According to a news story from Minneapolis, scores plunged at some of the best high schools in the city due to students who opted out of the testing.
The acting superintendent is upset by the falling scores, but parents are making their voices heard against the deluge of testing that has overtaken their schools. They are protesting the “reforms” based on test scores in the most effective way possible: by not letting their children take the tests.
With so many missing scores, the scores are invalid. Before the students opted out, the tests were invalid and unreliable, not available for review by independent experts. Parents know that the absence of transparency by the test-makers in not in the interest of their children and that the tests are designed to fail the majority of students because their passing score is set unrealistically high. Some parents understand that the tests provide little or no diagnostic information about their children (most Common Core tests provide NO diagnostic information, just a score.) Some are protesting the Common Core, some are protesting the federal takeover of their state and their local schools. Some are protesting the tests themselves. As more students take the tests, the opt out movement will grow.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Congratulations to the parents!
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This will be the best solution to the testing frenzy! Hopefully, the scare tactics and pressure placed on parents by the administrators about making teachers look bad, will not make parents back down. In the short term it will seem bad, but in the long term, it is the best for everyone to stop these tests.
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Falling scores means that the opting out students are not a random selection of the population but the higher achieving students.
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Higher scoring students. High scores have nothing to do with high achievement.
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Nothing?
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LH,
NO!, not nothing but ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!
Those “scores” have been proven to be COMPLETELY INVALID by Noel Wilson and no amount of claiming otherwise can prove otherwise. Educational standards and standardized testing are nothing more than exercises in mental masturbation that squander and ultimately waste valuable scarce educational resources, time and effort.
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Quote from the newspaper:
“Moore said the district is now losing a key data point that it uses to determine a student’s growth and progress at certain schools”
Ok, the averages will be meaningless, but the progression of individual students who did not opt out will still be as valid as before(!). It was after all a fairly small percentage.
Keep up the fight !!!!!
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“Ok, the averages will be meaningless, but the progression of individual students who did not opt out will still be as valid as before(!).”
NO!, that progression WILL NOT BE AS VALID as before due to the mis-classification of students into wrong categories and no amount of psychometric fudging can “cure” that problem. As a matter of fact that progression WILL BE AS COMPLETELY INVALID as before. To understand why any results of standardized testing are COMPLETELY INVALID due to the myriad epistemological and ontological errors in conception and execution of the process read and comprehend what Noel Wilson has proven in his never rebutted nor refuted 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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Our opt out story in SC is small in numbers but hugely noisy. And the largest numbers were in a middle school in an upscale community, and the parents who opted out were probably the better educated. So scores will drop.
In other parts of the state the opt outers tend to be anti-Common Core tea party oriented. It will be interesting how that plays out.
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So today, the honors math students at my school discovered that they are not enrolled for the right test. If our school’s grade goes down, because some of our top kids cannot test, that will be a real kick in the pants. Not that the stuff is valid anyway, but our evaluations may be connected to it.
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I find all the whining from ed reform kind of amusing. Mike Petrilli fretting that this opting out will hurt the school reform movement and wondering out loud about why this is happening. Well, Diane gives many reasons parents might have opted out and maybe, just maybe districts and states should start listening to them.
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This confuses me. I thought that I had read that the whole state of MN had cut all ties with ELA Common Core and SBAC testing on March 27, 2015.
Please enlighten me. I taught in St. Paul Public Schools. I have Master’s Degrees in Ed., teaching and Learning, and in ELL, Spanish minor and am a first generation American.
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