Hundreds of high school students walked out of Common Core tests in New Mexico, despite administrators’ threats that they may not be able to graduate. Many carried hand-lettered signs with statements like “We are not a test score.” U.S. News reports on the walkout here.
State Commissioner of Education Hanna Skandera, who previously worked for then-Governor Jeb Bush in Florida, is an avid supporter of Common Core and the PARCC tests. She is a member of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change and previously worked for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in California. The Senate in New Mexico delayed her confirmation because she has never been a teacher, which is a requirement for her post.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“delayed her confirmation” ? What the heck is that? So the NM legislators will take any Tom/Dick/Harry/Michelle/Hannah off the street and have them act as the state supe without any credentials?
Sure, why not. After all, Arne Duncan has never been a teacher and he only has a B.A. in Sociology.
Yep!!! That is about right!!! After four years of non-confirmation the NM Senate finally voted. The gutless wonders were afraid to stand up against Governor Martinez. But, Skandera was not leaving regardless of what the vote ended up being. Martinez made it Very, very clear two years ago that Skandera would be in office as long as Martinez was the Governor. Martinez, Skandera, and Legislators did not care want the statutes or Constitution said regarding the qualifications of the person holding the position as Secretary of Education. Makes me wonder if the oath office the Legislators took that basically stated that they would support the NM Constitution and NM statutes. I don’t think their oath office meant a plug nickel to them. I don’t believe many Martinez, Skandera, or Legislators really give a damn how much damage Skandera is doing to the education system in New Mexico.
New Mexico Senate approves Hanna Skandera as education boss
BY VIK JOLLY ASSOCIATED PRESS
02/16/2015 6:07 PM
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/article10445723.html#storylink=cpy
Still doesn’t make her qualified.
And boss is the correct term!
Happy Raj? Got your jollies posting that? She was “approved” by the spineless RHEEformers, but she isn’t qualified, not even by their constitution, now is she? Nope!
From the USNews report:
“The backlash came as millions of U.S. students started taking the rigorous exams aligned with Common Core standards that outline math and language skills that should be mastered in each grade.”
Pure edudeformer talk right there, right out of the playbook.
And
“The test — called the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC — can also be used in teacher evaluations and school grades.”
It may “be used in teacher evaluations and school grades” but that doesn’t mean that to do so is valid, ethical and just. That’s one hell of a magical test if it does what the article says. Will it also do laundry?
And
“”It’s an excess of time being used and an unfair evaluation of teachers,” Guiney said. “We don’t appreciate that and we wanted to make a stand.”
New Mexico Education Secretary Hanna Skandera said the exams would provide useful results.”
Guess who has made the true statement, the student or the supposed NMES-HS??
Would somebody help me out here?
Ok, students that walked out of CC-aligned tests were threatened by administrators. No test, no graduation.
That’s because the educrats determined that taking the tests was a requirement. A requirement that couldn’t be avoided one single solitary day.
😱
Hanna Skandera is the State Commissioner of Education and a vote on her confirmation was delayed for four years because they would have had to confirm her in a position for which (not being a teacher) she was not legally qualified.
So when something is mandated by law but you’re a Very Important Person—and a charter member of the “new civil rights movement of our time”—you don’t have to meet that requirement for four years and then when the people who are to vote on confirming you in your position finally get around to voting on it, the requirement doesn’t have to be met.
So that’s four years and still counting.
😳
Students: you get one day and no more.
Hanna Skandera: you get four years and all the extra time you want.
Let’s do charterite/privatizer math. Students get 1 day; Hanna Skandera (forgetting about all the time after four years that continues to add up) gets 365 x 4 plus an extra day for a leap year = 1461.
Worthy, unworthy, meritorious, lack of merit, count for something, count for nothing: so many many students and altogether they are 1/1461 of what one person, Hanna Skandera, amounts to.
SomeDAM Poet, Señor Swacker, Chiara, Linda, 2old2teach, anybody—the numbers tell us all we need to know.
Or do they?
😎
Sorry, KTA but my brain doesn’t have an “edudeformer ap” so I can’t help you.
“Hanna Skandera: you get four years and all the extra time you want.”
Must have been in her IEP …
GE2L2R: you are referring, I take it, to her Individualized Enrichment Plan?
😏
Well-played, KrazyTA
Cami Anderson was anointed by Fat Christie and she isn’t qualified either. How about all the appointed posts of TFA alums and Broad “graduates” and Relay, etc. – In a real district, one has to have the credentials, the degree, the years of experience, to be a V.P, let alone a Principal, or Superintendent. But, to open a charter, especially in NY, one needs to look no further than the young 21 year old poser…to get a green light. All these principals, V.P.s, the charter operators, and athlete charter school “owners” and even Pit Bull the singer – they have no credentials to be in education; they lend their names and the $$$$ comes rushing. How in the world, besides dirty campaign contributions, to these “rules” and “legislations” that circumvent the real laws, rules and legislations, come to be that would allow TFA and Broad “graduates” to run schools and supervise districts? Was her majesty Eva Moskowitz an educator? Look at Rhee – made chancellor because she mixed and drank the Rheeform koolaid. Look at her pedophile of a husband, running a school with young girls available. If that one doesn’t tell us that something is wrong, nothing will.
Wow. I actually love that these students walked out of testing. I firmly believe that nobody should have a test score define their self-worth or intelligence. If these students lost their right to graduate (which they earned) due to not taking a test, that’s ridiculous.
I have always felt that standardized tests were just another hoop that one must jump through in order to move on to the next grade level, and eventually graduate. I admire these students for sticking up for what they believe in, however I feel they could have protested in another way while still jumping through the hoop of testing if 100% necessary.
I think enough kids will take the test and fail to accomplish the goals of the reform crowd. Once enough kids fail, then they can declare all public schools “failures” and ramp up the privatization. They will probably just ignore those who opt out. A few don’t matter. If they are vindictive about it, they could just deny those kids high school degrees and kick them out. We’ll see. My guess is that they will just ignore the walk outs. Most kids are still taking the tests. They will get enough “data” to make their point. That’s all that matters.
Agreed.
But maybe enough kids won’t take it, and Pearson, et al. won’t make the cut. Maybe Pearson doesn’t get paid. Maybe Pearson and everyone else expecting ROI doesn’t get it. Maybe they stop attacking our children and move on.
New York had 60,000 refusals last year – that’s 5% of all test takers. We’re expecting that figure to double this year maybe many more. Yet no one can tell me at which point the scores will be invalidated. My conclusion is that they will use whatever scores they have because they make the rules. The percentage of refusals also varies widely among school districts. For many the number of refusals is still very low. If an Obama-proof ESEA is signed into law, we will be stuck for at least 7 years with annual testing used to evaluate schools, teachers, and students.
“Yet no one can tell me at which point the scores will be invalidated.”
NYTeacher,
Seems to me that Wilson has been telling us since 1997 that any results are COMPLETELY INVALID. When the epistemological and ontological foundations (the idiological* conceptual foundations) The scores are COMPLETETELY INVALIDATED even before the testing and results come in. In order to not string bean (Chiletize?) this response see below.
*purposely misspelled
I have been begging for people on this blog to pay attention to NM. Kudos to the students for finally reaching you all. Keep listening – PLEASE!
Does anyone have examples of inappropriate or outrageous questions on PARCC or the Smarter Balance test?
I could be wrong but there might be gag orders.
In Utah, we don’t have SBAC or PARCC, but our “own” CC-aligned test that started last year. Teachers haven’t been able to see a single question.
I had some fun with this…kind of a lonely task, with not many responding, but a decent number of views….my title was…”Fox news did what??Bill Gates will have them removed from TV!” you have to understand…the media in St. Louis and the rest of Missouri absolutely stonewalls talking about most of the issues raised here…..if they say anything, it will be an editorial about the tea party being behind this…..but there were comments in New Mexico of the familiar “it is the teachers’ union causing all the trouble…add in the conservative us news and world report…and……the pd is in the uncomfortable position of not being able to report about this, without abandoning their mantra that all opposition to standardized testing is from the far right….so I had as much fun as I could…http://interact.stltoday.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1096579&sid=43a7f5b382707ac5d09ade83ad2905b7
Yes, “it is the teachers’ union causing all the trouble.” And furthermore AFT-New Mexico and Albuquerque Teachers Federation are standing strong with our courageous students. I am not familiar with NEA-NM but suspect that they are standing in solidarity with our students. Coincidently, NM is presently fighting RTW legislation. Our governor, Susana Martinez and her Unqualified Secretary of Education Hanna Skandera are NOT fans of the unions; they feel that the unions work much too hard at blocking their corporate education “reforms.”
What concerns me is the corporation making absurd amounts of money on the backs of our NM children, and this is a corporation from which Hannah Skandera made a lot of money. Is that ethical?
As with compassion, for which Skandera or Martinez have none for students, teachers or parents, I doubt they can spell ethical or understand its meaning. Martinez once said that anything that is legal is ethical. Really??? Paying the big bucks to corporations like Pearson, Connections, K12, Inc. and others may walk the very thin edge of being legal but does not make it ethical. Skandera and Martinez really do not understand, or even want to understand, what ethical means.
Wonder if this is Adelina Silva’s effect.
Even though they may be behind the scenes, I am certain that teachers had a role to play in this, albeit discrete and indirect. The kids would have sat for the tests if teachers let them know they were useful. The walk-out occurred because the kids know the teachers know they are a waste of time, money and energy.
Skandera? Irrelevant and unqualified, just like Cami Anderson.
In my school we were told by administration that we need to tell the students how “important” the tests are. Even though teachers’ licenses are threatened if we even suggest opting out to parents, I REFUSE to tell the kids that these tests are important.
As an educator in NM, I am beyond proud of our articulate and knowledgeable students who are demanding to be taught and not tested.
The Unqualified Secretary of Education, Hanna Skandera is not just a shill for Jeb Bush and our Koch-funded governor, Susana Martinez. Skandera has been praised on several occasions by Arne Duncan and President Obama for her “bold” reforms in public education. Obviously, the students don’t agree with Bush, Skandera, Duncan, Martinez or Obama. They are now insisting for a quality education. Activists in NM who are fighting the dismantling of public education will never forget that Hanna was invited to stand with Duncan while Obama signed RTT.
http://www.abqjournal.com/58725/news/nm-school-reform-efforts-get-boost.html
The students should SUE!
The parents and teachers should sue too!! The protests are great, but I think law suits would speed things up. Imagine if we ALL sued!!
Continuing from above:
“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