Bianca Tanis, who is a parent, a teacher, and a leader of the opt out movement, warns of the dangers of the tests that start next week.
She writes:
The New York State Common Core tests are almost upon us and promises of sweeping changes to NYS tests and standards are rampant. The NYS Education Department is urging parents to opt back in and the media has reported that education officials are “bending over backwards” to address the concerns of parents and educators.
While the State has made some minor changes to this year’s tests (and promises more in the future), the fact remains that young children will still be subjected to reading passages years above grade level, test questions with more than one plausible answer, tests that are too long, waste valuable resources, and worst of all, tests that engender feelings of frustration, failure, angst, and confusion in our youngest learners.
Manufactured Crisis
Claims that untimed tests will alleviate stress on children are unfounded and misleading to parents. Giving a child more time to struggle with an inappropriate test rather than just fixing the flawed system is misguided and will create a logistical nightmare for the schools forced to accommodate this band-aid solution. Teachers will be pulled from classrooms to monitor student conversations during lunch breaks to ensure that 8-, 9-, and 10-year old students are not talking about the tests. At a time when our schools are being starved of funding, this is a gross and needless misallocation of resources.
In fact, very little has changed for children, and these damaging tests continue to threaten our children now and into the future. How much damage? A quarter million students are being labeled, annually, as failures. The transition to “college-ready” graduation requirements in 2022 will result in the loss of more than 100,000 graduates per year. Use this calculator to assess the impact on your school district: http://tiny.cc/DistrictCCR.
Unless we demand an immediate paradigm shift, many students will not only be labeled failures at 8-, 9-, and 10-years old, they will not graduate. We are not just talking about struggling students and students with special needs facing a graduation crisis.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Lipstick on a Pig”
Lipstick on a pig
Cuomo’s brand-new ruse
Really just a fig
To cover and confuse
LikeLike
Not just in New York. Carefully crafted procedures to undermine the well-being and education of children is hidden behind the facade of accountability and a campaign of overt fear-mongering about a loss of global competitiveness (since 1983, a Nation at Risk) Illogical reasoning in high places combined with decades of myth-making helped to sell the idea that failing students and their terrible teachers are responsible for tanking the economy. According to Condy Rice, this generation and their teachers are a threat to our national security.
The current campaign to undermine public education is a triumph of propaganda and PR predicated on the early work of Edward Bernays and all of those practitioners who work full time to persuade people of untruths, half-truths, lies, and degrees of “truthiness.” “
LikeLike
If rheephormers remain true to, er, form, then “untimed” becomes an excuse for spending MORE time on “test-to-punish” rather than less.
And LESS time on genuine teaching and learning.
All, of course, to be inflicted on OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN.
For THEIR OWN CHILDREN, Lakeside School [Bill Gates and children] and such will continue to, well…
Just yesterday, Wednesday, March 30, 2016, here is what some of the Lakeside students were forced to endure:
Sports, home and away: soccer, boys, varsity; soccer, boys, JV; tennis, coed, varsity; baseball, varsity; baseball, JV; and tennis, coed, JV.
Link: http://www.lakesideschool.org/podium/default.aspx?t=121590
Is there no mercy left in the world?
😎
LikeLike
It’s nice to see that spring has sprung in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, and that the sixth and eighth graders are having a chance to decompress after their grueling days spent taking standardized bubble tests.
https://www.lakesideschool.org/podium/default.aspx?t=204&nid=1018840&bl=back
Lakeside Academy–trusting but testing since 1914.
LikeLike
Thanks for driving home the thrust of my comments.
😏
And for brightening my day:
“A day without laughter is a day wasted.” [Charlie Chaplin]
😎
LikeLike
Bill Gates’s kids’ school administers standardized tests, recommends that kids eat and sleep well before taking them, and has an administrator to explain to families what the stakes are and what the results mean.
Remarkable stuff. Who would have guessed it?
LikeLike
TIM
Did 70%of Lakeside kids fail a set of rigged, annual (not grade span) math and ELA tests for the last three years? Were 8 year olds branded “FAILURES” because they couldn’t pass tests designed to make them think they are failures?
Were any of the Lakeside teachers threatened with said hyper-deflated test scores?
You didn’t hear any of us complaining for 12 years under NCLB when the exams were transparent, non-threatening, developmentally appropriate, and constructed in a generally fair way.
You insist that heaven and hell are the same because they both give us an afterlife. You are grasping at straws – and missing every one.
LikeLike
Cue the head of Sidwell Friends’s middle school!
“The best preparation for the testing sessions is a good night’s sleep followed by a nutritious breakfast. Teachers will assign light homework, and no tests, quizzes, projects or papers will be due that week. If it is possible to avoid appointments on the three testing days of your child’s grade level, that would be appreciated.
“It is important to remember that standardized test scores are only one measure of a student’s academic profile, a snapshot if you will. A more complete and accurate picture emerges when the scores are combined with classwork, daily performance, regular assignments, projects, and tests. Still, standardized tests help parents and teachers understand more clearly and completely a child’s balance of strengths and needs. Teachers may review the scores in detail, looking for patterns that emerge from one year to the next, and then use that information to be more effective in the classroom.”
Barack Obama’s kids. Bill Gates’s kids. Arne Duncan’s kids. Michelle Rhee’s kids. Trusting but testing. Opting in.
LikeLike
Tim, I know you will find this really disappointing, but I don’t think that most private schools give standardized tests. The ones I know well do not, and in the instances where they do, the tests are used diagnostically, not to grade students, teachers, or schools. Your love for charters and standardized tests is baffling. At least on this blog. But it fits well with the agenda of the Koch brothers, the Waltons, Scott Walker, Andrew Cuomo, and every rightwing think tank.
LikeLike
Notice it’s two grades, Tim, not EVERY grade from 3-11. Also, how long were those tests? In my state, the tests go for a MINIMUM of 20 hours a year. We can’t even use the computer labs or library for the entirety of fourth term because all of the computers are used for testing. Doubt Lakeside School has that length of testing.
LikeLike
Did 70% of Lakeside students fail their tests? Year after year after year? Did adults write the Lakeside test in order to sabotage student achievement? Do Lakeside teachers have their careers threatened by test scores? Does Tim have a clue?
LikeLike
“The Hypocritic Oath”
The Hypocritic Oath
Is taken by Reformen
It certifies their growth
To hypocriti-Coremen:
“The PARCC and Common Core
Are really something nice
But my kids will endure
A Core-less sacrifice”
LikeLike
RageAgainstThe Testocracy: you wrote—
“Does Tim have a clue?”
So glad to see another fan of Ionesco on this blog:
“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.”
😎
LikeLike
With a test specifically designed to “fail” up to 70% of the student population, that implies there will be more drop outs than high school graduates.
LikeLike
“Pattern for Success”
Gates dropped out
Which bred success
Little doubt
That dropout’s best
Design a test
That none can pass
And Gates’ success
Is theirs at last!
LikeLike
“the dangers of the tests that start next week.”
The “dangers” of those tests, the fact that they are COMPLETELY INVALID has been known for quite a while now. ANY EDUCATIONAL PRACTICE BASED ON FALSEHOODS ARE BY DEFINITION INVALID and qualify for the label of educational malpractice. Noel Wilson has shown all the epistemological and ontological errors, falsehoods and psychometric fudges involved in the process of making and using educational standards and the accompanying standardized tests render the whole thing COMPLETELY INVALID, harming many students along the way. To understand read and comprehend 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.
LikeLike
>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. <
THIS! THIS! THIS!
Testing is no longer a danger in NYS as 70% of our most vulnerable students have internalized and accepted themselves as failures in math and ELA. For three consecutive years administrators have willfully sent 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14 year old kids into the academic meat grinder of Common Core/Pearson testing. This civil rights movement of the 21st century has 80+% of black and brown children marching in the failure line. Advocates of testing the cognitively impaired and ELLs continue to think that a chronic 95% failure rate will somehow benefit the kids, never viewing the psychological carnage we see in the testing rooms. The harm is not only very real but in many cases it may be irreparable and permanent. Heck of a job Arne.
LikeLike