In the discussion draft for the revision of No Child Left Behind, Senator Lamar Alexander posed two options for testing: 1) grade span testing (once in elementary school, once in middle school, once in high school); 2) the status quo, that is, annual testing in grades 3-8. Politico reports this morning that there is some interest in a third option for federally-mandated testing: Let states and districts give assessments of their own choosing and their own timing.
A THIRD TESTING OPTION? Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have been considering a pair options for how to approach testing in No Child Left Behind – but additional language in Senate HELP Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander’s NCLB discussion draft raises the possibility of another option, by opening the door for districts to develop their own set of assessments. Alexander’s language gives them the option to go that route, if they meet a set of requirements, whether Congress keeps NCLB mandates intact or gives states more flexibility on testing. Districts technically have the same option now, but it never caught on. Might it catch on in today’s climate, given the public backlash against standardized testing? Depends on whom you ask. Anne Hyslop, a senior policy analyst at Bellwether Education Partners, wrote recently [http://bit.ly/1ByO4rh] that it could become ‘an irresistible option’ for many districts. But Gary Phillips, vice president at the American Institutes for Research, said ‘this is one of those concepts that’s theoretically desirable, but practically impossible.’ It’s just too difficult, and too pricey, for districts to develop their own assessments, he said.
Here is a fourth option: Let state and districts make the choice to allow teachers to write their own tests and to supplement them by sampling, like NAEP testing. Those who believe so passionately in “school choice” should support the right of states and districts to “choose” when and how to test, including the option of letting teachers test what they have taught.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Fourth option?
Sounds good. I await discussion on this thread, but I am curious to see if any of the rabid “choicers” will, er, endorse a genuine choice rather than just throw money at Pearson & ETS in order to solve the test score-gap problem.
Look south? Very very south?
¿? Not freezing over soon?
Oh my…
😎
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But how could there be any interest in a third option when Senator Alexander only gave us two options? I’m so confused!
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The third option is very interesting. Like, backward design. The teachers would base their own assessment on what the students must know and be able to do at the end of the year and give a pre-post to see growth results. I could see this being constructed as a common test in a district by grade level. Teachers creating tests is the best idea I have heard so far.
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I propose calling it the “I’m Great, You’re Great, We’re All Great!” option.
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Much better than “All teachers are bad, all students are alike, and Reformers know best.” The one problem Reformers have beside a complete lack of understanding and empathy, is a blind spot to the realities of the classroom and learning. Couple that with a view that people can not be trusted and must be punished to perform, and you have today’s school reform.
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I choose option 4…but at the minimum option 3…it probably makes too much common sense to be considered.
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I think you’re assuming flexibility on “timing” when I don’t see it in the Politico piece:
“Alexander’s language gives them the option to go that route, if they meet a set of requirements, whether Congress keeps NCLB mandates intact or gives states more flexibility on testing. Districts technically have the same option now, but it never caught on.”
If they keep the annual testing requirement (which I believe was a done deal before they walked into the hearing room ) all this does is give states flexibility on which annual test, which seems to be what they always had.
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It’s just hard for me to believe Ohio will drop Common Core testing. It’s a huge investment and dropping it would require some explanation to the public on why they put it in state-wide, spent all that money and time and then dropped it. I think it’s reached the magic tipping point where it becomes politically impossible for anyone to admit doubts.
I don’t even think we’re ever going to get any idea what it cost the states and districts and schools, let alone some kind of real cost/benefit count or analysis. Everything I’ve read from the state starts the clock when the kids file into the exam room and stops when they leave, but there’s obviously many, many, many more adult work hours than that, just looking at the 90 page “Preparing for Testing” manual, and that’s one of two manuals- there’s another one for the technical/system(s) prep.
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The argument I hear now in Ohio on Common Core is “we can’t just stop doing the wrong thing, just because what we have been doing is wrong”.
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Right. Agree. Sunk costs and all that.
My son’s math teacher is doing before school, recess and after school sessions, which are voluntary. They’ve always done “extra help” here on an individual basis (as I’m sure you do also) but this announcement feels a little frantic to me.
I read one of the transcripts from the NY roll-out where Coleman spoke and one of the middle school teachers thought they loaded up middle school math. The response was they worked backward from 12th grade and they had to cram some leftover stuff into 6th grade because if they didn’t it would drop to 5th grade, which would be worse 🙂
Paraphrasing! But take away all the science-y language and that was the (essential!) meaning of the response.
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I suppose the “no more standardized testing at all” option is too much to hope for? At the very least the “no more teacher evaluations, promotions, graduations or school closing decisions being based on standardized testing” option?
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Option 4.2 is more like option 4. Sorry I keep referring to my book but the option cannot be said in a few words. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475817713
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The HELP committee (Alexander) bill will be step 1 on a long and ardous path, the House is yet to even begin the process, and it is unlikely the Senate and House bills will be similar, the reconciliation process and a presidential signature will be major obstacles. Following the progress of the reauthorization would make a wonderful assignment in a government class.
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Or maybe, the feds should be providing funds to school districts to invest in building teachers’ talents in the assessments that have a real productive learning consequence: everyday formative assessment: http://www.arthurcamins.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/What-if-we-approached-testing-this-way_-_-The-Answer-Sheet.pdf
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The problem with the 4th option is that very few teachers have received proper training in test development and psychometrics. Many NY teachers (in non-state tested subjects) are writing their own pre and post tests for their SLOs. The results are what one would expect when untrained people attempt to do accomplish a task that is very difficult and challenging for even the trained experts. The portfolio approach, though cumbersome, is probably a better way to go. However the politicians have there newest shiny thing to be consumed with: quantitative teacher accountability. These idiots need to spend just one full week, alone, in a crowded classroom full of needy students. That would be enough to get them to give up the ghost.
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“Opt out of the Options”
If option to opt out
Is not among the options
Then opting out, no doubt
Is really worth adoption
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Diane Ravitch you are the bomb!!
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What happened to the good ol’ Iowa Test? Or the CA STAR test that was just great!
We need a standardized test and NOT a Smarter Balanced Assessment test that is useless to compare one student to another for achievement.
I think that if we decide on a state’s right to choose t a REAL standardized test there will be a lot of companies coming forward with REAL tests. There will not be a problem to find a standardized test.
Before the RTTT money was dangling in front of states to accept common core, there were plenty of test choices.
Doesn’t anyone want to know if the children are really learning?
Leaving the choice up to states? What a novel idea! Ugh.
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“I think that if we decide on a state’s right to choose t a REAL standardized test there will be a lot of companies coming forward with REAL tests. There will not be a problem to find a standardized test.”
There may not be a problem in finding a standardized test but it will still be impossible to find a valid one that doesn’t contain all epistemological and ontological errors the render the process completely invalid as proven by Noel Wilson in his never refuted nor rebutted: See “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
By Duane E. Swacker
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