On Tuesday, the results of the international test called PISA will be released.
Years ago, no one paid much attention to the release of international test scores, but now they have become an occasion for official moaning, groaning, and hyperventilating. It is time to remember the story about “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Will we hear more declarations that the latest results are “our Sputnik moment”? Will we hear more predictions that our economy is headed for disaster because some other nation has higher test scores? You can count on it.
Richard Rothstein and Martin Carnoy write here that the U.S. Department of Education released early copies of the PISA results only to organizations that can be counted on to echo the Obama administration’s official line that American schools are failing and declining and unable to compete in the global competition.
They write:
Typically, The U.S. Department of Education (ED) is given an advance look at test score data by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and issues press releases with conclusions based on its preliminary review of the results. The OECD itself also provides a publicized interpretation of the results. This year, ED and the OECD are planning a highly orchestrated event, “PISA Day,” to manipulate coverage of this release.
It is usual practice for research organizations (and in some cases, the government) to provide advance copies of their reports to objective journalists. That way, journalists have an opportunity to review the data and can write about them in a more informed fashion. Sometimes, journalists are permitted to share this embargoed information with diverse experts who can help the journalists understand possibly alternative interpretations.
In this case, however, the OECD and ED have instead given their PISA report to selected advocacy groups that can be counted on, for the most part, to echo official interpretations and participate as a chorus in the official release.1 These are groups whose interpretation of the data has typically been aligned with that of the OECD and ED—that American schools are in decline and that international test scores portend an economic disaster for the United States, unless the school reform programs favored by the administration are followed.
The Department’s co-optation of these organizations in its official release is not an attempt to inform but rather to manipulate public opinion. Those with different interpretations of international test scores will see the reports only after the headlines have become history.
Which organizations got early copies of the PISA data? The organizations who have been provided with advance copies of this government report, and that are participating in the public release are: The Alliance for Excellent Education, Achieve, ACT, America Achieves, the Asia Society, the Business Roundtable, the Council of Chief State School Officers, the College Board, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and the National Center on Education and the Economy. These organizations and their leaders have a history of bemoaning Americans’ performance on international tests and predicting tragic consequences for the nation that will follow.
Rothstein and Carnoy remind us that thirty years ago a federal government report called “A Nation at Risk” warned of our dire peril, and that report has since been proven wrong:
Advocates participating in Tuesday’s staged PISA Day release include several who, a quarter century ago, warned that America’s inadequate education system and workforce skills imperiled our competitiveness and future. Their warnings were followed by a substantial acceleration of American productivity growth in the mid-1990s, and by an American economy whose growth rate surpassed the growth rates of countries that were alleged to have better prepared and more highly skilled workers.
Today, threats to the nation’s future prosperity come much less from flaws in our education system than from insufficiently stimulative fiscal policies which tolerate excessive unemployment, wasting much of the education our young people have acquired; an outdated infrastructure: regulatory and tax policies that reward speculation more than productivity; an over-extended military; declining public investment in research and innovation; a wasteful and inefficient health care system; and the fact that typical workers and their families, no matter how well educated, do not share in the fruits of productivity growth as they once did. The best education system we can imagine can’t succeed if we ignore these other problems.
We don’t plan to comment on tomorrow’s release, except to caution that any conclusions drawn quickly from such complex data should not be relied upon. We urge commentators to await our and other careful analyses of the new PISA results before accepting the headline-generating assertions by government officials and their allies upon the release of the national summary report.
Wouldn’t it be refreshing if some of these organizations asked the obvious question: Why does the United States continue to thrive and prosper even though our scores on international tests are not at the top? Why was “A Nation at Risk” so terribly wrong in its predictions of doom and gloom to come if we didn’t raise those international test scores?
– See more at: http://www.epi.org/blog/pisa-day-ideological-hyperventilated-exercise/#sthash.mlTQYkwp.dpuf
speaking of hype and spin—interesting bit on NPR this morning about stack ranking.
also heard this morning that higher ups are encouraging teachers to give their students “a sense of agency” for the holidays.
What’s that?
Your guess is as good as mine! ;-}
A sense of agency is the feeling that one is in control of one’s own life. If you are possessed of a sense of agency, then you feel that events that affect, dramatically, your life and those of the people you care about depend upon what you do, not on what is done to you.
Clearly, the way to give children a sense of agency is submit them, day in and day out, to invariant, one-size-fits-all, canned curricula and pedagogy based upon canned standards and to do this under threat of failure on summative tests.
Clearly, the way to promote agency and autonomy is to create a distant, centralized, totalitarian educational authority that treats kids as parts to be identically milled.
Clearly, the way to create agency and autonomy is to ignore the fact that kids differ.
Clearly, it would be a mistake to believe that our goal as educators is to nurture internal, intrinsic motivation because people who view themselves as the locus of control in their lives do so only under conditions where they have no control whatsoever, where all control is extrinsic.
and, of course,
War is Peace,
Freedom is Slavery, and
Ignorance is Strength.
This message is brought to you by the Propaganda Ministry of the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth. I am scripted robo-teacher 347820J.v6a, and I approve this message.
Correction:
Clearly, the way to give children a sense of agency is submit them, day in and day out, to invariant, one-size-fits-all, canned curricula and pedagogy based upon canned standards and to force them to work under continual threat of failure on summative tests.
The NBBA(National Board of Bogus Agency)awards certificate no.BS4893 to Mr. Robert Shepherd below for his insightful analysis. Mr. Shepherd is hereby ordered to enact his outstanding agency daily.
In ’83, A Nation at Risk was the big item as Diane indicated above along with Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein. ANAP was supposed to be debuted at a journalists’ conf but Reagan Admin felt it had a hot item and moved debut to Rose Garden of White House, where mediocrity of Amer pub educe was proclaimed as a threat to national security(then in terms of “trade war” against Germany, Japan, Korea, etc., who were “winning.” Media hype indicates scale of bogus claims, now appearing again via PISA, an effort to shout down the consequential opposition raised by Diane and others in past few years, means we should keep going.
Ira, the only question about tomorrow is whether we will again hear shrieks about “a Sputnik moment.”
Or will anyone admit the failure of nearly a dozen years of high stakes testing?
“a sense of agency” is the magic of stupefaction.
It’s the same thing BUT different, because it’s separated together.
An example:
“insufficiently stimulative fiscal policies which tolerate excessive unemployment, wasting much of the education our young people have acquired; an outdated infrastructure:regulatory and tax policies that reward speculation more than productivity; an over-extended military; declining public investment in research and innovation; a wasteful and inefficient health care system; and the fact that typical workers and their families, no matter how well educated, do not share in the fruits of productivity growth as they once did.
Separated together…
“Why does the United States continue to thrive and prosper even though our scores on international tests are not at the top?”
What part of thrive and prosper contains ” fiscal policies which tolerate excessive unemployment, an outdated infrastructure, regulatory and tax policies that reward speculation more than productivity; an over-extended military; declining public investment in research and innovation; a wasteful and inefficient health care system;” ???
Isn’t the proof of a “Strategy” found in the results?
I am practicing, Ira, a very EFFICIENT form of agency called submission. It only has to be exercised once.
I tried to give that sense of agency to my students. I felt it was necessary for them to “compete” only with themselves, not for me or the district. They were never given the responsibility of thinking it was their responsibility as to keeping me employed. I gave them the right to make their own choices, good or bad, right or wrong, to make themselves feel as good about themselves as they chose to do. It was not about me.
However, that isn’t to imply that I wasn’t concerned about what their test results might be. I internalized everything and it wasn’t good for me. There was one boy who was stressed, thanks to his mother, but that was her issue. I tried to ease his fears, always. Ah, …
also, if America’s public schools are failing, then isn’t democracy failing? I mean if for nothing else, shouldn’t we hang on to public schools and be positive about them and find their beauty and build on their strengths for that purpose? Has the worth of democracy and its cornerstones really gotten that lost? Isn’t that a smack in the face of those who work in service to God and country?
“Isn’t that a smack in the face of those who work in service to God and country?”
How about a “smack in the face of those who work in service” of mankind?
Well, except that you leave room for the National Security issue if things are done for mankind. They have to be done for country if they are going to fly with the thought of the day. . .right? Better to at least converse over how to serve the country (since that is where reformers), knowing that the process preferred and typically espoused by educators is one that is beneficial to humans (mankind).
Joanna,
I stand by my statement!
“and a discussion with author Amanda Ripley (The Smartest Kids in the World)”
Ugh. So, so sick of the product placement and relentless marketing. Now all we’re missing are education experts Tom Friedman and Frank Bruni to fill out this media celebrity ’roundtable.” Duncan specifically cited Friedman on “career readiness” in a speech Duncan gave about a month ago. Friedman is an opinion columnist, a pundit.
As an outsider to education, watching ed reformers spin test scores to advance a specific “market based” agenda (NEAP and now this test) makes me less amenable to having my child sit for any standardized testing. I don’t really want him used like this, in a sophisticated, full-out political campaign.
It is peculiar that we are being pushed to believe the assertion that there is reason to blame teachers for perceived deficiencies in our society. Sure, there are inadequate teachers, but they are not the rule. We are a leisure-seeking, pleasure-pursuing, indulgent people. The act of being educated needs, in part, to be self-motivated. A teacher can’t force education into the unwilling, belligerent, unmotivated student.
The idea of testing students on material for which they have no foundational exposure, let alone interest will continue to produce the results that should be expected. These tests are used to “prove” a point. As long as they are the measuring device, the results will be the same. By the time the educational community pivots enough to assist students in grasping the material, by providing background and developmental support, the tests will change again to assure that mediocrity will appear to be factual.
To me, this is all just a game. Right now, those with money are toying with our children’s future. They will be dead before they see the fruits of their schemes. So many lives have been ruined already. So many have been shunned. So much psychological harm has been inflicted. It will continue until public schools will be meaningless. Instead of using education as a tool to uplift all, it will continue to separate, divide, punish, and browbeat everyone who can’t or won’t conform. Whoa!
“A teacher can’t force education into the unwilling, belligerent, unmotivated student.”
And like leading a horse to water but not being able to make it drink, administration expects us to suck on the back end to make the horse drink (our born and bred country boy biology teacher’s corollary).
“As long as they are the measuring device. . . ”
Standardized tests such as PISA do not measure anything, they are not measuring devices. That’s one of the many errors and falsehoods involved in the educational standards and standardized testing process that serve to render any results INVALID. At best one might call them pseudo-measuring devices, in other words, fake, not real devices.
And it is worse than a “game”. As you write, deb, there are serious negative consequences from using these educational malpractices, especially to the most innocent, the children.
If I may quote Noel Wilson:
“It requires an enormous suspension of rational thinking to believe that the best way to describe the complexity of any human achievement, any person’s skill in a complex field of human endeavour, is with a number that is determined by the number of test items they got correct. Yet so conditioned are we that it takes a few moments of strict logical reflection to appreciate the absurdity of this.”
Just one of the many jewels of thought found in “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
I didn’t mean to imply that they are truly measuring devices, but they are used as such. They are meaningless. But for some reason some find them useful and valid. I am always puzzled at the assumption that a given question has only one answer. Some may, depending upon the answer choices. But there are different ways to look at most things.
Great post.
“We are a leisure-seeking, pleasure-pursuing, indulgent people. The act of being educated needs, in part, to be self-motivated.”
So much of official educational policy advances a work/play dichotomy even though we know this is not how to develop the intrinsic self-motivation to learn. Everything is needlessly “amped up” on both sides of the equation rather than allowing children to learn while playing and play while learning. And now whole profitable industries are based on selling specific things to children for play and for work. Yet they have already come into the world with an immense capacity to learn while playing.
EXACTLY, EMMY!!!!!
Beautifully said. This is an EXTREMELY IMPORTANT POINT you have made here!!!!
This is the MOST IMPORTANT THING ABOUT EDUCATION THAT IS NOT UNDERSTOOD, AT ALL, BY THE DEFORMERS.
And yes I fear the smart 4th grader (who doesn’t want to take responsibility, but hears the slams on teachers) saying: see you ain’t a good teacher because I didn’t learn.
Even this morning, among some 4th graders who were not listening, I admonished that if they did not leave knowing the point I was making and demonstrating that it was because of their choices—not mine. When students talk while a teacher is talking, they are determining their learning fate. The teacher needs to try and turn it around, but yeah. .. slamming on teachers is not helpful to anyone.
Thanks, Robert.
Great article by Rothstein and Carnoy. When I talk to my non-educator friends about educational policy I find they listen much more closely if I have provided background knowledge (like this article) so when the media spin and hype arrives they don’t have to do a “close” listen – they have context to apply and maybe, just maybe, will begin to see the manipulation of the DOE.
So thanks for the post and the link – it is kind of like beating the bad guys to the punch.
“We don’t plan to comment on tomorrow’s release, except to caution that any conclusions drawn quickly from such complex data should not be relied upon.”
As anyone using a scientific, rather than ideological approach, must say. Do any of those organizations have statisticians on staff? What are the qualifications of the individuals who will craft their organization’s public statements? It takes time to evaluate complex data to come up with a meaningful (and accurate) interpretation.
If the DOE had competent statisticians, then the folks who have been submitting New York’s state test scores as required under NCLB over the past decade would have long ago been taken out behind the barn for a switching, as rural Americans used to say.
I saw a news [sic] story last week with a headline that said that A Quarter of U.S. High-School Graduates can’t pass the military entrance exam. This was supposed to be big news because the exam–the ASFAB–is a very low-level test of basic reading, math, and science knowledge and skills.
But, of course, the population taking the exam was not a representative sample of ALL U.S. high-school students. It was a self-selected set of students, a large percentage of whom had no options for their futures, in this difficult economy, except to join the military. The headline promoted the test results of a sample taken from the latter population to the results of a sample taken from the population as a whole.
It’s often said that it’s easy to lie with statistics. Not true. It’s easy to lie with BAD statistics, BADLY interpreted.
But that was the news outlet’s fault, right? Someday I am going to teach a class called “Statistics for Journalists (and others with loud megaphones)”. I am only partly kidding.
Anyone who has worked in education for decades will have lived through a number of reform movements that were to entirely transform education. Remember the promise of NCLB? In case you have forgotten, here it is:
All we have to do is to force states to issue rigorous standards and to give high-stakes tests correlated to those standards and abacadabara, BY 2014 ALL STUDENTS WILL HAVE REACHED PROFICIENCY IN MATH AND READING.
Well, we are a month away from 2014, and Arne Duncan is issuing NCLB waivers to states that will agree to do A LOT MORE OF WHAT HAS TOTALLY FAILED–testing to standards.
Now, I ask you, what is more idiotic than looking at a policy that has UTTERLY FAILED and saying, “Gee, we should do A LOT MORE OF THAT”?
If the PISA results show U.S. students to be anywhere but at the very top, then he deformers will spin them as proof that we need “NCLB on Steroids”–that is, NATIONAL STANDARDS AND NATIONAL TESTS. They will not see those results as proving that more than a decade of DOING IT THERE WAY has made no difference.
But neither conclusion follows from the international test scores because those scores compare apples and oranges. If you correct for socioeconomic status, U.S. students scored at the top or near the top on the international tests before and during NCLB, which means that NCLB was a cure for an illness that did not exist.
Correction: A decade of doing it THEIR way
I wish one could edit these posts!
http://www.northjersey.com/news/Teacher_ratings_can_strain_New_Jersey_school_districts.html?page=all
More zany conspiracy theorists and coddlers!
“New Jersey’s law requiring districts to start new teacher evaluations this year has become a bonanza for the firms that are helping schools comply.
Many districts have spent tens of thousands of dollars on new online tools for collecting data on teachers’ goals and techniques in the classroom, and training staff members how to use them. Many superintendents are grumbling that on top of the enormous investment of time required to conduct more frequent and in-depth evaluations, these bills are an unfair financial burden imposed by the state.
One four-school district in Ocean County took its complaints further last week, alerting lawmakers and superintendents across the state that its Board of Education had passed a resolution asking Governor Christie to pay it $206,540.61 annually for complying with the new rules — and to compensate all districts for their extra costs as well.
When state leaders “come up with these great ideas, I don’t think they realize there is a dollar value” to them, said Laura Venter, school business administrator in Berkeley. She said the district had to hire two additional supervisors just to handle evaluations. In a small district, she added, “we don’t have as much wiggle room.”
Are we allowed to ask what CC testing will cost in money and time BEFORE we adopt it or is that inquiry too taxing for the promoters?
“The sky is falling” works very well to get people to accept top-down, totalitarian control. The sky is falling in education. Therefore, we need a nondemocratic, distant, authoritarian, Commissariat to create and enforce national standards and national tests. “The sky is falling” in the area of national security, and therefore we need to spend six trillion dollars on no-bid contracts for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I will provide a propagandistic casus belli. Its credibility doesn’t matter. The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth.” –Adolph Hitler
PISA scores are a great all-purpose propaganda tool. One can spin them to support deform NO MATTER WHAT THEIR OUTCOMES.
Outcome: U.S. students do great. Spin: See, the standards-and-testing regime is working. We need to do a lot more of that.
Outcome: U.S. students bomb. Spin: Clearly, we are falling behind in education. We need standards and testing to correct this.
Outcome: U.S. students show minor improvement. Spin: Thanks to NCLB, we’ve had some successes, but clearly, we need to do a LOT more testing to standards to get where we want to be.
We must always keep in mind THE PRIME DIRECTIVE:
Create a single set of national standards and tests and a single portal of student responses and test scores through which curricula flows. Doing so will ensure that monopolists maintain and even extend their control over the educational materials market and that the coming generation can be effectively a) propagandized and b) made into obedient service economy do-bots used to inane tasks like bubbling in those bubbles.
No national standards, no national tests = no Walmartization and Microsofting of U.S. education. It means freedom of thought. Independent innovation and competition in curricula and pedagogy. We must, of course, avoid that AT ALL COSTS. Well, not at all costs, of course. This is all, we must remember, AT ROOT a business plan.
from the Rothstein and Carnoy article:
“Our analysis [of international test results] showed that conventional interpretations of these scores can be glib and misleading.”
To see exactly that sort of glib, misleading analysis, all one has to do is go to the home page of Achieve, the organization that, with a great deal of support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has been the central player in the deform movement.It’;s interesting that the Gates Foundation is a private charity but that its education initiatives JUST HAPPEN (gosh, isn’t that amazing!) to very, very potentially lucrative for Gates’s companies. Isn’t it JUST AMAZING that by SHEER COINCIDENCE, if every student is using one set of standards, inBloom can operate as a national database and curriculum portal, and if every kid is hooked up to that portal and taking online tests, Microsoft can sell a lot of operating systems and applications software. And, by another astonishing coincidence, the Gates Foundation just happened to be encouraging education entrepreneuriship by putting out an RFP for grants to startup computer-adaptive software companies.
I find this string confusing and contradictory. Since the blog entry was posted on Monday, the PISA report results have been released with much of the anticipated fanfare and expected commentary. The first thing I don’t understand is why this discussion thread seems to downplay the value of the report. It is a demonstrated fact that our students are falling behind their peers in countries with which we compete in the global economy. At the same time, we have far too many people and families living in poverty in the US. Most of the people who participate in this blog believe quality that K-12 public education is essential to enabling everyone to improve their lot in life. So if we have severely bad economic conditions in America and evidence that our education system is not preparing our citizens as well as our competitors are doing, we should be celebrating that report as a validation of our claims that the present policies are not working.
The problems with K-12 education are largely caused by a misguided set of national programs and policies. I don’t need to list them again here. They have been the subject of many recent posts. The problem is not the fault of the teachers and will not be fixed by better accountability measures. There are a number of urgent problems with K-12 public education in America that must be fixed as soon as possible. Rather than dismissing the information provided in the PISA Report and denying that we have a problem, we should be embracing the report as further evidence that the present programs and policies are failing and demanding the changes frequently discussed herein.
Research the scores submitted by Shanghai and other foreign countries. They do not include poorer scores from poor districts. The scores don’t paint an accurate picture. Finland isn’t worried about this bogus comparison. We are being manipulated.
Shouldn’t these test results produce a large wave of US citizens emigrating to Shanghai for their superior educational opportunities?
If not, why not?
“we should be celebrating that report as a validation of our claims that the present policies are not working.”
The problem here is that educrats and media pundits are blaming teachers instead of the failed policies.