Alan Singer points out that instances of verified cheating are extremely rare.
Newsday identified 36 cases in a 10-year period on Long Island in New York. He flips the narrative and says that teachers did not cheat 99.99999% of the time.
The media misses the point. The problem with high-stakes testing is not cheating, which is rare, but the way it distorts education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I am seeing this ‘blaming teachers and teachers training’ rapidly emerging at many blog sites and other media this week. I feel that this is the planned organized spin of the privatizers. We saw it earlier this week with Ben Austin and his silly Truth site, and now even the mass news media is following along.
I firmly believe that as the greater community is learning the real truth about RheeBroad/Reform and also Parent Revolution, etc., privatizers spin meisters are making a concerted effort to misdirect the public. The power of Murdoch who owns most of the media, and now PBS, and his cronies who want public schools to be investment opportunities, is so vast that it is difficult to refute them.
All teachers and friends of public education must repeatedly blanket the media with the facts.
Yesterday, in the LA Times, there were a number of excellent pro public education letters to the editor. We must all be sending those on a daily basis, not only to our local media, but to all of our elected officials. As a public policy specialist, I observe that we are gaining traction in educating the public as to the real facts, and now the big guns of wealth and distortion, the billionaires and the Grover Norquist followers will bring out their nuclear weapons and focus on shooting us down.
The LA blog sites since Tuesday talk about teacher training failures, but also about distribution of new funding as a result of Prop. 30 taxation (which raised $1 Billion for education), but the LA School Board voted to use this funding, NOT TO HIRE BACK TEACHERS so as to lower class size, but rather to buy every student an iPad from Best Buy, to use to study for Common Core testing. We have over 800,000 students in LAUSD, so this is a huge amount of private profit for these corporations.
This is outrageous and truly stupid and is being pushed by our Governor who preaches the need for Common Core testing. It enriches the manufacturer and the corporation selling iPads and since very child, they brag, can take these home, LA will have a remarkable loss of investment as the temptation for some families living in abject poverty in our community (where according to Supt. Deasy 190,000 homeless students attend public school), decide to sell these $700 Ipads for food and shelter, and they show up in pawn shops and on EBay. What a terrible beginning for our newly reconstituted School Board, when it is clear to all that smaller student/teacher ratio is prime to successful education.
Please let us know what you see in your locale as to the new litany of castigating teacher training and graduate schools of education.
Please contact me at
JoiningForces4Ed@aol.com
to learn about our rapidly growing group, Joining Forces for Education. We already have collegial contacts in the Latino community to talk about Parent Revolution, and our first Speaker’s Bureau Training Session is scheduled for July 9 in Los Angeles. We are also working with a No.California offshoot of Joining Forces which will be in startup soon.
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“The problem with high-stakes testing is. . .” the fact that it has educational standards and standardized testing as the base of the teaching and learning process. To have a proven fallacy* of educational malpractice as the base ensures that the results of high stakes testing will be invalid or as Wilson states “vain and illusory”.
*“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 quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking. 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 we are lacking much information about said interactions.
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. This 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 word all the 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. As 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 shit-in shit 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 measures NOTHING as the whole process is error ridden and therefore invalid. And 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.
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Lets think a little about point 2. If we only ever have interactions with others and the material world, would not evaluating the quality of those interactions be usefull? I would be perfectly happy to say that I am evaluating how a students interacts with my questions.
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TE, Can you be more specific? What so you mean by that?
I’m sorry you were not able to answer my last round of questions.
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Just trying to address Duane’s concerns that the evaluation of an assignment is the evaluation of an interaction between the student and the material in the assignment.
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Yes, evaluating the “quality” of those interactions would be useful, no doubt. We do it all the time. But if we get into an argument with someone do we automatically draw the conclusion that the person IS argumentative and stubborn headed based on that one interaction. I think not. And you would be quite logically correct to speak of “how a student interacts with my questions”, however most, having been so conditioned to think otherwise, have grave difficulty in seeing the difference.
Although it may seem a slight, a minor, an insignificant in most people’s eyes, difference “attaching” a grade, or a score (labelling) really does have real life consequences mainly negative from many (and more than 0 is any too many) and positive (for the at the “top” end of the academic spectrum, although I argue that it also effects them negatively in subtle ways that harm one’s psyche)
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Of course judgements about interactions with people are best not based on a single interaction, but I thought your position was that test scores had no validity no matter how often they are repeated. Am I incorrect?
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Standardized test scores have no validity, yes! Teacher made tests used in conjunction with the student (and/or parent if the student is too young) as part of the teaching and learning process can be valid part of the assessment process. Using teacher made tests to “grade” students-not valid. I hope you see the distinction that I am trying to make.
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You seem to be drawing a sharp distinction between assessment and grade. Perhaps you could flesh that out some more.
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Well, I agree with Wilson that there are a number of different frames (epistemological bases) from which we can view assessment. He has listed four: 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.
I argue that anything other than an assessment done in the responsive framework does a disservice to the teaching and learning process.
A “grade” is mental masturbation at its finest as it has no basis in logical thought No, it’s not a nice neat little shorthanded way of evaluating someone. A grade conveys next to nothing about what a student has learned or how he/she as evolved as a learner. Even though these imaginary things have an out of proportion sized social value, it does not lessen the complete invalidity of the concept.
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I would agree with you Duane in principle and spirit. However, in ALL schools, public and private, the actual output of every teacher is a grade. That’s just a fact. Whether that fact is an abomination, psychologically, statistically, theologically might be debated by some. I don’t. I agree with you about apprenticeship learning. It is, in fact, what we do with our own children. We don’t grade them, we encourage them to keep taking steps even if they fall down (to use a frequent analogy).
But once they enter school, they get a report card. The report cards become transcripts. My question is whether any grade can be fair. I know your answer=NO. Yet, a teacher who doesn’t turn in her grades is cut from the system.
Is there any answer? I like your idealism, your fierce humanity, but the question of grades is seldom discussed. I say again, what teachers are expected to produce is “grades.” How do you remain in the system without submitting grades? I suspect you DO submit grades. How do you arrive at fair ones, when no grade can ever be fair?
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Thinking again about frequency, you “a grade is mental masturbation”, but what of a set of grades? To be specific, lets think about a group of standardized exams a student might take as part of college admissions: PSAT, SAT, ACT, SAT subject exams, AP exams. Taken as a whole, do you think the results of these interactions have any power to predict the results of future interactions? I am not thinking about small differences in scores, but large ones, say something on the order of 800 vs 1550 on the1600 point scale on the SAT and 2 vs 5 on the AP exam scale.
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All newsday ever does is bash teachers and every other public sector employee. If only all those public sector workers would cancel their Newsday subscription the paper would fold.
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I have real problems with the statistics Alan Singer cobbles from the number of verified cheating events versus the student population. Huh? I don’t think the cheating events are defined by one child per event. Obviously, 36 verified instances of cheating in ten years given the number of test events in that time period is minor, but I question the stats he uses to make his point. Mercedes, we need you.
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Newsday has been attacking teachers and other public sector workers for years. It is owned by the Dolans whomalso own cablevision and MSG.
They were NOT all cheating incidents, they were irregularities. For example, a mistake might have been made administering the tests and the district reported themselves. That is not cheating, that is an example of honesty.
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Besides cheating scandals, Snoozeday publishes “data” by district on SAT scores, graduation rates, test scores,etc. Our district ranks “poorly”. I love my community, its teachers, and all its diverse wonderful children. Take those numbers and shove them!! I don’t give a rats ass about test scores. I care about humanity!!
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