Carol Burris wrote a post for Valerie Strauss’s “Answer Sheet” blog at the Washington Post, in which she reported the numerous Twitter exchanges among herself, Tom Loveless, and Campbell Brown. Burris and Loveless fruitlessly tried to persuade Brown to retract her inaccurate statement that 2/3 of America’s eighth graders score below grade level.
Given an opportunity to respond by Valerie Strauss, Brown made an incomprehensible statement about how she should have referred to grade-level proficiency instead of grade level. Then everything would be okay. Instead of correcting her error, Brown insisted she was under personal attack.
Please read the last two sentences of her comments, which are hilarious. Especially the reference to “the age of Donald Trump and Diane Ravitch” (Sic)!! And then there is her laughable claim that those who disagree with her negative comments are profiting from school failure. I wish she–who received $4 million to start her website–would provide evidence for that statement!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Oh, we know how this goes by now. There’s “testing season” where public school parents are scolded about their duty to turn their kids over for any and all tests that anyone dreams up-that lasts from January to June.
From June to January we get a stern lecture on the test scores. That’s “score season”
Add cheerleading for charters and vouchers and you have the total output for all the paid advocates for ed reform in any given 12 month period.
We’re smack in the middle of “haranguing on test scores” season. If the public weren’t so tragically mediocre themselves they would all know public schools suck. Sadly, we ARE just that low-performing, which is why we need The Best and The Brightest to show us The Truth.
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Carol, when NYS set the cutoff low, few, if any, were opting out in protest. The test results were just as delusional then as now. Equally bad misinformation. I guess that proves that the public prefers false positives to false negatives.
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“Hall of Tests”
The mirrored hall of tests
Of PISA and of NAEP
Retains eternal guests
Who never will escape
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I will continue to be baffled until the end of my days as to why the default assumption is that the tests themselves are perfected, as if they were handed to Moses on Sinai, and, therefore, it is teachers and students who are ‘failures’. Why are the tests unassilable and above evaluation and criticism? They are rarely if ever suspect.
The psychometry scam has succeeded all too well and has convinced too many that the tests are ‘scientific’ and without error or bias, instead of the truth that they are ALL wild guesses, stabs in the dark, approximations, and hunches, at best. Akin to phrenology, entrail reading, astrology, and divining rods. Always a few hucksters who achieve a modicum of success in ‘proving’ a small bit of accuracy, most likely random chance, but enough to convince the gullible to believe.
Testing is not like using a ruler or a scale. You can not accurately and precisely measure anything that you do not know for sure what form it even exists in, like thinking, reasoning, knowledge, understanding, etc. Without that caveat up front, like most researchers and scientists with integrity insist upon, it becomes manipulation and should never ever be used to make or break a student, a teacher, or a school.
Psychometry is a pseudoscience riding on the coattails of psychology, economics, and statistics, legerdemain and hocus pocus. Period. Too easily manipulated and tunred to evil.
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“The Test Commandments”
The tablets handed down
To Moses on the mount
Had tests downloaded on
By God, without a doubt
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Chris in Florida:
Yes, psychometrics indeed is related to psychometry in that both are based on “non-observable” mental constructs.
“Psychometry (from Greek: ψυχή, psukhē, “spirit, soul” and μέτρον, metron, “measure”), also known as token-object reading, or psychoscopy, is a form of extrasensory perception characterized by the claimed ability to make relevant associations from an object of unknown history by making physical contact with that object. Supporters assert that an object may have an energy field that transfers knowledge regarding that object’s history.
There is no scientific evidence that psychometry exists and the concept has been widely criticized”. (from wiki)
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Fred
Not quite. Under NCLB, grade 3 to 8 math and ELA tests did not produce super inflated (70%) failure rates because the tests were fair and reasonable. Common Core tests from Pearson were the game changers: designed to trick, confuse, and break the will of students, the super failure rates produced in NYS for three consecutive years were no accident. Parents have revolted against bad tests – not high cut scores.
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Yes, parents rebelled against bad tests.
Remember, the opt out movement started in the SUBURBS! Those were the areas that privatizers were chomping at the bit to subsidize their favorite charter schools opening.
Governor Christie experienced some of that rebellion when he had to dial back on all the charter schools he was opening in the wealthiest suburbs.
THAT is why Pearson designed a test that is supposed to convince suburban parents that despite the highest SAT scores in their high schools, their schools are simply terrible and why not send their kids to the nice, well-funded, billionaire supported charter school with free catered lunches and small class sizes instead of the suburban school experiencing budget cuts that the state tests “prove” is really not very good at all.
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Journalistic integrity. It used to be a thing.
Well, you do got to give Ms. Brown this she did follow the money.
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Wait: what?!?
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“Do the Limbo”
Trump is now the bar
For lower than the low
And Campbell Brown’s the star
For dipping down below
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How low can we go.
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One tends to obfuscate using the “personal attack” defense when one has no cogent reasoning or facts to back up one’s argument. Campbell Brown seems very skilled at it.
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“the age of Donald Trump and Diane Ravitch”
Trump is beginning to rival Hitler as an ad hominem point of comparison. Where someone once would accuse someone else of Nazism, now they write something like, “You’re just like Donald Trump” or “I bet you love Donald Trump.”
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I laughed but that isn’t funny, that Donald Trump is replacing Hitler as a figurative ad hominem attack. What if Donald Trump turns out to be worse than Hitler once in the White House.
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“FLERP!’s law”
“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Donald Trump approaches 1 — and the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler decreases accordingly.”
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“just like Donald Trump”, when used correctly means to make up any stuff you want to and change the facts whenever it suits your purpose and deny any facts that you find inconvenient, and finally, use the most vulnerable and poorest people as scapegoats for problems that you have no interest in actually solving.
“just like Hitler”, when used correctly, means you are claiming that Jewish bankers (or perhaps some other convenient minority group) are responsible for all the woes of the country and should be rounded up and sent to concentration camps where they may or may not disappear.
On the other hand, there are people like Campbell Brown who say “just like Donald Trump” to attack anyone who offers facts that disagree with whatever point the people who underwrite her big salary want her to make. It is right out of the Karl Rove playbook where you attack your enemies by claiming they are doing what you are doing!
Saying that Diane Ravitch is “just like Donald Trump” is like claiming that John Kerry was the coward in Viet Nam and George W. Bush the hero. She could not be more different than Donald Trump. But because the reformers themselves use Trump-like claims and false facts and attacks to push their agenda, it is important that they adopt the Karl Rove method of attacking the people who criticize those claims as being like Donald Trump.
On the other hand, saying that Campbell Brown acts like Donald Trump is probably legitimate. Or maybe I am just offering my own ad hominem attack.
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CB stands for Clueless Bozo. This is the same woman who appeared an in-depth coverage of Christopher J. Savoie’s controversial child abduction case in September 2009 while she was working for CNN. She never disappointed me in attributing the incident to Japan’s legal system, by conveniently ignoring the cause of Tennessee family court’s seriously flawed system that allowed a perpetrator(his Japanese ex-wife) to kidnap his children by breaking the decree. CB is not the only one in doing so called foreign/outsider bashing, but it’s no surprise that her talent for tele-genie is well shown in such opportunity to promote America the victim ideology across the nation.
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Has she weighed in yet on the big scandal in tony private schools with child sexual abuse?
Why does she continue to attribute child abuse to labor unions, when she must have read about the sexual abuse in Catholic schools and now in wealthy private schools?
Is that labor unions too? Why do they make this nonsensical connection?
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Good point, Chiara. Campbell is obsessed with the idea that teachers’ unions protect sexual predators. She has never touched either the abuse scandals in the best private schools or the abuse scandals in the Catholic church.
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Warning. What I’m about to say about Campbell Brown will be taken by her as an ad hominem attack — if she knows what ad hominem means — but I think what I’m about to write is the truth as I see it and not an ad hominem attack.
I think Campbell Brown is a brainless twit who will say anything for money and a chance at her moment of fame through a byline or in front of a camera. At least real prostitutes, that want to be prostitutes and are not sex slaves, know they are willing prostitutes.
And I’m sorry to disagree with Diane but I don’t think Campbell Brown is all that physically attractive. She’s not my type. I like strong women with brains who think for themselves and can’t be bought.
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I also love how the feminists of ed reform objected to Ravitch mentioning Brown’s looks when Arne Duncan made a patronizing, insulting comment about how the silly “moms” were much too emotional and coddling so couldn’t handle The Truth.
Insufferable. Maybe they should venture out of the echo chamber where they all give one anothers awards and jobs and promotions and hear how they talk to the people who use public schools. I don’t need rescuing by Brown or Duncan. I’m familiar with my schools- I live here and my children attend them and they have for 25 years, so longer than Brown has been an edu-expert. Add my own years in public schools and it’s 40.
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The false claim that 2/3 of American 8th graders score below grade level should be applied to a Social Studies lesson in civics.
Ms Burris and Ms Schneider both demonstrate how freedom of speech in our nation serve to protect our democracy and our citizens.
Ms Brown’s claim is deceitful and dangerous…a display of that which threatens to upend our democracy.
Two clear sides of the same coin…one of truth and civic values…the other an example of the dark side of humanity.
A lesson of virtue and morals, and the threats they face from dangerous elements in our society.
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I wish they would just say it- they hit public schools with all of society’s problems because they’re the easiest target. Obviously it’s easier to rant about our failed and failing public schools than it is to talk about taxes or real estate or any of the other factors that might upset or “disrupt” a lot of powerful people. They can control public schools and they can’t or won’t get their arms around any of these other problems. It’s public schools by default- bashing public schools is the universally acceptable “policy lever” and the ONLY one they’re willing to pull.
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I wonder if NAEP should explain results in terms the general public will understand. The word proficient in the every day world means something different than in the education world. It might help with folks misinterpreting the results.
One other thing I keep wondering about is say hypothetically that every 8th grader in the entire country studied really, really hard and did very well on this exam and all 100% of them were deemed proficient, then I expect folks like Campbell Brown would claim the test was too easy or a bad test or the kids need to work more or that they cheated… kind of like what folks are saying about the new SAT…or when one of the Boston High schools did really well on the state test, they held their scores because they assumed they cheated. I think you can’t really win with this stuff. If you both have the expectation that you want 100% success and a test that has a normal distribution those things i believe are at odds.
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I am just a simple person. Brown says 2/3 of 8th grades can’t read or count. Does that mean that those same 8th graders as 12 graders are still illiterate victims of public schools. I am confused. I have three children that graduated public schools and are successful college graduates with good jobs with benefits. Thats 3/3 success rate. Then, my neighbor across the street, the Aubrey’s, have 2 graduated and one a junior, then the Lins, 2 graduated. I think you get me point. Her math does not add up. Our public schools graduate great, successful students, many against great odds.
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