Chris in Florida describes here his attempt to introduce “close reading” as required by the Common Core. No one who wrote the Common Core ever taught elementary school. Yet they have imposed the Néw Criticism on young children who don’t yet know how to read.
Chris writes:
“Yep. I’m forced to test my 1st graders on tests where they are expected to do a close reading of a passage and answer complex, text-evidenced questions all because of David Coleman and CCSS.
“It is ridiculous. In that wonderful 1st grade way of creating one’s own reality many of my children WHO CAN’T READ YET simply select random answers, smile, and move on to something far more developmentally appropriate and fun.
“This idiocy is obvious even to 6-year olds. One said to me yesterday: “Teacher, why do they think I can answer those questions when I can’t read yet and they won’t let the computer read it to me?”
“Why, indeed? David Coleman, ‘rigor’, ‘grit’, and BS are the only logical explanation for this farce.
“As I find time I am going to create a Hall of Shame website of all of these reformers to document in one handy place the parade of idiots who have wreaked destruction on my precious little ones. They should be tarred and feathered.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’ve got news for Chris in Florida — this is what close reading looks like in every grade. The idiocy is obvious to my eleventh graders also.
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Two words that come to mind for this insanity are Kafkaesque and Orwellian.
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Out of the mouths of babes…
What the child said is the answer to the question:
When does a first-grader show a lot more perspicacity than a Rhodes Scholar who heads up the College Board named David Coleman who is more than seven times her age?
Perhaps the College Board needs to be searching for a six-year-old to be their 10th president…
Just sayin’…
😎
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Very appropriate.
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How are you “forced” do this? What are the consequences if you refuse? Do you not have enough professional currency to take the lead and just say no?
I’m not try to be critical of your compliance. Just trying to get a handle on the climate and culture down there in FLA. Here in NY still feel as if we have the option of rejecting stupid. Thanks Chris
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A teacher in Florida likely works in a Right to Work state/district, likely is not protected by a union, and is likely paid at a far lower level than a teacher in NYC, for example. Such a teacher is more likely to fear being fired for not following the party line or to fear not having support for doing what he/she knows is right even if it isn’t what the district/administration wants or expects.
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That depends upon where in NY you teach.
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NY Teacher, ALL Florida teachers are now “at will” employees, thanks to the state legislature passing an ALEC/Jeb Bush law 2 years ago that ended ‘tenure’ forever. We can fired for any reason at all and the favorite reason most principals give is “insubordination” or, refusing to do as you are told.
The FEA (Florida Education Association), of which I am a longtime building representative, sent out a cautionary email to all members 2 weeks ago telling us that under this law we are not allowed to even suggest opting out to parents or students and if we do so or refuse to administer the tests then we can and will be fired on the spot with no recourse.
We have no autonomy anymore in FL. I taught in the South Bronx for years before moving to FL. It is a different world entirely, with much lower pay, much weaker union representation, and a crazy legislature and governor.
I have been smacked down and threatened with dismissal repeatedly for simply asking questions about reform initiatives and offering countering research. My professional currency is fast losing any value, unfortunately.
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I taught in New York and retired to Florida five years ago. I live near Pensacola, the heart of conservative Florida, where wages are very low; yet these struggling people vote against their own interest I don’t get it; they’re clearly brainwashed. The snake of a governor along with the legislature also passed a voucher bill late at night after school let out this year. There is hope for Florida since there are liberals in the south, but people need to show up at the polls and vote them out despite their sneaky gerrymandering.
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What are you talking about? In New York you can’t refuse to give an SLO or follow district curriculum!
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There is no requirement to administer pre tests. I refused to, baselines can be set without pre test data. I will not put up a data wall and I will not post my daily learning objectives. If I taught ELA I would refuse to complete close reads, there is nothing they could do because the standards are not a curriculum. They can TIP me if they want and I will refuse that too. I am now exploring the option of refusing to write a SLO and willingly taking the 0 out of 40 points. There is a moratorium on APPR for any teacher rated as ineffective or developing, so what exactly are they going to do, 3020A me?
Compliance or defiance or good riddance is a choice we all have to make. I will say I have the luxury of playing with house money after 35 years in the business. I know not every teacher can choose to be defiant at this point in time. Hopefully that will change soon.
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Umm… options do not exist everywhere in NY… it’s required in my district. And I agree with Chris’s findings… its the same K-12.
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Because thanks to the FL legislature, half of our final evaluation and soon our pay will be linked to an almighty test score. Plus, it’s a right to work state. You basically refuse yourself out of a job.
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Advice from the Avett Brothers to Florida’s teachers:
Load the car and write the note
Grab your bag and grab your coat
Tell the ones that need to know
You are headed north
One foot in and one foot back
It don’t pay to teach like that
So cut your ties and jump the tracks
For never to return
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I doubt very few teachers in the primary grades believe what we are doing in the name of “rigor” is developmentally appropriate. Asking young children to answer higher-level “Depth of Knowledge” (DOK) questions in written form, analyze paragraph structure, and to “read closely” when they are still learning to decode words and literally comprehend text are making reading a tedious chore. I now have many more children entering at reading levels above grade-level at the beginning of the year, but if they dislike reading, we have done them more damage than good.
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” I doubt very few teachers in the primary grades believe what we are doing in the name of “rigor” is developmentally appropriate.”
Piaget would share your perception. I keep looking for “rigor” and “grit” associated with his description of stages of cognitive development and can’t find them. Was he unaware of their importance? Do Gates and Colman know something that he did not?
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GE2L2R… ah but don’t you understand the “great reform way” that anything that is disruptive is good and that anything that is more than a day old… like Piaget certainly… IS NOT WORTH LEARNING???? Here is a comment I will title…
“The Ed Reform Smoothie”
We live in the age of the “blender”… all things “good” have been hit by the blade and are still airborne just under the lid as the “ingredients start to fall they are “bad” so they hit the blade again only to become good when they are once again airborne. Grit and rigor require a 5 second reflection because if you take ten… it is already onto a new great idea filled with grit and rigor! Megabillionaires/corporate profiteers are controlling the “pulse” button on the blender! Ughhh!!
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Although there are obviously many HUGE differences between Mao’s China, the wacky “close reading” ideas of the common core gurus remind me of the way Chinese peasants were forced to make “steel” in backyard furnaces. It was absolute craziness then and it’s sheer nuttiness in our schools now. I can vividly remember the first time I heard about ‘close reading”. It was at one of those idiotic “in-service” days three years ago. We were forced to watch a video put out by the New York State Education Department. (Ever notice how quickly these consultants, these paragons of perfect teaching cut to the old video screen?) NYS Commissioner of Self-Delusion John B. King was featured in the short film having a “roundtable” discussion with some of his minions……and my jaw just dropped. The set for this video looked like something from 1970s-era Saturday Night Live. It was hilarious….it was enraging. Though many teachers just went into the usual trance….WHEN CAN WE JUST LEAVE? Ah……to know how our students sometimes feel. It was a true learning experience!
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correction to line one: between Mao’s China and the U.S.
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should add they are also controlling the ingredients for this “smoothie”!
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The “tests” provide data to help inform your instruction. At this point in the year, it’s up to the teacher to model how this is done, not expecting all first graders can do this. What about the first graders that are ready? What about those that know how to read but not answer these questions? What about those that can do this orally through discussion? What about those that can’t do any of it? Use your data, including your formative assessments, to teach what your students need. This is the art of teaching.
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Oh, please. When we can’t see the tests or how the students answer, these stupid tests do NOT inform anything. When a child is developmentally unable to do what is required, that is not the child’s fault. It’s the fault of the curriculum and the testing.
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Molly, I don’t know where you teach but what you advocate has not been an option here for a long, long time. All children are required to take these online tests by law from the Florida legislature. It doesn’t matter if some cannot do what is required and we are forbidden from helping them in any way.
All of my students were logged into a testing program the third week of school and were tested for 4 days running, 2 days of reading and 2 days of math. They are also required to take other assessments, either online or on paper that are part of our new ELA textbook program that do not allow for teacher differentiation.
Perhaps you have no knowledge or experience of what it is like to teach in an environment where you have no autonomy as a teacher like I do here in the Sunshine State.
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Molly clearly you are not a teacher and must not spend time in the company of children very often. Are you making these comments based on “buying into” the PR spin from “ed reform”… because it surely appears as if you are not aware what people are saying here (many of whom are veteran teachers). Try volunteering in a classroom and you just might understand. If common core were brought to infants, David Coleman would want a one month old to not only walk but to be able to tango as well! Some things are not possible by virtue of human development!
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Maybe we should call it “enrageNY”….we had to watch that same video….unreal how such a small group of people can make such bad decisions and stay in power in America.
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Love it. Great suggestion
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Ditto. I’m equally enraged in NY.
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I would not put it past the Reformsters to drag out this ‘Give it time for the CCSS’ and teachers to be trained properly, implement it properly and collect data to show it is working….delay tactics, and the ranks of experienced career teachers will thin to such a degree – the new crop of teachers will only hear the Billionaires’ CCSS message. No more experienced voices grumbling in the background. Only need a couple more years. Billionaires can wait. They have other $B deals brewing.
If parents do not rise up by the millions and quickly, that window will close and we will only read about this period in a “whitewashed” history book – if anyone cares about it then.
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The critical mass of EnragedNY parents will probably be reached this spring. Last year’s 60,000 (5%) opt-outs are projected to at least double in 2015. which will render their already invalid tests, DOA.
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One can only hope!
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Its time for teachers to start opting out of testing as well.
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I’ve noticed that the “close reading” seems actually to cause damage at least in my own child. She’s 15. Are there any studies that show that this truly makes children learn to dislike reading? Her reading on her own since they started this in English and History has dropped to almost nothing from a lot.
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You are on to something, for my 10th grader will NOT pick up a book if you paid him. Close reading kills the excitement of reading
a great book.
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It’s not close ready so much as the obsessive exclusion of absolutely everything else.
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Sarah, I’ve noticed the same thing with my 13-year-old daughter. She hates English class and absolutely refuses to read anything for pleasure. I was looking forward to her reading The Outsiders this year in her ELA class, but I just learned that our district has dumped in favor of another module.
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My 16 year old son is a HUGE reader, and I hope this slop doesn’t kill his love. My current rage centers on his school’s (and perhaps the district’s) decision to cut ALL novels, poetry, and plays in favor of more grammar and formulaic writing for standardized testing. He doesn’t do well with grammar, and his writing is good by esoteric, so he’s pretty much failing English. He hasn’t read a novel for class in two years.
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Excellent points, Threatened. I always give my students (ages 14- 18) study guides with close reading questions– otherwise they skim through and honestly do not understand what they read. Close reading isn’t so much the problem as the emphasis on writing as the ONLY way for kids to show what they have experienced in their reading.
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Though I don’t understand what you mean by “good by esoteric.”
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Misspelling. I meant “good BUT esoteric.” My son has a really unique outlook that makes it impossible to standardize him. He comes up with different ideas and puts them together in unusual ways. Teachers either really get him or really don’t. His English teacher this year really doesn’t. Yet another thing for him to fail. If it wasn’t for his band and debate classes, he’d drop out of school.
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Threatened Out West,
Your son is a divergent thinker. Treasure him. Don’t let them force him to conform.
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And that is why, though I’m a teacher, I did not prevent my daughters from dropping out of high school. My youngest daughter said,”I wish I would’ve dropped out after sixth grade. I would have learned a lot more.” And they both attended school before CC$$ but during NCLB. Neither regrets her decision to drop out.
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absoutly correct
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Let President Obama, your Representatives, and Senators know how you feel.
4,516 emails and letters have been sent to date. Political pressure is a must in order for Congress to re-write or repeal the Elementary and Secondary education Act which is the federal law that lies at the root of the Common Core problem.
http://www.petition2congress.com/15080/stop-common-core-testing/?m=5265435
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As Elizabeth Warren points out, “They want us to play, but the deck is stacked against us.” Here’s another perfect example of developmentally inappropriate testing. If the CCSS designers knew anything about child development, they would know that according to Piaget, most first graders are still “pre-operational,” which means they can barely sort out reality from fantasy. Deep level comprehension is developmentally inappropriate at this age when they are still struggling to decode.When I think of deep level understanding, I am reminded of applied linguistics and Noam Chomsky’s theory of deep structure, which I studied as part of my master’s in TESOL. This level of understanding requires, not only a sophisticated understanding of language,but the nuanced context of of the utterance while the child is practicing a relatively new skill of decoding. . Most six year old children, even bright ones, are not ready for this quantum leap. The point of this, I believe, is to make the teacher do the “walk of shame.” After the teacher has “failed,” the deformers can swoop in and save the child by sending him/her to a charter school where children are not subjected to such nonsense, and that is how they stack the deck.
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Reformers prefer Vygotsky and shun Piaget.
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Retired teacher, you hit the nail on the head! Six year olds are not ready for this! I am a first grade teacher, and this CCSS garbage is going to ruin our children’s education. In desperation this week, I pulled out my old Margaret Hillert books & used them in my reading groups. The children were so excited, and said, “Teacher, we can read these! This is so fun!” It nearly brought me to tears. In first grade, it’s all about Reading, capital R. My job is to make my babies fall in love with the written word-to make them not be able to wait to turn the page to find out for themselves what funny thing Junie B. Jones or Amelia Bedelia is going to do next. I’ve been teaching first graders to read for 19 years. I know what works. I’m keeping the Margaret Hillert books on the reading table and Pearson Publishers, David Coleman, and Bill Gates can come pry them from these gnarled hands. .
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Bravo! to a brave teacher.
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Here is what teaching portrait drawing looks like to one pre k who read her instructional materials… the pre k teacher must introduce the students to the concept of “quadrant” so they can draw the features on the face! Really? Children still learning their colors and shapes and who do not know words like eyebrow and chin need to fathom an abstract concept like using knowledge of quadrant to draw a portrait?????????? Those creating the curriculum to honor common core must have taken a magic mushroom!
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I’m teaching 5th graders here in NY. While some of the content has merit, overall it’s way over the kids heads and boring! It bores me to tears. We’re not making better readers, we’re making non-readers.
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Years ago I bought a wonderful book called How to Teach a Love of Reading Without Getting Fired. It’s by Mary Leonhardt, who is now retired from Concord-Carlisle High School in Massachusetts. Her book is probably more relevant today than ever. We used some of her ideas with our own kids many years ago. Our children have also been lucky to have caring, creative teachers in a school with small class sizes. The kids now devour books voraciously. I wrote to Mary years ago to thank her for her book. I even bought extra copies. I saw she’s on Facebook but she didn’t write back when I contacted her not that long ago. I’ve been really wanted to know what some of these people I respect SO MUCH think about all this craziness going on in our schools. Mary, if you somehow get this message, thanks so much again!
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I showed such an assignment from our TE to my pro common core reading coach the other day. She exclaimed this is so far above their heads! We spent an hour working on an alternative option. Next week, the sixth week in the reading wonders program, my students get to do research projects all week. So they are to research, take notes from their texts, write, revise and share their projects with the class. They can use magazines, computers and books for this research. I have three classroom computers and no magazines. I have plenty of books but how much research can a student do from predictable, decodable text? Not to mention that 90% of these texts are fiction.
The idea is that they are to read and take notes of the important details, determine how to write a topic sentence and paragraph to share with their class members.
Let’s discuss what writing looks like in a first grade classroom. My students just spent the last weeks talking about what a sentence looks like. Most cannot write a complete sentence. They are too busy trying to write the words. Most words are still lacking vowels. Because it is so tedious just to figure out how to write individual words, there is no spacing between words, no caps at the beginning of a sentence and no punctuation. Often whole thoughts are contained in long chains of letters that even the child cannot recall the meaning when asked. It can take up to an hour to get one sentence of indecipherable text. The children are often extremely frustrated and constantly ask how do I spell (insert multi-syllabic word here). Writing in a first grade classroom is often chaotic and noisy.
Now they are to pair up, read and help each other edit their texts. Really!? Can we just say the blind leading the blind? This sounds like a disaster going somewhere to happen. I will instead, chose a topic, find materials my students can read with support. Show them how to write the notes (They can copy my notes into their research journals). Help them use the notes to form ideas as a class. Write the sentences and again have them copy these to their journals. Next, I will come up with an art activity to help them showcase the writing. Now they can once again copy the writing into or onto their art, so that they can share these ideas with the class and at home.
It looks pretty, but I am not sure that this meets the goal of revising and editing. I’m not even sure this is possible for first graders especially at the beginning of the year. I don’t know how this meets DOK. After all, I did all the designing (DOK4), the researching, the note taking, sentence and paragraph building. I created the sharing format. The students get to copy.
The biggest problem with such an individualized project isn’t the project, it’s the classroom management. When I am helping one child with his/her project, what will the other children do? They are not yet independent enough to complete any of these pieces on their own. They don’t do a great job of managing themselves yet. This then requires that it become a whole group project.
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Firstgrademonkey ~
Please…Please…Please Do Not Listen to your reading coach.
She/he hasn’t a clue about children, 1st graders, classroom management, teaching, Reading, projects, lessons, curriculum…dare I go on?
Absurd unadulterated crap!
I can hardly contain my outrage.
Yes, let’s mess these little ones over in 1st grade?
Please raise your right hand and repeat after me: I will NEVER EVER follow this nutcase’ recommendations, EVER! I know Best what my students need!
Please!
This is for you and your little kidlets.
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tragic to see kids appetite for learning squelched by corporate tentacles in education.
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My second grader is writing summaries this year in her class — to assist, parents are linked to a very good, teacher designed graphic organizer…that specifically says that it is designed for use in grades 5-8.
And it isn’t being used ironically.
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Classic. You can’t make this stuff up. All I can say is that many of the techniques/strategies/etc. we’re “teaching” our elementary school students are ones that I used in high school and college.
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Do you really believe that first graders are not capable of citing text when answering a question about a story? It sounds to me like the teacher could use some coaching/feedback about how to structure centers in a skillful, differentiated way. I know many first graders that would thrive with these kinds of assignments. And for those that still need skill building on decoding, it’s incumbent upon the teacher to differentiate for them.
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Once again Mike, you manage to insult and willfully ignore the stated facts. No, first graders are not capable of citing text when they can’t read the text, which most first graders cannot do in this district where I live and teach.
I do not need coaching/feedback; I have been a literacy coach myself. I keep abreast of all the latest real research and pedagogical methods in reading.
I work in a Title I schools with 100% free/reduced lunch and 60% ELL population.
People like you can attempt to declare by fiat that all first graders can read but the reality isn’t listening to you.
Neither am I. Buzz off.
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Once again? This is the first time I’ve commented here. As with many of these polemics critical of close reading, the outrage obscures conversations about skillful teaching.
A scaffolding strategy for the beginning of the year with your first graders would be to have the students that can’t read yet to point to pictures to explain their answers to questions. (Example Question: Why are Sally Nick inside at the beginning of Cat in the Hat? Example Answer (student who can’t yet read): Points to raindrops in the picture. Example Answer (student who can read): “It was too wet to play!”
Your year with them is a 8 month marathon, not a sprint. With a thoughtful long term plan, I believe in your ability to teach your first graders to cite text in answering questions.
I am (or course) not saying that all first graders can read. No fiats to be found here. I’m saying that teachers who reject close reading out of hand are missing an opportunity.
What about your first graders who can read? Is it appropriate for you to encourage them to cite text to support/their opinions answers to questions?
And the “buzz off” is great. Makes it sound like you’re only interested in conversing with those that have similar views to you.
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Mike, I wonder at what point in your career did you start to believe that citing evidence from a text was an important action for first graders to perform? Was it when the CCSS were introduced? If so, it seems you’re trusting the pedagogical authority of the CCSS authors. I don’t trust their authority. You sound like a seasoned profession (are you?); can you give me a good rationale for having kids do this, aside from that fact that it’s mandated?
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For what it’s worth, not a single member of the committee that wrote CCSS had ever taught in elementary school. None ever taught reading.
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There is another commenter that goes by “Mike” who makes equally insulting comments to me on a regular basis. Sorry if that is not you.
I appreciate you mansplaining how to teach reading — I’ve been doing it quite successfully for over 20 years and am a longterm member of the IRA. I’ve also competed all the coursework for a doctorate in literacy education and hold two honors degrees in English.
You do not acknowledge the reality of my situation. I have no say in when or how my students are tested. I never claimed that 1st graders are unable to do a close reading or that they are unable to cite textual evidence in answering questions.
The whole point, which you have either missed or choose to ignore in your defense of rigor is that it is inappropriate and cruel to force children who can’t read at all to sit at a computer for 30 minutes expecting them to read complex passages and then answer multiple choice questions (which they also can’t read) about the passage. That is the situation I face with my children.
Your advice was not helpful, empathetic, informed, or
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Ponderosa asks the $64K question! Theodor Geisel would be appalled at using his books for this purpose with first graders. Citing evidence from a text to support an answer is like asking a child to explain why his feet help him to walk. It is just reading comprehension with the addition of having to overstate the obvious and would strike most kids as being a rather stupid activity. So if the six year old says that it was “too wet to play” in answer to the question why are Nick and Sally stuck indoors, they are really “citing evidence” in the text to support an answer? Isn’t it just answering the question based on what they saw and read? These types of give and take questions comprehension questions have been asked of kids by teachers forever. Can’t really see what the big deal is. What’s next a close reading of Hop on Pop?
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Mike:
Do you teach first grade? If not, what subjects and grade levels have you taught? Who are those many first graders you refer to, and in what context do you know them?
To me, trying to get six-year-olds to focus on citing evidence from a text–for what purpose, by the way?–is putting the cart way before the horse.
One of my mottoes, from early in my teaching career through 2005 when I retired, was “Textual evidence rules!” But I was talking to HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS.
To force children to worry about this sort of thing in first grade, and then to have them focus on doing that very same thing year after year after year . . . It has to be one of the stupidest ideas I’ve heard in the past decade. And I’ve heard some really stupid ideas.
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“Do you really believe that first graders are not capable of citing text when answering a question about a story?”
We really believe that students who cannot read, no matter the grade level, are not capable of answering test questions in which neither the question nor the answers are in picture format.
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Am I the only one that thinks the ubiquitous Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK) chart (a laminated version is posted in every classroom at our school) is pseudo-scientific gobbledegook? First of all, what does it have to do with knowledge? It’s a categorization of mental actions, e.g. “apply”. Is the idea that performing these actions will yield deep knowledge? Wait I keep getting told that CCSS is really about skills, not knowledge. Where else does the CCSS show it gives a fig about knowledge? The dominant interpretation of CCSS is that it’s designed to build mental muscles through workouts, not lead to the accumulation of knowledge. The actions listed on the DOK chart definitely comprise mental workouts; but why then not call it the “Mental Workouts Chart”. Calling it DOK seems like Orwellian doublespeak. It promotes the antithesis of teaching knowledge. Second, why should we accord this classification any authority whatsoever? It was introduced to me as a new and improved Bloom’s Taxonomy (which itself has been universally misinterpreted and abused). What’s the creator’s (Webb?) authority to say this has any validity at all? Third, how is this supposed to be a guide to good teaching? Should each lesson have a sprinkling of each “level”? How alluring –a formula, a recipe! A useful substitute for actually thinking and using one’s professional judgment. Principals can come in an judge a lesson with a DOK checklist. But this seems like pure snake oil designed to give the illusion of authority and impose a clear-but-bogus-and-damaging order on schools. It reminds me of bogus graphs and charts you might see at a Scientology indoctrination meeting. Sadly it has its intended effect: teachers are stunned into stupefied silence by its aura of authority.
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“Sadly it has its intended effect: teachers are stunned into stupefied silence by its aura of authority.”
Any teacher who would be “stunned into stupefied silence by its aura of authority” shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a classroom.
The DOK nonsense suffers the same epistemological and ontological errors that Wilson has pointed out for standards and standardized testing. It serves to give a veneer of scientificity to a human activity that cannot be scientized.
Read Wilson and one will quickly see how concepts such as DOK are INTELLECTUALLY BANKRUPT AND COMPLETELY INVALID. For me much if not most of educational theory and practice these days fall under that capitalized description.
“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.
By Duane E. Swacker
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Duane,
You make some good points here. What you say about the “A student” being misled by their grades/scores is interesting. That’s me, and I do now, in retrospect, question the meaning of those grades and scores. I do think they meant something, however. You sound like a testing nihilist. I believe that there are good tests and bad tests, and that even the good tests can be misinterpreted and misused. Care and sophistication are needed in interpreting and using even the good tests. Alas, such qualities seem to be in short supply.
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Ponderosa,
“Testing nihilist”???
Not sure that would be the right description. I am not against teacher made assessments/tests/quizzes that are used in conjunction with the individual student’s learning process in the mode of Wilson’s “responsive frame” of reference to the teaching and learning process.
It’s the individual (and often combined) effects of cut scores, labeling, percentages, grades, etc. . . and the meaning and supposed importance of those things that harm the teaching and learning process and truly harm many students.
Standardized testing without any function in the “responsive framework” of the teaching and learning process, being completely invalid as such, should have no place in the teaching and learning process. So yes, I am a “standardized testing nihilist”. An STN as it is. (Boy there’s lots of fun phrases that that acronym could stand for).
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Many of us are STANDARDIZED testing nihilists. But I think most of us see great value in giving a variety of differentiated assessments connected to what is actually being done in the classroom.
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Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
CCSS is now holding teachers responsible for how children arrive in school in kindergarten and 1st grade. If some children can’t read when they arrive in school for the first time, they still have to take the CCSS tests that will be used to rank and yank (fire) teachers and close public schools that will be turned over to for profit, corporate charter schools along with the taxes that once supported the public schools that have been closed. This had already happened in New Orleans, and is happening in Chicago and other cities across America.
This idiocy is obvious even to 6-year olds. One said to a teacher recently: “Teacher, why do they think I can answer those questions when I can’t read yet and they won’t let the computer read it to me?”
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From another angle: this is a startling confirmation that the self-styled “education reformers” know that out-of-school factors decisively trump in-school factors, so the CCSS is a guaranteed win-win for them, lose-lose for the vast majority.
Although, to be honest, they didn’t count on pushback from the rabble [aka us]…
😎
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Our 2nd grader said last night, “I love Fridays because we don’t have any homework.”
She cries nightly over math testing anxiety and can’t get to sleep. We opted her out of NWEA MAP for the year. I’m done.
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Good for you Eva! Keep fighting to keep your child’s life under YOUR control!
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Thank you, Chris. We’re trying. It’s been difficult. Our daughter can’t fall asleep at night, she begs me to stay home from school and worries all the time about homework. She’s only 7 and a half.
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NY teacher, there are now 4517 petitions to Congress. I sent mine and have forwarded this petition to everyone I know. Thanks.
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Appreciate it. If you look at the map you can see that the majority of signers are from NY because we are two years ahead of the CC curve and saddled with exceptionally bad assessments. When PARCC and SBAC test hit the fan in the spring, parents nationwide will be ready to join our opt out party. Thanks again and keep the faith.
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I wish the parents in Utah would be more outraged, since we’re a year ahead of everyone but NY. They’re just silent on this appalling level of testing and I don’t understand why.
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I sent one yesterday, with copies to my US reps and governor as well.
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NY Teacher, I am a fellow NYT, and I just sent in the petition. Thank you for posting it here. I’ll be sharing it with friends and family.
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In this climate, I am thinking that Corporatized publishing companies are not above questionable propaganda. I sincerely hope that some of our commentors are actual classroom teachers and not reform cheerleaders.
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Chris, I have had the same problem for years. I teach students with learning disabilities who are two or more grade levels behind in a self-contained classroom. Most of my third grade students are on a kindergarten level. I can’t think of anything more asinine than giving a reading test to a student who cannot read (and then use the resulting data as if it is in any way meaningful).
In our self-contained ESE district meeting at the beginning of the year, our supervisor noted that she knew that our students could not read but that we would be doing on-grade level work for “exposure.” I noted that years ago our district tried the exposure route and that it didn’t work then. I asked her what would make it work this time. Her answer: technology. All of our self-contained classrooms will be getting iPads, one per student. So, apparently, that’s the silver bullet. Maybe you could apply for a grant… /s
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I hope your iPads come with the “magic wand” app.
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I really would love to know…what can we do about this ? I have 3 kids already graduated and 2still in public school
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Join anti-common core action groups…StopCommonCore, UnitedOptOut, BadAss Parents, read Reign of error by Diane Ravitch (and her blog), A Chronicle of Echoes by Mercedes Schneider (and her blog, http://www.deutsch29.wordpress.com)…talk with friends and neighbors and teachers…share your knowledge…
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Check this out on Common Core
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