Peter Greene reports on a study by Chris Tienken at Seton Hall University, who was able to predict test scores by analyzing demographics. As others have pointed out, standardized test scores are a family wealth/education indicator.
Greene writes:
“In “Predictable Results,” one of his most recent posts, he lays out again what his team has managed to do over the past few years. Using US Census data linked to social capital and demographics, Tienken has been able to predict the percentage of students who will score proficient or better on the tests.
“Let me repeat that. Using data that has nothing to do with grades, teaching techniques, pedagogical approaches, teacher training, textbook series, administrative style, curriculum evaluation— in short, data that has nothing to do with what goes on inside the school building– Tienken has been able to predict the proficiency rate for a school.
[Tienken writes]: For example, I predicted accurately the percentage of students at the district level who scored proficient or above on the 2011 grade 5 mathematics test in 76% of the 397 school districts and predicted accurately in 80% of the districts for the 2012 language arts tests. The percentage of families in poverty and lone parent households in a community were the two strongest predictors in the six models I created for grade 5 for the years 2010-2012.”
“Tienken’s work is one more powerful indicator that the BS Tests do not measure the educational effectiveness of a school– not even sort of. That wonderful data that supposedly tells us how students are doing and provides the measurements that give us actionable information– it’s not telling us a damn thing. Or more specifically, it’s not telling us a damn thing that we didn’t already know (Look! Lower Poorperson High School serves mostly low-income students!!)
“In fact, Tienken’s work is great news– states can cut out the middle man and simply give schools scores based on the demographic and social data. We don’t need the tests at all.”
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
In other words, maybe these tests aren’t as brilliant as they thought they were…and the Common Core isn’t quite as good as they thought it was.
TY, Diane.
Common Core has always been a major wreck and so has high-stakes testing. They are just $$$$$ makers for the RICH at the cost of those most in need. Horrid stuff.
“But once we have the data we’ll be able to direct resources…”
All kids must be counted. And then counted again. And again. If we count them long enough they’ll be out of school and then we can just count the new batch.
We should be more interested in the 20-40% of schools where this was not predictive, yet the report provides no information on that.
Also, setting up measuring absolute performance and then critiquing it is a strawman. Nobody doesn’t think that economics are highly correlated with low scores (do you have any examples otherwise?). What state systems are measuring is growth, and this report says nothing about whether growth is correlated with economics.
Also, who is to say what is causative here? Low SES areas have lower performing students, but lower performing students have much higher unemployment, etc. Many schools in low SES cities are both a symptom of, and contributory to, the problem. IMO, only people who recognize and acknowledge both aspects of this have a chance of improving the situation.
“Also, setting up measuring absolute performance and then critiquing it is a strawman. . . What state systems are measuring is growth, and this report says nothing about whether growth is correlated with economics.”
First, these test measure absolutely nothing. They are not measuring devices by any stretch of the definition of measure. They do not measure “growth” mainly because there is no definition of what “growth” exactly means in any given subject/grade level. There are guidelines, guideposts, etc. . . but to confuse such entities with “measurement of growth” is the height of absurdity bordering on insanity.
Suggest states purport to measure growth, but unlikely that they measure
any meaningful growth beyond cash flows from public to private sector.
That is a good question. In what ways are the other 20% – 40% different?
“Nobody doesn’t think that economics are highly correlated with low scores (do you have any examples otherwise?).”
Yes, all the rephormers who constantly chant about “no excuses”. The ones who, when you try to explain the challenges faced by inner city poor kids and their teachers and schools, plug their ears and scream “EXCUSES!”
John, no one believes we can’t or shouldn’t make efforts to improve schools, regardless of affluence. Most of us on here believe that the hyper-focus on “accountability” through testing has been a massive waste of resources that has simultaneously weakened both instruction and learning. Until policymakers (and Gates) acknowledge that their initial vision of improvement through threatening tests has been ineffective (in fact, detrimental in numerous unintended but predictable ways), there can’t be improvement.
John, You say “What state systems are measuring is growth”
Here are the meanings of growth as propagated in USDE (Federal Register definitions in RTTT) and in state accountability systems. None of these meanings are based on concepts of human growth and development. The meanings are derived from economic and statistical calculations with test scores serving as a proxy for student and teacher productivity.
GROWTH is a gain in test scores from one point in time to another.
A gain-score is the difference between test scores from one point in time to another (e.g., pretest to post-test). This difference can be a positive or negative number. The underlying constructs for both tests are assumed to be the same. This supposition is handy for a statistical calculation but it misrepresents the actual differences in content and emphasis from early in a school year to later in the year, and from one year of schooling to the next.
Cut scores are specific scores, or score intervals, used to identify levels of performance on a test. Letter-based grades and rubrics function in the same way. The process of determining cut scores is a matter of judgment and definitions of achievement.
Expected GROWTH means that gain-scores of students (on tests in a single subject, such as math or art) are staying in about the same location in a distribution of grade-level scores from year to year—below average, average, or above average. For a large number of students, the distribution is likely to resemble a bell or normal curve.
Predicted GROWTH is an inference about a student’s future gain-score, derived from a linear regression analysis of two or more years of that student’s gain-scores. This analysis assumes that past performance will predict future performance. Perhaps, but in education, this is a dismal assumption. It can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The assumption is so risky that almost every corporate report begins with this caveat: Past performance does not predict future performance.
A student is said to have achieved a year’s worth of GROWTH if his or her gain-score on a test of proficiency is equal to, or greater than, the gain-score made by a 50th percentile student. The same measure is applied to teachers. Teachers in some districts are rated highly effective only if all or most of their students have gain-scores of more than a year’s worth of GROWTH .
References to a year’s worth of GROWTH are fundamentally misleading form many reasons. Among other reasons, people have a common mental picture of a calendar year. That is different from a school year (typically 180 days); an instructional year (typically 172 days); and a typical accountability year (130 days from pre-test to post-test).
Academic peers are students whose test scores in a given year are the same or nearly the same. This concept permits comparisons of their gain-scores from the prior year to the current year. Students who make greater gains than their academic peers have an accelerated GROWTH trajectory. Students who fall behind their academic peers need remedial work to keep up. The average of the gain-scores for academic peers in a teacher’s classes is typically used as a measure of the teacher’s productivity and effectiveness. This use requires a studied indifference to other influences on test scores.
A GROWTH trajectory needs a target. Targets for learning need to be set using baseline data so the instruction offered to each student, during a known interval of time, is efficient and has a measurable impact on student learning. Meeting targets for learning is analogous to meeting a sales target or a production quota by a date certain. Teachers and others who say they are “impacting the GROWTH of their students” are not thinking about the meaning of words. They are parroting econometric jargon.
Experts associated with Metametrics hope to set GROWTH velocity standards. They describe their theoretical mapping of “aspirational trajectories toward graduation targets” in reading skills as analogous to “modifying the height, velocity, or acceleration respectively of a projectile launched in the physical world” (Williamson, Fitzgerald, & Stenner, 2013, p. 63). They seek greater precision in setting targets and cut scores for grade-to-grade progress in meeting the CCSS.
Year to year, academic growth, as “measured” by standardized test score increases, will be very difficult for any student to demonstrate. ELA tests in particular, cannot be constructed with the precision and accuracy that year to year growth requires. Standardized test scores for any individual student tend to remain relatively flat over the course of a school career.
The only way that NYSED/BOR can substantially reduce the amount of testing is to use a year-to-year growth model (no pre-tests) and tie all teachers of non-tested subjects to state tests in ELA, math, or science (no local tests).
My own kids showed almost zero growth based on a year to year model. Does this mean that their teachers were ineffective? Ridiculous! Although that is the likely growth model we will be stuck with here in NYS.
Getting students to demonstrate appreciable, year-to-year growth will be very difficult regardless of student ability. In fact, most growth will be a result in differences in tests difficulty and grade level imprecision. Growth will have almost nothing to do with teacher effectiveness.
If a Regents Earth Science teacher must have her students score significantly higher than they did in the previous year in Regents Biology (LE) in order to prove her effectiveness, she will probably be looking at a very short career,
This is easy. Because there is no standard curriculum in most schools, the “knowledge” taught (and thus learned) is “child-centered” and “constructivist” and thus reinforces the differences kids bring to the table, which happen to be, especially in the absence of a good curriculum, demographic differences.
Riiight. So many schools these days are constructivist. Thanks for the laugh.
Also, the fact that scores are highly correlated with poverty in no way implies that they are not correlated with academic proficiency. This outcome proves that they are measuring something that is meaningful and statistically significant. It also indicates that higher or lower than predicted scores are meaningful, as is growth in scores.
The data set of students or schools that do better or worse than predicted is worth looking at. Again, IMO, this is what is worth measuring and this is how accountability systems should work.
I think the objection is the portion of the scores that correlate with poverty is ignored in favor of a more politically popular focus on academic proficiency.
It’s easier to get people to support “we need better teachers!” or “we need charter schools!” or “the problem is unions!” than it is to get people to recognize the effects of these huge divides in income.
I’ve had testing out the wazoo in my son’s school for 15 years and we lost about a million dollars a year in funding from 2010 to 2014.
We counted the poor students. Over and over. What we didn’t do was fund what they need to be on a “level playing field” with my son, who has more family resources. In fact, we made it worse because they’re more reliant on programs offered in public schools than my son is. I can buy him lessons to replace lost music funding and I did. They can’t.
Chiara, your last paragraph sums up in <100 words what Arne Duncan et al. should have considered.
I don’t give them any charity in their way of thinking; to me it is just a form of rationing…. These tests are designed to choose who deserves to receive an education. They are also reductive and push one type /kind of goal (and they call it education or some fancy thing that is invented in an Orwellian fashion; that is fraud)… I formerly used words like mean-spirited in describing these policies; now I know there are those who are not well-intentioned behind this and they have bought out and co=opted the buffers in the professional associations and the state department and the bureaucrats (mandarins)…. I support Karen Lewis ‘ declaration “this is war” and it is personal as we see in New York. These people who are pushing the tests have limited strategies and tactics; they have no imagination, creativity and their ideas are absent while they push reductionist goals with hyper marketing. I use words like heinous now in describing their policies.
John, you said “…This outcome proves that they are measuring something that is meaningful and statistically significant. It also indicates that higher or lower than predicted scores are meaningful, as is growth in scores.”
Pure mumbo-jumbo John, because you have failed to define ‘academic proficiency’ or ‘growth measures’ in any meaningful way. You seem to have a strong opinion regarding what is and is not worth measuring and you believe that accountability systems based on your beliefs should work.
What is your background? It sounds like you have a background in business.
So many of the people posting here have expertise that comes from years of experience in the field of education. Many have direct experience in the classroom. Many have studied education theory, child development, and/or have a historical perspective on the art of teaching and learning. What they add to the conversation makes sense to me. What you add to the conversation sounds like it comes from a rigid belief system built on business theory and a rather weak understanding of assessment and statistical analysis.
Educating children is not a business matter. It can not be approached from a business perspective.
Besty Marshall: “Quote:So many of the people posting here have expertise that comes from years of experience in the field of education. Many have direct experience in the classroom. Many have studied education theory, child development, and/or have a historical perspective on the art of teaching and learning.” This is how I feel I have learned so much about the profession in the past couple of years reading here; it has been extending my local networks and digging out information from the different states.
One of the issues that I think is important is our state department of ed is now filled with economics majors, the major from policy etc. This was common all throughout the decades; Harvard would train a student and send them directly to Washington with no teaching /classroom experience. The friends and colleagues that were at BU and Northeastern — many had 10 years of classroom experience and went back into classroom teaching or into administrative roles or into the colleges with added specialties.
In her book ‘The Teacher Wars” Dana Goldstein cites how TFA has “always been a political movement as much as an organization focused on classrooms” — it has been purposely used to break the teacher colleges that were thought to be full of “leftist crazies” or “Commies” or something…. I remember the accreditation by NCATE (before it merged ) and this was about 10 years ago there was a definite push to have the colleges remove “Social Justice” from the conceptual framework so this has been going on for some time and then heightened by the Great Recession .
off topic but of interest;
for those of us who like to follow David Sirota, International business Times has been announced as a finalist for this award; if you will check the listing under finalists you will see David’s name… Thanks and congratulations to David…http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/gerald-loeb-awards/2015-finalists
Ohio is working on a bill to reduce the testing of students as a result of political pressure from parents and teachers. This is the Ohio Senator who has been analyzing the testing situation for months. She’s a moderate Republican and an ed reformer:
“Ohio has so much testing now, Lehner said, because the state converted to a teacher-evaluation system that is partially based on test results. That has led to more practice tests and more pressure on students to perform.”
Wouldn’t it be great if we could get the ed reform movement and the US Secretary of Education to admit this simple fact?
They can’t fix if they won’t admit their policies caused it. They should take responsibility for this. That might restore some lost trust and credibility.
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2015/05/13/state-testing-ohio-house.html
The bill is more of a fig leaf and does little. Too much testing, still. And poorly designed tests, at that. Lehner is a supporter of Common Core and testing. She supported the draconian cuts Kasich made to education. She also believes today’s teachers are inferior and are paid enough, but we need to weed out more teachers with stricter standards. But she is one of the few rational voices in the Ohio statehouse. I hold out hope.
I just appreciate her frankness.
Of course the teacher ranking schemes caused more testing.
I was also glad to see them doing something positive for Ohio public schools. It’s pretty much 100% charter/voucher cheerleading in this state.
I think they should do their job, in other words.
From Greene’s article:
“He and his colleagues have done some of the most devastating research out there on the Big Standardized Tests.”
Well the most devastating, a nuclear bomb of research, that incinerates instantly any validity and reliability is Noel Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
“Tiemken’s work is one more powerful indicator that the BS Tests do not measure the educational effectiveness of a school– not even sort of.”
Not only do they not “measure the educational effectiveness of a school” as they aren’t measuring devices, even if they, by some magical process, were then it would still be UNETHICAL to use the results for something other than what the test was designed to assess (notice assess and not measure).
And a comment from a reader:
“1. Richard White May 11, 2015 at 1:47 PM
I agree with most of your opinions here, however, please don’t disregard the value of trends gleaned from standardized tests that show us shortfalls in student learning. This data can and has assisted our district as a tool to improve teaching in our school district.
Horse manure any results are “VAIN AND ILLUSORY” due to the COMPLETE INVALIDITY of the whole process of educational standards and standardized testing as proven by Wilson. To comprehend why read 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. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
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.
I posted the Chris Tienkin article and in my comment, (at OEN) there are embedded links to several articles on testing , including one on this site, and to Curmudgucation,
I got this link to Tienkin’s piece at Curmudgucation, Peter Greene’s wonderful blog.
Here are more links that will tell you the reality of these tests, in case you wonder how this travesty came about and for what purpose:
Standardized tests have a purpose — just one | United Federation of Teachers
http://www.uft.org/insight/standardized-tests-have-purpose-just-one
and this one from Diane Ravitch, Test Scorer: No High Scores Possible!:
https://dianeravitch.net/2015/05/08/test-scorer-no-high-scores-possible/
“I have often written that the Pearson Common Core tests are written and scored to fail most students. Not only are the reading levels two grade levels above the students’ actual grade, but the cut score is set artificially high.
“Here is confirmation from a teacher who graded essay answers”:
“When teachers score state tests, they are given formal training before they score actual student tests. Teachers are trained using student anchor answers that are culled from random field tests. Each student answer is used as an example and compared to the rubric to show how to score accordingly. There is always an anchor answer for each rubric score, meaning an answer that demonstrates a 1, another serves as an example of a 2 and so on and so forth. Teachers must then take a quiz using more student samples in order to gauge their preparation level before they move on to scoring actual exams.”
“This year’s 5th(?) grade training guides DO NOT have anchor answers for the highest score on the essay. That has never happened before. That means that during the random field testing NO STUDENT was able to achieve an answer that would have met the highest criteria of the rubric. Pearson filled in this gap with their own mock version of an answer that would meet the highest score on the rubric. In other words, the test was too hard for even the most accomplished students to achieve full credit and therefore way beyond their ability.”
“The training guides are embargoed and teachers are prevented from removing them from the scoring site.”
DON”T forget… do not miss this segment about testing and Pearson on John Oliver’s show on HBO:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=J6lyURyVz7k
We ALL know and have known this for some time. Dr. Ravitch has statistical evidence dating from her first book. The evidence is clear – to us.
Unfortunately the moneyed people pay no attention to it – unless made to do it. Politicians listen to the money which support their re-election – this by and large.
Again, in my view a large scale unified by as many organizations as possible to force the media to pay attention is essential if there is to be any hope of stopping the nonsense. Karen Lewis showed the way, brilliantly and emulation of her strategy on a huge scale by teachers organizations is essential if we are to adequately stop this.
Since “A Nation at Risk” first appeared the propaganda against teachers and public schools has only intensified. The longer we wait the worse it gets.
Letters to the editor seem not to have the desired effect. Letters to politicians likewise. It seems to me that to have a realistic chance of stopping this blow not only to education but to the survival of any semblance of democratic government the time is already late but procrastination will only exacerbate the problem.
Again, we know what it has cost people in our country in the past to gain freedoms which our country says it believes in. It may well cost much in the future for us but the more people involved etc etc, the more powerful message will be sent and undoubtely less repercussions. In unity there is strength.
A recent study has shown that there is a brain difference in poor children. I don’t know if this will help or hurt the arguments about standardized testing and poor students. It may be more eugenics, or it could be argued that this brain difference accounts for the low performance of poor students on standardized tests. I wonder what brain imagining would show if a poor student became middle class. Would this change in socioeconomic status change the brain imaging over time? If so, it might be a good argument for helping families escape poverty. http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/poverty-linked-to-brain-structure-in-children-new-research-shows/2015/03/31/25fe6f10-d7df-11e4-8103-fa84725dbf9d_story.html
You don’t need to look at a brain…. that is lab research for medical people…. There are many examples already that exist: one in particular is the scores that went up n Berlin/Germany after the wall came down.!!!!! Will you quit with the eugenics movement, please? I have repeatedly placed an article here by Deborah Waber from Boston Children’s Hospital who shows the impact of MCAS scores with the children living in poverty in Boston. Wish you would read her research because she is medically trained in the field of psychiatry and you are reading some of the Richwine dissertation and forming opinions basted on what Heritage says? We have had decades of nature/nurture discussions…. It is like the reading wars and the canon wars; I thinkDiane wrote here that the reading wars are over for many of us. The other example I have posted here is the differences in the children in Southern Italy compared with Northern Italy; they looked at the international test sores and Cornoldi found it was an artifact of the test; children in the southern part of Italy were making accuracy/speed trade offs when they answered questions with perceptual motor skills required (such as when you sit a kid in front of a computer and ask her/him to go through those experimental tests). You also need to read the Wilson articles on errora in measurement that have frequently been posted here by others.
I wonder what brain imagining would show if a poor student became middle class. Would this change in socioeconomic status change the brain imaging over time? If so, it might be a good argument for helping families escape poverty.
jeanhaverhill@aol.com
In unity there is strength…..Yes. But that was also the premise of the campaign to standardize education spurred into existence by former McKinsey & Co. guru and serial CEO, Louis Gerstner Jr, head of IBM in the late 1990s, initiator and co-chair of Achieve, Inc. from 1999 and shepherd of the American Diploma Project which produced common standards for high school graduation and was then extended down to K-12. Here is the unified vision of what should happen as set forth in 1999 by CEOs, governors, representatives from major testing companies, and a few foundations. These few self-appointed experts, many with limited or no credentials in education, created the organization called Achieve to take action on the following agenda:
1. establish alternative paths to teaching, recruit the most “talented,” raise standards for certification, and target professional development to higher standards
2. align curriculum to rigorous state standards and tests
3. provide extra learning time and help for low achieving students,
4. train school leaders to improve instruction, manage organizational change, reward the best teachers with pay for performance, hold schools accountable for results
5. intervene in chronically failing schools and expand public school choice and charter schools
6. benchmark and compare standards, tests scores and other data state by state and with other nations
7. align college admission standards with high school standards and expand the number of companies that will use student academic records in hires. Achieve’s history
published by Achieve (http://www.achieve.org)
It is no accident than many features of this agenda were placed into The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, signed into law by President George W. Bush on Jan. 8, 2002. Meanwhile, Achieve and like-minded groups continued to work on action steps 5 and 6 creating reports that were rarely peer-reviewed but constructed the narrative for Common Core and tests.
A collapse of this sixteen-year campaign to standardize so much of public education—pre-k to higher education, including teacher education—may not happen overnight, but I think the odds do favor a reversal.
Whether a new vision can be formed by a more democratic process remains to be seen. That requires rethinking and reframing the purposes of public education, principles for policy formation, and indicators of exemplary practice and outcomes without micro-managerial schemes and the belief that education is only about economic prowess..
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Study uses family income to predict the results of high stakes standardized tests—BEFORE THE TEST was even taken.
This is extremely important imfomation.
I would like to see Nate Silver weigh in on establishing predictAble outcomes based on census data, social capital and demographics. Is this science replicable? I sure do hope someone with Silver’s skills will show that it is. Does anyone know him??
Regardless of theoretical objections that are divorced from real world constraints and realities, high-stakes standardized tests as they have been and are being implemented—
Create few winners and many losers. They are set up to do that, with results that are highly predictable, e.g., the recent NYS 70% failure rate.
Why is that so? Because the testing industry delivers what clients want. And rheephorm clients want FAILURE not SUCCESS.
That is why the abuses of standardized testing fall on OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN and not on THEIR OWN CHILDREN.
This blog, 3-23-2014, the entire posting entitled “Common Core for Commoners, Not My School!”—
[start]
This is an unintentionally hilarious story about Common Core in Tennessee. Dr. Candace McQueen has been dean of Lipscomb College’s school of education and also the state’s’s chief cheerleader for Common Core. However, she was named headmistress of private Lipscomb Academy, and guess what? She will not have the school adopt the Common Core! Go figure.
[end]
And why do I remind viewers of this blog of the above? What possible connection could CCSS have to high-stakes standardized testing?
The blog of the redoubtable Dr. Mercedes Schneider aka deutsch29, quoting a charter member of the “education reform” establishment, Dr. Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute (and with much valuable contextual info):
[start excerpt]
In truth, the idea that the Common Core might be a “game-changer” has little to do with the Common Core standards themselves, and everything to do with stuff attached to them, especially the adoption of common tests that make it possible to readily compare schools, programs, districts, and states (of course, the announcement that one state after another is opting out of the two testing consortia is hollowing out this promise).
But the Common Core will only make a dramatic difference if those test results are used to evaluate schools or hire, pay, or fire teachers; or if the effort serves to alter teacher preparation, revamp instructional materials, or compel teachers to change what students read and do. And, of course, advocates have made clear that this is exactly what they have in mind. When they refer to the “Common Core,” they don’t just mean the words on paper–what they really have in mind is this whole complex of changes.
[end excerpt]
Link: https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/the-american-enterprise-institute-common-core-and-good-cop/
Opt out of standardized testing. Opt in to genuine learning and teaching.
A Lakeside School education for all. Whatever it takes. No excuses.
Will it be tough to achieve that? You bet. But as a real American hero reminds us:
“I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”
Frederick Douglass was right then. He’s right now. Time to get up on our feet and start moving forward to a “better education for all.”
😎