Gerri Songer compares ACT and PARCC and finds them both wanting , both developmentally inappropriate.
She begins that she used to think that ACT “is a dreadful attempt to assess student learning. Now that PARCC has hit the scene, ACT is beginning to look significantly better!”
Songer shows that both tests are beyond the cognitive levels of most high school students.
She then argues:
“Albert Einstein once said, ““Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Making things simple is true genius. Einstein’s first job was that of a patent clerk. He analyzed the ideas of others and simplified them, communicating them in a way most could understand. “Anyone can complicate things. But it takes patience, probing questions and creative thinking to simplify. Whatever problem you are facing it’s probably not as complicated as you think – but we often make it so. If you want to solve more problems, simplify them. The real genius is turning complexity into simplicity.”
“As much as our test makers seem to love using archaic language from primary sources written by our founding fathers at the birth of our American nation, somehow they must have overlooked Thomas Paine‘s Common Sense, “IN the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense: and have no other preliminaries to settle with the reader, than that he will divest himself of prejudice and prepossession, and suffer his reason and his feelings to determine for themselves that he will put on, or rather that he will not put off, the true character of a man, and generously enlarge his views beyond the present day.”
“Let me break that down for our test makers, “I’m going to make this plain and simple, using the mental faculty of common sense: Keep an open mind and listen to what I have to say!”
“Perhaps Arne Duncan would benefit from taking a look at Henry David Thoreau‘s Civil Disobedience, “I HEARTILY ACCEPT the motto, — “That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, — “That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.“
“In case you didn’t get that, Arne, let me help you, “Keep your nose out of public education – you obviously know nothing about it, and educators clearly do.”
“Students are not developmentally able to complete the multi-step, finitely detailed, mental manipulation of text needed to process information at the level of sophistication used by PARCC. The frontal lobe of the human brain is not fully developed until after age 20. The frontal lobe is concerned with reasoning, planning, problem-solving, parts of speech, executive functions (organization), judgment, emotions, and behavioral control. It allows for abstract thinking, an understanding of humor (subtle witticisms and word plays), sarcasm, irony, deception, and the mental processes of others. Other functions include: memory, sequencing of events, flexibility in thinking processes, attentiveness of focus.
“High school students are at varying stages of their cognitive development, yet both ACT and PARCC require they perform intellectually at the graduate level (1395L), or at the level of an accountant (1400L) or scientist (1450L). This is an unfair, unrealistic, and inappropriate expectation that assessments such as ACT and PARCC has placed on students. Educators MUST stop bending to legislative controls and demands upon education. Studies show that standardized testing is not the best predictor of college success.
“Human intelligence is so multifaceted, so complex, so varied, that no standardized testing system can be expected to capture it,” says William Hiss. Hiss is the former dean of admissions at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine — one of the nation’s first test-optional schools. “My hope is that this study will be a first step in examining what happens when you admit tens of thousands of students without looking at their SAT scores,” Hiss says. “And the answer is, if they have good high school grades, they’re almost certainly going to be fine.”
“The nonsubmitters [of Standardized Testing Scores] are doing fine in terms of their graduation rates and GPAs, and significantly outperforming their standardized testing.” In other words, those students actually performed better in college than their SAT and ACT scores might lead an admissions officer to expect. For both those students who submitted their test results to their colleges and those who did not, high school grades were the best predictor of a student’s success in college. And kids who had low or modest test scores, but good high school grades, did better in college than those with good scores but modest grades.
“Educators MUST remember the original intent of standardized testing: “A big test, the theory went, would allow more ‘diamond in the rough’ students to be found and accepted to top schools, regardless of family connections or money.” Today, standardized testing is used to filter students and to attack teachers, school districts, and public education as a whole. It is used as a means for capitalists to exploit children, dedicated professionals, and democracy to gain control of what they perceive as a new, untapped, money-making entity, public education. If the American public has any difficulty figuring out what this will look like, read Upton Sinclair’s, The Jungle. This novel portrays the impact American greed has on the weak, the innocent, and the underprivileged. The Jungle is the novel that brought about attention to our need for unions and federal protection over its American workforce.
“I urge educators to call for an indefinite moratorium on the implementation of Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) to assess Common Core State Standards (CCSS). I also advocate eliminating standardized testing all together, and replacing it with the use of GPA and class placement as an indicator of college and career success.”
It is just bizarre that after establishing “text complexity” as the cornerstone of the Common Core, the actual exams are so out of line (above) the specifications.
Anyhow, I’ve started going through the 9th grade sample test:
http://www.tuttlesvc.org/2014/05/oppenheimer-for-9th-graders.html
http://www.tuttlesvc.org/2014/05/the-new-cornerstone-of-cornerstone-of.html
http://www.tuttlesvc.org/2014/05/my-government-spent-350-million-dollars.html
I haven’t even gotten to question 3, which is the worst yet…
It continues to appear that these so-called education ‘Eggspurts’ try to out-do each other with more complex, obtuse, and unrelated questions and problems. It has EGO WRITTEN ALL OVER IT, to prove they are über intelligent, know best, and communicate that all underperforming clambering students are beneath them. Immature and self serving SOBs.
Since this EGO TRIP for CorpEdReformer$ begins by prescriptions for PreK, and has increased in intensity and over the top misaligned learning concepts and skills, there is no stopping them because they have all the $$. They could BUY real experts to write and be part of a reform, but no way! They know best! Although, many of these undereducated non-educators have never even spent more than a couple of minutes glancing at children. Love them in the abstract? Oh, sure, that works. Ego and Money!! Same old story, no change!
They are in it for the sport, hunt and profit. SickSickSickSick….
You are right, Hurley.
One of the bizarre aspects of the new tests of reading and writing is that students do NOTHING on them that EVEN REMOTELY RESEMBLES what people do when they do real reading and writing in the real world.
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“So, what are you reading these days?”
“I just finished Don Hoffman’s Visual Perception. I must say, his ideas are a little unsettling. It’s one of the most exciting and disturbing and philosophically important books I’ve read in years.”
“Yes, but, how does the method of exposition used in Chapter 12, Paragraph 13 differ from the method used in Chapter 12, Paragraph 11, and why did the author choose to change the method of development being used? Give two pieces of evidence from each paragraph to support your analysis.”
“Huh?”
“Oh, and I have five technology enhanced multiple-choice evidence-based short response questions for you to answer, each with two parts, each with one correct answer and three plausible distractors. Your task will be to determine which of these answers, though plausible, are incorrect. You will have 3 minutes per question. Your time begins now.”
“What on earth have you been smoking?”
“Your response is not relevant to the prompt. Yes. See here? The rubric says, “Presents evidence in response to the prompt. You get a zero.”
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“So, class, as you know, writing involves choosing a topic you care about and an audience, doing some preliminary research, formulating a significant thesis, doing research to gather evidence that confirms or falsifies the thesis, organizing the evidence, writing a draft, submitting the draft for review, looking over the responses, revising the draft, proofreading, preparing a final version, and then presenting it and discussing it with your audience. It’s a process that takes time, lots of time. So, we’re going to test your ability to do this. Look at this newspaper article and write a five-paragraph theme on how the method of exposition used in Paragraph 13 differs from the method used in Paragraph 11 and why the author chose to change the method of development being used. Give two pieces of evidence from each paragraph to support your analysis. You will have 12 minutes.”
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Again, what is done for these tests does not even REMOTELY resemble what people actually do when they read and write, and so these tests cannot be valid assessments of reading and writing. QED. But the problem is even worse. People read and write in order to communicate. That’s the whole purpose of reading and writing, and that’s why it’s worth doing and learning how to do. But tests like these focus attention almost exclusively on technical characteristics of texts and so skip over what people are saying almost entirely and so miss the purpose of reading and writing.
If you wish to respond to this post, please do not address what I have said. Make sure that your response is a five-paragraph theme that addresses how I have chosen to structure the post, and use evidence to illustrate what text features I have included. You will have 30 seconds in which to respond. Again, please, no irrelevant responses that actually deal with what I have said.
Say huh???
Oh, there will be hell to pay when the new Common Core College and Career Ready Assessment Program (C.C.C.C.R.A.P.) tests hit nationwide. The feds spent 350 million in taxpayer money to develop these, and districts have spent untold billions to purchase equipment and do training related to them. And what’s the result? Incredibly convoluted and completely invalid, curriculum-and-pedagogy distorting monstrosities. Of course, the CCCCRAP testing consortia and the CCCCRAP testing companies will insist on keeping the tests secret and on the water boarding of anyone who reveals anything about them, for they know that their tests would not survive the slightest learned analysis and critique, that if people actually saw these things, they would end this deformation of our educational processes immediately, and Ed Deform–NCLB and Son of NCLB, would be ding-dong dead.
In regard to the PARCC assessments, USDE allocated $15 million to as yet unseen curriculum materials that were needed to construct the tests. Achieve received $16 million to manage the development of PARCC tests. Achieve’s original proposal and PR said:
“The goal of PARCC is to create an assessment system that will ensure students graduate college and career ready from high school. The proposed assessment system will be computer-based and will measure student progress at key times during the school year, rather than on one test at the end, to allow for instructional adjustment and extra support to students who need it.
To ensure college and career alignment, higher education systems and institutions in all PARCC states, nearly 200 in total, have signed up to help develop the new high school tests. The goal will be for those institutions, and the nearly 1,000 campuses they represent, to honor the results of the new assessments as an indicator of students’ readiness to take first year credit-bearing courses (Achieve, 2010)”
Achieve’s plan for PARCC met the federal requirements of having assessments that would: (a) measure the full range of the common core state standards, and (b) identify common performance standards (cut off scores) so results will be comparable across states.
The approved original plan included tests at quarterly intervals in ELA and mathematics with an extra ELA assignment near the end of the grade or course. This extra assignment called for integrating and presenting knowledge. Because this assessment would be difficult to score, it was not to be counted in a final cut. The overall scheme echoed that of quarterly reports to stockholders.
I constructed a spreadsheet in order to understand other details in Achieve’s original plan. The PARCC proposal used the same assessment template for grades 3-12 (boilerplate).The plan assumed that students in grade 3 are able to read and write with sufficient fluency to take tests administered through a computer interface. PARCC’s plan described 9 tests a year–ELA + Math+ other subject literacy. It charted 12 uses of the data, from individual report cards for students and teachers, to reports based on aggregated data for the same grade or course. The basic process continues up the line for schools, districts, ending with comparisons among states (PARCC, 2010, June).
Achieve’s request for supplementary funding to create curriculum content for the PARCC tests included an uncertain speculative “could” and assertive “will” approach to producing model courses and ancillary materials by the end of 2011.
“Each model unit could include components such as: instructional materials; formative activities that would give teachers information they need about student understanding relative to the CCSS and PARCC assessments; professional development materials for educa-tors; and tools to inform conversations between principals and teachers, teachers and students, and teachers and parents about the results of the through course assessments.
The units developed by PARCC will serve as powerful models for others to develop similar tools for other standards or grades, and will help states and districts evaluate the quality and alignment of similar tools in the market (PARCC, 2010, p. 4).
I concluded that the writers of these proposals knew nothing about the functions of education, or curriculum design, or what teachers do when they are not testsing, and the rest.
Jargon and boilerplate will win you big contracts from USDE.
Achieve. (2010, September 2). State common core state standards partnership will create next generation common as-sessment system to prepare all students for college and ca-reers: Press release. Retrieved from http://www.achieve.org/parcc-consortium-awarded-race-top-assessment-funds
Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (2010, December 23). Proposal for supplemental race to the top assessment award. Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/media/parccsupplementalproposal12-23achievefinal.pdf
I agree with much of what was written, but — at least from what I’m seeing where I’m from and in the media from around the country — educators don’t have the power to make the changes that the author calls for. The movement for change has to come from the parents of children being affected by all the testing. The testing Movement has so much money and yes, ego, behind it. These are not people who admit being wrong. The only counter I see us having is massive parent outrage. Am I wrong?
For pushing Son of NCLB on the country, Arne Duncan will become known, in time, as the Robert McNamara of education. Of this I have no doubt. The only questions are, “How long will it take until that’s clear to everyone?” and “How much damage to kids and teachers and schools, to curricula and pedagogy, will be done first?” But yes, the deformers have put a lot of money in this, and that money has bought a lot of Vichy collaboration with their scheme, and the folks who financed all this have a LOT to lose and so will push HARD to make sure that the deform juggernaut continues to roll over kids. The contract for PARCC (spell that backward) alone is worth over a billion dollars to Pearson in the first three years, and that’s just a drop in the ocean of money that will be spent on this invalid summative standardized testing over the next few years.
These tests serve NO INSTRUCTIONAL PURPOSE WHATSOEVER. Their sole purpose is to make money for testing companies. They belong to an extrinsic punishment and reward theory of education that is entirely discredited, that is really, really backward and ignorant. But a lot of politicians and educrats have been bought of by the folks who stand to make billions on this con.
Voting and Activism is needed on a grand scale. We are saving children, animals, environments, miners, lost planes, nations & sick people around the world…all while we allow Obama/Duncan to wipe out a generation of highly qualified teachers and psychologically damage our children?
Everybody needs to step up NOW! Teachers are not helpless or without clout. We step in of front of bullets, disarm killers, cover children in tornadoes and protect dying children from living long enough to produce a disgusting Pearson Data Point.
Come On, People!
Wake up and smell the chalk dust and cafeteria milk cartons….
well said!!!
I’m here. I’m fighting. I’m trying to spread the word of what is really going on. I agree with point about grand scale voting and activism. Where I concur rather than fully agree is on the power of teachers. The politicians don’t care about us or our voice…except to the extent we can reach the parents and the community. I’m happy when I read about the Chicago Teachers Union rejecting the Common Core and all that comes with it, but I don’t find it as moving as when I read about the thousands of parents on Long Island opting their kids out of the tests.
I’m wide awake and have been since The Testing Movement began with tying Race to the Top with the 2008 stimulus package…and really since the near unanimous passage of NCLB.
So, as teachers we’re not powerless, but my point is that alone, we don’t have nearly enough power. The general public didn’t and doesn’t care about teacher evaluations being tied to standardized test scores (not to say they won’t in the future, but as of now, they generally don’t). Things started turning around in Texas when legislators tied student grades to the standardized test scores. It was a movement of parents that fought the “reforms.” We need the parents. With regards to this fight, we need the parents more than we need ourselves.
In the end, I mostly agree with you — very much on the same team.
There is a lot that can be done. One good start would be assembling a comprehensive, question by question analysis of the available sample and practice questions. We never really gotten together that sort of thing for the Common Core standards, but it seems kind of pointless in that case because standards are so abstract and nobody has a frame of reference for what “good” standards (or outcomes, or whatever) would look like in the first place.
The PARCC exercises I’ve looked at are just a complete basket case, even in their alignment with the Common Core (partly because the CC is so weird). If you lay out an analysis question by question, that’s at least more relate-able to people.
I agree completely. The posted questions are a mess, a joke, extraordinarily poorly conceived, and these were, no doubt, the best, least controversial examples from their detestable oeuvre that they could come up with.
I have posted on this blog some analyses of some of these questions. However, people need to DEMAND to see the tests in their entirety.
Parents in downtrodden communities are prey to the reformers. Some of these parents only want more for their children than the broken school house building, the perils of getting safely to school, etc., etc. Some of the parents are absent emotionally, physically, financially, etc. Charter schools look like the shiny panacea for what is wrong with an unsafe, impoverished neighborhood. So, they flock to the charter schools for safety, cleanliness, promise of a better education. They buy into this 100%. And, perhaps, their kids are safer. Chances are, tho, the education isn’t better, just different. Johnny can recite whatever babble is needed to fill in the correct bubble. However, Johnny isn’t happy. He isn’t creative. He isn’t treated with respect, tho he is called a scholar. His individually is dampened, and he is treated to be seen and not heard, to wear his clothing according to code, and to behave like an inmate. So, the charter schools are preparing Johnny for what???
I can’t blame the parents who hope beyond hope that a clean, safe school will benefit their child(ren). I do think, at some point, that these parents wake up and see what is happening, how their children are being treated like second class citizens and how the charter school in place systems are sapping the joy out of learning.
I hope the parents see that the quality and diversity of their children’s educations is seriously lacking.
I hope they see how their children are being segregated.
I hope the parents see the revolving door of young teachers, and I hope they question the credentials of said teachers.
I hope they see the “teaching to the test” and wonder what happened to Literature, Science, History, Current Events, Geography, Social Studies, Art, Home Economics, Health.
I hope they read the inane math problems, and listen to their children when they complain that they don’t understand how 2 plus 2 can equal 5 under the common core.
I hope they wonder what happened to …. school plays, physical education, recess.
I hope they are concerned about the school opening at 7:15 a.m., and closing at 6 p.m.
I hope the parents educate themselves in the fight against teachers and education.
I hope the parents realize that their children are a pawn in the the education money grab that the privatizing scam.
I hope.
Listen to Bill Gates’ talk at the American Enterprise Institute about the new standards and tests.
This guy actually thinks that education is this simple: You make a bullet list of skills that people need to know. Then you give a test to find out whether they know those. All of education can be reduced to an invariant bullet list in a stack of Powerpoint slides.
All of the complexities of this–that attainment includes knowledge as well as skills; that the skills have to be made concrete (have to be operationalized) in order to be tested validly; that much scholastic attainment is incidental and implicit acquisition and not explicit learning; that differing students with differing propensities and life trajectories need differing educations; that there are many, many possible tracks; that the test formats are such that the tests cannot validly test what they purport to be testing; that extrinsic punishment and reward is actually demotivating for cognitive tasks; that it’s dangerous to have some centralized committee dictate outcomes to everyone instead of drawing, continually, on the expertise of researchers, scholars, and classroom practitioners to develop and refine curricula and pedagogy; that teachers need to come to know their students and suit their approaches to those students’ propensities and needs–all of these and many more problems with his myopic “vision” go right over his head.
The devil is, of course, in these “details.”
It’s as though people had decided to treat their high blood pressure by consulting their aunt Mary, the beautician.
Which I suppose they might be inclined to do if Aunt Mary were not a beautician but, rather, the richest non-sovereign person who ever lived. Having all that money would make her the InstaExpert on Everything. And no one would dare to disagree. “High blood pressure?” says Mary the beautician. Oh, what you need to do for that is to wear thus bracket. It has magnets in it, and the magnets draw out the toxins that cause blood vessels to constrict and cause high blood pressure. I read all about this in New Age Medicine Weekly: What the Doctors Don’t Want You to Know.”
And no one would notice that Aunt Mary just happened to have large investments in companies that produce magnets.
Bob Shepherd: with all due respect, Bill Gates is telling us what he thinks should be mandated for OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN aka the vast majority of young people.
He has quite a different idea of what edupreneurs and edubullies and educrats and edufrauds should ensure for THEIR OWN CHILDREN.
The link below will take you to a piece entitled “Bill Gates tells us why *his* high school was a great learning environment.”
A short excerpt:
[start quote]
Lakeside has a lovely campus that looks kind of like a college campus:
– Faculty is nearly equally balanced between men & women (i.e. Lakeside pays well);
– 79% of faculty have advanced degrees;
– 17% are “faculty of color” (half the students are “students of color,” cough, Asian)
- Student/teacher ratio: 9 to 1
- Average class size: 16
– High school library = 20,000 volumes
– 24 varsity sports offered
– New sports facility offers cryotherapy & hydrotherapy spas
– Full arts program with drama, various choruses, various bands including jazz band and a chamber orchestra.
[end quote]
I urge viewers of this blog to ponder what Bob Shepherd wrote above and compare that to what Bill Gates and his children are privy to. Then consider to which level of Dante’s Inferno Lakeside School should be assigned.
Rheeally!
Link: http://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/bill-gates-tells-us-why-his-high-school-was-a-great-learning-environment/
Thank you for your comments.
😎
Education for the children of oligarchs. Commoners’ Core training for the children of proles.
From the report: “The problem with the ACT is that most students are not able to read text written as high in complexity as 1370L and 1420L.”
Is this a problem with The ACT test, or is it a problem with what the students have learned? Have the students learned basic Rhetoric?
Rhetoric is the art of argument and persuasion. There is much, much more involved in text complexity than rhetoric. This comment doesn’t make much sense.
For example, readability scores rely on very simple measures based on word frequency and sentence length, so texts with high readability levels as measured by these readability programs contain words that are infrequently used and long sentences that, because of their length, typically employ both complex syntactic structures and complex relations at the discourse level. Parsing such text therefore depends upon having a very large vocabulary and very sophisticated internalized, non-explicit models of the grammar and discourse structures employed in prose of this level of sophistication. None of which has anything to do, directly, with rhetoric. Furthermore, these measures of complexity are far, far too crude. By these measures, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” commonly included in 5th-grade textbooks, registers as a graduate level text. And Dylan Thomas’s “Time held me green and dying,” a very sophisticated statement conceptually, scores a 240L–below 2nd-grade level.
Bob Shepherd – You ROCK!
But hey, all you have to do is teach students the precepts in that classic text on rhetoric, Cicero’s De Inventione, and they should do just fine. LOL.
Of course, there is a great deal of money to be made in doing “SelectPrep” for the new tests, isn’t there?
“The frontal lobe of the human brain is not fully developed until after age 20. The frontal lobe is concerned with reasoning, planning, problem-solving, parts of speech, executive functions (organization), judgment, emotions, and behavioral control. It allows for abstract thinking, an understanding of humor (subtle witticisms and word plays), sarcasm, irony, deception, and the mental processes of others. Other functions include: memory, sequencing of events, flexibility in thinking processes, attentiveness of focus.”
Or in the case of the Sec of Ed, maybe significantly later than age 20 – or maybe not at all!
Ms. Songer’s superb piece will, I hope, be widely forwarded. It deserves to be read by many an administrator and teacher.