In 2000, when George W. Bush ran for President, we heard about “the Texas Miracle.” We were told that testing every child every year would produce high test scores and close the achievement gaps. Believing in the claim, Congress passed No Child Left Behind, which required testing every child every year from grades 3-8.
Then came “Race to the Top,” which ratcheted up the testing punishments, requiring that teachers be evaluated by student test scores.
In 2011, the National Research Council warned that test-based accountability was not working and was unlikely ever to work.
Congress ignored its report. In 2015, Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, continuing the practice of annual testing, a practice not known in other nations.
What has 17 years of high-stakes testing produced? Narrowing of the curriculum to what is tested. Cheating scandals. Gaming the system. Teacher demoralization. Teacher shortages.
Billions spent on testing instead of teaching.
But nowhere closer to the “top.” Even the NAEP scores went flat in 2015, the first reversal in many years.
The latest international test results show no gains in reading. None.
This failure belongs to Reformers.
I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but it’s all nonsense, no? This is a conversation that I have all the time with people who think charters are just swell. Create a phony crisis in education followed by a fake measuring stick for performance only aimed at public schools– particularly vulnerable ones. Set the bar for performance for both public schools and teachers at an absurd level that can never be and should never be reached (common core math in kindergarten), and then proclaim the public school institution an abject failure when said bar isn’t reached. Resultantly, close up public education and replace with billionaire controlled charter shops.
Of course “reform” failed; it’s as phony as Betsy Devos’ educational acumen or Donald Trump’s empathy for the “regular guy”.
Right you are. It’s like the old analogy – “Your house is on fire! Something must be done! Obviously, its time to approve that massive new housing development in another town!”
Reform didn’t fail the reformers. Reform gutted the profession. It did exactly what they wanted. The kids were never the issue.
Right you are and well said.
Now and then I think of Professor Harold Hill, the Music Man…”Ya Got Trouble” and “The Think System”.
JB2 heh heh, perfect
If you mean the purpose of reform was to destroy public education, then I’d tend to agree. However, some of my colleagues that are still “reform” minded– although they are ever dwindling in number– are still on the bandwagon with the idea that data and the like are good for kids and will “improve their education”. It has not in almost two decades. From that perspective, reform has failed.
It is good to hear that number is dwindling.
Putting a band-aid on the problem stops the bleeding temporarily or on the surface. You can’t address school reform until you address bigger problems like racism, segregation and poverty…We haven’t come far at all since Brown Vs Board of Education…this is the new era of education oppression
Unfortunately our government continues to do nothing. Shame on them. They need to visit the classrooms and actually see what has to be taught and the state of confusion they have made.
The ultimate irony will be when we’re told that the reforms have improved education, but in important ways that can’t be reflected in test results.
LOL. Yes.
FLERP!: I was going to post this separately, below, but I thank you for your astute observation and will post here.
Years ago Tom Hanks appeared on SNL as Mr. Short-Term Memory.
What he did as lighthearted fun the corporate education reform crowd does in all seriousness.
If you were to go by their promotional literature and advertising clichés and snappy political one-liners at very specific times long & not-so-long ago, rheephorm miracles too numerous to count were about to happen—or were/are in the middle of happening—from Texas to New Orleans to Chicago to Philadelphia to Los Angeles to Adelanto CA to…
🤪
The problem with bringing up past miracles is that it tends to get one in trouble when trying to make present-day sales. After all, dredging up the past when the numbers & stats can’t bear scrutiny has a downside.
Think about it: the “studies show” argument aka proof by assertion doesn’t hold up well when people look at actual places and people and results.
So it’s usually best to just live in the present jargon-filled sales moment. The past? RIP. $tudent $ucce$$ is usually best served by pretending that every rheephorm initiative is the first of its kind anywhere…
Sorry. I forgot what we were talking about. But I’ve got this Personalized Learning Digital Curriculum that is all the rage in virtual classes and can be had for a mere pot full of gold…
😎
Seventeen years of educational abuse has resulted in the gutting of veteran teachers which has led to the deprofessionalization of public school teaching. This is a tragedy hidden from the good people of this nation. We have all been played by the puppet masters.
Money well wasted!
Ideologues are impervious to what happens in the real world, especially if they are isolated in their sound bubbles. I just retired from three years of teaching at the end of my career. My juniors and seniors were taking 27 required standardized tests each year–required pretests, benchmark tests, and state tests. The state tests, onerous enough in themselves and worse, far worse, than simply a waste of time, were not the only ones required. There were, in addition, district requirements for practice tests to prep kids for the actual tests. A full third of the school year was given over mostly to testing, and in many classrooms, test prep was the only activity, day in, day out.
Sickening, stupid, distorting of curricula and pedagogy. It’s time we ended this nightmare.
The opportunity cost of this testing is incalculable. Traditional curricula are out the window. It’s test prep all day, every day. The kids practice their test-taking skills, over and over, and they learn, otherwise, almost nothing. I don’t think it an exaggeration to say that English language arts is effectively dead.
The deformers love to say that you get what you measure. Well, they have validly and reliably measured nothing. And that’s what they’ve got for it—nothing. An entire generation of profoundly ignorant kids who have had their opportunity to receive an education stolen from them.
“The deformers love to say that you get what you measure.”
The genesis of that idea originated with management consultant/”guru” Peter Drucker, who said, “What gets measured gets managed.”
And that was an important motive for so-called reform, to bring the teachers and the kids under a particular, ideology-driven kind of management based on threats and intimidation (“accountability” and school closings), authoritarianism and obedience to it, cultivated tolerance for tedium, “outcome-based “meaninglessness (just take a look at the context-free “close reading” idiocy of Common Core).
As for that generation of kids who’ve had the opportunity for an education stolen from them, it was sadly just a prelude to all the other thefts they will suffer, of their time, money, choices and freedoms.
yes. Education for the children of the leaders of the New Feudal Order. Obedience training for the children of the proles.
Peter Cunningham told me, back when he worked for Arne: You measure what you treasure.
I thought about what I treasure most, and I disagreed. I don’t know what he treasures.
Bob Shepherd:
The corporate education crowd prides itself on their tough-minded effectiveness and use of bidness-minded lingo. They not only don’t know or understand what they’re talking about when it comes to anything related to standardized tests and the numbers they generate, they can’t even use their own jargon in an accurate and honest way.
One of their sacred truisms is that you “treasure what you measure.” And what is the opportunity cost for OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN when those doing the “measuring” treasure treasure aka $tudent $ucce$$?
Exactly as you put it: that those students “have had their opportunity to receive an education stolen from them.”
Thank you for your spot on comments.
😎
P.S. I am reminded of something I heard during Ken Burns’ recent VIETNAM series. One of the people featured in the film talked about the misleading & useless US govt metrics used to measure “success.” It went something like this: “when you can’t measure what’s important, you make important what you can measure.”
Fits the rheephorm crowd perfectly.
“Late in life, McNamara trotted out another explanation for the policy and his own role in it: ignorance.” NYT Op Ed 11/28/17
One can see the damage on the individual level in a public school. I’ve been in a position to have 4 kids thru one Ohio district over 25 years.
the school simply isn’t better as a result of these “reforms” and it isn’t that we don’t adopt them- Ohio has adopted EACH and EVERY ed reform experiment, gimmick or “innovation” that these folks produce in those think tanks.
It’s a working class district – the population doesn’t change that much (it’s poorer now than it was).
It’s all been LOSS. They’ll take something great like field trips and replace it with some cheap garbage like an online “dashboard” or some ridiculous, faddish mandate like the Third Grade Reading Guarantee. This happens EVERY year. New fads. New gimmicks. New measures. There’s no TIME to do anything well. As soon as we adapt to the latest gimmick they pile on another one.
The one thing we have managed to preserve is a strong music program and that runs almost entirely on donations now. My 30 year old had a better public school experience than my 14 year old. I feel bad for the younger kids. This is just reality to them. They don’t know any different.
We desperately need some dissent and debate. This is an echo chamber and the response to failure can’t be ‘double down on ed reform”. Public schools won’t survive.
The goal seems to be that continuous defunding of public schools will lead to public schools being able to offer less and fewer options with larger class sizes. The only way to fight back is to target the “reform” enabling so-called representatives during the next election, and vote for candidates that support public schools.
Exactly right, retired teacher. The best way to teach misguided officials a lesson is to vote them out of Office.
so what would it take for ed reformers to reconsider?
They don’t have measurable success. They have an increase in graduation rates but we all know some of that is gamed and rates were improving every year before ed reformers came to power anyway
they claim to be ‘data driven”. this is THEIR movement and their policy and their ideology
When do they take responsibility for results?
Never. Each time that there is a legislative opportunity, despite all the evidence, they double down. These are ideologues with no interest in the facts. This has been going on for so long now that my high-school students had never known anything different. They simply assumed that school was useless, trivial, and punitive and always had been.
what about a non-experiment “experiment”?
What if they just stopped for 5 years and then we took a measure? All the lobbying groups and think tanks and operatives like DeVos just laid off and allowed public schools to work on one or two things with even funding?
They could pick. attendance. doing a solid job with Common core. whatever. their choice.
then we test. If the scores go up they can disband the 50000 groups and we’ll re-evaluate the whole idea.
Take a measure of the value-add of “ed reform” for once. Make them prove they are useful.
Here is another experiment.
25 states follow their policies. 25 are free to do something different. See what happens.
I don’t think they care, Diane.
The entire ed reform chorus are engaged in rebutting a single AP article that was critical of charter schools.
Don’t bother these people with the test scores of 4th graders. Charter schools are under attack! To the barricades!
You’ll notice we never get these coordinated defenses of public schools. Anyone can say anything about our schools and they’ll all pass it around on social media like it’s gospel
I feel like public schools could do a better job ignoring these people. Not teachers but school boards and principals
Stop treating them like they know more than you do. Stop deferring. Stop trying to win their approval- it isn’t coming anyway.
There’s no law that says we have to follow every random fancy of Jeb Bush.
We can say “no- that’s dumb and we’re not doing it”
That’s the whole upside of being “local”. Take the upside. Take it back. No one will treat you as experts until you start acting like experts. Jeb Bush doesn’t have the foggiest idea of what makes a rural Ohio public school good. Stop listening to him.
What if?
Effective test score Marketing starts/continues where critical thinking ends.
Critical Thinking per Noel Wilson/Swacker
“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. ”
Using the Scores, is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error (per Wilson).
Or, as Albert concluded:
The problems won’t be solved by the level of “thinking” that created them…
Pull out the test score stop plug.
Drain out the waste.
Who needs it anyway?
Fill in the deep holes, leave no trace, no sign of the test score disgrace…
I read that those Texas test scores were considered high if high school students demonstrated a 4th-grade literacy level. G. W. Bush and his minions made sure that the bar for a high test score was so low, they couldn’t lose.
Why should scores on norm referenced tests increase? To me that is like saying that the average golf score in my community must increase every year.
I’ve read that in Florida, top-ranked schools couldn’t improve anymore because they were already maxed out, so many teachers were ranked incompetent because they couldn’t raise their students’ scores higher than 100 percent.
Ms. Ollie, the argument that the deformers made from the beginning was that the U.S. was far behind the rest of the world and needed to catch up. That’s been a standard deformer argument ever since the Nation at Risk report. Of course, the truth of the matter is that we have a much more socioeconomically diverse population than do those countries whose students lead the world on these international norm-referenced tests.
The U.S. also has the 3rd largest population in the world and PISA tests 15-year-olds across our entire country instead of just one city like in Shanghai, China while ignoring everyone else.
As for Finland, the U.S. has almost as many teachers as Finland’s total population and poverty in Finland is almost non-existent compared to the U.S. with the highest child poverty rate in the developed world.
Finland has one of Europe’s lowest rates—5.5 percent—of people living below the poverty threshold vs 21-percent of all children in the United States. The U.S. has more than 70-million children. The total population of Finland is almost 5.5 million. The U.S. has almost 13 children for every person in Finland.
I just read that there are 1.5 million families in Finland vs. almost 126 million in the US.
Careful….
The assumption being discussed here is that these test scores ‘matter’. What do they ‘measure’ beyond a score on a particular ‘test’?
This whole idea that a ‘test’ can measure ‘education’ is an outgrowth of the IQ test (SAT, for example, STILL stands for ‘Scholastic Aptitude’, a measure of intelligence. If you want to measure the effectiveness of an education system, you should look at the success of a society. And, to measure that, you need to define ‘success’. In my personal opinion, ‘wealth’ plays a very small role.
You are right to question the value of the scores. Since the “reformers” used test scores to beat up on public schools, it seems fair to challenge them for their failure to make a difference, having spent billions on testing over the past 16-17 years.
Wealth matters a lot, because testing measures family income quite well
Good point, Diane! Yes, indeed, wealth matters as far as test score, but does it matter as a measure of either personal or societal success? I would say that ‘happiness’ and ‘contentment’ have far greater value.
So, as a parent, I think that there are several factors being discussed:
Why test?
1) how is a parent to determine if my children are receiving grade-level appropriate instruction and how successful is the child absorbing this information? Surely some state or national testing is needed
2) the entire college experience is a series of high stakes testing, from scholarships to 100% grade final exams, let alone entrance to college and the implications for future careers. So learning how to take tests of increasing complexity and importance is needed.
Why doesn’t it help
Parental engagement, early childhood education are factors that can’t be fixed in school.
So some testing is needed, but certainly student socio-economic status can have a significant impact on average test scores, so careful interpretation is needed … not to be used as a simple measuring stick or determination of teacher quality.
To answer your first question about how you know your child is absorbing [sic] appropriate [sic] content, here’s how: you receive reports from teachers.
To answer your second question, well I simply disagree that the entire experience is a series of high stakes tests. Even the tests themselves, however, are created and graded by professors, not by testing companies. That’s why you’re right, AZ parent, careful interpretation is needed, interpretation by teachers, not by Common Core or College Board.
And that is what they do in Finland. If you want to know if your child is doing the school work and learning from what they do, ask the teachers … but in the United States, the money behind the corporate reformer has spent years funding a PSYOPs campaign scapegoating and bashing teachers and blaming them for everything so no one will trust them.
Why would anyone worth billions fund that kind of campaign?
The proof, parents that think test results are necessary to measure learning.
Thanks for your snarky response, Inservice. Frankly, I have felt some teachers didn’t care to put much effort in their evaluation. Some were incredibly perceptive and most were in-between. I like some objective measures.
There are plenty of high stakes testing with life altering implications. A score of 30+ on the MCAT provides a 70% chance of getting into Med school. PSAT has major scholarship implications & SAT, GMAT, GRE have cut-offs at many schools.
How objective is a test shrouded in secrecy … tests that make billions for autocratic, private sector corporations?
Again, I repeat, Finland doesn’t use these secretive so-called (objective) tests to judge what a child learns and then punish teachers if the children don’t learn whatever the secretive test is measuring.
Teachers teach.
Children learn … if they cooperate and do the work and study and remember what they were taught.
And if parents/guardians support the teachers and children.
Secretive tests that AZ parent calls objective do not reveal what a child was taught, if the child did the work and studies and if the child forgot what was learned. Memory is a tricky thing and most children and adults have little power over what the brain remembers each day when the transfer takes place from short term to long term while we sleep.
In fact, studies show that we can revise memories and/or manufacture memories that never happened and then we think they did.
Those so-called “objective” tests are often flawed to begin with, and become even less reliable when we take into account how flawed our memories are.
AZ Parent, you sound like a privatizers minion and/or programmed stooge that returns here to repeatedly to make comments that demonize most teachers.
While I respect your right to have an opinion of your own, I do not respect your thinking.
For instance, there are about 3.5 million public school teachers in this country working with 49 million children in almost 100,000 schools in about 15,000 school districts spread out over 50 states and addition to territories, but you cannot base your thinking on more than a few (at most 50) teachers in your immediate area. How much time have you spent with those teachers? Did you request the right to observe their teaching and how often did you do that?
There is no way you should base your thinking on any comments your child makes when they come home. Some children can be very manipulative especially if they know their parents are already critical of teachers blaming them for everything.
It was my experience, that when teachers are being pressured and bullied by administrators and parents, they don’t perform as well as they could if they were left alone to teach like the teachers are allowed to do in Finland.
Students in K-12 were learning a LOT more when schools used classroom tests, made by teachers, almost exclusively. The reasons why these tests don’t work are complex, and one can’t explain those reasons in a few soundbites, and that’s one reason why we haven’t made any progress in getting rid of them. But here’s the beginning of a primer on this that I wrote five or six years ago:
How to Prevent Another PARCC Mugging: A Public Service Announcement
The Common Core Curriculum Commissariat College and Career Ready Assessment Program (CCCCCCRAP) needs to be scrapped for many reasons, including the following:
1.The CCSS ELA exams are invalid.
First, much of attainment in ELA consists in world knowledge (knowledge of what—the stuff of declarative memories of subject matter). The “standards” being tested cover almost no world knowledge and so the tests based on those standards miss much of what constitutes attainment in this subject. Imagine a test of biology that left out almost all world knowledge about biology and covered only biology “skills” like—I don’t know—slide-staining ability—and you’ll get what I mean here. This has been a problem with all of these summative standardized tests in ELA since their inception.
Second, much of attainment in ELA consists in procedural knowledge (knowledge of what—the stuff of procedural memories of subject matter). The “standards” being tested define skills so vaguely and so generally that they cannot be validly operationalized for testing purposes as written.
Third, nothing that students do on these exams EVEN REMOTELY resembles real reading and writing as it is actually done in the real world. The test consists largely of what I call New Criticism Lite, or New Criticism for Dummies—inane exercises on identification of examples of literary elements that for the most part skip over entirely what is being communicated in the piece of writing. In other words, these are tests of literature that for the most part skip over the literature, tests of the reading of informative texts that for the most part skip over the content of those texts. Since what is done on these tests does not resemble, even remotely, what actual readers and writers do in the real world when they actually read and write, the tests, ipso facto, cannot be valid tests of real reading and writing.
Fourth, standard standardized test development practice requires that the testing instrument be validated. Such validation requires that the test maker show that the test correlates strongly with other accepted measures of what is being tested, both generally and specifically (that is, with regard to specific materials and/or skills being tested). No such validation was done for these tests. NONE. And as they are written, based on the standards they are based upon, none COULD BE done. Where is the independent measure of proficiency in CCSS.Literacy.ELA.11-12.4b against which the items in PARCC that are supposed to measure that standard on this test have been validated? Answer: There is no such measure. None. And PARCC has not been validated against it, obviously LOL. So, the tests fail to meet a minimal standard for a high-stakes standardized assessment—that they have been independently validated.
The test formats are inappropriate.
First, the tests consist largely of objective-format items (multiple-choice and EBSR). These item types are most appropriate for testing very low-level skills (e.g., recall of factual detail). However, on these tests, such item formats are pressed into a kind of service for which they are, generally, not appropriate. They are used to test “higher-order thinking.” The test questions therefore tend to be tricky and convoluted. The test makers, these days, all insist on answer choices all being plausible. Well, what does plausible mean? Well, at a minimum, plausible means “reasonable.” So, the questions are supposed to deal with higher-order thinking, and the wrong answers are all supposed to be plausible, so the test questions end up being extraordinarily complex and confusing and tricky, all because the “experts” who designed these tests didn’t understand the most basic stuff about creating assessments–that objective question formats are generally not great for testing higher-order thinking, for example. For many of the sample released questions, there is, arguably, no answer among the answer choices that is correct or more than one answer that is correct, or the question simply is not, arguably, actually answerable as written.
Second, at the early grades, the tests end up being as much a test of keyboarding skills as of attainment in ELA. The online testing format is entirely inappropriate for most third graders.
The tests are diagnostically and instructionally useless.
Many kinds of assessment—diagnostic assessment, formative assessment, performative assessment, some classroom summative assessment—have instructional value. They can be used to inform instruction and/or are themselves instructive. The results of these tests are not broken down in any way that is of diagnostic or instructional use. Teachers and students cannot even see the tests to find out what students got wrong on them and why. So the tests are of no diagnostic or instructional value. None. None whatsoever.
4. The tests have enormous incurred costs and opportunity costs.
First, they steal away valuable instructional time. Administrators at many schools now report that they spend as much as a third of the school year preparing students to take these tests. That time includes the actual time spent taking the tests, the time spent taking pretests and benchmark tests and other practice tests, the time spent on test prep materials, the time spent doing exercises and activities in textbooks and online materials that have been modeled on the test questions in order to prepare kids to answer questions of those kinds, and the time spent on reporting, data analysis, data chats, proctoring, and other test housekeeping.
Second, they have enormous cost in dollars. In 2010-11, the US spent 1.7 billion on state standardized testing alone. Under CCSS, this increases. The PARCC contract by itself is worth over a billion dollars to Pearson in the first three years, and you have to add the cost of SBAC and the other state tests (another billion and a half?), to that. No one, to my knowledge, has accurately estimated the cost of the computer upgrades that will be necessary for online testing of every child, but those costs probably run to 50 or 60 billion. This is money that could be spent on stuff that matters—on making sure that poor kids have eye exams and warm clothes and food in their bellies, on making sure that libraries are open and that schools have nurses on duty to keep kids from dying. How many dead kids is all this testing worth, given that it is, again, of no instructional value? IF THE ANSWER TO THAT IS NOT OBVIOUS TO YOU, YOU SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED ANYWHERE NEAR A SCHOOL OR AN EDUCATIONAL POLICY-MAKING DESK.
The tests distort curricula and pedagogy.
The tests drive how and what people teach, and they drive much of what is created by curriculum developers. This is a vast subject, so I won’t go into it in this brief note. Suffice it to say that the distortions are grave. In U.S. curriculum development today, the tail is wagging the dog.
The tests are abusive and demotivating.
Our prime directive as educators is to nurture intrinsic motivation—to create independent, life-long learners. The tests create climates of anxiety and fear. Both science and common sense teach that extrinsic punishment and reward systems like this testing system are highly DEMOTIVATING for cognitive tasks. The summative standardized testing system is a really, really backward extrinsic punishment and reward approach to motivation. It reminds me of the line from the alphabet in the Puritan New England Primer, the first textbook published on these shores:
F
The idle Fool
Is whip’t in school.
The tests have shown no positive results.
We have had more than a decade, now, of standards-and-testing-based accountability under NCLB. We have seen only miniscule increases in outcomes, and those are well within the margin of error of the calculations. Simply from the Hawthorne Effect, we should have seen SOME improvement!!! And that suggests that the testing has actually DECREASED OUTCOMES, which is consistent with what we know about the demotivational effects of extrinsic punishment and reward systems. It’s the height of stupidity to look at a clearly failed approach and to say, “Gee, we should to a lot more of that.”
The tests will worsen the achievement and gender gaps.
Both the achievement and gender gaps in educational performance are largely due to motivational issues, and these tests and the curricula and pedagogical strategies tied to them are extremely demotivating. They create new expectations and new hurdles that will widen existing gaps, not close them. Ten percent fewer boys than girls, BTW, received a proficient score on the NY CCSS exams–this in a time when 60 percent of kids in college and 3/5ths of people in MA programs are female. The CCSS exams drive more regimentation and standardization of curricula, which will further turn off kids already turned off by school, causing more to turn out and drop out.
This message not brought to you by
PARCC: Spell that backward
notSmarter, imBalanced
AIRy nonsense
CTB McGraw-SkillDrill
MAP to nowhere
Scholastic Common Core Achievement Test (SCCAT)
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (“All your base are belong to us”)
Thank you.
Thank you, InService, for reading the response. I greatly appreciate that.
I live in Texas, the state that, until recently, had an 8.5% cap on special education…so not proud of the Lone Star State right now.
Dyslexia is very prevalent in my family, so it’s very concerning to me that our nation would rather pay billions of dollars for STARR testing our children than educate our teachers on how to teach dyslexic children. Our schools pretend dyslexia doesn’t exist, while 80% of people incarcerated in Texas cannot read.
I’m curious if our fellow taxpayers know that it costs $42,000/year/inmate, and only $8,200/year/dyslexic student; and prisons are built based on whether a community has an increased number of 3rd grade students who can’t read. It makes me wonder, are we putting our children through testing hell just so private prisons know where to build prisons? And are we closing public schools via testing/accountability to make way for charter schools and private enterprise to take their place? What is our country coming to? Why pick on the little guy…our children?
What can be done to put a stop to this?