Jesse Hagopian, a teacher of history and social studies at Garfield High School in Seattle and editor of the book More Than a Score, explains in this TED talk why parents and students are boycotting standardized testing. Jesse has an in-depth knowledge of the history of standardized testing; he knows its roots in racism, bias, and elitism. It is not an instrument of egalitarianism. It is meant to label, rank, and rate students, and it does so in relation to family income.
This is well worth your time to watch.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The link top the video doesn’t work, FYI.
Worth watching. In fact, invite your neighbors over for snacks and a sit down to watch this TED talk.
GO JESSE! 🙂
Unfortunately, the link provided gave an ‘invalid key’ error message for me.
HOWEVER, I have pushed S.J. Gould’s book, “The Mismeasure of Man” for years, now. In it he shows the intellectual flaws in almost any test, and the fuzzy nature of the concept of ‘intellegence’ (or, ‘college ready’, or ‘career ready’, or whatever abstraction becomes the latest rage). It probably covers the same stuff as the talk, although it’s a more difficult slog.
Well, I finally didn’t get the error message, and I see that this appeal was more of a ‘gut reaction’ (a valid one, based upon experience) than one relying upon pointing out the overarching logical fallacy (and lack of inductive feedback information) that propels this push toward testing. Well worth viewing, however read Gould to find out why the ‘gut’ response is, in fact, one supported by irrefutable logic. Also, Gould spells out the racist nature of the effort that seems to evade the ‘gut’ presentation given here.
I used the link provided and had no problems. It might be your browser or security or something else.
John Wund:
Jesse Hagopian talks about the racist origins and effects of standardized testing in this video from the 2015 NPE conference:
Neither presentation is based simply on a gut reaction. Watch this video and you’ll see that he has all the intellectual bases covered. If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, watch minutes 8:00 to about 18:00.
He’s a history teacher. In the NPE talk he comes at the topic from the perspectives of teacher (i.e., human being trying to help his students) and historian (hence the quotations from W. E. B. DuBois and Horace Mann Bond). He also speaks as a parent and activist. He makes a strong case for the Opt Out movement and Black Lives Matter joining together to fight high-stakes tests.
The main reason to opt out is to stand against the artificial test as a means to determine achievement. This is essential! However, it is important to assure that all of our children are well served. And, as evidenced by the past, states don’t always do that. Many don’t care about serving all children.
It is unethical to “assess” kids by an artificial test. It is also unethical to allow states to maintain low expectations for children of color, 2nd language children, children with special needs, and anyone else who doesn’t fit perfectly into the mold. Can you imagine Wisconsin given the power, under Walker, to assure all children succeed?
It is also unethical for a major conference to all but ignore a viable alternative to the testing fiasco. It is essential to point out the wrongs of Common Core and test mania. However, it is not only unethical, it is immoral not to offer a vision for the future.
Not to do this is racist in nature as a goodly number of the children will be left to flounder in many states.
Did you watch the video? If you didn’t, you should.
If you read Gould’s book, you will find that it IS racist to it’s very core. The fallacy is that questions are chosen for the test that ‘smart kids’ get right. Those questions that show the opposite are discarded. And, of course, we all know who those ‘smart kids’ are…..
YES. It is racist.
Since Jesse Hagopian is a history teacher, another way to approach the question is from an historical POV:
Is there any evidence that, in a large area in which certain types of standardized tests were and are given over more than a millenium, that they promote genuine teaching and learning? Or do they serve other purposes, such as providing a veneer of fairness in a rigged system of faux meritocracy that, in practice, maintains existing social inequalities and hierarchies?
Such an example exists.
Yong Zhao, WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD DRAGON: WHY CHINA HAS THE BEST (AND WORST) EDUCATION SYSTEM IN THE WORLD (2014).
Read.
😎
Well done. He’s speaks with a genuine, humane authority that none of the so-called reformers can match. That’s why I want to see him on television again.
NPE could set up a sort of speakers bureau, a stable of people who actually know about schools firsthand, to spread the word via radio and TV interview shows, conferences, and special events.
As it stands, hardly anyone discussing education on TV has actual experience in education.
Agree. Create a library of YouTube videos at the conference that we can all access via a link on Diane’s site. We can post them to social media sites, send them to legislators and the main stream media. It is time to bring our message to scale. This is one way to do it.
YES. Few of our modern-day educational “experts” have educational experience, and even fewer understand how the abuses brought to public education by a “philanthro” capital are punishing, labeling, dividing and segregating our nation’s poorest children. ciedieaech.wordpress.com/2015/10/09/setting-up-the-target
“Testing Race”
Testing’s always been a way
To keep folks “in their place”
To keep minorities at bay
It biases by race
Ahhh, tis the testing season, which can mean only one thing–that everyone involved in education in any fashion whatsoever should read and comprehend Noel Wilson’s total destruction of the epistemological and ontological foundations of educational standards and standardized testing proving that those two malpractices are COMPLETELY INVALID and cause untold harm to uncounted numbers of innocent children. Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted 1997 seminal dissertation, the most important work in education philosophy and thinking in the last 50 years “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” can be 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.
In many regards, humans are not much more advanced than the insects.
In humans, standardized testing and grades play the same role as “chirping” in crickets to establish and maintain a hierarchy.
And the Harvard crickets are particularly loud chirpers.
I’ve always felt that homo supposedly sapiens aren’t quite as “advanced” as some like to think.
It’s actually quite funny — and telling — that the person who did the naming dubbed modern humans “homo sapiens sapiens” (wise wise person) –a subspecies to distinguish us from our direct descendants– so there would be no doubt in anyone’s mind.
Someone at Harvard or some other Ivy league school did the naming, no doubt. It’s a wonder humans are not called “homo sapiens chetty” or something (though I hear Chetty is no longer at Haaaavid and is now gracing Stanford with his chetty-picking brilliance)
or maybe would that be “chetty sapiens sapiens sapiens sapiens”(Did i get enough “sapiens” in there?)
I never took Latin, so my ignorance probably shows.
I just checked the Latin for “homo” and it originally meant “man”
…which makes “homo sapiens sapiens” even funnier
The only thing funnier would have been “Harvard homo sapiens sapiens” (wise wise Harvard man”)
Love to see this. He’s so on the mark and a LOT of people watch TED.
Excellent!