District 2 in New York City–one of the city’s highest scoring districts–plans protests this Friday against the poor quality of the ELA tests given last week. State officials tried to dismiss concerns from other districts, specifically from Liz Phillips, a respected Brooklyn principal who wrote a letter to all the parents in her school saying the tests were.”terrible.” More than 500 parents and teachers at her school joined to protest the ELA tests last Friday. The Néw York Times ignored Phillips’ informed judgment and accepted the assurances of state officials (and pupils–how large was their sample?) that the test was “easier” than last year.
District 2 principals agreed with Phillips.
Here is their statement:
Community Action:
Join Us in Speaking Out Regarding the NYS English Language Arts Exam
Friday, April 11th, at District 2 Schools
Dear District 2 Families,
Community School District 2 represents a richly diverse group of school communities and it is not often these days that we have an opportunity to join in a shared effort. Last week, and for several weeks prior, every one of our upper grade classrooms devoted hours of instructional time, vast human resources, and a tremendous amount of thoughtful effort to preparing students to do well on the NYS ELA exams and, ultimately, to administering them. Only a handful of District 2 families even considered opting out, and we are not advocating families do so, specifically because we believe our students are well prepared for the rigor and high expectations of the Common Core and our schools have worked hard for several years to adjust our curriculum and teaching to support students in meeting those expectations. We had high hopes for what this year’s tests would bring and assured families that they would reflect the feedback test makers and state officials had received from educators and families regarding the design of the test following last year’s administration. Our students worked extremely hard and did their very best. As school leaders, we supported teachers in ensuring that students and families kept the tests in perspective – they were important, but by no means the ultimate measure of who they are as readers, students, or human beings. We encouraged them to be optimistic, and did our best to do the same. Frankly, many of us were disappointed by the design and quality of the tests and stood by helplessly while kids struggled to determine best answers, distorting much of what we’d taught them about effective reading skills and strategies and forgoing deep comprehension for something quite different.
Last Friday morning, Liz Phillips, the principal of PS321 in Brooklyn, led her staff and her parent community in a demonstration objecting, not to testing or accountability or high expectations for kids, but to these tests in particular and, importantly, to their high stakes nature for teachers and students, and the policy of refusing to release other than a small percentage of the questions. 500 staff and parents participated.
By Friday evening some officials were dismissing the importance of their statement, claiming that Liz and her community represented only a tiny percentage of those affected, implying that the rest of us were satisfied. Given the terribly high stakes of these tests, for schools, for teachers and for kids, and the enormous amount of human, intellectual and financial resources that have been devoted to them, test makers should be prepared to stand by them and to allow them to undergo close scrutiny.
Many District 2 schools will be holding demonstrations this week, making sure our thoughts on this are loud and clear and making it more difficult to dismiss the efforts of one school. On Friday morning, April 11th, at 8:00am, we invite our families and staff to join District 2 schools in speaking out, expressing our deep dissatisfaction with the 2014 NYS English Language Arts LA exams and the lack of transparency surrounding them. Among the concerns shared by many schools are the following: The tests seem not to be particularly well-aligned with the Common Core Learning Standards; the questions are poorly constructed and often ambiguous; the tests themselves are embargoed and only a handful of select questions will be released next year; teachers are not permitted to use (or even discuss) the questions or the results to inform their teaching; students and families receive little or no specific feedback; this year, there were product placements (i.e., Nike, Barbie) woven through some exams. We are inviting you and your family to join together as a school community in this action, helping to ensure that officials are not left to wonder whether our silence implied approval.
Yours truly,
District 2 Principals
Adele Schroeter, PS59; Lisa Ripperger, PS234; Robert Bender, PS11; Tara Napoleoni, PS183; Jane Hsu, PS116; Sharon Hill, PS290; Amy Hom, PS1; Lauren Fontana, PS6; Jennifer Bonnet, PS150; Nicole Ziccardi Yerk, PS281; Susan Felder, PS40; Alice Hom, PS124; Nancy Harris, PS397; Kelly Shannon, PS41; Nancy Sing-Bok, PS51; Lisa Siegman, PS3; Irma Medina, PS111; Terry Ruyter, PS276; Medea McEvoy, PS267; Darryl Alhadeff, PS158; Samantha Kaplan, PS151; David Bowell, PS347; Lily Woo, PS130; Jacqui Getz, PS126; Kelly McGuire, Lower Manhattan Community MS
Magnificent. An action taken by real educators. And a great opportunity for learning by their students.
Interesting signature list. Looks like it represents around half the District 2 schools, which is surprising to me and definitely impressive. Heavy on elementary schools (only one middle school principal), which makes sense.
At least one of these schools is K-8.
Proud that my principal signed this.
You should be. Very impressive. Wow.
“…the questions are poorly constructed and often ambiguous; the tests themselves are embargoed and only a handful of select questions will be released next year; teachers are not permitted to use (or even discuss) the questions or the results to inform their teaching; students and families receive little or no specific feedback; this year, there were product placements (i.e., Nike, Barbie) woven through some exams….” ~ What speaks loudest of this critique is that it highlights both the poor quality and design of these tests, but also that they offer no real value to educators or students. There is no political agenda here; no conservative or liberal bias. AND the tests don’t even assess what CC$$ has been emphasizing for the last 7 months as the panacea of reading strategies: the “close read”! If a student did employ a “close reading” strategy, and read, re-read, annotating, and carefully summarizing the text, then they probably didn’t have a chance to finish the test!
Reblogged this on NYtechprepper and commented:
The movement is GROWING!!!
What a fifth grader knows that is not understood by the makers of the PARCC and SBAC exams, Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Jeb Bush, . . . and the rest of the barrel of monkeys on the Deform Train:
A true story from a friend’s class today:
The friend asked the kids, fifth graders, to come up with some higher-order thinking skills questions to ask about a science topic. One of the kids, a little girl, raised her hand and said,
“You ought to explain that can’t really write good higher-order questions in multiple choice.”
LOL!!!!!!!
I thought this was just WONDERFUL.
From the mouths of babes.
“Kids say the darndest things.” A. Linkletter
I applaud these actions as the very baby steps that are needed to be taken before the true march begins.
Folks,
It ain’t no bull. If you want to kill “the undead educational malpractices that kill the joy of learning” drive a stake through its heart. Wilson has forged that stake. The CCSS and accompanying tests all suffer the same fatal flaws/errors identified by Wilson almost two decades ago that render the whole process completely invalid. Read and understand his never refuted nor rebutted classic “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.
A healthy dose of Noel Wilson with a topping of Banesh Hoffman should round off nicely this educational buffet:
[start quote]
The most important thing to understand about reliance on statistics in a field such as testing is that such reliance warps perspective. The person who holds that subjective judgment and opinion are suspect and decides that only statistics can provide the objectivity and relative certainty that he seeks, begins by unconsciously ignoring, and ends by consciously deriding, whatever can not be given a numerical measure or label. His sense of values becomes distorted. He comes to believe that whatever is non-numerical is inconsequential. He can not serve two masters. If he worships statistics he will simplify, fractionalize, distort, and cheapen in order to force things into a numerical mold.
The multiple-choice tester who meets criticisms by merely citing test statistics shows either his contempt for the intelligence of this readers or else his personal lack of concern for the non-numerical aspects of testing, importantly among them the deleterious effects his test procedures have on education.
[end quote]
[Banesh Hoffman, THE TYRANNY OF TESTING, from the 1964 edition of the 1962 original, pp. 143-144]
¡Buen provecho!/Enjoy your meal!/Itadakimasu! [English/Spanish/Japanese]
😎
I am going to have to get and read Hoffman’s book.
Duane Swacker: with no disrespect to myself or anyone else, I doubt there are many that will get more out of a first reading of THE TYRANNY OF TESTING than you.
You already “get” it. I think more than anything else you will appreciate that someone completely unrelated to Noel Wilson also “got” it.
“Happy trails to you, until we meet again.” [Dale Evans]
😎
Duane and Krazy, you are going to want to read this:
Thanks for that reference Bob.
The main point of any description is one of the interaction between the “measuring/detecting” device and the phenomena is quite pertinent and brought out by Wilson. I responded to R. Rendo yesterday with this “I find his (Wilson’s) point that any description of the student test/interaction cannot be “attached” to either the student or test, that the description is of an event or interaction. The implications of that concept are rather mind boggling to me in that the vast majority of people never realize/understand that very simple idea/truth and therefore much, if not damn near all, of what is done with the “results” of any test is more likely than not invalid in its descriptive attempt at the teaching and learning process.”
From your referenced article “In short, ability isn’t a property of the person being measured; it’s a property of the interaction of the person with the measuring instrument. . . Bohr referred to this as “subject/object holism.” If this is accepted then. . . one cannot meaningfully divorce what is measured from the measuring instrument in psychology.”
And:
“What does it mean for a property to be real? When you study an object how can you be sure you are learning something about the object itself, and not merely discovering some irrelevant feature of the instrument you used in your study? This is a question that has plagued generations of psychologists. When you measure IQ are you learning something about an inherent quality of a person called “intelligence,” or are you merely acquiring information about how a person responds to something you have fancifully called an IQ Test?
This passage derives from a famous debate in the history of physics between the two greatest physicists of the twentieth-century: Bohr and Einstein. The debate centred on a fundamental question, namely, “what is it for something to have a property?” The outcome favoured Bohr’s cautious position that the result of a quantum measurement is best thought of as the property of an interaction between the measuring tool and the entity mesured. Bohr believed that this was also true for measurement in psychology. Wittgenstein’s philosophy arrives at precisely the same conclusion. Bohr taught that it was wrong to think that the task of physics was to find out how nature is by which he meant that quantum physics cannot be tasked with investigating the intrinsic properties of electrons, photons, and so on. The cautious position to take is that we must settle for the interaction between the electron and the instrument designed by the experimental physicist.”
All of this pertains to the realm that I call “primary” in that the realm addresses fundamental epistemological and ontological questions/concerns that very often cloud thinking about our descriptions of the teaching and learning process.
Again, thanks, that was a “fun” read!!
Duane and Krazy, have a look at this:
Building the Machine, a movie about Common Core. Includes interviews with James Milgram PhD, Sandra Stotsky, Andrew Hacker and more.
http://www.commoncoremovie.com/
If you have not seen Susan’s brilliant movie, treat yourself. This is one of the most consequential and carefully reasoned pieces of documentary film-making ever created. It is also beautifully crafted.
Building the Machine is by a filmmaker named Ian Reid. I saw it on another website and thought I would pass it along. I hope everybody watches it!
Thanks for the clarification, Susan. I will have a look at the credits.
Warm regards, and thanks for drawing my attention to this film.
Welcome to the Resisstance principals, teachers, and parents of District 2, NYC
THE NETWORK FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION
Saying NO to Punitive, Test-Based Reform
Working Together to Stop the Madness
I posted a link (at Oped) to this page in my comment to an article re Brooklyn anti test opposition . I quoted from this post and added Read the Community Action statement here with an embedded link to this blog.
This is the oped address for the link to the Naiton article
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Brooklyn-Teachers-Push-Bac-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Backlash_Financial_Learning_Movement-140408-660.html
Reblogged this on Mrs. Rosevear's Class and commented:
See you there!
Power to the people,power to the people right now!
The New York Times laissez-faire attitude toward the testing situation and profiteers is unconscionable. The opacity of these tests prevent their invalidity and unreliability from being revealed clearly to the public and the educational community. We need our top university psychometricians to open these tests to the light: their readability levels both quantitatively and qualitatively, their linguistic complexity, what they actually test, their link to IQ testing, and their potential effects on young children. Certain grades were easier than last year, while others were substantially more difficult. These tests are burying the Common Core unfairly by claiming that they test grade level common core skills. They do not. —sad day for the federal Department of education and an administration for which so many educators had great hopes. These tests were promulgated by the imperative to test test test and evaluate teachers by the equally unreliable means in the Race to the Top legislation. — sad day for New York State Department of Education, also.
Testing is not teaching.
Testing is not empowering children for democracy.
Testing is not giving voice to the vulnerable.
Testing is not learning social skills.
Testing is not building values.
Testing does not create a work ethic.
Testing is not helping students believe in themselves.
Testing is not all the things we hold dear as Americans.
Testing is not education.
None of the countries “ahead of us” on the NAEP or PISA employ the excessive and punitive testing that this country has taken on while it “builds the airplane in the air.” Spend our tax dollars where there is local control and problem-solving as-needed in individual communities. Save the cash for the children, and the teachers and supplies they need.
WHAT IF?
As we continue to see ‘advantaged’ students move from urban districts to more affluent suburban districts, I’ve had this thought.: What if we swapped the teaching staff from the advantaged school with the staff at the disadvantaged school? Realtors are continually telling people that the educational grass is greener in BMWville, prompting many of the moves.
My guess: The teachers from the urban setting would do just fine and so would the kids at the advantaged school AND many of the teachers from the advantaged school would refuse to go or not show up after a short time. Can’t we at least recognize that the job in some places is more difficult and give our teachers and administrators some credit for giving their heart and soul to disadvantaged kids and, in many cases, making great progress.
Oh…and another thing…The BMWville kids would do fine in many of the urban schools. Why? Because there is good teaching going on there!
Dave Markward, in a recent column, Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg proposed the same thought experiment. He said if the teachers of Finland switched with the teachers of Indiana, it would make no difference. For one thing, the Finnish teachers would not know how to handle the extreme poverty that American teachers daily confront.
A grandparent, I was horrified of the anxiety caused by the tests to our granddaughter Francesca
Francesca is proud of her reading and writing skills but felt so unsure about being tested that for a week “crammed” both at home and in school, losing sleep from uncertainty and anxiety
worth it?