The superintendent of schools in Madison, Connecticut, is Tom Scarice. He is already on the honor roll of this blog because he speaks out for good education, not corporate reform.
In this interview, he is clear about what schools should do.
This is the opening of a wonderful interview:
CTViewpoints: Assuming for a moment that these scores are meaningful, (not everyone thinks so) shouldn’t we be outraged and alarmed that only about half our children are making the grade?
Scarice: Perhaps the biggest problem is that we’re having the wrong conversation, from our current presidential candidates right down through education advocates, bureaucrats, etc.
I believe that chasing test scores is not only fool’s gold, but it will clearly not prepare our kids for the world they will enter when they leave our K-12 schools. In fact, chasing test scores, especially invalid ones like the SBAC, prepares kids for a completely different era, one that vanished decades ago. Automation, artificial intelligence, robotics, and big data will continue to transform the job market, leaving millions without utility, unless they are prepared to take on the jobs that machines cannot perform.
This reality, and the future problems our children will face, necessitates combining rich academic content with the development of deep analytical and critical thinking, and perhaps more importantly, boundless divergent and creative thinking. Students also need authentic experience in developing collective intelligence, learning from and working with others.
No one works alone. Perhaps most importantly, students need to apply their learning to novel situations. There is not one stitch of usefulness in the SBAC with regards to giving us this information — the most important information — on student performance in these essential capacities. In fact, the part of the SBAC intended to measure application of learning was removed. Yet the scores erroneously take center stage in assessing school quality.
There isn’t one piece of reputable research indicating that SBAC measures anything other than maybe family wealth. In fact, CT State Department of Education literature, referred to as the SBAC “Interpretive Guide,” states that, “characterizing a student’s achievement solely in terms of falling in one of four categories is an oversimplification.” Essentially, the “box score” of test scores that gets published every August lacks meaning and usefulness, but, most importantly, it lacks validity.
Yet, million dollar decisions are made based on those scores, and educators around the state sadly get wrapped around the “test score axle,” compelled to chase higher scores, trapped in a flawed system.
However, there is one thing that the SBAC “box scores” do provide, something that the public has an insatiable appetite for, and that is misleading rankings, sorting, charts, winners/losers, top ten lists, etc.
What we should be outraged and alarmed about is the fact that states are participating in this testing consortium, voluntarily and willingly, spending millions of dollars for meaningless tests, the results of which are purported to gauge student learning and – stunningly – misused to assess teacher competence and school quality, which this test, or any test, simply cannot do.
The misuse of test scores has stained a generation of public education by conflating our goals with our measures and distorting the teaching and learning of millions of children.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The logic of reform is using test scores to improve test scores.
I now watch as my little dog begins chasing his tail in circle.
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It takes more for people to make it in the real world than test scores. Scarice is on the right track when he says that it is more important for people to learn how to adapt and solve problems creatively than work to get a test score, a static entity in an ever changing world. Our preoccupation scores is more a product of privatization than any real attempt to improve anything. Testing does not improve programs. Tests only rank and rate. It is not cynical to note that testing has become the vehicle of privatization. When those bottom students are over to state or city control, and policymakers make deals with corporations to supply them with a steady revenue stream. Only these are American students that should be entitled to a free public education, not some corporate concoction. This is injustice!
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The pursuit of test scores is FOOL’S GOLD…
Subtle translation:
The “currency” of a FOOL is test scores.
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This is the world envisioned by Bill Gates and the plague called common core. It involves the systematic destruction of the world we know to one where people are assigned tasks and live in the 21st century of robotics. Only, now they will be sorted and categorized in the same way that involve winners and always a bottom 10% or so. Our children will be participants in his world version of Hunger Games…wher everything is based on competition, stacking, and ranking, while the wealthy will control the jobs, the resources, and the outputs.
The clearest and most efficient way toward this macabre goal is to first destroy the status quo in public education…thus the attacks against our schools and our educators. The first group labeled for this inhumane shift must be the children, because the hopes ar that when the older generations pass, the wealthy will have trained our younger generation for modern day serfdom…
The processes of scoring are being used in a perverse way to strip away, albeit gradually, the gains in freedom that humans have won since the Enlightenment and American Revolution.
The idea that “all men are created free” will fade and eventually disappear, and be massaged into a college and career idea that all humans have the right to work hard for the state.
“Row well, number 41…row well”.
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Scarice should write a book. Bouncing off mounting current evidence that our ed reforms are based on the obsolete assembly-line model, he engages a much-needed dialog on what education should look like in our era.
As a teacher of foreign language for early beginners: the thoughts expressed in the interview on learning objectives and methods can be applied directly to learning a second language. Objectives and assessments which focus on easily-measured short-term output result in inputs like dialogs to be memorized and repeated, lists of words to be translated, verb conjugations to be memorized and filled into cloze grammar exercises. All left-brain activities, as James J Asher would say, and unrelated to how humans learn to speak languages.
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I do not know of a single effort to establish the so-called “predictive validity” of school tests through rigorous empirical research. Does anyone? Since these tests are mostly invalid they will not show any positive results unless when correlated with the same or similar tests, but not when correlated with real-life achivements.
As I pointed out previously, there are better alternatives to test design and scoring as well as to test use, namely for measuring the efficacy of teaching methods, text books and curriculum design.
Georg Lind
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I love when people articulate so well as a model of how we can communicate the issue. Fool’s Gold is perfect.
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