Bob Shepherd, veteran designer of curricula and textbooks, explains why he objects to PARCC:
How to Prevent Another PARCC Mugging: A Public Service Announcement
The Common Core Curriculum Commissariat 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 how—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 tune 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”)
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Very helpful, readable, and useful, so much about the tests laid out in such economical space, many thanks. Thirty years ago, Jeannie Oakes in her marvelous book ‘Keeping Track’ observed that achievement tracking in k-12 had no research to back up the efficiency of this vast practice, yet it continued. About that time, scholars in my field of comp/rhet published research that grammar instruction had no positive effect on student writing, yet the teaching of grammar in English continued. Now we know the failures of standardized testing thanks to Bob, yet we have had 14 years of it since NCLB, and more earlier following the alarmist declarations of a bogus ‘literacy crisis” in 1975, followed by 38 states then passing CBTE regimens(Competency-Based Test Evaluation). Knowing all we know for so long, good idea is to go on the offensive, not merely rejecting PARCC for all the reasons Bob outlines, but taking the initiative to rethink what k-12 public education should be to develop creative and critical minds in our kids.
Thank you, Ira. I had in mind when I wrote this post one that you wrote on the opportunity costs of ed deform in which you specifically mentioned kids having eye exams and warm clothes to wear in the winter. As always from you, extraordinarily eloquent, that.
Readers of this blog, if you haven’t read Ira Shore, treat yourselves.
Back in 1935, the Encyclopedia of Educational Research published a review of studies showing no decrease in frequency of errors in student writing and speech resulting from mastery of traditional parsing. We now know why that is, of course. Grammars and vocabulary are almost entirely unconsciously acquired, not explicitly learned. For example, we all know that
the green, great dragon
is ungrammatical and that
the great, green dragon
is grammatical
but we do not know, explicitly, the rules governing the order of precedence of adjectives in English, and explicit knowledge of those unconscious rules is largely irrelevant to grammatical performance.
I say “we all know,” but, of course, the “architects” of the the amateurish CCSS in ELA did not know this. They were blissfully ignorant of the past century of research in language acquisition.
“Grammar is Innate”
Grammar is innate
Except in MS Word
Where grammar is a Gate
To enter the absurd
“we all know that
the green, great dragon
is ungrammatical and that
the great, green dragon
is grammatical”
Well, I don’t know that particular fact.
Bob, you’ve used that example before and I don’t see why one is and the other is not “grammatical”. The change of the word order is such that in switching green and great one comes up with a different meaning depending upon the intent of the author/speaker. Without the context in which each is spoken/written it is impossible to discern whether one is “grammatically correct” depending upon what one wants to say. They can both be grammatically correct depending on the meaning unless some self declared (or even world declared) “grammar expert” has determined that it can only be the “great, green dragon”.
Now, what is the purpose of having “grammar” and grammatically correct ways of saying things other that to help clarify meaning which cannot be properly determined with statements taken out of context.
And although we may, or may not, learn “grammatically correct” usage innately in our first language that does not obviate the ability, even the need, to explicitly learn grammar (and vocabulary) in a second language. “Grammar” in that case is just a mechanism with which to connect the various structures of the different languages so as to hopefully be a bit of a “short cut” to learning the second language.
What is your definition of “grammatical”? And how can that then be used to be “more correct” either in one’s first language and/or in the second (third?, etc. . . ?) one to facilitate the learning of said language?
That’s not my example, Duane. It’s J.R.R. Tolkien’s, and it’s very widely used in intro syntax books. I’ve encountered it many times. As you probably know, in addition to being a consummate fantasy writer, Tolkien was also a great scholar of the history of the English language and of its grammar. And the judgment of grammaticality is not “my” judgment. It’s a matter of standard operating procedure among linguists studying syntax. They give people constructions and ask them to judge their grammaticality, and based on their answers, derive as parsimoniously as they can what are likely to be the underlying, unconscious rules informing those answers. Yes, it is possible to imagine a scenario in which “the green great dragon” is grammatical, but only without the commas (in a situation in which green and great are not coordinate, e.g, when one has a bunch of entities called “great dragons” and one is referencing those among the great dragons that are green). However, in this case, in both sentences, the adjectives are coordinate and so follow, for most speakers, a pretty well understood pattern of rules governing the order of precedence of coordinate adjectives.
Ungrammatical: the red, little Volkswagon microbus
Grammatical: the little, red Volkswagon microbus
The point of this example–and one could multiply examples ad infinitum–is that people do not know, consciously, any but a small fraction of the grammar that they use. This is far, far, far from being a controversial claim. It’s established science. Those interested can find excellent treatments of this topic in such introductory syntax texts as Carnie’s Syntax: A Generative Introduction or Radfords Minimalist Syntax. Roeper goes into great detail on this topic in his superb The Prism of Language, as does Jackendoff in his wonderful Patterns in the Mind.
Oh, and the topic is given a book-length treatment in Mark Baker’s superb The Atoms of Language: The Mind’s Hidden Rules of Grammar. NY: Basic Books, 2001.
As usual, Bob, you have a way of explainng, simply and succinctly, exactly what is happening in Ed Deform, in a way that no one else seems to be able. I appreciate your knowledge and background in this area which brings to reality a confusing and frustrating topic. You are a gifted teacher to those of us who yearn to understand and want desperately to bring some sanity back to our teachng profession. You don’t just reinforce what most of us already know, but bring another level of knowledge that helps me to better articulate what is happening to our/my public schools. I desperately want to be a part of bringing some sanity back into our public education system, especially for our high poverty, at-risk students. Is there a book in your future?
Thanks, Bridget, I have worked off and on for a couple years on a thoroughgoing critique of the amateurish, prescientific CCSS in ELA, but I have not found the freedom from other responsibilities to pull this all together into a book. Almost all of the discussion of the CCSS takes place at a very high level of abstraction, but the devil is in the details. Perhaps this summer. . . .
Waiting patiently….
We really need it now, but maybe by this summer the timing will be just right. I feel the tide slowly turning, so don’t put off too long.
I will definitely be first in line to buy it. I’m a big fan of your posts.
Great job putting all the critiques together, Bob. I think there may be a little typo in the 2nd paragraph of Section 1: shouldn’t it read “knowledge of HOW” rather than “knowledge of what” there? I find the part on motivation least convincing. It seems to me that humans are often motivated by extrinsic rewards, even in learning, and that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing –for instance, if you did a crack analysis of King Lear for a high grade, and, incidentally, started to really appreciate the play. The PARCC test certainly motivates TEACHERS to focus teaching on the test. If it motivated them to teach more Shakespeare, that might be a good thing. Unfortunately the convoluted and confusing nature of the PARCC tests seems to be leading to the stultifying teaching of disconnected skills like identifying evidence for a claim, rather than whole pieces of literature –which can be stultifying in bad hands, but which at least has the potential to be nourishing and inspiring.
yes, thank you, Ponderosa. This was a quick blog post that I did, and I didn’t go back to proofread it. There’s another typo at the end, which should read “tune out and drop out,” not “turn out and drop out.”
Here’s a great piece on extrinsic motivation:
So, yes, thank you very much. I definitely meant to describe procedural knowledge as concrete knowledge of how to do things.
Bob Shepherd: I was already familiar with the “All your base are belong to us” but I didn’t know there was such a history behind it [see the accompanying videos on youtube]. Thanks for the link.
😃
As I read the posting–and keeping in mind your other contributions to this blog—I was reminded of the title of chapter 22 in Anthony Cody’s THE EDUCATOR AND THE OLIGARCH (2014, p. 143): “Bill Gates and the Cult of Measurement: Efficiency Without Excellence.”
Among many pithy sayings about mathematical intimidation and obfuscation: “you don’t fatten a pig by weighing it.”
But let’s think like an “innovative disruptor” for a moment—or as TFA would put it, put ourselves in the “right corps member mindset.” I am sure that the “thought leaders” of the self-proclaimed “education reform” movement would like [or maybe not] thinking outside the box of $tudent $ucce$$…
Suppose pig production was the cornerstone of American economic, political and military supremacy. Why understate the case? Turns out that our rankings in pig production are beginning to falter, or are alarmingly far below, our competitors and enemies, and that that situation poses an existential threat to the US of A.
Pig production must be increased, dramatically, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Well, “you can’t control what you can’t measure” so in a truly bipartisan spirit of cooperation, both GWB “the decider and BO “the hoper” push giant federal initiatives called, among other things, NoPigLeftBehind and PigsToTheTop and such, relying on the objective advice of foundations of the BBBC [BoredBillionaireBoysClub] as well as getting much of their Dept. of Pig Production personnel from the aforesaid selfless organizations. And that doesn’t count all the heavyweight political support and MSM fawning and federal $$$…
“Weighing = Fattening” becomes the new mantra of pig production; at least, according to everyone but pig farmers.
Ok, you do the “logical” thing: you put the weighers of pigs in charge of mandating how actual pig farmers are going to raise actual pigs. VAMania comes in very handy here. Of course, there are the obtuse technical arguments about whether prices and poop and disease and a host of other real world issues intrude upon the pristine mathematical formulae devised to boost pig production, but the hasty optimists know that you can’t move forward unless you dismiss, devalue and publicly humiliate the pig status quo aka pig farmers. After all, we wouldn’t be out-pigged by the rest of the world if the pig farmers had been doing their job like they were supposed to. And while there will be a misstep here and there, let’s not permit the perfect to be the enemy of the good. You don’t make an omelet without breaking eggshells, or as the Secretary of Pig Production likes to point out—he is simultaneously somewhat for, somewhat against, and somewhat for & somewhat against weighing pigs to fatten them.
And as for you nincompoops that keep complaining that it’s all about weighing now, and less and less about actual pigs and genuinely increasing the quality and quantity of those porkers: when are you going to get down to the really—and Rheeally!—critical matter of weighing pigs? Afraid of being evaluated?
Enough of frivolous objections! Time is a wasting. And don’t expect to get much MSM time or public meeting time or private foundation time to air your strident and shrill and kookie notions.
😱
Although, strangely, the de facto Sect. of Pig Prod.—he has the biggest foundation too—has said that it will be ten years before we know if his “Weigh To Fatten” program actually works. In most matters he is hasty, and optimistic, but when it comes to something as complex and heretofore unmeasured and little understood as pig production, he prefers to reserve judgment.
It may only be an unconfirmed rumor, but the above mentioned charter member of the BBBC once said when challenged [on a very rare occasion when he wasn’t surrounded by yes-people] that he dreams of a day when pigs can fly, or when “pigs have wings” is how I think he put it.
Pigs with wings. Hmmmm…
Anybody in the market for silver bullets? I hear they’re real good at killing werewolves…
😎
To make matters worse, imagine the same scenario with a means of measuring the weight of pigs that didn’t actually validly measure the weight of pigs. Idiocy squared.
“Idiocy squared.”
What I call “idiology”.
And imagine that any pig farmer who dared to speak out against the invalidity of the measure thereby risked losing his or her job.
Bob Shepherd: evidently you aren’t on the right email lists. Uh, well, er, um, neither am I.
[From a Rheeality far far away and long long ago: “ All that ranting and raving by that Shepherd kook—just another pig in a poke!” The phrase “pig in a poke” repeated over and over again by a small chorus of giggling voices; variations include “I’ll poke your pig!” and “Pig, poke, prig, choke!”
Followed by background sounds of some identifiable voices like those of Raj Chetty and William Sanders and Eric Hanushek and some other mathematical pranksters saying to each other “Go figure!” when they look at their grant checks courtesy of VAManiacal formulae and the like, and then look* at Bob Shepherd’s ‘devalued’ bank account. *Courtesy of big data.*
Although David Coleman is present and knows they don’t quite understand what “pig in a poke” means, he keeps quiet since he knows, to his very Common Core, that “people don’t really give a **** about what you feel or think.”]
Material in brackets may or may not be true. Hence, I suggest that whether one ‘buys into’ CCSS or VAM or the above perhaps non-information text or anything else, you need to google “pig in a poke” and “definition” first.
¿?
“I reject that mind-set.”[ Michelle Rhee]
How did I know she would say that?
😎
ROFLMAO
Right on Bob!
The testing is a folly. It is like abondoned new streets and building lots in a Las Vegas subdivision, whose idea is fundamentally flawed.
“Green Tech”
Tests ain’t ends but simply means
For standardizing schools
To maximize the crop of green$
For education “tools”
lol
“1.The CCSS ELA exams are invalid.”
Since the CCSS and the accompanying standardized tests are part of the larger group of educational standards and standardized testing that Noel Wilson has shown to be COMPLETELY INVALID (my emphasis), then, by definition statement #1 is true.
For all you folks here in the site “site to discuss better education for all” who haven’t read N. Wilson’s work I strongly urge you to do so. See: “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
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
Bob, this is great, as usual, but it strikes me that what you’ve written here appears to apply to most of the testing that I see these days (not just PARCC), including district tests (to make sure you’re on track for the state test of course) and even the curriculum unit tests (shockingly Pearson for the most part).
Keep writing, good sir; I’d like to read more.
absolutely
Thanks Bob for yet another great post. On a slightly tangential matter, My usual wanderings lead me to the book “PREDICTABLE SURPRISES The disasters you should have seen coming and how to prevent them” By Bazerman and Watkins. Having skimmed the table of contents I fully expect to read a book that describes what we, the canaries in the coal mine already know, that due to the power of wealth and influence we are being driven down a road that ends at a bridge that never existed in the first place. I also expect that the instructions on how not to go flying off that non-existent bridge will describe what we have already been doing and also the continued resistance to our efforts in spite of the ongoing failure of reform.
For example: “By contrast,special-interest groups work not to better the lives of the broader citizenry but to improve outcomes for their members. For the sake of a chosen few, special-interest groups impose an undue social burden on everyone……In fact, the most generously funded welfare recipients in the United States are not the poor but America’s corporations.”
It seems that the true nature of our fight is to stop the repetition of history from being imposed upon us in spite of the fact that we see it unfolding before our eyes.
Common Core might have done some good if the right approach had been taken. A friend is trying to help his grand daughter with her math homework. He knows I have an MS Ed, so he brought the stuff over to see what I thought.
I told him that the new stuff is different from what my kids got, but just as bad. It’s not the teachers fault, I said. Don’t bother complaining. The teacher can’t do anything about it.
With my own kids, I did complain. I went to the administrator. She said, “That’s none of your business, Mr. Esler.” That was the end of that. My wife and I provided enrichment, told the kids to put up with the silly stuff.
Maybe someday we can have a national discussion of education.
The Sorting Test
A thousand thoughts or more ago,
When I was newly known,
There lived four wizards of renown,
Whose names are still well-known:
Bold Billy Gates from Microsoft,
Fair Rhee from her DC stint,
Sweet Duncan from Down Under,
Lord Coleman from Vermint.
They shared a wish, a hope, a scheme,
They hatched a daring plan,
To test all children in the land,
Thus Common Core began.
Now each of these four founders
Stack ranked to find the best
They value just one aptitude,
In the ones they had to test.
By level 1, the lowest were
There just to detest;
For Level 2, the closest
But failed to be the best;
For Level 3, hard workers were
Barely worthy of admission;
And power-hungry Level 4s
Were those of great ambition.
While still alive they did divide
Their favorites from the throng,
Yet how to pick the worthy ones
When they were dead and gone?
‘Twas Coleman then who found the way,
He whipped me out of his head
The founders wrote the standards
So I could choose instead!
Now slip me snug around your brain,
I’ve never yet been wrong,
I’ll have a look inside your mind
And tell where you belong!”
LOL. Indeed, these tests draw far more heavily on purest fantasy than they do on science. Very like the sorting hat in Harry Potter, but in the real world. . . .
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.
Hawthorne effect, huh?
Not to mention the gun-to-the-head effect.
Meaning, put enough pressure on people and you’ll get results, but not because the policy works; because people want to live and feed their families, etc.
And these results can be derived from fraud, other unethical tactics and unsustainable and ultimately deleterious efforts.
Brilliant post, Bob! I’ve shared it with many parents who are going to opt-out their kids from CCRAP. Are you on Twitter?
If you Opt-out of the pre, mid, end of year tests, it is not enough to escape the ccss crap in schools. Endless homework each night while your children suffer. No choice left but to homeschool.
The Shepard article is misleading.
There is no relationship between “higher-order thinking” and test item format. Look at a practice test for the Law School Admission Test, any Graduate Record Exam, an SAT or an ACT for verification. Multiple-choice, or other types of constrained format test items can test most levels and types of thinking. They are not good at testing highly subjective topics, such as art, ergo the art portfolio. The question is: do we want objective evaluation in the core subjects, or subjective evaluation in the core subjects?
In this context, the word “plausible” is used by test developers to mean answers that would be reasonable to test-takers who misunderstand a single aspect of a multi-aspect test item and so might think a particular wrong answer is plausible.
There is no question that tests are being misused when they are given to students with no consequences — who knows if they even try; and studies show that the level of effort on no-stakes exams varies by age, gender, and socioeconomic class — and used to decide the employment status of teachers. But, to denigrate testing itself because some misguided persons misuse it is itself misguided.
Richard P. Phelps
I’m late coming to this brilliant article, which I’ve been sharing on FB. Now that the Senate has released the torture report, I can’t help but see that what we are dealing with in education deform and its appalling effects on our children and our democracy, is in a larger sense parallel to the obscenely sadistic and shameful history of abuse of detainees. This Daily Kos article gives a glimpse into the incompetence and sadism perpetrated by two former military psychologists, men who had no knowledge of actual interrogation techniques, or of the constraints ethical human beings had put in place, or of the culture or context of the detainees. Yet their actions were sanctioned by unaccountable higher-ups.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/09/1350553/-CIA-paid-two-ex-military-psychologists-who-helped-designed-and-run-torture-program-81-million
“Morality aside, one element of the incompetence and stupidity plaguing the CIA’s and military’s interrogation programs is shown in The New York Times report, which notes that Mitchell and Jessen were each paid $1,800 a day, four times the going rate for an interrogator even though neither of them had ever interrogated a subject previously.
“As human beings, Mitchell and Jessen should have known what they were doing was the product of sick or sociopathic minds. As psychologists, they should have known that what they did broke the most basic ethical guidelines. If they had doubts about their actions, they succeeded in suppressing them. The money apparently made that easy.”
Thank you for this astute, insightful call to arms on the educational testing front. How do you get past all the propaganda and narrow-minded view of administrators that support such nonsense?