An earlier post described what happened after Pearson bought the GED and aligned it with Common Core. Passing rates collapsed by as much as 90%. The GED is a high school graduation test for students who didn’t finish the traditional four year high school course.
This New York teacher explains her own experience with the TASC, which is McGraw=Hill’s version of the GED and is also aligned with the Common Core standards:
Thank you so much for writing on this important and often overlooked topic. I would like to add insight about the TASC exam, which has replaced the GED in New York State and Indiana (their website also names New Jersey and West Virginia). I’m not sure about the new GED, but for the TASC it is important for people to know *how* the new test has become harder.
The old GED was a reading test that sought to test the test-taker’s ability to read, synthesize, and comprehend complex text in the content areas. The test taker would read a passage about, say, methods of union suppression during the early 1900s, and then respond to a series of text-dependent questions. McGraw Hill could have chosen to make the test more rigorous and more Common Core aligned by increasing the text complexity and deepening the questions. They did not do this.
The new TASC exam is a content test. In the science and social studies sections, the texts have been removed, and the questions are straight out of Trivial Pursuit: “What does red shift of light from a star indicate about that star?” If you know the answer, you pass. If you don’t, too bad.
I work with recent immigrants who need to pass this test in order to pursue life, academic, and career goals. In the old GED days, we would work on English together and improve reading and writing abilities – basically getting them ready for college, and by proxy, the test. These days we struggle to help students remember a large number of discreet academic facts and trivia, hoping that by some magic, what they learn through sitting in my class for six months will be what appears on the test.
I do not have a problem with the idea of the test of career and college readiness getting harder. I do have a huge problem with this new exam. The test has gotten stupider, and it seems to be a worse measure of a student’s career and college readiness.
Thank you again for helping to spread the word.
Mle Davis
NYC Teacher
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I wonder if advocates for GED-takers could appeal to judges to get some attention-someone in the justice system. I don’t know about other places, but judges and probation people here use getting a GED as a kind of mile-marker for rehabilitation when people who are in or have been in the system are tasked with re-entering the workforce, etc.
At the very least they should be informed that many, many fewer people will pass and it isn’t because they’re not trying it’s because they radically changed the test to align with the Common Core.
They should. This is all about the money— if they want to compete in a free market , that’s one thing, but these PEARSON people are unilaterally awarded all these testing contracts because bill gates and co. Are pulling the strings of the DOE and Obama. To make that clear we have seen a decline in quality and an upswing in sloppy , stupid hubris that discount those who teach the courses and know the needs of their students . Bill gates and ARNE Duncan can’t begin to empathize with an ESL student trying to cope with his disadvantages . MUCH LESS CRAFT A VIABLE STANDARD They can create ALL the crisis and disruption they wish but this teacher’s clear, concise explication of what the test is and the description of the new one s” trivial persuit questions” ( she is probably exactly right too) demonstrates how committed she is to her work and students.it is a Damned SHAME racist , greedy swine are allowed to steal our Amerucan dreams . Impeach Obama if he refuses to straighten this mess out. Damned traitor.
I was looking for who made the decision on the Pearson testing (OH uses the Pearson CC GED, NY uses a different one) and it seems to be this person:
“The council’s president, Molly Corbett Broad, said the partnership will provide a “much-needed fresh start to attack what is really an old and pernicious problem.”
The council and Pearson will concentrate their expertise and resources, she said, to expand access to the GED testing program and “to provide a driver that we hope will transform the nation’s adult education system.”
Pearson sold it to them by doing what private sector companies always do in these “partnerships” – they offered them something “free”- in this case the “free” benefit was Pearson would cover the cost of aligning the test with the Common Core. The non-profit then actually put Pearson on their board. Pearson bought a board seat, in other words.
http://chronicle.com/article/American-Council-on-Education/126736/
Yup. Lots of inmates will be frustrated and leave prison without a GED. Having worked in the criminal justice system, I say this bodes disaster.
Why couldn’t they just improve the curriculum and keep the test the same?
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
I don’t know where to post this, but I think that this deserves a comment.
So my school decided to volunteer to subject us teachers to the new state ” educator evaluation field test” of VAM, to try it out for the state prior to it officially rolling out in 2 years. My superintendent likes the idea of getting those kudos. I have discovered that there is a secret positive side to VAM.
I received my students’ VAM target scores the other day. More than half fell significantly under the pass rate, that they will need to obtain, for our new EOC test. Meaning that most of them have a target score of 40-50 ( obtaining this will show a year of growth), even though the pass will be set at 65.
Furthermore, they illustrate how diverse my classroom of ESL/LEP kids are: one student has a VAM target score of 99 ( lol), yet in the same class are children with 36, and 41 target scores. This is due to our school upping the “rigor” by also field testing the idea that we have only Pre-AP on my campus for all core subjects, even though some of my students were socially promoted after having failed the test three times the year before. I also have some children from other countries, being placed in the class after their stint at the newcomer center. They are in 9th grade, but they read at the 2nd grade level.
So at the end of the year, when the pass rate is not the 85% that my principal wants? My reply: ” I grew them a year, and the ones who did not pass, still hit their target goals.”
What can they do, fire me for only growing my students a year, in 8 months? ( Our test in April 1st).
Okay, it might be perverse, but I am enjoying the “data” for the first time.:)
I worry that your survival plan is based upon logic, fairness, and acceptance of reality. VAM, Danielson, Marzano, school grades, teacher evaluation, et al. are so far divorced from those moral concepts that they have little to no meaning anymore, at least in the Florida school system.
It wouldn’t matter one whit that you could “prove” a year’s growth here. The “law” is the “law” and if your students don’t “pass” the arbitrary cut score set by the political appointees on the state board of ed then you will be downrated and eventually fired and stripped of your license.
I have colleagues right now who are actually forbidden to teach math and reading to their upper elementary classes because of a stupid online test score. The coaches are supposed to plan and deliver all instruction to their classes and they have been warned that their jobs are in jeopardy. This, despite the fact, that these students’ previous year’s scores already indicated they were far behind their peers.
Do not expect logic, fairness, and acceptance of reality to protect you from the reformists. They don’t care at all about those things, any more than they care about democracy and serving parents and children.
Chris I had not thought about that: I just assumed that their providing us with the data, was an official providing us of the expectation.
Maybe there could be another angle: can you really fire one set of teachers who hit their VAM, but who don’t have their kids all pass a test, when in other schools in the same state which are not using VAM, teachers are *also* not having all their children pass the test?
I would think that field testing an idea, and judging teachers by a standard that other same public school teachers in the state are not judged by, would be illegal.
Kind of like failing students in certain districts, if they were forced to take a more rigorous test of a field test, compared to the other districts.
Our attorney at our (non) “union” said that the VAM based system is patently illegal, and that he and other associations are standing by, waiting for punitive measures to bring a lawsuit if it has ill effects.
Now, once it is fully implemented in every district, that would obviously change…
They are bringing scores of teachers up on tenure charges in NJ.
“What can they do, fire me for only growing my students a year, in 8 months?”
Try reminding your principal that as a secondary teacher , “8 months” amounts to a real time total of only 60 HOURS. That’s 7.5, eight hour work days. And your 60 hours was not a tutoring session, try dividing that time out across a room full of 25+ needy students who did not arrive on September on grade level.
This reply was meant for Title One Texas Teacher
They will probably have to revisit the GED tests. Rather than being a gate through which aspirational people can enter, they have created a barrier. This barrier will impede the economic potential of people trying to get ahead. It is counter productive to fill up the test with facts. In most jobs reading, writing and reasoning are required. These are life skills that will allow them to adapt to ever changing employment demands.
Well said!
I believe that is the whole point. We are living in an Orwellian society where some are more equal than others and more deserving of breaks such as education, a livable wage, affordable housing, medical care, etc. The rest are being systematically returned to a subhuman status and will be used for the improvement of the lives of their ‘betters’ who have grit, rigor, money, connections, privilege, and the ‘right’ politics.
Here’s a great article from the youth basketball blog that compares the race to “nowhere” in academics to similar nonsense and harmful practices in youth sports:
https://stevenashyb.wordpress.com/2014/10/20/the-race-to-nowhere-in-youth-sports/
“. . .an adult driven, hyper competitive race to the top in both academics and athletics that serves the needs of the adults, but rarely the kids. As movies such as “The Race to Nowhere” and recent articles such as this one from the Washington Post point out, while the race has a few winners, the course is littered with the scarred psyches of its participants. We have a generation of children that have been pushed to achieve parental dreams instead of their own, and prodded to do more, more, more and better, better, better. The pressure and anxiety is stealing one thing our kids will never get back; their childhood.
The movie and article mentioned above, as well as the book The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids, highlight the dangerous path we have led our children down in academics. We are leading them down a similar path in sports as well.
The path is a race to nowhere, and it does not produce better athletes. It produces bitter athletes who get hurt, burnout, and quit sports altogether.”
Our society and culture are sick and we need to start fighting the worst elements and defeating them before more damage is done and another generation is lost to the fever dreams of economists, neocon and neoliberal ideologues, and greedy billionaires banksters and hedge fund donors.
Fascinating and scary, Chris. Thank you.
From the article, [my changes]:
Common Core, high stakes testing is a race to nowhere, and it does not produce better students/citizens. It produces bitter students who get mislabeled, demoralized, and quit trying.
“GED Shift”
The red shift of a star
Reveals it’s very far
While green $hift of a test
Exposes it as jest
I was thinking along those lines as well. Who knew the Doppler effect would become the gatekeeper of prosperity and 21st century feudalism, or that this in itself would become the educational paradigm today? McGraw Hill and Pearson are now free to determine who may join the inner circle of blue shift elite masters and who will be the red shift underclass that serves them. That is a direct result of a plutocracy supported by neoliberal economic policies that have enabled corporations to manipulate every aspect of markets to their economic advantage by buying the politicians who have the power to let them do that.
Read Noam Chomsky’s books and watch his videos on youtube, such as “Public Education and The Common Good:”
My first read of your title “GED shit”
But then I’m prejudiced against standardized testing.
One of the reasons for this was to “expand access” according to the board that runs the GED. Their private sector partners were going to expand access, promise, promise, blah, blah, blah.
What happened to that part? Did ed reformers get ripped off again?
I hope Pearson and the other corporate contractors didn’t get access to a huge group of the most vulnerable people without paying for that access. That’s a horrible deal for the students.
You don’t have to look far to find the nationally prominent ed reformers behind this:
“The New York Department of Education and the sponsors of the General Educational Development program yesterday took an important step in the effort to raise expectations for all students.
At an alternative education center for youth and adults in Manhattan, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, and Molly Broad, the president of the American Council on Education, which sponsors the GED, announced the start of a pilot program to align expectations for GED program to standards that prepare participants for success in college and careers.”
Joel Klein! He’s everywhere! 🙂
That’s the US Department of Education endorsing this, with the usual ed reform marketing language:
“Now, New York City is leading the way to make these standards a game-changer for adults in the GED program. The 500,000 adult learners who pass the GED exam every year deserve to know whether they truly are ready to succeed in college and careers.”
Will they be “held accountable?” No. Absolutely not.
http://www.ed.gov/blog/2010/12/aligning-the-ged-to-college-and-career-readiness/
Chiara, do you think there is any way we could ban the use of the term “game-changer” or declare that anyone who uses it should be sent to cliche jail?
The reform movement uses PR firms to come up with catchy positive terms and phrases to support their agenda, but from what I’ve been reading the last year or so, those terms like “game-changer” are rolled out with a tsunami of propaganda behind them to overwhelm easy to fool voters and/or parents and then down the road a few months or years when someone pokes into the results of those false promises, the exact opposite is discovered and the results leads to devastation from the tsunami of propaganda.
For instance, the tsunami of promises from Michelle Rhee when she rode in on a flood of support from the corporate reform Charter school movement and her false promise hit the cover of Time magazine and the traditional media swallowed the lies and fell right into line pushing the propaganda out on the assembly line of fool you once, twice, thrice and then we get what we want.
And there is a follower of this Blog—can’t remember who right now—that has dived into Rhee’s false promises and published a series of posts on his/her Blog revealing the truth behind those PR lies to discover that Rhee didn’t deliver—-and Michelle Rhee has changed her last name and fled to Sacramento, California where it appears she may be in seclusion while investigations look into allegations that she might have committed fraud while still the canceller of the DC public schools to make it appear that she was making good on those false promises.
I haven’t heard anything about those investigations. Have they been quietly dropped in another attempt to cover up another corporate reformer fraud in the education wars?
“The Game-Changers”
“Reformers” changed the game
From “Life” to “Monopoly”
And nothing is the same
As anyone can see
I do have a problem with any country’s public schools that mandate that 100% of children msut be college and career ready by age 17/18 when about 70% of the jobs in the United States don’t require a college education and—-for instance—cooks, auto mechanics and gardening is a career that doesn’t require that much of an academic education at all.
In fact, about 26% of all jobs in the U.S. don’t even require high school graduation and that’s about the same number of jobs that require a college degree.
In addition. the U.S. is the only country in the world that mandates that 100% of children by age 17/18 must be college and career ready or the teachers and public schools must be punished through a test based rank and yank system supported by hundreds of millions of dollars from billionaire oligarchs like Bill Gates, the Walton family, the Koch brothers, Eli Broad, etc—-something else that no other country on the planet does.
The education reform movement is not about improving education. It’s about getting rid of the democratic public schools so corporations will profit off the taxes that supported those schools.
We (David Spring and Elizabeth Hanson) have been evaluating the fairness of the three new high school equivalency tests and post the results on our website, Restore GED Fairness (dot) org, for the past year. Our analysis is that the Iowa HiSET test is similar in fairness to the 2002 GED test. The TASC test is somewhat less fair and the Pearson GED test is not fair at all. Specifically, a fair high school equivalency test is one that at least 60% of high school graduating seniors could pass and that 50% to 60% of GED candidates could pass with a few months of preparation. The 2002 GED test matched this standard exactly for the past 12 years. The new HiSET test also matched this standard. The new TASC test had a 55% pass rate in 2014. However, the Pearson GED test had a pass rate of only 10% to 20% depending on the State. Some have reported problems with the structure and process of all three tests. However, our primary concern in terms of fairness is simply that the test difficulty be within reach of the majority of high school seniors. Our analysis of the Pearson GED test questions was that only 20% of high school graduating seniors would be able to pass the Pearson test – which is why we have opposed that test and encourages all States to allow their students the option of taking either the HiSET or TASC test instead. For more information on all three of these tests, visit our website Restore GED Fairness (dot) org.
David,
It would be wise for the both of you to read and understand Noel Wilson’s complete destruction of standardized testing in his never rebutted nor refuted “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
“The test has gotten stupider” Exactly. The education framework, mandated curriculum, and tests have gotten more shoddy. By association and unfortunately, students thinking will become part and parcel of that low standard of craftsmanship.
Chiara: another excellent illustration of what you have pointed out before—
One needs to have a “systems approach” in order to understand the real world effects and consequences of the superficially attractive “education reform” ideas and plans.
Let me approach this from the angle of language.
There is the rheephorm hackneyed phrase about “tests being too easy.”
So let’s run that up the flag pole. For example, instead of the CCSS approach of [seemingly] breaking every human thought and activity into the predictable ennui of atomized rules and actions, how about giving students a chance to, let’s say, learn how to write and think for themselves? As individuals. With a personalized style and recognizable panache. So if we can use standard English to describe so many standardized tests in narrow rheephormish clichés as being “too easy to pass” let’s—at least for a moment—think out of the box and be a bit creative: a test can be “too easy to fail.”
😏
The key, as any good teacher knows, is to do what the rheephormers claim computers and software can do: ongoing personalized instruction and assessment so that each and every individual is appropriately challenged, pushed, encouraged and brought along.
Add in the real world fact that test makers design and produce and pretest to within tight specifications what their clients want and you have, e.g., a recent NY test that failed 70% of the test takers. By design. There was no objective standard for determining what was “too easy to fail” but just the subjective judgment, goals and values of the clients that bought that particular eduproduct.
The “failure” was blamed on teachers, students, parents and schools—when it was, literally not figuratively, a calculated sucker punch by the edufrauds who bought and paid for it.
So engaging in widespread and destructive social engineering (see retired teacher’s comments) at all levels is not a bug of the high-stakes testing regimen, it’s a feature.
The leaders and enablers and profiteers and enforcers of self-proclaimed “education reform” break our country in various ways—they own it. They are responsible. The buck stops with them.
Let me end with another way of looking at the whole picture. It is increasingly the case that the heavy hitters in “education reform” complain that they don’t get enough $tudent $ucce$$ and classroom space and relief from innovation-killing rules and regulations and such because the “system” is denying them an equal and fair share of the public goodies they want to convert to private gain. Yet bring up their effect on public schools and they suddenly don’t want to engage in the self-same conversation.
For a prime example, when was the last time—any time, name just once!—when the choice/voucher/privatization crowd defended the midyear dump. That’s a “systems” question—and one they prefer that no one even asks.
My thanks to all those that have commented on this thread.
😎
The new TASC and GED tests are travesties. The old GED was a test of reading comprehension and not appropriate for ESOL students but for those who were native speakers. The education departments need to make appropriate expectations based on how people learn and what is really needed in the workplace.