Today, the New York Times has an article extolling the virtue of annual tests. It is written by someone who worked in the Obama administration and now works for Andrew Rotherhan’s Bellweather Partners, a consulting group. The writer claims that we learn a great deal from annual testing, and that better tests, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, are on the way (PARCC and SBAC). Of course, it is very hard to learn anything about how any child is progressing when the results from spring testing are delivered in August and when no one is allowed to see either the questions or the answers. But he doesn’t go into that.
Peter Greene answers the article succinctly. It is a must-read, Peter Greene at his incisive best. He calls the article:
A mishmosh of false assumptions. First, there are no “necessary” tests, nor have a ever read a convincing description of what a “necessary” test would be nor what would make it “necessary.” And while there are no Big Standardized Tests that are actually designed for school benchmarking and teacher evaluation, in many states that is the only purpose of the BS Test! The only one! So in Aldeman’s view, would those tests be okay because they are being used for purposes for which they aren’t designed?
And he adds:
New, better tests have been coming every year for a decade. They have never arrived. They will never arrived. It is not possible to create a mass-produced, mass-graded, standardized test that will measure the educational quality of every school in the country. It is like trying to use a ruler to measure the weight of a fluid– I don’t care how many times you go back to drawing board with the ruler– it will never do the job. Educational quality cannot be measured by a standardized test. It is the wrong tool for the job, and no amount of redesign will change that.
Good reminder though that while throwing money at public schools is terrible and stupid, throwing money at testing companies is guaranteed awesome.
Annual standardized testing measures one thing– how well a group of students does at taking an annual standardized test. That’s it. Even Aldeman here avoids saying what exactly it is that these tests (you know, the “necessary ones”) are supposed to measure.
Annual standardized testing is good for one other thing– making testing companies a buttload of money. Beyond that, they are simply a waste of time and effort.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
All one needs to see is the credentials of the author. Of course he defends testing. I wonder if he has children in public schools taking the tests.
We’ll never see better tests because they cost too much with little oversight.
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Peter,
“We’ll never see better tests. . . ” not because of the costs. No amount of resources can help Icarus survive his misbegotten venture. No amount of resources can overcome the epistemological and ontological errors that are inherent in the standards and testing regime.
Duane
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Annual tests that accurately measure and accurately discriminate between a third grader’s (age 8 or 9) and a fourth graders (age 9 or 10) reading or writing skills do not exist because, despite the annual testing addict’s undying belief in magic, measuring qualities with arbitrary numbers is a fool’s errand.
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“. . . I wonder who funds this group?”
Exactamente.
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Scratch that last quote and replace it with NY Teachers “. . . measuring qualities with arbitrary numbers is a fool’s errand.”
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Love Peter’s posts. Put it on FB.
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It is complete bunk that standardized testing tells us anything about an individual child’s progress, or offers any information to help the child who needs help in school. The only result is that a child who does poorly on this kind of test will likely be given more test prep in the following year. Test prep is not education.
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For all of those are addicted to the black magic of testing children or just can’t shake off the idea that tests can be used to hold teachers and schools accountable, here is an article that might persuade you to re-think your well intentioned but baseless beliefs:
https://gadflyonthewallblog.wordpress.com/2015/01/30/why-we-should-have-zero-standardized-tests-in-public-schools /
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Excellent post you have cited. All should read it.
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One of the complaints has been that there is too much time spent testing. The “reformers” are now telling schools to do away with the “Teacher produced” mid-term and Final tests to reduce testing time. NJ commissioner Hespe has stated :
“The PARCC assessments will, for the first time, provide detailed diagnostic
information about each individual student’s performance that educators, parents and students can utilize to enhance foundational knowledge and student achievement. PARCC assessments will include item analysis which will clarify a student’s level of knowledge and understanding of a particular subject or area of a subject. The data derived from the assessment will be utilized by teachers and administrators to pinpoint areas of difficulty and customize instruction accordingly.
Such data can be accessed and utilized as a student progresses to successive school
levels. ”
So in other words Hespe has promised NJ schools that the “new” PARCC can be used to replace the mid-term and final exams! I hope that the schools hold him to this promise since some have already cancelled mid-terms and finals.
I think they are in for a rude awakening!
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Will the item analysis relate the the current curricula or the previous year’s work? Most standardized tests provide data that is outdated by the time the teacher gets the results. Learning and children’s brains dynamic, not static or linear. Teachers can get better information from teacher made assessments.
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“The PARCC assessments will, for the first time, provide detailed diagnostic information about each individual student’s performance that educators, parents and students can utilize to enhance foundational knowledge and student achievement.”
And that right there folks is Exhibit A of USDA Grade AA 100% Pure Bullshit.
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And how will the new exam ensure that each and every student gave their absolute best on each answer? Grade Pressure?
Wouldn’t it be funny if kids learned to game the system by doing badly on early assessments so they had an easy year?
So students get to choose, not caring about the exams or school, or getting pressure stress sick over the questions….
Which option lets kids demonstrate their ability without scaring the daylights out of them?
This is behaviorism run amok if they think carrots and sticks are the only ways kids learn.
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So these are the actual Common Core tests:
The 3-8 PARCC assessments will be delivered at each grade level and will be based directly on the Common Core State Standards.
The distributed PARCC design includes four components – two required summative and two optional non-summative – to provide educators with timely feedback to inform instruction and provide multiple measures of student achievement across the school year.
Summative Assessment Components:
Performance-Based Assessment (PBA) administered after approximately 75% of the school year. The English language arts/literacy (ELA/literacy) PBA will focus on writing effectively when analyzing text. The mathematics PBA will focus on applying skills, concepts, and understandings to solve multi-step problems requiring abstract reasoning, precision, perseverance, and strategic use of tools.
End-of-Year Assessment (EOY) administered after approximately 90% of the school year. The ELA/literacy EOY will focus on reading comprehension. The mathematics EOY will call on students to demonstrate further conceptual understanding of the Major Content and Additional and Supporting Content of the grade/course (as outlined in the PARCC Model Content Frameworks), and demonstrate mathematical fluency, when applicable to the grade.
Non-Summative Assessment Components:
Diagnostic Assessment designed to be an indicator of student knowledge and skills so that instruction, supports, and professional development can be tailored to meet student needs.
Mid-Year Assessment (MYA) comprised of performance-based items and tasks, with an emphasis on hard-to-measure standards. After study, individual states may consider including the MYA as a summative component.
Speaking and Listening Assessment (ELA/literacy only) designed to be an indicator of students’ ability to communicate their own ideas, listen to and comprehend the ideas of others, and to integrate and evaluate information from multimedia sources.
Two are required and two are optional.
They can’t even limit testing to once a year with their OWN brand new tests. They’re ALREADY at twice a year. Once the test results are in districts will buy the rest because they’ll be punished if they don’t get the scores up.
And away we go again!
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Yes, TWO testing disaster for the price (untold billions) of one.
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I think parents (understandably) will see that as two tests, and I think former Obama Administration hires who go on to lobbying groups should mention that the CC has TWO required tests, not one, in a NY Times piece.
They can’t demand rigor, accuracy and “close reading” from 3rd graders while gliding over inconvenient or politically problematic details themselves.
I’m not satisfied with the adult performance.
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I believe the double whammy is exclusive to PARCC. Down to 9 states. NY is still on hold with PARCC and MA as well. After this testing season we may be able to say, “and then there were none.”
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Utah has THREE sets of required tests: the interim tests in ELA, math, and science, the ELA writing portion, and the final tests in ELA, science and math. And we have sold “our” tests to at least three other states.
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Today the NYT had their stupidest argument yet FOR testing! Read the intelligent response
Sent from my iPhone
>
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Stupid, stupider, and stupidest. And from reporters who have not even seen the tests of which they speak. Or the testing rooms filled with sleeping students after the first 20 minutes of a 90 minute test session. Or the frustration of IEP and ELL students in with tears and anger and other raw emotions that break the hearts of teachers but fill the pockets of reformers.
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I have had many crying ELLs in fear of being left back when I had to subject them to such nonsense. I told them that we get special money for the program so we had to show NY that there is a genuine need for the money.
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It’s also so great how Democrats set such an incredibly low bar for their own performance on that bill.
As long as they retain “annual” testing (which is really twice a year, with CC tests) they’ll call it a win.
Then in 2016 Democrats can all run on how Republicans wouldn’t put funding in to help public schools meet the mandates Democrats insisted on and public schools will be the big losers. It’s NCLB all over again. They’re doing the exact same thing again.
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EXACTLY! This is a sham to divert attention from the REAL ENEMY….big $$$$$ and oligarchs using politicians who don’t uphold our Constitution.
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“Worst of all, under this approach, far fewer schools would be on the hook for paying attention to historically disadvantaged groups of students. A school with 10 Hispanic students in each grade would no longer be held accountable for whether those students were making sufficient progress, because the 10 fifth graders wouldn’t be enough to count as a meaningful population size.”
Once again, public schools get the same stern, scolding lecture from DC with no support.
In what world is this language and approach “collaborative” or “cooperative”? They’re not “partners” with these schools. They’re the CEO’s and public schools are under-performing franchises.
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Just disaggregate HS graduation rates, college admissions, 2 and 4 year college graduation rates, and prison populations. NO TESTS NEEDED.
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Other than their enthusiastic promotion of testing, Democrats don’t seem engaged at all.
I watched some of the Senate hearing. Besides demands for “accountability!” FROM public schools Democrats did no advocacy FOR public schools at all.
Lamar Alexander can’t even define “public school”. He’s been promoting charter schools for 20 years and he thought charter schools were private schools.
They’re simply not interested in the unfashionable public sector schools other than to collect “outputs” from our kids.
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I wonder if the reformers ever apply their beliefs to their personal lives. Do they test their own children after museum visits, vacations, or theater shows to prove that their parenting is working? How do they really know that such activities are benefitting their kids?
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NY,
We need a field trip rubric for proper assessment.
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Maybe ed reform lobbyists could do more good lobbying their fellow “Movement” members prior to the release of the Common Core test results and ask them not to launch yet another “public schools suck!” political campaign when the scores come out.
Governor Cuomo is using these tests to treat public schools as a political punching bag, and we were all assured that would NOT happen.
It’s happening. Where are the well-intentioned ed reformers?
Are “Movement” lobbyists in Ohio planning on using my kid’s test scores to harm his public school? Public schools have already taken a real beating under ed reform leadership in this state. Can the Obama Administration guarantee the anti-public school caucus in The Movement won’t harm our schools using the tests they’re forcing our kids to take? I don’t think Ohio public schools will survive another politically-motivated smear campaign out of Columbus and DC.
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I would also add that Chad Alderman, who has strong opinions, and speaks so confidently about education and the value and necessity of tests, has never taught!
He has a very impressive bio: (http://bellwethereducation.org/staff/chad-aldeman) that is missing only one massive elephant in the living room…real time, front line, in the trenches, teaching experience. He has never taught or administered tests to a bunch of struggling, poor, urban kids whose social and emotional needs spill out all over the place. Nothing in what he says reflects an understanding of how and why high stakes testing narrows, and then cripples education. The dynamic set in motion by evaluating and then labeling schools, administrators, and teachers based on test scores, no matter what the variables are in students lives are, isn’t even mentioned in his op-ed. These variables are unquestionably significant and are a puzzling omission from his argument. To my ears ( the ears of a teacher of poor urban kids in a grossly under-resourced urban school), despite his credentials, he sounds naive. I am sure that he, like too many policy makers who live in a world of ideas, is filled with good intentions, but then, so is the road to hell.
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The hubris of edu-fakers like Alderman is difficult to process. These otherwise, educated and intelligent people, must see the elephant but then convince themselves that the elephant is a just a trivial room decoration instead of the animal sucking their credibility dry. Those addicted to testing have used their own testing success (AP, SAT, GRE, LSAT, UBE, etc.) to build up their own self image. To deny the importance and validity of testing would shake their own self belief.
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I think it would help greatly in this debate if all involved, for or against, get specific about the “testing” they’re talking about. Standardized tests by say, Pearsom of SBAC, statE End of Course exams, teacher made tests, whatever.or are we talking about the use of the data?
There’s just no such thing as generic testing you can be for or against. The only term I find clearly defined is “high stakes test”. But on further review, it’s not. High stake for whom?
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I have two specific objections when it comes to “testing” and they both have to do with the “misuse” of tests.
1) Poorly constructed tests containing developmentally inappropriate or academically inappropriate format/items such as the current crop of Pearson generated CC tests.
2) Punitive tests used to threaten and/or punish students, teachers, or schools which includes all NCLB?/RTTT tests
To simply say I am against the “misuse” of tests doesn’t paint a clear enough picture.
However, I think we are at a point in this reform disaster where no sane adult thinks that a teacher is against all testing. To be against testing is, I think, understood to mean – against the over-use and/or misuse of tests.
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Additional points.
1), From the piece by Peter Greene: “New, better tests have been coming every year for a decade.” I would add that “new, better tests” have been promised by test-makers for well over 5 decades.
Banesh Hoffman, THE TYRANNY OF TESTING (2003 publication of the 1964 edition of the 1962 original),
2), We need high-stakes standardized tests to tell us that kids are in need?
From Alfie Kohn’s contribution to the slim MANY CHILDREN LEFT BEHIND: HOW THE NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT IS DAMAGING OUR CHILDREN AND OUR SCHOOLS (2004, p. 87):
“1. How many schools will NCLB-required testing reveal to be troubled that were not previously identified as such? For the last year or so, I have challenged defenders of the law to name a single school anywhere in the country whose inadequacy was a secret until yet another wave of standardized test results was released. So far I have had no takers.”
3), But don’t numbers provide solutions? “The biggest problem with NCLB Act is that it mistakes measuring schools for fixing them.” [Linda Darling-Hammond, p. 9 of MANY CHILDREN LEFT BEHIND, 2004). *See also Anthony Cody’s THE EDUCATOR AND THE OLIGARCH (2014) for his chapter on “Bill Gates and the Cult of Measurement: Efficiency Without Excellence.”*
4), But won’t the numbers tell us who is responsible for getting the “business of education” back on track? From Stan Karp’s contribution to MANY CHILDREN LEFT BEHIND (2004, p. 58):
[start quote]
Tests alone do very little to increase the capacity of schools to deliver better educational services. They can also provide a kind of counterfeit accountability that sorts and labels kids on the basis of multiple-choice questions as a substitute for the much more difficult and more costly process of real school improvement. The keys to school improvement are not standards and tests, but teachers and students. And while teachers and students need a complicated mix of support, resources, motivation, pressure, leadership, and professional skills to succeed, the idea that this mixture can be provided by test-driven sanctions is simply wrong and is not supported by any educational research or real world experience.
[end quote]
5), But won’t the numbers drive the kind of improvement that will enrich and broaden the public school experience? From George Wood in MANY CHILDREN LEFT BEHIND (2004, p. 42), in a subsection entitled “Narrowing the School Experience”:
“School people are no fools. Tell them what they will be measured on and they will try to measure up. What this has meant for the curriculum and the school day is that test preparation crowds out much else that parents have taken for granted in their schools.”
And no list of points could match what Bill Gates himself—His Very Own Bad Self!—has said about what makes a school great. His own alma mater. The one he sends his own “precious assets” [Michelle Rhee] to. Lakeside School. He lays out three principles: Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships. But the first two aren’t possible without what he describes as “Relationships – making sure kids have a number of adults who know them, look out for them, and push them to achieve.”
Link: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/media-center/speeches/2005/09/bill-gates-lakeside-school
Missing in his entire speech, not even a nanosecond spent on a wasted bit and byte, is any mention whatsoever about how high-stakes standardized testing played any role whatsoever in what he describes as a wonderful educational experience.
And I know, I know, people are asking: Just how darn wonderful was it?
“I also support Lakeside out of simple personal gratitude.
Lakeside introduced me to computers. They allowed me to teach a class in computers. They hired me to write a scheduling program.
It didn’t have to work that way. They could have hired an outside computer expert to do the scheduling system. Teachers could have insisted that they teach classes on computing, simply because they were the teachers and we were the students.
But they didn’t. If there had been no Lakeside, there would have been no Microsoft. And I’m here to say thank you.”
Wow! Double Wow! I am just imagining the world without Microsoft and CCSS and demeaning hazing rituals like high-stakes standardized testing …
Sorry for the digression.
I take that back. Not sorry for the digression.
😎
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Thanks for the big words, Duane. Impressive.
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Peter,
I don’t give a shit about “impressing” anyone with “BIG WORDS” (or is that Big Bird Words).
If you have a question about a meaning of any of the words I use there is a fantastic thing called the internet. Look em, up!
You might heed L. Wittgenstein’s words (and no they’re not BIG): “The limit of my vocabulary is the limit of my world.
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Señor Swacker: I still cling to the hope that perhaps I was mistaken, however briefly, for you.
😊
I am undeserving of such an honor, but I will bask in the glow of an unintended compliment…
And I am all for communication, so for future comments I am considering deleting—or at least making less use of—such big words as “a,” “and” & “the.”
😎
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Well stated!
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Keep up the good work, Peter! Yeah, what exactly are these tests measuring? The tests are rarely attacked on that front (except by some voices here, like NY Teacher’s), but to me that’s their biggest weakness. Some purport to measure “literacy” –but is literacy really a thing? I am a new homeowner and, while I scored 800 on the GRE verbal, my home maintenance literacy is zero. There’s a study that shows “bad readers” who play baseball understand baseball articles better than “good readers”. There is no “literacy”. There are “literacIES”. And these literacies are coextensive with a person’s fund of knowledge. I cannot be literate in home maintenance until I KNOW a lot more about it. People who seem more literate IN GENERAL are the ones who possess more GENERAL knowledge about the world. But within that general literacy there can be gaping lacunae (e.g. my flooring material illiteracy). Conversely, an “illiterate” person can be stunningly literate in certain areas, e.g.. fashion or fishing or gutter repair. Holding a 7th grade ELA teacher accountable for a kid’s “literacy” is Kafkaesque. Literacy is dependent on the thousands of streams of knowledge that ought to pour into a kids’ head from birth onward. So you’re right: the tests are frauds. Their makers don’t even understand that the concept of literacy is fraught and complicated. They don’t even know the issues. There are similar conceptual errors with the tests that purport to measure “critical thinking”, etc.
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Peter makes this same point about many faceted “literacies” and relative text complexities in this excellent post: Reading as a Relationship.
http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/02/reading-as-relationship.html
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“Holding a 7th grade ELA teacher accountable for a kid’s “literacy” is Kafkaesque.”
Who would want to be held accountable for what is really a lifetime of language acquisition – and be given a sum total of 40 to 60 hours of disjointed and disrupted time? Some outsiders tend to forget just how little time we have to work the miracles they are looking for. Only about 2 to 3 hours a week per group of 25+ distracted students is not enough to dent the time away from teachers.
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In a perverse twist in logic, the allocation of funds and class time to pay for the annual tests Chad Aldeman defends in his editorial “In Defense of Annual Testing” results in a reduction of funds available to finance teachers and the number of instructional hours to improve and deliver the kind of instruction that the tests recommend. Aldeman notes that the Obama administration has invested $360 million in testing, which illustrates their choice in allocating funds to support a testing industry, not schools. The high cost of developing tests and collecting the test data results in stripping funds from state and local education budgets, and limits the financial resources for improving the academic achievement for students, many of those who Aldeman claims have “fallen through the cracks.”
His argument to continue annual testing does not refer to the obscene growth in the industry of testing, 57% in the past three years according to $2.5 billion, according to the Software & Information Industry Association. Testing now consumes the resources of every school district in the nation.
(full post: http://usedbooksinclass.com/2015/02/07/annual-testing-at-the-expense-of-instruction/)
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Under NCLB, I have administered 42 math, ELA, and science tests to 8th graders.
I have observed only three variable that significantly affect the results:
1) Difficulty of the test
2) Arbitrarily set cut scores
3) Academic strength of a cohort (130 students)
So, if you really want to improve scores, just follow the yellow brick road.
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