Fred Smith is a testing expert in New York who worked for the NYC Board of Education for many years. He advises the opt out movement.
He writes:
“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.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The figures for money spent on the shoddy, unvalidated, unreliable, curricula-and-pedagogy narrowing, useless summative high-stakes standardized tests that do not measure what they purport to measure is DRAMATICALLY underestimated in almost all reports. Not figured into these VAST expenditures are the billions spent to upgrade computers so that kids can take tests on them, the billions spent on online and print study materials that mimic the tests, the billions spent on benchmark and interim testing in imitation of the high-stakes tests. And, of course, there are the astonishing opportunity costs of all the lost time and energy and resources that could have been dedicated to learning and to ad hoc formative and diagnostic assessment.
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Just imagine what type of useful expenditures the state could have made with $38 million dollars. It could have funded wrap around services for needy schools or even helped cities repair aging buildings. New York needs to get out of the “high stakes arms race” and stop the testing madness that plagues our students and teachers with fear and tedium. New York should lead the way for other states that want to provide students with rich varied curricula that truly educates.
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“…the billions spent on benchmark and interim testing in imitation of the high-stakes tests.”
And then there is the time wasted on these tests, robbed from class by administration that is terrified of losing their position to bad test scores. To cover their posterior portions, they require teachers to fill out all manner of paperwork identifying skills their students lack as demonstrated on common formative assessments (CFAs). They require the lesson plans to reference these tests, they keep spreadsheets based on these tests, and they require teachers to lockstep in teaching to these tests so that any decline in performance cannot be attributed to the administration.
Teachers compete for subjects that are not tested and thereby ignored.
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Not to mention “Data Walls” and “Data Chats.” Imagine, doing benchmark testing six times a year, then meeting one-on-one with every student to discuss the benchmark testing results, and you start getting an inkling of how much time and effort is wasted with this crap. I remember when the clueless folks at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute ran a piece claiming that testing took only a week out of the school year, or some such utter nonsense. These people reveal, over and over and over again, just how very little they know about what actually happens in classrooms and schools as a result of the idiotic policies that they are paid to shill.
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Parents: It is your DUTY, for your children and for the future of American education, to Opt Out of these execrable tests. It’s long past time. Join with other parents. Join with the Resistance. End the madness.
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Something about the term “testing expert” does not sit well. Anyone else find that term grating?
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Yes.
But if there is one, from what I’ve read of his writings I believe that Fred qualifies.
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The true testing expert, the top of the line, THE authority in testing and assessment is Noel Wilson. No one else comes close.
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The phrase has become suspect given the number of “testing experts” who have, in the past, supported these egregious high-stakes standardized tests. However, this is an area in which true expertise is extraordinarily valuable in order to expose the high-stakes testing for the scam, the flim-flam, the con that it is.
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Common sense needs to rule. When the teachers administering the test say that the questions are invalid, irrelevant, or not appropriate, then, as the experts on the best interests of their students, their voices should count the most. In addition, if annotated results aren’t shared in a timely fashion (noting the weakness and strengths of each student in that subject), then these tests are worthless as an educational assessment.
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In general, teachers and proctors are forbidden to look at the questions and have to sign agreements with severe consequences for doing so. The results always come months later. They are never disaggregated by skill, and, at any rate, that wouldn’t be valid because one or two questions dealing with “skills” as vaguely described as those in the CC$$ for ELA are couldn’t ever produce valid results. The whole thing is a terrible scam. The test makers naturally pull their very best questions to use as sample release items, and these are a joke. They never hold up to the slightest professional scrutiny. Time to end the scam.
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One of the biggest issues with Ed Deform, and one of the reasons why it has been an UTTER FAILURE, is that the measures that they have made the be-all-and-end-all of education–scores on these high-stakes standardized tests–are invalid, unreliable, and extraordinarily narrowly chosen even if there were accurate, which they are not. The tests simply do not measure what they are purported to measure, and the results from them have no value. Garbage in (the test scores), garbage out (educational decisions made based on those). The devil, in Ed Deform, is very much in the details of the absurd tests and the puerile “standards” on which they are based. Far, far too often, the discussions of Ed Deform start with the unwarranted assumption that these high-stakes tests are valid. In ELA, they most certainly are not. But the results of these tests are accepted even though the tests themselves are delivered sight unseen. Imagine buying a car without looking at it and testing it. That’s precisely what happens with these tests. I have examined thousands of these ELA test questions. They are shockingly poorly conceived. This ought to be a national scandal.
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I think every single person who thinks those tests are good, should take every single one of them, and their scores published. That should bring those publishing companies a lot of money.
How about a banner: SAVE OUR YOUNG! Give those test to the deformers.
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It would, indeed, be amusing to see the scores on these tests of the legislators who approve them. Extraordinarily amusing. Arne Duncan, are you listening here? But even a lot of the Ed Deformers are starting to question the high-stakes testing and the Common Bore, given that their deforms have produced NO STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT IMPROVEMENTS on their own favored measure, scores on these invalid, unreliable, woefully narrow, shoddily prepared, USELESS tests.
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I would settle for every single private school in NY State having their students take state tests and having the results of students in private schools published (by school, not individual results) so we can rank private schools via the only criteria that educators believe is valid.
Oh that’s right, the few private schools that take the exam have mediocre to subpar results that are never mentioned. I can just see Eva Moskowitz crowing about how her charter school is far superior to Collegiate and Trinity and Dalton as proven by the fact that her passing rates on the state exams were better.
I’d love to see a group of thoughtful private school administrators get together and have every one of their 3rd through 8th grade students take the state tests along with public school students. Or I’d like them to do an experiment to have every one of their students take last year’s state exams to see their scores.
Then they could be compared with students’ CTP4 scores to see how if they correlate or if there are students who are noted as above average by private school standards who are mediocre by public school standards. Or vice versa.
I notice that any time both private school students and public school students take the SAME exam, suddenly educator reformers remain mum when critics attack the value of the exam.
You don’t see education reformers demanding that students be admitted to Ivy League colleges via their SAT exam only or demanding that private schools who refuse to have their students take AP exams are — as Arne Duncan says — just afraid of finding out how weak their private schools are.
Does Arne Duncan attack private schools who claim that no mere AP exam can demonstrate how superior their students are so they are opting out of AP exams instead of making sure all their students take them?
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I don’t know if you have seen the latest ed reform voucher proposal- it’s like a super voucher.
It came from Jeb Bush and the American Enterprise Institute- all ed reform ideas trace back to Jeb Bush, but this is what struck me about it:
“Parents could still choose to enroll their children in public schools using their entire annual funding allotment to pay for the full complement of services individual schools offer—from a full day of instruction to extracurricular activities to supplemental tutoring.”
Unless you read ed reformers you don’t really appreciate HOW LITTLE they value existing public schools and public school families and students.
The super-voucher would pull massive amounts of funding out of public schools. The schools would collapse. AT BEST they could offer a bare bones menu of essential academic courses.
Yet, in ed reform circles, they’re dismissed with “parents could still choose public schools” – as if schools exist and function by magic, and NO AMOUNT of ed reform disinvestment will ever affect them.
They take public schools for granted. In this fanciful ideology, “public schools” are just there… standing as a backup. This just isn’t true. They’re making a promise they can’t keep.
I know why they do it- it would POLITICALLY disastrous to tell the public they want to replace public schools with hundreds of individual contractors, so they insist public schools would still magically somehow still be there when they pull all the funding out of them.
There are no sacrifices in this “movement”. No trade-offs. “Want a curated collection of educational experiences for “choice” families AND public schools as a default back up? You can have both!”
They’re telling the public there is no risk AT ALL with privatization, no POSSIBLE downside and that’s not true. The people who are taking the risk in these privatization schemes are public school supporters and families. They’re the ones who are exposed to all the downside. But ed reform won’t tell them that, because if they did the schemes would be political non-starters.
https://pie-network.org/article/to-fulfill-its-potential-unbundled-education-needs-rebundling-too/
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Jeb Bush is a parasite and carpetbagger. With little to no talent of his own, his only claim to fame is to raid the coffers of public schools with horrible, schemes that Florida falls for every time. None of his schemes has any basis in fact.
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I went to the Florida course choice website because it’s being sold as high quality courses in the “unbundled” super voucher plan Jeb Bush came up with.
The reality in Florida? It’s online junk from Connections Academy. That’s the big innovation in Florida- they’ll allow parents to buy garbage online courses from the big national for-profits with public money. This is what they hope to export to the rest of the country.
They oversell everything in ed reform. Salespeople who exaggerate the value of their product aren’t confident their product is any good. Don’t buy from those people.
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What a Teachers Movement Can Look Like
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/02/los-angeles-teachers-union-strike-education-reform
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The grade 4-8 tests in NYS are only part of the problem. Pearson also writes the NYS regents exams. These exams (at least the ones in mathematics) are badly written. Since passing a certain number of these exams is required for graduation, students can’t opt out. At one time the NYS regents exams were written by teachers in the state and were quite good.
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The Algebra I cut score for “passing” is 27 out of 86 possible points; students are allowed multiple re-takes as well. That alone is indicative of a poorly constructed test. In what should be a fundamental algebra test, and 9th graders are not even asked to solve by proportion. This is one of five Regents exams that cognitively disabled students and ELLs must pass in order to graduate high school in NYS.
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I once plotted several decades of cut scores on the New York state ELA and Math exams. From year to year, the cut scores jumped around like a gerbil on methamphetamines. They were obviously being set to get whatever results the bosses wanted in a given year, and equally obviously, there was little cross-year reliability of the tests, suggesting (which is, of course, the case) that the tests were terribly designed. Often, the cut scores in a given year were very slightly above what one would be expected to get, on average, from simply guessing.
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In New York,the cut scores mysteriously dropped in 2009, the same year as the mayoral election. This Gabe Bloomberg a lot tobrag about. The following year, the state commissioned a study andconcluded the cut scores had been dropped and the questions were predictable. Poof! The Bloomberg miracle disappeared. Expect to hear more bragging about the NYC miracle if Bloomberg runsfor president.
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Another aspect of the scam. This is not an aberration. It’s the norm. It’s how things work in the sleazy high-stakes standardized testing business.
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When I read of the old gag order on teacher’s critiquing of tests, I am reminded of an incident that happened here when the state made up their own tests. Back then, they were just becoming a high stakes game, and a Collegue found a question on the English Competency test that was in error because there were two correct answers. Thinking the state would be generally concerned that a student might not graduate because of one of their errors, he contacted a member of the state department. What occurred was a stonewalling of epidemic proportions. Pearson is not the only immorality in the game. Often, it is the state department.
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Very, very often, these state department officials move back and forth between jobs with the state and VERY lucrative jobs or consulting contracts with the testing companies. And, ofc, the officials rarely have the expertise necessary to judge the quality of the tests–obviously, given how bad the tests are. The high-stakes testing in the US, particularly in ELA, is a total scam.
Years, ago, the guy who marketed brine shrimp as “Sea Monkeys” marketed an “Invisible goldfish.” The purchaser got an empty aquarium tank and a packet of fish food and instructions to fill the tank with water. The package included a guarantee that the fish would never be seen.
Well, the high-stakes tests are as clearly scams as the invisible goldfish was, but there’s a difference: This scam has ENORMOUS consequences in dollar costs and, especially, in opportunity costs. For an entire generation now, enormous learning opportunities have been lost to these stupid tests, and they have had no positive effects whatsoever. ENOUGH!!!!
OPT OUT!
Subjecting children to these is child abuse.
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This is not going to go over well but here goes…
Everything above is accurate (well, except the complicit educators) – –
But what if by some miracle of clarity and sanity the Regents or DOE or some powers that be stopped testing (although NCLB aka RTTT aka ESEA requires testing).
Imagine you clicked your heels three times and it’s back to Kansas without testing.
What do you all propose to illustrate that kids are learning? One by one and collectively as a school?
Parents and schools expect to know if their schools are teaching children well and progressing.
Parents, taxpayers, colleges, employers expect a diploma to mean something and grades don’t tell the picture.
So throw out the 3-8 tests AND the dreadful bi-products of it (formative assessments, benchmark assessments, performance assessments, computerized practice with trackers, etc.) – – What do we use?
I’d go back to the original concept of testing at transition grades to determine “readiness” for the next level. 5th graade, 8th grade, 10th grade.
But no assessments is not an option. So what works?
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Grade span testing in basic skills would be the proper solution to this mess we are now in. Developing tests that discriminate between the reading and levels of 8 and 9 year olds is impossible anyway. However, the origins of the Common Coercion was to link test scores to teacher evaluations. David Coleman gave little thought to the 70% of teachers who taught un-tested subjects. Grade span testing would have spoiled their intended hunt for “bad” teachers.
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reading and writing levels
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Regarding the 3 to 8 Common Core (recently re-branded as “Next Generation”) ELA exams, the general public is probably unaware of the inexcusable policy of requiring students (ELLs and LDs) who cannot read to sit for two days/four hours staring at exams that might as well be written in hieroglyphics. Learning disabled students who have “test read” as part of their IEP are suddenly left without help if taking a state “reading” test.
The fact that adults participate in this level of child cruelty is an embarrassment to our profession.
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Obscene. In a better world, doing this to such a child would be actionable in court.
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Common Core standards, and all of the re-brands, are the root cause of poorly written, age inappropriate tests. It is impossible for test developers to write fair and objective test items given the “performance-based” standards and vague, worse than subjective skill sets being tested for. Why are they worse than subjective? Because the MC items demand one right answer for highly subjective items.
Here is just one of many released items from the 2018 exam:
“Oh no” said Stella as the string of her shark kite tangled with the string of a biplane kite.
The biplane dove toward the ground, the grinning shark spiraling behind it. “I feel like a spider in a web” she said, frowning as the tangled strings drifted down around her.
1) In paragraph 1, [above] what does Stella mean when she says,
“I feel like a spider in a web.”?
A) Stella is untangling the strings
B) Stella is confused by the strings
C) Stella is surrounded by tangled strings
D) Stella is winding the string around her spool
Here is another test item (passage from, “Alex, the Talking Parrot”):
2) Which sentence from the passage shows a “cause and effect” relationship?
A) “But there is one parrot that who understands more than 100 words and understands their meanings.”
B) “Teaching Alex to speak words that he understands has let Irene talk to him directly.”
C) “In this way, Irene is finding out what sorts of things Alex’s brain can do.”
D) “He can also make comparisons, such as bigger or smaller and same or different, between objects.”
Can you guess which grade level these items are from?
3? 4? 5? 6? 7? 8?
Yes, these items were written for children age 8
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Obscene. A couple years ago, I did an analysis of all the sample release questions for our 9th and 10th-grade state ELA exams in Florida. Same sort of thing. Some questions were so poorly written that none of the answers provided was, in fact, a correct answer to the question AS WORDED. In many cases, more than one answer was arguably correct. In many cases, the test author(s) clearly did not understand the passage or some key concept. And these were the sample release questions–the ones chosen by the test maker as samples for public viewing–their BEST FOOT FORWARD!!! I sent copies of my analysis to all the administrators and teachers in my school.
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