The Oklahoma legislature voted decisively to drop the Common Core standards.
“On May 23, 2014, both the Oklahoma House (71-18) and Senate (31-10) voted to dump the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
“All that is left is for Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin to sign the legislation, HB 3399, into law. (Fallin was not governor when Oklahoma signed on for CCSS as part of Race to the Top {RTTT} in 2010.)”
If the governor does not sign, the bill is vetoed.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
HB 3399 aligns with Gov Fallin’s Executive Order. We’re supporting you, MF, in your soon-coming signature of this beneficial bill! I’m a teacher & mom of 3:)
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So I’m assuming she’s likely to sign? I’ve been looking for commentary on that subject.
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She is deeply aligned to ALEC, Jeb Bush, Chamber, and NGA. It will be interesting to see what she does. This 82-page bill will have hidden bombs, and unintended consequences.
Am NOT a fan of CCSS, but am wary of this…in the debate, conspiracy theories, UN, and dirty books were featured. This was not a serious, intelligent discussion of CCSS, it was a backlash against the evil federal gov’ment
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It’s not hard to predict. Many “conservatives” and “right wingers” and plutocrats hate the CCSS. CCSS represents that kriptonite known as “big government”. . . . .
So she will drop it for the state of Oklahoma.
And then she and the state legislature will sign all sorts of new laws giving rise to the explosion of vouchers and charters, whittling down pensions, and watering down collective bargaining rights.
What do you expect?
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We already have much of this: nn tenure rights, pensions under attack, expansion of the ALEC IEP vouchers to preschool kiddos.
If this becomes law, her hand-picked School Board will be in charge of Standards, as will the Legislature. What could possibly go wrong?
Progressive opponents were not consulted…our concerns have been ignored.
Worried. Deeply worried.
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The motivation for legislation does matter. This is not necessarily a good development for Oklahoma.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jZHNjc4Xk0
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Amen…
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I just HATE, though, the title of this. The video captures what’s happening with Ed Deform but NOT public education as I understand it, as it can be, when teachers are left alone to teach.
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The “five fatal flaws” of the Tougher Standards movement are adapted from Alfie Kohn’s book THE SCHOOLS OUR CHILDREN DESERVE, from which a shorter book called THE CASE AGAINST STANDARDIZED TESTING has been spun off.
You may also be interested in a list of essays about standards and testing available on this website.
Other resources:
Two books on standards: WILL STANDARDS SAVE PUBLIC EDUCATION?, a short essay by Deborah Meier followed by comments from other thinkers, published by Beacon Press; and ONE SIZE FITS FEW: The Folly of Educational Standards, by Susan Ohanian, published by Heinemann.
A collection of essays about the destructive effects of (and dubious intentions behind) NCLB: MANY CHILDREN LEFT BEHIND (Beacon Press), with contributions by Meier and Kohn as well as Ted Sizer, Linda Darling-Hammond, George Wood, Stan Karp, and Monty Neill of FairTest.
Also on NCLB: WHEN SCHOOL REFORM GOES WRONG by Nel Noddings (Teachers College Press); and ENGLISH LEARNERS LEFT BEHIND: Standardized Testing as Language Policy by Kate Menken (Multilingual Matters).
Also see NoChildLeft.com and this excellent summary of the law and its effects.
Other books about testing:
– Phillip Harris et al., The Myths of Standardized Tests (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011)
– Sharon L. Nichols & David C. Berliner, Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s Schools (Harvard Education Press, 2007)
– Sherman Dorn, Accountability Frankenstein: Understanding & Taming the Monster (Information Age, 2007)
– M. Gail Jones et al., The Unintended Consequences of High-Stakes Testing (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003)
– Linda McNeil, Contradictions of School Reform: Educational Costs of Standardized Testing (Routledge, 2000)
– Marita Moll, ed., Passing the Test: The False Promises of Standardized Testing (Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2004)
– Kathy Swope and Barbara Miner, eds., Failing Our Kids: Why the Testing Craze Won’t Fix Our Schools (Rethinking Schools, 2000)
– Gary Orfield and Mindy L. Kornhaber, ed., Raising Standards or Raising Barriers?: Inequality and High-Stakes Testing in Public Education (Century Foundation Press, 2001)
– Peter Sacks, Standardized Minds (Perseus, 1999)
– W. James Popham, Testing! Testing!: What Every Parent Should Know About School Tests (Allyn and Bacon, 2000)
– Gerald Bracey, Put to the Test: An Educator’s and Consumer’s Guide to Standardized Testing (Phi Delta Kappa, 1998).
A book about Nebraska’s recently aborted attempt to build assessment from the classroom up, thereby challenging the top-down premise not only of NCLB but of the whole “accountability” movement of which it’s a part: Chris W. Gallagher, Reclaiming Assessment: A Better Alternative to the Accountability Agenda (Heinemann, 2007)
Information from and about FairTest, the leading national organization offering a critical perspective on standardized testing. Its website, http://www.fairtest.org, includes an evaluation of every state’s testing policy and links to a listserv called the Assessment Reform Network. A related group, the Coalition for Authentic Reform in Education (CARE), which opposes the new testing program in Massachusetts, has drafted an alternative assessment proposal — a very useful document for anyone who wonders (or is asked), “If not standardized tests, then what?” For a more recent answer to that question, see Ken Jones’s article “A Balanced School Accountability Model: An Alternative to High-Stakes Testing” in the April 2004 issue of Phi Delta Kappan.
A remarkable collection of examples of, and essays about, the destructive effects of standardized testing and related policies at http://www.susanohanian.org.
A list of state and national websites devoted to challenging the tests can be found about halfway down the page devoted to practical strategies. Note in particular a new (2011) group called “United Opt Out National,” with a website and Facebook page, devoted to organizing people to refuse to take the tests.
Audio- and videotapes of presentations by Alfie Kohn on these topics: click here for more information.
A powerful study that finds no evidence of improvement on national exams (such as the NAEP and the SAT) for states that use high-stakes testing. Rising scores on state tests appear to reflect only training to do well on those particular tests; indeed, by some measures, students in high-stakes states actually fare worse on independent measures of achievement.
A devastating analysis, based on the high-stakes TAAS test in Texas, of how efforts to raise scores effectively undermine the quality of teaching and learning — and how this effect is most pronounced in schools that serve poor and minority students. This chapter, by Linda McNeil and Angela Valenzuela, is included in the book mentioned above, Raising Standards or Raising Barriers?. For the most comprehensive analysis of the effects of testing in Texas, click here to be linked to a lengthy article by Walt Haney.
Research demonstrating that when teachers are held accountable for raising standards and test scores, they tend to become so controlling in their teaching style that the quality of students’ performance actually declines:
Flink et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 59, 1990: 916-24.
Deci et al., Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 74, 1982: 852-59.
Pelletier et al., Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 94, 2002: 186-96.
Copyright © 2007 by Alfie Kohn. This article may be downloaded, reproduced, and distributed without permission as long as each copy includes this notice along with the author’s name. Permission must be obtained in order to reprint this article in a published work or in order to offer it for sale in any form. Please write to the address indicated on the Contact page at http://www.alfiekohn.org.
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Great post!
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This reading list is from Alfie Kohn. He is absolutely right about human motivation.
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Alfie K. doesn’t list the most important reading of all on educational standards and standardized testing, so allow me to add Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted “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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Duane – The more imbedded the testing gets into education, the more sense Wilson makes.
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Because effort does not equal success. So a child has no control over whether they pass or not. And thus a failing grade might easily be internalized.
And thus we will have a whole generation on anti depressants. In fact, the trend of over medication and abuse is already rampant.
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