TC Weber is a parent blogger in Nashville. He writes here about the testing chaos in Tennessee.
When the contractor didn’t deliver the tests in time, testing was canceled. Then came part two, the tests were delayed again, but eventually many kids took the tests. Tennessee fired the contractor, forced students to take the tests, then gave Pearson a contract for $18.5 million just to score the tests.
Just for scoring tests! How great is that! Way to go, Pearson!
Maybe some of the details are wrong. Read TC’s post.
Bottom line: Tennessee is squandering millions of dollars for useless tests. Wake up! End the nightmare!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I think the saddest thing is that as teachers we know exactly where our kids are at. Short formative assessments created by teachers are powerful..and tell us so much about each one of our students. The sad reality is that our kids are taking these expensive tests in order for the deformers to evaluate the teacher. Think how we could use all of that money! We could help so many of our students. It is a very sad time in education.
Blogger is really savvy and properly angry, very angry.
The “emergency action,” I have learned from ALEC, is useful to by-pass public hearings. You just legislate and the action is in effect as soon as the vote of approval is properly filed.
Indeed—
Where are the grown-ups?
😎
The really sad thing is that the children are now trained by the experience of state testing to ignore teachers and their tests. Students see teachers not as authorities in their field but as delivery men of test questions. Sound like merrie ole England? All of this money is being wasted.
I can attest to the mayhem that has been created in Tennessee. I teach an EOC US History course three block periods a day in West Tennessee and my students would have laughed at me when I told them the test counted (because they knew it didn’t) but most of them didn’t want to hurt my feelings. I proctered another teacher’s class while he covered mine. Half of the students in the room were finished with the 90 minute test in less than fifteen minutes. They told me they knew the test didn’t count on their grade “so why try. It’s too hard, anyway.” It’s demoralizing to have 16 and 17 year olds feeling sorry for you because they feel your pain and frustration. My test was given three weeks before the end of the semester leaving me with only the peelings of history to explore. Then, they had to take another final exam. In one stretch, juniors at my school had to take 6 tests in 8 days. It is insane. I don’t blame my administrators because they are being led by the nose by the DOE in Nashville. I love my profession (let me double back) I have loved my profession for over twenty years. I deplore the thought of retiring early but I don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel.
Just think of how many schools could have been built, repaired and/or refurbished; how many teachers hired and supplies bought with the endless billions being wasted on testing. There’s never any money for these things, but somehow millions are immediately found for Pearson, et.al.
What I want to know is when will the State Deparment of Education be held accountable for years of testing fiascos?
As a retired teacher with 45 years in the classroom, if a teacher had misappropriated 50.00 she would have been held accountable and rightly so. TN teachers have been told in recent years that they don’t measure up to standards that would be applied in the business world, hence value added evaluation. Well, the local school systems did what they were asked to do by the State Dept. Of Ed.: parent meetings to explain evaluation, teacher training, purchasing enough tablets or computers, training students, teaching students, and practicing for test. The State Deparment of Education employees who approved and sanctioned te vendors need to be held accountable as well, as would any big business. The top executives should lose their jobs.
If a teacher lost 1.8 million dollars of taxpayer money, they would be in prison.
Where is the accountability?
Governor? Legislators? Taxpayers? Anyone paying attention?
Here are some grown-ups – the Momma Bears:
http://www.mommabears.org/blog/emergency-tnready-resurrected
In many districts all of the “stakes” of these high stakes tests were removed for this year after the first fiasco with the online version.
While thrilled that our students/children wont have 15% of their grades attached to these invalid tests (up to 25% in some districts ) and thrilled that our teachers won’t be evaluated on studrnt scores on tests unaligned to classroom content and clearly far above grade level, it’s a special kind of fact that paying 1.8 million dollars to “score” the test was literally done for nothing. These tests are being given amd paid for for no reason other than to give them and pay for them.
The legislature needs to be sued.
The courts are the only front on which any logic has prevailed in the “education reform” assault on kids, teachers, parents and taxpayers.
Calling it an assault on education is too mild. This is assault on people.
Remember- these are the same state departments of ed that privatization advocates are counting on to regulate all those charter and state-subsidized private schools!
The only regulation will come at the state level. Fat chance of that.
There was a reason school districts were given local jurisdiction/regulation. The Best and the Brightest still haven’t figured that out yet. They “re-invented” government without understanding the first thing about how government works.
Who, exactly, will be monitoring and regulating all these thousands of schools spread across states? The same people who are hiring these testing contractors? They can’t even do the job they have now.
Yesterday the charter cheerleader caucus in Ohio announced that the state dept of ed was the worst-run state agency. That’s the SINGLE agency that monitors the hundreds of charter schools they’re opening. They see no contradiction or problem with this-they’re actually planning on regulating hundreds of schools full of children from the state capitol. It is a disaster waiting to happen and it WILL happen. They;ve been lucky so far. That won’t hold.
Ohio lawmakers spent all of last session re-regulating charter schools. Yesterday they announced they would be spending the lame duck gutting their own regulations.
Does anyone at the state dept of ed or the legislature do anything else? I’ve seen capture before but this is ludicrous. Maybe running schools at the local level was done for a reason and these arrogant fools threw out a system they didn’t understand or value with nothing to replace it?
This is the state agency that Governor Kasich and President Obama “envision” as the single regulator of hundreds of schools full of children:
“COLUMBUS – When it comes to inefficient, poorly run government operations, Ohio’s Department of Education is the worst of the worst, Ohio Auditor Dave Yost said Monday.
“ODE (Ohio Department of Education) is among the worst-, if not the worst-, run state agency in state government,” Yost said at a news conference detailing his audit of school attendance.”
This is why schools were run and regulated at the local level. The hubris it takes to imagine that was done for no good reason is really beyond my level of understanding. Of course they can’t regulate tens of local schools from Columbus. Are they supposed to be driving 5 hours to do inspections? Only morons would believe they could.
That’s WHY we put the regulator close to the school 150 years ago. How long do you think it will take the Best and Brightest to figure out what their great grandparents knew?
http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/education/2016/05/23/education-worst-run-department-yost-says-so/84783180/
Diane, Gates Foundation issued what amounts to an apology for the botched, top-down CC roll out:
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/2016/ceo-letter?wt.mc_id=05_23_2016_15_ceoletter16_sdh-tw_&wt.tsrc=sdhtw
It’s at the end of the piece. The sad part is this is much more humble and real than anything ed reformers in government have said. They seem to believe they can shame scold or harangue people into going along.
If Bill Gates is beating you on self-examination and humility you have a problem, and it isn’t “the status quo”- it’s the arrogance.
TNDOE feels the heat and they are doing what seems now shaping out to be a national strategy of the reformers: they give out surveys to gather the people’s opinion, so that they can claim a democratic process. But the surveys are rigged because the questions imply their assumptions about testing, accountability, measurability are correct. So whatever answer you give, it supports their agenda. The only thing you can do is point at every question, how wrong the question itself is. Most people won’t do that.
See for yourself
http://www.tn.gov/education/topic/essa-feedback-form
The first two questions set the stage
1. How should we measure student progress toward meeting state academic standards?
2. How could we strengthen the current state assessment system?
My favorite is this, though.
6. How can the department support the use of evidence-based strategies for school turnarounds in a way that both provides districts with structure and guidelines while allowing them as much flexibility as possible?
Let’s do a little calculation with this $18.5 million for grading TNReady, the TN state standardized test. There are 1 million public school students in TN. Assuming these students are evenly distributed among the 12 grades and the first two grades didn’t take the tests, there were
1 million times 10/12 = 833,333
students take the math and ELA tests in the first round. This means
833,333 times 2 = 1,666,666
tests in the 1st round. Taking into account that only high school students took the 2nd round, similar calculations show that there were 666,666 tests submitted in the 2nd round. This is a total of 2,333,332 tests to grade. Since Pearson got $18.5 million to do this, she gets
$18.5 million divided by 2,333,332 = $7.92
per test. Let’s make that $8 per test. Now how many teachers would be willing to sacrifice a weekend to grade 100 of these (mostly bubble) tests and get $800? How much do teachers get for grading a test (which they usually do after going home)?
Mate,
$18.5 million to score TN tests? Most of the scoring is done by computer. What a bonanza for Pearson!
It turns out that I was conservative with my numbers: Pearson has to grade only 1.8 million tests which means they get $10 per test.