As a nation, we are hypnotized by standardized tests and the scores they produce. We forget that the tests and the answers are written by human beings. The tests are not objective, except for the scoring, which is done by machine. Giving the same bad questions to all students does not reveal who learned the most or who is smartest. They do reveal who is best at figuring out what the person who wrote the question wants them to answer.
Bob Shepherd, who has written about curriculum, assessment, and is now teaching in Florida, writes:
“the field testing that ensued laid bare the intellectual bankruptcy of the testing”
It’s been 18 years now since the passage of NCLB. We’ve had this two-decade-long national “field test” of standardized testing–a study larger in duration and scope than any other, ever. The verdict? Standardized testing has been far worse than a failure. Not only has it failed, completely, to improve educational outcomes. It has narrowed and distorted curricula and pedagogy and produced a whole generation of kids who think that studies in English aren’t about writing essays and poems and stories or reading and discussing great poems and plays and novels but about scanning text snippets to figure out what the correct answers are to convoluted, tortured, indefensible multiple-choice questions.
“My teachers should have ridden with Jessie James
for all the time that they stole from me.”
–Richard Brautigan
Who should write tests? Teachers should write their own tests. They know what they taught.
Who should grade tests? Teachers should be trusted to grade tests.
Any test without diagnostic value should be banned.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’ll say it once and I’ll say it again. In theory I agree. But what happens when we have teachers whose tests don’t align to the curriculum? Who constanstly don’t push their students or have low expectations? Fine – teachers create tests but there HAS to be some type of oversight on those tests. I’ve seen and provided many examples here of teachers being able to do their own thing that leads to the above.
We’re in a minority here but I’m with you.
Ed reformers went absolutely bonkers with standardized tests. It doesn’t have to be like that.
I took one a year in public school – our teachers treated it as routine- akin to a once a year physical at the doctor. It was reasonable. It could be reasonable again. Teachers just can’t let ideologues with agendas grab it and misuse it.
Here you go with the bad teachers again! I have teen children who hate to read because reading above grade level (chapter books) was pushed and pushed in ES. Is it better to allow a child to read a comic book or magazine article that is enjoyable to read or do you consider that to be low expectations?….because reading a comic book is still reading, and still teaching valuable reading skills. You see, it’s all about how YOU define “learning” and not about what is good for each individual child.
Lisa – I won’t comment on the tasing example as i would probably tend to agree with you on it. And I understand how all of us are shaped by our experiences. What I can tell you is when I taught in an urban school district secondary math that there were teachers who did have low expectations of their students. They would teach Alg 1 material in Alg 2 all year long. Imagine what happened when those students got to college – yep: remedial math courses were required paid for by the students (often for no credit!). Yes there ARE some poor teachers out there. I don’t think they chose their decisions out of malice (just as in some cases those that want standardized tests as a measure I honestly don’t think are bad people). This there needs to be some accountability somewhere.
Comic books are not books, and it is not reading. Reading requires sustained attention for several pages, it requires retaining information from prior chapters, contrasting and comparing this information with what is being read now… Sure, you need these skills when “reading” comics too, but on much lower level. I’ve seen some nice comic books that were basically a replacement for a movie, like a scene by scene storyboard. Still, these are not books.
Except that the research says you’re wrong, BA. Kids who are allowed to choose their own reading materials, including “not books” like comic books, become much better readers later on than kids who are forced to read “real” books. Any activity that involves reading and understanding the written words is beneficial. That’s why we make children’s picture books. There is no magical age at which kids suddenly and uniformly outgrow the need for pictures to assist with comprehension and enjoyment. (Incidentally, enjoyment is the number one predictive factor as to which students will become better readers.)
Sure, reading something is better than reading nothing. Then high school teachers pull their hair out when 10-graders read on 2-grade level.
Those 10th graders are probably those raised on a steady diet of Common Bore who learned back in first grade that reading is a tedious chore.
Setting aside your constant “bad teachers” argument, what do you think standardized testing does to fix the alleged problem you raise? Are you pretending that standardized tests are objective “measures” [sic] of anything? (Other than affluence, that is.)
Three quick thoughts:
My post did not say standardized tests were the solution. It did say if we have teacher tests we need accountability on what’s on those tests
Having teacher created tests assumes teachers know how to create grade level and content appropriate tests. This is NOT always the case – so the what?
Some have argued districts should create tests. Why? Because that allows teachers more time to focus on th teaching and less time writing tests – I see value to that.
@jlsteach….except I live in a suburban district where teachers go to the mainframe and pull the test….and this was even BEFORE common core/PARCC. You can walk into any public school in our district and the teachers will be “teaching” the same content/standard at about the same time and the same tests are used in every school and given at about the same time. I got to the bottom of that when I wasn’t allowed to see my children’s tests in elementary school (a paper was sent home with the grade and parents had to sign)….how was I supposed to help them when they were having a problem if I wasn’t allowed to see the test to see where they were having a problem? This was the county’s way of keeping control over the test material/curriculum. Of course there was no going back to review for my child or for any other because it was always the push to move on. So what we have is the district developing tests that are low expectation so that every kid can get a good grade and the parents never complain. So…it’s not just teachers….and it’s to set “the tone” in the district to drive the real estate industry.
When complex responsibilities are involved, it’s is often impossible to look to oversight to solve a problem. My departed mother-in-law used to work for a business. She worked her arthritic fingers to the bone to produce the payroll checks while her youthful co-worker did nothing with the blessing of a boss who was amazed at what the boy could do with a computer. Oversight was indeed lacking, but this was a simple process that should have been possible.
Whether a teacher is doing what he or she should be doing is infinitely more complex. The standards movement has not served to help matters, or so the evidence seems to say. Perhaps that is because one size fits all expectations are a departure from reason, and the most important aspect of oversight is that the teacher have the ability to discern what those particular students need and give it to them.
There is a history of great teaching facing the sanctions of those who do not aprove of the ideas or the methods. Thus academic freedom must exist just as democratic principles exist for the promulgation of innovation and reflection. Testing as a part of this is not helping. It must go.
“There is a history of great teaching facing the sanctions of those who do not approve of the ideas or the methods” – and on the flip side there is a history of teachers doing their “own thing” that is not at the right level for kids, essentially short changing hundreds of thousands of students. Not to mention administrators that simply pass those teachers along (yes, I know, admin are part of this issue too).
Who hires teachers? Who gives them tenure? Not teachers.
You’re right Dr. Ravitch – as I said administrators are part of the issue as well. I would also say unions, where I know you will disagree with me. BUT when it takes more than two years to have a teacher leave a classroom who has done poorly. OR when administrators are pressured to give high ratings for poor teachers mainly so they don’t have to deal with the hassle of the complaining teacher, such an environment is NOT a good one. I believe too often in education we only want to look at the successes and not look at areas of growth. And when we do look at lack of growth we through blame (common core, etc). The fact is there were poor teachers before COmmon Core. There were some great teachers before Common Core. And guess what – there are good teachers after Common Core (That are using Common Core) and poor teachers after common core. There IS no silver bullet in education, We need to stop looking for it.
There were great teachers, good teachers, and poor teachers before Common Core and the same is true after Common Core except now there are teacher shortages acRoss the nation because of phony reform, disinvestment, low pay, disrespect, stupid teacher evaluations, and the Common Core, written by amateurs and testing companies.
There were plenty of teacher shortages BEFORE the reforms as well…and teaching has ALWAYS been a profession that was considered to have low salaries (that is not new before or AFTER Common Core). I am not sure that you can make a direct line to all of the reforms and the issues with education. In fact, I’d argue that many of the same problems of before ARE the same problems now.
Hence a clear need for a national curriculum and national set of textbooks in all subjects from K to 12, with strong inter-subject correlation, like learning about uniform motion in physics soon after learning about linear functions in algebra.
In my school we don’t even have math textbooks – none. There are some handouts and printouts from different sources in form of workbooks, but these are not textbooks. Everyone, including parents, students and teachers, should be able to find out what exactly is being taught or will be taught in a given subject in a specific grade. It all must be transparent K-12.
You mean the Common Core?
Why on earth do we want conformity and standardization? Do you think that any curriculum can possibly cover everything that everyone needs to know? Of course not. So why is variation a bad thing? Some people may know more about Newton’s Laws while others may know more about Boyle’s Law. Some may know more about Shakespeare, others more about Faulkner. Some may be better at geometry, some at algebra. Some may be great at math, others English, others art or computers or cosmetology. Why is that a problem? Doesn’t variation make us stronger as a species? If everyone has had different educational experiences, everyone knows somewhat different things, and, among us, we know a lot more.
Agreed. Biodiversity is superior to standardization.
Common Core compared to proper national curricula is like Alan Shepard’s space jump compared to Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight. Common Core is only for math and ELA. Common Core does not include textbooks. Common Core does not prescribe specific sequence of math topics in high school. And for the record, I am not enamored by Common Core’s ties to computerized tests or to older NCTM math programs. Common Core is just an alpha version of what should have become full-blown national curricula. Regarding its current content, I consider it mostly ok and age-appropriate contrary to what some other say. There are no new teaching methods, only old stuff that has been used for at least a century to teach math, and I am fine with it. Common Core does not peddle calculators or group work, it is NCTM-produced textbooks, ostensibly re-aligned with Common Core, do push “technology” and group-work and tables and inquiry.
If you want customized “educational experience”, you should look towards – surprise, surprise! – customized education (personalized learning, adaptive learning, differentiation, individualization…)
Public school system as it exists now is a highly compartmentalized age-separate K-12 system, basically a factory. If you want completely customized education, you need to hire private tutors to study, I don’t know, fencing, horseback riding, etiquette, foreign languages. This is what wealthy people did in the pre-industrial days. This is what they still do now. Can you afford it?
BA,
You are so wrong. Students have different interests, different strengths. Force feeding everyone a standard one size fits all national curriculum is absurd. How is Common Core working?
“If you want customized “educational experience”, you should look towards – surprise, surprise! – customized education (personalized learning, adaptive learning, differentiation, individualization…)”
Oh, come on, BA, I’ve read some of your comments – you are smarter than this! The only thing personalized about so-called “personalized” learning [sic] is the pacing. Otherwise, it’s just every kid going through the same program in the same order in the same way. Computers are not capable of true customization. Only algorithms.
What is absurd is requiring an age-segregated Prussian-style education system to provide individualized education. The latter requires practically one-to-one student to teacher ratio, which is not possible. The public school system in the U.S. employs about 3 million teachers, and despite that the class sizes go from 15 all the way to 50. The other option is to replace those private tutors with a computer, this can scale, and as Facebook and others show us, it can scale really well. Whether it will be really custom and individualized, and what quality will it provide, is another question. I think that we are not ready for computer-based education yet, but in 20 years every kid will have their personal robo-tutor (if the Earth will not be blown up by then). Present-day initiatives by Facebook and others are premature, just like stuff ordered by internet and delivered to home in the end of 1990s. They just putting their stakes, so this generation of students are going to suffer from clunky and rigid software.
In the meantime, a human teacher cannot provide individualized education to a class of forty. Therefore, the teacher must use effective curriculum, effective pedagogy and effective tests to assess students’ progress. Students must have easy access to textbooks. Parents must be able to find out what their children will be learning next year or in five years, and I mean, up to specific topics and problems, so that they can adjust pacing by doing extra work at home.
As we stand now, companies have hard time finding several hundred skilled workers to work on their car factories or LCD screen factories, while in China you can find thousands of engineers with similar skill level across them, and you can be sure that if they graduated high school they do know the required material. All of them.
You represent the failed ideas of the past
Egads, BA! I don’t have emotional energy to respond to every red herring and other fishy aspect of this comment. But a few things:
Arguing that classes are too big and “individual attention” is impossible is absurd. That points to a social problem, not an educational answer. It’s also not true. I have watched progressive teachers in progressive schools design projects that utilize peers as teachers and form small groups where every child gets abundant, individualized attention. Yes – with 30-40 in a class.
And your excursion into Facebook excellence is nonsense. The “individualism” facilitated by technology is neurobiological malpractice and lousy education from every point of view. Every bit of research, for several centuries, reveals the fundamental power of relationships in learning. And not relationships with an iPad!
Personalization is, indeed, a laudable aim because kids differ. What I’ve seen as a result of the standards-and-high-stakes-testing regime is the opposite of that–kids being forced to do whatever happens to be on the CC$$ bullet list this year, even if they were nowhere near being able to. But I assume, BA, that you are talking about computerized instructional programs that give kids a diagnostic test and then plop them down somewhere on a track as a result. I’ve see a lot of this too. Here’s what happens–for the first week, the kids are interested in the online instruction because of its novelty, and then they become bored to tears by it, and then they openly rebel and will do ANYTHING else rather than plod through it. And the lessons in these online programs tend to be highly scripted and very narrowly focused on particular “standards” and so out of any overall context. And a lot of stuff that’s important gets left out, and the tracks are themselves invariant. This sort of programmed learning works fairly well in short bursts with very specific, narrowly defined material, but completion rates for online programs are abysmal, and there are reasons for that.
Jlsteach has fallen for a common school management misconception, folks. It’s not your fault, Jlsteach, as decades of films, television shows, and punditry have propagated the false idea that miracles happen when teachers have high expectations. For example, pretty much everything produced since 1983. Jlsteach, like so many, walks into a classroom to observe, and without getting to know the students and their abilities and interests (or whether they were placed in algebra II because they were ready or because of pressure on the school to produce politically desired data), and assumes to know the students better than the expert, the teacher. No amount of training can make a visitor an expert. Non-experts are advising, evaluating, and downright micromanaging experts. That is the problem, and it is a very serious one.
It is important for teachers to get to know their students and assign material that is S.M.A.R.T., just beyond them, and within reach. When teachers are forced to raise the bar so high that students have to struggle to reach it, authentic learning cannot take place. Regarding reading material, some is right for independent reading, and some is more challenging and right for guided reading. Some is too challenging for independent and guided reading, material that is at the frustration level, which is to be avoided.
Progress is not made when every student is given standardized material that is often too challenging, but that only scratches the surface of the nuances that await a reading teacher. The subject matters. If one assigns a book about the first day of 3rd grade to an adolescent, who cares most about adolescent social relationships, because it’s the right reading level, it will induce boredom and a feeling of having been insulted. If one assigns a book about adolescent social relationships to a child in elementary school because it’s written at just the right level of challenging reading material, it will create confusion and lack of understanding, a feeling of being lost. Either way, the student’s needs have been abandoned.
Do not assign Paradise Lost to middle schoolers. Do not assign definite integrals to middle schoolers. Do not assume that you, an outsider to a classroom, know better than any teacher what his, her, or other students should learn. And with that said, we arrive at standards and test scores. Standardized tests are too inaccurate in measuring the ability of any single student, class, or school. (Grades based on teacher generated assignments evaluate students more holistically and therefore more accurately.)
The NAEP, which evaluates a much larger sample size than CCSS tests, is the best standardized – for lack of a better word – measure of knowledge. Not perfect, but better than any high stakes test. And since the addition of and addiction to standards with all the tests and curricula that go with them, NAEP gains have deteriorated, then evaporated, and finally turned into losses. Standardized curriculum is not the solution; it is the problem. And the outsiders who enforce standardized curricula need to learn to trust the real experts, and mind their own peas and carrots.
Superior thinking and writing as always, Bob. Thank you.
No LCT I’m not saying all kids need to be given material above their level. What I AM saying is that some teacher chose to give students material below their level. They say it’s because they can’t do it. They say “oh they didn’t have it in the past and fell behind so I have to get them caught up” which leads to the perpetual cycle of never catching up.
I was saying you don’t know that the material is too easy. You can’t know. You are not the expert.
Really? I disagree. I can know enough about students and their backgrounds to know. And how could there be a chance that I am right? That the teacher IS not challenging the students. Or is the teacher always right?
Hubris.
If you don’t believe in teaching to the test, don’t sell your soul and do it. The testing police can’t be everywhere!
Thank goodness for teachers who don’t align to the curriculun butalign to the students pathway to success. Education is not a game and students are not robots.
What if all students had their own MAP (My Action Plan), their own pathway to success. However, self serving politicians will never abandon the standardized test. So educators must abandon the politicians, subvert the system and take back the classroom.
Why doesn’t someone write a detailed plan to accomplish this? Wait a minute, I did!.
Teachers have to strike (or take action) in unison to make it happen and sad to say, that won’t happen. I live in a very test centric district/state with a curriculum that is directly aligned to the test and my only option was to pull child #2 and pay for private high school. It’s sad what has become of public education. Schools are now warehouses for test prep and the bad behavior exhibited by students is a direct reaction to the boredom of the test prep, a lack of varied subject matter, and the lack of physical movement. Learning children are happy and more emotionally stable children regardless of socio economic factors. When ALL teachers refuse to proctor for the tests and ALL teachers refuse to teach to the test, this will go away. One state at a time teacher strikes aren’t “cutting the mustard”.
Teachers may be able to influence the dialogue, but parents need to voice their concern loud and clear. After all, teachers are employees; no matter how dedicated they are to the welfare of their students, criticism, not to mention out right defiance, has its own set of costs. Why must teachers alone shoulder those costs? The recent strikes have pinpointed the importance of community support. Those strikes raise awareness across the country and spread the word. That is how change happens. Everyone points to the dramatic moment, but there are few such moments that haven’t been built on the back of years of locally based activism.
Spedkr: if you are correct, and teachers are “employees,” we would be able to define their job better and over see their doing it more effective. I feel that teachers fill a role more analogous to a house contractor. Interaction between a teacher and parent remind me of the interaction between a builder and his client. As the structure goes up, adjustments are made mutually with professional advice meeting personal desire.
Not that any of that is a fundamental disagreement with what you are saying.
I hope the relationship between teacher and parents is not framed as an employer-employee relationship. That undermines it from the start. Have you ever had the snarky kid that asserts that his parents “own” you because “they pay your salary”? My comment was directed at the district-teacher relationship at it worst. I suppose it just underlines the dangers of the loss of public education being framed as a common good as opposed to a consumer good.
excellent summation: The dangers of public ed. being framed as a CONSUMER GOOD
I completely agree with all students having their own plans, but I think we need to be cautious here. At the moment, I should be reading a dissertation from one of my doc students that is focused on Summit Learning. Under Summit, all the students have their own plans, set their own goals, etc. But the bulk of their learning time is spent on computers and I worry that this is the road we’re headed down. My son is in Montessori for this reason–he makes his own work plan and learns at his own pace, but he isn’t on a computer all day.
Summit is a sham
Define success.
“Defined success”
Okay: each individual leading a life that s/he feels is meaningful, worthwhile and satisfactory. Since it’s different for every person, there’s no one way to get there.
Since there is no one way to get there, the existing age-segregated system will not suffice. Electives in HS kinda sorta can get you closer to customized education, woodworking vs. computer programming, but the problem is that kids are getting behind early in elementary school. By the time they reach HS they cannot read adult-level books, cannot comprehend an operating manual for a router and don’t know enough algebra to write a simple loop. Their future is royally screwed. But hey, they had fun projects in elementary school, cutting color pictures and gluing them on a piece of cardboard. Silly kids, they thought they were learning.
Thank you dienne77
I love to repeat you wonderful and accurate definition of “Defined success”. May King
“Defined success”
Okay: each individual leading a life that s/he feels is meaningful, worthwhile and satisfactory. Since it’s different for every person, there’s no one way to get there.
Thank you BA for some injection of reality. So many possible careers now are limited by the amount of math and science students take in high school. How many students are waylaid from a desired future career because they were not informed of the necessary prerequisites and thus have to settle for less than their dreams?
https://bridgetotomorrow.wordpress.com/2018/12/29/bachelors-degrees-in-engineering-computer-science-and-physics-are-among-the-surest-routes-to-econo
Well, yes, of course. Standardized tests, accountability etc, etc. have damaged education and children. But the dependably reasonable Mr.Shepard doesn’t go nearly far enough. He ends by imploring teachers to design and grade their own tests.
How about avoiding tests almost entirely and avoiding grades completely? Grades are, perhaps, less idiotic than standardized test scores, but “grading” suggests that learning is a competitive enterprise or that performance on a test – any test – is a valid indicator of something important. Grades unnecessarily categorize kids. Grades dilute the pleasure of mastery and discovery. Grades are extrinsic motivators with little durable value. Grades and tests incentivize the wrong behaviors and priorities. They create anxiety for no good reason. They produce cortisol, which inhibits learning. I could go on, but this is a comment, not an essay.
We need to do more than rebuke the standards and accountability era. We need to rethink education and learning more profoundly. There are myriad ways to evaluate how well students are progressing and communicating those observations to the kids and their caregivers. Tests and grades are not the most effective way to do this. In fact it’s a lazy, ineffective way to discern how kids are learning. Most teachers, and many who might respond to this comment, will object – primarily because tests and grades are the way “we’ve always done it.” That’s a great argument for why we should re-examine traditional practices.
“There are myriad ways to evaluate how well students are progressing and communicating those observations to the kids and their caregivers.”
Genuinely curious, not trying to be confrontational. I’m interested in knowing some of these “myriad ways” because I’d like to have some ammunition as I argue against standardized test with my district’s board and administration.
Hard to do justice to your question in a blog comment. But, for example: In the high school I led for 19 years, we had no exams at the end of each term. We had demonstration days, where students, alone or in groups, would present something that demonstrated their understanding of the course in question. It might be film, an epidemiological study, a panel discussion, something constructed, a “mock” debate, a original research project or many other things. The nature of the presentation would, of course, depend on the subject at hand. The teacher’s assessment at the end of a term included, but was not limited to, this “demonstration.” We also noted engagement in class, responsibility, depth of understanding, clarity of expression and other variables.
I would argue that when class sizes are small, any good teacher knows how well every student is progressing. In my book I wrote an anecdote about a parent of a 3rd grader who was livid about our no-grades policy. I asked him why. He replied that he wanted to know how his son was doing. I replied, “We have regular conferences and provide very detailed narrative reports about your son’s progress several times each semester. How can you not know how he’s doing? Your son’s teachers are also available for conversation at almost any time, if you continue to be curious.” He then, rather aggressively said, “I want to know how he’s doing compared to the other kids!!!” I asked, gently of course, “Why is that so important to you?”
“I would argue that when class sizes are small….”
Ah, yes, therein lies the rub. Progressive education is very difficult when you have 30+ kids in a class, much less the 120+ students a day that high school teachers deal with. But, as Alfie Kohn says, that’s not an argument against progressive education. It’s an argument against large class sizes.
Standardized tests measure family income and education.
Thanks, Steve. I agree wholeheartedly with everything you wrote. In the civic education program I once worked for, we had a similar group learning program for high and middle school students. At the high school level, whole classes worked together to “testify” about six questions. That led to a competition of hearings that ended with state champions in DC. It was exceptional, but I left once I learned how corrupt the organization leadership was. My sons do similar things today in Science Olympiad.
These are activities that stay with students for their entire lives. Over the years I’ve randomly met a few of the students who did the civic ed competition and they remember it vividly and internalized the lessons. That’s something that can’t be said about tests.
Although in college, every test I had after my freshman year was a written essay. As much as I hated them then, I am so appreciative of the experience today; it taught me how to write and organize my thoughts. I appreciate your thoughts.
Go you one better, Steve. I teach middle school social studies. Most of my classes are between 37 and 40 students. We’re stacking the kids in like sardines. We can barely move in my room. And THEN, the administration suggests that we split the kids into “centers” and rotate. It’s crazy, because it’s nearly impossible for us to group desks like that when we’re so crowded together. And individualized plans for each student? Forget it! I have a teacher load of 282 students right now. Does anyone have a suggestion of what I can do?
I’m seriously asking here. I’m getting plowed under by the demands of so many students. I’ve taught for 18 years, and I haven’t been this exhausted since my first year teaching (when I was pregnant).
Threatened Out West: I am SO sorry for the situation that you are in. Things have gotten worse since I worked in the States. I left in 1996 and came back retired. I was a music teacher and have no idea how you can do what was asked.
What is wrong with administrators who make unreasonable demands? Administrators believe they run a small kingdom and too often have no idea of what it is like in the classroom. They observe teaching and don’t learn. I never will understand some of them. Teachers are their guinea pigs.
I have great empathy for the impossibility of your situation. I don’t claim that what I know to be best can actually be done. All the philosophical musing in the world can’t overcome neglect, under-funding and the other conditions you endure. Good education won’t happen until we as a nation understand what “good education” is and then provide the resources so it can happen. Thanks for what you do. Middle school teachers are among the best humans on Earth!
Threatened? Out West
Sounds like its gone past the point of threatening. An enrollment of 282 students is de-facto punishment.
There are no solutions that any child deserves. No solutions that could be deemed ethical. But here are some options:
Streamline everything.
Grade mostly on completion/effort.
Scantron MC tests only.
Stop torturing yourself because no teacher deserves this either.
Ask for grading assistance from those teachers who have much, much smaller enrollments.
STOP grading. Let students grade each other.
Take pictures and bring them to a BOE meeting.
Bring a stack of 282 essays to the next Board meeting.
Move to another state.
Rage –great advice. One thing they’ll never teach you in ed school is how to do sustainable teaching. Rage shows the way (bravely, because there are a million pea-brained edworld inquisitors out there who would have his scalp for uttering such heterodox things if he had published his real name).
I’m a pretty reasonable parent. I don’t expect my kids to get straight A’s or take AP classes or to spend countless hours studying, but I do need some indicator that my children are keeping their end of the family contract. School and learning are their “job”. If my child brings home a C in Geometry and he has worked hard and sought help but still doesn’t grasp the content, I can accept that C because it still means that he worked hard and he did learn….there is value to the grade. Now, if he got the C because he blew off the homework and classwork, yet aced every test…that’s not keeping with the family contract. It’s how parents react to the grades….using them for competition. I know my children, I know what they excel with and I know what they struggle with, I know what they like and what they don’t like. It’s the crazy parents who want the prefect children with the perfect grades and the perfect attendance who drive the grade and test obsession.
Well, fine. That’s a reasonable view for a parent, but has nothing to do with my suggestion that the whole enterprise might well be discarded. Your response is smack dab in the middle of the “we’ve always done it this way” belief. I’m suggesting something quite different. You could read the section in my book or many other critiques of grades and extrinsic systems and perhaps come to see it differently. Or not.
But the letter grade itself doesn’t tell you that. Only a conference with a teacher can tell you that. Why not skip the letter grade and just have the conference? The problem (one of the problems) with grades is that kids work just for the grade. They decide what grade they (and their parents) would be satisfied with and do only what it takes to get that grade, not a drop more. Furthermore, taking risks, as every kid knows, could reduce that grade, so grades motivate safety and conformity.
My kids have been in progressive school without grades since kindergarten (with the exception of the younger who chose to go to public school for a year). I’ve never worried about whether they’re working to their full potential because they’re not motivated by grades but rather by learning what’s interesting to them. The projects they’ve done year after year have grown more complex and in depth and, frankly, amazing.
My older daughter’s sixth grade class, for instance, studied pencils this year. They built a whole museum shaped like a pencil, filled with museum-quality exhibits on the history of pencils, the materials that go into them, ecological exploration of deforestation and mining, how colored pencils are made, etc. Science, history, environmentalism, writing, math, construction, problem solving, etc., all from studying something as simple as pencils. I don’t need to see an A on a report card to know that she learned a ton this past semester and that she worked hard doing it.
Yay!
Does this school go through high school? I would be very interested in hearing reports from you as your children get older. Knowing the amount of time teachers in my “progressive” district spend on professional responsibilities beyond the classroom, I shudder to think of the extra demands of a system that did not include a shorthand system of evaluating performance. I think that what we need is a new understanding of what grades convey. One of my sons’ English teacher refuse to put grades on their papers. A student had to make an appointment to go talk to him if they wanted to know. Looking back on it I now understand what he was trying to do, but at the time, it was difficult for my son to arrange to meet because of scheduling conflicts. In the elementary district, grades were not given until kids reached the middle school. Then they were phased in so students were receiving them well before they entered high school. A number of years ago, “high test” parents demanded grades in the elementary school instead of the extensive narrative reports that the teachers produced twice a year. It didn’t take long before they were demanding more conference time! I loved those narratives; they really gave me a picture of my kids far more informative than a standard report card. I agree that grades should never be the sole means of communicating how a child is doing for many reasons especially when a child is the one who is constantly exposed to them as a judgement.
D77: tell your daughter that Shelbyville, TN was once considered “Pencil City USA” due the to manufacture of most of the pencils made in this country. Shelbyville, the county seat of our county, replaced Nuremberg, Germany as the producer of pencils sometime before World War II as manufacturers sought to cut costs by making the product near the source of eastern red cedar, the favorite at that time for the making of what they called slats, or the parts of the pencil that went around the lead.
Thanks, Roy! I told her. She was interested but then said that according to their research, most pencils are now made in China….
@Dienne77…..How many parents are now able to go into school for a conference? How many teachers are available to drop everything to meet with a parent or stay into the evening to accommodate a parent?How many teachers have the time to call a bunch of parents to explain that little Susie might not have gotten the content that semester? I’m a professional Mom, so I have always had the luxury of spending time with my children and to be able to attend conferences when needed. The letter grade is an “indicator” that something might be wrong…either the kid doesn’t get the content or the kid is screwing up. Unfortunately, grades have become a competition among parents…..this is where the problem lies.
LisaM – you make a lot of valid points about today’s reality (I live all of that), but again, I’d go with Alfie Kohn. None of that is an argument for educational shortcuts. All of that is an argument for re-thinking how work and other responsibilities are organized and what we prioritize in our lives/society. It’s time to focus on humanity, not productivity.
speduktr – Sadly, no the school only goes through 8th grade. But we’ve been around long enough that we have a pretty large cohort of students who have gone on to public and Catholic high schools and they have all done well (our first two cohorts are now college-age and the majority have done well there too). For one thing, the school does spend a fair amount of time working with kids to anticipate what high school life will be like – grades, homework, tests, etc. But I think the bigger factor is that the kids have learned that their education is their own, so they are self-motivated by the time they get to high school.
@dienne77…..it’s hard for some parents to focus on humanity when all they want is to feed their children and have heat and electricity. I live in an area where families live in hotel rooms or run down trailers. Those parents don’t have the luxury of missing work from 1 of their several jobs to go and meet with teachers. In an ideal world we wouldn’t have this problem with poverty….but this is what we have. For these poor parents, the report card is the only thing that they have to let them know that their children have a chance.
Oh, this is splendid! Now, how do you expect a kid from a poor family living on a street corner where drug dealers sell their stuff and occasionally kill each other to “learn what is interesting to them”? How do you envision the daily journey from black-and-white reality into Technicolor school environment and back? To those kids, your kids’ experience is like Bill Gates’ kids’ experience to you.
BA, your deficit perspective here is showing – so a child that is poor and “has drug dealers” can’t be interested in math, science, or other similar topics. I partially agree that in school teachers need to connect the curriculum and the materials to have some meaning in their lives. I also think there needs to be some sense of standards or expectations for all.
Stereotype much? Poor kids of color can’t learn motivated by what interests them, because they have drug dealers in the neighborhood?
The intrinsic motivators that characterize good progressive education are not artifacts of privilege. They are universal human qualities. Poor kids in stressful environments need this approach more than the privileged kids. I’ve been there. I know progressive schools. public and private, that serve plenty of kids from difficult circumstances. They thrive, flourish, respond to love and discover things with enthusiasm just like all children.
“Now, how do you expect a kid from a poor family living on a street corner where drug dealers sell their stuff and occasionally kill each other to “learn what is interesting to them”?”
Odd, BA, but this doesn’t seem to square with other posts you’ve made around here. You seem to be saying that poor kids aren’t worth investing in. I had thought better of you.
If we can spend billions to bomb dozens of other countries back to the stone age, why can’t we spend what it takes to educate every child in this country to her or his individual full potential, even the poor ones? Why can’t every school be like my daughters’ school rather than that being something only accessible to the affluent and connected? Or do you buy into the neoliberal mantra, “There Is No Alternative”?
D77:your daughter is correct. Like other industries, the motivation for location of the industry went away. By the 1970s the end of the pencil capital was already on the horizon. Extruding pencils replaced building them, plastics for cedar slats. The rail fence gave way to the wire one and cedar slat mills began to mill rail fences out to be shipped to German pencil factories. By 1936, Nuremberg manufacturers were moving to Shelbyville. Whether this had anything to do wi the rise of Hitler, I do not know. After the war, hundreds of people worked in the mills. By the 1980s, things were slowing down. Now, like other manufacturing, the mills are gone. There is other light industry and the auto parts industry has taken the place of the old mills to some extent. We are certainly not the rust belt.
Dienne, no that is not what I meant, but feel free to interpret it as you like. Picture Bill Gates telling you how his kids’ school is great, and they get individual attention and coaching and private tutoring, and they also have their own pony to ride and their private Olympic-size pool to swim. You would say that everyone wants that too, but alas, everyone cannot have a private tutor for their kids, because we’ll need to have as many tutors as kids (maybe convert all the drug dealers into private tutors, they should be qualified enough, should not they?) Anyway, really good things – education, homes, cars, food – is not accessible to everyone and will not be even if this country stopped bombing other countries. So we need to replace the pony with a bicycle. That is, provide well-researched, universal, effective, cheap curricula and pedagogy. Instead of talking about predictions of social turmoil and fascist state described in the Day of the Locust how about just teaching them to read, for crying out loud. Not comic books, but something having more than 20 pages with no pictures. Then maybe later they will start reading by themselves.
BA, why are you always sour and angry?
There is no such thing as universal, cheap, effective curricula. The idea that education can be standardized, scaled, inexpensive and universal is the problem, not the solution.
Just because you don’t know about it does not mean that it does not exist. Ask Máté, he knows better.
“Anyway, really good things – education, homes, cars, food – is not accessible to everyone and will not be even if this country stopped bombing other countries.”
The Pentagon has $21 TRILLION (yes, that’s trillion with a tr) in spending that they can’t account for. If that money was divided up among every American citizen, that’s roughly $60,000 per person. I’d say that would buy an awful lot of “really good things”. At the very least, it would mean that every child could in fact have that private tutor you say they can’t have.
Can’t buy love. Seriously, according to different sources there are about 60 to 70 million students in K-12 system. One to one tutoring would mean another 70 million tutors. U.S. population is about 325 million with about 40% in the range of 25-54. And then there is a question of quality. Now, when only 3 million people are teachers, not all of them, put it mildly, are excellent. Where will you get 70 million excellent tutors? Oh, I know, I know! In China! Everyone wins. They offload their overpopulation problem, and every American kid will get a personal teacher.
A teacher’s grade has to send information to a parent like LisaM that suggests something about the many aspects of a student’s interaction with subject matter. Tests show one thing, daily work another, and so on. On some level, teachers move more toward the level common in the English tradition in which there was almost no testing at all for a period of years, and what was done was more like what we call formative assessment so the student could self-evaluate. I have an English friend who did not take a test except when he exited the program at Kings College. He laughed at Americans who felt like they needed to give and grade tests all the time. But he was English.
This right here.
I am quite sympathetic to your point of view. I favor doing away with grades in favor of very specific, pass/in-progress product-based portfolio assessment. Yes, you demonstrated that you can design a basic web page using HTML code and cascading style sheets. Yes, you have shown that you can write a short story with a central conflict that is resolved. Yes, you’ve demonstrated an understanding of the multiple causes and effects of some historical event. Yes, you’ve successfully ordered a meal in French. So, on that model, students would accumulate these certificates for demonstrated accomplishment of well-defined tasks. And, ofc, all students would not follow identical tracks. They would have individual plans, continually revisited, by a committee made up of a couple mentor teachers, the student, and his or her parents and guardians.
“How about avoiding tests almost entirely and avoiding grades completely?”
I may be the weird one on the block but I needed teacher’s tests and looked forward to getting a grade. I was motivated to do the best that I could do and it was proven by the high grades that I always got.
I was working to impress my father who noticed when I did well. I came from an abusive home and proving my worth was how I survived.
The usage of constant standardized tests would have driven me crazy. I had two standardized tests.. the IOWA and PSAT. I would get extremely nervous during both of them. I’m sure there are other kids today who feel the same way I did.
Your experience is instructive and too common. I understand completely, but pleasing a parent out of fear or a need to prove oneself is not a beneficial strategy in general.
Steve Nelson: I agree. But when there are no alternatives this is what worked. I had severe emotional and mental abuse from my mother, who simply didn’t know how to nurture. I had therapy for five years, twice a week, to learn what was the problem. This happened in my 50’s.
I learned that most people who lived in homes like mine became drug addicts, alcoholics or bag ladies. Working to get good grades was a survival technique. My ONLY source of energy to get through college was anger at my mother. Notice that when you are angry you have more energy.
I have forgiven her but it has taken many years of work to get to that place. My father worked and provided no emotional support. We were extremely poor and the home had no intellectual stimulation. There were no books and no field trips anywhere. The library was approximately 5 miles into town. There was no money for gas. We simply survived. It is also why I detest Trump and his hatred for the poor. They are just like everyone else but don’t have money.
Kids survive. But I had to have tests and grades to survive. I’m sure there are other children who live like I did.
I’m so sorry you experienced these things in your life. I know you believe that tests, good grades and proving yourself saved you. And I can’t argue with your experience, that’s for sure. But I also know that kids from emotionally abusive families can heal and find great comfort from the opposite – from schools where teachers provide the unconditional love that parents don’t or can’t provide. Schools where stress and competition are minimal. Schools where learning is a joy, not a chore. Of course that might not have pleased your father, but it might have saved you from some of the difficult things in your own life.
Thanks for being so open and honest. I suspect you are a very fine person indeed.
Teachers need the flexibility to respond to the needs of individual students, and they need small enough classes that they can know their students well enough to know what those are. Ed deformers don’t want to hear that. They like to think that you can put 400 kids in a room with computer monitors and a proctor and outcomes will magically improve. Not sure that this dependence on grades to prove your worth to your father was particularly healthy, though.
Bob Shepherd: “Not sure that this dependence on grades to prove your worth to your father was particularly healthy, though.”
Did you read the part about when, in my 50’s, I took five years of therapy? I was in a home with severe emotional and mental abuse and had been situationally depressed for 10 years before getting any help. This type of abuse isn’t wildly know about but is is probably even more severe than physical abuse.
Very moving story, Carol. Impressed that you have sought help, as an adult, to deal with this crap that no child deserved to have to put up with. My very best to you and yours.
Bob Shepherd: I’m totally fine now. These experiences have made me very compassionate towards the poor, the ill and the abused. I have worked as a hospice volunteer for over 8 years. It certainly beats having everything being given to me and then looking down upon people. [Trump, DeVos etc.] I fight for all people being respected, Medicare for All and the end to wars that consume our resources and kill and destroy. I worked overseas and have a view of the US that is probably different for many who have never left. I have seen poverty in many countries.
The “love affair with testing” is directly related to privatization. Standardized testing is a weapon that is used against poor students in order to scoop them up and put them in a charter school to monetize them. While standardized tests have little to no diagnostic value, it is the insane consequences that states and cities have attached to them that is undermining education programs. Even though higher stakes are more likely to result in gaming the system through test prep and/or cheating, we continue to pursue testing since there is a lot of money behind test based “accountability.” The whole “value add scam” is the result of wealthy interests that created a system to misuse test results to undermine public education. Middle class schools do not feel the existential threat the way schools with a high poverty rate do since standardized test scores correlate to the socioeconomic rank of students. The results of standardized testing are placing targets on the backs of poor students in order to deny them the same opportunities as others, and this is wrong! This misapplication of testing is an unjust, inequitable and undemocratic practice.
Yes. The deformers were certain that their testing regimen was going to close achievement gaps. It didn’t. They were certain that it would raise test scores for all groups. It didn’t. What high-stakes standardized testing did do was make it impossible for teachers to innovate or to tailor their teaching to the needs of their particular students. And, again, the bullet lists of standards became the default curriculum and stopped all innovation in curricula cold.
Bob – here’s a thought. Why call those that differ from you “deformers” let’s start there. The name calling (on both sides) never is a positive step. My original response to the post didn’t challenge the idea that there is too much standardized testing (OR even the notion that standardized testing measures only poverty, etc. (I tend to agree with both of those ideas). At the same time, I feel there should be some type of accountability. And NOT just teachers be the ones to give the tests. LCH – you call it hubris, You have no idea who I am, what I have done, how much I have taught, etc. And yet YOU jump to conclusions that I couldn’t judge what should or shouldn’t be taught in a classroom? Wow. I get it. I agree that too often observations are 15 min snapshots. I agree that more can be done there. And I am certain that there are administrators/coaches, etc. that have done what you describe. I can honestly say that in my work with teachers at the very least I ask questions of why they aren’t teaching at a given level. At the same time, in those classrooms, I have seen kids that ARE bored, being given repetitive problems time and again. I have come in as a coach and had kids turn to me and ask “Can you please teach me?” So, you call is hubris, I call it some of my reality.
The name calling, the extremes, has to stop if something productive is going to happen.
What I have seen over the past two decades, as a result of NCLB and its progeny, is deform–a horrific narrowing and distortion of our curricula and the death of curricular innovation. Civics, the arts, and science have all been pushed to the periphery. In my field, ELA, teachers around the country are using textbooks that are little more than thinly disguised test prep and spending most of their time doing test prep activities and high-stakes-test-related pretesting and benchmark testing and data chats and other nonsense instead of freaking teaching English. “Education deform” is precisely the right term to describe what has been happening. An English Department chairperson recently said to me, “I do test prep until April, when the test is given. Then I have a month in which to teach English.” That pretty much sums it up. The current generation of literature textbooks is appalling. Texts out of context treated as no more than occasions for practicing test taking skills related to CCSS “standards.” It’s sickening. Traditional ELA instruction is effectively dead except where a few brave souls defy the system and have their kids read substantive works and do real writing IN SPITE OF directives from their administrators and districts to do all test prep all the time. It’s deform. No more accurate term for it.
What do you mean by accountability? Punishment?
Dr. Ravitch – no I don’t mean punishment – BUT I do think that teachers should be held accountable for what they teach or how they teach. Many here seem to have a rosy picture of education – sure we often think of what our best teachers are like. But I can tell you time and again in looking back on my own teachers (And hearing from others) that plenty of people have commented on having poor experiences in education. And yes, this was PRE Common Core. They share experiences of kids as seniors cutting out photos from magazines and doing collages – in 12th grade English class! The worst fact is that those in elementary school have little control or real knowledge of whether their teachers are or were good or not.
Yes, I agree that things like A Nation at Risk, NCLP and RTTT did not solve any of the issues per se – the pendulum did swing to an extreme..That being said I am not convinced, and no one here has yet to convince me, that the solution to the education situation is to just “let teachers teach” ….As I said before, and will say again – too often in education we point to the one or two success stories as proof that all is okay. Some will point to the one child who happens to overcome all of the obstacles of inner city poverty to succeed as “proof” that poverty doesn’t impact education. Others will point to the one successful story about a caring teacher who is so innovative as “proof” that all teachers are good and there are no “bad teachers” Let’s be honest with ourselves – the truth across a school, a city, a state OR even the nation really lies in the middle. Which to mean means that the solutions need to be considered in the middle
We need some type of accountability – but do we need to test every child every year to get that? No of course not. Furthermore if teachers were doing what they were supposed to be doing in the classroom with lessons, there would be no need for test prep, because heck, if you felt confident of what you doing was right ,then there’s no need for prep. I attended a session at the National Council of Mathematics Conference on AP Calculus where the presenter mentioned he did a week or so of prep – mainly to have his students familiar with the testing format. There is research out there that notes that more test prep after a couple of week has diminishing returns…
As a song from one of my favorites, Billy Joel, states “…I don’t know why I go to extremes…Too high or too low there ain’t no in between” It seems that perfectly describes this conversation and conversations in education in general. To quote another recent pop song, “Baby…why don’t you just meet me in the middle?”
Thank you Mr. Shepherd!!!! This is exactly the reason that I pulled child #2 out of public schools and pay for him to go to private HS. He has a superstar ELA teacher. They read books together and discuss the content. They write essays related to those books and discussions. There is no teaching to the test, because they don’t have to take any standardized tests. AND….they do this in 40 minute classes working on a 6 day cycle because this is an all boy’s school and they know how best to teach boys. I can’t say the same for child #1 who remains in public HS and is bored out of her mind with test prep curriculum in almost every subject.
LisaM. This was the Ed Deformers’ game plan all along. They want to kill the teachers’ unions and to privatize schooling. And they want to sell educational products “at scale.” These were the real reasons behind the creation of the Common Core, the testing mandates, and the high stakes attached to the tests.
Here’s an idea: Why don’t we hold the politicians and self-appointed, well-compensated pundits who backed these egregious “standards” and the high-stakes testing accountable for the utter failure of their disruption of our schools–for failing BY THE DEFORMERS’ OWN MEASURES, to close achievement gaps and lift all boats, for narrowing and distorting curricula, for robbing a whole generation of kids of a real education? Of course, this wouldn’t be quite fair, would it, because the standardized tests don’t measure what they claim to measure, demonstrably, in ELA, and support a failed pedagogical approach in mathematics, but that’s a long, long tale, and I won’t got into it here.
But the ones who have been screaming for decades about the need for accountability refuse to be held accountable for their the clear failure of their program. Instead, they have decided to double down on the failure, though there are cracks, now, some defectors in the Ed Deform Movement from the high-stakes testing camp. That failure hasn’t become obvious to other Deformers because they are well compensated to ignore the clear results.
Bob,
Have you ever read Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Lost Tools of Learning? I think so much of our current education morass stems from the substitution of the trivium and the quadrivium for the modern ideas of “subjects” dissected into allotted time slots. The older methods of education dating from the 13th century took account of human developmental stages and truly prepared graduates to be able to think and to logically defend their positions – abilities definitely needed in our age of “fake news,”
I have not. I will have a look.
I have had students evaluate themselves and honestly, they know. In fact, they know about their own learning so much better than any test score.
I have also had my students be in charge of the parent-teacher conferences. The students showed their work, discussed what they know, and their strengths as well as areas for improvement. The students also discussed personal growth, social growth, and why they think they are terrific. The parents were blown away.
This is called empowering learners, forming partnerships with parents, and just darn good teaching/learning experiences. Students and parents are INVESTED. DOWN with those stupid tests.
Excellent, Bob, and thank you. And: excellent use of the Brautigan quote!
Do we spend more time in testing or in teaching? Who makes out the tests, educators or politicians? Do any of the tests now proscribed by politicians show the true value of a person to society at large or even with the things that make life worth living for people? The emphasis now seems to be to make children ready for the work force. In well over 50 years in education I cannot remember EVER when that has not been an important aspect of public education but is education about raising the child’s potential to be the best he can be as a human being or merely a cog in the industrial mechanism? Were some of our most important contributors to the commercial aspects of society, Edison et al even outstanding scholars in school? What IS the purpose of education and how do we perceive our children, as cogs in commerce, as important as that may be or yet again, as human beings who should be raised to their highest potential as human beings?
Edison was a fraud and a crook. He did not invent most of the stuff that is patented under his name, a team of other people hired by him did. At that time AC had clear benefits over DC in terms of long-range transmission, so he fought bitterly the DC vs. AC war with Tesla, staging “proofs” that AC is more dangerous and kills you on the spot. Nowadays UHVDC lines seem more beneficial than HVAC – China just built the longest one in the world – but at that time the needed technology was not available.
Tesla, on the other hand, was a real inventor. He had a good education to boot. He finished a four-year high school in three years, was able to perform integral calculus operations in his head.
“What IS the purpose of education”
After having examined all 50 state constitutions, 25 of which give a reason for public education and 25 that don’t, the fundamental purpose of education that stood out was:
“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.”
Since it is each state constitution that authorizes public education it seems to me that we should look to those documents for guidance on the purpose of of public education.
Notice this is not a blanket statement for all of education as a Catholic education and any other private school more likely than not has a different fundamental purpose.
I hated gym class and got out of it during marching band season. I’d like some gym teacher to comment on this article. I don’t know enough to give an evaluation.
I’ve read that kids need gym since our country is developing out of shape kids who are getting heavier and turn into adults who are out of shape and develop illnesses. Anyone have the answer?
……………………………..
Gym Class Is So Bad Kids Are Skipping School to Avoid It
Not only does P.E. do little to improve physical fitness, but it can also lead to truancy and other disciplinary problems.
…The paper posits that by subjecting participants—namely low-income kids, as the Fitness Now grants targeted campuses serving disadvantaged populations—to these circumstances on a daily basis, the P.E. requirement made students less inclined to go to school. “These adolescents were not enjoying the daily P.E. requirements and would’ve rather skipped school,” suggests Packham, who as an economist has focused her research on the outcomes of health programs. The Fitness Now program required that students participate in at least 30 minutes of physical education every school day. Schools that took part in the grant received $10,000 on average to help improve their P.E. programs by adding classes, for example, or hiring coaches and fitness instructors. They also used the money to purchase equipment such as stopwatches, jump ropes, and free weights.
According to the study, the program resulted in a roughly 16 percent increase in the number of disciplinary actions for each student. The study also found that the proportion of misbehaving students went up by more than 7 percent…
Read More:
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/01/why-pe-is-terrible/581467/?utm_source=eb
I think the article addressed the problems with P.E. fairly well. It gave a good short summary of the direction we should be taking.
It gives some ideas and puts a lot into restoring recess. I liked recess time in grade school but never got it in middle school or high school. Think we would have sat around and talked in the upper grades with no supervision of activities.
As I said, I hated gym. It gave good examples of why it is hated and I lived those when i had to go to gym. There is optimism that gym classes will improve. Maybe.
For YEARS I have said that at least middle school kids still need recess. If I was in charge, I would build a HUGE playground-type structure with “bigger kid” challenges–climbing walls, zip lines, and the like–and turn the kids loose. I think it would truly reduce middle school behavioral issues if we just gave those students recess, too.
My two cents, worth every penny: more gym classes is part of the problem, not the solution, for overweight kids. We have overweight/out of shape kids because kids are not allowed to do anything without Mom or Dad or another responsible adult being practically within arms’ reach. It’s “not safe” for kids to be out on their own, so they sit inside all day on electronics. So as a “solution”, parents enroll their kids in structured activities like gymnastics and little league so they have little free time, making kids even less available for free social time. Look around any residential neighborhood these days and find kids playing freely together outside and minimally supervised. You’ll hardly find it.
The solution is what the Free Range Kids blog advises: give kids back their childhoods. Ease up on the structured activities. Let kids go outside independently. Bring back recess (not P.E.). Put the risk back in playgrounds and stop trying to “engineer” playgrounds for “safety” and “educational” values. Stop with the “worst first” thinking that makes everything about “safety”.
Fitness should be a by-product of a normal childhood of running around and playing with other kids. It shouldn’t have to be yet another “standard” for schools to tick off in a forced, scripted way that’s only likely to encourage kids to hate what should be a joyful experience.
–Steps off soapbox–
I’m curious. Have you ever taught? Have you ever had to plan classes and stood in front of them? Have you ever coached? Have you ever been involved in public policy? You sure seem to have an answer for everything. Let kids run free, control everything, and God forbid they might actually have to do something they don’t immediately like.
They don’t want to go outside. They want to play Minecraft. Even if they wanted, the suburban environment is not conducive to playing outside.
Self to self: “Bite your tongue!”
Agree 100%
I will say this because I have a daughter in public HS and a son in private HS. Both are fit and have always enjoyed physical activities. In public school, the kids now have to take pencil and paper to class to take notes for the test…..yes…pencils and paper in PE class (at least in HS)! My son in private school likes PE because it gives him a chance to blow off steam and there are no pencils, paper or note taking.
For five years, 2012 – 2016, Pearson Inc. had a free ride that cost taxpayers $38 million for tests aligned with the Common Core blah blah. Pearson was shielded in completing its run by the State Education Department, which allowed the company to operate without having to provide information about how its exams were functioning. There would be no timely or complete disclosure of data about test materials, such as item statistics, thwarting the opportunity for independent review of their quality; a gag order that prevented teachers from discussing flaws in the exams; top-down engenderment of fear and confusion among parents abetted by compliant superintendents and too many jittery administrators, denying parents information about their right to opt out, effectively keeping most parents marching along blindly to the annual testing beat; and all the while Pearson and NYSED flouting professional standards for educational testing, while most of the academic world watched silently.
But by 2014 and 2015 a growing opt out movement arose on Long Island and upstate outside of New York City—brilliantly spearheaded by a few indignant parents activists who summoned the courage to say “NO” and drew on a well of leadership skills and organizing ability–the extent to which, perhaps, they did not know they possessed. And 20% of the children targeted for the tests sat them out. Evidence finally obtained from the state and the city revealed that the opposition the exams was fully justified. I urge readers of this influential tide-turning blog to Google a series of reports (“Tests Are Turning Our Kids Into Zeroes”) posted by the Benjamin Center for Public Policy Initiatives at SUNY, New Paltz.
So where does that leave us? I would hope that parents and other interested parties draw upon our experience with Pearson. A two-stage plan of action is needed as Questar (Pearson’s successor) is about to enter the third year of its five-year, $44 million agreement with SED this April. Before this occurs, a reasonable demand by parents and advocates would be for immediate information about how Questar’s exams worked in 2017 and 2018. To date, such information has not been forthcoming. Lack of transparency and lack of accountability must no longer be accepted as SOP. Stage 2 would follow: If, in two weeks, we don’t get information that we know is already in hand, that should help drive home the message that opting out in April is a rational alternative and a direct way for the voice of parents to be heard. I believe that pushing back against the tests could unify grass roots groups throughout the city on a number of issues that focus the well-being of all children.
Thanks, Fred, for the test debacle refresher. When it is all laid out, the idiocy is obvious. I have a suspicion that it is driven by the reliance of boards, politicians, etc. on “dashboards” as a quick and easy way to evaluate complex information. If we reduce kids to a few data points in an aggregate of data points, any numbnuts can draw (false) conclusions.
How does the SED justify spending so much money on such an “accountability” system that has never passed the process of validation? While I am no expert in the field testing, I have taken some testing a measurement courses. I also once participated in field tests that were part of a validation process for a test designed to measure English language proficiency for ELLs. What I know is that the validation process is a laborious, expensive exercise designed to ensure that the test measures what it purports to measure. While some may disagree that any tests can do this, the process is a form of protection for students ensuring the results have been subjected to a serious level of scrutiny and analysis. The Pearson and Questar testing have never been scrutinized in such a manner. We should ask why we are serving up our young people as guinea pigs for testing that represents the collusion of billionaires with government? These tests are the will of the 1% masquerading as “accountability.”
“What I know is that the validation process is a laborious, expensive exercise designed to ensure that the test measures what it purports to measure.”
There is NOTHING BEING MEASURED in the standardized testing process. Absolutely nothing!
The most misleading concept/term in education is “measuring student achievement” or “measuring student learning”. The concept has been misleading educators into deluding themselves that the teaching and learning process can be analyzed/assessed using “scientific” methods which are actually pseudo-scientific at best and at worst a complete bastardization of rationo-logical thinking and language usage.
There never has been and never will be any “measuring” of the teaching and learning process and what each individual student learns in their schooling. There is and always has been assessing, evaluating, judging of what students learn but never a true “measuring” of it.
But, but, but, you’re trying to tell me that the supposedly august and venerable APA, AERA and/or the NCME have been wrong for more than the last 50 years, disseminating falsehoods and chimeras about those tests measuring something??
Who are you to question the authorities in testing???
Yes, they have been wrong and I (and many others, Wilson, Hoffman etc. . . ) question those authorities and challenge them (or any of you other advocates of the malpractices that are standards and testing) to answer to the following onto-epistemological analysis:
The TESTS MEASURE NOTHING, quite literally when you realize what is actually happening with them. Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement:
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition]
Notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”. The same by proximity is not a good rhetorical/debating technique.
Since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning, there is no exemplar of that standard unit and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable”?
THE TESTS MEASURE NOTHING for how is it possible to “measure” the nonobservable with a non-existing measuring device that is not calibrated against a non-existing standard unit of learning?????
PURE LOGICAL INSANITY!
The basic fallacy of this is the confusing and conflating metrological (metrology is the scientific study of measurement) measuring and measuring that connotes assessing, evaluating and judging. The two meanings are not the same and confusing and conflating them is a very easy way to make it appear that standards and standardized testing are “scientific endeavors”-objective and not subjective like assessing, evaluating and judging.
Those supposedly objective results are used to justify discrimination against many students for their life circumstances and inherent intellectual traits resulting in unethical violations of student being.
All who participate in said malpractices should rightly be condemned for doing such harm to innocent children. It’s a holocaust of the students’ minds.
“There would be no timely or complete disclosure of data about test materials,”
And that’s about as unethical of test making behavior there is.
Where were the education “authorities” in allowing that to happen?
Gee Duane,
“These supposedly objective results are used to justify discrimination against many students for their life circumstances and inherent intellectual traits resulting in unethical violations of student being?”
Tell that to the six people who died horrible deaths after a bridge collapsed in Miami due to “design errors.” Does the right to “student being” override the average pedestrian’s (or car rider’s) right to life??
At some point, reality will hit the fan.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/11/15/ntsb-miami-bridge-collapse-design-errors/2012020002/
Well Abby,
I’m not quite sure what your point is. Are you saying standardized tests are legitimately valid?
What do you mean by “reality will hit the fan”?
PLease clarify.
Duane,
Do you remember back in 2000 (the height of the dot com bubble, when NYT columnist Tom Friedman told all of us that it was a new paradigm and that soon we would all be making our livings by day trading on our personal computers? I do (The Olive and the Lexus Tree).
Do you remember in 2007 when HGTV was telling all of us that this was a new paradigm and that we should all quit our jobs and become home flippers, we could make millions? I do.
In both cases reality (i.e. the real world) hit the fan and millions of people suffered because they bought into the delusion.
I hate to have to break it to you, but some things “work” in the real world and other things do not. Some people have brilliant ideas for new tech bridges that are aesthetically hip but maybe the math doesn’t quite work. This is the reason why every profession has gatekeeping tests that keep out those who do not understand the basics of the profession. Apparently your feeling that such tests are a “violence” is spreading – heaven help us all.
Abby, No I don’t remember those things from the earlier part of this century. My realm hasn’t included TV programs for 30-40 years or more. And I’ve not given T. Friedmann any credibility since I first started reading his garbage. Those “realities” you cite are the shit hitting the fan.
Interesting that you bring up aesthetics and bridges as that is one of the many things discussed by Noel Wilson in his never refuted or rebutted complete destruction of the standards and testing malpractices.
“Gatekeeping” tests are of a different realm than the standardized testing malpractices foisted upon innocent children. And those tests still suffer all the onto-epistemological errors and falsehoods and psychometric fudgings that Wilson lays out in his “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” which proves the complete invalidity of using the results of those tests for anything. May I suggest you read and understand what Wilson has to say: https://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/viewFile/577/700
I’m glad that “MY” feeling (and it’s not just me by the way, I just happen to be a very vocal critic of false, invalid and unjust malpractices) “that such tests are a violence.” Because they are. The tests violate the very being of the children in ways that may or may not be later mitigated. “Oh, look according to this invalid test score your a dumb#@$. Students, especially younger ones internalize those labels and “become” what they are told they supposedly are. “I’m an idiot, I might as well not even try.”
And if you don’t think that doesn’t go on on a daily basis in the standards and testing malpractice regime, well. . . please read Wilson to further understand all of the problems with the tests and the consequences of false means of evaluating students. I’ll help you through it if you need.
Duane – I know I’ve pointed this out before, but I will again – funny how you state that Wilson’s dissertation is “never refuted or rebutted”,,,I’ll add something else to his dissertation – its never (besides you) cited by ANYONE else against standardized testing…Hmm…what does that say.
To follow up on what I think Abby is saying – you (through your discussion of Wilson) seem to be against any type of assessment at all, not to mention any type of standards. So, going back to Abby’s point about the bridge in Miami that collapsed – if we didn’t have standards of assessments for the engineers who are buidling the bridge, is that really smart to just let ANYONE say “Hey I feel like building a bridge, so let me do it”
As for your comment, “The tests violate the very being of the children in ways that may or may not be later mitigated. “Oh, look according to this invalid test score your a dumb#@$. Students, especially younger ones internalize those labels and “become” what they are told they supposedly are. “I’m an idiot, I might as well not even try.” No. It’s a matter of what ADULTS do with the test scores. Certainly, if adults consider test scores to define children as being DUMB, well in my opinion those adults shouldn’t be in education. And yes, you do have a point that nearly all of the current standardized tests essentially measure poverty and NOT academic potential. Yet as you and I have gone back and forth on this blog before – the claim could be said about any assessment (seemingly by you)…And yet we know you assessed your students, right?
jlsteach:”No. It’s a matter of what ADULTS do with the test scores.”
I’m retired. What exactly is a teacher supposed to do with the test scores? I hear that they mostly come when the kids have moved on into the next school year and that teachers aren’t even told what answers kids got wrong.
Seems like a waste of school $$$ to put anything into standardized testing. So, the teacher reads the test scores and the school gets labeled.
So you’re right about scores coming back so late that kids have moved on – to clarify it’s up to adults who chose how to use/interpret the scores – as jn if they chose to label a child or even a school based on low scores
jlsteach: So you are saying that the scores have the potential to do a lot of harm and there is nothing useful that comes from them?
Not at all – I think that they could have some potential to help students (and parents) get a sense of where their children are. If the scores came earlier than when they did, they could lead to re-teaching opportunities, etc. Right now the data, in my opinion, is NOT used as effectively as it could be. BUT I don’t think that they HAVE to be used as to label a child (as Duane insinuates) .
jlsteach: This is just my opinion. What I loved best about teaching was coming up with new ideas that I thought would let the kids learn while experiencing something fun. [I was a music and band teacher.] It seems that ‘teaching to the test’ is stifling creativity and narrowing what can be taught. This is especially true if the test is not geared to the level of what the child can learn. It degrades him or her and frustration will set in for both the teacher and the kid.
I am of the belief that the teacher is the best guide of what the classroom needs. I would hate to have someone outside of my classroom tell me what to teach so that we could all have a better test score. I would be infuriated at having to live with that.
Any school that is continuously rated ‘failing’ is going to have a LOT of frustrated children. Word must surely get out that they have failed once again. A-F grades for each school are published in the local paper in my area.
If the school gets an F for too many years, the politicians believe the school should be taken over. Surely kids learn from that experience and it isn’t good.
So yes, we agree about the issues of teaching to the test…My personal belief is that teachers that are strong enough can teach however they want to teach, but they know the material within their content and the things kids need to know well enough that their kids will do well no matter what is on a test. What has happened in many classrooms today is the need to have seen the test before hand. Educators will say they want to do this so that they can best prepare their students. BUT essentially they want to teach to the test…My fear, on the flip side, is that if we let educators just do their own thing that some may not demand high expectations of their students and in the process short change them.
jlsteach: “…if we let educators just do their own thing that some may not demand high expectations of their students and in the process short change them.”
I believe that teachers are better than that. It’s a sad state when our own turn on us. Testing is NOT the solution because it hurts too many. I do not believe high stakes testing is raising exceptions, it is killing students and teachers.
There is a nationwide severe teacher shortage. Lack of teaching resources, poor pay and high stakes testing all contribute to this problem.
You mentioned carolmalaysia you’ve been retired for years. I can tell you first hand that I saw teachers like the ones I described. You may see it as turning on teachers I see it as part of the reality. Now should we go to high stakes standardized testing to combat this? No. It we should have some type of common assessments and expectations
What does that say? That most are too lazy to read and understand what are really easy concepts. A voice in the wilderness doesn’t make what it’s saying any less valid. As it is one of the tactics of those in power is to completely ignore those concepts which challenge that power. If one ignores it it will eventually end up in the dust bin of history.
I’ve never even hinted at being against all assessments, ever.
As far as the bridge situation. Of course it doesn’t make sense to have unqualified people designing them. At the same time I’ll bet a dollar to a dime that the all of the engineers that signed off on the project all passed their boards. So what does that say about that supposed gate-keeping test of those engineers?
Standardized tests measure nothing. See above.
I’ve spoken to many who went through their schooling career believing that they were stupid because of the labels attached to them by the “authorities”.
My assessments were designed to be used by the students to help them understand where they were in the learning of Spanish. They were not designed to be “diagnostic” against some norm, they were designed so that the student got a chance to see where they were in their learning. Again, I have never implied that I didn’t have the students do assessments/tests/quizzes/projects etc. . . .
Not sure what you are getting at but I certainly haven’t seen any cogent critique from you of Wilson’s work. You gonna give it a try one of these days, jlsteach??
Show me where his analysis is lacking, what the problems in his assumptions are. Have at it. I’ll even help you read and understand what he is saying if you wish.
Duane I’ve honestly tried to read Wilson’s work / and to me it’s one of the most convulted, unorganized, unclear pieces I’ve ever read. His “chapters” are all over the place and seem to make no connections at all. So I can’t make a clear argument against Wilson because he doesn’t make a clear argument at all.
So again you’ve made my point. You may have met people who were told they were stupid or were less valuable because of low test scores. But that is on the adult who said the words not the assessment itself.
jlsteach: “You may have met people who were told they were stupid or were less valuable because of low test scores. But that is on the adult who said the words not the assessment itself.”
You seem to be forgetting that WHOLE schools are rated F, sometimes for years on end. Does this not affect children? This degrading isn’t happening due to ‘the adult who said the words not the assessment itself”. These F grades are published for the whole area to see. It is due to the assessment itself.
Now it’s not the assessment that gave the score – it’s how the adults chose to use the test scores and how they assigned the percentages for the school rating.
The cut scores on standardized tests are not objective. The passing marks are not objective. They are decided by human beings who raise or lower them at will. They are subjective passing marks which may or may not have been set for political reasons
So yes, humans set the cut scores and HOW the assessments are used – that is what I have been saying. Humans make decisions on how the assessment and their scores are used.
The assessments accurately measure family income, education, and language proficiency.
If your family is poor and uneducated, you are likely to get a low test score.
Dr. Ravitch – I have seen other dissertations and articles that have claimed the things that you have stated, that “The assessments accurately measure family income, education, and language proficiency. If your family is poor and uneducated, you are likely to get a low test score.” I am teaching a class and next week’s topic is on education and poverty and I am using one of Helen Ladd’s articles looking at this connection. That being said, I don’t think that Wilson’s dissertation makes this claim at all – and if it does, it does so in such a convoluted manner that it’s very unclear and not useful for policy makers (thus the reason why Duane seems to be the only one who mentions it)
You are right that the dissertation is not necessarily an easy read, but hey isn’t that was dissertations are about? I’ll be more than happy to walk you through the dissertation chapter by chapter at your pace. Contact me at duaneswacker@gmail.com and we can get started.
Uh no Duane – dissertations are not easy reads. I wrote a dissertation and it was very clear and easy to follow
Oh, and if you would like my take on the standards and testing malpractices and those harmful effects “Infidelity to Truth: Education Malpractice in American Public Education”* I’ll gladly send you a copy. Just email me at duaneswacker@gmail.com with your address. All I ask in return is for you to give $15 to your favorite charity or to a classroom teacher for supplies.
Arghh, wordpress: following up on my offer:
In it I discuss the purpose of American public education and of government in general, issues of truth in discourse, justice and ethics in teaching practices, the abuse and misuse of the terms standards and measurement which serve to provide an unwarranted pseudo-scientific validity/sheen to the standards and testing regime and how the inherent discrimination in that regime should be adjudicated to be unconstitutional state discrimination no different than discrimination via race, gender, disability, etc. . . .
Duane,
I have already refuted Wilson’s lame position, so please revisit earlier posts. (by the way, jsteach, you are so right – anyone who has made it past 50 pages of that blathering postmodern polemic has a masochistic side). First of all, he misunderstands Pirsig’s metaphysics of quality. He states that non-violence is his ultimate value. But non-violence is not a value – it is a means to an end. First mistake. Many others.
I know that you care about your students, but the fact is SOMEBODY has to educate them if they are to have any chance of a decent life in today’s society. I do not shrink from this responsibility. I have had students who came into my classroom with the lowest possible scores. I let them know that they CAN and WILL succeed if they put in the effort (and it does require effort). Every one of my Algebra students (and many were below level coming into the class) passed the required end-of-year test. You say standardized tests don’t reflect student ability (I will agree to a certain extent in ELA, and especially in writing), but in math, I can predict each student’s score to within 10 scale score points.
Last summer when I hired a moving company, one of the employees told me that he wanted to be a heating/air conditioning tech, but his lack of ability in algebra prevented this. How sad! There is no reason for this!
And Diane, I do not accept that test scores “reflect the income level of families.” That may be the case in general, but a teacher who inspires his/her students will NEVER settle for that. I had an “intensive” class that thought they were failures and only 15 percent had passed the test the year before. 75% of them passed the test that year,and those who didn’t made large gains I know Duane will say that doesn’t matter, but it DOES to them.
Also, Duane, what do you think the professionals use as benchmarks on the way to their gatekeeping exams? That is why colleges use the ACT/SAT(track the results of these to internal testing of high school, middle and elementary school testing, by the way) as well as GPA. These tests are not a “different realm” – are you kidding me?
Regards.
Abby,
Check the score reports from any test, wherever they give the correlation between scores and income. The SAT does, so do others. The correlation is very tight. The richerthe Family, the higher the test score. The poorer the student, the lower the scores.
As I don’t remember seeing any cogent critique of Wilson’s work other than your general “it’s a postmodern polemic”, whatever that may mean, statement. You say he misinterprets Pirsig’s “metaphysics of quality”. How has Wilson supposedly misinterpreted that? Even with that bit of a critique he speaks of Pirsig in such a limited fashion. It certainly doesn’t even begin to make up the core of his work.
So, no, you haven’t rebutted nor refuted anything. My masochistic side would love to be excited by a true rebuttal/refutation. But I ain’t seen it yet.
Your assumption that because I, and many others who understand just how ludicrous and risible, and harmful, the standards and testing malpractices are, do not have “high standards” or don’t believe that all students can learn is false. It’s an arrogant condescension actually.
“Somebody has to educate them.” I was a teacher not an educator, I taught students. Your fawning acceptance of malpractices that you perceive as “educating the students” is not that unusual. I never needed an outside source to validate my classroom practices. I relied on the students to let me know how I was doing through a process of reciprocal respect.
Horror of horrors, how subjective can that be? 100% subjective because that is the only fashion in which any evaluation, judgment, assessment of the teaching and learning process takes place. There is no objective way. To deny this is to deny ratio-logical reasoning and dive into the deep end of the murky pseudo-scientific nonsense that is standardized testing.
As I responded to jlsteach concerning the bridge collapse example, I’d bet all the engineers involved passed the “gatekeeping” exam. Did that prevent the bad engineering? No. Did that insure that they were properly qualified? No. Do all the students that score in the 95th percentile of the ACT or SAT go on to succeed at university studies? No.
The question for me is “What becomes of those who do not do well on those gatekeeper tests, those who would like to continue in a certain career path but are denied?” Tough nooggies (sp)!! So be it, eh. Screw them!!
Since it appears you have admitted to not having read all of Wilson’s dissertation (. . . anyone who has made it past 50 pages of that blathering postmodern polemic has a masochistic side”) how much credence should I give to your meager critique? Hint: Little to none!
As it is, I’d be more than happy to go through Wilson’s work chapter by chapter to help you understand it. If you wish feel free to contact me at duaneswacker@gmail.com
Diane,
Let us not disagree about what will help all students!
I know what we are all supposed to think about socio-economics and test scores only I just posted what my own experience is. We need to get teachers into the classrooms who believe that they CAN and WILL make a difference and it will happen. I don’t know what the research says, but I can tell you from my own experience that the difference is DRAMATIC. There is not a doubt in my mind that ALL students can improve.
I know that my intensive students will not be engineers or doctors – but there is no reason they cannot be electricians or HVAC technicians.You and Duane see tests as limiting; I, on the other hand, see tests as empowering.
You need to learn more about the history of standardized testing. It began with eugenicists who believed that IQ was inherited and immutable. The fist standardized tests were IQ tests. I explained this in Left Back. It was never meant to be empowering. It was meant to sort smart kids from dumb kids and shower favor on the former. The Britisg sociologist MIchael Young Calls the high-scoring kids “the lucky sperm club.” Teachers make a difference but rarely overcome the home circumstances of students. Those who are ill-nourished, never see a doctor, live in roach-infested homes, worry about their next meal, are not on level ground with those who don’t have the same circumstances.
“Let us not disagree about what will help all students!”
Are you saying that the “what” is standardized testing?
As it is I don’t agree with Diane that these tests “measure family income/wealth”. As I’ve oft stated they measure nothing. No doubt that there is a positive correlation between those two things which Diane has pointed out. But a correlation is not a measurement.
Also Binet’s original intent with his IQ test was not of the eugenics camp. He wanted a test that would be diagnostic for the individual student and was wary of those who would use his test to sort and separate out people for whatever reasons. The eugenicists glombed onto the standardized testing falsehoods to “prove” their racial sorting theories. Needless to say that was a false proof for an abhorrent concept.
How you see those tests as empowering can only be accomplished through a willing blindness to all of the errors and falsehoods and psychometric fudgings that occur in the process of making a standardized test. Disprove Wilson and I’ll begin to listen more to what you have to say.
Read my chapter on the history of standardized testing in “Left Back.” Alfred Binet, who was French, was not a geneticist. His American devotees, the founders of the field of psychology, like Thorndike, Brigham, and Terman believed that the tests measured innate, inherited intelligence, which could never change. Brigham was the inventor of the SAT. HIs views were racist and he wrote a book about the racial and ethnic basis of IQ.
The Love Infest
The love affair with testing
Will never EVER end
Cuz Wall Street is infesting
And upward is the trend
Under pre-CC NCLB, there was very little outcry against testing, and the opt out movement wasn’t even a glimmer in Long Island’s eye. So what changed? What
exactly drove the Resistance (anti-testing) movement. What spawned blogs like this?
What drove Diane Ravitch, Mercedes Schneider, Peter Greene and many others to sacrifice so much of their personal and professional time to fight against the Reform movement?
History tell us that it wasn’t just testing. So, what was it?
Really BAD tests derived from really BAD standards.
The MISUSE of tests/test scores:
Linking teacher evaluations to test scores
Using hyper-inflated failure rates to assail public schools
Using hyper-inflated failure rates to open the door to privatization
Using hyper-failure rates to super-charge the charter movement
Blaming teachers/schools instead of poverty
The unintended(?) consequences of over-testing:
A complete obsession with CC math, reading, and writing – to the almost complete exclusion of all else ushering in an era of constrained curricula
Micro-management of teachers
Distrust of teachers
Stressed out teachers
A misguided infatuation with data
Mangling the concept of “accountability”
Limiting students instead of the opposite
Pushing academic pressures down to grade levels where it has no place
I think the majority of educators could live with a system that returns to grade span testing of basic skills with fair and objective tests that are purely diagnostic. And a re-emphasis on age appropriate content knowledge that is interesting, meaningful, and enriching.
Right: it’s not testing per se that’s the problem but THESE tests which induce us to narrow curriculum and teach unteachable skills instead of important knowledge.
High-stakes tests are part of the problem, but yes, a knowledge-based curriculum is important. Perhaps one day the era of the Thought Police will end and we can return to a democratic tussle over these approaches to curricula. I very much look forward to that time and to taking to the battlefield alongside you there, Ponderosa.
Rage,
All of the above. The confluence of all those factors starting in this millennium with NCLB and its impossible 100% proficiency mandate. Test-dominated schools. Children stressed out. Teachers fearful. Parents bamboozled. High stakes. Time and money wasted to no good end. As long as the testing is allowed to continue, new purposes (read misuses) will be found to justify it. We need to take all the stakes and drive them through the heart of testing.
To the above commenters (you, BA!) who criticize comic books (& also–in advance–to those who discredit reading in the bathroom!)–I learned how to read w/comic books–in the bathroom! My parents had a built-in magazine rack in the bathroom, &, inside, were “Peanuts” books & “Archie” comics. Pictures & words! Archie had the best words, too, such as “disingenuous” & “disgruntled..” (In fact, there was a discussion by the characters over whether, if there is a “disgruntled,” is there such a word as gruntled?) It made me–at 3-years-old–want to use the dictionary!
Yes, I was able to read as a 3-year-old…& it was all due to…comic books!!
When I was in first grade, the only thing that saved me from a teacher who should never have been a teacher, let alone a FIRST grade teacher (she was fired) was my advanced reading level. She asked my mom (o.b.m.) how I read so well, & my mom said, “Comic books!”
Remember, “reading is FUNdamental!” (I think that slogan came before NCLB, RTTT & Pear$on.)
& I will refrain from my usual comments about Pear$$$$on (never learning, ALWAY$ earning) & “standardized” testing.
Senor Swacker, enlighten the ever-growing new readership w/YOUR Wilson rant, please!
From P.G. Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters: “I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”
Well-stated, Roy. As to your first paragraph, especially the last 2 sentences, teaching was all about that.
Ask and you shall receive! Thanks for the prompt although I don’t consider it a “rant”. I consider it to be a truthful discussion/summary of Wilson’s work, albeit an incomplete one.
See below!
Ed Deformers love to claim that the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] are not a curriculum. And in theory, yes, that’s true. But they have become a default curriculum. Teaching materials and class activities have been narrowed and distorted to teach the bullet list, and innovation in K-12 curricula has been stopped cold. I spent many, many years working as a designer, editor, and writer of textbooks and online instructional materials. I know for a fact that educational publishers now start every project in ELA and mathematics with an Excel spreadsheet containing a list of the “standards” in one column and a list of corresponding materials in the new product in the next column. That’s insane. A diverse, pluralistic society and economy will suffer under such standardization to a bullet list. Kids differ. They are not nuts and bolts to be standardized.
Here, a case in point:
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/on-developing-curricula-in-the-age-of-the-thought-police/
It’s truly sickening to me how distorted and narrow our curricula have become under the standards-and-testing regime, which has FAILED UTTERLY BY ITS OWN PREFERRED MEASURE, TEST SCORES.
We need to trust teachers again. We need to return decision making to local schools and department heads, to give them general guidelines and to let a hundred thousand flowers bloom. People work best under conditions of autonomy in which they can respond to the actual circumstances they are confronted with. And people learn because they have fallen in love with what they are doing. No one ever fell in love with a series of exercises on snippets of text followed by multiple-choice questions.
It’s shocking to me that we’ve lived with this failed regimen so long that there are actually teachers and administrators who don’t remember how much better our classes were before it. The apologists for standards-and-testing are abettors of what can only be called mandated child abuse.
The echo in this blog is tiresome, people just don’t want to read and listen, instead being triggered by “red herrings”. Just three counterpoints:
(1) Common Core does not produce its own textbooks. It is not a curriculum.
(2) Core-Plus Mathematics was started in 1992 based on 1989 NCTM standards (no, Standards, with capital “S”). The textbooks were horrible, they did not get traction. Then Common Core happened. Its “authors” pulled a good deal of bullet points from NCTM Standards, which by that time have been revised and improved several times. In return, NCTM recognized Common Core and “aligned” its math programs with Common Core. Nowadays you can get Core-Plus Math Common Core edition, which is 90% the same 20-year old book with new cover. It is not rewritten as you might claim.
(3) I know of a great math program for homeschooling that exists since early 1990s. It was not based on NCTM standards. It was aligned with Common Core five or so years ago, this did not take much, because Common Core, whatever you think of it and whatever its roots, is not that bad, has logical progression of topics and rather age-appropriate. This math program is still being used with great success by homeschoolers. No, it is not Saxon.
If you don’t like the blog, don’t read it. I find your contempt for teachers annoying and tiresome.
Bob, did not realize you were talking about CCSSE, not CCSSM. Yes, I agree, most of the CCSSE “standards” are junk. Instead I would prefer to see specific grammatical and lexical rules, how to write words, how to combine them together, how compound sentences work, how tenses agree in a sentence and among several sentences. How to write essays. Plus something like The Elements of Style. And then a whole bunch of books to read and discuss. As they are, I don’t see much value in the CCSSE standards.
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2017/09/02/on-the-pseudoscience-of-strategies-based-reading-comprehension-instruction-or-what-current-comprehension-instruction-has-in-common-with-astrology/
Bob, TL;DR. If your main point is that kids should not be taught explicit grammar, then I disagree. Learning the intricacies of the language simply by speaking is not enough, especially if your interlocutor cannot speak correctly himself. Then you get “would of” instead of “would have” and “he and me” instead of “he and I”.
BA, read that essay. This simply isn’t a proper forum for going into those complex questions about English curricula, but I address this issue there.
Reply to m4potw way up there (at 5:24 PM-?)–What you said!!!
&–always like your (usual) sign off, “Back to Basic”–exactly where we need to go!
Here’s another piece detailing a distortion of curricula in English by the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] and the tests and materials based on them.
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/03/15/what-happens-when-amateurs-write-standards/
Congratulations, Bob. Quite a discussion you sparked there.
There will always be autocratic types with a rage for order who want to do the thinking for the rest of us. But a common curriculum and common standards do not serve the interests of diverse students or of a diverse economy. We need cosmologists AND cosmetologists. But most of all, we needs students who become intrinsically motivated life-long learners, and students do that because they fall in love with something they are doing that is a fit for them. A much more sane approach would be to promulgate very general, very broad frameworks that provide the degrees of freedom for people to innovate in curricula and pedagogy and to tailor these to the needs and proclivities and interests of particular students. The only tests that make sense are diagnostic tests for finding out what students know and can do and classroom formative tests that are themselves learning experiences. If we must have statewide accountability systems, then these should be portfolio assessments broad enough in their submission standards to allow for extraordinary diversity in the products proffered by students and their teachers, in keeping with the varying gifts and interests of students.
I would sum up what you write as a need to find balance, and just like one who tries to find physical balance when faced with obstacles, what needs to be done to maintain balance changes, sometime subtly, sometimes with greater effort. As opposed as I am to high-stakes testing, I favor giving teachers the autonomy needed to assess, which might include testing they themselves devise, as a diagnostic tool to figure out if and what their students are learning as well as to assess their own teaching. There is also, it seems to me, a need to balance the things that are intrinsically motivated with those that can be imposed and guided by a good teacher. This includes things like memorization, coping and adjusting to obstacles and failure, and just plain gruntwork. But a teacher needs both the experience, guidance and autonomy to foster these things among students. (I think of a great teacher I had in 8th grade where we diagrammed sentences to death and were expected to learn definitions, analogies, and usage of at least 20 words per week. I hated it, but I did it and I’m extremely thankful that I had that experience. It means more to me every year I age.) Not sure if I’m missing the point, but that’s what I’m getting out of your thoughts.
My issue is not with in-class tests designed by teachers. It’s with high-stakes state-level testing as scorecard. The Ed Deformers love to say that “you get what you measure.” Well, yes. And that’s ALL you get, and you only get that part of the time. That’s what two decades of this nonsense has made abundantly clear. Teaching and learning are human transactions. When teachers have respect and autonomy, they rise to the occasion, as did that 8th-grade teacher whom you are so grateful for. No one performs at his or her best in conditions of low autonomy. Imagine following the house cleaner around and telling him or her how, exactly, to fill the pail or to swipe the cloth. Well, that’s what we’re doing.
If you think back on your best teachers–the ones who really made a difference in your life–you will find that they all had something in common: They were passionate about what they were teaching, and you got the windfall of that passion. Perhaps this one was crazy about set theory or that one about Dante. It doesn’t much matter what it was. That stuff is contagious. The teacher becomes a model for his or her students of what an intrinsically motivated life-long learner looks like.
People don’t do that in schools and systems run by the Thought Police or under a regime in which someone as clueless about English literature and writing and linguistics and so on as David Coleman is hired to do the thinking for them.
Thanks, Bob. You explain it very well and I agree with all you wrote. We both agree that teacher autonomy—with appropriate mentorship—is the key.
But the older I get, the more I realize that some educational drudgery is not necessarily a bad thing. In the field I now work, I have contact with a number of top cancer specialists. An inescapable conclusion is that there are very, very few Americans at the top levels (although at the very top, they tend to be older white, male and American, but they are a dying breed). Once you get out of breast and prostate cancer—the “money-making” specialties—most top doctors come from India, Pakistan, the Middle East, and Europe. I think a lot of that is based on the fact that memorization is an essential foundation of the medical profession. They come from cultures that didn’t necessarily have the most liberal (writ small) educations. The same can be said of engineering and other sciences like chemistry and physics.
I would not have thrived under the systems that they did, but I and every American should be thankful that they were subjected to many of the things we might find to be abhorrent. I don’t have an answer to this, but it is an observation I find hard to reconcile with many of the opinions you and I share about the best educational experiences. It’s truly a conundrum. Not sure I explained this well, but I hope you get what I am so poorly trying to say.
Yet, Indian engineers who come to the US must spend a year or two unlearning rote memorization.
Yes, that’s true, Diane. But it’s a classic Catch-22 situation. One cannot excel in these fields without a great deal of memorization. Just the ability to diagnose diseases, especially complex and rare ones, requires an inordinate amount of memorization that is time consuming and boring. Just ask any organic chemistry student. I could not do it. But the art of medicine is being able to apply it, sometimes very quickly. Take a disease like chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) with blast crisis. It’s the cancer equivalent of being in a catastrophic car accident. It has to be diagnosed quickly and even then, very few patients will live for months. Or many rare autoimmune diseases. In order do diagnose them quickly and begin a therapeutic approach, a doctor has to know enough to quickly rule out hundreds of other conditions, and knowledge of them only comes from sitting down a long time and memorizing things that one may never encounter in a career.
Again, I don’t have an answer, and I reject the concepts of rigor and grit in education. I’m just confused about what to think.
That’s not memorization. That’s experience. Deep experience.
I agree entirely with the need to balance curricula aimed at building intrinsic motivation with first-class mentoring of new teachers and professional development aimed at improving the quality of in-class testing. And yes, that tough love stance really worked for some teachers. Teaching and learning are relationships between people. This is one model (though not, perhaps, the most ideal one). Education school folks love to attack “the sage on the stage,” but often, it is the very admiration of the student for the knowledge of that sensei that works–I want what that person has, the student says to himself or herself. I want to become like this person and so bring honor upon myself. The teacher serves as model in in the same way as the kung fu master does–someone with uncompromising personal standards who is worthy of emulation.
What diverse economy are you talking about? When a company cannot find a thousand blu-collar workers with decent high-school understanding of math and logic and capable of reading and comprehending, capable of working on CNC machines, this is not diverse economy, this is the jobs lost to China. Stop fooling yourself that you are living in a Communist paradise – I mean the way it was envisioned 100 years ago, where everyone does whatever they feel like and whatever they know how to do, and learn at their own pace, and challenge themselves because they are responsible citizens, each and everyone – and magically everyone has enough food and clothing and homes, maybe the robots are filling the gaps. Our current economy is split between menial services and high-level jobs in aerospace, IT, medicine. There is little in between for those who read on 2-grade level and cannot write a coherent email. Trump could not revive coal in any meaningful way despite the promises, and even if he could this is not what the planet needs now. If 13 years is not enough to learn basic language skills and basic math, what is the point? You can get cosmetologists and burgerologists and dog-walkologists without spending all this time bent over tiny desk at school.
What an incredibly narrow vision of the purposes of schooling! And do you really think that expecting the average third-grader to comprehend the concept of a variable (CCSSM nonsense) is going to get the results you are talking about? And what is this nonsense about a Communist paradise? I’m sorry, but I got entirely lost in that portion of your rant. The standards-and-testing regime has accomplished none of its goals of somehow vaunting us to superiority over other countries in math. And at any rate, the deformers’ notion that we are so far behind is completely fallacious. Our relative standing vis-a-vis other countries in mathematics is entirely accounted for by our serving a more diverse population of students. In the US, 26 percent of children live below the poverty level. Standards and testing have done NOTHING to raise those children out of that. There has been NO closing of the gap. It’s astonishing to me, given the utter failure of Ed Deform, that it still has such benighted defenders.
And why don’t you identify yourself, Mr. or Ms. BA? What Ed Deform organization do you work for, and who pays you?
“I favor giving teachers the autonomy needed to assess, which might include testing they themselves devise, as a diagnostic tool to figure out if and what their students are learning as well as to assess their own teaching.”
When did the teaching and learning process cross over into the medical realm of “diagnosing students” and then prescribing a remedy to “fix” or “heal” the students? Why the need for diagnosis?
I contend that no assessment should be given that doesn’t have THE primary function of helping the individual student learn. Any other usage of a student assessment is UNETHICAL.
Dwayne, I am a classical and jazz guitarist, and I’ve taught guitar from time to time throughout my life. I always start with having the student simply hold the guitar for me and play a few riffs so that I can find out what he or she is doing wrong with stance and hand position. Then I ask some questions. Do you know what chord families are? Can you play me a major or minor scale? And I have the student play a bit for me. That way, I know what the student does and doesn’t know and can start at his or her appropriate level–what education people sometimes call the “zone of proximal development.” If the student doesn’t have good hand position, giving him or her scales to practice over some chord changes is simply going to reinforce bad habits. If he or she doesn’t know what a chord is or how chords are made–doesn’t have that minimal amount of theory–then it will be much harder for him or her to learn how to transcribe a tune or modulate to a different key. The major disaster in the US has been the use of high-stakes summative tests.
Your assessment of the student’s hand work has the fundamental purpose of helping the student learn. As it should be, eh!
Yes, that’s what I mean, Dwayne. Yes, diagnostic testing of that kind.
Duane,
Suppose Bob asks a student to perform a variety tasks with the guitar and first decides whether or not to award the student a prize for musicianship based on the student’s effort and then outlines a lesson plan for the next class also based on the students effort. It seems to me that Bob would be using his knowledge of the student’s performance for a summative evaluation in the former and a diagnostic evaluation in the later.
Now it may be that Bob’s knowledge of the student’s musicianship is incorrect, but it seems to me that his knowledge would be incorrect irrespective of his use of that knowledge. I don’t see how Bob’s evaluation of the students musical strengths and weaknesses could be meaningless when doing the summative task, but meaningful just moments later when using the knowledge diagnostically.
Do you agree?
No. Because you have added a condition, a prize, that doesn’t need to be a part of the teaching and learning process.
I contend that the day in and day out teaching and learning process SHOULD NOT be viewed as a competition except for when a teacher in classroom uses learning games wherein all can learn and benefit. When I used learning games everyone that participated got some extra credit points. I understand that many accept academic competitions, I do to as part of extracurricular activities. And no the teacher should not be using class time to help those extra curricular students instead of working with all the students.
As it is, I said nothing about assessments being meaningless.
You raise a very interesting issue, TeachingEconomist. There’s a lot of research indicating that prizes are actually demotivating for cognitive tasks, which goes back to the issue of the importance of autonomy. The prize reduces the perception of autonomy and rankles. It becomes no longer a matter of intrinsic motivation (to learn to play) but a matter of external coercion (by the awarding or withholding of the prize).
I started writing a lengthy comment and my computer ate it. I don’t have time (lucky you) to recreate it, but I still have an unfulfilled need to add this viewpoint in abbreviated form:
This discussion started as a critique of standardized testing and evolved (devolved in some instances) into a broader discussion of purposes of education, good practices, etc. To oversimplify, much of it revealed the tension between a free, play and discovery-based form of progressive practice and the more traditional approaches, including universal curricula of some kind, memorization, versions of the E.D. Hirsch, Jr. “core knowledge” approach, etc. Many commenters lean toward the latter, finding the more fluid, experiential, less structured approach rather romantic, impractical or just wrong headed. Examples have been trotted out about engineers, medical professionals and others who need to memorize things and acquire specific, measurable skills.
This is a false choice, primarily because the purposes of education and the neurobiological developments of children are not static or unitary.
In early childhood and through most of primary and secondary education, a learning environment must allow engagement of all the senses and active use of fantasy and imagination. This is important philosophically for those of us who love children and wish a rich, satisfying life for them, but it is even more important as preparation for the later development that produces engineers and doctors as well as poets, activists and artists.
The kinds of traditional practices that many seem to champion, actually detract from the neurobiological development that allows really “rigorous” intellectual development later on. By pressing rote learning and so-called skill development into younger grades, we deprive children of the touching, smelling, movement, imagination, creation, experimentation and discovery that actually form the complex connections of neural pathways that allow deep understanding of things from particle physics to constitutional law. The traditional practices also tend to extinguish the curiosity that enlivens life and leads to real academic and intellectual growth for a lifetime.
Many studies, including the landmark Eight Year Study, hinted at the superiority of a free, self-directed, non-traditional experience in primary and secondary education. Now we know why. Progressive practices, whether you call them by that label or not, are the precondition for future success.
It is ironic that many traditional practices, including the notion that students should sit still, pay attention and “learn” things, actually inhibit the brain development reformers claim to want.
I have long contended that education reform, including the use of technology by children is not only ineffective – it is damaging. Many have noted, and studies indicate, that education reform has not improved anything. I am certain that it is much worse than that. Education reform, starting with the dishonest Nation at Risk, has steadily degraded education. Considering that our students are spending hours preparing for tests and still not improving, I propose that they are actually declining in actual learning. It is a multi-decade fiasco and should be a source of national shame.
I assess much of the time using student writing. The problem is that I have a zillion kids, which makes it hard to assess all that writing. But the REAL problem is that kids can’t write anymore. I mean, there are always a few exceptions, but most of what kids write today makes no sense. They can’t support an argument. They can’t even write a personal narrative. They say, “I don’t know what else to say.” When I encourage them to “tell me a story” by giving examples and describing the event and adding real depth to the writing, they can’t. They have been conditioned by so many years of “Common Core writing,” graded by computers, that they can’t write for a human audience. It’s tragic.
If they have my class long enough, they get a lot better at this, but it’s sad that kids can’t even write a story (personal, fictional, whatever) anymore. They’ve lost that skill, and they’ve lost the fire to tell me things. And it gets worse every year.
The “CCSS” is failing our students.
You nailed it, Threatened. If I have seven classes, each with 28 students in them, and I assign one five-paragraph theme, that’s 980 paragraphs to read and respond to, roughly equivalent to a long novel. The real issues in education are huge student-to-teacher ratios and poverty, neither of which deformers want to deal with because they want cheap solutions in keeping with their desire to cut taxes and social services. Deformers who tell you that “class size doesn’t matter”–a common mantra, have never taught writing. And, kids can never learn to write unless they read for much of the ability to write is learned unconsciously from models, and CC$$ has acerbated that problem, already severe because kids are spending far more time with online entertainments, by leading English departments to cut literature study in favor of test prep involving text snippets taken out of context (David Coleman’s New Criticism Lite). What a disaster!
In kindergarten they teach them to read, write words and by the end of the year they are writing simple sentences. In 1st grade they expand on the writing of longer sentences and by the end of the year, they are able to write a paragraph. In 2nd grade they expand on the paragraph and by the end of the year, they are writing the 5 paragraph essay. They also drill and kill them on grammar, punctuation, and usage. In 3rd grade they STOP all the writing. This is the year that testing starts so the emphasis is teaching to the test. It used to be (under NCLB) that our test was nothing but BCR’s (brief constructed responses). 3rd grade became BCR University and a child could earn their BCR degree BA, MA or PhD. Writing is not revisited again until high school and at that point, these kids can’t write and the teachers can’t do much about it with classes of 30+ students. It’s sad!
There is one problem with this idea: not all teachers can write tests that measure what is important to learn… nor can all administrators. This mis-measure can result in inter-faculty finger-pointing and disputes between lower level feeder schools and their upper level counterparts. I believe that in order for the notion of teachers administering tests to work it would require part of the teachersAND administrators training programs to be devoted to the development of assessments. I would favor devoting time and energy to that end than the time now being spent to prepare for assessments that are administered based on the students age and grade level.
It’s astonishing to me that we’ve gotten to such a point that people no longer have any faith in the ability of teachers to write tests for use in their classrooms, which is what teachers always did. I agree that it’s important for teachers to get training in preparing assessments. I recently taught in a high school in which no other teachers, except one in the math department, had any notion what a standard score was or how to normalize scores or what the difference was between a norm-referenced test and a criterion-referenced test. I would find other teacher’s tests left behind at the copy machine and was pretty appalled. There is a lot to know about the art of test construction, and this can be validly addressed in professional development.
But as bad as they were, those teacher tests were far superior to the garbage produced by the big testing companies. Those organizations have been running a scam. And like all scam artists, they are experts at hiding what they are doing. No, you can’t look at the test questions. No, you can’t get a question-by-question breakdown of student responses. Trust us. And send us billions of dollars.
“There is one problem with this idea: not all teachers can write tests that measure what is important to learn… nor can all administrators.”
That is because NOTHING IS BEING MEASURED! (see my above post).
Assessments can be used to evaluate, assess, judge, evaluate but they cannot be used to “measure”. That is a false concept that has caused untold, immeasurable harms to students and the teaching and learning process-and even harms to teachers and schools.
Reiterating from above:
The basic fallacy of this is the confusing and conflating metrological (metrology is the scientific study of measurement) measuring and measuring that connotes assessing, evaluating and judging. The two meanings are not the same and confusing and conflating them is a very easy way to make it appear that standards and standardized testing are “scientific endeavors”-objective and not subjective like assessing, evaluating and judging.
Standards testing is the chief reason teachers quit. At my school, test prep begins in Sept. and last till May when they take the tests with other tests such as PALs and MAP 3 times a year…..now, when does that leave for teaching the kids? Another thing too, as a special ed teacher I modify the curriculum for ID, DD, OHI, and AUT children who need alternatives. It doesn’t make sense to do this if I have to send a child with ID back to his gen. ed classroom for science and social studies where the info is NOT modified. This crap just makes me mad and ready to change careers at 64.
Mary, you finally bring us back to what we should be discussing here. The culprit is privatization and one of its strongest tentacles is high-stakes standardized testing. That’s what we need to focus on. Bob’s points are excellent, but he’s attacked by some because he sees value in certain types of evaluation—as, I think the majority of us do. Others want to throw out everything because doing anything that has roots in the past is reduced to “doing things the same way.” Others want to dismiss everything that BA writes—I have no love for most of it—but, like the ancient gold prospector, in the pan of mud and rocks, there are occasional glimmers of valuable thoughts. Others want to let children control the show with their natural curiosity, but ignore basic issues to make their flawed arguments. We are told that students learn to love reading when they choose what they read. Yes and no. One of the best classes I ever had was in CA 5th grade where we were given a quiet hour a day to read what we wanted, but the choices were a very large library of books chosen by our teachers. We couldn’t bring in comics or the backs of cereal boxes. That’s where I learned about Roald Dahl, explorers, and obscure biographies. But the point is that the reading materials were vetted and approved by teams of teachers. And the idea that we should let children run free to engage in exercise ignores a couple of important facts. Please let me know where, in today’s world children who live in communities with more than 20,000 people are given the freedom to run free and play. It happens, sure, but let’s admit it’s rare. Do parents in Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, etc. let their children run free anymore? There is also a value of the socialization and discipline that come with sports, some individually-based, like wrestling and track, some team-based. But what all of this does is tear us apart and lose focus. No wonder I can’t find a single parent in my community who either understands or cares about the dangers of standardized testing and how it is attached to a larger, sinister machine.
So thank you, Mary. You’ve at least tried to bring us back to what we should be discussing. High-stakes standardized testing is the enemy of parents, students, and teachers alike. Let’s focus our energy there and quit being distracted by other agendas. You and Bob are doing us a great service. I just hope enough of us will listen to you and act.
Terrible, Mary. Your story is indicative of what has been happening nationwide. It’s criminal. And as the trolls on this thread so amply demonstrate, the Education Deformers are clueless about these horrific consequences of their actions.
To return to the initial issue raised by the post above, the Ed Deform flim-flam artists sold America a pack of lies, to whit: America’s schools are failing vis-a-vis schools in other parts of the world (Finland, Singapore). To correct that, we need one set of national standards and annual standardized testing with high stakes attached (school grades, moving to the next grade level, matriculation, VAM). With these accountability measures in place, gaps between black and white students and rich and poor students would close, and test scores generally would increase dramatically, so dramatically, in fact, that no child would be left behind.
Well, we’ve had two decades of the standards-and-testing nonsense, and NONE OF THAT has happened. First, the initial premise was wrong. Researchers have shown that the relative standing of US schools on international tests is entirely accounted for by the fact that we serve a very diverse student population, including 26 percent of students who are from families living below the poverty line.
Second, scores are flat. Gaps haven’t closed. Predictably. But a lot of really awful stuff has happened that the Deformers wanted–teachers unions have taken a hit, schools have been privatized, online alternatives to brick-and-mortar schools have gotten a great boost in enrollment, test makers have made billions, computer companies have made billions as well because of the upgrading that schools had to do to have all students take tests and practice tests online, teaching and administration have both been deprofessionalized (so that we now have “superintendents” from the Broad Academy and teachers from five-week summer TFA programs). And curricula have been dramatically narrowed and distorted.
Third, VAM and school grading have been shown not to work to improve outcomes. But they have given our schools a laser focus on test preparation and so turned a great many of them into test prep organizations rather than schools.
Enough already.
I hate the way the Ed Deform trolls get onto these blogs and divert the thread from the topic at hand. Here’s the topic: ED DEFORM HAS FAILED UTTERLY. We’ve run the experiment, at a truly massive scale, and it has done great harm to our schools and kids.
Enough!!!
There is never a shortage of Education Deform trolls who will get onto these blogs and either attempt to divert the discussion from the issues at hand or simply reiterate ED claims that have been proven false by this two-decades-long experiment on our schools and kids. The definition of stupid is doubling down on policies that have failed utterly.
Ed Deform has failed BY ITS OWN PREFERRED MEASURE, test scores. It’s long past time to end high-stakes testing and to scuttle the Common [sic] Core [sic] and the renamed versions of it around the country–versions that were renamed because the Common Core brand had rapidly become completely toxic.
I think it’s analogous to the continued fighting of a failed war. “They cannot have died in vain, therefore we continue” kind of thing.
It’s more than that. It’s part of a whole worldview. Many of these deformers are neoliberals. They have no faith whatsoever in democratic institutions or processes. They believe that people of their class are there to create systems to keep the proles in line.
So, they have an ideological commitment to these top-down control mechanisms. Notice how BA went into a rant about how I was some sort of Communist because I dared to suggest that teachers might have some autonomy and think for themselves. Back in the 1970s and ’80s, one of the biggest debates in education was between proponents of district control of schools and proponents of school-based authority (over curricula). Now we are WAY past that. We’ve had the federal government forcing upon the nation’s public schools a defacto curriculum (for that’s what the CC$$ became) and testing regime. And the neoliberals, Repugnican and Dimocrat, supported it, because they believe themselves destined to do the thinking for the rest of us. Nevermind that schools in the US never ran that way before. Now, returning to the kind of autonomy that teachers and department chairpeople and school administrators once enjoyed is considered some sort of radical idea. Well, it is a radical idea. It’s called pluralistic democracy.
Good points all, Bob.
For RBMTK!
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.
Muchas (or mucho-?) gracias, Senor Swacker!
& I’ll respect your wishes to NOT call it a “rant.”
(But in my circle {strange as we all may be} of friends & acquaintances, we consider our orations being called “rants” as high honor, as in, “Here she/he goes on a rant, again!” It’s usually about politics…)
Muchas. Interesting what context does for meaning, eh. In that case call it a rant all you want! Hope all is well for you and yours up in frozen Chitown. It didn’t get quite as cold down here as predicted, but your guys sure got hit pretty hard.
I think it wise to point out that the real failure of educational reform has been to drive away a generation of teachers. When the baby boom matured, it placed thousands of well-meaning people in classrooms across the nation. My wife went to a school where the principal was encouraged to go out an recruit what he thought were the best people for the program he envisioned. I had a principal who told me that he had hired me because I was his intellectual superior.
Not everybody had that experience, but those of us who are on the tail end of the generation have seen the way the climate has now changed to an attitude that says: you are barely a wheel in the machine. Do what you are told or risk dismissal. Read this script, test this result.
Gone, then, are the poets. Gone are those whose passion was for the idea that there is a sacred trust where learning supersedes almost everything, where there is something holy in the library stacks, and the hush of learning permeates the very soul of educational existence.
The biggest crime of educational reform has been that those who can function in the testing environment are all that is left. That cannot be good.
This is extraordinarily well put, Roy. In today’s environment, people with passion and knowledge increasingly don’t want to teach because such people aren’t willing to be scripted. Increasingly, administrators are looking not for scholars–for people who actually know something that they might impart to kids–but for folks willing to follow the script, no questions ask. This deprofessionalization of teaching is, indeed, criminal.
Once again, so agree with both you. A couple of weeks ago I had a letter published in a local community weekly paper taking the superintendent and board of my school district to task on their gloating of “improvements” in 3rd grade reading test scores. I did so in hope that other parents would contact me so that we could have more voices speak up. One of the points I made was, “Perhaps they can explain just exactly what “providing ongoing training to teachers” means. If the ultimate goal is to turn teachers into virtual assembly line workers using pre-packaged lesson plans, then the logical next step is to get rid of teacher education and certification. Loss of respect for professionals and autonomy puts unneeded pressure on teachers and students alike.”
I heard from one parent in another district who agreed with me and he didn’t follow up with a letter to underscore the concerns I raised as he said he would. Otherwise, crickets. I concluded with, “I would hope that parents who willingly give of their time to raise funds for schools, serve on PTA councils, and make sure their children can participate in extracurricular activities would join me in wanting to know more about how standardized testing is harming our district.” I can only conclude that parents, and sadly, teachers who are afraid of losing their jobs, don’t really care either. No one wants to discuss or even think about this. I am less hopeful something will be done than I ever have been.
GregB: This was my letter-to-the-editor of The Times of NW Indiana published on Aug. 24, 2018
…………………………………….
Indiana teachers deserve better
What is happening in education in Indiana? Teachers have had a 16% decrease in pay since 1999-2000, the largest drop in the nation. Their pay is ranked 31st in the US. That has forced some teachers to work two or three jobs to keep their families afloat.
Regardless, we continue to ask for more from our teachers. They are expected to cover living expenses, additional mandated professional training, student debt and their own classroom’s supplies. Our Republican-led legislature is burying them in endless testing which is stifling creativity and love of learning.
More than half a billion tax-payer dollars have been pulled out of public schools and diverted into for-profit and private schools. Indiana has one of the lowest per pupil funding levels in the country, according to the National Education Association. Indiana’s per-pupil funding – $7, 538 – was 36 percent below the national average, according to a 2017 NEA report.
Voucher programs have contributed to school closings and consolidations across the state.
There is a severe teacher shortage. The Statehouse’s response to the shortage of teacher’s onset from low pay is to allow schools to hire unlicensed teachers to make up at most 10 percent of their staff. This stagnation in pay over the years has made it difficult for schools to recruit and retain the most qualified educators.
Would you start looking for another job if your paycheck continued to shrink since 1999? Lawmakers must act or this shortage will continue to hurt communities.
Just got an email blast from NPE, which I’m sure will be reposted here, to sign a petition with the message, “I am proud of my public schools.” Sadly, I won’t sign because I am not proud of my public school district. I want to be. But there’s a huge chasm between “am” and “want to be.”
Excellent, Carol. Any feedback from you neighbors?
GregB: There are a few residents of my condo building who told me they always look for what I write. One elderly lady really liked this letter-to-the-editor about education.
I have to meet someone in the elevator, the hallways, or the basement. This doesn’t usually happen.
Great letter, Carol. And please, GregB, don’t get discouraged. Keep fighting the good fight.
Tryin’, Bob. Thanks to people like you, Carol, and Roy…
Love that tune, btw, GregB. And I feel the same. That comradeship in the Resistance is important to me.
Bob, having taught many subjects, I would agree with you as far as ELA. In math, the standards ARE the curriculum. If you don’t teach them, you are in violation of your contract and could be dismissed. In ELA the standards are tied into vague “skills”, so an inventive teacher can easily subvert the “system” because those skills can be applied to any reading material. You can teach irony by having your students read Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace” or O.Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi”. You can teach your young students the beginning of narrative with Gilgamesh’s adventurous attempts at immortality and continue into Homer’s Iliad – the curriculum is only limited by the teacher’s background knowledge and imagination. Thankfully, I am in a school where the teacher is allowed to create his/her own curriculum as long as s/he follows the “standards”, which are pretty universal.
There are many schools, Abby, in which English teachers are being forced to use curriculum materials, including some of the primary national ELA textbooks, that are largely, now, geared toward very narrow readings of text snippets for applications of the ELA “standards,” and it’s often the case that these materials are narrowly modeled on standardized test questions. There has been a dramatic narrowing of the curriculum, and innovation has been stopped cold. Here, one example of the kind of thing I’m talking about when I refer to narrowed focus due to these puerile “standards”:
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/on-developing-curricula-in-the-age-of-the-thought-police/
And yes, the math standards are the curriculum, and they are simply a less sensible version of the NCTM standards that preceded them.
Here’s another example, Abby:
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/03/15/what-happens-when-amateurs-write-standards/
I’m happy that the teachers in your school are able to innovate and actually teach English despite these moronic “standards.” Sounds as though you have relatively enlightened administrators. That’s not true in many places, where ELA test prep reigns supreme.
Bob,
I would have to agree with you. If I could not have any control over the material that my students read, then I would have to find another occupation. End of story. The input of the teacher and his/her own passions are so intrinsic to the spread of a love of literature, or a kindling of ideas. The late great Neil Postman said that teaching was a conserving profession, but later changed his mind and said that teaching was a subversive profession. The best teachers must always be subversive. When students come back to visit me from high school, it isn’t the “citations” they remember, but the plays they performed, the novels that intrigued them, the research papers on topics of their choice.
Sub-verting. Etymologically, turning over the soil. Preparing the ground for new growth. This is from a book I have been writing:
“The best learning is unlearning. You step through the wardrobe, fall down the rabbit hole, or slip through a wormhole into a place beyond your interpellations, beyond the collective fantasies that go by the name of common sense because what you seek is uncommon sense. Real learning requires a period of estrangement from the familiar and the familiar ways of seeing. You return to find the ordinary transmuted and wondrous. You see it anew, as on the first day of creation, as though for the first time.”
You speak truth from experience here, Abby!
Diane,
When I was in graduate school getting my M.ED, your books (and Schlesinger’s) were the only rational oasis in a pool of multicultural idiocy that I was forced to read, especially What do Your 17 Year Olds Know? Do you think things have improved? By the way,during my masters I unfortunately learned all about the history of testing.
I admire your crusade against charters and vouchers, but at some point one must ask–Education? to what end?And please don’t tell me teachers know best what to teach – please check the latest statistics. I hate to admit it, but teachers are at the bottom the barrel on ACT/SAT scores. I know that you don’t think that matters, but it does:
https://qz.com/334926/your-college-major-is-a-pretty-good-indication-of-how-smart-you-are/
As a parent I have had some horrific experiences with unqualified teachers. I certainly do not want them in control of my child’s education – there must be some sort of an external determination of how well the material has been learned.
Also, as a teacher, there is absolutely nothing that I can do about the socio-economic situation of my students. I can only hope to better their prospects in the future. That is why I am in education. If you don’t think you can make a difference, then this is not the career for you.
And Duane,
There is no doubt in my mind that those bridge designers passed their engineering exams. Is that not cause to worry?? Apparently the university wanted a “hip” bridge at all costs and the engineers were willing to oblige. See my earlier post on delusional thinking that led to similar disasters.
As for Wilson:
Non-violence is not a value: it is a means to an end. Sometimes it works (Gandhi/MLK) and sometimes it doesn’t (Neville Chamberlain). The value is what is behind the method (home state rule/civil rights/peace for Britain). What does Wilson want for his students (other than not to be violated by tests)? He never really posits a realistic value.
Don’t you think that there is something seriously wrong with a society that goes into mass psychosis every eight years (don’t forget the election of 2016)? Could it possibly be that the system that educated such people that is ultimately at fault?? See Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Lost Tools of Learning (available online as a pdf) for reasons of present morass.
Dear Abby,
I have always said and written that the US is a multicultural society, that we have to learn to live together, and that we have created an American culture that reflects many strands. My battle in the late 80s and early 90s was against ethnocentrism, where different groups contend that they are best of all because of their race and/or ethnicity. I am not a believer in racial pride, ethnic pride, or white nationalism.
Dear Abby,
I have met so many super smart teachers that I find it hard to take those data seriously. Plenty of people major in education and never teach. Plenty of teachers major in their subject matter and are not counted in those surveys. I would trust any teacher before i would trust a random state legislator. Re entry a couple of commenters here reported that a significant number of legislators in their state never went to college. And these are the people who want to decide how kids should be educated.
About teacher’s SAT scores: a) You get what you pay for and b) what the conditions that you create attract. If you want lots of good teachers, then you have to pay them well and create conditions involving significant professional autonomy. In the old days, bright women went into teaching because few other jobs were available to them, and in those dreadful times, these women had to put up with second-class status and low, low pay. But there is no captive teacher candidate pool now. You have to be able to attract first-rate talent.
I hasten to add that there are great teachers out there, right now, but many of them are becoming disillusioned. They are leaving the profession and warning others against entering it. Why? Because they are being scripted and subjected to ridiculous demands by Vichy collaborators with Education Deform.
Bob,
Let me know when you have published your book. I really admire your thoughts on education and especially on the evolution (or lack thereof) of human consciousness.
Your sister in research,,,,
Thank you, Abby!!!!
As any generalization this is, of course, is not entirely true. Flesch’s book came out in 1955, yet even now in 21st century many schools use Whole Language – where were your baby boomer poets, your thousands of well-meaning intellectual superiors, during the second half of the 20th century? The Dick and Jane were scripted, boring non-books. A sure way to kill the desire to read and a direct path to produce illiterates. All this happened way before the “deformers” started Common Core and testing. Yes, high stake testing does nothing to students themselves, it is purely the statistics engine for USED, but “learning” to read using Whole Language does even less. At least NCLB stipulated usage of phonics – cheap, universal, fast method of teaching reading. Did you know that during the Whole Language times the kids that could not memorize all these zillions of words — the “dyslexics” and “mental invalids” — were switched to phonics, because with phonics you need to memorize only 44 sounds and then some letter combinations, not thousands of separate words? So do not throw baby with bath water. Good, cheap, fast methods do exist as Flesch’s book proves. It is not the case of insufficient funding or high teacher to student ratio, it is often the case of using methods that simply do not work. Throwing more money and teachers into this bottomless pit will make no difference until the curricula and pedagogy are changed. No need to re-invent a steam engine, look at other countries where there are no remedial language classes, where it takes just several months in the first grade to learn how to read and then the kids never return to this ever again, instead building their abilities as readers and writers, learning grammar and syntax and style. No need to invent a pen that can write in zero gravity when you can use a pencil.
BA: “The Dick and Jane were scripted, boring non-books. A sure way to kill the desire to read and a direct path to produce illiterates.”
I LOVED Dick and Jane.
See Spot run,
Run, Spot, run.
Run, run, run
It was a whole word approach but I had a great time with Dick and Jane in the first and second grades. I loved the pictures and the words. It was fun. I have no idea what anyone else in my class thought.
Could not agree with you more about Whole Language, BA. Ignorance of linguistic science informed that movement. Yes, most of the grammar that we learn is done unconsciously. We are born with parts of it hardwired, and parameters are set by our ambient linguistic environments, but there is no hard-wired internal mechanism for intuiting sound-symbol correspondence. For almost all children, these need to be taught. The science on this is quite solid.
I discuss the problems with Whole Language and the Look, Say method in some detail here: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2017/09/02/on-the-pseudoscience-of-strategies-based-reading-comprehension-instruction-or-what-current-comprehension-instruction-has-in-common-with-astrology/
Roy–sorry-I just commented on your 1/31 @ 12:16 PM, but it ended up after GregB’s P.G. Wodehouse comment way up there.
(Congratulations, Bob, this seems to be one of the most commented upon posts–190, w/this one–on Diane’s blog!)
&–to GregB–yes, LOVE P.G. Wodehouse–I read those books & stories as well as reading comic books!
(Seriously, I love reading & always have, & I wish that for all children & adults.)
One of the least talked about points regrading the testing issue, is the perfect storm of circumstances that overcame virtually every public school district at the start of the decade. The devastating financial blow produced by the Great Recession (2009 – 2011) ravaged teaching staffs and programs. To call the cuts Draconian would be an understatement. Enter CCSS/RTTT/NCLBDW in 2012uish to fill the vacuum. Had the GR never occurred it would have been much more difficult to allow test-and-threaten to dominate the educational landscape to the ungodly degree that we’ve seen. Many districts have yet to recover; witness the absurd class loads of 200+ students.
If we could magically bring an abrupt end to testing, what would be left in its wake to fill the vacuum?
Another example of the Shock Doctrine of which I was unaware. Again, thanks for bringing it to our attention.
If high-stakes standardized testing were suddenly lifted, say, by federal law, it would be as though Dementors out of Harry Potter were lifted from our schools. Teachers could go back to teaching. Administrators could go back to worrying about matters that matter. Districts could spend the funds they are throwing away on these tests on wrap-around services for kids in poverty.
Not so sure it would be that seamless. There are legions of young teachers and administrators that know little else. And the CC standards would still haunt our classrooms while critics would scream that we’re afraid to be held accountable. The people in charge of our state education departments have known nothing but test-threaten-and-punish for two decades – they would have no fall back. Has the dependence on testing created the very need for it?
Almost everyone involved knows that the testing is a horrific scam, including administrators and state department officials who privately hate it but publicly support it. Undoing the damage done by Common Core will indeed take some time.
But I can say this much, the transition from the era of standards-and-testing Ed Deform would be a good problem to have.
“Almost everyone involved knows that the testing is a horrific scam, including administrators and state department officials who privately hate it but publicly support it.”
And people wonder why I call it a GAGA Good German (circa 1930s-40s) attitude.
Good enough distinction GregB?
Duane,
Stop using “Good German” as an insult.
I don’t like it any more than insulting Jews, Blacks, women, Hispanics, gays.
Just stop.
No, it’s not an insult and I don’t use it as an insult and never have. I’m of German heritage myself-my grandmother spoke German. I believe in “Language Police. . . ” you lamented “political correctness” and your and GregB’s comments and condemnations of the usage reek of political correctness, of being a “language police”.
The historical fact that you two find so appalling is that it took ordinary, plain folk turning a blind eye and/or ignoring what they saw going on around them that allowed the Holocaust to take place.
There is a holocaust of children’s mind occurring with the malpractices that have been implemented over the last 20 years. And nary a teacher or administrator has fought back against those malpractices. They have willingly implemented the malpractices.
Is that a harsh judgement? Yes and it should be!
You pick out a phrase you don’t like and rail against that but I’ve noticed no one ever, at least that I remember has commented on the Comte-Sponville quote:
“Should we therefore forgo our self-interest? Of course not. But it [self-interest] must be subordinate to justice, not the other way around. . . . To take advantage of a child’s naivete. . . in order to extract from them something [test scores, personal information] that is contrary to their interests, or intentions, without their knowledge [or consent of parents] or through coercion [state mandated testing], is always and everywhere unjust even if in some places and under certain circumstances it is not illegal. . . . Justice is superior to and more valuable than well-being or efficiency; it cannot be sacrificed to them, not even for the happiness of the greatest number [quoting Rawls]. To what could justice legitimately be sacrificed, since without justice there would be no legitimacy or illegitimacy? And in the name of what, since without justice even humanity, happiness and love could have no absolute value?. . . Without justice, values would be nothing more than (self) interests or motives; they would cease to be values or would become values without worth.”—Comte-Sponville [my additions]
Why no comments? Does the truth hit home too hard and rattle too many complacent consciences? Are educators so blind as to not see what is happening?
Or is it just easier to Go Along to Get Along like good Red Army members or good Khmer Rouge members?
The fact is that the GAGA crowd is even worse than those three historical examples because teachers and administrators don’t have to worry about losing their lives in protesting against these malpractice atrocities.
Duane,
There were many good Germans who openly or quietly opposed Hitler. The camps held many of them. The general who tried to assassinate Hitler was a good German; he was hung by piano wire until he died. Sophie and the White Rose Society were good Germans. Many ordinary citizens were drafted and had no choice but to serve, like people in other countries. My partner is a good German and she was born here.
What do you say about stereotyping of gays, women, blacks, Hispanics?
Opposing the Language Police is not the same as defending racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. A decent society requires civility, courtesy, empathy.
Well, Duane, since you’re unteachable, I’ll quote Earl Long as he described one of his lesser opponents: “You ain’t nuthin’ but a little pissant.” But I say it with love and a smile. Ain’t nuthin’ I can do about your ingrained bigotry.
Duane, as much as we p*ss each other off, I have a feeling we’d close down bars all over the place.
GregB,
I don’t doubt that we probably would have a good time. You keep on disparaging me, albeit supposedly in good humor. So I guess I’ll take it as such.
As far as learning. . .
Read and comprehend my response to Diane. Learn from it.
As it is what are your thoughts on what Comte-Sponville has to say?
Try this, Duane, how would you react to someone from another nation who called you a racist and hypocritical evangelical because all Americans obviously support the current occupant of the White House? I really don’t see how the quote you cite fits here. Call me stupid.
But since you’re interested in history, take a little time to peruse https://www.gdw-berlin.de/en/recess/biographies/index_of_persons/ and http://www.gedenkstaette-ploetzensee.de/index_e.html and ask yourself if these people fit the definition of your slander. Would they have been (rightly) outraged with your oversimplification? And if you want to read a good novel that is based on reality, try Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada and ask yourself if they fit your very narrow view and should be tarnished with it.
I call those who go along with the Ed Deforms Vichy collaborators. That makes the same point while avoiding the smearing of an entire population. Operating under an occupation is difficult. In my own classroom, I dutifully posted my stupid “Data Wall” (required, a condition of employment) and passed out the mandated CC$$ test preppy “literature” texts. Then, I closed my door and ignored the data wall and the textbook and used handouts and novels and plays and took every chance I could to expose the absurdity of the standards-and-testing regime to my colleagues and to admin, including writing exposes of the released questions from the state tests and of the shoddy test preppy textbook lessons and sharing these widely. One does what one can do. All the English teachers I knew who were any good did likewise, though there will always be the collaborators with this nonsense. Generally, in my experience, these were the ones who were profoundly ignorant of their subjects–the ones who would pronounce the name Yeats as “Yeets” or ask what a gerund was–the ones who thought that the Twilight novels were great literature. Fortunately, there weren’t many of these, but in my experience, there was a strong correlation between ignorance of English and willingness to be scripted.
It’s dependence, Rager, is like any substance addiction. Appears to be good but is very harmful. Full intervention needed.
“the perfect storm of circumstances that overcame virtually every public school district at the start of the decade. The devastating financial blow produced by the Great Recession (2009 – 2011) ravaged teaching staffs and programs.”
Very well said, and diversion of funds from the public schools by charters, voucher programs, testing, VAM, and other Ed Deform nonsense has made recovery from that well-nigh impossible.
You know as with anything there is always another side to a story. Recently on my Facebook feed my former students posted about two hip hop DJs who were discussing sending their children to public or private schools. My former student tagged me and noted how the efforts I spent to work with her after school or Saturdays were signs of why she would send her kids to public schools (I was certainly honored to be called out in that manner). However, interestingly enough one of her friends who did not go to school with her (in another state) wrote a very long post about her experience in public schools. “Throughout junior high (a public school) most teachers let you slide by, give you answers to the test right before the test… so I never had to discipline myself to study at night. I remember I learned how to play spades though. Then I went to high school. I started skipping classes to sit with my friends in other classes. My teachers really didn’t care. I remember in my social studies class, we were literally blasting music and playing spades the entire class while our teacher read the newspaper…. EVERY DAY!” The poster did note that she had some really good teachers in public schools…but also some really bad ones. Look, I get it. Things like common core or standardized testing didn’t make the bad teachers any better. Fair point. But will going back to letting teachers do whatever they want, where tests are written by teachers, etc. really going to solve the problem. And yes, to those here that say that my argument is about bad teachers, this is coming from a student, NOT me, talking about poor teachers. Another interesting piece of anecdotal evidence. A fair amount (say 10-20) of my former HS students already have kids of their own in elementary or middle schools. Are they sending their kids to public schools in the area. No, They are sending them to charters. Why? Because they recall their own poor experiences in elementary schools. Now, the irony is that in the district the elementary schools have actually gotten better since some type of movement towards accountability. More parents of means are choosing to stay in the district for elementary (before leaving for middle and high school).
My point in all of this (as I have said before and will say again). WHERE is the medium ground? Where can we have some type of accountability. Because while yes, I agree that the new reforms aren’t working, well, at least it was an attempt to improve things as clearly in some cases the old ways weren’t working either.
Where are the administrators? Where is the principal? You are very contentious of teachers but you forget that they have supervisors?
No doubt they have supervisors, but honestly to me this seems like shifting the blame from one person to another…you and others here state that we should place decision making into the hands of teachers, but then you state that it’s the supervisor’s role to monitor the teachers. Yes, I do agree with that. But that’s like a child misbehaving and then saying that it’s the parent’s fault that they are misbehaving. Again, there HAS to be a balance. When I was a student in HS, teachers were never at fault. Yet when I was in the classroom (as late as 2009) plenty of parents tried to put the blame around poor grades on the teacher (even if the student had not studied or done their work). So, Dr. Ravitch, I ask…what SHOULD be done if a teacher is doing poorly? Or are you saying that’s where the change should have happened. and not at the classroom level?
jlsteach: I resent your implication that so many teachers are doing poorly. i worked in 5 different districts in Illinois. Because I was a traveling music teacher, I interacted with many, many different schools. I would say that overwhelmingly teachers are doing a good job under difficult circumstances.
I also worked in two different schools in Bolivia and Malaysia. These teachers were also working and doing good jobs.
There will always be a very, very few who aren’t great but this happens in every job. Please stop attacking teachers. I am insulted by your words.
I worked my ___off and I resent the implication that teachers are the problem. Administrators, I won’t stand up for them.
Carolmalaysia – we may have different opinions of what a good job is then. I also think that this is part of the issues with education discussion in general. In many cases schools or policy makers are not willing to face hard truths but rather at times want to sugar coat things and point fingers in another direction. The Ed reformers would say it’s the teachers fault. You or others here say it’s common core’s fault or it’s the administrators fault. I say it’s choice D, “all of the above”. True reform needs to look at all aspects. I shared a post from a student that stated her opinion and experience and it didn’t seem to phase your opinion at all, but instead you defensively told your story about working so hard in schools and knowing teachers that work hard. I know that there are teachers that work hard. I think the best teacher in my daughters school IS the music teacher. In fact I worked with her to get instruments so that 60% of grade 4 and 5 could participate in instrumental band (we are a school with 50% free and reduced meals and about 90% minority population). But in my work with a local district I also see teachers that aren’t working hard – that are sitting down during an observation while kids complete worksheets. Now you or others can add excuses for why this is: kids don’t have books, teacher had two jobs and this is all he can do for lesson planning, etc. When do we stop with the excuses saying poor teaching is okay?
jlsteach:”When do we stop with the excuses saying poor teaching is okay?”
There are ways to get rid of poor teachers if the system is working. “I also see teachers that aren’t working hard.” You see MANY who aren’t working hard? If it is that bad, do something. This is where an effective administration should be doing its job. This is not ‘passing the buck’.
Thanks for working to get band instruments into schools who are poor. I did the same thing since I was an elementary band teacher and some of my schools were poverty level.
“If the system is working” – can you or someone else site one district where this process is working. And not a small district with one or a few schools but a larger size district. From what I’ve read in some of these districts removing teachers for poor performance can take up to two years. And yes administrators are somewhat to blame but the level of paperwork they have to show go remove a teacher can be over the top.
This is why I’m saying there needs to be a balance between responsibility
jlsteach: There are states where teachers no longer have any job security. Now teachers can be fired because the principal has a relative who needs a job. Or, the principal gets rid of a teacher because she didn’t bow low enough. Teachers are afraid to speak out for what they believe in, one thing being the ridiculousness of excessive testing. Teachers need protection from these abuses.
I need the advise of someone who is teaching now. What happens if someone is incompetent?
I still say, your negativity is overwhelming your perspective.
So you’re right about some states that do that. I heard about a school where a principal did what you said – that she hired her friends or relatives as teachers.
This is a perfect example of the pendulum swinging too far. Policy makers attempted to put laws into place to remove poor teachers but they went too far. To me the answer is in the middle.