This is very puzzling. Standardized tests usually arrive with seals or stickers so that no one can read them without authorization. In the case of the PARCC test administered in Louisiana, there were no seals or stickers. Students could flip ahead to the next day’s tests.
That has raised concerns among some critics of the test, and the related Common Core national academic standards, that the partnership test made it easier for students to get a head start the content of the next unit — or even for administrators to get a look and prepare a study guide for students.
Those concerns are only the latest to be aired in the most controversial and politicized public school testing period that Louisiana has seen in years. Gov. Bobby Jindal’s opposition to Common Core and the national tests, and a vocal but small test-boycott movement, put extra pressure on educators. Low test scores may mean that charter schools close, voucher schools get cut off and conventional schools get taken over by the state.
State Education Department officials said the new booklet didn’t cause problems. But at least three New Orleans schools ran into trouble. And some educators expressed fear that the new test format will give their critics, and opponents of Common Core, yet more reason to doubt.
If scores unexpectedly go up, will it have something to do with the lack of security?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
New York does not worry about test security when they want test scores to go up…they just play games with the cut scores. You can anticipate that student performance will go up this year–to cover Murrlie Tusch’s and Lil’Mario’s behinds. Want crisis–bingo–adjust cut scores and NY State will give you a crisis…want to project progress–no problem–just play the NY State bogus cut score game…. guess we are a full year ahead of other states on scamming the Common Core.
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Gee… no wonder social media’s being monitored & teachers, administrators, etc. are being asked to play bad cop in regards to their students… once again, truth is stranger than fiction!
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The testing protocol should be the same across the board otherwise the results are not comparable from district to district, let alone from state to state.
Ellen #OtherwiseWhyBother
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Yep, states setting their own cut scores?
So much for the national yard stick argument. That just went down the drain.
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flos56 & TC,
“The testing protocol should be the same across the board otherwise the results are not comparable from district to district, let alone from state to state.”
and
“So much for the national yard stick argument. That just went down the drain.”
I have never understood this “comparison” game being played, nor the concept of “measuring” (national yard stick) the teaching and learning process. The epistemological and ontological basis for such nonsense has been shown by Noel Wilson to contains so many logical errors as to render any results COMPLETELY INVALID.
To understand why educational standards and standardized testing are falsehoods see below (don’t want to string bean/chiletize this thread):
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And Duane, to be clear, I am not supporting these tests. My point is simply that the “justification” given for forcing our schools to participate in these nationwide assessments is as bogus as the test questions. Unsecured test booklets are just one example.
Ellen#ButYouKnewThatAlready
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Is Louisiana going for the Atlanta Test Miracle award? The Atlanta trial is still going on. Maybe Jindal sent a scouting team to get tips…
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Gives new meaning to the term, “transparency”!
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Lousiana sounds a like they are trying for something similar to the “Houston MIracle” that led to Rod Paige becoming Little Bush’s Sec. of Education. The miracle worked this way…If a principal reported no drop outs they got a large merit pay increase, but if they honestly reported drop outs they got removed from their position. Easy choice…no solution. One difference, back then we had at least one media source (Sixty Minutes) with some integrity. Media have become corporate lapdogs since them.
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The “booklet is designed and delivered to allow cheating” phenomenon is a perfect example of the no-win testing environment for students, teachers, administrators.
Paper tests are used in some schools because states have not yet put in the infrastructure for computer testing. Paper is the alternative, and kids teachers are easily blamed for breaches in security that may be caused by the vendor and permitted by sloppy contracting.
The stakes attached to test scores are beyond any reasoning about their educational value. They are part of a “gotcha” ethos created by honoring test scores as if these are perfected and objective measures of teacher effectiveness and student learning. They are not.
High stakes tests invite cheating. That means that big bucks are invested in monitoring everyone for compliance and doing post mortum audits on test results. The contracts for doing security checks on paper tests have different specifications from those written for computer tests.
The largest provider of test security audits is Cavon, Inc. Paper tests are checked for erasures, with the detail going down to the pixel level if aberrations in the patterns of response are found.
The security for online tests is a different matter. Cavon, Inc. is at the center of framing how to do this along with the Council of Chief State School Officers and test publishers.
There are federal laws intended to protect the security of students’ personal information acquired by testing companies. There are 11 exceptions to these laws. Of these, about 8 are widely circulated to state education agencies where officials are supposed to publicize the exceptions so school personnel and parents/guardians know the rules.
Data gathering from tests and protecting the privacy of information are inseparable issues. These issues are exacerbated by the increasing use of cloud storage for data, the fact that meta-data is not protected (think code needed to access data), and the combination of churn in corporate ownership of data, competition for the huge budgets from testing, and the legal labyrinths created to protect the testing industry from accountability.
Readers should know that testing is an unregulated industry.
Also stored “in the cloud” is a euphemism for what is stored, and where. The storage demands for “big data” of the kind acquired through tests has produced a growth industry in Nordic countries where computer systems that generate a lot of heat can be kept cool in caverns of ice…as long as the effects of global warming are kept at bay. There are other locations for data storage, of course. In Ohio, one of the largest operations is managed by Battelle for Kids, with some help from foundations, including Gates.
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“The stakes attached to test scores are beyond any reasoning about their educational value.”
When the test scores themselves from the get-go are COMPLETELY INVALID then by definition THEY HAVE NO EDUCATIONAL VALUE. (and I know you know that Laura, this post is for others who may not be aware)
See below for a summary of why these educational malpractices are COMPLETELY INVALID.
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Chicago paper tests arrived the same way…no seals.
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John White sets our test scores and has made it clear he will set the “PARCC” test scores after he receives the scores. That is against state policy but no one at the state level seems to care. He says he will curve the school performance scores over ten years “so as not to denigrate students, teachers or schools.”A public information request that had to be forced in court revealed that JW has lowered the cut scores three years in a row to the point that guessing can statistically result in anything from an F to an A.
Who in their right minds can accept this when these scores are being used to fire teachers, fail students, close schools and funnel taxpayer money to some schools as “awards” for performance? In my mind this is illegal. His current school performance score formula assigns a zero for any unsatisfactory score, a zero for any approaching basic score and then gives 100 pts for Basic, 125 points for Mastery and 150 points for Advanced. Who in their right minds would accept this?
Well, guess what, I have yet to hear a district superintendent stand up to JW, as I have, to tell him to pack his bags. This, to me, is the most discouraging aspect of my fight to save our public schools and teachers. But now parents are realizing what is going on and the singular, undeniable power they have to turn this around. The opt out movement has the potential to END high stakes standardized test punitive accountability. No customers, no tests. I just hope that by the time our legislators come to their senses and we elect a new BESE board this October that too many parents haven’t pulled their kids out and too many teachers haven’t retired or quit.
Disclosure – I am running for BESE for the second time. Crazy Crawfish (aka Jason France) is running against incumbent Chas Roener. Parents are looking for viable candidates in each of their districts statewide to support. I hope that activists nationwide will look at our campaigns and decide to support us financially so we have a chance against the big money of our opponents. The incumbent in my district is beginning with $150,000 left over from his last campaign. I owe myself $3,000. Donations of as little as $20 + from hundreds of supporters will add up. Lee Barrios, P.O.Box 1456, Abita Springs, La 70420. http://www.geauxteacher.net. @geauxteacher. THANKS!
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Are these actual CCRAP tests or some parallel version? I seem to recall that LA got into some kind of testing twilight zone thanks to Jindal.
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Parallel version
They’ll be saying “Here the conspiracy theorists go again!”
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Maybe someone will take advantage of this and photograph an entire test and then submit it to WikiLeaks—that way the someone may stay anonymous.
But first, that someone should make sure to get rid of any ID numbers on the test that might identify the location of the test and maybe even the classroom where it was sent.
https://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/WikiLeaks:Submissions
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That’s exactly what needs to happen. Two words. spy cam.
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There are spy cameras that are so small, they can be hidden in a pen, tie clip, etc. I was going to install one in my classroom to help me catch some boys who were stealing spark plugs in auto shop and waiting for me to turn to write something on the board before they threw them hard across the room.
The assistant superintendent said I couldn’t do it—the hidden camera—because I would be violating the privacy of the students.
I had no idea that there was privacy in a classroom with 34 students and one teacher.
The problems was solved when I called the auto shop teacher and asked him to match names from his classes to that one period and we had a match—two boys. :o)
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No seals?
How about walruses?
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. . . 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
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“Gov. Bobby Jindal’s opposition to Common Core and the national tests, and a vocal but small test-boycott movement, put extra pressure on educators. Low test scores may mean that charter schools close, voucher schools get cut off and conventional schools get taken over by the state.”
Does the governor endorse the closing of poor performing schools based on tests that are based on the standards he opposes? I guess he is against national testing, but not against high-stakes testing?
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