Patrick Michels of the Texas Observer cites all the ways that ETS messed up the STAAR tests in Texas. It is not a pretty picture. Texans almost missed Pearson after encountering the incompetence of ETS. Almost.
Questions with no right answers.
Test booklets sent to the wrong schools.
Students’ answers deleted.
No answers from ETS on testing day.
Boxes of completed tests lost in the mail.
Short answer essays with improbably low scores.
Long waits for test scores, some never delivered.
The upshot?
Somebody should be held accountable!
The Texas Association of School Administrators has asked [State Commissioner Mike] Morath not to use this year’s test scores to rate schools. In an open letter to Morath published in the Houston Chronicle, Ben Becker — part of the parents’ group that sued TEA claiming this year’s test is too long — said that Morath owes “the people of Texas a transparent accounting” of this year’s problems, otherwise, “you must throw out all the scores, order them expunged from student records, and assure they are not used for any decision-making. Anywhere. Period.”
Morath responded to Becker, telling him that while the spring test scores will be late, he believes they’ll still be accurate. Morath’s staff apparently drafted an apology letter to parents in April, according to the emails obtained by the Observer, but is waiting to send it once all of the spring test results are out — which now won’t happen until early July.
State Senator Kel Seliger, who has praised Morath for his leadership so far, has told the Amarillo Globe-News that Texas simply shouldn’t pay ETS for its work on this year’s STAAR. Whatever action Morath takes to hold ETS accountable after this year, lawmakers are certain to have their own ideas for reforming STAAR when they reconvene in January.
Don’t mess with Texas.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This happens over and over and over again yet we still allow the reformists, the politicians whom they buy and pay for, and the billionaire scolds treat this kind of testing as if it were holy writ, passed down from heaven in God’s own handwriting.
Florida’s legislature, perennially in competition with Texas to see who can elect the most insane and unqualified to govern them, and forever locked in a perennial ALEC-controlled grifting mode, had angry parents and school boards storming Tallahassee over the new tests last year and all the high-stakes ‘accountability’ they had attached to it, so they passed a law requiring the FLDOE to ‘prove’ that the test was accurate, fair, and an acceptable tool for holding back students and depriving their teachers of their jobs and their communities of local control over the schools they pay for with taxes.
How did the FLDOE ‘prove’ the tests were valid? They hired another testing company to validate them! And even then, with the pro-testing agenda well-protected by other insiders in the testing grift game. they still cautioned that the new tests were not suitable for VAM, promotion, and other high-stakes decision-making. The new tests are supposedly’ accurate’ measures, however, of student learning of the new ‘Florida” standards.So the FLDOE and Commisioner Pam “I’ve sold my soul to the Tea Party” Stewart, declared the tests valid and stormed ahead, ignoring the caveat completely,
Those ‘Florida’ standards, by the way, are simply renamed and slightly-altered Common Core State Standards that the legislature’s previous grift pretended to ‘fix’ due to voter outrage and a storm of complaints from both the Tea Party and progressive voters.They hoped to appease and fool low-information voters by simply changing the name and the testing provider. It didn’t work.
Opting out seems like the only civil disobedience voters are willing to consider in stopping this noxious and foul encroachment of bogus testing, a fakery unmatched in recent history regarding the amount of credulity and support it has gained by having the imprimatur of political ideologues, greedy grifters, lofty-titled quacks from Harvard and other elitist enclaves, and, of course, the billionaire boys club.
Sadly, I still see credentialed people from the field of education, who should know better, giving weak-tea support to the silliness of testing, standards, and other failed reforms because they fear the repercussions of telling Emperors Gates, Bush, King, and others that their reforms are worthless mirages designed to further a right-wing political agenda and increase the wealth of the greedy few.
Stand up to the testing nonsense, America, before it destroys what little is left of your dignity, your future, and your common sense.
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“. . . this kind of testing as if it were holy writ, passed down from heaven in God’s own handwriting.”
It’s not a sanctimonious decretum from on high? (No, not that kind of high.)
Had me fooled!
In a prior lifetime that is.
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Will be late but “accurate” so… Refund from ETS or not? The answer is likely to be in the contract details and the courts. The shabby performance of testing companies needs as much as exposure as possible,especially since scores are the instruments of choice in the early 21st century campaign to make students, teachers, and schools the scapegoats for all corporate and economic failures.
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“. . . he believes they’ll still be accurate. . . ”
To what degree will they be accurate? A couple of standard deviations?
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The companies producing and selling high-stakes standardized tests are forever tweaking and fixing their products and frantically racing to get things corrected because fouling up is an natural to them as breathing is to us.
Google “pineapple” and “hare” and “Daniel Pinkwater.” Here’s one link among many—
Link: http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2012/04/20/daniel-pinkwater-on-pineapple-exam-nonsense-on-top-of-nonsense/
😎
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Focusing on the “incompetence” of testing companies is a big mistake.
Incompetence and test “errors’ can be fixed.
But the tests can’t
ETS has made billions over the decades by peddling what they know to be lies.
This is the definition of fraud and the people who work for ETS are frauds — all of them.
Don’t do business with them. Don’t associate with them either in a professional or personal capacity.
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