Jason Stanford has written a brilliant analysis of the efforts by state officials in Texas and California to cut back on unnecessary testing, and of Secretary Duncan’s rejection of both requests.
Just in terms of federalism, this situation shows how Washington has now taken control out of the hands of the states, which can no longer decide what is best for their students, even though they put up 90% of the funding.
In California, state officials want to drop the state tests so they can make the transition to Common Core testing, but Duncan said no. The California legislature voted to drop the state tests. This should lead to an interesting showdown between the state and the federal government. Someone might even remember the tenth amendment to the Constitution.
In Texas, state officials developed a plan to test the kids who needed testing and to reduce testing for the kids who don’t.
Stanford writes:
Meanwhile in Texas, the Department of Education rejected a common-sense reform in, of all places, Texas. Legislators and Gov. Rick Perry recognized that it wasn’t necessary to force every child to take every test every year to keep them on track. Under current law, a Texas schoolchild has to pass 17 tests to get to high school. This takes months out of the school year, costs millions of dollars, and produces data of dubious value.
For example, a child who passes a reading test one year is overwhelmingly likely to pass it the next year, according to data from the Texas Education Agency. The legislature asked for a federal waiver to let students who passed their state standardized tests in the 3rd and 5thgrades to skip the tests in the 4th, 6th and 7th grades. Teachers could focus on those kids who needed more help, students who had mastered the work would be freed up to learn new things, and taxpayers would save $13.4 million over two years.
This was a great example of government getting out of its own way, but there was a hitch. Because the Texas law conflicted with No Child Left Behind, Texas needed permission from the U.S. Department of Education to stop giving tests to kids who did not need them in order to produce data that told us nothing.
Unfortunately, Obama’s Education Department said no.
Gosh, when even Texas thinks there is too much testing, that should say something about how far we have wandered from common sense.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Gosh, when even Texas thinks there is too much testing, that should say something about how far we have wandered from common sense.”
Quote of the day.
A bit off topic, but New York Senate Education Committee is at this moment having a hearing on common core and testing, and there is live feed on their website. (10-2, today) It will be available for viewing in their video collection as well. Amazing testimony. Worth viewing.
Do you have a link for us?
http://www.nysenate.gov/event/2013/sep/17/regents-reform-agenda-assessing-our-progress
Someone might even remember the tenth amendment to the Constitution.
That’ll be the day.
The Common Core State Standards
common, adj. Base, ordinary, of little value
core, adj. Indigestible, of little or no nutritional value, and dangerous if swallowed. From the inner part of the fruit, the pit, or core.
state, adj. The Leviathan, whose purpose is top-down control. Think Orwell’s Ingsoc.
standards, n. Invariant requirements, as for parts to be identically milled by a machine
I hope this clarifies things.
“I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture. . . . Such men [as Henry Ford, who was a great funder of eugenics programs, btw] do not always realize that the adoration which they receive is not a tribute to their personality but to their power or their pocketbook.
—— Albert Einstein, Saturday Evening Post interview, 10/26/1929″
cx: Item three should read “Of the Leviathan,” of course
You win Post of the Year!
Brilliant!!
Thanks, Neanderthal. And did you guys interbreed with Cro-magnons or not? Inquiring minds want to know.
Yeah, that Tenth amendment. Lost in the shuffle somehow along with parents losing control of local schools. Hope that it gets restored soon.
It will be a struggle to get there, Mark. It may be that we shall simply have to wait until the whole totalitarian mechanism that has been built collapses of its own dead weight, crushing millions of our nation’s children and all real pedagogical and curricular innovation in the process.
Agree with the struggle aspect, but hope not for the latter.
Always bet on entropy.
FLERP: That is hilarious. Love it.
Personally, FLERP! I always bet on Ol Ma Nature to come through in(to) the end.
Please google Mike Miles—there is news about his job as superintendent in Dallas–but I am unable to forward to you the two articles about his reprimand from the board expected on Thursday of this week—9/19—and an editorial about his poor communication skills.
The vast majority of Dallasites want him gone. He violated his contract. An investigation that cost $100,000 concluded that he violated the contract.
Todd Williams (formerly of Uplift and Goldman Sachs) who “advises” the mayor on ed issues (inexplicable) wants Miles to stay. Imagine that.
Parents have no control and the school board serves themselves and a handful of plutocrats.
Miles is a Broad Toad. He wants more tests.
So Uncle Arne said “No.”
Who cares? What happens now that the bribes, I mean grants, are no longer that big a priority? What can Arne actually DO about it, other than withhold the money California and Texas don’t seem to care about any more?
Several years ago, Utah legislators ran a bill that, if passed, would have opted Utah out of all NCLB stuff. It actually would have saved money: Utah spends far more on complying with whatever federal mandate for education than it actually gets from the feds.
The federal DOE sent all kinds of bigwigs out to talk the legislature out of it, and the bill failed. I’m so sad it didn’t pass: I would have loved to see the DOE twist in the wind on that.
“This should lead to an interesting showdown between the state and the federal government. Someone might even remember the tenth amendment to the Constitution.”
A lawsuit would be interesting. It’s been forever since I thought about the 10th Amendment, but I remember enough to know that the federal government’s powers have a lot of potential sources and don’t need to be expressly enumerated in the Constitution, and that it’s the rare case where conditional financial grants are found to be coercive. So this isn’t an issue where the analysis is over as soon as someone cites the 10th Amendment. But fascinating stuff.
It’s been forever since anybody thought of the 10th amendment, it seems. Federal government powers were, of course, wildly and vastly expanded by various decisions that rested on the Commerce Clause. Bush and Obama and a succession of Education Secretary apparatchiks have completely overreached the regulatory authority of the Education Department and have employed an enormous amount of Doublespeak as cover: e.g., “state” standards. I have little hope for legal redress. The courts have been primary instruments of the extension of totalitarian authority to the federal government. It’s darkly ironic that the proponents of this centralization come, these days, mostly from the right. But hey, there is money to be made in centralizing this stuff and, as Arne’s Chief of Staff says, creating a single set of standards so that products can be “brought to scale.” Big-box education, anyone?
as in “big box store”
The Walmartization of American education. You’re going to love our everyday “standards”
I don’t think I’d characterize the general extension of federal government over the last 100 years as totalitarian, assuming by “totalitarian” you mean a central state that exercises total control over society and individuals. But I can’t mount a strenuous rebuttal to the argument that things seem to be trending that way in the long view, in the sense that in the last 100 years, the federal government has grown dramatically and generally seeks to exercise more, rather than less, control over society and individuals. Plus arguably it’s notable that the biggest increases in the scope of our central government were driven by war (WWI and WWII — at least I believe that’s the case). And when one considers the NSA and Google, yes, there’s a definite Orwellian trend to the relationship between me and the federal government. Plus we have always been at war with Eurasia.
Well, I suppose that you could call avalanches, mudslides, and volcanic eruptions tendencies as well.
: )
And no, this is not the old states’ rights quarrel–this is not the Kennedy boys versus Faubus and Wallace. The feds have legitimate authority to intervene when basic Constitutional freedoms are being violated at the state or local level. But what we are seeing is the development of a federal power without limit or check.
Obama and Duncan have effectively, for example, found a way to work around the strict language of the law that prevents the Department of Education from setting standards and making curricula. They have used a lawyerly subversion of the clear intent of the legislation that established the Dept. of Ed.. And what they have done happens to coincide with the financial interests of the billionaire boys’ club (go figure).
The thing about distant, powerful, centralized authorities is that they are not only inevitably CORRUPT but also inevitably STUPID. In the case of the standards-and-testing deforms wrought by Barry and Arne and their buddies in the oligarchy, the actual effects of these have differed and will differ wildly, dramatically, from what some of them think that those effects will be. From their rarified perches, they do not know enough about what actually happens, as a result of these deforms, in this lesson someone is preparing, in that student conference, in that textbook table of contents, in teacher trainings, in classrooms, in educational publishing houses–what actually occurs on the ground, where, because of these, pedagogy and curricula become grotesquely distorted, essential autonomy disappears, and innovation dies. From the distance from which they view things, clarity is lost, big time. Things look simple. Make some standards, Test to them. Hold people accountable. What could be simpler than that? But these ideas turn out to be simple minded and extraordinarily dangerous. They have failure modes and effects that those pushing them, unvetted and untried, on the rest of us don’t understand, that they don’t understand at all. These guys are destroying the teaching of English in the United States, but many of them have no notion that they are doing so. They think, ironically, that they are on the side of the angels.
Some of them, of course just don’t give a damn. They are simply willing tools of the plutocrats, sycophants who see opportunities to cash in on the ed biz. Toadying to plutocrats pays very, very handsomely, always has.
Figuring out which is which, which are villains and which are simply fools, is difficult. I won’t hazard to guess.
Obama is a former professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago. One would expect a person with such a background to have some respect for Constitutional limits on executive and federal power. BO has shown little of that. His decision to go to Congress on Syria was an exception, one that, given his record so far, I suspect was more a play in the diplomatic chess game than it was true respect for limits on presidential war powers. But he did articulate a belief in those limits, publicly, and for that we should all be grateful. Would that he were so respectful of those limits in many other areas, such as this one. His Dept of Ed is a disgrace, and it is doing terrible damage. The current Dept of Education will be looked back upon as Russia now looks back on Lysenko. It’s time for states to rise up, one by one, and start saying no.
Excellent goodthink, comrade FLERP.
Looking forward to the CCSS-aligned curricula delivered by Minitrue through the InBloom prolefeed.
And you are of course, correct. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
You sure that’s not MiniMe who is delivering that insanity?
So whatever candidate is up next for President has to really be put on the line about who they would want as Sec. of Ed and why and how and so forth. And we have to just hang on until that happens, I guess.
? We have to be loud about it before electing the next person. Like, they need to realize they won’t get any teacher’s vote unless they assure a Sec. of Ed who is not unreasonable (and this Texas issue could be a good case in point).
Joanna… good point but oh what to do… don’t forget it was our unions (both UFT and NEA) that sold teachers out. The NEA was immediate to support Obama without even asking the teachers and before Obama said anything about his public education intentions. OUR UNIONS MUST BE MADE TO UNDERSTAND THAT THEY REPRESENT TEACHERS. In this case, the unions represented a very small group of people (those part of the upper echelon of union administration). It is crucial that no candidate be supported unless the candidate has the majority of teachers’ support.
The US Department of Corporate Education must be abolished.
Otherwise known as the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth.
Minitrue for short.
Here is a great line in this author’s piece that says it all, “Sec. Duncan’s refusal to play ball with California and Texas shows that the federal government is committed to the ideology of assessment for the sake of the data, not the learning”…
The only other point I would add is to revise this slightly to read as follows:
“Sec. Duncan’s refusal to play ball with California and Texas shows that the federal government is committed to the ideology of assessment for the sake of the data and PROFIT, not the learning…”
I’m bothered as much or more by what Texas wants to do here as I am by Duncan’s decisions (although I completely agree that states should have much more control here). The idea of only testing those students who need it will set up a system that is painfully classist and racist, even more than our current system. At the moment it is not uncommon to find kill and drill instruction in schools with many low-income students and innovative, problem based learning happening in schools with more financially well-off students. Only testing those students who are struggling will simply exacerbate this. Testing students more often will not make them more successful. It will simply mean they spend more school days taking tests and preparing for tests. We can do better for all our kids.
C. Finn has a new article up on Fordham institute. Here is the first paragraph.
Can anyone tell me what he is trying to say or what point he is trying to make?
quote: “No, I’m not suggesting that social studies kill people, but the recent emission by the National Council for the Social Studies of “guidance for enhancing the rigor of K–12 civics, economics, geography, and history” does have this in common with the agreement that the U.S. and Russia reached in Geneva on Saturday regarding Syria’s chemical weapons: both are termed “frameworks” and neither will do any good unless many other people do many other things that they are highly unlikely to do.”
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this post and Texas and finally had to just write about it to process all the thoughts: http://emdffi.blogspot.com/2013/09/i-promise-i-really-dont-like-testing.html