Dear Senator Alexander:
I am a middle school English teacher for grades 6–8 at a small public school in the Hudson Valley. We’re a good school, no doubt about it. In 2010 my school was awarded Blue Ribbon status for the strength or our program and test scores. You would think that we would be in a great place in terms of the yearly testing that the NCLB and RTTP programs have required, but let me assure you that the truth is very different.
As I mentioned before, my school is quite small, and I am the only English teacher in the middle school. The students’ English education is my responsibility, and mine alone, something I take very seriously. Yet this mission is constantly being thwarted by federal testing mandates. A true English education would mean that kids get a great exposure to complicated, challenging, and interesting texts, yet the need to do test prep pushes me in exactly the opposite direction. Instead of classic literature, I am forced to give my students short essays, dozens and dozens of them, and then make them answer questions about them. My students hate this. They’d rather be learning poetry, or sailing with pirates, or crafting short stories, or strutting across Shakespeare’s stage. Yet NCLB has created just this, test preparation instead of a rich curriculum.
The critics may counter with, “No! That’s not how it’s supposed to be! You’re supposed to integrate the test prep within the curriculum!” True, there’s only a certain amount I can organically integrate test prep. After a point, I need to Xerox those hated essays and drop them on my kids’ desks. I estimate something like 10–20% of my year is engaged in test prep skills. This is the reality that NCLB has created. It’s made these tests so important that they dominate my curriculum like nothing else. Truly, was that the goal of NCLB?
Let us not forget that every student’s test score is also a measure of me. I am now evaluated by this one test, as if this is the very best way to know what I do in my classroom. How about that Shakespeare play I do every year? Sorry, that’s not on the test. What about the colonial era party, where every student makes a dish from the Revolutionary War period? Nope, not tested either. What about my journey through Ancient Greece through myths or leaping through space in my science fiction unit? Should I stop these? The testing regimen forced upon me seems to say that I should, because all that content doesn’t count anymore. My students and I are only measured by that score.
And what shall we do with the students who don’t do well, the ones who struggle? I can control, mostly, what happens in my classroom, but what about at home? I can’t force a kid who doesn’t study to put his nose to the grindstone. I can’t heal a child whose family life is chaotic, whose emotional turmoil prevents him or her from learning well. I can’t finance a family that’s stressed by poverty, who isn’t eating well and can’t focus. NCLB seems to insist that I employ god-like powers to fix these children so they do well on the yearly tests. It will even punish me with low evaluations if I don’t fix these children. How is this fair to my students or me? How is this even rational?
A testing moment I’ll never forget happened in the spring of 2013. One of my best students, let’s call him “Sam”, was taking the new Common Core tests for the first time. Sam was a student who wanted to do well, who always did well. His average for me was over 95 for three years straight. After the second day of testing, Sam came to me in tears. He pleaded for more time on the test because he hadn’t been able finish. My heart sank, because that was impossible. All I could do was say to this child, one who painstakingly wrote essay after essay for me, was “I’m sorry.”
If you want to use annual testing in a sane and meaningful way, you must take away its stigma. If you must test, give them in the beginning of the year and give teachers results in a timely manner to see what deficits that child has and help him/her. Right now we receive results about five months after they are given. It’s such a long period of time that the kids have already graduated to the next grade. What good is a test where you don’t get timely results? My tests evaluate what my students have learned and what I still need to teach them. The NCLB results come so far after the actual test that they are meaningless in terms of helping that child.
Even more importantly, you must remove the “high-stakes” part of the testing. Punishing kids, teachers, and schools for low test scores is damaging. It doesn’t help kids, or teachers, or schools. We are all trying our best to help children. We want to help kids no matter what his/her ability. Every child deserves our best efforts. Unfortunately teachers are now being punished for not being perfect. Who among us is that? Who among us can heal every wound? Who among us can lift up every single child? We do our best, of course, but that perfection is denied us. We are human. Yet NCLB demands my perfection, and my students and I will be punished because of low test scores. How is this ethical?
It needs to be said too that in my high-end public school I am shielded from many of these problems. Those who work in poverty-stricken or stressed neighborhoods are under much more stress from NCLB. These true heroes of education, those that spend their lives helping disadvantaged kids, are now failures because of low test scores. Their students too are punished. They must attend remedial class after class in this quixotic quest for high numbers, denying these needy kids art, music, and creative expression. How is this improving education? But of course, according to NCLB this enrichment is no longer important. It doesn’t measure a child’s musical ability, or verbal expression. Only test scores matter.
Please consider how damaging NCLB is to public education. It hurts rather than helps. It punishes children in poverty, stress, or those who struggle in a subject as well as their teachers. That said, if you truly want to design an effective education policy, please speak to teachers. We in the trenches of education are the experts in this matter, and we can help you. Too much education policy is designed by those who are not teachers, and this is one reason why it has gone so wrong. Listen to us. We speak the truth because we care very deeply about the children of America. So when we say high-stakes NCLB testing is destroying American education, we say this because that is the truth.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The school may be good when measured by test scores but if this is the main measure it will unfortunately determine method/ practice. Does the school produce great learners and does it contribute to goodness or are values assumed. Schools sadly are universally system prisoners and the best escape is to introduce vertical tutoring (mixed-age) but US schools rarely know what this is. My books should help.
Peter,
Please send me a copy of your book gratis so that I may do a review.
Thanks,
Duane
Duane Swacker
20427 Dry Fork Rd.
Warrenton, MO 63383
One feature of testing consequence, is described in the Dept. Of Education’s proposed
rule change, which is easily found with a search, “Federal Register Teacher Prep Issues”.
One thousand, seven hundred commenters have used the opportunity to give input on the rule change and, an overwhelming number, to scorn the Department. If you have not added your voice yet, it is easy to do, through prompts at the site. Based on categories, which commenters self-identify, people from all backgrounds or situations are welcome, i.e. parent, teacher, etc. Posting anonymously is possible. Feb. 2, is the final day for input.
How interesting and convenient forthe writer to omit the fact that spending “10-20%” of the year on test prep is illegal in New York State.
Illegal ? You mean against some regulation ? So, how — exactly — does the reg define “test prep” ?
The Common Core Implementation Reform Act was passed by the NYS legislature in 2014:
http://www.nysenate.gov/press-release/facts-common-core-implementation-reform-act
NY Teacher.. the reg must be to ensure that teachers fail while “appearing” benevolent!
I looked this up recently, and unfortunately I think this law is less a lot narrower than I had initially assumed/hoped. First, it doesn’t purport to limit “test prep” generally, but rather test prep “under standardized testing conditions for each grade.” Second, the NYSED regulation defines “test prep under standardized testing conditions” to mean only the taking of timed practice tests.
Attached a guidance doc issued by NYSED.
Click to access appr-field-guidance.pdf
See PDF page 37, for example:
See also PDF page 39:
Wow. When we need lawyers to interpret classroom teaching requirements, we’ve gone off more than the rails, we’ve careened off the bridge. Honestly, FLERP, I’ve got respect for lawyers, but take a step back and see what your post is really exposing about “reform”. We are needing legal prowess to decide how to teach kids in the classroom.
Yeah, I found that the other day, and I guess I’d been in denial, but really? As long as the kids aren’t put on the clock, it’s okay to purchase supplemental materials (often openly called “test prep” or “test sophistication”) that amount to nothing more than sample questions from the exams, and have them replace literally scores of hours’ worth of instructional and homework time?
That’s really, really depressing. I would love to see how this bill came together, and how that “standardized testing conditions” language got in there.
I don’t see any other way of reading it.
Re: the qualifying language, I don’t know the answer, but that language was in Cuomo’s Common implementation panel report, which came out shortly before the legislation was finalized.
Click to access common-core-implementation-panel-3-10-14.pdf
Panel members John Flanagan and Cathy Nolan likely know the answer to this question. Panel member Linda Darling-Hammond may, too. Maybe Diane can make a phone call and ask.
To be clear, the law thus permits teachers to use standardized tests (either actual ones used in prior years or ones designed specifically for test prep) to prepare students for year-end State tests for any amount of time, as long as they don’t require the students to take them under “standardized test conditions.” So a teacher could build a lesson around standardized test questions (e.g. “Let’s talk about why ‘A’ isn’t the best answer to this question.”), or send them home with students as homework, or God knows what else.
FLERP!: thank you for untying a bit of this Gordian knot.
😃
I can’t help but think that this comes from the same crowd that wails and whines and gnashes its teeth over ‘unnecessarily burdensome and obtuse government regulations’ and freeing charters schools from same—
And then sticks public schools with what they know is, well, as MathVale put it: “When we need lawyers to interpret classroom teaching requirements, we’ve gone off more than the rails, we’ve careened off the bridge.”
😱
With your help we’ve shielded ourselves a bit from a particularly sneaky and pernicious Rheeality Distortion Field.
Again, thanks.
😎
“If you must test, give them in the beginning of the year and give teachers results in a timely manner to see what deficits that child has and help him/her.”
Why not give the results to the student’s *next* teacher, who can then look at them “to see what deficits that child has and help him/her”?
At least in my state, the standardized test results don’t tell you one thing about “which things the kid got wrong”. Not one thing — so unless they got everything right, or everything wrong (which is true for almost no kid), the test results tell you nothing — NOTHING.
Flerp, that decision isn’t the teachers. It comes from NY state. A good test gives quick feedback to the test-taker. Ideally the results should be a soon as possible. The purpose of standardized tests is to give teachers and schools a report card, not really to give kids feedback.
I have been in the bizarre situation of doing intervention with kids who scored low on the test, referring to skills the kids barely remember. That’s not what education is about. Kids don’t learn like that.
Yes, I understand. Even if the results came back very quickly, though, it would still be too late in the year for teachers to use them to identify weaknesses and help students with them, short of forwarding them with a note to the teacher of the next grade.
We can’t see the tests, so we have no way of knowing what the kids did right or wrong. All we see is the raw score…which is useless.
The NYS common core math and ELA tests from Pearson are not designed to be diagnostic. They are de-facto norm-referenced exams which produce data used to rank students. In addition, Pearson tests are hands down, flat-out, embarrassingly bad – intentionally bad. They are traps – not assessments – designed to confuse, frustrate, tire out, and wear down young children. Tests (along with selected cut scores) intended to produce an artificially high failure rate. Tests such as these are of absolutely NO VALUE to a teacher no matter when they are administered, no matter how soon the results were available. And let’s not forget that teachers in NYS are forbidden from looking at them or discuss them. Teachers who score the exams must sign non-disclosure agreements, which are now the subject of a NYSUT law suit. I have administered every grade 8 math, ELA, and science test produced since 2001. I have paid close attention to results as our elementary and middle school students have struggled every year to reach the formerly challenging but now impossible goals of AYP under NCLB , and the academically inappropriate Common Core exams. When we have made some gains in test scores, the reason were simple: the tests became easier, the state lowered cut scores, or teachers were compelled to incorporate unfair levels of test prep. The end result has been discouraging and disappointing. Every single student, 3 to 12 in NYS is now the product of test-and-punish federal reform, and trust me, we have wasted a lot of time, money, good intentions with virtually nothing to show for it. Common Core reformers obviously grasp the fact that using tests as blunt force weapons to coerce “better” teaching and learning is a completely counter productive strategy. Just follow their children to see what they truly believe is best for kids. Follow them as they are enrolled in schools that want nothing to do with the Common Core, EngageNY modules, scripted lessons, endless test prep or tests used as weapons.
IMPOSSIBLE: Neither teachers, parents or students have any access to test answers or questions, no breakdowns of what was correct or incorrect, only a score. This score is already shared with next teachers, and has been used to place kids in leveled classes forever. But even if it were possible to identify deficits like “Susie needs help in dividing fractions”, you didn’t explain who was going to provide the extra resources so each teacher’s findings can be sent to hundreds of different destinations.
IMPOSSIBLE: Neither teachers, parents or students have any access to test answers or questions, no breakdowns of what was correct or incorrect, only a score. This score is already shared with next teachers, and has been used to place kids in leveled classes forever. But even if it were possible to identify deficits like “Susie needs help in dividing fractions”, you didn’t explain who was going to provide the extra resources so each teacher’s findings can be sent to hundreds of different destinations.
Let’s say, for instance, that your suggestion could work and the next year’s teachers received information about their students’ deficiencies.
But here’s a problem that hasn’t been addressed yet: We would still have the problem with the changing/graduated standards that are different than the previous year’s standards. While some standards overlap considerably with CCSS, we will still have a significant gap problem that could not be resolved.
I saw a study referred to from U of Texas Austin that made the case that testing increased the dropout rate. I am always surprised the progressive movement does not take this direction. I would devistate the testing argument.
I think progressives have made this point, or at least variations of it. The fact that tests cause students to lose interest in learning and hate school is one of the main progressive arguments against them. It’s a pretty short leap from hating school to increased drop out rates.
Amazing, then, that all the Dewey-approved elite private schools–Lakeside, Sidwell, Lab, Harpeth Hall, etc.–administer these tests, and yet somehow their school communities somehow don’t disintegrate.
First, I’m not sure they use the same tests – they may do standardized tests, but not necessarily the same ones as public schools. Second and more importantly, they’re not high stakes for the elite private schools. Kids don’t have to worry about not being promoted and teachers don’t have to worry about being fired. So the tests they take are not a big deal and do not consume so much of the school day/year with test prep.
Also, I don’t think those schools administer the tests to such young students. I believe Sidwell, for instance, starts testing at 5th grade.
Maybe instead of asking to throw out the tests entirely, a better intermediate step would be to eliminate the test prep (and not accept the excuse that test prep is unavoidable).
New York has already passed a law banning test prep (which, sadly, most schools, principals, and educators are ignoring). The same law forbids districts or schools from keeping state test scores in student records, as well as using state test scores for promotion decisions (although in practice, kids were almost never held back for state test scores alone).
Every single day is a high-stakes test for the faculty of the elite Dewey private schools, except for the one that’s attached to a multibillion-dollar behemoth–none of them have tenure, all of them are at-will employees. Again, how is it possible that these schools manage to keep it together?
Banning test prep when teachers’ jobs and students’ graduations and promotions depend on the test is like banning spell check for a typist whose job depends on accurate spelling. A better “intermediate step” would be to remove the high stakes.
Then you lose the right to be taken seriously when you play the “always do what’s best for kids” card. What’s best for kids is teaching the curriculum and eschewing the unadulterated test pre. Oh, well.
No, what’s best for kids is getting rid of the damn tests altogether. But you can’t have the tests mandated from the top down and pretend that they don’t affect curriculum – that’s crazy talk.
No, it’s far from crazy talk: it can just be done the way it is at Dalton, Sidwell, Harpeth, Lakeside, etc. Teach for real, have a test, have the results be part of what goes into the school’s assessment of how the kid is doing. It’s not complicated.
Do you truly not understand the difference between teaching at Sidwell vs. teaching at most public schools? To the extent standardized tests “measure” anything at all, it’s affluence. Nearly everyone at Sidwell (with the exception of a small handful of scholarship kids) is affluent. They were born passing tests and nothing a teacher does or doesn’t do is going to change that.
Kids in public schools, on the other hand, tend to be much poorer, so their test scores are going to be that much poorer. If standardized tests are going to be a given (and, right now at least, they are) and if teachers and schools are going to be evaluated based on those tests (and, again, right now they are), it’s unreasonable to think that teachers and schools aren’t going to do everything they possibly can to raise those test scores. You can complain about that all you want, but what is the alternative and is it really “better for kids”? Is it better to not worry about the tests and let kids fail them, not get promoted to the next grade or graduate, to have their teachers fired left and right, to have their schools closed or “turned around”? Are those really better options for kids?
I honestly don’t think we’re really disagreeing that much. I abhor the test prep – no child should be subjected to that as their “education”. But it’s the tests, especially the high-stakes nature of the tests, which is the underlying problem. If you want to get rid of the test prep, fight to get rid of the tests.
I suppose I’m a little confused over which parts of the lovely Dewey schools we’re supposed to advocate for in our public schools.
Perhaps the lovely elite Dewey schools have decided that it’s unwise and unwieldy to provide their faculty with an onerous due process system that makes it extremely expensive and time-consuming to remove a teacher for poor performance. Perhaps they have decided that standardized tests provide a valuable third-party reality check on student performance, regardless of their affluence or intelligence. If standardized tests are so destructive and awful, I would assume that they wouldn’t adminster them.
We’ll just have to disagree over what’s reasonable or unreasonable. A district, school, or teacher that eschews test prep can legitimately say that it is doing what’s best for kids. A district, school, or teacher that continues to test prep can only say that it is doing what’s best for kids when it doesn’t (possibly, theoretically) affect employment status.
Maybe we should instead open up Sidwell and the other elite schools to ALL students, no cherry picking allowed, Tim. That might be an interesting experiment. Your posts are hard to take seriously as someone who understands the reality of the classroom. Teachers are already set up to fail by Reformers who view “accountability” as some perverse form of retribution and punishment. Test prep follows the Law of Unintended Consequences. The tests are terrible and the system is ripe for gaming. The more Reformers pass laws micromanaging the schools, the more games will be played. And on till the system collapses.
Tim, you’re still thinking that the main problem with schools is bad teachers. It’s not. The problem is poverty and the myriad effects poverty has on children. And until you can understand that, you’re not understand the issue.
Tests are a necessary part of education, but these tests are destroying education. They test how well-off the schools are, then punish everybody if the kids are poor. Until you can say that the student population at some of these elite private schools are the same as the general public school population, then your argument is irrelevant.
These tests are not helping the kids who need help, and and they’re punishing the teachers who try to help them.
My own children took standardized tests each year in an affluent school district, It didn’t really bother them, and every year they did well. I never learned anything from them that I didn’t know.
My teaching experience was with very poor ELLs mostly from Haiti, Central America and Mexico. The standardized tests were like a punishment. I had many crying students, some fearful of being “left back” and some that just gave up. Only the students that had been here at least three or four years could attempt the tests. Lots of ELLs also suffer from interrupted or non-existent schooling as well so they struggled with content tests. When I retired from NY in 2008, I calculated that I lost 28 mornings of instruction due to standardized testing since I worked in K-5 school and had so many levels of tests to administer. The translations of tests supplied by NYS didn’t really help much since most of the students were not proficient readers in L1 (first language). Guess what! I never learned anything from them that I didn’t already know.
Even when the expensive private schools take standardized tests, they’re not nearly as long or pervasive as the ones in public schools. We have over 30 hours of standardized testing per student per year. You can bet that’s not happening at Sidwell Friends.
Bravo Stephanie. If more of us write publicly about what is really happening in our classrooms maybe someday we will be heard. I am frustrated too but have written/shared my story with everyone I thought would listen. Out of 27 people in government, education, and the media I shared with I received 1 response–1 board of education member. Truly disheartening. Our children deserve better.
Here is the comment that I sent to Alexander:
Start listening to the real experts in education…teachers and parents. They are against the NCLB mandate for continuous testing. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has urged that the testing mandate remain. Duncan is not a trained educator nor does he have the knowledge or any understanding of what is actually happening in the classroom.
There is no research which proves that continuous testing is helping students achieve more. It does not close the achievement gap. What standardized testing does show is the difference between low and high social-economic levels. Poor students are permanently labeled as failing.
These students have private tutors, educated parents, small classrooms, endless resources, and teachers with excellent credentials/meaningful planning time/experience. These students also don’t experience violence in as greater numbers. They also aren’t impoverished from birth, never experienced hunger, etc. There are so many reasons why these students don’t dropout. We have children in poverty who excel on these tests as well. But the students that can’t handle the tests and live in poverty, they don’t have many options. One of the few is to not engage.
So, what about this. In my son’s school they evaluate the 6th graders on whether they should be placed in an advanced English class in 7th grade. It’s (honestly) not that big a difference-my older children have been in both and the “advanced” class seems to go a little faster but they do evaluate them and they do split a smaller group off for the one class.
There are three components to the evaluation- teacher recommend, letter grade in English and then a standardized test score.
Is a standardized test used like that a good “check” on possible bias on what might be more subjective measures? Or no?
This is from the Common Core testing site. It’s a “success story” on a NJ district that is (in my opinion) spending an awful lot of time and energy and resources preparing for these tests. I can tell you my district doesn’t have anywhere near this level of sophistication and resources available to focus on CC testing:
“We are providing support and encouragement to our teachers across grade levels to incorporate computer-based instructional materials and assessments wherever practical and appropriate so that students gain experience demonstrating their knowledge and skills in this way. Although this is easier in classrooms where devices are ubiquitous, we are seeing teachers experimenting with a variety of platforms and approaches throughout the district.”
So does that count as test prep and if there were a law limiting test prep would this be included? How would they enforce the law?
http://www.parcconline.org/nj-school-plans-spring-administration
Madison is a wealthy district Chiara. My district is clamoring to come up with enough computers for the PARCC.
Yeah, mine too.
If there was a law on test prep-2%, 3%, whatever, how would they possibly define it?
Is Madison prepping for testing, or just encouraging teachers to offer assessments on computers that will make the kids more adept at testing on computers?
It seems impossible to me for states to limit “test prep”. I don’t know how they would define it.
“How is this rational?” the author asks
“Rational Rea$on$”
“Rational” is subjective
Depend$ upon one’$ view$
“Reality” is elective
If dollars let you choose
“Yet NCLB demands my perfection, and my students and I will be punished because of low test scores. How is this ethical?”
It’s not ethical…it is SINFUL.
One way to look at this—Campbell’s Law: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” [see this blog, 5-25-2012, for a posting on this; there are others on this blog as well—please google]
Or as Dr. Raj Chetty, VAManiac par excellence, put it during the Vergara trial: “Campbell’s Conjecture.”
I’m going to go with Campbell’s Law. It is operative in locales and time periods as disparate as the Potemkin Villages of the now-vanished Soviet Union and US public schools today.
I urge viewers of this posting and thread to read the piece below; it is short so I included the entire thing. Then ponder the following: with a little editing and rewording, this could be about public schools. That’s how painfully applicable Campbell Law has been and is to all sorts of situations.
And the idea is not new. If folks prefer a shorter earlier formulation of the same: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” [Charles Goodhart]
LATIMES, 10-14-2014, “Busting LAPD’s ‘ghost car’ falsifications”—
[start quote]
An Inspector General’s report released Friday confirmed what many Los Angeles Police Department insiders have been complaining about for months: Officers have routinely falsified records to make it appear that they were patrolling the streets, when in fact they were doing paperwork, working desk jobs or handling other duties at stations
The investigation found false reports of patrols — so-called “ghost cars” — in at least five of the department’s 21 geographic areas. The falsifications were carried out over multiple shifts by officers of various ranks, but the sole purpose was to make it appear that station commanders were meeting staffing levels set by a computer program and rigidly watched by department brass. As Alex Bustamante, the LAPD’s inspector general, wrote, commanding officers are responsible for 100% compliance with daily patrol staffing levels, and when they fail (or are unable) to meet that goal, they must answer to top leaders of the department. Union officials said captains are under “intense pressure” to hit their patrol numbers, and that urgency trickles down to lower-level supervisors who order officers to fill out logs showing they are on patrol when they are not.
The Inspector General’s revelation is troubling for a number of reasons. For one thing, it’s dishonest. False data lead city leaders and the public to believe the streets are more heavily patrolled than they really are. That undermines our sense of how safe we are, and also influences policy decisions on, for example, whether the city should hire more civilians for administrative tasks or keep hiring officers. And if supervisors can justify lying about staffing levels in order to keep the bosses happy, what other transgressions or omissions will they allow?
Most worrisome is that this is the second report in recent months to conclude that the LAPD has been relying on bad data and inaccurate reporting. A Times investigation in August found that the department understated violent crime in the city by misclassifying nearly 1,200 violent crimes as minor offenses during a one-year period. LAPD Chief Charlie Beck chalked that up to human error, although department insiders said deliberate miscoding had become common as captains and other supervisors were — again — under intense pressure to meet crime-reduction targets set by the brass.
Together, these investigations suggest that Chief Beck and his administration are so focused on maintaining good metrics that they’re ignoring what’s happening on the ground. Or worse, that they’ve created a culture in which officers and supervisors feel they have to cook the books to succeed. Mayor Eric Garcetti and the Police Commission must hold the LAPD responsible for these specific lapses, but they also must determine whether there are deeper problems within the department.
[end quote]
Link: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-lapd-ghost-cars-20141014-story.html
What do you call a business plan that masquerades as an education model that bases itself on the wrong end of Campbell’s Law?
“Education reform.”
😎
“Chetty’s Conjecture”
“VAM is great, VAM is good”
We thank him for our data
VAMen
This is a winner. There is Campbell’s LAW . There is Chetty’s Conjecture, but these need to be numbered to reflect how far into thin air the inferential leaps are made, and by spillover-effects, and other indicies of absurdity. Chetty’s Conjecture # 1000, a-p…. and so on. I think you have opened up a whole field for rating the absurdities when economists take over the policy formation process for the nation’s schools.
VAM: very arbitrary measures, voluntary abstract math, vindictive administrative madness, voodoo and mish-mash??????
Laura H. Chapman: we need to give credit where credit is due when numbers/stats folks like Raj Chetty and William Sanders and Eric Hanushek do all the heavy lifting.
In the face of their furious devotion to knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, they do all the work to which François de la Rochefoucauld referred.
¿? Sorry, meaning—
“Ridicule dishonors a man more than dishonor does.”
But not being a 21st century cage busting achievement gap crushing numbers/stats squisher like the aforementioned, he forgot to deal with a most creatively disruptive notion— “And how much worse is ‘self-ridicule’”?
And to add to the trials and tribulations of VAManiacs everywhere, when considering self-ridicule in a figurative, er, numerical, sense, how many standard deviations below the norm does that leave the bean counters? You know, when ‘measuring’ sanity and logic and the ethical and transparent use of those cherished hard data points?
I believe we don’t have to wait 10 years [thank you, Bill Gates!] to know if they’ve mortally wounded their reputations as denizens of Planet Reality. But they’ve surely found themselves a new lease on life on Bizarro World.
Go figure… [a numbers/stats joke]
😎
“Standard Deviations”
The chetty picker’s standard
Is lower than Death Valley
And even for a VAM nerd
That’s quite a lowly tally
Death Valley’s Badwater Basin has the lowest elevation in North America, at 282 feet below sea level
Chetty threw the baby (teachers) out in the Badwater (VAM).
Thank you, Diane for publishing this. Your blog is a light in the wilderness. Thank you for what you do.
I agree.
The discussion of testing definitions, in NY failed to note the “theory” of teaching learning embedded in this quoted material from NY ( p.39)
“Diagnostic assessments are evidence-gathering procedures that provide a sufficiently clear indication regarding which targeted sub-skills or bodies of enabling knowledge a student possesses or does not possess — thereby supplying the information needed by teachers when they decide how to most appropriately design or modify instructional activities.”
Knowledge is a possession the teacher (and others) have acquired. The job of the teacher is transfer some of this knowledge to students. For every course and grade level, there should be clearly identified “bodies of enabling knowledge” and “targeted sub-skills” for instruction.
And so on… There is not much appreciation for learning about the strengths of students, what they may value or not, how they have learned about the subject outside of school, and so on. I am impatient with such a truncated and sterile view of how good teachers discern leads for getting started in a school year. The subject matter constructs operating in the background in these definitions of “assessment” and “evidence-gathering procedures” come from a long tradition of book-learning and a determination to purge from the language and thought of teachers any ideas that can not be dressed up to look scientific, objective, depersonalized, stripped free of asking about students’ interests, honoring the right of teachers to not work on the minutiae of “targeted sub-skills”–as if that phrase refers to a defining attribute of everything that matters in education, every grade, every subject.
Reblogged this on The Amateur Artist and commented:
My thoughts EXACTLY!
It’s nice to hear a teacher from a relatively affluent area, explaining the imposition of standardized testing and loss of learning it has represented for years in districts that had no problem in the first place.
It was a fundamental mistake to target high performing schools for new policies and federal tinkering when the achievement gap was always about low performing schools. Another fundamental flaw was failure to provide the support failing schools need, instead increasing measuring, testing and new standards which have made performance drop even further.
It’s obvious the current administration is far off track – Obama has spent little time in the details of education policy and it shows, most everything has been passed off and farmed out, using corporate advisors as resources instead of parents and educators.
I am an elementary teacher in the Bronx and NCLB is leaving kids behind. I agree with your post but won’t give in to “test only” lessons any more. I am going to be the kind of teacher that inspires not expires.
Doug, me neither, my fellow Peekskillian.
I’m still catching up with yesterday…and it’s today. LOL.
This teacher’s letter along with Diane’s letter (both to Senator Alexander) are wonderful.
They reminded me of the phrase, you can’t guild a lily. Or, lilies in this case.
Thanks. I think it is those who work in or attend middle class schools, not the low ones, who will be listened to more. Unfortunately, the likely outcome is that they will back off from you, but continue clamping down on low-income schools, creating a dual system. Maybe that’s what should be hoped, in the sense that it might then be able to be brought to court and win.
Makes me think of a twist on the Starkist Tuna character, Charlie.
“Hey, Charlie, the future does not want people who think well, but who test well”
Hey, brain-shackled, being effective in life has little correlation to testing high on tests. For, there are many who scored high on tests, but did poorly in life, as measured by the harm and hurt they caused others (ex. misguided political leaders)
Wonderful letter– thank you for posting.
Here is my letter to Sen. Alexander re. the reauthorization of the ESEA:
January 23, 2015
Dear Senator Alexander,
I am an International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme Coordinator at a public high school in West Covina, California. Please allow me to share my thoughts regarding the reauthorization of the ESEA.
All children deserve to attend a student-centered school where each and every child’s needs are met. In a student-centered school, wrap-around services are in place to ensure that all students have access to proper nutrition and health care. Student-centered schools offer emotional support to all students through caring, credentialed counselors. A student-centered school has fully stocked libraries, staffed by professional librarians. In order to support working parents, student-centered schools provide quality before and after school daycare staffed by trained, caring adults. Both enrichment and remediation programming are offered at student-centered schools to help our students develop as creative learners and stronger thinkers. In student-centered schools, the arts are celebrated and honored. Imaginative play and recess are included as part of the curriculum in student-centered schools. In student-centered schools, teachers and students collaboratively design units of study that are rich and engaging. In short, student-centered schools are laboratories for discovery and inquiry.
Schools must be reimagined as places that teach the whole child.
Let us not forget that in teacher education programs, teachers are taught to design lessons that engage students in topics of personal and global importance. Teachers are taught pedagogies that inform and inspire us to teach with deliberate intention and purpose. Teachers must be trusted to use our talents and skills to design curriculum and assess our students in a meaningful fashion. Teachers take great pride in the accomplishments of our students and are fiercely proud of our profession.
For over a decade, however, our nation’s obsession with high-stakes testing has done great damage to students, schools and the teaching profession. Ours is the only nation in the world where every student is tested every year, in every grade. Our public school system is in crisis. Not because of test scores or international rankings. Our school system is in crisis because the Department of Education is operating as a National School Board.
And what has been the result? The punitive use of high-stakes testing under NCLB caused schools to narrow the curriculum and engage in an unprecedented use of “drill and kill” test prep in an effort to raise test scores and avoid punishment. Now with the advent of Race to the Top and its signature education policy, the Common Core State Standards, schools will be encumbered with an exponential increase in testing. Schools are buckling under the weight of federally mandated tests and one-size-fits-all, developmentally inappropriate standards.
Students, parents and teachers have little voice in deciding what types of curriculum and assessments are appropriate for learners. Instead, the Department of Education has allowed corporate, non-educators to dictate public policy and practice.
Schools must be reimagined as places that teach the whole child.
Approximately 25% of American children are living in poverty. Imagine the great good that could be done if the billions of dollars that are currently being channeled into the testing industry were diverted to create safety nets of wraparound services and programming for every school. Think of the great gains our children would experience if all of their needs were met.
Because I believe that schools must be reimagined as places that teach the whole child, I am in support of Option 1 that would allow states to adopt and design their own academic assessment systems. Let’s put an end to the federal mandate for annual testing and move to a teacher-designed and assessed grade span-testing program. Enough is enough.
Sincerely,
Jeanne Berrong
International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme Coordinator
Edgewood High School
West Covina, California