A comment on the blog:
I attended a forum at Scarsdale HS last night (4/30) w panelists Regent Judith Johnson, Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, and Scarsdale Schools Superintendent Hagerman.
Chancellor Merryl Tisch and Regent Rosa attended but did not participate.
All panelists spoke to the problems with the state tests and there was general consensus that the tests have no value as a measure of students’ abilities or teacher competencies, that they are a burden to students because test prep takes time away from project-based and other learning and are unnecessarily stressful for children, and are a financial burden to districts.
One of the most interesting comments from Judith Johnson was in response to questions from members of the audience who expressed frustration at not being heard by Albany.
Ms Johnson firmly insisted that parents and opponents to current testing and CC ARE being heard.
HOWEVER, she said that what hasn’t been put forward – what hasn’t be heard – are clear, unified demands and requests for specific changes.
Can you lead us forward in that?
What specific requests should individuals and groups demand of the the Regents, state DOE, Cuomo, and federal government?
Ms Johnson also expressed serious concerns that the State Regents do not having sufficient support staff-experiencing this already and only thirty days into the position. One can certainly see how that could limit her activities and scope of influence. Any thoughts?
There’s much more that I’m leaving out. The event will air on Scarsdale public access TV in next few days.
I’m curious to hear your thoughts.
Sincerely,
Mira Karabin
Hartsdale, NY
Dear Mira,
Thanks for writing. Your first question is whether the people in Albany are aware of your concerns. The answer is yes and no. They definitely notice when the parents of nearly 200,000 children refused to take the state test.
Governor Cuomo heard you. He pronounced that you shouldn’t be worried because the tests are “meaningless” and won’t count against your children; they will be meaningful only for teachers, who will be punished if the scores don’t go up by whatever metric the state chooses.
Merryl Tisch heard you. She offered to delay the stakes attached to the testing for a year for some districts, on a case-by-case basis, or to exempt high-performing districts like yours.
But they didn’t actually hear you because they didn’t hear what parents were saying when they opted out. They are not offering to disconnect the scores from teacher evaluations. They are not agreeing to reduce the stakes attached to the tests. They are not offering to review the validity or reliability of the tests. They are not offering any substantive change at all, at best just a delay.
They don’t understand that pressuring teachers to get higher scores–or else–changes what happens in the classroom. It shifts the emphasis from inquiry to drill. It makes test-taking skills more important than thinking skills. It narrows the curriculum only to what is tested. It is contrary to good education, which is why private schools don’t follow the state’s lead. I think it is accurate to say that the leaders and decision-makers in Albany, including the Governor, his staff, most of the Regents, and those at the top of the State Education Department are wedded to an agenda that confuses test scores with education. Tests are a measure not the goal of education. There is also, at the highest level, an inexplicable contempt for the work of teachers and principals. And your children suffer for their ill-conceived policies.
Yes, there are specific, clear demands, voiced by New York State Allies for Public Education. Among other things, they demand “a dramatic reduction of testing in grades 3rd – 8th,” and a call to Congress to shift from annual testing to grade span testing. They also demand an independent review of the state’s standards and a “public and transparent process” for selecting the new state commissioner of education. They say, do not release any personally identifiable data about any student to any third party without parental consent. Check out their list of demands.
I would add a few more.
Reduce the time required for state testing (currently 7-10 hours) to not more than 2 hours, one for reading, one for math.
Convene a task force of independent and qualified testing experts to review the validity and reliability of the state tests.
Release the state tests after they are administered so that parents, teachers, and researchers can learn from them.
Provide teachers with information specific to each child so they will know how to help them do better in the future.
These are clear and specific demands. I think they fairly represent the views of those who refused the tests. If the Governor, the Legislature, and the Regents refuses to change their agenda, more parents will opt out next time. Ideally, there will come a day when no one takes these tests, which have not been reviewed for their validity and reliability and which are kept secret from teachers and parents. How many pineapples might be hidden in the questions? Why shouldn’t teachers learn what students got right or wrong?
I hope this is helpful.
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Well stated. To the list of specific demands I would include: return the creation of State Syllabi ( standards) to NYS educators.
Ironically, the next morning….
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The clang of Ka-Ching in their ears has rendered them deaf …
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What part of “the tests are useless and harmful” do they not understand in Albany?
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“. . . State Education Department are wedded to an agenda that confuses test scores with education. Tests are a measure not the goal of education.”
NO!, Tests are not a “measure”. They are not measuring devices. Standardized tests based on educational pseudo-standards can be considered an “assessment’, a very poor one at that, but to assert they “measure” something (and please define what that “something” is and how the supposed “measurement” actually does measure that “something”) is epistemologically and ontologically wrong, a falsehood and therefore should be rejected from the start.
In light of that fact, the falsehood of the whole educational standards and standardized testing process the following suggestions are mute:
“Reduce the time required for state testing (currently 7-10 hours) to not more than 2 hours, one for reading, one for math.”
“Convene a task force of independent and qualified testing experts to review the validity and reliability of the state tests.”
“Release the state tests after they are administered so that parents, teachers, and researchers can learn from them.”
Since we know the COMPLETE INVALIDITY of the standards and testing regime and the resultant harm to many students, to continue with any of it is an enormous waste of time, effort and monies.
And as far as providing information to the teacher:
“Provide teachers with information specific to each child so they will know how to help them do better in the future.”
If the teacher can’t assess and evaluate the student’s learning (notice I didn’t include “grading”) then they shouldn’t be teaching.
BASTA, enough already with the standards and testing regime-the only way out of this educational quagmire/hole is to quit digging.
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Duane, the standardized tests measure how good you are at taking standardized tests, whether you can figure out what the tentmaker wants you to answer.
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I agree with your statement except I would change one word and that would be to substitute “assess” for “measure”.
The difference in meaning is a very very important distinction and not just a minor semantical problem. I can assess something, let’s say a classroom environment by counting how many how many desks, measuring the length, width, and height and then coming up with a figure of amount of cubic space per desk. The assessment included counting and measuring (that measuring is valid within a certain margin of error) provided that I have a “certified” measuring device that has been previously deemed to be accurate according to the “standard unit” of measurement being used.
In educational testing (yes all testing including teacher made) there is no “standard unit” of measurement of the teaching and learning process, and no the CCSS or state “standards” (which are curriculum wrapped up in a misnomer) are not a “standard” by any stretch of the use of the word when used in a “measurement” context.
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To understand that COMPLETE INVALIDITY read and comprehend Noel Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted seminal 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.
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Cuomo and Tisch are still going to pursue the test-and-punish strategy, even if so-called “high performing” districts are left out of it.
From the perspective of a believer in “reform,” the point is to increase “performance” in the “low performing” districts, and the strategy is to measure and correct (test and punish).
From their perspective, they need only placate Scarsdale parents, because the goal is elsewhere.
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This punitive testing plan will allow the state to swoop in like vultures and put districts with large numbers of poor students into receivership. To me this seems like a civil rights issue. Why should parents in Scarsdale have democratic rights to have input into their public schools while poor, minority parents have this right taken away due bogus testing? Their voices should be heard equally by Albany. In a bit of irony, teachers of special education, compensatory education and ESL in Scarsdale may still be at risk for being VAMed out of a job depending on the depravity of the metrics. It makes no sense, but this is the absurdity of creating a punitive system based on garbage statistics.
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“being VAMed out of a job depending on the depravity of the metrics”
Excellent!
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ALBANY—State education officials will soon adopt regulations finalizing a new teacher evaluation system, but because of a statutory deadline imposed by Governor Andrew Cuomo and the Legislature, they’ll do so without the formal public comment period that’s typically required by law.
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/albany/2015/05/8567132/evaluation-regs-be-adopted-without-formal-public-comment?top-featured-image
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I remember the first times, more than a decade ago, when members of the Chicago Board of Education would demand that critical parents and community leaders provide the Board with “alternatives” — as if a parent could come up with a plan for a school. Then in Chicago and today in New York, it’s nonsense. There is no obligation on any of us who are demanding that they STOP! so-called “standardized” testing that we promote some test of our own to substitute for their expensive Pearson tests. NO! is a good answer, whether in 1860 to the question of slavery or in 2015 to the question of corporate “school reform” tricks. Virtually all schools worth their existence, here and across Earth, base their grading and promotions on curriculum and teacher evaluations. Once a school or district has hired a professional educator to run the school and professional teachers to teach the curriculum (whether its horsemanship and musketry in 1860 or “Elizabethan tragedy” in 2015) the teachers’ grades should be respected.
Here in my home, where Resistance cost me my job (and because of the Black List, my teaching career) 15 years ago, we have done Resistance since. The publication of the odious CASE (Chicago Academic Standards Examinations) in Substance in January 1999 was just part of that. Another part continues today, with our two younger sons (Sam, finishing eighth grade; Josh, finishing fourth) at Chicago’s O.A. Thorp Elementary School Opting Out.
But this month we added a dimension to that. Sam came home and said that his “Language Arts” (we used to call it “English”) teacher had told them they were going to do test prep instead of “Romeo and Juliet.” Sharon talked with the teacher and pointed out that teaching a work of literary art instead of mindless test prep was better, and the teacher announced that she was going to teach them “Romeo and Juliet.” Monday, Sam is supposed to be Friar Lawrence to his friend Micheal’s Romeo on the morning after the balcony scene. (“God pardon sin, wast thou with Rosaline?…”). Every night we are having a Shakespeare conversation, and everyone is happier — including the young teacher who was being prodded, but not too pushily, to do more and more and MOST test prep.
The answer to the silly “What would you do instead?” question is the same: NOT THAT! is a good answer and we should challenge any bureaucrat who tries this nasty trick on parents, teachers, or students. By the way, the guy who was most obnoxious at that trick in Chicago was Michael Scott when he was President of the Chicago Board of Education and the critique (whether it was the latest plan to “turnaround” a West Side school or create another charter in Black Chicago) was valid then as now. Eventually, all of Michael Scott’s lies caught up with him, and his fate is a reminder of a kind of Shakespearean lesson from history…
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My next door neighbor has been playing very loud and disturbing music all night long, night after night after night. The music contains offensive lyrics and is preventing my kids from getting their much needed sleep.
As a result, my children’s progress in school is being negatively impacted. They’re constantly tired, cranky, and have trouble doing their homework. Worst of all they just aren’t learning much. And still the music keeps playing, all night long. Loud, obnoxious, disturbing, and disruptive music.
I finally called my neighbor and demanded that he stop playing his music. Gave him all the good reasons any rational person would need to stop. Tired kids. Inappropriate lyrics. Schoolwork suffering. Parents being driven crazy. Extremely frustrating. Please, please stop the madness, I mean music, I pleaded.
My neighbor responded,“I can’t stop playing my music.”
“Why not?”, I asked.
“I am still waiting for you to give me an alternative”
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Check out the New York Consortium schools and the results they are able to get without high stakes testing (I think they do take the English regents but that’s it). High grad rates, high teacher retention, high college completion and serving a more diverse population than the traditional public schools. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel, successful public schools without a testing focus already exist and can be expanded.
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Sounds like the state stopped listening-http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/albany/2015/05/8567132/evaluation-regs-be-adopted-without-formal-public-comment
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In less than two days on ipetition, over 1500 parents signed requesting an independent investigation of the Pearson tests. They want answers as to why the tests are designed for failure, with above-grade level reading difficulty and confusing and ambiguous answer choices. The petition was mailed to Eric Scheiderman, Merryl Tisch, and the NYS Education Department.
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This is great news. Let’s hope the concerns do not fall on deaf ears. This seems to be the latest strategy of deformers. Ignore citizens, and plow ahead with the agenda. Democracy is an inconvenience to them.
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One demand that can be asked as a first step (of course only a first step), would be a complete transparency of the tests that are administered. The districts, schools, teachers, parents are customers. They are buying a product from Pearson (that is quite expensive), therefore they should have full access to this product. They should have access to the questions, answer key and grading curve. Pearson should be able to be accountable for the questions on the test. Based on this, the validity of the test can be studied and determined in a strictly empirical way. Pearson can generate new questions for the next cycle.
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“Based on this, the validity of the test can be studied and determined in a strictly empirical way.”
NO!, It can’t be “determined in a strictly empirical way. Noel Wilson has already shown the COMPLETE INVALIDITY of the educational standards and standardized process by showing us the myriad epistemological and ontological errors involved in the process. Read Wilson’s study that I referenced above to understand why.
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Reliability and validity should have been determined before the tests were rolled out. Of course, proper procedures for the development of high quality standards would have helped, but even for those who buy into the common core, the testing development has got to be problematic. The whole mess needs to be tossed. We already had access to the information the feds claimed was so desperately needed through NAEP. No national test is going to assess what individual children are learning. That happens at a classroom level where students are more than a number.
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Regent Cashin was also in attendance. Curious that Rosa, Cashin, and Tisch were in the audience. Regent Johnson was very good. Wasn’t Rosa the regent that predicted about a year ago that the suburbs would soon be very upset with the expanded testing that would soon befall them? Regent Cashin has already come out publicly about her opposition to the tests now in place.
The test prep is what’s changing the scope of education since Cuomo assured the parents and children that the tests would be meaningless to them though they’d still have to suffer through the test prep. This must be stopped.
Isn’t the testing now un-reliable from this point forward since Cuomo made that asinine statement that the tests are “meaningless” for the students?
Tisch is behind all of this. She acts on her own without the support of the Regents, other than her cronies. Don’t fall for her baloney about Cuomo being the bad guy. She is behind all of this and paved the way for his agenda. Her actions are not educationally sound, they are all politically motivated. She doesn’t understand the basics of testing for diagnostic purposes. Tisch must go…the sooner the better. The Legislators are finally catching on to Cuomo’s games. Maybe Preet will meet that November 15 deadline and save us all a lot of headaches. Cuomo certainly has taken millions from the charter school crowd and delivered millions back to them in free rent. That’s much more than Silver and Skelos took. The three amigos riding off into the sunset – I’d buy a ticket to that movie!
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The tests are unreliable and can’t be validated since no independent reviewers are allowed to see them. Nor can teachers or parents after they are given. It is all a deep mystery.
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“It is all a deep mystery.”
NO!, Diane! “It is all deep do-do!”
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“Isn’t the testing now un-reliable from this point forward since Cuomo made that asinine statement that the tests are “meaningless” for the students?”
NO!, His statement has nothing to do with the unreliability and invalidity of the malpractice that is standardized testing. Wilson proved in 1997 that the educational standards and standardized testing regimes are COMPLETELY INVALID. Read his study I mention above to understand why.
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And then when we DO get a look inside the tests and the scoring what we see is terrifying! This was written by another Westchester teacher, just a few districts over from Scarsdale… http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/05/01/teacher-i-am-not-against-common-core-or-testing-but-heres-my-line-in-the-sand/
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Diane, I wish you hadn’t suggested continuing the reading tests. These are very problematic and the results guaranteed to be misinterpreted because of prevailing misunderstandings about what reading comprehension entails. The NCLB fixation on reading tests has spawned the mutant new form of education called “literacy” designed to goose up scores on the reading tests. It consists of reading bad fiction merely for the sake of practicing various reading strategies (like using context clues) on it. The reading strategies themselves have become the main subject in school. Imagine going to school for twelve years not to learn about our amazing world, but to learn reading strategies. If you had to redo elementary school and endure the three-hour daily “literacy block” that all American kids now suffer through, you probably would have hated school. Traditional subjects have been jettisoned for this verbal cud-chewing. The saddest part is that this approach makes kids not only less knowledgeable about the world, and less interested in school, but even less literate, as literacy depends on the general knowledge that is not being taught. If you had called for a general knowledge test, that could have yielded positive changes to school curricula, because it might have made districts change course and start making a point of teaching general knowledge. Much of the damage of the NCLB testing regime comes not from the demand to test per se, but from the KINDS of tests it has mandated.
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The CC standards do not contain one interesting and important piece of content knowledge. Not one. Not one fact, concept, or idea that could make a young brain get excited about learning. Teacher cannot inspire children with reading strategies that have been put in place as the end, instead of the means.
The new parent go-to question at the dinner table must now be, “Sarah, did you practice any new reading strategies in school today?
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You’re right: imparting content knowledge is not the point of CC. Sadly, it’s hard to find fellow defenders of knowledge because people are blind to its value. The knowledge that powers our brains becomes more-or-less invisible to us once it’s entered our long-term memories, and so we are blind to how we use it constantly to think about things. Plus there’s a been a long propaganda campaign against knowledge (maybe starting with Dickens’ Gradgrind caricature in Hard Times, continuing through Dewey and Freire) that has very effectively brainwashed almost every single American into speaking about facts with derision. We’re also blind to the fact that almost nobody really knows what they’re talking about when they say they’re “teaching” “reading skills” or “thinking skills” or “21st Century skills”. They take for granted that these are real things and that they can be taught, when in fact, if you critically examine these “skills” and the ways they are allegedly “taught” you see that there are a huge number of question marks. But who wants to critically examine what everybody “knows” exists and can be done. Running from the Gradgrind caricature, American educators have embraced trying to teach catchy buzzwords that have no referent in reality, like the early scientists’ old source of fire, phlogiston, or the four “humours” of the body,, creating schools that are even less edifying than Gradgrind’s.
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Reblogged this on stopcommoncorenys.
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