Steven Singer digs into Betsy DeVos’s decision to eliminate federally mandated standardized tests this year.
And he goes farther to predict that the tests might be canceled again next year.
The real danger (to the tests, not the students), he says, is that they would not be secure if they were offered online. Under ordinary circumstances, security during testing time is tight. Everyone–students and teachers–is watched to make sure no one copies down the questions. In the past, the testing corporations have even monitored social media accounts to make sure that the test questions are not revealed by teachers or students.
But if the tests were given online to students at home, parents would see how bad the tests really are, and worse, there would be no test security.
The testing corporations go to great length to ensure that their intellectual property is not copied or distributed.
He writes:
As a classroom teacher, I get to see these infernal tests. I get to see the questions.
They are not good. They are not well-written, well considered, developmentally appropriate or even good at evaluating student understanding of the knowledge they claim to be assessing.
But up to this point, anyone who gets to see the tests is sworn to secrecy including the students.
The kids taking these exams – regardless of age – are no longer treated as children. They are clients entering into a contract.
At the start of these tests, they are warned of the legal consequences of violating the terms of this agreement.
There are legal consequences to breaking the rules.
He adds:
If students were allowed to take these tests unsupervised at home, all of this legal protection would disappear.
The corporations would be much more exposed and defenseless.
THAT’S why the tests were cancelled this year.
It wasn’t because anyone rethought the value of high stakes tests – though they should have. It wasn’t because anyone had considered standardized testing’s history in the eugenics movement – which they should have. It wasn’t because anyone was worried that giving these tests would take away precious academic time – though they should have.
It was to protect the business interests that would be at risk otherwise.
Singer explains that the testing industry is already preparing for the post-pandemic future. He thinks we should plan too and plan a future that does not include the testing industry.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Beautifully said, Steven!
What a perfect time to get the con artist numerologists out of education altogether.
Then, I suggest a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate the scam that was high-stakes standardized testing, dedicated to recovering from these scoundrels the billions in lost public school dollars so that these might be turned to fruitful purposes. Sign me up to testify before this commission!
Diane, I don’t see a link to the article above?!?
https://gadflyonthewallblog.com/2020/05/16/why-high-stakes-testing-was-cancelled-this-year-and-probably-will-be-next-year-too/
Thanks, Ray. I scrolled back through Diane’s older articles and found Steve’s blog that way.
Inaccurate data produces inaccurate conclusions.
Useless data produces useless conclusions.
Standardized tests produce both types of “data”.
Its time to STOP the MADNESS!
amen
well said
My favorite line from this piece: They are not . . . even good at evaluating student understanding of the knowledge they claim to be assessing.
Yes, they are not even good at assessing what they claim to be assessing. In fact, they are so bad a this that they are not even bad at assessing what they claim to be assessing. They don’t assess what they claim to be assessing at all. For the ELA tests, this is readily demonstrable, and anyone who can’t figure out why shouldn’t be allowed in any policy-making position that affects the teaching of English or in any classroom as a teacher of English, for such a person is clueless.
Let’s imagine that 5th grader, little Bobbie S. scored a Level 2 on the Common Corish ELA test. Bobbie is now classified as “failing” – but do we know why? If we don’t, how can we possibly help him improve? So we run an item analysis that tells us which items he got wrong. Do we know why little Bobbie S. answered these items wrong? Nope. Was he frequently absent? Exhausted? Apathetic? Angry? Tested out? Skill deficient? Weak working vocabulary? An undiagnosed dyslexic? Confused by poorly crafted test items? Bad standards? Subjective items in an MC format? Raised in an English language desert? Other? Herein lies the dirty little secret of standardized testing, especially in ELA. Useless data if we want to try to help little Bobbie, useful data only if we want to point fingers of blame or threaten teachers and mislabel schools.
Beautifully said. The poorly crafted test items and the bad (so broad and vague as not to be validly testable) standards are particular problems, and many people don’t have a clue about either. This should be a national scandal.
The standards and test items are joined at the hip. The CC tests were academic death traps mainly because the ELA standards were mainly subjective performance standards instead of objective learning standards. No English teacher would object to well crafted items if the standards required something as basic as identifying the parts of speech or some of the key literary devices. Instead we got author’s tone and intent and identifying (self-evident) supporting evidence. Shear stupidity.
Science is undergoing a similar disaster with the NGSS adopted by 20 states. Treating novice, concrete learners like they are pretend scientists – without a command of the critical background knowledge.
Another issue with the “standards,” the Gates/Coleman bullet list, is that they are almost entirely content free, and those that deal with actions as opposed to knowledge (e.g., the writing standards) are so vague as to be useless–they don’t deal with concrete procedural knowledge. So, these supposed “standards,” like the lowest-common-denominator state “standards” that preceded them, don’t even cover most of the actual content of ELA.
“Treating novice, concrete learners like they are pretend scientists – without a command of the critical background knowledge.” YES, YES, YES. That’s utter stupidity.
I just don’t know why more teachers don’t just shut their doors and ignore the stupid curriculum? I got tired of fighting this every single year and pulled child #2 out of public school. So many other parents did the same thing. So we pay high taxes county taxes for public schools that our children don’t use and then again pay for private school. I don’t believe in vouchers, because when one takes $ from the gov’t, the gov’t wants something in return…CC, testing, data etc.
Lisa M
Standards based, test-and-punish “reform” has now been a focal point of schooling for nearly two decades. From NCLB to RTTT/CCSS to the ESSA, the majority of teachers know nothing else. It takes a principled veteran teacher to buck the system and those numbers are small and dwindling. I would anticipate a house cleaning via incentives, post pandemic, which will leave the public schools with 3 million teachers who came of age professionally under this god awful, data driven nonsense.
I guess we had our “house cleaning” 5-6 years ago? Any teacher with 15+ yrs in the system was given an incentive package to leave. Many took it and then got rehired as part time employees….some took the incentive and are now teaching in the private school systems. It’s just so awful for kids in public school and admin wonders why the behavior is so bad…….disengaged or bored kids will do anything to entertain themselves, even if that means becoming a behavior problem. And the tests? The kids don’t care or even try because it means absolutely nothing to them. I REFUSED as long as I could and then I had to make a decision to either let the abuse continue or to give child #2 a chance. Sad
Cold hearted ‘scores that defines our might (score based avatar-degree)
Removes the logic from our sight
One is nay and the other is might
But we decide which is right
And which is an illusion?
The wronger you paint the current tests, doesn’t make the tests of the past righter.
They’re BOTH based on Educational Standards and the Problem of Error.
Like!
THE MOST IMPORTANT piece of education writing of the last 50 years is Noel Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error”. Anyone getting near the teaching and learning process should read and fully understand what Wilson has shown in his never refuted nor rebutted 1997 dissertation. See:
https://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/viewFile/577/700
Am listening to the Moody Blues song now. Serendipity, eh!
Following up on Wilson’s work:
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
The problem is standards. Real standards include numbers of books in a library, time spent in class, salaries paid to teachers, numbers of children seen by a teacher in a day, that sort of thing. Behavioral objectives, now termed “standards” by the great gurus of American Education (not), are more generalized expectations teacher have of students that help guide their perception of success. You cannot measure behavior, except for counting numbers of times a student engages in that behavior. This is not measurement, as Duane has pointed out clearly.
Bravo for the Singer!
“The testing corporations go to great length to ensure that their intellectual property is not copied or distributed.”
What are the chances that testing companies go out of business? What comes out lately and not so lately clearly shows that these national and state wide tests do not serve the public interest.
“He thinks we should plan too and plan a future that does not include the testing industry.”
Is it possible to vote the testing industry (and statewide and nationwide testing) out of business?