Paul Bonner, who recently retired as a principal in Alabama, wrote the following comment as part of a discussion of administering NAEP to kindergartners.
He wrote:
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.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Administering tests to kindergarteners?! Yikes, sounds like something out of a futuristic dystopian novel. The future is now.
It’s been happening for many years. Kindergarten is the new 1st grade.
follow the laws: NCLB, RttT and ESSA. People forget the the federal laws initiate the insanity and should be completely overhauled. I think ESSA comes up for renewal in 2022?
The law doesn’t require testing in K and 1. That is a choice that some districts make. And how, how often you assess has some latitude as well.
Less creative interpretations include more tech and more tests.
But yes – overall – everywhere it’s increasing the stressful school environment for young children.
It isn’t the Kindergarteners that should be tested, it is the grown-ups! Ruining innocent lives at such an early age.
We were using a computerized K-2 assessment (I won’t mention which one) and the literacy questions were so confusing. It took me a few listens to understand the direction. And colleagues agreed and saw the same issue. I tried to convey this to our then curriculum coordinator – who subtly changed the direction of the conversation. Instead of looking at and listening to the test herself – she ignored that a problem was even being brought up. If she had looked into it – it would make more work for her to think more deeply about what we were doing.
It is a sad state of affairs when data collection takes priority over the social and emotional development of young children. The fact that this is even being considered indicates we have devolved into a corporatocracy. The only benefit derived from such a travesty of unsound practice goes to the corporations that monetize data and violate children’s privacy. It signals the intention of corporations to insert themselves early childhood education likely with inappropriate computer instruction and “pay for success” schemes.
We need parents and petitions to stop the inappropriate treatment of young children. Not only will any collected information be invalid, it is a cruel and unnecessary treatment of young children. There are many less cumbersome, formative assessments already in use that are brief and individually administered that yield useful information that can guide instructional practice. Our unrealistic obsession with standardization and data collection is harmful to young children.
Amen.
Paul, I wish every administrator and policy maker understood and cared the way you do. You are exactly correct.
But as you said, “This predatory capitalism that has so infected education”….. has seeped into the powers that be in education. After so many years of being told “data…data… data..” …. assess, assess, assess . . . . a good % of the teaching profession has bought into the thinking that “data driven” is more meaningful than it really is.
There are administrators who would walk into the testing situation you described and blame the teacher for not properly preparing and teaching the K students how to do well on the test. Rather than really understanding that the test is the problem.
Even tests that are not computer based can take away significant time for more important classroom activities that build motor, social, critical and creative thinking skills. It’s not only computer bases assessment. An appropriate amount of assessment is necessary to make sure we are moving students forward – of course. But assessments should be meaningful and far and few between at this age. If class sizes are appropriate – observations and anecdotal notes are more meaningful.
In the K-2 arena a lot of the data and assessment drive has created a new system paradigm – where the managers/coordinators/coaches in schools rely on the bits of data to keep themselves in a job that is not as stressful as teaching. The data and push on teachers to gather more data – justifies their job. This creates a dynamic where the coaches/data coordinators etc support the data-driven approach – and they are given a much bigger voice in decisions.
There are many layers to this data collection obsession – beyond just policy makers.
It’s very discouraging.
The predatory capitalism is is directed by billionaire and corporate interests seeking to monetize education. Too many politicians are their bought lap dogs. Vote them out. Vote for those willing to stand up to the predatory capitalists and urge them to pass laws to keep corporate interests out of public education.
It trickles down…. jobs relying on data collection are created…. people believe the mantra and it gets very muddled.
It’s not as clear cut to remedy.
Beachteach: “An appropriate amount of assessment is necessary to make sure we are moving students forward – of course.” Such assessment at this age is easily accomplished by the experienced K teacher—formal assessment not required— by simply raising a flag for those students who are outliers. Those who teach PreK-2nd grade are aware that the spectrum of learning abilities is very wide at this point, and doesn’t begin settling into recognizable patterns until 3rd grade earliest. Outliers by then often resolve and catch up/ blend in.. Raising the flag just means, keep an eye on this kid, if he/she continues to lag by 2nd or 3rd grade, look into whether they need extra support &/or perhaps IEP evaluation.
I agree – but we are SO far away from that philosophy – I can’t imagine it going back.
I agree…As a early childhood educator for over 30 years.. l agree that the testing in early childhood is not giving us meaningful results..We need to focus on developmentally appropriate activities and experiences…along with Social emotional and play.
Yes. This is the only reason I have thought to support public charters… a new paradigm/system needs to be created that can be pointed to and used as a model.
We don’t have time to wait for tide to turn/policies to change – to this around.
to turn this around.
It is certainly one reason why suburban parents are interested in charters. They don’t like the testing regime either and see the stress it puts on their children. What many of these parents discover is that charter entities set up to segregate for income and race use these tests to promote their effectiveness. It’s a vicious cycle.
Haven’t the greedy charter school, voucher school want-to-be vampire freaks also talked about testing preschoolers, too, and another method of making public schools look bad?
I’m surprised they aren’t yet subjecting kittens, puppies, chicks, and ducklings to online standardized testing.
Ohhh…. that could be a good business. Great money making idea.
It appears adorable data are valuable data. It doesn’t matter if the data come from creatures that don’t know a touchscreen from a mirror. Got to open up those new markets to keep those profit charts spiking in the executive meetings.
I wonder if they’ll let us give standardized tests to prisoners and hospital patients. The coma wards are filled with people who would protest being tested even less than do kindergartners. All that crying can be poor for our brand name. I say puppies and people on life support are the future.
I’m in. Let’s do this. I see a yacht in my future!!
It’s absurd to make any student take any “test” like this. In Ohio, they moved Alternate Assessments to be computerized and took away the local team’s decision as to which test the student student should take–regular state tests or the alternate assessment. The two main questions are can they go to the bathroom by themselves and can they feed themselves. If the answers are no, then the students do not qualify for alternate assessment. The rubric is 11 pages long. It’s ridiculous.
I heard a story that the whole 8th grade class at one middle school purposely bombed the test in an effort to get rid of the teachers. They purposely did it. Kids are really smart in ways that cannot be measured by these stupid tests. And, no, the teachers did not lose their jobs.
These tests are not valid. The scores are not valid. The analysis is not valid.
Stop giving them.
While online testing is inappropriate for young children, it also results in worse results for most students. When students work with a pencil and paper, student scores are higher. Online tests discriminate against vulnerable groups like classified students, ELLs and poor students. These groups often do not have access to technology. and using technology to assess students is unfair.https://www.edutopia.org/article/standardized-tests-students-face-online-penalty
I think the obsession with testing is simple- “ed reform” doesn’t have anything else to offer public schools or public school students.
As long as they’re pounding the table on “accountability!” no one notices they have no positive ideas or agenda for public schools at all.
Other than testing, can anyone who attends or attended a public school in the last 25 years point to anything the “ed reform movement” has contributed or added to that public school? I can’t, and I attended public schools myself prior to “ed reform” and had children in public schools for the entire span of this “movement”.
Charters, vouchers and tests. That’s what they have to offer so that’s what they offer.
The education sector unfortunately has become a font of money for individuals- the source of the money runs the gamut from venture “philanthropies” to taxpayers.
College Board was examined by Richard P. Phelps at NonPartisan Education Review. His 44 page review is a searing indictment. “Does the College Board Deserve Public Subsidies?” Susan Rice’s mother was a national V.P. of College Board.
Susan Rice is Biden’s domestic advisor.
Then, there is Stand for Children with a reported $7 -8 mil. in assets, co-founded by Jonah Edelman.
With Democratic friends like…..
It’s also an absolute truth that as administering tests gets cheaper and easier they will simply administer more of them. As the cost comes down the testing will increase and be pushed down to little kids. The cost of delivering, administering and scoring paper tests was a check on their overuse, where some kind of cost/benefit had to come into play, and that check is now gone.
You see it with the canned online classes various ed tech companies create- they test them constantly because it’s cheap and easy. Some of these classes are essentially one long standardized test broken into multiple 5 question sets, day after day.
This is in part a reply to Ciedie up there. The ESSA does NOT require testing K-2.
In fact, the ESSA leaves the evaluations (5 areas) of schools up to the states themselves. There is some glitch about the actual tie-in of federal funding to the administration of assessments. I’m waiting to receive the wording/paperwork that has this information, but, when I do, I’ll post it here.
In the meantime, NO ONE should be giving assessments to K-2…NO ONE!!! Parents should be told, & this issue is the one that SHOULD cause school board disruptions!!!
BTW: look at the next post by Jim Sleeper: it can Happen Here. Yes, yes it can. Only following orders, sir. Tell me to give assessments, & I will do it, w/o question.
&…this is child abuse.
There is a national teacher shortage: if every teacher in every state (even if every one in your district) refused to give assessments, are they gonna fire all the teachers (when they can’t even get any?!). Look at Seattle.
Look at Chicago. A # of years ago, those teachers refused to give tests, & were NOT fired. (Read the book, Educational Courage: Resisting the Ambush of Public Education by Nancy Schniedewind & Mara Sapon-Shevin, Beacon Press, paperback, 2012.)
The iPad tests for 5-year-olds!! Horrible idea! As a preschool teacher (thank god!) I watched several years ago as Boston Public Schools implemented a literacy test on an iPad for K. (I’m no longer there so I don’t know the current state of things.) The teachers and kids were so stressed. It was “criminal” as Paul said. Waste of time. Let them PLAY! OUTSIDE!! As we let our kindergarteners do when I started 35 years ago. We have completely lost the plot!
I have always called this junk child abuse
This is precisely what it is.
Unless we’re talking about Covid tests. Then I’m sure we’ll all agree that they should be tested every day!
“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.”
And that right there is exactly why I call almost all administrators adminimals. There is no right age to give standardized tests (not talking sped evaluation tests).
Why haven’t these bold adminimals refused to give the tests?
Self-interest/enhancement, i.e., $$$ of their salary.
“Should we therefore forgo our self-interest? Of course not. But it [self-interest] must be subordinate to justice, not the other way around. . . . To take advantage of a child’s naivete. . . in order to extract from them something [test scores, personal information] that is contrary to their interests, or intentions, without their knowledge [or consent of parents] or through coercion [state mandated testing], is always and everywhere unjust even if in some places and under certain circumstances it is not illegal. . . . Justice is superior to and more valuable than well-being or efficiency; it cannot be sacrificed to them, not even for the happiness of the greatest number [quoting Rawls]. To what could justice legitimately be sacrificed, since without justice there would be no legitimacy or illegitimacy? And in the name of what, since without justice even humanity, happiness and love could have no absolute value?. . . Without justice, values would be nothing more than (self) interests or motives; they would cease to be values or would become values without worth.”—Comte-Sponville [my additions]
Amen
OK. The standardized testing hasn’t improved scores and hasn’t reduced gender gaps in those scores, so clearly, we need to do more of it. That’s why I am calling, here, today, now, for standardized testing all the time in PreK-12. That’s right–from first to last bell, every day.
There. Finally, a solution to the problem all you teachers have created!
Please note this, Mr. Gates, and send me a big check.
All standardized testing all the time!
We at Concerned Parents for College and Career Readiness for Fetuses hereby all for mandatory standardized testing via online click the bubble test from the blastocyst stage to full fetal development.
Waiting for my big check from the Waltons, too.
Our preliminary testing demonstrates conclusively that zygotes perform extremely poorly on online bubble tests of the Common Core State Standards. So, clearly, public school education is a failure.
Bless you Paul Bonner for highlighting this issue. I worked with PreK students over the last two decades. Just as a traveling enrichment teacher, but that gave me an observation window into what goes on in the many regional PreK’s I spent time with. Know [if you don’t already] that whatever goes on in pubsch K bleeds into feeder PreK’s within 2-3 yrs. Faster– at least here in NJ– if it’s a PreK that accepts state-subsidized tuition for low-income students [accountability doncha know]. As long as 7 yrs ago it was routine to observe “KPrep-class” students [those who turned 5 later than the K-entry cutoff]—4yo’s—being held on laps or otherwise cajoled/ nagged into answering lengthy, age-inappropriate questionnaires designed by god-knows-who to determine god-knows-what, for the state data-miners.
Worse: I saw this going on, in K, in the ‘90’s– in my own kids’ high-SES pubschdistr, which was always too quick to buy into ed-reform whims (usually later backpedaling once parents got a clue; that was the pattern). Back then I volunteered for both an art-history-ed enrichment as well as an assist to help K kids get used to using ed CD-Roms. What I observed: K teacher bringing kids 1 by 1 to a corner of the room and administering tests . As a parent this was obvious: how else would K teachers have singled out both my eldest [K in ‘92] and youngest [K in ‘96] as strongly recommended for an IEP evaluation?
Testing kindergarteners is just as absurd as an attempt to make moral education as a standardized academic subject and put students into bogus metric assessment(like Japan MEXT’s trying to do in the near future).
This is why I am against universal Pre-K in the BBB plan. It sounds so great for children and families but the devil is in the details. What starts out as a helpful program will need data to justify its means and that will involve testing children barely out of diapers. That is child abuse. The KRA is already child abuse. The yearly testing 3-8 and 10 is child abuse.
A whole new education niche will evolve out of this for the deformers. They will be sucking on the teat for taxpayer dollars that should be used to help the kids. Makes me sick.
Anyone who has worked with little children should know the joy that can be seen when they make a discovery. Every moment they spend on a screen completing rudimentary tasks takes the opportunity to explore away. Standardized digital testing is another example of educators using what could be a profound tool for inquiry driven by the user and turning it into a weapon for numbing the mind toward compliance. I recall as a child that my most joyful learning experiences were driven by active discovery. I will always cherished the moments my own children marveled when they found something new that motivated more exploration independent of menial tasks. Children are naturally inquisitive and when exposed to the wonders of our world, voracious consumers of the new. This is not hyperbolic, but reality when we adults allow for curiosity and problem investigation. Our modern world has struggled with the hypnotic qualities of screens since the advent of the television. Turning our current devices into implements for testing recall devalues childhood.
I live in a high income/data driven/test centric area in MD. It makes me want to scream every time I see a daycare advertise their “STEM curriculum”. Many of these daycares claim to follow Montessori values yet they are the exact opposite of a true Montessori early childhood education. I never see kids out playing on the playground equipment….they are closed up inside behind locked doors and probably sitting in front of screens. This is what the parents in this area think is good for children and it boggles my mind.
LisaM– It all depends on the director– that is, of PreK’s, which mostly remain private (so far). There are still plenty of them devoted to play-based, & ‘STEM’ can just be a come-on that really means creative use of manipulables.
The ones to beware of are the chains. The problem is not precisely that they’re all about screens/ data-mining. It’s that you can never predict when ‘headquarters’ is going to flip on a dime and overhaul the mgt &/or curriculum. One of the most gifted directors I came across was at such a place. “No screens!” she advised me when she came onboard—“They get too much of that at home already.” I used to use the occasional DVD clip (on the little DVD player I hauled around). They were quality supplements– e.g. J-L Orozco & a group of Mexican children singing a song we’d just learned– but I quickly learned to do without them, and eventually modified my program at all the PreK’s so that I used them hardly ever. Kids really got a whole heckuva lot more out of an arty wind-down [you request the crayon-color you want with a Spanish phrase), or a hands-on board game.
The heavy hand of corporate eventually came down on that place too, imposing age-inappropriate, formulaic pre-reading and pre-math activities… and testing. (She was at least able to stick to ‘no screens.)
The Work Sampling Assessment system is a much better way to collect authentic data.
While teaching in the 1980s I was cautiously optimistic that there were real possibilities with portfolio assessment. I was an art teacher and all of my students had portfolios that helped them see the direction of their work. Alas, the Standards Movement came along and decided classes need to remain large and portfolios would be too much work.
The misuse of standardized testing is more ‘efficient’ but often gets it wrong. Portfolio assessment is both time and labor intensive but often gets it right. That is, it tells more about the student’s actual learning.
Same with me as a writing teacher, Paul. Kids need to write a lot more than teachers can actually mark, so it’s valuable to maintain portfolios of writing and work with students to choose samples from those portfolios to be marked/graded carefully.
“I would walk into kindergarten classrooms and watch students struggle and often cry over the inability to navigate iPads.”
“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.”
A curriculum and instruction director likely pushed for this “advancement”, at least that is the case in my area. A C&I director should know better, should know the relevant research on child development; yet, at least in my experience, they push STEM and tech in classrooms, even for 4th grade and below. They are pushing for AI instruction even in middle school, even though these students have insufficient background to assess the pros/cons of AI, especially in regards to the surveillance state–kids that age barely have any knowledge of the Bill of Rights and are only just beginning to develop a conception of individuality vs group association because that is where they are developmentally as young teenagers.
The tech tail is wagging the dog it seems.