Arne Duncan gave $360 million to two consortia to create tests for the Common Core. By law, no federal official may attempt to direct, control, or influence curriculum or instruction, but every one either ignores the law or pretends that tests have nothing to do with what is taught or how.
Mercedes Schneider here takes a close look at the efforts of one of those consortia to set achievement levels so everyone will know who is college ready.
“SBAC has purportedly anchored its assessment to empirically unanchored CCSS. How doing so is supposed to serve public education is an elephant in the high-stakes assessment room.
“Regarding its assessment scoring, SBAC decided upon cut scores that divide individual student scores into four “achievement levels.” SBAC knows it is peddling nonsense but does so anyway, apparently disclaiming, “Hey, we know that these achievement levels and their cut scores are arbitrary, but we have to do this because No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is making us. But we want to warn about using the achievement-level results of this high-stakes test for any high-stakes decisions…”
“The reality is that the media will publish percentages of students falling into the four categories as though the SBAC-created classification is infallible, and once again, schools, teachers, and students will be stigmatized.
“Forget about any cautions or disclaimers. Offer a simplistic graphic, and the media will run with it.”
I think it is fair to say that Schneider thinks the standards and tests are harmful nonsense.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“The reality is that the media will publish percentages of students falling into the four categories as though the SBAC-created classification is infallible, and once again, schools, teachers, and students will be stigmatized.”
That is EXACTLY what has happened in Utah with the new CC testing that began this spring. The media hasn’t even questioned the wisdom of the hours and hours of testing that children and teens must endure, or what the term “proficient” even means. Rather, the local media has just wrung their hands about how few kids scored “proficient” on the tests. The whole state educational bureaucracy, at the state, district, and school level, just keeps telling teachers to tell parents not to worry about the scores, because this is just “setting the standard,” and that these tests are “superior” and testing “higher level thinking.”
NO ONE seems to be questioning the wisdom of these tests, the money that they cost, and the fact that as many as 71% of students were not “proficient.” If a teacher made a test that failed 71% of his or her students, that teacher would be in serious trouble. BUT, if the state gives the test, it’s somehow okay?????
I can’t figure out how to speak out against this nonsense, because no one listens.
What I love about the Common Core is the legalistic parsing by the promoters.
” The standards are not the tests and the tests are not what any individual state or the federal government will do with the tests!”
The Common Core floats above all those pesky, practical real-life concerns, pure and unsullied by everything else that comes along with it.
Not that anyone will care once the tests go in and federal and state governments start hammering public schools as a result of the tests that are NOT *technically* the Common Core 🙂
“The Common Core is not high stakes!” Technically true! However, if a state should decide to make high school graduation hinge ON the Common Core tests, the Common Core and the Common Core tests have no connection WHATEVER with that.
I can’t tell if they’re trying to win debate points or educate the public on this giant new national program. If we cede the point that the Common Core is not the tests and the tests are not the horrible ed reform policy that will be used in conjunction with the tests can we have then have a real debate about the reality of this thing?
Chiara: they can verbally tap dance all around the facts on the ground but let me cite—it will never be enough times!—what a genuinely informed insider of the education establishment* wrote about the connections between the allegedly disconnected parts of what you mention—
[start quote]
In truth, the idea that the Common Core might be a “game-changer” has little to do with the Common Core standards themselves, and everything to do with stuff attached to them, especially the adoption of common tests that make it possible to readily compare schools, programs, districts, and states (of course, the announcement that one state after another is opting out of the two testing consortia is hollowing out this promise).
But the Common Core will only make a dramatic difference if those test results are used to evaluate schools or hire, pay, or fire teachers; or if the effort serves to alter teacher preparation, revamp instructional materials, or compel teachers to change what students read and do. And, of course, advocates have made clear that this is exactly what they have in mind. When they refer to the “Common Core,” they don’t just mean the words on paper–what they really have in mind is this whole complex of changes.
[end quote]
*That would be Dr. Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute.
For more context and information, please go to the following link—
Link: http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/the-american-enterprise-institute-common-core-and-good-cop/
Thank you for your comments.
😎
P.S. To sum up Hess on CCSS etc., a la THE BIG BANG THEORY—Bazinga!
I am a lawyer and I find it frustrating. To the ordinary person, making this rigid distinction between The Common Core and All the Things that Come Along With the Common Core is just besides the point. No one outside education will care about that.
The Common Core will be the reality of the Common Core standards PLUS the Common Core testing PLUS whatever horrid ed reform policy is built around those two things. The distinction doesn’t matter, outside the narrow silo of education.
It’s like saying that the health care law ISN’T the health care exchanges or the policies one purchases on the exchanges.
True! But why would that matter to anyone outside the drafters of the law? When the online exchanges failed people understandably and rightly said “this doesn’t work”.
I think it’s a mistake. They should be willing to discuss the whole thing, Common Core, testing, how the testing will be used, because people will feel like they were tricked when they’re told their 3rd grader isn’t going to 4th grade or their high schooler isn’t graduating. They should feel that. They WERE tricked.
It’s as if they’re all lawyers, it really is, and I LIKE lawyers 🙂
How long did we debate Federalism and The Common Core?
How long did we fret over whether Bobby Jindal was an ACTUAL turncoat or just PRETENDING to be a turncoat for the GOP base?
“Will Jeb Bush survive a GOP primary?!” Who cares? They’re conducting a giant experiment on tens of thousands of public school children and the big over-riding concern is whether these politicians make it thru all right?
I’m starting to get the sense this isn’t all about the children! 🙂
Politicians who think they know more about education than the educators. Their next step is to tie teacher pay/evaluations to their arbitrarily scored exams. Stop those who love to undermine public education: school choice/charter schools might be good for those who get chosen but we are supposed to educate all students. Charter schools = most children left behind.
It’s already happening or about to happen in many states. In Utah, by next school year, our evaluations will be tied to test scores. Already our evaluations are tied to student and parent surveys. Even the tiniest of children and kids who have severe disabilities have to evaluate their teachers.
What is stunning is that these tests were supposed to bring together some of the best thinking on assessment.
Proficiency is a not a standardized concept. It is a matter of definition.
These tests are part of a sustained campaign to portray test scores as if these are objective measures of achievement. They are not. They represent a seriously truncated view of what students have learned in school versus what students ave learned by virtue of priviledges brought into school.
Laura H. Chapman: well and succinctly stated.
As a cartoon I saw many years ago about the Golden Rule [I misquoted it recently] had a character say, “The Golden Rule. He who has the gold*, makes the rules.”
*Up to date version: Gold = $tudent $ucce$$.
And makes the definitions. And when those definitions are numbers, they are used against the innumerate—the vast majority of us—as weapons to keep up dazed and amazed and docile.
But as Señor Duane Swacker perceptively wrote a little while ago on this blog, just putting a number on something doesn’t make it a measure of anything, good or bad, accurate or inaccurate, trustworthy or untrustworthy. It’s just a number affixed to [literally] arbitrary judgments that are palmed off as objective measures of whatever the definers decide needs to be stack ranked.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
I don’t know about other people, I have a experimental group of “one person” in my house, but I think it’s nonsense that kids “can’t” be prepped for the Common Core testing. My 6th grader picked right up on the fact that the adults want language or facts from the text in the essays, and he’ll be putting those in if he’s feeling dutiful on test day.
I can’t guarantee that his essay will make any sense but he does seem to know they want it “text dependent”, and, I don’t know, opinion-and-attitude-free 🙂
After teaching is reduced to algorithms and metrics, medicine and law are next to deprofessionalize. Type your symptoms or hook up ro a bio-chip in a blended diagnostic kiosk and wait for results. File your tort claim via an online, standardize system and a Watson decides. Of course, those that can afford it get real humans.
If you can, Chiara, opt your child out of the testing. Last year, when my 15 year old was forced to do a “pretest” for the new CC testing (he was opted out of the actual tests), he wrote an entire essay bashing the Common Core and all of the associated testing. Glad to know that he sometimes listens to me! (:
Dr. David’s Amazing Crystal Ball Machine
Step right up mothers and fathers across the land and take a peek at Dr. David’s Amazing Crystal Ball Machine. I know it doesn’t look like your typical crystal ball, it’s not round or made out of actual glass, but fear not folks, the machine you are looking at is even more amazing. It’s way smarter than even the most magical crystal ball, and achieves a perfectly balanced prediction. Just sit your kids down, strap on their seat belt, and watch ’em go. In only 9 hours of interactivity with you son or daughter, Dr. David’s Amazing Crystal Ball Machine will have all it needs to predict your child’s future. I’m still working out some bugs so you’ll have to wait just few short months before you most of you get the not so good news. But hey, just think of all the money it will save you when you find out that your 9 year old just isn’t college material. And heck, if Dr. David’s Amazing Crystal Ball Machine figures that even a career is out of reach, why you can start getting their bedroom in your basement ready now. Soccer Moms and T-ball Dads, don’t let those report card grades fool you, with Dr. D’s Amazing Crystal Ball Machine you get the truth. And for all the colorful parents in the audience, tell your kids to grab their boot straps and grit it out. Who cares if 9 out of 10 kids-of-color fall by the wayside; this here Amazing Crystal Ball Machine looks past just the numbers. Dr. David’s Amazing Crystal Ball Machine sees a civil rights march. Ones and twos, both black and brown, marching, hand-in-hand, and singing together with one voice: Free at last, free at last, thank Dr. David – we are free at last!
Moms and Dads across the land, I can read your minds: just one easy payment per year due on April 15th.
Good job. Needed this and some of the other imaginative and on-target satire. Only problem is the reality is hard, actual. The PARCC grade 3 test is a test of mousing skills. I took the online sample test.
Laura, does the PARCC G3 require typed essay responses? The keyboarding piece gets little talk but will prove to be a major obstacle for far too many. It will be a nightmare for dyslexic, cognitively impaired, and ELL students. And for many underprivileged students who are growing up without computers or I-pads in the home, I’m still trying to figure out exactly how this will close the learning gap.
It is hard reality for 8, 9, and 10 year olds, too young and innocent to even begin to understand what is being perpetrated by Gates and Co. They are being used as pawns in a big money game. Millions of students will learn one thing from their PARCC and SBAC testing experience: that they are failures. The damage done to the psyche of our most vulnerable students will be very hard to undo. The majority of NYS students who enter HS next year, will have been branded for (at least) three consecutive years as failures in math and ELA and they will be looking down the barrel of grade 9 algebra 1 and grade 11 ELA with absolutely no belief in their own ability to succeed.
Okay, do we even know what percent of high school grads is college ready … now? How do we define that? Does than mean only one level of math and English remediation? Do these people even know that English 1A, for which being qualified to attempt the course is the standard for readiness for college in the English language was introduced as a remedial course?
How can anyone possibly claim that curriculum standards are directed to creating college ready students when we do not have an agreed-upon definition of what that means?
Not necessary to define anything. Too late.
The standards are set in stone. Initial aim was no remediation in college or other post-secondary education is needed, whether college meant Harvard or community college or on-the job training in McDonalds, or working as a pipe-fitter trainee. You can find most of the definital work in a publication written for the American Diploma Project called “Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma That Counts,”
EVERYONE goes to college? AND we expect high standards for collegiate work? A school superintendent one stated – with tongue in cheek – that his job was to graduate 99% of his students in the top 1% of the class.
That “ain’t” tongue in cheek anymore. I sometimes wonder what kind of logic some of our politicians have studied.
The governor of Utah wants two thirds of Utahns to have a college degree by 2030. I can’t figure out where all the jobs for that many college graduates are going to come from.
Logic? The CCSS in ELA put college assignments into grades 9-10 then “backmapped” from there. The “logic” was from manuals developed for troop training, racheted up in WWII and in the post-war era put to work in the “behavioral objectives” movement and in early programmed instruction. Throw in a bit of Robert McNamera’s love of stats for “this and that” to keep track of everything–outputs, body counts, you name it.
I participated in the scoring activity for Smarter Balanced (language arts). Curiosity mainly. Our job was to decide at what point 50% of high school juniors could answer correctly the content. Some of the questions were quite interesting and required short answer/essay type responses. Some or most of the questions were multiple guess and some were quite easy or obvious. The questions became more difficult as the test progressed, but not all the questions. I am not at all sure how others “scored” the questions/tests and not at all sure how final levels will be set for proficiency etc. (I’m just an English instructor at a Community College and testing is not my expertise or interest.) It seems to me that the test itself is not bad, but where proficiency levels are set highly debatable. I see the bigger problems as teaching to the test, the length of the test, and how the test is used to determine proficiency for college and career ready. Does anyone agree on what that means?
Teaching to standard means that you have a rubric/road map to a summative assessment that tells you if the student(s) met the standard. Designing the assessments (both formative and summative) are essential teacher tasks to developing the program of instruction that will lead to student success. Most teachers know this as the “backwards planning process.”
Keeping the test design A SECRET and not allowing the teachers to understand how the Smarter Balanced Test Questions (and answers) relate to the standards, places teachers and their students in the untenable position of “you teach” and we’ll let you know if we think you taught it the way we think it should have been taught.
Common Core Standards, for ELA & Math are wonderful; the teaching strategy (which includes the assessment activities) for Smarter Balanced is dysfunctional.
Also, this unidimensional Common Core focus on ELA & Math, albeit there are Literacy Standards for non-ELA/Math disciplines, fails to address the content necessary for education in Science, History, Fine Arts & Music. This is critically important because observation of this Nations Financing of Education clearly demonstrates that monies will be allocated on Test Results in ELA & Math to the detriment of all other disciplines.
The Common Core system of pedagogy is an unvetted program designed without true teacher input. Those in the ivory tower financed by philanthropic wealth have every right to dream, but the classroom teachers have the experience necessary to design a system that they know will work, but were not asked. If you are going to ignore countless years of experience then you surely must believe that no experience to teach is necessary.