This letter from a teacher in Chicago public schools shows how gaming the system has become more important than helping each and every child achieve their best.
Data matter more than students.
Data matter more than learning.
Numbers trump education and equity.
The advice: focus on the kids closest to passing. Forget those at the top and the bottom: They don’t matter.
Here is the message:
Today we had a grade level meeting about the NWEA scores for the fourth grade students at my school. We teachers were all given printouts of our students’ most recent scores: RIT bands, percentiles, the whole shebang.
Then we were instructed to highlight the students in our classes who had scored between the 37th and 50th percentile. These students, the admin informed us, are the most important students in the class; they are the ones most likely to reach the 51st percentile when students take the NWEA again in May.
Making the 51st percentile is VERY important to CPS, and thus to principals, literacy coordinators, test specialists and teachers-who-don’t-want-to-lose-their-jobs.
It might not be important to individual students, their parents or anyone else, but it is life or death in Chicago Public Schools.
We nodded, wide-eyed. These students, our guide continued, should be your primary focus. Make sure they get whatever they need to bring them up to that percentile. Sign them up for any and all academic programs, meet with them daily in small groups, give them extra homework, have them work with available tutors…whatever it takes.
What about the kids at the very bottom, one teacher wondered, the kids under the 20th percentile…shouldn’t they be offered more support too? The admin squirmed a bit. Well, they don’t really have any chance of hitting the goal, so for right now, no. There was silence.
Left unsaid was what might, could, will happen to any school that does NOT have enough students meet that magic number. No one really needs to say it. We all saw the 50 schools that got closed down last year. We see the charters multiplying around us. We’ve also seen the steady stream of displaced teachers come through our school doors as substitutes. We know that we could be next.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
They are missing the point about test scores.
Some kids go up and some go “down.” depending
on their emotional relationship with learning that year.
They should also focus on the 50-60 percentile that
will go down. As long as we have standardized testing.
Let the games begin!
All the others may do better
by not receiving this questionable focus.
Teacher, leave those kids alone!
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Last year I was working (not teaching) in a charter school (in Michigan). I taught four classes of Spanish and also tutored small groups of students in Reading during their eighth grade English class. Aside from the fact that I was taking these students away from their main lesson every day for 10-15 minutes, was a problem in my eyes, since it made these “at risk” students responsible for more material than those who I didn’t have to pull aside. Who I “needed to” pull aside was exactly what the teacher wrote in this post: those whose NWEA scores could be raised to “proficient”. Those students below that threshold were not the priority. It is so sad that test scores are tied to funding for the overall de-funded schools. Overall, the charters where I worked were more expert at “gaming the system” when it came to government funds than the purely public schools. We need to end the “system” that creates environments such as these; de-funded and stressed about test results.
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Kids are props for the testing industry, the teacher eval/reduction game, this entire reformy charade.
What does it say about our culture that we treat children like this?
With tears in my eyes I wonder……will the children ever forgive us for what we have put them through?
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The author points to schools saving their “hides” through this “gaming”. But teachers individually are being forced to do the same thing. This is what the “Student Learning Objective” that teachers must complete (as part of their evaluation) accomplishes – being forced to game the system within their classroom to hold onto a job. Teachers must show “gains” through data on a targeted group of students they select from within their classroom. Failure to do this will result in a teacher’s eventual termination due to an unsatisfactory rating. With jobs at stake are these teachers going to provide extra assistance to those not in their subgroup? This is the FFT Charlotte Danielson “method” being rolled out by mandate in districts in each state across this nation!
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Thank you for connecting this idiocy and harm to the egregious Danielson crap. I’m so over people acting like she is an innocent player in this mess. She is a Gates lackey. Teacher’s College and Lucy Calkins recently paired with her and that turned me off completely from the 20+ years of work I’ve done with TCRWP. She is a featured speaker at the National Board teacher’s conference this summer and that makes me ashamed to be a National Board certified teacher. I don’t understand why everyone is just accepting her rubbish evaluation as gospel truth without question. She is the lynchpin in destroying the careers of teachers and costing thousands upon thousands of us our jobs. She is evil. Period.
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@Chris in Florida… Danielson represents such a large problem… education run for profit at the expense of students and teachers and creating mandated “one-size-fits-all” Ford style assembly line protocol to enforce education run for profit… done so that publishing and testing folk can mass produce and profit profit profit. Just how did Danielson’s “my way or the highway” FFT rubrik get mandated in each school district around the country? Here is info on her for those who may not know about her (and most of us still do not know despite reading about her.. she paints herself as a jack of all trades having taught from elementary to college while also doing a host of other administrative leadership stuff.. not much time for actually being a teacher unless she is about 90 years old! This link is a bit “NYC centric” but what is being said applies to most states- certainly mine!
http://nyceye.blogspot.com/2013/06/huff-post-piece-delves-into-charlotte.html
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In my extensive experience with test scores before they were made secret with the Bell curves of proficiency, half of the students went up and half went down. The trick is to have more increases in scores than decreases. I always suspected from observation that the increases were due to a positive emotional experience in the class. This could be the case if students are not a part of the nonsense of the above mentioned focus groups.
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” I always suspected from observation that the increases were due to a positive emotional experience in the class”
Of the kind that they will not get in a Common Core test prep boot camp.
from the Reformish Lexicon:
data-driven decision making. Reformish numerology.
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At some point we need to come to the conclusion that they don’t give a Rats A* about test scores. The goal is to create the nonsense, like this, that surrounds testing and undermines teachers and children.
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Exactly the same at our school, an “F” school, in Florida.
We were told in no uncertain terms that grades 3,4, and 5 WILL focus on nothing but those students on the cusp of “passing” the FCAT by the Florida Dept. of Education DA team (Differentiated Accountability, or Educational Gestapo) and the district’s School “Improvement” Team, both of which did a few walk-throughs and immediately determined our problem was lack of rigor and low expectations. This diagnosis and treatment was the same for all 13 Title I schools that received “F” grades last year. Amazing how it was exactly the same in every school and how easy that was to diagnose and “fix”, eh?
No recess. No art. No singing. No holiday celebrations. Nothing “frivolous” or “unproductive”. Absolutely NOTHING is allowed in the classrooms that will not “improve” the test scores. Or else. We were threatened with dismissal and/or closure next year if we don’t perform and bring that “F” up to at least a “C”. We were actually told that we are “abusing” these kids if we aren’t teaching them to pass the FCAT test. I nearly puked. We were told that if we couldn’t do this then the district would hire teachers who are capable of teaching these children. We were given a miraculous new way of writing lessons and teaching that will raise the “rigor” and “expectations” and make our poor, minority, and ELL students soar to passing scores! No other teaching methods or lessons ALLOWED on threat of dismissal.
The average years of experience of our grade 3,4 and 3 teachers is 25 years, all in Title I schools. We are beyond farce and have moved into Looking Glass Land here in the Sunshine State. Coming to your local school soon courtesy of Jeb Bush and ALEC!
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Thank you for sharing this. We here in FL have definitely fallen down the rabbit hole and are living I Looking Glass Land. I always wonder why those DA state teams are not held accountable for the grades of the schools they are ‘advising ‘. If the school doesn’t improve by doing what the DA team mandated, why is it the school’s fault? Seems to me the DA team should be fired!
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Only in Florida, annieeducator. Our DA team quit en masse last week and was hired by our new super to run our curriculum department. Talk about a nightmare scenario. And I’m frankly shocked that the state DOE allowed this. One can never underestimate the crazy here in the Sunshine State!
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Does this part of the article sound familiar?
*Today we had a grade level meeting about the NWEA scores for the fourth grade students at my school. We teachers were all given printouts of our students’ most recent scores: RIT bands, percentiles, the whole shebang. *
*Then we were instructed to highlight the students in our classes who had scored between the 37th and 50th percentile. These students, the admin informed us, are the most important students in the class; they are the ones most likely to reach the 51st percentile when students take the NWEA again in May. *
* Making the 51st percentile is VERY important to CPS, and thus to principals, literacy coordinators, test specialists and teachers-who-don’t-want-to-lose-their-jobs.*
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So much of recent reform literature focuses on teacher training, but says little about administrative training. This note speaks to what Arthur Levine observed a number of years ago about his study of school administrative programs: an emphasis on boilers,budgets,and boosters and little attention to curriculum and instruction. I would add to his study an administrative culture that rewards/elevates administrators who do budgets, PR. and extra-curricular activities well and views curriculum and instruction as an entry level position for novice administrators. I keep shaking my head at articles, like this, and others that point to the implementation of zero tolerance policies, testing policies, textbook adoption policies, adoption of some technology, that describe Zombie like responses from administrators who have traded in their role of instructional leadership for instructional manager (i.e. telling-allocating-inspecting). Honestly, how do these administrators drive home at night without some feeling that they are doing something terribly wrong to children. Reminds me of all those social science experiments where individuals will do terrible things to other people when someone with a white coat stands in back of them and tells them that it is ok to do something that is morally corrupt. In this case the white coat continues to be an out of control accountability/testing regime that has no moral compass.
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Does this really surprise anyone? They’re managers with limited resources and their entire performance is measured by student test scores. Completely predictably, they focus exclusively on test scores.
If they were measured on extracurriculars offered, or creating a great school environment, or retaining staff, they’d focus there.
I know it would be extremely risky, because there’s the threat of shutdown and/or takeover, but I wish public school administrators would buck this obsession with test scores.
Parents don’t want this. This is coming from the market-based ed reformer dogma that says schools are like commercial entities. If public schools could find the spine to resist the ridiculous focus on standardized tests, they could differentiate themselves from charters in a very positive way:
“We’re Chicago Public Schools, and we believe your child as more than a test score”
It’s also nonsense that the politicians who are pushing this “never intended” this focus on test scores. All politicians talk about is test scores. It’s the metric THEY use.
If Chicago Public Schools test scores go up with this tactic, the mayor will be out quoting the test scores, and taking credit. The politicians who push this benefit from it. They need the number to point to more than anyone.
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I can attest to the same thing happening here in Texas about 6-9 years ago in my district at the fifth grade level. We were told to work hardest with the “bubble” kids. Then several years later the mantra became “all must pass.” I guess someone at central office got wise to how awful that sounded.
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OMGoodness!!! Yes! This is one of the MYRIAD reasons I quit my previous job… which btw was a charter school position…. did the SAME EXACT THING!!!! And those grade level meetings started creating a visceral reaction in many teachers… even in the school where I am now (which isn’t nearly as touched by the reformy movement), I still have reactions to the announcement of a “meeting.” Can feel the anxiety peak. It’s… dare I say… a form of PTSD… where every meeting was fraught with fear due to the threat of job loss & school closure… always the push to do more, more, more. People’s basic sense of survival is threatened in these situations… esp. those of us who don’t have a spouse (therefore another source of income). Sooooo glad that I started reading Diane’s blog and had my eyes opened!
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Sorry to go off topic, just received this, it seems that the Russians care more about kids in New York State than the Governor.
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When the Russians are thinking we are taking surveillance too far, we have a problem.
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Stop the Orwellian database. Communicate with parents and legislators. Speak about this in local churches. Organize Meetups.
If ever there was a time for organized civil disobedience, this is it.
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very funny. It’s becoming like RT is playing the role that radio Free Europe did . Bringing news that is not in the local media from behind the Corporate Curtain.
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The relentlessly grim, data-obsessed “reform” movement marches on.
There’s no joy in it, so they’ll have trouble maintaining the scores, which will lead to a further obsession with scores, until, I don’t know, all they’ll be doing is test prep?
Is there some system limit built into this? What’s to stop them from just conducting test prep 6 hours a day? If I were a manager of this “score production facility” and I was judged entirely on test scores, I’d have a huge incentive to focus on test scores.
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This is happening all over the country. This is working precisely as the deformers intend for it to work. They call this kind of obscene behavior “focus on results.”
Everyone who cares about kids needs to find every opportunity to out these collaborators in ed deform child abuse.
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This, I fear, is common practice: we were told by our superintendent at a meeting to put our efforts into those cuspy kids for the same reasons mentioned. I long for the “good old days” when test scores were not the be-all and end-all. There was a time when we took children from where they were and brought them along the education continuum, having faith that they would one day “get there”. Now we give the kids arbitrary deadlines about where they must be, otherwise they (and their teachers and their schools) are failures. Nothing is more disturbing than having a seven year-old tell you that they will never be good at reading/math/writing because of their scores on assessments. At one time we gave our earliest learners the confidence they needed for later success, now we tell them they’re failures before they’ve even begun the journey.
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I’m sure this is the same in every state. The “bubble kids” get tons of time / attention / resources, and the kids at the bottom are often receiving special services and extra interventions (but sometimes not).
That leaves the kids who already meet those standards. What about them? If they’re not identified as gifted, what do we do to extend their learning?
Is this not the group that will figure out solutions to the global problems? Are these not our future biochemists, communications experts, surgeons, engineers, and so on? Aren’t they the group who will find the cures for cancer and AIDS? Aren’t they the ones who will develop the new technologies and alternative fuel options? Where do they get their extra support? When do we find the time to challenge them and help them develop their talents? Don’t proficient students deserve our very best too?
BB
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I’d like to know what will happen to these purveyors of child abuse? Will they be arrested when there are children who require counseling due to all of the testing?? What happens with the kids who don’t score well on tests, but are otherwise quite intelligent, discover-along with their parents-that they are not important? WHY IS THERE NOT MORE OF A PUBLIC OUTCRY??? I know….sadly-because kids don’t vote and teachers, for some reason, wear a scarlet letter for societies woes……
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This is pedagogical eugenics.
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Time to put a stake in the heart of the undead NCLB that has risen again, stronger than ever, to suck the life from our children, our teachers, our schools, our communities.
This is the part of the film where the villagers get together and start making stakes.
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organize and resist
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Wendy Lecker’s column addresses the impact on kindergarten. Some teasers from the entire column:
http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/Lecker-The-disturbing-transformation-of-5256686.php
“One of the most distressing characteristics of education reformers is that they are hyper-focused on how students perform, but they ignore how students learn. Nowhere is this misplaced emphasis more apparent, and more damaging, than in kindergarten.”
“To make matters worse, the drafters of the Common Core ignored the research on child development. In 2010, 500 child development experts warned the drafters that the standards called for exactly the kind of damaging practices that inhibit learning: direct instruction, inappropriate academic content and testing.”
It may satisfy politicians to see children perform inappropriately difficult tasks like trained circus animals. However, if we want our youngest to actually learn, we will demand the return of developmentally appropriate kindergarten.”
Wendy Lecker is a columnist for Hearst Connecticut Media Group and is senior attorney for the Campaign for Fiscal Equity project at the Education Law Center.
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This approach to triaging instruction in Chicago was pioneered by Riverside Publishing back when the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) and the TAP tests were Chicago’s “accountability” tests. During the days Paul Vallas was “Chief Executive Officer” of Chicago’s public schools, he was coached about how the “bubble kids” were the ones who would bring a school’s scores over the magic number (the 50th percentile) and went on to recommend this method, as we reported in Substance back then.
The triage was discussed in detail at a forum sponsored by Fair Test and others in 1999 at Columbia University, where Paul Wellstone and Richard Rothstein were among the speakers. From Chicago, we reported how the kids “on the bubble” got all the instructional time.
What happened to the higher scoring and lower scoring kids?
Different forms of triage. The “top” kids (those already comfortably above the 50th percentile) were supposed to do “self directed” work.
The “bottom” kids (those hopelessly below — the 20th percentile or lower) were herded into holding rooms and told to SIT DOWN, SHUT UP and not GET INTO TROUBLE.
Several of us discussed this Chicago plan at the time, and an honors student from Crane High School described its implementation in detail. We reported it all in Substance, which was not on line way back then.
The original trick was proposed by Catherine Lawrence who at the time represented Riverside, which marketed the ITBS and TAP tests to Chicago. When I followed up on the story, I kept getting the runaround. Ultimately, all of the test companies send reporters not to a scientist but to their marketing department, and when you ask for actual studies they send you their marketing and PR materials. This has been going on for more than 15 years, since high-stakes testing made these tricks a very VERY lucrative business and the professors and others who lent their names to these frauds were told to sit down, shut up and count their royalties with a smile.
But could report personally because I had heard her utilize and recommend those strategies to bring schools “up.” The whole game was to show a “trending up,” which was the title of the Paul Vallas reports on test scores for three or four years. It was the earliest example of the same data driven mindlessness that we are still looking at.
The other trick, of course, is to change the tests every four years or so and establish a new low baseline from which “Trending Up” can resume again. All of this was reported by Substance and by Jerry Bracey more than a decade ago.
So…
Thanks for the news and the reminder that those who do not learn the harsh lessons of history are doomed to repeat history’s greatest mistakes.
Or, to put it another way…
Plus ca change, plus la meme chose.
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This seems so very futile. So we raise all kids to 51st percentile. The testing company will just re-norm the test scores to fit a bell shape curve and we are back where we started. The bell shaped curve is what it is.
I would love to hear our statistical experts talk about how often these tests are re-normed and how much control we really have or do not have in moving kids up on normed assessments. It would seem we would have very little-that score variation would be captured within the standard error of measurement.
I would like to understand this issue. Let’s discuss.
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Date mining like this isn’t recent. Back in 2001 around the time that G. W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind was enacted, the district where I taught in Southern California hired a data analyst to work for the district with a salary that would have been enough to hire three new teachers.
His job was to sift through years of data and come up with a strategy that would help boost the scores of the district’s schools to meet the mandated requirements set by NCLB.
I attended more than one instructional staff meeting that was led by this analyst—who went school to school—who passed out reams of legal sized printouts with the scores of every student every teacher taught and then he showed us how to identify those students closest to jumping levels that would help raise scores for the school.
We were told to identify and then focus more of our energy on those kids who would boost scores and all but ignore kids who were identified as losers in the game of data mining—this isn’t the exact language but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand what the message was.
Teachers who listened to him spent hours with highlighters in hand and rulers to go through that information and identify the kids who were to get the most attention and those kids weren’t the one’s who needed the most attention. The at risk kids were to be shoved to the back of the bus.
Back in my classroom those data sheets went into a file never to see the light of day again and I went back to teaching as I always had—to all my students and not just a focus group identified through standardized test scores.
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Lloyd Lofthouse: thank you for what you did—and didn’t!—do.
😎
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You’re welcome.
I didn’t do a lot of things that came down the buttered slide from Washington DC, Sacramento and the district office, but there was little they could do about it becasue what I was doing in the classroom worked.
Administration even admitted as much but that never stopped them from pushing the next magic bullet on many reluctant teachers. Then pressuring teachers to do as they were told as if we were troops in combat being ordered to charge a heavily fortified and armed bunker that would lead to certain death.
What’s interesting is that district and sometimes site administration wasn’t interested in what teachers were doing that was successful. Mostly they were only interested that we were implementing the untested theories they kept shoving our way.
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The shame of this paradigm is that if everyone is aiming for the 51st percentile, there will of course always be “failures.” That’s just the way numbers work. There will always be a bottom half. So it guarantees a level of failure in perpetuity – meaning there’ll always be justification for doing whatever it is they want to do.
As many have said, cooperation, not competition, is the key to success for public education. But their goal is not really education. It’s profit.
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When we did the same sort of analysis at my public school, (before it was closed and given to the EAA,) I was amazed at the large number of students who were only one or two questions away from passing. Then I looked further and saw there was a margin of error of plus/minus 3 questions. The system was gamed, but NOT but us. We need totally turn the tables on this junk science!
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…but not by us.
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Look at the districts using NWEA and the socio-economic status of their populations.
NWEA, the Kingsbury Center, you, I , the children of our future….. are we all just 1 degree or less from Bill Gates?
http://jaypgreene.com/2013/03/page/2/
We don’t need software to see what is before our very eyes.
If we continue to purposely focus on academics without also addressing the social and emotional needs of students who live in poverty, it is social injustice. Specific funding must be demanded to allow for smaller class sizes, adequate services and supports both in schools and communities.
Despite the most engaging lessons, improved curriculum, and diagnostic testing, it will continue to be: social injustice.
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The entire system is rigged to fail, of course. Every child cannot be above the 50th percentile since percentiles RANK students. In a ranking, half of the students will always be at or below the 50th percentile! Rank professional baseball players and half will be at or below the 50th percentile. But I would still bet on them winning a game against my local pickup team of teachers!
This statistical nonsense is brought to us by people who supposedly “know” how to measure learning. And our salary and job security is beholden to them Ridiculous!!
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“. . . people who supposedly “know” how to measure learning.”
How is it possible to know how to do the impossible????
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Exactly!!!
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CCSS and high stakes testing IS ABOUT MAKING $$$$$ off the backs of kids and teachers while at the same time keeping them docile and dumb. How can one run a fascist country with citizens who question the status quo?
Remember, FOLLOW THE $$$$$. IT’S ABOUT $$$$$ and power, period…nothing more and nothing less.
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“We see the charters multiplying around us. We’ve also seen the steady stream of displaced teachers come through our school doors as substitutes.”
At least every couple of days I get a list of charter jobs by email from charters in Chicago. Suburban public schools are slowly beginning to publish jobs by the 90 (?) day deadline as they finish their evaluations. I don’t know if it is statewide or a district contract issue, but the districts where I worked had to let a teacher know by the beginning days of March whether they were going to be terminated. The Chicago charter schools have published a steady stream of jobs all year long. What does that tell you?
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The worst part is that prepping for the ELA tests doesn’t even nourish the minds of the bubble kids. Reteaching reading strategies and then drilling on sample test questions does not an education make. So no one is getting a real education.
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This is exactly what happened when a person from District Office here in southern Queensland addressed us at my high school a few years ago about improving the results of our NAPLAN tests (literacy and numeracy tests). It was all about focusing on the kids who were just below the national standard to push them over the line and, secondly, pushing those students just below the top group into that group. When teachers asked the same question about the kids in the bottom levels we got the same reaction – there was not a lot that could be done. We ignored them and still tried to help those kids, but in Australia we are not under the same pressure to get our students to perform on standardised tests as you are in the US.
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At our district, these are the “bubble kids” – the kids who can elevate the building’s scores. We are required to meet with the lower groups every day, leaving the upper kids a bit neglected. Depending on how many low groups a teacher has, this process makes it difficult to maintain AYP for the upper kids. The biggest stress is the requirement to do certain things that do not benefit all students and that are detrimental to many. But, the “shut up and do your job” mentality rules and we have no recourse. Of course, we are called out on the AYP scores for all students, even though that doesn’t impact their “success”.
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Two years later, has anything changed?
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Oh yes, the “bubble kids”. In order to get or keep our numbers up, tgat was to be our focus. Except, VAM came along and we were responsible for increasing the growth of kids who had already achieved ar the higher end of the scale. It didn’t matter if they’d reached the ceiling. Common sense left becauae data showed that we must have students continuously improve. There was no recognition that there was no real proven comparison from grade level to grade level that AYP was even a valid measure.
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