Let the madness begin in Florida where the politicians’ zeal for evaluating teachers by student test scores has created a Frankenstein monster of testing: brainless and lacking in sense or self-control.
Broward County is said to be developing 1,500 new tests in every subject and grade.
“The abundance of new tests – up to 1,500 could be introduced in the Broward school district, according to Superintendent Robert Runcie – has rankled many parents and Broward school officials.
“We’re spending a whole bunch of time figuring out how to test kids versus trying to educate them properly,” Runcie said.
“Added School Board member Robin Bartleman: “I don’t need to know how well my kindergartner is doing in art.”
“It’s unclear whether the tests will even count toward a student’s grade. State law doesn’t address that.
“Why are you wasting my kid’s time when these are being used solely to evaluate teachers?” asked Rosemarie Jensen, a Parkland parent involved in the national Opt Out movement that opposes high-stakes testing.
“Administrators say they plan to make the new tests age-appropriate. But elementary students could end up taking multiple tests, such as ones for reading, math, music, art and physical education.
“Under state law, school districts are supposed to administer these tests this year. But the district doesn’t have tests available for most of the subjects.”
Where are the villagers with their torches and pitchforks? Who will save the children?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Well, it sounds like common sense has flown out the window.
This reminds me of the futility of the swim teacher who was required to post various rules and procedures plus a word wall. There was no bulletin board. There was no black or white board. And all attempts to attach said items to the wall failed due to the moisture from the pool. He had to reattach them every morning. I still laugh at the thought.
This, however, is no laughing matter. Let’s change things up and imagine that the CEO had to take a (mostly irrelevant) test at least once a week on all aspects of their job. When the company inevitably failed to meet it’s benchmarks, it would be considered the CEO’s fault, not the work constraints which prevented success.
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This year, in my social studies classes in Utah, I must give six 70-minute periods of testing, spread throughout the year. I am having to give up at least one of my writing assignments in order to have more time for writing tests. My 9th graders also have 3 additional 70-minute periods of the Explore test. Since my school is on a block schedule, I only see the students for 90 days during the school year (every other day). This means that my 9th graders will spend 10 percent of time in my class this year taking standardized testing, which we are not allowed by law to count on their grades, and we won’t get results into the summer. Doing all of this testing on computer (each student will have a minimum of 19 70-minute periods of standardized testing this year) will mean that no one will be able to use the computer labs or the library beginning in January.
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Threatened,
When you say that you must give six 70-minute tests I first thought that these were mandated standardized exams, but when you said that you gave up a writing assignment to have more time for writing tests it occurred to me that these might be mandated non-standardized tests. Which is correct?
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They’re standardized, to the extent that all students in the district will write on the same prompt, which teachers won’t know until just before the testing.
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Follow the $$$$$. This is insanity fueled by greed.
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I totally agree Yvonne. I can hear those old Greedy- Money- Hungry Selfish people now…..sitting around their mahogany tables in their cushy chairs…or out to the finest restaurant eating enough food to feel 25 hungry children…………
My take..”There is money to be made in education….if we change the curriculum…and the SAT..Just think of how much money we can make if every school district in the USA has to buy new materials and new test prep materials and new tests..It will be in the billions….What’s for dessert?”
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This video is comparable to the common core.. Worthless.
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1,500 new test..1,500 new tests…1,500 new tests…1,500 new tests…
“Under state law, school districts are supposed to administer these tests this year. But the district doesn’t have tests available for most of the subjects.”
State Law?????? Just how do the citizens of Florida go about changing this State Law???
Do any of you think it is possible that these Plastic Politicians who spend millions on their two vacation homes have….most likely …..invested some of their $$$$$$ in these companies that make the tests??? Just wondering!
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This quote irks me to no end, “Added School Board member Robin Bartleman: “I don’t need to know how well my kindergartner is doing in art.” First, it makes the grand assumption that these barrage of TESTS ACTUALL MEASURE LEARNING! Second, yes as a parent you should want to know how your child is doing in art! Art is about exercising creative process and this is essential to all endeavors in learning. Albert Einstein was a highly CREATIVE thinker as was Steve Jobs as was Madame Curie as was Picasso! And as for Broward County…. THE LEADERSHIP IS INSANE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thought I was reading an article in the Onion!
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Where is the Onion when we need them. Their absence has been sorely felt in this arena!
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I actually thought it was an Onion story when I saw the blog entry. That happens with a lot of ed reform stories unfortunately.
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“…as a parent you should want to know how your child is doing in art! Art is about exercising creative process and this is essential to all endeavors in learning.”
An informed parent would want to know what children are doing in the name of art, especially in kindergarten where using crayons to color a worksheet is all too common.
An informed parent would want to talk to the child about what he or she learned, perhaps point to things especially important, or fun, or hard. Anyone who looks only at the product created by a child in kindergarten is not likely to gain much insight. The narrative is almost always more important than how the product looks.
Well educated adults tend to think that a kindergarten art program is always about a creative process. While that may be an ideal for adults ( and one I share) the truth is that children spend a lot of learning time in art watching their peers and learning from them, whether that is drawing or cutting and pasting or using a medium such as clay. Some children blatantly copy each other, no guilt unless that is put into play by a peer who resents it, or the teacher who tells them not to copy. The aim is to build some confidence so copying is not always the first path taken.
One more thing, a great kindergarten art program invests time, teacher expertise, and resources so children are eager to look at large and sophisticated artworks and learn to have conversations about them. Good conversations and great questions from the teacher and students can launch and sustain conversations for as long as 40 minutes.
Some pretty remarkable vocabulary boosts come when teachers know how to converse with students and cultivate those skills as the norm for everyone. Kids feel empowered when they can say words like enormous and architecture and ceramics and such and when they are allowed to perceive multiple referents for these words and experience with the real deal–walkabouts, hands-on and so on.
I do not think any formal testing of kindergarten children in art, or music, or dance, or dramtic play (theater) has value, especially if the teacher knows how to watch for an nuture emerging skills, affinities and knowledge and when to gently move children beyond a comfort zone.
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Must you post the same off-topic stuff (which was already posted by Diane anyway) on every thread? Once is plenty.
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“Sen. Andy Gardiner, R-Orlando, incoming president of the Florida Senate, voted for the merit-pay law and said testing provides “valuable information to parents and teachers.”
But Gardiner said he supports Scott’s review. “We want to be sure testing, whether required by the state, or added at the local level, is being utilized in an efficient manner,” he said.”
I don’t think he should get away with that response. He voted for the teacher evaluation law. The teacher evaluation law requires testing in every grade and every class.
How did he think this was going to work? Did he vote for a law that was drafted and submitted in state after state? My state has one a lot like it. The same thing happened here.
They’re promoting these laws and then avoiding accountability on the inevitable and predictable results of the laws. That’s a dodge. He has to add more value in his work, do some independent thought and analysis.
I’m not satisfied with the quality of the work done by the “accountability” crowd. It’s shoddy and slap-dash and they follow fads. Why didn’t they anticipate excessive testing?
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The Florida Legislature is famous for making poor, spur of the moment decisions when passing laws, never thinking through the longterm results and implications.
If ALEC says do it, they do it and smile broadly while cashing the campaign contribution checks from the lobbyists.
This time they have overreached by about a mile. School districts in Florida cannot raise taxes to pay for unfunded mandates such as this. The state cut funding under Gov. Scott and shifted much of the education money to charter schools and ‘opportunity’ scholarships for religious private schools.
We have the ability in this state to pass any constitutional amendment put forth to the voters. That is how we got the Class Size Amendment done.
I think it is time for us to write an amendment barring the state legislature from micromanaging public schools through unfunded mandates, using school funding to intimidate and coerce districts into abusing children through testing, and requiring legislators to undergo the same kinds of scrutiny and evaluation they force on teachers. It’s time for legislative VAM and weekly civics and law tests.
Are you with me, Sunshine staters?
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My eldest son works in tech and they’re coming up with “games” that are assessments. It isn’t his area, but he’s aware of what the industry is focusing on, and education is a huge market.
I love the thinking behind this. “Let’s see if we can ruin games, too!”
The whole point of a game is it isn’t, actually, a test, which is why it’s fun. That’s why we call them “games” instead of “assessments”. They aren’t high stakes. The grim joylessness just infects everything.
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I think gaming is a pretty interesting approach to education. The goal is to banish grim joylessness after all.
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Gaming is an interesting approach to education and I use it as a supplement a lot. Different types of games to access different types of thinking is actually interesting. But in no way should it be used as an assessment style tool to judge learning or teaching performance. It can be a diagnostic or inform teachers about students and their strengths and weaknesses.
I wrote a class that will never run in my district. My district leaders loved it as an elective. They acknowledged that it would be fun and difficult and particularly good for students who didn’t like the traditional aspects of school. But then they noted that it wouldn’t help with the next iteration of tests and therefore would be “lost time” in our school. The class would have revealed whether students were good at visual / spatial approaches, deductive reasoning, probabilities, strategic or tactical planning and so on. It would not have tested their reading ability (though it would have had numerous writing assignments). Therefore, it does not fit what is tested.
This is what happens when things like CCSS and standardized test pressure infect a school. Creative approaches get squeezed out. (For the record, one longtime administrator told me that if I had presented this idea 15 years ago then it would have been tried for certain.) Standardization is the enemy of innovation.
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Steve,
I don’t see the sharp distinction between an activity being viewed as diagnostic or as an assessment. My final exams, for example, are an attempt to assess what the students have learned over the course of the semester and can serve to diagnose strengths and weaknesses in particular students (though very very few pick up their final exams) and more importantly they serve to diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of my approaches to the various topics covered in the course.
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TE,
That’s because you’re viewing this solely through the eyes of the student. Standardized tests go far beyond the realm of the final exams you administer in your class.
Your final exam scores are not:
Used to judge your quality as a teacher
Used to judge the quality of your school
Used to judge the quality of your district or organization
Published in newspapers as parts of comparative tables
You missed a key point in my post. My class was not shot down due to its ideas, value or innovation. It was shot down because it could not be considered of value in a system that insists upon or stresses the items I listed above.
In this climate, how could a gaming class possibly estimate my quality and value as a teacher? How could it improve reading test scores? This is the world we inhabit at the K-12 level.
So here’s the difference between diagnostic and assessment in my mind: A diagnostic informs me about strengths weaknesses and other specific traits. An assessment judges for the purpose of sorting, ranking and establishing value.
Our state tests are designed to judge us. Political leaders did not create these measures and laws to diagnose our teaching abilities but to create a flawed system to compare teachers (and schools) based on a very narrow swath of the standards / curriculum.
By the way, no response to my example of how standardization stifles innovation?
Also, tests are the new game. Schools game it as much as possible. Lots of practice tests and simulations are one way to improve scores. It isn’t about improving education. It’s about improving test scores. It isn’t the same thing.
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Steve,
My exams ARE used for the purpose of stacking students, ranking students, establishing the suitability of students to continue at the university (students with sufficiently low GPA’s are suspended from the university), and enter into their desired academic programs (GPA is one criteria for entry into professional programs, for example). My exams are judged by my peers as part of my teaching portfolio.
I think many aspects of public education stifle innovation. The use of traditional zoning for school admission is probably the most stifling as it forces districts to impose uniformity across buildings. Standardized tests, in and of themselves, could help validate the use of an innovative teaching method as it has with the teaching of physics (here is a long but good talk about the impact of peer instruction on how much students actually learn in a physics class: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI) I don’t know how you might convince someone that one method of teaching is better than another without some standardized metric.
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I agree in theory, but I’m still waiting to see gaming-as-education executed well.
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FLERP! (and others),
Here is a site that you might be interested in looking at: http://www.moblab.com/ .
There are other examples, but this site offers free access to the games. You might pass this along to anyone that teaches economics or uses game theory in a class.
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Thanks, TE. Economics probably lends itself to gaming better than any other subject.
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Dang it, TE, don’t show me a bunch of games that I can’t play!
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FLERP!,
Sorry, forgot that it is only free for educators. Here is another site: http://economics-games.com/. To play these games you need to have multiple players participating.
It is certainly true that games are well suited for teaching economics, but many social science disciplines (and some natural science ones as well) use game theory as a tool of analysis.
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To Flerp,
I agree that gaming as education would be difficult to do well. Also, my games were all board and card driven games, not video. When I met with my district committee to propose my class, I admitted that gaming would probably be useful for the following items:
Helping students develop collaborative skills (some games are all players versus the game, Pandemic as an example).
Providing a class that would allow for the integration for multiple types of students (because I’ve had an after school board gaming session that attracts everything from athletes to band kids to power nerds and many unexpected friendships have occurred in this setting).
Providing a class that did not focus on content, but rather on thinking and creativity.
There were writing components (regarding rules, reviews and so on).
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Chicago strikes again. Robert Runcie never taught a year in a real public school. He was one of Arne Duncan’s guys in the Chicago Public Schools administration during the Duncan years (2001 – 2008). Tall and smiling all the time, Runcie also played basketball with Arne during his Chicago years.
Then like many others, he cashed in in Chicago and found a sucker elsewhere.
Runcie wowed the Broward Board of Education and was hired to be their schools chief despite the failure of their due diligence to note that he had not teaching, classroom, or principal experience. Now he is replicating the Chicago Plan developed by this generation’s Chicago Boys — massive testing. This reminds me of the CASE (Chicago Academic Standards Exam) tests that we outed in Chicago in 1999 and which were eliminated (after their content was a laughing stock joke for those who were able to examine them) in 2002. Like Rick Mills (Sarasota) and dozens of others who have used their “Chicago cred” to get jobs elsewhere, Runcie knows nothing about teaching, child learning, or how to run a real public school in the real world. But he’s a “data driven” robotnik who got Broward to hire him, in part because, like all the other dumb Boards of Education from Nevada to Massachusetts and from Florida to Minnesota, they think that a “Chicago” brand on the backside of these frauds will bring them some federal dollars from their old buddy Arne.
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Rick Mills (actually Manatee, not Sarasota, George) has created a tsunami level of incompetent disaster here. He fired all the knowledgeable, experienced people and replaced them with business world idiots who are driving the district into the ground faster than can be measured. It is the 23rd day of school and we still do not have a working IT system in place thanks to Mills’s brilliant management move of firing all the IT people (an award-winning team nationally recognized, I might add) and replacing them with a business dude who is incompetent and has managed to tick off everyone. Thanks Chicago!
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Here’s The Student Success Act.
“Requires school districts to administer assessments for each course offered in the district”
They didn’t know it required school districts to test on each course? Why not? They drafted it, supposedly.
“The bill reinforces Race to the Top, which requires 50 percent of the evaluation for classroom teachers and other instructional personnel to be based on student performance for students assigned to them over a 3-year period. The bill specifies that 50 percent of a school administrator’s evaluation is based upon the performance of the students assigned to the school over a 3-year period.”
Next time someone from the Obama Administration says there’s too much testing, ask them if they read and understood RttT, and considered the consequences.
“The current salary system is divorced from the effectiveness of the classroom teacher, other instructional personnel, or school administrators. Instead, salary decisions are made on the basis of longevity. The bill comports with Race to the Top by tying the most significant gains in salary to effectiveness demonstrated under the evaluation.”
Our leaders are not meeting performance metrics. They’re not adding value.
http://www.flsenate.gov/Committees/BillSummaries/2011/html/0736ED
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It is not unreasonable for a student to take 1500 tests over the course of 13 years. The problem is the kind of tests being given and the purpose of the tests. The use of tests in FLA and Broward county are deeply misguided… as are the standardized tests that are the basis for NCLB and RTTT…. but 1500 well conceived mastery tests might help the public see the underlying problems of public schools. http://waynegersen.com/2014/09/18/whats-passing/
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Wgersen. Yes it is. Classroom tests and qwuizzes given by the teacher are enough. THese are absolutely ridiculous. Teachers have been giving mastery tests for years. We don’t need high stakes mastery tests nor do we need one for every grade in every subject. I am astounded when I hear any one defend this given we put men on the moon, created Pulitzer Prize winers, Nobel Prize winners, made incredible scientific progress with people educated in our public schools devoid of this nonsense for years. ANd apparently, private schools still do.
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“Captain Testus”
The Sunshine State is growing tests!
With testing juice and testing fests!
Captain Testus leads the way
To rescue tests and save the day
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What’s with Florida? They mess up the voting and give us George W. and now they mess with education.
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There is no reason why Florida needs to use test scores in teacher evaluations for the 2014-15 school year. Duncan granted a one year reprieve from using test scores in teacher evaluations for all NCLB waiver states. VAM is always garbage, but any VAM scores generated for the 2014-15 school year will be complete fraud. The algorithm cannot predict learning gains for a test that no student has ever taken. As of today, no pretests or baseline assessments have been given to secondary students in Miami Dade for the new exams. How is the state going to measure “growth”?
Please send an email to Pamela Stewart (Commissioner@fldoe.org) asking her why the state is still planning on using test scores in teacher evaluations when it is statistically impossible. Email your local legislators as well with the same question. Feel free to copy and paste from an email I sent her yesterday.
Dear Commissioner Stewart,
I was very disappointed to see that Florida will still be using student test scores in teacher evaluations this year even though Arne Duncan granted a one year reprieve from test based evaluations to the NCLB waiver states. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2014/09/which_nclb_waiver_states_may_d.html?cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS3
I am utterly perplexed as to how the state plans on calculating VAM scores for teachers in the 2014-15 school year. Almost all of the tests our students will be taking this year are new exams that are still in the process of being created. Students have not been given a baseline assessment. How can the VAM model possibly predict growth for a test that a student has never taken before?
Perhaps you can direct me to the appropriate statistician at the Florida Department of Education who can better explain to me how an algorithm is capable of predicting student learning gains on a test that doesn’t even exist yet?
Thank you in advance for any assistance you can provide,
A concerned educator
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So I was the parent quoted in the article. Let me give a little background. I am a product of Broward County schools. I also returned to teach in them right up until Jeb and his merry band of privatizers came to town. I was screaming then about this idea of FCAT and grading schools. I got the pat on the head and told it was no big deal. Five years later my own daughter enters Broward COunty schools and I watch and warn and write letters as I see how the curriculum is narrowing, how my former colleagues can’t do what they know is best…but I am told I am overly dramatic and a chicken little. A few years later my son is in 3rd grade and I am asked by the teacher to teach the science curriculum because “there is no time” but on Fridays as they prepare for the FCAT. This is how it has gone. That reporter listened to me for over 15 minutes. THAT quote was such a minor part. His first question is what do you think about these tests? I responded, “they are ridiculous, a waste of time, and money.” ANd then I got a bit of a “scolding”…”well surely you want to know how your child is doing?” I think I might have snapped at that point. I said, “I do. THat’s what REPORT CARDS are for. Oh and chapter tests and quizzes, and papers and projects.” I asked him how did he get through school without all these tests (!), how do we expect children to remember a year’s worth of material when we don’t even ask college students to do that, how does a test reflect a teacher’s ability to plan and teach a lesson as that has been proven to be completley and utterly without merit, and why are my children responsible for someone;s evaluation or pay? Administration is repsonsible for evaluating teachers. ANd yet THAT is the quote he pulls? Mind you, Runcie is a Broadie and our board is woefully undereducated about what is happening in the ed world outside the Broward bubble. THey aren’t doing anything because they are good little soldiers for the machine. And in fact, one, my representative, pulled her middle school son out of public school last year right after elected ( for a tony $26,000 private school) because of all these tests yet she’s done NOTHING to stem the tide for the rest of our kids. Angry? You bet.
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WHo are you addressing Dienne?
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