This is an article I wrote for CNN.com, explaining why there is strong parent resistance to Common Core testing.
The pushback is not so much against the standards as against the decision to make the tests so “hard” and set the passing mark so unrealistically high, that most students failed.
In a democracy, public officials have to remember that they were not hired to impose their dogmas on everyone and that government functions best when it has the consent of the governed.
The most important lesson to be learned from the growing backlash is the importance of critical thinking. Right now, public officials defend the CCSS by calling critics names and trying to discredit them as extremists and ideologues.
Why not listen, engage in honest dialogue, and demonstrate a willingness to think critically and reflect on the objections, rather than smearing those who ask questions?
One of my intellectual heroes was Robert Hutchins, for years the president of the University of Chicago. He once said, and I paraphrase, never stop listening to your critics; they may be right.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Unfortunately Arne Dincan’s mantra seems to be, “Never start listening to your critics, they might be right.”
BEAUTIFUL. Also: He who knows only his own side of the argument knows nothing. The only thing worse than those who know not that they know not are those who know not that they know not but are absolutely sure they know.
Ignorance is not bliss – at least in the long run. The proverbial lemmings rush to the sea should be understood especially now when money and power supersede the search for those “glimmers of truth” which humankind’s best mind have long sought. Is education to be run by politicians or be scholars and educators? Should one’s belief system be built on accredited research by unbiased scholars who have studied in great detail or by what one already believes to be true?
The wise old owl sat in the oak
The more he heard. the less he spoke
The less he spoke, the more he heard
Let’s all be like that wise old bird.
🙂 I agree with everything you wrote and I’m glad they asked you to write about it.
I saw the interview with Arne on morning Joe. Everyone agreed with his position, that we are failing as a nation and the bar needs to be set higher. But nobody seems to be asking the people who will be responsible for implementing CC, us, the teachers. As teachers we have all heard the comment, “when I was in school…blah, blah.” They are looking at education from a jaded pov. There is always that feeling that things were better back in the day.
That is not really true, because “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
As teachers, we all know that we can make up a test that all our students would fail, and the test could be valid. As teachers, we base out assessments on our students. I have a little ELL student that scored a 54% on my chapter test. I moved him up to an 85% because he tried. he was thrilled. Am I negligent as an educator?
I have a little ELL student that scored a 54% on my chapter test. I moved him up to an 85% because he tried. he was thrilled. Am I negligent as an educator?
I don’t know if I’d say negligent is the right term.
I wouldn’t have done what you did. I would have had the student come in and go back over the test with him, having him make his corrections, discussing each answer with him individually. Then I would have given him 1/2 credit for the total points remaining meaning he would have 77%. Plus that option would then be open for all students.
I’m not thrilled about offering half-credit re-takes, but I do, as they are becoming more widely expected and accepted. That said, before I do so, I re-teach material that was particularly troublesome on the first go-round. If the students learn it the second time around, then great…that’s my job, and I’ve provided them with a bit of an incentive to keep trying. It’s still better to do well initially, as getting that 54 means you can only max out at 77 (as you noted).
Well, grades are a bunch of hogwash anyway, so that any way I can help a student I will but at the same time being cognizant of issues of justice and equity.
I wouldn’t call grades “hogwash” Duane. Done well, they give a good window into the strengths and weaknesses of students. As for justice and equity…well, I just want to teach math, so that’s what I’ll do.
SC Math Teacher:
Ah, someone who recognizes that there is only so much that can be done and doing that as well as possible is a great achievement..
Really! Grades give a good window into strengths and weaknesses? Actionable feedback on how to improve. Yes. Grades. I’m not sure they provide the learner with any idea of to improve their performance.
The grade alone, of course, does not. However, a student who gets, say, a 40 on a test on systems of equations clearly needs to brush up on the subject. My job as a teacher is, in part, to help students identify areas of weakness so they know where to focus their efforts.
Bernie:
You read way too much into my comment. But I appreciate sarcasm as much as the next person. It’s great when it can take the place of an actual argument, eh? (Ooh…this IS Fun.)
SC Math Teacher:
I was not being sarcastic at all. Perhaps I misread or misinterpreted your comment. If so I apologize.
My wife was and is an outstanding language teacher – her classes are over-subscribed. Her focus is on teaching it to her students. It some times is a bit tough when I am the guinea pig for explanations of the wonders and arcanae of English verb tenses.
That is what I would have done Duane…exactly…
Bernie,
It is I who should apologize. I assumed snarky sarcasm when I shouldn’t have. Sometimes one’s dander gets up and it is a false alarm.
Cheers!
One important question would be if students who received a 75% on the chapter test also tried. A second might depend on how this student understands the score, as an indication of what good work looks like or as getting a break.
TE,
I’m trying to find your response about temperature and either I’m half blind (at times no doubt) or it’s not showing up for some reason. Help me out either with a time frame or restating your position/question.
Thanks,
Duane
Duane,
Let’s not worry about it and start afresh. Can we agree, in lines with your point 1, that thermometers are inappropriately attempting to quantify the quality of “hot” and “cold”? If so, perhaps we can move on to point 2, where we discuss the epistemological importance attached to the “temperature” as measured by the thermometer and how it only represents an interaction between the observer, the thermometer, and the air in the immediate vicinity of the thermometer.
TE,
See my post at the bottom of the thread. Please restate your points there as I still am not sure what you are saying.
With all due respect to the owner of this blog, I add another quote that she has used before:
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” [John Maynard Keynes]
And for good measure:
“It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.” [John Maynard Keynes]
The edubullies and edufrauds can’t get even the most obvious things right. It is long past time they listened to someone outside their own insulated echo chambers.
REIGN OF ERROR, anyone?
😎
Reblogged this on Timbered Classrooms….
Agree that parents are upset by the test difficulty and unrealistically high passing score. Think that parents are also very upset by the amount of testing — that is, that students are subjected to pre-tests, practice tests, and the tests themselves as well as forced to waste instructional time on test prep. These tests are all in addition to the tests that the teachers write themselves and routinely administer at the end of each unit throughout the school years.
Some parents are probably also upset by the high-stakes aspect of the standardized testing — that is, these parents realize that the school systems are using the students standardized test scores to reward/discharge teachers/principals and/or close schools. Teachers and principals are more likely to be pressing these valid objections than parents, but some parents — particularly those who are teachers themselves or who are sufficiently aware of local school policies to realize that school closure might be the result of test scores — are no doubt also upset by the high-stakes-testing problems.
To some extent, it’s the high-stakes testing problem that is driving the parents’ too-much-testing/too-much-time-wasted-on-test-prep concerns. If the students all took just one two-hour standardized test at the end of each year in each subject, then the parents would not be as upset. If the standardized tests were low-stakes (that is, no ties to teacher/principal discharge or school closing decisions), there would be no need for the pre-tests, practice tests, or test prep.
Not entirely clear to me why Common Core requires standardized testing at all (even low-stakes standardized testing). The main purpose of Common Core is to ensure that the material taught in the schools throughout the state/nation includes the important substantive knowledge and thinking skills. Measuring how effective the schools are at conveying this knowledge and developing these thinking skills is a separate goal. For many years in many/most states, the state govt established a recommended curriculum for use in the state’s public schools; only a few states required that students take state-developed standardized tests tied to the curriculum and then only for the purpose of measuring student knowledge, not teacher or school effectiveness. Seems reasonable for the states to similarly adopt the Common Core but either not use standardized tests at all or to use the standardized tests only for the purpose of measuring student knowledge, not teacher or school effectiveness. (And, of course, when we use standardized test scores to compare teachers or schools, we are mostly measuring the SES level of the teacher’s or school’s students rather than the effectiveness of the teacher or school.)
I think those two issues, common core state standards and assessment of common core state standards are intermixed here. A better discussion would distinguish between issues concerning 1) who determines a standard 2) what the standard might be, 3) who should assess the success of the standard, and 4) how the standard should be assessed.
TE,
I am going to respond, even though I don’t have the comment, to the temperature question you pose a little later on by starting a “new” comment.
If you read the MoU that the member state signed, it becomes clear that the standards and the testing are joined at the hip. To add another metaphor, the standards are really a trojan horse to hook the states on testing and data collection—and profits for Gates and Murdoch.
As I said before pushing to separate assessment revenue from textbook/materials will help resolve this issue.
While we see the differences between the assessment, the standards and the curricula, they are all interconnected, interdependent upon each other. There’s no point in having standards, if we are not going to see if we meet them with some form of assessment. And to teach these standards, we need some form of curricula. If you remove one of them from the picture, it affects the other two. They all work in a symbiotic relationship by feeding off and supporting each other. It is easy to discuss these issues in a vacuum of isolation; however, because each segment affects the other, separating them doesn’t necessarily solve any problems. In fact, it usually clouds people from seeing the big picture.
Teachers do not have a problem with assessments, curricula, or standards. They DO have a problem with scripted lessons and reductionist proxy evaluations that are filled with error. The more emphasis is placed on the assessment, the more teachers modify the curriculum and solely focus on the tested standards (not the untested ones that actually help build better people).
Parents like a quick data snapshot of how their student did on a test. But most parents prefer the grade in the class over the data still life. The data snapshot is just that–a snapshot of a moment. The grade does more than judge students on standards–it also evaluates them on work ethic, punctuality, creativity, synthesis, collaboration, and many other hard-to-pin down abstract nouns. No assessment developed by any corsortia will tell parents anything about their child’s specific abstract noun qualities. A grade is the closest thing we have. However, because teachers and others have fed them on the importance of the data snapshot, they expect it on an annual basis.
The major problem is not with the assessments, the curricula, or the standards. The major problem arises when too much emphasis–too much leaning–is placed on one of these three parts. We are now in a phase that places too much emphasis on the outcome of the assessments. Because of that, that is why teachers have fallen out with favor with CCSS. While I do think the parent revolt against CCSS is growing, it is nowhere near the antipathy that teachers feel.
If the problem with the CCSS is scripted lessons and poor assessments, the solution is to change those things, not eliminate common standards as is the position of many who post here.
I do not know what most parents prefer, but parents of boys should be grateful that standardized exams are given as an alternative measure of academic achievement to teacher assigned grades. Boys as a group seem to perform better on standardized exams than their grades would predict (see http://news.uga.edu/releases/article/why-girls-do-better-in-school-010212/). As the parent of three boys, I can say that this research is consistent with my experience.
TE:
This sounds like the view of Christina Hoff Sommers.
Apparently she has a new edition out.
I think she cites the research I cited in the book but I have not read her book. Like most people, I find the research that is consistent with my experience the most compelling, and the finding that boys academic achievement is higher than their grades suggest is very consistent with my experience. If my sons did not respect the work they were being asked to do, they would generally do a poor job of it if they did it at all. This was especially true of my middle son. In his AP chemistry class the final exam was an old AP exam. My son scored 22% higher than the second highest score in the class (I know this because the teacher used the highest score to set the curve for the class. You can imagine how popular this made my son, but he had decided long before not to sandbag anymore) but barely managed an A in the class because of missed or poorly half worked assignments that he correctly perceived as trivial.
TE:
The study uses a very interesting and rich data set. I found this detailed write up of the study.
Click to access cmvp.genderdiffs.pdf
Having 2 boys and a girl – I am not surprised. The youngest, a boy, is by my reckoning the smartest of the three but he is the most creative, the least disciplined and is very difficult to teach and coach. He reacted positively to athletic and physically imposing teachers, but very negatively to fussy, pedantic and unimaginative ones. Fortunately he seems to have turned a corner and is now more willing to take the bad with the good.
If we could fix the problem areas, then we should do so. But don’t get your hopes up. There are times when I agree with Burris and Ravitch when I read about another teacher basher who has grown in the crucible of “only testing makes sense.”
Just because boys perform better on standardized tests, it does not mean that we should base an entire year’s worth of work on them. They are a poor measure of everything else that really counts in life. And standardized tests might work well for math related fields, but they have never been shown to match up in ELA for any gender. Despite the gender, grades are a better predictor of future academic success and life success than standardized tests.
While I agree with TE that more boys than girls show their “stuff” on standardized tests, I have seen plenty of boys who had the scores but couldn’t deliver on maturity and gumption when it mattered most. I already think we have an extremely long delayed childhood.
On the NAEP, girls have consistently outscored boys on the reading test. On the math, boys have a slight edge, not a large one.
Standardized tests do not privilege boys.
But standardized tests–overused, as they are in this society at this time–are not good for education because they teach that every question has one right answer.
Students are not encouraged to think or to act, just to think the way the test publisher wants them to think.
The issue here is not if boys out score girls or girls out score boys on standardized exams, it is if boys score better on standardized tests than their grades in the class suggest they should.
I think you will find grades, at least in states like mine that use unweighted GPA, to be an increasingly poor indicator of academic success. At my local high school about half of the valedictorians have not taken a sufficient number of academic classes in high school to qualify for admission to any state university. The top 10% of the class is jammed somewhere between 3.85 and 4.0. Soon there will not be enough variation in grades to be able to predict anything.
TE:
In my opinion, you are pointing at the elephant in the room.
In CA, there are some schools that are changing HS grades to align with how well students preform on standardized tests. When I visited one of the ELA teachers who did this, I found that the students who did nothing all year were getting an automatic boost because of their test scores. Although many stayed the same, some went from Fs and Ds to Bs and As. Apparently, the untested standards on the test are more important than the tested ones. Who knew? When I asked if it worked in reverse for those who did not do so well on the test, I was just looked at with puzzlement. They told me that they would never lower student grades based on a standardized test. Hmm. . . but they would raise it. Somehow that reasoning just didn’t add up for me. But I am sure that this is some kind of confidence booster thingy that I never got the memo for.
I am certainly not an anti-standardized test advocate, but it appears to me that we are relying too much on how students do on an annual test .
I haven’t taught in a while, but my wife still teaches English at the university level. I asked her if she wanted to reduce her class and all the writing assignments down to one test at the end–a standardized one with a mixture of multiple choice and writing–one that most of her department would agree to. She said that the majority of students in her class, most of whom are girls, wouldn’t like it. Hmph. Can’t please everyone, I guess.
“Right now, public officials defend the CCSS by calling critics names and trying to discredit them as extremists and ideologues.”
And good luck with that. They can pretend that critics are all extremists, ideologues and coddling suburban mothers but many of us actually have credentials that would belie that depiction. Eventually, the lack of a research basis for these sweeping changes will come back and bite them in the arse.
“The pushback is not so much against the standards as against the decision to make the tests so “hard” and set the passing mark so unrealistically high,”
Then maybe The Dunkster was semi-right in voicing the concern that the backlash is more of a self protection instinct and that it didn’t matter when these deforms affected the poor communities, whether urban or rural, only did the blowback occur when it hit the more vociferous suburban crowd. I’m not sure that that was his intent because of the garbled language but that could have been one of his intents. If so, I concur.
“The most important lesson to be learned from the growing backlash is the importance of critical thinking. And still way too many “true educators”, not the GAGAers or edudeformers refuse to critically examine some of the most notoriously difficult to “unseat” educational malpractices-educational standards, standardized testing and the “grading” of students.
Critical thinking as in what Noel Wilson has done with his “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
simplicitly 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.
I think parent backlash or resistance could also hinge around Duncan’s certainty about what is required for being competitive. And also what about good living?
Life is certainly about competition but if that is all one thinks about then the quality of life that one has is not the quality of life I would want. At some point you find your niche and you settle in and relax into life. The drive for competition as an impetus for CCSS has a desperation about it that is uncomfortable and as a mother I do want to shield my children from it. Not because they are not as “brilliant” as I thought but because I care about the quality of life they set out to discover. A sense of urgency and fear is not what I want them to learn.
Duane,
I had hoped that you might respond to my little modification of this post to talk about temperature standards and the possibility of error.
Perhaps bite size chunks would be better, so let’s take point 1, a quality like “hot” or “cold” cannot be quantified. Any disagreement so far?
Excellent response Joanna!
“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.”
I agree. I once overheard some “gifted” students discussing in detail how many levels above grade they were working. As if it was an awful crying shame that a 4th grader would be working at a 4th grade level. Talk about “coddling”…what are these kids going to do when they realize that knowledge is not linear? Or that you could have been above grade level in 4th grade but at grade level in 10th grade. We know this happens to many students. Many “gifted” early learners fail to score in that range later in their careers. Do they think they got dumber? What a cruel added stress to bring upon adolescents.
I remember being disappointed in 8th grade that I was only on a 10th grade level in math. All my friends had were on a 12th grade, 9th month level in everything at my gifted middle school. I was two years ahead of myself, but clearly I was the dumb kid in school.
All standardized tests need to go. Let’s spend that money on the kids, school buildings, and teachers. We need to be like Finland.
Standardized tests are a useful alternative source of evidence about a students abilities.
My middle son found being in unchallenging high school classes to be very stressful. He found the college classes he took in high school to be much more fun and stress free.
TE,
You gotta know that I’m going to say horse manure to your first sentence. They are useful for absolutely nothing because of their invalidities. Horse manure in Horse manure out!!
I am confident in your ability to tell a native speaker of Spanish from. A novice student. I am also confident that a standardized test could do the same.
TE:
I prefer to see standardized tests as additional sources of data, that may confirm or raise questions about the object of the measurement forcing reconsideration and potentially the need for more information.
“I am also confident that a standardized test could do the same.”
No, not at all. If a fluent speaker is having a bad day, decides to Christmas tree the test or is simply a bad test taker, there will be no difference between his standardized test vs. the test of a novice speaker. I’m confident that Duane knows much better who his fluent vs. novice speakers are, even when they’re having bad days or attitude problems.
Dienne:
Given all the well known limitations and issues with Standardized Tests, why and how do you think colleges use SATs and Miller Analogies?
In addition, both students and Duane can have a bad day! ;D
If a native speaker attempts to deceive either the test or Duane, I think both could be mistaken in their assessment of the speakers fluency.
How bad a day would a native speaker have to have to be outperformed by a novice speaker on a standardized test?
Diane – I apologize for contacting you via your blog but I couldn’t find an email address for you. I was hoping that you would be available to answer a few questions via e-mail for my thesis which focuses on Finland’s education system and education reform in the US. I can be reached at mastersthesis.finland@gmail.com. Thank you in advance. You are a real inspiration!!!
Go to dianeravitch.com (not net) to contact Diane.
love the Robert Hutchins paraphrase– tried to find the source and failed but did turn this up on wiki: According to Hutchins in The University of Utopia, “The object of the educational system, taken as a whole, is not to produce hands for industry or to teach the young how to make a living. It is to produce responsible citizens”.
It seems to me to be almost meaningless to say that a test is “too hard” without providing evidence as to what constitutes “too hard”. Some time ago when the NYC exam results came out folks here and elsewhere rightly complained that nobody could see the results or the questions on the tests. In short, nobody had the data to do an item analysis.
Just as importantly, nobody could say something to the effect that 80 or 90 or 100% of those answering this item should be able to answer it correctly. A test will be too hard if a priori there are a significant portion of the questions that teachers believe only a small % of students will answer correctly. If the teachers on the other hand say that a large % of the students in a grade level should be able to answer the questions on a test, then I do not understand how it can be defined as “too hard”.
What evidence do we have that there was a “decision to make the tests so “hard” and set the passing mark so unrealistically high, that most students failed. Since we do not have the question or the response data we do not know whether the passing mark is unrealistically high or that the student performance is surprisingly low. We just do not know.
For example, I looked at the Math items on the NAEP for 17 year olds. Here are four items classified as easy.
a) Identify when two lines are perpendicular (you pick from four image of two lines intersecting)
b) What is the sum of the interior angles in a rectangle (you pick from four equations)
c) What is 200% of 30 (you pick from 4 answers)
d) Solve f(z)= z +8 for f(6) (you pick from four answers)
Should students who cannot correctly answer these items be considered proficient in HS level mathematics? Does the fact that a large % of students cannot answer these questions make the test “too hard”?
Why are you comparing NAEP HS tests with Pearson’s CCSS aligned tests adnministered at grades 3 to 8?
It wasn’t a matter of test questions being “too hard”
A math question should test a students ability to solve math problems or to follow standard algorithims. A high stakes math test should not test a students ability to parse convoluted syntax or to decipher bizzarre wording clearly designed to confuse all but the most highly developed brains in the room. A reading comprehension test should not require students to interpret the intent of an author’s tone or choose the “best” or “most likely” answer from three distractors that to many teachers seem to be best or most likely. A standardizes test should not test the stamina of 8 0r 10 or 12 year olds – children asked to sit longer than HS Regents exams or college SATs.
NYS Teacher:
I used the NAEP questions to illustrate the point I was making. Without seeing the items on a test how do you know that it is “too hard”? A test is not necessarily “too hard” because a surprising % of students get too many items wrong. You have to assess the questions independently. On the other hand the tests at issue may contain too many questions that it unreasonable to expect students to answer.
Issues of the length of the test is another issue.
You also need to see the items on the test before gauging the quality of the items.
I administered both math and ELA tests last April.
I used my five years of professional test writing experience to draw these conclusions. I was trained as an item writer and the Pearson Tests violated most of the rules for proper test writing.
Too long. Too confusing. Unreasonably difficult. Misleading cut scores. Norm referenced.
NYS Teacher:
I am not disputing that the items on some of the tests are poorly written and poorly written items clearly compromise the test. We went through some of them here last month – vegetables in rows, if I recall. One of Diane’s points was that the CCSS tests were too hard. All I am saying is that I have seen no evidence to date that the tests themselves are misaligned because nobody has released the test items.
What, the stories of previous well-performing, well-adjusted kids suddenly coming home in tears and needing therapy for stress disorders doesn’t move you enough?
Dienne:
That is a separate issue from whether the tests are “too hard”. There may well be too many tests and there may be too much anxiety generated around the tests, but again that does not make the tests “too hard”.
No, it’s not separate. Yes, part of the problem is too many tests. But even one test that brings kids to tears is too hard. Any test – even one – that makes kids feel “stupid” or like “a failure” is too hard. And even if you don’t care about the kids themselves, what could a test possibly be measuring if kids are taking it in tears?
Dienne:
Nobody wants anybody too cry. However, that leaves the issue of whether the tests are “too hard” in a substantive sense unresolved. All I am suggesting is that these test items and the data need to be made public.
Come on Dienne, crying, vomiting, curling up into the fetal position, heads down drooling after 10 minutes, angry tirades, even therapy (for those who can afford it). Cant you see that Duncan and Co. are just trying to help develop the grit, tenacity, perseverence, and the overall no-excuses attitude it takes to become college and career ready. As John King would say, “Get over it, change is hard. This no time to delay our march to academic victory over Finland. We can’t let a few tears or vomit piles stand in our way. We must be #1!!!!!!”
Dr. Ravitch has pointed out that it proved extremely difficult to get 17 year old students to care at all about exams that “don’t count”. Younger children can be manipulated to take exams that don’t count very seriously.
Bernie,
I would like to focus on an aspect that the others haven’t mentioned yet. You stated (by the way with which I concur):
“What evidence do we have that there was a “decision to make the tests so “hard” and set the passing mark so unrealistically high, that most students failed. Since we do not have the question or the response data we do not know whether the passing mark is unrealistically high or that the student performance is surprisingly low. We just do not know.”
And therein lies the problem. “We” aren’t allowed to see those questions and data involving item validity. That is copyrighted material and supposedly for a teacher to read and know what is on the test is unethical. No, what is unethical is not being able for all to see the questions themselves and all the edumetrics involved in making the test.
The process is so shrouded in secrecy that why should anyone believe what those who make a fancy profit off the backs of the students, teachers and districts have altruistic intent and/or their methods are valid. Sorry but I don’t!
Duane:
From the beginning when the issue of the NYC tests was raised I argued that to hide the items and the data is totally unacceptable and professionally highly suspect. I used the four examples of the NAEP 17 year old test to point out that the adequacy or inadequacy of the tests are empirical questions and that folks should get the data and then draw conclusions – not withstanding the general limitation of any simple measurement of a complex phenomena.
Señor Swacker: ya has dado en el blanco/you have hit the nail on the head.
Copyrighted material. Shrouded in secret. Of course—high-stakes standardized tests are (literally, not figuratively) eduproducts. For example, in many cases schools and school districts don’t BUY these eduproducts, they RENT them. And the schools and school districts don’t score them, they are sent back to the publisher or another educorporation for scoring.
So even when high-stakes standardized tests are very limited in what they measure, are inherently imprecise, and don’t even pretend to measure most of what the vast majority value about learning—
They are not open to the scrutiny of the vast majority so that they can be “corrected” [if such were possible].
And to add insult on top of injury, the psychometricians have had decade after decade after decade to “perfect” their “mental measurements.”
Hasn’t happened yet. Won’t happen. Can’t happen.
Of that I have a better than 98% satisfactory [thank you, Bill Gates!] chance of certainty.
The pro-testers may think you are tilting at windmills, but you are landing scoring punches while they are hitting nothing but air.
Keep on keepin’ on…
😎
KrazyTA:
Duane’s pov has some validity in that it is impossible to measure complex phenomena with simple measures. That said, simple measures have value depending on the issue that you are trying to address. There are pragmati
Parents are rejecting the CCSS/Pearson tests (in NY) because they know in their heart of hearts that their 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14 year are NOT FAILURES. They know you don’t pull a newly germinated, underdeveloped tomato plant out of the garden after a few weeks of growth and brand it a failure becuase it has no tomatos. They know tnhat their kids should never be intellectually defined at age 8 or 14. They are also rejecting the CCSS/Pearson tests because thay know deep down in their heart of hearts that their children’s teachers, by and large, though not perfect, are competent, effective, and caring (despite their Danialson/Marzano scores, or growth band movement). They aslo know that they moved into neighborhoods with good schools with excellent track records for developing successful graduates. They are rejecting CCSS testing because if it smells like BS and looks like BS and floats like BS – it is.
Your article is currently the third most emailed link on CNN today! Well done!
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
But opposing the theme of this piece, sometimes as with you being a used car salesman, you don’t want engagement because engaging leads to the truth, and the truth leads to a lost sale. you want to move the car off your lot.
Actions such as these make it apparent that Common Core is not about helping children. That is the furthest thing from their mind. It is about how to profit off of helping children., No profit, … then forget about it then…..
Those things being forgotten about, are…other people’s children.. I suggest that is the key to parental backlash….
I don’t know enough to say whether the tests are too hard, but I actually do have a problem with the “standards themselves” at least so long as they are tied to high stakes testing, which leads to districts mandating teachers to “teach to the standards” in a ridiculous and counter-productive manner. Robert Shepherd has commented extensively on this in this blog and I think he’s spot-on.
Robert’s view is interesting, but the diversities of approaches he advocates requires that students go to schools that best fit their individual needs and aspirations, and is thus incompatible with zoned school systems and practically guaranties that some students will be “skimmed”.
I’m not sure about Robert’s comprehensive approach, I was just commenting on his explanation of how standards get implemented, in practice, especially in poorly run districts where there is high stakes testing.
Say you have two standards, “students will be able to identify the main idea of a passage” and “students will be able to identify the mood of a passage”. I realize that these are not worded precisely how standards tend to be worded, but bear with me for the sake of argument.
What districts tend to do is tell teachers that on day 1 you teach the main idea standard and on day 2 you teach the mood standard, and you teach it by having the students read 5 passages and identify the main idea of each on day 1, and read 5 passages and identify the mood of each on day 2. This, it seems to me (and to most teachers, I think) to be an absolutely terrible way of teaching main idea and mood. Whats funny is even *if* all you wanted to do is maximize standardized test scores, I don’t think this is the right approach. The problem is that many of these struggling districts do not have the human resources to thoughtfully support teachers in how best to teach those concepts, even if the goal is simply test scores.
Importantly, my gripe here is NOT specific to Common Core. I think its the inevitable problem that will come up when you have a combination of an invariant set of mandated standards, high stakes testing of those standards, and school- and district-level administrators who don’t understand that the best way to maximize test scores is not to “teach to the test” in the way I described in the previous paragraph.
When you say “high stakes” do you mean “high stakes” for the student taking the exam or “high stakes” for another party like the teacher of the class or an administrator in the school system? It seems to me the two are often conflated here.
I have no doubt that there are better and worse ways to teach almost anything, and if teachers are told to teach in a better way the students gain and if teachers are told to teach in a worse way, the students are worse off. It seems to me, however, that it is a problem of administration rather than any problem with the goals of the education.
TE:
I found an interesting study today connected to a multi-country study of math teachers using videos of a large sample complete classes.
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/feb04/vol61/num05/Improving-Mathematics-Teaching.aspx
Interesting. I wonder what Robert Shepard would make of the uniformity of teaching eighth grade math in the US despite having no national standards.
TE:
I am not sure how standard the math teaching in the US is because of the research methodologies and the sample size and structure, but the disparity in the use of connectedness in math problem solving is pretty remarkable.
CTee, you are so correct about the teaching methods that standardized testing inevitably drive.
I mean high stakes for the district or school.
You’re right, of course, that there are good and bad ways of teaching anything. However, I’m sure you’d also agree that educational policy makers have an obligation to try to enact those policies which are more likely to yield good teaching rather than bad teaching (subject to all the relevant constraints).
If we know that one-size-fits-all state standards coupled with high stakes (for the school/district/state) testing of those standards is likely to yield bad results given the lower quality human resources in struggling districts, its worth rethinking whether the standards & testing are a good idea.
If I’m right and high stakes testing, invariant state standards, and low quality school- and district-level administration are mutually incompatible with improving the learning outcomes of students in high-poverty districts, we should think about which of those things should be changed.
Personally I think the first best solution would be to take major steps to reform the education profession. Second best would be to remove the “high stakes” part of high stakes testing (again, meaning “high stakes” for the school/district/administration, not the student).
Does that make sense? If I thought that standardized testing and invariant state standards would lead to an arms race towards best teaching practices, I’d have a different opinion. I’m not conceptually opposed to invariant standards or to standardized testing.
Too long (absurdly long) too many (to what end other than to punish teachers) too confusing (why are the Common Core and the VAM movement institutionalizing dread)?
Diane- You are the voice of reason in a world gone mad.. Keep up the good work and the fantastic thinking. People left, right, and center are listening to YOU!
I will link!
http://www.audacityofnope.blogspot.com/
Tammy, love that title: The Audacity of Nope
I prefer “The Audacity of the Dope” . . . . .
I feel like the entire approach to high stakes testing is predicated on schools being giant Skinner boxes with both the teachers and students subject to positive/negative reinforcement to mold their actions.
There are psychological models that favor collaboration and cooperation – but generally Skinner’s techniques for operant conditioning tend to favor individual behavior and not group behavior.
How else do you explain the psychology of how all of this is set up? Is there a better fitting way to describe?
Can we really boil down human advancement to carrot and sticks?
TE,
Okay, let’s go from here!
“so let’s take point 1, a quality like “hot” or “cold” cannot be quantified. Any disagreement so far?
In so far that temperature is a continuum and not discrete increments, such as counting is, it’s not that it can’t be quantified, it can, we do it all the time. But there is an error inherent in that quantification (which can be seen as negating the validity of “temperature” as a discrete concept as one never knows for sure if one is correct or not). Now for all practical purposes that “error” is so small as to be insignificant.
Interesting that you chose temperature because Wilson uses temperature to illustrate what he’s getting at in “error of measurement” and how the measuring itself can interfere with the actual temperature. From Wilson:
“Newton’s Third Law is a universal principal: every action has an equal and opposite reaction; if the field acts on the measuring instrument, then the measuring instrument simultaneously acts on the field. The effect may be relatively small – a thermometer inserted into a large container of hot water will not much affect the temperature of the water, though it will affect it. However, a very cold thermometer inserted into a very small cup of warm water may cause the temperature to drop appreciatively. The temperature thus measured is not that of the hot water, but that of the water-thermometer system.
In this particular case, it is possible to estimate the imprecision caused by the measuring instrument, if we know the masses and specific heats of water and container and mercury and glass, and the temperature of the surrounding air and the time taken for the thermometer to give its highest reading and the rate of heat loss from the container. Then we may estimate the temperature of the water at the moment the thermometer was inserted. However, even in this simple case, it is necessary to use a theory that is itself, of necessity, subject to some imprecision.
Does that help?
I am not worried about the third law as much as by choosing what to wear for the day.
I am interested that you say a quality like “hot” or “cold” can be quantified. Which qualities can be quantified and which not?
Many can be quantified but the inherent limitations of the measuring devices render each one with error. Although one “can” quantify things perceptually, the problem still lies in the error of measurement.
That brings us to your second point, the presence of error. With the backyard thermometer, the the possibilities of error are nearly endless. Errors in manufacturing, errors in eye level while observing, even poor eye sight contributing to the many sources of error. At best the “temperature” is only the result of the interaction at a particular place and time. It can not be assigned to the air at the front door at a different time.
Normally I’d side with Duane – but saying that any degree of inaccuracy renders a measurement worthless is not accurate nor responsible to say.
The question is HOW inaccurate and is it close enough that we agree it has value. For instance – we don’t need to haggle over whether a stove is 199 degrees or 200 – we agree it’s hot enough that your hand shouldn’t touch it.
The problem with these measurements is that they’re nowhere near accurate enough for us to agree whether (to paraphrase the 1-4 scale of reformers) “This teacher’s practices should be spread, this teacher is good enough to teach, this teacher is good enough to train to teach, and this teacher should be fired”.
The measuring may render a degree of inaccuracy and the main issue with the “reformers” scoring models is not that they have a degree of inaccuracy, it’s that the degree is so wildly inconsistent and in some cases, out of sync with objective reality (and correlated so highly to non-teaching factors) that it renders the measurements worthless.
Evaluating teacher effectivenes?
Measurent? or Judgement?
Is it more like measuring a downhill ski racer or judging a figure skater?
I am applying Duane’s criticism of measuring educational achievement to the issue of measuring “hotness” and “coldness”. I hope it will show that temperature reports are so riddled with error that they can safely be ignored when making decisions about dressing for the day.
No, TE your analogy of of weather temperature is not a good one. The question, on a pragmatic level is, “is it good enough for government work?”. The fallacy in your argument is that you are talking about a single well defined variable whereas the teaching learning process is so complex and complicated that there isn’t agrrement at all about how it should be evaluated and that to distill a complex problem down to a single number or name is useless. Temperature and teaching and learning are completely different kinds of things.
I think your confusing “temperature” with the quality of “cold” or “hot”. Temperature is only one dimension of “cold” or “hot”. To quantify “cold” or “hot” as one dimensional quantities (numbers in an arbitrary scale) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error.
M,
“but saying that any degree of inaccuracy renders a measurement worthless is not accurate nor responsible to say.”
I have never said nor implied that. If I have please point me to it.
All measurements have error. The degree of the error on a practical level is what matters and educational standards and standardized testing have such large error components not only epistemologically and ontologically but in construction, the giving of and the dissemination of the results of that they are completely invalid and to discuss the results as if they have a “true” meaning is absurd.
At the risk of alienating many people, i can’t see myself calling CCSS good or bad, because we teachers have always dealt with changing standards.
What is HORRIBLE is the pernicious practice of tying test scores to teacher employability. If this practice is not reversed, it will be the death knell of education, period, end of story, as my luminous and still inspiring former principal of PS7Q, Arlynn Brody, used to say.
Arlynn, if you are reading this, you should be writing left and right on this blog. . . you have much to say . . . . . You don’t need a nom de plume . . . . .
Robert Rendo: you won’t alienate me. I often find value in the sometimes unexpected, or perhaps it is best said, less expected, stances by commenters on this blog.
In fact, I welcome it. That’s how I learn best.
However, one small quibble. All of us have been so inundated with the ideas and vocabulary of the edufrauds and their accountabully underlings that even when we expose and oppose their programs and policies for the failures they are, we continue to parrot some of the key words that advance those failed programs and policies.
In particular, it’s all the rage to say and write “achievement” and “performance” instead of “learning” and “teaching” and such. The first two terms are part of the staple jargon of the psychometricians. They are used in very specific ways by the pro-testers and, IMHO, help limit our thinking about all aspects of education. **I recognize that it is hard to not use those words as they have general usages beyond psychometrics.**
How delightful and refreshing when someone here alludes to something like the “joy of learning” or the “pleasure of teaching.”
Again, just my dos centavitos worth…
Thank you for your comments.
😎
Krazy TA (is that you, Arlynn?),
I agree with everything you say.
I can teach and implement any standard. There are ALWAYS things one can learn and gain. When standards had holes and gaps, we teachers have always successfully risen to the occasion and plugged those gaps because we’ve first and foremost asked the critical question, “What exactly does the student need at this point in time?” (I’m not saying all standards are good ones).
I can teach and cram more units in less time. (I’m not saying this is a good practice).
I can do a lot more and go way above and beyond my contract with pay cuts and benefit cuts. (This is NOT a good thing at all, and it’s demoralizing, but it is not the end of the world, and the sky will not fall).
But as a Natioanally Board Certified teacher who has taught for 20 years, I do not, will not, cannot, will never accept that excellence in pedagogy and cognitive stimulation and growth can be equated with a number at the end of and assessment. There are myriad reasons.
Teaching is not an if-then statement, with “if you teach well, you will guarantee that this percentage of students will make this amount of progress.” This false notion and catastrphic practice will result in millions of perfectly fine teachers being lied about and mischaracterized. It will result in their firing. They will have been lied about in a metrics system that is narrow and unempirical all the way.
If you want to judge me, come into my room and critique my lesson. Videotape me (as long as the video has a very limited audience) and let’s watch together to see what works well and what works poorly.
Look at my tempo, how clearly I spelled out my learning objectives, how well I spirall back, how I differentiate, how well my materials were prepared and ready to launch, how I provided scaffolding, what my rate of speech is like, if I restate things to be more comprehensible, if I am on the look out for students’ misconceptions and misunderstanding, if my students are actively engaged and taking delight in what they are doing, if I am constantly providing multiple forms of comprehensible input, if I am monitoring learning as children practice something independently, if I am providing a gradual release of responsibility, if I am monitoring students along with other professionals who teach the same child, if I am truly engaging the child’s parents to teach them ways they can empower their child at home, if I assume leadership roles amongst my colleagues, if I write grants and fund raise, if I am politically active to advocate for funding and excellence in teaching environments, if I am empathetic to administrators even if I don’t always agree with them, if I update my skills in teaching with increased credentialing, if my peers have input into critiqueing my teaching, if we look at all four mostly okay domains of Charlotte Danielson, which have now been perverted as tools for determining employability.
We are the only nation that fired teachers based on test scores. . . . So if a teacher manifests excellence in all the above areas, but does not have enough students who scored at a particular level because of multiple confounding variables, both within and outside of the test, then that teacher stands to lose his/her job.
This is fascism at its glossiest and polished best . . . . . .
correction: ” . . . the only nation that fires teachers . . . . . “
No one could have stated the case against quantifying teaching excellence any better. A highly effecticve post Mr. Rendo!
Robert Rendo: not Arlynn.
But I will take that as a compliment.
😎
Keep on posting. I will keep on reading your comments.
Of that there is a better than 98% satisfactory [thank you, Bill Gates!] chance of certainty.
Krazy TA,
Thank you for your comment. I am sorry you were not Arlynn Brody, who is the right kind of force to be reckoned with. I miss her, and having been young and dumb, I only listened to her half the time. She was always urging all of us to go for every training under the sun from many schools of thought. She inspired. She spelled things out. She acknowledged people who tried . . . . she was big about recognizing and articulating effort.
Anyway, I was so exhausted when I wrote my post that I did not edit and left some things out. . . . I did not put things in the preferred order.
Oh well . . . . . .
Excising test scores tied to evaluation is the next big step in pushback . . . .. that and how public schools get financed.
Less money for war and more for public education.
NYS Teacher,
Thank you for your post. Let’s spread the word about getting rid of this horrible crime: tying scores to teacher employability.
I have such vivid visions about Bloomberg, Klein, Gates, Rhee, Broad, Walton, Weingarten, Roekel, Duncan, Obama. . . . . . . I am thinking about them and all their cronies. . . . and a giant, larger than life food processor, one that stands about 40 feet high . . .
Don’t ask, don’t tell . . . . . . .
Happy Thanksgiving.
Krazy TA,
I meant to add that you just being you is fantastic also . . . . I was waxing nostalgic for my old school. . .. very beautiful memories, I was there for 6 years. . . . My former principal was the kind of leader who took the 4th and 5th grade to Broadway to see “Judgement at Nuremberg” with Max Von Sydow, got the kids a private audience with him after the performance, and then had a real life camp survivor, the mother of one of our faculty, come in and talk to the kids. One of the kids asked, “If you saw all this horrible stuff going on and people dying all around you in Bergen Belson, did you ever stop believing in God. I mean, how can you still believe there is a god?” . . . .A fifth grader asked this question. The kids had to write about all they experienced from this field trip. We were using Writer’s Workshop to teach the writing process.
Talk about brilliant moments in cognition, intellectualism, teaching, courage, and administrative leadership.
But then again, Arlynn Brody was hot stuff in the education field, and she knew it. .. . she probably still does.
Robert Rendo: your recollections of a principal who had her students see “Judgment at Nuremberg” and talk with Max Von Sydow and listen to and talk with a death camp survivor—
“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” [Socrates]
I think some of those old Greek guys would have called her a real fire starter.
😎
She was a fire starter. . . . When we won $200,000 in grant money to buy computers for the school, she allowed any of us to take a computer home for the summer and experiment with it. My wife learned how to use a computer this way. Arlynn Brody had kids lying on the floor in the hall on the irst floor playing chess every day during lunch. She had vision correction therapy systemically infused in the school curriculum. She had kids visiting nursing homes every month, once a month to buddy up with ta senior, and then write about the experience. Kids learned about other people’s lives from another era. Anything experiential was then parlayed into a writing lesson. Her big thing was “Experience something, then write about it!!!!!!!!”
The list goes on and on and on.
The good old days. Now we have dreck and wreck like Arne Duncan and Obama.
Without RttT and NCLB, Arlynn raised math and reading scores in two years by about 17%. I remember to raise money for the school, she rented a dunking tank and made herself the dunking victim. .. parents and children were lined up around the block to take shots at the lever so see if they could inundate her. . . . she raised several hundred dollars that day.
If there were a past educational hero in my mind, she would be it.
But I digress . . . . .
(Arlynn, if you are reading, this my wife and I also keep in touch with Hollyce Yoken from time to time . . . . ).
RR
You have hit the coffin nail squarely on the head.
APPR is suffocating the profession.
The Law of Unintended (Negative) Consequences – to the extreme.
APPR is an abject failure already.
It has “inspired” nothing but dread, despair, disillusionment, and deceipt.
Lydia Gutierrez, a candidate for California State Superintendent of Public Instruction opposes Common Core.
http://www.lydia4schools.com/home.php
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Lydia-Gutierrez-for-CA-State-Superintendent-of-Public-Instruction/226850210497
I like this comment, “In a democracy, public officials have to remember that they were not hired to impose their dogmas on everyone and that government functions best when it has the consent of the governed…” I fear that this quote regrettably no longer carries the weight is should; our government is run now by megamillionaires and billionaires who do not give a rat’s “a” about the consent of the governed – the People. PAC money has dictated political campaigns and politicians are “sold” to the highest bidder. So how do we restore balance to govt such that the will of the People will matter?
Stop. STOP!!! Stop this discussion…because there IS no discussion. Did some of you not read the previous post? It is ALL about the money. Period. End of story. It’s about Pear$on making money with their lousy, stinking INVALID (yes, Duane is ALWAYS correct in his discussion of so-called “standardized” testing!) tests and test prep materials. It’s about closing down “failing” public schools and replacing them with charters–which, of course, are operated by the well-contacted & who are making Big Buck$. It’s about not really teaching children ANYTHING worth learning anymore, sucking all the joy of learning & creativity out of them in order to treat them like widgets & give them “21st Century” skills–those skills being not questioning authority, not reading/analyzing REAL books, being NOT thinking, just doing what the 1% dictators tell you to do.
This is NOT about educating children, it is about USING them as experiments–after all, even Bill Gates has said that we won’t know the success of these experiments (like the CCSS) for ten years. In ten years, the Waltons and the Kochs will have all their widget, non-questioning, uneducated workers, who they will pay even less than the workers in Bangladesh.
And there will be no more strikes at Walmart.
Thanks for the backup RBMTK!!!!
We need a Debate….and I do mean a Great Debate…between..
Diane and Arne….
I would so pay to see this debate…..
Needs to be in Prime Time…
Someone needs to set the record straight and Diane could do it …
Another Great Debate….
The Bats vs the Plastic Politicians……(The Dunkin” & his RTTT engineers)
A debate between Arne Duncan and Diane Ravitch?
A-a-a-a-a-h!
The lioness and the zebra . . . . . . .
Pounce, snap, slurp, whince, reel, chew, crunch, tear, swallow, drink, and burp . . . . .
We almost had one with Rhee…but she cancelled. Couldn’t find a 3rd. Sounds like a duel.
While I’m in complete agreement with Diane on the punitive use of testing to achieve political/privatized goals, I have to say: I’ve noticed that mention has been made (more than once) that the problem isn’t so much about the standards as the testing.
I, for one, DO have a very big problem with the standards. Maybe not so much as with the obvious ways in which the testing associated with them has been and will continue to be rigged…but it definitely comes in a close second.
I have a problem with the absence of education specialists in the planning process.
I have a problem with the chief architect’s “background” and “educational philosophies”.
I have a problem with this seemingly accepted goal of having MANDATORY national standards which can only be modified up to 15% (these numbers are going to drive me crazy), and might not be the best thing for different student populations.
I was taught that one of our country’s strengths was it’s diversity of teaching styles that evolved from the demographics of the areas in which students were being taught. I don’t like the idea of a nationally mandated set of standards that will be so difficult to make modifications to when they’re deemed necessary.
So I’m wondering if there’s a shift in thinking here on the standards. I know that Randi’s for them. Somehow she seems to think that the majority of teachers are, too. I, for one, am not. I smell a rat.
Who would Arne’s second be? His third? Fourth? You know he couldn’t take on Diane single-handedly. Diane, on the other hand, could take on the lot of them while reading her favorite novel and still put them all to shame.
I suggest Arne Duncan, Pamela Anderson, and Cathy Black vs. Diane Ravitch, Noam Chomsky, and Stephen Krashen . . . . .
Let the games begin.
Hard graders and easy graders are as old as schools. But the grading that always enraged students, most teachers, and parents was crazy grading. Only Arne, Barack, and the “Chicago Boys” (who never worked in a public school, let alone taught in one for more than a year) could come up with crazy grading, then declare everyone “failed.” This isn’t a “high standard” — it’s not really a standard at all. Arne’s babblings since merely confirm what everyone already knew about him. If you “raise the bar” high enough (to use one of his favorite dumb metaphors) even Harvard and University of Chicago “fail.”
Worse than “crazy” grading –
This is manipulative grading.
This is agenda grading.
This is abuse of power grading.
This grading should be classified as an institutional crime.
George – time for you to write the book on Duncan. Appreciate your insights.
A substantial way to change the politics of the nonteaching professional who control the classroom and impose unworkable, sometimes ludicrous teaching mandates on teachers and students is to change teaching licenses so that a licensed professional must teach a class. Make the nonteaching professional obsolete. I think parents would very much want main office people to also be master teachers. In the private school world, it is successful because head masters teach. Teaching and teachers are respected in that world. It’s quite the opposite in the public school world. Sometimes people who have never taught a class walk around intimidating teachers, mandating the stupidest of teaching methods. Of course teachers must do it, it fails, predictably, and then the teacher is blamed for the incompetence. We need to expose this. Successful schools only need teachers, students, cafeteria worker, custodians, and office staff. Everything else is what I call the education racket.
Ginger:
You touch on an interesting point.
LAUSD has 650,000 K-12 public school students and 800 public schools. It has 26,000 K-12 teachers plus 34,000 other employees and a budget of $6,470 million.
Click to access Fingertip%20Facts%2013-14-100913.pdf
The average LAUSD elementary school has over 500 students. The average middle school has 1200 students as does the average HS, though some have more than 3000 students.
Your model works in Finland, where the average school size (ages 7-15) is 186 and the upper school (16-19) is 260 and principals in the lower schools are expected to teach.
How do you get from A to B? How does one manage a system with 800 schools and 60,000 employees? Note, I am not disagreeing with your premise.
Dear DR,
You write: “Why not listen, engage in honest dialogue, and demonstrate a willingness to think critically and reflect on the objections, rather than smearing those who ask questions?”
“First, he said their critics were members of extremist groups…
… Right now, public officials defend the CCSS by calling critics names and trying to discredit them as extremists and ideologues.”–
In his introduction to The Montessori Method, (Maria Montessori, 1964), Professor J. McV. Hunt, a past president of the American Psychological Association, writes of the forces that prevented ECE from taking hold one hundred years ago. I wonder if anyone finds this to be instructive.
In the early twentieth century, Maria Montessori ignited a national discussion: Should public education begin at age three? In 1913 more than a hundred articles were published in newspapers and periodicals on the subject.
Montessori made two trips to America, the first in 1913, to push for ECE. With the support of Howard C. Warren, president of the American Psychological Association, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Helen Keller, and many other luminaries, ECE had a real chance.
William Heard Kilpatrick was a giant, a leader in the field of progressive education, and and an intimate of John Dewey. He traveled to Italy to observe Montessori, and report on the merit of her recommendation. On his return he self published a pamphlet, “The Montessori System Examined.”
In the introduction he describes how professional educators should go about their examination of Montessori and her work:
“They would weigh every item of the idealistic projects of radicals and even of the practical successes of experiments born among the differing conditions of foreign soil.”
In place of ‘white suburban moms,” Kilpatrick belittles “the smaller class of of heroic enthusiasts.”
“The smaller class of heroic enthusiasts that become the more or less partisan leaders and followers of a new propaganda are not likely to be interested in a critical analysis of the particular theories and practices that constitute their faith. With them the new institutional spirit is the thing! Details may be left to the rectification of time!”
Kilpatrick explains that she tries to be scientific, but she can’t pull it off, and he explains why.
“For example, the teacher must keep records, both anthropometric and psychologic, of each child. The books in which these are kept are often shown to the visitor. The remark may be interjected that the data so recorded, unfortunately, hardly function otherwise than in keeping alive in the teacher a general spirit of child observation.
“She generalizes unscientifically as to the condition of contemporary educational thought and practice from observation limited, it would seem, to the Italian schools. If she had known more of what was being thought and done elsewhere, her discussions would have been saved some blemishes and her system some serious omissions.”
“If she had known more of what was being thought and done elsewhere, her discussions would have saved some blemishes and her system some serious omissions. Her psychology in particular would have been improved, had she known better what Wundt (founder of the first psychological laboratory, 1879) was doing in Germany, to mention no other names.”
“…we feel compelled to say that in the content of her doctrine, she belongs essentially to the mid-nineteenth century, some fifty years behind the present development of educational theory.”
“Madam Montessori centered much of her effort upon devising more satisfactory methods of teaching reading and writing, utilizing thereto in masterly fashion the phonetic character of the Italian language.”
“Her preparation for the school arts should prove very helpful in Italy.”
On the positive side, Kilpatrick does make many positive comments. Here he describes one of her inventions:
The apparatus “consists of sand-paper letters mounted on cards and a box of alphabets cut from paper. These letters of both kinds are in clear script. It is in connection with this second element that the reading is taught.
“When the association of the sound with the form is being taught, the sand-paper letters are used; and the child is required to trace each letter with his index finger as if writing it. They are encouraged to do this repeatedly even with the eyes shut.
“The child is thus gaining at the same time both visual and muscular images of the letter and associating these with each other and with the sound. As soon as the child knows some of the vowels and consonants, the box of letters is put before him.
“The directress selects a simple word, pronounces it so clearly as to analyze it into its constituent sounds, and calls for the corresponding letters.
Kilpatrick continues describing how the letters are used to teach reading and writing simultaneously..
And he reports the following result:
“After both the elements of the writing process, carried on thus simultaneously, are well fixed, it is a simple matter to have the child write. Indeed, according to reports, this takes place so suddenly as to warrant the phrase “exploding into writing.”
“It only remains to be said that this writing, while very slow, is unusually good. The beauty of the writing, quite as much as the reported ease of acquisition, has brought the system into favorable publicity.”
In the end, Mr. Kirkpatrick says no to ECE. The reason:
“The writer agrees, therefore, with those who would still exclude these formal school arts from the kindergarten period. To him a school for the young without books is Froebel’s chiefest glory.”–Professor William Howard Kilpatrick
Hunt writes of other obstacles, the opposition of “the emerging behavioristic school whose conceptions were shortly to become dominant,” and Montessori’s “notion that school experience for three- and four-year-olds could be significantly important for later development, conflicted with the “conceptions of the intelligence-testing movement.”
So the testing industry weighed in against ECE a hundred years ago, and supports CC standards today. I believe that their position now is just as damaging as postponing early childhood education.
Allow me to demonstrate. Here are the 6th grade Common Core standards for speech:
Adapt speech to a variety of contexts and tasks, demonstrating command of formal English when indicated or appropriate. (See grade 6 Language standards 1 and 3 for specific expectations.)
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.6.1 Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English grammar and usage when writing or speaking.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.6.1a Ensure that pronouns are in the proper case (subjective, objective, possessive).
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.6.1b Use intensive pronouns (e.g., myself, ourselves)
.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.6.1c Recognize and correct inappropriate shifts in pronoun number and person.*
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.6.1d Recognize and correct vague pronouns (i.e., ones with unclear or ambiguous antecedents)
*
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.6.1e Recognize variations from standard English in their own and others’ writing and speaking, and identify and use strategies to improve expression in conventional language.*
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.6.3 Use knowledge of language and its conventions when writing, speaking, reading, or listening.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.6.3a Vary sentence patterns for meaning, reader/listener interest, and style.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.6.3b Maintain consistency in style and tone.*
Here is the Common Core promise, from “Are Kids Too Coddled,” by Frank Bruni, NYT:
“David Coleman, one of the principal architects of the Common Core, told me that he’s all for self-esteem, but that rigorous standards “redefine self-esteem as something achieved through hard work.”
“Students will not enjoy every step of it,” he added. But if it takes them somewhere big and real, they’ll discover a satisfaction that redeems the sweat.
And they’ll be ready to compete globally, an ability that too much worry over their egos could hinder. As Tucker observed, “While American parents are pulling their kids out of tests because the results make the kids feel bad, parents in other countries are looking at the results and asking themselves how they can help their children do better.”
“A satisfaction that redeems sweat.” Wow!
But that’s “if ‘it’ takes the them somewhere big and real.” Huh?
And they’ll be ready to compete globally.” Wow and thanks.”
“Be careful not to worry about your child’s ego too much.” ???????????
Mr. Coleman is selling snake oil.
Think of the importance of fluency and expression in speech. Why isn’t that part of Common Core?
The great danger is twofold. First, the people of CC have the President of The United States behind them, just like Arne does, and just like Kilpatrick had Dewey.
Now we know that it’s good to have books in the kindergarten class room.
Important curriculum is being discarded because it is not amenable to electronic testing. That is why CC has removed “fluency and expression in speech.”
Those qualities can be evaluated by the classroom teacher teacher. But you can’t test fluency and expression with a number two pencil. You need a human being for that. So It’s out.
The development of a positive sense of self is an “ego concern” and seen as obstacles to competing globally.. Compete, Compete, Compete!
So the problem might not be critical thinking, it might be something else. We all need to feel important. But some, only understand importance as something achieved competitively.
But that’s not where our kids need to be. Were at a tipping point. Their need is to learn how to cooperate.
And if their generation doesn’t get good at that, each generation after, might have fewer and fewer lovely afternoons.
We need to test our children to see where they need help. We should not test our children to see if they meet a standard, unless it comes from God.
And whether from God, the forces of evolution, or the accidental collision of fermions and bosons, the times they are a changing. Aren’t we ready for a renaissance. Wouldn’t it be great for our kids.
Maybe Maria Montessori had it right:
Human teachers can only help the great work that is being done, as servants help the master. Doing so, they will be witnesses to the unfolding of the human soul and to the rising of a New Man who will not be a victim of events, but will have the clarity of vision to direct and shape the future of human society.
Maria Montessori, Education for a New World, 1946
Nice post, Michael.
“So the problem might not be critical thinking, it might be something else. We all need to feel important. But some, only understand importance as something achieved competitively”.
It’s more than that. It’s, “Nobody gives a s*#t what you think of feel”.
Coleman should be banned from education. Instead he’s being pushed into it.
We must stop this. We simply must.
Typo = “Nobody gives a s*#t what you think OR feel”.
I may have misquoted, as well. I know he said “feel”…not sure about “think”. Don’t much feel like checking it out, at this point, anyway.
Either way, it doesn’t matter. I, personally, don’t give a s*#t what HE thinks or feels. I think he may have internalized a bit in that speech.
“We must stop this. We simply must.” My sentiment exactly.
I believe Coleman’s actual quote was:
“We must develop impossibly difficult standards and assessments. Tests that will guarantee students are college and career ready. Tests that ensure our students become world class critical thinkers, because no one will give a shit about what they think.”