Entering the peak weeks of school testing season, pressure from students, educators and community leaders for genuine assessment reform is accelerating as more people recognize how much classroom learning time is undermined by standardized exam overkill.
Multiple States Did Changed Test Questions Cause Decline in Smarter Balanced Test Scores
https://jaypgreene.com/2018/03/26/did-changed-test-questions-cause-national-decline-in-smarter-balanced-scores/
Colorado Testing Fixation Rushes Students Past Real Learning
https://www.coloradoan.com/story/opinion/2018/03/25/opinion-start-school-later-and-let-learners-take-their-time/445465002/
Florida State Uses “Mumbo-Jumbo” Calculation to Select “High-Impact Teachers”
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/lake/os-lauren-ritchie-high-impact-teachers-meaningless-20180322-story.html
Hawaii Teachers Push to Reduce Standardized Testing
http://www.khon2.com/news/local-news/teachers-push-to-reduce-standardized-testing-for-hawaii-public-schools/1064609297
Illinois Teachers. Parents and Community Push Back Against Testing
https://www.ctunet.com/media/chicago-union-teacher/downloadable-pdf/Mar-Apr-2018-CUT-FINAL_reduced.pdf — see esp. pp 10-11
Indiana Pressure From Educators Blocks Bad School Grading Plan
http://www.journalgazette.net/opinion/20180323/making-the-grade
Indiana Is the Thinking Behind ISTEP Testing Fair?
http://www.heraldbulletin.com/opinion/columns/shane-phipps-column-is-the-thinking-behind-istep-testing-really/article_e843cf9e-8c03-5ded-9647-e0d0a396e9f8.html
Mississippi Educators, Lawmakers Push for Move Away From State Testing
http://www.wdam.com/story/37798622/educators-and-lawmakers-push-for-a-move-away-from-state-testing
New York Opt-Out Leader Explains the True Costs of the Tests
https://vimeo.com/261373078/e139f7bab6
New York Petition to End Test-Based Teacher Evaluation
https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/repeal-nys-teacher-evaluatio
North Carolina Timing of Supplemental Nutrition Benefits Affects Test Scores
https://sanford.duke.edu/articles/timing-snap-benefit-affects-children%E2%80%99s-test-grades
Ohio Let Real People, Not Computers, Grade Writing Tests
http://www.theintelligencer.net/opinion/editorials/2018/03/let-real-people-grade-the-tests/
Ohio State Senate Agrees to Eliminate Use of “Value-Added” Score to Evaluate Teachers
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2018/03/ohio_senate_backs_change_in_te.html
Oregon Oppose Mono-culture of School Testing
http://www.bendbulletin.com/opinion/6106779-151/letters
Pennsylvania Teachers Must Speak Out Against Standardized Tests
https://gadflyonthewallblog.wordpress.com/2018/03/21/the-lone-voice-of-dissent-against-standardized-testing/
Tennessee Bill Would Lower State Test Weight on Student Grades
http://www.lebanondemocrat.com/Education/2018/03/26/Bill-could-lower-TN-Ready-weight-on-student-grades.html
Utah Testing Season is the Real March “Madness”
https://news.hjnews.com/logan_hj/one-teacher-s-take-on-testing-and-other-grade-school/article_e9019fe1-f123-5950-8a3e-e875bc117c91.html
Washington New School Report Cards Show Many Factor Beyond Test Scores
http://www.krem.com/article/news/local/northwest/new-database-helps-wash-parents-keep-track-of-their-childs-schools/293-530454696
Worth Reading New Book by Sir Ken Robinson: You Can Change the System
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-03-21-sir-ken-robinson-s-next-act-you-are-the-system-and-you-can-change-education
Bob Schaeffer, Public Education Director
FairTest: National Center for Fair & Open Testing
office- (239) 395-6773 fax- (239) 395-6779
mobile- (239) 699-0468
web- http://www.fairtest.org
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Worth Reading: New Book by Sir Ken Robinson
“For his follow-up act, Robinson is releasing a new book for parents on how to raise capable children who thrive in school.”
I hope he encourages parents to be affluent, college educated and have white kids. Those things help a lot. BTW, “capable” and “thriving in school” are very likely to be very different attributes.
Incidentally, what qualifies Sir Ken to opine on either parenting or education?
And even more incidentally I suppose, why do we insist on calling him “Sir” Ken? Silly British titles mean nothing here.
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you are right about titles. Everyone was calling the Uber-Reformer Michael Barber, “Sir Michael Barber.” He is just plain old privatizer, test-seller for Pearson, Michael Barber on this blog.
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Several points. I have not read the book You, Your Child and School: Navigate Your Way to the Best Education by Sir Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica.
“You Can Change the System is not the title of the book that Bob Schaffer mentions it is the title of the EdSurge article.
“Sir” Kenneth was appointed a Knight Bachelor by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for Services to the Arts (2003). He is a performing artist and administrative consultant on the arts. I do not regard him as authoritative on education or educational policy. He is glib. In the EdSurge article he is quoted as saying:
“Rather than thinking of education only in terms of subjects and content to be learned, we should also be thinking about the many skills and competencies and attributes that we hope education will help to encourage in our kids.”
I wince when I hear the word “competencies,” not only because I vividly recall the 1970’s minimum competency movement but also because the tech industry is in the process of coding every “competency” imaginable for a new age of “algorithmic instruction.” That effort is going forward with platinum level support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and all of the tech companies that belong to IMS Global (IMS stands for Instructional Management Systems). https://www.imsglobal.org/sites/default/files/K12%20Revolution%20Program%20Overview%20v021318.pdf
Apart from that, the EdSurge article reports that Sir Ken Robinson thinks the Orchard Gardens Public School in Boston. Massachusetts is exemplar of some “we can change the system thinking.” So, I poked around to see what “we” can do to change the “system.” This is from the Orchard Gardens website.
Begin quote: Orchard Gardens K-8 Pilot School guarantees all students a rigorous academic experience, provided in an environment that values and celebrates strong relationships between students, staff, families, and community. All students will believe in their ability to achieve and be offered a wide range of enrichments to be fully prepared for success in college and career.
Orchard Gardens K-8 Pilot School is on track to becoming one of the top performing schools in the state. In order to achieve this goal, we will:
Create and support teams of highly skilled educators who share a commitment to high achievement though data, high quality professional development and opportunities to work, plan and reflect together
Ensure students will be educated through the creation and support of a safe learning environment and taught by educators differentiating instruction to meet specific, rigorous goals
Commit our school to work closely with our strategic community partners to provide expanded learning time for all students, provide educational and engagement opportunities to all members of our community, and give families multiple opportunities to get involved with our school.
Through these steps, all our students will be fully prepared for success in college and career.
Special Features
An innovative “pilot” school for kindergarten through 8th grade
Music, art, theater, dance, library media program
Multiple extended day programs
Guidance counselor and student support coordinator
Strong partnerships with families through monthly progress reports
Family coordinators who partner with families to access additional services
A beautiful, state of the art building built in 2003
Clubs and sports after school for students in grades 3-8
Special academic programs
Specialized strand for students with disabilities
Full inclusion model with skilled intervention teachers providing specialized support
Sheltered English Instruction (SEI) for Spanish and Cape Verdean Creole speaking students
Specialized program for students with interrupted formal education
Our partners
Boston Medical Center, Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI), Mass 2020, New England Conservatory of Music, PlayBall Foundation, Playworks (recess and class game time), and Thompson Island Outward Bound Program, CitySprouts.
After school programs in our building
After school programs, all free: City Year (grades 3-5), Citizen Schools (mandatory for all 6th-8th grade students); America SCORES soccer and writing program (grades 3-5); sports and clubs (eligibility based on attendance and grades). End Quote
These are some other 2018 partners, Alvin Ailey Dance Camp; Arbor; Boston Teacher Residency; BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life); Boston Arts Academy; Boston Partners in Education; GoodGuides Mentoring program; Imajine That; Northeastern University; Orchard Gardens Boys & Girls Club; Teach for America; and Teach Plus.
So, Sir Kenneth Robinson cites as exemplary an Obama era ‘Pilot School” in the arts and humanities that benefited from a federal grant of $4 million dollars. This year, the school serves 844 students. The school is a relatively new facility (2002-3, tax value in 2016, $21,437,000, overall quality rating for construction and educational use is “good,” highest is “excellent” ). The school has dedicated rooms (2 visual art), (1 music), (1 medical service) among other features.
It has outsourced a lot of “enrichment” to other agencies. It values grades and attendance so much that eligibility for after-school sports and clubs is a bonus you have to earn.
The school appears to have opened the doors for some fee-based services (e.g., Imajine That for parents) and has some relationships (unclear) with teacher training programs and teacher leader groups active in promoting charter schools (e.g., Boston Teacher Residency related to Dudley Promise Corps, Teach for America and Teach Plus).
The school test scores remain well below those for other schools in Boston and Massachusetts. Perhaps someone in the Boston area can give some reasons for thinking that this school shows how “we can change the system.” I would also know how the “Families coordinator” works and if that is a paid position. I would love to see more schools devoted to a balanced program of studies in the arts, sciences, and humanities–with some restoration ELA and math as tools for inquiry and understanding, not he end game and all of that disconnected from bowing and scraping before the alter of “college and career” readiness.
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English and math teachers at my school will lose two weeks each of instruction to the upcoming SBAC test, which has a variety of validity issues, to put it mildly. So, for two weeks, I stop teaching. A large percentage of my students will lose additional instruction to be pulled out of class after the two weeks to finish the tests. (And the way my school has it rigged, if they don’t finish the multiple choice English section on time, they have to wait three weeks before going back to it. Math multiple choice, two weeks.) We don’t get that time back. It’s just lost, stolen by politicians who don’t care about or understand education or the people who elect them. And for what? I did everything I could, which was very little, to make sure parents know their rights not to have their children lose the time. I am still nervous administrators could find out. And for what?
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IS, How long does it take to get SBAC scores back?
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Months. We get the scores during the following school year.
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Bob and Monty at FairTest believe that there can be a “fair” standardized test. Wilson has proven otherwise, there is no “fair test” due to all the inherent onto-epistemological errors and falsehoods and psychometric fudgings that are rife during the making, giving and interpreting of any results that render said results COMPLETELY INVALID. When something is invalid it cannot be “fair”.
Monty and Bob, to learn why your position is risible and ludicrous pleas read and comprehend Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
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I gave a fair test last week. I taught my students about the 1850’s, and told them to write an essay explaining how the events involving slavery during the 1850’s contributed to causing the U.S. Civil War. They wrote their essays on paper during class. If they got grades they didn’t like, they could study some more and retake. I did not hire Pearson. I did not sell any test data on Facebook. That’s how tests can be fair. They are made by teachers for their own classes. Standardized tests can be fair too, if they are given very rarely with no stakes attached. The problem isn’t just annual standardized tests, though, it’s that the whole concept of “accountability” that must go. “Accountability” must be replaced with ‘return to respecting professionals’.
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What you hint at InService is the confounding and confusing usage of the various terms regarding assessing, evaluating and/or judging a student’s learning, knowledge, skills, etc. . . . Testing is but just one small fraction of that assessment with standardized testing having taken its disproportionate share of that particular assessment process (making some folks a lot of money in the whole game).
I contend, along with you it seems, that teacher made specific to the classroom setting in which the teaching and learning is occurring tests should be the main, if not only focus of any testing as an evaluative tool. How much weight in that overall assessment that is assigned to testing is up to the “professional” in the classroom, i.e., the teacher of record. Which hints at what you are saying about accountability in general and with which I agree!
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Yes, Duane. It’s so simple. Let teachers teach. (small classes.)
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Today is Mar.29, 2018, and tonight my school had their first SOL night for the season. From now on, SOL is on everyone’s mind. As I conclude March Madness tomorrow (most of my Ieps will able done.) , I realize what is missing in our kindergarten classes: full-time instructional assistants. Bodies, people, bodies! We need extra hands to service kids with poor fine motor skills, poor socialization skills, ADHD, and Autism. The kids get more needy everyday and our schools get worse.
I am very disappointed in the public schools but realize just how important they are!
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