Many readers are asking the same question: Why isn’t the American Psychological Association speaking out about the misuse of standardized testing? Where are the professors who teach about testing? Why are they silent when children as young as 8 are subjected to hours of testing? Why are they silent when children in middle school are compelled to sit through tests that last longer than college admission tests? Why are they not defending their own standards for the appropriate use of tests? Is their silence a sign of complicity or indifference?
Testing expert Fred Smith wrote in a comment here:
“Not only should the American Psychological Association be petitioning against these exams–but APA should be joined by the National Council on Measurement in Education and the American Educational Research Association in condemning the NYS tests, their publisher and misusers.
“The three organizations jointly set forth and revise the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. They deal with fundamental matters of “validity, reliability, test development and administration, score comparability and supporting documentation.”
“It serves no one well when they don’t speak out against testing malpractice and abuse. I have yet to hear them comment on how statewide testing programs under NCLB, Common Core and ESSA have failed to meet their Standards. Unlike the American Statistical Association, which has stepped in to sharply and decisively repudiate the Value-Added Model for evaluating teachers, these three professional organizations have stayed above the fray.
“One area in which they should have critiqued the New York State Testing Program is the withholding of complete and timely technical data by which independent reviewers can judge the quality of the ELA and math tests. This opens into questions concerning the lack of transparency about the exams. But there is much to be questioned regarding test development and administration.
“Finally, where are the college and university professors who specialize in the field of tests and measurements? They must know that what’s going on is wrong. Why haven’t they joined forces to speak out against ill-conceived and damaging state testing programs?”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
My guess is that they don’t want to anger Gate$, Broad, Walton & Company, who probably provide a majority of their funding. Only logical explanation. Or is that too cynical?
No, it’s not too cynical. I had the same thought.
Money talks. 😔
pfh64 Not entirely cynical, especially when you consider that grant-seeking and grant-making for faculty research in public universities is being curtailed by Governors who don’t care about evidence and think research is a waste of faculty time that should be devoted to teaching
In public and private universities, and among other research oriented organizations (non-profit and for-profit), test scores are too often regarded as necessary and sufficient for measuring achievement. Test scores are also available on the cheap, especially in reading and math, so we get research that is truncated in scope and subtlety as the norm.
Fred Smith has put out a call for action. It is on the mark. The unethical use of test scores should not be condoned by the academics and professionals in testing. If protests will help, show up at the conferences of the “professional associations” and demand action.
Good question! Follow the $$$$$.
Same reason the Unions are not Speaking out Union Silence is one of the most disappointing and frustrating aspects of the last 15 years of Union membership. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mercedes-schneider/neas-lily-eskelsen-garcia_b_7313764.html
Gates gave a keynote in which he said, “Without measurement, there is no pressure for improvement.”’Forget learning for learning’s sake. External pressure is required, says expert Gates. He also urged legislators to lift caps on charter schools.
And of course, Gates did not want to miss an opportunity to plug CCSS as a hub for “measurable” reform.”
The National Association of School Psychologists [NASP] has also been tragically silent on these issues as students and teachers are further objectified and subjected to psychometrically flawed measures that are not made available for independent verification. Long past time to speak up!
How many of you readers/commentators here have read those standards?
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My bet is less than a handful.
If I may suggest a little reading about invalidity in those standards:
From “A Little Less than Valid” by Noel Wilson:
To the extent that these categorisations are accurate or valid at an individual level [and they are not], these decisions may be both ethically acceptable to the decision makers, and rationally and emotionally acceptable to the test takers and their advocates. They accept the judgments of their society regarding their mental or emotional capabilities. But to the extent that such categorisations are invalid [which they are], they must be deemed unacceptable to all concerned.
Further, to the extent that this invalidity is hidden or denied, they are all involved in a culture of symbolic violence. This is violence related to the meaning of the categorisation event where, firstly, the real source of violation, the state or educational institution that controls the meanings of the categorisations, are disguised, and the authority appears to come from another source, in this case from professional opinion backed by scientific research. If you do not believe this, then consider that no matter how high the status of an educator, his voice is unheard unless he belongs to the relevant institution [APA, AERA or NCME].
And finally a symbolically violent event is one in which what is manifestly unjust is asserted to be fair and just [as all the standardized tests claim to be]. In the case of testing, where massive errors and thus miscategorisations are suppressed, scores and categorisations are given with no hint of their large invalidity components. It is significant that in the chapter on Rights and responsibilities of test users, considerable attention is given to the responsibility of the test taker not to cheat. Fair enough. But where is the balancing responsibility of the test user [the institution giving the test] not to cheat, not to pretend that a test event has accuracy vastly exceeding technical or social reality? Indeed where is the indication to the test taker of any inaccuracy at all, except possibly arithmetic additions? [my additions]
A Little Less than Valid: An Essay Review
Click to access v10n5.pdf
My guess is the purpose of the standard in this case is as a fig leaf to cover up their nakedness.
You don’t need to know anything at all about testing to know that subjecting young children to hours of what amounts to torture is not a good idea.
Some of these so called professional organizations have lost all touch with common sense and even reality — to say nothing of human decency.
Hear, hear!
Yes, Duane, I read them years ago. But then, I was a psych major before I switched over to special education, and I have kept up with the field.
Anybody who has studied statistics would look with an extremely jaundiced eye at the validity (or more accurately, the invalidity) of those standards.
“APA Consistency”
When waterboard was used
The APA approved
When children are abused
The APA’s unmoved
The American Psychological Association is too busy assisting with the torture of detainees. Don’t look to them for anything moral.
Now now Dienne
That’s all water over …. I mean under the board.
That’s all water through the towel!
I absolutely agree! I don’t think standardized tests achieve much of anything. For many students, it’s an anxiety-riden, lengthy, and boring process that most spend thinking they’d rather be elsewhere. As a college student myself, I know I found myself wondering numerous times when I was forced to take those tests in school how they could possibly be useful. I know they didn’t reflect my best work because I was nervous. One test they used to make us take, the STAR test, was a state test just to make the school money based on how well you could do, so they wasted valuable school time that they could’ve spent helping us on things that we would’ve needed later on, such as grammar or sentence structuring, but instead they prepped us for this test that could benefit them as a school, and pressured us to do well. These tests are pointless, and achieve nothing for the student. They’re a waste of valuable class time, and they should be pushed against to be rid of.
I first realized that the professors were doing the bidding of their benefactors when a noted university did a study on the same subject (charter schools) and came out with completely different conclusions. When I did some investigation I found that the grants came from people with totally different views on the subject. Sadly, we are now in a place where the oligarchs are affecting our great universities and our media. Perhaps it’s always been this way to some degree but it’s really bad now.
You should also look with a skeptical eye at any “scientific” studies regarding the efficacy of pharmaceuticals and other medical studies that are funded by pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology companies, and other medical companies.
Be prepared for more and more shaky research if the current administration gets its way and cuts funding for the NIH and NSF, which have been giving a lot of grant money to basic research. The less NIH and NSF funding is available, the more researchers are going to depend upon money from for-profit companies. And this will not end well.
This will be TMI, but is an example of how good pharmaceutical research data gets buried.
I lost my eldest son to treatment for chronic pain syndromes (in his case, a rare joint/organ arthritis called Reiter’s, that was triggered by viruses at age 3, eventually compounded [as immune system raced into overdrive] by ankylosing spondylitis, interstitial cysitis, & fibromyalgia).
The advent of the pain mgt field in ’90’s was a blessing, & extended his ability to function for yrs. Yet they erred finally, in trying to switch him from high opiod dose (which was not efficacious) to methadone (which might have worked had they known precisely how to do it).
After he died, I pointed the pain mgr to a small study suggesting that the transition from hi-opiod-dose to methadone is fraught w/difficulty, particularly in the 1st 3 days, especially in transiting from IV to pills [precisely when my 23-yo son died from SFCA (sudden fatal cardiac arrest)]. The doc had not seen the study. Partly of course, because it was small– but mostly because of the problem suggested by the study: due to fed focus on heroin et al drug addiction, the statistics for pharmacological treatment of chronic pain are often subsumed into stats for drug addiction. Where the ME perceives methadone overdose, regardless of specific patient info, the stat gets buried as a ‘drug death’.
Bethree,
I am sorry for your loss.
Bethree, I am so very, very sorry about your son.
Thanks Diane. His thirtieth birthday would have been April 10.
I should have clarified in my post that he died in hospital under treatment, so there was ME/physician dialog, & his particular ‘stat’ was ‘unknown causes’, w/a note about the methadone. So his data might be unearthed in a similar study today. Study’s thrust was to alert the med community & call for better data collection & more studies– careful interpretation suggested there were far higher risks than realized in transitioning to methadone for chronic pain, hidden by lumping these death stats in w/addiction/ OD stats. The study has gotten easier to find on google search & there are now some related papers, so there’s progress.
‘Unknown causes’ because you can’t ‘see’ atrial fib/SFCA in an autopsy so technically can’t declare it– you’d have to be hitched to an EKG during the incident to prove it. Chronic pain mgt is a relatively new field, & docs did best they could. But during the experience of raising a kid w/multiple illnesses, I found that pharma studies, med protocols, feedback data are heavily skewed toward pharma profits, & the pain-mgt field is saddled w/the extra burden of untoward DEA attitudes/ procedures. Can’t help thinking that a non-profit-based healthcare sys, combined w/a med rather than criminalized approach to clinical pain mgt would have put us far ahead of this particular 8-ball.
Bethree, you are correct about the pharmaceutical industry funded studies, as well as those they do in house, being designed to make them money. They don’t tend to fund studies that don’t promise to “pay off” for them in the relatively short term. They essentially do not do basic research because that is a long, long term thing. In fact, they depend upon the basic research being done by NIH researchers and by scientists at universities and other research institutions that are funded by NIH and other government grants. The research is published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and the drug companies get to use this research for free.
And as for the DEA, yes, their heavy-handed approach has made a lot of physicians almost afraid (or at least reluctant) to prescribe the pain-management drugs that would be sufficient to, well, manage long-term pain, and has made many clinicians reluctant to do studies about pain management. So we don’t get too many research papers published regarding subjects such as transitioning from opioids to methadone for chronic pain, as you found out the hard way.
Hugs to you, bethree.
Namaste.
Thanks, Zorba.
Bethree
I am also very sorry to hear about your son.
Bethree: Such a tragic story. I’m truly sorry for your loss.
Thanks for the hugs Zorba I appreciate them!
I was thinking of another wrinkle to this as I read yesterday that J&J will probably buy Actelion, a smaller Swiss pharma w/a clutch of meds for rare diseases.
I remember back in the day (researching while my dear one slept for a bit) feeling so helpless as I realized my son’s illness (polyarthritis indicated at age 3, but confirmed Reiter’s dg not till age 10– & not fully debilitating til age 20) was so doggone rare. Which meant, in a for-profit healthcare system like ours, almost zero research on it, let alone clinical pharma studies. I got my best info from UK, where socialized medicine ensures that more attention will be paid to chronic, debilitating diseases that–however rare– cost the public a fortune to treat. You’d think in the global age, US rheumatologists would just grab the internet info from abroad & use it, but it doesn’t work that way. They are slowed down by FDA approvals, & answer to a different protocol which is cost-efficient by different lights.
Anyway, I’m thinking maybe globalism “helps” in this instance: a social democracy like Switzerland enables med advances for rare diseases– then US pharmas, w/their oodles of $ gained from charging too much for bread&butter drugs & not researching rare diseases– can just buy them out?
SomeDAMPoet & Threatened out West, thanks so much. It means a lot.
The National Association of School Psychologists should have been at the head of this movement. No one knows more about the best and worst use of standardized tests than a school psychologist.
The American Educational Research Association has taken the position that student test scores cannot be used to evaluate schools or teachers. The association stated that the use of value added modeling of student test scores is NOT VALID.
Hi Rosalie, & thanks for all you do re: education. I lived just down the block from you in ’80’s Park Slope, when my kids were tiny.
““Finally, where are the college and university professors who specialize in the field of tests and measurements? They must know that what’s going on is wrong. Why haven’t they joined forces to speak out against ill-conceived and damaging state testing programs?””
They probably are operating under the assumption that testing is good, or at least necessary. Let’s face it, the vast majority of profs and teachers operate under the assumption that grades are necessary in education. Once you think like this, testing doesn’t sound that evil. Just think back the tests you took in college.
Tests are the easiest way to pressure students to study.
OK, I’m just your average layman, but I think we’re barking up the wrong tree here. I remember psych majors in the ’60’s, they were the ones w/math & statistical forté who were monitoring the white rats in the maze. I know a few psych majors who went on to PhD’s– math types– they ended up contracting for the DOD. These folks are more likely to buy into edumetrics.
I suspect we should maybe be looking to pediatricians for support in this cause.
Just anecdotally: in my experience as Mom to IEP-kids, it was not the pubsch-contracted ed-psychs who helped matters. No. They were the ones who said: this kid needs drugs. The helpful folks were the SpEd Dept heads in midsch & hisch.
The psychologists here are analogous to the economists in the lead up to the calamitous Wall Street crash and, as others have noted, the various researchers who give cover to Big Pharma…There are a few renegades who will speak out against the testing but the corporate line is that testing and measurement are a good thing because they feed the paradigm that schools-are-a-business-whose-bottom-line-is-test-scores… And the best tests are those that can be done quickly and cheaply and yield a number that can be put onto a spread sheet and used to establish a rank order… As long as educators use tests in any way to sort and select, standardized tests will be with us.
I wouldn’t expect too much from the credentialed, professional class at this point, seeing how many of them have been enablers and beneficiaries of so-called reform.
As a psychologist I recommend to abandon all tests based on Classical and Modern “test theories.” But I am not sure whether my colleagues at APA and AERA will agree with me. They make a living on applying traditional tests. Even those who critically examine test usage do not question their validity and their use in principle. They have not only vested interests but have not heard of possible alternatives to which they could switch. Critical scholars like Alan Schoenfeld, professor of math didactics and former president of APA, warn us of the use of psychometric methods but all they suggest is a moratorium of tests. I think we can do better.
I am a retired German professor of psychology, having specialized in experimental and psychometric methods, besides my involvement in the study of moral-democratic competence and its application in education. Already during my study at university I developed some suspicion against Classical Test Theory and its modern variations (IRT, Rasch-scaling), on which nearly all tests are based. The better I understood these “theories” the more I discovered that they have nothing to do with scientific psychology. Prevailing test theories are a modern form of Vodooism with sacred rituals which are to make the people believe that our sorting and evaluating of people is something rational, scientific. It is not.
Prevailing test theories fail an important standard of sound science: they cannot be falsified by data, they are immune against reality. If a test yields some anomalies, its items are replaced until the data fit the statistical dogma of reliability – regardless of the damage this “item analysis” does to the overall validity of the test. Because test makers have no real understanding of what they measure they cannot answer the basis question of validity: Does the test really measure what we intent to measure? Instead they invent all kinds of “validities” in order to save their assumptions.
No wonder that these tests have all failed. They have little, if any, “prognostic validity”. Even much criticized teacher grading is a better predictor of college success. Moreover, no support can be found for the allegation that their use would improve teaching and learning. I have analyzed many studies of the effects of the high-stakes-testing which began with the Head Start program in 1965, the year when I was exchange student in the US. I could not find any support for this allegation. Some small, short-term increases of test scores occurred but they could be fully explained by growing test-wiseness and cheating. Therefore, tests have to be replaced by new versions at an ever faster rate.
Then it was the first time I had to take a test as a school student. In Germany we had no multiple choice tests in school until PISA started. I was surprised how easy it was to get an A. To answer a 90-minute test, it took me just ten minutes. I did not know many of the answers, I just made guesses. Only much later I understood why my school-mates worked harder but got lower test scores. It was BECAUSE they worked harder. For me tests were just fun like cross-word puzzles. I was not obliged to get credits. For them tests were high-stakes. They scared the hell out of them and confused them. Peter Sacks has shown how test anxiety, students’ background and test scores are connected. Tests cannot compensate for student poverty, bad teacher-education and poor curriculum. On the contrary, they even seem to deepen these disadvantages.
But, if tests are based on well-elaborated teaching goals and on sound psychology, and if they are used anonymously, they can be a great help for improving curriculum and teaching methods. If tests are not used for evaluating people (which I believe is a human rights issue), but for evaluating teaching method and content, and for improving teacher education programs, they can be a real blessing. I have shown how a valid test can help to multiply the effect size of methods for teaching moral competence. Just google for the experimentally designed Moral Competence Test. Its construction principle, Experimental Questionnaire, can be easily adapted for other fields of teaching.
Thank you. What a terrific post.
Georg,
Have you read Wilson’s critique of standards and standardized testing “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700 ?
If so your thoughts on it, please!
Duane
Thank you, Georg. I was about to advise the readership to consider reading ‘The Mismeasure of Man’ by Stephen Jay Gould. In that book he describes exactly what you mention, the fact that these tests are ‘adjusted’ (sometimes with the best of intentions) until they give the expected results, and then claim to measure a reality that may not, in fact, exist.
Gould concentrates on the measure of ‘intellegence’, however the same methods are used by outfits that publish the SAT, ACT, etc. They ‘test’ future questions before including them in the score to make sure they lead to the ‘right’ (already determined) conclusion. That method has a huge conceptual flaw. It’s called ‘circular logic’.
Sometime the question is more meaningful than the answer.
I think most people here know why APA and other so called professional organizations have not come out against the testing. As Georg points out above: “they make a living on applying traditional tests”
As Upton Sinclair noted, if is hard to get a person to understand when that person’s job depends on not understanding.
But it’s nonetheless worth asking the question “Why have psychologists , professors and others been silent on the issue? ” because it focuses a spot light on them and forces them to address the issue.
APA would never have said a word about their official support of torture by the Bush administration if a few courageous individuals within their ranks had not asked the question “Why is APA supporting torture?”
I suspect the same is true now. Someone within APA needs to ask “Why is APA supporting testing that amounts to torture of children?”
Bethree5, Thank you for telling your and your son’s personal, painful story in such a clear-eyed manner. I think the efforts you have made to bring the facts of the case to light is extraordinary in order to make changes in treatment and reporting.
Georg, I kept shaking my head in agreement with your observations–and concur with you and SDM that there is an investment and inherent conflict of interest in maintaining the status quo. To wit, let me relate one story:
Around 1980, the NYS Senate was holding hearings on what was to become the Truth-in-Testing Law. (Seems like an ever-deepening example of an oxymoron.) The legislation, which is still on the books, applied to College Admissions tests.
ETS, developer of the SAT for the College Entrance Examination Board, was under attack for its gatekeeper role. Among the claims ETS made was that the test measured aptitude and, as such, was not coachable. Another claim was that the exams were not racially biased. I’m not sure the term cultural bias had come into use. The important element was that ETS controlled the data and was not obligated to disclose it.
I and the founders of FairTest testified on various points under discussion. But the real showdown came when Stanley Kaplan–the genius behind coaching students to raise their scores on the PSAT and SAT exams–was called upon. He had developed a surefire way to gain access to the test material by having bright kids take the exams with the aim of remembering the items they saw and reporting them back to him.
He became a very wealthy man based on converting that intelligence into test preparation material for families who could pay for courses that would boost scores–ergo, get their kids into college or into better colleges. And he had data to prove the efficacy of his approach. The cost of his courses added to the item bias against poor minority group children by making his program unaffordable for them.
The point I’m leading to is this: Kaplan wanted to show that what he was doing worked. But he didn’t want to rock the testing boat too hard–because he depended on the existence of a system he had figured out how to beat. Is this not similar to what we are seeing now, as professionals have a stake in preserving what they know or can’t admit is harmful and should be scrapped. [Anyway, the legislation was enacted and ETS thrived but had to disclose some information.]
” But he didn’t want to rock the testing boat too hard–because he depended on the existence of a system he had figured out how to beat. Is this not similar to what we are seeing now, as professionals have a stake in preserving what they know or can’t admit is harmful and should be scrapped.”
Interesting thought, Fred. Makes sense!
And I think one can include the GAGA* teachers and adminimals in with those “professionals who have a stake . . .”. Their stake is their own personal reputation in their own minds. The GAGAers perceive themselves as helpers, protectors of the children in their charge To have to admit that what they are doing harms children goes beyond what most are capable of doing mentally speaking. The GAGAers will tell you that they are mitigating the harms that they are doing to the innocents in their charge.
Self-deceit is a powerful tool of the mind.
*GAGA = Go Along to Get Along.
And that self deceit enables self-interest to hold sway over justice for the students.
From Andre Comte-Sponville’s chapter on Justice in his “A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues:
“Should we therefore forgo our self-interest? Of course not. But it [self-interest] must be subordinate to justice, not the other way around. . . . To take advantage of a child’s naivete. . . in order to extract from them something [test scores, personal information] that is contrary to their interests, or intentions, without their knowledge [or consent of parents] or through coercion [state mandated testing], is always and everywhere unjust even if in some places and under certain circumstances it is not illegal. . . . Justice is superior to and more valuable than well-being or efficiency; it cannot be sacrificed to them, not even for the happiness of the greatest number [quoting Rawls]. To what could justice legitimately be sacrificed, since without justice there would be no legitimacy or illegitimacy? And in the name of what, since without justice even humanity, happiness and love could have no absolute value?. . . Without justice, values would be nothing more than (self) interests or motives; they would cease to be values or would become values without worth.”—Comte-Sponville [my additions]
I don’t think Kaplan had to worry too much about rocking the testing boat, given that it’s an aircraft carrier.
And if David Coleman didn’t sink it with his megatons of incompetence I’d say it is well nigh unsinkable as well.
Yes, and shouldn’t the NEA and UTF talk the American Medical Association about modeling approach like they do? To me that’s where teachers’ unions went wrong. We aligned ourselves with laborers in markets that have greatly changed. And then the teachers’ unions became lumped together with all unions and down went the notion of public schools with them.