Lisa Eggert Litvin, parent leader in Westchester County, remembers a childood in which testing was present, but far from dominant. There was time for play and hanging out with friends.
Today, however, standardized testing has become the measure of students, teachers, and schools.
She writes:
“When I attended public school in the 1970s, we didn’t have the high-stakes tests in math and English Language Arts that elementary and middle schools now give every year. We studied math and English, of course, but we had time to dig into other disciplines. We didn’t have much homework, so that after school, we could play with friends and be with our families. Not every day was amazing by any means, but we had room to explore, have fun, make mistakes, and just be kids.
“We didn’t take many standardized tests. In fact, I remember taking a standardized test only two or three times over those years. There was no test prep, except for the reminder to bring a #2 pencil to school.
“Fast forward to 2001, with the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The law was well-intended, hoping to ensure that all children were accounted for. It required that schools test every year in grades 3-8, and report the results, including for traditionally underserved groups. The thought was that low scores couldn’t be hidden, students’ needs would be addressed, and every child would eventually show proficiency. The tests would provide accountability.
“But NCLB went astray: it limited its focus to annual tests in math and ELA, and imposed harsh repercussions on schools for low scores (hence the term “high-stakes testing”). At the time, the nation’s top adolescent psychiatrists warned Congress not to increase testing, especially with draconian stakes, explaining that “test-stress is literally making children sick” and that “the health effects of such policies” must be studied. But the law and its testing mandates passed anyway.
“Now, nearly two decades later, such testing-centric public education means that my childhood, with its range of studies and exploration and free time, is endangered. Playtime, recess, and the arts are considered throwaways as schools double-down on ELA and math. As early as 2005, a survey by the Center on Education Policy found that 71 percent of school districts cut back on subjects like history and music so they could spend more time on the tested subjects.
“In addition, the pressure for high achievement in the tested subjects has intensified tremendously. Teaching has become more about preparing children for the tests, and tested subjects are being taught earlier than ever. Kindergarten is the new first grade, with emphasis on reading and math over unstructured free play time — even though experts have warned of the grave consequences that this will cause.”
In theory, NCLB was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act (which is just another way to say “No Child Left Behind”, but the reality is that standardized tests continue to dominate the lives of students and teachers.
Can anyone say that no child was left behind as a result of the imposition of annual testing? With enough test prep, scores may go up, but they don’t translate into success after school. Does anyone sentient person believe that “every student” will succeed because of annual testing?
No other nation imposes annual tests on children from grades 3-8. Why do we? It is a massive waste of time, purpose, and money. The biggest beneficiaries are not the students but the testing companies.
The emperor has no clothes yet has paraded around stark naked since January 8, 2002, the day NCLB was signed.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sometimes one has to take a break from it all and go find some. . .
Always loved that “black water” while hanging out at the Sunshine Co. in the Ocean Beach community of San Diego AKA The Peoples Republic of Ocean Beach.
Being around any natural water, especially in solitude can certainly sooth one’s being.
Now to figure out when the next time I can get away will be!
Diane- are you saying no other nation gives annual standardized tests like PARCC, for example? ( which my district is in a frenzy as we prepare our students and the schools for testing…)
I thought many Asian countries were test-crazy. No?
No other nation gives ANNUAL standardized exams as we do.
The big exam in Asian nations is the high school exit exam, which determines the student’s college and life chances. Everything is a big build up.
Read Yong Zhao’s book, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? Why China Has the Best and the Worst School System in the World.”
Chinese saying:
Yin Zhen Zhi Ke: Drinking Poison to Quench Thirst
Zhao interview: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/05/yong_zhao_in_conversation.html
“Three laws in a nutshell” ( and I do mean “nut” shell)
We left them in the weeds
In race to make a buck
And every child succeeds
In being out of luck
(No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top
Every Student Succeeds)
“No child Left Unscathed”
“No Child Left Unscathed”
“Race to the Mental Breakdown”
Kindergarteners bathed
In bubble-testing shakedown
“ 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
So true!
SDP: you are besting your own poetic standards. I have measured it.
These tests have destroyed my field–English language arts. Students used to read substantive literature and write papers. Now they do test prep exercises. All the joy and value has gone out of this. I strongly advise people whom I care about NOT to become English teachers in the current test-mad climate. And, ofc, from all that test prep the kids are learning almost nothing because the Common Core for ELA, on which the tests are based, is a joke.
And, btw, the test scores have NOT increased as a result of twenty years, now, of this testing madness. The testing regime has utterly failed.
It’s not the test themselves that have destroyed your subject area Bob. It is all the educators who have obediently, like the GAGA Good Germans they are, implemented these malpractices. Let’s place the blame where it should be: On each and every educator who has implemented these malpractices.
I refused to do so and survived–barely–and this only because of the force of my personality and my learning in my subject area. But my district wanted us to do test prep all the time, and that’s what a lot of my colleagues did.
I fought the “data driven dialogue” from the first time I heard it at a “Being Professionally Developed” day in the late 90s. Our district wanted to get ahead of the curve. Yeah, they and many others got a curve, a curve looking for strike three.
I paid the price in many ways for being outspoken. I kept on going, fighting and refusing until the day I retired and I still am fighting it now.
Thanks for all the work you do for education, Bob!
Good for you, Duane, for fighting back against this insanity. I finally had enough it it. Certainly, a person of conscience cannot do the job of the English teacher as most administrators, today, are demanding that it be done, for they are evaluated, of course, entirely on their student’s scores on these abominable tests, and that’s all, for the most part, they care about. The damage being done to kids and to our country by these tests is incalculable. We have a whole generation of young people, now, who haven’t really studied their language and its literature but who have spent YEARS doing test prep exercises. Freaking insane. And it doesn’t look as though anything is going to be done about this because the legislators and many of the high-level education “leaders” are so freaking ignorant. They have no clue how sloppy and misguided the Common Core is. They have no notion that the tests don’t measure, at all, what they purport to measure. They have no clue that the tests have become the curriculum and have driven out sane instruction in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking. They still think that the joke that the Common Core is some sort of “higher standard” (the irony of that is very dark indeed). Under these conditions, I would counsel any young people reading this to steer clear of the teaching of English as a career. This profession, as it was practiced, as it’s best, in the past, is now history. It’s done.
I reserve my most extreme disdain for the education pundits who saw which way the wind was blowing and threw all their principles aside and hopped aboard the Common Core and standardized testing gravy train. Would that there were a particularly nasty circle of hell awaiting them. I’ve taken names. I know who these people are. And when they renounce it all, I shall remind them of how they sold out our profession.
As we all should for those who knew and know the harms caused to so many students and who choose to continue to enforce the malpractice.
Here’s a little thing I wrote a few years back and have posted it a few times here:
Going Along to Get Along (GAGA): Nefarious practice of most educators who implement the edudeformers agenda even though the educators know that those educational malpractices will cause harm to the students and defile the teaching and learning process. The members of the GAGA gang are destined to be greeted by the Karmic Gods of Retribution upon their passing from this realm.
Karmic Gods of Retribution: Those ethereal beings specifically evolved to construct the 21st level in Dante’s Hell. The 21st level signifies the combination of the 4th (greed), 8th (fraud) and 9th (treachery) levels into one mega level reserved especially for the edudeformers and those, who, knowing the negative consequences of the edudeformers agenda, willing implemented it so as to go along to get along. The Karmic Gods of Retribution also personally escort these poor souls, upon their physical death, to the 21st level unless they enlighten themselves, a la one D. Ravitch, to the evil and harm they have caused so many innocent children, and repent and fight against their former fellow deformers. There the edudeformers and GAGAers will lie down on a floor of smashed and broken ipads and ebooks curled in a fetal position alternately sucking their thumbs to the bones while listening to two words-Educational Excellence-repeated without pause for eternity.
As much as I agree with your basic point, Duane, I would point out that the majority of teachers during the period of time we are discussing were new to the profession. By 2002, when NCLB started in earnest, almost 60% of our teachers were in the last years of their careers. NCLB forced out many a bit early, and their young replacements would have had to had a lot of hubris to come out of college with the audacity of a seasoned veteran. Some of us have been lucky enough to slither our way between subjects that were not tested. Others have battled.
Little late in responding, Roy. Was down on the Current River camping for the last 6 days and just got back. Had to leave all canoeing and fishing equipment at home so that I wouldn’t be tempted to overstress my new right knee (done three weeks ago.) But it was still wonderful hanging out at the river, although I was certainly going crazy not being able to float or fish.
Interesting point about the experience level of many of the teachers who have had to suffer under the current malpractice regime-basically this whole century so far. And I agree with Bob about those way above the teacher level who sold out and sold the teachers and students.
“Today, however, standardized testing has become the measure of students, teachers, and schools.”
NO!, it’s not a “measure” of those things. Standardized testing is an assessment, albeit, a piss poor one at that, and that description is being very generous, that serves no legitimate educational objective in the teaching and learning process. Oh, everyone and their brothers and sisters, mommas too, will tell you that the standardized testing malpractice is absolutely vital to determine. . . . .
. . . . . yeah, determine what? As how can one determine anything with a faulty, invalid, unreliable assessment device. And what is the standard unit of learning that standardized testing is supposedly using to “measure” student learning, abilities, capabilities, etc. . . .?
Hint: There is no standard unit of learning.
Sooooo………How can there be any supposed “measuring”.
Hint: There isn’t any!
It’s all a big farce that harms many students in the process.
Why the hell do we continue with such insane inanities that are standards and testing?
We were forewarned of the problems that are inherent in the malpractices that are education standards and standardize testing by Noel Wilson in his never refuted nor rebutted “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. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. 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.
Harvard biologist Stephan Jay Gould rightly called such pseudoscience “mismeasure” and even wrote a book called “The Mismeasure of Man”.
Gould understood, as you have pointed out many times, that a big part of the problem is that even people who criticize the wrong headed policies use terminology that unwittingly reinforces the very claims they are criticizing.
Every time one calls the result of a standardized test a “measurement” or “measure” (eg, of learning), one lends undeserved credibility to the pseudoscience that uses such terminology.
My favorite Gould was his response to The Bell Curve, a controversial book in the early 1990s. Full House, by Gould, used baseball to demonstrate that “measurement” of intelligence was much more about the model we impose on the humans than the humans themselves.
NCLB was used to force me out of teaching. I had worked at my elementary school for eight years. We had some good principals. I heard our District thought we were too cliquish, so they brought in a new principal. On day in the spring, he came out while my students were at recess to talk. He asked me what I thought of NCLB. I told him I thought we were leaving many children behind along with a few other comments. He, of course, disagreed with me. In the fall, I had the most challenging class I ever had. I asked the school secretary how that happened, and she told me he took my class list and stacked it. It was a vey difficult year. I wasn’t allowed to use the time out room, or get children tested for LD or counseling for emotional handicapped children. I used our association to have a meeting with the principal, who also had a representative. My representative was new at this and didn’t do well. I spoke up for myself far better than she did. Right to work doesn’t work. I was moved farther inner city. I survived five more years being moved to another school. I spoke up for my students. I don’t regret it, and I am happy teachers are finally saying enough. Unfortunately, I know of some of my students now in prison. With help, they might have not gone the direction they went. That’s what I regret.
This sort of horror is common enough now. Alas!
The fools who support the Common Core in ELA and the absurd standardized testing regime have, from ignorance and greed, laid waste to the teaching of English in the United States. It’s a national tragedy.
A poem on this subject:
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2017/10/02/the-coring-of-the-six-hundred-with-apologies-to-alfred-lord-tennyson/
I really appreciate the inclusion of experts and their warnings of increased testing in place of play and free time. Kids need time to be kids, not stressing from a young age over tests.
Thinking back on NCLB and even through today, it is concerning that politicians think they understand how to fix the education system. The power should be put in the hands of the teachers who are working in the classroom, not people who are out of touch with the current education scene.
At last count (2017), the Common Core/College & Career Standards were still alive in twenty-four states. Since the initial adoptions in 2008-2009, eleven states have revised or re-branded the original standards. Only 10 states were still using those daunting and flawed online Common Core tests from the federally funded consortiums: Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC). States have found alternative tests “aligned” with the Common Core. Here are a couple of additional points. The Common Core/College & Career Standards were designed to narrow the curriculum, set expectations for college-level mastery of skills and content in grades nine and ten, and “back map” (reverse engineer) standards as a system of pre-requisites for grade-level to grade-level mastery beginning in Kindergarten. That folly (substantive, procedural, managerial, developmental, pedagogical) has been well documented. Back mapping is of some use for relatively short-term workforce and military training and for indoctrination programs with adults. Some versions of back mapping are used in planning large-scale construction and engineering projects (e.g., PERT). Back mapping is misapplied to education that occurs over a twelve or thirteen year period of time and with children and teens who are still growing physically and maturing at differing rates and in different ways—cognitively, socially, emotionally, and aesthetically—with affinities of uncertain duration and more in their lives than school-based obligations. The Common Core/College Career standards were designed from the get-go for connection to computer-delivered instruction with training systems as the model and computer-based testing for “correct” answers.
https://www.edweek.org/ew/section/multimedia/map-states-academic-standards-common-core-or.htm
CRITERIA FOR RATING COMMON CORE ALIGNED CURRICULA: https://www.edreports.org/files/EdReports-Quality-Instructional-Materials-Tool-K-8-Math.pdf
FOLLY OF BACK MAPPING: https://www.alternet.org/education/how-our-backward-approach-education-hurts-our-youngest-learner