Marion Brady, veteran educator, writes a list of reasons why standardized testing is a waste of precious time and money.

It is a comprehensive list. I recommend that you read it.

Categories Education Reform

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Susan Lee Schwartz says:

April 24, 2017 at 10:05 am

Can’t read it unless you subscribe to the Washington Post.

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- Lisa M says:
  
  April 24, 2017 at 10:22 am
  
  you get 12 (?) free reads a month…maybe yours have been used up. I can often times game the system by reading the article on my cellphone.
  
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- carolmalaysia says:
  
  April 24, 2017 at 10:51 am
  
  I’m in the same position. Can’t read the list.
  
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  - Laura H. Chapman says:
    
    April 24, 2017 at 12:20 pm
    
    Me too.
    
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  - dianeravitch says:
    
    April 24, 2017 at 2:14 pm
    
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/04/19/34-problems-with-standardized-tests/?utm_term=.20df3327929a&wpisrc=nl_answer&wpmm=1
    
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- Duane E Swacker says:
  
  April 24, 2017 at 10:55 am
  
  Read and commented on it. No problem.
  
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  - Laura H. Chapman says:
    
    April 24, 2017 at 2:26 pm
    
    Here is an earlier list, no subscription required.
    http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/29516-http-www-washingtonpost-com-blogs-answer-sheet-wp-2015-03-01-the-important-things-standardized-tests-dont-measure
    
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drext727 says:

April 24, 2017 at 10:21 am

Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.

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Duane E Swacker says:

April 24, 2017 at 10:53 am

And he left out the most important one that obviates the need to use those 34 as reasons against the standards and testing regime. The most important FACT is that using the results of standardized tests for anything is COMPLETELY INVALID as proven by Noel Wilson is his never refuted nor rebutted 1997 dissertation. To understand why standards and standardized testing lack foundational conceptual (onto-epistemological) validity read and understand Wilson’s “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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Yvonne Siu-Runyan says:

April 24, 2017 at 11:23 am

These TESTS ENSLAVE. SLAVERY is the foundation of this country.

Money and power
http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/on_contact_with_chris_hedges_eugene_oneill_shatters_the_american_20170423 This begian the day the Civil War ended.

I can attest to the fact that the Hawaiian Islands and the people who live there are ENSLAVED by the GREED and POWER of the FEW in charge. The “ALOHA SPIRIT” was just BRADNING, and the islanders have been relegated to be servants because of TOURISM as the mainstay of the Hawaiian Islands.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/23/mark-zuckerberg-hawaii-land-lawsuits-kauai-estate

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Yvonne Siu-Runyan says:

April 24, 2017 at 11:25 am

Love Marion Brady’s work. He’s has a GREAT WEB site, too.

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John Wund says:

April 24, 2017 at 11:43 am

The fools who make these tests have no idea of the meaning of ‘education’. Neither, apparently, do the some of the judges who make these rulings. Perhaps, the lawyers who present these cases are partly to blame, although the ‘system’ that produced them had a purpose.

I once (as a graduate student in Physics) roomed with a Law student. I would characterize his post-graduate education as ‘hazing’ (not all that different from the medical ‘profession’). He had to read tons and tons of stuff and then draw from those ‘case studies’ to defend a position. He had no time to even consider the possibility that those ‘studies’ were, possibly, flawed decisions. He had no time to consider that the entire system might, in fact, not be engaged in dispensing the concept that most people have of ‘justice’ but, rather, to subvert that ancient concept by perverting our language.

My roommate was a good man, however he was subjected to the ‘boot camp’ that drained his humanity in order to ‘rebuild’ him. This has nothing to do with education (a drawing out from within the student).

These tests have the same ‘boot camp’ mentality. They serve to make both students and teachers submissive. That is their purpose. It has nothing to do with education.

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- Duane E Swacker says:
  
  April 24, 2017 at 1:11 pm
  
  “. . . roomed with a Law student.”
  
  Having lived through my ex’s law school experience, I can say that what you point out is quite true. The law schooling and the legal system is about case law and not justice. Hell, she went to the supposedly august Jesuit institution-St. Louis University. All of the grades for each class were normal curved. That is there were “X” amount of A’s, Y amount of B’s, Z amount of C’s, Y amount of D’s and X amount of F’s. How absurd is that tyranny???
  
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  - KrazyTA says:
    
    April 24, 2017 at 3:00 pm
    
    When it comes to the rheephorm-minded that have the money and/or power and/or authority to impose their will on others, paraphrasing the “Queen of Mean” herself, Leona Helmsley:
    
    “We aren’t subject to forced ranking. Only the little people are stack ranked.”
    
    😎
    
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debmeier says:

April 24, 2017 at 11:52 am

Brady has always been a favorite of mine.

Sent from my iPhone

>

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Duane E Swacker says:

April 24, 2017 at 1:19 pm

Personally, I found the 34 reasons to be rather secondary, even tertiary concerns that perhaps connect on an emotional level for some but that can be easily discounted as the whining of a disgruntled teacher.

We need to raise the awareness on the fundamental errors, falsehoods and psychometric fudgings of the standards and testing regime and keep on pounding home that fallacious hogwash.

For example the supporters (and unfortunately the vast majority of ignorant GAGA educators) like to believe that we can “measure student achievement” and/or other aspects of the teaching and learning process. Well, that’s just one of the major falsehoods out there today in discussions of education:

The most misleading concept/term in education is “measuring student achievement” or “measuring student learning”. The concept has been misleading educators into deluding themselves that the teaching and learning process can be analyzed/assessed using “scientific” methods which are actually pseudo-scientific at best and at worst a complete bastardization of rationo-logical thinking and language usage.

There never has been and never will be any “measuring” of the teaching and learning process and what each individual student learns in their schooling. There is and always has been assessing, evaluating, judging of what students learn but never a true “measuring” of it.

But, but, but, you’re trying to tell me that the supposedly august and venerable APA, AERA and/or the NCME have been wrong for more than the last 50 years, disseminating falsehoods and chimeras??

Who are you to question the authorities in testing???

Yes, they have been wrong and I (and many others, Wilson, Hoffman etc. . . ) question those authorities and challenge them (or any of you other advocates of the malpractices that are standards and testing) to answer to the following onto-epistemological analysis:

The TESTS MEASURE NOTHING, quite literally when you realize what is actually happening with them. Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement:

“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition]

Notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”. The same by proximity is not a good rhetorical/debating technique.
Since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning, there is no exemplar of that standard unit and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable”?

THE TESTS MEASURE NOTHING for how is it possible to “measure” the nonobservable with a non-existing measuring device that is not calibrated against a non-existing standard unit of learning?????

PURE LOGICAL INSANITY!

The basic fallacy of this is the confusing and conflating metrological (metrology is the scientific study of measurement) measuring and measuring that connotes assessing, evaluating and judging. The two meanings are not the same and confusing and conflating them is a very easy way to make it appear that standards and standardized testing are “scientific endeavors”-objective and not subjective like assessing, evaluating and judging.

That supposedly objective results are used to justify discrimination against many students for their life circumstances and inherent intellectual traits.

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Mary DeFalco says:

April 24, 2017 at 3:57 pm

Marion Brady: 34 Reasons Why Standardized Tests Are Useless

Only one reason should suffice to stop using standardized tests to evaluate children:
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                                            Child Abuse
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From personal experience, the standardized test does not give the readability level -that level at which students can read with ease without being threatened: Word accuracy 92 – 95% instructional level (60-75% comprehension) When a student is forced to read on a frustration level he/she will only regress; develop a dislike for reading; and worse yet develop a poor self-image which is almost impossible to rectify. ( I engaged in a conversation with an 80 year old man at a library while he was baby sitting his grandchild. It was evident that he had a poor self-image. I asked him why he felt he was stupid and didn’t know anything. He responded that he was retained in grade school.)

Some students begin to panic, become apprehensive to the point that they can’t focus and worse yet, their brain “freezes” out of fear, their brain “blows a fuse”; cry when they don’t know the answer; and get so upset that they have to use the bathroom and even vomit. That automatically invalidates a test when a student can’t fully concentrate plus losses time.

Frank Smith states, “…when an individual is anxious or unsure of himself/herself or has experienced an unhappy succession of ‘failures’, his/her behavior exhibits an inevitable consequence: he demands far more information before he makes a decision. His very hesitancy aggravates his difficulties. …The more anxious he is, the less likely he will be to rely on non visual information. …Where the relaxed individual sees order, the tense individual sees visual confusion.” The old saying, “Nothing succeeds like success.”

Chronic stress is known to change brain chemistry in children and can lead to mental illness and cause psychological harm.

In 2014 Dr. Ravitch posted the following:
“A Terrifying Report about Child Abuse in Texas Schools–and in Your State Too”
by dianerav 10/16/14

A Terrifying Report about Child Abuse in Texas Schools–and in Your State Too

“…A group of mental health professionals prepared the following report. …This is what many schools are doing to our children. They must be stopped. This borders on criminality. Wake up. It is happening in many states and communities….”

“The signs of psychological abuse that I have observed from chronic stress in this system usually begin by age 6 – 8. The most common symptoms begin with signs of desensitization, anxiety, loss of imagination, loss of spontaneity, loss of humor, regression, irritability, self injury, inability to concentrate, and dissociation. However, the most destructive effects of this psychological abuse will not manifest until the children reach their teenage years, or early adulthood. At that time, their conditioned emotional repression from victimization of institutional bullying and positive/negative ambivalent role modeling can lead to mental illness and criminality.”

“Few politicians or “reformers” have listened to the voices of mental health professionals or educators who are warning about the potential for psychological harm … After writing numerous professional articles and reports for state legislators, only to have them ignored”

Joyce Murdock Feilke: What Are We Doing to the Children?
By dianeravitch July 12, 2014
Joyce Murdock, a mental health a professional discusses how children cope with stress,
“Dissociation is how children often cope with stress which they are developmentally unprepared to process. When it becomes chronic in their daily environment, it can lead to mental illness, since it impacts their social and emotional development.”

Secondly:
Students have to be able to
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                                     relate to the topic 
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in order to comprehend the text.

Marion Brady states commercially produced machine- scored standardized tests,
“Are unavoidably biased by social-class, ethnic, regional, and other cultural differences.”

It is impossible for students across the board to identify with every question?

Frank Smith, a highly recognized psycholinguist, furthermore, purports, “Remedial action with older students who are diagnosed as ‘reading problems’ may magnify difficulties rather than facilitate fluency. The main need of a student inexperienced in reading is to engage in reading that is easy, interesting, and can relate to.

Instead he is likely to get less reading, contrived, meaningless text and more isolated, meaningless drill. Material that is challenging …rather than easy, raises the anxiety level so that reading is neither meaningful nor pleasant. The problem of a fifteen-year-old who has difficulty reading may not be insufficiency of instruction, but that his previous years of instruction have made learning to read more difficult. …After ten years of instructional bruising a student may be far more in need of a couple of years …in education convalescence than an aggravation of his injuries.”

Add to those two reasons:
The most important the higher order thinking skill, the imagination, can not be validly test or standardized that.

The first reason: child abuse should be sufficient for judges to out law standardized tests indiscriminately instead of punishing them for opting out or failing to meet the acceptable score.

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KrazyTA says:

April 24, 2017 at 4:01 pm

A few apt quotes re standardized testing from Jim Horn and Denise Wilburn, THE MISMEASURE OF EDUCATION (2013):

1), “What was once educationally significant, but difficult to measure, has been replaced by what is insignificant and easy to measure. So now we test how well we have taught what we do not value. —Art Costa, professor emeritus at Cal State-Fullerton” (p. 1)

2), “Initially, we use data as a way to think hard about difficult problems, but then we over rely on data as a way to avoid thinking hard about difficult problems. We surrender our better judgment and leave it to the algorithm. —Joe Flood, author of The Fires” (p. 55)

3), “When the right thing can only be measured poorly, it tends to cause the wrong thing to be measured, only because it can be measured well. And it is often much worse to have a good measurement of the wrong thing—especially when, as is so often the case, the wrong thing will in fact be used as an indicator of the right thing—than to have poor measurements of the right thing. —John Tukey, mathematician Bell Labs and Princeton University” (p. 147)

😎

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carolmalaysia says:

April 24, 2017 at 6:31 pm

How Poverty Changes the Brain…The Atlantic
TARA GARCÍA MATHEWSON APR 19, 2017

…The early results out of a Boston nonprofit are positive.
When a person lives in poverty, a growing body of research suggests the limbic system is constantly sending fear and stress messages to the prefrontal cortex, which overloads its ability to solve problems, set goals, and complete tasks in the most efficient ways.

This happens to everyone at some point, regardless of social class. The overload can be prompted by any number of things, including an overly stressful day at work or a family emergency. People in poverty, however, have the added burden of ever-present stress. They are constantly struggling to make ends meet and often bracing themselves against class bias that adds extra strain or even trauma to their daily lives.

And the science is clear—when brain capacity is used up on these worries and fears, there simply isn’t as much bandwidth for other things…

It’s true that exposure to the constant stresses and dangers of poverty actually changes people’s brains. Al Race, the deputy co-director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, which has an enduring partnership with EMPath, says children who grow up in and remain in poverty are doubly affected…

Read More:
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/04/can-brain-science-pull-families-out-of-poverty/523479/?utm_source=eb

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Cassandra says:

April 25, 2017 at 11:23 pm

The detrimental effects of standardized, high-stakes testing is no foreign topic throughout all of my classes this semester. I mainly sided against it because it diminished teacher and student creativity and caused unnecessary stress to both parties. While those two reasons and variations of it were included in article, what most interested me was the fact that tax dollars are helping to consequently diminish the most important parts of learning: play, music, arts, and a safe learning environment. Something else on the list also gave me a disheartening feeling as a future teacher: when she stated that bullying, classist divisions, and inequality in every sense of the word, were the direct result of these mandated state testing.
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In Florida, where Marion Brady (author) sets her example, it was the brightest students who opted-out for the tests and were punished by being held back in the third grade, or forced to have assisted reading lessons. The divergent thinkers' parents in turn sued the school system, backed by the Opt-Out Florida Network, with the argument that the overall growth throughout the school year is what should be the assessing tool on whether or not a student moves on to the next grade, and not a pointless and unsuccessful test. It seems common sense that these tests should slowly cease to exist in general, as it has proven that it fails most of the time. By keeping them around, only the financially-corrupt higher-ends of the bureaucracy benefit, and absolutely none of the students.
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