Everyone understands that the key fact about Néw York’s test scores is that they will be used to measure the “effectiveness” of teachers. The progress of children has been small over three years, and the scores align closely with demography, language, disability, and family income. Ho-hum.
Mercedes Schneider reminds us of basic facts:
“Under no conditions is it a valid use of student test scores to evaluate teachers or schools.
“The students are the test takers; these tests purportedly measure their achievement. There is no way to account for all of the possible variables that would enable the New York State Education Department (NYSED) to accurately evaluate teachers and schools using student test scores.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
THANKS! Great post. Love Mercedes’ insights and courage.
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Regarding the whole Common Core curriculum and testing, the following two videos are must watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42ZkHkTu3GY
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_Eiz406VAs
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Oops… wrong video on top…
Here’s the right one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvKVkitKOgk
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OLD NEWS. We need to start beating a different drum. Right now we are spinning our wheels and going no where. Time for a change in strategy unless writing and reading blogs is all that we have become.
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Suggestions please, Karen.
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I think they have shot themselves in the foot with VAM and these exams.
They made the exams so hard, so long and so tricky that the majority of scores are going to be low and that kids guessing are going to be pretty indistinguishable from very able kids tricked into the wrong answer. What this means is that it’s going to be hard to use this data to discriminate between the more able and less able kids and therefore even harder to discriminate between the “more able” and “less able” teachers.
The point of these tests is to discriminate students and teachers which means, ideally, you need 1) the most able kids to do well and less able kids to do worse and 2) the scores to be as spread out as possible.
The thing is that it became about politics – it was a better political advantage to make people feel bad about schools and about their children’s education so they made it hard for even the best kids to do well (tricky questions that soak up time, long readings that take up time, work above grade level that’s equally tough for the very able and least able students) so I am guessing that the results for teachers are going to be really counter-intuitive and the scores between the most effective and least effective teachers are going to be really narrow.
If some treasured teachers get fired or forced out than I think the opt out movement is going to take off even more. It’s the only way for parents to show their displeasure at such an insane system.
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Unless the testing companies are designing the test to measure teacher effectiveness and are willing to state on the record that they measure teacher effectiveness then they should not be used for that purpose. Where are the unions challenging this???? There is no secret formula. The testing companies are the ones who must present that these test measure teacher effectiveness. Why are they not being challenged in court???
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“Where are the unions challenging this????”
In bed with the edudeformers after having been on their dinner table as a new haute cuisine hors-d’oeuvre named Cojones de la Cordillera Rocky. It’s the edudeformers’ newest form of population control.
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and we get more proposals from media outlets on the backs of those scores.
did ALEC float man made hurricanes as their latest reform cause it seems like very suddenly media is very on point in calling for radical restructuring (another shock to recover from) in promoting this horrendous disaster capitalism.
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2015/08/14/test-scores-ela-rochester-school-district/31709625/
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Journalists do not really seem to understand the gravity of what is happening to education in the United States. There is a reason that highly educated parents are opting their children out of standardized tests. It is a scary time to be a teacher and an even scarier time to raise a child. Since 1997, the testing market in the United States has grown 835%, or roughly 14% annually, from $263 million to over $2.46 billion. That’s nearly double the annual rate of return of the S&P 500. A lot of people have made a lot of money off of the test-based accountability movement and a lot of corporations now have a lot to lose. Corporations and politicians promised us a lot when they seized control of the nation’s education policy and enacted No Child Left Behind in 2002. Since then, the rate of growth in NAEP scores has declined, SAT scores have declined, ACT scores have remained flat, and PISA scores have declined. As if that wasn’t enough, politicians and their corporate backers doubled down on the dismantling of public education by withholding funding, taking over school districts, and threatening to close down schools. In Washington D.C., after linking 50% of teacher evaluations to standardized test scores, teacher turnover increased to 82%, schools in communities with high poverty rates showed large or moderate declines in student learning outcomes, and the combined poverty gap expanded by 44 scale-score points causing poor students to fall even further behind their more affluent peers. Realizing the calamity of these reform efforts, the American Statistical Association, the National Academy of Education, the American Educational Research Association, the Economic Policy Institute, and educators throughout the country issued statements urging policymakers to reconsider the use of high-stakes tests which have robbed teachers of their autonomy and forced hundreds of hours of test prep on our students. While some states have responded to limit the stakes until more is known about the validity and reliability of the assessments, officials in New York State continue to press forward. It is long past time to acknowledge that the high-stakes accountability movement has failed our children. We must hold politicians responsible for withholding funding from our public schools and allowing poverty to wreak havoc on our education system. The United States now has its highest level of income inequality since 1928. Yet when you control for poverty, we have the best PISA scores in the world. Our schools are not failing our children, our politicians are. It takes a real hero to ignore the impact of poverty and threaten to punch teachers in the face. But parents can see right through the lies, the decept, and the corruption. In 2016, opt out rates will double and this grass-roots parent movement will ensure that the American Dream is not permitted to skip a generation.
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