Peter Greene has noticed that reformsters send contradictory messages about testing. First, they make it all-important, tying teachers’ careers to the scores. Then, they chide schools and teachers for putting so much importance in testing, e.g., teaching to the test, test prep, etc.
Peter Greene knows who is to blame. in this post, he reviews the remarks of Andrew Rotherham, a leader in the corporate reformster world. (Readers may note that I have been using Green’s word “reformster,” which has the virtue of rehabilitating the once admirable words “reform” and “reformer.” I expect to hear the Koch brothers lauded as reformers soon, along with Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, and other hard-right free-marketeers.)
Greene writes:
“Reformsters seem to want the following message to come from somewhere:
“Hey, public schools and public school teachers– your entire professional future and career rests on the results of these BS Tests. But please don’t put a lot of emphasis on the tests. Your entire future is riding on these results, but whatever you do– don’t do everything you can possibly think of to get test scores up.”
“I have no way of knowing whether Rotherman, Duncan, et al are disingenuous, clueless, or big fat fibbers trying to paper over the bullet wound of BS Testing with the bandaid of PR. But the answer to the question “Who caused this testing circus” is as easy to figure out as it ever was.
“Reformy policymakers and politicians and bureaucrats declared that test scores would be hugely important, and ever since, educators have weighed self-preservation against educational malpractice and tried to make choices they could both live with and which would allow them to have a career. And reformsters, who knew all along that the test would be their instrument to drive instruction, have pretended to be surprised testing has driven instruction and pep rallies and shirts. They said, “Get high test scores, or else,” and a huge number of schools said, “Yessir!” and pitched some tents and hired some acrobats and lion tamers. Oddly enough, the clowns were already in place.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane,
Governor Christie announced he’s dumping Common Core. You didn’t post this?
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I believe Jeb and Kasich are the last hold outs – if they’ve even read it. But, sadly, most voters so not take the issue seriously.
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Christie is keeping the test. Getting rid of the standards, but keeping the test.
The Onion had a piece a while ago where Duncan replaced the entire K-12 system with a single test.
This could happen! 🙂
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This is nice:
“Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sought — and received — advice from Jeb Bush about how to deal with Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s concerns about Common Core, emails obtained by BuzzFeed News show.
Bush advised Duncan that Scott, “fearful of the rebellion” brewing around the program, “[w]ants to stop using the term common core but keep the standards,” but couldn’t name “specifics [sic] things that the federal government is doing or perceived to be doing” that he found objectionable.”
A marketing strategy meeting. Designed to protect vulnerable ed reform politicians.
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Peter Greene does a great job (as usual) of explaining why that news is really a yawn: http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/05/christies-useless-gesture.html#comment-form
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Test mania becomes a game. We are seeing the exodus of many great teachers from our district. They all express dismay with the direction of education. They have integrity and professionalism which are undermined by the test reform regime. Many excellent teachers remain, but they are fighting a difficult battle. It wears on them. They, too, will likely leave early. The few struggling teachers, if not gone in 5 years, remain. They know how to game the system and are propped up by parents compensation poor classroom instruction or tutors and agonizing homework sessions. Let’s see – get rid of good teachers, keep bad teachers – I’d say Reformers are achieving their mission.
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Yes, MathVale, yes. I was with a group of teachers after school yesterday. One of the truly enthusiastic veterans (23 years as a teacher) was describing the feelings toward teaching of the younger teachers in his building. He noted that every one of them was deeply questioning their decisions about making teaching a career. Why?
Because they don’t care much for the reform methods of test-and-punish and the hyper-data methods of evaluation. They enjoy more creative planning (passed down and suggested by veteran teachers like my friend) and find the type of assignments they’re expected to execute as lifeless and uninteresting for students.
Teaching is about to become the job (not career) that people have temporarily until they get the job they really want. It will be like TFA, except it won’t be TFA.
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I love Chris Christie’s position on the Common Core because it’s ed reform boiled down to its true essence.
It’s just charter schools and a test. He doesn’t care if they learn anything that will be ON the test. They could just show up for “testing season”, input data, and that’s all he needs.
I almost admire him for cutting thru all the other lofty rhetoric and focusing on what matters 🙂
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Chiara: few words, much said.
Thank you.
Reminds me of Dr. Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, late 2013, on CCSS, quoted by the redoubtable Dr. Mercedes Schneider (aka deutsch29):
[start]
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]
Link: https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/the-american-enterprise-institute-common-core-and-good-cop/
And my reaction to what he said? To quote you: “I almost admire him for cutting thru all the other lofty rhetoric and focusing on what matters”—
Yes, what matters to rheephormsters near and wide—measure to punish the vast majority of OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN while the vast majority of THEIR OWN CHILDREN are spared institutionalized child abuse because they go to Lakeside School and Harpeth Hall and Sidwell Friends and U of Chicago Lab Schools and such.
¿😳? Yes, for example, just those poor tykes at Lakeside School will have to endure the WIAA 3A State Tournament coed tennis and track-and-field championships today and tomorrow.
And miss all that test prep?!?!?!?
So far, no takers for a rescue mission. Inquiring minds already know why…
😎
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C Christie may not care much what public school students learn–he sent his children to Catholic schools, supposedly deferring to Mary Pat Christie’s preference. (Bridget Ann Kelly of Bridgegate attended Catholic schools & college, so there’s no guarantee of ethics, compassion.) Recent appointees to NJ State Board of Education have connections to private schools.
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Test scores are the weapon of choice for the wholesale destruction of a love of learning in this generation.
The reification of test scores is a direct result of the coordinated takeover of public education by self-appointed CEOs from IBM, INTEL, and other companies who, in 1996, created and staffed Achieve, Inc. with persons who made a living from tests and writing standards, and who also made it a policy to minimize the role of parents and educators–teachers and scholars close to the real world of education–in their grand plan for public education.
The CEOs were aided in this takeover by members of the National Governor’s Association and by some members of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) eager to do the bidding of the CEO’s. This inside the beltway campaign to transform public education–standardizing it on a national scale-has been funded by billionaires–Gates, Waltons, Broad, Carneigie’ and many others–and by massive funding for test-based accountability from the Obama/Duncan administration. That federal funding was coordinated with the CEO’s two-pronged agenda. The first prong was tanking public schools through outcomes only policies and requiring them to use test scores glorified as measures of “success.” That success had little to do with education. It had everything to do with compliance with the value system and aims of the CEOs and their “partners” almost all of the totally indifferent to the consequences of standardized public education–except for one consequence and one of the most the important– replacing public education with “subsidized” market-based education.
From the get-go, the same promoters of standardized public education were also pushing hard to enlarge the market for public-in-name-only charter schools most of these free of accountability, also for-profit on-line “personalized learning. This campaign was operated in tandem with the effort to dismantle the concept of professional expertise in education (e.g. Teach for America), and to treat public higher education as useful only in the degree that institution contributed to the economy.
These efforts were forwarded by the same sort of coordinated effort from CEOs, aided by politicians eager to make reputations as supporters of market-based solutions to education and other social services, along with billionaires eager to toy with investments in education. Add funds from the Obama/Duncan administration, poured into charters and “innovations” many of these enlarging the market for technologies, and with a short use-life but helping to create a new “sector of the economy.”
For an overview of how this sector of the economy has become organized as a lobby, visit the Education Industry Association website’ and notice how the Dean of the School of Education at Johns Hopkins University has positioned himself and his university as skilled marketers of for-profit education. Or take a look at the role of Goldman Sachs in marketing profits to made from investments in Utah preschools.
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I feel sorry for public school kids. School was one place outside their families they ALL had that was outside the commercial world, set apart. They weren’t just “consumers” there. They’re marketed to constantly and it gets worse every year.
We couldn’t give them this one space that wasn’t wholly devoted to selling them something? We have to go in and make as much money as we possibly can there, too?
It makes me mad because this didn’t happen to the adults who are selling this snake oil. They had a place to grow up before they were thrown into the 24/7 consumer culture. They’re denying them something they were given. It’s appalling.
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This is the agenda of “reformers:” Profit at any price.
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Back in the beginning – maybe 20 years ago – when we had tests, but not the high stakes, principals, superintendents, even some teachers, bought into test scores as a way to validate what they were doing, sometimes their pay. It did start as a game, but soon became serious stuff.
We can and should blame corporate interests, but many actual educators laid the groundwork.
Even a now well-known blogger of education issues once bought in.
I wonder how many anti-test folks today once drank the Kool-Aid before Pearson bought out Kool-Aid.
So what seems a neat fad can eventually come back and swallow you up.
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“We can and should blame corporate interests, but many actual educators laid the groundwork.”
YEP, those GAGA educators. Unfortunately there are still way to many GAGAers around.
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Duane,I’m afraid it’s even getting worse. We have some entering teaching who have known nothing but the testing and VAM and whatever. I had one tell me that teaching is a data-driven science. He didn’t know what either word meant.
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Now that teacher, if one can call him that is scary. But then again our new principal this past year didn’t know what the undercurrent of a work environment was nor knew what inane meant. Quite sad these things.
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When I first starting teaching ESL, frankly it was a new field, and I created my own program and formative assessments. It was a lot of work, but I took great pride in the results I got. This was in New York so we always had the Regents exams as exit tests for high school students. The district also gave the CAT tests at the end of the year in order to qualify for Title 1 funds. While there was social pressure to meet with success, the real punitive drum didn’t beat until NCLB. This was the first time there were sanctions attached to results with, of course, the absurd conclusion being that all students had to pass in order for the district to succeed. Now, with the advent of Gates’ faux VAM formula, the punitive measures have multiplied, and testing is now a “weapon of mass destruction” that is being used to close public schools and fire public teachers. This, of course, is the agenda of the free-marketeers that seek to turn public assets into private investments. This agenda has little to do with reforming anything; it is about transferring wealth with the collusion of the government.
Parents and teachers should continue to resist if they want to support a democratic form of public education. Fight for your children and your voice! Anyone with any sense can understand that billionaires no business determining what our children should learn; it is, in fact, a disturbing and potentially dangerous notion.
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From Peter’s article:
“Achieving a specific degree of literacy and numeracy might help with that goal, but only if the test is a good and valid measure, and that topic is open to debate.”
Although the topic is open to debate, the debate has already been won by Noel Wilson. He has proven the COMPLETE INVALIDITY of educational standards and standardized testing. See the following:
“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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Reflect on this: Hitler’s final solution did not blossom overnight. It was a strategically thought out plan that was made behind closed doors by a select group of like minded, trusted henchmen, and the selection of the right people to be in charge was crucial for this plan to be successful.
All of the front line leaders in the reform movement—not the powerful oligarchs funding the movement—were selected because they were all ruthless psychopaths that could be trusted to carry out their marching orders no matter what.
It is obvious to me that people like Michelle Rhee, Eva Moskowitz, Scott Walker, Arne Duncan, Cuomo, etc., have no moral core or conscience.
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