The Néw York Board of Regents is meeting today to vote on a proposal to make field testing of online Pearson tests for Common Core mandatory. Commissioner John King says it will make the tests more valid and reliable.
But it won’t make the tests useful to teachers or students. Teachers are not allowed to know which questions their students got right or wrong, so the tests have no diagnostic value. They are not allowed to discuss the tests with one another. The tests are an expensive waste of time.
In the past, Pearson tests have had numerous errors. How will the public know if their children are fairly judged?
Teachers must teach to the tests to help the children and to protect their jobs.
This is not education. It is regimentation.
Call your Regent and tell them not to make field testing mandatory. Call your legidlators. Enough is enough.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is working for free, though hardly volunteer work. Teachers and students are going to give up hours of their time and effort on behalf of Pearson, for Pearson’s ultimate profit, with no benefit at all accruing to them. That’s the crux of it, really. Students may always “work” for free but they benefit directly in that they are learning — how are benefitting here? They are not, in fact they are being harmed in that time is being stolen from them, plus the stresses and strains of taking inappropriate tests.
I don’t know quite what to call this: slavery seems hyperbolic, indentured servitude isn’t the right term either, but at the least, unfair, unethical and disgusting fit.
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Forcing children, parents and teachers within an inch of their public school education existence is becoming more and more frightening.
We have tons of examples in the World of punishing people who exercise their freedom and rights. I can foresee a time, given the despiration by Reformer$, when children are forced to turn in their parents if the family Opts Out of Pearson testing.
EducationReform Stasi?
The greed of Reformers, foundations, think tanks & testing companies has set up a network of enforcers that is choking the last child for the last data point for the last $!
America, wake up! This is not about properly ducating our children…never was.
How long will we allow this?
Abuse!
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Edu-reform Stasi- exactly.
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Wouldn’t you be ashamed as an adult to keep piling these tests on kids? Since most people attended public schools. it stands to reason that most of the testing fanatics also went to public schools.
When they were in school, were they tested constantly? I wasn’t. I think we took one standardized test a year, if that. It may have been every couple of years. It was such a small part of our year that I don’t remember teachers mentioning it until the day before, when they told us all to get enough sleep.
I love how they’re eager to pile on all this “rigor” once they’ll safely graduated and out the door.
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“I love how they’re eager to pile on all this “rigor” once they’ll safely graduated and out the door.”
Yes, yes.
Or, once your own children are tucked safely away at Lakeside, Sidwell Friends School, Horace Mann, The Chicago Lab School, or some other private island of educational sanity. Sanity that can be purchased for a mere $500,000+ (K – 12).
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Horace Mann and other elite private schools are a refuge from rigor? This claim would likely come as a shock to the vast majority of parents, even at progressive schools like Dalton and Riverdale, who are shelling out up to $1000+ / week (no, that’s not a typo) for tutoring. Not for SATs, mind you, but simply to keep up with regular academic coursework.
This on top of the misconception that children at the elite private schools aren’t taking standardized tests; nearly all of them are. Sidwell Friends students in grades 5-8 take a standardized test, stretching over three days, administered via computer, and the school uses the data to inform instruction. “[T]he ERB/CTP’s can help parents and teachers understand more clearly and completely a child’s balance of strengths and needs. Teachers may review the scores in detail, looking for patterns that emerge from one year to the next, and then use that information to be more effective in the classroom.”
The U of C Lab School? Yup, they give these tests to third, fourth, sixth, and eighth graders: “Results of these measures are used . . . to compare with more content-specific, curriculum-based measures of performance. This comparison can be useful when identifying those students whose skills and achievement scores show marked discrepancies.”
Lakeside? 6th and 8th grades.
Horace Mann? From the family handbook: “Standardized testing begins in kindergarten.”
I don’t doubt that these schools are a sanctuary of sorts, given the price tag (and the fact that 80-85% of the kids don’t receive a penny of financial aid), the brutally tough admissions process that involves 4-year-olds sitting for an IQ test, and the almost complete absence of English language learners, or any children with significant disabilities. But they are academic pressure cookers, and they do administer standardized tests, with the expectation that the results will be used to inform classroom practice.
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Tim
You honestly cant be this ignorant. Too bad for you because being a shameless troll is even worse. Standardized tests are not being used to threaten the careers, the reputations, or the livelihoods of the teachers at any elite private school. Therein lies the entire difference. The standardized tests they take are the not the CC aligned traps designed to trick students into failing. No one dares to threaten to shut down Sidwell Friends or Lakeside and replace them with TFA/Charter shams either. You are an embarrassment to your cause and really should consider taking up another hobby. Oh and by the way, Chiara put the word “rigor” in quotes for a reason.
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Oh be still my heart! A test every year for three years stretching over three days? How about testing every year from grades K-12, stretching over fifteen or twenty days? Even if the private school does standardized testing, it certainly does not test the kids as frequently that public schools are forced to test.
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NYS, not only do I think it doesn’t make for much of an argument to play the “Dalton for all! / other people’s kids” card without providing specifics on what happens to the non-brilliant, ELLs, kids with disabilities, and tenure, I also think many commenters have a shaky grasp on what life is like at the uber-elite schools. Think unrelenting academics, $500/hr tutors, and “Race to Nowhere,” not something like a Sudbury school.
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They’ve set the cut off scores for Common Core tests!
Looks like 60% will fail.
“In a move likely to cause political and academic stress in many states, a consortium that is designing assessments for the Common Core State Standards released data Monday projecting that more than half of students will fall short of the marks that connote grade-level skills on its tests of English/language arts and mathematics.”
It’s okay. The adults assure me it’s time to “rip off the band-aid” and introduce these lazy little slackers to the merit system! Just ignore that none of the adults saying this did anything like this in 3rd grade. They were all carefully coddled and encouraged.
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This is actually good news. It will take a beat-down to wake up parents. They will revolt on a national scale in the form of an opt out movement that will render the test score data useless.
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John King is threatening to violate the rights and protections of participants in scientific experiments. He’s giving Pearson unregulated access to children’s test data and using the weight of the law to both circumvent parent permission and punish those who refuse to participate. This behavior is unethical. Do these reformers have NO shame?
Further, he’s either ignorant of methods for establishing test validity or he’s lying. Pilot testing does not “make” a test valid or reliable, that’s the responsibility of the researchers in testing research & development. Researchers use pilot data to refine and correct test content, questions and administration procedures and if the test isn’t valid they don’t use the test until the data show validity. The cost for refining assessments are born by the test developer not the participants. King is setting up a backdoor subsidy to Pearson. The public bears all of the cost of PARCC research & development and Pearson can turn around and sell it back to the states. Is it any wonder the public thinks the entire system is rigged against them?
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All concerned parents – know your rights! Please read this link and act according to your conscience.
http://unitedoptout.com/2014/11/16/urgent-national-update-opt-out-of-all-online-testing-and-online-curriculum-for-under-age-13/
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If I may correct your first sentence as it has a glaring mistake “John King is threatening to violate the rights and protections of participants in PSEUDO-scientific experiments.”
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“. . . if the test isn’t valid they don’t use the test until the data show validity.”
That’s not true. Wilson has proven the COMPLETE INVALIDITY of any and all of these standardized tests and they are still used and even worse the makers contend that they are valid. To understand that COMPLETE INVALIDITY read and comprehend his never refuted nor rebutted “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
By Duane E. Swacker
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Interestingly, in 2013, Ken Wagner — the author of the current memo urging mandated stand-alone field testing — explained why stand-alone field testing data is problematic: “Mr. Wagner said the state would prefer to eliminate stand-alone field tests. The tests can be statistically unreliable, he said, since children are not as motivated if they know the exam has no consequences. But ending the stand-alone tests would be costly, state officials said.” http://www.nytimes.com/…/to-sharpen-student-testing-another…. In an about-face, Mr. Wagner now says this plan will help develop “fair and valid future State tests.” Nothing is given in support of this 180-degree turnaround — and nothing can be.
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Link courtesy of Peter Greene at Curmudgucation; re; important opt out information for any parent concerned about the data mining of their children during on-line testing (including field testing). Know your rights and act accordingly.
http://unitedoptout.com/2014/11/16/urgent-national-update-opt-out-of-all-online-testing-and-online-curriculum-for-under-age-13/
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Duane ~
Dedicated, ethical, credentialed & experienced educators keep going down the same path of professionalism, honesty & humanity.
Given the Corporate-Takeover, the collection of data crunchers, your kids…other people’s children, we know best, and we care about your kids while collecting $M & never backing kff to make another dollar…no matter the harm – our methods are not working and not appropriate when socipaths are endangering children, teachers, parents and the future of our country.
Do we honestly think that Pearson cares about ethics, test validity, reliability or honesty, period? I do not! All about $M.
I used their evaluation instruments for years when evaluating children considered for SpEd services. I now question all their products and motives!
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Sir Michael Barber
Chief Education Advisor, Pearson
Founder of McKinsey’s Global Education Practice
Former Head of the UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Delivery Unit
Sir Barber is a leading authority on education systems and education reform. He recently joined Pearson as Chief Education Advisor, leading Pearson’s worldwide programme of research into education policy and efficacy, advising on and supporting the development of products and services that build on the research findings, and playing a particular role in Pearson’s strategy for education in the poorest sectors of the world, particularly in fast-growing developing economies. Prior to Pearson, he was a Partner at McKinsey & Company and Head of McKinsey’s global education practice. Sir Barber previously served the UK government as Head of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (from 2001-2005) and as Chief Adviser to the Secretary of State for Education on School Standards (from 1997-2001).
“Deliverology requires…urgency to accomplish goals, ensure irreversible transformation of structure, culture, and results….” -Sir Michael Barber
Anyone who spent four years advising Tony Blair should be banned from having any influence on programs for children. Tony Blair was one of the high officials who knew Jimmy Savile was a pedophile and allowed him to continue without consequence. Tony Blair should be in jail and people closely associated with him should reconsider touting that association on a resume.
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Call it piloting, field testing or whatever: it’s research.
Ask any graduate student how hard it is to get through the process.
Free research, data files on students, patental obliviousness and compliance. A reformers dream.
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