Long Island’s Newsday has a story about growing interest by parents in opting out of state testing.
It says that the terrible scores will increase the number of parents who don’t let the schools test their children.
William Johnson, the superintendent of Rockville Center district, says the scores are essentially useless.
They dropped so far for so many students that he can’t make any sense of them.
Meanwhile a spokesman for the New York State Education Department expresses surprise that some parents will not care to find out whether their children are on a path to being “college and career ready.”
I read that line and I thought about my grandson, now entering second grade.
I hope his parents opt him out next year. He will be 8. I don’t care if he is college-ready. Neither do they.
He is a great little guy.
So far, he loves school.
The state should keep its hands off him and let him learn with the natural joy that he brings to everything he does.
We have reached a point where it is time to say no. And mean it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The state will not tell me if my child is read for anything, ever. The testing results envelope is going back and I’m not even peeking. Don’t care and there is no meaning anyway.
The fear of opting out is … Will NYS put requirements on AP classes for schools not to allow students in if they opt out, or any advanced program? What about sports, etc. Will they try to reach that far?
If enough students do it together there is comfort in numbers.
Reblogged this on SCHOOLS MATTER @ THE CHALK FACE and commented:
Diane Ravitch is turning up some of the heat on “opting out” as a strategy of civil disobedience and protest. Many parents are no realizing that there is nothing to learn from test results, particularly in NY.
Well, conveniently enough, the good folks at United Opt Out just released a mighty comprehensive Back to school Protest Pack, replete with all sorts of good information on opting out as a form of protest and resistance. They also have posted opt out guides for EVERY STATE IN THIS UNION.
Now you don’t have any excuses. The information is there. Use it.
Chalk Face: Do you have a link to the opt out guides – state by state? Would love it if you posted this.
oops.. did not see the link right after your posting!
State Opt Out/Refusal Guides found HERE.
http://unitedoptout.com/opt-outrefusal-guides-for-each-state/
I pass these out to my students parents after school and always have a couple of copies with me to give out at district workshops to other teachers as well.
How can Texas teachers help? The ONLY thing I ever agreed with Governor Perry on is rejecting CC funding. But, Texas is charging ahead with it’s own “high” standards, most of which are developmentally and socially (read SES) inappropriate.
Unfortunately, I feel I must remain anonymous in a right-to-work state.
Isn’t it interesting that most of us were college-ready after high school and never had the hindrance of high-stakes testing to tell us so. I graduated high school in 1972 and went on to a successful first career before entering teaching in 1996. The only standardized test I ever took was the SAT, which I did not do as well as I hoped. I have since earned multiple Bachelor’s Degrees, two Master’s, and two Ph.D.’s.
I’ll bet most of New York’s students will be college-ready in spite of these tests!
Seconded. I’ve mentioned that before! And somehow it didn’t seem to hurt that I did not learn about prepositions and prepositional phrases until I was in 7th grade. Now, I’m supposed to teach such concepts in first grade. My former, now retired principal, about fell out of her chair laughing when I told her about that.
Keep the state off of the children? Did you just demand the end of government run schools?
(Only Six minutes on the grid!)
Opting out is THE BIGGEST THREAT the BROADIES face. Watch how they act to squash the OPT-OUT option.
If the CHOICE to opt-out ever gets some sustained momentum, you will
see real panic in the reformy world.
Letters, protests, boycotts, and blogs are helpful tools, however only exercising parental choice to opt-out will slay this beast.
Watch how the reformers start to put in servere restrictions and consequences for students who CHOOSE to opt-out.
Ironic, isn’t it, since CHOICE is all these “reformers” ever talk about. But heaven help us if we want to opt out of In Bloom or the testing! That can’t possibly happen!
It continues to amaze me that so many people, INCLUDING MANY PROFESSIONAL ELA EDUCRATS, take these tests seriously as accurate measures of reading and writing ability.
Such people think that reading and writing, like math, consists of a list of discrete, easily measurable skills like ability to find the main idea or ability to recognize evidence adduced to support a thesis. But that’s simply not so. This is an EXTREMELY widespread confusion among educrats.
Such skills–the kind that are to be found in state standards and the CCSS standards–are extraordinarily vague, and if one thinks about one of them carefully in application to specific texts, one finds that applying the skill to a passage in a particular text depends upon lots and lots of other abilities that are text-specific, on things like specific world knowledge related to the subject the author is treating, on understanding of specific grammatical or discourse structures that the author has used in a particular text, etc.
So, for example, if the author has used an absolute construction in a topic sentence, and the kid comes from a speech community where such constructions are not used, he or she can be thrown off entirely by that. Or if the passage deals with cups and saucers and the kid comes from a cultural community where people don’t have china sets, . . . you get the picture. Such problems are not obviated by applying Lexile or other readability measures to texts because those, too, are extremely crude. Texts with very high Lexiles can turn out to be quite readable, and texts with very low Lexiles can turn out to be extremely difficult. Case in point: “Paul Revere’s Ride,” by Longfellow, has a graduate school Lexile level but is typically taught to 5th graders. “I Heard a Fly Buzz,” by Emily Dickinson, has a very low Lexile level but is an extremely complex and difficult poem, easily as difficult for most people to read well as is, say, Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” The latter is conceptually difficult. If one is not familiar with the bodies of thought and cultural conditions to which the poem is reacting, one can’t follow it, at all.
So, the questions on these ELA tests test a lot of abilities that the authors of the test and those interpreting the results don’t even know that they are testing. The tests are extremely crude and inaccurate. The criterion-referenced ELA testing currently being done reminds me of trying to measure the components of a cell with a yardstick. The results cannot be trusted at all.
The whole reform agenda rests upon the assumption that these tests actually measure what they purport to measure. But that assumption is false, demonstrably so. It’s meaningless to say that kids have failed on a completely inaccurate measure.
cx: “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died” is conceptually difficult. If one is not familiar with the bodies of thought and cultural milieu to which the poem is reacting, one can’t follow it at all, even though the vocabulary and syntax are quite simple.
I used to think that the “cultural milieu” stuff on tests was bogus (I’m a white female, so I just didn’t get it) until two years ago when the state writing test asked the students to write an essay about whether to convince the district to buy tablets instead of books. That was the term: tablets. No definition or examples given. I teach in a low SES school, and a lot of them didn’t know what tablets meant in that context. Many did not own tablets anyway, so even if they had known what they were, they wouldn’t have known all of the ins and outs of what tablets do and how they work. There were not examples or even a picture of what the tablet was, and it threw kids off in a major way. I’m now a firm believer that tests have ENORMOUS cultural and racial bias. PS: I’ve never agreed with these tests anyway, but now I have ANOTHER reason to despise them.
I was extremely moved by this from the post:
He is a great little guy.
So far, he loves school.
The state should keep its hands off him and let him learn with the natural joy that he brings to everything he does.
Exactly. The damage being done by these tests is incalculable. To borrow a phrase from Richard Brautigan, the reformers should have ridden with Jesse James for all the joy that they are stealing from childhood.
The educrats who defend these high-stakes ELA tests also make the mistake of thinking that expertise in writing consists in acquisition of a list of abstract “writing skills.” And that leads to TERRIBLE curricula and pedagogical practices. One of the keys to good writing is having something to say–knowing something. If you know something and have something to say, and if you are reasonably competent with the language, and you read often, you’ll have to work pretty hard to produce a really awful piece of writing. But this emphasis on teaching writing skills disconnected from any specific content leads to awful, formulaic writing that will meet the requirements of the testing rubric but be nothing that anyone would want to read. The test takers, in order to make their test questions “fair” to everyone, have to make those questions so vague, so general, that they become TERRIBLE prompts for writing. Good writing teachers know that they are going to get nowhere if they don’t ensure, up front, that kids have something truly substantive to write about.
These scores are the result of junk science. The “science” of testing in reading and writing, as it stands today, is, as one commentator on this blog put it, akin to phrenology or astrology.
And don’t forget social studies. Students are being asked questions that I didn’t see until college. The idea that a 13 year old will understand the dynamics of American or world history at the level of a college major is absurd
Doesn’t anybody read E.D. Hirsch?
We don’t have social studies standardized tests at the moment in Utah, thank goodness. I’m just curious what the questions are like that you feel are over kids’ heads. I’m not accusing you of exaggerating; I just want some information as I fight those tests here.
Dear Dr. Ravitch: My granddaughter is about to turn six and is going into first grade. She is a remarkable child, the light of my life. Her father is an historian and a teacher-she has great background knowledge–it is fun to hear her extol on the swinging gate offence at the Battle of Gettysburg, even if her final commentary is that there were a lot of dead people. I pray she survives these next few years–before we see the tide turned. I have a recent picture of her in silhouette doing a handstand on an ocean beach which will be a part of my opening day talk with my teachers and staff. We need to re-claim childhood for our beloved children. We, as parents and grandparents, need to be a presence which insulates them from the utter obstruction of their education and of their innocent belief that school is supposed to be inviting and exciting for them.
Teresa,
You are a true hero in every sense of the word.
Thank you for your advocacy, truth, and courage . . .
The Opening Day talk we all wish we could hear instead of data, data, data: pitting one school against the other.
In addition to, “We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, we need to blah, blah blah. “Common Core this Common Core that”….
I dread opening day. Sorry to be negative.
Let’s compile a collection of comments, posts and inspirational quotes to keep on our iPads, laptops or in a notebook to read when the edudrones start babbling.
There’s also bull$hit bingo. You set up bingo cards with a free space and then surround it with reformy words and acronyms: CCS, rigor, college/ career ready, close reading, etc.
Pass them out to colleagues you trust and you secretly play BINGO while the suits babble incessantly……secretly signal (cough, move your chair, stand up and stretch).
Later you collect small prizes: chocolate, markers, stickers….
And before you know it another useless Indoctriniation session is over. 🙂
Linda,
San Diego teachers perfected BS Bingo in the late 1990s. You start with a list of cliches…..
I love it. I better get busy. I’ll scan Jeb’s speech. 🙂
Linda,
I agree with you, and you crack me up!
Pitch your idea to Milton Bradlee . . .
My first grader came home with “How to Chart” schoolwork. I wonder if he wrote this for a standardized test how the question would be graded?
I wonder what the reformers would write for how to care for students?
The following was all in his handwriting:
How to Chart
Title: How to Care for a Donkey
Step 1: First give it water
Step 2 Secent giv it lots of love
Step 3 Give it food
They wouldn’t have a clue! And in reality, we probably don’t really want to know their response. I love your son’s ideas for taking care of a donkey!!! I would give his work an A if he were in my first grade class! I would also LOVE to see his picture of the donkey! I bet if he weren’t having to do the work chart style, he could tell a really great story about the donkey…if fiction writing were still allowed.
Alabama Teacher,
Thank you for your kind words. When I read your posts, I often think it would be great if my son could have you for a teacher!
I second that…..AT is definitely a super star! Have a great school year. 🙂
I agree completely. Why do we say we need to compete globally, but we do not want to learn from those countries supposedly outperforming us? Please read the following and remember, Finland is one of the top scoring countries in math year after year. Let us read and learn.
Finland’s education expert Pasi Sahlberg
Finland’s Pasi Sahlberg is one of the world’s leading experts on school reform and the author of the best-selling “Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland?” In this piece he writes about whether the emphasis that American school reformers put on “teacher effectiveness” is really the best approach to improving student achievement.
He is director general of Finland’s Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation and has served the Finnish government in various positions and worked for the World Bank in Washington D.C. He has also been an adviser for numerous governments internationally about education policies and reforms, and is an adjunct professor of education at the University of Helsinki and University of Oulu. He can be reached at pasi.sahlberg@cimo.fi.
By Pasi Sahlberg
Many governments are under political and economic pressure to turn around their school systems for higher rankings in the international league tables. Education reforms often promise quick fixes within one political term. Canada, South Korea, Singapore and Finland are commonly used models for the nations that hope to improve teaching and learning in their schools. In search of a silver bullet, reformers now turn their eyes on teachers, believing that if only they could attract “the best and the brightest” into the teaching profession, the quality of education would improve.
“Teacher effectiveness” is a commonly used term that refers to how much student performance on standardized tests is determined by the teacher. This concept hence applies only to those teachers who teach subjects on which students are tested. Teacher effectiveness plays a particular role in education policies of nations where alternative pathways exist to the teaching profession.
In the United States, for example, there are more than 1,500 different teacher-preparation programs. The range in quality is wide. In Singapore and Finland only one academically rigorous teacher education program is available for those who desire to become teachers. Likewise, neither Canada nor South Korea has fast-track options into teaching, such as Teach for America or Teach First in Europe. Teacher quality in high-performing countries is a result of careful quality control at entry into teaching rather than measuring teacher effectiveness in service.
In recent years the “no excuses”’ argument has been particularly persistent in the education debate. There are those who argue that poverty is only an excuse not to insist that all schools should reach higher standards. Solution: better teachers. Then there are those who claim that schools and teachers alone cannot overcome the negative impact that poverty causes in many children’s learning in school. Solution: Elevate children out of poverty by other public policies.
For me the latter is right. In the United States today, 23 percent of children live in poor homes. In Finland, the same way to calculate child poverty would show that figure to be almost five times smaller. The United States ranked in the bottom four in the recent United Nations review on child well-being. Among 29 wealthy countries, the United States landed second from the last in child poverty and held a similarly poor position in “child life satisfaction.” Teachers alone, regardless of how effective they are, will not be able to overcome the challenges that poor children bring with them to schools everyday.
Finland is not a fan of standardization in education. However, teacher education in Finland is carefully standardized. All teachers must earn a master’s degree at one of the country’s research universities. Competition to get into these teacher education programs is tough; only “the best and the brightest” are accepted. As a consequence, teaching is regarded as an esteemed profession, on par with medicine, law or engineering. There is another “teacher quality” checkpoint at graduation from School of Education in Finland. Students are not allowed to earn degrees to teach unless they demonstrate that they possess knowledge, skills and morals necessary to be a successful teacher.
But education policies in Finland concentrate more on school effectiveness than on teacher effectiveness. This indicates that what schools are expected to do is an effort of everyone in a school, working together, rather than teachers working individually.
In many under-performing nations, I notice, three fallacies of teacher effectiveness prevail.
The first belief is that “the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.” This statement became known in education policies through the influential McKinsey & Company report titled “How the world’s best performing school systems come out on top”. Although the report takes a broader view on enhancing the status of teachers by better pay and careful recruitment this statement implies that the quality of an education system is defined by its teachers. By doing this, the report assumes that teachers work independently from one another. But teachers in most schools today, in the United States and elsewhere, work as teams when the end result of their work is their joint effort.
The role of an individual teacher in a school is like a player on a football team: all teachers are vital, but the culture of the school is even more important for the quality of the school. Team sports offer numerous examples of teams that have performed beyond expectations because of leadership, commitment and spirit. Take the U.S. ice hockey team in the 1980 Winter Olympics, when a team of college kids beat both Soviets and Finland in the final round and won the gold medal. The quality of Team USA certainly exceeded the quality of its players. So can an education system.
The second fallacy is that “the most important single factor in improving quality of education is teachers.” This is the driving principle of former D.C. schools chancellor Michele Rhee and many other “reformers” today. This false belief is central to the “no excuses” school of thought. If a teacher was the most important single factor in improving quality of education, then the power of a school would indeed be stronger than children’s family background or peer influences in explaining student achievement in school.
Research on what explains students’ measured performance in school remains mixed. A commonly used conclusion is that 10% to 20% of the variance in measured student achievement belongs to the classroom, i.e., teachers and teaching, and a similar amount is attributable to schools, i.e., school climate, facilities and leadership. In other words, up to two-thirds of what explains student achievement is beyond the control of schools, i.e., family background and motivation to learn.
Over thirty years of systematic research on school effectiveness and school improvement reveals a number of characteristics that are typical of more effective schools. Most scholars agree that effective leadership is among the most important characteristics of effective schools, equally important to effective teaching. Effective leadership includes leader qualities, such as being firm and purposeful, having shared vision and goals, promoting teamwork and collegiality and frequent personal monitoring and feedback. Several other characteristics of more effective schools include features that are also linked to the culture of the school and leadership: Maintaining focus on learning, producing a positive school climate, setting high expectations for all, developing staff skills, and involving parents. In other words, school leadership matters as much as teacher quality.
The third fallacy is that “If any children had three or four great teachers in a row, they would soar academically, regardless of their racial or economic background, while those who have a sequence of weak teachers will fall further and further behind”. This theoretical assumption is included in influential policy recommendations, for instance in “Essential Elements of Teacher Policy in ESEA: Effectiveness, Fairness and Evaluation” by the Center for American Progress to the U.S. Congress. Teaching is measured by the growth of student test scores on standardized exams.
This assumption presents a view that education reform alone could overcome the powerful influence of family and social environment mentioned earlier. It insists that schools should get rid of low-performing teachers and then only hire great ones. This fallacy has the most practical difficulties. The first one is about what it means to be a great teacher. Even if this were clear, it would be difficult to know exactly who is a great teacher at the time of recruitment. The second one is, that becoming a great teacher normally takes five to ten years of systematic practice. And determining the reliably of ‘effectiveness’ of any teacher would require at least five years of reliable data. This would be practically impossible.
Everybody agrees that the quality of teaching in contributing to learning outcomes is beyond question. It is therefore understandable that teacher quality is often cited as the most important in-school variable influencing student achievement. But just having better teachers in schools will not automatically improve students’ learning outcomes.
Lessons from high-performing school systems, including Finland, suggest that we must reconsider how we think about teaching as a profession and what is the role of the school in our society.
First, standardization should focus more on teacher education and less on teaching and learning in schools. Singapore, Canada and Finland all set high standards for their teacher-preparation programs in academic universities. There is no Teach for Finland or other alternative pathways into teaching that wouldn’t include thoroughly studying theories of pedagogy and undergo clinical practice. These countries set the priority to have strict quality control before anybody will be allowed to teach – or even study teaching! This is why in these countries teacher effectiveness and teacher evaluation are not such controversial topics as they are in the U.S. today.
Second, the toxic use of accountability for schools should be abandoned. Current practices in many countries that judge the quality of teachers by counting their students’ measured achievement only is in many ways inaccurate and unfair. It is inaccurate because most schools’ goals are broader than good performance in a few academic subjects. It is unfair because most of the variation of student achievement in standardized tests can be explained by out-of-school factors. Most teachers understand that what students learn in school is because the whole school has made an effort, not just some individual teachers. In the education systems that are high in international rankings, teachers feel that they are empowered by their leaders and their fellow teachers. In Finland, half of surveyed teachers responded that they would consider leaving their job if their performance would be determined by their student’s standardized test results.
Third, other school policies must be changed before teaching becomes attractive to more young talents. In many countries where teachers fight for their rights, their main demand is not more money but better working conditions in schools. Again, experiences from those countries that do well in international rankings suggest that teachers should have autonomy in planning their work, freedom to run their lessons the way that leads to best results, and authority to influence the assessment of the outcomes of their work. Schools should also be trusted in these key areas of the teaching profession.
To finish up, let’s do one theoretical experiment. We transport highly trained Finnish teachers to work in, say, Indiana in the United States (and Indiana teachers would go to Finland). After five years–assuming that the Finnish teachers showed up fluent in English and that education policies in Indiana would continue as planned–we would check whether these teachers have been able to improve test scores in state-mandated student assessments.
I argue that if there were any gains in student achievement they would be marginal. Why? Education policies in Indiana and many other states in the United States create a context for teaching that limits (Finnish) teachers to use their skills, wisdom and shared knowledge for the good of their students’ learning. Actually, I have met some experienced Finnish-trained teachers in the United States who confirm this hypothesis. Based on what I have heard from them, it is also probable that many of those transported Finnish teachers would be already doing something else than teach by the end of their fifth year – quite like their American peers.
Conversely, the teachers from Indiana working in Finland–assuming they showed up fluent in Finnish–stand to flourish on account of the freedom to teach without the constraints of standardized curricula and the pressure of standardized testing; strong leadership from principals who know the classroom from years of experience as teachers; a professional culture of collaboration; and support from homes unchallenged by poverty.
Thank you for reading this paper and let us pray for our children and grandchildren.
Concerned Grandparent
To “7th grade teacher in a Texas title 1 public school” How can you help when you feel threatened at your job? Be creative– Try partnering with others who live outside of your immediate area- or leaving flyers at the food court of the local mall, under windshields at movie theaters, or -my favorite- taping flyers on the back of the doors of bathroom stalls. Continue being active on facebook and other social media sites in a way in which you cannot be identified. Write/email your legislator. And you can always tell us of local places that you wished you could contact, and we will be your voice. Whatever your views, whatever the cause, it is a shame that one cannot voice an opinion without risking employment. Respectful discussion of real issues should never be considered a threat. That, alone, should be a red flag that something is seriously wrong- and all the more reason that we need to speak up.
Dr. Ravitch,
My son is entering kindergarten in TN. He attends a public Montessori magnet school. He is a bright little boy who tells people “school is lame” and he already informed his teacher, “I won’t be taking standardized tests, I will be absent.” So while I am quite proud that my son will stand up for himself when it comes to testing, I am very sad indeed that this is a conversation we are having with our kindergarten son, whose classmates will be expected to take the SAT-10 under the leadership of Kevin Huffman.
What a bright young boy you have. Nurture that spirit of independence. And don’t let him take the state tests until they are designed for diagnostic purposes, not for punishing teachers.
The STATE and US Dept of Ed should OPT out – at least until WE (not “they”) get it right. Moratorium on excessive high-stakes testing for one year (at least) and get back to the purpose of assessment, benchmarking, reliability.
19 Do-Nows for Albany and US Dept of Ed
http://thinkingaboutschools-jhstlny.blogspot.com/
At maximum, not minimum, valid, fair tests should only be at transition years to benchmark how the whole system is doing – alignment and gaps.
Tests should not make a child say “I used to be smart”
If children opt out they are forced to sit through the exam and not read or write or do any activity. This is the brutality of the system. I remember when my Muslim kids did not eat on their holy fast Ramadan. I allowed them to stay in the classroom during lunch. This is how it should be handled.