John Merrow hammers away at the folly of placing standardized testing at the center of all education.
The evidence of this folly, he says, is the latest ACT reports.
What can we learn from them?
Our seniors are not getting smarter as a result of the testing regime imposed on them.
“These seniors have had 12 or 13 years of test-centric education, and the kids coming up behind them have also endured what the ‘school reformers’ designed. How much more evidence do we need of the folly of “No Child Left Behind” and Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s “Race to the Top” before we take back our schools?
“People who have consistently been ‘half right’ have been in charge of public education for too long. Now some are changing their tune (“Perhaps we have been testing too much,” they say) and asking for another chance. Others, however, are doubling down, calling for more charter schools, vouchers and other aid for private schools, and more anti-union initiatives. I say a plague on both their houses.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The overwhelming majority of teachers know their students “level” after they read the first homework assignment. They may not know reading at 4.2 or math at 8.1 but they know the level of their students. Standardized tests are a political invention not an educational one.
And yet, I have teachers tell me all the time that without the standardized tests, they wouldn’t know “what level the kids are on.” I don’t understand that at all. There’s not standardized testing in the subject I teach, and yet I know each kid’s level within a week or two.
TOW,
That’s silly. The test results results are not reported until the student is on another class. The teacher gets a number or numbers. How does that help the teacher?
These other teachers say that they can look at last year’s scores to, “see where the kids are at.” But that presumes a few things that I think we can’t presume: first, that the kids actually tried on the tests. And second, that the tests actually SHOW anything, which they don’t.
I’ve tried to talk to my colleagues about this, but they ignore me. Utah has been doing this all-standardized testing, all the time approach for nearly 20 years. Even teachers who are experienced believe this hooey.
Those states who haven’t bought this malarky, wake up: Utah is the canary in the coal mine. We’ve been doing “reform” longer than about anyone else. Our pay is abysmal, our class sizes are monstrous (I have 273 students right now, 7-9 geography and current issues), and our curriculum is a joke. What happens in Utah education will happen to everyone else in 5-10 years.
30,000 (that’s not an error) people in Utah have teaching certificates that are not teaching. 50% of our newer teachers will leave teaching in their first five years. It’s a crisis here–and it’s coming for the other states, too.
Yet Mr. Merrow is joining forces to open up a charter school….an independent charter school. I don’t understand how he can condemn the problems and participate at the same time.
https://themerrowreport.com/2018/09/28/can-the-charter-movement-be-saved/
Good catch, Lisa M. I went to his blog and followed the link to read more about the coalition of independent charter schools that has formed. It sounds like they are trying to do a wrong thing better, but I’m still skeptical for now. I believe that public schools could be and do for children all the things that charter schools claim to IF they were given the support, autonomy, no-strings attached billionaire funding, etc.
I’ll actually be in attendance at an event featuring Mr. Merrow in the coming months… I have a strong feeling this will be a big part of his keynote address.
If it’s a charter school…independent or not….it is still siphoning money away from public schools. All it takes is one person to start taking from the “cookie jar” of tax payer dollars earmarked for children’s education to have it all turn into a KIPP or Success Academy etc. I think Mr. Merrow is dead wrong on this one! And you are correct…he is likely trying to do a wrong thing better. He has some explaining to do.
The essential ingredient in charter schools is their fatal flaw. They are free of regulation, oversight, and supervision. That opens the door to entrepreneurs and grifters.
See:
CURMUDGUCATION: Is The Big Standardized Test A Big Standardized Flop?
http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2018/10/is-big-standardized-test-big.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FORjvzd+%28CURMUDGUCATION%29
It’s struck me recently…the kids suffered and so did the teachers. The worst teaching of my career was during that time when the Common Core and APPR and the “we’ll build the plane while we fly it” lunacy was in full swing. Worst…and I include those first few years when I started out as an educator. Dealing with insane state mandates that no one understood or that changed on a daily basis, attempting to keep some shred of integrity while dealing with ridiculous observations, flaky, invalid “outside exams” and watching colleagues around me fall victim to stress….what a mess. All the while, thrown under the bus by Republican AND Democratic leaders. (Cuomo, I’m thinking of you.) Luckily, classroom teachers had Diane and the other people who comment on this blog.
One of the realizations I came away with from during this “dark age” of my career…(and to some of you I’m sure this thought is obvious): of course, some people don’t care about teachers….so many of them don’t even care about the KIDS -unless those children are their own genetic material. Why would we expect them to care about the adults working in schools? We’ve got all these kids nationwide living in poverty and neglect. And it just continues, on and on and on. I mean here’s this dope of a president giving a huge tax handout to the wealthiest in our nation. What a travesty.
Yeah…..so we got all the tests….and we got Trump.
I will use this again….Poverty exists not because we can’t afford to feed/clothe/house/educate the poor but because we can’t satisfy the rich. We are truly living in a Hunger Games scenario where a few get to make the rules and the rest of us are just trying to survive. The rich are in competition with one another over who has the most and we are just the pawns in their sick game.
Bumper sticker from the 80s: “The boy who dies with the most toys wins.”
suffering,
ignorance (because of the opportunity cots of this nonsense, and
nothing actionable by teachers
I think what happened is ed reform focused exclusively on charters and vouchers, and then ed reform captured (most) lawmakers, which led to the federal government and (many) states focusing exclusively on charters and vouchers, which led to public schools being neglected for a decade, with the exception of testing our kids.
They don’t do anything for public schools. They offer absolutely nothing to public schools except testing.
Since 85% to 90% of kids attend public schools, ignoring or neglecting the schools that huge group attend (understandably) didn’t work.
Go read any congressional testimony. Public schools are treated as a disfavored “default”- a huge mass that are dispensed with in a paragraph or two as “failing” and then they all move on the the schools they support- charters and private schools.
We have whole legislative sessions in Ohio where the entire discussion and debate revolves around charters and vouchers. Listening to them you wouldn’t know public schools exist. It’s political capture.
It got SO bad West Virginia teachers had to shut down every public school in the state to get lawmakers attention. That’s remarkable. They were completely and utterly ignored until they literally shut down the schools.
That’s more than “out of touch”- it’s lawmakers living on another planet- the ed reform planet of “choice” where no one attends a public school.
They all followed this “movement” like lemmings and abandoned public schools. It didn’t matter that 85 or 90% of kids attend the schools they oppose- they simply stopped serving those kids at all, hoping, I guess, that no one would notice while they transitioned to the privatized systems they prefer.
What’s happening here in NH indicates that nothing is likely to change on the testing front. Instead of moving forward with an alternative method of assessing students our Commissioner and GOP governor seem intent on using scarce state funds to expand ESAs and “harden” schools…. and based on what I’ve read here and in other blogs that appears to be the case across the country where GOP legislators are using the ALEC playbook and capitalizing on the fears of parents to reinforce the message that public schools are inherently unsafe and need to operated more like prisons.
The only way to combat this truth is for voters to recognize the ALEC game and intentionally change over to Democrat governors — and then stay very much in each governor’s space. So many “Democrats” are still playing closet conservative where school invasions and testing are concerned; it is hard to feel optimistic.
Be optimistic. Despair kills action.
Here is my letter to my state Senator Niemeyer [R-IN] and Representative Slager [R-IN]. I feel that sending them letters is a lot like talking to a door. Actually doors speak back to me more often than either of these quacks. I forwarded the whole blog and added my comment. GRRRRR!
……….
Dear Senator Niemeyer and Representative Slager,
When are you going to take responsibility for the failures of public education in Indiana? The test mania and underfunding of public schools does make a difference. The insistence on supporting vouchers…that have proven to NOT improve students’ test scores but lower them, and charters that either measure worse than public schools or measure better only because they cherry pick their students is a crime and you are responsible. Why don’t I hear back from you or, even better, read that our Congress is doing something useful? Fund public schools. Stop all virtual schools that are proven worthless. Stop the expansion of vouchers and charters and start eliminating them from the system that only takes money away from public schools. Stop the wasteful standardized testing and let schools use that money to improve what needs to be done inside each school. We do not need more undereducated children who don’t even have basic knowledge to attend college or go out into the world and succeed. Standardized testing is proving to NOT work. It is bringing in money for the publishers and test makers. This has to stop!!!
“We cannot let continuing evidence of the folly of test-centric education be obscured by the craziness of our polarized politics or the increasingly frequent (and devastating) proof of climate change, because, make no mistake, public education is in danger, and not just from Betsy DeVos and her privatizing schemes.
Here’s my headline: Since the non-partisan “No Child Left Behind” Act of 2001 ushered in ‘accountability’ and ‘school reform,’ things have generally gone south, and students and teachers are paying the price. Students are being mis-educated and undereducated by a system that basically reduces them to a number, their score on standardized, machine-scored tests.”
Sincerely,
Carol Ring
_________ Dr., #211
Schererville, IN ___
[Phone}
Here is what I get. Whoopee.
……………………………..
Thank you for contacting me. My staff and I will review your comments and respond to you as soon as possible. If you need immediate assistance, please contact my Legislative Assistant, Victoria Szczechowski, at 317-232-9816. Thank you for taking the time to share your comments and concerns.
Respectfully,
Hal Slager
State Representative
House District 15
……..
Thank you for taking the time to contact me. Your communication is important. Due to the high volume of e-mails I receive, I may not be able to respond immediately but I do see every email.
Your comments help guide me in the legislative process and I value your communication.
Senator Rick Niemeyer
Indiana State Senate
Senator.Niemeyer@iga.in.gov
This is the worst thing ed reform accomplished, in my opinion:
“It’s shortly after dawn when Edward Lawson, one of America’s 3.2 million public school teachers, pulls his car into the parking lot of Julian Thomas Elementary in Racine, Wisconsin. He cuts the engine, pulls out his cellphone and calls his principal. They begin to pray.
Lawson is a full-time substitute based at a school with full-time problems: only one in 10 students are proficient in reading and math.
That may be explained by the fact that 87 percent of the students are poor and one in five have a diagnosed disability. Blame for test scores, however, often settles on the people who are any school’s single-most-important influence on academic achievement – teachers.”
Ed reformers gave lawmakers an out. They encouraged lawmakers to blame all the problems in the country on public schools, and sensing an out, lawmakers were happy to do that.
I’m not a teacher but I’m not at all surprised they’re miserable and stressed out- they are responsible for every single problem in this country. They have to fix poverty and a lack of health care and gun violence and a lack of civic participation and everything else under the sun. Our cowardly political classes dumped everything on them and then walked away and ed reformers cheered them on every step of the way.
Public schools are our national punching bag. Find a problem and I’ll show you why public schools should fix it. The latest is “gun violence”. They added that to the list this year. The country has a problem with people shooting other people and once again it’s up to public schools to fix it. It’s easy for lawmakers- point to public schools and get back to fundraising. That’s why they all followed ed reformers like lemmings.
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2018/10/17/teachers-appreciation-pay-union-jobs-schools-education/1509500002/
“Ed reformers gave lawmakers an out.” It not only allowed them to blame teachers and public schools, It gave them the back door escape hatch so they no longer felt responsible for education. Since the advent of “reform,” we have seen a disinvestment in public schools. States are responsible for education. They need to stop abrogating their responsibility. Parents and concerned citizens need to pressure them to better fund our public schools.
There’s a graph in that article you linked to that’s sad..i.e. would you want to your child to be a teacher. Very true comments overall, Chiara. Thanks.
Has Merrow every apologized for his role in thrusting Michelle Rhee and her test-centric policies into the spotlight in the first place? Has he ever apologized for allowing her to fire a principal on-air? Has he apologized for any of his support for Rephorm?
It’s amazing how they disappeared her, isn’t it? She was lead ed reformer and poof! we never heard from her again.
Perhaps she polls poorly.
Ed reform is not so much “:science” as it is “political science”. The marketing department apparently saw a problem with the brand.
Not only has she quietly disappeared, there has been not a speck of reckoning regarding the toxic legacy she left behind from the ones who promoted her – the very ones now stroking their chins and pretending to wonder, what happened?
At my son’s public school they’re trying to fit in last year’s addition of “financial literacy” training with THIS year’s addition of opiate abuse prevention education.
Because this state has apparently decided that every problem under the sun can be dumped on public schools and no one else has to do anything.
Politicians love this, and you would too if you were them! All they have to do is order public schools to fix it (whatever it is) and their work is done. That’s why they all flock to ed reform- it’s a lot easier to dump all this on public schools than it is to do some actual work. Public school bashing is a reliable applause-getter.
Why would it be up to public schools to do drug abuse prevention and financial literacy instruction?
Couldn’t some other people or institution do some of this stuff? I get it- public schools are there and they’re an easy target but perhaps lawmakers could consider actually solving something instead of telling public schools to solve it.
If these private school graduates are wondering why we do less “civics” education they might drop into a public school some time and look at the long and ever-growing list of problems they’ve been ordered to solve.
Far from “failing” they seem to be the only institution anyone asks to do anything. They’re the only functioning public institution left.
John Harvey’s comment about predictive validity is important: ” The ‘college readiness’ standard rests on a very flimsy reed — that students meeting the standard are unlikely to require enrollment in remedial courses in the first college year and can hope to attain a ‘B’ in related mathematics or literature courses…. Analysts report that the correlations are, to put is as charitably as possible, only modest. It is estimated that they predict as little as 0.07 percent of first-year college GPA (on the English/Language arts ‘college readiness’ standard) and as much as 16 percent (on the mathematics standard)…. [I]n the worst cases, what accounts for 99.5 percent of first-year grades is a mystery [on the basis of the ‘college readiness’ standards].” These state tests like MCAS are sold to parents with “predictive validity” ; the lower down we go in the grades, the less they will predict anything at all….. let’s remember that.
Can ANYONE produce a paper and pencil test which adequately demonstrates or determines the value of ANYONE to society? People have forgotten what true education is all about..
Your bank statement!
I can.
Was the medieval Chinese civil service exam worthless?
China’s Imperial exams did not take place during what’s known as medieval times because that happened in Europe. China didn’t have a dark ages.
When the Roman Empire collapsed and Europe suffered through a thousand years of darkness and misery, China blossomed during the Han, Tang and Sung Dynasties, the golden age of Imperial China.
China’s educational system served the top 5 percent of the population. There were few if any schools available for the other 95 percent.
The Imperial exams were linked to a merit based system and were probably flawed but those flaws did not stop China from being the most technologically advanced country in the world for 1,500 years up until about the 15th or 16th centuries.
More mental masturbation about standardized test scores!
And. . .
in the meantime. . . ,
All, every single one, of the students are being abused and violated in their being through the standards and testing malpractice regime. Noel Wilson showed us in 1997 all of the onto-epistemological errors and falsehoods and the psychometric fudges involved in those malpractices that render the usage of any of the results of standardized testing to be COMPLETELY INVALID.
Why haven’t we listened and learned? When will the madness stop?
To understand just how insane it is to use the false standards and the standardized testing that is based upon said standards (and also tests like the ACT and SAT among many others) for anything read and understand 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. (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.
“People who have consistently been ‘half right’ have been in charge of public education for too long”
Half right? Really! He’s giving them a lot of credit for being half right. 1/100th right is closer to reality and that’s being nice.
The question of the post bothers me. How? In regards to having public education “produce” anything or anyone. Talk of production is not appropriate for the realm of public education considering the fundamental purpose of public education: “The purpose of public education is to promote the welfare of the individual so that each person may savor the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the fruits of their own industry.” (from Ch. 1-The Purpose of Public Education in “Infidelity to Truth: Education Malpractice in American Public Education.
Public education is provided so that all citizens may learn to the extent that each individual (in conjunction with parents when young) deems necessary for his/her own development. Nothing, at least that I can remember, in any of the states’ constitutions implies or hints that we should be “producing” something or someone. To have the state, through its public schools, produce something/someone would be to deny that person their ultimate liberty, that of determining for oneself one’s own concept of being. That should not be tolerated in this country.