The New York Times has an excellent article by Lizette Alvarez about the growing outrage among parents against the standardized testing of their children. The article focuses on parents in Florida–whose children are being intellectually suffocated by the Jeb Bush model of punitive testing and accountability–but in fact the same complaints are increasingly heard in every state. The idea that children learn more if they are tested more has been the dogma of the ruling politicians of both parties since at least 2001, when huge majorities in Congress passed President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law. Now, along comes President Obama and Secretary Arne Duncan with their Race to the Top program, and the stakes attached to testing go higher still. Now, it is not only students who are subjected to tests that label and rank them, but the jobs of principals and teachers are on the line if test scores do not go up.
This is the best article I have read about the current testing mania in the New York Times. It is heartening that the revolt against the testing madness has attracted national attention in the nation’s most important newspaper. Many broadcast media use the Times as their guide to the important issues of the day.
Alvarez begins:
ROYAL PALM BEACH, Fla. — Florida embraced the school accountability movement early and enthusiastically, but that was hard to remember at a parent meeting in a high school auditorium here not long ago.
Parents railed at a system that they said was overrun by new tests coming from all levels — district, state and federal. Some wept as they described teenagers who take Xanax to cope with test stress, children who refuse to go to school and teachers who retire rather than promote a culture that seems to value testing over learning.
“My third grader loves school, but I can’t get her out of the car this year,” Dawn LaBorde, who has three children in Palm Beach County schools, told the gathering, through tears. Her son, a junior, is so shaken, she said, “I have had to take him to his doctor.” She added: “He can’t sleep, but he’s tired. He can’t eat, but he’s hungry.”
One father broke down as he said he planned to pull his second grader from school. “Teaching to a test is destroying our society,” he said.
Later in the story, she adds:
In Florida, which tests students more frequently than most other states, many schools this year will dedicate on average 60 to 80 days out of the 180-day school year to standardized testing. In a few districts, tests were scheduled to be given every day to at least some students.
The furor in Florida, which cuts across ideological, party and racial lines, is particularly striking for a state that helped pioneer accountability through former Gov. Jeb Bush. Mr. Bush, a possible presidential contender, was one of the first governors to introduce high-stakes testing and an A-to-F grading system for schools. He continues to advocate test-based accountability through his education foundation. Former President George W. Bush, his brother, introduced similar measures as governor of Texas and, as president, embraced No Child Left Behind, the law that required states to develop tests to measure progress.
The concerns reach well beyond first-year jitters over Florida’s version of Common Core, which is making standards tougher and tests harder. Frustrations also center on the increase this year in the number of tests ordered by the state to fulfill federal grant obligations on teacher evaluations and by districts to keep pace with the new standards. The state mandate that students use computers for standardized tests has made the situation worse because computers are scarce and easily crash.
“This is a spinning-plates act like the old ‘Ed Sullivan Show,’ ” said David Samore, the longtime principal at Okeeheelee Community Middle School in Palm Beach County. “What you are seeing now are the plates are starting to fall. Principals, superintendents, kids and teachers can only do so much. They never get to put any plates down.”
Imagine that: Many schools will dedicate 60-80 days this year to standardized testing! This is a bonanza for the testing industry, and a bonanza for the tech industry, which gets to sell so many millions of computers and tablets for test-taking, but it is a disaster for students. Think of it: students are losing 33-40% of the school year to testing. This is time that should be spent on instruction, on reading, on creating projects, on debating ideas, on physical exercise, on singing, dancing, painting, and drawing.
The testing madness is out of control. Parents know it. Teachers know it. Principals know it. Superintendents know it. The only ones who don’t know it are sitting in the Governor’s mansion and in the State Legislature, in the U.S. Department of Education, the White House and Congress. If they had to spend 33-40% of their time taking standardized tests to measure their effectiveness, they would join with the angry parents of Florida and say “enough is enough.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In many schools around the country, the media labs are almost never available because they are being used for testing–not only the state mandated tests but also district-mandated diagnostic tests, pretests, benchmark tests, post tests, practice tests. And, of course, most of the curriculum in subjects like ELA, reading, and mathematics has been swallowed up by test prep. This is insanity. And all the more insane because the new tests are completely invalid and, in ELA, based upon extraordinarily prescientific “standards” hacked together by amateurs.
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Most elections are won or lost on margins of 3 percent or less. When politicians realize the strength of the anti-testing movement in the country and the depth of people’s feelings about this–when they realize that this can be the DEFINING ISSUE of an election–then it’s over for test-based deform. That’s interesting given how the next presidential race is shaping up. Bill and Hillary Clinton were two of the early instigators of testing-and-standards-based education deform. Jeb Bush has long been a high-profile leader of the ed deform movement. Unless Hillary begins to see sense about this, the way is open for a third candidate who taps into the overwhelming opposition to the testing mania among the people.
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Bill Clinton recently spoke out against high stakes testing so that will hopefully have some positive effect and get some politicians to pick up on this issue.
Parents should also opt their kids out of the major tests– no test takers=no data
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Link??
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Forget Hillary/Jeb. They are two sides of the same bad coin.
Bernie Sanders has common sense. He understands what is wrong with our country. He listens and learns.
Run, Bernie, run!
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The next election will not make a difference if people do not continue to ramp up the push back against testing at the local level now.
Here is a great letter that should be shared with parents and teachers everywhere. When parents finally understand the damage that is being done to their children in the name of profits for corporations, they will find a way to protect their children from the harm and the depersonalization that this competitive testing culture creates.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RDSfPJEo9HUnlKIA_jdy0Oy5JU5T_–_pDKRgGI_zrw/mobilebasic?pli=1
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How to Prevent Another PARCC Mugging: A Public Service Announcement
The Common Core Curriculum Commissariate College and Career Ready Assessment Program (CCCCCCRAP) needs to be scrapped. Here are a few of the reasons why:
1.The CCSS ELA exams are invalid.
First, much of attainment in ELA consists in world knowledge (knowledge of what—the stuff of declarative memories of subject matter). The “standards” being tested cover almost no world knowledge and so the tests based on those standards miss much of what constitutes attainment in this subject. Imagine a test of biology that left out almost all world knowledge about biology and covered only biology “skills” like—I don’t know—slide-staining ability—and you’ll get what I mean here. This has been a problem with all of these summative standardized tests in ELA since their inception.
Second, much of attainment in ELA consists in procedural knowledge (knowledge of what—the stuff of procedural memories of subject matter). The “standards” being tested define skills so vaguely and so generally that they cannot be validly operationalized for testing purposes as written.
Third, nothing that students do on these exams EVEN REMOTELY resembles real reading and writing as it is actually done in the real world. The test consists largely of what I call New Criticism Lite, or New Criticism for Dummies—inane exercises on identification of examples of literary elements that for the most part skip over entirely what is being communicated in the piece of writing. In other words, these are tests of literature that for the most part skip over the literature, tests of the reading of informative texts that for the most part skip over the content of those texts. Since what is done on these tests does not resemble, even remotely, what actual readers and writers do in the real world when they actually read and write, the tests, ipso facto, cannot be valid tests of real reading and writing.
Fourth, standard standardized test development practice requires that the testing instrument be validated. Such validation requires that the test maker show that the test correlates strongly with other accepted measures of what is being tested, both generally and specifically (that is, with regard to specific materials and/or skills being tested). No such validation was done for these tests. NONE. And as they are written, based on the standards they are based upon, none COULD BE done. Where is the independent measure of proficiency in CCSS.Literacy.ELA.11-12.4b against which the items in PARCC that are supposed to measure that standard on this test have been validated? Answer: There is no such measure. None. And PARCC has not been validated against it, obviously LOL. So, the tests fail to meet a minimal standard for a high-stakes standardized assessment—that they have been independently validated.
2. The test formats are inappropriate.
First, the tests consist largely of objective-format items (multiple-choice and EBSR). These item types are most appropriate for testing very low-level skills (e.g., recall of factual detail). However, on these tests, such item formats are pressed into a kind of service for which they are, generally, not appropriate. They are used to test “higher-order thinking.” The test questions therefore tend to be tricky and convoluted. The test makers, these days, all insist on answer choices all being plausible. Well, what does plausible mean? Well, at a minimum, plausible means “reasonable.” So, the questions are supposed to deal with higher-order thinking, and the wrong answers are all supposed to be plausible, so the test questions end up being extraordinarily complex and confusing and tricky, all because the “experts” who designed these tests didn’t understand the most basic stuff about creating assessments–that objective question formats are generally not great for testing higher-order thinking, for example. For many of the sample released questions, there is, arguably, no answer among the answer choices that is correct or more than one answer that is correct, or the question simply is not, arguably, actually answerable as written.
Second, at the early grades, the tests end up being as much a test of keyboarding skills as of attainment in ELA. The online testing format is entirely inappropriate for most third graders.
3. The tests are diagnostically and instructionally useless.
Many kinds of assessment—diagnostic assessment, formative assessment, performative assessment, some classroom summative assessment—have instructional value. They can be used to inform instruction and/or are themselves instructive. The results of these tests are not broken down in any way that is of diagnostic or instructional use. Teachers and students cannot even see the tests to find out what students got wrong on them and why. So the tests are of no diagnostic or instructional value. None. None whatsoever.
4. The tests have enormous incurred costs and opportunity costs.
First, they steal away valuable instructional time. Administrators at many schools now report that they spend as much as a third of the school year preparing students to take these tests. That time includes the actual time spent taking the tests, the time spent taking pretests and benchmark tests and other practice tests, the time spent on test prep materials, the time spent doing exercises and activities in textbooks and online materials that have been modeled on the test questions in order to prepare kids to answer questions of those kinds, and the time spent on reporting, data analysis, data chats, proctoring, and other test housekeeping.
Second, they have enormous cost in dollars. In 2010-11, the US spent 1.7 billion on state standardized testing alone. Under CCSS, this increases. The PARCC contract by itself is worth over a billion dollars to Pearson in the first three years, and you have to add the cost of SBAC and the other state tests (another billion and a half?), to that. No one, to my knowledge, has accurately estimated the cost of the computer upgrades that will be necessary for online testing of every child, but those costs probably run to 50 or 60 billion. This is money that could be spent on stuff that matters—on making sure that poor kids have eye exams and warm clothes and food in their bellies, on making sure that libraries are open and that schools have nurses on duty to keep kids from dying. How many dead kids is all this testing worth, given that it is, again, of no instructional value? IF THE ANSWER TO THAT IS NOT OBVIOUS TO YOU, YOU SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED ANYWHERE NEAR A SCHOOL OR AN EDUCATIONAL POLICY-MAKING DESK.
5. The tests distort curricula and pedagogy.
The tests drive how and what people teach, and they drive much of what is created by curriculum developers. This is a vast subject, so I won’t go into it in this brief note. Suffice it to say that the distortions are grave. In U.S. curriculum development today, the tail is wagging the dog.
6. The tests are abusive and demotivating.
Our prime directive as educators is to nurture intrinsic motivation—to create independent, life-long learners. The tests create climates of anxiety and fear. Both science and common sense teach that extrinsic punishment and reward systems like this testing system are highly DEMOTIVATING for cognitive tasks. The summative standardized testing system is a really, really backward extrinsic punishment and reward approach to motivation. It reminds me of the line from the alphabet in the Puritan New England Primer, the first textbook published on these shores:
F
The idle Fool
Is whip’t in school.
7. The tests have shown no positive results.
We have had more than a decade, now, of standards-and-testing-based accountability under NCLB. We have seen only miniscule increases in outcomes, and those are well within the margin of error of the calculations. Simply from the Hawthorne Effect, we should have seen SOME improvement!!! And that suggests that the testing has actually DECREASED OUTCOMES, which is consistent with what we know about the demotivational effects of extrinsic punishment and reward systems. It’s the height of stupidity to look at a clearly failed approach and to say, “Gee, we should to a lot more of that.”
8. The tests will worsen the achievement and gender gaps.
Both the achievement and gender gaps in educational performance are largely due to motivational issues, and these tests and the curricula and pedagogical strategies tied to them are extremely demotivating. They create new expectations and new hurdles that will widen existing gaps, not close them. Ten percent fewer boys than girls, BTW, received a proficient score on the NY CCSS exams–this in a time when 60 percent of kids in college and 3/5ths of people in MA programs are female. The CCSS exams drive more regimentation and standardization of curricula, which will further turn off kids already turned off by school, causing more to turn out and drop out.
This message not brought to you by
PARCC: Spell that backward
notSmarter, imBalanced
AIRy nonsense
CTB McGraw-SkillDrill
MAP to nowhere
Scholastic Common Core Achievement Test (SCCAT)
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (“All your base are belong to us”)
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cx of typo: Commissariat, no e at the end
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cx: causing more to tune out and drop out
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Thanks Bob, you have said it all, from an old teacher with an M.A. in Criminal and Abnormal Psychology. You hit all the highlight faults in test design that we all learned in Educational Measurements as undergraduates. These people have no clue.
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“The Common Core Curriculum Commissariate College and Career Ready Assessment Program (CCCCCCRAP) ”
If you leave three Cs and an R and an A out of the acronym what are you left with?
Yep, Soviet style top down bureaucratized numbers driven false control that eventually implodes.
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“The CCSS ELA exams are invalid.”
As Noel Wilson proved to the world about all educational standards and standardized tests back in ’97: “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.
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There is no substitute for analyzing, closely, the gap between what is supposedly being measured and what the actual instrument actually measures and determining the degree of confidence that we can have in the particular measurement. In order to quantify, we operationalize–we substitute something we can measure for the more complicated thing. And there’s the rub. We create a measurement criterion (say, dots per square inch) to measure a quality (faithfulness of reproduction in printing), and in so doing we have substituted something easily measured (the number of dots per inch) for something more nebulous (faithfulness of reproduction), and the claim is made that one can validly measure the quality using the operational measure. But it turns out that there are other factors that can completely invalidate the substituted simple measure. (On paper that is porous, the dots can bleed. Different printers lay down the dots more or less heavily or completely, and do so differently at different times–when the ink available to the printer is sufficient or low, when the printer is properly adjusted for the pressure on the page or the amount of spray, when the room in which the printing is done hot or cold.) So, there are lot of questions that have to be asked before we can accept the measurement as valid and reliable. None of these questions were asked regarding these tests.
Fools rush in.
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And when one actually does an analysis of what is supposedly being measured by these tests and what is actually measured, one discovers that there is a complete disconnect, both between the standards and what they are supposed to specify (general reading, writing, and thinking ability) and between the standards and the supposed measurements of them. The new spate of state and national tests in ELA are neither valid nor reliable. That is demonstrable, but one actually has to do the necessary work to show that that is indeed the case. One has to show, for example, that a measure of whether a student can identify gerunds in a bit of grade-level text (one of the 8th-grade ELA standards) is a valid measure of that aspect of general reading and writing ability that we call grammatical competence AND whether the test questions, as written, actually measure the ability to identify gerunds. In both cases, the answer turns out to be “no.” It turns out that the authors of these “standards” were working from a prescientific understanding of the attainment of grammatical competence–an ignorant, folk model of language learning–that introduces both kinds of invalidity.
And the same turns out to be the case for standard after standard, test question after test question.
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In other words, the new tests in ELA do not measure what they purport to be measuring, and this is particularly egregious because curricula are being mapped to these, and so horrific distortions are introduced by them throughout the learning process.
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Exactly, Robert! Good explanation!d
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The sloppiness and amateurishness of the new ELA standards and of the tests based on them is so extreme that one is forced to conclude that those who conceived them were completely heedless. They were driven by factors other than a concern for the quality of education. That much is evident. One doesn’t have to look far to find what the motivating force is. This stuff is all about selling computers and databases and educational software and computerized tests. It was a business plan from Day 1. The only other alternative is to think that people were actually stupid enough to think that the CCSS in ELA is an accurate representation of attainment in ELA, and that’s obviously untrue. At any rate, all this was done with complete heedlessness.
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i totally agree with each of the issues you addressed concerning the invalidity and problems of the CCSS. I recall prior to NCLB, my district was moving towards portfolio assessment as an alternative to high stakes standardized testing. Then came NCLB, and gone were any notions of “authentic assessment.”
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There was much, much of great worth that was being advanced at the time, but most of this has been forgotten. We’ve witnessed the trashing of an entire field of endeavor–of the development of creative, informed pedagogy and curricula in the English language arts. We have allowed philistines to take over. It’s tragic.
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What struck me about it was not the time spent testing, but the how the people mandating the testing completely ignored the reality of the schools.
“But there is another requirement that has made testing more difficult in Florida. The state ordered all students, including those in elementary school, to take standardized tests on computers as of this year. But again, the state did not give districts extra money for computers or technology help.
Because schools do not have computers for every student, tests are staggered throughout the day, which translates to more hours spent administering tests and less time teaching. Students who are not taking tests often occupy their time watching movies. The staggered test times also mean computer labs are not available for other students.”
It’s a huge logistical problem. They must be shuffling kids and adults in and out of testing all the time.
They just turned the schools upside down, cavalierly and casually. They wanted computer testing so they simply ordered it, as if mandating it would make it workable and practical. It’s a fantasy. Had they given it half a day’s thought they would have realized it would be very.very difficult, but apparently no one thought any of that was important. They shoved the policy thru, walked away, and left this huge mess for someone else to deal with. You feel sorry the local people, because they get all the parent blow-back.
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This is just the beginning of the computer boondoggle here in FL. The legislature also passed an ALEC-written law requiring all future textbook purchases be e-books only; we are not allowed, after this year, to purchase hardcover books anymore. We do not have the technology to give to the students yet and no money is earmarked for this massive purchase so no one knows how this will be accomplished, least of all the legislature. All we know is that we can never purchase a traditional textbook again without violating this stupid law.
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I think a lot of the technology push is driven by lobbyists. It seems obvious to me. I laughed when they started mandating online courses. Talk about creating a market.
Jeb Bush is the worst, but Duncan is right behind him. They’re basically blatantly pushing product that this point.
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Do you suppose these guys think they are in a giant monopoly game? If we could all just pass go and stay out of jail long enough to drive everyone else into bankruptcy. There is a board game somewhere in this debacle to rival Monopoly. Plutocrats and hedge fund moguls, lobbyists, liberals and conservatives of various stripes, corporations and the judicial system, parents, children, teachers,…It could be a pretty interesting game and it wouldn’t even have to be on the computer.
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No text books would not be a bad thing if teachers were allowed to use what ever materials they deemed appropriate to teach the subject. As everyone here knows, on-line learning is all about data collection and selling product.
I am personally in favor of forcing teachers to stop relying on Text books. If they do not know their subject matter well enough to teach with out corporate sponsored text books, they don’t know their subject matter.
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Betsy, I find your response privileged and dismissive. The state of Florida ranks around 48 out of 50 for teacher pay and not much higher in per pupil spending.
You assume that teachers will have access to rich curricular materials to use to teach. Where do those materials come from? We have not been able to buy any supplies for the last 3 years due to the state’s budget cuts and appropriation of most available funding for charter schools and technology.
Our library hasn’t received a budget of more than a couple of hundred dollars for the last 6 or 7 years for the same reasons and for a few of those years we didn’t have a library or a librarian due to budget shortfalls.
Your comment is offensive to new teachers who are being paid low salaries and are unable to purchase materials to teach with when they don’t have textbooks.
It is also offensive to those of us who have learned, which you apparently haven’t, how to use a textbook as an effective tool to supplement what you teach.
And not everyone teaches a ‘subject’ in high school. I teach primary students and I need a multitude of materials to teach many ‘subjects’ and I am not paid near enough money to supply all those things myself. My school hasn’t spent one penny on providing me with anything for more years than I can remember.
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I agree with you totally, Chris. There is the advantage that textbooks bring to aligning curricula to CCSS, too. I don’t know about you, but if I had to write my own curricula and align everything to CCSS,…do I have to paint a picture? I think special education teachers are typically left on their own when it comes to planning instruction. I was never provided with a curriculum for my students.
Aside from the fact that a textbook can provide a framework/outline for a curriculum, it also provides the subversive function of allowing a teacher to produce all the documentation that instruction is aligned to CCSS while using one’s own expertize to enrich this outline without having to spend hours figuring out how to align it all to CCSS. I spent many hours writing lesson plans that were invariably tweaked on the fly throwing the best of plans off schedule. With a classroom full of struggling (high school) readers, a dynamic discussion took precedence over the next SWBAT.
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The people on the outside think they know more than the people on the inside. The politicians are oblivious to the disruption and harm they are causing; of course, they are so arrogant they would not consider listening to the people that actually work with students.
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Is anyone who can change it making a difference? Do the politicians give a shit? Do the billionaires HEAR what is happening and want to put a stop to it? Does Obama hear? Does Duncan hear? Does Jeb Bush and his foundation for excellence hear? Does Gates hear? Does Broad hear? Do the Waltons hear? Does Campbell Brown hear? Does Michelle Rhee hear?
Anyone who can make it stop—doesn’t want it to stop. Are there about 150 “players” in this game that you see all the time, either funding the nonsense, or mandating the nonsense, or implementing the nonsense, or changing the laws to make it easier to dismantle public schools and open charters or mandate vouchers – aren’t those the same people, over and over and over.
“They” don’t HEAR the parents, or the teachers. They dismiss the parents, they dismiss the teachers, they blame the unions, they say the unions and the teachers are behind the dissent and say that parents and kids who balk are puppets to the unions and the teachers.
THEY DON”T HEAR IT. They don’t hear it.
All they hear is Ka-Ching. The $ spent to put computers in benefits the computer vendors, the curriculum benefits Pearson, the charters benefit the hedge funders and frankly, the fact that charters are the number 1 growers of bond fundings is pretty scary.
So, there will be a melt down of the bonds, which will be bundled and sold, etc., charters will close without any responsibility to the neighborhoods, municipalities will be left holding the debt, students will be thrown out of the closed charters, etc., rinse, repeat.
Are we getting anything done? No.
What do we need to do to make it stop? Lawsuits? A Million education march? What do we have to do?
No. One. Who. Can. Change. It. Hears.
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The disconnect between what the people know and what their leaders are doing is not sustainable. No amount of corrupt money can sustain ed deform. It will fall of its own dead weight. It is currently doing so. Unfortunately, it’s falling on kids and their teachers and their parents and their administrators. Eno rmous damage is being done. It’s not a matter of whether ed deform will fail. It’s a matter of when and how much damage will be done before we return to sanity and the fools who pushed this are rooted out of office and out of policy-making positions. There will be a lot of edupundits, during the period when we try to rebuild from this, pretending that they were against it all along–many of them among the biggest names, today, in edupunditry. Remember those collaborators.
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Remember all the damage that they did to kids and to their schools.
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Thanks for the excellent and passionate expose of how many ways the testing mania is wrong.
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I understand your frustration. The people with the power to stop the insanity are bought and paid for by Wall St; they are part of the problem. My hope is that the numerous stumbles by charters will be so great they cannot be ignored. Only then, when the politicians know the public is watching, they will start jumping ship. At least, that is what I hope.
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When will the tipping point finally come? When will it be obvious to enough people that this testing mania is born of a corrupt business plan that is destined to fail in the long term, as it continues to destroy professional careers and harm children in the short term?
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Let’s see, it was Condoleeza Rice and Joel Klein who headed up the task force at the Council on Foreign Relations that published the report that supposedly justifies the “reform” they have shoved down our throats. The independent Task Force report on U.S. Education Reform and National Security stated that “Educational failure puts the United States’ future economic prosperity, global position, and physical safety at risk,” the country “will not be able to keep pace—much less lead—globally unless it moves to fix the problems it has allowed to fester for too long.” The CFR has strategically placed several members in every aspect of our mass media to the point of total control of content and persuasion of public opinion. Push back and real criticism does not get much air play.
Until people are willing to acknowledge there in fact exists a shadow government (CFR) which calls the shots because they have their own agenda they are following which has nothing to do with the education of our children there will be no way to fight this behemoth. It is a freight train barreling through very fast hoping no one has the foresight or the guts to stop it. You have to name your enemy to defeat it. UNESCO. UNESCO, UNESCO. UNESCO. UNESCO. Do you hear me? UNESCO.
The tipping point will come when enough students refuse the tests.
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I think it may come this year when all these 3rd graders are suddenly expected to have these amazing keyboarding skills for these online tests. Hopefully more parents will start to realize….
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Children’s privacy is continually violated and 400-plus data points are gathered through excessive online assessing. Gates’ excitement about the sharing of this data making it easier for companies to market to your children is clear. He said: “When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well —
— and that will unleash powerful market forces …”
http://www.mansfieldnewsjournal.com/story/opinion/readers/2014/11/01/common-core-money/18270201/
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“and that will unleash powerful market forces …”
To force that money into his back account.
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“When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well -and that will unleash powerful market forces …”
Don’t know about the “market forces” part, but Gates sure seems to have gotten the “unleash powerful forces” part right: millions of enraged (dare I say “militant?) parents, teachers, students, education experts and others around the country.
And one point about lining things up that seems to have escaped Gates: knock one down and they all go down like a bunch of dominoes (along with all of those hundreds of millions of dollars that Gates “invested”)
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Tim Kremer, Executive Director of NYSSBA (New York State School Boards Association) will be @ the Pleasantville School District Board of Education meeting on Tuesday, Nov. 18th to answer questions the P’ville. School Board has about NYSSBA’s support of CCSS. Read about it here:
http://www.lohud.com/story/news/local/2014/10/24/critics-rip-school-boards-association-common-core/17845999/
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The percentage of students being homeschooled in Westchester, Putnam & Rockland Counties has risen due to the excessive testing:
http://www.lohud.com/story/news/local/2014/10/25/homeschooling-rise-parents-say-school-environment-excessive-testing-desire-family-closeness-deciding-factors/17632785/
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I think many politicians BETTER GET DOING THEIR JOB of REPRESENTING THE PEOPLE! Parents are powerful in numbers and the “ed reformers” don’t seem to get that! The recent PA governor’s election shows the promise of “We the People”… and now FLORIDA… one of the original bastions of “Ed Reform” is shouting OUTRAGE.
So what does EdWeek do recently??? They organize and event to “TELL” us what will be happening in public education due to recent elections. Really??? And in order to prevent any REAL PROTEST… the event is not live but in the form of a “live” webinar. And if you look at the bottom of the event notice none other than PEARSON is sponsoring it. EdWeek needs a name change…
“EdReformWeek”
Here is the announcement from beginning to end:
“Watch Live: After The StormWATCH LIVE ON NOV. 12
#EdElect2014
Join us on Wednesday, Nov. 12, at 1 p.m. for the livestream of After The Storm: What the Election Results Mean for K-12 Policy, featuring:
U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif.
U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif.
Ranking Member, House Education and the Workforce Committee
This afternoon of in-depth discussions will feature scene-setting analysis by Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank M. Newport, offering his keen insight on the 2014 midterm election. Education Week’s Politics K-12 team will examine how education played at the ballot box. And a roundtable of political insiders from the White House, Congress, and leading think tanks will debate the direction of education policy as we look ahead to 2016.
AGENDA
1 p.m. | Introductions/Welcome
Brandon Busteed, Executive Director, Gallup Education
Christopher B. Swanson, Vice President for Research & Development, Education Week
1:15 p.m. | The National Landscape
Frank M. Newport, Ph. D., Editor-in-Chief, Gallup, recaps the midterm elections using Gallup’s analysis and data to tell the story of the Nov. 4, 2014, results.
1:45 p.m. | How Education Played at the Ballot Box
Education Week’s political reporters dig deeper into congressional and state-level election results and what they mean for education-policy priorities.
Lauren Camera, Staff Writer, Education Week
Alyson Klein, Assistant Editor, Education Week
Andrew Ujifusa, Staff Writer, Education Week
2:45 p.m. | What the 2014 Results Mean for Education Going Forward
An Education Week-moderated discussion offering a range of perspectives from:
David Cleary, Chief of Staff, U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander and Republican Staff Director, Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions
Jamie Fasteau, Director of Education Policy, House Education and the Workforce Committee-Democratic Staff
Carmel Martin, Executive Vice President, Policy, Center for American Progress
Neal McCluskey, Associate Director, Center for Educational Freedom, Cato Institute
Roberto Rodriguez, Deputy Assistant to the President for Education, The White House
3:15 p.m. | Keynote Conversation With U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif
“A Look Ahead” with George Miller, the ranking member of the House Education and the Workforce Committee and one of the architects of the No Child Left Behind Act.
4:00 p.m. | Conclusion
This event is sponsored by Pearson”.
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EdWeek says it has a barrier between its editorial work and all of the sponsors of the special reports-Gates, Walton, Wallace, and about twelve others. That claim is proven wrong with very issue and most of these ancillary activities. EdWeek offers a forum for anyone who wants to undermine public education. Your post makes this clear. This blog and the few investigative journalists in education are essential in constructing the alternative narratives in a media landscape that has become Orwellian. This event is designed to affirm the validity of a dubious survey, not disclose who funded the survey, and cherry-pick results to support an agenda already determined by the Corporate Congress of the United States.
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Precisely why I dropped my subscription. I’m not paying to read a publication that denigrates my profession.
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Not just edweek, but also public media such as PBS and NPR. Their education coverage rarely covers anthing that “replace regular public schools with charters” crowd would find embarassing. FBI raids on charters, etc get little to no coverage.
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Once again, I implore people on this blog to open your eyes and realize we are not in Kansas any more. The great Wizard of Oz is broadcasting everything we are supposed to believe from a machine behind a curtain. Every one of our major media sources has been captured by the CFR. Pull back the curtain and see a little man named David Rockefeller pulling levers and punching buttons and disguising his voice. He is the one man on the planet who can walk into any office of any head of state on the entire globe unannounced. He runs the CFR. He was part of the cabal that ran Hitler. (Hitler wouldn’t have been able to get one plane off the ground if it were not for U.S. Standard Oil Company supplying the technology through I.G. Farben to create tetraethyl to raise the octane value of aviation gasoline. It was developed in U.S. labs and transferred to Germany until they could get their own labs up and running. Refer to the historical research of Professor Antony Sutton if you are interested in this issue.) The only reason I bring up Hitler is because the same people that ran that operation are running this one.
He outs himself on page 405 of his Memoirs. “Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
The reason none of this makes any sense to us is because we are not elite depopulation freaks with an agenda to bring the U.S. to its knees. Stop trying to make sense of it. Stop thinking the United Nations and UNESCO are benign institutions. Out the perpetrators. Refuse the tests.
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The Gawker report that Krazy TA referenced about Time Inc.’s ranking of its writers by the criteria. “beneficial to advertisers”, shows the failure of a press, that pretends to be free but, is owned by multinational corporations.
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Laura Chapman… couldn’t agree with you more! The tone of this “webinar” is extremely patronizing and arrogant. I am surprised they included Pearson credits – and it speaks volumes! I get emails from this organization at least once a week with articles they choose to send (don’t even know how they got my email or why they send them). I do read them or scan the articles as I like to keep up on THE BULL. But it is more BULL than one can bear.
This webinar is SUCH AN AFFRONT.
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At the risk of sounding like a test supporter (eeeek!), surely FL schools aren’t spending ALL DAY on testing. That would mean students are testing 6-7 hours a day for those 60 to 80 days, with no instruction at all. Surely not. Please. I hope! (Can anyone in FL speak to that?) I also wonder whether some of this is considered “progress testing,” tracking students for improvement and to fine-tune instruction. Reasonable progress testing makes sense. That said, seeing my own students’ fatigue after even an hour or two of testing, I’m sure the instruction and attention are not top-quality. How could they be? Everyone is spent. And I can’t imagine that progress testing every day is useful; that’s obviously not enough time for any student to gain or improve skills that would show up on the testing. All in all, Florida is a testing nightmare. Thanks for sharing this article, Diane.
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teacher… I assure you they are likely not to be exaggerating one bit. Public schools are truly forced to focus education based around these high stakes tests because all roads in education lead to the results on high stakes tests at the end of the day. And there is a whole industry of prep tests for the big tests at schools around the nation. There are start of the year “baseline” tests (in addition to the ones for the SLO’s), then there are mid term tests to gauge how students will do on the high stakes tests and then tests before the BIG ONE. Any teacher who wants to hold onto their job must try to have their students do well on these tests or at least show great “improvement” from that first test until the big one. And national ed policy has created an inseparable link between common core tests and the curriculum. The school year is not about learning and truly is about preparing for that one big test! The “ed profiteers” love it because computer systems at schools must be updated (at the school community’s expense), all publications are centered around “the tests”… the “expensive” veteran teachers are very fed up and retiring early if they can. Meanwhile the new teachers are young enough to be able to get out after a few years of the nonsense. Salaries are kept low and money is saved in pension benefit payouts. So who is this tesumania benefitting? Certainly not the students or teachers. But is sure benefits the services all connected to the high stakes tests.
Florida’s time spent on testing is probably not much different from most regions around the nation. They may have more actual tests but make no mistake, the entire school year is dedicated to eking by on that one HIGH STAKES COMMON CORE TEST and Arne Duncan sees to it that this holds true.
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The testament to the testomania is the testsunami of a miasma of metrics resulting in the destruction of true teaching and learning.
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I think you’re probably right that not all students are testing all of that time. That’s a little garbled in the piece.
My sense of the complaint was that it’s WORSE that not all students are testing at the same time, because this long “window” of testing to comply with the computer requirement is really disruptive to the schools.
That seems to be what they’re saying: they can’t do this without making testing the focus of 60-80 days.
I think it would be a mistake to look exclusively at the specific time TESTING, because what they’re really talking about (if I understand them) is a 60-80 day FOCUS on testing that is harming their schools.
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Chiara.. as far as I am concerned… when students must have 90 minute blocks of English and 90 minute blocks of math at the expense of other subjects… this is ALL ABOUT TESTING. Students are preparing in these specific content area classes for the purpose of succeeding on high stakes tests. They are not learning for the sake of learning. Everything that is done to “get good scores” on these tests in my opinion is “testudcation”!
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The proliferation of tests is required in at least 43 states that took the bait of federal dollars. Teacher evaluations are driving the testing mania, specifically the demand for data not just on achievement but on “growth” which requires a calculation of gains in scores from pretest to posttest,and year to year. That has become the minimum for every subject. Then there are interim tests to monitor progress, and so on. Although the statewide tests are still the most important for report cards on schools, and these are more likely to have some testing expertise brought into play,a about 60% of teachers have job assignments that rely on other tests and many of these have no screening for reliability or construct validity. The time sucked up by tests is appalling as is the shoddy thinking that has reified test scores as if these are the necessary and sufficient measure of eduction. Hogwash.
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Do you think there’s a chance the mandarins at the NY Times, the editorial board and very serious Op-Ed columnists, might actually read their own paper and notice that all is not well in the reform world of testing-centricity they have cheerleaded for all these years!?
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Zero Percent Chance!
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Duane– a year and a helf ago the Times editorial board wrote one with a headline including the term Testing Mania . . . then they went back to cheerleading for Charters, Reform, Duncan, Cuomo and all that jazz for other people’s children . . . but more and better stories like this, in their own paper has to be noticeable to them. At some point maybe they’ll connect the dots and figure it out. Or not. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/opinion/sunday/the-trouble-with-testing-mania.html
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“Be careful what you ask for”
“Make me do it,” said the Pres
“Make me end, the endless tests”
“Make me bar the Gates of Hell”
Parents listened very well
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quote: “Russ Whitehurst and Matt Chingos have noted, state assessments—usually limited to reading and math in grades 3–8—don’t give us enough information to analyze most teachers based upon student growth on objective assessments. To gauge a teacher’s impact on student learning in Ohio, we’ve devised an intricate web of additional assessments and student learning objectives that supplement the state assessments. The result has been a dramatic increase in time students spend testing and teachers spend administering tests. The overreliance on tests for every teacher’s evaluation has put the entire test-based accountability system on trial and jeopardizes the progress that’s been made over the past twenty years.” Yes, it has set us back and the progress made in 20 years has been erased by this fetish with tests…..
you can find more about this on Fordham Institute site but they say it is in the ‘messaging” the “communicating” and the “portrayal” whereas it is truly in the implementation of Duncan’s policies.
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‘The overreliance on tests for every teacher’s evaluation has put the entire test-based accountability system on trial and jeopardizes the progress that’s been made over the past twenty years.”
“Failing the Test of time”
Sewing seeds of their own demise
Testing teachers to the skies
Reformers pushed the tests too far
Worthy of a hardy har
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secondary source: Chad Aldis is the person quoted from Fordham I. He starts out his paragraph about Whitehurst and Chingos but then switches over to the “royal we” who devised an “intricate web of additional assessments” ….. with subsequent “over reliance on tests”…. just wanted to clear up I was using a secondary source at Fordham I. by Chad Aldis …..
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