Students in New York sat for the ELA Comin Core tests on Tuesday. The test will continue for three days, an ordeal lengthier than graduate school exams.
Leonie Haimson invited teachers and parents to share their stories about the test, which is otherwise blanketed in deep secrecy.
Testing expert Fred Smith sent this comment:
Thank you, Leonie for inviting the comments of observers who otherwise have been silenced by SED and DOE from breathing a word about the exams.
I’m sure we will find that the improved 2017 ELA exams have the same flaws as the ones Pearson has produced since 2012.
To me, the following exchange on your blog concerning field testing is particularly important because it succinctly describes what is wrong with field testing—both embedded and stand-alone field testing—which continue to plant the seeds that perpetuate bad exams. Yet, SED has run interference for the publisher, selling our kids out so tests can be developed on their backs.
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Anonymous said…
Field testing questions embedded within today’s test hurt students. Fifth grade students deal with 5 passages. The entire third passage and the seven questions that followed were different across the various test forms, indicating that the whole text and question set will not count towards student scores. Why waste students’ time with it on an ACTUAL exam? Field test questions are notoriously ambiguous because their validity is still being assessed. My students struggled with the third passage and expended a lot of stamina on it, which hurt them on the last two passages. If we must field test passages, can we not at least place those questions LAST. I had a boy still testing at 2 pm. He spent an hour on the third text (which gained him no points) and was forced to randomly fill in bubbles for the last two stories (which do count!) in order to finish by day’s end. Where’s the logic? Why don’t we do separate field testing like a few years ago?”
Blogger Leonie Haimson said…
“The problem with separate field testing is that students don’t take it seriously and thus the results aren’t as reliable. However, having really hard questions as embedded field test questions on some exams and others easier is unfair to the students struggling with the hard questions. And the tests shouldn’t be so long! This tests endurance more than comprehension.”
Fred Smith continues:
Each year since 2012, the core-aligned test years, questions have been tried out without informing parents that their children were being used as unknowing subjects for commercial purposes. SED and DOE have gone out of their way to leave parents out of the loop for fear they would object—and say NO! And they might exercise their right to OPT OUT.
Note: Educational Testing Service, a testing giant, recently acquired Questor which had been awarded a 5-year contract in 2016 to succeed Pearson in furnishing the statewide exams. It now appears that Questor merely served as a pass-through window, allowing Pearson to exit and be replaced by ETS. Both companies have played a major role in promoting the Common Core and the riches it opens up to them in marketing related educational material. (Yet, even ETS, which administers the SAT, makes test-takers aware that parts of that exam are experimental.)
Leonie, please include the following link to an opinion piece I wrote on the grim reality of a state testing program that has been abetted by SED and DOE through their efforts to suppress information. They treat parents with disdain. Diane Ravitch ran it yesterday.
It expands on the above.
Fred
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
The passages were all excerpts from larger text. For our reluctant readers, or those still struggling to gain comprehension, this is hard. They often fail to draw connections or see the bigger picture. The passage seems disjointed and this lends to their lack of understanding. Almost each question has them going back to a specific line or paragraph. And, to top it off, these skills are NOT presented in the almighty scripted modules of NYS. Thank God I woke up and stopped teaching the modules and went back to teaching the standards with best practices. All my kids won’t pass, and the ones that do probably will have the cut scores moved so they don’t either, but I’m so sorry for those teachers and students who blindly use the modules! They don’t have a hope. I was unaware of the embedded field test questions. Let’s frustrate our kids so the remaining questions are tackled with a lack of confidence. That makes sense! Grrrr!
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“They often fail to draw connections or see the bigger picture.”
It wasn’t until I was about 26 years old and finishing my Masters program in French before I was able to do this. It’s preposterous.
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One can make a very good argument that ALL the questions on these tests are “experimental” because the tests (and the standards they are supposedly based on) are themselves basically large scale “experiments” that never went through any kind of ethical review and never got the informed parental consent that is normally required for experiments on children.
“Andrew Cuomo’s Experiments on young Children”
Experimentation on your kid
Is what the New York governor did
Sans review and sans consent
The school deform was Satan-sent
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One can make a very good argument that ALL the questions on these tests are “experimental” because the tests (and the standards they are supposedly based on) are themselves basically large scale “experiments” that never went through any kind of ethical review and never got the informed parental consent that is normally required for experiments on children.
You are correct. Informed consent for experiments has never been a feature of the large-scale projects authorized by USDE and also undertaken by many universities who have been a party to research on “interventions” bearing on education. The ethic of “do no harm” does not exist.
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Today we have entered into one of the darkest days in education. In New York State the abusive Common Core tests get underway. Our students, some as young as 8 years old will begin the grueling process of reading passage after passage and answering an unforgiving array of multiple choice and essay questions. These children will sit for at least 9 hours to fulfill a political ideology that has nothing to do with educating the child.
With these ‘new” untimed tests, some children could potentially sit for 6 hours on each of the 6 testing dates. Their only break will be a sequestered supervised lunch break where they will be monitored to ensure they do not discuss the test with their fellow students.
Our children will struggle with questions that have more than 1 plausible answer. They will have to select the best plausible answer. Questions will ask them , for example, to analyze paragraphs 3, 14 , 24 & 26 and then choose the answer that best describes their relationship. They will be forbidden to give their opinion in an essay as they regurgitate details to fulfill the task at hand.
When we look at past tests, we can almost guarantee some passages will be purposely confusing due to the use of names and customs they are not familiar with. This makes it extremely difficult for them to utilize their own schema to decode the information provided. Some passages are above grade level and there are also field questions that are not counted are part of these tests.
Teachers must sit by as our students struggle for hours. We will observed children get physically and emotionally ill taking these tests. We are forbidden to assist or even discuss the tests.
Students who refuse the test must sit in the same room with those taking the test. They are expected to sit quietly and read for at least 90 minutes. Have you ever tried that? How do they expect 8-12 year old kids to do that?
Folk, this is institutional child abuse! I have written about this and about how this is the time of year that I am ashamed to be a teacher. We all should be ashamed, when we make these children take these tests to fulfill a political agenda and provide absolutely no valid data that helps children excel.
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What I don’t understand is where are psychological organizations like APA when it comes to this stuff?
Do all the psychologists who are members of APA REALLY have no problem with it? Or do they simply not even think about it?
I would think that after how badly the APA burned itself by their tacit endorsement of and support of torture during the Bush administration, they would want to get out ahead of things this time, especially given that it involves child abuse and testing on children without ethical review or consent.
I suspect that eventually, this is going to come back to haunt the APA just as the torture did. Probably worse because it involves millions of children.
They may not realize it, but psychologists are damaging their credibility in a very big way.
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I think SDP makes an excellent overdue point. 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?
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“They may not realize it, but psychologists are damaging their credibility in a very big way.”
So are teachers and administrators, by not standing up and refusing to subject their students to this institutional malpractice. We are all culpable. Every good German at the Nuremberg trials said he was just following orders.
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Ralph,
I didn’t post your piece in full because I want to send traffic to your site.
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Thank you
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@Fred Smith….because they are making money! Everyone is making money off the backs of children and it’s disgraceful. Where is the American Academy of Pediatrics? The colleges?…. . making money because all the kids need remedial math and english due to the dreadful CC curriculum with it’s over emphasis on skill sets. GREED is the driving factor.
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On the torture issue, it was a relatively small number of APA officials and other psychologists who were involved and benefitting in some way — effectively making back room deals at the expense of the good name of their organization.
But that does not excuse the other members of the organization, in my opinion.
If they don’t police themselves, who will?
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This is consistent with what my child told me yesterday. Apparently, not all of the kids received the exact same test. My child and his friends counted three readings that were not on every test. These must be the field questions you are referring to.
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Before reading this article I had no idea what field questions were, and still after reading I was confused. I decided to do a little research and learned that field questions are just questions to gather data for the testing company. So in theory they are turning students into test rats. I am also shocked to hear that parents are not made aware that there are field questions hidden in these exhausting tests. This brings up another point made in this post, these tests tire the students out. Thus invalidating these field questions because they do not have an attention span to give 100% for the whole test. I know that when I had to take a standardized test I would feel fatigued after just a couple questions, mostly because I knew that there were x amount of questions left. These tests are more for the benefit of the testing companies than for the benefit of the students. It is outrageous that schools allow for days to be taken up by testing, when it is used for research. School is a place of learning, but in our current society we have shifted to a system that views each individual as a number. The activities that go on in school, such as testing should be created by the teachers, rather than companies that seem to have no care for the educational development of the student.
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