Since the passage of No Child Left Behind, we have allowed standardized testing to swamp our schools, stigmatize our students, and demoralize teachers. For years, test publishers warned against the misuse of tests. Tests should be used only for the purpose for which they are designed. They should be used diagnostically, to help students, not to label them or rank them.
But federal law requires that the tests be misused. Educators are frustrated because they feel helpless. They are forced to teach to the tests, which used to be considered unethical. The current tests cannot be used diagnostically, because teachers are not allowed to review the questions and answers with students after the tests. Those are considered the “intellectual property” of the test publisher. From a diagnostic perspective, the tests are useless. All they can do is rank and sort students, based on a criterion that is completely subjective and arbitrary.
Here is what John Dewey wrote about testing in Democracy and Education, p. 222:
How one person’s abilities compare in quantity with those of another is none of the teacher’s business. It is irrelevant to his work.
What is required is that every individual shall have opportunities to employ his own powers in activities that have meaning.
I have a suggestion.
How about giving the tests in September, when school starts? No one would be judged by test results. No student would be stigmatized, no teacher would be given a low rating, no school would be closed. Whatever information can be gleaned from the test at a point when teschers might find it useful. If there is nothing useful to be gained, it would be clear from the outset, and the tests would do no harm.
Furthermore, states and districts should require the testing companies to reveal the questions that students answered correctly and incorrectly. That way, the teachers would learn what the students need to spend more time on. Without that information, the tests are useless.
The states are the consumers. If they jointly insisted that test publishers release the diagnostic information for every student, the test publishers would comply. If the test publishers refuse to do so, the states should seek different vendors and find those willing to supply the necessary information.
I like this, but I would also like to have a reason for giving the tests … other than bragging rights. Some indication of how test results may be used as an indicator for curriculum changes, maybe?
I have been sending this to the state reps in my district; we need to reign in the DESE (the governor and his people who are pushing the Duncan failed policies ). *Developing tests for assessing student’s abilities has been a part of the American educational scene for over a century.
*There are proven and established psychometric techniques to establish high degrees of relia- bility and validity for tests/products as reported by technical manuals (see for example, IOWA Test, California Achievement Test , Stanford, Metropolitan, etc) the tests we took as students.
*PARCC and Smarter Balance should have their similar evidence that they are proven tools for assessing students on credible “higher” standards
*It is impossible to tell how accurate and precise these experimental tests are because evidence of their accuracy is not readily available. Publishers of these tests do make mistakes that are uncovered on occasion and revealed (less frequently) to the public paying the bill.
*A greater concern is the “cut scores” that determine proficiency levels and DESE establishes cut scores for MA schools.
*Setting cut scores is a subjective decision. (if you set them low, then more people “pass” and the real estate firms are content they can sell more houses in “the best” places — when you set them “high” the students in the gateway cities are most thoroughly punished)
*Comparisons with other state testing programs would have provided relevant comparisons for determining cost-effectiveness of MA testing program. This would have brought true transparency to MA emerging experimental tests that assumed great weight and expense of these past several years. (an independent review, not more sales marketing from Pearson)
*These faulty tests are now being used for high stakes consequences. The roll-out from design (logic plan) to implementation has been a disaster known as “test and punish”
*What do these experimental State test results tell us? Not a lot. It is a very blunt instrument….. I suggest we not even use them for Haverhill.
*Testing company (Pearson) fails to respond to objections from parents when they claim tests are not adequate. The Pearson Corp. gets angry when parents/students opt out because that means they will never be able to sell the tests to all the states (they can’t prove their experiment is adequate)
*What about the State legislature that has to approve these expenditures from DESE for state testing?
*It would be humorous if the stakes were not so catastrophic
*We need to be knowledgeable about psychometrics and be aggressively proactive in the pub- lic and political domain to CLARIFY all of these questions. The damage done to the integrity of student testing is a direct result of this controversy and presents a serious challenge.
Of course that would be better. But why have tests at all? If we properly fund schools and have well-prepared, attentive, loving teachers and small classes, no tests are needed. When I led a school, every teacher in every class at every grade level could accurately describe every student’s strengths and growing edges – without ever administering a test, standardized or otherwise.
Thank you!
On a side note, I ordered your book and it should be arriving today – can’t wait to start reading it!
Thanks! Let me know what you think. stevehutnelson@gmail.com
I recall this is what Koretz suggests in his new book. Unfortunately ESSA requires that test scores be used as the primary component in a school accountability system. That means if you used fall test scores that would punish the schools with the neediest populations even more, because these students tend to suffer the great summer learning loss.
Defy unjust laws.
Amen Sister Ravitch!
Don’t you think something like this could actually end up being a real boon to the testing industry? I’m afraid that promoting testing each Fall would result in testing companies seeing an opportunity to increase their profits by glomming onto and running with the notion of providing schools with a pre-test/post-test regime, consisting of testing each Fall and every Spring. They might try to negotiate a compromise whereby they relinquish their intellectual property rights for the pre-test but not the post-test, since they could also push test prep materials for the period between tests. They would probably figure out ways for their post-tests to differ significantly enough from the pre-tests that a certain amount of failure would be ensured –while hanging onto their rights to those tests, and then also pushing remedial materials…
If teachers are to gain information about kids from testing, I’d much rather see them making their own tests –as they so often do anyways. The strongest support for teacher evaluations of students is research demonstrating that student grades predict college success better than standardized tests like the ACT and SAT,.
https://edsource.org/2014/high-school-grades-are-a-better-predictor-of-college-success-than-sat-act-study-says/58033
I once served on an elementary testing committee in my district. This was after NCLB, but before all the new tests. At the time we gave the CAT-California Achievement Test annually. Our purpose was to look at the tests to see if we could gather any diagnostic information from the results. The committee was led by the assistant superintendent whose job included managing the district’s standardized testing. A grid of item analysis was available from the publisher. We sat down with the results to determine if we found patterns in the missed items which were categorized by the type of error. In reading, we had items like locating information, cause and effect, drawing conclusions, etc. In math we had calculation, operations, reasoning etc. Rather than finding useful patterns, we found that most students got the easier items correct, and there were errors in the more complex items. After several sessions of item analysis, we discovered that the items that required the most mental “heavy lifting” were most problematic in both reading and math. In reading it was questions requiring analysis or synthesis, and in math it was the two or three step problems that required a student to solve through multiple steps. We spent a lot of time to conclude that teachers needed to spend more time on the more difficult items.
Personally, I have found class tests and observing how students work more useful than any standardized test. When standardized tests interfere with curriculum, waste a lot of instructional time, or are used inappropriately with high stakes, they are counter productive.
YES! “When standardized tests interfere with curriculum, waste a lot of instructional time, or are used inappropriately with high stakes, they are counter productive.”
Good grief, teacher observation, student writing samples, discussion are so much better. The teacher is the instrument, just like Sully was the instrument when he landed that passenger plane on the Hudson River.
Has this country lost its mind to the DEFORMERS? Has this country been brainwashed? And why do the people of this country BLAME teachers for the ills of society? No other country does this.
The problem is POVERTY.
MLK, Jr. on poverty:
http://www.azquotes.com/author/8044-Martin_Luther_King_Jr/tag/poverty
Precisely said and worth repeating: “When standardized tests interfere with curriculum, waste a lot of instructional time, or are used inappropriately with high stakes, they are counter productive.”
I think this is wonderful, Diane. I went to public schools a long time ago and we had a standardized test and it was downplayed to the point that I recall it as one day where we did something “different”. They had it right. They still had the info they could have used for tracking “equity” in subgroups, I would imagine. It would just be a matter of identifying the subgroups and pulling that out.
My son has teacher-created exams in high school next month- his first big tests- and I see those as useful to him because he has to figure out how to go back and review and show them he knows it. That seems like a completely reasonable demand on students.
He gets something out of it. He’s reviewing what he learned so far. That’s what’s in it for him. Their work has value. If we want them to work hard we should respect the work they do and not demand they waste days on data-producing for later collection by data gatherers. Why wouldn’t one test in September give them enough to check for equity?
Same here. I took a standardized test, and my children took them each year as well. It was like a “litmus” test with no prep or angst over the results. In my own career I watched the testing machine take over. When I retired in 2009, I was losing 28 mornings of instruction due to testing. What a waste!
Didn’t this obsession with testing really take off with “value added” and teacher ranking schemes? If those have been (somewhat) discredited then why are we still stuck with an idea based on a faulty premise that was cooked up not by educators but by economists?
Can’t we move on now? The “value added” fad seems to have passed.
The testing obsession did not start with VAM or even with NCLB — No Camel Left Behind.
The testing camel has had it’s head in the education tent for a very long time.
Colleges, high school students and their parents have been losing money and sleep over the SAT (Stupid Attitude Test) for ages.
I know you disagree with me but I worry about colleges doing admissions without a blind test. I feel like I’m getting these assurances that there will be this fair, nuanced, rigorous process but that isn’t my experience with college admissions. I went to community college and then a state school and I was “processed”- no one was doing this elaborate careful analysis of my aptitude.
What about bias? What about bias based on race or ethnicity or class? How do you make sure people aren’t harmed by that?
The college entrance exams suck but the alternative sucks worse. They need SOME objective standard to control for bias or we’ll just get individuals deciding who goes to college and who does not and I’m not comfortable with that. I think they would have turned me down without a high score. It was what I had to show them to say “see? Let me in”.
Yes, I think there is a respectable argument that universities that receive huge numbers of applications could not begin to carry out their admissions processes with consistency or fairness without some kind of evaluation that consists of exactly the same questions and is graded in exactly the same manner for every applicant, regardless of who they are.
An understandable concern, Chiara, but the SAT and ACT have become just another bauble available to the privileged. Test prep and cultural bias have made the SAT a good predictor of only one thing – family wealth.
I tend to think that wealthy applicants are going to be best-positioned to either game or outperform no matter what admissions rubric you use. And, for the moment, at least, affirmative action is still legal. So universities aren’t required to just mechanically admit applicants in descending order of SAT scores.
“SAT (Stupid Attitude Test)”
I know her 2.7 percent
We plan to tie the knot
Relationship is heaven sent
Her SAT is hot!
The vast majority of studies of SAT (apart from those produced by College Board, which makes and sells the SAT) indicate that SAT “accounts for” only a miniscule percentage -(one study indicated only 2.7%) of the variance in grades among college freshmen.
And ONLY for freshmen. By the sophomore year, even the very small “predictive ability” [sic] is indistinguishable from that of random noise. In other words, coin flipping is just as good.
“ NCLB (No Camel Left Behind)”
The Bushy camel head
Was poking in the tent
And look at where that led
To Arne’s government
And now we have the butt
Of camel in the tent
We’re really in a rut
With stinky camel scent
Even if one believes the obsession is justified, that does not change the fact that the obsession started long before value added.
If one were to use that argument, FLERP, one could use a graduate level test of Einstein’s general relativity to decide whom to pre-screening for admissions, “an evaluation that consists of exactly the same questions and is graded in exactly the same manner for every applicant, regardless of who they are.”
If a test is only marginally better than flipping a coin when it comes to predicting college freshman grades and NO better when it comes to predicting eventual “success” (graduation) AND actually worse at prediction than high school grades (regardless of the high school attended) it is actually irrelevant whether it contains all the same questions and is graded in the same way.
The latter part of my above comment applies to the SAT, which despite it’s highly dubious “predictive ability” is regularly used to perform admissions pre-screening.
Just because colleges have used a bogus method for ages does not mean it is not bogus.
A high school GPA is a better predictor of college success than the SAT. A GPA indicates, at least to some degree, how hard a students is willing to work and that the student has a good work ethic.
I disagree with those who believe the high school GPA tells you enough about the student.
To me, the high school GPA reflects the grade inflation policies of the high school as a whole (as in private schools in which 90% of the grades are A- and above) and the random nature of the teachers one gets and whether they are easy or tough graders.
High school grades are useful but so is an exam that every student nationwide takes, regardless of whether their education has been extremely privileged or not. Perhaps not just the SAT, but a range of exams.
My suspicion is that the reason some highly selective colleges have deemphasized SAT subject tests and AP exams is not to admit more low scoring under represented non-white students but because de-emphasizing them allows them to admit many privileged students from expensive privates over higher scoring middle class public school students.
If you really delve into ed reform you find that a truly disturbing number of ed reformers are political science majors or professors.
THAT might be worth looking into. Nothing against political science but what gives with that? Odd, don’t you think?
There is NO appropriate use for standardized testing. Even before it came with “high stakes” it stigmatized children, both the “smart” kids and the “dumb” kids, giving all kids an unrealistic and damaging view of themselves and their abilities.
You are right, Dienne
The abuse has been going on since the very first standardized test.
It’s just that some standardized test supporters (the self styled testing “White hats”) want to pretend there is a difference between themselves and those “bad” high stakes test supporters (The Testing black hats)
The problem is fundamental: even if one could come up with a standardized test with a legitimate use (other than as fire starter in the wood stove), one can not prevent it’s being used illegitimately.
It’s all about looking at Students as Human Capital to be data mined. The testing data and everything that goes with it feeds their databases. The funders now want education data linked to work force data to determine where to put resources and $$$. No surprise these are the funders of the Workforce Data Quality campaign: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – Laura and John Arnold Foundation – Joyce Foundation – Lumina Foundation .
http://www.workforcedqc.org/about/funders
Why do tech companies and the government want education and workforce data linked in databases? Take a look at this New York Times article about China-“How China is changing your internet”.
It gives a glimpse into the power of all this data linked in a central database. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/technology/china-homegrown-internet-companies-rest-of-the-world.html
By the way, have you ever noticed that it seems to often be Ivy League types who have been proved wrong time and again by legitimate research who support standardized tests?
I find that intriguing.
Must be something in the ivy.
Maybe it’s poison ivy.
😉
“states and districts should require the testing companies to reveal the questions that students answered correctly and incorrectly”
My nephew just got back his scores for the practice ACT.
It was actually hilarious
In addition to the scores, they provide an “Item response analysis [sic]” which indicates, for various sections (math, science, English and reading [apparently it is reading a language other than English??]) the numbers of the questions the correct letter choice and the (allegedly) incorrect letter choice that was chosen.
Not the actual questions, mind you, just the numbers.
Not the actual correct and incorrect answers, just the letters.
The geniuses at ACT obviously believe that students who took their test weeks (if not months) ago are going to remember the questions and answers corresponding to the numbers and letters!
I could not make up a more ridiculous “analysis” if I spent my life trying.
These tests are not the least bit “scientific” and the people making and “analyzing” them are not scientists but quacks.
No self-respecting person would EVER work for ANY of these testing companies.
They are purveyors of trash and anyone who buys their trash is a fool and/or an idiot.
I just read you can get the test booklet for the practice test so you actually can see the questions and answers choices for the practice.
Yes, I was about to correct you on that. For the SAT (and I assume the ACT), you can now receive the test questions themselves and see what questions you got wrong, what your wrong answer was, and what the correct answer is.
The ACT now has a higher market share than the SAT and that’s a good thing (in my opinion). First of all, competition helps the students. And they are somewhat different exams and students may do better on one than another simply because of their style of learning.
More than 1,000 colleges and investiture are test optional
Meaning, students are not required to submit SAT or ACT scores
“How one person’s abilities compare in quantity with those of another is none of the teacher’s business. It is irrelevant to his work.”
Somewhere, Duane S’s ears are perking up at this.
Getting to reading it all now, FLERP!
That somewhere is frosted in in the beautiful Missouri River Hill country of southern Warren County, MO. I should be out backroading just to look at the snow-covered scenery but don’t want to take a chance on slipping and falling and screwing up my new hip.
Best of luck with your new hip!
Thanks! Hip part is doing fine. I couldn’t be more than satisfied with the procedure and outcome. Ortho doc is now 2 for 2 on surgeries on me. Now all the other sources of pain are coming through that before couldn’t break through the pain caused by the hip. Talking to the ortho doc on Monday about right knee, probably will be replaced. Hey if it makes the pain go away, I’ll tolerate the pain of the surgery and rehab. Again thanks for the good wishes!
I return again and again to the words written by the Sidwell Friends middle school principal (now retired) who oversaw the education of three presidential daughters. This is excerpted from a letter she wrote to the school community in 2014, in advance of several days’ worth of computerized ERB testing administered to all students in grades 5-8:
“It is important to remember that standardized test scores are only one measure of a student’s academic profile; a snapshot, if you will. A more complete and accurate picture emerges when the scores are combined with classwork, daily performance, regular assignments, projects, and tests. Still, the ERB/CTP’s can help parents and teachers understand more clearly and completely a child’s balance of strengths and needs. Teachers may review the scores in detail, looking for patterns that emerge from one year to the next, and then use that information to be more effective in the classroom.”
These tests are given closer to the end of the year than to the beginning, and students/teachers do not see the completed, scored test, so they don’t know which problems they got wrong.
Why do deeply experienced, doctorate-holding educators at progressive, Dewey-approved schools like Sidwell and Lakeside see standardized testing as useful and worthwhile?
Tim,
They may not realize how vapid the tests are, how useless the information is, how tied they are to the discredited pseudo-science of eugenics.
Or, alternatively, they know that standardized testing was introduced many hundreds of years ago to remove bias, nepotism, corruption, and favoritism from government hiring practices, and they are aware that the history is quite a bit more nuanced than what you presented here, which would be like my reducing the history of the advocacy for neighborhood zoned schools to 1920s Oregon (the KKK’s—yes, that KKK—support for the Oregon Compulsory Education Act) and 1970s Boston (“Save our neighborhood schools!”—Louise Day Hicks).
Tim,
Unlike you, I actually wrote a history of standardized testing in the IS. Read “Left Back,” chapter 4.
Its origins were in the eugenics movement and the tests were created to sort soldiers for assignments on WW 1
With all due respect, I think you are conflating standardized testing with IQ testing. It appears there is historical consensus that Horace Mann introduced the idea of standardized testing in the US in the 1830s-1840s.
http://blog.hmleague.org/testing-wars-in-the-public-schools-a-forgotten-history/
Tim,
Horace Mann did not introduce standardized testing.
I have studied and written about the history of testing.
The standardized tests were based on IQ Testing. The giants of the testing movement were Edward Thorndike,, Carl Brigham (inventor of the SAT), Lewis Terman, and others of their generation.
Please read chapter 4 of “Left Back,” Which is a history of the 20th century in education.
I just bought a copy of Left Back from Jeff Bezos, because I needed to read it anyway, but whatever is in that chapter doesn’t change what is accepted as historical consensus:
From “Reconciling a Tradition of Testing with a New Learning Paradigm,” Gallagher, 2003:
“In 1845, [Horace Mann] proposed that the schools become vehicles for social advancement, enabling all citizens to live educated lives. Mann persuaded the Boston Public School Committee to allow him to administer written exams to the city’s children in place of the traditional oral exams. Using a common exam, he hoped to provide objective information about the quality of teaching and learning in urban schools, monitor the quality of instruction, and compare schools and teachers within each school . . .
“His model was so successful that competitive written exams were adopted by school systems in nearly all U.S. cities, and in 1865, the New York Regents Exams were developed on the basis of Mann’s assessment concepts.”
From “A Thin Line Between Love and Hate: Educational Assessment in the United States,” Schneider/Hutt:
“The first written standardized test was introduced into American public schools in Boston in 1845. . . . [S]tandardized tests were ushered into schools in an effort to replace impressionistic evaluations of students with ‘hard facts.’ Unlike recorded grades, however, the introduction of tests was done with the explicit intention of engaging the larger public in a debate about school quality. The men responsible for introducing standardized tests to Boston, including none other than Horace Mann, believed that the (low) test scores would provide evidence of the need to adopt their favored school reforms.”
From “History of Standardized Testing in the United States, http://www.nea.org/home/66139.htm
1838 American educators begin articulating ideas that would soon be translated into the formal assessment of student achievement.
-1840 to 1875 establishes several main currents in the history of American educational testing including formal written testing begins to replace oral examinations administered by teachers and schools at roughly the same time as schools changed their mission from servicing the elite to educating the masses
-Pre Civil War, schools use externally mandated written examinations to assess student progress in specific curricular areas and to aid in a variety of administrative and policy decisions.
Googling “Horace Mann standardized testing” will return several other sources.
“[Standardized tests] are so named because administration, format, content, language, and scoring procedures are the same for all participants – these features have been ‘standardized.’” (Wilde, 2001)
There are many standardized tests that aren’t IQ tests or even a proxy for IQ tests—the federally mandated annual state tests for grades 3-8; the NAEP; the various diagnostic tests (ERB/Iowa, etc.). The eugenicists may have used a standardized form of testing to administer IQ or IQ-style tests, but they did not invent or own a monopoly on that form of testing, period.
Standardized tests are machine scored. There were no machines to score tests in the 19th century.
Giving the same tests and having the answer written by hand and graded by the classroom teacher is not a standardized test.
Diane, this is just silly. Machines weren’t scoring the eugenicists’ tests in the 1920s; conversely, and I hope you are sitting down for this one, ideally with a Cambodian delicacy and beverage nearby, guess who scores the annual grades 3-8 NYSED standardized ELA and math exams, even the ones administered on computers?
You guessed it—actual living breathing grade 3-8 teachers.
Tim,
The original College Board tests were essays and hand-written tests. They were not standardized. They were replaced in 1941 by machine-scored multiple choice questions.
Multiple choice tests are machine scored. There is one right answer and three wrong answers. The value of standardized testing is that they are cheap because they are mechanically scored.
Tim quoted the Sidwell Friends’ teacher saying this:
“Still, the ERB/CTP’s can help parents and teachers understand more clearly and completely a child’s balance of strengths and needs.”
The ERB/CTP exams are NOT the state tests. They are completely different than state tests and the private schools would never publish the results of what % of their students got 8s and 9s and what % got 5s so that parents could understand that the private school they were paying $50,000 tuition to was far inferior than the private school that their friend’s child was attending.
Tim, why isn’t the Sidwell Friends principal having her students taking the state tests which private schools are absolutely welcome to take and which a very few private schools DO have their students take without particularly stellar results?
When the education reformers demand that their OWN children be given the state tests that they place so much value on instead of tests specially designed for overprivileged private school students that do not have questions like “tell us the author’s intent in writing this”, I will believe that the exams are valid.
The fact they avoid the state tests like the plague — and now they are avoiding AP tests, too! — tells you that private schools don’t think those tests are valid. If Sidwell Friends believed in state tests, their kids would be taking them. They wouldn’t be taking the CTP exams instead.
Or, alternatively, they know that standardized testing was introduced many hundreds of years ago to remove bias, nepotism, corruption, and favoritism from government hiring practices, and they are aware that the history is quite a bit more nuanced than what you presented here,”
No, Tim, standardized testing was not introduced many hundreds of years ago. Standardized testing as we know it came into being in the early 1900s as an off shoot of IQ testing designed originally by Binet and expanded/refined by Terman.
Your historical take is wrong.
It’s not my “take;” it’s peer-reviewed research produced by professors specializing in the history of education. Ones who often take a very dim view of the impacts of standardized tests, ironically. Read the links!
Tim,
I have been a historian of education for nearly 50 years. There was no standardized testing in the 19th century. Giving the same test to all the children in the same grade in one District is not the same as machine scored Testing for every child in the nation.
Check out the work of MCIEA in Massachusetts and PACE in New Hampshire, there will be a webinar with more information about them on 1/22. There are ways to do accountability and to better understand students and schools without standardized tests. If we want to “take the temperature” with a standardized test, we could continue to use NAEP, with no high-stakes attached.
https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/8833577960134551297
http://mciea.org/index.php/about-mciea
https://www.education.nh.gov/assessment-systems/pace.htm
NAEP suffers all the inherent onto-epistemological errors and falsehoods identified by Noel Wilson that renders the usage of the scores and results COMPLETELY INVALID.
Duane
You are a true scientist because you follow an argument back to it’s initial assumptions.
As you have pointed out time and again, if those assumptions are invalid, there is no way the subsequent conclusions can be valid.
The folks who support NAEP never address the concerns you raise because they can’t.
Very unscientific.
Since I subscribe to the Duane school of thought where testing is concerned, I do not see an improvement in the suggestion here except that it does look for ways to make the testing process help rather than hurt. The prospect of giving th ACT in September and using the results leaves me nonplussed. I see endless spreadsheets to fill out, administration driven rabbit holes to dive into where magic potions swell fictitious heads.
I suggest a different metric. We need to measure how much time is given to the teacher to read poetry inspired by the World War I experience. This we can measure. We need to measure how many students the teacher sees. We need to measure how much access students have to books, information on the Internet, and science labs. Is we can measure. We need to measure where money is spent in school districts, whether it goes to administors or personnel with student contact. This we can measure.
That said, Diane is spot on about testing transparency. Test questions should not last a year, but be subject to analysis from academics soon. Questions called out by his process should be stricken from the scoring of tests and students should see their scores appreciate after this process. Millions of eyes need to evaluate the questions against their perception of our general educational goals. If this process makes testing too expensive, then it should go away. Right now, testing is too expensive, and it is being paid for by robbing teachers of time and money. Presently, our work regimen dictates a sort of lesson planning and use of testing that requires massive labor, for which teachers are not compensated.
I suggest we go back to measuring people’s skulls with calipers.
Much easier and just as effective.
Psychometrics and psycho-metricians give science a very bad name.
(And the dash between psycho and metrician is purposeful. These standardized testing folks are psycho)
And too dumb to be real scientists.
Or measuring the inside volume of the skull with steel ball bearings.
Duane – I can think of some people’s skulls I’d like to try that on. Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Rahm Emanuel, Cory Booker….
Can we start now?
Dienne
What makes you sure Arne Duncan and the others you mention don’t already have ball bearings in their heads?
It would explain a lot.
This is something that could be tested with a large magnet.
An MRI machine would work quite well.
I would also suggest public school parents look into how much testing is involved with “personalized learning” platforms that are now being lock-step promoted by ed reform.
Maybe my 9th grader is an outlier but he’s in a “personalized learning” section in science and they are testing those kids CONSTANTLY. I think he may be spending 25% of class time taking short check up tests on a computer. A “10 minute test” eats up a LOT of time if you’re taking one two times a class period.
Personalized learning people reassure parents by telling them “half” the time is computer instruction but look into what they’re doing in that chunk. They read a passage, they take a test, they view a video, they take a test. They’re testing half of that half, which for the student means 25% of time spent on testing. You’ll be shocked.
Personlized learning to me looks like an elaborate standardized test with a lot of bells and whistles. Reading a short passage and then testing IS a standardized test. It’s basically a series of Common Core-type test questions.
I think you are exactly right that Pearsonalized learning (from Pearson, of course) is basically a test disguised as a lesson.
My nephew is using Pearsonalized learning for his Spanish and math homework and it is one test after another.
The software is absolute junk. You have to answer correctly all but one of a series of questions after a “lesson” and if you get any more than one wrong, it is “no soup for you” and you have to start all over with a brand new series of completely useless questions. Worst of all is the fact that there is no partial credit and no explanation for why you got a question wrong, so no possibility of learning from your mistakes.
My nephew gets incredibly frustrated, as you can well imagine. I’m sure he is not alone.
The programmer who wrote this so called “educational software” has absolutely no clue about learning and teaching and has no business writing applications for education.
I spent a good part of my career as a software engineer and encountered many such types along the way who can write code until the cows come home but either can’t or don’t bother to learn anything about the things they are writing code for, in my nephew’s case, teaching Spanish and math.
There should be a centralized database of these people somewhere so schools know to avoid any software that they have produced.
Most parents are unaware of the extensive data mining in depersonalized learning. I think they would be shocked to know that their child’s information is being sold. Parents must be aware of the tedium involved from staring at a screen all day with young people stumping for Pavlov’s dogs.
My son had a “personalized learning” math program that was frustrating not just for not only not being able to miss any, but that the number of decimals he had to put varied by question, and it was never labeled to tell kids what to do. In some problems, he had to go out to five decimal places or it was “wrong.” In other problems, it was “wrong” if he did go out to five decimal places. It was a guessing game to how to game the system so that the correct answers would actually be accepted by the computer program.
It costs nothing to decry standardized testing when you’re reacting to a perceived threat to your livelihood. If you really believe that standardized tests are useless and tell us nothing, then here are some ways that you can line up your actions with your words:
–the next time you need a medical procedure, actively seek out not the “best” doctor, who went to the best schools and got the best fellowships almost entirely on the basis of her high standardized test scores, but the “worst”—someone who attended a lowest-tier medical school (low MCAT scores) and who is not affiliated with a teaching hospital (low scores on residency exams). Go to a poor neighborhood in a big city and look for them working out of a storefront office. The biggest difference between these guys and the elites isn’t what they were taught during their medical education; it is their test scores—so choose them with confidence!
–the next time you need assistance with taxes or financial planning, actively seek out not the “best” accountant, but instead someone who has failed to pass the standardized, computerized Uniform CPA exam. Tens of thousands of people who graduate with great grades and degrees in accountancy go on to fail all or some of the test, but there is no reason at all that they can’t prepare your taxes or assist you with hugely important decisions about money.
–the next time you need legal advice, seek out law-school graduates who have failed the multiple choice standardized bar exam (assuming your state administers the bar in that fashion). The bar exam tells us nothing about what someone was taught or his fitness to practice law.
–Got car trouble? Sure, it might seem reassuring to know that the person about to operate on your baby has either passed or will be supervised by someone who has passed the standardized computerized test for certification, but in reality those guys are just inauthentic rote learners. Buy your own parts at Autozone and have those guys who hang out in the parking lot help you.
The path to many other professions is gatekept by some type of standardized test, but these can be a start. Good luck and let us know how it goes.
My livelihood is in my way related to standardized tests. I don’t get your point.
Tim,
Next time your child needs an operation, make sure to take the doctor with the highest MCAT scores and not the one with the highly regarded reputation who attended the non-top ten medical school where his or her skills and knowledge earned them a coveted residency at a top hospital.
Next time you need a lawyer, make sure to take the one with the highest LSAT scores and not the one most skilled in getting his or her clients the best outcome.
Do you ask your surgeon whether she barely passed her medical boards or whether she passed with the top grades? Do you ask your lawyer what his LSAT scores was?
And, how about helping educators, like coaches, really embrace the ‘formative assessment to increase teacher and student learning’?
Efff the GD standards and testing regime.
Don’t perpetuate flawed assumptions. Classrooms should be places where there are puzzles, challenges, and “what might happen if’s..” .
The most important questions in life, and in art, in the humanities, and arguably in the sciences do not have a “correct or incorrect” answers.
Better to ask students what they would like to know about X, or have them suggest topics to think about and go from there. That is certainly true in the visual arts.
In any case, the opening days of school should be devoted to getting acquainted, getting kids involved in setting, understanding, and following some routines, and such. Phillip Jackson was a master atf disclosing the importance of these routines, noting which were probably required, and which might be worth radical reconstruction. There is NO one best way to start a school year. Also do not forget: A majority of teachers also have job assignments in “untested subjects.”
Yes, even the sciences don’t really have “true” answers, only approximations to the truth, at best.
And what is considered correct today may even be considered wrong tomorrow because a better theory was proposed and/or an experiment was performed that contradicted the idea.
Isaac Newton was considered right until Einstein came along and showed that his equations gave the wrong answer for things moving very fast relative to the observer doing the measurement.
Standardized tests are actually very poor models for creative thinking.
It’s no accident that they only model the thinking of people who are not at all creative.
These are the types who support them: people who never discover or create anything new.
Eliminate all standardized tests that require students to pick a “correct” answer. I am purposely not talking about diagnostic batteries used to determine disability and or areas of educational concern (even those have a slew of onto-epistemological burdens that have yet to be satisfactorily addressed).
Wilson has shown us just some of the onto-epistemological (conceptual foundational) errors and falsehoods that render the usage of any of the results of the tests COMPLETELY INVALID, not to mention UNETHICAL in many regards. To understand those errors and falsehoods, anyone associated in any fashion whatsoever with standardized tests, especially those who so ardently support the atrocious malpractices of standardized testing, should read and comprehend Wilson’s 1997 dissertation “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700 I challenge anyone to refute Wilson’s work. (Yes, I know there will be just the crickets, cicadas and tree frogs of my tinnitus that I will be hearing, certainly not a peep from the testing malpractice supporters.)
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
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.
YAY!!! The Duane “Wilson Rant” (copyright it, Duane, & make $ome $$$, then buy Pear$on out!!!)!
I think it’s a sign (no, not a $–not everything is all about $$$) that you’re feeling better, & so happy for you! (My friend waited a looong time B4 she had her hip replacement–after the recuperation, she felt so great that she’d regretted not having it done earlier. EXCEPT–it was a lucky choice, because–remember?–there had been replacements done w/faulty materials, & those unlucky patients had to have the procedure redone.)
Anyway…WHY are we STILL having this conversation? Parents: fight for your kids–they are being abused (call Child Protective Services en masse–clog up their inboxes & phone lines). Do we let pedophiles off? Why do we enable psychological & educational you-know-what?
NO.TESTING.PERIOD. NONE. NADA. ZIP.
It’s ALL about the money (for the ed. publishing monopoly) AND keeping “other people’s children” from getting a quality education…which is…all about money (all of our kids can work for Walmart & Amazon & NOT get food stamps because, by the time they’re old enough, all gov’t. benefits will be long gone).
Some day, people will acknowledge that Duane Swacker was right – and also that other guy that Duane kept quoting.
Thanks for the kind words RBMTK! And you are quite correct to ask “Why are we still having this conversation?” I ask that myself on a daily basis. Money and the power to make a lot of it through the nefarious malpractices have to be at the base of it. . . . “For the love of money is. . . !
And also, thanks SDP! I get very frustrated knowing the damage being done to the children, damage that we know results from the malpractices–maybe I should call them goddamned malpractices, damage that we can prevent and that would allow us time to broaden and help enlighten students to their own sense of being were we to listen and understand what Noel Wilson has shown us.
And I am very very frustrated at this point (chronic pain, fatigue and malaise don’t help but I’m working on that) by the fact that when shown the inherent errors and falsehoods that render the standards and testing regime process and results completely invalid, educators will agree but they then hem and haw around, something about “but I need my job.” GAGA Good Germans all of them. Bastards!! (and I’m being nice with that last term-how can one not condemn those who would abuse children for their own expediency?)
It is one of the main reasons I retired when I did. I couldn’t continue to be a part of this abusive practice on children. Testing has never given me any useful information. The results do not come back in time to do any good and often have no meaning. I usually knew what I needed to know about my students without them anyway. My methods to discover this information was much less disturbing to the learning process, and nowhere near as damaging to my students’ self-esteem. I fought for so many years to end this testing madness and it only kept getting worse.
I would love it if tests were used for diagnostic instead of punitive purposes. Ranking students is not the purpose of education. Ranking schools is not the purpose of government.
I have the best diagnostic test of anyone anywhere (for subjects other than mathematics). I call it the ‘Writing Assignment’. I get to know my students’ individual bases of knowledge, skills, and interests better, far better than with closed-ended comprehension questions. I learn from the open-ended “outcomes” far more than any data or big data can tell me. There is no “standard” to which I must adhere other than the individual levels and differences my students bring to class. And now, here’s the best part, the BEST PART: the students are thinking and learning during the test. Just let me teach.
How do I address what W. Bush ignorantly and wrongfully called “the soft bigotry of low expectations”? I don’t! I don’t have expectations. My students don’t try to live up to my expectations. Venture capitalists have expectations; I have intellect, and my students have curiosity. Learning and building on what we know is our goal, not “measurable outcomes”.
Like the “I don’t have expectations”. I never did have expectations either. As far as I was concerned it was/is up to the student to want to learn and to learn as much as they wanted to learn.
Exactly. Well put.
I have to come back to this even though it was three day ago. A slight modification, if I may. It’s not up to the students to want to learn, or to learn as much as they want; it’s up to the teacher, rather, to determine what the students want to learn, and to get them to learn as much as they can. Either way, it’s imperative to get the standards and tests out of the way.
Can’t agree that it’s the teacher’s responsibility to “determine what the students want to learn”. We can attempt to lay out a course of study, to show the student possibilities within our subject areas (thinking more high school with this) and perhaps try to show how it might benefit them. But I never could nor attempted to get inside the mind of the student in any fashion in order to “determine their wants/needs/desires”. And yes, it is up to the students and their parents to determine what and how much the student will learn. That is part of their own sense of being and being free to determine for themselves about their lives. How can it be any other way? (and I mean that question quite literally) [I hope this makes sense.}
I think there are two separate issues here. It is not a question of getting into students’ minds to determine what they want to learn. Viewing it that way unintentionally capitulates to the silly criticisms of progressive education as catering to each child’s wish, lacking “rigor” (gawd, I hate that word) and focusing on every child winning a prize.
The real notion of student-centered is to capitalize on students’ genuine interests and passions to lead them toward the skills and knowledge we hope them to attain. Math can be learned through statistical analyses of things the kids care about. A brilliant essay can be written about something a student deeply loves. History can be brought to life by skillfully creating context that is relevant to students’ life experiences and interests. I could go on at more length than anyone would read.
But a major problem in education, particularly when curricula and testing are standardized or a Core is supposed to be Common, is the inevitable consequence that students don’t particularly care about what they are asked to do. Some will manage the tedium and do just fine, but is that really good enough? Crafting contexts and experiences that matter to students is the art of good teaching. In that respect, “getting into their minds” is not only useful, it is essential.
Can’t disagree with you on the negative effects of the standards and testing regime malpractices. And, as you know, could add many more negatives.
It is indeed a fine line between “getting into their minds” and knowing enough about the student to generate the kind of interests in the student’s mind. I prefer to fall on the side of believing that it is not the teacher’s job to get into that mind which is now being forced even more into the schools through things like grit, socio-emotional learning, and the various other supposed means of addressing/learning about what is in a student’s mind. I contend that it is a fallacy to believe that one can do such a thing.
Now, good ol fashioned getting to know the students and their interests, as expressed by them (and their parents if young) has always been and still is one of the many skills a teacher should have. And using that “soft” information to then help guide the student to his/her learning destination (which may change over time and probably will) is also important. Without the very “human” connection (which the standards and testing regime totally obliterates) learning can hardly be considered “complete” or even adequate.
I know we are not that far apart on this, I just am very cautious about the role of the state, the teacher in being in and/or overstepping the bounds of the liberties of the student-even when those teachers may have good, even innocent intent (which I believe that almost all teachers do).
Agreed, particularly suspicions of the “state.” I also abhor the “grit” phenomenon which is basically a way to place blame on a kid for not being gritty enough, just like blaming them for not being smart enough. Social-emotional learning is mostly horse manure too, although social and emotional development will happen quite nicely if we care about kids and stop the horrors of no excuses schools.
Example: I have a student right now who hasn’t done a lick of work all year long. He refuses. He doesn’t want to read anything. He doesn’t want to write anything. He wants to play baseball video games. He wants to be a Major League Baseball player and knows he doesn’t have to graduate from anywhere to have a shot. It suddenly occurred to me recently that I was missing my chance to be one of his great teachers, maybe his greatest teacher. I went to the library, grabbed an armful of baseball novellas for young readers, and asked him if he wanted to borrow any. Now he reads all day. I am going to see if he wants to do any baseball research writing soon. Forget the standards. Forget the “curriculum”. I’ve done this before: found out what a student was interested in reading, and kicked the curriculum to the curb. This young man still doesn’t care about his education, still doesn’t want to learn anything. But he’s learning, and he doesn’t even realize it. That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout!
I very much do NOT mean that it’s my responsibility to do this. It’s not possible to do it with every student. I just think it’s important for me to keep an eye out for the opportunity, and more important for me to have the autonomy and authority to ditch the “curriculum” when the opportunity arises.
Anyone who has taught for a decent length of time, oh minimum 5-10 years understands this process and more likely than not has done something very similar. And it does mean taking the time to listen to the student on a one on one basis (somehow making time to do so without it being so intrusive as to turn off said student).
One student, whom I still see in the local small town bar every couple of months, a certified heavy equipment operator, struggled with my class-Spanish as a freshman. His mom and I did all kinds of things to try to get him interested. I know, because he told me, that the reason he did any work at all was because I took the time to talk with him about. . . outdoors, fishing, hunting. See he was and still is a country boy through and through and I (who has a lot of country boy in me) enjoyed talking to him about his adventures out in the woods and on the farm.
Every year I had the students prepare authentic type dishes from different Spanish speaking countries (no, not tacos, burritos and that stuff, food really good recipes). I let the students pick the recipes, with my approval. This student picked out a recipe for a braised saffron rabbit dish from Spain. I asked if he had the half dozen rabbits in the freezer and he said, “nah, I’ll go out and get em this weekend.” And he did and with his mom’s help (I supplied the saffron as it is more expensive than gold) they prepared the dish. And it was exquisite.
He came back for level 2 after having gone from a low D in first semester and did a lot better in attempting to learn that second year.
No doubt that the very basic human connection is one of the most important in the teaching and learning process and why smaller class sizes are the real, and perhaps only, reform that we really need.
So, I take back what I said about it being “a teacher’s responsibility to find out what students want to learn” and instead say it’s a teacher’s right to find out what students might want to learn. Not every student wants to learn. That’s a fact.
I can’t stop. I’m on a roll.
It occurs to me that there are a lot of social and political issues (in addition to mathematics) surrounding baseball, including race, immigration, steroids, journalism, cheating, celebrity, advertising, gambling, the roll of Congress… I have just under five months left with this youngster, four months if you figure in the time we’ll lose to computerized state testing. By the end of the school year, I hope to have him interested some of those issues. It could be the birth of a civic-minded man. I love it.
Teaching is beautiful.
Teaching can be beautiful, no doubt. But to be an adequate teacher one must be a learner (which you are doing with this student-kudos) first and foremost. I use the term “teaching and learning” and up until the last month or so thought it to be adequate. But that phrase is actually backwards as it should be “learning and teaching” for without the learning there is no teaching. And I contend that ultimately we learn to teach ourselves in the learning process.
Another way I put it is that “when one stops learning one is dying”.
I learn everyday.
Thomas Jefferson said, “I cannot live without books.”
I cannot live without learning.
Duane, I love that story. Rabbits and baseball: ain’t they grand!
And I enjoy both! Excellent discussion, thanks!
Ways to connect with students. I started to write “connect to” but I prefer the preposition “with” as it implies a two way street and not just one way “to” something.
Thanks back at ya.
Kudos on your learning-teaching prowess back at you too.
Diane,
I just saw your photos from Cambodia. I am humbled. One cannot live without learning. Also, one cannot learn without living. Thank you for being my teacher.
Humbled isn’t the right word. I don’t know what the right word is.
Wow. Dr. Ravitch offers what I consider a reasonable repsonse and Duane says no standarized testing period…Again. I will come up with my what about accountability? (sorry, no fancy long Wilson rant like he has about no tests)…I believe that if we lived in a bubble where we knew all teachers were doing the right thing for their kids, then sure, no such tests would be needed. But the fact is we don’t.
I will say that I agree that tests should not be used as punitive, and that growth should be focused on as the measure rather than proficiency (yes, I know the difference, unlike our current Sec of Education!). Really, Duane it’s up to the student if he/she wants to learn – the teacher should have no role in that? and I am little confused about InService saying he or she has no expectations of students – what does that really mean? Please elaborate.
If no testing – then no assessment and no accountability? Then what…
Ranking and sorting is not how education works, admin.
InService, see below for further responses to jlsteach.
Sorry, jlsteach, I just saw your response. Ya know three days is a long time past in the blogosphere, eh!
The dichotomy “If no testing – then no assessment and no accountability” is not necessarily a logical if/then statement as there can be many different “thens” that are not being taken into consideration.
Was there no accountability for teachers and the job that they were doing before the current standards and testing regime? Of course there were, ever since the one room schoolhouse teacher was evaluated by the local school board/council. Standardized testing was never a part of the teacher’s evaluation until NCLB. And as well it shouldn’t have been nor be for, as per the test makers themselves and the various educational standardized testing promulgators have declared – It is unethical to use the results of any test (not just standardized test results) for any other purpose than to determine what a student has done on a particular test at a particular time and space. One can’t then arbitrarily (and yes it is quite arbitrary and subjective) pull out those scores and make a statement about the teachers, shools, district, etc. . . . That is an unethical usage of the test results.
Show me how that isn’t an unethical usage, jlsteach, I’m all eyes and ears.
“and that growth should be focused on as the measure rather than proficiency”
What is the standard unit of measurement for that “growth”? Jlsteach, please explain and/or show where we can find the agreed upon standard unit of “growth” that the supposed measurement must surely be based upon if it is a true measure.
. . . . . .
Let us know, gracias.
“Really, Duane it’s up to the student if he/she wants to learn – the teacher should have no role in that? ”
I never said nor hinted at that the teacher has no role in attempting to get the student to learn. If I did, please point out where I said that.
The fact is any and all learning must be, must come from the student, the one doing the learning. Can outside influences affect said student? Of course, but ultimately, as a matter of onto-epistemological reality, it all comes together (or not) in the mind of the learner.
Duane,
Jlsteach is a former teacher, an adminimal or quasi-adminimal who thinks he/she has seen teachers “not teaching the right thing at the right time.” Apparently, it’s up to jlsteach to walk into a classroom cold and determine the “right thing” to teach, not getting to know the students at all, and just assuming that the bar set by David Coleman is the best fit for every student. Jlsteach says, Forget rabbits, forget baseball, forget writing sonnets, forget reading whole fiction; just get under the limbo stick set by Coleman.
NCLB is a prime example of an unconstitutional federal law. We are debating aspects of a law that should not exist.