A reader sends this comment:
“It is starting in Illinois with the PARCC fled tests coming next month . Technology coordinators and classroom teachers have been trying the online sample field test questions and are appalled at how developmentally inappropriate the tasks and questions are for eight, nine, and ten year olds. I am all for rigor. Ask my students and their parents. Rigor does not mean developmentally appropriate.
“One ELA test can be as long as 120 minutes with only one three minute break allowed. During that break the students may not communicate with each other. They are nine and taking a test that for some will take 120 minutes and others will finish early and sit for 120 minutes. This is outrageous!
“Plus, all staff members involved will sign a one page Security Agreement. If you are found in violation of it, you may lose you license. The manual and agreement state that you must have your full attention on the testing environment. The manual states that the proctor may not read, grade papers, check email, etc. while the 120 minute test is being taken. So you will just stare at you students while they struggle through the nightmare.
“This must be stopped!”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Not one bit surprising.
The fastest way to stop it would be if hundreds of millions of Americans (teachers, children, parents) poured into the street threatening riots. Riots work really well. Break windows, burn cars, etc.
Protests and riots got the US out of Vietnam, didn’t they.
The other way is to find lawyers willing to take it to court and spend years crawling through the legal system with lawyers from the billionaire robber barons of public education and the Wolves of Sesame Street blocking your lawyer’s every move with the goal to drive you or your lawyer into bankruptcy and ruin.
The legal system in the United States serves the wealthy well.
The third option is to get out the vote in every election and do what that parent group did in Texas: rank every politician and inform the public who not to vote for. That takes time too and costs a lot of money to publicize in the media. The billionaires have the advantage there too.
Then there is getting as many people as possible working hard to get the message to go viral on the Internet by creating a meme to counter the memes from their side. The billionaires can’t do much about that.
We have a democratic governor who is intent on destroying public pensions in a state where we have been denied social security and Medicare (we pay for part A out-of-pocket). Then we have a wealthy venture capitalist intent on destroying unions running against him. Vying for the Republican nomination along with him are other extreme conservatives including the Illinois ALEC chair. We have no alternative candidates who are not bent on destroying public education.
It’s true that there are Democrats, Republicans and Billionaires all gunning for public education. But each faction—both political and religious—has a different goal. The one thing they all have in common is a goal to destroy democratic public education in the United States and make public school teachers and their unions the scapegoats for just about every problem in the United States.
The same exact thing Hitler and his Nazi’s used the Jews for starting in the 1930s leading up to World War II.
I think America is at a crossroads and if teacher, kids and parents lose this battle, the US will no longer be a republic and/or a democracy. And there are also members of both major parties who aren’t out to profit off the taxpayers who support public education. That list out of Texas proves that.
There’s another way. Every concerned parent sends their child to school with instructions to not pick up a pencil or participate in any way on any high stakes assessment, computerized or otherwise. This is called civil disobedience, and it’s a very effective form of protest. It can be done. My daughter did it. The system feeds on data. It must be deprived of what it needs to survive.
Gandhi did this but to make it work there must be wide spread support and a way to communicate with the population so people can opt in.
It’s obvious that we don’t have most of the traditional media because the robber barons and wolves have been buying the media up most of it’s controlled by six major corporations and most of those corporations will profit from the end of the public schools and unionized public school teachers being driven out of education.
This is exactly what needs to happen, Joe. Massive civil disobedience.
Starve the numerologists of their data.
This is precisely what needs to be done.
Unfortunately, the teachers’ unions, which should be leading this disobedience, are headed by collaborators. So, this will have to be done without them.
Shame on them.
That security agreement sounds pretty boilerplate and has been around for standardized tests pretty much since forever. Same for the testing blocks. He issue here is the spread to younger grades, because this mostly sounds like exposure shock upon experiencing what many, if not most, teachers have been dealing with for decades with standardized tests.
True, we had this sort of classroom test environment in California decades ago and we tested at the high school for several day in long blocks of time. They also teamed teachers up so there were two of us in each classroom where tests were taking place. This way, one teacher could allow another to take a RR break.
And the rules also included loss of job if you didn’t maintain the test environment and the rigorous testing protocol down to counting test booklets to make sure they were all returned. If you were missing one, that could lead to termination.
We were also supposed to turn in a list of any kids who finished the test in record time so they could be called into the office to be grilled and maybe forced to take the test again.
It pays off being a teacher who is a tough disciplinarian the kids respect/fear in a testing environment like this. Kids tend to follow directions from those teachers easier than the softies.
You put it into a perspective of what is worst than being a tortured prisoner is like. I’d rather go back to the paddling consequences.
I retired from teaching in 2005 and if the robber barons looted the CalSTRS pension fund (and I expect that is one of their goals with every teacher pension fund in each state and US territory once they are done taking over the public schools) and forced me to go back to work at almost 70, I’d rather volunteer to fight in Afghanistan with the Marines instead of return to a school environment controlled by those tyrants.
The Marines could strap explosives on me and then I’d walk into a pack of Taliban or al Qaeda and blow myself up as long as my family would get a pension of some kind from the US military. Or better yet, I could walk into a meeting of those billionaire tyrants and blow them up along with me.
I feel like we’ve all been dropped into the Twilight Zone.
This morning I got an email from Amazon advertising this book:
Princess Labelmaker to the Rescue!: An Origami Yoda Book
The description below is unbelievable.
“At McQuarrie Middle School, the war against the FunTime Menace—aka test prep—wages on. Our heroes have one battle under their belts, and they’ve even found a surprising ally in Jabba the Puppett. But to defeat the Dark Standardized Testing Forces they’re going to need an even bigger, even more surprising ally: Principal Rabbski. But with great forces—aka the school board—pushing her from above, will the gang’s former enemy don a finger puppet and join the Rebellion—or will her transformation to Empress Rabbski, Dark Lord of the Sith, be complete?
Well, every little bit helps and young children in the primary grades will understand this and go home with the news of Darth Vader running Common Core.
Keep the message simple.
LOL
…and what about students who are special ed, ELL, 504s who have accommodations like extra time and a reader?
From the feed on my two tech-listserves (one for tech educators and one for tech directors) the technological problems, related to giving the test, are unending and multiplying by the minute. I can only be thankful that my school is still doing pencil and paper this year. I’ve been saving every email because I know I’ll be tackling this nightmare next year. There are so many work arounds to keep track of, it hardly seems worth it. I’m hoping against hope that by next year parents and tax payers will have wised up to this testing nightmare and insist that it be done away with. I know my school’s bandwidth can’t handle it so….we’ll see );
The national roll-out by PARCC and SBAC of CCSS aligned tests in math and ELA will be a two-pronged disaster.
Prong #1 – The COMPUTER FIASCO that will unfold as the US school system will reveal to the ivory tower reform group that the LACK OF1) working computers, 2) necessary bandwidth, 3) keyboarding skills, 4) fine motor skills, and 5) money to upgrade
Prong #2 – The TEST WRITING CRIME that is about to be perpetrated on 20 million 8 to 14 year olds. Remember these tests have not been constructed by accident. They have been constructed to achieve the exact result that the DOE wants. All that $325,000,000 can buy! They are TRAPS not TESTS, designed to TRICK, CONFUSE, and WEAR DOWN the test takers. beware the false claims of test security. Demand that they be viewed in their entirety.
Better yet – simply OPT -OUT your kids.
A wonderful (and apropos–producing a brief smile) typo in this piece…which is otherwise disturbing. The typo is “fled tests” instead of “field tests”. And fleeing from testing situations such as this is surely what is necessary.
Post after post, day after day, week after week, month after month…the stories multiply. Keep them coming. Perhaps sufficient outrage will be generated that this testing craziness can be brought to an end.
What exactly are the ELA tests measuring? At one point on a practice Smarter Balanced test, I had to look at one complex sentence drawn from a passage, and then scrutinize six other sentences to see which ones supported the first sentence. I found this very laborious. I had to hold the first sentence (with its slightly complex and ambiguous meaning) in my short-term memory, and then, one-by-one grasp the other slightly complex and ambiguous sentences and hold them up next to the meaning of the first sentence. I had to think hard, and in some cases I wasn’t sure what the correct answer was.
What is such a task measuring? I suppose the authors of the test would say “a particular reading skill”. It’s all quite vague to me. What it FELT like was that my brain’s hardware was being tested –my memory power, my ability to use logic (does Evidence X support Proposition A?), my concentration… If so, what does this mean for curriculum? Are these things teachable? Are these mental muscles that can be strengthened with exercise? I want to understand the theory and assumptions behind such tests. Has anyone really explained these tests in depth? Or is the test-makers’ understanding of what they’re doing vague too?
“What exactly are the ELA tests measuring?”
NOTHING, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!!
They are not measuring devices. In no way shape or form can they be considered a measuring device.
A TEST WRITING CRIME is about to be perpetrated on 20 million 8 to 14 year olds. Remember these tests have not been constructed by accident. They have been constructed to achieve the exact result that the DOE wants. All that $325,000,000 can buy! They are TRAPS not TESTS, designed to TRICK, CONFUSE, and WEAR DOWN the test takers. beware the false claims of test security. Demand that they be viewed in their entirety. Better yet – simply OPT -OUT your kids.
Exactly, Ponderosa. well, well said!!!
Yours is precisely sort of critique that needs to be made of these assessments, but, unfortunately, what you are saying isn’t easily translatable into soundbites that the national media can grok. Few will be the readers who will actually attend to the important points you have made here.
It will be fun to write the exposés of these tests when they are rolled out nationally, and at that point, when the assessments really matter, people may be ready to listen. But I grieve for the kids who will be subjected to these Philistine assessments being created by the educrats who are collaborating with the deform invasion force.
And no, the educrats haven’t thought through the absurd assumptions on which these assessments or the bullet list of CC$$ ELA standards were based.
“Plus, all staff members involved will sign a one page Security Agreement. If you are found in violation of it,. . . ”
Sign ze papers, Ms. Olman!
Don’t worry about the kids and proctor not getting any breaks during the 120 minute test. The technology will inevitably fail, sputter or stall. Built in test break!
They probably have a wildly unenforceable as well as ridiculous protocol for that situation as well.
“They are nine and taking a test that for some will take 120 minutes and others will finish early and sit for 120 minutes. This is outrageous!”
The age of the students is a very good common sense point and I wonder why it isn’t being taken seriously by the people promoting this testing.
I don’t think you’d find very many parents who wouldn’t agree with this teacher that a 9 year old should be treated differently than a 16 year old. There’s a real dogmatic blind, INSISTENCE involved in this that is just nuts. I’d like to ask any of these hard-driving ed reformers if they sat for a 2 hour high stakes test when they were 9 years old, and whether they think that makes any sense at all.
240 minutes for many speds! That’s supposed to help counter-act their disabilities.
Also, before our entire media/political complex endorsed these tests, did anyone ask how they were to be applied to each age group?
I know these are minor concerns, petty in the Grand Scheme of Ed Reform, and probably just the griping of union bosses and special interests, but do the NYTimes editorial board know that 9 year olds are sitting for 2 hour high stakes tests, where not just they will be judged on the results but also their teachers and schools will be judged? Did anyone bother to ask?
And, now, pre-K testing begins!
The Amplify gang continues to grow:
“Sandy Kress, the controversial testing lobbyist, is leading a new raid on school taxes. This month he registered to lobby for Amplify, the company that wants to replace textbooks with tablet computers, positioning him to grab some of the hundreds of millions of dollars Education Sec. Arne Duncan is offering to create pre-K tests. Despite a nationwide backlash against high-stakes testing, your tax dollars are now going to developing standardized tests for 4-year-olds, and Kress is ready to cash in.”
I love “controversial testing lobbyist”. That’s great 🙂
http://www.cagle.com/2014/02/cashing-in-on-pre-k-testing/
Here’s the problem with the Common Core College and Career Ready Assessment Program (C.C.C.C.R.A.P.) being developed:
When many, many extremely bright people, employing many checks and balances, create an end product that utterly fails, then there is something systemically wrong–something wrong with the guiding assumptions under which they are working. People ask, how could this possibly have gone wrong? We had the best and the brightest working on this. We were extraordinarily careful.
The classic case of this is the Vietnam War. It’s because of Kennedy that the phrase the best and the brightest became everyday currency. He had such people engaged in the oversight of U.S. military and intelligence operations, and those same people stayed in place during the Johnson administration. They were experts. They were extraordinarily experienced. Some of them had overseen the programs that led (though at terrible cost in civilian lives, it must be remembered) to the victory in the Pacific theater of the Second World War. And they followed sophisticated procedures, based on flawed assumptions, that led to the horrific boondoggle that was Vietnam.
Often, in organizations, there are horrific dysfunctions despite the fact that very bright people are working very hard and very diligently. The problem is not with the people but with the system and with the unexamined assumptions built into it. That’s what’s happening with the tests being developed. Some think that are being developed by idiots in a sloppy, haphazard manner. They could not be more wrong. The new tests are being developed extraordinarily carefully by very talented people. But those people are working under general assumptions that are false. For example, they are assuming a) that you get better what you measure and b) that if you measure more sophisticated skills, then c) you will get more sophisticated skills. The conclusion that serves as the deformers’ initial assumption seems to them obvious–rigorously true in the mathematical sense of being a consequence of deductive reasoning from true premises.
But, if you are asking multiple-choice questions about complex skills and requiring that all your distractors be “plausible”–that is possibly true–then what you are producing is a test guaranteed to trick large numbers of test takers into choosing the wrong answers and, inadvertently, you are creating an industry for those who can train students in answering questions of that type. In other words, you are creating a new test prep industry with enormous opportunity costs that will usurp and take time away from actual instruction in subject matter. In other words, you are turning your schools into factories for that kind of test prep. You get what you measure, so you had better be very careful about what you are ACTUALLY measuring. Often, it’s not what you think you are measuring. The devil is often in the details.
And then there is the problem with the initial premise–that the way to get better performance on sophisticated cognitive tasks is via external punishment and reward (high or low test scores). There is a large body of research, now, that shows this premise to be dangerously false. See Daniel Pink’s book Drive,, a popular account of this research.
The new tests will not be a failure because they were produced by idiots. They will be a failure because they did the wrong things very, very well. As John Tukey, the statistician who invented the box plot, said
“When the right thing can only be measured poorly, it tends to cause the wrong thing to be measured well. And, it is often much worse to have a good measurement of the wrong thing, especially when it is so often the case that the wrong thing will, in fact, be used an a indicator of the right thing, than to have a poor measure of the right thing.”
The current education deforms are basically large-scale experimentation on the U.S. K-12 public educational system based upon
1. an early twentieth-century factory model for milling identical widgets and
2. an extrinsic reward theory of performance that goes back to the hydraulic empires of the earliest stages of human civilization.
And this extraordinarily backward thinking is ironically being touted as what is needed to produce students with 21st-century work skills.
Wrong from the start.
Valid but false conclusions have been drawn from flawed premises.
Garbage in, garbage out.
The testing and evaluation system being put into place is being hailed as “data-driven decision making.” No. It’s numerology-based decision making. And what the deformers do not realize is that
1. A complex, diverse, pluralistic society and economy needs students who have been extraordinarily variously prepared for extraordinarily various roles, not ones who have been identically milled, and
2. Our prime directive as educators must be to create independent, intrinsically motivated learners, which cannot be done with a highly scripted, top-down, monolithic, external punishment and reward model.
Bill Gates says that it will take decades for us to know whether the current deforms have worked. If the deformers are successful in foisting these on the country, he will be right about that. Those will come to be known as the lost decades in which outcomes plummeted, humane and productive practices related to teaching and learning were trashed by numerology-driven Philistines, real ideas and innovation in curricula and pedagogy were precluded, and millions were robbed of educations that would have helped them to identify their potentials and pursue those toward ends productive for themselves and for the larger community.
Good point: the makers are smart. But their premises are flawed. It seems to me that a background in philosophy helps incline a person to examine and question premises. France and Finland mandate philosophy courses. I wonder if reflection on Europe’s history of totalitarianism has led to this choice. I’ve read somewhere that many Nazis had unparalleled technical education, but lacked strong foundations in the humanities. Germany’s war effort: dazzling execution…to what end? (I don’t mean to equate the Common Core with Nazism; just point out the importance of getting the premises right).
Superb, Ponderosa!!!!
yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!!!!
It’s interesting to look at the questions from the French French baccalauréat, required of students who wish to pursue university studies. Those exams contain essay questions, often ones dealing with broad questions of significant philosophical import and requiring breadth and depth of content knowledge on the part of the student.
Some of those questions:
Is man condemned to create illusions about himself?
Can we prove a scientific hypothesis?
Is it our duty to seek out the truth?
Would we have more freedom without the state?
Can natural desires exist?
Is the only purpose of working to be useful?
Is every belief contrary to reason?
Can desire be disinterested?
Are we prisoners of the past?
Do artworks have to be pleasurable?
Do technological developments threaten our liberty?
Is it absurd to desire the impossible?
Are there questions that no science answers?
Does technical development transform humans?
Does language betray thought?
Does historical objectivity presuppose an impartial historian?
Students are asked to write detailed essays in response, referring to specific (but variable) concrete materials that they have studied.
I can only imagine how students who have done nothing but skill drill in preparation for bubbling in bubbles, students who come from a system in which content is treated as incidental, would fare when faced with such questions.
An important correction to my hastily written note, above. As the blogger going by the name NY Teacher pointed out, correctly, a plausible distractor, as defined by the makers of objective tests, is one that seems as though it could be true but isn’t. People create such distractors to avoid this kind of thing:
Which of the following are found in a minor seventh chord?
A. the root, a minor third, a perfect fifth, and a minor seventh
B. Bo Diddley
C. “If all the world and I were young”
D. mascarpone
But, in attempting to avoid that sort of thing while at the same time addressing sophisticated thinking skills, the test makers are creating questions with distractors that seem highly likely, so that the student often has to spend quite a bit of time thinking about each. There might be, for example, there might be lots of material in a selection that suggests that a given distractor is correct but one adjective in the selection, easily overlooked, that rules it out. Because test writers have to create three plausible but incorrect distractors related to the question, they often end up writing distractors that are very tricky or even, arguably, correct (I’ve seen a lot of those).
And it’s no wonder that only a fraction of the kids are passing tests constructed like that, with those good intentions gone awry.
Of course, there are many, many other problems with the tests as constructed. This is just one of them. But we don’t have a democratic process here whereby we can debate, as a country, the details of these initiatives. The decisions are all being made for us. Ours is but to shut up and proctor.
cx: that only a fraction . . . is, not are, of course
Oh, for a means of editing these posts!
“You get what you measure, so you had better be very careful about what you are ACTUALLY measuring. Often, it’s not what you think you are measuring. The devil is often in the details.”
The main “devil detail” is the fact that these tests measure nothing. They purport to measure something but that something is not an agreed upon item. It is nebulous, ephemeral and unmeasurable.
The secondary “devil detail” is that these tests are not “measuring devices” no matter how much the psychometricians, edudeformers and GAGA educators deem them to be. Declaring that something that is false is true does not make it true unless one prefers to live in a idiological (purposely misspelled) mind world.
“. . . so you had better be very careful about what you are ACTUALLY measuring.”
And at this point (and prior and in future) we have no idea what we “are ACTUALLY measuring”.
The video above explains one of many reasons why the extrinsic reward and punishment theory on which education deform is based will not work, why the system instantiating that flawed theory will have precisely effects precisely the opposite of those intended.
Good video. I’ve read about companies that do this and usually with great success.
But the deformers aren’t punishing the learners. They’re punishing the teachers.
Teachers are the whipping boy for kids who don’t read; don’t study; don’t cooperate—-for whatever reason.
Kids know this. Parents know this. So why bother to make an effort to be better parents or students when no one is going to hold you accountable because the teacher is your whipping boy?
It is also morally wrong to put students who really like their teacher, in a position where they will worry that said favorite teacher will lose their job if they answer some test items wrong. I had a special ed student who told me that he hoped to do really well so I wouldn’t get fired. Felt so bad for the kid, he didn’t stand a snowflake’s chance on the impending test.
That comment, NY Teacher, just brought a tear to my eye. This is tragic. What a travesty!
Lloyd, the punishment is doled out all around. Summative testing is all about punishment (you were below the cut score) and reward (you were above it), as a result, you will not pass or will not graduate, and you will.
The schools, the teachers, the students are ALL being subjected to a system based upon on extrinsic reward and punishment theory.
Disgusting! Who are these guys? What rock did they crawl out from under? Considering that a handful of billionaires and their pet politicians are going to make life difficult for tens of millions of adults and children, they may one day find themselves the victim of a guillotine.
This arrogance where a few think they know what’s best for the many usually does not end well once the many get fed up with the suffering and decide to get rid of the few.
Reblogged this on 21st Century Theater.
Opt out
The point of CCSS and high-stakes testing involves MONEY as well as MUCH MORE than money. CCSS and high-stakes testing = RIGOR MORTIS….this is the point! RIGOR MORTIS.
Our students are being used as unpaid laborers to field test PARCC. Pearson is a huge for profit company that can afford to pay. I wish parents would figure this out and demand that their children be fairly compensated or choose to opt out.
Don’t take their blood money. OPT OUT