The “reform” lobby, never content without testing and data, has argued in a host of opinion pieces that children really need to be tested this spring. The reformers believe that school is unthinkable and teachers won’t know what to do without annual standardized testing. They have completely imbibed the Texas Miracle That Wasn’t, the “miracle” that justified No Child Left Behind’s testing mandate. The achievement gaps remain large, with no sign of closing, but facts never got in the way of datamania.
Peter Greene wrote in Forbes in response to the reform clamor for more tests. He specifically responded to Aaron Churchill of the Thomas Fordham Institute, who wrote in the Columbus Dispatch about the importance of giving the annual tests this spring.
How can children possibly be educated if they aren’t taking tests and we don’t have data? If you can’t get enough of Peter Greene on the BS Test, here is more.
Greene rebuts each of six points.
The tests do not collect valuable information. They are not even useful, since teachers are not allowed to see the questions or the answers of individual students.
The results (scores) are reported 4-6 months after the tests. How is this information useful to teachers? (Hint: it is not.)
The data are used not to help students but to harm their teachers and their schools. Based on this useless data, states have closed schools and seized control of entire districts, to facilitate privatization of public funds.
The biggest beneficiaries of testing are the testing corporations, which pull in hundreds of millions each year for useless data.
The best response to the reformers’ urgent appeal for more testing came from Melissa Cropper, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers. Unlike anyone at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Melissa is a teacher who represents teachers. She and her colleagues deal every day with the real life problems of real life students and families. They do not live in a well-funded bubble inside the Beltway, where every education issue is theoretical.
Melissa Cropper wrote:
This isn’t the time for high-stakes testing
I’m writing in response to Aaron Churchill’s Thursday column, “Don’t cancel K-12 testing when we need data more than ever,” and his contention that testing is needed to “effectively target resources in recovery efforts.”
Our students are going through a school year like no other in history. They are adapting to remote learning and plowing through obstacles at every turn. They are doing remarkable work, but they are not receiving the support they need and they are not receiving the resources they are entitled to under Ohio’s constitution.
The Ohio House voted 87-9 recently to adopt the Fair School Funding Plan, a bipartisan 90% majority vote. However the Senate refused to even bring that bill up for a vote. That is the path forward for advocates who truly care about getting needed resources to Ohio students, not high-stakes testing during a pandemic that has interrupted the academic year in countless ways.
If you want to know how students are doing, ask their teachers. If you want to secure funding for students who need it most, support a school funding plan that meets our constitutional requirement to provide an adequate and equitable education for all Ohio students. If you want to be able to direct charitable organizations to support the students who need it, hire resource coordinators in every school district
We should not mandate testing until we can provide a stable and safe school environment for all students.
Melissa Cropper, President, Ohio Federation of Teachers
If I may, I would like to amend Melissa’s response. The best time to resume NCLB-style annual standardized testing is never. It is expensive and useless.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
…and harmful.
…and inefficient.
…and time-wasting.
…and deceptive.
While I agree that the testing industry has been the biggest beneficiary of the Reform craving for data, I sometimes wonder if it might not be those powermongers who do the bidding of those who make the tests. Who has benefitted more than the likes of Arne Duncan, Michael Bennet, John King, David Coleman,…or George W. Bush? This is a large-scare symbiotic relationship.
Attached to those tests is teacher evaluation, according to federal law. Under the odd circumstances under which we are working, none of which we’ve prepared for, it’s bizarre to observe teachers under anything resembling the rubrics used. I can’t imagine a suitable replacement either. The President-elect, who was part of the administration that enabled this, ought to relax or drop that as well.
Absolutely agree…but fear that being part of the group behind this suggests that he won’t.
However, one of my favorite moments of the campaign was when Biden said at an education town hall that there is too much testing. Does he and do we remember that?
Really tough to say where he will go. I went to the education candidate summit in Pittsburgh and did my damndest to question him about it, but MSNBC wasn’t having it.
Really appreciate your effort there, Arthur. In spite of less than favorable moderation, that’s the only time I can ever remember presidential candidates pinned down to positions going against the Reform establishment. (I’m afraid President-Elect Biden won’t stick to it, though. Hoping to be surprised.)
Neoliberals campaign from the left and govern from the right. Two faces.
“….since teachers are not allowed to see the questions.” Here is the key. If the questions on these tests were ever known to a general public, the lawsuits that would follow would bankrupt the test makers. Perhaps we need to file papers to disclose the questions. Surely public information laws exist that would allow citizens to analyze the questions themselves and the harm they do to the individuals who are forced to take them and feel adjudicated by the right or wrong designation given to things that are contextual in nature.
“How can children possibly be educated if they aren’t taking tests and we don’t have data?” If children are not taking high stakes testing and we don’t have data, then the children are not educated. A implies B. If A implies B is true, then logically it follows that the inverse is also true, so not taking tests implies not being educated. One assumes that the people clamoring for high stakes testing this year (and any year) were once in school themselves. One also assumes that they did not take such high stakes testing because such testing is more recent than when they were in school. If the quote is true, then those clamoring for high stakes testing are not educated. Hmmmm. I guess we’re being told how to educate our children by a large group of very loud non-educated people.
Well done on putting your finger right in the middle of the irony, Susan.
how the heck did we end up with a secretary of education nominee who is endorsing standardized testing??? its gonna be a disaster.
Agreed. Our fighting and kicking and screaming needs to be early. In advance. This blog is not enough. NPE is not enough. Come on national unions. Lead (for once).
Here is the real issue–these tests are used incorrectly. State summative tests are designed to measure PROGRAM effectiveness and not individual student performance. It’s the lack of assessment literacy, from teachers on up to legislators, that’s the problem. I’m not suggesting teachers are not knowledgeable–they, more than anyone or anything, can more accurately “predict” what students understand or don’t understand/struggle with.
There’s nothing wrong with data, as data is nothing more than information. It’s HOW data is used that is also at issue. So using test data as evidence to support some argument about a teacher’s effectiveness is inappropriate, as all the experts have stated.
I do not like year-end testing. I contend that this drive towards accountability and testing has destroyed education in this country, with a focus on two subjects which, as we all know, could and should be learned in context–like the sciences, social studies, the arts and literature. I feel for students that don’t have the opportunity of the same kind of holistic education I had.
I would highly recommend every educator read the whitepaper about balanced assessment systems, published by the Dylan Wiliam Center and authored by Susan Brookhart, Jay McTighe, Rick Stiggens and Dylan Wiliam. There’s a beautifully laid out chart describing various assessments and the appropriate use of each.
https://www.dylanwiliamcenter.com/whitepapers/
Oh my friggin sky-daddy!
“Here is the real issue–these tests are used incorrectly. State summative tests are designed to measure PROGRAM effectiveness and not individual student performance.”
You inadvertently got one thing right–that the tests are used incorrectly. No, no, and no that the tests are designed to assess program effectiveness. Not they are not. The designers, makers and pushers of these tests loudly proclaim that the assess, evaluate and/or judge what a student supposedly knows. The “using the tests incorrectly” stems from them being used as a program effectiveness evaluation.
Now, the other concept you have completely wrong is that these things are designed to “measure” anything. They aren’t measuring devices and cannot be used to measure anything.
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”)
Now since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning, there is not 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!
Continuing:
“There’s nothing wrong with data, as data is nothing more than information. It’s HOW data is used that is also at issue. ”
Yes, there are many things wrong in how the data that is obtained and then used invalidly in the standards and testing malpractice regime.
The primary reason is that the data is completely invalid as proven by Noel Wilson in his never refuted nor rebutted 1997 dissertation “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error.”
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 Ohio House voted 87-9 recently to adopt the Fair School Funding Plan, a bipartisan 90% majority vote. However the Senate refused to even bring that bill up for a vote.”
Tells us all we need to know about ed reformers.
Another year passes and they get absolutely nothing accomplished for public school students.
They’re lobbying to test public school students, but none of them do any productive work at all FOR public school students. They can’t even manage to get a basic funding formula passed.
They all lobbied to expand vouchers and pour more and more public funding into the private schools they prefer, but nothing at all for public school students except demands we test our kids.
They’re all pushing testing because the “ed reform movement” offers absolutely nothing to public school students and families EXCEPT testing- it’s all they have.
This year the ed reform gang down in Columbus passed huge funding increases for vouchers and got nothing at all done for public schools.
Every year it’s like this in Ohio- our state government is so captured by the ed reform lobby they produce absolutely nothing of value for the 90% of kids in this state who attend public schools. Year after year,every single legislative session- ed reform demands for voucher and charter funding are all met and public schools are ignored.
To break the ed reform echo chambers hold on our state government we’re going to have to fire some of the lawmakers who are captured by the lobby. Until we do public school students will get nothing out of value coming out of Columbus. They simply do not serve children who attend public schools. They do no work at all on their behalf.
What likely incoming secretary of education, Miguel Cardona, talks about is using test scores to help students who have fallen behind the “achievement gap”. Greene is right that teachers do not have a way to speed up instruction for students with low test scores, but that’s not what I think Cardona is talking about. No, targeting the achievement gap is really about increasing segregation with intervention classes.
Intervention classes are a form of segregation. Selective classes, programs, and schools are a form of segregation. What they really want to do with the test scores is use them as an excuse to separate young people into classes of classes. One must admit that if given a reason to lump the “bad” students together in an “intervention” class so that their “gifted and talented” children can be kept away from them, many parents will gleefully take the opportunity.
Aaron Churchill: “Most analysts predict mounting learning losses due to the disruptions, yet without state tests nobody can measure the size and scope of the damage.”
Mounting learning loss? Or mounting test-prepped short-term memorization loss? Test-prepped short-term memorization loss is pretty much guaranteed to happen during “the disruptions.” But is loss of authentic learning necessarily guaranteed to happen? It seems that test-prep for standardized tests functions to help undo authentic learning as well as to inhibit authentic learning, so as to ensure so-called achievement gaps persist. To the extent it does, then test-prep sets off a vicious, self-reinforcing cycle going from test-prep to tests to gaps to test-prep to tests to gaps to test-prep to … on and on … that enables test makers to continually increase profits and reformers to continually hone their aspirations and drive to privatize public schools and public education. Right now, it seems both test makers and reformers are in a Pavlovian frenzy, knowing that the biggest ever so-called achievement gaps are certain to result from “the disruptions.” They need to show the huge gaps in order to justify their greed and selfishness.
“. . . yet without state tests nobody can measure the size and scope of the damage.”
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ad infinitum. Spit out my hot cocoa on that one!
“can measure”-Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! (see my comments above)
“Performance is everything!”…….a Nazi quote
Joyce, just fyi… Carstarphen lasted five years here in Atlanta. John Lewis–yes, that icon on the Civil Rights Movement–stood before the school board to plead renewing her contract. I responded none too kindly, I admit. Street media reports she is now angling to become Atlanta’s next mayor.
Carstarphen did not last that long in Austin.
Since NAEP testing began around 1990, scores have remained flat or, in some cases, are in decline. If the corporate disrupters really believed in data, they would have stopped high stakes testing two decades ago because it has never worked. It’s all about the money.
NAEP has been around since 1969. I think you meant to say that NAEP scores have remained flat…since around 1990(?).
Never mind. The whole history of NAEP is more complicated.
NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) tests began around 1990: Math TUDA began in 1990 and Reading TUDA began in 1992. NAEP TUDA tests are administered every two years to large so-called urban districts that volunteered to participate.
Right.
Anyone who thinks Biden/Harris will not cave to the Education Industry ought to have their head examined. It will be “business as usual Biden” and no one will dare complain because that might mean that everything that every happened was NOT Trump’s fault. Suckers.