Anthony Cody met teacher Michelle Gunderson at Occupy the DOE. When he heard her ideas about testing, he invited her to write a guest blog.
Gunderson explained that she has seen test used to sort children, to punish children, and now–to privatize schools.
She has developed her own credo for the ethical use of tests.
Please read it.
The essence of the pledge is that a student’s test scores should be treated as confidential.
I wholeheartedly agree.
I would go farther.
We don’t expect our doctors to turn over our test results to the state, why should teachers give children’s data to anyone but them and their parent or guardian?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
That reporting situation already exists–it’s called homeschooling. Using test results in punitive ways can be counterproductive, but restricting use of data that could be used to provide feedback that in turn can be used to inform/improve instruction would seem misguided as well.
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Personally I feel there is not ethical use of data. The whole standardized test concept is wrong and the standards movement is an abomination. Don’t fool yourself, there is no use for this data except for hurting students, teachers and families, not to mention communities and this country.
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Agreed that there is no ethical use of data. When the process-educational standards and standardized testing is so error filled to completely destroy its validity as shown by Noel Wilson in “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700 then any conclusions drawn are falsehoods. The use of falsehoods to evaluate anything leaves conclusions that are “vain and illusory” and therefore UNETHICAl.
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Agreed – even when the tests are used only as they’re supposed to be, they sort and rank kids against each other. To what end? So some kids can be the “smart” kids and some can be the “dumb” kids? So some parents have bragging rights that their kid is in the 99th percentile? (And frankly, practically every parent I’ve ever met has at least one, if not all of their kids in the 99th percentile, allegedly, so who needs tests to have bragging rights – just make it up.) To what end? What benefit is there to knowing that any particular child scores above X percent of other kids on a particular test?
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The AJC (Atlanta Journal and Constitution) as I expect you are aware has been a major investigative player in finding and reporting test cheating not just in Atlanta, but across the country. Check out this mornings article, “Testing Stakes too High, Some Argue” by Nancy Badertscher. It’s one of 72 articles posted this year on AJC.com.
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I wholeheartedly agree with Michelle Gunderson, the two responders above, and most all the rest of the community of educators. However, I think we all need to take a reality break here. Now, a bunch of Democratic politicians have issued a decree against standardized testing and the privatization of education by for-profit corporate entities with the support of the federal government behind them. I think it’s a great step in a good direction for public schools.
However, as the fed supports the Affordable Care Act and Vouchers for education, the fed also supports the privatization of public assets such as public schools. With this in mind, we must remember that the federal government will require that the state DOES receive medical records from doctors. And they are now requiring the public notice of standardized test scores. Unless the whole system of privatization, CCSS, and requirements for standardized testing (and the evaluations that are attached to it that does hurt teachers, students, schools and communities) are nullified, I fear Ms. Gunderson’s pledge, while obviously the right thing to do (and further, I’d stop all testing that goes beyond the student, teachers, and parents), there will come great opposition to her unwillingness to turn over test scores to governmental / corporate agencies. It will be interesting to see how this works for her. let’s stay tuned.
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There’s no question that we need to be concerned about privacy and how these data will be used, but there are many strong reasons for data to be available beyond the walls of a classroom:
1) Kids move from classroom to classroom, and from school to school. If teachers were the only ones to retain data, other teachers serving that child would be severely disadvantaged when trying to serve that child.
2) Making school-level and district-level decisions can’t happen without data. It would impossible to know, for example, whether single-gender education worked for a school without aggregating data beyond the classroom level.
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Data (as the term is used by current eddeformers) = 100% USDA Grade AA Bovine Excrement.
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Duane, which data are specifically referring to?
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Spoken like a true educrat. None of what you say is vital to parents or teachers, only to those who hope to profit from the bermuda triangle of gates duncan pearson.
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Standardized tests do provide another independent assessment of a students knowledge, so I found them important as a parent. When standardized test scores suggest one path and grades suggest another, it is sometimes the case that the standardized exams give better advice.
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The above comment was for eded education.
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