Tennessee has had endless problems with its state tests. They are called TNReady, but they are NeverReady.
The state just chose Pearson to manage its testing program, despite Pearson’s long history of problem-plagued tests.
The British publishing house has been dropped by other states, but Tennessee is placing its bet on Pearson.
New York dropped Pearson after the #pineapplegate affair. See here and here.
Pearson’s PARCC Test encouraged 200,000 students to opt out of state testing in New York.
Texas dropped Pearson, perhaps when it realized that $500 million a year was excessive.
Good luck, Tennessee!
On the other hand, why not try a radical experiment and trust teachers to judge the progress of their students? They know what they taught and they know their students. Think of the savings!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
They chose to ditch Questar which has had huge problems with breaches and time-outs with computerized based testing in many states, and whose test quality is no better. https://www.sltrib.com/news/education/2019/05/26/utah-knew-company-it/
Exactly. And Utah signed while knowing the problems. Idiots.
WLLL –WHAT LEARNING LOOKS LIKE was the mantra and the OBJECTIVE of the research– When Harvard came to study my practice for the Pew New Standards PERFORMANCE STANDARDS;, I herd those words from the first day of seminars they gave in NYC District 2 ( which got the Pew $$ when thy selected my classroom for the research on Harvard’s Principles of Learning,)
Over 20,000 teachers were observed in order to establish the Genuine ASSESSMENT & authentic EVALUATION principle. (Love the. adjectives… because the reality of testing for memory is not a genuine way to judge PERFORMANCE.)
And yet, because corporate money runs America — and so does Pearson , like Walton and every entity in the EDUCATIONAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, (EIC) https://greatschoolwars.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/eic-oct_11.pdf woos the legislatures in the 50 states, and they get to call the shots in the 15,880 separat3 school systems.
It works and the reason why is soooo simple.
You see, everyone who went to school knows what teaching looks like– or imagines that they do.
Fancy bulletin boards and lots of kids sitting at computers makes parents sooo happy. But that is not learning.
We spend 180 days, 5 days a week for 40 weeks with a child… and for each and every child, a GENUINE professional teacher -practitioner* watches, observes and evaluates what that little brain can do, and what it still needs to learn.
* educated, experienced, professional as opposed to a trained TFA.
In this way, every student has objectives THAT ARE SET by a professional TEACHER-PRACTITIONER!
( HEY, out there—>>>> isn’t it time YOU started using that phrase instead of ‘teacher?)
The EIC and its lobbyist$ are patient. Little by little ,like they are doing in Pa and Rochester ( as Diane writes) they replace local control, where parents talk to teachers and ask the crucial questions about what is ongoing, and how their kids are doing.
How simple is that!
Tests evaluate memory, not performance. Period!
Tests do not show what a chid needs to do next to LERN A SKILL… and thinking is THE skill that cannot be taught by by a test.
My career ended 20 years ago, and I never used a test to evaluate anything in my English.Communication Arts classroom. I used portfolio, and other performance methods to assess what my kids were able to do… like think, speak, read, and write coherent thoughts.
Even spelling was not tested. They wrote for me, and if they could not spell, their writing showed it… and I spoke with them and their parents. about my expectations… CLEAR EXPECTATIONS was the FIRST PRINCIPLE OF LEARNING… BTW!
I am exhausted by this conversation.
Agggh!
Heard not herd… and it is in writing that demonstrates that… not a test.
Musical test Companies
Musical testing
Pick and drop
Vest and divesting
Flip and flop
Pearson was stranded
Sans a chair?
Give ’em a hand and
Hire ’em there!
Not only that, but Pearson still has a hand in expensive teacher certification procedures in New York State; walked the State Education Department into discredited, un-mandated stand-alone field testing on a massive scale, during its five-year run as Common Core test provider; and is responsible for the yet-to-be validated Specialized High School Admissions Tests in New York City.
We in New York are set up to pay for anything that appears to be required, rather than refuse to comply.
more states adopting the “teachers must repeatedly pay Pearson to take tests to prove ability” agenda
And now a word from our sponsor:
Pearson, Not Persons!
All your base are belong to us!
YUP!
On the other hand, why not try a radical experiment and trust teachers to judge the progress of their students? They know what they taught and they know their students. Think of the savings!
Amen to that.
Many millions of dollars and the breathtaking opportunity cost of doing test prep instead of educating students.
Which state will be the first to tell the federal government to take its testing requirement and. . . . OK, there are some things I am not allowed to say on Diane’s page.
BTW, teacher grades have ALWAYS been better predictors of success in college than are the SAT and ACT.
Do you suppose Diane would allow the phrase “Shove it where the sun don’t shine”?
Its not my usage but the phrase doesn’t contain any offensive words.
“Shove” is ok. So is “sun” and “shine.”
Some PRETTY SLOW LEARNERS
(or some well compensated ones)
in the Tennessee Department of Education!!!
This would be funny if it weren’t so tragic for the students and teachers and parents of the state of Tennessee.
Is there anyone with a brain not paid in some manner by the Ed Deform machine who still thinks that high-stakes standardized testing is a good idea? An entire generation of students has now grown up under this Vichy regime. And none of its promises were kept. The tests have NOT improved educational outcomes. They haven’t narrowed achievement gaps. They have cost BILLIONS of dollars that could have been wisely spent elsewhere (on wrap-around services for impoverished kids, for example), and they have dramatically distorted and narrowed curricula and pedagogy.
Enough already!!! This is insane. The testing is a vampire. It sucks the lifeblood out of K-12 education. Put a stake in it.
It’s the height of stupidity to continue doing what has so obviously, utterly failed.
Pearson is the dregs of the testing industry. Seriously, students in Pearson tests and surveys are like Alice in Wonderland. Tennessee is making a mistake. Is there a good testing company, though? The real solution would be to stop mandatory testing, but since corrupt Congress has its head buried in the sand, wouldn’t the best compromise be to have school districts design their own pencil and paper tests with committees of practicing teachers?
Different con artist, same shell game.
It is literally impossible to design valid tests of the Common [sic] Core [sic] in ELA. The “standards” are too abstract and vague and broad to be operationalized sufficiently to be validly tested, and because the standards are nothing but a list of “skills,” they leave out much of what constitutes attainment in reading and writing. The tests are a scam. And so is what they purportedly (but do not) measure.
Consider this. A given standardized high-stakes test of ELA will contain one or two questions for each standard. So, for example, there will be one or two questions that supposedly measure a student’s ability to make inferences based on evidence (one of the “standards”). Well, there are three major categories of inference (induction, deduction, and abduction) and literally thousands of subtypes of inference under these. And one or two questions will validly measure whether a student has this ability? The very notion is absurd, and the slightest bit of thought about that would have revealed it to be. These “standards” should have been laughed off the national stage when they first appeared, and the tests along with them. It’s shocking, really, that they weren’t, and that they weren’t doesn’t speak very highly of those in power in ELA education–of their seriousness and depth of knowledge of their subject.
The extent to which a given person takes the ELA “standards” and the tests based on them seriously is a pretty accurate rough-and-ready measure of his or her competence in the English language arts. Most teachers I know think them ridiculous. Here, an analysis of one of these “standards”:
and here, another:
I agree. Completely. It’s given that standardized test results do not measure anything other than parental income level. I only seek ways, navigating the horrible “standardized” system in place, to get the monied corporate interests out of education and return control of curricula to us teachers in the classroom.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
The year that NYC introduced the ELA ( the Writing exam, they already aced the Reading exam) ) my students scored THIRD in NY STATE, while 3/4 of NYC students in grade 7, failed. That is why Harvard said, “What the…? How did your do this/” …when Pew arrived at my door.
DUH! for a lifetime I taught second and third grade kids to write.
It’s. freakin’ SKILL. (Sorry Diane!)
When an experienced teacher-practitioner knows IN What Ways (i.e HOW) a skill is learned, it is easy to facilitate the acquisition of that skill in a classroom practice! Well, if the room is clean, safe and organized for learning, and there aren’t 38 kids to observe and evaluate.
Not to worry for questar, folks. Utah picked up the company for its tests, knowing the problems. This year’s tests crashed all over the place and will probably have to be thrown out.
And this is year 1 of a 10 year contract. Sigh
Another season on the high-stakes standardized testing carnival Midway. Step right up folks, . . .
So, these companies already have a huge bank of questionable questions based on the questionable “standards,” so what’s their marginal cost?
According to the article, “We’ve been spending anywhere from $7 to $11.50 [per] paper test.” The unit cost of printing those tests is probably a few cents. Very lucrative, this scam! And the educational publishers really want to keep it going. Why?
Well, state education budgets haven’t recovered from the recession. They are very, very tight, and all the big educational publishers have been running in the red. So they need the testing scam to keep afloat.
Pearson is the Facebook of education.
Pearson may be the worst of the worst in the testing industry — check out this chronology of the company’s screw ups — https://www.fairtest.org/pearsons-history-testing-problems
Bob,
Thanks for having the endurance to track Pearson’s many mistakes.
Here’s one I tipped the NY Post about in 2015 when Pearson, abetted by the NYS Education Department, stealthily removed flawed questions from the Grade 3 ELA test. That amount to subtracting 6 out of 55 points on the test–a cool 11 percent secretly discarded.
https://nypost.com/2015/03/22/state-scrubs-exam-questions-too-many-students-didnt-answer/
This moron in the clip I’m going to link to below, Scott Alan Buss, is an advisor on education to the Texas legislature. He argues that our culture is “going to Hell on a rocket” because public schools are built on a theory of education taught by Satan in the garden when he was tempting Eve–the theory that we should be perusing knowledge of the world for its own sake rather than submission to the Lord. He then goes on to argue that because public schools are built on this foundation, are fundamentally Satanic, they can no more be saved than can strip clubs. They have to be eliminated.
One would be hard pressed to come up with an argument more bizarre, more insane, than this. It’s a self-parodying argument. But this is the level of the argument among what Buss calls “the good, godly Christian men and women . . . in the capital in Nashville.”
If you want to see what sane men and women are up against in places like Tennessee, check out Mr. Buss.
You might well think, after listening to this clip, that it represents a whole other level of crazy limited to a few psychotics. But if you do, you’re wrong. Large swathes of the US hinterland are populated by folks who think just like this guy.
Advice: Skip the long, blathering intro.
cx: to the Tennessee legislature, not Texas
cx: pursuing knowledge, not perusing knowledge
Darned autocorrect!