Today, parents and students rallied against the state tests at dozens of schools across New York City, unassuaged by State Commissioner John King’s claims that the tests were better this year and consumed less than 1% of the year. Little children that had sat for three hours of reading tests did not take comfort in his words, and parents demanded transparency.
“The protests, which drew hundreds of people to some schools before the start of classes, followed a speech Thursday by New York State Education Commissioner John King, in which he fiercely defended the state’s education initiatives, including the new standards and tests.
“He described recent debates over those efforts as “noise” and “drama,” and attributed some of the outcry to “misinformation.” And while acknowledging that some schools spend too much time preparing for tests, he insisted that the state had worked to reduce testing time. He added that the new Common Core exams “are better tests” than previous ones.
“His comments struck a nerve with some of the principals, who usually avoid getting involved in education’s political fights, but felt impelled to refute the notion that misinformed members of the public were stirring up unrest about the tests.
“P.S. 59 Principal Adele Schroeter said the hundreds of parents and students who filled the streets around her Midtown school Friday morning were “more than noise and drama, in spite of what John King might say.””
Tomorrow, dozens of Manhattan principals plan their own protests. One of them wrote in a letter to parents: ““I have never seen a more atrocious exam.”
“Echoing criticisms of the exams that other educators have posted online, the Manhattan principals said the tests did not measure the type of analytical reading and writing they associate with the Common Core standards. They also argued that the tests were too long and many of the multiple-choice answers were bafflingly similar.
“I have a double masters and some of them could be A or C,” said Medea McEvoy, principal of P.S. 267 on the Upper East Side, one of the schools planning to protest.
“The principals also said that confidentiality rules shield the test maker, publishing giant Pearson, from public scrutiny. And because only a portion of the test questions are eventually released, they said, teachers cannot rely on them as instructional tools.
The school leaders added that, considering all the flaws they found in the exams, they do not trust the state’s new evaluations that rate teachers partly on their students’ test scores.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“The school leaders added that, considering all the flaws they found in the exams, they do not trust the state’s new evaluations that rate teachers partly on their students’ test scores”.
It appears that any teacher with a poor eval based on these scores would have standing for a suit. Can anyone speak to this?
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I do not think much of Dr. King’s math skills. Three days ELA and two days of math are closer to 3% of 180 day school year. Add two days for 8th grade science, throw in mandated science and social studies MOSL tests, mock tests and interim assessments, and we are at more than 6%. Now add test prep. And consider that the tests do not provide for specific and immediate feedback or any instructional purpose. The exams as administered distract from instruction in every way. T-Mobile. America’s First Nationwide 4G Network
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How is it possible for John King to be so smugly certain about his tests so many intelligent people — who have actually TAKEN those tests — are telling him that atrociously flawed? Is it stupidity? Arrogance? Desperation? Fear of his political owners?
Whatever it is, he’s a disaster. He must go.
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Not a New Yorker, but the opt out movement might make some additional news of the NON-Opt parents, teachers (who can’t opt out) and kids who want to learn more than test prep would wear a black armband or black clothing on the days of the tests. This is an alternative way to say that these tests are a sham. I think the opt out and protests by parents are necessary and I applaud those with the courage (and resources) to take that action. There should also be a way for the latent anger, outrage, and test fatique to be demonstrted. Just thinking. New Yorkers are famously creative.
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Personally, my experience of opting our two children out of the state tests for the past three years has not required courage or any resources. It’s free, and if you’re in one of the majority of schools whose principal and teachers treat parents with respect, there’s just no problem. (It’s a differnt story if your principal has drunk the Kool-aid of ed deform.)
Opting out is a simple, efficient and necessary way to say to state and federal mis-managers of education: “Thanks, but no thanks — we parents and teachers can figure out on our own how to assess children.”
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Jeff, has opting out impacted your planning for middle school? I realize that’s a personal question, but I’m curious. (I’m the parent of a fifth grader in District 2, currently waiting on middle school admissions responses.)
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Hi Flerp!
We haven’t gotten to the middle school stage yet, but we figure when we do we’re not interested in schools that would prioritize bad data in their admissions decisions.
Moreover, it seems to me even schools that do want to rely on state test scores for admissions would have a hard time doing so this year or next, since the tests have been so badly mangled by the state in 2013 and 2014 that scores are virtually meaningless — and the NY state legislature if I understand correctly has just prohibited their use as a primary criterion for admissions. Very confusing scene that we are simply ignoring! But it’s easy for us because we only want progressive education for our kids. We’re opting out of tests and out of hyper-competitive data-driven schools as well.
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Terrible. This has got to be stopped. I feel so badly for kids.
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the kids engaged in these protests are getting the very best of their educations right there
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Amen to that Bob.
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Agree
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Not to mention those who opt out have been protected from abusive situations.
School to our children means engaging with their teachers and peers, asking questions, listening, working — but not sitting silently and anxiously trying to figure out how to respond to nonsensical questions, forbidden to ask for help when their answers could potential determine their promotion or their teachers’ future employment. High-stakes testing of young children is state-mandated child abuse. Wake up parents!
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The Toxic Testing Insanity must be exposed and stopped!
Many parents have struggled with Opting Out their children, even risking harm to their children. Teachers have been sounding the alarm for a long time, and several brave principals have also spoken up. Profits are the motive and none of the Profiteers would change their ways. Never will, unless the educators and parents increase their opposition.
Finally, parents, teachers and principals must join forces. Principals must draw the line in their schools and expose the inappropriate materials, tests, extreme amount of testing and overall poor quality related to the CCSS. This is new territory for administrators where they have to protect children and teachers from top administrators. However, it is quite simple, protect when it is wrong, harmful, unethical or illegal. Things have gone on too long, gotten out of hand and there are no other options.
See something, say something!
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The tests must be released for public comment and debate. The growing opt out movement and protests show the public is losing faith in the state and does not trust the the tests. If the state will not release them, then New York City DOE needs to do it. Parents/teachers/districts could also potentially seek temporary injunctive relief on the basis of irreparable harm–the tests are high stakes after all and /or cause harm to children. Let the state defend the tests in open court where we can all get a good look at them! Question: is there a whistle blower statute that would protect educators who might release them? I know there are great NY lawyers out there.
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Ah, but remember that gag rule. Actually, it is working: it is making many thoughtful, caring, experienced educators gag!
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As a history teacher I serioudly hope John King does some reading this spring about the French Revolution. Louis XVI kept his head in the sand all through the early and mid 1780’s. He thought everything was going along fine with a few reforms. We all know how that turned out.
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oops, seriously. Well maybe I can get a job writing questions for Person!
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I caught the protest in front of PS 87 on video:
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The biggest question is, “Why is Arne Duncan still is his job as Sec. of Ed.?” It’s funny how you can sit in an unelected position and bully everyone, be arrogant, and still keep your job. He has absolutely no accountability.
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Sadly, the Glenn Beck’s on the right give ready made cover for people like Duncan to the media. It is only now that the original concerns on core and testing are being repeated by large groups of middle class parents that there is a chance of getting heard.
What I am afraid will be missed is the critical discussion on poverty we desperately need. If core and tests and VAM are adjusted or shelved to satisfy suburban families, who will force us to acknowledge that our achievement gap IS our poverty gap?
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Also — I am not happy that Gothamschools got replaced with Chalkbeat. Their list of supporters includes the Walton Family Foundation and Gates. I hate to admit it, but I am suspicious that they can remain entirely independent even with the excellent people they have working there.
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DK, thanks for the info on the “supporters” (co-opters?).
I noticed that the article is focused on “what’s wrong with that particular test” and not whether or not we should be doing any type of standardized testing to begin with. “We just need a ‘better’ test.”
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That was the focus of the demonstrations. At least according to the principals who set them up. The letter was obviously carefully calibrated to walk a tightrope, e.g., we support Common Core, we don’t encourage anyone to opt out (the letter actually says something like “almost no district 2 families even *considered* opting out, etc.
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For what it’s worth, I’ve noticed no change in their coverage or perspective since the change. I think most of the regular readers would agree — although many of them are of the view that Gothamschools was a charter mouthpiece from the beginning.
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That certainly makes sense…
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I just started this at Petition2Congress. It is very easy to sign, copies are automatically sent to President Obama, and your own senators and your representatives. Please take the time to read and the petition entitled: STOP COMMON CORE TESTING. Thank you.
http://www.petition2congress.com/15080/stop-common-core-testing/?m=5265435
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Signed
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Interesting that Dr. King’s background included:
. . . ” Prior to his appointment as Senior Deputy Commissioner, Commissioner King served as a Managing Director with Uncommon Schools, a non-profit charter management organization that operates some of the highest performing urban public schools in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. Prior to joining Uncommon Schools, Commissioner King was a Co-Founder and Co-Director for Curriculum & Instruction of Roxbury Preparatory Charter School. Under his leadership, Roxbury Prep’s students attained the highest state exam scores of any urban middle school in Massachusetts, closed the racial achievement gap, and outperformed students from not only the Boston district schools but also the city’s affluent suburbs. Prior to founding Roxbury Prep, Commissioner King taught high school social studies in San Juan, Puerto Rico and Boston, Massachusetts.”
I suppose that this should come as no surprise!
http://usny.nysed.gov/about/commissioner_king.html
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The “spin” of the article is that it’s that particular test that is the problem. Nothing about all the inherent conceptual errors, flaws, and defects (epistemological and ontological fallacies) that render the whole educational standards and standardized testing malpractices completely invalid, not that I’d expect that from a site whose funders include the Walton Foundation and Gates.
What needs to be shouted from the rooftops, to be widely disseminated is that those malpractices need to have a stake driven through their mythological hearts. That stake is Noel Wilson’s never rebutted nor refuted “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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Time to crack open Todd Farley’s shocking Pearson Testing exposé again (or for the first time for those of us who haven’t). Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry
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