The prolific Peter Greene wrote two posts for New Year’s Day 2017.
This post contains a positive agenda for all those who care about education. We are all familiar with the attacks on public schools and teachers. We spend a lot of time saying NO: no to privatization, no to high-stakes testing, no to rating and ranking students based on test scores, no to evaluating teachers by test scores, no to bonus pay based on test scores, no to for-profit charters, no to public funding of religious schools.
Peter offers his list of the 9 things he wishes for.
1. Get rid of the Big Standardized tests that now rule schools.
2. Fair and equitable funding for all schools.
That’s two. Read the other 7 —and offer your own.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I wish for:
Decoupling test scores from teacher and administrator evaluation.
Getting big corporate and union money out of educational and all politics and replacing it with a defined, finite public fund.
Promulgating laws that require that 90% of all education posts – from assistant principal all the way up to Federal Secretary of Education – gave at least 15 years of public school teaching experience with diverse ad low income populations.
Mandates for class size no larger than 18 to 2 for K through 2nd grade and 21 to 1 for 3rd through 12th grade.
Dramatically far more federal tax dollars coming back to us locally with local control.
The obliteration of the power structure of theNEA, UFT, and AFT so that members can dramatically more democratically vote in and vote out Union executives, and the prevention of any majority caucuses and their loyalty oaths that obstruct true democratic n transparent union power operations.
The outlawing of all voucher systems and the limit of charter schools to be kept to 1% or lower of all schools across at all times America in any given year.
The infusion of fiction literature into early childhood education to promote a joy and creativity of imagination.
The widespread use of deconstructed Basal readers, series books, and repeated reading methods, such as the Lotta Lara method, to teach reading to children who are low on the oral-language-development and concepts-of-print spectrum.
(The tenth one is not so mentionable here. I am trying to decrease my puerile sense of humor as a New Year’s resolution . . . . )
An admission from just one billionaire/politician Ed Reformer (preferably Bill Gates) that they have been wrong about the use of testing.
The Democratic Party to purge or marginalize neo-liberals like Cory Booker and Dan Malloy.
The public to catch on to the toxic impact of TFA.
Oprah to apologize for her thoughtless promotion of Michelle Rhee.
Leading progressives like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren discover the effort to end public education is an important issue and representative of themes they champion.
Here, here!
We can achieve a broad agreement – from the far left to the far right – on the intentions underlying Peter’s 9 wishes. However, the devil sits in the details, and details is what is lacking in educational policy-making since long.
Therefore my wish #10: look at the details; it’s really not that scaring. Actually its easy when you look at the testing issue.
Tests!? What kind of tests should we dislike? All? Or only those which destroy our education? Are “standardized tests” devilish?
Since this is my special area of expertise since five decades let me try some humble clarifications:
– Not all tests are bad. Tests can be a wonderful help for improving our educational system. But they need to be valid and need to be used in the right way (more in a minute).
– Tests need to be “standardized” like a year-stick needs to be standardized. Otherwise we do not need them! Think, if every community and co9unty would select its own measure of length like they did 200 years ago!
– Probably it’s >standards-based tests< that you dislike, which is something quite different from >standardized tests<. Tests should not be built on politically invented and enforced standards. But they need to be the same for everybody.
– “Big” tests (meaning huge samples and long tests) are often misused by the test industry (which actually runs the educational systems in many countries today) to cover up the invalidity of their tests. Big is not bad but often useless and expensive.
– Small cross-sectional studies (e.g., comparing 7th with 8th grader) could tell us about the efficacy of our educational system, our teaching methods and our textbooks much more than those huge useless studies. Because we could then clearly see what works, what doesn’t, and how we can make improvements.
– Smaller but more valid tests could help us to understand what goes wrong and why.
This last point needs a little more elaboration: We can achieve more valid tests only if we abandon the Test-Theory-Church founded by Louis Leon Thurstone about 80 years ago. Its two core doctrines are (1) that a reaction to a test item (i.e., question, task) is determined >by one and only one< human disposition, namely the disposition which the test-giver wants to measure, and (2) that any random measurement error can be easily handled by repeated measurement. Both doctrines are wrong, yes, completely wrong. Thurstone may have been a good engineer but he surely was a lousy psychologist. Otherwise he would have immediately seen (1) that a single, “apparently simple” human reaction can be the result of any of several possible dispositions, and picking one is faith-based not science-based, and (2) that usually “error” is better avoided by careful test-design than by repeating invalid measurement.
His suggestion of seven possible factors may be correct or not. We do not know because this hypothesis has never been adequately tested. It has only been pseudo-tested by testing samples of people. But data which describe >samples< of people describe only the differences among them. These data do NOT (not, not, not!) describe an individual person. We should abandon this pseudo-scientific church!
Psychological measurement can do better! Only because it takes a bit more thinking and time the test industry dislikes alternatives. I am NOT speaking of alternative like “qualitative measures” or “in-depths interviews” or alike. I am speaking of hard-data producing experimental measurement of human traits. For more details see my book “How To Teach Morality” in which I describe how we can do objective and valid measurement of moral competence. Unsurprisingly, our valid tests is much shorter than main-stream standards-based (but invalid) tests.
Our measurement method can be applied to any trait — requiring only a bit of research, of course.
– Last but not least, if we do not trust students, teachers and school administrators, they do not trust us – and cheat. United States is known to educational researchers as the world champion of test cheating. Cheating takes place on all levels. Terefore, all statistics are highly questionable. So much about test-based accountability.
Bottom line: We need to start examing the theory behind bad testing to find a way out of it. Otherwise we just reinforce it with our suggestions. Let’s appoint a task force for the next five years to work out a plan for an overhaul of our educational systems, like the Finnish government did in the 1990ties, which made their school system one of the best in the world. As Peter noticed: quick shots can lead to big contradictions! Amateurs must be heard, but experts, too.
Best wishes for the new year!
Georg stated:
“I am speaking of hard-data producing experimental measurement of human traits. For more details see my book “How To Teach Morality” in which I describe how we can do objective and valid measurement of moral competence. Unsurprisingly, our valid tests is much shorter than main-stream standards-based (but invalid) tests.
Our measurement method can be applied to any trait — requiring only a bit of research, of course.”
First, I’d like to read your book, but at $30 plus shipping, I’ll have to wait until I can find a used copy unless you would like to swap books. I should have mine back from the printer in a few weeks. I can send you an electronic draft copy if you would like and then send you a hard copy when I get them. If interested (even if you’re not interested in the swap) please feel free to contact me for that electronic draft copy anyway (and anyone else that would like) at dswacker@centurytel.net . Please reference book in subject line.
Be that as it may:
Standardized tests measure nothing. Absolutely and literally measure nothing. (notwithstanding psychometrician’s proclamations to the contrary)
Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing”, unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement:
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition]
Notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”. Not a good defense strategy.
Now since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning, there is no exemplar of that standard unit and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable”?
THE TESTS MEASURE NOTHING for it is impossible to “measure” the nonobservable with a non-existing measuring device that is not calibrated against a non-existing standard unit of learning!
PURE LOGICAL INSANITY!
“Since this is my special area of expertise since five decades let me try some humble clarifications:”
Perhaps, Georg, then you can rebut/refute Noel Wilson’s condemnation of the standards and testing regime- “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700.
What part of his work is wrong, not logical, doesn’t jibe with reality?
Have you read his work? If so your thoughts, please.
Testing is rarely (if ever) free of a political purpose. There is a huge difference between evaluation and testing.
THE most important line of Peter’s post:
“No child should fear school for any reason.”
When your pedagogy instills fear into the students as the standards and testing regime does IT IS WRONG, DEAD WRONG.
Not only is it wrong for that reason but also because those malpractices allow/force the state to discriminate against many students on factors completely out of their control, i.e., home environment, first language differences, and most importantly iinnate mental capabilities. The state through it’s schools is not allowed to discriminate against students because of gender, skin pigmentation, eye color, sexual orientation and even religious beliefs which are not innately determined but drilled into children at a very early age (many times using fear as a main motivating factor also) so that those beliefs seem innate to individuals.
My wish in 2017 is that someone brings a discrimination suit against a state dept of ed over these abhorrent educational malpractices of the BS Test (Greene’s moniker, a good one at that.)
I too find it misleading to assert that measuring something that is observable and is in physical units that are verifiable [by agreed upon units of measurement] is the same as what happens with the standardized tests under discussion.
Take a human activity such as baseball. There is a wealth of data concerning all sorts of results such as how many runs a certain player has hit, or how many times said player has struck out against left- or right-handed pitchers, or how often said player has advanced someone with bunts. Numbers can actually be attached to performance. For example, a pitcher worked an entire game, striking out all the players s/he faced. Nine innings in a game, three players at bat @inning, 9 x 3 = 27. The pitcher struck out 27 batters. One can also total up the number of pitches, literally measure how fast/slow the pitches were and in what order, etc.
*Of course, even in these cases, when we predict future “performance” based on what has been done, it is like (I use an analogy I believe I got from Daniel Koretz in his 2008 book MEASURING UP: WHAT EDUCATIONAL TESTING REALLY TELLS US) driving by looking in the rear view mirror. To bring up just one inconvenient fact: what happens when that marvelous pitcher suffers a broken pitching hand because of an unforeseen accident—and never pitches as well during the rest of her/his career because of complications from the injury? In this case, the “testers” are well described by that old saw that ‘people plan—and then life happens.’
The problem with IQ tests et al. is that the “testers” use proxies for what we are really interested in. Then they compound the problems inherent in using substitutes for the real thing by more or less arbitrarily [I wonder if I should even use the modifying phrase “more or less”] attaching numbers to them.
If I may digress slightly, it took years for me to figure out just how unsubstantial the foundations of standardized testing were and are. For example, the stunning absurdity of the snappy rheephorm slogan “if you’re going to teach to the test, make it a test worth teaching to” [SAT, David Coleman, bring it on!]. So if one objects to the notion that there is some objective standard by which numbers are affixed to standardized tests, there are classic examples of the Latin phrase “non sequitur” [it doesn’t follow] as in [from an online dictionary] “[a]n inference or conclusion that does not follow from the premises or evidence” and “[a] statement that does not follow logically from what preceded it.”
Link: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/non+sequitur
The default defense is to compare standardized tests with standardized tests and roll out a plethora of numbers & stats. Mix in mathematical intimidation and obscure formulae. Attach life-changing consequences and the profit motive. Then combine with a total incomprehension of the admonition to not confuse correlation with causation, and you have—IMHO—just about the entire rationale for standardized testing.
To be concrete, just consider the matter of “cut scores”—and how there is absolutely no way whatsoever to take non-numerical human judgment out of the “equation” by which those pass/fail points are determined.
One last point. The hypocrisy of the heavyweights of corporate education reform—whatever their outward political appearance—is stunning when they are asked to apply the same suffocating mandates re high-stakes standardized tests to THEIR OWN CHILDREN (and their peers) that they impose on OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN.
See this blog, 3-23-2013, “Common Core for Commoners, Not My School!”:
[start]
This is an unintentionally hilarious story about Common Core in Tennessee. Dr. Candace McQueen has been dean of Lipscomb College’s school of education and also the state’s’s chief cheerleader for Common Core. However, she was named headmistress of private Lipscomb Academy, and guess what? She will not have the school adopt the Common Core! Go figure.
[end]
That’s the entire posting. The thread is well worth reading.
This from someone who, quite “literally” and not “symbolically” [to highlight rheephorm’s Trump-like rhetoric] understood precisely what kind of a test-to-punish regimen she was peddling.
‘Nuff said. Good discussion. Thanks to all.
😎
Thanks to you KTA, on another well thought out and stated post!!
I like Greene’s suggestion that we reform from the bottom up rather than the top down. The only successful method for reform must come from the people who must buy into the idea of the reform. If you want me to teach something or use a particular method, you must not only tell me about it, you must also sell me on its worth. No system will be successful unless that system gets complete buy-in from the players. This includes teachers, parents, students, and community.
Note that the reality of this makes education naturally conservative in the sense that that word implies unchanging (modern definitions of conservative are self serving). It is really hard to change everybody in any direction. This can be frustrating. Still, moving attitudes is hard work. To suggest otherwise is to misrepresent reality.