Stephen Krashen, literacy expert, wrote a letter to the Denver Post to comment on Arne Duncan’s recent discovery that children take too many tests. Some little ones sit for 9 or 10 hours of testing, as well as test prep. Arne is not happy. But who brought all this testing that got out of control in the past five years. No Child Left Behind? Race to the Top? Race, race, race for higher test scores. Evaluate teachers by test scores . Evaluate education schools by the test scores of students taught by their graduates. Who is responsible for this madness that makes children cry?
Stephen Krashen wrote this letter in response to an article by Arne Duncan (or his press office);
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been an enthusiastic supporter of the common core testing program, accurately described as “nonstop testing” by education expert Susan Ohanian. The common core imposes more testing on our children than has ever been seen on our planet, and no attempt was made to determine if the new tests result in higher student achievement.
Now Secretary Duncan (“A test for school tests,” Oct 20) says he supports a movement to eliminate redundant and inappropriate tests. This should have been done using small-scale studies before the tests were forced on millions of children.
Stephen Krashen
original article: http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_26762648/test-tests?source=infinite
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In LAUSD, 55 days into the school year, we have been required to give the CELDT test (for English level) administered one kid at a time, the totally useless DIBELS test, administered one kid at a time, at ten to fifteen minutes per test, a mandated math assessment, which they downloaded from New York State, based on a completely different curriculum than the one they provided, with a different scope and sequence, and a mandated writing test that was originally so awful that they sent a new test with a completely different rubric based on end of year standards. Talk about sucking time out of my classroom, and setting my students up for failure!!
LikeLiked by 1 person
It’s an age-old technique of manipulation and mystification. Act as if every good idea was always yours and every bad idea always came from the opposition.
LikeLike
Is this the Stephen Krashen who has significant research on Language Acquisition Theory? Like Comprehensible Input, Pushed Output…
LikeLike
Yes…Dr. Krashen is Emeritus from USC and is the reading/language specialist educator looked to as a touchstone for language learning.
LikeLike
So glad Krashen is calling out Duncan for his typical doublespeak. When I read the article Duncan wrote, it just seems so hard to believe that this man is at the helm on national education policy. He is harping on an “eye candy narrative” that truly is just junk food science when you really hear his words!!
Duncan says,
“After a generation of watching other nations surpass ours educationally, the United States is putting the building blocks in place for schools that will once again lead the world. But for this effort to pay off, political leaders must be both strong and flexible in support of the nation’s educators…”
So what he heck is Duncan saying in his above quote??? Surpassing? On tests or in real life activities? Are we in a race??? Really? How? Is his policy creating building blocks or stumbling blocks??? Let’s face it, taking tests and being told exactly how to think creatively is NOT CREATIVE THINKING nor does creating a race to the top build collaborative skills. Leading the world? A pay off? Really????? His words are vapid platitudes to nothingness.
And then he says,
“America’s schools are changing because our world is changing. Success in today’s world requires critical thinking, adaptability, collaboration, problem solving and creativity — skills that go beyond the basics for which schools were designed in the past…”
This narrative about “change”… sounds a bit “eye candyish” to me once again. How does the US manage if many of its above 40 year old leaders were educated in a time where schooling did not require critical thinking, adaptability, collaboration, problem solving or creativity? Does he really believe that these are new concepts? Really? Maybe for his schooling (and yes his leadership indicates that maybe indeed his education was lacking in those requirements he lists above). But how wrong he is to harp on a favorite “corporate ed narrative”! There was a time pre NCLB when young children were able to investigate, explore, ask questions during a lesson that were tangential.. and a time when teachers were able to use their creativity in implementing lessons they devised and were even free to change course if need be. There was a time when critical thinking emerged in a natural way such that students experienced the process instead of being given a “how to think critical” in 20 steps guide from Pearson (in context of it being tested). Yes… so glad Krashen is calling out Duncan on his double-speaking dribble.
LikeLike
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
Albert Einstein
LikeLike
Arne and his whole team should be fired. They are not just incompetent but a destructive force intent on damaging American education while blaming kids, parents, teachers, principals, public schools, and teacher education faculty. Obama shares the blame, along with all of the educators who have passively accepted the poisoned kool-aide or feasted on the grants from Gates, Walton, Broad, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and the rest.
LikeLike
Dream on. Arne and his hapless will not be fired. He and the President have an identity relationship on education. Arne and the President will be gone soon enough and the evil that Arne has done will. live on far after he exits his secretaryship
LikeLike
Duncan states that he wants to address equitable funding issues in education. I would like to know what he is doing the change how we fund education. If this is his goal, what are his plans? Also, I would like to know how the proliferation of charters is making funding more equitable when they take the most capable and leave public schools to educate the most expensive and difficult.
LikeLike
Would we ever have an Attorney General who has never practiced law? Would we ever have a Surgeon General was not a doctor? So why do we have a Secretary of Education who was not an educator?
It goes back to how we view teaching in this country as a second rate profession, one that anyone can do after we have exhausted all other options.
LikeLike
Watch Bernie Sanders on Moyers.
http://www.billmoyers.com
As long as the Democrats chase after the same Wall Street dollars as the Republicans there will be no change. Send Obama, no send Hillary a message – if the Democrat candidates in your state are corporate shills, vote Green on Nov. 4.
LikeLike
It seems like a never ending shell game with these politicians. We need to get the money out of the game. Then, we may be able to see who actually wants to serve the American people. Unless that happens, we will continue to get disingenuous statements from opportunists that speak with forked tongues.
LikeLike
“no attempt was made to determine if the new tests result in higher student achievement.”
I don’t give a rat’s ass if any educational practice supposedly “results in higher student achievement”. I hope that Krashen doesn’t either as it is a false meme that denigrates the daily teaching and learning processes that occur throughout the educational realm. “Student achievement” is one of those snake terms used to solidify the numerologist/psychometrician belief that the teaching and learning process can be quantified.
IT CAN”T BE LOGICALLY QUANTIFIED. Things may be counted but counting is not the same as “measuring” which is what the “higher student achievement” meme is all about.
LikeLike
And how does one know that the teaching and learning process can’t be quantified. Well, a gentleman named Noel Wilson proved so in his never refuted nor rebutted 1997 dissertation “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
LikeLike
I too despise the use of the word “achievement” for test scores. I can tell right away what kind of administrator I’m dealing with when they drop the achievement bomb to rationalize decisions when I know they mean test score-frenzy-put-everyone-in the-building on it-mindset.
There’s a new speech coming down the lines (similar to the “new normal” from last year) about “these are OUR students, so everyone should be involved in their achievement.” No s—t, Sherlock, that’s why we are all here. But not for test scores!!! At least, not in a better time and place.
They are “our” students. Eye roll. Stomach ache. twilight zone. Of course they are. But that doesn’t mean everything should revolve around test scores. But it does. Now.
LikeLike
Duane Swacker and Joanna Best: I wouldn’t object to using “achievement” and “performance” in our discussions here and elsewhere if those words (among others) hadn’t been hijacked by the self-styled “education reformers” to mean “test scores.”
Anthony Cody reminds us in his recent THE EDUCATOR AND THE OLIGARCH that when those terms and select others like “multiple measures to evaluate teaches” are used, they keep circling back to “test scores.”
Am I nitpicking? VAM is essentially all about test scores. Continue below…
Let me give you a very small but specific sampling from Audrey Amrein-Beardsley’s recent RETHINKING VALUE-ADDED MODELS IN EDUCATION (2014, pp. 44-45). *HISD = Houston Independent School District. EVAAS= Education Value-Added Assessment System. PDAS = Professional Development and Appraisal System.*
[start quote]
These and other HISD teachers also noted that their superiors were skewing their observational scores to match their value-added scores given external pressures to do so…
One teacher stated: Here’s the problem. No principal wants to be called in by the superintendent or another superior and [asked], “How come your teachers show negative growth but you have high valuations on them? Are you doing your job? I don’t understand. Your teacher shows no growth but you have [marked them] as exceeding expectations all up and down the chart?” Now, it’s not just [sic] data that’s gonna harm you, it’s the principals [who are] adjusting our data over there to match the EVAAS®. So it looks like they’re being consistent. …
Another teacher agreed: “Well my evaluations were fine, but of course now they have to make the evaluation match the EVAAS®. We now have to go through that”…
Another teacher wrote: They’re not about to go to bat [for us, though] a few of them will. But most of them are going to go in there, and they’re going to create a teacher evaluation that reflects the [EVAAS®] data because they don’t want to have to explain, again and again, why they’re giving high classroom observation assessments when the data shows [sic] that the teacher is low performing. …
Another noted: Our principal pressures us. You bet she pressures. If you don’t [make EVAAS®], then it goes against you in your PDAS. In a roundabout way she finds a way to put that against you. …
Another noted: My boss has to go to the district superintendent and explain why we needed to be kept, when ultimately the data showed that we weren’t good teachers. … [However] you’ve got other good teachers who are being thrown under the bus because of this system. …
… HISD teachers also described how principals would switch their PDAS scores to match their EVAAS scores if dissimilar, mainly because they believed their administrators held the opinion that the EVAAS® estimates were superior and should trump the more subjective PDAS scores[. …]
[end quote]
(all brackets by Amrein-Beardsley)
Adopt the terms as the self-styled “education reformers” use them, adopt the POV they force on them, you’ve surrendered the argument before it’s even begun.
It’s about time terms like genuine learning and teaching were reintroduced into ed jargon, dontcha think?
😎
LikeLike
Are we interested in improving education or improving test scores. These are two completely different entities. Test scores can be easily improved. Just make questions easier. Education requires something quite different. Too bad the schools have failed to EDUCATE the politicians who cannot discern the difference.
LikeLike
exactly!
But the mandates put pressure on the states, they put pressure on the districts who then scramble and put pressure on the administrators and “curriculum coaches” and they put pressure on teachers and they put pressure on peers and students.
And that’s where we are today.
LikeLike
“Arne D the testing man” (parody of HERMAN’S HERMITS-“I’M HENRY VIII, I AM”)
I’m Arne D the testing man,
Arne D the testing man, I am,
I got married to the common test lore,
It’s been varied 90 times before,
If every one was an Arne D,
You’d always have a Pearson and a VAM (a VAM)
I’m your testing man, I’m Arne D
Arne D the testing man
100th test same as the first
(a helluvalot longer and a helluvalot worse)
I’m Arne D the testing man,
Arne D the testing man, I am,
I got married to the common test lore,
It’s been varied 90 times before,
If every one was an Arne D,
You’d always have a Pearson and a VAM (a VAM)
I’m your testing man, I’m Arne D
Arne D the testing man
(Raj Chetty slide VAMbone solo here)
A-R-N-E-D
Arne D (Arne D) Arne D (Arne D)
Arne D the testing man, I am,
Arne D the testing man
Listen to Herman and his hermits and sing along
LikeLike
The more concerns change the more they stay the same. From the same era (69ish):
“In The Beginning”
[First Man:] I think, I think I am, therefore I am, I think.
[Establishment:] Of course you are my bright little star,
I’ve miles
And miles
Of files
Pretty files of your forefather’s fruit
and now to suit our
great computer,
You’re magnetic ink.
[First Man:] I’m more than that, I know I am, at least, I think I must be.
[Inner Man:] There you go man, keep as cool as you can.
Face piles
And piles
Of trials
With smiles.
It riles them to believe
that you perceive
the web they weave
And keep on thinking free.
Listen to the Moody Blues tell it the way it was: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZiBHmUj1bQ
LikeLike
You know, Stephen is an interesting guy.
His original blog was very interesting, and I had 2 illustrations of mine published there. He co-founded the blog, with, was it Tom Slekar? I could be mistaken about this completely.
But as time went by, he left the blog because he felt the language was getting too “peppery” and perhaps emotional. . .. . not so consonant with his own very academic branding.
Was this a business move or a purely philosophical one?
Still, I have no resentment because his research is what drives and fuels my practices, and without him, I would not be the NBCT I am today. Steve is a gift to any child who needs greater comprehensible input to make sense of new concepts and the world. His lens on this has always been a game changer in best practices and pedagogy.
Still, I would like to see him more comfortable in the presence of people who now and then may erupt with less than elegant, scholarly expressiveness. This reform movement is enough to make Gremlins out of us all . . . . .
LikeLike
I never thought I’d agree with Michele Bachmann, but I cannot think of a good reason for the federal Dept. of Education.
LikeLike
Vandykel@michigan.gov
LikeLike