Jesse Hagopian wrote the following essay for the blog. Jesse is an associate editor for Rethinking Schools magazine and teaches history at Garfield High School. Jesse is the editor of the book, More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing.
Obama regrets “taking the joy out of teaching and learning” with too much testing
In a stunning turn of events, President Obama announced last weekend that “unnecessary testing” is “consuming too much instructional time” and creating “undue stress for educators and students.” Rarely has a president so thoroughly repudiated such a defining aspect of his own public education policy. In a three-minute video announcing this reversal, Obama cracks jokes about how silly it is to over-test students, and recalls that the teachers who had the most influence on his life were not the ones who prepared him best for his standardized tests. Perhaps Obama hopes we will forget it was his own Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, who radically reorganized America’s education system around the almighty test score.
Obama’s statement comes in the wake of yet another study revealing the overwhelming number of standardized tests children are forced to take: The average student today is subjected to 112 standardized tests between preschool and high school graduation. Because it’s what we have rewarded and required, America’s education system has become completely fixated on how well students perform on tests. Further, the highest concentration of these tests are in schools serving low-income students and students of color.
To be sure, Obama isn’t the only president to menace the education system with high-stakes exams. This thoroughly bi-partisan project was enabled by George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. NCLB became law in 2002 with overwhelming support from Republicans and Democrats alike.
Obama, instead of erasing the wrong answer choice of NCLB’s test-and-punish policy, decided to press ahead. Like a student filling in her entire Scantron sheet with answer choice “D,” Duncan’s erroneous Race to the Top initiative was the incorrect solution for students. It did, however, make four corporations rich by assigning their tests as the law of the land. Desperate school districts, ravaged by the Great Recession, eagerly sought Race to the Top points by promulgating more and more tests.
The cry of the parents, students, educators and other stewards of education was loud and sorrowful as Obama moved to reduce the intellectual and emotional process of teaching and learning to a single score—one that would be used to close schools, fire teachers and deny students promotion or graduation. Take, for instance, this essay penned by Diane Ravitch in 2010. She countered Obama’s claim that Race to the Top was his most important accomplishment:
[RttT] will make the current standardized tests of basic skills more important than ever, and even more time and resources will be devoted to raising scores on these tests. The curriculum will be narrowed even more than under George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, because of the link between wages and scores. There will be even less time available for the arts, science, history, civics, foreign language, even physical education. Teachers will teach to the test.
What Ravitch warned us about has come to pass, and Obama has now admitted as much without fully admitting to his direct role in promoting the tests. Duncan and Obama, with funding from the Gates Foundation, coupled Race to the Top with Common Core State Standards and the high-stakes tests that came shrink wrapped with them. Together these policies have orchestrated a radical seizure of power by what I call the “testocracy”—The multibillion dollar testing corporations, the billionaire philanthropists who promote their policies, and the politicians who write their policies into law.
These policies in turn have produced the largest uprising against high-stakes testing in U.S. history. To give you just a few highlights of the size and scope of this unprecedented struggle, students have staged walkouts of the tests in Portland, Chicago, Colorado, New Mexico, and beyond. Teachers from Seattle to Toledo to New York City have refused to administer the tests. And the parent movement to opt children out of tests has exploded into a mass social movement, including some 60,000 families in Washington State and more than 200,000 families in New York State. One of the sparks that helped ignite this uprising occurred at Garfield High School, where I teach, when the entire faculty voted unanimously to refuse to administer the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test. The boycott spread to several other schools in Seattle and then the superintendent threatened my colleagues with a ten-day suspension without pay. Because of the unanimous vote of the student government and the PTA in support of the boycott—and the solidarity we received from around the country—the superintendent backed off his threat and canceled the MAP test altogether at the high school level. Can you imagine the vindication that my colleagues feel today—after having risked their jobs to reduce testing—from hearing the president acknowledge there is too much testing in the schools? And it should be clear that this national uprising, this Education Spring, has forced the testocracy to retreat and is the reason that the Obama administration has come to its current understanding on testing in schools.
However, the testocracy, having amassed so much power and wealth, won’t just slink quietly into the night. A Facebook video from Obama isn’t going to convince the Pearson corporation to give up its $9 billion in corporate profits from testing and textbooks. The tangle of tests promulgated by the federal government is now embedded at state and district levels.
More importantly, the President exposed just how halfhearted his change of heart was by declaring he will not reduce the current federal requirement to annually test all students in grades 3 through 8 in math and reading, with high school students still tested at least once. A reauthorization of NCLB is in the works right now, and all versions preserve these harmful testing mandates. As well, Obama’s call to reduce testing to 2% of the school year still requires students to take standardized tests for an outlandish twenty-four hours. And it isn’t even all the time directly spent taking the tests that’s the biggest problem. The real shame, which Obama never addressed, is that as long as there are high-stakes attached to the standardized tests, test prep activities will continue to dominate instructional time. As long as the testocracy continues to demand that students’ graduation and teachers’ evaluation or pay are determined by these tests, test prep will continue to crowed out all the things that educators know are vital to teaching the whole child—critical thinking, imagination, the arts, recess, collaboration, problem based learning, and more.
Obama’s main accomplice in proliferating costly testing, Arne Duncan, said, “It’s important that we’re all honest with ourselves. At the federal, state, and local level, we have all supported policies that have contributed to the problem in implementation.”
Yes, let’s all be honest with ourselves. Honesty would require acknowledgement that standardized test scores primarily demonstrate a student’s family income level, not how well a teacher has coached how to fill in bubbles. Honesty would dictate that we recognize that the biggest obstacle to the success of our students is that politicians are not being held accountable for the fact that nearly half children in the public schools now live in poverty. As Congress debates the new iteration of federal education policy, they should focus on supporting programs to uplift disadvantaged children and leave the assessment policy to local educators. They have proven they don’t understand how to best assess our students and now they have admitted as much. It’s time to listen to those of us who have advocated for an end to the practice endlessly ranking and sorting our youth with high-stakes tests. It’s time Congress repeal the requirement of standardized tests at every grade level. It’s time to end the reign of the testocracy and allow parents, students, and educators to implement authentic assessments designed to help support student learning and nurture the whole child.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Read the NYT editorial on Obama’s “Testing Action Plan”.
They are clueless. (i.e. Highly Ineffective)
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/opinion/dialing-back-on-school-testing.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-right-region®ion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region&_r=0
The ed reformers at the top literally cannot fail. Any failure is immediately attributed to the usual suspects, the public schools they’re supposed to be serving:
“But Congress could not have anticipated the reaction — more precisely, the overreaction — among school officials who, afraid of being tagged as low-performing, rolled out wave after wave of “diagnostic” exams that were actually practice rounds for the real thing. Worse still, districts often deployed primitive, fill-in-the-bubble exams that gave no sense at all of whether or not children were developing the writing and reasoning skills essential for jobs in the new economy.”
This is the best job ever. The experiment works the leaders take credit. The experiment fails and the leaders push accountability down to the local level. There’s no risk at all for people at the top. They’re completely insulated.
Obama hired Duncan and Duncan has a market-driven, ideological view of public education. Nothing has changed. This is Duncan’s latest on how schools are just like businesses. If you can get past the management-speak and faddish buzz words, he thinks schools are contract service providers- the old-fashioned word for that is “government contractor”. The private sector can do it better:
“In the entrepreneurial ecosystem, when the status quo is failing, someone creates a new model. Sharing economy startups, for example, are helping small businesses and individuals access office space, lodging, and transportation; and crowdfunding start-ups are helping raise money for entrepreneurs who may not access conventional sources of funds. ”
The President did voters a real disservice by neglecting to mention he intended to “relinquish” public schools to the private sector. The least they could do is run on it. He didn’t. The fact they don’t run on it makes me question if they truly believe the public wants schools privatized.
View at Medium.com
Honest, or as Comte-Sponville would say “fidelity to truth” dictates that we would give up attempting to do the impossible with invalid policies and procedures, that is, attempting to “measure” the teaching and learning process through the educational malpractices that are educational standards and standardized testing. The truth of the matter that the errors and falsehoods in the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of those malpractices render any results/conclusions of those processes COMPLETELY INVALID.
Noel Wilson proved the COMPLETE INVALIDITY of those malpractice in his never refuted nor rebutted http://www.edrev.info/essays/v10n5.pdf
“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 words 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.
Although a small step, it is a start. Now we must present that viable alternative in the form of local, whole child assessment that takes kids from where they are.
cross posted at
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Jesse-Hagopian-on-the-Obam-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Change_Children_Obama-Administration_School-151029-784.html#comment569487
with this comment: My take-away: “Obama has now admitted the failure without fully admitting to his direct role in promoting the tests. Duncan and Obama, with funding from the Gates Foundation, coupled Race to the Top with Common Core State Standards and the high-stakes tests that came shrink wrapped with them. Together these policies have orchestrated a radical seizure of power by what I call the “testocracy”–The multibillion dollar testing corporations, the billionaire philanthropists who promote their policies, and the politicians who write their policies into law.”
Take a look at the graphic at another Ravich post which shows the EDUCATION INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX and the connection to Gates, Broad, Walton & Pearson.
https://dianeravitch.net/2015/10/24/the-educational-industrial-complex/
And remember this — NYS Governor Cuomo, in the face of all this, and the rage of NYS parents who opted out in record numbers, wants to INCREASE to 50% — the evaluation of teachers by these scores… “all the better to call you a big bad teacher” he says to the professional educators who raise all our kids so they can succeed.
The President understands there is push-back and he sees that it is based on reasons. That’s good as far as it goes.
Eisenhower’s famous “military-industrial complex” speech didn’t curtail the military industrial complex at all. All it did was to prove that Eisenhower was paying attention to what was happening under his own administration.
Maybe Obama will give a speech denouncing the educational metrics and privatization complex just before he leaves office.
The reality is change is a process. Of course the reduction in the test doesn’t change much, but the window of opportunity opens just a little bit wider. And with the Collins Sanders amendment, if the bill is ever passed, the window opens more.
Those who stand on the side lines and shout, certainly help the process. But those in the trenches seek out opportunities and pounce on them. They don’t get the attention but they do make the change, one step at a time.
There will be no real change in policy while Obama, Duncan, and King are in office. They plan to throw some money at states to do audits of their testing policies. The have been forced to acknowledge there is a problem in part, because of the Opt-out movement, and NAEP scores, but even more by the evidence presented in a 164-page report from Council of the Great City Schools
I watched the C-Span forum on Standardized Tests, National Press Club, Oct, 26, 2015. The forum began with Michael Casserly’s report on testing from the Council of the Great City Schools. His summary painted a vivid picture of too many tests, too many redundant tests, too many tests of poor quality, the absence of any coherent policies on testing, too many tests disconnected from standards, and too much time spent in testing, especially in grade 8 (2.3% of time in a typical school year for mandated tests), average of eight tests per year for every student, many given in a short window of time, with 400 titles for tests, not counting special education and career-vocational tests. You can find the 164 page report here http://www.cgcs.org/cms/lib/DC00001581/Centricity/Domain/87/Testing%20Report.pdf
The forum lasted for about an hour with off-the-cuff remarks from Arne Duncan; John B. King, Jr. both from the Department of Education; Chris Minnich; Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO); June Atkinson, State Superintendent, North Carolina; and Alberto Cavalho, Superintendent, Miami-Dade County Schools, Florida.
There were a few questions form the moderator, Carolie W. Hendricks of Education Writers Association, who seemed to fixate on the 2% rule proposed as a means to cut back on testing.
Arne Duncan, John King, and Chris Minnich are clearly committed to national standards and tests aligned with those standards for “performance” comparisons. Arne said that “we” are entering a new era. Referring to the college and career agenda in tandem with PARCC and SBAC tests, he praised the emergence of common metrics for “growth” and “achievement” with a brief comparison of those comparable scores to metrics for basketball and Wall Street. Arne says that national tests based on high standards are needed so everyone to tell where the best practices are, who is “getting better faster,” and so on.
Arne also said that “tests should drive instruction” six times, a theme that others echoed. Arne varied that claim once: “Tests should drive instruction in REAL time.” I interpreted that as a pitch for on-line instruction—so-called personalized learning—with non-stop data-gathering functioning as the means of testing and determining the next steps in instruction.
Most of the speakers were certain that teachers needed tests in order to know the strengths and weaknesses of their students and to “decide what to teach next.” These speakers clearly saw teaching as step-by-step instruction, even in the midst of rhetoric about “high quality tests,” more “coherent” testing, and more “strategic” testing, alongwith lip service to tests of critical thinking, etc.
June Atkinson, the new President of the CCSSO from South Carolina said they are re-working their testing. They are doing a trial run with three or four tests a year focused on “chunks” of standards so measures of “growth” and “achievement” could ”drive” instruction. She said that “assessments should be thoroughly integrated into instruction you can’t tell the difference between the two” …and that technology can help.
Alberto Cavalho from Miami/Dade County made the most sense. He said, “We cannot assess ourselves to excellence.” He nailed the fact that the required federal, state, and local tests were largely the result of legislation aimed at evaluating teachers. He also said that we cannot ignore moral issues connected with testing, especially cutbacks that would allow achievement gaps to be hidden. He and colleagues had succeed in getting the governor to override, through executive order, a statute mandating end-of-course tests in every subject, put in place only to evaluate teachers.
In response to a question about teacher education, Duncan said clearly “We are looking at that and higher education in the same way, shifting to outcome measures.” King agreed. So, the policy of judging teacher education programs by tracking student scores of their graduates is not going away under their watch.
There was also a clear signal that the 2% testing time rule, or rule of thumb, was not going to become a bright line, or cap. I think a cap is not wanted because that would be incompatible with on-line learning where testing is already fully integrated with instruction, and also the concept that teaching and testing should become the same thing in regular classrooms. Either way, the orthodoxy of Obama, Duncan, King, the CCSSO is teach to the test, and the tests should drive, determine, be engine and the go-power for instruction.
The opt-out movement was mentioned only once, in connection with the moderator’s suggestion that the administration’s “action plan” might be a political move to earn support from teacher unions. That idea was rejected by Michael Casserly who made it clear the Council of the Great City Schools initiated and paid for their report on testing, and that took two years to put together.
Overall, the most significant part of the panel was Casserly’s opening summary of the two-year study of actual practices in schools and the clear, counter-narrative offered by Superintendent Alberto Cavalho, from Miami-Dade County Schools.
The audience was small, most of them members of Education Writers Association, who had few questions.
“… Duncan’s erroneous Race to the Top initiative was the incorrect solution for students.”
No! It was Obama’s “Race to the Top Competition.” Obama said it was his. And may history judge Obama accordingly. So let’s not make Duncan the scapegoat.
Arne is the Willy Wonka of the ed biz. His Common Core tests are so amazing they get students ready for this:
And this:
Oh, PUH-LEEZE!!! This is just more stuff & nonsense from a president who speaks of a real failure of a D.o.Ed. Sec’y. in glowing terms when he resigns (DESPITE repeated calls, letters, etc. to Obama to FIRE him–but, all of us were–ignored. Again & again, ad nauseum.)
And then–in what we all should consider an additional stab in the back to children, parents, educators & public schools, Obama appoints the just-as-harmful (& as ignorant & as arrogant) JOHN KING as Sec’y. of D.o.Ed.
Copy what Laura H. Chapman says above.
And, caplee68–sorry, but I have a bridge to sell that I’m sure you would buy…
Bernie 2016…or, perhaps, another 4 years of an Obama DINO (Democrats in Name Only, i.e., Hillary) administration pushing “other people’s children” even further into the rabbit hole.
Which WILL happen, if we once again–even though, this time, we DO have a real choice–play “the lesser of 2 evils” game.
Now, stop that whining & start that working…for Bernie.
“In a three-minute video announcing this reversal, Obama cracks jokes about how silly it is to over-test students, ‘
Reminiscent of the video of GW Bush “joking” about not being able to find the Iraqi WMD in the Oval Office.