Tim Slekar, dean of Edgewood College school of education, has a few questions for Senator Vos, speaker of Wisconsin ‘s state senate. He doesn’t ask Senator Vos about his proposal for “the right to work for less.”
No, he asks about the senator’s idea that the state’s students and educators need tough new accountability.
Tim asks:
“WHY, WHY, WHY would you even be thinking about implementing “accountability?” Accountability has a 30-year record of failing children, parents, teachers, and communities. And the disaster of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top over the last 14 years has literally denied a generation of children access to their fundamental right of a powerful and critical education! The only beneficiaries of “accountability” have been you and your friends in the legislature and the companies that have made millions on the sale of tests and data systems to schools. Schools that have simultaneously been drained of money that could have gone towards the only things proven by research to help create an atmosphere in which real learning can occur—health care, basic nutrition, and access to books.
“This leads me to ask again, why? Why engage in behavior that actually damages children, families, and communities? Is the money being offered by lobbyists really worth purposely harming Wisconsin’s kids, families and communities? If you and your colleagues in the legislature really want to help make sure Wisconsin is delivering on its promise to the children of the state, why not simply start by asking for help from people that actually know what they’re talking about. Why not ask a classroom teacher what they need to help educate the children of Wisconsin?”
Senator Vos even wants to crack down on the University of Wisconsin because he is sure its faculty doesn’t work hard enough.
Tim offers his own proposal: why not start with a Legislator Accountability System?
“I have a better idea. Before you start screwing up one of the best systems of higher education in the world all over your perceived issue with faculty workloads, please first implement a transparent system of accountability for you and your legislative colleagues. Provide us with detailed daily workloads—the taxpayers— so we know where and when you are actually working for us. We—the taxpayers— need to be sure that all of you are not “working on administrative and other nonproductive activities.” We—the taxpayers—want efficient legislators. We don’t really have time for you and your colleagues to engage in inefficient legislative practices.
“Also, it would be really helpful if you and your colleagues designed a legislative report card. We—the taxpayers—would like to know if you and your colleagues are actually building Wisconsin’s infrastructure, creating life sustaining jobs, and helping to promote a civil society free of racism, segregation and poverty. Right? I mean we are paying you good money. Shouldn’t we—the taxpayers— know if you and your colleagues really are effective civil servants?”
Dave Zeeicel, the editor emeritus of the Capital Times in Madison loved the idea.
So do I.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
LAS? Why not? As an elected member of my village council, I have no problem with my fellow village residents demanding accountability for the manner in which council decides to not only budget but spend revenue received via local taxes and state funds. I realize the state legislature is further removed, but they should indeed be held to the same demands placed upon them by their constituents. It’ll only happen if voices are raised in the statehouse and the media. It’s easy for legislators to dismiss emails and letters, and most don’t get past an aide anyway. Testimony is huge because it goes in the legislative records. Do it if you can!!!!
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LAS? Why not? As an elected member of my village council, I have no problem with my fellow village residents demanding accountability for the manner in which council decides to not only budget but spend revenue received via local taxes and state funds. I realize the state legislature is further removed, but they should indeed be held to the same demands placed upon them by their constituents. It’ll only happen if voices are raised in the statehouse and the media. It’s easy for legislators to dismiss emails and letters, and most don’t get past an aide anyway. Testimony is huge because it goes in the legislative records. Do it if you can!!!!
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Rate their own performance?! Not likely! We need independent auditors. Ratings? Data driven. I’m sure we could come up with criteria that adequately describe all legislative responsibilities with a number. Of course, they will come back with the fact they are rated by voters. Hardly. The propaganda machine called campaigning kind of defeats the voter’s ability to make an informed decision especially when we do not have an independent media. Not to be defeatist, however, I think we could probably come up with an equitable standardized assessment system…
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Eloquent. All ‘bases’ are touched. Simple enough for a legislator to comprehend. This is the basic letter that should be written to all legislators and Governors: we can start with the King himself, Andrew Cuomo and the Queen of the Regents, Meryl Tisch.For good measure, send a copy to that ‘sell-out’, Randi Weingarten..
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You hit the nail on the head. It’s time to turn the tables. Teachers, parents and students are like a bunch of abuse victims. When will they stand up?
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So now the major issue has morphed into “accountability” reform. I lifted this link from Peter Greene; it is well worth reading:
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar99/vol56/num06/Why-Standardized-Tests-Don%27t-Measure-Educational-Quality.aspx
Written in 1998, but still rings true. All reformers should be required to complete a close read. And of course they don’t have to worry about using prior knowledge.
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Diane,
In Wis. one proposed Assembly bill
directs the Value Added Research
Center at UW to devise a method
to equate three different standardized
tests (like Iowas, Stanford, ) to one
another and to the new SBCommon
Core to be given this spring. Is this
statistically valid? Help!
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Deb,
I will check with VAM experts and get back to you.
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NO! It’s not valid, statistically or otherwise as Noel Wilson in his never refuted nor rebutted 1997 dissertation has proven. Educational standards and standardized testing have no epistemological and ontological validity due to the various conceptual errors involved in the making, giving and dissemination of the results of those two educational malpractices. So that attempting to “equate” the three different invalid tests would be an exercise in futility. When one starts with fallacies (those tests) then “equating” them can only lead to further error and invalidities.
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Thank you so much Diane.
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debcef,
I received the following response from Audrey Amrein-Beardsley about combining three different assessments to create a VAM system.
She writes:
“We have three issues here when equating different tests SIMPLY because
these tests test the same students on the same things around the same
time.
First is the ASSUMPTION that all varieties of standardized tests can be
used to accurately measure educational ‘value,’ when none have been
validated for such purposes. To measure student achievement? YES/OK. To
measure teachers impacts on student learning? NO. The ASA statement
captures decades of research on this point.
Second, doing this ASSUMES that all standardized tests are vertically
scaled whereas scales increase linearly as students progress through
different grades on similar linear scales. This is also (grossly) false,
ESPECIALLY when one combines different tests with different scales to
(force a) fit that simply doesn’t exist. While one can ³norm² all test
data to make the data output look ‘similar,’ (e.g., with a similar mean
and similar standard deviations around the mean), this is really nothing
more that statistical wizardry without really any theoretical or otherwise
foundation in support.
Third, in one of the best and most well-respected studies we have on this
approach, Papay (2010) found that value-added estimates WIDELY range
across different standardized tests given to the same students at the same
time. So ‘simply’ combining these tests under the assumption that they are
indeed similar ‘enough’ is also problematic. Using different tests (in
line with the proposal here) with the same students at the same time
yields different results, so one cannot simply combine them thinking they
will yield similar results regardless. They will not because the test
matters.
With that being said, this is very unfortunately the norm”.
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“To measure student achievement? YES/OK.”
Audrey is caught up here in the tacky web of educational jargon.
Those tests do not “measure” “student achievement” as they are not measuring devices. They may assess (in a very crude fashion) proxies for what constitutes student learning supposedly by counting the number of correct answers. But they don’t “measure” those proxies of student learning as there are no “true and agreed upon” standards from which one might attempt to fashion a measuring device for learning without the use of proxies. Yes, I know that psychometricians claim that these are valid “estimates” of learning but, notwithstanding those claims, the fact is that Noel Wilson has proven the complete invalidity of the educational standard and standardized testing concepts due to multiple epistemological, ontological and logical errors.
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Audrey and Diane,
Thank you for this explanation. It’s very helpful to
me in my attempts to explain the folly of this type of
proposal. Several of our legislators contend they can direct
the UW Value Added Resource Center staff to devise such a system
and have it written in a proposed bill. It is an effort to allow the
schools in our expanded voucher program and charter schools
to continue to use their current standardized tests (mostly the Iowa’s)
or pick one of three tests provided by our DPI. This choice would not
be afforded our public schools since they are required to administer the Smarter Balanced Common Core aligned test, which as we know is
projected to insure lower scores for all the public school students,
and especially the ones already attending “failing schools” as defined
by the state Report Card. Then the “failing schools would be turned over to Charters. Fortunately a just proposed Senate bill would require
all students take the same test. Yet, I’ve spoken to members of our Senate who support the Assembly bill. Plus. local school have been
told they can opt out if the Common Core, but the SB testing is the basis of our School Report card. Sigh. Again, thank you both.
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debcef,
For a complete take down of the concepts of educational standards and standardized testing please read and understand Noel Wilson’s work “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
By Duane E. Swacker
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