Must be something funny in the water in San Diego. Back in the 1990s, when it was widely seen as one of the best urban districts, the San Diego business community decided it was no good and needed a tough master to bring it to heel. So they hired Border Czar and attorney Alan Bersin as superintendent, and he launched controversial, pedal-to-the-floor reforms that I wrote about in “Death and Life of the Great American School System.”
I visited San Diego a few times since, and on one visit spent a morning in an exemplary elementary school. The principal was Cindy Marten. The district was very proud of her. Justly so, it was a terrific school.
On my next visit, Cindy was suddenly superintendent. A few weeks ago, I wrote a post on why I thought San Diego was the best urban district in the nation. I specifically said it was not about test scores, though they are good, but about vision and teamwork.
Of course, this prompted a local journalist to complain that the San Diego schools were awful, awful. What a negative reaction. Imagine if you say to a mother, “That baby of yours is beautiful,” and she yells back, “She is not!” Like people who can’t take yes for an answer.
So an editor at Voices of San Diego, where the snarky article appeared, invited me to respond, and this is what I wrote.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you, Diane. What would we do if we didn’t have you to fight these attacks on our public schools.
I have a question which you may or may not be able to answer:
Why do you think the leaders of our two teacher unions failed to provide the leadership in fighting the effort to destroy our schools and demoralize our teachers?
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Good QUESTION that needs answers! Bet the answers will be well…not true, but instead SPINS. Why aren’t our students learning about propaganda techniques used throughout history to disguise the truth. Today…One of the biggest propaganda is that our kids and schools are failing and of course,,,the really bad one: Politicians and people who have $$$$$$ know more about teaching than educators.
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Linda,
I think Randi is changing her mind. She denounced VAM, she wants an end to high-stakes testing, she will be more outspoken. I don’t see any effort on part of NEA. That is for them to answer.
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Thanks.
If Randi had fought hard at the very beginning, she could have done a great deal to prevent the present fraud from happening. As for NEA, I no longer pay for my membership for retired teachers. Instead I have joined the Network for Public Education and thanked them for their efforts to educate the public.
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Diane, your response to the article in the “Voices of San Diego” concerning the new superintendent, Cindy Marten, was marvelous. You speak for us who work with diligence to educate and inspire our students. Enjoy your day in Florida.
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Maxine, thank you.
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Bravo to Diane for articulating simple truths in a time of manufactured crises, nonsensical spin and shameless bullying.
Read the first comment in the linked opinion piece to appreciate the sort of pushback we can expect from the edufrauds when they perceive that $tudent $ucce$$ is threatened.
“The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.” [Mary Sarton]
😎
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Diane, why did you double down on the claim that San Diego has higher NAEP scores than Houston?
When I provided the disaggregated data showing that such a claim is provably false, you sloughed it off, saying that scores don’t really matter and that wasn’t your point anyway. That didn’t really make a whole lot of sense to me–if you feel the scores don’t matter, you should have just left them out of the argument.
But this was a new piece where you had a chance to either be more specific about the data or to just forgo the discussion on test scores since you don’t feel they say anything about the quality of a district. You often accuse “reformers” of fudging the numbers, but to say that San Diego outscores Houston without disaggregating is engaging in exactly the same practice.
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Tim,
I continually point out the fallacy of using test scores for anything. The processes involved in educational standards and the accompanying standardized tests and the “grading” of students are so fraught with error that those processes are completely invalid**.
As much as most here deplore the usages of educational standards and standardized testing for the various things they are used for (teacher, school, district, etc. . . ) evaluations most also refuse to deplore using “grades” and “labels” to sort and separate students so that some are rewarded and others punished, mainly because of inherent traits and characteristics that cannot be “measured”, not something that is under the control of the individual, much like skin color, gender, age and sexual preference are not under the control of the individual. So that the state is discriminating against some and rewarding others much like segregated schools which have been determined to be unconstitutional. These nefarious practices will have to one day be ruled unconstitutional to stop them.
As Wilson states: 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.
**“Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”.
In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
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Thanks, Dr. Ravitch. This community and collaboration is what Carmen Fariña at Tweed is telling New Yorkers: “We know that there are things that need to happen, but they need to happen with people, not to people.”
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Dr. Ravitch-
I have read and have agreed with some of your positions but, take it from me first hand…Elementary Principal credentials with great Public Relations does not an effective, or even capable, Superintendent make. I hope your friendship with Cindy Marten does not cloud your view of how miserable a job she has done in the San Diego Unified School District over the last year…especially in the area of community collaboration and open dialogue with District stakeholders including Parents, Principals, Teachers, Students and Communities.. Please read my blog to give you more background on this ongoing disaster: .http://districtdeeds.wordpress.com/
Best-
Frank Engle
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