Mercedes Schneider posted a guest column by James Kirylo on our leaders’ sick obsession with testing and its harmful consequences for students.
Testing has become a grueling rite of spring, he writes.
“Whereas in 1950 those who completed high school took only approximately three standardized tests through their entire K-12 experience, and whereas in 1991 those who completed their K-12 experience took an average of 18-21 standardized tests, students today upon completion of their K-12 school experience can take anywhere between 60-100 standardized tests. In short, more than 100 million standardized tests are administered yearly across the U.S., annually costing the states approximately 1.7 billion dollars.
“This intense focus on testing and its results have moved into the realm of obsession, so much so that we now refer to “high-stakes” testing simply because they are becoming the sole criteria on how we assess and evaluate our children, teachers, administrators, and school districts. In short, the “reform” movement provoked by A Nation at Risk can be characterized as one that is now controlled by the profit-making testing industrialized complex.
“Truly, it has become disturbingly normalized in explaining reform efforts with detached terminology such as outcomes, ratings, scores, performance, monetary rewards, school takeovers, school closures, competition, and comparing and contrasting. As a result we have created an educational system that is analogous to describing a for-profit corporation, which ultimately results in the creation of “winners” and “losers.”
“This corporate-speak loses sight of the humanity behind this type of discourse, which works to objectify school-aged youth, fosters a constricted view of what is educationally important, and largely blames teachers if students don’t “perform” to some kind of arbitrary expectation.
“Make no mistake, this testing environment has placed school-aged youngsters under unnecessary stress, where many are fearful, dealing with bouts of panic, crying spells, apathy, sleeplessness, and depression. Therefore, it ought not be of any great surprise that droves of parents from around the country have opted-out their children from taking these tests, a number among which I include myself.
“And perhaps ironically, this testing movement has yielded very little positive results in improving our schools. In fact, one could argue that our nation is more at risk than it was 30 years ago, still leaving scores of children left behind. Indeed, illiteracy remains high, millions of children still live in poverty, and countless of youngsters are still attending classes with limited resources in schools that are old and dilapidated.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Concise and well stated. All should read and share (already did this morning)
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Jeff McQuillan
http://bit.ly/SAT-Prep-Is-Useless
What Kaplan and Princeton Review Don’t Want You to Know About the SAT
APRIL 19, 2017
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$1.7 billion generated for testing companies and the politicians shilling for them (Republicans and Democrats alike)
Pretty much explains the standardized testing phenomenon.
But of course, $1.7 billion is just an enticing tidbit.
The public schools represent a mammoth captive market worth tens of billions per year to testing, textbook, software and hardware companies — and millions in the campaign coffers of politicians.
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Pearson and other testing companies have lobbyists that buy support for their tests. It ensures that the dollars keep flowing into the cyber dustbin.
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YES. $1.7 billion is just an enticing tidbit. Massive, massive money is now tied to not only the tests and the endless revision and production of tests, but to 1) forced pre-scripted curricula 2) teacher/administrator trainings 3) survey production/statistics garnering 4) educational consulting 5) charter school creating 6) technology development…(oh, this list goes on and on).
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“The Last Frontier”
The Last Frontier
Is public school
With gold-rush near
Pull up a stool
To strike it rich
Just stake a claim
And make a pitch
For testing game
And sell your “gold”
(The gold of fools)
To public sold
On techy tools
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“But of course, $1.7 billion is just an enticing tidbit.”
YEP! Only about .003% of the federal outlay for education. There’s plenty more where that 1.7b comes from. Thar’s gold in them hill’s!!
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Standardized testing is built into every State Plan for ESSA. Was there any discussion by teachers and parents in any state before the Plan was completed by the state’s department of education?
It is not too late for a state legislature to file a Supplemental Plan (not forbidden by ESSA). http://newbostonpost.com/2017/04/19/how-do-you-sell-common-core-standards-and-tests-to-unwilling-parents-hide-them/
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“Was there any discussion by teachers and parents in any state before the Plan was completed by the state’s department of education?”
Ha ha ha heh heh ha ha ha ha ah ha!! (and for you Spanish speakers-¡¡je je je je je je je je je!!)
Thanks for the good laugh, Sandra!!
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Let’s back up a step. Was there any discussion in any state before the DOEd issued NCLB or RTTT? These were micromanaging over-reaches by fed into state territory, re: ‘equal access to quality ed’, eventually under RTTT defining ‘quality ed’ w/model stds, & prescribing (in more minute detail under RTTT) how to measure & report progress toward it, & specifying sanctions for unsatisfactory progress.
15 yrs of poor results & backlash culminated in ESSA, which shifts a fair amount of power back to states, but retains the worst of testing reqts, as well as reqg fed approval of state stds/assessment criteria. And meanwhile states had assimilated NCLB/ RTTT criteria into their ed systems 2001-2016 [w/zero voter input], ensuring a fair amount of inertia in re-defining stds/ assessments, & still hamstrung by the fed reqt for annual testing 3-8 plus once in hs.
NCLB, RTTT, & ESSA all define prereqs for accepting fed ed $– most important in rust-belt & generally-poorer states. All of those states, tho conservative & perhaps ideologically favorable to municipal control of ed, had many poor communities dependent on state-ed-funding. And those states see ed as one of the 1st places to slash state funds in hard times, so most already had top-down imposition of ed-policy in place, & if not, quickly developed such a structure in time to hew to NCLB/RTTT for needed fed ed-funds. Despite the fact that the funds attached to these mandates are meager by comparison to the actual costs of implementing them.
All of which places many states in an impossible position re: implementing fed-DOEd mandates for public schools– but not to worry, because during the whole 2001-2016 era (& before), most of these states were implementing quasi-private escape hatches via charters & vouchers– subject to fewer or none of those mandates– & receiving fed $ to help that effort.
So: while it is true that few states engage public response as they plan how to meet ESSA criteria, that is a pattern set long before by over-weening Fed DOEd intrusion into state ed policy, reflected in overweening state DOEd intrusion into municipal policy. Which has laid the table for DTrump/ BDeVos proposal to jump out of the public-schooling paradigm altogether via vouchers.
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Except for the Dupes who believe so, and the Opportunists who believe in nothing but their own self-advancement, and are willing to step on the necks of children and colleagues to do so, the current regime of standardized testing has nothing to do with “positive results,” unless discrediting public education counts as that.
The tests are weaponized profit centers, nothing more.
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Corporations don’t care about the human impact of too many standardized tests as long as they get paid. An I.R.I. (informal reading inventory) given in an elementary class is a lot less stressful and yields a lot more useful information about what a child does or does not know. It can be given during the regular class, and it is a lot more relevant since it can be a tool to guide instruction. Standardized tests waste too much instruction time and money that could be applied to programs.
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Agree! What can we do?
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Opt out. Don’t take the tests. Let them wither.
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Opt out. Don’t take the tests. Let them wither.
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Yup, lots of power in opting out! Thanks for posting, Diane!
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Yes, lots of power in opting out! Thanks for posting, Diane!
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Considering that the whole standards and testing regime is foundationally conceptually, i.e., onto-epistemologically COMPLETELY INVALID why the hell are we wasting not only the money, but more importantly the child’s educational life in using such educational malpractices???
To understand that COMPLETE INVALIDITY I ask that all read and understand what Noel Wilson has proven in his never refuted nor rebutted 1997 seminal treatise (arguably the most important piece of educational writing in the last half century) “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)
1. 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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So true, Duane. And the testing-madness that set in in 2001 & has grown like Topsy plays a large part, I suspect, in the public’s willingness to at least consider Trump/DeVos’ radical plan to dump public-ed via vouchers.
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Some states are now adding an additional test, before kids can graduate from High School. The US Citizenship test. See
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446893/most-americans-fail-basic-civics-test?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Trending%20Email%20Reoccurring-%20Monday%20to%20Thursday%202017-04-20&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
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Frankly, I like it! I note one needs to answer only 60 of 100 Q’s to pass– & you can start taking it even before hs, & re-take as many times as needed. What’s not to like?
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It’s not just the tests that are COMPLETELY INVALID–it’s the one-size-fits-all standards themselves. Opt Out is just the tip of a very deep and hidden iceberg!
View at Medium.com
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