The testing monster is coming for our children.
Helge Wasmuth of Mercy College in New York writes here about the full-steam-ahead plan for international testing of five-year-Old children. As he reports, the planning has excluded experts on Early Childhood Education and has been shrouded in secrecy.
This is the latest and most disgusting manifestation of what Pasi Sahlberg dubbed GERM (the Global Education Reform Movement).
Wasmuth predicts that Baby PISA will lead to:
“increased standardization, high-stakes accountability, predetermined learning outcomes, control over teachers, business-based management models, and privatization.
“The goal of the study is to gather information on children’s cognitive and social-emotional skills as well as characteristics of their home and early education environments. Direct assessment, including actual samples of student work, will measure the domains of emerging literacy and numeracy, executive function, and empathy and trust. Children will be expected to do their work on a tablet, devoting approximately 15 minutes to each domain over a period of two days. Indirect assessment—parents’ and staff reports and administrator observations—will focus on cognitive and social-emotional skills. By participating in the study, OECD asserts, member nations will have access to the primary factors that drive or thwart early learning, developing a common framework and benchmarks.
“The study is now underway. A pilot that was originally planned, which would have provided a valuable opportunity for meaningful feedback and fine-tuning, has been scrapped. The organization has moved forward with data collection, to be conducted from the end of 2017 through 2019. This will be followed by so-called “quality control” and analysis, and the release of a report in 2020.
“While the original plan called for participation by three to six countries in the northern and southern hemispheres, a number of early childhood communities have already successfully registered protest, urging their governments to abstain. (Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, and Denmark are among them.) The only outliers are England—Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are not taking part—and the United States…
“Critique of the IELS has been fierce, and numerous concerns have been raised. Most egregious is the marginalization of the wider early childhood community. “The entire IELS project has been shrouded in secrecy from day one,” Mathias Urban, director of the Early Childhood Research Centre at the University of Roehampton in London, told me. Respected researchers and scholars in the field were not consulted, their input unwelcome. As has long been the case with early education policy, decades of research have been ignored.
“The OECD values objectivity, universality, predictability and that which can be measured. The organization seems to be oblivious to alternative ideas about educating and caring for young children. Nor have local contexts and traditions for this process been part of the conversation…
“So, why is all of this shrouded in secrecy? Why are we kept in the dark? Why are the experts and the field’s knowledge marginalized? One needs to ask: Who really benefits from such a study? The children? Will it really inform policymaking and improve educational practices in a meaningful way? Or is it another piece to open up public education sectors to corporate interests?
The disregard of the early childhood community is concerning enough. Don’t even get me started on the collection of child-based data on a global scale without the consent of children, parents, or practitioners. Or with assessing five-year-olds on a tablet. How flawed and meaningless are the results. How do you assess trust and empathy, or the complexities of learning and development?
“The impact on our field will be disastrous—maybe not immediately, but soon enough. OECD is a powerful and influential institution. Everyone should be clear about their goals of creating a common framework with benchmarks and assessing learning outcomes. Early childhood education will be reduced to what can be measured: literacy and numeracy.
“Ultimately, the field will fall even deeper into the clutches of GERM. Many countries will feel compelled to do well on the IELS, and the easiest way to do that is to align the curricula to what is measured. Pedagogical compliance will follow, along with teaching to the test—especially in countries, such as the U.S., with many private providers of early education, who will use their outcomes to win new customers. As in the case of the Common Core, a new market will be created, “Aligned to IELS” the new trademark.
“The quest for predictable outcomes leaves no place for the hallmarks of early childhood—for uncertainty, experimentation, surprise, amazement, context, subjective experiences. OECD values and measures what can be measured, but not necessarily what is important.”
Baby PISA opens a Pandora’s box. Out of it flies standardization, conformity, inappropriate pedagogy. Trapped in the box will Be Children, yearning to play.
It all about the children (and how we sort, train and monetize them)…
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
Only one thought comes to mind; follow the money!
Who is getting rich off this stupidity?
If I were to google the idea of tablet applications that would allow testing to be administered quickly by pediatricians during routine checkups, what are the odds that I’d find that idea was already in progress?
I have heard that Finland did not start educating its young until the age of 7. If true, the it is going to be kind of hard for them to test them at 5 years old. So, I would expect them to say no.
Good grief. This is really sick.
So, what about the mega RICH? Will their kids be tested this way, too? Or is this just for those who are NOT entitled?
The only student data that is 100% safe is data that is not collected electronically. The continued threat of student data being hacked will pressure parents to demand a stop to data collection. I am still waiting for the public alarm bells to be sounded about this real threat to all electronically collected student data. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/criminals-make-student-data-public-escalating-demands-ransom-n821066
If I were a parent of young children, I would opt for homeschooling. There are so many homeschool meetings and school groups starting up. When the parents finally catch on, there will be a riot. The teachers will have to start the noise and they will have to take a stand….no matter that they have been labeled “the bogey man” for so long.
Teachers have very little power to change the system. They are poorly paid and have families to support, and they have put a lot into getting where they are. Not easy to change tracks, though most, now, are extraordinarily unhappy and are looking for options. They are sick of being reviled and micromanaged and working incredibly long hours and treated disrespectfully. This dark era will eventually pass, but a lot of damage is and will be done before it does.
I’m w/you, Lisa M. I would have moved totally off the grid if my 3 sons had been faced w/this OECD move to test/ data-collect on PreK-5 cohort when they were that age. As a free-lance for-lang-specialist since early-2000’s, I tapped local homeschooling offerings back then, & discovered a vibrant network here in central NJ, working across pubsch districts to create locally-taught units -teaching via NJ -approved curriculum & working together to provide field trips, sports, etc. That’s the direction I would have headed for– demanding my share of RE taxes to support my off-the-grid kids.
Which tells you that this OECD K-5 plan is yet another stake in the heart against public schools.
Teachers and students have no need for a “Baby Pisa.” Early childhood educators have enough tools that can help them better serve young children. Nobody needs a standardized tool to rate or rank young children. In fact, to do so would produce more harm than good as the results may serve to pigeonhole developing children. This would be a mistake. Anyone that has studied child development understands that young children develop at different rates depending on their nature and nurture. It is wrong to make false assumptions about developing young children.
As an ESL teacher, I have dealt with many students that we would consider to be “delayed” according to a standardized measurement that reflects middle class American norms. Failure to perform on such an instruction does NOT mean that these children lack potential. It simply means that we failed to measure their potential due to their lack of experience with the items deemed significant on the test. If I gave young children a test that required them to make toys from caste off material, essentially garbage, I can guarantee that my ELLs would be in the gifted category, and the middle class American children would be the “slow learners,” as they would probably be to busy washing their hands with anti-bacterial soap to get started on the task.
The biggest lesson my ELLs have taught me is that just because they may be considered late bloomers in our culture, we must not believe they are incapable. Given the opportunity and time to develop their language and cognitive skills, the vast majority of them will achieve.
We need to protect ELLs and poor students from corporate exploitation. Authentic educators need to make decisions about education, not corporations and billionaires looking to sell products.
Ugh.
In the past half century, we’ve seen a widening gap, throughout the West, between ordinary people and those of the ownership class. In other words, we’ve seen the emergence of what I refer to, not exactly tongue in cheek, as the New Feudal Order.
The leaders of the New Feudal Order believe themselves to be at the top due to their exceptional merits, and they are committed to sorting people according to merit as a matter of principle. Historically, this is an improvement on sorting them by birth into a particular social caste, as in previous feudal societies, but the instruments that they have come up with and so fervently support for doing that sorting are extraordinarily crude and do a lot of damage.
Imagine a world in which instead of devoted vast resources to sorting people out as meeting, more or less, some predetermined, monolithic set of criteria (in EdSpeak, “standards”) and slotting them into positions in a predetermined, monolithic training regimen, we instead devoted those resources to
discovering what gifts and proclivities each young person has and
creating alternative tracks for developing those gifts and proclivities.
I’m a scholar. I’ve spent much of my life buried in books. I would have loved it if all my children had followed in my footsteps, for a scholar’s life is a rich one. But one of my sons is not a scholar at all, at all. He’s bright, but he doesn’t read and isn’t likely at this point ever to develop that ability or interest. Nonetheless, he has great gifts. For example, if you drive someplace with him, he will remember the route forever. A year later, he will know exactly how to get there. And he doesn’t get lost. Whatever the twists and turns of the route, he will know where he is. In other words, he has exceptional internal spatial mapping ability. He’s the guy you want to get lost with in the maze or the woods because he’s not going to get lost. He also loves to take things apart and put them back together–to work with his hands. He now has received training as an auto mechanic, and he’s very, very good at it. If I were organizing a search and rescue team, I would want him on it.
A highly complex, diverse economic system needs a school system that is equally diverse. We need far more more cosmetologists than cosmologists, and our school system needs to be a garden of forking paths, not a stair on which a few “race to the top” and most are left struggling, broken, on one of the lower landings.
What an absurdity it was to create a single set of standards (and tests on those standards) that all students should meet and then proclaim mastery of these to be the ticket to “college and career readiness”! And what an absurdity it is to design our K-12 schools to require for graduation a single set of courses that all must pass. In the Greek myths, the ogre Procrustes waylays travelers, throws them onto a short bed, and lops off the parts of the travelers’ bodies that don’t fit. Well, that’s what we do to our kids.
Creating a different kind of system–one that would seek to identify unique gifts in every child and nurture those along appropriate paths–would be quite challenging, a major paradigm shift. But we need to do that. We need to loose the “one ring to rule them all” mentality. A few suggestions:
Scrap the monolithic standards and the tests of these.
Replace grade levels and courses with an enormous variety of certificates attained via fairly specific accomplishments measured in a wide variety of accomplishment-specific ways.
Create many, many paths to graduation–the exact opposite of what we are now doing (the opposite of requiring that all students pass a set of standardized exams in order to receive a high-school diploma)–including a LOT of apprenticeship programs
Build lots of schools within schools into our public education systems
Our primary directive as educators should be to create intrinsically motivated, life-long learners. But we need to grok that one can be a life-long learner of cosmetology who isn’t much of a reader and isn’t a mathematician at all. Interestingly, MOST of the current graduates of our current monolithic system, which includes 13 years of required mathematics instruction, end up hating mathematics and no good at it. Ask the adults you know. Stop some on the street and ask them to do a simple calculation for you. And that’s what the monolithic system has taught them–what it teaches most people–you hate math and suck at it. And yet, despite all the evidence that that’s indeed what the monolithic system teaches, we persist. This is as stupid as it gets.
A lot of what you mention is part of the framing of the debate between individualism versus collectivism. Public education and what we would consider traditional Democratic belief is based on collectivism which supports the common good. It supports public education and assets , social safety nets and equity as values. Our current breed of right wing extremists represent “individualism.” When DeVos states,”I don’t see systems, I see individuals,” she is supporting what they term personal responsibility and elevation of “worthy” individuals. It is easy then to justify all the testing to determine those that are “worthy.” We can see this play out in the cultural bias of the screening procedures of selective charters. All the ranking and sorting often leaves students that are poor or different in a cheap charter as they have been deemed “unworthy.” It is the same type of thinking that justified feudalism or even slavery.
I meet a lot of kids these days who have been totally failed by our monolithic school systems–kids with gifts who think of themselves as complete failures because that is what they have learned from our system. They’ve learned that they don’t have the stuff, whatever that is, to make it. Sometimes, they’ve dropped out. Sometimes, they’ve struggled all the way through college and are living in their parents’ basement and working at fast-food restaurants, having figured out that that degree in “Communications” from State U has almost no value in a job market saturated by kids with these vague degrees. Eventually, some of them figure out in their twenties, after all those years of wasting their energies, that they have to get some training in welding or cosmetology or whatever if they are not going to spend the rest of their lives asking, “would you like fries with that?” What an absurd waste! And what damage all that lead-up to the “ah-ha” moment has done to them emotionally and spiritually. Our system fails most kids, and it will continue to do so as long as it is monolithic. Ramping up a top-down standards and testing regime is precisely what we should NOT be doing.
I recall a few years ago New York was selling their slogan, “All roads lead to the Regents.” While this is laudable in theory, it is regrettable in practice. I believe in high standards, but I do not believe this monolithic goal is realistic for everyone. We know that different people have different interests and talents. Not everyone can or should be a scholar. Germany knows this, and they have a wonderful technical schools to train students in the trades. In our country education has become a political football. Instead of providing students with what they need, we are providing students with what the prevailing politics decide they should have.
The private sector, for-profit testing industry is always shrouded in secrecy and surrounded by lies, and misinformation.
“By participating in the study, OECD asserts, member nations will have access to the primary factors that drive or thwart early learning, developing a common framework and benchmarks.”
What?! You mean to say OECD believes nations the world over do not already have access to THE primary factors that drive early learning? Do they not understand that those factors are the children, themselves, naturally born to do early learning stuff? Does OECD not already understand the OECD common framework and benchmarks stuff will thwart children’s inborn nature to do early learning stuff?
Late. Unless I am mistaken, this “Indicators on Early Childhood Education and Care (IELS)” project is intended to rate countries by the levels and kinds of support they invest in early childhood.
The categories for judging programs and levels of support are not yet permanent, but the data-mongers have put together a monochromatic data dashboard to show which countries OECD has ranked in the upper 25 percent relative to others (dark blue) and lower 25 percent relative to others (light blue), with many countries in the middle (white). This report is short on details about the trustworthiness of the data, and the methods of migrating information into ratings. http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/education/starting-strong-2017_9789264276116-en#page1
In 2017, 35 countries were listed as contributors to the main budget of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The major contributors, in rank order were the United States at 20.6 percent, followed by these nations and percentages: Japan, 9.4; Germany, 7.4; United Kingdom, 5.5; France, 5.4; Italy, 4.1; Canada, 3.6; Australia, 3.1; and Korea, 3.1.
The major education projects of the OECD have representatives from the United States. As near as I can tell, all of the US representatives are connected with USDE.
The US representative for OECD Education Policy is Maureen McLaughlin who became Director of the International Affairs Office in the Office of the US. Secretary of Education in August 2010. She is still serving under DeVos. Except for eight years of prior work at the World Bank supporting education reform and modernization in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Turkey Mc Laughlin has been employed at USDE in administrative posts since 1988. She has a Master of Public Policy degree from University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Arts from Boston College, majoring in Economics.
Look at OECD’s three priorities for The Education Policy Committee: “providing employment opportunities for all, improving human capital and social cohesion; promoting high quality lifelong learning for all, (which contributes to personal development, sustainable economic growth and social cohesion).
Bottom line. In OECD education policies, all persons are viewed as “human capital” —assets if they create economic value and liabilities if they don’t. The main reason to invest in human capital is to increase the productivity the workers who are able to create economic value for themselves and their employers.
That OECD Education Policy Committee works with the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI). The US representative to this program is Dr. Thomas Brock, commissioner of the US National Center for Educational Research. Prior to being named NCER commissioner, Dr. Brock spent 13 years with MDRC, formerly known as the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation and set up by the Ford Foundation. MDRC properties to offers “objective, unbiased evidence about cost-effective solutions that can be replicated and expanded to scale.” Dr. Brock also worked as an evaluation officer for the Wallace Foundation. He holds a B.A. in anthropology from Pitzer College, a master’s degree in public administration from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in social welfare from the University of California, Los Angeles.
The US representative to OECD’s Programme on International Student Assessment (PISA) is Dr. Peggy G. Carr. She is acting commissioner of the US National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), and for 16 years served as Associate Commissioner of Assessment for NCES in charge of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), and US participation in the alphabet soup of four other OECD testing programs: the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), and the relatively new Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), modified for 2018.
The TALIS survey for OECD is being managed by Ms. Mary Coleman, Senior Education Research Scientist Assessments Division: International Assessment Branch of NCES. TALIS 2018 will address teacher training and professional development, teachers’ appraisal, school climate, school leadership, teachers’ instructional approaches, teachers’ pedagogical practices, and their experience with and support for teaching diverse populations. See summary here http://www.oecd.org/edu/school/TALIS_2018_brochure_ENG.pdf
The TALIS survey and all of the OCED tests do show how OCED and economic reasoning are helping to create what Pasi Sahlberg aptly calls the GERM effect—Global Education Reform Movement.
Not satisfied with all of these tests, the OCED has embarked on getting standardized “Indicators on Early Childhood Education and Care (IELS). Helge Wasmuth has done a wonderful job of reporting on this monstrosity.
You can read about this initiative here. It is all about inputs, outputs, and outcomes especially outcomes associated with inputs and outputs (I kid you not).
The US is paying big bucks to support the OCED, and enlisting our bureaucrats to forward the idea that we are all to be measured for… our worth as human capital, not more and not less.
http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/education/starting-strong-2017_9789264276116-en#page1
Laura,
Thanks so much for sharing all these information about the people who are working for OECD here in the US