Experienced teacher Nancy Bailey opposes Michael Petrilli’s proposal to give NAEP tests to kindergartners. Petrilli, who is president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute made this proposal in Education Next.
Petrilli recognizes that the typical 5-year-old can’t read and probably can’t hold a pencil but thinks there is value in online visual tests. He argues that it’s a mistake to delay NAEP until 4th grade, because policymakers are “left in the dark” about what children know by age 5.
He writes:
Grades K–3 are arguably the most critical years of a child’s education, given what we know about the importance of early-childhood development and early elementary-school experiences. This is when children are building the foundational skills they’ll need in the years ahead. One report found that kids who don’t read on grade level by 3rd grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school later on. Why do we wait until after the most important instructional and developmental years to find out how students are faring?
Petrilli assumes that knowing test scores leads to solutions. I question that. We have been testing random samples of 4th and 8th graders (and sometimes seniors) since the early 1970s, and the information about test scores has not pointed to any solutions. After 50 years, we should know what needs to be done. We don’t, or at best, we disagree. Since 2010, test scores have been stubbornly flat. Does this mean that the Common Core and Race to the Top failed? Depends on whom you ask. It’s hard for me to see what educational purpose would be served by testing a random sample of kindergartners online.
Bailey doesn’t see what the purpose is. She points out that Petrilli was never a teacher of young children. He never was a teacher, period. He is an author and a think tank leader who champions conservative causes.
She writes:
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) randomly assesses students across the country in math and reading in grades 4 and 8, and in civics and U.S. History in grade 8 and Long-Term Trend for age 9, but it doesn’t test kindergartners. Why should it? Why is the testing of kindergartners necessary? The answer is it isn’t.
Suppose we learn that 52% of kindergartners recognize the color red. Suppose we learn that 38% recognize a square. Suppose we learn that 63% recognize an elephant. So what? Why does any of this matter?
Bailey writes:
The best assessment of this age group is accomplished through observation, by well-prepared early childhood educators who understand the appropriate development of children this age, who can collect observational data through notes and checklists as children play and socialize with their peers.
Who needs the information that might be collected about a random sample of kindergarten children? What would they do with it?
It’s a puzzlement.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Much of this mindless testing is so that TESTING COMPANIES MAKE PROFITS. It’s all about $$$$$$, disguised as assessment.
YES. better to OBSERVE what kids are doing for good information that affects instruction.
I love the critique here, but it’s even worse than described:
High stakes testing is child abuse.
Exacto
Exactly the right descriptor: CHILD ABUSE!
I will never describe high-stakes testing in discussions with others without using the term “child abuse” again. Thanks so much.
Eric Dwyer. Exactly right, Eric.
And, what does most if not all US states do to child abusers?
It’s bad enough that they give kindergartners the KRA and now some bozo (and Petrilli truly IS a BOZO!) wants to foist another test on small children barely out of toddlerhood? As I drive around my community I see “Montessori” pre schools (they have to be fake?) offering STEM education. There are some pre schools offering foreign language education. My gosh, can’t we just let children play….and play without being obsessively monitored, helicoptered and told what to do. This is why I am against universal Pre-K….it will turn into a data grab via testing and mandates. We live in a very sick country that allows abuse and neglect of its own children for the sake of the all mighty $$$$.
When Maria Montessori was alive, she maintained strict control over the use of her name. Read the bio by Rita Kramer. Now, anyone can call themselves “Montessori.”
There’s a pretty simple formula here. If Petrilli is for something, you pretty much know it’s a bad idea for our nation’s education. (But agree with all comments above and Nancy’s analysis.)
I knew Mike Petrilli well when I was a trustee at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He was a really nice guy. To my knowledge, he never taught. He served in the George W. Bush administration, then returned to TBF. He is a zealous supporter of charters, vouchers, high-stakes testing, Common Core, etc. TBF is a sponsor of charters in Ohio. It receives 3% of the tuition of every student in its charters.
He seems like a perfectly decent and civil person. Not surprising that he has no in-the-trenches experience with the impact of the policies he champions.
Once again Bailey understands what is developmentally appropriate for young children, and the data monger is clueless. I learned so much about my students through observation, but, of course, conservative members of think tanks believe they know best.
Mr. Petrilli should have to administer a group test to kindergartners as I have. When NY required a standardized test for end of year data collection, I had to give such a test to kindergarten students. Even with an assistant, it was a challenge for my ELLs. Many of these students could not find their place on the page. I created a cardboard cutout bookmark for each students. Otherwise, students were overwhelmed by all the pictures on the page, and they could not find their place. By visually blocking the other items, students had a better chance of finding the correct line of the test. Students will never get the correct answer if they cannot even find the correct line of the so-called test. I had to run around the room checking to see that each student was at least on the correct line that had the question that I read aloud. It was an unrealistic, inappropriate task for this age group.
I would love to put Petrilli in a kindergarten class with him ALL ALONE with the students. He would run screaming and break down in tears.
People like Petrilli HAVE NO CLUE.
Exactly….. however….he may be able to handle a few days or even a short term sub position where someone else did the planning for him…and he has a reasonably balanced class. He might even walk away thinking he did great (as people who dabble or volunteer sometimes feel).
The true test would be to make him responsible for everything soup to nuts for a few years.
Data are not just $$$$$, but also toy guns. Privatizers play with test scores, and it doesn’t matter how meaningless the scores are, pointing at public schools and claiming it’s all their fault the sky is falling. I see the crayon writing on the wall. If a kindergartner grabs a handful of little toes instead of staring at a screen and pointing a little finger at a polygon when cued, Petrilli will point his little finger at the school and say FAILING. Then it will be time for a nap.
One of the experiences that made me aware that my time with public education was coming to an end was when our district began testing kindergartners. I would walk into kindergarten classrooms and watch students struggle and often cry over the inability to navigate iPads. I would leave those classrooms shaken to the core. The students who could work with the devices were not making decisions about correct answers but through simply getting the program to move from question to question. Almost none of these students could understand what the test was asking them to do. This angered me significantly because what we were focusing on ignored the activities that were needed to build an actual foundational developmental standard. No focus on gross and fine motor skill development or social and emotional growth. No test below third grade will give us meaningful understanding of what children actually know and that really is beside the point. The poor quality of most of the tests I have seen keep us from understanding what those form third grade through twelve understand! What we are doing to children, or being asked to do, is criminal and a denial of how the brain can get to a point of meaningful inquiry. The fact that people who have no experience with child development and have done no meaningful study of the early brain, provides further evidence that our society and polity has no appreciation for the professional approach required to raise children to become successful adults. It just seems to be getting worse. I am absolutely appalled to see another presidential administration and the plethora of state governments that refuse to see the damage they are doing. This predatory capitalism that has so infected education, and all of governance, just might result in the same effect led poisoning had on Rome.
An all technology test would be worse for kindergartners than pencil and paper. Touch the wrong spot, and students would find themselves in a whole other place. This is another example of the tone deaf policies pushed by Big Data. It will likely result in erroneous information, but privatizers do not care about validity. They want a tool to justify their destruction of public education.
The use of I Pads and computers in testing also places the disadvantaged students at a greater disadvantage. Not only is this unfair, it discriminates against poor students whose families cannot provide access to these devices.
It is criminal. I would love to have the opportunity, one day, to testify before a Truth and Reconciliation Committee established to recover from the educational publishing industry the billions of taxpayer dollars lost to the testing scam.
So well said Paul, and so tragic!
Was just taking to someone involved with a non-profit that provides services for preschool age kids and their families. The board members, big donors, and the politicians they look to for funding love data and want to know if the services they provide are “working” and I fear that this is what they mean, standardized testing for younger and younger kids
I presume Petrilli and associated slime at Hoover are offering themselves up as examples of the failure of no testing in kindergarten.
It doesn’t matter what argument anyone uses apparently. Ironclad evidence that early testing is worthless does not influence decision makers. Ironclad evidence that early testing is even harmful does not influence decision makers.
I applaud every person and organization involved in fighting this battle. But I don’t have any hope for winning. We are abusing children out of the womb five years and nothing changes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/09/02/test-prep-for-5-year-olds-is-a-real-thing-heres-what-it-looks-like/
The teachers’ unions could end the child abuse that is the standardized testing occupation of our schools by taking this to the streets. Until they do that, they are complicit in the abuse. As complicit as the other parent who does not remove the child from the abusive situation and report it to the authorities.
Let us all remember that for conservatives the purpose of high stakes testing has always been to provide faux “evidence” of supposed failure in order to justify something the public never wanted: replacing public schools with private schools outside of democratic control. Charter schools are an end run around public rejection of vouchers.
Exactly. This was the plan on the part of the politicians like Jeb Bush who foisted this upon us.
And then there was Billy Gates’s motivation–to bring about computerized education of Prole children and lay claim to the 1.5-trillion-dollar-a-year education market
It takes a lot of money to buy a Petrilli opinion.
Think Tank. n. A place where thinking tanks
meretriciousness. adj. The primary attribute (along with a low cunning) required of the leader of a Think Tank. ETYM: From Latin meretrix, prostitute. NB: This comparison is unfair to workers in the sex trade.
I never learned this word in my Latin class. I wonder if the expression “turning tricks” comes from the second part of this word. I found some other explanations online, but who knows?
A false cognate, I think.
I suspect that the employees of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation go through rigorous training:
“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’
I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
This is a sensitive topic, and let me say, up front, that I am grateful for variety in human cognition, which is so fruitful, and I am moved by both Thomas Szasz arguments about our lack of respect for alternative ways of being and thinking. However, I have long wondered whether the whole data obsession in Gates-funded Education Deformation isn’t related to Gates being way out the one side on the autism spectrum–whether the business of Education Deformation isn’t simply HIS DISABILITY WRIT LARGE. When you’re rich, you can do that. Gates seems incapable of understanding the damage he and his paid minions/toadies/sycophants like Petrilli have done.
That said, I am grateful for those on the spectrum who work as airplane engineers doing Failure Modes and Effects Analysis.
Which brings me to the primary failure mode of Ed Deform: action based upon invalid, supposed data that does not capture the complexity and variety of actual humans and their circumstances, needs, and possible modes of flourishing
A few years ago, I was vacationing in Turks and Caicos. I went on a snorkeling boat with about 8 others. One was a Microsoft executive. I asked her if it is true that BG is on the spectrum. She said, of course. Everyone knows that.
LOL. Yes.
I hope you got to do some diving while you were there, Diane!
I have long thought that he was probably incapable of grokking the human dimensions left out of his vision of education. And so we get a perfect confluence of his failure of understanding and his avarice and need for control.
Come to think of it, the diving isn’t necessary. A LOT of the really good stuff is near the surface. I love snorkeling and diving. Diving is this weird opposite of a sport. You are weightless, effortless. That alone is amazing.
The same question asked of Wharton students (Trump’s alma mater) should be asked of ed reformers. Twenty-five percent of the Wharton students thought the average American made over $100,000. The median American wage in 2019 was $34,248.
Really telling, isn’t this? Increasingly, the wealthy and the remnant of the middle class in the United States live isolated, sheltered lives in their gated communities or in their enclaves protected by a private security force. They take lunch and play golf or tennis at a private club. They stay in the best hotels. They wait for the plane in the VIP lounge or simply walk onto the private plane. Others do their shopping and home deliveries for them. Their older children go to party in Ibiza or Goa with other children of the powerful and get their degrees from Harvard or Stanford or Wharton. Their interactions with common people are extraordinarily limited. The cook, the maid, the driver, the gardener, the masseuse, the personal trainer, the stable hand.
I am reminded of Ghislaine Maxwell’s instructions to Juan Alessi, hired to be a house cleaner and later promoted to head house cleaner at the Jeffrey Epstein estates: speak only in answer to direct questions; never look Mr. Epstein in the eyes; see nothing and remember nothing. And of the maid who underwent a day-long training on how to arrange the ADULT (sort of) Prince Andrew’s teddy bear collection on his bed. (The prince would go into a rage if his teddies were not arranged precisely as required.) And I am reminded of Geoge Bush, Sr., being filmed marveling at automatic checkouts in a grocery, thus revealing that he never did any shopping himself.
Completely out of touch.
These young people who think that the average American makes $100K+ a year are from the privileged class and will step into their parent’s shoes as our “leaders.” Their Daddies will set them up with a nice internship at McKinsey. And then with a job with real power. Clueless, entitled people like Princess Sparkle and Slender Man, Ivanka and Jared.
Such people have no idea what is might be like for a single, mother of color in an inner-city tenement, frantically tearing her apartment apart to try to find the last 30 cents she needs to pay the bus fare to her job across town swabbing out toilets or changing some rich person’s kid’s diaper because she knows that she will be fired from it if she shows up four minutes late again.
Yes- it explains Sunny Holstein of the View who says she is ambivalent about charter schools, herself a graduate of Catholic schools. While she states that Biden should do more for the Black people who elected him, she ignores the elite Black families for whom he has delivered e.g. a position in his admin for Josh Edelman. Marian Wright Edelman (Childrens Defense Fund- $20 mil in assets) is a generation before. Biden and the Democratic Party won’t defend the public schools that middle class and poor Blacks and Whites attend, I assume, because of prominent families, some Black and influential who have access. (IMO, Gates made a wise choice in employing Josh before Biden did.) The hedge funders’ Robin Hood Foundation aimed at bridging investment and philanthropy is very happy to have Marian Edelman on the board as are they happy to have Jonah Edelman at Stand for Children. Wikipedia reports about Jonah’s pride at what he did to working people in unions.
Thank God for Nikole Hannah Jones’ support for public schools.
Sunny Hostin, spellcheck changed my misspelling to a word it recognized..
[…] Source link […]
I started writing a long reply to something Bob S. commented (in absolute agreement, but can’t find his comment now: I lost it/blog space, as I got a little crazy: watching the Packers/49ers game), but I’ll just say that, in IL, we are fighting against testing like crazy.
IL Families for Public Schools (email info@ilfps.org to get more info/their news letter) is having a virtual presentation on testing on February 12th. They’re also having a fantastic virtual (w/Jennifer Berkshire, & more)
next Thursday, January 27th, 7:00 PM CT.
Sure you’re reading this, Cassie: could you put the links in the post comments?
Not a football fan, but GO PACKERS!!!
Godspeed
The need for Pre-conception Standardized Testing
NAEP for the sperms!
And NAEP for the eggs!
Tests for the germs
Before they have legs!
Proficient” level on NAEP”
The sperms that are “proficient”
Are those that are efficient
At swimming to the eggs
Through all the gooey dregs
The eggs that are ” proficient”
Are those that are efficient
At navigating tubes
Like 1-D Rubik’s cubes
I agree 100% with Nancy’s response to Michael Petrilli’s proposal.
A few thoughts:
1. There is already too much testing of K students…. many districts for over a decade.
2. I have experienced first hand the difference between before all the elementary testing (before 2010ish in our case) and after. Increased data and testing has not improved 4th grade scores AT ALL. The more we fragment the curriculum…. the less fine motor and other skills K students are demonstrating on the whole. * This is also in part due to screens and the decrease in natural, human connections, socialization and free play.
3. How can anyone involved in education policy not understand the flawed logic and lack of child development and education expertise of those like Gates …. and how it is negatively impacting policy especially for the youngest learners. It seems so obvious.
“Suppose we learn that 52% of kindergartners recognize the color red. Suppose we learn that 38% recognize a square. Suppose we learn that 63% recognize an elephant. So what? Why does any of this matter” Exactly.
Let Petrilli not only prescribe tests for K students….. but interpret them…. create a curriculum aligned to the results…. plan the lessons and teach a class of students to improve the scores.
Only then…. and after a few years of observing him do all of the above…. maybe it would be worth putting him at the table to discuss his insights as to why K students need more tests.
Suppose we learn that 52% of kindergartners recognize the color red. Suppose we learn that 38% recognize a square. Suppose we learn that 63% recognize an elephant. So what? Why does any of this matter?”
It matters because it means that 48% of kindergartners won’t understand bull fights, 62% might try to put a square peg in a round hole, and 37% won’t be able to understand what Horton Hears a Who, by Dr. Seuss is about.
These are all very serious issues.
Yes…. the data would provide me with some nice project based learning ideas – I would especially love to incorporate bull fighting into a thematic based curriculum 😉