Peter Greene warns you not to be fooled when the biggest advocates of high-stakes testing say they want fewer and better tests. Consider the source.
Greene writes:
“The big news on the street is that the CCSSO and CGCS (state ed leaders and big city school folks respectively) have announced an intention to rein in the testing juggernaut.
“I’m not impressed. To begin with, they put front and center NY State’s John King, Louisiana’s John White, and DC Public’s Kaya Henderson– three big fresh faces of the anti-public school reformster movement (two TFA temps and a charter profiteer). That’s a big fat signal that this not about changing course, but about protecting the current high-stakes test-driven status quo.
“And in fact these folks were not there to say, “We realize something is wrong and we’re committed to fixing it.” They were there to say, “We recognize that we’re taking some PR heat on this, so we’re going to see if we can’t tweak the optics enough to get everyone to shut up while we stay the course.” They’re going to “look at” testing. Maybe “audit” the number. ”
He adds:
“The whole trick of this new position is that it carefully avoids the most important question. And so we’re having a conversation about having less testing without discussing the quality of testing and its role in driving education. We’re going to combine tests and streamline tests, but we’re not going to discuss the value of the tests or the uses of their results. It’s as if we discovered that students were getting arsenic on their school lunch every day and the compromise response was, “Well, let’s just look at putting a little less on there.” It’s like living in a crime-ridden neighborhood and being told, “Good news! The muggers have gotten together and decided that they will coordinate more carefully so that you only get robbed once a day.”
Don’t be fooled.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Peter Greene has figured it out. Alas Randi Weingarten, Linda Darling-Hammond, and (face it) Lily Ekselson Garcia are their front men. (Isn’t it odd that we have no cultural usage for “front woman”?)
Their proposals to “improve” public accountability leave private corporate controllers with a legal mandate for more teacher and child subjugation. The way to respond is to REPEAL the enabling legislation. Start with your own state’s Race to the Top bill. That’s an easy target for bipartisan action, because everybody already agrees those are flawed and messed up laws. Get them off the books, and start over. Don’t tweak them, don’t update (and thereby reaffirm) them.
Reclaim public education. Peter Greene, well done.
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About a month ago, I attended a recent training on teacher evaluation put on by the state department. There were corporate “minders” in the room. Everytime a speaker went off message or allowed the audience to ask questions, these “minders” would intervene by counseling the speakers with sidebar conversations or take over the conversations themselves to “manage” these conversations.
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For the unsure, let me translate the message. We will reduce the testing to assure we control the testing monopoly we plan on creating. The market will eat the lesser challengers to the throne in the name of quality. Think of it as analogous to The Lord of the Rings; they want one test series to define the course of our lives so they can plan and profit off of us all.
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I agree, but I still think they have a fundamental political problem and it’s the fact that most people still use public schools and people don’t believe ed reform has “improved” public schools. They’ve been running things a long time. It’s 20 years in this state. What did public schools get out of ed reform? More testing and less funding. That’s the bottom line.
They can say over-testing is the fault of districts if they want, they are saying that, and that seems to be *technically* true, but someone at the top created this climate. Over-testing and test prep didn’t just spring up organically and mysteriously in hundreds of public schools coincidentally just as ed reform became the dominant political force. They created this climate. Once it was apparent it was happening they did absolutely nothing to mitigate the harm or stop it.
They can’t both run public schools at the state and federal level and also continue to blame public schools every time their vision doesn’t translate into anything productive and positive on the ground, and they aren’t going to be be to replace public schools fast enough to dodge accountability for what happens in and to public schools under their watch.
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I totally AGREE with Peter Greene. Don’t be fooled. The testers are actively re-Grouping and strategizing. Be like the nurses and speak out. CCSS and testing craze is like Ebola in many ways.
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I guess they can continue to bash public schools in the hopes of replacing them, but since they’re RUNNING public schools I think that eventually hits a wall, and people say “hey wait a minute- weren’t you the people who promised to improve public schools?”
Because that is what they promised. That’s what the ed reform politicians ran on. Not replacing, improving. There isn’t a single politician in this state who has run on or will run on replacing public schools, and President Obama certainly didn’t run on it in Ohio.
In fact, the ed reformer who is running locally here, for the statehouse, is doing this nasty and completely dishonest thing where he’s showering praise on “local” public schools (his voters) and pushing the need to replace “urban” schools with charter schools (not his voters). He knows there’s no political support here for replacing public schools. The clear implication and political message is people here are sending state tax money to “failing” urban schools, and he’ll fix that by chartering, but not HERE. OUR schools are worth saving! It’s incredibly cynical and disgusting.
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“I guess they can continue to bash public schools in the hopes of replacing them, but since they’re RUNNING public schools I think that eventually hits a wall, and people say ‘hey wait a minute- weren’t you the people who promised to improve public schools?’ ”
I don’t know, Chiara. That worked for Deasy until this week.
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See also damage control from Duncan at
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2014/1016/As-overtesting-outcry-grows-education-leaders-pull-back-on-standardized-tests
and some reaction: “Hollow pledges to ‘review the entire array of assessments’ are insufficient. In the short run, we need … an elimination of test-based consequences for students, teachers and schools,” said a statement from FairTest
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PARCC:
“The goals of PARCC match what some critics say they want, she said: “Better, fewer, fair and high-quality tests.”
For students, Slover said PARCC tests will measure the “most important things for kids to know.”
“They’re real tests that have meaning,” she said. “They provide the opportunity for students to show what they can do and are good reflections of what the teachers are doing in classrooms. It should be not be a surprise. If they pay attention in class, they should be ready.”
I guess 70% of kids in New York weren’t “paying attention” so didn’t pass the tests.
They shouldn’t sell PARCC as “fewer” tests. It’s a testing system, described as such on their own website. The two tests that students will take this year are simply the biggest (longest) tests offered, now. PARCC will have a whole suite of assessments that schools can purchase and if the threat is people get fired or schools are closed unless the scores go up I imagine local leaders will buy them all.
Read more at http://gazette.com/assessment-advocate-stands-by-benefits-of-common-core-testing/article/1539715#5D42O3tElWPfYtw2.99
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“The Tests of Power” (with apologies to JRR Tolkien)
Three Tests for the John Kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-brains in their think-tanks fair,
Nine for the Teachers doomed to die,
One for the Test Lord on his Broady chair
In the Land of Pearson where the testers lie.
One Test to rule them all, One Test to find them,
One Test to bring them all and in the software bind them
In the Land of Pearson where the testers lie.
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My bet is that they’ll find a way to blame teachers for the increase in testing. Makes sense, as we get blamed for everything else. Coming soon to a school district near you!
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They’re way ahead of you:
“There is a culture of testing and test preparation in schools that does not put students first. While the actual time spent taking tests might be low, a culture has arisen in some states and districts that places a premium on testing over learning. It is difficult to systematically document the prevalence of these activities. However, our research indicates that some districts and states may be administering tests that are duplicative or unnecessary; they may also be requiring or encouraging significant amounts of test preparation, such as taking practice tests.”
This is NOT the language of people who take responsibility for their actions: “there is a culture”, “has arisen”, and “they”. It’s distancing language. They may as well say “mistakes were made”.
Apparently no one created this culture and it arose organically and at the same time in thousands of public schools as ed reformers became dominant in DC and states, but they had nothing to do with it.
They should look up “accountability” in the dictionary. It doesn’t mean “blame front line people first”.
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/2014/10/16/99073/testing-overload-in-americas-schools/
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I read in the Christian Science Monitor that President Obama supported the decrease in testing… but this quote tells me otherwise:
“I have directed [Education Secretary Arne] Duncan to support states and school districts in the effort to improve assessment of student learning so that parents and teachers have the information they need, that classroom time is used wisely, and assessments are one part of fair evaluation of teachers and accountability for schools,” Mr. Obama said in a statement Wednesday night.
To which my reply is: WAIT A MINUTE!!! As long as teacher and school evaluations are linked with STUDENT test results districts will have a de facto incentive to test students early and often. And hasn’t the President read ANY of the research on VAM? There IS no valid means of linking test scores to teacher performance!
I live in a state where I’m getting lots of phone calls about the need to keep Democrats in control of the Senate and I use the opportunity to indicate my deep disgust with the President’s position on standardized testing. I urge readers in “battleground” states to do the same every chance they get because otherwise the issue will never register with the Democrats who believe educators will vote for them no matter what they do to undermine public education.
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The increase in testing in Ohio is driven by the Obama Administration’s obsession with grading teachers.
That’s what’s driving it. Arne Duncan’s teacher grading schemes:
“But complaints have intensified the last few years as new teacher evaluation systems rolled out in Ohio and other states that started requiring more testing of students – not to directly help students learn, but just to measure teacher performance.”
Cleveland is run 100% by ed reformers. They announce at school board meetings how many instructional days are left until state tests. It is the ENTIRE focus.
What did the President think was going to happen when he rolled out his teacher grading schemes? How did he think they were going to grade the teachers? His instructing the same people who caused this to “review” it seems a little silly.
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2014/10/do_schools_today_have_test_man.html
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I’d be willing to bet that the teleprompter is the only one that takes Obama’s statements literally at this point.
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well said!
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They’re not trying to fool us (we’re not fooled, but we really don’t matter to them). They’re trying to fool the parents and the media.
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NYS Governor Cuomo is running a similar add just days before the election. All of a sudden he wants to reduce testing and questioned the common core .
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