This item appeared in politico.com for New York, but it is not posted online, so no link.
Betty Rosa, chancellor of the state Board of Regents, was elected with the help of the New York state opt out leaders.
By Keshia Clukey
09/12/2016 02:39 PM EDT
State Board of Regents Chancellor Betty Rosa Monday called for New York State to be a national leader in taking a stand against the testing of English language learners and students with disabilities who are not ready to take the exams.
“I want us to take a super leadership role in our waiver,” Rosa said at the Regents meeting. The state has continued to apply for a federal testing waiver, but the request has yet to be granted.
“Not just children with disabilities, but with the English language learners, we know before they even take a test that they cannot,” Rosa said. “They don’t have [the] language proficiency to demonstrate their success story.”
Regents board member Roger Tilles agreed and said that former state Education Commissioner John King Jr. had signed on and sent the request for the federal testing waiver during his time in New York, but now as U.S. secretary of education has the power to act and has yet to act on it.
With the low proficiency rate of English language learners on the state exams, Regents board member Luis Reyes said, it could be taken up as a civil rights violation.
“Testing children who are recently arrived is child abuse, not to say bad education law or bad education policy,” he said.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Wondering where civil rights leaders come down on this one. Same for the Gates Foundation. And the Fordham Institution.
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Testing vast numbers of non-ELL or non-SWD is also child abuse. And that is exactly what King, Tisch and Duncan have been doing for the last 5 years. Commissioner King and Chancellor Tisch admitted that the KNEW and fully expected the huge drop in proficiency levels on 3-8 tests that would result back in 201x, but gave the exams anyways. Their goal was clearly to prove how poor public school teachers were doing to justify their attacks and impose charter schools as their one and only real solution. Which they aren’t. They have been literally beating up kids that teachers and administrators and researchers ALREADY know are not able to meet the standards under the new exams. I’m with Regent Reyes- They should all be arrested or sued for malfeasance. Is there any wonder kids and parents are all losing their motivation? For some bizarre reason, the wrong-headed Triumvirate of King/Tisch/Duncan has sold the idea that convincing 2/3rds of kids and parents that they are “Not Proficient.” How well would any of you do in your jobs if 2/3rds of you were guaranteed an Unsatisfactory job evaluation every year, regardless of your effort? Think that business would survive very long? Now picture that feeling if you were 8 or 9 years old….
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The over and misguided testing of both ELLs and classified students may very well become a civil rights case. We have other ways of assessing these students as all the big standardized test does is demoralize vulnerable children and waste their time.
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How does one define “who are not ready”? What does not ready mean when looking at ELL and students with disabilities?
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I would ask the reverse… Shouldn’t we rely on their teachers to decide when they ARE ready? Our biggest problem today is that no one believes teachers are the people that know best what students need and are ready and able to do next. We’re blaming the doctor instead of the disease. How’s that working out for everybody so far?
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Exactly!
In the sense that is is the classroom teacher that best knows the student’s capabilities.
At the same time, NO STUDENT should be subjected to any invalid standardized test. And yes, all standardized tests are filled with onto-epistemological errors and falsehoods and psychometric fudging that render using them and any results COMPLETELY INVALID. See post below!
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The question of being ready is a complex one. As a retired ESL teacher, I can tell you that ELLs in New York used to be given a three year exemption before they were required to take standardized tests, In the interim they were given a test called the NYSESLAT, designed to measure understanding, speaking, reading and writing in English. It is pointless to administer an academic test in English to recently arrived students that are very limited in English. It serves no purpose other than to make them feel terrible.
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It’s about time this was done. As an ESL Teacher of more than 40 years I have been advocating for this for many years In the past schools had used the Lab Ronnie as a screening device. Less than 40% on the lab Report and you could be exempt from exams!!!it meant you were not yet reading!!! It is child abuse to make a student sit through an exam when they can’t read !!!!
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It’s child abuse to make any student sit through any standardized test (other than one meant as a diagnostic tool to identify a disability, and there are still major problems with that).
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Perhaps the Civil Rights Issue can address the fact that ELLs in NY are subject to quadruple the amount of testing as their monolingual peers. Not only do they have to take the bogus ELA test, but they also have to take the ridiculously flawed NYSESLAT exam which is a four part test. That’s four days of additional testing for ELLs ONLY. Couple the laughable NYSESLAT with the poorly thought out newly implemented part 154 policy which expects ELLs to magically acquire language while also learning content and you have a perfect storm of a lawsuit.
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When I retired from NYS, I counted twenty-eight mornings of missed instructional days due to the ridiculous amount of over testing on ELLs. It was wasteful and demoralizing.
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Love her well put about time some one listened
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When a process, standards and standardized testing, is so onto-epistemologically bankrupt no student should be subjected to it.
Noel Wilson has shown us all the onto-epistemological errors and falsehoods and all the psychometric fudging that render the whole standards and testing malpractices as COMPLETELY INVALID. Not to mention, should the state be in the business of discriminating against some citizens through these malpractices? Is discrimination via innate characteristics of the persons mental abilities/capabilities any different than discrimination via skin pigmentation, gender and/or sexual orientation in the harms that it causes? NO!
To understand all those errors, falsehoods, psychometric fudgings involved in these nefarious malpractices read and comprehend Noel Wilson’s never refuted not rebutted “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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And re the numbers & stats generated by standardized tests, I take this as my cue to pipe in with a little Banesh Hoffman from his THE TYRANNY OF TESTING (2003 republication of the 1964 edition of the 1962 original, p. 143-144):
[start]
A person who uses statistics does not thereby automatically become a scientist, any more than a person who uses a stethoscope automatically becomes a doctor. Nor is an activity necessarily scientific just because statistics are used in it.
The most important thing to understand about reliance on statistics in a field such as testing is that such reliance warps perspective. The person who holds that subjective judgment and opinion are suspect and decides that only statistics can provide the objectivity and relative certainty that he seeks, begins by unconsciously ignoring, and ends by consciously deriding, whatever can not be given a numerical measure or label. His sense of values becomes distorted. He comes to believe that whatever is non-numerical is inconsequential. He can not serve two masters. If he worships statistics he will simplify, fractionalize, distort, and cheapen in order to force things into a numerical mold.
The multiple-choice tester who meets criticisms by merely citing test statistics shows either his contempt for the intelligence of his readers or else his personal lack of concern for the non-numerical aspects of testing, importantly among them the deleterious effects his test procedure have on education.
[end]
Read this posting in conjunction with another of today’s, “Texas Denies Special Education Service to Save Money.” As I see it, whether it involves VAM or SLOs, or setting a cap on SpecEd funding, the cut-offs and maximums and minimums can’t stand up to scrutiny because they are arbitrary and serve ends which have nothing to do with providing either a genuine learning/teaching environment or the services actually required by living breathing human beings.
Viewed from another perspective, there is a very decided rheephorm POV/MO regarding learning/teaching/providing appropriate services, except that it is almost always unstated and implicit—
Ferociously pursue any and every means fair and foul to (1), maximize ROI and (2), create and maintain a two-tiered education system that favors the advantaged few and disadvantages the vast majority. Perhaps some will disagree but I would add a third: the owner of this blog has occasionally referred to the heavyweights of rheephorm as indulging in their passion for “vanity projects.” For the shot callers and chief enforcers of corporate education reform, I think this is just as important (if not more so sometimes) than the first two. In other words, they are sincerely passionate about indulging in the beat down of a “better education for all.”
A tip of the hat, again, as a thank you to Noel Wilson and to Duane Swacker.
😎
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I finally acquired and read Hoffman’s work a month or so ago. Cogent and regnant analysis for then (50 years ago) and for now!!
“A person who uses statistics does not thereby automatically become a scientist, any more than a person who uses a stethoscope automatically becomes a doctor.”
Am currently reading a fairly recent (2010) book “Proofiness: How You’re Being Fooled by the Numbers” by Charles Seife. Needless to say he discusses what Hoffman (quoted) had said back when I was 9 years old. Another spot on analysis which all should read.
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Duane Swacker: I too have heard of the Seife book.
Will take your comment as an encouragement to get my own copy.
Thank you again for your comments.
😎
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I think my used copy was like a buck or so plus shipping.
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Whereas I agree that testing these students is an act of repression, and damaging to their development as human beings, I also feel the same about any other student. NY simply wants to ‘raise it’s scores’ to ‘prove’ it provides a ‘great’ education. What better way than to eliminate those who will probably ‘perform’ poorly?
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It’s about time! Go NY, go! Subjecting ELLs to regular standardized testing is absurd. We know before they even bubble in their names that they will be “low proficiency,” because that’s kind of the definition of being an ELL. If they were scoring high on regular tests, then they wouldn’t be ELLs anymore. This is a good start, although I’m with the others in these comments who would be happy to see standardized testing done away with completely.
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Amen! I am required to test my 2nd and 3rd grade IEP students who read below level, some way below level, with the MAP test three times a year. Now, MAP has a very nice audio format for K-3rd and I believe were in the process of making it computer adaptive. However, a district must purchase a license. My district (Richmond City Public Schools) purchases licenses of all kinds but refuse to buy this one. And I refuse to read it to kids who are not ready.
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In NY, the testing sham has gone haywire – taxpayers currently fund standardized testing that doesn’t deliver help and computer-formulated teacher evaluation rankings derived from the scores. This evaluation system was found “arbitrary and capricious” in court, but not rescinded. Instead, a four year moratorium ensure the rankings will carry no consequences, begging the question – why continue to waste millions of dollars on it?
Aha. This is where the federal and state governments show naked corruption, ignoring not only established research and developmental science, but the will of parents and the testimony of the best, most experienced practitioners in education. Who are they listening to? A handful of billionaires and hedge fund managers with an army of hirelings who generate PR instead of research, and leverage key backroom ties to get the heads of unions and heads of civil rights organizations to push market-based quotas into education.
Our districts are forced through economic blackmail to test school children. Promised support for low achievers never comes. So the claim the tests provide valuable data is disproven by 15 years of evidence and continuing to waste precious time and tax dollars. Schools lose out on teachers, school repairs and counselors as we fund testing, and insultingly, we fund government PR too, with one-sided arguments trying to convince parents that the testing isn’t what we are see with our own eyes.
This ELL/SWD waiver should point out that policymakers never considered the diversity of student test-takers. The ELLs and SWDs are most directly hurt by the tests, but are only the tip of the iceberg. These particular tests shouldn’t be administered to anyone. High performing districts are slowed and inconvenienced – low performing districts never see the supports the testing promises. Thus, the notion to standardize all schools was wrong from the start, and has proven so ham-handedly oversimplified, that the diverse needs of children get ignored and steamrolled, hurting kids more than they help.
Nothing can change until campaign finance reform and legal payola is greatly curtailed. Wealthy social engineers have politicians and media bought with the revolving door spinning away as years and years of sustained protest and superior evidence falls on deaf ears. We waste a lot of time continually talking about evidence when the biggest problem is the flow of money from rich non-educators into the education decision making sphere.
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I am a Special Education Teacher and there are a cluster of special situations that need to be looked into… my students have mental health issues and the goal of the program is quick turn around and return back to their home districts. I have most students for 3-6 months or less. They return to school or are hospitalized. Then I am testing a completely different group at the end. I may have 2 students take a test one I may have had for a month or so, they get tested they fail the other passes and it is an unfair test for them and it drops my slo to 50% so they get unfairly tested and I would be labeled ineffective by the state. Also my students are there for depression and debilitating anxiety… most have extreme test anxiety. So at my site in a clinic we have students test for 3-4.5 hours each test and they break down may never pass and the assessment is invalid for both them and me. I would love to be on a committee to discuss Special Education and Assessment. This is not the only case there are other similar situations in other programming as well.
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