Peter Greene here picks apart an article by Patricia Levesque defending the Common Core, testing, and accountability.
Who is Patricia Levesque? She is CEO of Jeb Bush’s organization called the Foundation for Educational Excellence. It is safe to assume that she speaks for Jeb Bush in celebrating the Flrida miracle, Common Core, and the immense value of standardized testing and accountability.
Levesque is critical of those who question the value of a one-shot standardized test or the value of holding teachers accountable for their students’ test scores.
This, he writes, is what he learned from Levesque:
“Student success depends on testing and accountability. Not teaching. Not learning. Not supportive homes. Not a supportive classroom environment. Not good pedagogical technique. Not a positive, nurturing relationship with a teacher. Just tests. Tests with big fat punishments attache to failure.
“Perhaps what we need is an all-test district. Every day students file in, receive their punishments for the previous test results, take a new test. I mean, if testing is the whole key to learning, the whole key to a successful life itself, then why are we wasting classroom time on anything else? Let’s just test, all day, every day. “
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Test all day, every day…” is a FANTASTIC idea!!! The test has become the curriculum anyways. I have taught the same grade level for 29 years. I had so much more time to teach and covered so much more material before the arrival of the sixth grade proficiency test. I can’t believe how silly it has all become. Testing makes money. It’s big business. Let’s test all day, every day…Have the students pick up their test at the door, correct mistakes, and take a new test. Let’s do that every day. Great idea! (: The rich politicians could care a less about what they are doing to our kids and teachers. It is so sad and seems to totally be out of our control to change a terrible situation. It’s an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”
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Sounds like a village in Florida has found its idiot!
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🙂
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Oh my…this person mus be crazy! Students are not productos. Now I am rally scared.
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Wow, who would have ever thought that education would become a monetized BDSM ritual?
Yes, Masters Jeb, Bill and Eli, I’m so unworthy, please whip me again!
Ooh, it hurts so good!
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Unless they cherry pick the facts to cook the results, there will not be any success from testing kids to the breaking point, so the next move will be to torture the kids—tasers, cattle prods, weatherboarding, anyone—all sold by hedge fund billionaires, the Koch brothers, Bill Gates and the Walton family, of course. And paid for by the tax payers.
I can see it now, the children all file in, sit and then the restraint automatically locks the child to their desk. Then the punishment is delivered for kids who did not show improvement on yesterday’s tests. The kids who aren’t punished will thank God and think, I’m so glad it’s them and not me. Until the next day when they get shocked.
The music will be loud to blanket the screams of children. Parents will fear speaking out because there will be laws that allow the DOE, owned and controlled by the Gates Foundation and/or Wall Street Hedge Fund billionaires to remove the child from their legally dysfunctional family (for lack of Common Core cooperation) and send them to Charter boot camps.
Who will own the Charter school boot camps where the kids will be sent when they are removed from the home of parents who won’t cooperate? You got it, the Walton family, Hedge Fund billionaires, etc., and the taxpayers will be stuck with the bills.
Children who are extremely difficult to teach, when they turn eighteen, will automatically get a life sentence and be shipped off to private sector, for profit prisons that tax payers are forced to support, where the lifers will be forced to work on assembly lines as jobs pour back into the United States from China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and India because free, slave labor is the cheapest possible—even cheaper than robots.
There will be no health care for this criminals. When they get sick, they die and are quickly replaced by the next crop of at risk, difficult to teach kids.
And if I had been born into this Bill Gates, test them to death, Hedge Fund world, I’d be one of those kids and my brother would have been one too.
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Yes, I think all of this craziness is directed at downgrading the profession of teaching. It will no longer be a profession, but it will be a part of the service industry. Salaries will be capped at about $32,000. maximum, and a teacher will be fully credited with an associate’s degree. The few teachers who might have advanced degrees will oversee the lower degree teachers as they monitor students online on computers. Public education, as we know it in 2014, will be a thing of the past. The Billionaire Boys will make millions at the expense of our kids. It’s their last ditch effort. Everything else has gone to China. The profession of teaching has to be downgraded in order for charter and online schools to take over everything!
With the elimination of tenure, older teachers will turn into “poor teachers” over night and will be given their walking papers by their local boards to save money in the horrible economy. Education will become a revolving door, until, finally, very few people will go into it at all – even those only having to have an associate’s degree. No teacher can invest hard earned money into a job in which they will never have the chance to reach retirement. It’s sad but true.
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Now that we’ve beaten back the scourge of collective bargaining agreements which are destroying this country, those test scores in Florida will SOAR.
Oh, that’s right. Florida is a “Right To Work” state. Labor unions ruined it anyway.
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I just heard on the radio that the day before Eric Cantor’s constituents threw him out he was meeting with lobbyists. Not constituents. Lobbyists.
You really can’t make this stuff up.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2014/06/house_majority_leader_eric_can.html
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Yes, Levesque, the mouthpiece or Sauron, err Jeb, could very well end up as the next Secretary of Education if Jeb wins the White House. Jeb loathes and despises teachers. Every move he has ever made in education was designed to humiliate and punish teachers and their unions for opposing him and causing him embarrassment and 3 big defeats during his gubernatorial reign of error, lies, and grifting.
He and his brother have made millions from their education scams, selling worthless software to urban districts, connecting ALEC and the biggest corporate donors and billionaires to the low-morals operators who will gladly enact any piece of ridiculous policy in return for a guaranteed sinecure in the Wingnut Welfare circuit.
A whole lot of the most egregious reforms bubbled up out of the evil mind of Jeb Bush. He tolerates no dissension and ignores laws and regulations without blinking. I will be anxious to see how many masochistic teachers come out in support of his candidacy for president and how many vote for him.
I still remember the cognitive dissonance of the majority of my fellow teachers here in Florida who enthusiastically elected him twice and then remained dumbfounded as the became the targets of his policies and suffered through low pay, loss of autonomy, loss of professional standing, and experienced the death of their profession, starting with his lying about increasing funding by shifting money out of the general fund to equal the amount he added from the lottery.
And then there was the “promise” that FCAT scores were soley to HELP teachers by showing us what students had learned and what they had missed so we could use the data to improve our teaching. Funny thing was that we NEVER get the FCAT scores during the year the students are tested and it has never been useful for informing teaching; just a punitive punishment through Jeb’s school grade program and a way to funnel millions into his voucher “opportunity scholarships” and “online learning” scams. He removed our already weak due process, eliminated “social promotion” without providing any extra resources for the thousands of retained students, destroyed step pay raises, eliminated the National Board Certification as “too expensive”, made sure that the A+ program pays bonuses only to upper middle class white schools, and changed the cut scores on FCAT for years to achieve political gains.
That’s just a few of the problems leaving alone yearly cuts to the state budget for education and for child welfare which results in yearly scandals where children die due to a massive shortage of case workers who are grossly underpaid and overworked to the point of insanity.
Yeah, Jeb is the “education” candidate who looks out for kids. Riiiiiiiggggghhhhht.
JEB! ugh.
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Assessment is only as good as the information gathered and it’s application to the education of the child. Assessmenmt is more than testing and must be built into the daily activities of the class.
Testing,, being a lower form of assessment if at all, is a waste of time and money. Go to http://www.wholechildreform.com and look for my upcoming book
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The ed reform record for effective advocacy on behalf of public school children, with numbers:
“The result: Total school funding fell in 2012 for the first time since 1977, the Census Bureau reported last month. Adjusting for inflation and growth in student enrollment, spending fell every year from 2010 to 2012, even as costs for health care, pension plans and special education programs continued to rise faster than inflation.
Urban districts have been particularly hard-hit by the cuts in federal education spending: Nearly 90 percent of big-city school districts spent less per student in 2012 than when the recession ended in 2009.2”
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/public-schools-are-hurting-more-in-the-recovery-than-in-the-recession/
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Careful, Chiara! teaching economist will show up and explain how teachers always get a raise and how spending always increases, proof be damned.
One (of the many) problem with allowing economists to set education policy is that work completely in the speculative, isolated realm of complex theories. They do not understand nor do they take the time to learn about the real world and the real world impacts of their theories.
Evidence Chetty claiming to Diane that he has respect for teachers while simultaneously destroying our profession, tearing it down brick by brick and then throwing the bricks at us.
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Chris in Florida: what you said.
Or a Señor Swacker would write:
¡TAGO!
😎
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You give te too much credit. He’s staunchly opposed to raising the minimum wage because he’s afraid jobs won’t be lost.
What he practices is advocacy, masquerading as unproven and ill- conceived theory.
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Linda: if I may, er, quote you to yourself—
“Grow a heart please.”
My treat down at Pink Slip Bar & Grille.
😎
P.S. For the context of the quote, please look for a comment by Linda at—
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2013/05/12/remembering-the-triangle-shirtwaist-fire-of-1911/
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Krazy TA,
Different, Linda. One’s green. One’s blue. And, there may be many more.
I stand by my statement. te doesn’t “work in the realm of complex theories.” He advocates policy. A failure to recognize the difference between the two, is dangerous.
I was under the impression from posts at this site, that those in education, affected by flawed research, recognized that data can be created or distorted to drive an agenda.
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It’s time to brainstorm the details of common core, keep what little is good, change what is wrong, and get rid of all that destroys kids. My new book will do just that. Go to http://www.wholechildreform.com for the release date when it is available
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“Levesque is critical of those who question the value of a one-shot standardized test. . . ”
Well, Patty, if you are reading this I (as one who knows-not just questions-that a “one-shot standardized test” is completely without value unless negative value counts) invite you to learn why what you support is COMPLETELY FALSE, ERROR RIDDEN, INVALID AND UNETHICAL through reading and understanding Noel Wilson’s “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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Well said Peter
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Tweren’t Peter but me, Duane!
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Dear Chris in Florida, I am an Ohio teacher, and everyone I know here cannot stand Jeb Bush. He looks like that mother of his, and no one can stand him. Our country could never stand one more Bush. The 2 other President Bushes did enough damage, and our country could not stand one more like those two. I am a Republican, and I would never vote for Jeb Bush or John Kasich (Governor of Ohio). The actions of those two men have inflicted so much pain on Ohio and Florida teachers. Someday both men will reap everything they have sewn. Both of those men make me sick.
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