We now know that the national convention of the NAACP endorsed a strong resolution opposing the expansion of charter schools, saying that they foster segregation, target communities of color, remove community and parent voice, and impose harsh discipline.
But what do civil rights groups think about testing?
Our reader Laura Chapman wrote about this question.
She wrote:
Before ESSA was passed, about 30 members of the 200 member of the “Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights” lobbied Congress and USDE to continue the use of use of disaggregated test scores as if this was the only “objective” way to identify disparities in education. NAACP, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., participated in this effort.
Of course, the charter industry exploits these disaggregated measures to justify their test-centric schools and to promise they can do better than public schools in providing ”high quality seats” in struggling urban districts.
In April of 2016, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights sent a letter to John King requesting that these features of ESSA not be compromised in the guidance letters he might issue to states.
http://www.civilrights.org/advocacy/letters/2016/ESSA-implementation-framework.html
Also in April, the “Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights” published a survey of African American and Latino parents on what they want from schools. The survey promotion had this headline and lead-in:
“Parents: Schools Not Preparing Students of Color for Future.” http://www.colorlines.com/articles/parents-schools-not-preparing-students-color-future
The survey was conducted by Anzalone, Liszt, Grove Research “a public opinion research firm specializing in message development and strategic consulting. For nearly 20 years, we have helped clients ranging from President Obama, to EMILY’S List, to Microsoft achieve their goals.”
The Survey promotion continued “From lack of funding to low expectations, a new survey finds that Black and Latino parents don’t trust public schools to help their kids succeed.”
Given this lead-in, I thought the survey might deal with “trust in public schools.” Not so. In fact we do not know much about the survey other than the published methodology does not meet minimal standards for research: For example, we do not know if the parents who participated in the survey by landline or mobile phone had children in public, charter, or parochial schools. We do know that the 400 African American and 400 Latino participants lived in Chicago or in Philadelphia. Perhaps Julian can discern the messaging function of the survey get the full survey not just the survey, and discern why the headlines were framed around “trust in public schools.”
https://www.dropbox.com/s/99tklsqp6aykxgk/New Education Majority poll summary.pdf?dl=0
My impression is that this is a push poll created to support a messaging campaign. I note, for example, that the “Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights” received $878,338 in October 2015 from the Gates Foundation ”to make the national education policy conversation more reflective and inclusive of a civil rights framework of equity and access by including more diverse voices and perspectives.” That is Gates-speak for promoting access to charter schools.
The Gates Foundation has a sure-fire method of winning hearts and minds.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
One of the lowest expectations that a school can have is “higher test scores” on poorly constructed, math and ELA exams. This is especially true when it is the only academic expectation.
One of the lowest expectations that a school can have for poor, minority children is the belief that they are incapable of normal, civilized behavior in the absence of no-excuses, mouth bubble, eye tracking, lock-step discipline practices.
One of the lowest expectations that a school can have is when its funders and promoters would never dream of sending their own children there.
100% correct with “One of the lowest expectations that a school can have is “higher test scores” on poorly constructed, math and ELA exams.”
And the rest of the post!
Ed reformers believe kids who opt out are “low performers” anyway:
Marianne Lombardo @marianne_dfer Jul 29
@PCunningham57 ?? Opt outers tended to score at Levels 1 & 2 in 2015.
It’s part of their elaborate mind-reading process, where they attribute all kinds of bad motives to certain parents.
It seems like it would have been easier to just explain the latest ed reform testing scheme to parents and leave out the scolding and smears. Didn’t Gates pay these people tens of millions of dollars to promote testing?
They decided to go with the “deliver another stern lecture to the under-achieving public” strategy again?
An aside to Chiara…after watching the morning shows today, do you think that Kasich might speak out against in Trump in Ohio and influence a Blue vote???? Please feel free to respond at
joiningforces4ed@aol.com
I rely on your wisdom and research for Ohio insights.
The marketing slogan is now “say yes to the test”. Lest anyone accuse ed reformers of completely ignoring kids in public schools unless it’s “testing season” they made the slogan center on testing. Just so we’re all clear what the top priority is- data collection.
I don’t know what Gates paid for that slogan, but I would suggest MAYBE he paid too much.
“Say yes to the test” doesn’t even RHYME 🙂
Just what we need, another mindless slogan from “reformers.”
I thought good poetry didn’t have to rhyme.
We need an English teacher. It may qualify as assonance.
Stolen from “Say Yes to the Dress” i.e. an expensive wedding dress.
As a retired ESL teacher, I can recall when ELLs in New York started to have unreasonable testing demands on language minority students. I recall one administrator stating that “this rule has been made so we won’t forget these students.” I remember thinking that to my knowledge, these students were getting what they need, making good progress, and they have never been “forgotten.” This time period was at the start of NCLB, and the changes assumed teachers were feckless creatures that ignored students that didn’t fit the mold. The solution was to subject students to an unreasonable over testing regimen. All this response does is to frustrate ELLs and helps to make them feel inadequate. This has nothing to do with civil rights. If anything, it discourages students that feel overwhelmed from doing their best. If we raise the bar to an unreasonable height, it will discourage many ELLS or disabled students from even trying. This is a counterproductive response to “civil rights.”
Your words capture exactly what I experienced while employed at a 90% non-white school. Outside forces presumed the unspoken theory that disconnected dominant culture teachers were “feckless creatures” set to ignore their many non-White kids who didn’t fit the dominant culture mold, and the solution was “to subject students to an unreasonable over testing” — which then overwhelmed and frustrated our non-dominant culture students and made them feel inadequate. This counterproductive “civil rights” testing cycle continues today. http://www.ciedieaech.wordpress.com/2015/10/12/dont-do-me-that
Why any group, much less the NAACP, would support standardized testing is way beyond my comprehension abilities. It has been know since the advent of standardized testing that the process leaves more than a little to be desired. In fact Wilson has shown that the whole process of developing educational standards and standardized testing is so fraught with onto-epistemological errors and falsehoods and psychometric fudging that any results are completely invalid. Or as I say meaningless mental masturbation.
To understand why, read and comprehend Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted total destruction of those educational malpractices in “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
The appendix to the report is well worth looking at, not just their summary.
The appendix shows that for both Black and Latino parents, “students do well on state tests” is the LEAST important quality of a great school, out of 10 choices.
“The school uses yearly testing to help parents and teachers tell how well children are doing” rates slightly higher – 7th out of 10.
But what school only tests “yearly”? They didn’t even specify “state standardized tests” – just “testing.”
They don’t seem to have asked about, “The school uses state standardized tests to determine which teachers are worth keeping.”
They also didn’t try, “The state uses test scores to determine whether or not to close the school.”
alainjehlen
I am glad you looked at the Appendix. I see these “push surveys” often with headlines that reveal the agenda, a methodology that is unsound for making generalizations, and so on. Peter Hart is another company that churns out surveys like this one. The techniques are not new but the distribution is wider than ever before.
We have management by tests and surveys, BOTH BAD IDEAS. When will this insanity stop? Answer: not with the.current non-leaders in office and the DFERS and the GOP. Follow the $$$$$.
“…push poll created to support a messaging campaign. ”
Great terminology! We should use it to shoot down fake stats in one sentence.