A reader has collected the ways that test scores can be manipulated to make a school or a district look better or worse:
How to Manipulate Test Scores
1) Manipulate the standards
2) Manipulate the test items
3) Manipulate the cut scores
4) Manipulate the test takers
5) Manipulate the responses (i.e., change the answers, also referred to as, “The DC Rheeform Miracle” a tactic so successful that Atlanta gave it go.)
6) Manipulate the media
Number five is the only overt form of cheating, however, all the other methods are forms of de-facto cheating. Number 1, 2, 3 were used by reformers to prove that our schools were failing; numbers 4, 5. 6 are used by reformers to prove that the charter experiment is working. Six reasons why Common Coercion test-and-punish reform was a criminal enterprise.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
A criminal enterprise. Exactly. Well put.
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How about we don’t even give a damn about standardized test scores, yes including NAEP, and spend all the wasted resources, time, effort and monies on the actual teaching and learning process?
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But then how would we know that the Deformer policies have failed?
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I don’t know about you, Duane, but the **logic **of this stuff gives me a headache.
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You bring up,a point I made in 1998 or so when we first started to emphasize testing. Once you have decided that a certain test is the be all and end all to education, how do you get out of the trap without referring to conflicting testing (which is most certain to be as vacuous as the first)? When I head about all this back then, I pointed out the slippery slope of such idiocy to my superiors. Their response was a silly zinger: “so how do we make teachers accountable?”
I answered that this was a word that had been invented to get around the basic question, that administration at the highest level wanted to rule my classroom without really having to get out of a central office that was already bloated and becoming more so all the time. That was, naturally, a nonstarter in conversation.
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We knew they’d fail even before they were implemented. Why? Lack of conceptual validity-practices based on errors and falsehoods.
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All you need to know about ed reform is how they pick and choose what they promote, not based on “data”, but based on what their funders want promoted:
“What worked: Addressing the effects of child poverty
One way to help students in poverty do better in school has nothing to do with schools themselves. That’s the conclusion of a bevy of studies we wrote about this year: improving the conditions of poor children, by just making their families less poor, translates to better outcomes.”
I await the Walton and Gates promotion of “making their families less poor” as an ed reform strategy.
I’ll be waiting a long time.
They dump everything on public schools because it’s easier and more politically palatable among a certain set of wealthy people- their backers.
The narrowing of debate and exclusion of certain options happens right at the outset, and it stems from the beliefs and preferences of the funders.
That’s why we’re given such a narrow set of “options”- privatization and/or tests. Nothing else even gets in the door.
https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2018/12/21/education-research-2018/
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If Walton paid its one million workers a bare living wage of $15 an hour, that would improve education immediately by making families less poor.
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“Reform” always baits the hook with all the wonders that charters will bring to students that were born in the wrong zip code. They want us to believe they will provide equity that will right a social wrong. What they offer is privatization, the transfer of public money to private companies, increased segregation, and lots of marketing without much substance.
Poverty itself is never on their radar. They try to ignore it, but it just won’t go away. You can’t privatize your way out of poverty unless you “fudge data.” Wrap around services will help poor students along with more money for families are helpful. There are not too many ways for corporations to make money from them so these suggestions are ignored. Integration is a proven way to improve outcomes for poor students, but I am not holding my breath. Few are brave and honest enough to pursue it.
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Defective testing is the engine driving the destruction of public education. Deceptive reporting of the results is a necessary component to that end.
The narrative that teachers and unions are lousy is a mainstay of the reform party line.
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“Defective testing is the engine”
By definition all mass standardized testing is defective. Not only that but using the results of that malpractice for anything is COMPLETELY INVALID. To understand why See Noel Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted 1997 “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error”.
Have you read the treatise Fred?
If so your thoughts please.
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If one were to download Wilson’s PDF…
and clicked Edit, then selected Advanced Search, then entered
standardized testing, then clicked Search…ZIP, NADA
Try it again with, standardized.
“… We have seen how in practice the delineation of the standard cannot be more
specific than the fuzziness of the rank order of those being standardized…”
Point: Concocted rank, based on concocted tests, based on
concocted standards, is concocted validity.
Snotus pedagogus technologicus, DOESN’T right the wrong.
Snotus, it’s the DOE.
Snotus, it’s the Adminimals.
Snotus, it’s the funding waste of choice schools.
Snotus, it’s the deformers…
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Common Core-ercion test-and-punish reform was a criminal enterprise.
Fixed the spelling.
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Also known as Conman Core-ercion
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Also known as Race to the Top
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I like JD Wright’s description “Common Conformity”.
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AND THE BAND PLAYED ON…WITH OUR KIDS!
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Seventy Six Vambones (with apologies to Meridith Wilson)
Seventy six VAMbones led Reform parade
With a hundred and ten Core nets close at hand.
They were followed by rows and rows of the wolves in sheepy clothes
The cream of ev’ry shyster band.
Seventy six VAMbones caught the morning sun,
With a hundred and ten Core nets right behind.
There were more than a thousand Rhees springing up like weeds,
There were scams of ev’ry shape and kind.
There were crapper bottom Coleman schemes and Gates platoons,
Bluundering, blundering, all along the way.
Double bell baloneyums and big buffoons
Each buffoon having his big fat say.
There were fifty mounted conmen in Reformery
Dundering, dundering, louder than before.
Teacher nets of eve’ry size Reformers who’d improvise
To set the standard failing score
Seventy six VAmbones led Reform parade,
When the order to test rang out loud and clear.
Starting off with A No Child Left, which of value was quite bereft
With a big bad ESSA at the rear.
Seventy six VAMbones hit the counter point,
While a hundred and ten Core nets played the air.
Then a Betsy took her place as Reformers brand new face
And oompahed up and down the square.
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You are amazing. Thanks for this ( and many others).
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Liked it! Great line about sheepy clothes. Lemme mangle just a chorus verse of Tennessee Ernie Ford for you, since I’m going on survival under the invalid weight of sixteen years of NCLB English tests. It has to stop.
You test for sixteen years and what do you get?
Another year stressed out and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the data Big Bro.
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It’s rare that I ever venture to suggest an improvement on your sublime work, but shouldn’t that be “Seventy six VAMbones led Reform CHarade”?
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It is not a coincidence that the charter networks with the highest test scores use #4 (i.e. use any reprehensible tactic you can to get rid of low scoring students).
It is not a coincidence that the charters that do not copy the very best (but unmentionable) practice that reformers love of using tactic #4 get test scores that are no better – and often worse — than public schools.
It is not a coincidence that with all the bragging and writing about the “best practices” of charters using technique #4 to get high test scores, the very favorite tactic of flunking children over and over and over again is never mentioned but very often used.
It is a sign of the corruption if the ENTIRE charter movement — including those charters which try to keep their students and therefore have mediocre results — that their leaders pretend not to see how tactic #4 is used because they personally benefit and in the end, what are some lies when they personally benefit.
In that manner, the charters who employ tactic #4 and lie about it are like Trump and the charters that don’t employe tactic #4 but enable it are like the Republican Party. They both sold their ethics and morality long ago.
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Not mentioned is the fact that up to 69% of teachers have job assignments for which there are no national or statewide standardized tests. Solution: assign them a test score in a subject they do not teach or a writing assignment that requires them to predict the gains of students in meeting “measurable objectives” from the beginning of the year to the end of the year with the aid of a template called an SLO–student learning objective. A typical SLO assumes you have prior year “benchmark data” on your students and will use that to plan your learning objectives for the current year.
An additional farce is the weighting of “scores” on tests and other measurable assessment in several domains of learning (reading, math, SEL, school culture) then conjuring a single rating from this stew. The result can be seen in the CORE Districts of California “School Improvement Index” and the related metrics at “Great Schools.org” a website that sells data to Zillow among others who like this tool for redlining. A related version assigns letter grades to a school– A-F– based on pseudo-mathematical inferences through thin air. Ohio’s current report cards are a tortured example of pseudo math.
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Under the current, and soon to be extended, moratorium on the use of CC math and ELA (grades 3 to 8) test scores an even more farcical idea is now in place a majority of New York school districts: the use of shared or “distributed” Regents high school test scores to evaluate virtually all teachers (there are some exceptions), K to 12, in a school district. And this shared score is valued at 50% of a teacher’s APPR. Truth be told, life under the moratorium has relieved most of the stress surrounding test scores and evaluations. Hopefully the Board of Regents will see the light and deep six the misuse of invalid scores.
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