California officials want to end state testing as they prepare to phase in Common Core testing. They don’t want students subject to double testing. Now the state is locked in a showdown with Arne Duncan, who has warned the state that he might cut off federal aid if it stops state testing. Yesterday the state senate ignored Duncan’s threat and passed a bill to move forward with the plan to end current tests.
In his statement, Duncan said in part:
“A request from California to not measure the achievement of millions of students this year is not something we could approve in good conscience. Raising standards to better prepare students for college and careers is absolutely the right thing to do, but letting an entire school year pass for millions of students without sharing information on their schools’ performance with them and their families is the wrong way to go about this transition. No one wants to over-test, but if you are going to support all students’ achievement, you need to know how all students are doing.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The LA Times article states that “California would be moving up its timetable for the computerized tests by a year, leaving some school districts scrambling to prepare. The plan also would result in the suspension of test scores for at least a year during a trial run of the new exams.”
Does anyone know how much more the computerized testing with cost California, and who stands to gain from computerized testing? I am very curious about the cost differential of the current standardized test vs. future CC computerized testing for the state.
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Microsoft stands to benefit, and Apple if the iPad plan goes through. can’t think of too many others who would benefit.
Arne Duncan is on some sort of power trip, using the Department of Education in ways it was not created to be used. When are we going to wake up to the fact that the federal government has a limnited role in education, and should not be threatening to cut off funding when states are doing what is right for kids.
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Does the money California stands to gain actually cover the cost of implementation?
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Ridiculous. I was planning to use this year as a transition year between the old science standards and the NGSS before it gets officially adopted. How does testing my students on the old or new standards help measure their achievement in this case? If I’m supposed to just stick to the old standards, when do I get to experiment with the new ones?
Meanwhile, on my campus of 900 students, we have 2 computer labs, one of which has 20 computers and the other of which has 30. Classes are 25-40 students. Who is going to provide the money to get enough computers for everyone on campus to take these tests?
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Duncan, stay out of our business. We don’t want to be forced into race for the bottom mandates. Go coerce another state into following your dictates.
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Take a pass on the federal money – it’s blood money anyway.
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“. . . in good conscience”
Duncan wouldn’t know what that was if it bit him in the arse! For good reasons. If he knew what a good conscience is or had one he wouldn’t be able to do the bidding of the edudeformers.
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It is naive to be dependent on Federal money and then be surprised by attempts at Federal control. If you are dependent on a rich uncle sending you an allowance every month to support your lifestyle you will have to endure his interference in your life and lectures on your shortcomings. If you don’t like that tell him you don’t need his support and send his check back to him.
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Your analogy is spurious. The uncle (In this case: Sam) is made rich by money he collects from us younguns (citizens and such)-
Our family agreed that uncle kicks in for educatin’ us cousins out in the hinterlands without tellin’ us how to do that.
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It is very troubling to think that our nation’s secretary of education believes that standardized tests are the only way to measure student achievement or school success. This is compounded by the fact that our nation has at least 50 different standardized tests by which we derive the same conclusions about achievement and performance. Taking a year off to transition to new standards makes sense for kids, schools, states, and our nation.
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Vetting those standards before foisting them on everyone makes even more.
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Exactly,
Standardized testing is expensive and worse than useless. The results of the tests, though reported to students are not detailed enough to benefit them, certainly not in a timely fashion, so what are they really for? Why for comparisons with other students, schools, states, and nations. Then the content of the tests are driving education. Bottom line is that we have no consensus about what our children should know and be able to do when they graduate from HS. It’s not a simple question and, since getting an education is an individual achievement, the individual student needs to buy into and own his/her education. Local control which gives teachers the freedom to teach with general support in the way of standards and guidelines on curriculum, plus well educated teachers is the way to go. This dictation of “standards” from on high being imposed on all the children in America is terribly wrong. It kills the interest and enthusiasm of teachers for teaching and of students for learning. This national, centralized approach is the same thing that killed Russian free enterprise and their economy with the 5-year plans, has destroyed education in Mexico and will NOT work in America. By taking the responsibility for education away from parents, teachers, and the local school boards, they will loose personal ownership and game the system, cheat on the tests and think they are getting (giving) an education. Arne Duncan is acting like a wrongheaded egomaniac. Can he possible believe what he is doing will help America’s youth become educated?????
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Just another variation/manifestation of the problems raised when federal education $ is tied to substantive education policies. Either the feds should be making the education policy decisions or the states/local govts should be making the education policy decisions. Having both levels of govt involved in substantive policy making is a recipe for disaster.
And, it’s the feds who are the wrong-doers here. No one ever made a convincing case demonstrating that the federal govt was more qualified than the state/local govts to make substantive education policy. NCLB might have been acceptable if it had merely required testing without attaching federally-enforced consequences to the testing. Such federally-required testing would have been defensible on the grounds that the state/local govts had a vested interest in covering up the inadequacies of their public schools and that federally-required testing (with no federally-enforced consequences) would have addressed this problem by giving state/local citizens information regarding the adequacy of the state/local education policies so that the citizens could more knowledgably determine whether to press for school reform at the state/local level.
There are compelling reasons why the federal govt should determine US military policies, foreign policies, fiscal policies, food/drug safety policies, and interstate commerce policies. Having each state/local govt determine its own policies regarding these subjects would be inefficient and often counterproductive. However, there is little, if any, compelling reason for the US to have the same education policies applied in every state/locality. The US got along for 200+ years with state/local govts determining the education policies and, generally, the US population was well-educated by world standards. Even today, the US population is well-educated by world standards if the comparison is done based on income levels — i.e., affluent US citizens compared to affluent French citizens; poor US citizens compared to poor French citizens. Also, given that voters in federal elections will almost certainly focus largely on military, foreign policy, and economic issues; education policy issues will be at most a footnote in the federal election campaigns. By contrast, education policy is often a core issue in state and local elections. Therefore, to the extent that the federal govt becomes involved in setting education policies, those education policies will be largely removed from voter control. Indeed, few of the teachers — or citizens generally — who voted for Obama in 2008 had any idea that his administration would be pushing high-stakes testing/teacher discharge as the administration’s principal education policy.
The feds should get out of substantive education policy and leave it to the states/local govts.
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Arne Duncan is not an educator. He is an arse. And I don’t care if that is polite, or professional. We are in the position we are in, in part, because we have been polite and professional. Time to start getting real.
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Please colleagues note that this is another Ellen whom we welcome to the debate…but my posts will always identify me as
Ellen Lubic
and…as director of
Joining Forces for Education
joiningforces4ed@aol.com
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But surely we can all agree that Arne is an arse.
He’s so over the top awful that it’s not even impolite to word it that way.
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Can you read Arne? Does Finland force students and schools to take standardized tests every year? Do they grade their teachers on the same standardized test results? Teachers know how well their students are doing despite a lack of “devices” to tell them how they are doing. Education is not about COMPETING Arne. It’s not about humiliation. It’s about creating an environment where teachers are empowered to teach and kids are encouraged to reach their full potential – you need to leave and take all your friends with you. NOW.
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AMEN!!!! And thank you Elizabeth.
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Proud of my state. Just had to say it.
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Please excuse this very long posting.
This latest statement by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan needs to be viewed in context.
If you read his speech to the April 2013 American Education Research Association he is: for standardized testing and against it; it is useful and not useful and somewhat useful; education is all about testing and not all about testing and somewhat about testing; tests measure and mismeasure and somewhat measure learning and teaching; and to get to the point before his distinguished audience, schools and test experts need to get their testing act together. The clincher: “Some schools have an almost obsessive culture around testing, and that hurts their most vulnerable learners and narrows the curriculum. It’s heartbreaking to hear a child identify himself as “below basic” or “I’m a one out of four.””
Link: http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/choosing-right-battles-remarks-and-conversation
What is one to make of all this ‘word salad’ that wanders all over the place and seeks to placate and deflect? Teresa Watanabe let the cat out of the bag in the LATIMES of 8-29-13, “State academic performance slips, but L.A. Unified improves.” Her first paragraph: “California public schools lost ground this year in overall academic performance for the first time in a decade, but more than half met state goals for achievement on reading and math standardized tests.”
So just how important are standardized tests in the overall scheme of things?
“The achievement ratings, called the Academic Performance Index, are based on a 1,000-point scale compiled from standardized test scores. They are widely viewed as a comprehensive marker of school quality, affecting property values and triggering penalties, among other effects.”
Link: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-api-scores-20130829,0,447246.story
In other words, the quality of schools and student achievement and teacher effectiveness = scores on high-stakes standardized tests.
Am I exaggerating? Taking him out of context? Obviously not, for even when for good reasons—within the very strictures imposed by high-stakes standardized testing!—state officials take obvious action to forego for a short time one round of the Holy Edumetrics of $tudent $ucce$$ in order to prepare for another, the Secretary of Education suddenly grows a backbone and speaks his mind plain and simple:
“If California moves forward with a plan that fails to assess all its students, as required by federal law,” Duncan said in a statement released Monday night, “the Department will be forced to take action, which could include withholding funds from the state.”
Link: [the second above in Diane’s posting]
One of the great functions of this blog: to make it possible to put such folks on the spot with their own public words and actions!
Duane Swacker: I think this is a rare instance of you and I parting company on measuring qualities by quantities. I think that blind acceptance of the all-importance of the scores of high-stakes standardized testing can give us an excellent measure of the LACK of: creativity, critical thinking, curiosity, civic-mindedness, compassion, empathy, courage, imagination, and humility [not to mention others]. [taken from Gerald Bracey, EDUCATION HELL, 2009, p. 4].
Just look at the current Secretary of Education. He passed the high-stakes standardized test of “LACK of” with flying colors! He scored a perfect 100 out of 100!
🙂
Lastly, on the misuse and overuse of standardized testing in general, from THE MISMEASURE OF EDUCATION (2013) by Jim Horn and Denise Wilburn, p. 147:
“When the right thing can only be measured poorly, it tends to cause the wrong thing to be measured, only because it can be measure well. And it is often much worse to have a good measurement of the wrong thing—especially when, as is so often the case, the wrong thing will in fact be used as an indicator of the right thing—than to have poor measurements of the right things. —John Tukey mathematician Bell Labs and Princeton University”
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Admiral Ackbar-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F4qzPbcFiA
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“but letting an entire school year pass’
Why can’t we try one year without the reformer-mandated tests, in one state?
I was told school reformers were innovators. We’ve been churning out their standardized tests for more than a decade now. Why won’t they consider an experiment that comes from outside narrow, dogmatic reform circles? They have nearly the whole county experimenting with students determining teacher scores. My kid is part of that experiment.
This “marketplace of ideas” seems to offer only one product.
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Someone should apply for a billionaire ed grant for a study on “a year without standardized tests”.
Say it’s a bold and innovative push against the status quo to defy the government schools lobby low expectations 🙂
Wouldn’t it be great if they bit?
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Follow the $$$$$! It’s about $$$$$ and control of the masses. Arne is just a mouthpiece for corporate greed and control.
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As an executive officer of one of CA’s two teacher unions I am right in the middle of this effort at brinksmanship. We published an op-ed in the Sacramento Bee, CA’s “political newspaper,” calling for a multi-year moratorium on high stakes use of state tests just a week before the legislation putting a moratorium into law, as CA’s schools are now transitioning to CCSS and new (Smarter Balanced) assessments. The new assessments, obviously, have not completed field testing nor have they been statistically analyzed for validity and reliability. So it’s a question of using old tests based on standards no one is teaching to, or new tests for which there has been little professional development, no CCSS aligned materials, and a widespread lack of technological capacity (Smarter Balanced is “computer adaptive”). Immediately there were charges that this was “a war on accountability” and a refusal of the state to “be transparent about student achievement.” One group, a shill for the charter industry, ironically told the truth when it charged that without test scores they would have no labels of “failing schools” with which to propagandize parents into signing petitions for the “parent trigger” so they could turn public schools over to private sector charter management companies. It is more than obvious who has Arne Duncan’s ear here. It is the self-styled school reform industry and ruthlessly ambitions superintendents like the one in LAUSD.
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They’ll close 50 public schools without batting an eye in Chicago, privatize a whole city school system in New Orleans, dissolve school boards in district after district, put vouchers in everywhere, but God forbid we should take the giant leap of allowing a single state to drop standardized tests for a year. That’s too risky-might lead to all kinds of unintended consequences.
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Is the term “educational malpractice” too strong a term?
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No, I’d say that sums it up perfectly. Now, what to do about it?
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I gave the CST last year to my second graders (7 and 8 year olds, isn’t that awful?). I had been teaching from Common Core math materials all year. I was very much aware of the large amount of information/skills that the new curriculum was not covering which would be on the test. The district said, “Oh, you’ll be surprised at what the new curriculum covers!”. They said, “It’s okay, we know the scores will fall!”. Why would we want to give the test this year when we are even more fully involved in teaching Common Core? Doesn’t Arne understand that the tests actually have to cover specific things and that the specific things we are teaching in Common Core don’t match up with what is tested in CST? Arne appears to think that the CST is a generic measurement of “progress.” It’s not.
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Arne doesn’t care, this ushers in every bit of failure that he intends for CA. It’s already happened elsewhere, look at NY and Chicago.
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If you really want to get to the heart of the matter, here it is: Duncan’s goal is failure for all kids, this enables him to usher in his type of Rahm style “reform”. In California, while the legislature and education establishment may have bought into the Common Core Kool-Aid, they still have lofty goals for it’s success. For the most part, the intentions in CA are good, they just do not see the bigger picture. Duncan sees the impossible situation of preparing kids for tests that are not designed for kids to pass or even be able to take under the current technology situation in CA AND if he can force them to take tests that are not compatible with the new Common Core goals at the same time, all the better. Failure is assured this way and Duncan and the reformers get everything they want at breakneck speed.
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