Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters and board member of the Network for Public Education, responded to Biden’s broken promise about suspending the testing.
She wrote:
Today, Ian Rosenblum acting Asst. Sec. of the US Dept. of Education announced that states would NOT be given a waiver from administering standardized exams – though ten had already requested them, including New York. Rosenblum is the formerly the Ed Asst. to Cuomo, and then worked at the pro-testing outfit Ed Trust, headed by John King.
His letter is here; article in Chalkbeat here. The letter does say that the tests could be shortened, given over the summer (!) or even next fall.
Surprising and depressing that they would make this announcement before Miguel Cardona, appointed as Secretary of Education, even took office, in the midst of a pandemic. Check out the video here where Biden promised at an AFT forum that he would end mandated standardized testing. Watch his answer here. Makes you wonder who is really running the show at the Dept of Education.
If states have to give these exams remotely, watch out for the surveillance spyware schools will ask to install on your children’s devices. Best advice is to refuse and opt out of these exams altogether.
Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
New York, NY 10011
phone: 917-435-9329
leonie@classsizematters.org
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Corporate interests own Washington.
I actually love Joe Biden…. I just think corporate influence is hard to fight.
Where was the fight? There was no fight, just a sad prefight capitulation.
Let’s see what happens in the long run. Keeping my fingers crossed.
More like “prefight crapitulation (rolling over and letting the alpha male dog — Bill Gates — crap on you without a fight)
Love is an overused word especially in this context. Biden needs to be reminded that he was elected because tens of millions of us who otherwise wouldn’t have voted, went to the polls just to vote against Trump. Biden and Harris needs to remember this or they will have only one term.
I don’t think I have ever used the word love to describe any politician.
Nor do I think I ever will.
Now, loathe is a different story.
I have loathed many.
Don’t they sound similar, though they may rhyme only to my Hungarian ears, love and loathe?
As Alfred Lord Tennyson said, Tis better to have loathed and lost than never to have loathed at all.
And as the Beatles sang
All you need is loathe, doo doo doo doo doo.
How come such happy songs were popular during the ’60s? Were those such happy times here? Or these songs were popular only among white people?
Biden is still better than Trump.
Lloyd, I thank whatever gods there be that I will never have to see or hear Trump again, except as a defendant in court.
True, but that’s not much helping. I can see how chronically bad, awful policy has been hurting hundreds of thousands of teachers, millions of students and parents across the nation for over decades. Too much damage has been done. Biden knew that. Nevertheless, his administration decided to choose the status quo.
I don’t wanna see that ‘BAKATONO’ clown again in the media, much less in the office. But it’s all up to how Biden/Dems execute really well to secure democracy from Trump or his clown clones(who will be smarter and far more dangerous than Trump) in the next 4 years.
7, 847,789,085 (and counting) humans on earth are better than Trump.
Biden promised a new day for public education. Strangely, Biden’s new day is very much like Obama’s “test and punish” old days, even in a pandemic.
Maybe we misheard and he actually said a ” nude day for education”.
People could probably use a nude holiday to get their mind off the pandemic.
Nude but masked!
“Biden is still better than Trump.”
Let’s wait with this hasty statement. In real life, a single broken promise makes me lose trust. I do not have different standards for politicians.
A Lying neoliberal is better than a lying fascist
The Lesser of two Liars
My feeling is that we need to change our focus from Biden to Gates and find out how we can sideline him. There must be a way.
Bill Gates and his more than $100 billion doesn’t give a damn what we think.
We can get to Biden more easily than Gates. He needs our support.
So Biden could be turned against Gates?
Biden made a promise to teachers, in public, out loud. He wants to be popular. He cares about his ratings.
Gates doesn’t have ratings. He doesn’t care what you think. He thinks he is god.
If you could get close enough, you could probably pull his plug out of the wall socket and cause him to shut down a entirely.
But I doubt you could ever get that close unless you were a housefly and in that case you could not pull the plug.
So, no I don’t think there is any practical way.
God is good
God is Gates
Thank you for our food
Amen
That’s a “grace” I used to say as a kid before meals.
So in fact your praying unleashed Gates on humanity. Could you now pls un-unleash him?
is there a middle ground?
On Mon, Feb 22, 2021 at 5:36 PM Diane Ravitch’s blog wrote:
> dianeravitch posted: ” Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size > Matters and board member of the Network for Public Education, responded to > Biden’s broken promise about suspending the testing. She wrote: Today, Ian > Rosenblum acting Asst. Sec. of the US Dept. of Ed” >
Looks to me like Biden has already staked it out: yes tests but not reqd to follow format, may be given remotely, no stakes attached, no schedule.
So much for Biden protecting public ed. The guy he chose was not really pro public to begin with…Biden is going to now down to the pressures since he’s not really running the country…he didn’t even call the heads of state which is the role of the President, but Harris the VP did the talking. This is only the beginning. Wait and see what else he does… He’s already got Rham Emanuel lined up for a cushy job.
I think Biden is running the country. But he has too many deformers in his Ed Department.
“The guy he chose was not really pro public to begin with”
If you mean Miguel Cardona, I disagree. If Rosenblum, I agree.
Why wasn’t Cardona allowed to choose his own Asst Secy of Ed?
Why was Rosenblum allowed to speak for Cardona?
Ginny,
You ask important questions. Someone is making important decisions about Ed policy for the nation, and it is not Cardona.
Denise Carter?
As a public school parent, I don’t have a problem with this.
Agreed. As long as scores are not used to threaten and punish schools and teachers. The results might not support the claims of testing advocates. Could be a pleasant surprise.
If the test results don’t support their case for “learning loss”, they will ignore them.
But you can bet that if scores have declined since the last administration, these self proclaimed “data- and science-driven” folks will claim it “proves” their case.
These people only tout the data when they agree with their preordained conclusions and would not know science if it bit them in the ass.
The rules sound flexible, and apparently states can get waivers from having results used against schools.
But hundreds of millions, if not billions, will be spent on the tests as well as countless hours of precious instructional time wasted on test prep.
I’m skeptical there’ll be that much prep if the tests are “no stakes,” but I’ll keep an eye out to see what happens with my son.
Kids supposedly have “learning loss”, but now they will have even more of that since they waste their time on testprep.
Waivers to protect teachers would be critical as well. Interesting that the only stakeholders in all of testing reform who have zero accountability are the actual test takers.
Might be hard to ignore if “learning loss” proves to be a figment of their imagination. It would also be interesting to compare results of the three different types of standards being tested:
Vague and subjective (ELA)
Objective skills and analysis (Math)
Objective content knowledge (Science)
The reality is that the test conditions and format, not to mention the obvious fact that this school year has been his terrible for so many students, will mean that anyone who wants to discount the importance of the results will have a good basis to do so, no matter what their agenda is. So I don’t think this will change any minds.
My own unscientific view is that whether you call what’s happening to kids “learning loss” or something else, there is a terrible toll being exacted on huge numbers of students, and it cannot be dismissed as some invention of education reformers (and frankly it looks flippant and defensive to dismiss it as such).
Whenever the topic of testing comes up, I see a lot of comments about how testing is abusive to students. But, as I’ve said before, I see few to no comments about the toll that a year of remote school and isolation is having on students, except to attack the notion of “learning loss” as a figment of education reformers.
It’s been frustrating.
Yes, the year has been terrible but the test results will confirm what you already know while providing no diagnostic information to fix what’s wrong.
Teachers know the kids. Tests don’t.
Ask any teacher about 24 hour subject specific “learning loss”. The serious “loss” has been that of routine, structure, discipline, along with all the aspects of school that kept most kids interested (lunch, shop, science labs, music, theatre, art, sports, vocational, etc.). The sum of K to 12 schooling has always been far greater than its parts. Most of those parts are now missing.
I can’t dispute that, Rage. It’s terrible. I do thank you for not ignoring the concern and not not responding with a snide comment or a reference to Covid deaths. My Captain Obvious theory is that a lot of people are afraid that any recognition of the damage being inflicted on children will be a concession to the forces of evil that support school openings. So they just won’t talk about it.
How will we know if “learning loss” is a figment of the imagination?
If test scores don’t decline, of course.
And how will we know if it’s real?
If test scores decline, of course.
After all, we know the test scores “measure” learning.
And what else could possibly cause test scores to decline? Certainly not if some kid’s mother just died of covid. Or if there is no food in the house because the parent(s) list their job due to covid . Or any of a myriad of other things.
FLERP
As bad as things seem (personal tragedies aside), for most kids that I talk to the current school situation is not great but not as devastating as many adults think. Never underestimate the resiliency of children and adolescents. They all know that this pretty much sucks but they are also aware that they are not alone; all of their peers (worldwide) are in the same big boat. I think that pandemic schooling has negatively impacted HS juniors more than any other K to 12 group. Loss of technical instruction in the critical year has not been good. Younger kids have a much bigger cushion to rebound. I have always been a believer in academic momentum, the simple routines of getting out of bed, getting dressed for school, daily attendance, paying attention in class, and completing and submitting work. For many kids these traditional demands have been largely diluted but should return by September. As far as the large group of kids that have completely disappeared, their recovery will be a very different issue. Always appreciate your perspective as an engaged parent here.
Q: What do the tests measure?
A: Learning.
Q: And what is learning?
A: What the tests measure( silly)
Standardized ELA tests do not “measure”, but reflect a lifetime of language experience and mostly informal acquisition.
Standardized math tests do not “measure” but reflect patterns of linear rule following (skills). They are mostly numerical games that some kids excel at and most do not.
Standardized science tests do not “measure” but reflect a combination of memory skills, student seriousness, and the quality and thoroughness of content specific instruction.
FLERP!,
I agree with you about how kids have been impacted during this pandemic is a serious issue.
But surely no parent believes that the impact can be measured in a state test score!
I don’t know any parent who would look at their kid’s perfectly good state test score and say “oh good, the pandemic had no effect on my kid and no need to do more.”
The help kids will need after the pandemic is NOT the help that ed reformers want to give students — more test prep and no excuses education to raise their state test scores.
They seem to believe that if they force all public school kids to study all summer to raise their state test scores and if their test scores improve, they can stop spending money because that means all is good! That is basically the ed reform vision of how to address this in public schools. But the children of the billionaires who fund ed reform groups will still be lavished with the kind of non-test prep help to address their post-pandemic issues, but those ed reform billionaires know that kids in public schools need testing.
Except that the staggering loss of time and money, in a year where both are in extreme short supply, is unconscionable. I have to buy my own cleaning supplies and PPE for heavens sake. In classes of up to 35 9th graders with ghastly ventilation. There should be other, FAR more important, priorities.
I would trust NAEP far more than the state tests—it’s a better measure given to a sample in each state with no stakes— but NAEP was cancelled by DeVos.
“Standardized ELA tests do not “measure”
Agreed.
But that’s precisely the word Standardized test proponents use : measure.
And their argument really IS as circular as my above comment indicates.
It’s the same argument made for VAM.
Q: What does VAM measure?
A: Teacher quality.
Q: and what’s teacher quality?
A: what(ever) VAM measures
In other words, the VAM score defines what VAM supposedly measures.
Who can argue with such “logic”?
Well, this is what we always do with basic concepts and activities.
What are you eating?
Food.
What is food?
What I am eating.
VAMming is such a basic human activity as eating.
In Utah, opting out is allowed by state law BUT, because not enough of the “specialty categories” of students at the school took the test in 2019, we are a “failing school” and ate in danger of being closed if we “fail” this year. A whole department at my school was already fired last year.
From the Chalkbeat story:
“The letter sent by the department on Monday says states can request to shorten assessments, provide the test remotely, or lengthen the window in which students can sit for the exam — potentially extending it into the summer or the start of the following school year.
“Certainly, we do not believe that if there are places where students are unable to attend school safely in person because of the pandemic that they should be brought into school buildings for the sole purpose of taking a test,” wrote Rosenblum, echoing a comment education secretary nominee Miguel Cardona made during his confirmation hearing.
The letter notes that the department will consider additional flexibility on a state-by-state basis.”
That last sentence seems to leave it pretty open.
If I were a betting person, I’d wager a bit of money that NYC public schools don’t have any testing this year. But don’t know about other places.
This is not your reformers’ hardline Department of Ed.
They drew a line in the sand but with dozens of caveats.
Give the test… but when you want, can be shorter, can be online…
I expect we’ll see this “flexibility” on many issues.
Not necessarily coming from the reformer letter author – but others and possibly the Secretary know what’s right; however they need to appease the reformers – “tough on crime” “slam the public schools” philosophy of policy.
And, then there’s Missouri still imposing on-site testing. (Those feds aren’t going to tell us what to do including it’s ok to be flexible)
The problem with the “shorter, online” arguments is that most states are already invested in the BS Tests and won’t have the time, money, or inclination to suddenly change the tests last minute.
In most places, especially those of us who are already fully or partially open, we will have the full testing, which takes up 2 weeks of time in normal years.
Biden should be reminded of the promises he made to public education. He promised to reduce testing. If Cardona is a “public school guy,” this is a strange way to show it. If he cannot see the absurdity in the decision, perhaps he is less of a public school person than he actually is. If he supports public schools, he should be make decisions in the best interests of our students, not the charter lobby. If Cardona is going to be a pushover for big money, then he is not the right person for the job. Parents should opt their students out of testing. We should call the DOE to complain about this absurd decision and perhaps organize protests as well.
Cardona did not make this decision. He has not been confirmed.
So is it possible that this decision was made by Betsy DeVos holdovers?
^^^never mind — I see he was appointed to the DOE by Biden along with some others who didn’t need confirmation. I wonder why it was his name on the announcement and who made the decision.
States can ask for a waiver from reporting and identifying schools with low results, as well as getting a bye on ESEA’s 95% participation rule. So schools will not face evaluation based on the test scores this year (if the state asks for the waiver).
Hopefully a similar waiver is available for using scores to evaluate teachers as well.
If the threaten and punish aspect of test reform is eliminated, maybe we should all stop complaining about tests that might actually produce some surprising results.
Kids might find these no-stakes, tests a respite from the boredom of online instruction.
What a shame that their first real policy priority for public school students is testing. Same old grim, joyless agenda.
I don’t think we’re going to see real changes in the approach to education from Biden. He’s stacking the US Department of Education with the same people from the same ed reform orgs that ran it under Obama. I think the best we can hope for is they don’t do active harm to existing public schools.
Jeb Bush is running US public education policy and now has under FOUR Presidents. It’s all his agenda. He hasn’t been elected to anything for 20 years but somehow we ended up stuck with his education agenda thru four consecutive presidents.
“Makes you wonder who is really running the show at the Dept of Education.”
Any suspects?
Bill Gates.
I wonder what Gates actually says to Biden which makes him back down on his promise. Is it blackmailing or bribing?
Gates doesn’t run things.
The people he has paid do.
They have no ethical principles.
They will do ANYTHING for money.
Gates doesn’t run things, he just pays the entrance fee to the Capitol Club for unscrupulous people who are thoroughly vetted by the Gates Foundation beforehand.
“State assessment and accountability systems play an important role in advancing educational equity.” They can’t really believe this, so where does this lie/hypocrisy come from?
Inside the Beltway, far from reality, policy makers and think tanks say this, egged on by Gates $$$ and orgs he funds.