Jose Vilson is one of New York City’s best teacher
bloggers. In
this post, he notes that Mayor Bloomberg experienced two
major setbacks within a matter of days: First, his education legacy
collapsed along with the new state test scores showing that most
students are “failing.” The Mayor felt compelled to defend the
lower scores, calling them “very good news,” when he should have
been calling foul play. Second, a federal judge said that the
Mayor’s prized policy of allowing police to “stop and frisk” anyone
at any time was unconstitutional, and ordered that the Police
Department must be monitored to see that it carries out stops in a
legal manner, one that is not racially discriminatory. Vilson
brilliantly connects these two seemingly disparate results. He
could not believe that most of his own students had “failed” and he
was suspicious of just how high the bar was raised and whether it
made any sense. Time to stop and frisk the test scores, not young
men who happen to be black or Hispanic and minding their own
business. For a terrific round-up of the best blogs about New York
State’s testing fiasco, read
Larry Ferlazzo’s roundup. Larry is a master cataloguer of
all things education.
A site to discuss education and democracy
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No real accountability and consequences for him and his crimes against the people.
That’s the worst part.
Bloomberg: a hateful, horrid little mad scientist whose evil laboratory doubles as a bank. . . . . . a namby-pamby dictator who finds enough aggression in himself to terrorize the middle and working classes, a little lord Fauntleroy whose powdered tushy sits upon piles of cash that was accumulated by not paying a fair share of taxes, a lizard-faced, frog-mouthed reptile slinking and sliming in and out of poltics, a despot whose personal army has become the NYPD Blue, and a billionaire who has as much disconnect as Louis the 14th and Marie, his patisserie-obsessed wife.
Ah, to see Bloomberg go and leave his post as mayor is like getting rid of the shingles, Montezuma’s revenge, and hepatitis, all with one prescription . . . .
May history judge him harshly and severely . . . .
But what do you REALLY think, Robert?
All kidding aside, yes, the man truly is a petty little monster.
Michael Fiorillo,
I was just getting started . . . .
🙂
We have gotten so comfortable with critiquing the test taker. It is time we start critiquing the test maker! Great read!
Robert Rendo – Marie Antoinette was the wife of Louis the 16th not Louis the 14th.
Thank you!
I meant Louis the 16th. . . . . my apologies.
I did not envy those charged with actually creating the new exams. Imagine being in their position.
You are told that you have a few months to create a single set of exams that every child in the country will take, exams that will reliably and validly test multi-grade standards in ELA and mathematics that have not actually been instantiated, yet, in curricula and pedagogy. And you are told that the whole point of these exams that they are to be used to “hold people accountable,” i.e., that the futures of students, teachers, administrators, and schools are to hang on the exam results.
I’ve said from the beginning that this was going to be a plane crash of unprecedented proportions. The recent experience in New York was entirely predictable. EVERYONE, reformers and their opponents alike–that is everyone with an IQ slightly higher than that of a head of lettuce–knows that any set of tests put together under such circumstances will inevitably be a disaster, and the reform advocates are becoming quite concerned that their multi-billiion-dollar craft is going to blow up in mid air when millions of parents are told that everything else they know about their kids’ attainments from every other source is wrong because the tests say so.
Fortunately for the reform crowd, their wind-up toys in Washington are in a position to rebuild in mid flight the airplane they have us all on. So, the INSANE NCLB Lake Woebegone-esque requirement that ALL students reach proficiency by 2014 was “fixed” with waivers, and now schools are being offered a respite before the high stakes for the new exams kick in (well, something of a respite, for in district after district across the country, everything is now driven by the test data, which is sort of like forgoing the rivets and tying the sheet metal of the fuselage onto the aircraft with fishing line; these exams, which would be a lot less dangerous if they were diagnostic and not high stakes, are not appropriate for their intended use).
It would be very interesting to see a real Failure Means and Modes Analysis of the high-stakes tests. There is so much involved with these that has never been dreamt of in the reformers’ philosophy!
So, which of our fine reformy foundations is going to fund that (as opposed to another slick piece of marketing disguised as research)?
Correction: Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA)
Click to access FailureModesandEffectsAnalysis_FMEA_1.pdf
My proposal that the high-stakes competency-based tests and testing system be subjected to failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) is intended quite seriously. We shouldn’t be putting kids, teachers, administrators, and schools on Reformy Airlines without knowing, first, that doing so is safe, and there is very good reason to think that it isn’t. A FMEA would look at the intended functions of the tests (not of the kids), possible modes of failure of those functions, effects of the failures, severity of the failures, probability of those failures, causes of the failures, probability of detection of the failures, costs and means of correcting for those failures, corrective action, and THEN, THEN, at possible implementation.
This is just what was NOT done in the roll-out of the new standards and tests.
However, it wasn’t done for the rollout of the state standards and tests that preceded the CCSS either. And that’s one of the reasons why those failed, miserably, to live up to the promises made by the folks who were promoting NCLB more than a decade ago. Remember all that? The promise: All students will demonstrate proficiency on these exams by 2014.
The more sober among us knew that that was crazy talk way back then. But how much crazier is it to look back upon that failed standards-and-testing regimen, which has turned our K-12 schools into test prep factories, and to say, “Gee, we ought to be doing a lot more of that?”