Jesse Hagopian, Seattle teacher leader, reports on the chaos that accompanied the introduction of the Smarter Balanced assessment in Seattle.
“Before the testing season began, educators in Seattle knew that because of the lack of proper preparations, IT support, technological upgrades, and training – and due to the outlandish number of tests administered this year – testing pandemonium would ensue.”
Their expectations proved correct.
” We heard many stories about SBAC testing that are common to high-stakes, standardized tests: the tests dramatically disrupted the educational process, deprived students of hours of instructional time, reduced stressed out students to tears, and monopolized the computer labs and libraries in service of test administration for weeks at a time.”
One teacher reported:
“Students spent a total of 6 hours completing the first half of the [Common Core] testing they are required to do. Students are being asked to navigate confusing split screens; drag, drop, and highlight; and type extended responses. They are being asked to demonstrate their learning in a completely different way than how they have acquired it. The district has said that the amount students are expected to type is not overwhelming. However, students are being asked to type an entire essay, several paragraphs long, on the computer. Our school does not have a technology teacher and not all students have computer access at home, so many students have not learned computer or keyboarding skills. I watched more than one student hitting the space bar over and over because they did not know how to go down to the next line to start a new paragraph.
“I was so proud of my students for working through the test and trying their hardest, despite the challenges. We were all glad when a long week of testing was over and we could get back to learning. We later learned that the directions we received from the district about how to access the test and what the test was called were incorrect. This meant that an entire grade took the wrong test and were then required to retake it. We were told that this was not an isolated incident but had occurred at several schools. The look on my students’ faces when I told them we had to do the test again was heart-breaking.
“Due to the challenges students have had navigating the testing interface, I question the developmental appropriateness and the equity of this test. Due to the many issues we’ve seen with the rollout this year, I question the validity of this test to evaluate our schools, our teachers, and our students.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
For months, I have been disheartened that there has been so much media attention devoted to PARCC but not to SBAC. Don’t get me wrong: I welcome the focus on the nefarious funding-sources and profiteers of PARCC and I love, love, love the large scale civil disobedience we have seen by kids, parents, teachers and even, in some brave cases, by principals and superintendents, in places like New Mexico, New Jersey and New York. But we are not seeing the same level of journalistic interest in and investigation of the Smarter Balanced tests being suffered here in Oregon and elsewhere. Why not?
My hunch is that it has to do with HOW BLOODY DIFFICULT IT IS TO FIND ANY INFORMATION ABOUT THE SBAC FROM ANY SOURCE OTHER THAN SBAC ITSELF. Seriously, I recommend you do a google search and experience for yourself the Orwellian scrubbing of the Internet by the Consortium.
I am not a journalist and I can say tonight: I have never been more saddened by that fact. If I *were* professionally trained, I would have the expertise to spend the next month getting to the bottom of this clearly corrupt enterprise: any organization that spends this much energy obscuring every last detail about its origins, governance, finances and practices cannot be entirely above board.
But, using my admittedly amateurish journalistic skills, here is what I have found and, if I WERE a journalist (and not a full time teacher), here are some leads I would pursue:
1. Since SBAC’s Race to the Top grant ran out, it has been housed at UCLA’s education school. (http://www.smarterbalanced.org/news/states-move-forward-smarter-balanced/) This move also seems to coincide with the end of publicly available quarterly reports, which list SBAC’s subcontracts. The most recent report I could find was from June of 2013. There you will see contracts with Educational Testing Service, AIR, Amplify, McGraw-Hill, Pearson and many more. (http://www.smarterbalanced.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Quarterly-Report-June-2013.pdf)
2. In its new home at UCLA, SBAC is collaborating with something called the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing (CRESST) and guess what? It is funded by some of the very same organizations that are getting contracts with SBAC (ETS, for example), as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (http://www.cse.ucla.edu/about/agencies.php)
3. From what I can find, UCLA’s education school is also enmeshed in the charter school movement. In fact, UCLA offers a certificate on Charter School Finance Policy and Administration! (https://www.uclaextension.edu/pages/ProgramDetails.aspx?reg=CF586) If I were even remotely cynical, I might ask myself who stands to benefit the most from a new standardized test for which it is projected that 60-70% of kids will fail? Might it be charter schools that can swoop in and offer “alternatives” to “failing” schools, where “failing” is measured by standardized tests?
4. Who the heck wrote the SBAC? Looks to me like ETS and McGraw Hill, which received (at least) a combined $82.6 million from the Consortium (that’s us!) for “test-item development” and other services. (http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/10/01/06contract.h34.html)
SOMEBODY has got to connect all these dots and show that the SBAC, just like the PARCC, is a giveaway to profiteers, was NOT crafted by educators with the best interests of students in mind, and is another step toward taking the “public” out of public education.
Ursula,
AMEN!
Ursula, have you checked state department of education web sites in the Smarter Balanced member states?
oea.dpi.wi.gov/assessment/Smarter
Plus they are “forgetting” here in Seattle that some students are explicitly opted-out. I have a note from the principal AND my fifth-grade son’s teacher confirming their understanding of our instructions — and the teacher even told us he’d have math sheets to work on. And we wouldn’t have known if we hadn’t happened to ask our child, “So, how many math sheets did you finish?” Apparently the entire class was filed in and sat down and that was that.
Happened in my school as well. I’ve opted out my sons for three years now, and this year, my youngest told me he was forced to take one of the tests he was opted out of. His teacher didn’t know that he was opted out, because the administration hadn’t bothered to tell the teachers who had opted out. I set the administration straight, but they were actually violating the law by NOT informing the teachers who had opted out.
HORRID.
OPT OUT!
Parents UNITE. Don’t buy the KOOK AID. All this testing and the so ridiculous CCSS is to control, NOT to educate.
The Colonists are at work.
These scanarios VIOLATE so many practices in education and testing.
Why we don’t just boycott EVERYTHING TEACHERS AND CHILDREN ARE FORCED to do, by now, I don’t understand.
We just watched the sentencing of educators in Atlanta Public Schools. Their experiences and the erosion of ethics did not happen overnight.
It took years!
More and more demands, on top of more demands, then more pressures and demands, plus pressures to earn pay-for-performance-school-against-school competition, newspaper reportings, awards for higher scores, etc.
Who can maintain a compass?
Few?
In Seattle and everywhere else, these mandates of high test scores, unprofessional – unethical practices and chaotic experiences are painful to read, and outrageously insane to experience. We have no idea what they are testing. Is it computer skills or content knowledge, or both?
The RIGOR parades as pain, pain, pain and keeping everyone in chaos >> total stress and confusion. Purposeful!
Where are the educational psychologists?
Why are they not raising the roof?
Everything we know about children and evaluating them…is broken, on purpose!
This just cannot continue!
ALL…Parents & Educators: OPT OUT!
The SBAC tests sound like they have the same user interface as those from PARCC. SBAC tests are supposed to be adaptive, based on number of correct answers, item difficulty, and number of paths used to arrive at the correct answer…fewer paths are usually better.
I have not studied these tests, but they are being advertised as “adaptive ” by the latest spokespersons for the CCSS, Michael Kirst, President of the California State Board of Education ( emeritus professor of education, Stanford) and Harold Levine, Dean of Education at the University of California, Davis.
Both appear to have been enlisted by the National Governor’s Association to pitch the wonders of the Common Core and computer tests to officials in higher education.
In addition to having the Commentary section of EdWeek (April 13, 2015) for this purpose, they are also pitching the new “organization, funded by the usual billionaires, called Higher Ed for Higher Standards.
The messaging campaign seems to be that colleges and universities should accept scores on the tests for admission, placement in programs, eligibility for specific courses, and “rethinking” the content in teacher education programs.
The Commentary appears to have been constructed around talking points provided by NGA and put together by marketing pros, not scholars who are well informed about the testing fiascos and legitimate questions about the CCSS. From this account, you would think that the CCSS are all about hands on learning, collaboration on projects, and developing wonderful and new styles of thinking in this generation. The jargon is thick, misleading, and intended to erase the actual history of the Gates funded project.
“The messaging campaign seems to be that colleges and universities should accept scores on the tests for admission, placement in programs, eligibility for specific courses, and “rethinking” the content in teacher education programs.”
All of which will lead directly to over-reliance on a single test score. They’ll tie more and more decisions to the tests, while telling parents the tests are not “high stakes” and it’s not all about the test.
It will inevitably become all about the test. It can’t end any other way.
I’d love to see some spending comparisons: how much did they spend on testing/marketing the Common Core test versus how much they spent on support for Common Core aligned instruction/support?
I think they had an ethical duty to tell parents the simple truth: “we plan to use these tests for many decisions” Maybe they know which decisions, maybe they don’t, I don’t know, but guaranteeing parents the tests are not “high stakes” while HOW the tests will be used is still being decided is dishonest.
They DO plan to use the CC tests for decisions on students, and they have not revealed that. If they HAD revealed that, parents would have had many more questions.
I think that this interfacing are fashionable or something, because Utah’s AIR tests are the same type of thing. The kids complain about having to navigate all of these split screens. Maybe this is the test makers’ ways of making the test supposedly “rigorous.” Confusing kids is REALLY rigorous (that last sentence was sarcasm).
Sorry. I typed too fast for good grammar: “These interfacings are fashionable…”
SBAC in Washington is handled by AIR – American Institutes for Research. So really, Utah is probably getting the SBAC under another name.
Wouldn’t surprise me.
The interface is horrible. I gave them tons of feedback last year after the pilot testing and they clearly did not listen to a thing, since NOTHING has changed.
My experience with 3rd grade:
Split screen is awful, and sending the screen out to full size sometimes freezes the test, kids can’t get it to go back to the split screen to answer the questions.
All the text is the same font, same size – even quotes, blocks of text that kids are supposed to refer to to find an answer. No use of bold or indented text boxes to help them visually differentiate between directions and a reading passage.
Questions are “hidden” within multiple lines of text – tricky, eh?
Question numbers are on the line above, places for responses are ambiguous.
Kids are “forced” into certain responses, because the 2nd part of the question won’t allow itself to be selected unless a kid has chosen a certain answer in the previous answer.
Highlighting feature gets “stuck” – a known bug.
Tab keys on iPad Bluetooth keyboards will crash the test – a “bug” the developer has known about for a long time. Their solution? “Tell the kids not to touch the tab key.” Whatever.
On Macs, the F keys – Function keys – can also crash the test. Their solution? Disable the function keys, which also means you have to disable the volume keys there, which means if the volume isn’t set right, you have to pause the test, log the kid out, adjust the volume, log them back in. Effective AND efficient, right?
Public schools should make a lot of noise during testing season, because that’s the only time our schools get lawmakers attention.
The Common Core testing is almost completed in Ohio. Lawmakers are now working on the following: more money for cybercharters, expanding vouchers and threatening charter teachers who want to unionize.
Public schools immediately dropped off the list the minute the CC tests were completed. Our kids are no longer useful to the ed reform “movement” now that their data has been collected. They’ll go back to “ignored”.
The testing chaos is beginning to make some news, but at the national level, the campaign to sustain attention to the Common Core and high stakes tests is robust and increasingly targeted to make complaints look like a matter of “state and local politics around state standards and high-stakes assessments tied to accountability.”
That quote is from an EdWeek Commentary (April 13,2015) that appears to have been constructed around talking points from the National Governor’s Association and published as if totally authored by Michael W. Kirst, President of the California State Board of Education (emeritus professor of education, Stanford University) and Harold G. Levine, Dean of the School of Education, University of California, Davis.
I think these scholars were performing a PR function, a pay-back for a grant from the National Governor’s Association. NGA is launching a new PR campaign, starting in California. The Commentary is a promo for “Higher Standards for Higher Ed,” by only one facet of a huge marketing campaign funded by the usual billionaires.
The Commentary also pushes the “The Collaborative for Student Success,” a grant-making initiative created with the pooled resources of a diverse group of regional and national education foundations deeply committed to improving public education.”
This Collaborative appears to be a very sophisticated equivalent of a super, super, super pac–a billionaire-funded PR campaign from The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Helios Education Foundation, Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Lumina Foundation among others.
According to Kirst and Levine, “The members of the Collaborative share the belief that the successful implementation of the Common Core State Standards is an important next step in ensuring that all students are prepared to succeed at college level work.”
“The mission of the Collaborative is to support the state-led efforts of State Education Agencies and local education organizations responsible for educating and informing all stakeholders — parents, students, teachers and community leaders — about the new state standards and assessments.”
I love how these two scholars repeat the “state-led” rhetoric present in all marketing of the Common Core from the get-go.
This Collaborative is a monster PR machine that has one basic message going out to multiple state PTA’s, Chambers of Commerce, and their business groups, local and regional foundations, school districts, a lot of professional groups that have been recipients of grants including the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, the National Education Association, and the American Federation of Teachers.
Others who have signed on to promote the Common Core and the tests are the American Association of State Colleges & Universities, Complete College America campaign, Association of Governing Boards of Colleges and Universities, National Association of System Heads, Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, State Higher Education Executive Officers…
The roll-out of this messaging campaign is happening in time to push back against opposition from the left and right. I also think it is being timed and orchestrated to make it make it difficult for presidential candidates to object to the agenda.
This testing scam is a junk from top to bottom
The fact that Pearson thinks students should conform to their interface is typical of software developers who have no clue what good software is.
It’s the same attitude that Bill Gates had when he was developing software: “If the user can’t figure out how to restart the computer (ctrl-alt-delete!!!), too bad”.
Not coincidentally, it is also the prevailing attitude of reformers in general: “if you are not up to my ‘smarter balanced’ expectations, tough beans. You fail.”
The attitude of these people absolutely wreaks of superiority and condescension.
I think it’s kind of amusing that they think low income people have no experience with an online interface and will be wowed with all this awesome testing technology.
Low wage employers rely on online applications and training sessions and have FOR YEARS. It’s cheaper. One cannot register with a temp agency in this town without using an online interface and taking an online test.
Ask a low wage employee if they took (for example) safety training online. The answer is “yes”. It’s an inexpensive way for a large employer to check the “safety training” box.
“. . . I question the validity of this test to evaluate our schools, our teachers, and our students.”
No need to question the “validity of this test” as Noel Wilson has already proven how these standardized tests are COMPLETELY INVALID. For a short read on the invalidity issues see his take down of the testing bible in “A Little Less than Valid: An Essay Review” found at:
Click to access v10n5.pdf
Or, of course, Wilson’s complete destruction of the concepts of educational standards and standardized testing in 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.
In my opinion we need many more likeJesse Hagopian! Congratulations to him and my hope is more will support and speak out like he has done.
And there’s the key: “I watched more than one student hitting the space bar over and over because they did not know how to go down to the next line to start a new paragraph.” That’s how we will divert poor students into oblivion: the conservative interpretation is that the student is too stupid to learn and ed dollars spent on him (except to test him out of the system) is wasted. Read The Bell Curve. Look at European class-based systems. Read Francis Fukuyama. This is the way it works – this is about much more than education. It is about turning the country over to an oligarchy.
Today in Miami FL, AGAIN, the network cannot handle the traffic for the new “improved?” FSA (FL Standards Assess..) and the state cancelled the test, for today. This keeps happening again, and again. Maybe Bill G and others that want more testing, put their money where their mouth is an upgrade our networks and servers. Oh, they will create a system to “judge” schools with, but not to support them.