The NAEP report card for 2013 is out, and “reformers” were quick to declare vindication for their mean-spirited approach of “test and punish.”
Gary Rubenstein examined the report to see what the claims meant and who made gains. D.C. made the most gains but remains the lowest ranking “state” in the nation. Tennessee made big gains and is pushing to meet the national average. Indiana too saw test score gains.
Does this prove that aggressive moves to close schools and crack the whip on teachers is a formula for success?
Well, no.
Gary looks at the scores for students who are poorest and suddenly D.C. falls to the bottom. At the top are states not known for their adherence to the corporate reform strategies. Suddenly Wyoming and Néw England states are at the top.
G.F. Brandenburg weighs in with his take on the D.C. Scores.
What does all this mean? Probably not as much as it appears. Maybe it shows that a national strategy of test, test, test will raise scores. Kids know how to take standardized tests.
But what be more important in relation to our national quality of life is the rate of child poverty. There the news is not good at all. The Southern Education Foundation reported that children living in poverty are now a new majority in public schools in the South and West.
The rise in child poverty will ultimately be more consequential for our nation than NAEP scores.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
http://www.texastribune.org/2013/11/08/top-academics-little-diversity-two-new-charters/
“Great Hearts’ presence signifies the emergence of a new kind of charter school in Texas. Often dependent on infusions of private money and parents’ contributions to supplement their programs, these schools go after students seeking intensely focused academics in a collegiate atmosphere and acknowledge that they do not serve every kind of child. But the reliance on additional fees and other policies at the new schools have amplified an already contentious debate over what it means to provide a public education.
At the 16 campuses that Great Hearts operates in the Phoenix area (where nearly 60 percent of public school students are Hispanic or black), 69 percent of the nearly 7,000 students are white. Only two of Great Hearts’ Arizona campuses participate in a federal program that offers free and reduced-price meals for low-income students. Of the almost
5,000 Basis students in Phoenix, Tucson and Flagstaff, roughly 12 percent are Hispanic and 2 percent are black. None of the eight campuses in Arizona offer free and reduced-price meals, which is also the case at the San Antonio school.”
Which of course places more pressure on the public schools in these districts, thereby harming every kid in those existing public schools.
Weren’t we told reform was intended to improve existing public schools? Isn’t that how this was sold to the public?
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“Peter Bezanson, Great Hearts’ chief academic officer, said that in Nashville, the school board had manufactured complaints about the school’s plan for diversity because it did not want the competition.
He said the school’s financial inability to provide transportation created a challenge, but that parents organized car pools and distributed bus-route information. He also said the school never allowed financial need to keep a student from participating in a trip or extracurricular activity.
Well, that’s a relief, that they don’t leave the tiny group of low income children they enroll sitting at the curb. Texas should definitely expand this semi-private charter chain. Clearly they’re very compassionate people.
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It’s interesting to compare the two maps of NAEP score results in this Huff article
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/07/national-test-scores_n_4229264.html?utm_hp_ref=tw
to the map of U.S. poverty.
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2013/10/graph-of-day-percentage-of-low-income.html
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“What does all this mean?”
Nothing, absolutely nothing, at least in an empirical logical sense-which should be the way these discourses are examined.
NAEP scores and the discourse surrounding them suffer from the “crap in crap out” problem in that the process suffers all the logical errors that Wilson has identified which render the whole process logically invalid and render any conclusions “vain and illusory” or in other words MEANINGLESS. Meaningless mental masturbation at its finest!
See Wilson’s “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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Once again, the corporate ed reformers are posting these scores and misrepresenting the “Proficient” rating as being “at grade level”. We need to jump on any such public statements.
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