Motoko Rich of the Néw York Times answered the question deftly. Peter Greene says she gave a “master class in how to let the subjects of a story make themselves look ridiculous.”
Most of the graders have never been teachers. We know that Pearson and other testing companies hire test graders from Craigslist and Kelly Temps.
Rich writes:
“On Friday, in an unobtrusive office park northeast of downtown here [San Antonio], about 100 temporary employees of the testing giant Pearson worked in diligent silence scoring thousands of short essays written by third- and fifth-grade students from across the country.
“There was a onetime wedding planner, a retired medical technologist and a former Pearson saleswoman with a master’s degree in marital counseling. To get the job, like other scorers nationwide, they needed a four-year college degree with relevant coursework, but no teaching experience. They earned $12 to $14 an hour, with the possibility of small bonuses if they hit daily quality and volume targets.”
My favorite lines in Rich’s story (and Peter’s too) are these:
“At times, the scoring process can evoke the way a restaurant chain monitors the work of its employees and the quality of its products.
“From the standpoint of comparing us to a Starbucks or McDonald’s, where you go into those places you know exactly what you’re going to get,” said Bob Sanders, vice president of content and scoring management at Pearson North America, when asked whether such an analogy was apt.
“McDonald’s has a process in place to make sure they put two patties on that Big Mac,” he continued. “We do that exact same thing. We have processes to oversee our processes, and to make sure they are being followed.”
So, if you want test scoring by readers who are paid by volume, who are not teachers, and who are trained like employees of McDonald’s and Starbucks, the results of Common Core testing should please you.
Don’t you wonder whether this madness is done on purpose to drive parents out of public schools and make them desperate to find an alternative to be free of mass-produced teaching and testing?
The best way to stop it is to refuse the test. Opt out. Take control away from Pearson, PARCC, and the privatizers. Make the machine grind to a halt.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Plug for Tom Farley’s book “Making The Grades”.
Read it !
So nothing has changed.
I read it. Farley’s experiences were almost all under NCLB testing.
It can only be worse due to the scale of test scoring required under Duncan’s NCLB waiver.
Debunks the claim that CC tests measure critical thinking skills.
There is still only one right, full credit answer as far as scoring goes.
The anchor paper is just the right bubble. In what world of critical thinking and problem solving is there only one right solution?
To answer your question NY Teacher: Edudeformlandia!
Isn’t that the island nation surrounded by the Snake Oil Sea?
howardat58: I suggest you read, in tandem with Todd Farley’s excellent book from 2009, an article from 2010 by Dan DiMaggio entitled “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Test Scorer.”
Link: http://monthlyreview.org/2010/12/01/the-loneliness-of-the-long-distance-test-scorer/
[Full disclosure for the faint of heart: it appears in the online version of MONTHLY REVIEW, a self-described “Independent Socialist Magazine.”]
A teaser, the second paragraph of the above mentioned piece:
[start]
I recently spent four months working for two test-scoring companies, scoring tens of thousands of papers, while routinely clocking up to seventy hours a week. This was my third straight year doing this job. While the reality of life as a test scorer has recently been chronicled by Todd Farley in his book Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry, a scathing insider’s account of his fourteen years in the industry, I want to tell my story to affirm that Farley’s indictment is rooted in experiences common throughout the test-scoring world.
[end]
“Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.” [Frederick Douglass]
Let’s all get unfit. Read Farley. Read DiMaggio. Opt out of standardized dumbing down. Opt in to genuine teaching and learning.
😎
Oh, you just have to start thinking about your kids differently.
Here’s some very prestigious ed reformers pontificating on “the products”
“Engler: The president of Purdue and the president of the Business Roundtable – we are the consumer groups here at the table. All the products of K-12 system are either going to go to the university or they are going to the work force. The military is not here, but they’re not very different.”
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/a-report-card-on-education-reform/?_r=0
I wonder what it will be like to have a national score attached to you beginning in 3rd grade. We’ll have to ask students what that’s like because not one of the adults opining on it in this country have any idea.
I dunno, the more I think about it, I think I prefer it this way. If we paid $20+/hour for actual teachers and/or subject matter experts to grade these essays, it would seem to lend an air of legitimacy to the whole thing. In fact, there is nothing legitimate about a standardized essay (an oxymoron if ever there was one), whether graded by genius PhDs or by untrained chimps. At least by paying unqualified people bargain basement wages, even Pearson is admitting the whole thing is a farce.
Not in any way disagreeing with you, Dienne, but I was wondering what you think of AP tests, scored much the same way except by people who have been teaching the AP courses for years.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
“… about 100 temporary employees of the testing giant Pearson worked in diligent silence scoring thousands of short essays written by third- and fifth-grade students from across the country.
“There was a onetime wedding planner, a retired medical technologist and a former Pearson saleswoman with a master’s degree in marital counseling. To get the job, like other scorers nationwide, they needed a four-year college degree with relevant coursework, but no teaching experience. They earned $12 to $14 an hour, with the possibility of small bonuses if they hit daily quality and volume targets.”
————————————-
Put yourself in the shoes of one of these non-teacher temps who make $12-14/hour:
— the faster you grade tests—i.e. the more half-assed and the more rushed your grading is—the greater the volume of tests that will get graded by you… and the more money you’ll make, and the greater likelihood you’ll keep your job…
… while conversely…
— the more careful and caring a job you do in grading essays, the less money you’ll make, and the greater likelihood you’ll get canned.
This whole market-based factory model basically incentivizes doing an increasingly horrible job grading these essays, and disincentivizes doing a thorough and fair job of grading.
Those who actually take time to do the job right, are penalized and presumably fired for not reaching their “quota” of tests graded.
And these wildly inaccurate “results” will then be used to judge the “quality” of both teachers and schools, with those of poor quality fired (teachers) or closed (schools.)
These fired teachers will probably end up getting replaced by those bonus-earning essay graders who can churn out the most number of essays graded, and the traditional public schools that are closed will end up getting re-opened under the management of Acme Charter Schools Inc., a privately-run for-profit corporation.
Perhaps the next wave of reform is efficiency, as in how fast can you teach this subject to your kids? The faster the better, the more material you cover in a shorter time, the more you get paid. Yuck!
There was also a mention in the article of a tester who was a woman who immigrated from France with her American husband. Left unsaid was whether or not she was a simultaneous bilingual speaker of French and English. I would hope that Pearson would only hire evaluators who have spoken English since birth, not later in life.
Have you ever been to San Antonio? It is 61.5% Hispanic. This does not mean that all these people are Spanish dominant, but I know from being an ESL teacher for more than three decades that many people in San Antonio are not fluent in English. I don’t know what type of people they will get for such a low wage, but I can imagine.
This makes me sick to hear this, but it does not surprise me. They are reducing everything to “drive through” service. They are using “drive through” service to give teachers their “ratings.” These ratings are not worth the paper they are written on. When will this madness end?
One of my friends, a retired school psychologist with a PhD, has to continue to work since she adopted two children late in life. The only thing she could find at her age (65+) is in claims processing mill. She works for a private company that processes social security claims for the government. She has a quota of how many people to see each day and a quota for her rejections! This is the way people are treated in Orwellian America.
Everything associated with Pearson is a joke but brunt of the joke is being played on the Students, Teachers, Parents and the taxpayers of America in general. Pearson is running sweatshops paid for on the backs of our Students and Teachers with taxpayers dollars. I am positive it does not go unnoticed that the only party that has any say about who gets hired to do the grading is Pearson and as long as Pearson gets paid the big bucks it means little to Pearson if the results coming out of their sweatshops makes sense and is in the best interest of the Students.
My view: this whole testing fiasco is worse than even the fiasco we talk about.
When corporations, government tell students what they should know, then test them on how well they assimilate their “truths” and their ability to regurgitate that on tests and teachers, schools are evaluated on how well the students assimilate THEIR ideas of “truth”, That my friends is:
FASCISM, TOTALITARIANISM, AUTOCRACY, NOT a belief in the principles of democracy.
THAT is how FASCISM controls their people. AND when the corporate media, the supposed bulwark of democracy pushes corporate agenda in this manner how long cab any vestige of democracy exist? No longer scholarly, unbiased, in depth research but top down assertions of “truth”, can we say that democracy even now exists?
Good question.
TAGO!
Don’t worry Gordon, the edu-fakers are all bound to lose!
This grading scheme is not, “a mile wide and an inch deep”? Everything common core was supposed to avoid and solve, it has become and made worse. A parody of itself.
The industrial education system they have developed is what white bread is to nutrition.
It was always about the tests. All the rest is window dressing. They have unshakable and fundamental belief in testing.
I;m dreading when the scores come out. Get ready for a coordinated political campaign- government, the foundations and the private sector.
I am an adjunct professor of history who cannot get enough work. I signed on with Pearson for scoring opportunities some time ago, reluctantly, because I need the money. I have worked for ETS scoring the AP history exam–they pay well at least, and use only history educators as far as I know. Pearson–they pay $12 an hour (this is scoring online at home) and the only time I heard from them was for two tests being scored on the last week of our semester, when I was not willing to spend as much time as they wanted for what I would have received in compensation, probably about $200. Even though I replied I was not interested–I was harassed by robo calls from them for about two weeks, I took it that they were desperate for scorers and thought–they get somebody to score, but I doubt that it is many actual educators, based on the time of year when they need scorers and the amount they pay. They sent me a long email detailing what would happen if I didn’t live up to their standards. I am desperate for money, but no thank you. They are a profit-oriented corporation and does not seem to know how to recruit appropriate scorers and is not willing to compensate.Aside from not liking the tests to begin with, I don’t think that they have a clue as to how to deliver what they are promising to their clients.
I really appreciate the postings in your blog, I only score for ETS for the money, but it has certainly been a learning experience to see these companies from the inside. It’s all about the money.
Stocking shelves at Walmart while remiaining on public assistance or grading essays for Pearson?
And the difference between each is?
We should be placing our clenched fists into the faces of the members of British Parliament and letting them know how we Americans feel about their global unregulated, out of control spoiled brat child conglomerate Pearson.
Let the British ruling elite spread their educational colonialism on some other foreign soil . . . . . .
Fwiw, I’m grading Parcc. I have a PhD and almost a decades worth of teaching experience. I’m also earning $12/hour to score, because I’d be otherwise unemployed. Scoring these tests is disheartening on all levels. The questions posed to the students are vague. The materials students have to read are frequently opaque. The rubric used to score (not grade) is boiler plate. The interface students used to take the test was buggy. Pearson’s use of scorers like me is a technological update of the 18th-century cottage industry. Most of all, the students’ essays are simply awful to read. What does this tell me? Not much, especially given that students in upper grades know that the test doesn’t “count” for them personally. The whole thing is just a mess.
OMG … worse than ever. Parents BEWARE corporatists bringing gifts of tests to your school district in the name of accountability. This is so colonial, it’s gross. Robert Rendo is right.
This is very reminiscent of what went on at the height of the housing bubble when banks hired lots of temps with no qualifications to OK mortgage applications.
It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry over this stuff.
it’s just absurd.
As a current teacher, Pearson has contacted me not once but three times asking me to volunteer my time to quality control review some tests I just had to pay them to take myself a few years ago. Is there any question that the only reason they exist is profit? If only we could opt out of our licensing exams or continuing education exam requirements. It’s a stranglehold.