I received news from England that a letter written by Rachel Tomlinson, the head of Barrowford, a primary school in Lancashire, went viral.
The letter was a clone of one written by American teacher Kimberly Hurd Horst on her blog.
No claims of plagiarism here. Maybe every principal and teacher should send the same letter home when students get their Common Core test scores, saying they failed. Remind parents that children are more than a test score. Tell them that the passing mark was set unreasonably high. Tell them that the tests failed, not the children.
In October last year Hurd Horst wrote on her blog: “There are many more ways to be smart than what many schools are currently allowing. The current testing culture personally drives me crazy. It does not tell students that they matter. Tests do not always assess all of what it is that make each student special and unique. The people who create these tests and score them do not know each student the way I do, the way I hope to, and certainly not the way the families do. They do not know that some of my students speak two languages. They do not know that they can play a musical instrument or that they can dance or paint a picture. Doesn’t that matter more?”
The school seemed to acknowledge debt to Hurd, retweeting a comment from someone linking to her blog.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
From the link in this posting:
“The people who create these tests and score them do not know each of you – the way your teachers do, the way I hope to, and certainly not the way your families do. They do not know that many of you speak two languages. They do not know that you can play a musical instrument or that you can dance or paint a picture. They do not know that your friends count on you to be there for them or that your laughter can brighten the dreariest day.”
The rhetoric spewed out by the education reform establishment is that high-stakes standardized testing will make learning more personalized.
Rheeally! In a Johnsonally sort of way…
This flies in the face of a simple incontrovertible fact. The testing industry prides itself on providing the (many decades long proven) expertise that will produce thoroughly depersonalized algorithm-selected test items that trump allegedly frail, uncertain and untrustworthy human judgment. In their opinion, that’s exactly what makes them “objective” and “scientific” and the only sure means to accurately label, sort and rank people. Rather than words and good sense and assessment, it’s all about the numbers and stats and hard data points.
Really!
Until one looks more closely. It’s all part of charterite/privatizer math. Numbers that are missing, and those selected to prove the predetermined conclusions and/or requirements, and truncated graphs, and delayed release of inconvenient figures, and the list of unethical and unprofessional practices goes on and on and on.
This is not news, especially re standardized testing. Banesh Hoffman, THE TYRANNY OF TESTING (2003 republication of the 1964 reprinting of the 1962 original, p. 143):
[start quote]
The most important thing to understand about reliance on statistics in a field such as testing is that such reliance warps perspective. The person who holds that subjective judgment and opinion are suspect and decides that only statistics can provide the objectivity and relative certainty that he seeks, begins by unconsciously ignoring, and ends by consciously deriding, whatever can not be given a numerical measure or label. His sense of values becomes distorted. He comes to believe that whatever is non-numerical is inconsequential. He can not serve two masters. If he worships statistics he will simplify, fractionalize, distort, and cheapen in order to forced things into a numerical mold.
[end quote]
The last chapter of his book anticipates many blog postings here: “Don’t be Pro-Test—Protest” — Amen!
😎
“Until one looks more closely.”
Thanks for the opening KTA! With Noel Wilson following up on Hoffman, closely taking apart the whole educational standards and standardized testing farce. To understand why it is a worse than a farce please read and understand Wilson’s 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.
The link you gave didn’t work for me, but I found it here (close): http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/index.php/epaa/article/view/577/700
Duane: always glad to provide an opening for you to present Noel Wilson.
😃
And I refer viewers of this blog to the posting immediately preceding this one for other examples of the charterite/privatizer numbers game.
Although they don’t see figures quite the same way we do. Ellen Glasgow anticipated the leading charterites/privatizers some time ago:
“Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would only win more mediocrity.”
😎
P.S. Even before I posted this I got a rheesponse:
“I reject that mind-set.” [Michelle Rhee]
After all, gotta defend the brand…
Rheeally! In a Johnsonally sort of way…
😏
I wrote the original letter in 1999 and it was published in the East Longmedow Town Reminder in Maasachusetts. I was active in the anti-MCAS movement at the time.
“So many ways to be smart” is a song by >Stuart Stotts on a CD I produced called No Child Left Behind? (on CD baby) And it is very true. Would you, on your job like to be assessed by someone who has never seen you? Think about it
The city of Shanghai, China, disappears the majority of its fifteen-year-old population, who are sent back to the countryside where their parents (not they themselves) were born, in order to look good on the PISA tests!
The misrepresentation of public schools and the accomplishments of students and teachers is aided and abetted by the policies of the Obama/Duncan/Gates administration and the hawkers of VAM and SLOs as if the stack rankings these metrics enable also result in a fair and objective way to portray student learning and teacher effectiveness. Nothing about education is objective unless it is literally an object, like a book, an iPad, a needed pair of shoes.
Solution to the misreprestation.
No data, no numbers, no VAM or SLOs and micromanging. Just weekly or bi-weekly conversations and presentations of student work. Students make some choices, peers make some, teachers make some, and parents community members are invited. Once a year celebrations of individual and group accomplisments. No competitions, no prizes, no pizza.
Many of us have the same thoughts and feelings. If I were to write them out, they would be very similar to what has been written by others.
Can universal truths be plagiarized?
Ultimately, children need to get the message that they are valued and loved, regardless of their test scores or school grades. And, as adults, we want to give them the opportunity to explore and develop their individual passions so they can live full and enriching lives. (At least that’s what I want for my children and grandchildren.)