John Merrow demonstrates the incisiveness of poetry as a means of communicating complex ideas in his rewrite of Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall.” Merrow turns the poem into “Mending School,” a scathing critique of bubble testing. Used appropriately and sparingly, he suggests, the bubble tests may offer value. Used promiscuously, as they are today, they are a parasite that is consuming the host. They have become not a measure of education, but a substitute for education, an insidious force that strips education of meaning. Merrow’s annotations are important. In one, he writes, “Robert Frost’s poems, including ‘Mending Wall,’ may not be on many school reading lists in the future because the Common Core State Standards emphasize non-fiction” another annotation refers to the growth of the opt out movement. And one exposes the uselessness of the current regime: “School districts generally get back the test results about four months after they are given, long after students have moved on to new grades, new teachers, and perhaps new schools.” One wonders how useful the test results would be even if they were reported in a timely manner. One wonders about the long-term effect of judging students by the format of a multiple-choice test. How many decisions in life consist of four defined, discrete choices? How many are “none of the above” or “well,, two of the four might be right”?
Diane Thank you. We are hoping the 24″x36″ full color annotated poster will end up on lots of walls. We are giving it away to everyone who contributes to Learning Matters. All but $10 (shipping and handling) is tax deductible. John
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I first posted these very lines from Frost’s poem, two years ago, on Diane’s blog, as a description of the Ed Deformer:
I see him there ,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying
Since then, I’ve posted these again four or five times here.
This inability to look beyond their preconceived ideas is typical of the deform-minded.
I’m glad to see that the same thought occurred to Mr. Merrow and that he fleshed it out.
Well designed standardized tests do not have this problem: “well,, two of the four might be right”? In a well designed test, there is only one demonstrably correct answer. Unfortunately, there are not many well designed tests.
These bubble formats are appropriate for tests of very basic factual recall. In practice, in the real world, try to lean on bubble format for anything more sophisticated than that and the test rapidly becomes completely FUBAR.
Hand me any of these summative standardized tests–even one MUCH BETTER vetted than are the high-stakes tests used in K-12–and I will demonstrate it to be absolutely shot through with error and nonsense–questions unanswerable as worded, questions that ask some other question than the test maker thought was being asked, questions with more than one correct answer, questions with no correct answer, questions with partially correct answers, questions that do not validly measure what they are supposed to be measuring . . . one can go on and on.
It’s child’s play, really, to tear one of these tests apart. That’s why PARCC (spell that backward) and not-Smarter, imBalanced aren’t every going to release their full tests for all to see, if they can keep from doing that. They know that people like me will reveal the tests to be utter crap, just so much invalid hocus pocus.
It would be bad enough if Common Core insisted on eliminating poetry (which is in fact the best way to develop “close reading” skills) in favor of non-fiction, but it doesn’t: it uses the degraded term, “informational text,” which we can expect – via the “(Poverty Wage) Career Ready” side of CCSS – to devolve into “close reading” of consumer product and job training manuals.
I saw that one of these consortia had used an Anne Sexton poem in one of their dreadful torture devices. I can only imagine what Sexton would have said about this.
The creators of these tests would find themselves wishing that it were only Erinyes after them.
“They have become not a measure of education. . .”
They NEVER WERE MEASUREMENTS of education. A type of an assessment (and a piss poor one at that) but certainly not a measuring device even though damn near the whole world and god him/herself may believe the tests to be a “measurement of education”.
Noel Wilson has proven the COMPLETE epistemological and ontological FALLACIES that are educational standards and standardized testing as a means of “measuring” the teaching and learning process. He has shown how UTTERLY ILLOGICAL, INVALID and UNETHICAL these EDUCATIONAL MALPRACTICES are.
To understand why read his “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief summary 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.
I ADMIRE THE INTELLIGENCE THAT YOU BRING TO THIS SITE. I COPEID YOUR COMMENT AND CROSS-POSTED IT ON OPED NEWS, http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/ohn-Merrow-s-Poetic-Critiq-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Education_Ideas_Poem_Poetry-140603-127.html#comment492610 where few people who do view education links I provide, actually develop a conversation about it. Bravo Duane! and Thanks.
Thanks for the kind words Susan!!!
John has a great gift. He did a superb job of this. I hope that it gets read widely!