New Jersey believes in testing its children until they cry. The state clung to PARCC long after almost every other state dropped it. Now an even worse disaster is coming down the pike. Now is the time for Governor Phil Murphy to step in and stop this fiasco.
Jersey Jazzman called the testing regime in New Jersey “testing chaos.”
Students are forced to take tests in order to graduate, even though the tests have not been validated for this purpose.
The students are required to take tests for which they have not been adequately prepared.
He writes:
I think this is deeply unfair for at least one reason: The state has not been providing the resources necessary for the majority of students to meet this new, higher standard.
The usual suspects have, of course, been making their case that New Jersey must have these tests in place to ensure that high school diplomas “mean something.” They worry that without a rigorous exit exam, New Jersey — consistently one of the highest-performing states in a variety of educational outcome measures — will dumb down its standards and leave its students less than “college- and career-ready.”
First of all: if there is any empirical evidence that high school exit exams, by themselves, improve educational outcomes, I haven’t seen it. After all, weighing the pig doesn’t fatten it up. Plenty of states don’t have exit exams; some, like Connecticut, perform well in national and international comparisons. Where, then, is the evidence exit exams lead to better outcomes?
Second: I often read op-eds like this and think the writers must believe that all we need to do to improve educational outcomes is just try a little harder. Those of us who actually work in schools, however, know it’s never that simple. If a child shows up at the schoolhouse door hungry or ill or in stress, that child will have a disadvantage compared to others in academic outcomes. So if we want all of New Jersey’s students to meet a “high” standard, we have to ask whether those students are arriving at school ready to meet that standard.
Further, we have to ask whether the school itself has the resources it needs to educate children to meet higher levels of achievement. Remember: New Jersey has not been providing its schools with what the state itself determined was necessary for children to achieve equal education opportunity.
Worse, that determination was made back when the standards were lower. Now, suddenly, “reformers” want to raise the bar, without the slightest thought as to whether schools might need even more resources to achieve even higher outcomes.
SOS New Jersey pleads for help to stop this travesty!
THIS IS AN EMERGENCY!!!
The horrible legislation that would force our children to take an unlimited number of standardized tests in any grade in order to graduate from high school, is up for a full Senate vote tomorrow and just got posted for a full Assembly vote on Monday. The bills (A4957/S3381) were introduced by Senator Teresa Ruiz in the NJ State Senate and by Assemblywoman Pam Lampitt in the NJ Assembly.
Having the full Assembly vote on this is entirely up to Speaker Craig Coughlin. Please do three 3 right now:
1) Call Speaker Coughlin’s office(732) 855-7441 and ask that Speaker Coughlin pull A4957/S3381 from Monday’s Assembly voting agenda. Tell them you do not want our children forced to take unlimited numbers of standardized tests to graduate from high school.
2) Let Speaker Coughlin know on twitter how you feel about this awful legislation @SpeakerCoughlin
3) Call your Assembly members and ask them to oppose A4957. You can leave a message on their voicemail. Call both your State Senators and two Assembly members. You can look up your legislators here: https://www.njleg.state.nj.us/districts/municipalities.asp
The entire NJ Assembly is up for reelection this November. Let them know parents will NOT FORGET!
PLEASE GET YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY INVOLVED IN STOPPING THIS AWFUL BILL!!
ONCE THIS LEGISLATION BECOMES LAW, IT WILL BE ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO GET RID OF IT AND OUR CHILDREN WILL BE PAYING THE PRICE FOR MANY, MANY YEARS TO COME!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
No different in MD. We will now have zombie PARCC as our graduation requirement as opposed to the regular PARCC. There used to be other options….SAT, AP, ACT, Accuplacer scores…..but every year they change it up and parents are always confused. Right now, every HS child has to pass ELA 10 and Alg I to get a HS Diploma. If a child can’t pass after 2 (maybe 3?) tries, they are given a “Bridge project” that they must do in school and it takes away time from the classroom where they can really be “learning” (we have test prep as curriculum in our schools so I can’t really say that they learn that much).
the outrageous irony behind TAKING KIDS OUT OF CLASSES FOR TESTING: where do children learn the information taught in the classes they are forced to miss in order to prove on test after test that they do not know the information they have been forced to miss because they are taken out of their classes so often for testing
The Common Core and Its Associated Testing
Proof that you can take something as interesting and important as is, say, studying George Orwell’s 1984 and turn the whole process into
a series of trivial, disconnected, out-of-context exercises in
choosing from a group of sentences
the sentence that best expresses how a simile in sentence 2 of paragraph 2 of chapter 7 is used by the author to convey tone and mood,
thereby making BOTH
the learning of literary techniques and
the reading of the novel itself
of no intrinsic appeal or perceived long-term value whatsoever
and in the process,
reduce the whole of ELA to trivial test prep exercises
Please DO NOT, under any circumstances, address in your comments on this blog entry, what I had to say here or discuss, in general, the Common Coring of American education. That would be too much like actual, real-world response to writing. However, you can, for extra credit, write a five-paragraph theme on how my word choice affected this blog entry’s tone and mood. Remember, no independent thinking by students, teachers, or scholars is allowed: Bill Gates and David Coleman have done that for you.
Next class: American history, Civil War unit, all of which will be devoted to exercises on ways to compare the relative sizes of Union and rebel cannonballs in keeping with Standard 666.1-A on comparison and contrast.
Here’s the thing about the ELA tests:
They are based on “standards” so vague and abstract and content free that those standards cannot be made operational enough to be validly or reliably tested.
If actual scholars and researchers were allowed to analyze, independently, the questions on the test (at this point they can do this only for sample release questions), the tests would quickly be revealed as the work of con man (and women): con man. n. One who practices deception short for “confidence man.”
In other words, the tests do not measure what they are purported to measure.
And, of course, the tests, though elevated to the status of being all-important, don’t cover content (that is, almost entirely ignore descriptive and procedural knowledge,
and they are of no diagnostic value whatsoever because the results take a long time to arrive and, at any rate, are not disaggregated in any useful way (and couldn’t be because one can’t make valid or reliable inferences about particular student learning based on a single question related to one tortured question, on a test, dealing with one “standard” so vaguely written as not to be testable).
Furthermore, DECADES of such testing has not improved outcomes by the Ed Deformers’ own preferred measure, these ridiculous test scores, and hasn’t closed achievement gaps, again according to those measures, but it has had the effect of dramatically narrowing and distorting ELA curricula and pedagogy.
These tests are a multi-billion-dollar scam. 21st century snake oil. Almost every English teacher knows this. Anyone so ignorant that he or she cannot see this should not be anywhere near an education decision-making desk.
Opt out. Doing that is a civic duty.
cx: (and couldn’t be because one can’t make valid or reliable inferences about particular student learning based on a single tortured question, on a test, related to a single “standard” so vaguely written as not to be testable)
In MD we don’t have Opt Out. I REFUSED for both my children and then I opted child #2 out of public education and pay for private HS. Child #1 got grandfathered in because she was the “cut score” year so she remains in public school. I know this is the intended result, but I really had to save child #2 (and myself) from 4 years of ELA and Math test prep insanity. School in our common core/PARCC aligned district is just dreadful. Child #2 being a boy, would not have done well with the ELA “standards” or the strange math.
The Ed Deformer’s plan is devilishly crafty–use the high-stakes tests to turn public schools into test-prep centers, siphon off the best students and necessary funding via vouchers and charters, and thereby privatize schooling and kill the teachers’ unions. I sympathize with your plight. Many public school districts have so bought into the standards-and-testing regimen that individual parents with the means to do so have good reason to pull their kids out, but by this means, public schooling is severely compromised. A good friend of mine lives in Ohio and has two small children. She made the decision to put those kids into private school because Ohio (home to the infamous Thomas B. Fordham Institute) has gone so far down the road of all-test-prep all the time. This decision, to keep the kid in or not, is a difficult one. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. The ideal thing would be if parents banded together, as they did on Long Island, and opted out in large numbers. But parents could really use some help there. We need the Teachers’ unions to get behind the resistance to Ed Deform–to the whole standards-and-testing regimen–in a big way. We need strikes by teachers aimed at the testing and in support of parents who want to opt out of it. That could be the Turning Point that finally puts the stake into the heart of Ed Deform, but it would take visionary new leadership in the unions to make that happen.
STATEWIDE students STRIKE over excessive testing is needed to end this GOP harassment of students.
Unfortunately in NJ, it’s a lot of Democrats that are forcing testing on our children.
Norcross and Sweeney are big fans of charter schools, especially KIPP, also TFA.
Both are Democrats.
You are exactly correct, Mr. Gray, in saying that the way to end Ed Deform is via state-wide strikes. We need the unions on the side of ending the standards-and-testing regime. The combination of parents and teachers, backed by the unions, would bring this shameful period in the history of American education to an end.
I have an idea.
Let’s give these tests to the corporate deformer vultures and their billionaire oligarch vampire masters and if they fail (the test will be graded by children and public school teachers), they lose all of their wealth and property and also their citizenship and are kicked out of the country. In fact, I think they should be sent to Antarctica to live out the rest of their lives. They can become ice and snow farmers.
Time to place the blame for hungry and impoverished children on the politicians who do nothing about it. How many NJ teachers send food home with students so they can eat on the weekends? How many teachers lobby politicians to raise funds to assist the communities in expansion and staffing because families cannot support the upkeep of the district. We need to do better than test our kids to death.