Mercedes Schneider digs into the background of Virginia’s new Secretary of Education. She is a data collector, not an educator. On the good side, she is conservative but apparently not an anti-CRT warrior:
On December 20, 2021, Virginia Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin announced that his choice for state education secretary is “education consultant” Aimee Guidera. In the ABC8News in which I read Youngkin’s choice, political analyst Rich Meagher commented, “We don’t know a lot about this nominee just yet in part because she is not a political operative. She is a data scientist.”
We don’t know much about this nominee, but let’s unequivocally label her a *data scientist* and not just a data collector.
The ABC8News article does identify Guidera as “founder and former chief executive of the Data Quality Campaign (DQC), a leading voice advocating for improving the use of data to increase student achievement,” a statement that reads more like the pro-data-collection sales pitch than perhaps the article author realizes.
Guidera holds no degree in data collection and analysis or statistics and research. According to her Linkedin bio, Guidera’s bachelors of arts is from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (public policy), and her masters is in public policy from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Nevertheless, since she founded and operated a data collection organization, Guidera is cloaked in presumed credibility as a student data expert.
For those who are sketchy about founder Guidera and her DQC, allow me to offer information from several posts I have published between 2013 and 2017 concerning DQC, DQC’s controlling nonprofit, Education Trust, and her connection to Common Core and ubiqitous Gates funding, among other market-based, ed-reform connections. Then, readers can decide whether they believe “education consultant” Guidera to be more “data scientist” or just a well-funded, well-positioned data collector.
As for me, I’m going with “well-funded, well-positioned data collector.”
In the rest of the post, Mercedes (who has a doctorate in statistics, unlike Guidera) reviews the Data Quality Campaign. Open the link and read all about it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Geez, Mercedes, go ahead. Make like actually knowing statistics is a necessary qualification for being a “data scientist.”
When I was just a wee lad, my mother taught me to count on my fingers and toes. So, I’m a data scientist, too. Hey. Maybe I could apply for an Education Innovators award from the Gates Foundation!!!
Translations into English of key terms from the Reformish Lexicon (Reformish is a language derived from Oligarchical Ghoulish).
data-driven decision making. n. phr. Deformer numerology.
“data-driven decision making. n. phr. Deformer numerology.”
Slight correction “data-driven decision making. n. phr. Deformer bullshit.”
Nope. Numerology. A particular variety of bullshit.
“Data science” is quite literally numerology: the study of numbers.
Not all of it is bullshit. But a lot of it is.
A lot of “data science” is just “data diddling” aka, mathturbation.
VAM is a perfect example.
A diddler on a roof. Sounds crazy, no?
That’s because it is.
Despite its etymology, which would suggest the meaning that you describe, the word has a much more specific current meaning:
numerology. n. Any of a number of pseudosciences that deals with the
supposed occult significance of numbers, such as the Pythagorean notion of the integer-based “music of the spheres” or the current fad of supposed “Angel numbers.”
The irony is that “data science” all too often corresponds with both the literal AND the common meaning of numerology.
By “studying” the numbers, data “scientists” (sic) read all sorts of bullshit into them.
Cathy O’Neil has a lot to say about this sort of stuff in her book, Weapons of Math Destruction and on her blog.
If you stare at and diddle numbers long enough, you can find almost any pattern you are looking for, whether it is actually there or not.
I suspect that most people are not dishonest, but are simply fooling themselves into believing their own preconceived notions.
The irony is that “data science” all too often corresponds with both the literal AND the common meaning of numerology.
By “studying” the numbers, data “scientists” (sic) read all sorts of bullshit into them.
Well said, SomeDAM!
It is amazing how these Ivy League pedigreed edupreneurs keep falling upwards with fancy titles that fail to match their actual qualifications. Backed by Gates’ money and Duncan’s failure to protect students’ privacy, the stage is being set for smooth sailing to grab data along with monetizing it. After all, isn’t data “the new gold?”
DeSantis recently released an executive order of parents’ rights that was designed in direct response to counter CRT and mask mandates. However, this order affirms a parent’s right to make health and educational decisions about their child. I would think that under this provision parents would have the right to limit a student’s time spent on-line if a parent were concerned about the health consequences of too much screen time.https://www.flgov.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Executive-Order-21-175.pdf
“pedigreed” — a word which so exactly works in this mess
Florida is again setting the pace for new covid cases.
But of course, this will just make DeSantis more popular.
Just Google Fairfax County, Panorama education. This was already going on BEFORE Youngkin was elected (although left leaning MSM wouldn’t cover it). It isn’t going to get any better! Data is the new gold and those at the top of the food chain are salivating.
I long for the day when every schoolchild in America will write on the bubble test: “My mind is not standardized enough to formulate the requested responses,” and nothing else.
The teachers’ unions, if they were really the forces to be reckoned with that the right claims them to be, if they had real leadership and vision, could make this happen. They could end the CHILD ABUSE that is the “data”-driven deformation of U.S. education. Note well that the term “data,” there is in quotation marks. It’s all sheer numerology. A scam. Until the teachers’ union leaders do this–until they take federally mandated bubble testing to the streets–they are Vichy collaborators. Collaborators in the devolution of U.S. curricula and pedagogy, in the micromanagement of and removal of professional autonomy from teachers, and in the abuse of children.
I think DeSantis’ executive order that gives parents control over students’ health could be used to justify opting out of standardized testing. Corcoran would probably come up with another diabolical way to hammer students.
LOL. Yes.
Stopping by School on a Disruptive Afternoon | Bob Shepherd
after decades of test-driven education “reform”
Whose schools these are, I think I know.
His house is near Seattle though.
He will not see me stopping here
to watch what kids now undergo.
My better angels think it queer
to see a place so void of cheer
what with the tests and data chats,
the data walls with children’s stats.
Where are the joys of yesterday—
when kids would draw and sing and play?
The only sound I hear’s defeat
and pencils on the bubble sheets.
Disrupters say, unflappable,
“We’re building Human Capital!”
Such word goes out from their think tanks,
as they their profits build and bank.
“Music, stories, art, and play
won’t teach Prole children to obey
with servile, certain, gritful grace
and know their rightful, lowly place.”
The fog is heavy, dark and deep.
Where thinking tanks, Deformers creep
and from our children childhood steal
and grind them underneath the wheel.
Postscript:
Disruption of the Commonweal
is that in which Deformers deal
that they might thereby crises fake
as cover whereby they might take
(the smiling villains!) take and take
and take and take and take and take.
Excellent, Bob! I think Frost would approve.
The use of data has one Achilles heel. There are many serious flaws, but only one that can harm big edu-data. We have been using reason and logic about the inaccuracy of standardized testing with those who constantly pawn off “next generation” tests and lies about how the data will be used to corral funding for those in need. Truth means nothing to them. Their eyes glaze or roll, and they respond with the tired, passive agressive refrain, “But don’t you want to be evaluated?” Fact means nothing to them. Reason and logic are not working.
2021 was an important year because the University of California exposed big edu-data’s fatal flaw. The UC dropped the SAT because of racial bias. Racial bias is the Achilles heel. I have argued until I was blue in the face about how meaningless test and survey data are, and the opposition never blinked. But this year, I tried arguing that the tests were racially biased, supported by the UC and by Mayor de Blasio’s temporary suspension of data-based gifted schools. The opposition in my district was flummoxed. They were clearly upset. Seriously, they freaked out. You all should try it.
Here is the truth: There is no achievement gap. The tests are socioeconomically biased. They tests produce the gap with racial discrimination. Period. Every one of the thousand companies funding the Business Coalition Network that Mercedes uncovered is associating itself with a product that discriminates against potential customers. Expose that fact, and it will hurt their bottom line, the only thing they care about.
Hit them where it hurts: DATA ARE RACIST.
Steven Singer wrote several posts about this on his blog. They were very well researched and informative. Try saying this to parents (or administration) in a very test centric, data rich, competitive school district and they will think you wear a tinfoil hat and eat babies for breakfast. Ask me how I know?…..
I did, in my test centric, data driven, school choice disabled district. Mentioning the UC decision removes the tin foil hat insinuation. The UC decision to stop using the SAT carries weight and forces people in California to consider the implications. My thoughts were considered by administrators in the central office downtown, and they responded politely. I was astonished.
It was a very long email response. It took time to write.
The SAT is not racially biased.
All standardized test give advantage to students from families whose income and education are higher than average. The results of every standardized test precisely reflect family income. SAT, ACT, commercial tests, international tests, NAEP: all show the students whose families are wealthy at the top, and the poorest students from the poorest families at the bottom.
The UC freshman class next year, based on applications, looks to be more diverse than ever before. I rest my case.
OMG. That’s a good one, Flerp. Really, you should work this up into a whole routine, maybe get your own special on HBO.
I would agree with Flerp only in the sense that SAT & other stdzd tests are class – based. Spoken as someone who grew up in rural upstate-NY & has kept info current through friends/ relatives in public ed and health fields.
The rurals live in virtually 100% white communities– their ave poverty rate is just a bit lower than that of non-white state residents. And that’s “central NYS” [downstate is suburban and urban]. The more sparsely populated “north country” is considerably poorer: 1/3 of the children in that area have poverty 30% higher than state ave [as do NYC children].
Test scores track income levels. Focusing on the racial angle distracts from acknowledgment of a large common cause. Just as the oligarchy would prefer.
The other Achilles heel is that the supposed “data” come from invalid tests. The Common [sic] Core [sic] consists of extremely broad, extremely vague descriptions of skills. So, for example, there will be one that says that the student will recognize the multiple meanings of words. On the text, mastery of these skills is supposedly measured by asking one question per skill.
Now, here’s a little homework assignment for you: Write ONE multiple-choice question that will validly assess whether a given person has mastery of the multiple meanings of words IN GENERAL.
This cannot be done.
And all that invalidity doesn’t add up to overall validity.
It’s a scam. It’s numerology.
But there are many, many other problems with the tests. Read my piece on this, which I linked to above. I tried, there, to summarize the most important problems with the ELA tests.
Coleman and Gates should have been laughed off the national stage when they first proposed this nonsense, and it’s shocking that they weren’t. The issues OUGHT to be obvious. That they aren’t to a great many educators is really depressing and tells me that our educators need to be better educated.
Permit me to qualify that last bit. Almost all the English teachers I’ve worked with recently understand at least a few of the reasons why the federally mandated state ELA tests are a crock, but almost all were afraid to say anything aloud about this to their administrators. It’s sort of like being a low-level government functionary during an occupation.
And that’s what this is: U.S. K-12 education, today, is an occupied state. We are living under the Deformer Occupation.
I have pointed this out over the years here, but it bears retelling. Back when the CCorpse was trotted out as the latest idea that was going to save us all, I was teaching Geometry. We were sent to learn about the new type of testing in one of those week-long inservices. While mind-numbing, it was instructive.
The geometry session was taught by a really nice kid from some middle school position in another part of the state. Obviously chosen because she had people skills rather than geometry skills, she had no idea how any of the ideas fit together. Most of the teachers were competent, forgiving, and helpful. She made it through, despite the quick trip she took to Nashville to see the Back Street Boys.
The material she presented was immediately suspect to anyone with even a cursory understanding of the subject, especially where the test questions were concerned. Each question was broad, and required essay explanation of answers. Anyone evaluating the answers to these test questions would not have been capable of determining whether a student missed a question because he made a calculation error or a logical error. A logical error might be hidden in a response without being immediately obvious.
As the years went by, the intellectual bankruptcy of the test questions became more and more apparent. Students questions about tests they were taking led me to believe that the tests were made up by putting the type of question in a box and drawing them out at random, thus assuring that the tiny topic had just as much probability of appearing on a test as a vital concept.
I was very glad to teach World History when the opportunity arose.
You never get “laughed off the stage” when you are paying everyone in the crowd to squelch their laughter and pretend to take you seriously
This problem is an age old one: Kings surrounded by grovelling servants and probably even caveman tribal leaders surrounded by tribesmen grunting approval after the leader just threw them a bone.
The problem infects all manner of “leaders”: billionaires, CEOs, governor’s, mayors and presidents
I’ve argued against the bias of standardized tests since 1970s when I saw some of my ELLs get unfairly classified for special education. The tests work against the under educated, ELLs, those with disabilities and the poor. Unless students have a middle class American framework, the tests will rate them lower despite their innate abilities and talents.
If the recent prosecution of the Harvard grad for taking SATs for high school students for $10k a pop taught us anything, it is that the SAT is FBIased.
Let’s consider another example of this sort of invalidity, just so you can be sure that you clearly understand the issue. At Grades 9 and 10, the Gates/Coleman bullet list of skills for ELA contains 80 standards (including progressive language standards from other grade levels), as well as breakdowns of some of the writing standards into sub-standards. So, about 100 standards. A typical standardized bubble test in ELA will consist of about 30 multiple-choice questions and one or two short writing prompts. So, there isn’t even one question for each standard on the test, meaning that some of the standards are not tested, and those that are, are tested by 1 question.
However, each of the “standards” is a statement of a very broad skill. Here’s an example:
Consult general and specialized reference materials (e.g., dictionaries, glossaries, thesauruses), both print and digital, to find the pronunciation of a word or determine or clarify its precise meaning, its part of speech, or its etymology.
Now, imagine that you are a question writer for one of these tests. You get a list of 30 standards (a small portion of the standards for the grade level) and are told to write one question for each standard. Try this. Try writing ONE question that will validly test this standard IN GENERAL. The one multiple-choice question will have to test the student’s ability IN GENERAL, to find word pronunciations, to determine word meanings, to clarify word meanings, to find the part of speech of words, to find the etymologies of words, and to do this in both digital and print and in both general and specialized reference materials, including dictionaries, glossaries, and thesauruses. Obviously, no one multiple-choice question would be able to test for ability to do all this IN GENERAL. The question would be an invalid measure of the general skill. And, of course, all this invalidity of testing for each “standard” can’t add up to overall validity, so, the tests do not even validly test for what they purport to test for, which is proficiency in all the standards at a particular grade level.
If this sample language “standard” seems broad to you and impossible to test validly with ONE multiple-choice question, check out the reading and writing “standards” on the Gates/Coleman bullet list. These aren’t quite “The student will be able to recount every event since the Big Bang,” but they tend in that direction. And despite this untestable (by a single 30-item bullet test) broadness, these “standards” leave out almost all CONTENT in the subject area, though knowledge of content is much of what attainment in ELA consists of.
Now, add to the fact that you have a single question that is supposed to test, validly, attainment of an extraordinarily broad and multi-faceted skill the further complication that all the multiple-choice answers are supposed to be “plausible,” with one of them being better than the others, and you’ll get a sense of what a mess the ELA standardized tests are. They are tricky and don’t validly test for what they purport to test for–proficiency in the whole list of “standards.” It’s rather as if I tested whether you had sufficient diplomatic skill and knowledge of French and of French culture to be our ambassador to France by asking you for a recipe for gougères.
This is actually a pretty good example because if you grew up in a socioeconomically upper-middle class or upper-class family, you might have once at least tasted a gougère and so would be more likely to be able to pass this “test of American ambassador to France skill.”
It’s mind-blowing to me that stuff like this about the tests hasn’t always been IMMEDIATELY OBVIOUS to educators. The tests are a scam. They don’t validly test for what they purport to test for, and so the decision-making based on them is a pseudoscience, a variety of the pseudoscience known as numerology.
When considering standardized tests, readers should be aware that their purpose is to discriminate on a spectrum from the “best” to the “worst.” A test would be useless if it was so hard that everyone failed or so easy that everyone succeeded. So the test publishers try out the test questions and put together a test made up of questions that range from very easy to very hard. The kids from the homes with the most resources (financial and intellectual) invariably get the highest scores, even after test items have been scrubbed of cultural bias. What do the tests measure? Family advantages.
In our society today, financial advantages run mainly along racial lines, so racial bias is inherent.
What does the SAT “measure”?
Scientifically speaking, “nothing” (see Duane Swacker)
But they are a pretty accurate proxy for family income — and, of course, the value of College Board President David Coleman’s stock portfolio.
Poor David. He just be pulling out what is left of his hair after the UC system decided to dump the SAT for admissions decisions.
Well, Duane and I have a long-standing disagreement there, but it’s a long story. I’ll not get into it. But as a practical matter, yes, that’s mostly what the SAT does. One could easily use ZIP Codes as a proxy for it.
I have to agree with Duane.
It makes no sense to claim one is performing a measurement without specifying precisely what is being measured.
What, specifically, is the SAT measuring?
Answers like “learning” or “educational achievement” (or the older claim, “aptitude”) are not valid because they do not provide the information necessary to perform the measurement without actually having the specific instrument (the SAT test itself).
If I didn’t have access to an SAT test and someone simply told me it was measuring “educational achievement”, how would that provide me with enough information to perform an independent measurement that would give an answer consistent with that supposedly being performed with the SAT?
It wouldn’t. In fact, I would have no clue where to even start.
The mere fact that the College Board has changed what SAT stands for over the years indicates that even they can’t say what the test is supposedly “measuring”.
It also makes no sense to talk about measurement without specifying a measurement unit.
Without reference to the test itself, what is the specific unit of measurement supposedly being performed with the SAT?
Duane keeps asking these questions because he never gets the answers.
And there is a reason for that: there ARE no legitimate answers.
My issue is with the idea that one cannot measure, legitimately, any intellectual attainment. I would be fine with not using the term “measurement,” which is misleading, but clearly one can assess whether a person knows the times table for integers from 1 to 9 or something like the number of kanji someone knows. Here’s what bothers me about the kind of argument that Duane makes: It makes opposition to the federally mandated state testing sound like a fringe phenomenon when there are actual, demonstrable problems with the assessment that have nothing to do with this issue of whether measurement (assessment) of intellectual capabilities is at all possible. I keep writing about these actual issues with the assessments–issues that render them invalid–and no one ever responds to those arguments because they involve actually looking at the sausage-making process of the purported testing of these “standards.” Too much work.
In the cases I mentioned, the measuring stick is simply the finite list of the facts assessed. How many of these 81 products of integers 1-9 does the person know? It’s a kind of measuring stick.
I can invent all manner of “instruments” to perform a virtually limitless number of what I call “measurements” (which I can name anything I like) but if the “measurements” are all defined in terms of the specific instruments I have created ( with no independent definition), they might not mean anything at all.
If I just hand someone an instrument and claim it measures graguluity, they can use it , but the answer they get is meaningless because they have no independent means of verifying the result. They don’t even know what is (supposedly) being measured.
Agreed. In the case of these standardized tests, they supposedly measure attainment of proficiency in a bullet list of “standards,” which in turn is supposed to be a measurement of proficiency in the subject. I discuss, here, why the ELA bubble tests don’t do those things, why they don’t, in fact, measure (assess) what they purport to measure (assess):
Bob,
Duane has made it quite clear that his problem is with the term “measurement” to describe what tests are about.
He has stated many times that he much prefers the word “assessment”.
Duane has also been pretty clear that his issue is with standardized tests like SAT, which are quite different from the simple test of the products of integers you mention.
Duane and I would not call these measurements , but Duane has said many times that he has no problem giving tests in his Spanish classes to assess student knowledge of the sort of thing you refer to.
Here’s the final point that Duane has made many times and I think it is key: people claim standardized tests are performing “measurements” for the simple reason that they wish to give them an air of scientific credibility that they do not deserve. I think Duane has put his finger on the crux of the issue.
Yes. I agree, SomeDAM. Drawing attention to these issues is important and valuable. But it’s also important for people to understand the ways in which these tests fail. That understanding clearly is not widespread, or the testing would have met with ridicule. And certainly teachers’ unions would not have supported it. Journalists typically report the test scores in breathless articles about how we “are improving” or “are falling behind” without ever stopping to question whether these tests actually test what they purport to test.
Duane also pointed out that in a standardized test there is no unit of measurement. You can’t”measure” anything without knowing whether you are calibrating inches, feet, ounces, kilos, etc.
Not incidentally, I also find it cringe worthy when people pretend that VAM scores are “measurements” — sometimes giving them out to hundredths or even the thousandths decimal place! (Florida was doing that )
VAM scores are utterly and completely dependent on the details of the particular model and even computer code used.
The whole thing has nothing to do with measurement.
Its absurd.
agreed
Bob, I have n doubt that you probably know a great deal about “how the tests fail”
I don’t know anything about that.
But I do have a bullshit detector that goes off whenever people talk about doing “measurements” with standardized tests and VAM.
Yes, and these state tests really set that detector off, or should. I continue to be astonished that the Common [sic] Core [sic] and the tests based on them weren’t laughed off the national stage when they were first introduced. That they weren’t should really give us pause. Clearly, there’s a lot of educating educators to do. Also, I hasten to add that I agree with Duane on many matters, though I argued with him about this one (several years back), and he has done really important, valuable work on various fronts: describing the sloppiness of test-makers’ claims, asking us to consider the epistemological underpinnings of testing, and exploring testing as an exercise of violence and power. I consider him a brother and a friend, someone aligned in this battle against a horrific scourge on U.S. education.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the years working on instruments to perform actual measurements. Even once consulted with an expert at NIST when I and another guy were developing an laser/imaging device to perform various measurements on threaded fasteners.
So I actually know a little about measurement science.
I knew that, so I can understand completely why this malappropriation of the term “measurement” appalls you, SomeDAM. This sort of thing is endemic in education. As you will know, in the real world, a benchmark is an achieved goal against which competitors compare their products (e.g., fastest read-write time for hard disks). Educators half hear this term and it becomes, to them, any interm test. Similarly, in the real world, a strategy is an overall plan for achieving a goal. Educators half hear it and half understand it and it becomes any little thing one does to accomplish something (what people in the real world would call a tactic). Education is rife with such bs, often disastrous use of borrowed, misunderstood terms. Many heard linguists say that acquisition of a grammar was an automatic, unconscious process and decided that it was unnecessary ever to teach phonics, but they didn’t catch that linquists were talking about SPOKEN language. Lots and lots of borrowings from tech and business jargon. Almost all of them egregious misuses of the terms. An acquaintance of mine recently became involved with a new age cult that did “hands off energy healings” for “quantum alignment” and “uncapping chakas.”
Duane is a philosopher who keeps people honest by demanding that they properly define their terminology.
When one is confronted with basic questions like “what does the test measure?”, there is no beating around the bush.
Agreed. Really important.
I love the tongue-in-cheek circular nondefinition, “IQ is whatever it is that is measured by IQ tests.”
A brilliant, kind, deeply learned professor of mine at Indiana University, Don Gray, told me this possibly apocryphal story about George Lyman Kittredge, a great Shakespeare scholar who had never gotten a PhD. One of the IU professors said, “Professor Kittredge, you should sit for our PhD exams. Obviously, you would fly through them.” Kittredge responded, “Which of you is going to test me?”
I freaking love that.
There’s always an element of arrogance and violence in testing.
I hear quantum mechanics are good at doing quantum alignments.
Quantum balances too.
Quite frankly, I don’t find the new age co-option of scientific terminology anywhere near as annoying as the co-option by people like David Coleman who are simply trying to make themselves more credible.
I actually find the former entertaining.
I hear quantum mechanics are good at doing quantum alignments.
ROFL!!!
And yeah, don’t get me started on the utterly incompetent guy appointed by Master Gates to be the decider for the rest of us.
Unfortunately, it’s not just IQ tests.
The same circular logic applies to other stuff as well.
Who are the good teachers?
The ones who get high VAM scores
Who are the ones who get high VAM scores?
The good teachers
It would be comical if it were not so tragic.
I find the whole VAM thing sickening.
I know of at least one teacher — a fellow who commented here under the handle “Mathvale” — who left teaching largely because of VAM and Common Core.
He went into teaching after retiring from engineering.
The people like Duncan, Gates, Chetty, Friedman and others who were pushing the crap have a lot to answer for.
Teachers lost their livelihoods because of them.
And they just moved onward and upward as it were no big deal. “Better that the teachers be fired sooner rather than later” as Chetty’s collaborator John Friedman said.
I’ve known quite a few of these people, and most of truly outstanding textbook industry writers and editors I know have quit in disgust at having their jobs devolve into generating practice exercises keyed to the Gates/Coleman bullet list. Where before they might have written a coherent unit on, say, writing a research paper or using reference works or Romantic Era literature or the Elements of Drama or Dystopian Fiction or News Writing, they now find themselves spending most of their time doing things like entering XML tags into Common [sic] Core [sic} practice exercise and sample test question manuscripts. And cognitively challenged folks like Billy Gates have no clue, none whatsoever, what devastation they’ve brought to U.S. curricula and pedagogy.
isolated, sheltered, cognitively challenged, adulated folks like BG
I left out emotionally stunted
Here’s an inescapable conclusion: the folks who take seriously the purported “testing” of these inadequate, puerile skills lists must fall into one of the following categories: a) someone who isn’t at all bright, b) someone who hasn’t thought even a little bit about the actual “standards” and the actual “tests,” or someone who has something to gain from pretending that this stuff actually works.
cx: or c) someone
Or, to give another closely analogous example, it’s as though I tested adults for general health and fitness by handing him or her a lacrosse stick and asking him or her to make ONE feed pass with it. No need for a complete physical. No need for a complete fitness examination.
Your examples clearly point out the bias in the tests. The affluent are more likely to have the references that are likely to be included on the test. That’s not even considering the issue that my students had. How valid is a test when the test is given in a language other than the student’s native language? How can we call standardized tests a valid assessment of non-standard students? Even when a test is translated, non-middle class students would not have many of the cultural references supposedly tested in the assessment. These tests are guilty of cultural bias as well.
This great article appears in the L.A. Times. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-12-29/they-are-the-unentitled-kids-californias-new-generation-of-star-college-applicants
I can’t remember when last the Times did an uplifting story about a public school. The author wrote plenty about charter schools and Common Core in the past. The end of test score admissions for UC is moving mountains. I hope the LAUSD is following these events.
LCT, that is a terrific story. Is that a regular public school? Any selection?
Yes, it is an LAUSD public school like the magnet where I teach. The LAUSD website https://schooldirectory.lausd.net/schooldirectory/ lists the Downtown Computer Media Digital Arts/English and Downtown business magnets at the same address as the school website, downtownagnets.org, 1081 West Temple Street.
No requirements for admission I could see. It’s not a highly gifted or even School for Advanced Studies school. Looks like any public high school in Los Angeles.
I meant to capitalize Business Magnet.
WOW!!!!! THIS.
THIS.
This article is just awesome. Bravo to the writer, Teresa Watanabe.
And the kids described in this. Yes. Yes. Yes. Give me these students.
May they all one day hold positions of power and authority in the United States. We need them.
leftcoastteacher,
That article was great. And I agree that politicization of state-wide standardized testing to evaluate schools, teachers and students is ridiculous.
However, the LA Times article did remind me that there was a time when college admissions tests like the SAT (which are different from state-wide tests) played a positive role for kids like those. There were kids who had low GPAs in the LA Times story, because of family struggles. But they showed promise, and their teachers vouched for them.
But lots of disadvantaged kids like that attended schools where there weren’t teachers vouching for them, and sometimes they took the SAT and scored high and got noticed despite their lower GPA.
Standardized tests should never be the entire measure of a student. But when admission is solely on GPA, some disadvantaged kids will also lose.
Well if Flerp says it, it must be so…🙄😂