How often have you learned something for a test, then promptly forgot it?
One of the goals of education surely is to instill a love of learning and to build a foundation of knowledge that one can draw upon and increase in future learning.
Steven Singer notes that a steady diet of standardized testing may actually undermine learning.
He begins:
The main goal of schooling is no longer learning.
Raising them. Measuring growth. Determining what each score means in terms of future instruction, opportunities, class placement, special education services, funding incentives and punishments, and judging the effectiveness of individual teachers, administrators, buildings and districts.
We’ve become so obsessed with these scores – a set of discrete numbers – that we’ve lost sight of what they always were supposed to be about in the first place – learning.
In fact, properly understood, that’s the mission of the public school system – to promote the acquisition of knowledge and skills. Test scores are just supposed to be tools to help us quantify that learning in meaningful ways.
Somewhere along the line we’ve misconstrued the tool for the goal. And when you do that, it should come as no surprise that you achieve the goal less successfully.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The Common Core tests barely test knowledge. They test “skills” like ability to identify supporting evidence. The fact that this skill is really a function of background knowledge is sadly lost on the test makers and most educators.
Exactly
Yes, this is an issue with Mr. Singer’s otherwise cogent discussion of the tests. Several times, he says that the tests are designed to test knowledge. But in ELA, they aren’t. They are supposedly designed to test acquisition of the skills on the puerile Gates/Coleman bullet list, but of course, they don’t even do that validly. That’s because those “skills” are so vague and abstract that they simply can’t be tested for in by the one or, at most, two questions on that “skill” that appear on the typical ELA standardized test. You can’t ask one multiple-choice question that validly determines whether a person can, generally speaking, make inferences from evidence in texts. The very notion is absurd.
In ELA, the “standard” and the standardized tests based on them are almost entirely content free. They don’t test knowledge. They intend to test skills. But they don’t even do that validly.
And the “skills” that the students supposedly learn aren’t being learned. My junior high aged students can’t even write a complete sentence or a coherent paragraph. I keep wondering what they are “learning” in ELA class. I have to teach them how to write complete sentences, and I don’t teach English..
In the past, students would have writing units and grammar units and literature units, but now they are being subjected to totally incoherent “integrated” and “balanced” ELA curricula and pedagogy focused on answering test prep-style multiple choice questions on Common [sic] Core [sic] “skills.” For the last eight years or so, almost every project for ELA curricula being run by one of the development houses to which the educational publishers now farm this stuff out has been to write such practice materials based on the standardized tests. The stuff has no pedagogical value. But all that matters to most administrators is the test scores because those are what their own evaluations are based on. It’s sickening but entirely predictable, and none of the Ed Deform supporters and collaborators bothers to look closely enough to figure this out because they are paid to look the other way and toe the party line about “accountability.” What a horror show. Just as there are many, many Republicans now collaborating with Trump, so there are many, many people in responsible positions in American education today, including union leaders, who are just fine with this.
1) We argue against tests using other tests. We are so ingrained in this mess that most of us can’t think beyond it cause it is all we know — AP Exams, Regents, NAEP, etc.
2) But the standards are not “vague.” They actually say something in comparison to the flowery language used from past standards – at least in my state.
And they ask for something beyond doing a “painting by numbers” assignment.
In safe environments, everyone can openly admit what little they learned in middle school. Not really sure what great “knowledge” everyone feels the need to protect. As Threatened Out West states, her or his “junior high aged students can’t even write a complete sentence or a coherent paragraph.” No argument that a major focus should be addressing that issue – but common core basically states that everyone is now an English teacher (that is why they call them ELA teachers – for literature, poetry, plays, creative writing – if they are responsible for grammar and sentence structure, too, you might not have a job because it would take three to four periods in the day). How is content knowledge useful when they are not able to express what they have learned?
Yes. It is truly overwhelming to know, as a veteran teacher who lived through NCLB/RttT mandates hitting our district’s lowest-income schools, how much less direct instruction is now allowed compared to twenty years ago.
The reason why many educators supported the common core standards was because of the skills. The skills listed in the standards are things that every human being should aim to learn – if you have a job, read the paper, or vote in an election.
The problem began when the tests failed to address any of the skills mentioned in the standards; common core skills are not for formal tests.
Every question on the state standardized tests is meant to measure one of the “standards” from the bullet list, so you are wrong that “the tests failed to address any of the skills mentioned in the standards.” The tests address these, but the standards are so vague and broad, typically, that one cannot validly test for them, so the whole enterprise of “testing for attainment of the ELA standards” is doomed from the outset. This should be obvious. If question 1 on the test treats standard a and question 2 treats standard b, and and so on, obviously, there aren’t enough questions per standard to test, validly, having met that standard if the standard is incredibly broad. Suppose that I tasked you with writing ONE question that would test whether a person had a command of styles of painting, for example. The same problem.
The writing “standards” in the Common [sic] Core [sic] list are extraordinarily vague. They don’t address SPECIFIC types, or genres, of writing and the structural characteristics for each of those (that is, the standard formula for producing, say, a traditional short story or news story or lyric poem or film script or whatever); the many varieties of paragraph structures; the enormous variety of types of sentences and how these are constructed (syntactic fluency); the many ways successive ideas can be connected (e.g., by negation, disjunction, amplification, exemplification or illustration, generalization about preceding material–one could make a very long list) or the many methods of elaboration in prose (basically, the same list); the many types of figurative language and rhetorical techniques and techniques of sound that writers can use, the many ways of introducing or concluding a story or an essay, methods of characterization, rules for writing dialogue, and so on.
In fact, it seems that when Lord Coleman got to the writing portion of his puerile standards, he was tired of the whole thing and simply repeated, in standard after standard, at level after after level, simple-minded nonsense about writing in distinct “modes”–narrative, informational, and argumentative (to use the CC$$ lingo), paired with some vagaries connected with each mode, with one innovation, that narrative writing should be devalued because, as Coleman put it, “No one gives a $$it how you feel.” These “standards” deal in generalities instead of encouraging the teaching of specific procedural knowledge–news a student can use in order to write specific types of pieces well, and because of that, these “standards” lead to extraordinarily vague writing instruction because the “standards” are, in the real world, used as a curriculum map. Coleman and his co-conspirators seem to have been unaware of the fact that MOST writing in the real world is narrative and that the so-called modes of writing into which he cleaves his “standards” are typically not distinct in real writing in the real world except in artificial schoolbook writing and a few very specific types of pieces. He seemed to have been unaware that one might, for example, in a post on Diane Ravitch’s blog tell a story (narrative) to illustrate a problem (informative) a part of making a case for some policy (argumentative). On Coleman’s devaluation of narrative writing: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2018/11/30/what-makes-humans-human/
He would have done a much better job had he divided his “standards” into a section on craft fundamentals (examples: sentence structures, paragraph structures, metrical structures, essay structure, methods of introduction, methods of elaboration, ways to connect ideas, rhetorical techniques, types of figurative language, eliminating redundancy, writing concretely, characterization, showing not telling), and a section on the techniques and formulae for creating specific types of writing (the paragraph that states a general idea and then illustrates it with several pieces of evidence, the short story, the lyric poem, the press release, the scientific paper, the interpretive essay–literature). More on teaching paragraphing: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/02/22/prototypes-versus-aristotelian-categories-in-the-teaching-of-writing/
In other words, he should have rethought what we mean by “standards” in ELA and moved away from the vagueness of existing state “standards” toward encouraging teaching of practical, concrete procedural knowledge. But he didn’t do that. Instead, he simply cobbled together a list of vague “skills” based on a cursory review of the lowest common denominator groupthink in existing state “standards,” rather as though you put together no a group of scholars to prepare your “standards” but rather a group of, say, small-town insurance executives remembering what “skills” they learned in “English” back in the day.
Again, as a teacher in New York State, I have never read standards that were not vague. They are usually very open to interpretation.
You can even compare the Common Core standards to the celebrated Massachusetts standards from 2004 – they are archived. There are differences, but they aren’t world shattering. Actually, there is a lot of similar language.
Everyone spends so much time talking around the standards without talking about specific ones. Compare a middle grade list of ELA Common Core standards with other state standards before the CCSS began.
From the ELA Massachusetts Standards for 7th Grade (2004):
Standard 8: Understanding a Text
Students will identify basic facts and main ideas in a text and use them as the basis for interpretation.
• Use knowledge of genre characteristics to analyze a text.
• Interpret mood in a text and give supporting evidence.
• Identify evidence in a text that supports an argument.
It sounds plagiarized!
Education is not the goal of those pushing the testing.
Profits off of school children (by test, software, hardware and textbook and other curriculum companies ) are.
These people are stealing not only our money but our children’s future.
Where’s Duane Swacker?
Haven’t seen his posts in a while.
Hope he is Ok.
I think most sincerely believe Common Core is a superior new form of education.
I do not think they are superior, but I do believe they address key issues for our rapidly changing world.
I am not for testing these standards – I completely disagree with Bob that each standard is evident in the tests. The writing standards are asking students to do detailed research projects / papers – how is that in the test?
I am a strong public education advocate.
I just see the need for some level of these standards for every kid. The Internet rules most of our lives — between fake news, manipulated news, millions of opinions — it is now important for every person to have basic critical thinking skills. This is why we have Trump.
The standardized testing of the vague, abstract skills on the puerile Gates/Coleman bullet list has completely distorted and devolved ELA curricula and pedagogy in the United States. It’s become incoherent and trivial, and nothing will improve until the federal standardized testing mandate is eliminated. However, it’s been a great boon to profiteers. Notice that Pearson just unloaded its K12 print and online textbook business, in a fire sale, to an equity firm. Houghton, the other big K12 textbook publisher, is also in dire straits financially, having seen declining share value for many years now. What did Pearson hang onto in its fire sale? It’s te$ting divi$ion and its virtual school division. That’s where the $$$$s are.
The other large players in K12 textbooks are McGraw Hill and Scholastic. However, McGraw is mostly a college and reference publisher, and it is attempting to carry out a merger with another big college publisher, Centage. And Scholastic is almost entirely a publisher of trade book materials for the school market–not a big player in textbooks.
Very good to hear.
I miss Duane’s astute comments about testing and measurement.
He has really forced me to think about what measurement is — and what it is not.
I just now sent Duane an email. He used to get back to my emails the following day.
I heard from Duane. He’s still kicking. Just taking it easy for a time.
Thank you.
Glad to hear about Duane.
Cancerous Growth
Testing is a cancer
That grows until you die
If testing is the answer
Then question is a lie
Amen
The main beneficiaries of standardized testing are the testing companies. Too much testing narrows the curriculum, and this is what students need, not testing. Results of standardized testing are often used against students, schools and teachers. When testing is used to close schools, the bell shaped curve with a movable cut score, generally sorts out poor minority students that get targeted for privatization. Parents should consider opting their children out of the testing of this corrupt process. These standardized tests are like venus fly traps for struggling students.
A few years ago, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute for the Privatization of US Education issued a report about how little tiem was actually spent in schools on standardized testing. And typically, for Fordham, this report totally misrepresented the situation by counting only the time actually spent taking the tests. But the truth is that like a cancer, standardized testing has metastasized throughout the body of US K12 education. Teachers are forced to keep test-related “data walls” tracking the progress of their students on the tested “skills” and to hold “data chats” about these with their students. And students are forced to take pretests and benchmark tests (practice tests) based on the standardized tests throughout the school year. And they are forced to sit through tons of explicit test prep. But more important than any of these is the fact that curricular materials, online and print, are absolutely shot through, now, with test preppy exercises and activities, and ELA curricula are planned to teach the blithering, vague, abstract skills on the puerile, almost entirely content free Gates/Coleman standards [sic] bullet list. Curricular coherence–planning of online or print textbooks based on acquisition of content knowledge and knowledge of the canon of English and American literature is out the window, replaced by random exercises on random snippets of text put forward as practice of skills from the Gates/Coleman list. In other words, there has been a complete Coring of ELA curricula and pedagogy. The godawful standardized tests run the show. It’s not even the tail wagging the dog. It’s a bear with its teeth dug into the dog and thrashing it about.
Likewise, there have been an abundance of complaints about the CCSS math as well. While it is supposed to teach students better number sense, it often winds up being more confusing. BTW, despite all the testing, our NAEP scores have been flat.
The testing was supposed to vastly improve outcomes and close achievement gaps. It has done neither. It has, in fact, utterly failed. Stupidity: continuing to do the failed thing.
And let’s not forget that the testing windows include make-up tests and extended time for those w/testing accommodations, & tie up computer labs, gyms, and libraries for weeks at a time. There’s a good month toward the end of the school year when daily schedules are disrupted, as well as staffing, while aides & teachers are pulled from various classes for proctor duty, & kids are tiptoeing around halls because “shh– testing in progress.” I’ve read many complaints from elemsch teachers that worthwhile larger end-of-year projects are a thing of the past due to this.
Yeah, in my school, the testing schedule lasted for two months. During that time, there was no access to the computers for any other purposes. And, of course, the high-school kids are totally burned out by the pressure, and teachers are called out of their classes for proctoring, and basically, very little else but testing gets done.
So, my advice to teachers: make up crap to put on your data wall. Meet with your students to discuss their writing and call those data chats. Plan substantive, coherent lessons and then, for each, find for each lesson one or two vague items from the Gates/Coleman list that the lesson is tangentially related to, and when some idiot administrator comes into your room and asks, “Which standard are you teaching now?” name one. (Keep a list of the stupid standards nearby at all times for that purpose.) In other words, teach DESPITE all this crap.
Give lip service to the stupid accountability system as you need to in order to survive, and teach DESPITE IT.
Good advice!
I knew one great English teacher who put one set of numbers up on his Data Wall at the beginning of the year, under big cutout letters that said “Data Wall,” backed by colored construction paper. Then, he would change the construction paper from time to time and the order of the pages of numbers. This worked.
My question is this: How can we convince administrators to read about and understand the destructiveness of testing? As Singer notes, “Since most administrators have drunk deep of the testing Kool-Aid, they now force teachers to use test scores to drive instruction.” In my experience, they tend to become defensive and reactionary at the mention of norm referencing and cut scores. It’s as if their emotional well-being is tied to data. How does one get them to read Diane Ravitch and Steven Singer? How do we detoxify their minds after the Kool-Aid dose? I think the only way is to outlaw high stakes tests. Until the tests are completely unavailable to them, school leaders will continue to walk the earth in their zombie-like student brain eating trance.
Give them a Christmas present of a book that explains the uselessness of standardized testing
I tried that. I bought a stack of your Death and Life… books and gave them to teachers and assistant principals. They all accepted the gifts and a year or two later, each told me they hadn’t had time to read them. One exception, come to think of it: a special ed teacher once told me he enjoyed the copy of Gadfly on the Wall I gave him. You know what, again come to think of it, Gadfly… is a very quick and easy read. I should buy more of those and try again. Thanks for getting me thinking!
By the way, folks, The Death and Life of the Great American School System is a very enjoyable book, but for its depth of reasoning and detail not for the quick pace and relaxed writing style of the Gadfly.
As long as they are being paid to think that the high-stakes testing is a good thing, most are going to think that it’s a good thing. That’s really sad but true. Nothing is going to change until the federal high-stakes standardized testing mandate is ended, and that will end when the unions get behind ending it. That they haven’t, yet, is completely unconscionable.
True. Well, in the meantime I’ll just have to keep posting blanket standards on the board and faking dives into data while I scour what’s left of the school library and book room for literature my students can read and discuss. My application for my classes to waive the district mandate to take interim standardized tests hasn’t been approved, but it also hasn’t been rejected…
I’ve been thinking lately that some of the WORST teaching I did in my entire career was during those years when the idiotic Common Core and APPR was foisted on me and, sadly, my students.
We were directed to create these little, model lessons for every class and at any time we could be observed to see if we were toeing the line….whatever the hell the line was at that particular moment. (This was the lunatic era when Arne Duncan and John B. King were ‘building the plane as they were flying it.’)
Day after day one consultant would contradict the next consultant as to what the bureaucrats at State Ed. in Albany were dictating. It was truly “Leave No Consultant Behind”….fat city if you wanted to get on that gravy train. Sure, there were plenty of big name villains. But I never forget that fellow teachers are sometimes our own worst enemies. Sad to say, they suck up to power and collaborate with the zany, destructive twists and turns of never ending school “reform”.
“Model lessons”..what crap! Model teaching is about as real as those model train layouts that people build in their basements. Fake roads, fake, plastic cows, fake schools.
There were parts of it I tried to fight. My only regret is I didn’t do more.
Look where all this fakery has landed our country now?
Yes. It’s really sickening how many Vichy collaborators we’ve had with the Common [sic] Core [sic], high-stakes test, VAM, school grading–the whole, rotten Education Deform package. For quite a long while, one could make a lot of money sucking up to the Deformers. Lots of consultants and EduPundits made themselves a pile of money. And lots of good people, in schools and in the textbook publishing industry, quit in disgust.
Re: Good people quitting
Bank fraud expert William Black labeled the phenomenon “control fraud” with regard to banks.
Basically, the head of the bank creates an environment in which those who go along get rewarded and any who don’t either get fired or are made so “unhappy” that they quit.
Black focused on banks but the same thing occurs in all manner of organizations including schools.
Make no mistake: what politicians, superintendents and principals are doing when they continue to support testing is FRAUD because they know damned well that testing has not worked , not even to raise test scores.
Well said, SomeDAM. It’s great to have a name for this phenomenon. Once all this is over, and EdDeform collapses of its own dead weight, all the Vichy collaborators who didn’t quit because they were benefiting from the scam will claim that they were on the other side all along. I have a particular loathing for the EduPundits who have participated in the standards and standardized testing scam–the ones who have made a LOT of money from lucrative contracts related to it and willingly threw over all their principles to climb on the gravy train. Lord knows that I could have made a lot of money had I been so willing. All I would have had to do is sell my soul. And sell out the kids and their teachers.
“Control fraud”. Fascinating.
It reminds me of a story I heard recently about the huge Malaysian bank scandal. I can’t find the specific story….but it sounds just like this control fraud idea.
Here’s a general piece about the Malaysian fiasco. “How Malaysia’s 1MDB Scandal Shook the Financial World”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-malaysias-1mdb-scandal-shook-the-financial-world-quicktake/2019/08/28/f183b7c2-c95b-11e9-9615-8f1a32962e04_story.html
In school, the phrase I scribbled on a scrap of paper recently was “passive conspiracy”. People just sort of…slip along…. falling deeper and deeper into the morass.
As I said during a faculty meeting a number of years ago: “School: the place where I come to tell lies.”
Sometimes these words just tumble out of my mouth. I go home and I’m like, what the hell?!
What a horror story. So much of this now. Damn all the collaborators with it.
But it isn’t just the collaborators. There is also a class of “educators” who are just so ignorant, so simple-minded, that they actually believe that the Gates/Coleman bullet list, in ELA, makes sense. These people should not be teaching. They don’t know enough to be doing so.
This phrase, John, “passive conspiracy,” is also really insightful. We see a lot, in schools, these days of this Emperor’s New Clothes phenomenon–a lot of teachers scared to death to let their administrators know just what they think of the standards -and-testing regime. It’s like living under an occupation, isn’t it?
John, I worked for many years in educational publishing and at the end of my career returned to teaching English. I just retired from that. Almost all the English teachers I worked with knew that the standards and the tests and the data walls and the data chats were total crap. There were a couple very simple-minded ones who didn’t, but most were perfectly aware of this and appalled by the whole mess. But their administrators had no clue that this was so. If those administrators had known this, they would have lost their jobs. So, they all learned to teach IN SPITE OF all this nonsense. To nod their heads, close their doors, and do, as much and as often as they could, something actually worthwhile. Doing this, playing the double game while the occupation authorities were in charge, was taxing and difficult but the right thing to do. The only thing to do.
I am very, very angry about all that has been stolen, for decades now, from our students by the standards-and-testing police and about the destruction of the field, the teaching of English Language Arts, to which I have dedicated my life. Its appalling. A profession in ruins. But there are a lot of brave teachers out there, still fighting the good fight, trying to teach kids to love to read and write DESPITE this utter, abominable nonsense.
Bob, you wrote :”So, they all learned to teach IN SPITE OF all this nonsense. To nod their heads, close their doors, and do, as much and as often as they could, something actually worthwhile. Doing this, playing the double game while the occupation authorities were in charge, was taxing and difficult but the right thing to do. The only thing to do.”
Good advice!
It’s interesting how that phrase ‘close your classroom door’ comes up when I hear from educators who really know what they are doing. Yeah.
It does make me wonder, though, what happens when we live in a society where doors aren’t as easily closed anymore. Where there just aren’t those “doors”. A 24-7 culture, twitter, the “cloud”, a surveillance state.
tI was thinking of giving a call later to a longtime colleague of mine who retired many years ago. I want to say hello plus get the exact phrasing of something a superintendent accused him of once: I think the accusation was that he was guilty of “malevolent obedience to authority”, ha, ha. Like, my friend was following the rules just to irk the boss. Sort of like working to rule.
But it’s just the way my friend IS. He does excellent work. Won’t cut corners. Does it (whatever “it” is) with his whole heart. I love the guy.
Funny how doing a job right can get someone in so much trouble at times, you know. But I guess that effect is timeless.
Well, gotta go. Woke up early to work on my daughter’s college financial aid (FAFSA) form. Yikes.
I don’t drink too often but there are those jobs that go much better with an ice cold beer. But, no, drinking (as in booze) at 5:15 a.m. is NOT good. And, don’t want to screw up those numbers. But, I am tempted.
Coffee will be the answer and the salvation of this moment. And, a lot of it.
Yes, how can we ever forget the “we are building the plane while we are flying it” comment from the nitwit in the NY State Ed department?
Deformers have said a lot of dumb things over the years, but I think that has to be the dumbest.
The most pathetic part was that the person who said that thought it was very clever.
It’s appalling, isn’t it? People of the caliber of Dunkin’ Duncan and Ditzy DeVoid serving as the highest education officials in the land. Arne and DeVos, scholars of nothing. Talk about a national embarrassment!
I cannot add much to the discussion above. Thanks for all of it. I would add that, despite all logical arguments to the contrary, many teachers buy into the idea of teaching to a test and are trained in education schools to do so. Like the communist apparatus that produced good Stalinists as well as cynics, modern education reform has produced those who really buy into the testing mythology, and those who have figured out how to work through the system.
An apt analogy, Roy! Very like.
You forgot those who bought into Communist idea but realized that Stalinism is not it. They tried changing the course, but were purged, even those who slipped as far away as Mexico. In case of standards and testing this would be those who believe that good standards and good tests do exist in principle, and that CC is just a botched implementation.
The USSR also was “botched implementation,”
for 70 years.
Friends of The Common Core can always say, “botched implementation.”
Good ideas don’t have that problem.
More years ago than I care to mention, the high school where I was teaching English decided near the end of the school year that we teachers should test our students in order to assess the amount and quality of their learning. Since designing the tests and evaluating them was up to us teachers, I chose the most sensible–and easy– type of test I could think of. I asked students to spend the allotted test time writing about the most important things they had learned in our English class and why they valued them. Not only was I favorably impressed by most of my students’ writings, I also found it easy to recognize the work of those who hadn’t learned much and were faking it in their “tests.”