As Testing Frenzy Grows, So Does Opt-Out Movement

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1. kittzb2014 says:

   August 23, 2014 at 10:07 am

   Reblogged this on teachersindistress and commented:
   Is the pendulum finally swinging away from the crazy emphasis on testing for the sake of testing? Perhaps so.

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2. schoolgal says:

   August 23, 2014 at 10:27 am

   Perdido writes on his blog that Duncan is not going to grant flexibility to NYS on testing. The report is from Capital NY, but is behind a firewall. Can you please look into this because Cuomo is lying through his teeth and the Union is supporting a phony claim about teacher evals and testing.

   Also, take a look at the LA Times editorial on VAM now that a Bill and Melinda VAM study found it inappropriate. Bill and Melinda are using this week to pay tribute to teachers. Something tells me their PR firm is working overtime!!!

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   • Bob Parker says:

     August 23, 2014 at 11:02 am

     The best way for Bill Gates to pay tribute to teachers would be to go away and leave us alone.

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     • Chiara says:

       August 23, 2014 at 12:01 pm

       It’s the new and improved kindler, gentler ed reform. The polling isn’t good on the Common Core and on President Obama’s education agenda in general. Polls are data too! 🙂

       There’s also a weird element of good cop/bad cop on the teacher love/hate that feels manipulative to me. I read an interview with Melinda Gates yesterday where she weighed in on tenure (given too easily in some states) and then minimized the statement she had just made based on tenure not being their “focus” and it being a local issue.

       Obviously I have some trust issues with ed reformers after watching it unfold for 15 years and being told it isn’t anti-public schools when everything they say and do is anti-public schools, but the newer marketing does seem like a deliberative effort to make it warmer and fuzzier. It’s an odd contrast; the stern lectures and scolding of Campbell Brown and the lawyers and lobbyists in her group contrasted with the kindler, gentler new marketing.

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     • schoolgal says:

       August 23, 2014 at 1:35 pm

       I read that puff piece Katie Couric interview on Yahoo. Never did she ask about the backlash to both Common Core, VAM and the Gates’ in general. (now that’s real reporting!!) Her statement on tenure was meant to be neutral. But we all know where she stands and since Brown isn’t giving out donor info, we will never know if they contributed or are working deals behind closed doors.

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3. Yvonne Siu-Runyan says:

   August 23, 2014 at 10:31 am

   It’s about $$$$$ and CONTROL from the FEDs. Lots of $$$$$ to be made plus CONTROL the teachers, students, and parents…GREAT for a FASCIST government fueled by corporate profits. All the DEFORMERS have is MARKETING bad ideas and products for PROFIT and, of course, paying off politicians to do their bidding. It’s reprehensible.

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4. Momoffive says:

   August 23, 2014 at 10:45 am

   I sat through a two hour school board meeting waiting for my turn to speak against Common Core, and I was stunned that the entire meeting was about the new district tests coming this year. I sat there listening to committee after committee show their fancy graphs while using complicated edu-speak. Testing, testing, and more testing is what is in store for the kids…evaluating, evaluating, and more evaluating is what is in store for all those committees.

   And for what? Nothing I witnessed will directly help the students learn academics. In fact, academics is not the district’s main focus this year. The focus is “real world solutions for real world problems,” and “innovation and excellence.” Most parents want the focus to be “grammar, phonics, spelling, history, science, traditional math, and reading.” Sadly, this will never happen because teaching academic subjects is too easy and will give those expensive committees nothing to do.

   After a year of 1st grade, my daughter hadn’t memorized 6 + 3 = 9, my 5th grader couldn’t write a grammatically correct paragraph, and my 7th grader only read one novel the entire year in English class. But, they all spent lots of time talking in groups, discussing “grit” and listening to anti-bullying campaigns…I GIVE UP!! As a mother of five, I will homeschool them this year. I’m convinced it’s the only way to teach them academics.

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5. Chiara says:

   August 23, 2014 at 11:18 am

   For such a 21st century innovation, it is amazing how difficult the PARCC site is to use. Nearly every link to substantive info (so not the marketing language on the main page) leads to something you have to download and that is difficult to read or understand. This is the “parents” portion, so presumably it wasn’t designed for “assessment professionals”.

   You’d think with all our political focus on “STEM professionals” PARCC could have spent some money and hired a few of them to make this information accessible to the average person.

   Some of it just leads the reader in a circle. If you want to read the “PTA information for parents on PARRC” in an attempt to find something that is usable or relevant you just end up back at the PARRC site.

   http://www.parcconline.org/for-parents

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6. Chiara says:

   August 23, 2014 at 11:32 am

   So I live in a PARRC state and I also live in a state with what I consider a nearly completely captured legislature and my concern is these new test scores will be used as one more political tool to use existing public schools as punching bags for a political agenda. I have the misfortune of having political leadership who recently announced that public schools should be privatized, so we’re not talking about conspiracy theories here: this is the head of the education subcommittee in my state. This is not “fringe” where I live, although I recognize it’;s a big country and this probably not true in MA or NY (although I think it’s true to some extent in PA and especially MI).

   Are there any ethical rules regarding the use of student test scores? If our politicians misuse these scores to advance an agenda that is wholly or partly driven by lobbyists is there any recourse or sanction or bar to doing that?

   Or should I just wait for the onslaught of nonsense when they release the scores next spring and count on their inherent integrity and sense of fair play? 🙂

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   • Duane Swacker says:

     August 23, 2014 at 12:56 pm

     Chiara,

     “Are there any ethical rules regarding the use of student test scores?”

     I believe you have stated that you are not a teacher so you wouldn’t have taken “Testing and Measurement 101” (or whatever that type of course is called at any university/college).

     One of the first things that you learn in that class is that it is COMPLETELY UNETHICAL to use the results of any assessment to assess/ascertain/describe anything other than what the test was designed to assess. A fifth grade math test is supposed to discern whether the student has “learned” the concepts that are on the test, nothing more, nothing less. To then say that the teacher is competent/incompetent relying on those test scores is UNETHICAL, plain and simple-T&M 101.

     Even to attach the grade/score to the student as we do-Oh, Johnny and Janie each got 99% of the questions correct they are therefore “A students” is a logical mistake of misatribution/mislabelling. That 99% is just the amount of correct items they got in their interaction with the paper and pencil and/or computerized test and is just a description of that interaction, not of the interactees. That 99% doesn’t say anything of the student’s mind/thinking. As Wilson states:

     “It requires an enormous suspension of rational thinking to believe that the best way to describe the complexity of any human achievement, any person’s skill in a complex field of human endeavour, is with a number that is determined by the number of test items they got correct. Yet so conditioned are we that it takes a few moments of strict logical reflection to appreciate the absurdity of this.”

     Not only is the misatribution/mislabelling “an enormous suspension of rational thinking” but is also UNETHICAL in that it perpetuates a falsehood.

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     • Chiara says:

       August 23, 2014 at 3:17 pm

       They don’t call it out now when numbers and stats are misused. None of them call it out.

       Arne Duncan regularly parrots nonsense stats about “100% graduation rates” for schools that lose half their students btwn 9th and 12th grade. That isn’t “100% graduation”. It’s a cooked number.

       How do I know that won’t happen with this “data”? If lawmakers in my state who have an agenda to privatize public schools trumpet the higher CC failure rates as “further proof of our failed and failing schools”, what am I supposed to do about that lie?

       Why would I willingly offer up my kid’s scores to this adult agenda? How do I know this will be used for the stated purpose, which is to “assess and improve”? I’ve watched this ed reform political campaign for 15 years. Has something changed? Did the various ed reform factions stop using public schools to promote a political and policy agenda? I haven’t seen any evidence that anything has changed.

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     • Duane Swacker says:

       August 23, 2014 at 3:28 pm

       “Why would I willingly offer up my kid’s scores to this adult agenda? How do I know this will be used for the stated purpose, which is to “assess and improve”?”

       You shouldn’t. Opting out is the only protection you have for protecting your children and the “data”-the adult agenda-from the edudeformers predatory schemes.

       They won’t be used for the stated purpose and even if they were they still be used for other nefarious purposes that weren’t stated. You know “let the test taker beware”.

       Opt your children out, Chiara, that is the only ETHICAL thing to do.

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7. Communist Teacher says:

   August 23, 2014 at 12:04 pm

   The insanity will continue until we all walk out of the schools together.

   “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”
   ― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

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8. Lloyd Lofthouse says:

   August 23, 2014 at 12:19 pm

   I think this is a safe bet to cash in on and take to the bank.

   As the Opt Out movement grows, the fake education reformers will pressure their puppet politicians in the states and Congress to vote for legislation to make it illegal to Opt Out of CCSS tests unless the children are in private sector Charters where there is no Common Core testing and lower paid teachers—with cherry picked students—don’t have to be credentialed, have no due process rights, and are not represented by a labor union.

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9. Duane Swacker says:

   August 23, 2014 at 1:06 pm

   I await the day that Fairtest embraces Noel Wilson’s never rebutted nor refuted destruction of educational standards and standardized testing. Fairtest seems to still embrace the sorting and separating that accompanies those malpractices believing that those two concepts can be “tweaked” to make them acceptable.

   Well, they can’t be “tweaked” to be acceptable. To give in to those malpractices because, “well, that’s just the way it is, we have to test students” is to accept and to allow UNETHICAL educational practices. To understand why I urge all to read and understand 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 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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10. schoolgal says:

    August 23, 2014 at 1:32 pm

    Florida will now make Kinder take end of year exams!!!
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/08/22/and-now-final-exams-for-kindergartners-really/

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