March 3, 2016 12:00 pm
Tennessee is testing the Common Core for the first time this year, but the tests are not cooperating. First, the state tried to give them online but the computer breakdowns were so numerous that the entire test was delayed. Then the state ordered tests to be available on paper, but several districts didn’t receive them.
The original testing period was supposed to begin on February 8 and March 4.
This schedule, which is common across many districts, raises one big question:
The tests are supposed to assess nine months on instruction, but the tests are offered after only five months of instruction. This means that the tests are not correctly aligned with what children learn.
To make matters worse, the test results are not reported until the fall, when the student has a new teacher.
Posted by dianeravitch
Categories: Education Reform, Tennessee, Testing
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Correction: In Colorado at least, individual results are not reported until January. January!!
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By Janet on March 3, 2016 at 12:03 pm
Test scores don’t show up till “too late,” but the truth is that they have very little relevance. “Bad” teachers are lumped together inside low scoring schools, so that all teachers in tested departments (typically Language Arts, Math, Science) just face the same non-stop reformer invasions and programs brought to the school by those who are hoping to grab up yet more philanthrocapitalist money. No matter how much “showy” noise is made about the individual tests, actual student test scores produced inside predictably low-scoring (low-income/non-dominant-culture) schools have very little to do with anything except the fact that they are, once again, predictably low. It is the cycle of regularly produced overall low test scores and the addition of yet more accountability money which holds testing reform so firmly in place.
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By ciedie aech on March 3, 2016 at 12:38 pm
TNReady = FAIL
Just another “float” in the reformster PARADE of FAILURE.
Next year New York’s ELA (Grades 3 to 8) from Questar Assesments will be administered in March. Math in May.
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By NYS Parent on March 3, 2016 at 12:16 pm
This is absurd of course.
And it makes zero sense for economists to translate standards deviations in test score gains (or no gains) “year to year” into “days of learning.”
The official school year in most states is 180 days. The instructional year is much less than that, and even shorter if you subtract test preps.
Almost all reports on this or that gain in test scores, year over year are fraudulent, a clear case of malpractice in accounting, bookkeeping, basic arithmetic.
That this fraud had become acceptable practice, embodied is state and federal law, is an outrage.
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By Laura H. Chapman on March 3, 2016 at 12:20 pm
Economists have no business interpreting test scores. It’s long past time they admit they are over their heads. A monkey can enter test scores into a computer program & run a regression analysis. That doesn’t meant the results say anything about learning or knowledge.
Some of these economists who shower us with their test score interpretation are like monkeys. They throw their poo against the wall & see what might stick.
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By jcgrim on March 3, 2016 at 1:22 pm
jcgrim: I fear you may have given poo a bad name…
At least it helps to make your garden grow. Economists? Do they do anything even remotely as useful and practical?
😏
And in line with what you and Laura H. Chapman wrote just above: there could hardly be a clearer example of the impracticality and foolishness of the numbers & stats accountability of self-styled “education reform” aka “hard data points” aka “data analytics” than expecting people to know after five months what is scheduled [and often micromanaged to the hour and minute!] for nine.
Rheephorm math: 9=5 and 5=9. The only way it adds up is if it makes ₵ent¢ to the principal beneficiaries of corporate education reform.
$tudent $ucce$$: ain’t it grand?
😎
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By KrazyTA on March 3, 2016 at 2:11 pm
Boy, they’re really making it abundantly clear to those students that testing is the most important thing they’ll do all year.
Tell us again how it isn’t all about the tests. It is ALL about the tests. It is never about anything BUT tests.
Why not tell students the truth? State and national lawmakers have decided that testing is the single most important thing children do all year, as evidenced by their complete lack of interest in anything else children do in public schools.
We won’t be able to stop focusing solely on testing until we stop focusing solely on testing.
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By Chiara on March 3, 2016 at 12:48 pm
Hillary Clinton will be identical to Bush and Obama on public schools:
“Actually it’s very consistent with mine and that is that we, one, have a platform of providing and presenting to our young people quality educational opportunities in their neighborhood. Choice is very much a part of this. I think you’ll see with Hillary Clinton, and she has stated to me personally, carrying the advancement of a lot of the same values that President Obama brought forward with his unprecedented investment in public education. Those things were exciting to me.”
I think we should take the word of those who are endorsing her and know her best. The idea that anything will change in DC regarding public schools with a new President is not realistic. There is no debate. All of these people are lockstep.
“Choice” and testing will be the focus, just as was true with Bush and Obama, which means existing public schools get testing from ed reformers and nothing else.
I don’t think people should be surprised this time. This will the third ed reform President in a row, and there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between any of them.
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By Chiara on March 3, 2016 at 1:36 pm
Here’s the interview with Clinton’s endorser, where he tells us there will be no change from Bush/Obama policies with Clinton:
https://www.the74million.org/article/the-74-interview-denvers-mayor-on-testing-hillary-clinton-and-americas-fastest-growing-urban-school-district
We can’t say we weren’t warned.
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By Chiara on March 3, 2016 at 1:37 pm
“To make matters worse, the test results are not reported until the fall, when the student has a new teacher.”
To make matters drastically worse, the test results are COMPLETELY INVALID as proven by Noel Wilson in his never refuted nor rebutted dissertation “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.
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By Duane Swacker on March 3, 2016 at 2:03 pm
“A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality.”
You had me, Duane, at the first two sentences. 🙂
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By Máté Wierdl on March 11, 2016 at 12:31 pm
Thanks for the nice words but I deserve no credit, I’ve just restated, perhaps in an willow oak acorn cap, Noel Wilson’s work on educational standards and standardized testing.
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By Duane Swacker on March 11, 2016 at 8:28 pm
Hi Diane. As always, thank you for sharing accurate information. My husband and I are both teachers in Knox County, Tennessee. We have two elementary age children who have refused to participate in TNReady. Their school handled it beautifully by allowing them to remain in their classrooms and read quietly during testing. In the first day of testing (Wednesday), my husband was discussing our decision to another parent in the front office of our school. One of my husband’s students overheard the discussion. When the student got to my husband’s class, he asked my husband to clarify what he had overheard. My husband proceeded to educate his class on their right to refuse testing. He showed them the letter we drafted, some students requested copies and he went about his day. This afternoon he was called in to a disciplinary meeting with our administration and several supervisors for honestly answering students’ questions. It’s a sad day in public education when teachers are being punished for educating students. Instead, we are being told to remain silent, thus allowing our students to be deceived. I’m appalled and ashamed of the state of affairs in our system and our state. I’m saddened that administrators are using punitive measures in order to maintain some semblance that these high stakes tests are good for our kids.
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By Elizabeth on March 3, 2016 at 7:11 pm
Sounds like your husband works for some of the best GAGA adminimals around.
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By Duane Swacker on March 4, 2016 at 10:42 am
Elizabeth, my feeling is that it’s hard to find real (non-TFA) public school teachers in TN who agree with TNReady.
I think teachers should be careful in openly expressing their opposition to TNReady as an employee . We do not have freedom of speech in educational institutions. Not even at universities. True, you won’t go to jail for speaking your mind since the first amendment protects you, but all educational institutions are set up in this country so that they can fire you for “harming the institutions reputation or mission”.
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By Máté Wierdl on March 11, 2016 at 12:51 pm
The scheduling of the test not only doesn’t make sense, but strikes me as a serious violation of both fairness and legal rights for students, teachers and schools. How can you administer a test with stakes so high that they are used to rank students, fire teachers, and close schools, 3 to 4 months before the window for teaching the content is closed!?
What rational reason is there for doing this? Whose agenda does this align with? Certainly not the student’s.
The high stakes testing culture creates conditions opposite to the needs of my low income, urban fourth graders, many of whom need extra time and academic support to learn. It takes time for students to assimilate new skills, particularly in math. Instead the natural pacing of teaching and learning is co-opted by the anxiousness to show “growth” on high stakes standardized test.
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By Jonathan on March 3, 2016 at 8:52 pm
And the tests had such promise when they were being advertised
http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/08/tn-weve-found-unicorn-farm.html
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By Peter on March 3, 2016 at 9:03 pm
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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By drext727 on March 4, 2016 at 8:46 am
Thank Goodness the computer program crashed! Studies have shown that students perform better on a paper and pencil test.
Here in Memphis, Tennessee most students do not have any computer skills. There are no computer classes in my school that teach typing, a necessary skill for students to be able to pass the writing part of the test. Additionally, in the math portion, students had no idea how to drag and drop items. A problem that was glaringly evident in the completely wasted and frustrating week of practice testing (the week before the actual test–two weeks of wasted instructional time!)
Computer delivered tests will only increase the disparity that is evident between affluent and less affluent communities. Before the state rolls out the cash for a computer delivered exam they need to increase funding to schools so that we can teach our students computer literacy skills.
There are even more issues with implementation of the TNReady–it currently overlaps with our ESL WIDA Access exam, thereby increasing stress in an already vulnerable ELL population. Additionally, schools are not given the assessment scripts/manuals and are expected to print these out themselves. For an already underfunded and struggling school, in which teachers are expected to buy their own paper, this expectation feels like an overwhelming burden.
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By Hannah Mehegan on March 6, 2016 at 10:58 pm
I am struggling to understand how these tests, which admittedly have more functions than the strict gathering of data to reflect how well my child has learned the material, can be used as part of his grade?!
I see many mechanisms for and stories about opting out, but how do I push my son all year academically into a straight A record, then say, “yeah you’re gonna take an F on the chin here, because this particular test isn’t fair.”
Is there any way that anyone knows to refuse the tests without hurting the kids’ GPA?
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By resonantresident on March 8, 2016 at 1:40 pm