Brian Jones, a former teacher in the New York City public schools, is currently a doctoral student at the City University of New York. He here explains a conundrum: Many black parents think that choice and standardized tests are good for their children, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. How should he reason with those who disagree? He focuses here on the issue of standardized testing, which compels schools–especially those serving poor and minority students–to divert time and resources to testing and test preparation, thus leaving less time for the arts and other subjects that are essential ingredients of a good education. In his experience, it is best not to argue with parents who have been persuaded by the “reformer” claims, but to listen respectfully and to “deepen the conversation,” a term he learned from Chicago teacher Xian Barrett.
Jones writes:
Likewise, when we deepen the conversation about standardized testing, we usually discover that parents and educators want similar things for our children. If standardized tests are widely and loudly touted as an antiracist measure of opportunity and fairness, some parents who are desperately searching for some measure of fairness for their children might latch onto that. Those of us who are opposed to high-stakes standardized testing shouldn’t moralize with people, or disparage their viewpoints or their experience. Rather, we have to validate their experience and find a way to deepen the conversation.
In my mind, we can find a lot of common ground on resources and curriculum. Of course, I think teacher training is important. It is absolutely essential that teachers be trained to respect the languages, cultures, and viewpoints of students and their families—and engage them in the learning process. But this should never lead us away from demanding the kind of educational redistribution that this country refuses to take seriously. My experience as a student has convinced me that resources are central. On scholarship, I attended an all-boys’ private high school. As one of the few students of color (let alone black students), did I experience racism and prejudice? Absolutely. However, there are aspects of my education that I wouldn’t trade for anything—the opportunity to read whole novels and discuss them in small classes, the opportunity to participate in several sports teams, to put on plays, to engage in organized debates, and to practice giving speeches. If, for my own child, I had to choose between an amazingly well-resourced school with a fabulously rich curriculum staffed with some prejudiced teachers, on the one hand, and a resource-starved school with progressive, antiracist educators who were forced to teach out of test-prep workbooks on the other, I hate to say it, but I would choose the resources every time.
Our society is currently spending untold sums to create more tests, more data systems, more test preparation materials, ad nauseam. And then they have the audacity to tell us that these are antiracist measures! Of course, all this focus on testing is a huge market opportunity for the private companies that provide all these services and materials. What is never under serious consideration is the idea that we could take all those same millions of dollars and create for all children the kind of cozy, relaxed, child-centered teaching and learning conditions that wealthy kids already enjoy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Civil rights leaders who have seen generations of black children moved through the education system without learning the basics of reading and math would beg to differ.
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Francis, it is true that many black children have “moved through the education system without learning the basics of reading and math.” The question is what to do. Are they helped by creating charter schools that skim off the top 10% and leave the other 90% in underfunded public schools? Or would they gain more if the public schools had far greater investment so that all were up to the same standard of curriculum, instruction, and services available in affluent districts?
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And furthermore, do these black students benefit from never-ending testing and test prep to improve their reading and math? Or, perhaps, would they be better off with curricula like the elite kids get that motivate students to want to read and do math because they understand the exciting things that can be learned by reading and how math can be used to solve real world problems?
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Another POV:
http://bigthink.com/videos/daniel-koretz-on-sat-bias
Transcript:
When you look at something like the SAT, for example, the question is, how would you know if it’s still biased? The question I start with is when people attack the SAT or other standardized tests because of racial and class differences, I ask, do we know something about the quality of schools that disadvantaged kids go to in this country? Of course we do, they’re not as good. Well, do those differences matter? Of course they matter. If they matter, that means that the kids coming out of those schools will no less and will be less well-prepared for college. So any test that is working properly will show differences between advantaged and disadvantaged kids. The only question is whether it’s showing the right difference. Is it too big? Is it too small? The way this question has been handled at the SAT most often is to predict how well students will do in college and to see whether that prediction is off in one direction or the other for different groups of people. And it is. It’s slightly underestimates the performance of white women. It’s slightly overestimates, very slightly, the performance of African-American and Latino men. It’s a very slight difference. Now, this is not rock hard evidence, because what you’re using is a criteria and it’s the grades that students get in college. Students go into different kinds of classes. Some of the faculty may themselves be biased in assigning grades. I actually trust grades less than I trust tests. But it’s a logical first step. And that research which is going on now for decades consistently fails to show, if you pardon my [IB], fails to show bias against minority students. Could still be there but that particular piece of evidence doesn’t support it. Now, on the other hand, the SAT is not a strong predictor of performance in college. It is a predictor, but just like high school grades, it’s a fairly weak predictor. So you can find lots of kids not just minority kids who do poorly on the SAT and do well in college, you can also find kids who have high grades in high school and do poorly in college. There’s a lot of slippage and a lot of error in that. In the case of test given to younger kids, it’s much harder. There are no criteria like performance in college to use, so it’s much harder to say… to pin down whether there’s bias. But the results of different kinds of tests are really very consistent and have been for a long time with one exception I’ll get to. And if you actually look at the content of tests, it’s not clear to me where the bias would come from. But there are two exceptions to what I just said. One is that there has been a consistent trend with an interruption in the early 1990s, consistent for perhaps 40 years that test show that the gap between white and black kids is narrowing. It’s not… It’s still substantial, it’s still worrisome, but it is a great deal smaller than it was in 1968. We don’t know why that’s happening. There’s some research that suggests some answers. There’s some suggestion, for example, that it maybe an echo of the fact that the earlier generations of African-American parents were completing more schooling themselves than their parents. And more educated parents made for higher scoring kids. But we don’t fully understand it. We just know that it’s very consistent across sources of data. So that’s one exception. The other exception is that there’s certain categories of kids for whom bias is an extremely [pressing] problem. Some kids with disabilities and some kids who don’t speak English as a native language, and that latter problem is getting bigger every single year because of immigration. We don’t have a sensible way to deal with, in my view, with kids whose native language is not English. The current laws are very harsh. It basically gives a short amount of time before they have to be tested like everyone else. But particularly for kids who come here, say, as adolescence, it takes a very long time to be fully fluent. So we have a very difficult time even if we have freedom to test them anyway we wanted to, it’s very difficult to get a good estimate, really, as good an estimate of the knowledge and skills of kids who are speaking a second language. And that’s often a bias.
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Very interesting. Thanks for posting.
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” I actually trust grades less than I trust tests”
If you’re talking about predicting grades in college, you shouldn’t be trusting the tests more than teacher grades. Your faith in standardized testing is quite misguided.
“There’s a lot of slippage and a lot of error in that”
I’m not sure what you mean by “that” as the antecedent is not clear but if the “that” refers to standardized testing then you are quite correct. Noel Wilson has proven those “slippages” (what he calls fudges) and errors are so epistemologically and ontologically suspect as to render the whole process and any results COMPLETELY INVALID. To understand why read and understand his never refuted nor rebutted treatise “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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I commend Brian Jones for taking on a difficult issue.
And his example re the two schools he might have to choose between as a parent—frank talk about difficult choices. Choices with, IMHO as he put it, predictable outcomes.
The problem for those leading, and profiting from, self-styled “education reform” is that they rarely get called out on how their rhetoric doesn’t match their reality. So there are two very different kinds of conversations to consider, and the one with parents and community members won’t be quite the same as one involving, let’s say, Diane Ravitch and Michelle Rhee or David Coleman—with the former looking to see where the latter two and others have fled.
I am sure others will have many good suggestions, but narrowing my focus a bit— for parents considering a charter, perhaps in dialogue with them folks might bring up:
1), What rights and protections do you as a parent and your child as a student enjoy? Are they the same as those in public schools? And if not, what are the differences? Do the differences seem reasonable and fair?
2), Do teachers and non-administrative staff have job protections that shield them from retaliation if they have to act as a child advocate against the charter school’s operators/owners/administrators? If not, why not?
3), Does the charter have the same sort of broad offerings that the leading promoters and managers of charters ensure for their own children. Have a handy list of websites and your web device of choice on hand, starting with Lakeside School (Bill Gates and his two children). If it’s good enough for the pro-charter crowd, it’s good enough for every child.
4), Does the charter “require” ‘volunteer’ time from parents? If so, why the difference with public schools? And are there fines for student misbehavior? If so, why? And does the charter make a commitment to retain and teach a child regardless of cost and resources—if not not, why not?
The above are in no particular order. And they may, in fact, not be the best ones when it’s your time to contribute to the dialogue. There is no one-size script that fits every person and circumstance so the above is just a way of perhaps provoking comments by others.
😎
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The last two posts on this subject have been very interesting. In order to make standardized testing a benefit and not a burden to our students, we must first identify the purpose of what they are trying to accomplish. In its current model, I have a hard time finding a purpose that has any positive aspects.
I believe that we, as a society, must have conversations regarding testing, not just digging in our feet and saying we “don’t like testing” or “testing is absolutely going to fix education.” If we do not have open dialogue, all that is going to happen is that policy makers are going to jump from one bad model to another bad model.
We have to take the time to figure out the root causes of why our current testing model is ineffective, but also gather together as a problem solving community to figure out a productive alternative. Although I would LOVE to see testing go completely away, the reality is, it is here to stay. Therefore, we have to figure out how to navigate our classrooms accordingly.
A conversation has been started regarding the purpose of testing. Please feel free to join in…
http://www.thekidneytable.com
Thank you,
Mr. K
3rd grade teacher, Colorado
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“We have to take the time to figure out the root causes of why our current testing model is ineffective.”
Those “root causes” have already been figured out by Noel Wilson (see below) that prove the COMPLETE INVALIDITY of the educational malpractices that are educational standards and standardized testing and even the “grading” of students. The root causes are the fact that those malpractices are epistemologically and ontologically based on false concepts, the main one which is “the teaching and learning process is measurable”. It’s not, never has been and never will be effective due to those false concepts. When one starts with crap don’t expect diamonds to come out of the process.
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should be (see above) not below
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I agree with you. Our goal as educators should be create lifelong learners. Unfortunately, there is no test, other than real life, that allows us to put a value on our effectiveness of doing this. We are a society infatuated with numbers. When kids become just another, that is a very damaging place to be.
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How many opportunities do, high performing affluent students have to self segregate from low performers? If poor and minority students want that same opportunity, I suppose I can see that argument.
How much segregation by ability to specific schools is healthy is another question.
Classes is one thing, but actual segregated facilities?
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“Numerical scores provide an easy-to-grasp gauge of student progress: high scores are good, low scores are not.”
The easy to grasp” simplicities that are INVALID test scores are a travesty to the teaching and learning process and there should be no room to tolerate such nonsense.
“So it makes sense, on some level, for everyone—students, teachers, and administrators— to focus on raising test scores.”
NO! It doesn’t make sense on any level to “focus on raising test scores” when the results already have been proven INVALID.
“If scores go up, that means students are learning and growing.”
NO! It doesn’t mean that “students are learning and growing”. When one starts with an invalidity one ends with an invalidity and to think that test scores are a legitimate proxy for student “learning and growing” is naïve at best, but better described as insane.
“It shows that teachers and administrators are doing their jobs.”
NO! It shows that the vast majority of teachers and administrators have shunned/skirted their ethical responsibilities to the most innocent of society, children who are harmed by such educational malpractices.
“I don’t entirely blame my supervisor for canceling our science experiment.”
I blame her completely for not having properly forewarned the staff of what she wanted them to do with test prep. To end the experiment at that point is atrocious and she should be called out for such shabby management.
“Those of us who are opposed to high-stakes standardized testing shouldn’t moralize with people, or disparage their viewpoints or their experience. Rather, we have to validate their experience and find a way to deepen the conversation.”
When one’s “viewpoint or their experience” harms the most innocent in society, defenseless children, HELL YES we should “moralize and disparage” them. They are the ones that are wrong and need to be called out for it.
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Actually, in Massachusetts they use Fitness Gram for the PE teachers. Students need to show improvement in BMI and fitness such as # sit-ups and pushups and time running a mile.
http://www.fitnessgram.net
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Big brother is watching you! Do the PE teachers go home with the students to make sure the parents don’t feed them Krispy Kremes and Ring Dings?
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One of the problems with getting black parents or anyone else to understand the true motives of hedge fund managers is that they are masters of marketing. Thus, they soften the market by tossing Gates’ Foundation money at key groups like the NAACP as they have with the AFT. Then, they control the narrative by co-opting the civil rights discourse as they buy influence with key players such as governors and representatives. They flood the media with anti-public school messaging. It is is all smoke and mirrors! Their true agenda is to PROFIT big. They want to offer a cheap canned education to as many students as they can. They have no vision, no illusions of forwarding civil rights. They know nothing about educational research; I seriously doubt most of them care. Their goal is to convince everyone to buy their product so they can turn public money into private equity while they steal comprehensive education from our students.
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If hedge fund managers care so much about civil rights, why are there no African Americans among their top earners. http://hbcumoney.com/2013/04/25/201-25-highest-paid-hedge-fund-managers-no-african-americans/
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“Many black parents think that choice and standardized tests are good for their children, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. How should he reason with those who disagree? He focuses here on the issue of standardized testing”
Good one to focus on. It’s a lot easier to explain to someone why their child might be harmed by massive amounts of standardized testing and test prep than it is to explain why their child might be harmed by choice.
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FLERP!
It is not that hard to explain why children may be hurt by choice. Basically, school choice is the school choosing, not the parent choosing. Choice destroys the public education system, on which most people rely. Choice promotes segregation by race and income. Privatization is not good for our society.
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You’re confusing someone’s actual child with “children” or “society.” There’s a difference between telling someone that the proliferation of charter schools has negative consequences for public education overall and telling someone that they should not have the ability to choose where to send their child to school because choice will harm their child. I think you understand what I’m saying.
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I would never tell a parent that their decision is wrong. I’m telling you that they are likely to send their child to a bad charter, a terrible voucher school, and at the same time, all this choosing does not improve education or help anyone but those lucky enough to get into one f the best charters. The collateral damage–the destruction of public education–hurts our society.
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Oops, meant to post that at the bottom of the thread.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
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I’d like to “deepen the conversation” a little by making a distinction between parents who are pragmatically trying to navigate a broken system and may choose “testing” and “choice” versus people who are actively employed and working for neoliberal education reform organizations. I would never tell a parent what is right for their child, but you better believe that I will resist the people working in the organizations pushing “choice”, “testing”, TFA, etc. If are receiving a paycheck to be an edreformer or have a special position where your voice is elevated through an edreform organization, I will resist you.
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I agree that parents must act in the best interests of their children. Today many charter schools are not the charter that were offered at the onset of the movements. These are mostly cheap, mass produced corporate schools today. If a parent has a child that can secure a place at a non exploitive charter, and it is the best option for the child, then the parent must act in the best interests of the child. I would do the same if I had no other options.
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An important, thoughtful and courageous piece on an extremely difficult issue and one i which I know all too well. May it be read far and wide and may it spark many a vital conversation.
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To FLERP:
Please STOP beating around the bush.
Please focus on WHAT the CORRUPTED corporate’s children learn at their choice, versus what the CORRUPTED corporate INTENTIONALLY IMPOSES on public children with an INCOHERENT testing scheme = public ONLY choice
Please be aware that you, yes you never will be genius now, if you were not a prodigy child to begin with.
Likewise, public children will never become civilized citizens in the future, if they are imposed or taught by a culture of fear, punishment, and an impression of being SUB-standards from corrupted corporate’s scheme.
IMHO, it takes courage, self-reliance, joy of learning, curiosity in science, passion in literature, and lots of time, effort, resources, care, share, money and CIVILITY from parents, students, educators, and leaders in policy authority in order to build a strong PUBLIC EDUCATION SYSTEM, and NATIONAL PRIDE in country. Back2basic
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