Breaking News: R.I. House of Representatives Passes 3-Year Ban on High-Stakes Graduation Test

17 Comments Post your own or leave a trackback: Trackback URL

1. ohyesjulesdid says:

   June 20, 2014 at 10:58 pm

   Reblogged this on ohyesjulesdid and commented:
   Empowerment at its best! Students are creatively working together to solve a very real problem. Teachers have long been fighting this battle, but when the students, who are the most impacted, stand together, that changes the landscape. WTG!!!

   LikeLike

   Reply
2. Sheila Resseger says:

   June 20, 2014 at 11:01 pm

   The Providence Student Union’s creativity and perseverance has been electrifying. Tonight’s wonderful and amazing victory was also won by the hard work of many people who lobbied their legislators by providing testimony in hearings, face to face, by phone, and with emails. Today is the last day in the RI legislative session. Until yesterday, it was very uncertain that the House bill would even come to the floor for a vote. Ironically, the illogical and unfairly and unevenly handled process of “waivers” that the RI Department of Education concocted in January (after students’ college applications had to be sent in) was the last straw for Speak Mattiello, who until just a few days ago was fine with the waiver process in theory and not planning to bring the bill to the floor. Commissioner Deborah Gist and Board of Education Chair Eva Mancuso over-reached themselves. It was obvious that their agenda of “rigor” and faux “accountability” is fatally flawed. The next step will be to raise the awareness of the parents of RI that the Common Core and PARCC testing are also fatally flawed. Then people who truly understand authentic teaching and learning can do what they know how to do and provide a meaningful education to all of our students.

   LikeLike

   Reply
3. deutsch29 says:

   June 20, 2014 at 11:50 pm

   These are some great kids.

   LikeLike

   Reply
4. jeanhaverhill says:

   June 21, 2014 at 2:35 am

   I found this group through an earlier post Diane offered us…. they have some good resources if you look at their fact sheets etc.

   http://parentsacrossamerica.org/parent-resources

   LikeLike

   Reply
   • Sheila Resseger says:

     June 21, 2014 at 3:11 pm

     Rhode Islanders can also check out parentsacrossri.org

     LikeLike

     Reply
5. Bob Shepherd says:

   June 21, 2014 at 6:35 am

   Believe it or not, the following is an essay about the new national tests. Stick with it and you will see what I mean.

   Years ago, I was doing a project for one of the major textbook publishers—writing for a high-school British literature textbook. I was given an assignment to write a lesson on Robert Burns’s poem “A Red, Red Rose.” This poem begins, you may remember, with the following lines:

   O my Luve’s like a red, red rose
   That’s newly sprung in June;
   O my Luve’s like the melodie
   That’s sweetly play’d in tune.

   One of the questions that I asked about the poem was, “Why does the speaker compare his beloved to a red, red rose?” And the answer I wrote for the answer key was something like, “The speaker wishes to communicate that his this person is attractive and that he loves her, and so he compares her to a red rose, which is a traditional symbol of beauty and of romantic love.” I could have elaborated: Probably through association with blood and with blushing, the color red traditionally symbolizes intense emotion, or ardor. Roses are attractive and share this property with the objects of romantic affection. For these reasons, it became conventional to speak of someone as being “a red rose” in order to communicate that a) she (or, more rarely, he) was beautiful and b) that she (or, more rarely, he) was an object of ardent emotion, and c) that that emotion was one of romantic attraction. The speaker is therefore using a conventional symbol.

   I could have added that the reason why the poet chose to express this in a simile rather than in a metaphor (“O my Luve’s a red, red rose”) was probably as mundane as to fill out the meter. I could further have explained that it is the beloved not the speaker’s feeling that is compared to a rose, for later in the poem, the speaker uses the same word, Luve, in direct address:

   And fare thee well, my only Luve
   And fare thee well, a while!
   And I will come again, my Luve,
   Tho’ it were ten thousand mile.

   The editor wrote back to me saying, “Don’t presume to tell students that there is ONE CORRECT interpretation of the line.” I responded, “What should I say instead?” She wrote back, “Say, ‘One possible reason is that red roses are traditional symbols of beauty and of romantic love.’” I pointed out that if I were to follow her advice, I would have to include a similar disclaimer (“one possible”) in almost EVERY STATEMENT made about any work of literature in the book, which would make for awkwardness. She informed me that I was being overly directive and not respecting the students’ right to his or her own interpretation and that this made her question my suitability for the job she had asked me to do.

   Let me hasten to add that I do understand where that editor was coming from. She held a version of a reader response theory of literature that goes something like this: a text means whatever the reader constructs when reading it. This grotesque misunderstanding of what “a reader’s construction of a text” can reasonably mean had become the de facto orthodoxy in ELA lit texts at the middle-school and secondary-school levels. I call this a grotesque misunderstanding because a text is an act of communication and as such depends, usually, upon shared usages and upon the belief on the part of the reader and the writer that communication across an ontological gap of a communicable meaning is possible. To deny that—to say that any text can mean anything—is to undercut the very notion of communication, of transmission across that gap from one subjectivity to another. Part of teaching people how to read literature is to teach them about conventional usages and what those can reliably be taken to mean.

   Now, one might say, but wouldn’t an alternate reading like the following be acceptable?

   The convention of the red, red rose as a symbol of feminine beauty is part of an complex of objectifications found in poetry and song produced by men, particularly in the Cavalier and early Romantic periods, and the speaker probably uses this because he is a conventional, unthinking, objectifying pig.

   The editor might have had a student response like that in mind.

   But here’s the problem with that: the editor would be confusing significance (meaning as mattering to the reader) with interpretation (meaning as the intent of the author). Failure to observe this distinction leads to a lot of complete nonsense in writing and speaking about literary texts. The differing responses are to differing matters–what the author intended and what significance what the author did has for a particular reader.

   So, how does all of this relate to the new tests?

   Well, one remarkable characteristic of the new tests is that they have COMPLETELY OVERTHROWN what was the STANDARD CHURCH ORTHODOXY in K-12 ELA–the prevailing Reader Response/Constructivist/The Author Is Dead orthodoxy that texts have alternate readings, constructed by readers, that have to be respected. For the most part, the questions about literature on the new exams assume that THERE IS ONE CORRECT ANSWER. Am I the only one to notice that? Did millions of English teachers and textbook writers who were of the “readers construct texts” or “reader response” schools of thought suddenly change their minds about this?

   No, their minds were changed for them, de facto, by people constructing the new tests based upon the new standards.

   Shouldn’t I be pleased about this, given my defense, above, of the “one true” reading of the line from Burns? No, and here’s why: What we mean by “What does this mean?” itself differs depending upon whether we are talking about intent or significance, and intent itself is by no means cut-and-dried, simply there for discovery. Getting at intent involves a great deal of knowledge of matters like literary conventions and genres and techniques and historical periods and the thought and practice and life experience of the author and much, much else. So even if we made the assumption that any question on a standardized test must deal with intent and not with significance, it would still be the case that particular passages would be open to varying interpretations.

   And the relevance of extra-textual matters to interpretation raises another issue with regard to the approach to literature instantiated in the new standards. Students and teachers are encouraged in these to follow a New Critical procedure—to examine closely the text itself, without reference to external materials. But intent does not exist in a vacuum. If someone leaves a note saying, “Tie up the loose ends,” it matters whether the note is from a macramé instructor or from a mob boss worried about possible informants! Texts exist in context.

   When I examine the new tests and the questions asked on them, my overwhelming impression is that the questions were written by people who hadn’t the subtlety to understand what a complex business learning to read carefully and well is. As often as not, the questions FAIL because the question writer did not himself or herself understand some subtlety. Let me give an example to illustrate what I mean.

   Suppose that a question on one of these tests reads as follows:

   Which of the following best describes the attitude of the speaker in the first line of Burns’s “A Red, Red Rose”?

   A. Ardent affection
   B. Casual interest

   The test writer would probably think that answer A. is the correct answer.

   But consider this: A deconstruction of that first line would look beyond the verbal intention—the intended communication—to other factors getting at significance. Why did the speaker use a hackneyed, conventional expression? Why did he express the conventional association in a simile instead of in some more sophisticated way? Do the facts that he chose a hackneyed convention and chose the simile, most likely, simply as an easy way to fill out the meter suggest that he did not give this poem much work or thought? In other words, is this first line suggestive of someone who is not as serious as would be another poet who, in this circumstance, would bother to say something original and real? I’m reminded of a fellow I knew when I was a kid who had written what he called a “general purpose love song.” He said to me, “The beauty of this song is that I can throw any girl’s name in there. Miranda. Amanda. Sweet, sweet Jane.” Is the casualness of Burns’s line related to the fact that in the last stanza, he’s outta here?

   “Hey, you’re great. Really. I’ll be thinking about ya. Outta here.”

   Hmm. Suddenly the wrong answer starts to look as though it might not be so wrong after all because now we are talking not about intent but about significance. Is this an accurate reading of the significance? I love Robbie Burns. I have participated with great delight in Burns dinners (though I shall always pass on the haggis). But he was a notorious womanizer, and this poem is a piece of tossed-off minstrelsy and not a great work of art like his “Song Composed in August” or “To a Mouse.” I don’t mean to take away from the poem by saying that. It’s a perfect specimen of its type. But it’s a conventional type. It’s a “My Darlin’ Clementine,” not Yeats’s “The Folly of Being Comforted” or Millay’s “Love Is Not All” or Burns’s own “John Anderson, My Jo.”

   LikeLike

   Reply
   • Tamara Skaggs says:

     June 21, 2014 at 8:18 am

     Interesting. But exactly why I hated literature in high school lol. I prefer people to just speak bluntly, both in conversation and in writing. A lot less miscommunication that way. 😉 However, I do agree with your point. Tests must be constructed so there is no ambiguity in what is required.

     LikeLike

     Reply
     • Bob Shepherd says:

       June 21, 2014 at 1:45 pm

       You comment, Tamara, suggests that I was not being blunt, by which I suppose that you mean that I should say the clear and obvious thing. But that is precisely the point–communication is complex. There’s almost always a lot going on–more than meets the eye. One of the points of what I wrote, above, is that IT IS IMPOSSIBLE in ELA to construct tests of any value in which there would be “no ambiguity in what is required” because ambiguity is IN THE NATURE OF WHAT IS BEING STUDIED. The example that I give is that for a given communication, there will be at least these differing perspectives that one can take on it–the perspective of figuring out what is likely to have been the intent of the author and the perspective of thinking about the significance of that intent to the author, to the reader, or to some hypothesized other.

       Einstein is often quoted as having said, “We should try to make things as simple as possible but not simpler.” It turns out that he didn’t say this in exactly those words, but he expressed a similar idea many times. The point is important.

       People who think that learning to read well is SIMPLY a matter of learning how to figure out THE PLAIN, BLUNT MEANING don’t understand much about meaning. Communication involves all these different parts–a communicator, an audience, a mode, a channel, what is being communicated, conventional usages, the intended effect, the actual effect, the influences on the communication, the assumptions that went into that communication, and much, much more. It’s almost never SIMPLE, and those who assume that it is or can be (e.g., the makers of a lot of ELA tests) make a FUNDAMENTAL MISTAKE that invalidates a lot of what they do.

       Go back to the question that I asked about the first line of the Burns poem. What is the blunt, plain meaning of that line? Which is the “correct answer” to the question?

       It turns out that many, many of the questions on these ELA summative standardized tests are like this one. The answer that the writers of the test thought was the simple, blunt, clear, unambiguous one turns out not to be if one is, in fact, reading closely. And so, it is often the case that, arguably, none of the answers to a given question, as worded, is correct or that more than one of the answers is correct, which invalidates the question, of course.

       Hand me one of these tests and I can demonstrate this again and again and again for question after question after question.

       LikeLike

     • Bob Shepherd says:

       June 21, 2014 at 2:03 pm

       All of which raises an issue that should be considered with regard to these tests:

       Given that summative standardized tests cannot accurately (validly) measure sophisticated reading ability, shouldn’t their use be restricted to the more limited purpose of ascertaining that a student has mastered elementary decoding skills and in that sense is able to read? That’s what such tests can validly do.

       and

       Given the complexity of demonstrating sophisticated reading ability, shouldn’t the tools we use to assess that ability be, themselves, nuanced and complex? Wouldn’t portfolios of work–collections of essays written by students for such purposes as interpreting, relating, synthesizing, or evaluating works of literature and informative texts–be more appropriate for demonstrating such ability?

       LikeLike

   • Duane Swacker says:

     June 21, 2014 at 10:30 am

     Bob,

     You bring up very important points on communication, language, intent, context, etc. . . that most people haven’t even begun to realize exist. For the most part and for most people communication is understood to be a very simple process, I speak/write you hear/read and “know” what I mean. Tain’t that simple.

     Now, take it the next step and relate all those things to learning a second language and things really get complicated! How do these sounds, and representations of sound-written words-come to have “meaning” for the individual learning the second language so that they can become like the first language and mean what they mean without the necessity of translation? How and when does that occur? And yet, I’d suggest that most foreign language teachers haven’t given one iota of thought to that conundrum.

     LikeLike

     Reply
     • Bob Shepherd says:

       June 21, 2014 at 2:12 pm

       Indeed, Duane. I think that people imagine that it’s a simple matter to make a list of what people know and then to test for it. But the fact is that there are very, very many different kinds of learning and acquisition and measuring those different types validly requires different kinds of instruments and, as you never tire of pointing out, often no valid measurement is even possible because what is being measured is too ill defined or because the measurement mechanism affects what is measured or because measuring is not what’s at issue. Whether one knows the multiplication table up to 12 x 12 is a different matter from how sophisticated one’s passive vocabulary is or whether one can read a challenging poem by, say, Wallace Stevens or William Blake, with understanding. The fact is that any two readings of Wallace Stevens’s “Credences of Summer” will differ enormously, even when those readings are done by people working with similar methods, and a multiple-choice test is a terrible way at getting at whether someone has developed skill in approaching and making sense of such texts.

       LikeLike

     • Bob Shepherd says:

       June 21, 2014 at 2:23 pm

       You may be familiar, Duane, with the linguist Edward Sapir’s line that “People who speak different languages live in different worlds, not in the same world with different labels attached.” While any strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language constrains the possibilities for thought and feeling is unsustainable, certainly a weak version IS sustainable and widely evidenced. That’s the whole point of the New Historicism, for example. When Plato writes of Socrates talking about his legacy or reputation, this is in a cultural context–a context in which one’s reputation after one’s death was considered a PRIMARY VALUE–of extraordinary importance. The ancient Greeks cared A LOT MORE about that than we typically do. Or, to give an example that more clearly distinguishes eras, we today would be aghast at someone who refused to take moral responsibility for an action because he or she was “driven to it,” but the ancient Greeks had a strong belief in Ate–internal forces that drove people against their own will or better judgment. “I couldn’t help myself” would seem, to us, a TERRIBLE defense, but among the ancient Greeks, it was a common one and was widely accepted. Or, to give another example, Plato’s word that is often translated into English as “virtue” meant something like “efficiency.” So, one could speak of a virtuous person or state, but one could also speak of a virtuous shoe–which would be one that would last a long time, not cost much, be comfortable, not be overly complicated, and so on–a good purchase for one’s money. And that difference in their word makes a difference, for it presupposes criteria for virtuousness. Determining whether something is virtuous becomes a matter of comparing it to the presupposed model of the virtuous to see how efficiently it instantiates that model. In other words, these are very FOREIGN habits of thought, to us, and part of learning how to read the ancient Greeks is learning how to think like them, which will often involve smacking up against habits of thought that are, to us, alien, weird, strange, uncomfortable.

       LikeLike

     • Duane Swacker says:

       June 21, 2014 at 2:57 pm

       Bob,

       Tis a pleasure to read your writings and thoughts!

       Many thanks!!

       LikeLike

6. lisa says:

   June 21, 2014 at 6:39 am

   I am curious. The ban is on using test as graduation requirement. Do they use the test for teacher evaluation?

   LikeLike

   Reply
7. Bob Shepherd says:

   June 21, 2014 at 4:20 pm

   I think that many are justifiably concerned about the validity and appropriateness of the new national testing instruments. The experience in New York was certainly a wake-up call. There has been altogether too much heat and not enough light with regard to this issue. Here are my recommendations:

   1. The proponents of the testing want accountability. They want mechanisms for ensuring that learning is taking place. This is a reasonable expectation. However, we must make sure that those mechanisms are valid.

   2. The summative standardized tests in ELA have validity issues. These derive, I think, for using the wrong tool for the intended job. One doesn’t use a $500 micrometer to hammer a nail. One doesn’t use a yardstick to measure the dimensions for a $30,000-dollar handmade violin. Summative standardized tests can do a superb job of determining whether a student has mastered basic decoding skills. They can do a superb job of measuring purely factual content. For other purposes, they are generally not appropriate tools. It makes sense, if we are going to use such instruments, to use them for the purpose for which they are best suited, and it would be valuable to establish this kind of baseline accountability via such a mechanism: Has the student mastered basic decoding skills? There are excellent tests for this purpose. Such tests would be appropriate as minimum graduation requirements.

   3. For measurement of more sophisticated reading ability, we need to be using performance portfolios requiring critical and creative writing, demonstration of mastery of large (but not necessarily identical) bodies of content, and demonstration of ability to communicate sustained thinking. Such tests would be appropriate as requirements for various kinds of certification to be appended to certificate of fulfillment of minimum graduation requirements–graduation with certification in vocational English, technical writing, argumentation and debate, creative writing, general honors academic/critical analysis, etc. One might even offer the new national tests that have been developed as ONE ALTERNATIVE THAT A STUDENT AND HIS OR HER PARENTS OR GUARDIANS CAN CHOOSE AS A MEANS FOR FULFILLING SOME SORT OF HONORS addendum to a standard graduation certificate. So, for example, a student would be able to fulfill the requirements for that general honors academic/critical analysis addendum requirement EITHER via accumulation of a portfolio throughout a high-school career OR a proficient score on one of the new national tests.

   Doesn’t that make sense?

   Not doing something like what I am proposing here is going to lead us into a nightmare that no one–people on both sides of the “education reform” debate–wants–a repeat of the fiasco in New York. No one would benefit from repeating that on a national level.

   And so, a moratorium is not enough. We need to rethink what we are doing here and, I believe, go with an alternative like what I have suggested above.

   LikeLike

   Reply
8. Barbara Keller says:

   June 22, 2014 at 9:49 am

   So glad to know there are still some teachers out there (please tell me you ARE a teacher) with an actual brain in their heads. This is the kind of thoughtful, analytical education I received “back in the day” (I graduated high school in 1971) when we only took one standardized test and not every year. I understand that it might be beneficial to have testing to ensure that kids are leaving school with basic skills intact. My problems with the “exit exam” strategy is that this evaluation should have been going on all along, through thoughtful assessment of progress by NON-standardized testing at every level or grade. I also agree that there are simply many many things in an educated brain that are not testable with multiple choice questions. Of course, perhaps we have gotten to the point of resorting to these tests because there is a lack of trust of the evaluative processes by teachers along the students’ educational journey. That, as they say, is another kettle of fish entirely. Sadly, there is cause for concern there. So let’s solve THAT problem, shall we? Maybe actually work towards a quality education for all? And accept that for some that is not college prep literature courses but quality vocational education? My high school had both – and an excellent graduation rate. Thanks for your thorough and thoughtful assessment.

   And to the fellow above who hated lit because of his preference for blunt speaking – the ambiguity is where all the fun is!

   LikeLike

   Reply
9. Sociology Essay says:

   June 30, 2014 at 7:53 am

   I think this department of education concocted in January (after students’ college applications had to be sent in) was the last straw for Speak Mattiello, who until just a few days ago was fine with the waiver process in theory and not planning to bring the bill to the floor.

   LikeLike

   Reply