Linda McNeil is a professor at Rice University and an eloquent spokesperson for children and teachers. She has done important research about the negative effects of high stakes testing.
Her thoughts for this day:
http://educatingallourchildren.blogspot.com/2018/09/honor-americas-teachers-on-labor-day.html?m=1
As we celebrate America’s workers this Labor Day, let’s be sure to honor our children’s teachers: teachers who every day inspire our children’s minds, spark their curiosities, (wipe their noses and search for missing mittens), nudge hesitant writers, cheer on insecure readers, seek out the child on the sidelines, and then do it all over again the next day. And the next.
Honoring our teachers means voting for candidateswill restore the massive funding cuts that have starved many of our schools and made being a teacher even more financially precarious than it has traditionally been in many of our states.
Honoring our teachers means marching with them when they feel they have to march and rally and petition to get politicians’ attention – then following up with our own messages to those politicians so they can’t claim the “teachers are just complaining.”
Honoring our laboring teachers means volunteering in their classrooms, learning first-hand what they need to do their jobs well for our children and grandchildren, then joining our voices to theirs to make these needs persistently known.
Honoring the teaching profession means becoming so politically active and effective that no teacher has 7 classes of 24 to 42 students (yes, that’s a teacher I know here in a Houston public high school), that no charter chain takes one more dollar from our public schools, that no US secretary of education gets one piece of voucher legislation through Congress, and that no more billionaires use their wealth to try to “buy” our public schools (yes, that’s you, Los Angeles and Little Rock).
And if we truly honor our teachers, we will follow the lead of the students of Marjorie Stedman Douglas High School and the thousands of other youth and their families around the country in working tirelessly for good, strict gun safety and gun control laws so that no teacher ever has to protect her students from a shooter and no teacher ever ever is expected to have — or use — a gun at school. Ever.
Honoring our laboring teachers means joining forces w them to protect the public’s schools and, by so doing, protect our democracy.
Thank a teacher, hug a teacher – then go to work on their behalf!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you.
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If you want to see all of the universities getting money from Arnold, check the foundation’s grant site under “Evidence Based Policy”.
Some highlights from the report
Bard-$224,720 (2017-2024), Brown- more than $6.6 mil., a portion presumably went to Prof. Justine Hastings, principal investigator for the R.I. Innovative Policy Lab (2015-2020), President and Fellows of Harvard, $12,410,000 (2013-2022), and the Regents of the University of California and the University of Michigan.
The Koch’s have ALEC to draft state laws. Bill Gates has his paid education media to sell his policies and, the Aspen Institute to get his policies enacted and, Enron’s Arnold has labs and centers within universities and a plethora of other spending like his efforts with Pew on pension destruction and on community aerial surveillance.
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Brown’s economist, Prof. Justine Hastings, has a breath of knowledge new in my experience. Her NBER papers cover the far ranging topics of commodity price shocks related to mental accounting, the BP oil spill related to advertising, sales force and competition in financial markets, the effect of school admission on voter participation, earnings disclosure and college decisions, financial literacy in Mexico, how financial literacy shapes U.S. wealth and investment behavior, which degrees are worth more than others, privatization of social security, income effects in gasoline and grocery purchases,…
But, the subject of most interest at this site is her article ,”The Effect of School Choice on Intrinsic Motivation and Academic Outcomes” (that’s a lot of territory to cover) which concluded, “We find substantial test score gains from attending charter schools and some evidence that choosing and attending a high value-added magnet school improves test scores as well”. There was also a claim about immediate effect on student behavior which I think was the abstract’s reference to attendance (which I deduce was the tie-in to intrinsic motivation).
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Validity and reliability- the hallmarks of “evidence-based policy”
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Validity and reliability are concepts hijacked by psychometricians in a sad and invalid attempt to lend a pseudo-scientific sheen to their onto-epistemological invalid standardized testing regime. See Noel Wilson for further details: A Little Less than Valid: An Essay Review
http://edrev.asu.edu/index.php/ER/article/view/1372/43
From the review:
As before, I focus on validity. Why? Because, as the good book says,
Validity is, therefore, the most fundamental consideration in developing tests (p. 9).
I concur. If the test event is not valid, if indeed the test is invalid, then all else is vain and illusory.
So what is validity?
‘Validity refers to the degree to which evidence and theory support the interpretations of test scores entailed by the proposed use of tests. . . the proposed interpretation refers to the construct or concepts the test is intended to measure’ (p. 9).
Further to this,
‘A sound validity argument integrates various strands of evidence into a coherent account of the degree to which existing evidence and theory support the intended interpretation of test scores for specific uses’ (p. 17).
That is, the validation argument presents a cogent case for the defence. Such an argument becomes a professional guarantee that the whole event of testing is valid.
Now let’s look at the dark side of the truncated definition of validity here described. When I went to school, validity was about whether an assessment measured what it purported to measure. And what were estimates of the errors. Invalidity was assumed as an empirical fact. the problem was to estimate its extent.
But times change. According to Standards (2002), to show that a test is valid, what you are required to do is to show that you have examined in detail some aspects of validity, and can produce evidence that in these aspects some glimmer of validity exists. I say glimmer because there are no real standards in this book of Standards about what, for example, even an acceptable level of reliability might be in particular cases. And of all validity aspects, reliability is the one most beloved by psychometricians, and most lauded by test constructors. So what level of reliability constitutes an adequate standard? That’s a matter for professional judgment.
What does all this mean in practice? Surely that any test can be validated, and thus deemed valid, because not only are those involved in the validation process not encouraged to address all sources of test event invalidity, but are positively encouraged not to.
‘Professional judgment guides decisions regarding the specific forms of evidence that can best support the intended interpretations and use. As in all scientific endeavours, the quality of the evidence is primary. A few lines of solid evidence regarding a particular proposition are better than numerous lines of evidence of questionable quality.’ (p. 11)
The advocacy described earlier is again evident here. The reference to scientific work is fatuous. Genuine scientific endeavours examine all of the evidence. It is legal endeavours that favour advocacy bias. The real problem with this definition goes deeper. The test event does not include the validation process. The validation as described is the supporting argument for using the test data in particular ways. It is an adjunct to the test event, and separate from it. So whether the validation is or isn’t done, the test event remains unchanged. Logically then the empirical test validity, to what extent the test event does what it claims it does, is independent of the validity argument. It is clear that the test validation is a public relations spin for the test event. The empirical validity or invalidity is undisturbed by the validation process. And we are back to square one in our invalidity discourse.
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Swacker,
Your analysis is far more sophisticated than the paper abstract I mentioned, which if I interpret correctly uses a sample of students to predict generalized intrinsic motivation as measured by attendance, which is then attributed as a causal factor to charter school enrollment. The authors for the paper I referenced in my comment are from Brown, University of Chicago and Princeton.
If bias masquerades as evidence, corruption finds definition.
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Correction “causal factor for school choice success”
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Labor Day to me meant laboring over lesson plans, plain and simple. School Board meeting tonight concerning pay for those extra 90 min. of PD we are supposed to have each week! Wish REA luck.
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Voters should reach out and hug teachers,students and our collective future by voting in pro-public education candidates. Teachers can only do their job when conditions allow them to do it. We need to stop privatization, testing madness and allowing corporations and billionaires to insert themselves into policy. Their goals, access to public money, are not in alignment with quality, equitable, democratic education for all.
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I ❤️ public School Teachers! They are smart’, kind, organized, caring, generous, and more!
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