The Network for Public Education, with members in every state, has issued a call for a national opt out from standardized testing.
The tests have no diagnostic value. They are used to rank and grade students, teachers, and schools, but they provide no information to help teachers or students. They are useless.
They consume an absurd amount of time. Little children spend more time to take tests than law exams.
The tests have an absurdly high passing mark, which guarantees that the majority of students will fail.
The tests do not help children. They hurt children. We don’t know how to measure what matters most.
Join us. Opt out.
Didn’t this same group endorse the new education act, which still called for testing? Or was that a different group Diane was in?
Mike in Texas, did you prefer NCLB?
The Network strongly opposed the testing in ESSA, but Congress didn’t listen. They listened to Gates-funded groups instead.
And reformers themselves send their own kids to schools that do not embrace these “improvement” strategies.
Yesterday, I watched the posted How to Opt Out of State Tests video, and then some of the other related videos on YouTube. It led me to a wonderful video from an unexpected, normally despicable source — TedTalks. This is a flower in the desert:
He’s so funny, articulate, and passionate. Clearly.
Excuse this question if it has an obvious answer, but where is he in the public/charter discussion? I’ve googled his name in several combinations and couldn’t find specific information.
Are Gates/Broad/Walton people listening? Or in disagreement?
He makes very compelling arguments for things that need to change. But before I start quoting him too widely, I was wondering if anyone could tell us what his bigger picture solution is.
Thanks
I was wondering that too, concerned that I was posting it. Local control has become a corporate dog whistle. It is TedTalks, after all, but usually charter advocates support test and punish which makes me think this is on the up and up. Surely there are those reading who know a great deal more than I do, so I hope it was.
Yes, opt out.
Never again should standards for testing come before teaching and learning.
Designing backwards in this case is simply backwards.
Only arrogant and ignorant twits believe they know testable benchmarks for critical thinking itself. And the same twits believe that highly engaging curricula with insane demands can be created on the fly. They don’t believe in research. They apparently don’t believe in even knowing themselves or reality.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Opt Out! Refuse to let our children take these flawed and often fraudulent high stakes tests that only profit a few but damage many.
If only…
Diaene Ravitch: Your call to opt out states the following:
“The tests have no diagnostic value. They are used to rank and grade students, teachers, and schools, but they provide no information to help teachers or students. They are useless.
They consume an absurd amount of time. Little children spend more time to take tests than law exams.
The tests have an absurdly high passing mark, which guarantees that the majority of students will fail.
The tests do not help children. They hurt children. We don’t know how to measure what matters most.”
Some of your statements are patently incorrect. Let me explain.
“The tests have no diagnostic value. They are used to rank and grade students, teachers, and schools, but they provide no information to help teachers or students. They are useless.”
This is wrong. Of course they are used to rank and grade the students, etc. That is what tests have been used for a long time. As a parent I used the test data to assess how my children performed as compared to the others in the school. This information was very valuable to me to help, teach, guide and nurture my children when they were growing up. With my help and the schools teaching they became outstanding citizens of this country. My sons worked very hard and they felt great when they did very well on the tests. It was a great joy to them and their parents.
“They consume an absurd amount of time. Little children spend more time to take tests than law exams.”
Here is an excerpt from Washington Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/10/24/confirmed-standardized-testing-has-taken-over-our-schools-but-whos-to-blame/”
“The average student in America’s big-city public schools takes some 112 mandatory standardized tests between pre-kindergarten and the end of 12th grade — an average of about eight a year, the study says. That eats up between 20 and 25 hours every school year, the study says. As for the results, they often overlap. On top of all that are teacher-written tests, sometimes taken by students along with standardized tests in the very same subject.”
You always state the high stakes testing takes too much time (undefined quantity but stated with an assertion that it is true because you say so) and to illustrate you quote teachers such as the one in Florida that testing uses up 154 days of the school year of 180 days. That is absurd and there is no reliable source that agrees with that statement. Most states have limited the standardized testing to a maximum of about 2% of the class time. Washington Post (see extract above) reports an average of 25 hours that accounts for about 2.34% of class time. This is far less than the testing time in any of the institutions of higher learning. (see below) There is nothing absurd about this fact.
“Little children spend more time to take tests than law exams.”
I believe you are thinking of LSAT, the law school entrance exam which last for 4 hours. Let us examine a typical university on a quarter system consisting of ten weeks of teaching for each course of a value of 4 units. Each week classes take up 4.5 hours with a total class time of 45 hours per course. Out of this there is at least one midterm and one final each taking up 1.5 hours or a total of 3 hours of testing time. This represents 6.7% of time devoted to testing. On a 3-unit course this results in 10% of the class time devoted to testing.
To get to the LSAT test you must have a 4-year college degree where you have spent between 6.7 and 10% of the class time on taking tests. Therefore to take the LSAT one must first spend about 8% of 4-year college class time taking tests. This is far larger amount of time than what is endured by little children in taking the standardized tests (average 2.34%).
“The tests have an absurdly high passing mark, which guarantees that the majority of students will fail.”
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/12/15/459821708/u-s-high-school-graduation-rate-hits-new-record-high
“For the fourth straight year, the U.S. high school graduation rate has improved — reaching an all-time high of 82 percent in the 2013-2014 school year, the Department of Education announced Tuesday.”
Whereas your statement may be factual, I have not been able to find any reason to believe that the high passing mark has kept students from graduating. I am making an assumption that graduation is the goal for all children whether they go on to college or not. I do not know what happens to those that fail with most reports stating that graduation rates are steady or increasing in this country. See NPR report cited above. Therefore your statement is unsupportable by facts.
“The tests do not help children. They hurt children. We don’t know how to measure what matters most.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/01/students-should-be-tested-more-not-less/283195/
“Testing is terrible for learning, destroys student and teacher morale, and impedes opportunities for productive, meaningful teaching. This oft-repeated axiom has become accepted as true without proof. Opposition to testing and all its associated ills has led to an over-generalization of the word “test” and an unwarranted reputation as the embodiment of all that is wrong with American education.
One researcher believes we are throwing a very effective learning tool out with our educational bathwater, and asserts that we should be testing students more, not less.”
“Researchers have long known about the “testing effect,” the phenomenon of improved performance through testing. William James, psychology professor at Harvard and author of The Principles of Psychology wrote in 1890.
A curious peculiarity of our memory is that things are impressed better by active than by passive repetition. I mean that in learning (by heart, for example), when we almost know the piece, it pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again. If we recover the words in the former way, we shall probably know them the next time; if in the latter way, we shall very likely need the book once more.”
You are just stating this as fact that test do not help children, whereas there is no supporting data or documentation. If you do not know how to measure what matters most, how do you assert that testing hurts children? Please explain.
Raj,
You are wrong in so many ways that I don’t have time to answer point by point.
There was a time when teachers received a diagnostic analysis of how students performed on tests. They learned whether students needed more time to learn fractions, or other specifics.
Today, the standardized tests provide no diagnostics, only a ranking of 1, 2, 3, 4. The teacher never sees how students answered. She or he gets no actionable information.
They are useless.
Right, the only action these folks are interested in is firing teachers and privatizing education, not helping teachers or kids.
To Raj:
The simple answer to your inquiry is that please investigate the curriculum in all schools where rich children attend. If those schools follow common core state tests, then your inquiry has been answered. Back2basic
So what do you guys say about this
“With one part of TNReady down and one still to go, superintendents across Tennessee have received a matter-of-fact directive from the State Department of Education: don’t make it easier for students to refuse to take the state’s new standardized test.”
http://tn.chalkbeat.org/2016/04/04/state-seeks-to-limit-opt-out-options-emphasizes-testing-balance-as-tnready-part-ii-approaches/#.VwO4nHXRbMV
More from the same article (I cannot quote from the memo released by the TNDOE)
“The memo says that schools should not offer alternative activities for students not partIcipating in mandatory testing.”