Sixteen elementary school teachers in Framingham, Massachusetts, wrote an eloquent letter to parents explaining the damage that is done by high-stakes PARCC testing.
They write:
As teachers we cannot stay silent as PARCC makes its way into our classrooms.
In the words of Soujourner Truth at the 1851 Women’s Convention, “Where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter.” Nationally, we’re hearing a racket about the problem of standardized tests driving instruction, knocking the process of education clearly out of kilter. Here are a few reasons why:
First, test prep takes time away from real instruction in reading, math, and writing. “On average we will cancel six weeks of reading and writing instruction to prepare for the tests.”
Second, test prep extinguishes students’ love of learning:
Third, standardized tests harm students who are English language learners, students with disabilities, and students with anxiety.
Fourth, PARCC will feed into the reform mantra that our schools and teachers are “failing.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Bravo! All in a nutshell from every state in the nation. Everyone keep up the focus on who is behind this and the money trail. A retired Middle School teacher from CO.
LikeLike
Thank you for your courage. You put your love of teaching and learning on the line and have real tenacity in writing this letter. You have achieved your goal. Anything really worth doing takes persistence, perseverance, and stubborn determination. Being a great teacher requires real gifts, no doubt, but even the most gifted teacher won’t make it to the big leagues without the tenacity required to make the long, hard journey up from being a teacher who doesn’t create waves to someone who just won’t quit — who keeps trying until they reach their goal. Teacher who dislike their jobs, dislike their principal, dislike the things they must do in order to make the living, will also continue disliking their life. Kudos! Another teacher from Massachusetts.
LikeLike
Agreed! And more on Pearson monitoring social media…… it will reach a head this summer, I predict!
Nan Cook from my phone
LikeLike
Amen: Gutsy move, people. More teachers…and college professors…should be doing this.
LikeLike
>
LikeLike
Hurrah for these brave teachers! I love the quote from Sojourner Truth. Smarter Balanced and ACT Aspire need to go as well!
LikeLike
What about the science, social studies, art and music that are being eliminated? At least language arts and math still get taught.
LikeLike
It seems to me that the problem is one of your own making. If you choose to spend 6 weeks on test prep, that was you poor choice, not a problem with parcc. There may well be problems with high stakes testing, but this certainly isn’t one of them. If you teach the common core standards all year long, including the practice standards, you won’t need all that ridiculous “test prep”
LikeLike
“that was you poor choice”
NO!, More likely than not the pressure by admin to raise test scores is at the heart of the problem. The teachers are not the decision makers for these educational malpractices. Coercion and bullying on the part of the Feds, States and Districts are the “poor choice”.
“If you teach common core standards. . . ”
Horse manure. Those “common” core standards are educational malpractices in and of themselves. To understand why educational standards and standardized testing, and even the “grading” of students are abominable educational malpractices read and understand their COMPLETE INVALIDITIES that results in any conclusions being “vain and illusory” in Wilson’s 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. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
By Duane E. Swacker
LikeLike
If you do not do the “test prep” on the computer, how will your students know how to use the “tools” provided? This is especially true for the younger students. And, we lost one day due to “infrastructure test.” In addition, those schools with portable computer labs lose time because all the portable labs are needed for the test. Part of the “ridiculous ‘test prep'” has nothing to do with the test but with the computer skills needed.
LikeLike