Laura Chapman is a regular reader and contributor. She is a retired educator and a crack researcher. She writes here about a letter from Education Trust and other groups to Secretary-designate Miguel Cardona, urging him to deny all state requests for waivers from the mandated federal testing this spring.
She writes:
Kevin Ohlandt of Delaware and I looked behind the curtain of this attempt by the Education Trust and several other charter-loving groups to “demand” Secretary Cardona refuse state waivers on standardized tests.
I looked at the footnotes to discern what “authorities” this hastily assembled group relied on is issuing their demand. Their call included some footnotes as if to prove the wisdom and validity of the tests.
Here is an excerpt from one source: McKinsey & Company.
“We estimate that if the black and Hispanic student-achievement gap had been closed in 2009, today’s US GDP would have been $426 billion to $705 billion higher. If the income-achievement gap had been closed, we estimate that US GDP would have been $332 billion to $550 billion higher (Exhibit 1).”
This absurdity is from a report, dated June 1, 2020, offering several scenarios of possible outcomes for students who would receive instruction online, or in person, or in hybrid arrangements. The report is so out of date that it should be an embarrassment to EdTrust and others pushing these hypotheticals. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/covid-19-and-student-learning-in-the-united-states-the-hurt-could-last-a-lifetime
The second footnote comes from the charter-loving Bellwether Education Partners. It refers to their October 21, 2020 titled “Missing in the Margins: Estimating the Scale of the COVID-19 Attendance Crisis.” This report estimates that three million of the most marginalized students are missing formal education in school–virtual or in-person. The estimate of three million comes from mostly federal estimates of the number of students in higher-risk groups in every state and nationally: Students in foster care, Students experiencing homelessness, English learners, Students with disabilities (ages 6-21) and Students eligible for the Migrant Education Program.
This report, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, offers a series of recommendations already in the works for addressing the effects of the pandemic on K-12 education. Most of these recommendations have less to do with formal education than with tapping every possible community and state resource (except money) to provide food, shelter, and other necessities to survive unemployment and dodge the virus.
This Bellwether report also chases data from news reports from several large districts, the State of Florida and a study done in 2008.
This whole effort relies on out of date “estimates” of this and that, and offers recommendations of little use in addressing the systemic and immediate needs of students, teachers, their families and caregivers.
The last thing we and they need is to have anyone telling the Secretary of Education to keep the meaningless standardized tests.
Opt out and do so proudly.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Just amazing how little regard they have for public school students and families.
Their ONE offer, idea, proposal to public schools in a pandemic is a demand to test all our kids. That’s what we get. Testing.
Public school students apparently exist only in that they generate test scores for ed reform groups. Like an unpaid army of experimental subjects who serve these adults.
Testing the nation’s children during a massive and deadly pandemic to then moan over the “lowest” scores feels like the very height of elitist White privilege.
Not that a company like McKinsey would ever strike me as a paragon of integrity, but after the firm agreed last week to pay almost $600 million in fines for abetting Purdue Pharma’s engineering of the opioid crisis, I guess I don’t and won’t believe a word–including definite and indefinite articles (to paraphrase Mary McCarthy)–of any press release McKinsey issues.
Just sayin’.
Blame cutthroat capitalism and those that worship at the same altar Trump worships, GREED!
They will get rich or increase their wealth no matter how many people they have to trample and lives they destroy while chasing the Golden Calf.
“We estimate that if the black and Hispanic student-achievement gap had been closed in 2009, today’s US GDP would have been $426 billion to $705 billion higher. If the income-achievement gap had been closed, we estimate that US GDP would have been $332 billion to $550 billion higher (Exhibit 1).”
Ironically, this torturous piece of reasoning is actually built around a grain of truth, though it’s related only correlatively to K12 public ed, and has nothing to do with testing at all. Jim Tankersley’s “The Riches of This Land” (2020) shows that our postwar economic boom—typically described in terms of white male jobs—was intimately tied to the lowering of barriers for women of all races and non-white men to enter the middle-class. He corrals economic data proving that economic progress for immigrants, women and Blacks is essential to the overall health of the American economy.
Also in that postwar era, influenced by the GI Bill providing funds for education vets.
Amen to this, Ginny!
More testing isn’t gonna do it. Obviously.
Deformers: It’s the poverty, stupid.
Unfortunately, the biggest problems with the high-stakes standardized ELA tests are demonstrable only via CAREFUL ANALYSES OF THE TESTS THEMSELVES. Such analyses (I’ve conducted them) reveals that the tests
a. are breathtakingly sloppy and
b. don’t measure what they purport to measure (are invalid)
And the folks who support the testing don’t know enough about the actual tests to be aware of this. THEY SIMPLY NAIVELY ASSUME THAT THE TESTS ARE VALID INSTRUMENTS.
In other words, the devil is in the details, and the Deformers don’t know these details. Many of those Deformers are pundits who set themselves up as “thought leaders” in education, but they are acting from sheer ignorance, and correcting this ignorance is impossible because it involves capturing their attention long enough actually to explain, in detail, based on actual tests and test items, what the problems are.
I have cast about for an analogy to describe this situation. Imagine, if you will, a political operation–America First Global, AFG–that funds the distribution of cell phones to citizens in a foreign country, Kakistostan, that has a repressive, dictatorial regime. The idea is to use these phones to text, via satellites, information that might destabilize and lead to the overthrow of that repressive government. The political operation contracts with Bob’s Real Good Satellite Cell Services, BRGSCS, to distribute the phones. However, there’s a problem. AFG doesn’t have any operations in Kakistostan. It has no way of knowing whether the phones it is paying for, being smuggled into Kakistostan by BRGSCS, actually work on the ground there. The fact is that the satellite link barely operates and the phones themselves rarely, if ever, work. But AFG has no way of knowing this. Nonetheless, pundits praise AFG for its noble actions and write learned articles and books about the importance of using propaganda to destabilize repressive regimes and so spread Democracy.
Or, here is another analogy: Imagine that health science is in an even more primitive state than it is in today. Pundits and politicians learn that salt is essential to the proper functioning of human bodies. It provides essential sodium and chloride ions. The sodium is needed for nerve and muscle function and regulation of body fluids, including blood pressure and volume. Chloride ions function to regulate blood pH and pressure. So, the pundits and pols get the government to pass mandatory salt content laws: all prepared savory foods are to have a minimum of 10 percent salt. Years later, the entire country is sick, and some people are writing posts on Diane Ravitch’s blog about the dangers of all this salt consumption. But the pundits keep at it: The Fordham Insitute for Salting the Earth keeps churning out its pieces about the importance of sodium and chloride in the body. Essential! Very important! But no one bothers to do the actual work of learning what effects all this salt is having. They can see that people aren’t getting healthier. In fact, they are getting sicker. But obviously, say the health reformers, salt is soooooo important!
Ignorance at the highest levels.
Every once in a while, a particularly stupid test question from some high-stakes exam captures national attention–the infamous pineapple problem, for example. But the fact is that there are equally egregious problems–often several of them–with almost every test item and text on the state ELA exams. But edupundits aren’t going to be bothered with anything as mundane as actually learning about the junk they are pitching because that would require a lot of hard work. And, typically, they don’t know the most basic stuff about assessment. Ask these geniuses if they know the difference between a criterion-referenced test and a norm-referenced test and whether, given this difference, using the former for comparison across student populations is advisable. Ask them how one might validly test for something as vague as “inferencing ability.” Ask them how a standard score is calculated. Ask them what the limitations are for using Lexile scores for determining readability. Ask them what it means that the test developers now require incorrect answers to be “plausible,” why they do this, and what issues that raises. Ask them to describe the general guidelines for matching assessment item types with the level of abstractness, generality, and cognitive complexity of what’s being tested for. Ask them what content knowledge in ELA is tested by the state exams and how a test could be valid if it leaves most of this out. Ask them why decades of common “standards” and assessment of these has led to NO INCREASE in test scores and NO DECREASE in racial and economic disparities. Ask them what effects high-stakes “accountability” has had on the organization and content of typical ELA textbooks. Just for starters.
What you will get from these “expert” edupundits is hemming and hawing, blank stares, and equivocation.
The high-stakes standardized [sic] ELA tests are, demonstrably, a scam, like the magic elixirs that used to be peddled from the backs of wagons by the likes of Professor Marvel from the Wizard of Oz. that this hasn’t been exposed is ridiculous in the extreme. That it looks as though the Biden Administration, so progressive elsewhere, might double down on this is a national tragedy.
I have tried to get the discussion started in my state of Ohio and while everyone I speak with agrees with everything I have written in this blog, I can’t seem to get the right people at the table to figure out how to fix what is terribly wrong with our early childhood expectations that create irreparable negative attitudes toward school. https://lindaslocke.com/my-blog/f/journey-update
Did I not comment on the ludicrousness of these businesses calling themselves experts? Well, I have been a little busy lately, working in the field of my actual practicing expertise.
I think we should think about ways to help kids recover from the pandemic when they’re back in school- if we don’t the ed reform echo chamber are just going to flood the space with whatever they’ve decided should be done by public schools.
There needs to be an alternative to the ed reform echo chamber on policy.
There should be a pro-public school policy group. People who affirmatively support and value public schools. As it is now public school policy is directed by ed reformers- people who don’t support our schools and indeed lobby to replace them with privatized systems of charter/voucher schools.
Public school students should have people who value their schools setting policy for their schools. They don’t get that from ed reformers.
Here’s an example:
https://www.the74million.org/article/osborne-states-still-rely-too-heavily-on-test-scores-to-hold-schools-accountable-heres-a-better-way-for-them-to-break-it-all-down/
The Progressive Policy Institute doesn’t support existing public schools. They work to replace public schools with the privatized systems they prefer ideologically.
So why are they directing testing in public schools? They don’t even value our schools. How is it fair to public school students to have people who don’t think their schools should exist directing what happens in them?
I mean, just look at some of this stuff out of ed reform.
Here’s their proposed ranking scheme for public high schools:
“For high schools:
Student academic achievement: 20 percent
Student academic growth: 25 percent
English learner progress toward proficiency: variable
Student engagement: 10 percent
School Quality Reviews: 15 percent
Student outcomes: 25 percent”
Can you imagine? Schools will do nothing BUT measure with this. There won’t be time to do anything else.
The overdetermination of the categories is hysterical, too- “student engagement, 10%”
Not 9% or 11% but 10%- they’re not going to (supposedly) measure “engagement” with this level of specificity.
This is just nonsense. They’re just creating categories and assigning almost random percentages to to them. No public school should waste time and money on it.