Peter Greene: Who Has Been Saved by High-Stakes Testing?

24 Comments Post your own or leave a trackback: Trackback URL

1. pculliton says:

   May 7, 2015 at 5:32 pm

   Not only has the response “been to cancel democracy, shut down the duly-elected school board, and effectively silence the parents, students and taxpayers of the community”– I believe that was the intent in the first place, and the more naive got carried along under the name of “civil rights.”

   LikeLike

   Reply
2. Holley says:

   May 7, 2015 at 7:34 pm

   Who has been saved? In one word, PEARSON!

   LikeLike

   Reply
3. formercheesehead says:

   May 7, 2015 at 8:27 pm

   Excellent piece! Thank you, Diane & Peter for all you do!

   LikeLike

   Reply
4. Laura H. Chapman says:

   May 7, 2015 at 9:29 pm

   On Diane Ravitch’s blog, NY teacher posted some alternatives to tests for data on subgroups. Tests are NOT the only option. This is really just a starter list.

   Attendance data
   GPA data
   Honor roll data
   Credits earned
   Failure rates
   AP course offerings/enrollment
   IB program offering/enrollment
   Class size data
   LD/ED classifications
   Pre-K enrollment
   Graduation rates
   College acceptance
   Completion rates at 2 or 4 year colleges
   Employment/unemployment rates

   And it could all be disagregated by sub-group

   LikeLike

   Reply
   • booklady says:

     May 8, 2015 at 12:12 am

     And even these indicators can be subject to game-playing e.g., AP enrollment. Schools can respond to pressure to look good by putting students who aren’t genuinely ready in AP when they’d be better served in a quality Gr 12 English course.

     LikeLike

     Reply
     • NY Teacher says:

       May 8, 2015 at 5:33 pm

       Yes, but the pressure to do so would be absent. No threats. No punishments. Just *resources going to the neediest schools/communities. It is unlikely that schools would game a system that requires them to look worse than they are.

       *Small class size (12 max)
       Infrastructure repairs/improvement
       Air conditioning
       Truant officers
       Support services
       HQT in every class
       Teacher pay subsidized by working tax free at no cost to districts

       LikeLike

   • NY Teacher says:

     May 8, 2015 at 6:06 pm

     Adding to the list:

     Family income/assets
     Parent education
     Parent incarceration
     Student homelessness
     Lab equipment inventory
     Musical instrument inventory
     Theatre equipment/costumes
     Sports equipment inventory
     Swimming pools
     Field trip data
     First gen data
     Zip code

     LikeLike

     Reply
5. John Young says:

   May 7, 2015 at 9:32 pm

   DELAWARE PASSES PARENTAL OPT OUT IN HOUSE!!!! http://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/education/2015/05/07/house-passes-testing-opt-legislation/70966896/

   LikeLike

   Reply
   • Ohio Algebra II teacher says:

     May 7, 2015 at 10:05 pm

     Passes 36-3, yet according to the article the bill only narrowly got through the education committee, because the chairman (along with the governor) was opposed. Glad democracy seems to have won this round.

     LikeLike

     Reply
     • John Young says:

       May 7, 2015 at 10:53 pm

       yes, parents sent mass emails and really went after reps to get the switched votes!

       LikeLike

     • John Young says:

       May 7, 2015 at 10:54 pm

       threshold in committee is to release to full house v. not to approve it on merits. Crazy shift here, politics were bruising on this vote.

       LikeLike

6. Scott Hertzberg says:

   May 7, 2015 at 10:31 pm

   Didn’t the NAACP and similar organizations call for reducing high stakes standardized testing as recently as 2012? Here’s a Valerie Strauss article on a NAACP resolution to curb h.s. testing.

   http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/national-resolution-against-high-stakes-tests-released/2012/04/23/gIQApRnNdT_blog.html

   What has happened in the past few years to change their positions. I thought the NAACP and a few other groups issued a report or statement against h.s. testing even more recently than 2012.

   LikeLike

   Reply
   • Kent Harris says:

     May 7, 2015 at 11:16 pm

     What’s happened to logic. It seems obvious comparative testing benefits the disadvantaged most. Gifted kids may lose unrealized potential if their ‘gift’ isn’t nurtured through measurement, data gathered by testing but poor and disadvantaged children will never ‘catch up’ with their for fortunate peers unless their shortfall in acquiring reading, writing and arithmetic skills is detected early through testing. How can anything else be true. OMG, testing is a measurement tool that identifies which ‘learning’ isn’t progressing satisfactorily so additional time and resources can be targeted to specific needs.

     LikeLike

     Reply
     • Dienne says:

       May 8, 2015 at 6:41 am

       “OMG, testing is a measurement tool that identifies which ‘learning’ isn’t progressing satisfactorily so additional time and resources can be targeted to specific needs.”

       Tell me when that has ever happened. When has anyone ever suddenly realized that certain kids aren’t “progressing” simply because they took a standardized test? What kind of teacher needs a standardized test to know how her students are doing? Furthermore, even if you believe that tests identify kids who aren’t “progressing”, when has that ever resulted in “additional time and resources”, rather than simply punitive measures against the kid, the teacher and/or the school?

       LikeLike

     • Duane Swacker says:

       May 8, 2015 at 12:59 pm

       “testing is a measurement tool that identifies which ‘learning’ isn’t progressing satisfactorily so additional time and resources can be targeted to specific needs.”

       NO!, It’s not a measurement. Tests, even teacher made tests, are not “measuring devices” as there has never been, is, nor will ever be any agreed upon educational standards. It is a logical impossibility to “measure” the teaching and learning process. Those tests can be considered an assessment device, quite different in meaning to a measuring device. And the vast majority of tests are poor assessment devices as it is with all kinds of epistemological and ontological problems.

       LikeLike

   • NAACP Member says:

     May 8, 2015 at 7:55 am

     My instincts tell me the NAACP took an offer from the federal government to fight the school to prison pipeline if they support the testing. The president, many politicians and even Arne Duncan started bringing it to the forefront of their talking points. What a choice to make for the NAACP… The Sophie’s Choice of Black & Brown politics.

     LikeLike

     Reply
     • dianeravitch says:

       May 8, 2015 at 8:09 am

       Thanks for the comment. High stakes testing discourages many students and feeds the school to prison pipeline

       LikeLike

   • KrazyTA says:

     May 9, 2015 at 2:17 am

     To add to what Dienne & Duane Swacker have written:

     A little historical perspective on high-stakes standardized testing—and not going back so far.

     An excerpt from Alfie Kohn’s contribution to the slim 2004 paperback MANY CHILDREN LEFT BEHIND: HOW THE NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT IS DAMAGING OUR CHILDREN AND OUR SCHOOLS (p. 86):

     [start]

     1. How many schools will NCLB-required testing reveal to be troubled that were not previously identified as such? For the last year or so, I have challenged defenders of the law to name a single school anywhere in the country whose inadequacy was a secret until yet another wave of standardized test results was released. So far I have had no takers.

     [end]

     Another excerpt, this time from Linda Darling-Hammond’s contribution to same (p. 9):

     “The biggest problem with the NCLB Act is that it mistakes measuring schools for fixing them.”

     The rheephorm emphasis on pouring more and more resources and time into misleading measurement is and has been a substitute for actually improving and ensuring genuine teaching and learning.

     Anthony Cody, THE EDUCATOR AND THE OLIGARCH (2014), chapter 22, felicitously entitled “Bill Gates and the Cult of Measurement: Efficiency Without Excellence,” p. 146, last paragraph of the chapter:

     “Measurement and standardization delivers efficiency without excellence. When this becomes the driving force in a marketized education system, it both fosters conformity and channels innovation towards commercially viable solutions for those unable to purchase the sort of personalized education the wealthy choose for their own children. Measurement in eduction will not serve the poor. It will merely make the schools attended by the poor more efficient in preserving their poverty.”

     As for high-stakes standardized testing as being meritocratic and somehow providing or enabling social mobility—the best and most recent refutation is Yong Zhao, WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD DRAGON: WHY CHINA HAS THE BEST (AND WORST) EDUCATION SYSTEM IN THE WORLD (2014).

     Opt out of standardized testing.

     Opt in to genuine learning and teaching.

     😎

     LikeLike

     Reply
     • Duane Swacker says:

       May 9, 2015 at 3:07 am

       TAGO on your addendum to “opt out of standardized testing.” Gonna have to use and repeat that “Opt in to genuine teaching and learning”.

       Because you know, “opting out is so soooo negative-don’t you have anything positive to say”.

       LikeLike

7. Robert Tellman says:

   May 7, 2015 at 11:32 pm

   Kent, I sure hope your comment was tongue in cheek.

   LikeLike

   Reply
8. roxanne says:

   May 8, 2015 at 12:37 am

   Members of the Civil Rights groups did not get the memo that Pearson Publishing is manipulating this Common Core wagon train. Members of the Civil Rights groups must not know that very few real K-12 teachers were consulted in the writing of these tests. Civil Rights groups probably do not have children in the K-12 system because no parent in their right mind would declare these tests or preparation drills for these test are in anyway fair or logical. I’ve clocked in dozens of volunteer hours at my son’s former public school and those who I felt were being most adversely affected by the test were minority students and the majority of boys. These legal eagles ought to take a seat in the back of a fourth grade classroom before they make the assumption that this is fair and just testing. I support assessments however have been corrupted. Rewrite them and make them a lot shorter. Four half days of testing is cruel.

   LikeLike

   Reply
   • Duane Swacker says:

     May 9, 2015 at 3:12 am

     “I support assessments. . .”

     If by “assessments” you mean standardized tests then you are gravely mistaken. Read and comprehend Noel Wilson’s work to understand the COMPLETE INVALIDITY of the educational standards and standardized testing regime:

     “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.

     LikeLike

     Reply
9. Lily says:

   May 8, 2015 at 2:29 pm

   This is like telling Freddie Gray that the police are here to protect him. This is like the whites giving American Indians alchohol.

   LikeLike

   Reply
10. Scott Hertzberg says:

    May 8, 2015 at 3:42 pm

    It was actually just this past October that the NAACP and ten other civil rights groups came out against test based accountability. The great Answer Sheet blog on the Washington Post website had the story:

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/10/28/eleven-civil-rights-groups-urge-obama-to-drop-test-based-k-12-accountability-system/

    Maybe they will try to say they are for high stakes testing but not test based accountability.

    LikeLike

    Reply