Rochester NY’s Coalition for Public Education, in collaboration with the University of Rochester, Writers & Books and the Rochester Teachers Association recently began a “community read” project using Daniel Koretz’s book, “The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better.” The project involves having as many community members as possible read the book and/or attending a presentation by Dan Koretz, and attending one or more of several discussion/problem-solving/action meetings to generate alternatives to high-stakes standardized testing to education policy-makers.
These are the key points that organizers of the Rochester Coalition for Public Education circulated to readers of the Koretz book:
FIVE CRITICAL POINTS FROM DANIEL KORETZ’S BOOK: “THE TESTING CHARADE: PRETENDING TO MAKE SCHOOLS BETTER”
- Education policy makers have created and implemented many non-research-based and harmful practices in the name of accountability, including the following:
- Basing teacher evaluation scores, to a significant degree, on test scores of students who have significant variables in their lives that negatively impact their growth and development.
- Holding English as Second Language students, who have little or no English language experience, accountable for passing standardized English exams, after only one year of learning English.
- Using unreliable, invalid, non-field-tested standardized tests to hold students accountable,
- Holding all students accountable for meeting grade-level expectations, when some students may not be developmentally ready or may be deprived of the resource help they need.
- Punishing students, teachers & school communities, by labeling them as failures.
- High-stakes standardized test scores are often inflated for some of the following reasons:
- Teachers focusing on “teaching-to-the-test,” rather than student interests and areas not often tested, like citizenship, music and current social problems,
- Some students and/or teachers “cheat,”
- Middle & upper class students may receive “paid” extra tutoring,
- Some students are taught skills for more accurately guessing correctly.
- Standardized tests can have a useful role, if the following criteria were used more often:
- Used for diagnostic vs. “high-stakes purposes,”
- Test student sample populations vs. every student,
- Set realistic, appropriate test score goals for individual students,
- Use “performance-based” vs. memorize and regurgitate tasks,
- Piloted for validity and reliability, before implemented,
- Test what is important, and
- Use human judgment as part of the process.
Koretz states: “ The problem is not tests. The problem is the misuse of tests. Tests can be a useful tool, but policymakers have demanded far more of them than is reasonable, and this has backfired. Used appropriately, standardized tests are a valuable source of information, sometimes an irreplaceable one. For example, how do we know that the achievement gap between minority and majority students has been slowly narrowing, while the gap between rich and poor students has been growing?”
- “Campbell’s Law,” generally states that whenever a socio-economic goal is reduced to a number, corruption and perversion of the process to attain that goal is inevitable. This phenomena is demonstrated in a number of ways, including: cheating, teaching to the test, ignoring student needs and interests, and creating invalid teacher evaluation systems that devalue the role of teacher judgment.
- The high-stakes standardized exam-driven, approach to school reform has been a huge failure. Koretz
states: “If you line up the effects of this approach, the answer is clear: It has been a failure. The improvements it has produced have been limited, and these are greatly outweighed by the serious damage it has done. Of course, in many places, improvements appeared to be big, but most often, this was just inflated test scores.”
HIGH-STAKES STANDARDIZED TESTING
DISCUSSION/PROBLEM-SOLVING/ACTION GROUP MEETINGS
- October 11th, Thursday, 4:00-6:00 pm at Nazareth College, Golisano Academic Complex, Room 211, led by Professor Shawgi Tell
- October 15th, Monday, 7:00-9:00 pm at St. John Fisher College, Mid-level Gateway Room, Basil Hall, led by Professor Jeffrey Liles
- October 18th, Thursday, 7:00-9:00 pm at Writers & Books, 740 University Avenue, led by Rochester Coalition for Public Education Coordinator, Dan Drmacich
- October 29th, Monday, 7:00-9:00 pm, at Pittsford Barnes & Noble, led by Howard Maffucci, former East Rochester Superintendent & current Monroe County Legislator
- November 8th, Thursday, 3:45-4:45, LaChase Hall, Margaret Warner Graduate School of Education, University of Rochester, led by Professor David Hursh
Please go to our website www.roccoalitionforpubliceducation.com, to register to attend any of these discussion/problem-solving/action meetings. Our objective is to submit well thought-out proposals to our educational policy-makers for meaningful change in our current public school tests. Please get involved and bring your ideas and colleagues. You need not have read Koretz’s book to be involved, but we do encourage reading the first two and the last chapter of his book: The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I would also add that “proficiency” often determines passing or “failing.” Proficiency is not a statistical construct; it is a man made one and perhaps even a political one. States may change raise or lower the proficiency level at will. It is unjust and unscientific to attach high states to a rating that can change on a whim.
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A CRUCIAL point.
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A minor correction, RT:
“Proficiency is not a statistical construct; it is a man made one JUST LIKE STATISTICAL CONSTRUCTS ARE and POSITIVELY a political one.
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I propose a much simpler way to know that our testing regime is nonsense, and worse: if the schools the education “reformers” send their kids to don’t follow any of this accountability nonsense, then this accountability nonsense is, well, nonsense. There’s Campbell’s Law, and now there’s the Obvious Law (if rulers don’t follow their own rules, then these rules are not really rules, but scams).
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Steve, excellent. Simple rule: do unto the children of others no more nor less than you do for your own.
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Bingo.
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“Koretz states: “ The problem is not tests. The problem is the misuse of tests. Tests can be a useful tool, but policymakers have demanded far more of them than is reasonable, and this has backfired. Used appropriately, standardized tests are a valuable source of information, sometimes an irreplaceable one.”
Ay ay a ay! Yes, the problem is the standardized tests, and the supposed standards upon which the whole shebang is based. To understand why see Noel Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted treatise “Education Standards and the Problem of Error” at https://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Also Koretz’s problem is the sloppy usage of assessment terms. Tests as a general term include all types of test-teacher made, department made, standardized, etc. . . so that yes “Tests can be a useful tool” is true. The problem is that Koretz is using the term “tests” to mean a specific kind-Standardized Tests. Those terms are not interchangeable. To suggest so is to obfuscate and give aid and comfort to those who “extol the supposed virtues” of standardized tests.
The only appropriate use for a standardized test is a truly diagnostic test used as a part of the diagnosing of disabilities that effect the student’s learning, that doesn’t have “right and wrong” answers and that is not used for sorting and ranking students. Even those have onto-epistemological problems, but they are meant to assist educators to help students learn.
As it is those standardized tests and results that Koretz believes “are a valuable source of information” are actually a hobgoblin of error, falsehoods and psychometric fudgings that render any conclusions COMPLETELY INVALID. So that the real problem is the abuse and violations of the students’ being due to those malpractices.
Oh, and they are completely replaceable and the malpractices that harm all students in myriad ways need to be abandoned.
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the malpractices that harm all students in myriad ways need to be abandoned
GASP, Is Ivan Illich off his rocker? (De-schooling Society)
“School prepares for the alienated institutionalization of life by
teaching the need to be taught. Once this lesson is learned, people
lose their incentive to grow in independence; they no longer find
relatedness attractive, and close themselves off to the surprises
which life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional
definition. And school directly or indirectly employs a major part of
the population. School either keeps people for life or makes sure that
they will fit into some institution. . . De-schooling is, therefore, at the
root of any movement for human liberation.”
Wilson:
“The Examination
Before accepting or rejecting Illich’s ultimate solution, let’s look more closely at some of
the specific mechanisms that produce this “alienated institutionalization of life.”
First we look more closely at the examination, and at the particulars of its function.
Foucault (1992) certainly affords it pride of place among the mechanisms of disciplinary
power which he elucidates:
The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy
and those of a normalizing judgment. It is a normalizing gaze, a
surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to
punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one
differentiates them and judges them. That is why, in all the
mechanisms of discipline, the examination is highly ritualized. In it
are combined the ceremony of power and the form of the
experiment, the deployment of force and the establishment of truth.
At the heart of the procedures of discipline, it manifests the
subjection of those who are perceived as objects and the
objectification of those whom are subjected. The superimposition of
the power relations and knowledge relations assumes in the examination all its visible brilliance (p184).
The examination is the ceremony of ordering; it is the mechanism through
which real people (and hence the world) is ordered, and held in order, in all of
the meanings of that word. By doing this in a setting in which the person who
establishes order is also the person who establishes truth through knowledge,
the certainty of correctness is established, and the person becomes an object in
the acceptance of their place in the line, in their acceptance of their
uni-dimensionality, in their incorporation of their relative merit as an essential
part of their beingness.
Of course the examination is also a crucial element in the construction of human
cognition. It defines what are true and false facts, what is right and wrong
thinking, and what are the acceptable limits of intuition and feeling. But we are
more concerned here with social categorisation.
The report is the place where such individuality is made official; here is the
permanent record, uncorrupted by any possibility of error, of one’s place in the
order of things; of a person’s history, present, and future distilled into a single
mark; of a sign that evokes possibilities and defines exclusions; in the world of
higher education and the world of work, here is the official indicator of who
you are, what you are.”
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¡Sí sí sí, señor NoBrick!
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Ask any educator who touts the importance of testing this:
Is developing curricula and methodologies with the primary goal of increasing test scores in the best interest of your students?
And yes it is a ‘gotcha’ question.
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