In this post, EduShyster takes on Joe Nocera, columnist for the Néw York Times. As pundits are inclined to do, he relies on anecdotes and a discredited study to pronounce that teacher education is the cause of our nation’s educational decline.
Please let Joe know that our nation’s schools are not declining. Please, someone, send him a copy of my book.
Forget it, I will ask my publisher to do it.
It is fine for columnists to declaim about education, but they should have the facts before they do, not anecdotes
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Someone needs to remind Joe Nocera that the plural of anecdote is not evidence.
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Nocera is actively misleading his readers yet he claims higher education is failing? The NYTimes & Nocera’s friends in the 1% have done an expert job at keeping the public ignorant when framing education reform. He can uncritically spread doubt about the quality of higher education and he can use a discredited think-tank propaganda piece without any fear of being chastised by anyone in at the NYTImes or his fellow pundits. Accountability for dilettante- pundits? Not so much.
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Huzza! I have spent the past 25 years directing and co-directing an English Education program at San Jose State University, and have spent the last 35 years of my life in the field of English Education. I know in my bones that we are doing a BETTER job today than we were doing 10 years ago. And incomparably better than 35 years ago. But if larger and larger numbers of our students, because on increasing income inequality, are entering our classrooms undernourished and under-loved, the very best sign of the daily miracles our teachers are performing will be that student achievement test scores are not slipping in exact ratios with declines in income. Is this not just plain old-fashioned common sense?
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“. . . the very best sign of the daily miracles our teachers are performing will be that student achievement test scores are not slipping in exact ratios with declines in income. Is this not just plain old-fashioned common sense?
NO, it’s not “old fashioned common sense”, it’s sheer stupidity (or a complete ignorance on the part of the professor). Believing that “student achievement test scores. . . not slipping” is any indication of anything is a belief in a chimera, a delusion, a fantasy, a duende. Wilson* has proven the complete invalidity of the process of making, using and disseminating the results of standardized test scores and that any conclusions drawn are “vain and illusory”.
Perhaps our schools of education are failing if the professors believe the tripe about standardized test scores.
Maybe I am being a tad harsh on jonathanlovell, perhaps he has not read any of what Wilson and many others have elucidated when it comes to the fallacies of educational standards, standardized testing and the “grading” of students. So Prof. Lovell, I invite you to read and understand the study linked below and jump on the true common sense Quixotic Quest Bandwagon with me to rid the world of the nefarious, noxious and or otherwise harmful aforementioned educational malpractices. You’re in a great position to educate many future teachers as to the “uncommon” sense that such practices are.
*“Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
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 logical 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 crap in-crap 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’ 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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Joe Nocera is from Rhode Island. I wrote to him to give him a couple of suggestions of who to call in Rhode Island to see what good things are being done in teacher training. I recommended that he talk to the wonderful Professor Laura Snyder of the Brown University Education Department. Brown offers a fine undergraduate Education major, an excellent Master of Arts in Teaching program, and many opportunities for students to volunteer in the Providence public schools. In addition to student teaching, Brown M.A.T. students teach in a low-cost summer program for local high school students. It’s so much easier to generalize after talking to 3 people than to actually do the research and find out what is being done. Frank Bruni of the Times does the same thing. I wrote to him after he cited Jeb Bush’s education policies as one reason to consider Bush seriously as a Presidential candidate. The reference was just thrown out there, with no real understanding of what Jeb Bush’s education policies and record actually are.
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Never let the facts get in the way of your firm beliefs.
LOL
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