I am a few days late posting this good essay by Rachel Levy. Here she debates whether to opt out her children from Virginia’s state testing.
Levy has a terrific blog, and you should read it whenever possible or subscribe. She is one of our best thinkers today writing about education issues.
She knows that everyone is caught up in the same snare, and she doesn’t want to cause problems for her children’s teachers or their school.
She considers the pluses and minuses and ultimately decides not to comply.
She writes:
“The best education is one that involves a rich and diverse curriculum where kids learn lots of stuff and read lots of books. Good leadership or bad, America’s public schools students largely aren’t getting that right now. Test prep and practice does not facilitate a rich and meaning full education and what’s more, it doesn’t even facilitate a meaningful boost in test scores.
“So, by all means let’s protest and work to end poor education policy and end high-stakes standardized testing. In the meantime, I am mostly willing comply with what is required. But I vigorously protest all the rest; it’s not necessary, it doesn’t work, and it’s poor practice.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What I wrote on Rachel’s blog:
Rachel,
If I may introduce myself: I am Duane Swacker and can be reached at dswacker@centurytel.net . I posted this as anonymous because I can’t figure out how to get my wordpress account to work.
I’m greatly disappointed that you decided to not opt out your children this time around. Why should this old fart Spanish teacher from rural Missouri care about what a mom in Virginia does in this regard? Because some things are right and some things are wrong and high-stakes standardized testing, well any standardized testing, is wrong. And the educational standards and standardized testing beast must be fought many ways, at all times.
You have fallen for the “marketing” that the ededeformers have promulgated appealing to your “conscience” about “not helping out the team” when it is they, the psychometricians and test pushers, who are selling a false bill of goods. How do I know it is a false bill of goods. Because one former “pusher” has proven just how error prone and invalid the whole educational standards and standardized testing process is. Read and understand what Noel Wilson says in “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700 . This is the most important educational policy analysis of the last half century (and prior to that Banesh Hoffman’s “The Tyranny of Testing was) bar none. See below for a summary and my comments:
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
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 in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional 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 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. 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 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 “something” which supposedly is specified by the test maker but the whole process is so error ridden that any conclusions drawn are invalid. The test supposedly measures “’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.
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Duane–in all fairness to Miss Virginia, when you are somebody who was raised to trust leadership it is hard to take that first step and say no, I am against this. Our NC Dept of Public Instruction is still headed down the garden path of RttT, dragging us all behind them. And I have heard of some parents getting together this summer to advocate opting out of testing and to circulate info on how to do just that, but the inclination (particularly for southern women, still),, is to want to support and trust our leadership. So I am glad you have given the detail to empower parents like the Virginia mom to hold ground, please understand that our worlds are being totally rocked (in a bad way) by the testing mania. I haven’t been this confused by anything other than my own parents’ divorce and I haven’t been this compelled to learn as much as I can about something (the education reform movement)since my fascination with gypsy music. Alas, when I saw real gypsies begging in the Balkans it curbed my passion–because the real stuff revealed itself. We mothers are still trying to find a bright side. We don’t want to have to say no, it is best if I stay away from gypsies, so to speak. We want to believe there is still good in this somewhere. My son, however, might end up in private school. This is not an easy ordeal for mamas with school age children.
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Oh… my… God… this is a funny
parody created by some NY parents
who are opting out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvKVkitKOgk
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I just had this conversation with my coordinator; in NYS this year and next years juniors will sit for both the NYS Regents exam and the new common core exam. Add this to AP and SAT exams, how many test are these kids taking in English alone? When asked what will happen to those kids who decide not to take both exams, I was given a long speech about funding blah blah blah.. When I told him that parents, and students, are tired of being used as pawns in the corporate take over of public education, he hadn’t much to say. We must used whatever tools we have to end this destruction of our public schools.
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My kids were in 3rd grade and 5th grade last year and I opted them out of district-mandated benchmark testing and STAAR testing as well. I have watched standardized testing degrade their education beyond recognition. Participating in this charade will only perpetuate it.
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I asked about opting out and I was told it is not an option. I don’t want my child to participate in a process designed to intimidate teachers and most likely uses class time to teach children test taking strategies that serve no purpose outside of the test.
However, I want/need my child to attend public schools and tests are a requirement of participation. If opting out was allowed, and enough people opted out, maybe change would happen.
Does anyone know how some states allow opting out and others don’t?
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As a teacher, I am heartened whenever I read that parents are taking a stand against useless testing in order to support meaningful curriculum. When parents band together with a clarity of purpose and position, the earth under bureaucracies moves and, to keep the metaphor going, politicians quake.
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ConcernedMom,
You are correct when you said that if enough people opted-out maybe change would happen…
You are in charge of your children. You don’t need anyone’s permission to keep them home instead of subjecting them to too many hours of useless testing. ( Not “useless” to the testing companies who are making billions on ftheir flawed product lines.)
Plan some field trips to the zoo, the library, the bookstor e,and lunch with Mom… better than providing InBloom the personal data that will rob your children’s privacy rights because of government “deals” with educational materials and processing companies.
Be part of the “cure” and get your friends to join you in helping to prevent the excessive standarized testing (child) abuse.
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