.”
and no accountability.
Yes, retired teacher, “Teachers and parents need to support Opt Out.” My mantra is: OPT OUT!
And … Linda, so agree with, “No education center attached to a university should offer a program about school accountability without a corresponding session demanding accountability of self-appointed billionaires for their ed policies.”
What galls me are those charter schools, which label themselves “public charter schools.” There’s nothing pubic about them except siphoning money from our public schools with absolutely no accountability for how those monies are spent whatsoever. What a sham.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-montini/2018/03/05/flourishing-charter-school-rip-off-revealed/393682002/
As you know there’s more scams that went on and are going on.
Read “After the Education Wars” by Andrea Gabor. The book is out in hardback. You can look over the first chapter on that big site that started out by selling books.
True accountability indeed does start with the teacher in the classroom.
It is the teacher’s professional ethical mandate to insure that no harms are done to the students. By implementing the standards and testing malpractice regime the vast majority of teachers have violated their duty to the students as it is well known that those malpractices harm the teaching and learning process and violate the very being of the students in the process.
Of the ethical standards that I have researched there are two main thrusts to ethical behavior by the teacher–one to the profession, following directives, mandates, etc. . . and the other to the students to provide the best possible teaching and learning environment for the students, an environment that allows the students to fulfill a course of study that best for each individual student.
When those two ethical mandates collide which should hold sway, which should be upheld first and foremost? If you believe that the ethical mandate to the profession outweighs the ethical mandate to the students then may I suggest you get the hell away from the students and leave the teaching to those who understand the real moral choice here.
“. . . a course of study that IS best. . .” ay ay ay.
So ABSOLUTELY TRUE, Duane: “It is the teacher’s professional ethical mandate to insure that no harms are done to the students.”
There’s been just so much endless and continuous HARM being done (in the name of profits for the few and total control of this endless stream of cash to deformers) disguised as doing something good.
You know I love and admire you, Duane, but it does get hard to sometimes when you use such absolutist language and reasoning like this. That kind of reasoning works in an ideal world—one in which ethical and moral judgments are respected even in dissent—but it takes on an infinite number of shades of gray in the real world. I understand that you have and continue to be willing—may I write, driven?—to make these choices in your life which, you have admitted many times, have come at substantial costs to you. I admire you because I too have made a few choices like this in my life. To be honest, if I had it to do all over again, I probably wouldn’t knowing in retrospect what costs I and innocent loved ones have had to pay.
So I’m little more lenient and hopefully ethically pragmatic, if you will. Your first and last sentences to concern me a bit. They seem to put much too much of the accountability, even over things they can in no way control, on teachers; especially teachers would agree with you but have considerations like earning a living and having responsibility of their families. Let’s say you are infallible and these teachers do “get the hell away from the students.” Who will take their places? Where will they come from? Especially when the rules of the game haven’t changed one bit.
I agree with Steven that it starts at the top and that’s where most of pressure has to be placed. With federal, state, and local policymakers and administrators. That’s why I think it’s so important for parents who understand this to be be vocal. In fact, based on my personal experience in my community, I would put as much blame on the parents who put in hours of boosterism and not one minute of thought of academics and curricula unless it affects their own children. And even then, their “activism” is focused on their children only, not those of others or teachers.
I write with a “strident” attitude in the hopes that some teachers will awaken to the harms they are doing. Is that stridency at times rather condemning? No doubt and again it is meant to be condemning.
I tire of the excuses I hear/read from those whose first ethical concerns, the teachers, MUST BE for the students. Do we allow such malpractices to occur in other professions? Hell no we don’t. and we shouldn’t put up with unjust and unethical malpractices by anyone who is a teacher.
Is it unpleasant to be reminded of that?
I sure hope so.
I could write pages of rebuttal, but will refrain. My only observation is that when you write, “Do we allow such malpractices to occur in other professions?” it does matter so much if we “do…allow” them. The fact is that they occur in every profession, every hour of every day. Name the profession, and I am sure examples could be cited by every reader of this blog, ad infintum. Glass houses, Duane, glass houses. I wish I everyone else had your certainty of infallibility.
Dammit. What I meant to write was:
My only observation is that when you write, “Do we allow such malpractices to occur in other professions?” it doesn’t matter so much if we “do…allow” them.
Would you agree with the following sentence?
“When young people’s education is at stake, compromise is a crime.”
I have no “certainty of infallibility”. I just point out very inconvenient facts, in this case, that the first ethical responsibility of the teacher is to the students, not the authorities in charge. Please read and understand what follows, I know I’ve posted it before but it gets to the heart of the problem. Without justice for the students there can be no professional ethical treatment of them. Professional ethical treatment of students has to, cannot be done without, justice.
“Should we therefore forgo our self-interest? Of course not. But it [self-interest] must be subordinate to justice, not the other way around. . . . To take advantage of a child’s naivete. . . in order to extract from them something [test scores, personal information] that is contrary to their interests, or intentions, without their knowledge [or consent of parents] or through coercion [state mandated testing], is always and everywhere unjust even if in some places and under certain circumstances it is not illegal [the standards and testing malpractice regime]. . . . Justice is superior to and more valuable than well-being or efficiency; it cannot be sacrificed to them, not even for the happiness of the greatest number [quoting Rawls]. To what could justice legitimately be sacrificed, since without justice there would be no legitimacy or illegitimacy? And in the name of what, since without justice even humanity, happiness and love could have no absolute value?. . . Without justice, values would be nothing more than (self) interests or motives; they would cease to be values or would become values without worth.”—Comte-Sponville [my additions]
Your argument is one for self-interest over justice for the students. I cannot agree with that at all.
“When young people’s education is at stake, compromise is a crime.”
Can’t agree or disagree as the statement is far too vague and there are too many interpretations of the statement. I can say it seems way too trite of a statement overall. Please explain what you mean by the statement and I can further respond.
As far as glass houses? The mental house from which my argument about the teacher’s primary ethical responsibility emanate is made of laminated glass. There is no worry on my part about someone throwing my argument about that primary ethical responsibility to the students back in my face and breaking it apart.
And as far as broken ethical duties on the part of other professions being a reason for unethical malpractices being allowed, mandated and implemented in public education, well, let’s just say it holds no water for me. Those lapses in other professions are rightly abhorred and if caught taken care of within professional and legal means.
My “argument is” NOT “one for self-interest over justice for the students.” If you read what I wrote, there are no absolutes, or “very inconvenient facts”. There are opinions. There is real life. There are shades of gray. Yet you dismiss the quote I posted as “too vague and there are too many interpretations of the statement.” So that is not an absolute. Yet you are ready and willing to judge the motives of teachers everywhere—teachers you do not know—who have to make hard choices as they try their best to do the best they can for their students, even in the face of innumerable administrative and political obstacles put in their way.
Why is it that the overwhelming majority of attendees at the NPE meeting are retired teachers? Because they recognize that working teachers do not always have the freedom to act as they do. That’s teachers in conflict rely on committed retired teachers. They can speak and have less to lose. I understand that as a parent and that’s why I try to speak for them. I always used to tell my students that if the world were exactly as I envisioned it, the world would likely be a miserable place. That’s because I realize I don’t have a monopoly on the truth. I think that falls under the category of a very inconvenient fact.
And yes, that quote is getting very old. Philosophers can speak in absolutes. Those of us who have to live in the real world can’t. But that doesn’t mean one capitulates. One must maneuver between ever-changing poles. I have a certain admiration of you for being able to identify and the righteous path and judge others.
I am reminded of a great quote by the late Rep. Jack Brooks from Texas: “Sometimes you have rise above principle!”
I think they are crossing the line when you are required to sign statements with testing companies. They tried this with MCAS testing in MA maybe 15 years ago. We teachers, with strong union support, refused to sign and that was it. The requirement disappeared. Where’s your union?
The Deformers haven’t been held accountable for turning our schools into test prep factories, for reducing instruction in English to trivial exercises on master of Lord Coleman’s puerile list of so-called “standards,” for wasting billions on a testing regime that has NOT closed any achievement gaps and has NOT improved educational outcomes BY THE DEFORMERS’ OWN PREFERRED MEASURE–test scores. Even the paid escorts of Deform at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute now admit that the whole test-them-until-they-scream paradigm hasn’t worked. But here we are, still mired in it, like a fly in treacle.
Amen, Mr. Singer! Well said!!!
“But what’s your alternative to test-based-accountability?” the Deformers cry. Well, as Singer notes, accountability for those who brought this mess upon us (and for the Vichy collaborators with Deform among education professors and pundits). And this–this is an alternative: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/03/17/killing-ed-deform-and-making-american-education-suck-less-some-suggestions/
Standardized testing in English language arts is one of those industries full of dirty little secrets. Here are a few of them:
The tests are invalid. They don’t measure what they purport to measure.
The test formats are inappropriate.
The tests are diagnostically and instructionally useless.
The tests have enormous incurred costs and opportunity costs.
The testing regime distorts curricula and pedagogy.
The tests are abusive and demotivating.
The tests have shown no positive results.
The most damning of these, and the dirtiest of the dirty little secrets of standardized testing in ELA is that the tests don’t measure what they purport to measure–reading and writing ability. They exemplify the dictum “garbage in, garbage out.”
For more on each of these issues, see “How to Prevent Another PARCC Mugging: A Public Service Announcement” here: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/03/24/how-to-prevent-another-parcc-mugging-a-public-service-announcement/