Jeff Bryant reviews the claims for and against the testing that has now become the central feature of April.
State and local officials assure us that the tests will help children, but they don’t.
State and local officials insist that they will close the achievement gap, but for decades they have measured it, not closed it.
Blah, blah, blah.
The tests in use today don’t help anyone but the testing corporations.
The results come back in the fall or maybe as early as the summer, when the students have a different teacher or are not even in school.
The results don’t explain what the students got wrong so they have no diagnostic or instructional value.
They tell students if they passed or failed, but the students don’t know why and neither do the teachers.
What a waste of time and money.
The great puzzle is why all those officials–federal, state, and local–demand, insist, declare that students must take these useless tests. Why do they want the data when the data don’t help the students?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
this comment was by Max Page at the MA Commissioner’s April Letter on why the testing is necessary/required “The MA Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education, Mitchell Chester, continues his love affair with high-stakes testing and with deceptive statements.
He suggests that advocates are calling for an end to tests. We are not: we are calling for a moratorium on the high-stakes aspects of tests (punishing students and schools for performance on a test) until we devise good assessments that actually help educators and students. MCAS was never intended to be used to fire teachers and punish school systems.
Commissioner Mitchell Chester suggests that the recently passed federal ESEA (Every Student Succeeds Act) makes no difference at all to our testing regime. This just flies in the face of a central purpose of the law, which was to deemphasize testing, which has ravaged school districts across the country.
And he suggests that all good school systems have these high-stakes tests. This is patently false, as the example of Finland and other countries suggests.
Debate is good. Honest debate is even better.” end of quote
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Jean,
Someone should tell Chester that no high performing nation in the world tests every student every year.
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Commissioner Mitchell Chester suggests that the recently passed federal ESEA (Every Student Succeeds Act) makes no difference at all to our testing regime. This just flies in the face of a central purpose of the law, which was to deemphasize testing, ”
It would certainly seem that different people can view “a central purpose of the law” quite differently.
Some might say that such ambiguity was quite intentional — and the reason that Obama signed the bill, despite the claims that ESSA was a rejection of his policy.
Getting people to agree even though they disagree on what they are agreeing to is a classic politician’s trick.
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Thanks, Poet and Diane… I write to the Ed Secretary; I write to the Governor etc. Last week M. Chester sent staff to the Skandera conference on PARRC so I am assuming his “leadership” is still in the soup ; at least one of his staff member has already gone to work at Pearson and I am hoping the rest of them will go. In the meantime people at the DESE slander Sandra Stotsky’s work.
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“. . . they will close the achievement gap, but for decades they have measured it, not closed it.”
No, those tests haven’t measured the achievement gap. Au contraire, they “measure” absolutely nothing. They aren’t a measuring device as there is no agreed upon unit of measurement involved in assessing that achievement gap. There is no “standard” that the measuring device is calibrated against (and no, rubrics do not serve that function), no measurement error estimation (and, no, the psychometric fudging done by test makers is not a true “error measurement”).
“Blah, blah, blah.”
Yes, that is an apt description of the blathering done by psychometricians and the supporters of educational standards and its conjoined standardized testing.
“They tell students if they passed or failed. . . ”
Only if one stretches the meaning of both of those terms into garbled nonsense.
Continual usage of the edudeformer and privateer language and terms can only help their cause in the further destruction of the community public education realm and the concomitant harm caused to the most innocent of society, the children.
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Maybe it is not such as puzzle. The main drivers of test-based accountability are not equity or systemic improvement, but rather exerting control, undermining public education and public sector unions, and providing profit for testing and publishing companies.
The motives of advocates for consequential testing are surely varied, but the cynical and elitist central assumptions are is these:
“The history of the comparatively low standing of U.S. schools on international assessments and intractable achievements gaps demonstrate that teachers cannot be counted upon to improve student outcomes. Rigorous national standards will yield consistency in expectations, instructional materials, and assessments. Consequential assessments are necessary for improvement because some people will only respond to rewards and sanctions.”
This is from a much longer article published several years ago before the encouraging rise of the Opt-Out Movement.
Click to access Past-Gets-In-Our-Eyes1.pdf
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A neglected dimension is the sale of test scores and ratings based on these aided by the IRS and shell non-profits.
The greatschool.org website is set up as a non-profit. It scoops up all of the test score data from states, districts, and schools and then morphs that information into a 10 point rating system. ( A similar system is being used for OECD ratings in development.
If you go to the greatschools.org website and look at a specific school rating, you are also directed to Zillow. The scores function as a support for redlining districts and steering people to highly rated schools. A feature of the website links schools and their ratings to district names and zip-codes.
Zillow, Target, Walmart, Scholastic and other corporations and groups pay a fee to lease the information. The data is also paid for by researchers who want a quick path to all of those scores and the breakouts by subgroups.
This database will soon be expanded to include measure of “school climate” and “social/emotional learning.” USDE is currently field-testing the school climate survey which actually has questions that are framed to measure “social emotional” learning, measures of school cleanliness, appearance and so on. THE USDE surveys are being field tested in middle and high schools, but they are envisioned as workable for elementary through higher education.
Separately, there are new surveys of social emotional learning for a new “School Quality Improvement Index” for ten CORE Districts in California. These districts serve about 1 million students. Panorama Education, is the contractor for surveys that will report students’ perceptions of:
Classroom Climate – the overall feel of a class including aspects of the physical, social and psychological environment;
Engagement – their behavioral, cognitive, and affective investment in the subject and classroom;
Grit – their ability to persevere through setbacks to achieve important long-term goals;
Learning Strategies – the extent to which they use metacognition and employ strategic tools to be active participants in their own learning process;
Mindset – the extent to which they believe that they have the potential to change those factors that are central to their performance in a specific class. See this original test at http://mindsetonline.com/testyourmindset/step1.php;
Pedagogical Effectiveness – the quality and quantity of their learning from a particular teacher about that teacher’s subject area;
Rigorous Expectations – whether they are being challenged by their teachers with high expectations for effort, understanding, persistence, and performance in the class;
School Belonging – the extent to which they feel that they are valued members of their school community;
Teacher-Student Relationship – the overall social and academic relationship between students and their teachers; and
Valuing of the Subject – how interesting, important, and useful a particular school subject seems.
Panorama Education is a 2012 startup. Surveys are delivered online (or paper). Investors include Y Combinator, Google Ventures, and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s Startup: Education.
This is to say that the market for tests in the form of surveys–with data used primarily to evaluate teachers, school staff, and schools–is a growth industry. The growth is aided by ESSA’s invitation for states to include at least one “alternative” assessment for accountability. These surveys, like the conventional academic teats, hold school personnel responsible for a host of factors over which they have little direct control.
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I don’t know if we need to get passed our “individualist past” or our Puritanical obsession with punishment. We are held back by the regressive thinking of groups like the Tea Party which now seems to represent the majority voice in the Republican Party. We as a nation are more polarized and less willing to work for the “common good” than I can remember.
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Retired teacher – I think we have always had sub-groups w/enthusiasm for 17th-c Puritanism & 18th-c individualism. (Later, Ayn Rand & Milton Friedman gave them philosophical & economic platforms). They remained just parts of the whole during the reign of properly regulated capitalism starting w/ anti-trust laws 1890, then New Deal 1933-1937. Much of the 20thc can be viewed as properly-regulated capitalism which brought riches to some while extending a decent QOL to many.
Since 1980, there has been steady deregulation [or de-funding of execution of laws for] anti-trust, Wall St, banking, campaign-funding. & a host of related laws. We have let loose the corporate lions, & they are always hungry; they look now to the ‘public good’ as a place to feed & grow. The puritanical & individualist sub-groups look on in approval & join in the cannibalization of public good as govt representatives– they always believed in ‘God helpf those who helf themselves.’
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“God Help us”
God help us all
Against the wolves
Against the call
Of “help yourselves”
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Exactly the question–the day will come when we boldly follow the money!!
Who better than schools to be the next mountain to be stripped mined!! Copper, gold, platinum, all those metals are also in current technological hardware. Some huge rich resource needs to buy a huge lot of computers and software for the industry to make money. ..oh and grow and give jobs to new college graduates. Techies want jobs too.
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My favorite quote from the cited article: “The truth everyone knows is that America’s education is vastly unequal in how it educates children, and it’s in undeniable fact that students of lesser income, and who aren’t white, struggle the most. But while testing can make something already well understood even more apparent, it’s of little use in determining what to do about the inequity.”
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The true cruelty of April is how it corrupts and disrupts classroom life in September thru March. How it drives school culture and teacher morale straight into the ground.
How it is driving bad pedagogy. And how it is draining student interest and enthusiasm.
Anyone I know who has proctored the Pearson tests has left the testing rooms this year shaking their heads in absolute despair – the professional frustration has been palpable. The experiment is OVER! The conclusion is DEFINITIVE. Common Core, test-based reform is an abject FAILURE. There is NO REASON to continue the charade. NO rational educator could provide a defense of the current state of testing reform in New York State. It has accomplished NOTHING worth the expenditure of time, money, energy, and angst. In the eyes of many, it has become nothing more than a CRUEL April Fool’s JOKE.
The Common Core approach to ELA is based almost entirely on a single-minded approach to reading and writing (textual evidence) that bears no resemblance to the ways or reasons that actual humans read or write. On the surface the relentless demands of providing supporting evidence from a text seems like a reasonable and useful skill. In practice it has put a stranglehold on student motivation, stifling creativity and turning reading and writing into pure cookie-cutter drudgery .The notion that these standards are preparing students for college or careers is absurd. God bless the ELA teachers that are using their professional judgment and ignoring this narrow, constricting approach language arts skills.
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Well-placed rage.
Bill Gates is still trying to shore up the Common Core, making many of his grants contingent on keeping those standards and tests alive, including his grants for “transforming teacher education.” He is continuing to fund third parties like the Education Trust and the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) and the Council of Chief State School Officers in an effort to rate all sorts of ancillary products and activities and services as “compliant” with the Common Core or not. And now he is enchanted with metrics for “continuous improvement in school quality” with social-emotional learning and school “climate” part of that. This work is aided and abetted by scholars at Stanford, UCLA, Harvard, and MIT and contractors for USDE–the best and brightest who have a “vision” of proper behavior for all of our students, and the proper policies and actions to be taken by all teachers, all principals, all school staff and so on.
I have yet to find much concern for the principle of “informed consent” in these endless experiments launched for the last three decades with approval of our Congress, several presidents and their secretaries of education, and with personnel who are in revolving door relationships with foundations that increasingly function as racketeers, co-opting educational policies, hiding behind non-profit structures, and enabling education to become a market-based disaster.
These elected and unelected education bosses operate from the premise that all teachers are incapable of doing professional work and that all students are destined to fail. These dire predictions most often come from economists who make inferential long jumps about the fate of the nation followed by proposed “interventions” to save millions of students by some handy, rapid, cheap, and disruptive innovation. Economists have proven to be untrustworthy with something they are supposed to know about. They aided and abetted practices that tanked the world economy. Stop feeding them test scores. Opt out.
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You outdid me on the well-placed rage scale. Your contributions to this blog are unmatched. Your professionalism, detailed research, and your relentless pursuit of the truth has been invaluable. You missed your calling as an investigative journalist. Thank you Laura for everything.
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I so agree. Often the outrage of age-inappropriate & generally malaprop CCSS-ELA stds compounded by atrocious ‘aligned’ tests gets forgotten amidst the hullaballoo over CCSS-Math-aligned hw & test prep– which to me is no biggie, hello, my kids were doing the same crap pre-CCSS thanks to Chicago’s ‘Everyday Math’.
[Could we just for once admit that ‘everyone’ is not STEM-inclined just because gov/industry claims if you aren’t you have no future? Could we suggest instead that 100% humanity needs the products that we 50% artsies provide?… & I speak here as a polyglot ready & willing to turn monolingual Americans into multi-lingual folk equipped for globalism! But, no, sorry… Early-language-learning programs were budget-zeroed out just prior to music, art, & recess…]
Excuse my parenthetical rant. Back to the current CCSS-ELA situation. & hate to be anecdotal, but: I was an early & preternatural reader– & received kudos for that, & the ’50’s/’60’s paradigm when readers predominated [sorry, STEMMIES]. Had anyone forced me into 70%-30% expository prose pre-5th-gr (let alone fiction or non-fiction theme & comparison analysis before 8th-gr)– I would perhaps have retreated into homeschooling in fetal pose (while reading my favorite book).
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Thoroughly agree with ya rager on Laura’s contributions. Not being one to like using “best lists” notwithstanding, Laura ranks at the top!
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I’m just a little curious.
If you’re a teacher or parent of students/children of test-taking age, I’d greatly appreciate participation in my first ever on-line survey. It’s a bit rudimentary, but I thought I’d start simple.
The results are for my information only, although results could become fodder for a future blog post.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/G3G6QKY
thanks
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A teacher speaks from the heart about high-stakes testing and what it’s doing to her beloved students: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdVwSLwWf1c
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