Sara Stevenson, librarian at the O. Henry Middle School in Austin, says that Texans should calculate the true cost of state testing.
It is not just the purchase price of the tests. It is also the cost of the time of teachers and others, like herself, who monitor testing.
Instead of teaching or in Sara’s case, tending the library, their time is spent as test supervisors.
Republican Representative Jeff Leach has proposed that the state do a true financial audit to measure the real cost of testing.
Sara says this is a great idea.
Of course, the audit will not take into account the time that students lose when they should be getting instruction, nor will it measure the distortion of education by focus on testing as the be-all and end-all of schooling.
In other words, what exactly are we paying for — and how much are we spending annually? It’s shocking that no one before Leach has ever asked this question.
For instance, as a school librarian with 25 years of experience and a masters’ degree, I make $50,000 annually, or roughly $32 per hour — not counting the time I work outside of school hours. Texans are paying me $128 each time I monitor a STAAR test for four hours. During several days each year of STAAR testing, the Texas Education Agency threatens to strip us of our Texas teaching certificates if we read or do any other task while monitoring these tests. Once, I jokingly asked if it was OK for me to daydream — and I was told no. Just try to stop me! I’m writing this op-ed in my head.
Last legislative session, Pearson lost its testing contract to Education Testing Service in part because of the negative publicity Pearson garnered from advertising STAAR scoring jobs on Craigslist for $8 an hour. Maybe the state should pay outside test monitors $8 an hour and allow teachers the time to plan, grade or benefit from professional development.
Will the lobbyists for the testing industry defeat the bill?
Do elected officials really want to know what the state is spending on testing?
This is a test of what they want to know.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
But this analysis fails to acknowledge the incalculable value of being able to secure data on students, teachers, and schools that the testing so uniquely provides!
I enjoy early morning sarcasm.
Honestly, In many schools in Texas as much as a 1/3 of the school year is wasted due to testing, practice tests, benchmark and special tutoring time.
Thank you, drext, and agreed.
So few parents really understand how devastating the testing game has been for our children’s education. After a decade bent to chaotic test-score decisions in our extra-fanatic fund-greedy district, as a teacher I struggled to get through one HALF of what I had been used to covering before NCLB.
The biggest, most costly scam was Common Core because it required states and districts to develop or simply buy new curriculum (eg, with new CC “aligned” texts), retrain teachers, buy new hardware and software and prep for, monitor and buy tests – all in one pretty package tied up with a bow!
Bill Gates funded what was by far the cheapest part of the deal: writing the standard (which was actually done by unqualified, overpaid backs like David Coleman and Jason Zimba)
Common Core will probably cost schools a hundred billion dollars or more in the long run.
Overpaid “hacks”
So true, SDP, yet don’t forget that the CCSS were — according to Bill Gates — going to allow all of our transient students to move from school in State A on day x into school in State B on day x+1 and find him or herself able to seamlessly resume their learning…until we realized that CCSS was merely a set of standards rather than a curriculum.
When did the clock start on Bill Gates’ comment that it might be ten years before we know if his ideas are working?
I believe the alarm is ringing and it’s been ringing for a few years now! All we hear from Bill now is silence and that’s scary. When Bill is silent, he is thinking, and he’s usually thinking about how best to make more money from other people.
Bill thinking?
I think “plotting” is probably a better word than “thinking”. “And the world will be MINE, all MINE!!” Cue evil mad scientist laughter.
You’re correct….plotting is the better word. What was I thinking!!?
“Wait ten years to see how things work out” was what Bill Gates told his mother after his head had just emerged from the birth canal so she would not put him up for adoption.
By then, it was too late and Bill certainly knew from day one that that would be the case.
“The Urgency Emergency”
An urgency
Emergency
Is why we need to test
But wait ten years
And have some beers
Until we see success
Bill Gates fits the part of Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. Gates loves to bomb at everything he does.
The only difference is that while the the Dr. suggested a 10:1 female to male ratio in the bunker to repopulate earth after the nuclear catastrophe, Gates would recommend a 100:1 nerd to normal person ratio.
And there’s something fundamentally wrong with the claims that Common Core was supposed to change the way we teach rather than what we teach, when we still had to get all-new textbooks for English and Math.
The biggest costs of standardized testing are not monetary. It’s the damage we do to children by stack ranking them and deciding that they are defined by a number, especially a number that could just as easily be achieved by stack ranking kids by household wealth. And it damages those on “top” just as much (perhaps more) as those on the “bottom” of the stack
Excellent observation. Monetary cost is not everything. In addition to the stack ratings there is the test-centric curriculum with boosting ELA and math scores dominating everything else.
“And it damages those on “top” just as much (perhaps more) as those on the “bottom” of the stack.”
Exactly Dienne!
From the end of my Wilson posts:
“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.” (Wilson quote)
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.
How timely. This is the greatest cost of standardized testing: http://teachertomsblog.blogspot.com/2017/04/hardly-worth-worrying-about.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TeacherTom+%28Teacher+Tom%29
Excellent read! Thanks for the link, Dienne77.
Thank you, Dienne77–I read this & made a comment. One of the best pieces I’ve ever read. (I was lucky enough to have taught kindergarten for a semester, then Early Childhood SpEd for 13 years.
And then, I was the after-school coordinator & summer director for a preschool in my neighborhood. What a joy!)
“Play is the work of children.”–Vivian Gussin Paley, U.of C. Lab School Kindergarten Teacher & Renowned Author
“One day I watched this boy who ranked near the bottom according to a standardized test spend a half hour on our “concrete slide” with a piece of chalk, sliding down while dragging the chalk behind him, trailing lines on the concrete surface. As he slid, he studied the chalk in his hand, the colors, and the shape of the lines he was making. When another child dumped a bucket of water down the slope, he discovered that he could create more intensely colorful lines with wet chalk. He slid again and again and again, sometimes joined by other kids, sometimes all on his own, gradually changing its treatment in an experimental process of trail and error, each time down leading to the next, and none generally privileged over others. It was a process of searching, a process in which learning was a more important goal than passing a stupid test.”
You should really credit Teacher Tom for your post…unless you are Teacher Tom?
Thought the credit would be clear from the preceding post.
I am glad to see people writing about my bill. I am the original author of HB 1336 (aka, “Transparency in Testing”), and the person who Mrs. Stevenson saw speak at the Save Texas Schools rally. Representative Leach is the legislative sponsor. I am not a CPA, but I have been an accountant for the last seven years. During that time I have served as the DFW Regional Organizer for Save Texas Schools.
It was through my public education advocacy work that I found out that nobody has any idea how much we are really spending on standardized testing. The commonly reported number is $90 million per year, but that accounts for little more than the state’s contract with ETS & Pearson to print the test, score the test, and send out a few roaming consultants. It fails to include the bulk of direct costs associated with testing (most notably the salaries of certified educators who are forced to proctor the tests) which are paid for by the districts.
Recent estimates have indicated a price tag closer to $13 BILLION per year. That is over 1/5th our entire public education budget every year, or in terms Texans can appreciate, up to 10 times what we spend on our athletic programs or even administrative salaries.
I wrote HB 1336 in December to address what I believe is a material lack of transparency in the yearly financial reports submitted by our school districts to the Texas Education Agency. It was written in consultation with education experts from both sides of the political spectrum, and it has gained public support from county parties, elected officials, and candidates from across the state. Representative Jeff Leach, a noted conservative Republican, sponsored the bill, and it was co-authored by Representative Lina Ortega, a Democrat out of El Paso.
In short, HB 1336 adds just a couple of lines to the Texas Education Code which would require the districts to include a total of testing-related expenses on the financial reports they already submit to the TEA every year. In my opinion, we cannot expect to engage in any substantive conversation regarding the finance of our public schools without a full picture of how the funds are being spent.
Here is a link to the text of the bill:
http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/tlodocs/85R/billtext/pdf/HB01336I.pdf#navpanes=0
The draconian $5.4 billion cut imposed by the Texas Legislature in 2011 was devastating to our schools, and that was over a two year period. Every other year, the public has to fight over the scraps we are given for gifted, AP, disability, athletic, music, art, career & tech, and numerous other programs. Giving the public a view of exactly how much we are spending on standardized testing is the first step toward freeing up the $13 billion (and 45+ class days) per year we spend on the tests.
HB 1336 doesn’t eliminate standardized testing, but it sure as heck would change the dialogue about public education in Texas. For instance, I had one man ask me, “How much are you wasting on educating illegal immigrants?” Here is my response:
“While I’m not partial to calling anyone ‘illegal,’ nor do I consider education for anyone to be a ‘waste,’ I think I might actually be able to formulate a decent answer your question. First, let’s assume that you are asking about the total of all education-related expenditures on children of unauthorized immigrants who are also unauthorized themselves. Anyone born in the United States is a citizen of the United States.
According to a January 2016 report from the Migration Policy Institute, 834,000 children of unauthorized immigrants lived in Texas in 2013. Of those, 667,000 were U.S. citizens. That means that 167,000 were children who were at the time considered unauthorized immigrants.
Of the 834,000 children of unauthorized immigrants, 566,000 were of an age where they might have attended public school. Assuming the same ratio of roughly 80% U.S. citizens, the total number of unauthorized immigrant students in Texas in 2013 would have been approximately 113,200.
According to PEIMS statewide financial data which is publicly accessible on the Texas Education Agency’s website, we spent an average of $9,902.64 per student in 2013.
$9,902.64 x 113,200 = $1.1 billion
The acting assumption of most questions like yours tends to be that the parents of these children pay none of the associated taxes. While I could easily debate that with you, let’s assume that were true, and the entire $1.1 billion in funding associated with educating those children came out of the taxes paid by the rest of the children’s parents. That would mean that of the $9,902.64 schools get per student, $226.70 would be attributable to educating unauthorized immigrants.
If we were to presume instead that parents of unauthorized immigrant students pay sales and property taxes, then the only portion of the public education budget that this issue would apply to is federal funding. Of the $50 billion in total funding Texas public schools received in 2013, $5.6 billion came from the federal government. That’s approximately $1,101.27 per student.
$1,101.27 x 113,200 = $125 million (note the “m”)
Dividing that over the remaining student population would mean that $25.21 out of $9,902.64 would be attributable to educating unauthorized immigrants. So now we have a range we can agree is somewhere between $25.21 – $226.70.
By comparison, recent estimates indicate that we spend up to $13.4 billion per year on standardized testing. That’s around $2,700 per student. In light of all of this, wouldn’t it be more prudent to focus on how much we spend on standardized testing instead of blaming immigrant students for the scarce education resources our schools receive to teach our kids?”
It’s amazing how easy it is to put into perspective the scapegoats that have traditionally been used to justify minimal resources for public education when you’ve taken the time to research the numbers. Think about how conversations will change when the public has access to a full account of all expenses related to standardized testing. That is what HB 1336 (aka, “Transparency in Testing”) was written to accomplish. When we know better, we make better decisions.
If you would like to see a dramatic shift in the public discourse regarding public education in Texas, please visit my page, http://www.facebook.com/TransparencyinTesting, share the information, and ask your legislators to support HB 1336. Thank you!
In order to truly see how much time is wasted/spent on testing each year. Each school should be required to document and submit data for every benchmark, practice test, and STAAR Test.
How many personnel were involved for how many hours? How many District-Level Administrators, Principals, Teachers, Aides, and other personnel were required to administer the scheduled “test”.
How long were each involved; hours, days, or weeks?
What the daily pay rate of each of the personnel? This will be used to calculate their cost of giving the “test”.
How many non-testing students are present in building not receiving instruction for that day or days?
I would also be in favor of moving testing to the final week of school. If a student isn’t required to test, then they may stay home, especially high school students. The summer retest can be pushed back until the first week of August instead of July. Test review and prep can be for the two weeks prior to the testing in July.
Seniors that have not passed the required exams to graduate by May 1st would not be eligible to graduate in the spring ceremony. If they retest at the end of school, then they may participate in a graduation ceremony in August.
Some of these ideas are included in my plan when I become Governor of Texas.
https://davidrtayloreducation.wordpress.com/2017/04/04/i-want-to-be-governor-of-the-state-of-texas-part-2/
How about ditching the standardized testing all together, eh, considering the COMPLETE INVALIDITY of the whole standards and testing regime as proven by Noel Wilson in his seminal 1997 dissertation.
In order to not totally “chiletize” the thread I will post a brief summary and comments below.
Actually that is my favorite idea, do away with all testing. Let teachers be professionals and assess their students progress. It worked for thousands of years before the artificial crisis was created.
Exactly!!
With that dump as potus, this country is finally waking up. Hope it’s not too late. And really, the TWO PARTY system is corrupt to the core and totally BROKEN.
I forgot to mention earlier that a version of HB 1336 was added to SB 1 (the Senate budget bill) as an amendment, which gives us a second avenue to hopefully see the bill passed in this legislative session. We are hoping that the amendment isn’t stripped out either by the Senate or the conference committee. We’re still pushing for HB 1336 as a stand-alone bill, but since it’s currently stuck in the Public Education Committee and we only have six weeks left in the session, the amendment might be our best hope.
Continuing from my comment to drext727:
“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. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
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.
Again, many thanks, Duane, for your never-repetitive Wilson rant.
Post it again & again.
Six area superintendents (including the Supt. of New Trier High School) wrote our State
Supt., Tony Smith, thanking him for doing away with PARCC in IL high schools, but asking him to also abolish them in the elementary schools. They asked to meet with him about this.
Insofar as I know, there was no meeting. (In fact, it reminds me to check on that.)
That having been said, this year, elementary children continued to be CCRAP tested/test prepped.
Suggest new Massachusetts Next-Generation MCAS, which includes PARCC questions, is not much of an improvement – but the old PARCC/MCAS tests had reached a point of ‘diminishing’ returns.
http://jonathanpelto.com/2016/05/27/breaking-news-common-core-parcc-test-gets-f-failure/
http://jonathanpelto.com/2016/05/27/breaking-news-common-core-parcc-tests-gets-f-failure/