Valerie Strauss has a fascinating column about the scoring of the Smarter Balanced assessment. It appears that the achievement levels mirror the levels on NAEP. Understanding the scoring process is not easy. Apparently only the students in the top two levels will be considered “college-ready,” as befits a very rigorous curriculum. This means that less than half of the 11th grade students will be on track to go to college. In terms of mathematics, only one-third will be college-ready. The scoring ends with the rather ominous statement that Smarter Balance has not yet figured out a scoring guide for “career readiness.” Since there is so little in the Common Core that is related to career readiness, this is understandable. Very likely, the students who are involved in career and technical education will be in the lower bands and won’t be eligible to go to college.
I served on the NAEP governing board for seven years. NAEP Proficient is not grade level. It represents a very high level of achievement; in my view, NAEP proficient is an A or A-. To expect almost all students to reach NAEP Proficient is totally unrealistic. The only state in the nation where as much as 50% of students have reached NAEP Proficient is Massachusetts. The achievement levels were set in 1992 and are periodically revised. They are set by panels of judges who make estimates about what students should know and be able to do; they are arbitrary. Many scholars have contested their validity, as well as the validity of the standard-setting method, over the years.
If NAEP Proficient is used by PARCC and Smarter Balanced as a standard for graduation, most of our students will not graduate high school.
At some point, someone will have to admit that the Common Core and the tests are so “rigorous” that the students who succeed are being prepared for elite universities, not for state universities, and not for career readiness.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Even more discouraging is that Arne wants to use NAEP to judge special education students with funding in the balance. This all is so wildly inappropriate.
That is inappropriate, but it is possible for many of them, it may take a lot of work from faculty and extra years for students to be able to pass, but wouldn’t that benefit them? All testing is bogus it isn’t prepping for anything besides testing.
But for the most common categories of learning disability and intellectual disability, when a student is able to pass grade level exams they are legally required to be exited from special education rosters – meaning they do not qualify for special services and do not count in statistics gathered re: special education outcomes. It is Catch-22 that people must understand to see how misinformed Arne Duncan’s statements are.
Becca, what state does this occur? One goal of providing special education services is so students with learning disabilities can learn (and demonstrate) their learning in grade level courses. There are a small number of twice exceptional students who may be both learning disabled and gifted who excel in their coursework and exams, with appropriate services provided.
From federal IDEA: “The group described in 34 CFR 300.306 may determine that a child has a specific learning disability, as defined in 34 CFR 300.8(c)(10), if:
The child does not achieve adequately for the child’s age or to meet State-approved grade-level standards in one or more of the following areas, when provided with learning experiences and instruction appropriate for the child’s age or State-approved grade–level standards…” and can be further explored at dea.ed.gov/explore/view/p/,root,dynamic,TopicalBrief,23, Instructions for exiting students from special education services state “Most children are exited from all special education services under three circumstances.
First is when the IEP team determines that the child is no longer a child with a disability
or no longer needs services in order to make progress in the general education
curriculum.” and can be explored at http://www.usd333.com/pages/uploaded_files/CH9%20Exiting%20a%20Child%20from%20All%20Special%20Education%20Services.pdf
Becca is right. The a student with a disability is only legible for services if the disability results has a negative educational impact. We routinely dismiss students initially found eligible for services as a student with a reading disabilty once they are reading grade level. They no longer need services. By definition disabled students can only qualify if their disability results in a negative educational impact. Though obviously a student can be grade level or gifted in math but needing specialized instruction reading. A student can have a high IQ but still need specialized instruction in one or more subject areas.
The issue is whether the student needs specialized instruction in some recognizable educational domain. If they only need accommodations they may qualify for a 504 plan. But the point is that Arne Duncan is either an idiot himself or believes the rest of us are idiots. You can’t be proficient in every subject and still qualify for special education services.
The key phrase is “or no longer needs services in order to make progress in the general education
curriculum.”
If on reevaluation of a student with a specific learning disability, the IEP team finds that the student is making grade level progress in the general education setting with reasonable supports that can be provided in general education, then team would decide to exit the student. The independence of the students in using reasonable supports can be a factor in the decision. If the IEP team finds that the student is making grade level progress in the general education setting but still needs specially designed supports including but not limited to pre-teaching, explicit strategy instruction, and self-advocacy training the team would decide to continue services.
This would be the approach under Wisconsin’s SLD guidelines. Interpretation of IDEA varies across states.
RTI is intended to provide general education (not sp.ed.) supports for the students who struggle but can make progress with support. It makes qualifying for and keeping special education supports much more difficult, so only those students who have persistently low achievement after intensive RTI support will qualify as learning disabled. I think this is a great reform, but will bring down overall student achievement scores for those with disabilities. Watch out if you are trying to hold grade-level achievers on your rosters – it may look like gaming the system.
Becca, completely agree about RtI and we are seeing a reduction in the number of students identified with disabilities as a result. Just 9.3% of out students have IEP’s today, down from 11.7% four years ago.
Our differing views on when it is appropriate for grade level achieving students to continue to receive special education services may be a result of different state guidelines.
You may be right. I think there is variation in the way exits are handled from county to county as well.
extra years by a student? you want 19 and 20 year old hanging in school with new 14 year old freshmen? there has to be a better way.
And this two track system based upon scores? wow. What if a student blossoms later, a a couple years down the road; is that considered? Or if a student just happens to be a good test taker and has a good day that particular day so their score looks quite adequate for the “elite” college system, but we find they cannot handle the work load with whatever reason they provide, then what?
This was for mentally challenged students, so yes, if it takes them to be 30 in a public education environment to be able to graduate high school. It will better prepare them to possibly enter the work force and it provides support to the family while they are in school. A good test taker? You mean they are intelligent and do not enjoy school work or are not interested in the subject matter, than they were not meant for school, their are other routes to financial success than going to school.
Students who score 1 & 2 have failed? So why is NYSED calling and letting the community think that 2’s are “partially proficient?” You can’t have it both ways state ed. Make up your mind.
The Smarter Balanced assessments are not pass/fail end course exams. Nowhere does Smarter Balanced describe a performance level as failing. If I am wrong, I would appreciate it if someone could provide evidence of that.
The achievement levels are aligned with NAEP for both PARCC and Smarter Balanced. In NY state, where Common Core tests have been administered twice, the state education department used “proficient” as the passing mark. That’s why 70% “failed.”
Diane, Wisconsin realigned its proficiency levels on the state WKCE assessment to the NAEP two years ago. Wisconsin districts are required to have a promotion policy that uses the state assessment levels, and also local criteria so the state assessment is not high stakes for students. Our district revised our policy so that basic is the automatic passing level before we consider local criteria.
Smarter Balanced is not designed to be used as a pass/fail assessment, so it falls to districts to decide whether they want to use the data that way, subject to any state requirement. To be clear, I feel states should let districts control their local promotion criteria with out mandating specific levels on a standardized assessment.
Interesting discussion. But doesn’t all of this defeat the major claim that the CC will provide national standards keeping everyone on the same page in math and ELA. Anyone with any sense knew this was an impossible goal. Despite their best efforts, and trillions of dollars spent, nothing is all that standardized after all.
NY Teacher, I agree. I like the idea of good multi-state standards because it allows for broader conversations about instruction, materials, and professional development, especially for small and medium sized states. Otherwise, too much of the agenda is set by the decisions of big states. But the idea of rigid month-by-month (or tighter) standardization is unrealistic and inappropriate.
Success Academy kids did OK
Simply: Success students are test prepped. The truth was exposed when none of their graduating middle school students passes the entrance exams to specialized high schools. Public school students did.
This post discusses the Smarter Balance assessments. NY students took the Pearson math and ELA tests (not PARCC) that were aligned with CC standards. After two straight years of a 70% failure rate, NYSED decided that rather than move the goal posts a little closer, that they would simply call the near misses, “almost close enough”. This was an obvious an attempt to stop the wildfire of parent outrage (esp on long Island and in Westchester) produced by these completely bogus test scores.
Also so districts would not have the burden of hiring more AIS teachers, correct? Partially proficient for 2’s? I don’t think so. Tell it like it is. Is it the teachers? The students? Or are the tests flawed? I do know the tests are developmentally inappropriate. But as long as NYSED keeps changing the cut score, it will look as if there has been some gain. So sad. Our kids are more than a test score, and so are our teachers.
I think it is reasonable for parents to be outraged. When I took a testing and measurement course many years ago, I was told that my results should look like a bell shaped curve or I HAD FAILED. 70% failure is ridiculous. This test should be challenged for validity.
Parents should be outraged on many levels:
– Invalid, inflated failure rates
– Narrowed curriculum
– Lost educational opportunities
– Taxpayer money diverted for this snake oil
– Damaging the psyche of innocent children
– Circumvention of the democratic process
Fewer students graduating means more students who need to take the GED, now also owned by Pearson. Either way, they make money. Diabolical, really.
That’s exactly what I was thinking. Though the new Pearson GED has been disastrous here in WA State; not sure how long it will last.
The education establishment or “education reform” movement or “new civil rights movement of our time” is very clear about what it wants.
One of their catchiest slogans, used as a bludgeon against their critics, was and is “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
Given how it is used against teachers and public schools, it is nothing more than a smear, sneer and jeer.
I have proposed a variation on their slur of choice that accurately sums up their deeds even if they don’t like to use words to describe it so: “the hard bigotry of mandated failure.”
Or for those shills and trolls that can’t seem to get over the numerical chimeras and deceptive mirages of the scores generated by high-stakes standardized tests, let me put it in plain English so you can’t misunderstand—
Sucker punch. And they’re doing it in plain sight. And they’re proud of sucker punching us.
That’s the way bullies are. That’s what they do. The best way to push back against their casual and cowardly cruelty—
Op out.
😎
KrazyTA,
The goal is to lower the high school graduation rate thereby restricting access to a college education. The proletariat be damned!
How about remedying the NIGHTMARE college professors have been facing with students admitted into college that have no clue about how to write a decent paper or even think simple tasks through by themselves not to talk about thinking critically to come up with logical thoughts of their own?
The Common Core reformers have a different definition of “critical thinking” than the one most people have in mind. It is not about using reason and analysis.
“Self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinking [that] entails effective communication and problem solving abilities and a commitment to overcome our native egocentrism and sociocentrism.”
A critical thinker tries to avoid “prejudices, distortions, uncritically accepted social rules and taboos, self-interest, and vested interest.”
It is all about race and gender. American exceptional-ism with its emphasis on creative innovation as the basis for productivity is completely denied. Students are taught to be ashamed of their ancestors including the Founding Fathers. The AP History framework is a sham.
This is the kind of confusing doublespeak that masquerades for rigorous learning. The Common Core is not content rich. The standards are an “empty skill set” as Sandra Stotsky would say. It is about 21st Century skills such as collaboration, persistence, and leadership which will be measured by affective means. Biometrics, etc. It is a sick system that Bill Gates and Marc Tucker have in mind. Better nip it in the bud before the full bloom of outcome based education is upon us.
I know. I am an adjunct at a community college. Some nights the only one who has done the reading is me.
So, if you want students to be able to write papers,
Cornelius, or to think through projects, why not have them write papers and think through projects instead of having them spend their entire K-12 careers doing mind-numbing test prep on CCSS skills in preparation for multiple choice and EBSR questions on the new standardized tests? You seem to have swallowed hook, line, and sinker the utter nonsense that these amateurish “standards” and the new tests require more and better thinking. The new ELA “standards” are a mashup of previously existing state standards with some New Critical fairy dust sprinkled over them.
The CCSS in ELA can most charitably be described as a compendium of rules derived from ignorant folk theories about the fields of study covered–reading, writing, literature, grammar, speaking and listening, thinking, research, etc. They are common in the sense of being vulgar, uneducated, base. They are an almost entirely content-free, vague, random, and wildly prescientific mashup of previously existing standards. They were not vetted by the research community. They were thrown together overnight by amateurs who had
a. no knowledge whatsoever of what we have learned in the past fifty years about how students acquire the grammar and vocabulary of a language;
b. no familiarity with enormously rich, varied, and productive approaches that have been developed through the centuries for the teaching of writing; and
c. almost no familiarity with the enormously varied approaches to literature developed over the past 150 years (beyond a debased and puerile version of New Criticism–what I call New Criticism for Dummies, or New Criticism Lite).
At the very least, Coleman and company should have been forced to read a few introductory surveys–say, Radford’s Minimalist Syntax, Tom Roeper’s The Prism of Grammar, and George Miller’s The Science of Words (on language and its acquisition); Davis’s The Two Keys (on reading instruction); Erica Lindemann’s A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers (on approaches to writing instruction); Paul Frye’s Theory of Literature (on approaches to literature); and E.D. Hirsch, Jr’s Validity in Interpretation (for its invaluable distinction between meaning as intent and meaning as significance)–so that they could have had a eunuch’s shadow of a clue what they were talking about.
The CCSS in ELA are most notable for what they leave out–for their lacunae–and for the brilliant pedagogical possibilities that they preclude. And therein lies the greatest tragedy in all this–that the CCSS in ELA stop all progress cold and undo most of the progress that we’ve made in ELA pedagogy.
CCSS was part of a business plan. Some folks who want to sell educational software and computers and who want to reduce the units costs of their educational products by making the transition to digital needed a single set of national standards to key their software to in order to achieve monopolistic economies of scale, so they paid to have this crap created overnight by amateurs. And then they paid for a lot of propaganda. What’s most shocking is that the authors of the CCSS in ELA have not been hooted off the national stage.
Bob, just reading how you write and process things tells me you are a very smart and awesome teacher (I can picture being a student in your class) and can look at any standards created or that will be created and KNOW exactly what you need to do to prepare your students. MANY teachers and administrators cannot do that and are clueless and cannot figure out what they need to do to implement any set of new standards. They are afraid of losing their jobs because they are afraid of being evaluated over a set of new standards they don’t understand and are afraid of. Give 100 different bakers the exact same recipe to bake a wedding cake, are you going to get 100 wedding cakes that are EXACTLY the same? The answer is NO but you can bet that most if not all of the wedding cakes will be sweet, edible and please palates of those who eventually eat them. The loud noise over CCSS appears to be drowning out and important issue … bad teachers and administrators in the system that are clueless and are just collecting a paycheck. Attached to that are reformation of archaic education codes in the different states that are being utilized by school districts and teachers’ unions to play the “negotiating game.” All many good teachers want to do is TEACH and what many good students want to do is LEARN … this is not rocket science! The NOISE is too much. Let’s all take a chill pill and teach with deep passion imparting knowledge and great love for our students’ future regardless of what standards we are tasked with … and the great Universe or Creator out their will do the rest for us. Oh, I know that we have to fight as teachers to keep out jobs and livelihoods and ensure that we have due process, better working conditions, etc., etc., BUT those issues are being drowned out right now by this particular debate on new standards and new testing.
Thank you, Cornelius. But, alas, teachers are being micromanaged for compliance with these “standards.” Those chill pills would have to be distributed to a great many district administrators who are enforcing the use of scripted CCSS lessons.
Kindly excuse my few typos that I am catching after submitting!
Cornelius,
Are we moving on to the bad teacher rhetoric? I am a bad teacher in a bad school in a bad district. I have better things to do than attempt to educate you.
Unless CTE teachers are doing CTE students the disservice of dumbing down curriculum, we should see the CTE students do as well if not better on these tests as high achieving students because CTE courses teach students to be problem solvers, think out side the box and to be able to see that there is more than one correct answer to a problem. I am not a proponent of standardized testing but your post makes it seem like CTE students have a lower intelligence that other students which is not the case, they just think about things differently.
Leigh,
I don’t think CTE students are less intelligent than other students. But standardized tests punish those who think differently. So those who are divergent thinkers will fail.
This is such an important point. I work with so called struggling readers. When I examine their test reponses and ask them to tell me how they arrived at their answers, I am amazed at the logic and strategies they used to arrive at the “wrong” answers. These are the students who, unequivocally, expose the flaws inherent in all tests, especially standardized tests. This testing craze marginalizes the intelligence of all students.
I wonder it the strengths of students and teachers in Career and Technical Education (CTE) can be brought out in the CCSS tests. I just spent the better part of the day looking for any credible research about career readiness and the CCSS.
The research bearing on careers in conjunction with the CCSS is meager and dates back to the 1990s, with career and college ready clearly a theme by 2001–before the economy tanked and well before the biggie in 2008. For example, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and Occupational Handbooks were cited to justify some of the claims and benchmarks in the American Diploma Project 2001-2004 which morphed into the CCSS. Also the National Education Longitudinal Survey (NELS-88) to look at high school courses taken, occupations of those students later in life and so on. The researchers seemed to be determned to make taking Algebra 2 as a criterion for college and career readiness.
“Career readiness” fans of the CCSS have been shortsighted. Early on, they ignored the basic orientations to work that employers seek (show up, pay attention, teamwork to solve problems, etc) and completely ignored the occupational clusters and trends that CTE teachers are aware of.
In 2001 when the college-career mantra was being propgated, the “in” occupations–high growth, high wages–were computer and information technology–the hope of the future, especially in the light of big losses in manufacturing jobs. The promoters of the college and career mantra ignored the recession in 2001 and the spillover from 9/11. Promoters of the CCSS have been totally silent about the coincidental tanking of the economy in 2008, just with the first drafts of the CCSS were being prepared for review in 2009, then published in 2010.
So what about careers now and in the future? The high growth occupations are no longer in computers and information technology. The occupations with the fastest growth between 2012 and 2022 are services and industries related to healthcare. The next sector is construction, but in both of these, the growth is projected to be greater for low-wage aides and assistants than professional or workers in skilled trades. For most of these workers, the entry path is on-the-job training or a short-term certification program.
The CCSS and tests based on them are back-mapped from the concept of having all students COMPLETE a freshman year in college with no remedial instruction during that first year. The standards are not really about entry into college or a career trainging program. This criterion of successful completion is why some of the grade 9-10 ELA standards and examples are lifted straight from assignments in freshman courses. Just shove that content down, and keep back-mapping to Kindergarten. That way kids will be ready. They will have completed college work before graduating from high school…a bit like everybody starting AP courses in in grades 9 and 10.
That is/was the grand theory of action. It has no merit…unless you think education is the same as training where backmapping–reverse engineering– is common and step-by-step learning progressions are perfected for mastery of each step.
The arrogance and stupidity of thinking that kindergardeners should be judged by college and career readiness is just unbelievable….but federal policy has been cheered on by unthinking politicians on both sides of the aisle and hardwired into state and district policies. The undoing of this nonsense will take some time and a lot of courage.
The remnant of the careers part of the CCSS is in the ELA focus on close reading of informational text (especially following directions in tech manuals ) and in math, and the requirement to take tests by key-boarding and mousing around. I took the sample grade 3 ELA test from PARCC and went bonkers with the split screen for reading text (left) and questions (right) and getting my scrolling so the text and the test questions were aligned.
As for cut scores on these tests, PARCC and SMARTER have done a dance and the jig is up. The CCSS initiative has been contrived to maintain the pretense of not being a giant step toward a nationalized system of standards, assessments, and discipline-specific instruction with curriculum materials pre-approved by national panels of “raters” using criteria and process NOT generated by teachers. That pretense will be difficult to maintain much longer.
Here is the evidence that the two consortia were seeking “comparability” in their tests and cut scores from the get go.
PARCC will “coordinate with the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium on… artificial intelligence scoring, setting achievement levels, and anchoring high school assessments in the knowledge and skills students need to be prepared for post-secondary education and careers” (PARCC, 2010, December, p. 3).
Similarly, the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) asserts: “SBAC and PARCC are strongly committed to ensuring comparability between their assessments…[including] collaborative standard setting that will facilitate valid comparisons of achievement levels (cut scores) in each consortium’s summative test…” (SMARTER, 2011, p. 31).
Now we know that the comparability and coordination in these statements must be made public. So the comparable cut scores are being rationalized by looking at NAEP scoring — a system that is NOT comparable, as Diane knows well, and as I do from work on the art/music NAEP ssessments in the early 1970s.
The PARCC and SMARTER “experts” in testing are determined to fail as many kids as possible and churn up the crisis rhetoric about failing our children and our nation.. and…we need more tests, .on and on. The tipping point on this nonsense cannot be far away.
Sources. SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium. (2011, January 6). Supplemental funding budget narrative submitted to the U.S. Department of Education. p. 31. Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. (2010, December 23). Proposal for supplemental race to the top assessment award.
I have been on a state school board since 2003, and your comments make more sense than anything I have heard from the State DOE or the USDOE.. I hope to read more posts by you. Thanks to Diane Ravitch and Valerie Strauss for getting this topic rolling.
Laura, you said, “The occupations with the fastest growth between 2012 and 2022 are services and industries related to healthcare.” That is a very significant fact and the truth is that service and healthcare industries will need workers than can think critically. CCSS as I see it offers a solution in that teachers will no longer teach to the test and students will now be able to show what they know by explaining HOW they arrived at their answers. Critical thinking skills are necessary and foundational skills that service and healthcare industry workers utilize EVERYDAY because they are constantly problem solving. Imagine arriving at a restaurant and you ask “what’s on the menu?” and you meet with an “I don’t know.” Or arrive at a doctor’s appointment and healthcare worker is unable to explain to you how and why you need to have the different blood tests done.That is what is bound to happen if PARCC and SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium continue to be MISUNDERSTOOD and MISINTERPRETED …. 70% failure rate in the first wave of testing … SO WHAT? That was bound to happen because the 70% of students that failed had not been learning much all along and have passed in the past through guessing on MCQs or other means. Let’s get real hear and stop churning up ridiculous scenarios and innuendos about CCSS and the PARCC and SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium tests.
Common Core is tied to the testing. It creates a national market for Pearson, Microsoft, Amplify.
Cornelius: The idea that the CCSS tests are superior to the previous standardized tests is false. Utah’s CCSS tests, which began this last spring, are inherently the same as the previous tests. They now just try to confuse the students by adding in extraneous details and keyboarding skills. The essay portions of the tests are graded by computer. As long as the students use really long (and often run-on) sentences and large words, it doesn’t really matter if the essay even makes sense. AND, as long as the test scores matter for evaluation, teaching to the test is GOING to happen. I have just learned that my evaluation will be partially based on the ELA test. I teach history and geography, and yet my evaluation will be based on a subject I don’t teach.
It seems to me that Corneilius is like a lot of college teachers: he thinks K-12 just needs to teach thinking and problem solving skills and therefore Common Core sounds like a good, intuitive plan. What he doesn’t realize is that kids HAVE thinking and problem solving skills; the problem he sees is that the SCOPE of their skills is very limited –e.g. to solving Instagram problems. What will expand that scope? Knowledge –the teaching of which has taken a big hit since NCLB. Common Core threatens to keep us on that anti-knowledge track. In this case, college teachers, the intuitive answer is not the correct answer.
It may be hour, but, for the life of me, I have no idea what a CTE student is.
Sorry, I didn’t read far enough. Thank you, Laura.
OPT OUT! If more would just OPT OUT, what are the yahoos going to do? Put us all in FOR PROFIT jails? Then who would be the oligarcy’s servants?
I agree. Opt out, and refuse to play the game. If enough people do it, maybe they will get the message. It’s a form of peaceful protest.
Setting scores that are designed to fail such a high percentage of students so profiteers can then say “see the schools are failing to educate your children, you should try our charters instead. Pay no attention to the rejected SPED and ELL students, pay no attention to the expulsion rate increases, pay no attention to the unqualified TFA grads and most of all pay no attention to our administrative services fees and lack of extra curricular activities. You shouldn’t want for more than just rote drill and kill direct instruction because hey that’s all we can afford while we cut taxes for our corporate masters and really what did you get out of sports and band and glee club when you were in school anyway.”
The Atlanta teacher trial is continuing, and it’s as much a trial of test-based school management as it is a trial about cheating:
“One of the governor’s former special investigators on Monday leveled stinging criticism on the Atlanta Public Schools system, saying unrealistic test targets installed by former Superintendent Beverly Hall caused the cheating scandal.
Bob Wilson, one of three special investigators who uncovered cheating throughout APS, made note of both the targets and Hall’s threat to oust principals whose schools failed to meet the goals.
“In the end, I don’t think it had anything to do with children,” Wilson testified as a prosecution witness during the test-cheating trial. “… It had to do with image.”
Ed reformers should look at what happened in Atlanta and learn from it. While it is true that people shouldn’t cheat, it is ALSO true that the insane focus on unrealistic test scores is a LOUSY way to run a school.
That’s not going to happen, though. Instead ed reformers are going to take the wrong lesson from Atlanta and focus on test security. The problem isn’t security. The problem is creating a fear-driven culture that prizes test scores above all else.
This is a horrible way to run schools. Not only would I not have wanted to work in one of the test-obsessed schools in Atlanta, I would not want my children in one. This had to be grim and miserable and fear-filled for everyone in that school, ESPECIALLY children.
http://www.myajc.com/news/news/local/targets-blamed-for-atlanta-public-schools-test-che/nh89C/#4f52aeef.3699274.735556
Chiara –
Test security is a new growth industry, but don’t worry, the DOE is on it:
Click to access 2013454.pdf
footnote #45 sums up the problem well:
“Mr. Wilson stated that ‘up until fifteen years ago, the tests were all about the students.’ As a result, although cheating did occur, it was ‘almost always’ by students cheating, not cheating committed by adults. That ‘equation’ shifted when, according to Mr. Wilson, under No Child Left Behind (P.L. 107-110), the test ‘became more about the teachers and the schools and the principals than it did about the students.’ This shift explains the need for professional investigators in the school context because we are no longer ‘talking about adults to students,’ but about ‘adults to adults that requires real investigation’.”
Does anyone think it’s ironic that Beverly Hall was a National Superintendent of the Year before she fell from grace? And her predecessor replaced Pearson’s Sir Michael Barber as head of US Ed Delivery Institute, which had a huge role in both ADP (American Diploma Project) and the CCSSI.
Prior to Atlanta, Beverly Hall was in Newark.
Disappointed when I also see IRA’s “Reading Today,” saying to “Shift the Focus-How to Cut the Noise about Common Core.” What happened to their high stakes testing mission statement? Cut the noise? Not when it is jeopardizing valued teaching for our youth. Keep the noise going and make all listen.
Unfortunately, everywhere we look our professional organizations appear to have been bought off. They certainly are doing little critical thinking. Given the obvious shortcomings of CCSS, there is plenty of room for debate. I have not seen it. Have other professions had their own professional organizations so effectively muzzled?
Are the PARCC test scores scaled? Are the test results the raw score or scaled score? If so, what datapoints are used to scale it with?
Considering:
“So what does a test measure (sic) in our world? It measures (sic) what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures (sic). 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.”
To understand read and comprehend:
“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
I am always amazed at the attacks on Common Core and the tests associated with it. FINALLY, standards and testing that facilitate critical thinking arrives and everybody is up in arms. The multiple choice questions high stakes testing of year past (despite overwhelming agreement that such tests are worthless) in which students could guess and pass to gain admissions to college appears to still be more desirable NOW that the “Common Core and the tests” are truly indicating what everyone has either suspected or known all along … that many American students are not learning in K -12 and that many of those that gain admissions to universities and colleges are NOT equipped with the foundational education to handle authentic academic pursuits in those higher institutions. The next most important pursuit for many academically deficient or unprepared college student is the “partying” default university/college pursuit. Let’s try Common Core (standards and testing) for the next ten years while identifying those things that need to me fixed and fixing them … collect authentic data about the first crop of university/college graduates of the Common Core Era and then start debating all these all these ad hominem arguments!
Let’s not waste any more time on Common Core ELA Standards Cornelius.
As I mentioned above, Cornelius, the new CCSS tests show no such thing. Kids are being asked to do things far beyond their abilities. I don’t see how that “proves” that kids are not being educated. The CCSS tests are just as worthless as the old ones, and are double or triple the length of the old tests, meaning that, at my school, students will be testing from January until the end of the year. How does testing kids so much that there is no time for instruction help students?
On Developing Curricula in the Age of the Thought Police
Posted on April 10, 2014
“The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873)
” (1951)
One of the nasty, generally unremarked features of the new national “standards” in ELA, and of the state “standards” that preceded them, isthat they draw boundaries within the vast design space of possible curricula and ped gogy and say, “What is within these boundaries you may teach, and what is outside you may not.” And in so doing, they rule out almost all the good stuff–great existing material, or curricula, and approaches, or pedagogy, incompatible with Lord Coleman’s list. And, more importantly, they preclude all material and approaches that might be developed in the future that happen to be incompatible with that list.
I will give a single example to illustrate the general principle, but one could do the same for most of the other “standards” on the bullet list.
At several grade levels in the CCC$$ for ELA, there is a literature standard that reads, in part, that the student is to be able to explain “how figurative language affects mood and tone.”
Now, given a topic as rich as figurative language is, doesn’t that “standard” strike you as oddly constricted, or narrow, and even immature? It does me. Why effects of figurative language “on mood and tone” in particular? Why should we be having students think and write about effects of figurative language on the mood and tone of selection after selection in lesson after interminable lesson, year after year? Why not treat any of the thousands of other topics we might consider under the general heading of figurative language?
As an alternative to that “standard,” let’s consider just one topic related to one variety of figurative language. The variety we shall consider is metaphor, and the topic is conceptual framing. Thinkers as diverse as Emerson, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Borges, Sapir, Whorf, Burke, Hirsch, Derrida, Lakoff, and Kovecses (one could list many others) have all written, to various ends, about how metaphor is one of the fundamental means by which we understand the world. Our ways of conceptualizing the world are to a large extent metaphorical.
Language is absolutely shot through with metaphor. And most of the metaphors we use we use unconsciously. They are sometimes called “dead” metaphors.
If you think carefully about the preceding paragraph, you will discover that it is heavily (that’s a metaphor) dependent (that’s another) upon metaphorical conceptual framing. The word Let’s depends upon a conceptual frame of a coming together of you, the reader, and me, the writer–a frame that equates consideration of a topic with physical meeting. Topic, of course, comes from the Greek topos, or “place.” Another metaphor. The word ends employs a conceptual frame in which a process of thought is treated as a journey or as a physical object with a beginning part, a middle part, and an end part. The word figurative belongs to a large class of metaphors that describe statements and thoughts as shapes (e.g., “The argument centered on Eliot’s last poems”). The words fundamental and understand relate to a conceptual framing of ideas as parts of structures–ground on which to stand or overarching shelter. The metaphorical frame of shot through is clear enough: ideas are projectiles. And conceptual framing and dead metaphor are, of course, examples of themselves. The phrases are self-describing. They apply to themselves. In the argot of analytical philosophers, they are autological terms.
Emerson, in the essay “Language,” Chapter 4 of his book Nature (1836), makes the claim that all abstract thinking has its roots in the concrete, is at root metaphorical. He gives the examples of the word right, as in “the right way,” having the literal meaning of being on a straight path, of spirit being derived from wind, and transgression being derived from crossing a line. So common is such metaphorical conceptual framing that Nietzsche, in his influential, in-your-face early essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873), speaks disparagingly of such unexamined use of such inherited, “prefab” metaphorical concept frames as the essential, or defining, human activity! Heidegger, in the essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1951) derives I am from dwelling on Earth, making our expression of our very existence metaphorical in origin:
“Bauen originally means to dwell. Where the word bauen still speaks in its original sense it also says how far the essence of dwelling reaches. That is, bauen, buan, bhu, beo are our word bin in the versions: ich bin, I am, du bist, you are, the imperative form bis, be. What then does ich bin mean? The old word bauen, to which the bin belongs, answers: ich bin, du bist mean I dwell, you dwell. The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is buan, dwelling. To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell.”
Heidegger’s etymologies are much disputed, but the wisdom of his general approach is indisputable.
Lakoff and Kovecses have created extensive but by no means exhaustive catalogs of metaphorical conceptual frames.
Example: debate = war:
He won the argument.
Your claims are indefensible.
He shot down all my arguments.
Her criticisms were right on target.
If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out.
Example: achievement = harvesting:
She reaped her rewards. What a plum job!
By your fruits you will be known.
That market is ripe for the picking.
In short, metaphor does a lot of heavy lifting in our language and thought, and limiting ourselves, as teachers, to having students explain, year after year, for selection after selection, how the use of figurative language affects mood and tone is like reducing the study of the Civil War to consideration of the relative sizes of Union and Rebel cannonballs.
Suppose that a curriculum developer were to suggest to an educational publisher, today, that there should be, in a tenth-grade literature program, a unit or a part of a unit dealing with
common metaphorical frames in literature (cycles of seasons = the life cycle; a journey = learning, personal change);
how metaphors work, structurally (their parts and their mapping to the world);
how they shape thought, and the extent to which they do (note: we must reject any contention that metaphor renders certain perceptions or conceptions necessary or impossible–any strong version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis; but a weak version certainly holds, often with dramatic effect–consider the egregious metaphor of “the little woman” used by U.S. husbands in the 1950s to refer to their wives);
how most metaphors are dead ones–are unconsciously employed, unexamined, common linguistic inheritances; and
how dead metaphors that constrain thought within preconceived patterns often have to be unlearned if progress in thinking is to be made (consider, for example, how the bad metaphor of “using up energy and becoming tired during work” shaped Aristotelian mechanics and had to unlearned by Galileo and Newton).
Such a unit on metaphor as conceptual framing–often inherited, unexamined, culture-shaping conceptual framing–could be extraordinarily valuable and interesting. It could give kids tools of ENORMOUS POWER that even many professional writers and critics don’t have. And those tools would have applicability far, far beyond the classroom. Critique of conceptual framing (itself a metaphor, remember) is a powerful (another metaphor) lever (yet another) for thinking generally. Dan Dennett has suggested that use of such heuristics, such levers, such intuition pumps, as he calls them, likely accounts for the Flynn Effect–the remarkable average continuous increase in IQ over the past century. Dennett’s casual observation should be taken very seriously, I think, by educators–such is the fertility of his mind.
Suppose that I suggested to a K-12 educational publisher, today, that we do a unit on metaphor as conceptual framing, or even a single lesson or “special feature” (in the argot of the educational publishing trade), on the topic. Here’s what the publisher would tell me: “No. You can’t do that. The ‘standards’ [sic] say that you must concentrate on how figurative language affects mood or tone in literary works.”
In comparison, of course, the “higher standard” is, well, not higher (note the metaphor: correct is up/false is down). The “higher standard” is hackneyed and obvious and something teachers have done pretty much unthinkingly for eons, and it’s a LOT LESS interesting and powerful and important than is the alternative (or addition) that I’ve recommended. What we are told to concentrate on in the standards reads, to me, like what might be suggested by an amateur who really doesn’t know much about figurative language and how it works.
And so it is with standard after standard. We find in these “higher standards,” again and again, received, hackneyed notions. Even worse, the mediocre, the common, pushes out the uncommon and valuable: exciting alternatives are, a priori, ruled out. They are not important. They will not be on the test.
Obviously, the alternative that I outlined above is just one of many possible approaches that one could take to this one topic from this one “standard”–one of many ruled out because we have been told that we must do what the “standard” says and not any of a thousand other things that never occurred to Lord Coleman.
Of course, a unit on metaphor as conceptual framing would be in line with the state of the art of research into the cognitive science of thinking and language. Such conceptual framing is fundamental to the thinking via natural prototypes (as opposed to Aristotelian natural kinds) that we actually do. And being aware of what we do, there, is extremely powerful and enriching, to one’s reading, one’s writing, and one’s thinking generally. Knowing about conceptual frames facilitates unlearning, which is the most powerful kind of learning there is.
But no. As an author of curricula for K-12 students, I am not allowed to think about such matters now. Lord Coleman has done my thinking for me and for all of us, and we shall have new thinking when the CCSSO reconvenes its Politburo in five years or so to issue its next bullet list. If we want changes in these “standards,” we shall have to await future orders from the Commoners’ Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth, appointed (by divine right?) the “deciders” for the rest of us.
And so it is by such means as I have described above that these “standards” typically limit the possibilities for pedagogical and curricular innovation. We are to limit ourselves to the backward, received, unimaginative, uninformed, often prescientific ideas of the Philistines who put together these “standards” based on the lowest- common-denominator groupthink of the previously existing state “standards.”
I’m not happy about that. Could you tell? How did my use of figurative language in this piece affect my tone and your mood?
And who cares? Wouldn’t you much rather engage what I had to say? to agree or disagree and tell me why? I thought so.
P.S. If you wish to respond to this piece, please make sure that your response is a five-paragraph theme on how my use of figurative language in the piece affects its tone or mood, and please give at least three pieces of evidence from the piece to substantiate your claims. Do not under any circumstances address what I had to say. That would be outside the parameters for response that I have set here.
See what I mean? The Coleman approach leads to completely unnatural, inauthentic Instawriting, InstaReading, and InstaThinking instead of actual, normal engagement with texts–with what writers actually have to say. But precisely the sort of directions I just gave for your response are being repeated in text after text after text, on test after test after test, because of the CC$$ in ELA. And if that’s not completely wacko, I don’t know what is.
“Perhaps universal history is the history of a few metaphors.”
–Jorge Luis Borges, “Pascal’s Sphere” (1951)
Cornelius, I agree that K-12 is not providing the foundation, but of what should that foundation consist? In the old days and in many other countries, that foundation is knowledge. Knowledge of chemistry makes you a good thinker about chemistry; same with other disciplines. The problem is that we’ve been trying to bypass the teaching of knowledge to go directly to all-purpose skills (in reading, writing, thinking, problem-solving). You college teachers are seeing the fruits of that approach: not just ignorance, but lack of the very skills K-12 schools have devoted themselves to. Common Core is doubling down on that failed approach. Read E.D. Hirsch’s The Knowledge Deficit and you will understand that building critical thinkers is not as straightforward as you think it is. In fact, ill-informed demands to teach critical thinking are, ironically, leading to curricula that stymie the development of critical thinking.
It grieves me that the Core Knowledge Foundation decided to go along with the CCSS in exchange for some lip service to substantive texts in the materials ancillary to the new “standards.” Those “standards” are, of course, everything that Hirsch argued against for years in books like The Schools We Need and The Knowledge Deficit, and they are based on an approach to literature that he spent the first half of his career debunking in works like Validity in Interpretation. The CCSS in ELA are an almost entirely content free list of vaguely and very abstractly formulated skills, and it is precisely such lists that Hirsch argued against for decades.
Bob,
I know; I’ve been waiting for Hirsch to disavow the CCSS. I suppose there is always the hope that the good part of the standards –i.e. the part that calls for systematically building background knowledge –will stop being overlooked by the self-styled experts on CCSS. The seeds of Hirsch’s vision are in the standards; they’re just not germinating.
Considering that the whole idea of this in-text citation that is being used by the CCSS, and the fact that it insists that students CANNOT use background knowledge in their reading, and even insist on NOT including background knowledge before reading, this is not going to happen anytime soon. David Coleman, et al, keep insisting on “keeping it within the four corners of the text.”
Also, Cornelius, they are copyrighted and codified, states are not allowed to change them, only add to them. Let’s not use ten years of mass experimentation. And what ad hominem argument are you referring to? Do you mean the fact that there was no pilot study of these standards? There is no international benchmark for these standards. Furthermore, calibrating these tests based on the common core to the NAEP proficient level will in fact guarantee mass failure for no good reason, as others have explained. Proficient on the NAEP is not as what is being misrepresented to the public, a barely passing mark, but rather, a high achievement level. We are in fact building a caste society and the privateers of education will position themselves at the top along with their progeny. Notice, the schools their children attend are not subjected to this nonsense.
Worker training and development– not education– brought to you by Common Core.
This mother is correct. She recognizes this “system” because she escaped from it.
A ten year experiment on every public school student in America in 45 states all at once with no control group for comparison? Doesn’t sound like an experiment that should be funded and supported to me. What happened to common sense? The Common Core has vanquished common sense. Sad.
Hey, there’s that dude with the funny hairdo, again!
To clarify: Students from the middle class will not be eligible for the elite universities. Those (like George W. Bush) will get “legacy” appointments, based on some formula proportionate to their families’ donations to the endowment. Anyone who believe that a Broad, Walton or Gates will not get in (after the requisite pitch from the endowment people, if the donation hasn’t already come in) is naive. “College ready” is s fishy and slippery concept when applied based on economic class, since basically if you can pay to play you get in the game and always have. All of this other stuff is to mask those underlying class realities.
Reblogged this on Network Schools – Wayne Gersen and commented:
Diane Ravitch writes: “At some point, someone will have to admit that the Common Core and the tests are so “rigorous” that the students who succeed are being prepared for elite universities, not for state universities, and not for career readiness.”…. or MAYBE at some point we will acknowledge that if we truly want all students to meet the standards we should give them enough time to do so. Is there ANY evidence that students mature at the same rate physically? Do we declare a young man to be “failing” if he hasn’t started shaving when he’s 15 because most boys, on average, begin to grow facial hair around the age of 15? If we think such a test of physical growth is preposterous why do we put so much stock in the assumption that tests of intellectual growth are meaningful? If we expect performance to be constant we need to make time variable.
Now Common Core is a Chinese/Communist/Brainwashing tool designed to make American children automatons? THAT is one of the ad hominem arguments I am talking about. I grew up in a third world country and came to America to seek greener pastures but do not buy into the scripted crap the woman on the video is saying. One thing I know as a classroom teacher is that our students have already been turned into automatons with the high stake testing. The answer is either A, B, C, D, or E. Bubble in the correct answer, If you don’t know the answer GUESS. Most likely the answer is C. Or the choice with the longest answer. Or the one with the shortest answer. Majority of American children are NOT capable of thinking through simple tasks by themselves. I see it in the classroom EVERYDAY! Common Core is offering a solution to facilitate CRITICAL THINKING … no one is saying it is perfect … At least, it is a step in the RIGHT DIRECTION. Tell me or show me HOW you arrived at this answer, David. Explain to me why you think Imperialism was a good or bad thing? Mary, what is your opinion, based upon the articles you’ve read, on the issue of bullying in school? Common Core is not rocket science and it does not spell doomsday for American education. GIVE IT A CHANCE TO WORK!
Cornelius,
Have you had the opportunity to read through the ELA Standards K-12?
Clearly, he has not, and he hasn’t read the new crop of Common Core College and Career Ready Assessment Tests (C.C.C.C.R.A.P.) either.
I have a Social Science credential and taught 7th Grade World History last year (2013/2014) and 6th Grade Language Art the year before (2012/2013) … so the answer to your question is YES!
Cornelius,
Were you able to ascertain the redundancy of the standards when scanning from grade to grade? Put on your critical thinking cap.
Does that mean you have only taught for two years, Cornelius? If that is the case, you didn’t see schools pre CC or pre NCLB. There is a vast difference.
How did you teach ELA with a “social science credential”?
The Single Subject Teaching Credential in Social Science authorizes an individual to teach intermediate and secondary level history and social science classes. The holders of this credential may teach history and social science classes in grades six through twelve. Courses include United States history, world history, government and civics, economics, geography, other social sciences, and social studies classes.
The “Dear Hillary” letter, written on Nov. 11, 1992 by Marc Tucker, lays out a plan “to remold the entire American system” into “a seamless web that literally extends from cradle to grave and is the same system for everyone,” coordinated by “a system of labor market boards at the local, state and federal levels” where curriculum and “job matching” will be handled by counselors “accessing the integrated computer-based program.”
On September 25, 1998, Representative Bob Schaffer placed the 18-page, original “Dear Hillary” letter by Marc Tucker in the Congressional Record. The letter may be accessed on the Internet at: http://www .theroadtoemmaus.org/RdLb/21PbAr/Pl/Tucker-Hillary.htm
This letter clearly laid out a plan “to remold the entire American system” where curriculum and “job matching” will be handled by government functionaries controlled primarily by the President and others in the United States executive branch who form partnerships with selected private corporate companies and foundations. This is now the blueprint for the Common Core plan.
Tucker’s plan would change the mission of the schools from teaching children academic basics and knowledge to training them to serve the global economy in jobs selected by workforce boards. Very little in this comprehensive plan has anything to do with teaching school children how to read, write, or calculate.
Tucker’s ambitious plan was implemented in three laws passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton in 1994: the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, the School-to-Work Act, and the fifth reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. These laws establish the following mechanisms to restructure the public schools throughout America:
1. Bypass all elected officials on school boards and in State legislatures by making federal funds flow to the Governor and his appointees on workforce development boards.
2. Use a computer database, a.k.a. “a labor market information system,” into which school personnel would scan all information about every schoolchild and his family, identified by the child’s social security number: academic, medical, mental, psychological, behavioral, and interrogations by counselors. The computerized data would be available to the school, the government, and future employers.
3. Use “national standards” and “national testing” to cement national control of tests, assessments, school honors and rewards, financial aid, and the Certificate of Initial Mastery (CIM), which is designed to replace the high school diploma.
Designed on the German system, the Tucker plan is to train children in specific jobs to serve the workforce and the global economy instead of to educate them so they can make their own life choices.
http://www.tnonline.com/2013/jun/08/more-about-common-core
It seems to me that this is a universal goal with the Common Core based tests, no matter where they are; failing a majority of students in order to “prove” that public schools are failing. Here in Pennsylvania, we have just seen the results of the last set of Keystone Exams (our CCSS-aligned high school exit tests) and they were exactly as you would expect of tests scored to the NAEP standards: 60% below “proficient” in algebra, 58.6% below “proficient” in biology, 47.6% below proficient in English. This is a result of the cut scores set by the state DoE for these tests.
The official line is that the cut score of 1500 for “proficient” (passing) is the 50% mark in score terms for the test, i.e., it is 1500 on a 1200-1800 scale. This is not actually the case, since the actual minimum score on all these tests is 0, not 1200. I have seen scores as low as 66, so this is no theoretical minimum, students are actually being scored this way. The cut score is, at best, a version of the NAEP standard, where only 50% of students will, on average, score above the cut. What parents are being sold (but are now beginning to doubt) is that students only need to get a 50% score to pass, when the actual equivalent is an 83% score. That’s a rather higher “standard” than most people assume all students should or could meet, unless this is Lake Woebegone where “all the children are above average.”
Or across the lake where all the students are below average?
They are NOT deliberately failing students to prove anything. They are tests for new standards and I believe it is reasonable for the first two or three crops of test takers to perform badly as they adjust to the new standards and subsequent tests. Everybody is up in arms over something they lack any understanding about and continue to make outrageous claims about standards and tests they have not studied or taken to understand EXACTLY why the CCSS is a great thing for American students.
“. . . over something they lack any understanding about and continue to make outrageous claims about standards and tests they have not studied or taken to understand. . . ”
Pure Bovine Excrement, Corne. Your the one with little to no understanding of all the errors in educational standards and standardized testing that Noel Wilson has proven which render those educational malpractices ILLOGICAL, COMPLETELY INVALID AND UNETHICAL to boot. Read Wilson’s study that I referenced above. Come back and attempt to refute/rebut what he has proven. Then we can have an intelligent conversation about the crap that is CCSS and its accompanying tests.
You conveniently forget that kids should not be guinea pigs. The field trials should be small in scale, but they are now statewide or nearly national in scope.
Second you conveniently ignore that these are high stakes tests and the federal government requires that these test scores be used to evaluate teachers, with 50% of a teacher’s evaluation based on the scores in at lease 15 states.
Third, you forget that the tests for grade three reading may well determine whether students are permitted to stay with classmates or repeat the entire third grade. I suggest you take a stab at the sample PARCC grade three reading test on-line to see the hurdles in mousing around and figuring what the on-line system requires.
finally,
A four-point scale likely to create a 50% failure rate with multi-state data and that rate of failure will likely be due in part to the computer skills of the students and the degree to which the school has the bandwidth and much else that works perfectly.
The tests are not high-stakes. Some states – a declining number, actually – make the mistake of linking the test results to evaluations in a way that makes them high stakes.
What state is it that has said it will keep third graders back based on their reading scores? I haven’t seen that.
There are several states that have adopted a third grade retention policy. I will ask readers to supply the names because I can’t remember them all. Florida started it as part of the Jeb Bush miracle.
My question was whether any state had said it would hold third graders back based on Smarter Balance or PARCC assessments. Florida uses neither of those tests. I think it’s using a revised version of its FCAT.
Bill Duncan,
Fifteen states and D.C. have a strict third-grade retention policy based on tests. When the Common Core tests are adopted, as they will be this year, the retention policy will be governed by the Common Core tests.
http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2013/11/15/states-insist-on-third-grade-reading-proficiency
Since the Common Core tests have a far higher failure rate than state tests, there is likely to be a higher failure rate and more retention of third-graders.
Diane,
Let’s agree, first, that the whole discussion of how to ensure that our students can read by the 3rd grade is too big and important for a comment thread.
Retention itself is a controversial policy. And even measuring retention is complex and controversial.
But just to get our bearings, about 10% of children are retained at least once between kindergarten and the 8th grade.
But according to NAEP, only 35% of our third graders are proficient in reading. As you point out, Smarter Balanced is roughly equivalent: Going by the field test (an unreliable source), 38% of third graders would be Level 3 or 4 and 62% are Level 1 and 2. Does that mean you expect to see 65% of third graders retained?
And where do you see that retention policy will be governed by Common Core tests? The PEW report you cite doesn’t say that. And nothing else I know of does either.
Actually, there is no basis for asserting that scores on a single new test of any kind would lead to more children retained. As you can see from this ecs report on retention, virtually no state retains students strictly on the basis of a single test.
So I think that the general statement, “Since the Common Core tests have a far higher failure rate than state tests, there is likely to be a higher failure rate and more retention of third-graders” turns a much bigger and more important discussion into mere ammo in the Common Core wars.
NAEP proficient=an A. That’s the old Michelle Rhee trick, to pretend that everyone should reach A level performance. Sorry, but NAEP basic is the appropriate benchmark. It is not “grade level,” but is the nearest approximation.
Use whatever criterion you want. Smarter Balanced Level 1? Are you saying that those kids are retained?
Regarding that claim that these tests are not high stakes:
“E”leven states have a Promotional Gates policy. This calls for testing near the end of the year in the elementary grades to determine if a student should be retained or promoted (Education Commission of the States, 2005; 2012).
And, of course, transparently, the whole point of these tests is for them to be high stakes. Need I post about how many states have VAM models currently in place based on these assessments?
The Florida test being implemented this year is the AIR CCSS exam given in Utah last year. Florida’s governor followed Mike Huckabee’s advice to “rebrand” the Common Core by giving the same standards a state-specific name. In other words, the Reverend Mike’s advice was, basically, Common Core has become a toxic term, so lie about it. Call the standards by a different name, and hope the people won’t notice.
I suggest you get the whole background story and conversations on the creation of CCSS first. It makes you think a good standard, but it’s not. CCSS is engineered by a pork-barrel edu-tortionist(David Coleman) and Big G philanthropist(Gates Foundation). Neither of those have any working knowledge or expertise on curriculum and teaching whatsoever.
The scores were even lower in Utah’s CCSS testing. Utah has not released how they scaled “proficient.” Some teachers were involved in the decision, but they also do not say how the decision was made. Up to 71% of students were not “proficient” on these tests. The scores have not yet been released to the students or parents. The state is “concerned that the parents will not understand the scores.” What they’re really concerned about is the furor that I expect will erupt when parents see that their children, many of whom “passed” under the old system, are “failing” now. I expect the scores will be released right before Winter Break. Everyone will have their mind on other things, and it’s a month before the Legislative session begins. I am cynical about it, because I think that most people will ignore the scores and will happily go on their way, leaving teachers and students stuck with this horrible system. I hope for an outcry, but I don’t expect one.
Is the Smarter Balanced assessment really too hard?
Based on the demand for remedial coursework when our high school graduates reach community colleges, for instance, what percentage of our high school graduates do we actually are “college-ready?”
Are the colleges demanding too much? For that matter, has the problem of college readiness increased since NCLB? I have found that my students since NCLB are more demanding of the “one right” answer, rather than coming up with answers on their own.
It’s not that the test is “too hard”. It’s that the test and the standards upon which they are based are COMPLETELY ILLOGICAL, INVALID, UNETHICAL and any results derived are VAIN and ILLUSORY.
Yet it arrives at the same estimate of college-ready that our day-to-day experience tells us is what we’re seeing.
So why spend all the money on ILLOGICAL, INVALID AND UNETHICAL EDUCATIONAL MALPRACTICES???
And I disagree that it “arrives at the same estimate. . . ”
What is that “estimate”?
“Violates everything, gets everything wrong, but arrives at scoring similar to NAEP?”
Bill, what do you mean in “arrives at scoring similar to NAEP”? I don’t understand what point you’re trying to get across.
It’s not that they are too hard. It’s that they violate fundamental heuristics for preparing appropriate assessments.
Violates everything, gets everything wrong, but arrives at scoring similar to NAEP?
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.
Unlike most of the CCSS-related messages that you have seen–the ones pouring out of the propaganda mills–this message is not brought to you by
PARCC: Spell that backward
notSmarter, imBalanced
AIRy nonsense
CTB McGraw-SkillDrill
MAP to nowhere
the College Bored, makers of the Scholastic Common Core Achievement Test (SCCAT),
nor by the masters behind it all,
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (“All your base are belong to us”)
If NAEP proficiency is an indicator of college readiness, then we are encouraging far too many students to pursue a college degree. From what Diane has said about her experience with NAEP, choosing a score cutoff that corresponds to NAEP proficiency is not an indicator of college readiness. From what we know about tests as indicators of such readiness, we should be highly skeptical of such claims even if such tests had been properly vetted against already validated standards.
NAEP proficiency represents solid academic achievement. The selection of the cut points between advanced/proficient and proficient/basic are arbitrary and are decided by a motley assortment of people who guess what students should know. Having spent 7 years on the NAEP governing board, I always considered Proficient to be A or A-. The only state where as much as 50% of students reached NAEP Proficient is Massachusetts.
When these ridiculous assessments are given nationwide and 70 percent of students do not receive proficient scores, parents will DEMAND that the assessments be made public, and when that happens, these extraordinarily poorly conceptualized assessments will not survive the resulting scrutiny. I suspect that there will be an unprecedented policy meltdown when that happens.
Bravo Bob! You hit this discussion out of the park. I hope you are publishing your brilliant analysis!
It didn’t happen that way in Kentucky
For a while, the CC$$ propaganda mills were calling for a moratorium on these “assessments,” for the wisest of the deformers could see what an utter catastrophe was in the offing. Now it seems that there is an emerging deformer consensus that they can’t stop the juggernaut they have created (after all, they have spent many millions of your dollars to create these tests). They seem to have fallen back on the sort of reasoning that Macbeth employed:
I am in blood
Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er.
So, a great deal of damage will be done, and only after that, after the catastrophe, will people come again to their senses. I can imagine now all the earnest articles that will be written 10 years from now about the dark era of testing madness, many of them by edupundits currently collaborating with the deformers.
It IS happening in NY Bill D. Over 60,000 opt outs out of 1.2 million test takers in 2014.
That number is expected to at least double this spring, maybe even triple!. When the critical mass of opt outs is reached, the test scores will be effectively disabled. Parents have the power to stop the madness and no government agency or corporation can stop them. I would expect to see all sorts of bogus threats made against parents in a futile attempt to scare them back into compliance. It will not work. Not here in NY. The tipping point is near and the reform crowd has to be worried. When CC tests are used to prevent students from graduation, the lawyers will step in and finish off what the parents have started. just my dos centavos.
Bill,
I got 800 on the GRE verbal and read classic European novels for fun, yet I find the SBAC ELA hard. It tests short term memory, logical thinking and doggedness. If a highly-literate adult struggles with it, I wonder what it’s really measuring. It’s like saying, OK Olympic gymnast, if you can’t scale this 100 foot wall, you’re not much of an athlete. The SBAC is a hard test, but the question should be, is it a good test?
It’s not a good test of logical thinking ability. However, it certainly tests doggedness, which is one reason why it will WIDEN achievement gaps, which reflect to a considerable degree differences in motivation among students.
I was shopping in a Joanne Fabrics store today and happen to wander by the teacher/school aisles. The number of Common Core materials being marketed to parents was really eye opening. ELA and math packets fro K to 8. Academically challenging stuff for 5, 6, and 7 year olds. Test-prep kits for home use! Kids who should be out playing, will now be sitting at the suburban kitchen table with Mom or Dad working on CC activities. Despite the developmentally inappropriate nature of these primary materials, some will certainly gain test taking skills that will serve them well on the PARCC and SBAC. I can only imagine the software that is in the works as well. The urban and rural poor will have no such experience. The end result will be a further widening of the so-called learning gap. How this reform is being marketed to minorities as a 21st century civil rights issue must have MLK spinning in his grave. Taking advantage of the disadvantaged with lies and false hope is shameful and sinful.
The way the Common Core is actually trying to narrow the achievement gap is by bringing the top down. When you prevent students from accessing an accelerated math track because they have been falsely identified for AIS you are bringing the top down. When you insist that Algebra will not be taught until 9th grade there is no way that calculus will be offered in high school any more and you are bringing the top down. When you deny students the pleasure of being exposed to the great English classics by well educated English teachers who enjoy that sort of thing you are bringing the top down. Let’s not be part of the chorus of reformer know nothings that insist that the Common Core is actually more rigorous than teaching with the broader freedom that teachers enjoyed when individual state standards were in existence.
Does anyone remember how clueless they were when they graduated from high school? I was a pretty good student and went on to a highly regarded college. However, I did not do very well on their writing test and had to take a class in English composition. I don’t think I learned much from it and my grade indicated as much, but as I moved through college, my courses taught me how to think and expected me to be able to demonstrate that thinking. Guess what? I learned through lots of practice and attention to detail. Even then, I don’t think my writing ability really began to mature until I was in graduate school. All of a sudden, I seemed to have a much more sophisticated understanding of the power of words and how to clearly convey an idea in writing. I believe my grades put me in the top 5% of my very competitive and well respected high school and yet I needed “remediation.” Are we really surprised that students need to take review type courses especially since so many more students attend college than used to? Plus, I think the role of community colleges has morphed over the years since four year schools have become so expensive. More and more students are hoping to transfer to four year programs than in the past when a 2 year degree was the aim. The types of demands are different for the student who is attending a culinary program and the one who hopes to earn a B.S. in biology.
A commentary on the CCSS tests from the medieval Welsh romance “Taliesin”:
Asked Gwyddno, “Art thou able to speak, and thou so little?”
And Taliesin answered him, “I am better able to speak than thou to question me.”