Once again, Peter Greene has done us a great favor by reading a tedious billionaire-funded report that tries to prove what we know to be absurd: that the students and teachers of these United States really really need standardized testing. Having taught for 39 years, Peter knows this is hogwash.
Somehow, the United States became the most prosperous nation in the world long before the Big Standardized Tests we’re mandated by federal law in 2001. Nearly 20 years of the BS Tests, billions paid to testing corporations, and what is there to show for all this time, money, and effort: NAEP scores in reading and math have been flat for at least a decade, history and geography scores have declined, and students have lost time for recess, play, the arts, and whatever else is not tested.
It bears mentioning that no high-performing nation in the world tests all children every year from grades 3-8 as we do.
The report that Greene reviews and found wanting was produced by a DC organization called FutureEd, which wants to preserve the status quo created by No Child Left Behind.
Greene writes:
Defending the Future of the Big Standardized Test
What has happened to our beloved Big Standardized Test? Why do people keep picking on it? And can we lift it back up to its hallowed heights of the past? I have a report sitting in one of my tabs here that wants to answer those questions, yet somehow falls short. It’s FutureEd’s report The Big Test, and it is yet another attempt to repackage reformster alternate earth history. It’s not super long, but I’ve read it so that you don’t have to. Thank goodness I took my blood pressure meds today. Buckle up and let’s go.
Who Are These People?
FutureEd is a project of the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. It was founded by Thomas Toch, whose previous work included some edu-flavored thinky tanks and executive director of Independent Education, a private school network in DC, and an editor at US News. He is one more self-declared education policy expert who has apparently never taught in a K-12 classroom.
FutureEd launched a few years back, with declarations of independence and lack of bias; one more entry in the “new conversation” pageant. But its independence was all that one can expect from a group funded by the City Fund, the Waltons, and Bill and Melinda Gates. Their senior fellows are drawn from 50CAN, Bridge International Academies, Education Trust, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, Alliance for Excellent Education, and NewSchools Venture Fund. It’s a whole blooming field of Reformsters without any traditional public education advocates anywhere in sight.
Greene
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I feel like the voucher laws they’re all pushing are a real “tell” on how much they actually value standardized tests.
If they actually valued standardized tests they wouldn’t exempt the private schools they all prefer from standardized testing, and they do.
So one of two things is true- they either don’t actually value standardized tests or they believe private school employees and schools are inherently superior to public school employees and schools- our schools require oversight from ed reformers, their schools do not.
Public schools require constant monitoring by their ed reform superiors, but private schools do not.
I struggle with this because I don’t really object to one standardized test a year for kids. I think you COULD use an objective measure to help ensure equity and look for bias.
I think ed reformers have NOT used a test to check for equity, but one COULD do that.
I don’t think the tool should be thrown out because the people using the tool put it to nonsense ends and instead of using it in a productive way they all used it to promote their ideological goals.
Since we know there’s bias towards minority students, for example, how do we correct for that? They’re punished in schools more, slotted into less challenging classes, etc.
I feel like public school advocates have to address this and not just ignore it.
People have subjective bias. One thing a common measure can do is correct for that. So what do we do instead of a test?
I agree that I’m not entirely opposed to an objective test. My view is: Remove (completely banish) the high stakes from the test, since they’re guaranteed to corrupt the entire process. And: Testing should be used ONLY to gauge a student’s mastery of the subject, for the purposes of supporting that student. Any other use is exploiting children, and exploiting children is evil. It’s wrong and immoral to use a student’s test scores to assess a teacher, a class, a school, a district, a community or a demographic subgroup, or to sell real estate (a common use in high-income areas). It’s also wrong, immoral, evil for any entity to make a profit from those tests — that’s also exploiting children.
“I agree that I’m not entirely opposed to an objective test.”
There is no such thing as “an objective test”. That concept is just one of the many falsehoods purporting to be a truth of the nature of testing.
“Testing should be used ONLY to gauge a student’s mastery of the subject, for the purposes of supporting that student.”
No, all testing, assessments, judgments and evaluation must be, first and foremost, to enable the student to help understand where he or she is in relation to her/his learning of the subject matter. The gauging of student mastery is a secondary consideration. (I agree with the rest of your thoughts in the paragraph after that thought.)
“I don’t really object to one standardized test a year for kids.”
You should!
The whole standards and testing malpractice regime is a Potemkin house of cards built of sand at the waters edge at low tide. There is no structural capability of said house that withstands Wilson’s destruction of the whole mess of the standards and testing irrational, illogical and invalid onto-epistemological supposed foundations.
Psychotic attempt would be more accurate.
If billionaires were not psychotic, they would not be billionaires
“The Path Not Taken” (apologies to Robert Frost)
Two paths diverged in a public school,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, helper and tool
I looked down one, like a teaching fool
To how it lent to the student growth
Then took the other, for profit bare
And having for dollars the better claim
Because it was psycho and wanted power,
Rejected empathy and care,
Engulfed the public schools in flame
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this for the Fates
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two paths diverged in a school, and for Gates,
I took the one of Norman Bates,
And that has made all the difference.
That would be the psychopath, of course
bingo
So, for example, lower income parents here say their kids are put on a lesser track than that of higher income families. They’re saying there is bias. I don’t know that there is (I’m in the higher income group) but there was when I was in school. I saw it.
DeVos is wrong- public schools are NOT actually “one size fits all”- there’s a wide range of courses and “tracks” available at public high schools. The kids go off in all different directions. In my public high school you can take 4 quite different paths to a diploma.
They might want a standardized test to correct for that, to make sure their child isn’t being judged as “not college material” or whatever because of their lower income.
I think we have to tell them how we would fix that without a common measure.
I enjoyed this walk down memory lane as a teacher that started a career with no standardized tests to one that experienced the vice grip that standardized testing had on curriculum and instruction. Evidence is important. There is no evidence that standardized testing improves outcomes for students. The only reason the standards and accountability people keep pushing testing is because it is the will of the 1% that seek to undermine public education. Standardized testing has little to no value in planning for instruction. It is a waste of money.
Accountability is not the same as standardized testing. Teachers are accountable every day they walk into a classroom. They are accountable to plan, deliver and assess what is happening in their classes every day. They are accountable for every meeting they attend, every phone call or email they write and every conversation they have with students and colleagues. I rarely took any sick days as it took so long to prepare plans for a substitute, and that is because I was accountable to my students and school district. Standardized testing is a false measure that generally tells us how wealthy or poor the families of the students in the class are, not how much students have learned or how competent a teacher is.
You are gonna love this, from the Atlantic no less:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/pushing-kids-along-is-prudent-but-problematic/610702/
This is utter nonsense.
late and long.
Peter Greene’s historically informed take-down of a recent report arguing for more standardized testing is wonderful. Almost in passing, Greene notes that the report does not dwell on VAM, value-added-metrics that result from massaging student scores on standardized tests, then judging teachers from those scores. https://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2020/04/defending-future-of-big-standardized.
By coincidence, Gene V. Glass, currently a Senior Researcher at the National Education Policy Center and a Regents’ Professor Emeritus from Arizona State University just released a treasure trove of correspondence about VAM, first used in education by the late William Sanders, an agricultural statistician. http://ed2worlds.blogspot.com
In his blog post “Archeological Dig for VAM” Gene Glass recommends Vamboozled, the website of Audrey Amrein-Beardsley for anyone still interested in VAM or still being a victim of this method of estimating the “value you have added” to the test scores of your students.
VAM is not dead. According to a 2019 report coauthored Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, 15 states are still inflicting VAM evaluations on teachers and 28 are using the equally invalid process of writing up Student Learning Objectives (SLOs). SLOs require you to predict the end-of-year (or end of unit) test scores of students, among other ridicule-worthy feats. https://kappanonline.org/mapping-teacher-evaluation-plans-essa-close-amrein-beardsley-collins/
The “Archeological Dig for VAM” reveals how William Sanders borrowed statistical methods for calculating VAM, then began using that calculation to judge teacher productivity/quality, based on the test scores of their students, specifically in the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS).
It turns out that Sanders’ TVAAS process (VAM) was “built on the formulation of the late C.R. Henderson, a Cornell animal breeder who was named a fellow in the American Statistical Association for his pioneering work in this area.” Henderson was most interested in population genetics and in animal breeding, specifically dairy cows. Henderson’s statistical methods of producing a “genetic evaluation of livestock have been widely accepted, utilized, and enhanced by animal breeders and statisticians.”
Until Henderson’s 1953 publication of “Estimation of variance and covariance components” in Biometrics,” no one had tackled the difficult problem of “estimating variance components from unbalanced data of cross-classified models, e.g., of milk production records of daughters of A.I. (Artificially Inseminated) sires in different herds – where sires are crossed with herds, and, for a large group of herds, each sire has daughters in many herds and each herd has daughters of many sires.” https://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstream/handle/1813/31657/BU-1085-MA.pdf;sequence=1
If you have a background in statistics (mine is minimal and vintage), you may enjoy reading the extended “defense” of VAM/TVAAS by the late William Sanders who cites his debt to Henderson’s work. Sanders’ defense of his use of VAM with teachers and the test scores of their students is revealed in his answers to numerous questions from William Robert Saffold, Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies, who is well-informed about the results in TVASS in Tennessee and wanted more clarity on how to interpret the results of TVAAS. The extended discussion reveals the many unwarranted assumptions Sanders made in constructing TVAAS.
I think the hoopla over the specifics of VAM (and SLO’s) is too often disconnected from the fact-based origin story on “how to cull herds of dairy cows to maximize their productivity.”
Almost all of the accountability structures in education based on standardized test scores are intended to cull–select and discard–teachers who are not producing gains in test scores, as if test scores were not much different from measures of milk production. Our education geneticists and eugenics experts (many billionaires) also seem to think that some teachers are destined to be more productive than others. For example, TFA’s graduates with high GPA’s from selective colleges are likely to be good breeders of above average test scores. Moreover, all these potential breeders need is a brief course in summer before they are ready to produce a yield of high scorers on tests. In this case, a summer course to prepare for teaching is analogous to AI in breeding females… or for males perhaps a dose of Viagra.
I think it is long past time to rid education of VAM and SLOs. Both methods of making inferences about “teacher quality” are deeply flawed and based on premises too rarely publicized. Thanks to Gene V. Glass for his amazing archaeological dig.