Rhode Island State Commissioner Ken Wagner says that the state will drop the unpopular Common Core exam PARCC and adopt instead the Massachusetts test called MCAS. After all, if Massachusetts is the highest-achieving state in the nation, it must be because they have the best tests! So soon, you can expect Rhode Island to be up at the top of NAEP alongside Massachusetts because testing must be the key to their success, especially since Massachusetts has used more or less the same tests for two decades. Stability and the same test. Magic!
Now if every state adopted MCAS, then every state would be at the top!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Not quite. We must always be league tables, rankings, with winners and losers, at most only a tie for top dog. I am being snarky, but the public function of tests is to aggrandize the cultural importance of being number one, a winner, not a loser. Trump is what this looks like in a grown man, obsessed with proving he is always a winner, number one.
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Bingo!
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My comment to the Providence Journal article: “Massachusetts has been successful because it has stuck to the same standards, the same test and the same teacher training for almost two decades.” Those MA standards were developed by actual experts in English Language Arts and math, principally by Dr. Sandra Stotsky. The MA standards were also developed with full stakeholder input. The original MCAS was created to align with those standards. In contrast, the Common Core State (sic) Standards were developed behind closed doors, primarily by employees of the college testing industries. Dr. Stotsky was on the Validation Committee for the Common Core ELA standards and refused to sign off on them because of their poor quality. The MCAS 2.0, the assessment that RI is apparently adopting, is a hybrid of the original MCAS with the PARCC. It is supposedly aligned to the Common Core standards, which is the reason RIDE claims there will be no problem with the transition. Is the shift to the MCAS 2.0 a distinction without a difference? Also, the MCAS did not lift all boats. Students in more affluent communities, with teaching aligned to the standards, scored well. Students in less advantaged communities have not.
Here’s a related article from yesterday. Please note Monty Neill’s comments. http://www.providencejournal.com/news/20170413/ri-adopting-mass-test-to-measure-student-performance-ditching-parcc?start=2
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That would be great except that the MCAS is just PARCC with a new name. Looks exactly the same.
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This game has seemingly fooled everyone, including Diane Ravitch. MCAS 2.0 is PARCC in disguise. That was known in November 2015 when the game began. MA has ONLY Common Core-aligned/based standards. The good MCAS (think about Swan Lake) was based on the original standards. The name was kept after the standards were changed–to confuse people and because MERA required MCAS (not Common Core by name).
RI is playing the game, too. Wagner et al know that MCAS 2.0 is PARCC in disguise. If MCAS 2.0 spreads nationally, it simply means that all states are using a CC-aligned test.
This is the way the defenders of PARCC have figured out how to save it financially.
Only one reporter and magazine in MA has reported the truth as it was known.
https://www.baystateparent.com/2017/03/14/state-officials-vague-on-new-standardized-test/
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You are right, Sandy.
Mitchell Chester, MA ed Commissioner, was also chair of PARCC.
He wanted to drop MCAS and adopt PARCC.
Too much resistance.
As I recall, he said districts could choose.
But if you are right, he snookered everyone.
And Wagner is too.
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“PARCC by another Name”
MCAS 2.0
Is really PARCC, you know
The name was switched
Cuz hope$ were hitched
On Common Core below
Of PARCC, Mitch was the chair
And Ed Commissionaire
But districts balked
So Chester hawked
His dressed-up testing ware
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Don’t ya love marketers?
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To the best of my knowledge, Wagner has never passed the MCAS. Raimondo, ditto despite all her Ivy League credentials. Wagner is now the commissioner of education and Raimondo keeps reminding us, “I’m the Governor”. Maybe, just maybe, the MCAS should be required of everyone before taking public office and making decisions that will affect everyone for years to come. It makes more sense than empowering officials based on their success in raising pay-tp-play unreported fees or campaign contributions.
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My grandson’s school relabelled Smarter Balanced with the name of the old test, but the kids recognized it right away. Nice try, guys.
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Maybe, just maybe, Mass has parents with more education than average which they pass on to their kids.
Education is exponential, not incremental.
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As far as best results on yearly standardized tests go, it’s not enough just having the same kind of test, but they should give the same test, year after year. The questions and answers will be passed on from older sisters to younger ones, from fathers to children, from great grand parents to great grand children. Within a few years, catchy tunes will be composed, and kids will march into the brightly and patrioticly decorated testing room, boys singing the questions, girls singing the answers. Those will be the truly glorious times in US education.
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There is no magic bullet that improves education. Bullets kill. The engineering term “test until destruction” is the closest thing we can get. An upper limit on testing at which point the pupils either die or go mad. Then we can adjust the testing down to the point that it no longer exists.
No longer exists? Yes! ! ! ! Did you know that when Sir Isaac Newton was at Cambridge there were no tests. Oxford still does its best to avoid them. Scholars observe the student over time and then announce when they feel he is ready a largely pro forma oral quiz follows and a degree is awarded.
And the MCAS by the way is not an easy test. As my MA teacher friend once told me: the MCAS is very difficult. Does RI teach to this level? If they don’t, a lot of kids are going to fail.”
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I remember when MCAS first went in in MA. (That is, MCAS 1.) It’s a standardized test, like any other, no more a valid measure than any other. The last year before it became obligatory, when the scores were going to count for NCLB, the top students in the senior class in the town where I lived refused to take the tests. “We are the last group who can do this without being punished,” they said, “and we think we need to stand up and say no.” The principal threatened to withhold letters of recommendation to colleges. A letter to the town paper said that these children needed to let the adults make decisions. I wrote a letter pointing out that “these children” were probably all of voting age and said I was very proud of them for taking action.
But ever since Common Core came in, MCAS has been this golden standard. I don’t get it. It’s a standardized test.
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The “magic” of standardized testing is so deceptively deceiving that the vast majority of Americans believe that it is a “measure” of student learning and therefore acceptable for the state to use to sort and separate, ranking students to reward the few and punish the many, discriminating against students in a fashion that is no different than discrimination involving gender, racial and/or other categories that have been adjudicated to be against American principles as outlined in the Bill of Rights.
Someone please enlighten me as to the standard unit of learning that is supposedly being measured through standardized testing. . .
. . . YEP, thought so. There is none. So how can one “measure” and compare a student’s learning. . .
. . . NOPE, one can’t measure and compare student learning in a truly rationo-logical fashion.
Standardized testing = falsehoods at every step.
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Now to understand those falsehoods and errors I recommend that all read and comprehend what Noel Wilson has proven about those inherent onto-epistemological fallacies and the psychometric fudgings that sre used to attempt to justify such utter nonsense that is educational standards and standardized testing:
“Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
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