The Momma Bears of Tennessee see a disaster coming. It is called TNReady, the new online test that is confusing, requires keyboard skills that many children lack, and is certain to label their children as failing.
Momma Bears are a group of anonymous parents who are fierce protectors of their children, just like bears.
What can they do?
They can protest and demonstrate in their legislators’ offices.
They can insist that the legislators take the tests and publish their scores.
They can build and organize a massive opt out movement, as New York parents did. No matter how much school officials warn of punishments to come, opt out. The more students opt out, the more school officials will cringe and back away. The punishments will never materialize unless only a handful opt out. Get 20% to opt out, as in New York, and the Mamma Bears and their cubs win.
OPT OUT! It is your most powerful tool. You have the right and the power to defend your children. Use it!
The Momma Bears took sample questions from the test and concluded that they were NOT ready for use. The tests are a mess.
Some of our Momma Bears bloggers spent a precious Saturday taking the sample TNREADY tests and trying to get answers. Here is what we observed on the Sample TNREADY computerized tests:
Difficult to read passages: A tiny 4-inch scroll window to read long passages of text. This requires good mouse skills and eye tracking. (see pic below) Students with knowledge of how to expand the reading pane using the little tab in the middle, and collapse it again to get to the test questions, will fare better. This format isn’t like any of the internet sites or reading apps that most children are accustomed to; they will need to be taught how to navigate those tools for the sole purpose of taking this test.
Tiny window for the test questions: It was barely large enough to show all the answer options, and not large enough to show the “RESET/UNDO” buttons at the bottom of the question unless the student scrolled lower. See the photo below to understand how students are supposed to write an entire essay response in a text box that is about 4″ square. Typing, mind you, which elementary students aren’t fluent in doing; their hands aren’t even large enough to reach all the keys properly. So, they will be hunting and pecking letter keys to write an essay in a box the size of a cell phone screen.
Distracting numbers on ELA test: Bold paragraph numbers along the left margin of the text passages.
4 Quite distracting
5 if you’re trying
6 to read something.
7 Isn’t it?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“This year, the state of TN is spending more money than they’ve ever spent before on a brand new test. Well, it isn’t actually a new test, but more like a recycled test since TN leased the test questions from Utah’s old SAGE test. Anyway, they stuck these expensive questions from Utah in a confusing test platform created by a company in North Carolina, and are now rebranding it as homegrown in TN. This test is called TNREADY. ”
Ohio got leased questions from Utah too. I laughed out loud when I read one of the sample questions because they had inserted an Ohio city into the prompt. Your city HERE.
Obviously they weren’t writing thousands of new questions in the three months between when they dumped the CC test and have to start preparing to administer the new test, so I assumed they would be pulling questions from other tests. They should probably (finally) admit this isn’t “state-led” however, unless the state is Utah.
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I still don’t get why states can’t create and administer their own tests like they did for many, many years. You have thousands of teachers who would be more than willing to create questions. Then you create a computer test bank. Then you have the computer choose the questions. I know Pearson, et al could not get millions to create and then re-create the same crap tests.
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I don’t understand the scrolling for the long responses. They really can’t create an essay format that gives them a full screen to write an essay and then switches back to the next question? They literally have unlimited space and they give them 4 inches. They managed to make it much worse than a piece of paper.
It infuriates me that they’re demanding they do these difficult tasks and then giving them lousy tools- tiny boxes, slow connections, ancient equipment. They would never do this to adults.
Maybe they’re developing “grit” by making it as difficult as possible.
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Holley,
“I still don’t get why states can’t create and administer their own tests like they did for many, many years.”
Because those state tests suffer all the inherent errors, falsehoods and psychometric fudges that Noel Wilson has proven that render the testing process COMPLETELY INVALID.
To understand, I urge you and all others to read and comprehend Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted 1997 seminal 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 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 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.
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I’d also like to mention to the test developers that my son is completely comfortable with computers and he uses a piece of paper to do math calculations when he does test prep with a popular online program. It’s faster and easier than using a clunky format with too many buttons, tiny text boxes and a huge potential to hit a button inadvertently and then have to back up. If they’re going to insist these children use these programs they should spend some money on finding out if the tool they’re forcing them to use works properly.
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The equation editors on many of these tests are a formidable barrier to success. While great for typesetting, they are poor tools to express answers to math problems. It would be like telling all legislators they must now create law using the Greek alphabet. Some could do it, most would howl in protest. If only our kids had a vote.
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I thought lawmakers already created laws with the Greek alphabet.
Maybe you can understand what they write, but it’s all Greek to me.
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Well, SDP, when you get that many lawyers in a room together you know there’s gonna be trouble for someone!
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SomeDAM Poet:
TAGO!
😎
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I’m a public school teacher and a parent of a public school student. I’ve had enough and I’m ready to fight for the rights of students, teachers and parents. What can I do to help?
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Laura Deitrick,
Join the Network for Public Education and connect with your state and local pro-public school organizations. Yes, get active. Organize. Make a difference by joining with others.
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I am not sure where people are getting their sample questions for the tnready. The MICA platform urged on the teachers is our introduction to it. One of the problems I have seen in the format is the drop down box format. Students must harmonize as many as three boxes without seeing the choices in all three at once. Why this is reliable testing is beyond me. It seems rather an obfuscation of the simple or an attempt to get at the complex without a conversation.
My guess is that the education department will curve the results to stave off political flak. They took plenty of that before they junked the Common Core name for the standards which are mostly still the CC.
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But isn’t “Totally Not Ready” what TNReady means?
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My school did the math TNready on paper and I am so worried on how I did. There were 31 questions assigned in 90 minutes for just part 1. While that is a bunch of time, I only answered 12 which I’m pretty sure were all wrong. My friends were also very worried and scared on how they did. Everyone was crying. It was just a mess. The questions weren’t even multiple choice! Our schools for years have prepared us for tests that are multiple choice so they pretty much set us up for a disaster with this test. I really wanted to get into the International Balchlourette Program however with my test score on math they’ll probably repeal my acceptance. This is absolutely absurd and I can’t even sleep for the past week because I can’t stop thinking about it! I wish they would repeal the math test for Tnready and just give us a math TCAP like how they’re giving us a science TCAP. Please someone do something about this
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