Andy Jones is a high school language arts teacher in Hawaii. The public school teachers in Hawaii have been energetic in stopping the worst extremes of the Race to the Top grant that the state received. This past spring, Hawaii dropped the test-based teacher evaluation that Race to the Top had forced on the state as a condition of winning RTTT funds. The money was all gone, and so was this bad idea.
Andy knows the history of American education, the cycles of criticism that follow one another, and he believes that the new federal law will give the state the ability to chart a better course than the one imposed by the Bush-Obama agenda of test and punish. I regret to say that his article is behind a pay wall, but I will share with you what he shared with me. In this time of doom-and-gloom, it is great to hear an optimistic forecast!
Andy writes:
Alarm, overhaul, stagnation, denial, recognition. Repeat ad infinitum.
Students of educational history will recognize in these five words the cycle that has defined American school culture for decades.
Thirty-three years ago, the “A Nation at Risk” report rang the alarm of educational decline. Its clarion call for improved public education resounded for the next generation and led eventually to initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top – programs that inaugurated sweeping, possibly irreversible changes to schools and school communities across the country.
A consensus has now emerged that these changes have led to dismal failure — a consensus signaled by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which emphatically seeks to reverse the damage done, in part by giving states back the freedom to define and enact their own vision of 21st-century education.
On the heels of ESSA and the widespread discussion it has initiated, the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) has released a report that may prove as decisive as “A Nation at Risk.”
The title — “No Time to Lose: How to Build a World-Class Education System State by State” — is misleading in that it seems to announce a mere repeat of the alarmist tone of the “Nation” report, perhaps to be followed by a new round of dubious policy suggestions from non-educators.
However, in what must come as a welcome shock to educators accustomed to routine governmental denial of policy failure, “No Time to Lose” fully acknowledges the mistakes of the past 15 years and seconds the sustained criticisms of prominent researchers such as Diane Ravitch and Pasi Sahlberg. These and many others have analyzed the extensive Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reports on international education and have concluded that the misguided “reforms” of the past years have had an overwhelmingly negative impact on American schools, leading to ever further decline internationally.
They have also highlighted an additional, sinister aspect of these “reforms,” which have involved the gradual removal of educational decisions from the purview of teachers and educators and the corresponding enrichment of educa- tional corporations profiting from the proliferation of mediocre materials and programs that schools are forced to use.
We are fortunate to be living in a state led by a governor who recognizes what is at stake and who has created a robust task force that is working to establish grassroots consensus as to what is best for Hawaii schools and the students they serve.
We are also fortunate to have an increasingly dynamic teachers union that has sponsored a teacher- written report, “Schools Our Keiki Deserve,” which echoes the advice of our top educational researchers as well as the urgent tone of “No Time to Lose.”
Hawaii Department of Education (DOE) officials have shown signs recently that they are beginning to veer away from the pattern of denial that for years has characterized state and district education departments across the country. They have, for instance, conceded the unhealthy aspects of standardized testing, and they have also begun to embrace the idea of whole-child education as practiced in the world’s top-performing school systems.
As the DOE continues revising the Strategic Plan which will guide Hawaii education over the course of the coming years, teachers and citizens should encourage DOE officials to fully embrace the sobering findings of “No Time to Lose,” the tremendous energy and wealth of ideas emerging from Gov. David Ige’s task force, and the “Schools Our Keiki Deserve” report.
The report outlines a plan that is fully in accordance with the best educational research — one that can and should be integrated into the blueprint of the document that will determine much of what happens in our schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Any evaluation scheme using student test scores is invalid on the face of it as the test was/is designed to assess student learning and not teacher effectiveness.
Be that as it may, Noel Wilson in the most important educational writing of the last half century has proven the COMPLETE INVALIDITIES due to all of the onto-epistemological errors and falsehoods and psychometric fudging involved in standards and standardized testing regimes in his never refuted nor rebutted 1997 dissertation “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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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