Gene Glass has written one of the most brilliant, most perceptive commentaries on the billionaires’ reform movement that I have ever read.
He gives a witty, well-sourced analysis of the familiar corporate reform narrative and punches giant holes in it.
Here is the opening sentence:
“A democratically run public education system in America is under siege. It is being attacked by greedy, union-hating corporations and billionaire boys whose success in business has proven to them that their circle of competence knows no bounds.”
Glass is one of our nation’s most celebrated and honored researchers. He called VAM “stupid” back in 1998. Unlike many ivory-tower academics, he is taking sides: he is on the side of public education, democracy, and truth.
If you don’t read this, shame on you.
Please tweet it, post it on Facebook, share it with your friends and your elected officials.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you, Diane, for focusing our attention on this truly superb and cogent commentaries! And to its author, Gene Glass, I say “Bravo!”
As someone who learned to read and write in one of the many public schools named “Horace Mann,” I found this to be particularly moving and inspiring. Thanks again.
Also, I’ll be featuring it on the website—being officially introduced today!—for our newly formed group: “Washington Voters For Public Education.” The very fitting and appropriate words of Gene Glass will be put in a very conspicuous place on our site.
So please come visit at: http://www.WashingtonVotersForPublicEducation.com
Thank you, again, Diane, for all that you are and all that you do! (And see you this April, in Raleigh, when I attend my first-ever NPE Conference!)
What is being done to education is a mirror of what is happening to our democracy.
“The Mack Truck in the Mirror”
The objects in the mirror
Are closer than they appear
The oligarchic terror
Is something we should fear
Reflecting total capture
Of democratic state
The money-driven rapture
Is sealing certain fate
One of the most worrying thing about the current state of politics in the US is highlighted by his sentence:
” I never cease being amazed at how cheaply legislators’ support can be bought.”
The piece certainly does detail the full extent of the assault on public education. Made me think of the line, We’re “going to need a bigger boat”. Jaws, 1975. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I91DJZKRxs
From the article (and it’s a good one overall):
“The best available evidence on the quality question came from National Assessment testing. . . .”
And that “best available evidence” is COMPLETELY INVALID as it is. Man o man is it hard for most folks, like 99.999% to give up the sorting, ranking, rating standardized testing mania under which they live. Noel Wilson has proven the COMPLETE INVALIDITIY of the educational standards and standardized testing regimes in his never refuted nor rebutted “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.
Again from the article:
“VAM scores must only be derived from students’ scores on assessments that meet
professional standards – by which they mean AERA’s standards – of reliability and
validity.
VAM scores must be accompanied by separate lines of evidence of reliability and validity.
VAM scores must be based on multiple years of data from sufficient numbers of students.
VAM scores must only be calculated from scores on tests that are comparable over time.
Evaluation systems using VAM must include ongoing monitoring for technical quality and
validity.
(Educational Researcher, 2015, Vol. 44, No. 8, pp. 448-452.)
I submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, that these statements are vacuous truisms. No state, district or federal agency devoted to VAM would be the least threatened by these kinds of mealy mouthed recommendations. Measurement must be reliable and valid – yes, of course. But how reliable?How valid? Data should be plentiful – yes, of course, plentiful data are always a good thing. Systems should be monitored – yes, by all means. But by whom? And what will these monitors look for? Academics opposed to VAM – including myself and several of my colleagues – have labored and brought forth a mouse.”
That “mouse” could easily be have the destructive force of a nuclear weapon if Glass and his colleagues had taken Noel Wilson’s 1998 EPAA article to heart. (See above for reference).
Another quote:
“I have harbored a growing sense during the last few years that my original academic specialty – education measurement – was passing slowly to the dark side. From 1960 onward, I believed that we psychometricians were doing the work of the angels on earth. We were speaking Truth to Power, but I learned too late that Power was listening to Politics.”
It is good to see that Glass has changed his mind on “education measurement”. As with many in general who were so enthralled with the apparent “truth” of statistics, numbers and measurement, Glass and almost all others involved in psychometrics did not heed the warnings that were available, albeit obscure at times, of folks like Kaplan in the 50s, Hoffman in the early 60s, and Wilson in the 90s. Warnings of the errors and falsehoods involved in “education measurement (sic)” regime that render any “measurement” and the results invalid.
Educational practices based on epistemological and ontological falsehoods, errors and mis-statements can only lead to educational malpractices. And those malpractice have caused untold damage to many, unfortunately the most innocent the children that are students. This lack of “fidelity to truth” in the psychometric realm leaves it mortally wounded, hopefully soon to die (although it appears to be a rather brilliant morphing beast).
When I was getting my Master’s at Columbia’s Teachers College, I took a lot of classes in Horace Mann Hall. I’m pleased to see his name brought up in this article — and thrilled to share such a serious, insightful look at how corporate profit-making is taking over our public education. If we as educators don’t speak up, then who will? The author is correct that transparency is a key component of democracy. I hope Gene Glass’s article will get broad circulation. I have shared it on my blog and will share with colleagues. Thank you, Diane Ravitch, for bringing this to our attention. Bill Gates: Children are not Apps!