I reviewed Harvard Professor Daniel Koretz’s “The Testing Charade” in “The New Republic.” It was behind a paywall until a few days ago. The paywall has been lifted.
Here are the main points.
Koretz demolishes the test-and-punish regime of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. He says in no uncertain terms that they failed. He says they ignored Campbell’s Law, which declares that attaching high stakes to tests distorts both the measure and distorts the process they were meant to measure. The emphasis on testing led to inflation of scores, so any rise in scores as a result of pressure is of little or no significance and surely does not mean that students are better educated. I enjoyed reading the book, and my reservation is that Koretz is not at all sure what to do about accountability. I am not either. I wish that the leaders of Congress understood what a complicated subject of accountability is. I would like to see greater accountability at the top, where decisions are made about funding and autonomy. We have a wacky system where teachers, principals and students are held accountable without the power to change the conditions under which they Labor.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
My students are not really held accountable in any concrete way. Failure punish the school in the graduation rate column, so we do not have failure.
I did not like the old attitude that meant that only the student was accountable. This led to teachers who would give students a book, tell them to learn the lesson, then strike them when they did not learn (this is the literal experience of a friend of mine in a rural public school in the 1960s and 70s.
Most teachers during that time thought they were accountable to provide either the best possible verbal explanation of the material appropriate to the course, or activities that would accomplish the same job. Involved in this was the teacher’s responsibility to keep the subject matter appropriate to the stage of development the student was experiencing. Involved in this was a responsibility to fail students who did not measure up under that vision.
With the early 1990s, I began to perceive a sort of top down reform agenda that viewed teachers in an adversarial position. Teachers were stupid and needed a script. Proof of this was that some geographical areas could deal with content that other areas did not deem appropriate. Instead of teaching what they should, these ignorant teachers were teaching ideas beneath the students. Real teachers made the student rise to high expectations. Teachers who could handpick their students saw no problem with this and bought into it. Teachers forced to deal with a broad spectrum of society noticed the problems of this approach.
During this later period, political forces moved accountable action into the strict realm of the test, and the responsibility for the test completely on the shoulders of the teacher. This is the system that is the present way of working things, and we are now seeing its shortcomings which are legion.
Political figures like to say that the ballot box is their accountability. I wish we could make that a reality, but I despair of it due to people voting other issues.
So when Diane suggests that Koretz is not sure what accountability is, I can understand. It is indeed very complex. So is democracy. Complex things look messy. Any real thinker knows that and it would be dishonest to say otherwise. I like messy. Nice and neat looks like fascism or soviet communism or some other totalitarian simplicity.
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cross -posted at https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Settling-for-Scores-The-Te-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Change_Congress_No-Child-Left-Behind_School-Reform-180111-141.html#comment685670 with this comment which has embedded links
“There been NO DISCUSSION in the MEDIA, about the legislative take-over of the public school systems, and the ongoing destruction — the privatization of our public education by the state legislatures that the NO Child Left Behind Act
https://dianeravitch.net/?s=No+child+left+behind+actenables with its testing mania. “Test scores are fundamentally a reflection of family income and education. They are now cynically used by rightwing politicians to declare schools to be failures and set them up for privatization. The Race To the Top left the same kids a the bottom, because education is not a race.”
“Diane Ravitch covers the fallacies of testing kids and schools, promoted by dark money.
Read the TRUTH…at the RAVITCH BLOG or the NPE newsletter and see my series here, or my commentary that ties it all together.”
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“Testing the Testers”
The “Tester test”
Is really best
To save the schools
From Tester rules
Like Race to Flop
And “Left Behind”
We need to stop
The tester kind
A tester brand
Of SATs
To cuff the hand
Of Arne D’s
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I posted your poem, too.
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Where were the Harvard professors when teachers were being evaluated on the basis of student test scores when “everyone” knew, or should have known, that these standardized tests were not designed to evaluate teachers? I was very puzzled by this and still am.
Teachers can be held accountable, but like all other professionals, their evaluation must be done by experienced peers and not be single tests given to students. In order to properly evaluate a teacher’s work, several professionals would have to be familiar with her work, as well as the progress of her students, throughout the year. There is no quick, easy and cheap way to do it.
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The gatekeepers are NOW BIG $$$$$$, who peddle their unsavory wares (high-stakes tests and common gore) all wrapped up in glitter and glitz selling promises, which will never be fulfilled.
Didn’t take them long to do this with the technology available these DAZE.
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Where were the Harvard professors?
Well, Harvard profs like Raj Chetty and John Friedman were cheering for VAM and calling for teachers to be fired sooner rather than later.
And their Harvard colleagues were silent.
At Harvard, scholarship and truth apparently take a back seat to the Crimson Club.
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Where were Harvard scholars
When VAM was in the air?
Snug in bed with dollars
From Gates the billionaire
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“He says they ignored Campbell’s Law, which declares that attaching high stakes to tests distorts both the measure and distorts the process they were meant to measure.”
Campbell’s law is just the American version/reformulation of the old Soviet 5 year plans wherein managers/apparatchiks had to meet certain numerical goals for whatever area of life they were supposedly in charge. The high stakes of the Soviets were called “The Gulag”.
While the description of Campbell’s law is not quite correct as the law was not developed necessarily for academia but for any societal indicator in which pressure is put to “improve the numbers”. Notice that improving the numbers does not inherently mean improving “the measure” or the process of that supposed “measuring”.
Where almost everyone involved in public education has it COMPLETELY WRONG is in the concept that in assessing students learning and the teaching and learning process we are actually “measuring” something. THERE IS NO MEASUREMENT of the teaching and learning process and/or what a student knows, supposed “student achievement”. Until we break out of this false onto-epistemological thinking we will continue to harm many students via the error-filled and false assumption filled processes that are the standards and testing regime.
I challenge anyone, especially staunch standardized test proponents like Richard Phelps, to rebut, refute and/or show how Wilson’s arguments* against standards and testing and my assertion that nothing is being measured** in those educational malpractices. Let’s see it!
What?
Crickets and cicadas of my tinnitus but nothing from standards and testing proponents. Intellectual lightweights that they are, they have nothing to offer as rebuttal.
*see: “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
**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”)
Now 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!
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It’s actually quite interesting that physics has it’s own version of Campbell’s law: the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, which says that you always change the thing you are measuring.
But in fact, it goes much further, saying that physical things (like electrons) do not even possess “sharp” attributes like position and momentum until you perform a measurement and “force them to give you an answer.”
So, with a physical “test” you are essentially creating a reality that did not exist before the test was performed.
That situation has similarities with the case of educational testing, for which the reality is created by the test itself.
But there is one critical difference between physical tests and mental ones: attributes like momentum and position are properly defined (so tests for them can be produced) but attributes like IQ and other “measures of the mind” are not properly defined –except in terms of specific tests, so the tests in the latter case actually precede the definitions! Of course, this makes the whole educational “measurement” process a giant circle jerk. But as you point out, this does not seem to phase the testing proponents in the least.
I agree hat it is quite absurd to claim to “measure” something that is not even properly defined.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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The whole metaphor of accounting is wrong unless you think that adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing and doing the wiz-bang calculations in VAM or those SLO rating schemes will “balance the books” and make everything right in education.
The book of life is larger than the ledger–a ledger accounts fill with test scores, ratings achieved, and demerits, etc and the costs of these metrics. That is the mind of Bill Gates. The cost of education has gone up and the test scores are not rising in proportion to the cost. Blame the teachers, the schools. Throwing money at them will not fix the problem.
Moral responsibility should be the anchor of discussions, not accountability,
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The mind of Gates is … warped.
The deformers want total control over all of us, which is NOT an education.
Chomsky on education:
Been thinking about John Dewey and his work, too.
Decay of the Roman Empire … are we like Rome and no one is paying attention?
http://www.history.com/news/history-lists/8-reasons-why-rome-fell
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All empires eventually collapse.
To posterity, Rome left art, architecture and a legal system.
What will we leave? Besides a gigantic pile of ipods, iPads, iPhones and other iTrash, that is?
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“”What do empires leave?”
What do empires leave
When empire rule is gone?
Something to believe?
Or only what was wrong?
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WSJ suggests that teens are logging-on every ten minutes, of every hour, all day long — every day.
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Forgot to write: GREAT ARTICLE, Diane. THANK YOU.
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Marvelous review of an important book. Thanks for sending it around now that the paywall is down. Enjoy Southeast Asia!
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To me, the reason we can’t solve issues of “accountability” is we can’t agree what we expect of schools. Each set of parents, each group in society, each political party, each newsman or woman, and each politician will give you different ideas. Ideas change by region and across the nation.
Yet until we can say “the role of schools is to do _____”, we don’t know how to determine success.
Hence, standardized testing – because politicians can at least say “we hold them accountable”. But it’s a bum pass – for exactly the reasons discussed in the article.
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Wonderful review! Powerful writing, Diane. I have shared your review with many already, including our new Secretary of Education in Virginia, middle school teacher, Atif Qarni. Secretary Qarni will be interested in reading your review. I know for a fact that he has a copy of The Testing Charade. 🙂
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Use of the term “accountability” has merely been used by the education establishment as an excuse fro micro-management. What we do with “accountability” is acknowledge that used in this context it holds no one accountable. In reading about countries with public school systems that out perform the US, the most reasonable step is to focus on providing time for planning and collaboration in the school house. This should not be done through creative scheduling, but through an increase in teachers available to a school thus reducing class size and reducing hours individual teachers instruct while allowing more time to prepare for the classroom. Improving teaching conditions and prestige should also be a priority that would attract higher quality to the profession. Focusing on poorly designed standardized tests has been a profound failure. It’s time to realize that we have two decades of evidence supporting this fact.
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