Carol Burris and Biana Tanis take a close look at New York’s Common Core tests and find them deeply flawed. Burris is a high school principal on Long Island and Tanis is a public school parent and special education teacher in the Hudson Valley.
State officials celebrated paltry results: the passing rates on the reading test were flat and increased in math by 4.6%. But nearly 2/3 of the state’s children did not reach the state’s unreasonably high proficiency level. Testing experts and state officials knew in advance what the results would be. Why do they stubbornly cling to the outworn cliche that raising the bar improves achievement? We thought that idea was discredited by the abject failure of NCLB. If a run er can’t clear a four-foot bar, how will he clear a six-foot bar?
Burris and Tanis show that certain groups, such as students with disabilities and English language learners, did very poorly. The content was far beyond their capacity. Fifty percent of the questions were released, and the authors show that many were age-inappropriate. What is the logic of giving 7th grade content to a 5th grader?
Here is an example:
“In addition to passage difficulty, the questions themselves required skills out of the reach for many young children. Consider this fourth-grade question on the test based on a passage from Pecos Bill Captures the Pacing White Mustang by Leigh Peck.
Why is Pecos Bill’s conversation with the cowboys important to the story?
A) It predicts the action in paragraph 4
B) It predicts the action in paragraph 5
C) It predicts the choice in paragraph 10
D) It predicts the choice in paragraph 11
Visualize the steps required to answer this question. First, 9-year-olds must flip back to the conversation and re-read it. Next, they must go back to the question and then flip back to paragraph 4. Complete this step 3 more times, each time remembering the original question. In addition to remembering the content of each paragraph, they must also be mindful that choices A and B refer to the action in the related paragraph, while choices C and D refer to a choice. Similar questions were on the third-grade test. Questions such as these are better suited to assess one’s ability to put together a chair from Ikea than they are to assess student’s understanding of what they read.”
Is it any wonder that parent anger towards the Common Core is growing in New York? This is a blue state; these parents are outraged by a state policy that labels their children as failures based on tests that are developmentally inappropriate. Why does the state want 2/3 of its children to be branded as failures? If this is what Common Core means, it will have a short life indeed. It may be fine for the kids bound for the Ivy League, but most kids are not. We need common sense more than Common Core.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And yet after 2 years of this nonsense, our district and many others will do it again this year.
Makes me sick to my stomach. Nobody has the balls to stop it.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein
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I wouldn’t call it insanity; I think it’s unrestrained Overclass aggression – take a look, for example, at the pedigree of our state Regents head – directed against teachers, their unions and public education in general, with children as “collateral damage.”
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Yes it is crazy. My district is the same. As parents we have stood up to our Administration and School Committee and shown examples exectly like this and more. But still they dismiss it and say Common Core must stay. Here we go into another entire school year of it.
A local politician in my area recently made a statement that (if he were to be Governor) if in any way, the Common Core degrades our educational experience, he will eliminate it. But this statement makes me wonder, what would it take for such a conclusion to be drawn? If facts, evidence, and supporting examples of how bad Common Core is in actual practice can be simply dismissed, how would a person recognize that it is in fact not working? If showing what a bad program it is is not enough, if actual concrete examples that it is not working is not sufficient, then what?
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There are 15,880 districts all experiencing the same tactics. It is this DIVISION that works for them because no one sees the vast conspiracy that is ending public education. Moreover, there is no way for parents or teachers to fight the $$$ that corrupts the system. The only way is for the national union to LEAD. A teacher has no feet to stand on… as I have demonstrated HERE by telling ( in detail) of the assault on me, and on Lorna Stremcha.
If you have not yet seen this, who they did it to the largest district in the nation do take a look.
https://vimeo.com/4199476
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It is going to take parents to stop this nonsense. My fear, however, is that these crazy tests in the public schools are a part of the overall plan for the evil charter schools to attract the parents over to their schools – because they are not using these silly tests. They have taken so much away from our public schools. It truly is all unbelievable and very sad. I’m an Ohio teacher, and Kasich despises public schools and career status teachers. Sadly, Kasich will be reelected, and I’m scared for Ohio education. It’s a train wreck.
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The Heartbreak & Insanity continues!
While CorpReformer$ experiment with our students, manipulate the cut scores, shove content, irrelevant, inappropriate and Gates’ Propaganda, the concepts and content our children should be learning is not available to them. Time marches on and the missing information will never appear, never be taught and kids will graduate with gaps, giant gaps, in their learning.
I have served on countless committees to write curriculum guides and implemented many types of content for SWD. The abilities are wide and their needs and learning abilities vary. It was obvious to all professionals that our students need to have access to general education curriculum – if appropriate, and functional curriculum – if appropriate. Trained special education teachers were equipped to locate, choose, develop, teach, test, observe, and implement what children needed.
Now, in the Age of Gates, these children are pushed through the “tight sphincter of CCSS” and are marching for years through our schools and many NEVER, EVER receive the skills needed for life.
I am outraged that children with IQs <70 are mandated to take the general ed tests and we are to pretend that they can do it if we just aim high enough, for their own good. These students would perform at grade level if they could. Meanwhile, the content needed for those students is not on the horizon. Forbidden, Verboten!
Those students fail repeatedly and eventually age out of schools, no diploma and living at home without skills to offer them employment and independent living skills – if appropriate.
This is a crime and a disaster to their self worth, dignity – shutting many doors for their future. Parents should protest by the thousands for the rights of their children.
Years of research is ignored, Pooh-poohed, and laughed at – and the world looks away. The Gate$ Machine, giant combines, are scorching the US educational landscape and education is looking more like the devastation left behind after corporations rape the mountain tops of Appalachia.
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Thank you for your awesome post. I couldn’t agree with you more. Sometimes I wonder if the war on the public schools is related to the war on the middle class of this country. If the evil rich men take away our public schools, the middle class will eventually disappear. Middle class families in this country are already struggling to get their children through college. Middle class kids are struggling to get to the education accomplishments of their parents. It is very alarming to my husband and me. Our daughter is 2nd generation college, and this country and its “through the roof” tuition costs are trying to keep the American dream away from these kids.
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P.S. Those selections on Common Core tests make me furious. Bill Gates, who never earned his Bachelor’s degree, would be confused. Anyone who victimizes a child will pay. I hope all of those responsible for victimizing our children like very hot places. They are all headed there. It just makes my blood boil.
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“Sometimes I wonder if the war on the public schools is related to the war on the middle class of this country.” Sop wondering Sad Teacher. You are correct.
If people would only hear what I am saying about the United Nations being the actual catalyst for the Common Core along with Bill Gates who personally funds UNESCO. The UN is run by people who believe in a socialist utopia which will be headed by the UN. A major stumbling block to implementing one wold government is our pesky Constitution and the middle class people of the U.S. that actually believe in individual rights enumerated in the Bill of rights. These people and these ideas need to be crushed for their plan to go forward.That is the purpose of the Common Core.
For example the new Social Studies Framework developed by David Coleman for the AP History course in NY all but eliminates the founders and their principles.
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Dawn, how is it that the UN, universally recognized to be ineffectual and irrelevant in just about every realm it participates in, seems to have this near-occult power to control society?
You obviously have done a lot of reading and have many facts at your disposal, but your conclusions are just plain wrong.
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You are forgetting the Illuminati.
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The Illuminati is just another name for the Jesuit Order of the Roman Catholic Church. They were thrown out of the church by Pope Clement XIV in 1773.
IT IS THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, and the Jesuits have launched a massive salvo-their most audacious campaign yet for world domination. May 1, 1776-a high Satanic holiday – was the beginning of a new phase for the Roman Catholic Church, a phase that would have reverberations around the world for decades to come.
On that date a German Jesuit by the name of Dr Adam Weishaupt founded a secret revolutionary society called the illuminaten Orders, or Order of the Illuminati {“to enlighten”} based at the Jesuit university of Ingolstadt, Bavaria {Professor John T. Robison}, and “patterned after the model of the Jesuit order”. {Johann Jakob Herzog}. Weishaupt adopted the code-name Spartacus (after a slave who led an uprising against the Roman legions).
Prior to their suppression in 1773, the degree of power that the members of the Society of Jesus had attained in the German state of Bavaria was almost absolute. It was by them that the majority of the Bavarian colleges were founded; and it was by them they were controlled. {René Le Forestier}. And so it is not surprising that they would use their most renowned university to launch their comeback. It is a fact that even before the pope canonically restored the Jesuits in 1814 the Society of Jesus had already been scheming a return to power.
http://religiousmatrix.com/archive/the-bavarian-illuminati/
The Jesuits have thoroughly revived their order in the U.S. because we have “freedom of religion” and we are so politically correct. Here is a video of Hillary Clinton admitting that she takes her orders from the Council on Foreign Relations which is a Jesuit run organization in D.C.
Take a survey of how many people in the Obama administration have been Jesuit trained and you will find many many many starting with VP Joe Biden. And actually Obama himself had a Jesuit mentor Gregory Galuzzo when he was a community organizer for the Gamaliel Foundation. All of the foundations started by Saul Alinsky were funded by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. There is a collection that is taken in every Catholic Church in America once a year that goes for this effort. If they only knew that many of these community outreach programs actually support abortion clinics the parishioners who give generously would be appalled. Everyone is so worried that Obama is a Muslim when actually it is more concerning that he has ties to the Jesuits.
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Ronald Reagan thought UNESCO was a top heavy left leaning bureaucracy led by a director who enjoyed living in a penthouse in Paris more than doing anything good in the world. He withdrew the U.S. from UNESCO in 1984.
On June 12, 2002, President Bush had announced that America would rejoin UNESCO and participate fully in its mission The U.N. declared 2005-2015 as the decade of Education for Sustainable Development and announced that UNESCO would lead the way. At the September 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, unelected representatives of the peoples of the world adopted a document called “Agenda 21” and called it the global road map for sustainable development implementation.
On October 3, 2003, celebrating our new partnership with UNESCO, then Secretary Robert Paige, stated that the U.S. is pleased to return to UNESCO and we agree that our governments have entrusted us with the responsibility of preparing our children to become global citizens of the world. Paige stated, “The Education for All initiative is consistent with No Child Left Behind.” Education for All is a U.N. initiative.
In 2004, Bill Gates signed a cooperative agreement with UNESCO to develop a world-wide curriculum that would use Microsoft as a platform to disseminate the goals of UNESCO. Five years later, the Common Core was being foisted on every state in the union with the help of Arne Duncan and President Obama. Promoting world citizenship over national sovereignty is now official U.S. government policy for education.
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Here is a portion of a speech by Arne:
“…This announcement is the latest example of our work to support reform across states, districts and neighborhoods across America. We call it the “Quiet Revolution”—where elected officials, administrators, teachers, unions and parents are demanding better schools and working hard every day to create them.
For all of this activity, though, this sustainability summit marks a new milestone for the U.S. Department of Education. Until now, we’ve been mostly absent from the movement to educate our children to be stewards of our environment and prepare them to participate in a sustainable economy. That work is taking hold in corporations, in other agencies of the federal government, as well as colleges, universities, and schools across the country.
But this Education Department is just getting started in this important work. It’s been clear for a decade or more that education plays a vital role in the sustainability movement. In 1996, President Clinton’s task force on sustainable development issued its goals. One of them stated that all Americans should have access to lifelong learning opportunities so they will understand the concepts involved in sustainable development. I think it’s obvious to everyone here today that we’ve fallen short of that goal….”
http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/greening-department-education-secretary-duncans-remarks-sustainability-summit
Also, if you take a look at any NY county Comprehensive Plans you will see all kinds of policies about sustainable development, limiting vehicle miles traveled to cut down on CO2 emissions by 2040, plans for compact urban housing and less rural sprawl. It is happening under the radar. Agenda 21, Sustainable Development, Smart Growth, whatever you want to call it is happening in every part of our country now.
The Common Core is the education piece in which they need to convince U.S. citizens that private property is a selfish throwback to colonialism and having air conditioned houses and cars is really over the top when people don’t have a light bulb in Africa. The brainwash is to convince our youth that it is a good thing to shut down our power plants and go back to living a much simpler life that does not create a huge carbon footprint. Give the land back to the animals and ship our technology to underdeveloped nations. Collapse the U.S. dollar and our manufacturing sector on purpose. That would be social justice and that would be equitable. Dangerous concepts which are talked about all day long at the U.N. and now being brought into our schools with the help of Bill Gates.
He told the opening session of the Rio Conference (Earth Summit II) in 1992, that industrialized countries have:
“developed and benefited from the unsustainable patterns of production and consumption which have produced our present dilemma. It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class — involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning, and suburban housing — are not sustainable. A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmentally damaging consumption patterns.”
In an essay by Strong entitled Stockholm to Rio: A Journey Down a Generation, he says:
“Strengthening the role the United Nations can play…will require serious examination of the need to extend into the international arena the rule of law and the principle of taxation to finance agreed actions which provide the basis for governance at the national level. But this will not come about easily. Resistance to such changes is deeply entrenched. They will come about not through the embrace of full blown world government, but as a careful and pragmatic response to compelling imperatives and the inadequacies of alternatives.”http://soldierforliberty.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/maurice-strong-man-behind-agenda-21-part-2/
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All this and no reference to the Trilateral Commission or the Bilderberg Group. Impressive!
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Dawn: You obviously haven’t read the actual AP framework. OF COURSE the founders are there!
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The AP U.S. History Curriculum Framework
© 2014 The College Board.
Key Concept 4.1
PERIOD 4: 1800–1848
The new republic struggled to define and extend
democratic ideals in the face of rapid economic, territorial,
and demographic changes.
Key Concept 4.1:
The United States developed the world’s first
modern mass democracy and celebrated a new national culture,
while Americans sought to define the nation’s democratic ideals
and to reform its institutions to match them.
“The world’s first modern mass democracy?” Really?
The United States is a republic in which we elect representatives. Democracy is often described as the tyranny of the majority over the minority. America’s founders were well aware of that, which is why America is not a democracy; but a republic.
The framework does not even mention God which was the inspiration for crossing the ocean in the first place. I am not talking about proselytizing. I simply mean that you cannot gain a real understanding of the Puritans or the Pilgrims without an acknowledgement of the Biblical basis of the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. Regardless of what people believe now, they believed in the Bible then. Abraham Lincoln did not go to college but no one will argue that he was not a learned man. He was so familiar with two books that he could quote from either one of them at will: The Bible and The Works of Shakespeare. Will our students learn that?
The framework goes out of its way to paint Americans with a brush that maximizes our mistakes and minimizes our unique contribution to the world. It tries to define everything in terms of race and ethnicity and power and greed. We are a Judeo-Christian.country founded on the concept that we have God given rights as individuals. We were escaping the corrupt monarchs and their allegiance to the corrupt Pope. We were Protestants looking for a place to read the Bible ourselves without intercessors and priests. None of that is conveyed in the framework.
The percentage of time to be devoted to the founding of our nation is minimal compared to other less interesting time periods. The percentage of time devoted to anytime before 1607 is 5%. So how is there going to be a great discussion of the English Queens and kings and the Puritan Pilgrim ideas developing from the moment that Martin Luther nailed his theological theses to the castle door if there is no time for it and the students know it will only count for 5% of the tested material? If there was no Reformation there would be no United States as we know it today.
Using this framework as a guide for teaching history will not educate our students about the wonderful experiment called the United States with our unique Constitution that enumerates our God given individual rights.
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Dawn, you’re upset because the two sentences above, relating to 1800-1848, don’t mention “God” or the Puritans or the Pilgrims? This is a great example of what a nightmare it must be to write history standards.
“Look, I’m getting a lot of heat about this, can’t you just plop the word ‘God’ in there somewhere? And also something about the Puritans and the Pilgrams. Yes, I know it’s about the 19th Century. Just fix the problem, I’m sick of hearing from these people.”
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I am disturbed that they define the United States as a Democracy in the title. It is a republic.
The Puritans and the Pilgrims should be discussed in the section before 1607 which is only allotted 5% of the course.
My point about God is that it is impossible to discuss our history without mentioning God either in terms of the Puritans who came over in 1628 or the founding fathers who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights based on the concept of God given inalienable individual rights.
The reason any of this matters is because the Common Core is a direct assault on our individualism, as students and as teachers. It derives from the United Nations which is bent on establishing itself as the head of a one world government under which individual rights will always be subservient to the good of the collective.
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I went to the Engage NY link in the article, which shows the released questions for each grade. I may not have the most updated laptop, but then again, neither do many schools. As I scrolled back and forth losing my mind in the ELA selections, all I could think of was how difficult this will be for children, if and when these tests go online. Flipping pages and looking at paragraph numbers in booklets is distracting crazy enough, but online….insanity!
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Love this knowledge I am learning.My 4 kids have multiple diabilities.
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Cross posted at
Oped news http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/New-York-Common-Core-Test-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Common-Core_FAILURE_Testing-140818-117.html#comment507132
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A brief reminder to readers of this blog—
Standardized tests, and most especially those of the high-stakes variety, are hardly casual affairs. They rest on many decades of experience, trial-and-error, thought and results.
The CCSS tests referenced in this posting were designed, produced, pretested and administered to the clients’ satisfaction. The end results—within a narrow margin of error—were known ahead of time.
So it is perfectly legitimate and necessary to criticize the policy and political judgments of those that bought and paid for those predictable outcomes.
And it is not superfluous to add: this is what the self-styled “education reformers” tout as quality data points. Yes, the tests themselves that by their very nature measure very little, are inherently imprecise and are used in completely inappropriate ways (e.g., VAM)—tells us at the end of the testing cycle almost exactly what their clients demanded they should tell when they started the design and production cycle!
Hard data points? Objective assessment in place of frail subjective judgment? Not in the least. The data are so squishy that they make jellyfish look like vertebrates.
Just my dos centavitos worth…
Within a 5% margin of error, plus or minus.
Go figure…
😎
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One major complaint about the Pearson tests here in NY is that, due to the ultra secrecy/security surrounding them, that they cannot be used to inform instruction.
When tests are this poorly/inappropriately constructed, why would we want them to inform instruction? Tests this BAD cannot possibly inform good instruction.
In my nightmare world, I am administering the Pearson math and ELA tests next spring. I can see Rod Sterling outside my testing room. And why yes, I can read his lips, “You unlock this testing room door again with the key of hopefulness. Beyond it is another dimension—a dimension of doubt, a dimension of uncertainty, a dimension of ineffectiveness. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and shallowness, of untestable standards and test items testing those standards. You may have thought this year would be different, but,you’ve just crossed over into the Twilight Zone – again.”
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They can’t blame a rushed roll out this time. How is it that the Common Core standards still can’t be successfully “unpacked” after two years of concentrated efforts by tens of thousands of well meaning, highly educated teachers, coaches, administrators, and consultants? Just a complete and utter waste of time, energy, and money. Worse than a waste because this reform effort is inflicting harm to students, demoralizing the teaching force of NYS, and creating a black hole of opportunity costs. This is beyond shameful. History will not treat us kindly if we don’t stop the madness.
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Another result of this madness has been the number of excellent teachers that have “retired early.” Our students will be missing out on them as well.
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It easy to forget that these tests were spawned by federal funding and requirements for the use of the funds. Corporate and foundation involvement was part of our collective choice of Obama and his appointment of Duncan and staff. Charter friendly policies were built into NCLB from the get go. I realized this when I downloaded the whole law, read it, and then did some key word searches useful for additional analysis. Reading a federal legislation is not much different from the task presented to kids for “close reading.”
In addition to federal policies that have been corporatized you have state policies pushed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, conservative and corporate friendly and ignorant of education but determined to install, for example, the reading by grade 3 “grantee” and to mislead the public by highly reductive A-F rating schemes for teachers, schools, districts.
Add the belief tanks that have built a tangled web of interlocking directorates with Pr-campaigns and “fellowships” and revolving door recruiting strategies paid-in-full convenings of like-minded “thought leaders” to propagate market-based schooling–under the banner of improving student achievement, parental choice, and the rest.
All of these well-financed efforts to divert public investments in public schools and create a demand for subsidized consumer choice in educational fare depend on high-level marketing and media skills to “engineer consensus.” That is the title of an article by the recognized founder of PR in the United States, Edward Bernays (see The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science March 1947, 250 (1). 113-120.) wrote a seminal article titled “Engineering Consent” (1947). Bernays argued that the Bill of Rights extended to protections of PR firms engaged in the arts of persuasion and in a manner eerily similar to the Supreme Court affirmation that money can fuel the options available to us in making political decisions.
The largely invisible shapers of policy are the executives and staffers in PR firms including savvy for-hire drafters of legalese who can make federal and state officials look like they have a deep understanding of x, y, z, topic.
The largest PR contractors for RttT received a four-year grant $43 million grant from USDE to create the Reform Support Network, a “technical assistance” arm of USDE to help grantees communicate with each other, but also to propagate “best practices” for the “bold transformation” of teaching into a pay-for-performance occupation “at scale,” which means nation-wide. IFC International and nine subcontractors have constructed the media campaign. They have produced or had a heavy hand in shaping the blizzard of “canned” materials that teachers are encountering in schools either as requirements that seem to come from nowhere or from the state, or straight from the “messaging” tool kits, webinars, pod-casts, publications,”calibration” instructions, templates for SLOs, scripts for trainings and convenings, videos, brochures, white papers, op-eds, language for websites and so on from largely anonymous contractors working under the banner of RSN who are largely anonymous.
Just type in Reform Support Network to see some of the publications, look at videos and so on. As an indication of how PR firms can actually interpret and forward ideas not in federal policies, look at RSNs work in promoting SLOs for teacher evaluation. or be mindful of why the following disclaimer in RSN’s publications:
“This document was developed by the Reform Support Network with funding from the US Department of Education under Contract No GS-23F-8182H. The content of this publication does not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U. S. Department of Education.” Some RSN materials have the additional disclaimer: “Inclusion of this information does not constitute an endorsement by the U.S. Department of Education of any products or services offered or views expressed, nor does the Department of Education control its accuracy, relevance, timeliness or completeness.” This is the freedom of action given to PR firms that “guide” state departments of education and district officials, and the independent consultants and trainers galore entering your schools to make “bold transformations.”
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Laura regrets there are more typos than should be there, and some unintended redundancy.
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Excellent point. It’s always PR that makes unacceptable things acceptable.
Remember this? She was the daughter of an ambassador who was trained by Hill & Knowlton to fake this bit of theater using a story that never happened. Propaganda.
Nayirah al-Ṣabaḥ (Arabic: نيره الصباح), called “Nurse Nayirah” in the media, was a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl, who alleged that she had witnessed the murder of infant children by Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait, in verbal testimony to the U.S. Congress, in the run up to the 1991 Gulf War. Her testimony, which was regarded as credible at the time, has since come to be regarded as wartime propaganda. The public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, which was in the employ of Citizens for a Free Kuwait, had arranged the testimony. Nayirah’s testimony was widely publicized. Hill & Knowlton, which had filmed the hearing, sent out a video news release to Medialink, a firm which served about 700 television stations in the United States. That night, portions of the testimony aired on ABC’s Nightline and NBC Nightly News reaching an estimated audience between 35 and 53 million Americans. Seven senators cited Nayirah’s testimony in their speeches backing the use of force. President George Bush repeated the story at least ten times in the following weeks. (Wikipedia)
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NYC DOE web site touting higher scores. Of course no mention of the reduction in cut scores.
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I’m piloting three of the middle school EngageNY ELA modules. As I work through these, I’m blogging about them at
http://teachthefantastic.blogspot.com
This has changed the nature of what I’ve been writing about, which is normally teaching science fiction and fantasy literature. I’ve been teaching middle school English for eleven years now, but so far I haven’t found much good stuff in these modules.
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Not sure why there is wonderment over the fact that “common core tests fail our students again”. When one starts with crap one ends up with crap. Noel Wilson proved the multitude of errors involved in the standards and standardized testing regime in his 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 description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional 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 the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
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. And 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 attempts to measure “’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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As an eighth grade PreAlgebra and Algebra I teacher, I find myself spending so much time in front of the copy machine, My home state of Louisiana has declared that Eureka Myth is the only “text” that meets all their standards. (Check out Jason “crazy crawfish” France’s insightful reveal of the process http://crazycrawfish.wordpress.com/2014/05/04/louisianas-texbook-selection-shenanigans/)
My district has swallowed the Eureka Myth pill but they have only purchased individual student workbooks, assessment materials. They then purchased only one copy of each grade level teacher edition for the ENTIRE DISTRICT! That means the central office is making individual copies of the teacher material and sending them to us two Modules at a time
The district refused to purchase Eureka Myth internet access for the teachers (saving $100 per teacher!). Some of us have taken advantage of the “free 30-day trial” offered by the Eureka Myth. I have only 17 days left on my trial and am frantically downloading everything I can possibly ever want from the site. The Eureka Myth Busters even had to nerve to send me a bill for $275 for my “free trial” Good luck collecting that!
As I am attempting to present the lessons, I find myself thinking “What the dickens” is the point of this lesson and why is it so complicated? Math is supposed to make the complicated simple not the inverse. I have almost decided to use multiple sources of lessons to develop instruction the students can understand and use. I fear if we follow the Eureka Myth, we,in Louisiana, are destined to produce the same low success rate that New York experienced with Engage NY? Since Louisiana students are more behind than any other state in the union, do we have any hope of catching up with this Eureka Myth Voodoo?
I realize our teachers will take the blame for failure to close the achievement gap but how many classes of students will be labeled as failures and discouraged with this process?
Too many to count.
Pawn Power!
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Carol Burris does the kind of close reading of these ELA tests that more of us should do When you get down into the weeds of these tests, you really start to wonder what they are testing. Is it reading ability? Is it critical thinking ability? Is it mere doggedness? Is it short term memory power? Deb Sigman, the California testing tsar, once told me these are highly sophisticated new kinds of tests that measure something far loftier than lowly reading comprehension; they measure “mental constructs”. What the heck does that mean? And how is a teacher supposed to impart these “mental constructs”? And is there any evidence that these mental constructs can be taught? I suspect these tests are frauds designed to impress a certain sort of ignorant education bureaucrat or philanthropist who’ve been promised a radically improved new order in education that will impart the elusive “21st Century Skills” on which the future of American civilization depends. A straightforward test of knowledge or reading comprehension would seem so 19th Century.
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Ponderosa: ya has dado en el mero blanco/you have hit the very middle of the target!
If I may indulge in a bit of word play, the adherents of the High Holy Church of Testolatry may use the term “mental constructs” but what they are really—and I mean Rheeally! Johnsonally!—getting at, is that THEY have brains full of “mental obstructs.”
😏
Their unfounded faith in the precision and accuracy of standardized tests would be touching if they, er, weren’t so touched when it comes to understanding how little they measure, how inherently imprecise they are, and how they are used for purposes that go far beyond their circumscribed strengths.
Would that they had taken even the intro course in ancient Greece:
“A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.” [Plato]
Or visited, once at least, the blogs of ethical and honest numbers/stats folks like deutsch29, Jersey Jazzman, VAMboozled!, Bruce Baker, GF Brandenberg, Gary Rubinstein…
Hope springs eternal…
😎
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Ponderosa
The Common Core ELA standards simply cannot be tested using MC items. They are for the most part a list of abstract skills and subjective concepts. They are un-teachable and unstable, yet we are spending untold amounts of time, money, and energy trying to do so. If ELA teachers in NY had completely ignored the CC standards and ignored NYSEDs EngageNY modules and ignored Danielson and Marzano, and refused to post data walls and student learning objectives and refused to participate in close readings and rejected every other unproven untested idea crammed down their throats and if NY English teachers simply applied best practices developed over the years, I would bet my pension that the scores would be no different. If standards can’t be successfully “unpacked” after two years, maybe the conclusion is that they are “unpackable”.
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untestable NOT unstable
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NY Teacher,
I agree: there’s no proof at all that the fashionable approaches (Danielson, EngageNY, etc.) result in higher scores on these tests. I would love to put the test-creators on the spot and ask them point blank, what exactly are these tests testing? What sort of teaching will improve kids performance on them? And, once I hear their answer, HOW DO YOU KNOW THIS? What’s the proof? Or are you just speculating? Methinks the emperor has no clothes. You’re right, we’ve had two years and were still mired in murkiness.
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Reblogged this on seldurio.
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Yes, how does the common core benefit special needs students? It serves to frustrate them especially when there are many variables that affect their ability to assimilate such difficult material. Can someone tell us how the common core is going to benefit our special needs population or did we forget to remember them?
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