Jersey Jazzman untangles a simpleminded assertion by New Jersey Reformers: Harder Tests Make kids smarterand Cause scores to go up.
We have been hearing this claim since NCLB was enacted.
And we must ask, what’s the connection between scores going up and learning more?
Test prep can drive scores higher too.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
From the article: “I’m all for improving assessments.” (and by assessments he means standardized tests)
How is it possible to improve a completely invalid malpractice? Doing the wrong thing righter only nets one with more wrongs. The completeley invalid standards and testing malpractice regime belongs in the category of what systems theorist Russ Ackoff describes as “doing the wrong thing righter. The righter we do the wrong thing,” he explains, “the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.”
To hell with the standardized testing malpractice!
I am so glad to read about the over inflated claims of standardized testing. We have been riding this dead horse far too long. As someone that had to administer testing to ELLs, I can attest that these tests get misleading results. It also explains why there is an under representation of these students in gifted programs and an over representation of
ELLs in special education.
The most interesting study I read recently was from Peter Greene’s Sunday’s recommended reading. The title is “What Works for Poor Students: Human Beings. This is an international study that looks aggregated findings of various studies on poor students around the world. It then looked at the similarities of the findings and graphed the common findings in the various studies. What was a continuous theme of making a different was human intervention through tutoring or small groups. Other factors like technology or “rewards” had far less impact. They conclude:
“What’s shared by tutoring, small group instruction, cooperative learning, and feedback and progress monitoring – the interventions that come out looking best? The influence of another human being. The ability to work closely with others, particularly trained professionals, to go through the hard, inherently social work of error and correction and trying again.”https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/05/16/study-of-the-week-what-actually-helps-poor-students-human-beings/
By it’s own preferred measure–test scores–education reform has utterly failed. Scores haven’t improved, and achievement gaps haven’t closed. The cost of state testing contracts alone is 1.7 billion a year. Add to these the cost of pretests and benchmark tests to give kids practice for taking the tests, of test prep materials, of textbooks and online materials that have been debased and distorted to turn them into test prep, and of computers to take the tests on and of all the proctoring and test prep teaching. Billions wasted each year.
Enough!
Oh, and if you would like a test that you can’t pass, just send $500 to Bob Shepherd’s mail order “Ed Deform School.” We’ll send you one unpassable test a month for a year, and by the end of that time, you’ll be the next Da Vinci or von Neumann.
To see just how tortured, how twisted, how convoluted the ELA tests have become, I invite readers of this blog to take portions of the PAARC test released here: https://parcc-assessment.org/released-items/?fwp_subject_facet=english-language-arts
Good luck. You’re going to need it. And when you finish, you are going to be very, very angry. You will say, “How can anyone get away with such a scam?”
And here’s how: they don’t know what these tests actually look like. They haven’t done an exercise like this one.
Require the state legislators to take this test, and that would be the end of it.
As Don Duane Swacker, Hidalgo, pointed out on this blog many years ago–
PAARC: Spell that backward.
even better had it been named PAAAAAAAAARC
or CCCCRAAP, the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat Really Abominable Assessment Program
I just looked at the grade 9 piece…..I’m a mathematics teacher and my reaction is, “this is for freshmen????” I feel I have a decent background in English, but this is ridiculous. The mathematics portions are bad enough; the English portion is beyond bizarre. You are absolutely correct in that legislators should take these tests and not be able to answer the questions – then we probably wouldn’t have them.
Thank you. The persistence of these tests is due to the fact that legislators know nothing about them.
The geniuses who prepare these tests decided that they needed to use multiple-choice questions to test “higher-order thinking skills,” and in order to do that, they created a rule that the wrong answers–the distractors–have to be “plausible.” And so, one ends up with these questions, on the ELA exams, that are so badly written that arguably, a) more than one answer is correct, b) none of the answers is correct, c) one of the answers that is deemed incorrect actually is the best answer. Any ELA question set will provide examples of what I’m talking about here. The tests are, as you say, “beyond bizarre.”
This problem is particularly evident in the question sets for the upper grades–in the very tests that are required for graduation.
The persistence of these tests is due to the fact that legislators know nothing
about them.Fixed it for you
My view: legislators who can’t pass the tests they mandate should be expelled from office.
likely more than a few teachers have found out the hard way that arguing with their school’s suddenly imposed test-score “fixer” admin that they should take the test — or even teach a class — is a sure track to being targeted for dismissal
If Legislators had to pass the tests they mandate — or abide by any of the laws they pass, for that matter — we would have no Legislators.
Or a handful, at most..
Thank god for Mark Weber. His posts are always a scholarly reality-check, which I find a cooling shower, rinsing away the hot-hyped jargon of ed-deformers.
How to Write a Not CCRAPy ELA Reading Test:
1) Write NOT CCRAPy standards that are objective and grade level appropriate.
(Note: Don’t kill the messengers/test writers! They are slaves to the CC standards)
2) Stop trying to find/use reading passages that do not favor prior knowledge of specific subjects or topics because that is impossible. Instead provide schools with 3 or 4 topics in advance of the exam and allow students to be familiar with related vocabulary and ideas.
e.g. The 3 selected topics for the grade 4 2020 ELA reading test are:
1) whales/whaling; 2) safe playgrounds; 3) weather
3) Write an objective basic skills reading test using new NOT CCRAPy standards.
Include actual 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade teachers in the development.
4) Stamp the front cover: Diagnostic Only
5) Ignore that loud screaming you hear coming from the vicinity of Missouri.
2.5) Provide a grade 4 vocabulary list