Heidi Hayes Jacobs has surmised that this is an ominous situation. Before you go into a paroxysm of laughter, remember that life is ephemeral.
If you wonder why the outbreak of clamorous verbiage, please note that Jacobs has collected some of the unusual words that appeared on the 6th grade Common Core test in Néw York.
She writes:
“Arguably there is universal admiration for a command of vocabulary, but the thought of eleven and twelve year olds wrestling with these words in a timed pressure cooker suggests an “ominous situation”.
“What were these test makers thinking? Perhaps they yearn to design those SAT exams for seniors. The sobering fact that the results will have a direct impact on how a teacher is evaluated points to a profound disconnect.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
“A Plinth of Space”
A plinth of space
Is Common Core
An empty base
Of Coleman lore
Thanks Heidi and also Poet…convinced me to move from my plinth to my tuffet.
S.e.c.r.e.t. Feedback from a 6th grader: Trigonometry was defined & students were required to answer Trig Math #ToxicTest questions. Trig in 6th grade?
Forgot, RIGOR is defined as: giving children content questions 2-3 years above grade level, always. Reformers L.O.V.E. to watch children squirm, cry, vomit, act out, hate school, and shut down.
Mission Accomplished!
Sickos!!
I happen to love words and language, but language that is appropriate for most educated adults is inappropriate for 6th graders. This is more of the elitist straight jacket that harkens back to the old Latin school of “Merry Old England.” I am surprised they don’t expect students to have a foundation in Latin and Greek as in traditional classical education. I remember reading recently that the College Board was going to revise its vocabulary section with less emphasis on erudite words. I guess Pearson didn’t get the memo.
I wonder if the low-paid readers of these tests would understand those words, if used by the 6th-grade students in their writing.
I did not have a classical education, but I did have an excellent immersion into Greek and Latin roots & stems…in NINTH grade.
This is the idea of the “fake reformers”. It just has to sound good, it doesn’t really have to achieve anything. Making tests “harder” doesn’t necessarily make them “better”. I have argued for years that teachers should have an idea of what will be on the tests so we can present relevant material to our students. Is this teaching to the test, no. It is however acknowledging what is important and what should be taught and tested. This new method is more like “Who wants to be a millionaire?” Know enough trivia, pass the test.
Holley,
Can you believe the audacity of some teachers?!? They endow students with a list of words on Monday and test them on the spelling of the words on Friday. This is clearly an example of giving students an unfair advantage and teaching to the test. It is so inequitable, an affront to the very plinth of education.
You all need to view this bang up explanation of the history of the Common Core.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_zvUkOXvtg It is a speech given by Sandar Stotsky. She unveils the origin of the tests.
Perhaps this is the only way to make a test rigorous. I’m serious. I’ve been saying this for years now. Try watching 7th and 8th graders struggle with college level material. It’s not fun. First of all, they aren’t developmentally ready. Second, they often have a poor command of grade level vocabulary in the first place.
What really is higher order thinking? If you haven’t mastered the vocabulary or the facts, is higher order thinking really possible?
I wouldn’t dream of taking an exam in a subject I wasn’t thoroughly familiar with.
Why are we subjecting our students to this?
Perhaps the goal of the testing is to frustrate and confuse students so they will fail. Then the state can broadcast the failure of public schools while they recommend a “takeover” and ultimate privatization.
and they don’t have the life experiences that are an important part of understanding the text as well! (oh, but that’s right – they shouldn’t need that to understand the text – yah, right!)
it most definitely is child abuse, plain & simple!
I just saw this article. So, as per Cuomo, the tests mean nothing for students. Yet the students’ performance on them can comprise up to 50% of a teacher’s APPR score and mean the difference between keeping one’s job and losing it.
http://blog.timesunion.com/capitol/archives/232746/cuomo-remember-teacher-evaluation-tests-dont-count-for-kids/?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed
The sobering fact that the results will have a direct impact on how a teacher is evaluated points to a profound disconnect.”
It also points to a profound inability to offer a reasonable, respectful compromise to teachers. The Obama Administration and the ed reform movement (but I repeat myself!) could have dumped VAM and gotten 90% of what they wanted with the Common Core testing. They chose not to. They offer nothing.
Every faction in The Movement gets everything they want, and they get it NOW.
The CCSS testing is so out of touch with reality. We may as well put the monkeys in charge of the zoo.
I thought we already had
G. K. Chesterton said, ““The Madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” Those that champion ed-reform are basically those that have lost everything but their reason, they reduce education, as they reduce most everything else, to what can be benchmarked and quantified, in a data driven environment everything is “rational” and “reasonable” but little else. There is no room for whimsy, there is no room for beauty, there is no room for sanity.
But as long as the classroom teacher is sane, does see the importance of whimsy, beauty, the individual and the discovery of the individual that lives beneath the surface of every student, real education will ultimately triumph. The real subversive work of the teacher is what happens in the classroom. That is why I think it is important that we, as classroom teachers do not lose sight of what we are really called to do. I think sometimes we become so strident in our opposition to what is happening in the larger world that we lose sight of what we can accomplish in the world of the classroom. In our stridency we are in danger of losing everything but or reason and in the process become like those we oppose.
Our students have one crack at an education. Each student I teach in 9th, 11th, or 12th grade (the grades I teach) will only have one chance at 9th, 11th, and 12th grade and they deserve a meaningful and “sane” 9th, 11th, and 12th grade. It is important to fight as best we can the battles going on outside our classroom, but w also need to do the best we can to see to it that our students in our classrooms today get the best and most meaningful education we can give them. Sometimes I believe I am being asked to teach with both hands tied behind my back, but as long as I have a voice to speak with I can leave the gesticulating to others. If we reach the students we teach they will become the future and the best way to change the insanity of the present is to prepare those that will inherit the future. If our students are able to keep their sanity as they go into the world there is a real possibility that they will make the world they help to shape a more sane one.
Two more words for the “The Educational Devil’s Dictionary:
Leader – First follower.
Leadership – The ability to get others to do what they are told by do doing what they, the leaders, are told better than anybody else.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
LOVE IT!!! Would that the test makers had the intellect and perspicacity of people like you.
A realtor was showing a castle to a talking plinth in a sleeveless T, who said, “I love the spaces in this castle!
“ephemeral,” “aerogel,” “plinth,” “ominous situation,”
“paroxysm,” “clamorous,” “tutelage,” “furlong,” “absconders,” “surmised”
Kind of absurdity Pearson test-makers think that they can make 6th graders look smart by forcing them to take the GRE Verbal test. Well explains such parochial mindset puts test-makers into the ocean of delirium.
I had to look up aerogel. It is even listed as misspelled in this blog format.
I know where Pearson can put their ephemeral aerogel which will cause a paroxysm leading to an ominous situation.
This speaks to one of the essential issues in the current high stakes testing debacle. Why the Pearson, PARCC, and Smarter Balanced testing is unscientific and unethical. I am a psychologist, faculty at UCLA, and a mother in California. I hadn’t heard about these concerns with the current high stakes testing, until after I became very concerned with the developmental level of the SB practice items when helping my daughter (dutifully prepare for the tests).
The 6th grade ELA practice performance task for the Smarter Balance was completely inappropriate for 11-12 year olds, requiring them to toggle between several screens (on small Ipad screens), and choose multiple pieces of evidence to evaluate, select, paraphrase, compare and contrast, as well as write a multiparagraph essay. Never mind that while practicing, toggling back to the articles caused the students’ written work on the essay to be erased (lost).
Why the current high stakes testing is unscientific:
1) There is no proven Construct Validity (does your test measure what you think it measures)
2) Cut scores are determined by an unknown (arbitrary) process- labeling children as proficient, or failing appears to not be based on any scientific process. It is not scientific to arbitrarily decide what levels of your test scores actually mean in the real world. Scientific measurement requires cross-validation with external measures that provide evidence for your claims (like grades, or independent in-depth measures of children’s educational achievement in a a smaller sample with highly experienced evaluators).
3) Computer adaptive tests- there have been many concerns raised about how item difficulty has been decided. Children continue to progress on these tests if they continue to get a certain number the most recent answers correct. Educational measurement specialists (true academically trained professionals) and parents and children have observed that very often items following very difficult questions are significantly easier. This raises concerns that children’s scores are artificially deflated by unscientifically determined item difficulty determinations.
4) Inter-rater reliability- No checks exist to independently determine whether the scoring administered by these testing companies has truly reliable and valid measurements of children’s answers (see Todd Farley http://www.bkconnection.com/static/Making_the_Grades_EXCERPT.pdf )
Most importantly, the Pearson, PARCC, and Smarter Balanced testing is unscientific because they violate the basic rule of science. The assessments are not verifiable, because they are not permitted to be subject to independent scientific evaluation. Their validity cannot be proven nor disproven. Under the guise of “test security” companies use copyright laws so extreme they prevent true scientific evaluation of the validity of these tests, by scientists with expertise in the fields of Education, Psychology, and related fields.
So I am deeply concerned that the profit-driven testing business is using unscientific (and expensive) testing which is portrayed to the public as if it’s truth, with high stakes ramifications on children, teachers, and our public education system. As stakeholders and parents, we need to demand accountability, real science, and an ethical separation between profit-driven educational businesses and the true scientifically-based education and measurement. For the sake of our children, our teachers, and our educational system which is truly one of the foundations of our democratic country.
An earlier post spoke of passage from Smithsonian about an cloud-based artwork. I found that discussion. Here are some thoughts.
The 6th grade test with this passage has the kind of language art critics use to talk to each other about contemporary art in magazines like October, published by MIT. Not anywhere near grade 6.
I have not determined whether the writer of this passage for Smithsonian magazine has also written for October, but the passage is perfect for the readers of October, many with advanced degrees in art.
Also the account of the artist’s work appears to be incomplete in the passage presented to students. The artists stages cloud events in museum/gallery spaces, but the artist claims that the primary works of art are the photographs that he takes of the fleeting special effect.
In that case, then an astute artist/critic might wonder why the big bother. “Special effects,” including images of clouds, can be superimposed on any background with Photoshop and by other means, plinths not required.
Moreover, instructions for inventing cloud effects for videos are abundant on the internet. You start with a tank and some water. An aquarium will do. Or you can buy a smoke machine that creates the illusion of clouds (or smoke, or fog) for about $750 to $1000. Such machines are part of stagecraft whether for live performances or film.
If you are interested in another passage about the artist’s artificial clouds—created inside of museum/gallery spaces (including Versailles)—you will find one at Slate. The language is not quite as exotic. I will spare readers my take on why this work is newsworthy in the first place, except to restate Andy Warhol’s one liner: “Fame is a function of publicity.”
http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2013/02/21/berndnaut_smilde_capturing_the_fleeting_moments_of_clouds_created_inside.html
“Plinth” needs a new definition. I suggest that the first new sub-atomic particle discovered by
the hadron collider should be named a ‘plinth’.
I opened a web site on my computer and it had changed all the words to this strange hieroglyphic: icons where once the verbal menu had been.
I went to buy my seeds and all the packages had hieroglyphics: raindrops circles with radii on a plane blue background. No words.
Ominous?
Does anyone really believe that the leaders of this country want more literacy?
As a sixth grade teacher, I administered that test. As I read through it, I felt sick to my stomach. I looked out at a classroom full of great kids who had worked so hard all year, with great results, and I couldn’t believe that I was complicit in this travesty. Now I read that Cuomo says that the test are meaningless, that the tests don’t count. Why did I have to do that to them? I think of all the things I would have done instead- prepare for an upcoming field trip to the Cloisters Museum and St. John the Divine Cathedral, start the da Vinci biography, or start designing their own castles. Sadly, my style of teaching through immersion and engagement has gone by the wayside. I am literally sick over what is going on.