When I read this post by Steven Singer, I was so excited that I thought about devoting an entire day to it. Like posting it and posting nothing else for the entire day. Or posting this piece over and over all day to make sure you read it. It is that important.
Steven’s post explains two different phenomena. First, why is standardized testing so ubiquitous? What does it have a death grip on public education?
Second, in the late 1990s, when I was often in D.C., I noticed that the big testing companies had ever-present lobbyists to represent their interests. Why? Wasn’t the adoption of tests a state and local matter? NCLB changed all that, Race to the Top made testing even more consequential, and the new ESSA keeps up the mandate to test every child every year from grades 3-8. No other country does this? Why do we?
He begins like this:
“It’s easy to do business when the customer is forced to buy.
“But is it fair, is it just, or does it create a situation where people are coerced into purchases they wouldn’t make if they had a say in the matter?
“For example, school children as young as 8-years-old are forced to take a battery of standardized tests in public schools. Would educators prescribe such assessments if it were up to them? Would parents demand children be treated this way if they were consulted? Or is this just a corporate scam perpetrated by our government for the sole benefit of a particular industry that funnels a portion of the profits to our lawmakers as political donations?
“Let’s look at it economically.
“Say you sold widgets – you know, those hypothetical doodads we use whenever we want to talk about selling something without importing the emotional baggage of a particular product.
“You sell widgets. The best widgets. Grade A, primo, first class widgets.
“Your goal in life is to sell the most widgets possible and thus generate the highest profit.
“Unfortunately, the demand for widgets is fixed. Whatever they are, people only want so many of them. But if you could increase the demand and thus expand the market, you would likewise boost your profits and better meet your goals.
“There are many ways you could do this. You could advertise and try to convince consumers that they need more widgets. You could encourage doctors and world health organizations to prescribe widgets as part of a healthy lifestyle. Or you could convince the government to mandate the market.
“That’s right – force people to buy your products.
“That doesn’t sound very American does it?
“In a democratic society, we generally don’t want the government telling us what to purchase. Recall the hysteria around the Obamacare individual mandate requiring people who could afford to buy healthcare coverage to do so or else face a financial tax penalty. In this case, one might argue that it was justified because everyone wants healthcare. No one wants to let themselves die from a preventable disease or allow free riders to bump up the cost for everyone else.
“However, it’s still a captive market though perhaps an innocuous one. Most are far more pernicious.
“According to dictionary.com, a captive market is “a group of consumers who are obliged… to buy a particular product, thus giving the supplier a monopoly” or oligopoly. This could be because of lack of competition, shortages, or other factors.
“In the case of government mandating consumers to buy a particular product, it’s perhaps the strongest case of a captive market. Consumers have no choice but to comply and thus have little to no protection from abuse. They are at the mercy of the supplier.
“It’s a terrible position to be in for consumers, but a powerful one for businesspeople. And it’s exactly the situation for public schools and the standardized testing industry.
“Let’s break it down.
“These huge corporations don’t sell widgets, they sell tests. In fact, they sell more than just that, but let’s focus right now on just that – the multiple choice, fill-in-the-bubble assessments.
“Why do our public schools give these tests? Because peer-reviewed research shows they fairly and accurately demonstrate student learning? Because they’ve been proven by independent observers to be an invaluable part of the learning process and help students continue to learn new things?
“No and no.
“The reason public schools give these tests is because the government forces them. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) requires that all students in grades 3-8 and once in high school take certain approved standardized assessments. Parents are allowed to refuse the tests for their children, but otherwise they have to take them.”
A captive audience of 50.4 million students. Read the full analysis as I am skipping the meaty part.
He concludes with these questions:
If an industry gets big enough and makes enough donations to enough lawmakers, they get the legislation they want. In many cases, the corporations write the legislation and then tell lawmakers to pass it. And this is true for lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
Standardized testing and Common Core are one pernicious example of our new captive market capitalism collapsing into plutocracy.
Our tax dollars are given away to big business and our voices are silenced.
Forget selling widgets. Our children have BECOME widgets, hostage consumers, and access to them is being bought and sold.
We are all slaves to this new runaway capitalism that has freed itself from the burden of self-rule.
How long will we continue to put up with it?
How long will we continue to be hostages to these captive markets?
Google Deliberately Dumbing Down and you will see what is behind the common core. I have mentioned this before.
How is common core and the next generation science standards adding to this dumbing down? Please do not think I am being adversarial. I just want you to lay it out to me so that Ican understand it better.
Mary, I have done a study of the number of NATIONAL standards on the books, for Pre-K to grade 8, only beginning with the Common Core in 2010.
As of 2016, there were 3,558 national standards in about 15 subjects on the books. Some of the stardards are written for each grade. That usually means the subject will have more specific and more standards than a subject where the standards have been written for a span of several grades (e.g., Pre-K-2).
Many of these standards are redundant. Some set forth expectations in one subject that contradict expectations in another subject. Some are based on the wild assumption that students are only going to be learning about one subject.
In my “let’s look at standards” exercise, I excluded the laundry list of words marketed as “21st Century Skills” by Ken Kay, a lobbist for the tech industry. Since my analysis some new standards have been written for computer science/literacy.
There is no simple answer to your question about dumbing down. It is more a matter of teachers drowning in standards that many if not most had NO part in shaping at all.
If you really want to take in the complexity, read the 747 standards for English Language Arts and Literacy, or the 144 science standards with 410 connections to the Common Core. Most of the Science “connections” are connected to 285 Common Core standards in mathematics. For a real adventure, take a look at the 483 standards for physical education, grades K-8.
Not only are we held hostage by active markets, testing companies are generating even more revenue by constructing tests that measure ability —not skills. I’ve taught under FOUR different state mandated tests in Texas. I’ve prepped students for AP, SAT, and ACT exams. Every time testing companies see their market share eroding, they start pushing for another test redesign.
Our children have become data points that can be sliced, diced, repackaged as commodities for investors interested in public-private bonds. All the data generated by testing companies are turning our children into derivatives to be sold. Testing is about profit. Every hour a student spends testing is another lost hour of opportunity to help a student develop his or her talents and skills.
I agree with your explanation. Many teachers don’t have the time to physically go through all the standards and dissect out the redundant pieces. Often, they are just going around and around teaching the standards and not having the students develop a deep and rich understanding of the specific content knowledge that will support them going from grade level to the next. So, this is how the dumbing down occurs in most cases.
I apologize– I meant “captive markets” not “active markets”.
Please tell me the amount time each grade level is spent test g and on what? I need it clearly laid out for me. Perhaps this will help others to u Der stand as well
This post on captive markets explains a lot about how corporations have inserted themselves into our public schools through mandated testing. Likewise, when states take over urban school districts, they often eventually turn over responsibility for education to one or more charters to which students have been assigned. This opens the door for lots of cronyism and pay for play in order for companies to get the contracts. This practice, in my mind, seems to be another version of a captive market with students being treated like widgets. With many of these takeovers there is no “choice.” The choice has been made for students through assignment. “Reformers” try to malign public schools by portraying them as “monopolies,” but they are no more monopolies than the police, fire department or government itself. Monopolies generally involve cornering a market for profit like the $700 epipen. There is no profit in public schools; they are a public service that often provides more choice than one size fits all charters.
Great article. But our children cannot become widgets unless WE as parents, teachers and adults allow it.
And we have allowed this travesty to happen. Think LOBBYISTS! The education lobbyists have really lobbied for themselves.
KEEPING in mind: so many teachers who have been fighting against the widget strategy are no longer allowed in the classroom. We should never forget that the “teacher shortage” growing across the nation hasn’t happened simply because few are choosing to enter the field: There has been massive unconscionable pain perpetrated against many outspoken individuals, a pain which has allowed the widget-makers to have gotten to this point in their power game.
Philanthropists have an unholy alliance with test companies as well. Gates actually chose Pearson to scale up his plans for Common Core, SBAC and PARCC. And Stand for Children is one of their cheerleadesr.
Lots of billionaires, especially the unholy trio,(Gates, Broad, Walmart) use testing to prove “public schools fail” in order to justify privatization, but the tests have a rigged cut score so they can fail at will which will produce more “widgets” for privatization.
Diane,
I think it’s important to differentiate the use of standardized tests averages as useful indicators of comparative student achievement from their radical transformation via NCLB into actionable criteria for grading “school” performance (“school” being a euphemism for teachers and support staff).
The difference is enormous:
Before NCLB, a test with no “turnaround” consequences did not label schools and their teachers as pariahs, but gave school boards and superintendants publicly reported information that there were problems that required attention and, if within the realm of their authority, was their responsibility to address.
NCLB legally transformed standardized tests from public indicators into tools for destabilizing public schools and promoting the growth of charters. This was done by the creation of a legal fiction, “the school” as a legal entity whose performance is wholly responsible and accountable for students’ “achievement,” i.e. test results. On the basis of these test averages, “the school” can be evaluated and, in a leap of illogic, “the school” becomes the teaching and support staff, who are then subjected to draconian “turnaround” consequences.
This fraudulent misuse of both testing and statistical averaging has led superintendents to a single-minded focus on test prep that drives school time and schedules and created an entire industry of test prep “experts,” prof development contractors and related school staffing (“instructional coaches”).
Standardized tests are not, nor ever have been, “useful indicators of comparative students achievement” unless you mean as a tool to separate the wheat from chaff. They were first introduced by Edward Thorndike to decide which students were good enough to warrant further education. (See http://learninginmind.com/myth-of-average.php for more on this.) They were also used to give the aura of science to justify social classes, which we are still seeing today. With all the talk of “growth mindset” the tests are the poster child for fixed mindset.
The only thing the tests measure is the relative ability to recall and recognize facts–the possession of “knowledge objects” with little or no concern over what, if anything a learner can do with those objects. They are skewed toward students whose strengths include verbal/linguistic intelligence. They tell us NOTHING about the learning of individuals. The test results cannot be used by teachers to help them help students because there is no information on which questions were missed, not to mention that the test scores aren’t available until those students are no longer in that teacher’s class.
“Proficiency” is totally subjective, and often the “score” needed to be judge “proficient” isn’t decided on until the test publishers see the results. Why? So they can sell more “stuff” to help teachers with those who need “remediation.”
A long time ago I had some meetings at a new foundation that was trying to figure out its mission. It was to be art education, but little else was settled. The head of the foundation had been the head of the SEC–Security and Exchange Commission. One of his first questions to the assembled group: How can we create a market for art education?
Cross posted at https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/One-of-the-Best-Articles-Y-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Diane-Ravitch_Standardized-Testing-170412-703.html#comment654297
with this comment which was a post by Diane here
Georg Lind is an educational researcher and professor of psychology in a German university who has studied the moral implications of standardized testing. His bio is at the end of this post. He sent Diane the following short essay on the negative consequences of standardized testing:
Leviathan: The Anti-Democratic Effect of High-Stakes Tests.
We ought to think about high stakes tests in wider contexts than we usually do, namely in the context of human functioning and in the context of human rights and democracy:
(a) All tests which are based on classical test theory (CTT) and its off-springs (e.g., item-response-theory, Rasch-scaling) are essentially statistical artifacts. Their hidden psychology is at odds with our knowledge of psychological processes underlying human behavior. These tests are built on a false postulate which says: each and every human response to a test is determined only by one disposition, namely the competence or personality under consideration, except for some degree of random measurement error which can be easily minimized by repeating measurements.
This core postulate is totally wrong: A single response is usually determined but by several dispositions at the same time, not just by one. Hence a single response is ambiguous and does not allow to make any inference on a particular disposition. If data falsify this believe they are misclassified as “unreliability.” Besides, repeated measurement is virtually not possible with human subjects. Repeated questions have to be varied, and the more varied tasks are used to reduce “unreliability,” the less valid a test becomes.
Better methodologies exist, especially for the measurement and improvement of curricula and teaching methods (see my reading suggestion below). We can single out the disposition(s) determining a person’s responses only with experimentally designed tests that let us observe pattern of responses to carefully arranged pattern of tasks. Of course, such tests require much expertise and money, probably more than the private test industry is able to provide.
(b) High-stakes testing violates human rights and undermines democracy. The frequent evaluation – year by year, month by month, day by day, and sometimes even hour by hour – of students violates their basic rights and, indirectly, also of the rights of their teachers and parents. This inhumane practice has nothing to do with well reasoned and well designed assessments required before taking over a responsible position in our society. There should be more such assessments. Why don’t we examine future parents whether they are prepared well enough to raise children? This would spare us a lot of juvenile delinquency and broken up families. Or assess future politicians’ ability to run a town, a state, or a country? You can imagine what this would spare us.
Frequent high-stakes testing is also a threat to democracy. It restricts students’ thinking and reflection. It leaves too little opportunity for the development of moral competence. It produces “subjects” not citizens of a democracy. As many decades of research into the development of moral competence shows, simply through the extreme proportion of time absorbed by the preparation for evaluations and other activities required by authorities, students are prevented from developing the ability to solve problems and conflicts through thinking and discussion instead of through violence, deceit and power. They will later, as adults, depend, as Thomas Hobbes has pointed out, on a “strong state” and on dictators to keep violence, deception and power within bounds. Morally competent citizens don’t need a “Leviathan.”
Reading suggestion: “How to Teach Morality. Promoting Deliberation and Discussion. Reducing Violence and Deceit” by Georg Lind (Logos publisher, Berlin, 2016)
“It’s easy to do business when the customer is forced to buy.” Isn’t this their argument AGAINST the ACA? Adults should not be forced to buy health insurance, but it is fine to force children as young as 7 to sit through six days of exams??
As an elementary counselor who barely saw a student this week, or the week before, or the week before due to management of my school’s standardized testing, I wonder if parents and law makers realize how much, besides money, is lost to these tests. Teaching time. Counseling time. Time doing the meaningful things we are supposed to be doing to educate kids. The time spent by staff and students is overwhelming and absolutely unnecessary. I spent from 3:00-7:30 last night (my official leave time is 3:30) just printing test tickets and test codes for the second round of ISTEP for a school with about 165 test takers. Image the time spent for large schools. Today I spent from 8 am to 2:00 p.m. sorting approximately 500 test tickets into 45 different testing sessions, with no breaks. I saw one child today during school. One. I worked until 7:30 pm again tonight, wrapping up details for testing. I have put in hundreds of hours this year since January preparing for ISTEP, or supervising or giving ISTEP and we still have three weeks of ISTEP testing and make up tests to do! Three more weeks where I won’t do the job I was trained in graduate school to do and hired to do. In total this year with ISTEP prep, ISTEP practice tests, ISTEP testing and wrap up, I lose NINE weeks of my regular counseling job, in lieu of ISTEP, which means I am not teaching my usual 14 guidance classes a week on subjects such as dealing with bullies, conflict resolution, college and career planning, character education, and peer pressure resistance. It means grieving and traumatized kids go unseen. Starting next week, our 3rd graders have to take ISTEP (SECOND round for 2017—why?) for seven more test sessions over seven days and our fourth and fifth graders have nine more tests over nine days of ISTEP test sessions. Then we spend a week doing make up sessions as fast as we can. This is insanity. Our kids, and ESPECIALLY our special needs kids, are suffering at the hands of a ridiculously long and expensive series of tests and they are missing so much valuable teaching and guidance in the process. The costs of ISTEP go far beyond the huge dollar amounts being paid to the testing companies. ISTEP steals such a huge chunk of the school year for students and staff and for what? It is time for all of us to speak up and speak loudly! Why does a 3rd or 4th grader take a longer test for ISTEP than someone trying to get in medical school or law school? It is time for some common sense.