Thanks to the dedication of parents, students, and educators, the legislators in Néw Jersey are listening. Citizen action works! Protest works! Organize, mobilize, demand what is right for children and good education.
Reader LG reports:
“On Monday, the NJ Assembly voted YES in a landslide to delay the use of PARCC testing for three years. The uses cited would impact student placement, student graduation and teacher evaluation. Next the bill goes on to the senate for discussion and vote.
“This does not necessarily eliminate the PARCC in NJ, at least this year, but I predict a disaster after the PARCC results come in and then a parental pushback so large that the legislators will cave and dump the test.
“At our NJEA Legislative a Conference last Saturday, we heard from a senator who feels there needs to be a moratorium but who also feels that three years might be too much. The assembly sure didn’t feel that way. Regarding the opt out bill, we shall see.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Citizen action works! Protest works! Organize, mobilize, demand what is right for children and good education.
AND
“Don’;t give up the ship”; “I have not yet begun to fight”.
Take heart; however messy – Democracy works.
Let us just work like crazy that it is Democracy that prevails.
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It is looking more and more like “the people” are going to end the high stakes national tests, but the battle is far from over. VAM and SLOs and benchmarking the bejesus out of kids does not and will not end with the demise of PARCC and SBAC. Children are still being judged by numbers with little regard for the professional opinion of teachers. There has been a disturbing long term trend of scripting instruction in an attempt to make it “teacher proof.” Common Core may seem more benign without its assessment mandate, but they are no less flawed because the tests may be eliminated. Technology and all its wonders are still being touted as essential to 21st century learning, and the virtual world is being pushed as the next great teacher, perhaps to the detriment of functioning in the real world. In addition, the focus on outcome measurement in higher education is troubling. Colleges had better start mobilizing their constituents and building coalitions if they don’t want to become strictly training programs for industry. And, as I think we all have realized, the battle is not simply over how we wish to educate the next generation but for the kind of values we want our country to reflect and protect.
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Excellent point. I was having lunch yesterday with a co-worker, a teacher assistant, who was talking down about the new movement here for parents to allow their children to refuse the test. She felt that by allowing them to refuse the test, children will not understand the importance of taking future tests such as the SAT if they’re given this “out.”
I informed her that taking tests are essential in many cases when applying for licensing and roster spots in college, but the problem with the PARCC is that it is untested and developmentally inappropriate especially for children as young as eight, among a myriad of other things.
She said, “Well how are we going to know if kids know what they’re supposed to?”
I said, “That’s what the professional educators in the classroom are for.” She seemed shocked by my answer, but she should know better. It’s a shame that she doesn’t have the experiences of the classroom teacher to develop lessons and monitor assessment and she works with teachers every day! (Her children are all grown, too.)
Can you imagine the stance that a member of “John Q. Public without children” might have on this? Some of the legislators, many of whom come from a different era of child-rearing, do not understand the importance of the teacher’s professionalism in this equation. Many of those who have the money to run campaigns often do not have children in the public schools themselves because their children are sheltered in fancy private institutions. It’s the legislator here in NJ who has children in the public schools who is spear-heading these bills. This is an example of how politics is run by those with a specific experience and perspective. The professional educators’ voices never seem to matter on education issues, but when backed by the parents, suddenly we make sense.
I agree–interference with the teacher’s ability to assess his or her own students is absolutely out of control and will continue to be an issue if we do not convince parents to be our partners in education.
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I urge everyone to read Neil Postman’s Technopoly and Amusing Ourselves to Death for an excellent discussion of the pros and cons of technology.
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At the testimony sessions conducted by the PARCC committee this past month, the protesters far outnumbered those in support of the test. In fact, at one session, testimony against the PARCC was offered by the hundreds with only one person testifying in favor.
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LG,
Your co-worker has drunk the kool-aid of “only the test can tell how much the student knows.” It’s easy now that there is so much emphasis on the importance of the computer and data. As Neil Postman said, “To a man with a computer, everything is data.” Furthermore, many colleges don’t even require the SAT or the SAT is considered just a part of the student’s entire portfolio. It’s disturbing that many people don’t have the perspicacity to question the validity of these tests or the social, economic and political factors that have brought about the insistence on their implementation and the reliance on their results.The ability to do this comes not from relying on test prep and computerized multiple choice tests, but on reading and discussing and having the time to think. As Martha Nussbaum argues in her book Not for Profit, the ability of citizens to critically assess their society and culture is crucial to a healthy democracy. So, I would say that democracy is being threatened not only by the economic forces of politicians and businessmen who seek to overthrow public schools to make profit, but also through the narrowing of curriculum into becoming a vehicle for test prep for multimillion dollar companies to become even more wealthy. Further, in many schools, art, music, foreign languages and the humanities are being eliminated so students will have more time to prepare for these tests. Your co-worker was shocked by the idea that professional educators could know about their students’ progress through observation and experience. This is based on the premise that only data can give us the answers to questions of student knowledge and “preparedness for college and career” (whatever THAT means!). I remember my students used to laugh when they saw signs around school that said something to the effect that if you get an 75 on the English regents and 80 on math, you’re “college and career ready.” The students knew it was absolutely ridiculous! To many of them, being college-ready meant being able to manage time, take good notes, pay attention, read well, be observant, deal with peer pressure, and the list goes on. I think we all should think about the language we are using nowadays to talk about these issues. But that’s a whole other post. Anyway, those are my ideas for today. Off to reread Postman! 🙂
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“It’s disturbing that many people don’t have the perspicacity [although I would use cojones] to question the validity of these tests. . . ”
Yes, it is disturbing, especially considering that we’ve known for a long time that “these tests” are COMPLETELY INVALID. Noel Wilson has shown so in his never refuted nor rebutted “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.
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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Dear Diane,
I am a regular reader and great admirer of your blog. I retired recently after serving as a school social worker for 26 years in a public special education school district in Mercer County, NJ. Both before I retired but especially since I retired I am spending a good part of my day actively fighting the many battles we face in the corporate reformers attempts to dismantle public education through charter schools, PARCC testing, attacks on teachers both in terms of high-stake testing for evaluations and the attempts to undermine educators’ job and financial security (through layoffs, pension cuts, healthcare give-backs, etc.).
One of my activist friends, Branden Rippey, is a history teacher at Science High School in Newark, NJ. Branden is a leader of the NEW Caucus which is described on its Facebook page as “a social movement-based caucus comprised of members of the Newark Teachers Union and the Newark community that is dedicated to three big goals: 1) the revitalization of the NTU as a force for social justice in Newark; 2) the defense of public education from privatization and the support of market-free solutions to transform public schools; 3) the establishment of solidarity with education workers and the Newark community to improve living and working conditions in the city.” Branden has worked closely with the student leaders of the Newark Student Union who led the occupation of Superintendent Cami Anderson’s office last week.
Branden sent me a copy of a petition that 35 staff at Science High School signed condemning the PARCC and asked me to get it out to activist contacts and press contacts. He may have already sent it to you but in case he did not, I have included a pdf below. He said that he was unable to include the actual signatures due to computer issues but you can contact him directly and I am sure he can provide you with the statement and signatures. His email address is brandenrippey@verizon.net.
I’d like to thank you for the wonderful work you do around education issues. These are very troubling times for any supporter of public education and the clear vision that you provide, along with the wealth of information, is invaluable to activists like me.
Thanks, Carol Lerner
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Carol, the pdf with the petition did not come through your comment. Ask Brandon to send it to the blog, not as a pdf, but as a text.
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