The PISA results were released, and they put the test-and-punish reforms of the past two decades in a harsh light. Billions have been spent on testing and spurious teacher evaluations.
Dana Goldstein writes in the New York Times:
The performance of American teenagers in reading and math has been stagnant since 2000, according to the latest results of a rigorous international exam, despite a decades-long effort to raise standards and help students compete with peers across the globe.
And the achievement gap in reading between high and low performers is widening. Although the top quarter of American students have improved their performance on the exam since 2012, the bottom 10th percentile lost ground, according to an analysis by the National Center for Education Statistics, a federal agency.
If you recall, the Disrupters claimed that their method would both “Race to the Top” and “close achievement gaps.”
Their strategies did neither. Time for a change.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reform has turned much of US K-12 education into trivial test prep.
The test prep has limited results. If you look at the scores, you will find that in the first few years after No Child Left Behind, the scores improved a little bit. Why? Well, all that test prep familiarized students with the formats of the tests and with how to navigate the on-screen questions.
And then the scores went flat. Why? Because kids don’t learn anything from test prep except the formats of the tests and how to navigate the on-screen questions.
In the era of test prep and the Common [sic] Core [sic], this statement from Richard Brautigan is spot on:
My teachers should have ridden with Jesse James
for all the time they stole from me.
THis boils my blood: all the time that was stolen from my kids, how their lives have been altered by tests and test prep.
It has utterly sickened me, Mate. I worked for many years in educational publishing. Many of the best writers and editors I’ve worked with have quit because they are disgusted by being forced to turn all the curricula they create into thinly disguised Common [sic] Core [sic] test prep. They no longer start with what they want to teach and then design a coherent set of lessons to do that. In ELA, these days, they start with the Gates/Coleman bullet list and string together random exercises on random items from that. I’ve seen literally hundreds of specs for educational publishing projects that do precisely that. It does boil one’s blood. And the idiot Deformers have no understanding, at all, that this is happening. They sit in their offices, far, far away from what’s happening on the ground.
Everything has become about sales, marketing and profits.
Most people have heard about the Boeing 737 Max crashes.
But I suspect most people are not even aware of critical safety issues with another new Boeing plane: 787 “Dreamliner”
The” issues” with Boeing’s newer planes are not simply due to coding or hardware errors by a few lower level engineers .
They are due to a long standing systemic problem, a policy that puts sales over safety.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/federal-prosecutors-issue-subpoena-for-boeing-787-dreamliner-records/?utm_content=buffere9221&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=owned_buffer_tw_m
To fix this problem will require nothing short of firing every upper level manager at Boeing, but Boeing won’t even fire their CEO who oversaw 737 Max .
I would– and will NOT fly on either a 787 or a 737 Max and will not trust any supposed “fix” they put in place because one can simply no longer trust the process that supposedly ensures safety. It is corrupt and the people who made it that way are still in control.
Dang, I am afraid of flying, and I have been flying 787s, thinking, they are better than the old 767s.
What a colossal farce. I spent several decades leading a pre-K through 12 school and have written extensively, and with futility, about education reform.
The issues are primarily racism and money, despite what politicians and for-profit scam artists tell you. Rich kids do fine, poor kids – not so well. Classes are too large in poor neighborhoods – especially neighborhoods of color. Buildings are falling down. Resources are disproportionately skewed to more affluent communities and charter schools, in great part because of the dependence on property taxes. Early childhood experiences in and out of the home are far richer when parents are richer. We have more children living in poverty than any developed country. We put fathers of poor, black kids in jail and deny their families decent health care. We have a social problem, not an educational program. The teachers at my former school, where all graduates went to college and many to the most “selective” ones (I hate that term and the process), were, on balance, no more committed or loving than the teachers at a poor school less than 400 yards away.
Then, to exacerbate the problem, our politicians decided to test kids most of the time and prepare them for tests the rest of the time. It is like weighing Hansel and Gretel every few minutes and hoping they’d gain weight without feeding them.
We neglect poor kids, try to push them before they’re ready, discipline them viciously when they act like children and then are mystified when they don’t do well. We’re crazy.
a perfect summation for that statement. We Are Crazy.
Well said….
So great to get plain talk. Thank you.
“…despite a decades-long effort to raise standards and help students compete with peers across the globe.”
Or perhaps this was only the stated goal. Perhaps the school reformers were really out to cut services to the majority because they believed in their heart that only about 10% of the young people in the country deserve to learn. I have heard this from individuals who see the world as best if the top leadership of the world can dominate an intellectual underclass. These folks would never say any of these internal musings publically, but I have heard them privately, generally from people who see themselves as participants in the upper crust of intellectual society. Talk about feeling entitled.
“a rigorous international exam”
Produced by economists (aka clowns)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
from the Reformish Lexicon (one of the dialects of Ghoulish):
rigor. General-purpose descriptive to lend an air of value, necessity, and inevitability to any magic elixir product of the Reformish propaganda mills and curriculum mines, derived from logic and mathematics, where, in stark contrast, the term denotes determinability via algorithmic truth-checking.
It cracks me up, too. Sounds like a “global gravy train” bound for Japan. I had one clueless Japanese education minister who recently said something like, “Please get ready to buy a ticket for a “Global English Tests Railroads” and buckle up. We will assure you to stay the course, according to your [Financial] status.” The crowd nationwide erupted in anger and pandemonium. The ministry decided to postpone its operation. Reason? Too many flaws and caveats.
Most likely the middle class students that rank near the top are reading literature and non-fiction extensively, and as Steve notes they have the background to handle the work. The poor students whose scores are dropping most likely get a steady diet of test prep behaviorism which prepares them for nothing in the real world, and it does not prepare them to be decent readers, writers and perhaps thinkers. The students in our country are diverse, but the solution is to give all students access to an appropriate, challenging education. As Steve points out poor schools have always lagged in funding, and we have not fought hard enough for equity.
Test prep is not a curriculum. Under the stress of so-called reform we are providing the poor with less access to quality instruction. Our schools are becoming more tiered than ever, and this does not bode well for the future. Frankly, I could care less about the testing, but I care a great deal about providing the poor equitable instruction. All students require investment, and the poor need more, not less investment.
As an elementary teacher, I once again am horrified by the depth of knowledge of–or lack thereof–of mainstream media. How can Dana Goldstein actually quote Schleicher comment that the Common Core has produced good results in the DC schools. Just a quick internet search of DC graduation critiques produced articles with “scandal” in the headline! Sigh, I am happy to see that candidates are beginning to see the problem with all testing all the time. I regularly contact my senator, Angus King, with a “correction” every time one of these articles inadequately reports on education. I always end my communication to his office with a request to return to grade-span testing. As Peter Green always says–even though we’ve made the argument before–these issues are so important we need to keep repeating them.
Kathleen Mikulka
DC is gentrifying.
Politicians are like “on and off switches” who like simple solutions to complex issues and this is why they like Skinnerian Doctrine.
I’ve studied various models of psychology and for me Skinner is at the bottom.
Amen to that!!!
Agreed! Who needs chicken pecking at corn?
Can anyone explain why the regions, for example in China, that came out on top did? In international studies like this I always wonder if the samples are really comparable from country to country. If that’s not distorting the results, do the countries that are doing better have more funding, more teacher training, lest test-prep-focused approaches, etc?
Here was my answer to a similar question at the NYT comment thread:
You have to take the China scores w/a lump of salt. They have been criticized for manipulating so that mostly highly-educated urbanites are being tested, while rural poor in far-flung areas are both undereducated and not sampled by PISA. Among the few other Asian entities cited are some of the richest regions of the world. Those Western nations listed as out-doing us all have far smaller % child poverty – except Estonia! Their child-poverty is on a par w/our own, & they have been roaringly successful at re-making their ed system in recent decades. That would be a system to study. [I have studied it: it is much like Poland’s and Finland’s. The differences are systemic, & well worth a look.] But meanwhile, we’re doing pretty well, on par w/UK, Japan and Australia.
In the US, our public schools attempt to educate everyone, including kids living in poverty, kids with severe cognitive impairments, etc., and tests like NAEP and PISA are given to a random sampling of those kids. Almost a third of kids in the US live in poverty. Many are food insecure. In most developed nations, there are much lower childhood poverty, and in some countries, the kids living in poverty aren’t tested. Correct for socioeconomic level, and US kids far well in comparison to kids elsewhere, so the whole “US schools are failing” narrative on which Education Deform was predicated was a lie.
The lie was that the problem was bad schools and bad teachers rather than childhood poverty.
More proof that teaching to the test is a disaster.
Who gives a flying $#%@ about PISA scores?
Uninformed journalists certainly seem to.
Well, Dominos for one.
And Pisa Hut for another.
But they knew this, right? I’ve seen numerous mentions that improvements in school can add 15% to expected “achievement” by students, with the rest attributable to out of school factors.
It was a decision not to address out of school factors, and that decision was made not for educational reasons but for political and economic ones.
We decided, as a country, to ignore the 85 and focus on the 15- because it was easier and cheaper to blame schools and lets powerful people off the hook for the out of school factors.
Agreed, but do we know if that explains why other places are doing better on this test? That is, are these other places dealing with out-of-school factors more effectively, or are those factors less of an issue in those places? Or are there other reasons why they’re doing better?
And if, as one person above suggests, we should just ignore this test, why is it irrelevant, and should we pay attention to any other metrics?
Denis,
Standardized testing accurately measures family income. The more poverty, the more low-scoring students.
Diane & Denis,
No standardized tests do not “measure family income.” They measure nothing as they are not a measuring device. Yes, the test scores correlate with family income but a correlation is not a measurement by any means.
The TESTS MEASURE NOTHING, quite literally when you realize what is actually happening with them. Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement:
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition]
Notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”. The same by proximity is not a good rhetorical/debating technique.
Since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning, there is no exemplar of that standard unit and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable”?
THE TESTS MEASURE NOTHING for how is it possible to “measure” the nonobservable with a non-existing measuring device that is not calibrated against a non-existing standard unit of learning?????
PURE LOGICAL INSANITY!
The basic fallacy of this is the confusing and conflating metrological (metrology is the scientific study of measurement) measuring and measuring that connotes assessing, evaluating and judging. The two meanings are not the same and confusing and conflating them is a very easy way to make it appear that standards and standardized testing are “scientific endeavors”-objective and not subjective like assessing, evaluating and judging.
That supposedly objective results are used to justify discrimination against many students for their life circumstances and inherent intellectual traits.
I get your point but it is important to understand that the overwhelming majority of people believe that the tests matter. Saying they don’t doesn’t change minds.
Yes, I also understand your point about the “overwhelming majority”. The question becomes “How then do we change that overwhelming majority’s false consciousness/understanding of the nature of standardized tests? My purpose is not to say they don’t, that is a by product or a side issue. What can I (we) do to change that perception?
For me it is to continue pointing out the fallacies whenever and wherever I come across them. The corollary to “tell a big lie often enough it becomes truth” (the state of that overwhelming majority thinking in regards to standardized testing) is “tell the truth often enough and it’s still the truth, and it can change minds.”
I know it’s a Quixotic Quest, there is no doubt about that. But eventually the world came to see that Alonzo Quijano, a fictional character, really did perceive reality better than the overwhelming majority and Cervantes book was the first of many that finally broke the stranglehold of Middle Age thought and brought about the Enlightenment under which we still think and live..
Not sure what the best way is to change public perceptions.
But I’m pretty sure of what is NOT a good way: to continue with the charade by holding up these tests as some sort of gauge of success or failure.
Unfortunately, even stating that the PISA sores indicate a “Bad showing for Deformers” does the latter.
Making false assumptions to prove a point is a very bad idea.
I certainly understand and agree that the major factor in testing outcomes is income. But my question on the PISA test is whether we know whether income explains the different outcomes in other countries. And if it doesn’t, is there anything to be learned from the differences?
A number of other nations select the students that are tested. In the US it is totally random. This last test showed American students scoring BETTER than other OECD nations in reading. That isn’t often in the headlines. As to math, I am an elementary school teacher and you would not believe how math is being taught. University professors–who obviously have multiple ways of thinking mathematically thought it would be great to teach all children all the ways to figure out how to decide what 4 times 8 is. So, children spend a lot of time on this rather than memorizing the math facts. I have watched my own grandchildren in advanced math courses doing “repeated addition” to come up with a math fact…an incredible waste of time. Lest you think I am just math challenged, I recently asked the coach of the gifted math team at my school what she thought of–God forbid asking students to memorize math facts so they could quickly get to the higher level math problem solving–she turned and gestured toward her math team. They start every session with seeing how fast they can complete the–memorized–multiplication facts. I rest my case. And that doesn’t even address the fact that children are being confused by being asked in first grade to understand algebraic equations. Hope this helps.
Kathleen Mikulka: such an interesting topic. Personally, I am a language-brained person who always had trouble w/math – this was brought home to me yrs after college, when I studied for tests in anticipation of taking post-grad courses & found I tested literally off the charts in ELA, but had to study 6 mos to raise my [test-prep] grade from F to C- in math… Nevertheless. I’m married to a mathematician, & we both learned all the facts by rote as kids in the ‘50’s. I learn much from my spouse about big-picture abstractions & logic, but find—as was true in my biz career, which led me to think I might take biz post-[For-Lang-Lit!] grad—that I am quick at mental math, & have a good general grasp of order-of-magnitude [it’s why I was good at developmental stages of project proposals] – which is not my spouse’s forte at all! (That’s why he pays the bills, but I do the taxes & budgets). My husband the mathemetician knows a tremendous amount – & in general, he’s good at seeing forest for trees – yet, his math sense is so obstinately skeptical-I-need-evidence & by-the-numbers that he has to walk through the logic to be convinced of what to me is… common sense?
Meanwhile, my kids are musicians, & had learning disabilities; I find tho none were “good at math” in school, they share my general grasp of big-numbers/ order-of-magnitude. I’m not sure whether they were helped or harmed by public ed math [‘90’s]— their math ed was of the Everyday Math ‘conceptual’ variety. They could have done w/more rote. Eldest was an LD-hobbled natural mathemetician: he could explain in 2 sentences to low-math-brain me what “quadrilateral equations” were, but couldn’t work one through on paper… Youngest was particularly visual, & benefited from quirky lattices his 5th-gr teacher taught him for working 3-digit #’s in mult & long-div…
Denis,
Do you understand the business concept of GIGO? Garbage In-Garbage Out.
When you start with all the falsehoods and errors that that standardized tests are based upon which render any conclusion to be, as Noel Wilson, puts it “vain and illusory”, in other word completely invalid, it makes no difference what you are attempting to do with that invalid data. All that can be derived from the process are falsehoods and errors. In other words, discussing any standardized test score results as meaningful is a bunch of mental masturbation.
M124: WALKING
The picture shows the footprints of a man walking. The pacelength P is the distance between the rear of two consecutive footprints.
For men, the formula, n/P=140, gives and approximate relationship between n and P, where,
n=number of steps per minute and,
P=pacelenght in meters.
If formula applies to Heiko ‘s walking and Heiko takes 70 steps per minute, what is Heiko’s pacelength?
This is a PISA test question. It has been brought to my attention by a HS teacher and I wanted to make it public somehow. This place looked relatively appropriate.
This question is supposed to test a simple skill in young people. However, a formula like this has no meaning (which is not the right answer according to PISA). Let’s say A=140, then A clearly has no units of measurement according to this question. Since the ‘n’ and the ‘P’ do have units of measurement AND they are not the of the same quality, the formula has no meaning.
Only a lecture on poor translation of real situation into its mathematical model should be based on this item from the test. This is a question (and answers) on such a rigorous subject as math/physics. I would not buy this test to think about math preparation, let alone some less rigorous topics. I would fire every teacher who teaches students to solve this item the way PISA does, and I would like my tax money otherwise spent on it back, too.
My answer: Yes. Even in some countries like Japan. Japan’s PISA test score only reflect the top 5-10% of school districts that are generally considered wealthy. It doesn’t count schools in small, rural areas. And certainly not the magnet schools to support at-risk students.
The Common Core math authors took a generally confusing subject for most young kids and decided that making it infinitely more confusing would be a good idea. No need to wonder how that worked out.
And science is next in line for non-sensical disruption via NGSS.
Did these adults ever talk to a kid?
Yes, billy the gates kid!
No, they don’t. They also have totally abandoned Jean Piaget. Eureka Math reminds me of SMSG, a California state curriculum I used from 3rd to 8th grade. The New Math. It was abandoned.
This article is so full of falsehoods I don’t know where to begin. I’ll just settle for Common Core: an effort by govrs et al to “enrich the national curriculum” – and “help students compete”? Its priorities include ”writing persuasive essays” ?? And CCSS-Math “added” conceptual “depth”?? [my kids got the same conceptual razzmatazz via Everyday Math 15 yrs prior!] … another clueless entry by Dana Goldstein. However, the comment thread was wide-ranging & interesting… An awful lot of teachers chiming in on the theme of finding themselves victim of &/or pushed to promote low-performers… one 9thgrmath teacher said he/she has 2nd-gr level people in class? I wonder how many of you here have experienced that? I asked one whether he/she felt grade-inflation was connected to the general drift of ed-reform, i.e., low performance reflects bad teaching…
Retirement is really looking good. I have always supported public education, but now, I wonder. Currently, I teach a small self-contained exceptional education class. I am on the kindergarten team. Each kindergarten is about 2/3 ESL, kids who are learning English. Yet, these teachers are pushed to assess 3-4 times a week, even doing the ORR reading test. For most of these children, they are still learning letters! I am tired of the proverbial data machine tactics.
Yes. The Deformers maim differing kids to fit them into the same Procrustean beds. It’s child abuse, and at some point, one gets tired of continually fighting against it from within. Kudos to those teachers who do–who do their very best to continue teaching DESPITE the endless, mindless testing and the trivial, boring, useless depersonalized education software.